Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/14/21: Corruption, Budget Bill, Health Crisis, Student Debt, CNN Pedo, Fox News, Streaming Wars, Lucas Kunce, and More!

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Krystal and Saagar cover widespread corruption in Congress, Build Back Better legislation, health crisis in America, student debt payments returning, CNN producer pedophilia, Fox News cheering mass layoffs, streaming wars against mainstream media, Lucas Kunce's populist Senate campaign, 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/Lucas Kunce’s Campaign: https://lucaskunce.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of interesting stories that are cooking out there. Insider has done a massive deep dive into the levels of shocking corruption. Well, maybe not so shocking at this point. I'm shocked at how little they uncovered. Yeah, among our lawmakers and also their staff, which I actually think is a really important aspect of this. We're going to leave the show with that. But other stories we want to get to is an update on where the Build Back Better plan is. Joe Manchin continues to be the big holdout. Chuck Schumer wanting a vote before Christmas. Is that actually going to happen?

Is it ever going to happen? We'll give you the latest there. Also, some new indicators about some of what is going on in our labor force. A lot of people are suffering out there, both with mental and physical health challenges that are keeping them out of the labor force. We've got some new numbers there. Also, the Biden administration has announced in spite of continued economic troubles, they are going to restart student loan payments in the new year. Very latest there. Also, a story about CNN. I'm not

even going to tease it. You just wait. Read the caption. Wait to get the details on this one, because it's really something. Also excited today to talk to Lucas Kunz. We've had him on the show before. Veteran who was very supportive of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some really courageous things there. He's now running for Senate in the Democratic primary in Missouri. It's an open seat. So we're going to talk to him about his campaign. He's really running, trying to run as a progressive populist. Yes. Very, very rare. I'm not talking about identity politics at all. It's very, very fascinating to, I think, both of us. So if he can win, that would be a big, big deal. Especially in a state like Missouri. I mean, even if he's able to outperform what Democrats can do now in a state like Missouri, that would be a very interesting

piece of data. So I'm going to talk to Lucas about his campaign. But we did want to start with that deep dive from Insider into corruption. They took a look at every member of the House, every member of the Senate. They evaluated all of their stock trades and their portfolios. They matched them up with the committees that they sit on to see, you know, where they might have special insight and be able to direct policy and legislation. They also, as I mentioned before, they looked at the staff because especially, I mean, this varies a lot member to member. Some members are more like actually in charge in their office and some are, you know, really influenced by the people that they have around them from their chief of staff

to their legislative directors. So it matters a lot what those staff members are doing as well, which is why they were also included in the Stock Act, which forces disclosure both for members of Congress, but also for their aides. Let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. They say we rated every member of Congress on their financial conflicts and transparency. Part of what they say is dozens of federal lawmakers and at least 182 top congressional staffers are violating a federal conflict of interest law known as the Stock Act. Others are failing to avoid clashes between their personal finances and public duties. So the two pieces there are, number one, some of these people, a lot of these people actually are in violation of the law of the Stock Act. Others, what they may be doing

is not illegal, but it probably should be because of the conflicts of interest directly impacting the country, impacting the trades that they're making here. This is obviously something that we've tracked quite closely. So very interested to see the results of this. What they say here is in Washington, D.C., a one bipartisan phenomenon is thriving. Numerous members of Congress, both liberal and conservative, are united in their demonstrated indifference toward a law designed to quash corruption and curb conflicts of interest. Insider's new investigative reporting project, Conflicted Congress, chronicles the myriad ways that members of the U.S. House and Senate have eviscerated their own ethical standards, avoided consequences, and blinded Americans to the many moments when lawmakers' personal finances clash with their public duties.

Very strong language, and what is uncovered is quite significant. Let's go ahead and put who are the worst of the worst here. They graded everybody. You can see the graphic there along the left. Democrat, Republican, and Independent. They graded everybody as solid, borderline, or danger. You can see the numbers between Dems and Republicans. There's a few more Republicans, but really quite a bipartisan phenomenon. And that's the picture there. We have 14 members of Congress who are rated as danger. Dianne Feinstein is there, Senator. Senator Tommy Tuberville is also, is it Tuberville or Tuberville?

I think Tuberville. I don't know. We'll go Tommy Tuberville is also, is it Tuberville or Tuberville? I think Tuberville. I don't know. We'll go with Tuberville. We're showing that we don't watch football, but. Yeah, totally. Sean Patrick Maloney, who is head of the DCCC. So number of members here that are sort of the worst offenders in terms of violating the Stock Act or not taking proactive steps to avoid potential conflicts of interest. A lot of the excuses that these lawmakers give, I mean, it's all the classic things that we,

oh, it's my wife's stock. Oh, I have nothing to do with that. Oh, I, you know, I had no idea. And of course I uphold the highest of ethical standards and, oh, I didn't disclose that. I just forgot. I didn't get the information from my husband or my trader or whoever until it was too late. So, you know, the excuses are what they are. But let's go ahead and throw this next piece up on the screen. So they took this data and then they broke it down into different individual articles, one of them highly significant here is the pandemic raged. At least 75 lawmakers bought and sold stock in companies that make COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests. They also track 15 lawmakers tasked with shaping U.S. defense policy that actively invest in military contractors. They caught a dozen,

more than a dozen, environmentally-minded Democrats who are investing in fossil fuel companies. I mean, it just exposes how full of it these people are when they claim to be public servants, when they claim to be above the fray, when they claim to be acting in the public interest. And even some of the positions that they claim to hold, those are in direct conflict with some of the things that they are investing in and making money off of. No, absolutely. I think going through each of these things just gives you a way in order to comprehend the scale. So just one of these, Representative Pat Fallon, he was the first one on that danger list. He had 118 violations of the Stock Act with up to $9 million in trades. The member said that they paid any fines, but they did not provide any proof.

Okay. So that's just one. What about the next one? Whenever we go and we look at Diane Feinstein, The member said that they paid any fines, but they did not provide any proof. Okay? So that's just one. What about the next one? Whenever we go and we look at Dianne Feinstein. I mean, this is a person who had a late disclosure, but totaling thousands of dollars in terms of her Stock Act violation. All of them. Many of them are ones that you haven't even heard of. But like you said, one of these people is the head of the DCCC. And yet, whenever you look at Sean Patrick Maloney, we're talking about up to eight different

trades that he also refused to comment or didn't even respond on whether he had done anything. I just gave you a small sampling of the three of the 13. And the other thing that gets me is when you look at the most popular stocks which are owned by Congress, this matters a lot, right, in terms of potential regulation. Well, what do you guys think they are? Well, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan & Chase, Pfizer, Berkshire Hathaway, ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble. I just read off technology, energy sector, and financial sector. Those are probably the three most intertwined sectors with government. In terms of what's before government right now, it is absolutely.

Are we going to do anything about tech? What does that even mean? Are we going to do anything about energy, fossil fuel, infrastructure bill, financial regulation? I mean, that's a longstanding tradition here in D.C. Now, you would have to be a fool to think dispersions on them. This is to say they're normal human beings. Most people, if you own something, well, when something bad happens, or are you really going to vote directly against your financial interests? The whole point is, let's not even let people get into that situation. And the more you look at this stuff, like even Berkshire class B stock, like high net worth individuals. Alibaba is also on there. Love that, you know, Chinese corporation. Awesome for American congressional members. And the more I

look into the list, what I'm just struck by is just how bipartisan it all is, how it also permeates basically every single sector. Like you said, 15 people who serve on the defense committees getting defense stock, 75 lawmakers buying and selling stock in the COVID vaccines, Democrats who are hailed as environmental champions who are buying and selling fossil fuels, members of Congress who publicly blast Facebook but quietly invest all their savings in Facebook. I mean, and 182 high-ranking congressional staffers have violated federal conflict of interest laws with overdue disclosure of their personal stock trades. I have an idea. When you work there or whenever you serve there, you can't sell stock. I know that sucks, but you know, it's a choice. Nobody forced

you to do this. You signed up and you ran for election in order to do this. You don't have a constitutional right in order to day trade stocks while you're a member of the US Congress. Based on the insider info you're getting as a public servant. I mean, that's the thing that I always come back to is those words just become so meaningless. Like, yeah, it's no big deal to ask somebody to sacrifice a small amount, right? Oh, you can't day trade while you're in Congress? Big deal. Or even, I mean, the other big thing is that this is one aspect of it, the way that they're profiting off of the knowledge they have sitting on these committees. The other aspect of it is, of course, how they line themselves up for whatever career they're going to do after they leave Congress when they feel entitled to enter the elite 0.1 percent and make tons of money and cash in. They want to go live. Most of them are already millionaires and they want to continue going and living the life that their donor that the donor class is living. I mean, those are their closest friends.

Those are the people they spend the most time with in Congress. And that's the social set that they are a part of and see themselves as continuing to be a part of. And one thing that always we see with these is even the wealthiest members who have millions, tens of millions, in some instances hundreds of millions of dollars, it's never enough for them. Like Nancy Pelosi is a person.

You still got to trade based on your knowledge of, you know, what's never enough for them. Like Nancy Pelosi is a person. You still got to trade based on your knowledge of what's going on in Congress. You still got to be out there day trade trying to maximize every market cycle. This is disgusting. And so these very same people, many of them, they rightly decry the erosion of our democracy and are concerned about trust in our institutions. And it's like, look in the mirror. I mean, you're such a part of degrading anyone's faith that you all are acting in the public interest. So yeah, this exposes, it exposes the corruption, it exposes the hypocrisy, you know, the people who are saying they care about climate change and then they're out there, you know, trading stock in ExxonMobil or whatever, the people who claim that they hate the tech

giants, et cetera, et cetera. They're literally buying stock. Yeah, they're profiting off of whatever our tech oligarchs are out there doing. It's exactly what you would expect, and yet we cannot just accept it as business as usual. And to your point about the incentives here, look, whether you're a good person or a bad person, people are not always aware of the way that their incentives are shaping their behavior. Oftentimes, they're sort of influenced by it. They rationalize whatever decision it is that they're making in their committee without even necessarily being aware that it's because they have a financial issue. They may swear to you up and down. It's nothing to do with it. But just like we saw with the judges who were compromised,

who had financial investments affiliated with the companies or the entities that they were then having to rule on and not disclosing and not recusing themselves, oh, guess what? More times than not, they were likely to rule in favor of their financial interests. That's the whole point, which is that, look, on balance, it obviously is going to have some sort of impact. Is this the core root of the, you know, stasis, corruption, or whatever in Washington? No. Does it contribute to it? Yeah. And this is one of the things where nobody wants to talk about it because it is so bipartisan. You have a Republican senator. You have a Democratic senator. You have the Speaker of the House, whose husband is, you know, pulling multi-million dollar trades. You have a Republican senator, you have a Democratic senator, you have the Speaker of the House whose husband is pulling multi-million dollar trades. You have some people on here who

consider themselves hardcore MAGA Republicans. Lance Gooden, I'm looking at you. Mr. Drain the Swamp and all this stuff. Oh, interesting. Ended up here on the list. A lot of 12 late disclosures totaling $60,000 in Stock Act violations. Seems a little swampy to me. I mean, every single thing that I'm looking at here, yeah, they could claim that they have an excuse or, oh, I'm sure I paid a fine or, oh, I disclosed it. Most cases, they didn't even respond. Do you know why?

Because they know nobody's going to care. Most people in their district, not going to hear about it. Most people in America, also not going to hear about it. That was the other thing that really struck me is if it wasn't for Insider doing this deep dive. We wouldn't even know. We would have no idea. Like, who's keeping track? I mean, this stuff is very complicated. People need to understand is that because it's not like it gets fed into a database. They have to compile each individual member's data,

enter it into a database, then break down the data by state representation, all that, then look for a late violation, and then ask if they went ahead and paid for it. It's like what I just described to you would take, I don't know, what, 10, 15 people? Months of work. It's a lot of work. Huge project. The amount of data entry alone would be immense. And yeah, we wouldn't even know about this. Now that we do, I mean, is it going to make a real difference? Probably not. I saw, you know, rare for me to defend AOC, but I saw her tweeting about like, no, I don't own any crypto because I don't think members of Congress should be able to buy like fungible assets while they serve in Congress.

And it was like, she was getting ridiculed in DC to that idea. I was like, no, that's actually a really good idea. Yeah. I'm like, that's actually principled. I'm like, that's unironically a very, very good idea. Um, but that tells you a lot, but it's just, as far as I know, the only member of Congress who's ever really spoken about it, at least in recent times, and it's not going anywhere for them to change the law. They'd have to change it themselves. That's the issue. That's another problem. That's another thing that should be changed. We should be the ones governing the rules that apply. They should have some sort of different, yeah.

There needs to be some sort of check on Congress itself because that's the real issue. I think that is the real issue. One of the real issues anyway. Okay, let's give you an update on some of the workings of Congress. Let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. So we haven't talked about the Build Back Better bill in a few days. And so we wanted to

give you an update. Although there isn't that much to say, Manchin continues to be the big hold up here. He's worried about the debt, even though he doesn't seem to worry about the debt when it comes to military spending or any number of other things. But that's one of his excuses. Of course, the inflation numbers are another thing that he keeps pointing to. And so he's really leaving the White House and, you know, Chuck Schumer and the Senate Dems. He's really leaving them in limbo. I don't think even they really know what his game is, what his plans are, if he ever even attends to vote for this thing. He's certainly dragging his heels. So what they said,

he just met with Biden on Monday afternoon. Manchin said he was still engaged in discussions as he left the Capitol. The key Democratic senator made clear he was not ready to commit to voting for or against a bill. Schumer wants action by Christmas. No telling whether that is likely to happen. I think it is very unlikely to happen. So that's kind of where things are. Yeah, I think the most important thing for people to understand is, and you know, per that discussion that you said, a lot of people in Washington took notice of this. Joe Manchin was here in D.C. The president's in the White House. The president invited him to the White House. Joe Manchin said, let's do a phone call instead. If you want to know how weak Joe Biden is, that's it. Can you imagine Lyndon Baines Johnson allowing some senator to blow him off while you're

president of the United States and head of your own party? Manchin knows there's only upside to holding the middle finger up to Joe Biden back in the home state of West Virginia. And nationally, nobody likes Joe. He's in such a poor position that the swing state senators are doing better off by telling him to screw off in public. That is how weak of a president that we currently have. I mean, I know this type of stuff doesn't seem like it matters, but this is the president of the United States. I mean, he's supposed to be the most powerful person, the leader of the Democratic Party, at the very least supposed to have some sway. And that's just not the case whatsoever. And that's why Joe Manchin feels like he can do

whatever he wants. He's stringing them along. I also got to say, Crystal, he's making those progressives in the House who voted for the infrastructure bill look like absolute idiots. That was so obvious. They were like, oh, well, President Biden told me that I have their word for it. I was like, are you intentionally stupid? I mean, here's the thing. Don't lie. Just say, I'm capitulating.

It's over. You know, I've decided this is probably the best that we can get, et cetera. But they're liars. And so that's all that we have. The president is weak. The House progressives who voted for this thing literally lied to you about why. And Joe Manchin, every single time, this is what he was talking about on Capitol Hill, giving all these reasons not to vote for the bill.

My money right now is you're probably not going to vote for it. Let's take a listen. Schumer says December 31st, maybe December, that he'd like to see this, or will it be when you all come back? I know people have been in a hurry for a long time to do something, but I think basically we're seeing things unfold that allows us to prepare better. And that's what we should do, take advantage of what we're doing in a very litigious way and making sure what we do and how we do it, for what period of time we do it, is something that we can maintain, manage. My grandfather used to say, unmanaged debt will make a coward out of the decisions you make. And we're now at $29 trillion, and we'll be pushing on to $30 trillion.

And I'm sure that Mr. Powell, with the feds, they're going to make some decisions pretty soon here. And I'm understanding that he is considering things that we've talked about. Quantitative easing should be reduced or eliminated as quickly as possible. And the interest rate is going to affect all of us if he has to increase interest to try to control. Senator, what is your message going to be to President Biden today? I don't have messages. I basically go and have conversations whenever the president calls me or wants to visit. We visit and talk genuinely as person to person. As two people that have had the experience of being in the Senate, him much longer than me, understanding this process and being extremely respectful and very friendly.

He's been a friend. Senator Grimm said on Friday that in conversations with you, you were stunned, that was his quote, by this modified CBO report that came out. Is that an accurate? Well, I've seen the Penn Wharton report. The Penn Wharton report, we've been working with a lot of different people getting cross-sections of what really was a true figure. And we've seen figures pretty high on that. And then when the CBO came back and confirmed that, yeah, CBO's figure was even a little bit higher. I think it's very sobering.

So there's a couple things to dissect there. Number one was that new CBO report. Basically what happened is that John Cornyn, the senator, put forth and asked the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, in order to score. And what I mean by score is estimate how much the bill was going to cost if the provisions inside the bill were made permanent, which pushed the price up to $3 trillion, which was double what the purported price tag is. Obviously, that set Joe Manchin off. But I think the truth, as you said, given that the entire Congress just voted for a $700 billion defense NDAA bill, which is a record defense number, Joe Manchin is looking for an excuse not to vote for this thing. And that is what comes out very clearly to me. I mean, there's two things here. Sadly, our politics are so just eaten by culture war that the specifics of the bill don't really matter. Yeah, nobody even knows. Even though, you know, if you look at the numbers on this provision, that provision, whatever,

you'll get a majority support in West Virginia. He is politically playing to his interest just by opposing the Democratic president. The details don't matter. I mean, that's what's so sad about how partisan and tribal everything has ultimately become. The news media is total trash. So they don't educate anybody about what's actually in these bills, what's at stake, any of that. The Democratic Party is total trash. So they fixated on the top line number versus what any of these programs ultimately mean. And so then it just becomes like a whose side are you on kind of a game. And the other thing here is obvious, which is that Manchin is serving his donors' interests, which is what his primary goal and concern is. And he's

able to couch it in this way. Oh, I'm concerned about the deficit. I'm concerned about the inflation, et cetera, et cetera. And to your point about progressives, it was always clear what the game was going to be because it was always contingent on like, oh, and we'll see what the CBO score is. Even from the beginning, there was never any like, oh, 100%, we're going to be on board with you. So they always had given themselves an out of if the CBO score comes in some way that we don't like, which you have no control over, then we don't know if we can ultimately vote for this thing. What really happened, the reason that progressives totally folded and capitulated from their original position was because Glenn Youngkin won in Virginia and there was starting to be all this, like, you know, the media was moving to blame progressives for actually holding the line on this thing.

And as they always do, they freaked out, they panicked, and that's where we are. Because God forbid that, you know, Wolf Blitzer says something critical of you. It's really, really sad and pathetic. And the other thing that's sad and pathetic is I can't even get that upset about it at this point because there's not that much left in this thing to get that upset about. I mean, even the one thing that I was sort of like, okay, well, this is a major step forward, the universal pre-K, it's anything but. As Matt Bruning and others have dug into the numbers, first of all, states can opt down of it, and many of them will. And even some blue states are not sure that they're going to take up the program because the funding is so insufficient. And it's also just the funding mechanism is really weird and strange and

insufficient. So even some blue states are saying, I'm not sure we're on board with this. The idea that this is universal pre-K is a complete farce. And then when you represent it as universal pre-K to the public, and then it doesn't end up being universal pre-K, how do you think that's going to go? So listen, as we said from the beginning, Joe Manchin is a corrupt pain in the ass. Kyrsten Sinema is a corrupt pain in the ass. But Joe Biden owns this because he could have come out of the gates at the beginning when there was a major political pressure in places like West Virginia and everywhere across the country to get something

done to deliver during the pandemic some additional relief. He could have put major agenda items on the table then and there. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was thinking that it mattered to anyone outside of the Beltway, whether you had a few bipartisan votes on the infrastructure deal or not. Everything got bogged down once they separated these pieces out and Manchin got what he want. He wanted the infrastructure deal because the donor class wants it. He got that part. So now what incentive does he have to play ball? He holds all the cards and the Biden administration deserves whatever they get.

No, they absolutely do. It's their fault. And just to show you how big of morons that they are, guess who they sent to New Hampshire in order to go sell this thing? Put this up there on the screen. Buttigieg is in New Hampshire Monday to cheer Manchester's development grant and commuter rail potential. That's in order to hail the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But he was also there to lobby for the Build Back Better bill. There's just one problem, though. Let's put the next one up there on the screen, please, which is that in the state of New Hampshire, yeah, new New Hampshire, new journal poll finds Biden

and the Build Back Better bill underwater with the Granite State voters. He's let this thing languish. I mean, up until very recently, the Build Back Better poll actually very well. The infrastructure deal polled well. Build Back Better polled very well. But as they've allowed it to languish and face attacks, and as his approval rating has gone down, although it actually has ticked back up a couple points here in the last couple of days. But the whole program has suffered. Yeah. And it's that it's all Joe Biden's fault. Like I said, he's so weak, he can't get a senator in order to come visit him at the White House. I really can't get over that. I mean, that is just the pinnacle of showing that you have zero. That's like lame duck level, you know, inability here in Washington. Next Manchin's going to force him to go to his houseboat. Right, to come to Congress or something.

Come to his houseboat. Ironically, that might actually happen. He's going to beg on his knees on the houseboat, and Manchin's still probably going to vote for the thing. And at this point, he's probably doing him a political favor. I mean, nobody's going to care if this thing passes. And it may sound callous. Yes, there might be elements in there that you like or not.

But look, I've watched this thing. It's a political dog. It's probably as bad as Obamacare. Obamacare at least had the pre-existing conditions thing. This doesn't even have a close to the same type of popular provision within it. And, you know, the Democrats in particular, Biden in particular, sank the whole country over the last couple of months. I don't really think I honestly don't think politically it matters that much one way or the other whether it passes. You might be right. Yeah. I mean, listen, there is some investment in climate change.

There's some investment in preschool. There's some investment in child care. There are some marginal increases here that are better than the state of, you know, the status quo. But is anyone really going to notice? Is this going to be a game changer in terms of? No, not really. You know, I heard it put it this way. They would have been better off going all in on a single program for the same price tag. But because they had to do reconciliation and please a bunch of different coalitions and interest groups, then what they ended up doing is half-assed measures across the board on everything.

So now nobody can point to a single thing like I just did with Obamacare and say, well, at least it has that one thing. It's like, no, this part expires. That part expires. This is block grants to the states that they can opt in and out of. This could actually make things more expensive. This has this part, but it only applies. You know, this isn't. Your eyes are going to glaze over, and they should because it's just a bunch of BS.

It's perfect, actually. This is the perfect example of what happens in Washington. Whenever you try to do things on a single up or down vote, they just completely crash and burn. And let me also say, I mean, part of that failure was deciding not to do anything about the filibuster. That forces them into the reconciliation process. So that's another tactical, strategic error that's incredibly significant. But the other thing I would say is, you know, these people talk about existential threats to the country, existential threats to the planet, and then they just dither. I mean, they do not come even close

to acting like there are actual real, you know, challenges, let alone existential threats. And I think that's, you know, it's very obvious that they didn't mean what they said when they were talking about those things. Yeah. If you want real proof, there it is. Okay, let's move on to something which has been completely unexplored and I did not even know. I wanted to make sure that we went ahead and highlighted it to all of you. We're obviously talking right now about the great resignation, about how there is a labor shortage, about many people who decided to drop out of the workforce for good, in many cases for good reasons. They want to spend more time with their children. They wanted to pursue early retirement, career change, education. Those are all great,

fantastic things, even if it means that we're going to have to deal with some crunch in the short term. But some of it is a big health problem. And there's some new data actually that shows us that. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that a new survey actually from McKinsey of all places. So it's not like, you know, they wanted this to be, but they did a big survey of workers and decided why and asked them, why are you not working? Half of the currently unemployed Americans say that health issues are the primary reason that they're not working. So you should got to drive even deeper into what that means. So it's not just physical health, it's physical health and mental health. Mental health problems in particular have reached, quote, epidemic proportions.

So the latest American Opportunity Survey actually found that 37% of people have been diagnosed with mental health issues or sought treatment for their mental health. Now, in between that, though, the survey also found that 16% of the people there were unemployed, 9% were looking for work, 7% not looking. That's actually way higher than the general population, which has an unemployment rate of 4.2%. Now, go even deeper into why people are unemployed. Health is the number one reason out of all because they're not working. 30% said that they're not working because of their physical health. 15% said that it was because of their mental health. You add that together, that means 45% say that they're not looking for work, particularly because of their health. You break it down even more, and you find that when you've got 9 million jobs lower than the pre-pandemic trend, and only 59% of Americans are employed, that's down from 61% during the pre-pandemic. And there was actually a high of 64, 65% almost

in the year 2000. So when you have a 6% drop like that in the labor force, yes, some of it is age, you know, the boomers getting older, nearing the retirement. But the whole point was that we're supposed to have enough young people to be able to enter the workforce. Now we're seeing that this major health crisis, mental health crisis, as well as general health crisis, is creating the conditions where a lot of people can't work. And I think the worst part of all of this is it's not like the pandemic made us more healthy. I mean, yes, obviously that seems to be the case when you have a respiratory viral infection, like when we have COVID, but we also see that the conditions through which we've handled this have made people a lot unhealthier. And I was really struck by a Washington Post piece. Let's put it up there on the screen.

Over half of young adults right now are obese or overweight. So more than half of 56% of people between 18 to 25 are overweight or obese. If you look at the data from a nationally representative sample, the average weights over the past four decades, the population's average BMI has increased by 4.6 points from 23, which is considered a normal weight, to 27.7, which is considered overweight. That means the median average American right now is overweight. And that if you shift the number of overweight adults, it has gone up 18% from the late 1970s to 24% by 2018. So the biggest spike in weight measurements right now, and this is a much more recent phenomenon in the last couple of years, is actually the prevalence in obesity. It used to be that people were overnate and not obese, but now we actually have a large percentage of young adults even who are overweight, who are not just overweight, but are clinically obese. And obesity, in COVID in particular, there's a new study that just came

out, which shows that COVID actually particularly attacks the fat cells in your body, which makes it so that if you're obese, it can actually make it so that you're going to have a much more severe reaction to COVID, not just because you're generally more unhealthy on basically every single metric, but because also the actual fat cells within your body are harboring the virus and making it more virulent within you. So that's one reason, you know, in order to look at your health. But let me tell you guys something, you know, personal information. I just got my blood work done and all of that. And pretty much all of the bad things in there are solved by losing weight. I was like, all right, doc, like, do I need to change my diet?

You know, he's like, listen, lose 15 pounds and you're good. Like, that's it. It's one of the most general health markers that can have one of the most general best things you can do in your life is reduce the amount of fat that you have on your body and exercise more. It's a literal miracle drug. Declines in all cause mortality for exercise, for aerobic, even weight training, strength training, all of that. But I don't know.

I think it's a very important message right now, Crystal. We have a huge problem right now with the labor force. So obviously it has economic problems, but I don't even want to think about it in that perspective. Look, being obese and overweight, it is going to cost you years on your life. It will cost you mental health, physical health. It will make you feel worse. All of that. I just can't emphasize it enough that with these lockdowns, you know, we have seen young adults and even children, childhood obesity go up. Now we have the numbers for young adults and more. We're setting ourselves up for a real disaster in the coming years.

Yeah, I mean, you have the cost of the lockdowns, which impacted people's health in a certain way with weight gain, with the severe stress and mental health issues that have particularly also impacted young people. I remember we looked at something recently with very high numbers of young people who had had recurring thoughts of harming themselves, who said they were suffering from stress and anxiety. And then, of course, you couple that with the pandemic itself, which cost lives and compromised health and made a lot of people sick in a way that they're still dealing with and still recovering from. It's just a really sad state of affairs when you look at these basic metrics of how a society is doing, and it becomes clear how sick, both literally and metaphorically, the country ultimately is. That's one of the things we've tracked for a long time with declining, with the way that mortality is declining. I mean, how long people live is the most basic measure

of how a society is doing. And we're deeply sick. I mean, one of the things that I, you know, it's always a balance because obviously people have agency and choice and they can make different choices in their lives, improve their health, improve their fitness. You work very, very hard at that. I work a lot less hard at that. But you also have to look at society-wide trends and say, this is a social, this is not just like, you know, shaming this individual person because they're not doing X or Y or Z. This is a massive society-wide issue that results from a whole host of factors. I mean, it results from the fact that so many people don't have good health care, that they're not able to go to the doctor. It results from the fact that you have a for-profit health care system where they're

incentive. They're incentive. They make money off of people being chronically ill. And so we shouldn't be surprised when that's exactly what we end up with, a population that is chronically ill and highly profitable to an industry that doesn't actually want them to be well and healthy, wants them to be sick, but continue to live so they can continue to get their reimbursement rates as you're coming in for care. So you have those incentives. You have the way that big food has, you know, made the worst things we could consume extraordinarily affordable and extraordinarily available. Our government, through subsidies of corn in particular, you know, helps to create that situation. We have cities and lifestyles that cater to everybody just being in their car and driving around and not walking and moving their bodies and any of those things. And so when you add all of those pieces together and you compare us to our peers in the developed world, we have worse outcomes on almost every metric. And it's because all of those pieces coming together and then you put the pandemic on top of it. And it's just a really terrible and explosive combination. It's not my intention whatsoever to shame anybody out there. I've struggled with my weight since I

was literally like a small child. So like, listen, if you're out there, I've also fallen for all the scams. Tried it. It never works. Really what it is, is that the probably best way that this is going to work is like you said, is designing and creating entire new systems and environments for yourselves. Unfortunately, that's the hardest part. And look, I have the luxury of being able to do that. Most people are so bogged down in the ability to like just provide food for your kids or yourself.

They do not have that ability. I do not blame them whatsoever because it is very convenient, very cheap. All the incentives and structures are designed to push you both towards activities and towards food and towards many other things in your lifestyle, which are terrible for you. And actually, in many cases, the short-term reward that you get is an engaging and unhealthy behavior, not the opposite. Same with medicine. Because we have a medical system right now in which, you know, it's very expensive for most people who go and visit the doctor. They don't visit the doctor.

They only go whenever something is catastrophically wrong. You know, I learned this whenever I got injured. By the time you have to go in there for injury, you've been screwing up for months, if not years. You could, if you have regular checkups and all of that, which is what a lot of rich people do, is then they're like, hey, this could become a problem three to five years from now. Let's put you on a protocol right now in order to make sure that you do this correctly. Or, oh, your insulin right now, let's make sure that you start eating right now. So you don't develop diabetes like 20 years from now, but most people have no ability in order to have any of that. So all of this is obviously just to say, look, we can't change the system right now. Um, you can change some limited parts of yourself. I would

really encourage anybody's look, the new year's resolution all that time, it's always a good time. It's just, this is a dire, dire situation, especially with COVID. But it's not just COVID. It's all-cause mortality. It's cancer. It's from cancer, heart disease. When you're old, I didn't know this. One of the most highly correlated things for whenever you're old age and you die is grip strength. And it's because if you don't lift weights or if you don't go out there and really exercise and you don't have grip strength, then if you fall when you're old, it can actually be really deadly. So having that ability, declining and waiting off osteoporosis, a lot of these types of things, this can have long cause effects. It's not just about you. It's about your family. It's about the people who are around you. So look, if that's

anything you can take away from this, I hope that's what it is. Take care of yourself. It's really important. All right, let's move on. This is very similar, actually, if you want to talk about why we have mental health problems and so much more. Well, it's because I would say this is obviously an upper class bias. You know, both went to college, know people predominantly who went to the four year college degree. I know a lot of people with six figure student debt, and I am not going to pretend that that is in any way the norm. And yes, it is an elite problem. I would, however, pair it with the general fact that working class people also have a lot of debt.

It just doesn't happen to be student debt. Well, and people who are of less means who go to college, they have the most debt. Yes, and community colleges and elsewhere, they get completely screwed, especially if you don't finish college. Well, community colleges are a decent value. It's the for-profit scam universities that are the absolute worst. But there's just no doubt about it. Listen, if mommy and daddy aren't fronting your college bill, you're going to end up with a much higher amount of debt. And then that constrains what you do for your entire life.

So. So, Joe Biden, let's put this up there on the screen. Joe Biden has said he will not extend student debt relief and confirms that student loan payments are going to restart on February 1st. Now, of course, it's already only applied to federal loans, but for a lot of people that actually meant a lot. The reason why this matters, and we'll be doing this a segment later on, Crystal, is that in many cases, the highest payments don't really kick in until after these kids obviously graduate from school. And we just have the latest data that's come in that amongst 2020 Gen Z graduates, only

50% six months after graduating even have full-time employment. 50% of people who graduated from college in 2020 are completely unemployed. So how exactly are they supposed to pay their student debt? I understand, you know, these debt companies, they come up with what you can pay or whatever. Even if you can't pay though, what's happening? That interest is racking up and it's not like you can discharge it. Even if you die, they can go and garnish your estate or whatever. So this is just one of those cases where the student loan debt, I mean, for a while, the Biden administration conversation was, let's cancel some student debt, right? Up to 10K or whatever, which I actually do completely support because that would wipe out the debt

for the working class Americans in particular who have that 10K following and actually the vast majority of student debt at the highest, highest levels for people with graduate degrees. And I don't think it's fair to be bailing out people at the very, very top of the spectrum, you know, who went to like Columbia University or whatever. I actually thought that was a very reasonable program, especially if you pair it with some sort of credit card debt relief and more for working class young people that we have right now, because it wouldn't be fair to bail out the elites and not bail out everybody else. But this is not just a bail. This is not just talking about not bailing out. This is what they call a quote, smooth transition back into repayment. And they consider it, quote, a high priority for the

administration, for the Department of Education, in order to start getting repayments on February 1st. Well, there's also this, everybody is like wish-casting that the economy is great again. Right. For rich people. For rich people. Oh, forget about it. I mean, they're doing better than ever. They're doing great. They're using the excuse of inflation for corporations to jack up prices. But there's new Fed survey data that finds that 33% of Americans say they're somewhat worse off or much worse off financially than they were a year ago. That is the largest share since April of 2020, which is right when you're in the freefall of the pandemic. So yeah, it's no surprise that they pulled all of the pandemic supports. We continue to have issues in terms of supply chain disruptions and price increases and things that are eating into

people's paychecks and whatever savings that they ultimately have. And so you have people saying, I'm actually doing much worse off than I was last year. A third of Americans saying they're worse off than they were last year. And yet the Biden administration is like, okay, that's great. Time to start paying again. I mean, it's just, I think there's two things here. Number one is the utter political stupidity of this. Oh, right. Trump, Breonna points out all the time, like, Trump is the one who paused the student loan payments, and you all are going to be the ones that restart it, and you don't cancel any debt? Like, what are you doing? So there's just the

utter political stupidity. But also just in terms of where we are economically, people aren't where you're wishing that they would be. There's a majority out there that say they expect things to get worse for them economically. So the picture is really not good in terms of how people are feeling about their current financial circumstances. And yet, you know, you're pushing forward to make sure that the debt collectors get theirs. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And it's just like, when you're talking, I can't think of anything dumber that you could do in order to depress like youth. Let's say be purely cynical, right? Pay off the people who are going to come out to vote for you. Young college grads are disproportionately Democrat

by like 80% or something like that. So why would you do this right before the midterm elections in November? Right, and it's a group that doesn't necessarily always turn out. No, actually almost never turns out unless they really care, like Obama 2008. They, also a group that voted for not just debt cancellation, but also free college. Even after, okay, Bernie's off the table. We got Joe.

There was still an expectation of like, oh, maybe I'll do 10 grand. Maybe we'll get like free community college or something. No, no, not at all. I think in the Build Back Better plan, I think there's some like a few dollars for additional scholarships or something like that is what it came down to. Oh, it's Pell Grants. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And we're going to restart your student loan payments also, by the way. I've been thinking about it. I mean, if you're Gen Z out there, think about how terrible of a year you just had. It's like you graduated from college, barely could get a job if you could get a job at all. Oh, you want to buy a house? Yeah, that's literally never going

to happen. Just ask your millennial brother who also still can't afford a house. Now you have to kick in for your student debt payments, which you thought you might have a little bit of a break on. You had basically the last year of college robbed from your life, like a very transformative experience. Or if you're an entry-level working class worker who didn't go to college, you had probably an absolutely terrible time trying to reenter the labor force or find the job or find a place in order to acquire some skills. You had all this time and all this social stuff just completely robbed from you. Now you're economically destroyed. I just can't think about how. It makes me so depressed, especially, you know, in consideration of the previous segment.

No wonder people are so obese. I mean, like, what are you supposed to do? You lean into comfort, you know? You lean into the stuff that will dull your pain. Drugs, food, video games, you know, all this stuff. It's just all sensory overload in order to make you just forget about the stuff that's happening. So I don't just look at this, you know, student debt as an issue on its own. It's just symbolic to me about how so many of the people who are young in this country are just getting so screwed over and over and over again.

And it's like, they don't believe in democracy. No, yeah, no wonder, right? Right, because where are their views and their priorities and their concerns represented in government? Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, and, you know, climate change is a top issue for that generation as well because they see where things are headed

and no seriousness there. Biden's opening up more of the Gulf to oil drilling. I mean, it just it feels like a total disconnect, even though, quote unquote, their side in terms get the same thing over and over again. So it's just, as you said, very symbolic of the lack of care and concern for younger generations and also symbolic of the tone deafness about where we actually are in economic recovery and how people are actually doing financially, which is not, you know, where the Biden administration is wishcasting them to be. 100%. Okay, let's move on. This is a really creepy story. Don't want to just make it about CNN. It's actually about a much broader problem in media about whitewashing, child sex trafficking, and child sex abuse. So we'll start out with the very basic facts, which is that, and let's put this on the screen, please. CNN, Chris Cuomo, obviously, ex-CNN primetime talents producer, was just charged by authorities with luring girls for sexual training. Now, his name is John Griffin of Stanford, Connecticut.

I'm just reading directly from this. Allegedly used messaging apps to befriend and persuade moms of young girls, telling them a woman is a woman regardless of her age and that he should be the one to, quote, train their daughters sexually, according to an indictment from the U.S. attorney of Vermont. Griffin, 44, allegedly got at least one mom of two daughters to bring a girl to his Ludlow ski getaway in June of 2020. It was then the mom's responsibility to see that her older daughter, 13 years old, was quote, trained properly. Griffin himself, a father, sent the woman $3,000 for a plane ticket so they could fly from Nevada to Boston, where he picked them up for a ride to Ludlow, Vermont. He's been pictured, you know, many times

with CNN's Chris Cuomo. And it's very clear that he was directing that young girl, 13 years old, to direct, engage in unlawful sexual activity. He attempted to do this with two other children over the internet. From the indictment, he used apps like Kik and Google Hangout. And in April of 2020, he even suggested, quote, a virtual training session over a video chat that would include him instructing a mother and her 14-year-old daughter to remove their clothing and touch each other. In June, he told another mom of a 16 year old that she would take a mother-daughter trip to his ski house for sexual training involving the child. Okay. I feel sick. Um, you know, I, by the way, who are these moms? I hope they're going

to jail too. Uh, look, the government, if it has one job on this earth, is going to lock people like this up forever. This problem, though, is that these stories obviously celebrated by the right wing, you know, in this case, but they will ignore many cases that involve those. By the way, this dude used to work at Fox News. There you go. Okay, good. So this is a bipartisan problem. But what I have been really disturbed by is this general idea that because it was a QAnon thing in order to believe that there was child sex trafficking, that we should try to attack the idea that there's child sex trafficking at all. the Atlantic, almost immediately before this indictment dropped, let's put this up there on the screen, they write, quote, the great fake child sex trafficking epidemic dispatches from a moral panic. And what they point to are viral instances in which people have been claimed to be abducted or more. And they say that on average, Save the Children posts and others

are a moral panic akin to satanic worship in the 1980s. Number one, the numbers don't bear that out whatsoever. Number two, Ghislaine Maxwell is literally on trial. I mean, for running a child sex trafficking ring. So you can't say that there's a moral panic whenever you have one of the most high-profile child sex trafficking ring trials ever in modern American history at the exact same time. If we're going to have a moral panic about anything, let's have a vote about this.

I'm good with that. I think we're okay. I actually know, and I suspect you do too, I know people who have been working in the, you know, to combat sex trafficking for years, long before QAnon. And, you know, there are a lot of misconceptions about who is vulnerable and susceptible to ultimately being trafficked. And, you know, used to be the ideas, oh, this only happens with, you know, girls from other countries or in other places, et cetera. And the reality is a lot of young girls who are in traumatic or vulnerable situations. Especially homeless. Especially homeless or, you know, in an unstable home situation,

those are people who are most vulnerable here. So to pretend like it's not an issue, I mean, obviously, obviously we can see in front of our eyes right now with the trial that's going on that this is something that is happening. It's happening here. And it's something that everyone, it should not be a partisan issue to be disgusted by and outraged by. There is a weird thing going on with the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the QAnon people, which just shows you, like, the partisan brain worms, I guess, infect absolutely everybody, is that, of course, the QAnon people have been super focused

on Save the Children and using the hashtag. But the minute that in the trial, the pilot said, oh, by the way, Donald Trump was on the plane a number of times. Yeah, they got very upset. Another witness was like, oh, another one of the victims had been introduced to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Then suddenly, oh, well, we're not as interested in this. So we even saw Lauren Boebert, like, trying to downplay, you know, who's the most QAnon, I guess, of the members now trying to downplay the trial and whatever. So I don't know.

It makes me sad for the country that you're in a place where you're trying to like have child sex trafficking somehow fit into your. Into the culture war. I also would be remiss if we didn't show you this. Let's put this up there on the screen. That article about how there is a moral panic was written in The Atlantic. And before you, for those of you who are just listening, is an image of Laurene Powell Jobs, who is the majority stakeholder in The Atlantic, with Ghislaine Maxwell hanging out seemingly poolside. It looks like, you know, just saying, that happens to be you write an article about fake moral panic. The owner of your company literally hanging out with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Laureen Powell Jobs is the widow of Steve Jobs, multibillionaire, obviously, and she's been investing in a lot of media organizations as well. I'm not implying anything about her personal conduct or whatever, but I think it just goes to show you that there are certain issues that they don't want to talk about because they implicate, in many cases, not them and their personal behavior necessarily, but who they hang out with. And in Epstein's case, being actually convicted of abuse of a minor and still being accepted into the highest echelons of American social society, Bill Gates obviously and more. So look, this CNN thing, we're not trying to score cheap points against anybody. I think the indictment is so repulsive and just goes to show that this person is a depraved, absolutely depraved, sick, evil individual. But it's part of, it's a story that drops, you know, almost immediately after seemingly an elite campaign in order to whitewash the idea that there is child sex trafficking here in the United States. And this just goes to show you this could, this is happening all over the country. Don't turn it into a culture war thing. And don't whitewash what's happening right now.

It's just really sick. Indeed. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, around 900 employees of fintech mortgage company Better.com, they were recently summoned to a Zoom meeting with their CEO, Vishal Garg. Some of these employees would later tell reporters that they were just expecting another corporate town hall, but this was no typical Zoom webinar. Instead, Garg logged into the Zoom as employees were still trickling in and announced that, quote,

if you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Little was offered in the way of rationale. The entire meeting lasted just three minutes. Employees frantically trying to figure out what the hell just happened. They were immediately locked out of their email, their Slack channels, their company computers, their phones. In total, the mass Zoom firing affected at least 10% of Better.com's workforce, and in an especially brutal twist, came just before the holidays. Garg then assembled the remainder of the Better.com workforce and threatened their jobs as well, informing them that the coming year would be a quote, bloodbath. Terrible, right? Heartless, inhumane, cruel. That's how any normal human

being I think would process these events. But one host over at Fox News, she had a very different take. To know that because maybe he'll quit. Maybe he'll fire himself. Emily, go to CNN. I loved this. Actually, I loved this so much. The productivity of those 900 individuals averaged two hours a day, even though they were paid for eight. And I understand the indelicate nature of this.

But part of my role as a federal attorney when I was managing an acting director was terminating individuals. And I did it with the utmost respect and care. But I also had to do it with a lot of security measures in place. I love that for 900 people, he stayed safe and he let them know that their theft was no longer tolerated. So for me, good riddance. And I feel bad that he's now having to capitulate to the other execs at his company and apologize for it. Sorry, guys. Bye. For all of them, they're snowflakes.

They're probably millennials and Zs. Very surprised. They need to learn work ethic. Emily's tough. We're on the opposite side of this. And for those people on the call who are the exceptions to what he accused them of, they all have lawsuits. I'm with Brian, though. I mean, they do. I mean, if he accused them of not doing what they're supposed to be doing and all that and their receipts, that's going to be tough for him. Yeah, but this guy, I like the bravado. I like having the debate. I hope his pockets are deep. To Brian's point, though, this guy in court documents, it was alleged that he wanted to staple someone to the wall or door, whatever it was. I mean, this guy has some pretty big issues. Maybe they were safe from him.

He loved it. We're outnumbered after this. Now, there are a few things I really enjoyed about Emily's comments there. First of all, she does that thing of just throwing together a bunch of conservative buzzwords and cultural tropes in hopes that her points are going to land with the Fox audience. The employees are a bunch of snowflakes, probably a bunch of millennials and Zs. They need to learn work ethic. Nothing like pampered, rich TV hosts lecturing the youths of America about work ethic. Also, snowflake discourse is so 2016. Emily should really have worked more contemporary references like the woke mob into her justification of rich assholes behaving like rich assholes. Second, she just repeats this claim,

which came directly from that CEO of the company, that the 900 fired workers were only working two hours per day. Garg had written as much on an internet forum where he claimed that those employees were then stealing from the company. This appears to be categorically false, as Harris Faulkner sort of delicately suggests there. Employees who had just recently been praised for their work ethic and who had recently been promoted, they were terminated. And Garg apparently doesn't think much of the remaining staff either, by the way. He'd previously derided the entire

workforce as, quote, dumb dolphins. And there was that whole threatening a bloodbath thing as well. In reality, the layoffs were not at all the fault of the workers. Better.com staffed up massively while mortgage lending was going gangbusters. Now that rates have started to tick back up a bit, the pace of new mortgages and refis has slowed. And that's left Better.com in a very tough spot as they move towards a public offering. That's not the fault of the employees, but it does kind of suggest some poor planning on the part of management. Finally, I enjoy the discomfort of the other Fox hosts on set here. It's Kayleigh McEnany and Harris Faulkner. Emily's gleeful and celebratory reaction is in some ways more honest because if you truly buy into the glory of the full-on unfettered capitalism program, mass capricious firings based on shifts in market wins, well, that's exactly what you have to be down for.

You have to be ready to celebrate, as Emily does, 900 jobs lost and lives destroyed because the mortgage rates happen to tick up half a point. Or in another example, the decimation of American small towns and cities because free trade demands it. You have to then turn around and argue that those who lost their livelihoods,

that they don't deserve any safety net or help getting back on their feet, let alone medical care. And if you're upset about any of these things, then you are a lazy snowflake. It's quite telling, after all, that while the CEO has been made to apologize for his insensitivity and take a leave of absence while the board engages in some BS analysis of workplace culture, the layoffs are still going forward. The board didn't have an issue with the firings. They just had a problem with the indelicacy of how it was all done. They wanted 900 people to lose their jobs before Christmas. They just wanted it done with more

decorum. I mean, does it really matter to you whether your job-ending Zoom call was done one-on-one with an HR professional in 30 minutes or in a mass meeting with the CEO in three minutes, ultimately the end result is the same. Now there's a few other things that you should know about Better.com's CEO that speaks to the sort of people who succeed in our grand meritocracy here and those who get fired in mass Zoom meetings. That also speaks to what exactly Emily is celebrating. Garg has been sued for fraud repeatedly by his business partners and his former friends. He's been accused of siphoning millions into his personal accounts and several different complex business deals involving shell companies and the Cayman Islands. In a deposition

over one of these claims of betrayal and fraud, Garg turned to his former best friend and informed him he was going to staple him against an effing wall and burn him alive. In Garg's Disney version of Better.com's founding, he started the company when he and his fiancee lost out on a home because of a cumbersome mortgage process. According to the allegations of former associates, Better.com was actually launched with illicit money siphoned into Garg's accounts using stolen technology. And yet, in spite of all of that, or perhaps because of it, Garg is a billionaire. As John Steinbeck once wrote, the things we admire in men—kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding,

and feeling—are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest—sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second. Emily's delight in these firings might have been unseemly to watch, but her ideology runs the country, elevates the liars, the thieves, and the cruel to the very top, and pretending that those who aren't willing to cheat their way to the 0.1% are the ones with the moral failings. Pretty interesting comments there. Yeah.

You know, just playing to, like, just go and fall in on... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, yesterday we reacted specifically to Chris Wallace's shock announcement that he's leaving Fox News for CNN's streaming platform. I thought we were done. But honestly, the more I thought about it and the more information I read about corporate media and their plans to try and compete out here in the streaming world, the more I realized that we had a lot more to say. Wallace's departure from Fox News is not just a one-on-event. It is the beginning of a new war. As the Axios graph you can see in front of you shows,

the number of people who are paying TV subscribers has dropped 7.3% in just the last six years. As the boomer audiences of cable news begin to age, the cable news networks have woken up. They're going in an all-out battle for talent in the streaming wars. Chris Wallace will join Casey Hunt at CNN Plus for live programming. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. NBC News has now hired 200 people to join its NBC News Now streaming service, and they've even launched a show with a guy named Joshua Johnson, who I've literally never heard of. Fox News, after failing miserably with Fox Nation, is adding weather programming to the online service,

and CBS News is now going all in on a streamlined version of online CBS. These people are pouring billions of dollars into this war. They're giving multi-million dollar contracts out before they've even launched. There's just one problem. Why would anyone pay for literally any of this? Remember the original CNN Plus announcement.

They're going to add stuff online, but none of the stuff that's actually valuable from CNN, a.k.a. live news programming during breaking events. Why? Because CNN, NBC, Fox, and others are currently embroiled in multi-billion dollar deals with cable news carriers who have exclusive rights to their live programming for breaking news. Meaning that when CNN or NBC News say they're going to be offering something live online, it's not the cool live programming. It's their live news panels or live commentary.

And in that case, I think we could safely say, go ahead and bring it on. The reason that Breaking Points and many other independent news organizations have succeeded in recent years is because we can compete on a relatively level playing field. In the world of commentary and presentation, aggregation, and in domestic news consumption and gathering, that's a relatively low marginal cost business, meaning that the market determines who wins and loses. Cable news, though, by definition, is a rigged market. There are only three major channels, but the internet is endless. And in the world of endless options, who is going to pick a Chris Wallace to listen to or a Casey Hunt? Who, remember this Joshua Johnson guy? No, no, no, no. In our world, you actually have to be attuned not only to what people want, but what they actually care about.

For years, the inane and terrible cable news commentary has been subsidized by live news. People like to be able to switch on the TV and watch crazy stuff like 9-11 or riots or January 6th or COVID. The problem is that doesn't happen that often. So they fill the in-between parts with Joanne Reid or Chris Cuomo or any of the other terrible blather that has ruined our country's political discourse. For years, they have benefited from a rigged game.

And streaming is the unspooling of it all. Attention at the end of the day is zero-sum. You either listen to someone or you don't. And in this world, they're about to have a very rude, rude awakening. But I don't want to take too much of a rosy picture and sugarcoat it. The battle is really just beginning. Because this fight will be just like the one for the internet. The internet started out as a free and prosperous place,

a democratization of information that enables the little to fight against the small. The internet of 2006 was the birthplace of the anti-war movement and voices that sprang forward in response to the dominant media ecosystem. But slowly over time, corporations realized the power of the internet. They decided to exert pressure on the tech companies to seize control of all discourse, to rig the platforms in favor of the established players. This same war is coming to our space right now with streaming news. The same war is going to happen. First, they ignored us. Then they will become just as big as them. Now they're entering the space. Right now on YouTube, you see them already getting preferential treatment. They will try to do the same thing with streaming news, rigging podcast platforms

and elsewhere to recommend their content over ours and many others of our friends in this space. Soon the drive to outright censor will materialize under the guise that because more people watch us than them, they need to fact check or control the quality of information. These dying sons are not going to go quietly into the night. And the more that they enter our sphere and realize how many of us despise them, the more vicious the battle for the future actually will be. The first version and promise of the internet was lost. But I do still have some hope in all of you. A business can only be fake for so long before real people's preferences ultimately have to be taken into account. And as fake as the world has been, the internet has still

pushed us towards a place for consumer preference. All of this is just to say that we have to fight. What gives me life is the idea that people are actually starting to wake up and are done with the fake news mongers over on cable news. But let's just make sure that they die with the medium instead of trying to take over ours and the new frontier. That was the thing, Crystal, as I was struck by the Chris Wallace thing,

is at first, you make fun of it and all of that, but I realized, oh no, this is going to be an all out vicious war. And if you want to hear my reaction to Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have Lucas Kuntz. He is a Democrat running for Senate in the great state of Missouri. Also has been on Breaking Points before talking about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, was on Rising before that, talking about China, worked with our friend

Matt Stoller on antitrust issues as well. Great to see you, Lucas. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we've introduced you to our audience in any number of ways, but not so much as a political candidate. So just talk to us about why you decided to run. And look, it's tough sledding for a Democrat at this point in the state of Missouri. Why do you think you got a shot? Sure, let's do it. I mean, I think I have a shot exactly because of the reason why I'm running. And that's that I truly believe that we need to fundamentally change who has power in our country. And so, you know, like for me, I've seen my state, Missouri, just get absolutely stripped for parts by, you know, a set of people who've been buying off our politicians. And I'm tired of it. You know, I joined the Marine Corps. I did 13 years in the Marine Corps.

I Iraq, Afghanistan, thinking that, you know, this was the best way to serve the community I grew up in. This was the way to pay them back for for helping us out when we went bankrupt for my little sister's medical bills and a bunch of other stuff. And then, you know, I just come home again and again during those deployments or after those deployments. I see the first house I lived in bulldozed down, the corner store boarded up, the one I joined the Marine Corps out of just kind of falling apart. And it's just, you know, the reason for that is that we have a lot of people at the top who are, again, pairing up with our politicians, buying off our politicians to strip communities like the one that I grew up in for parts. And you know what? Missouri is the front lines for that battle, and I'm bringing it to

the House. Lucas, I'm curious. I mean, to be blunt, Joe Biden is not doing well. His approval rating is low. What is your estimation as to why the national mood of the country is? And since you are in the same party as the president, many politics are national right now. How are you going to distinguish yourself from the president of the United States? Look, people don't believe in institutions anymore. I mean, that's what we see all across the state. And they feel like they have no power. And so like, like for me, what I see is I don't see anything that meets the needs of everyday people in, in, in this power dynamic. And so what I mean by that is, you know, wherever I go in Missouri, like people often ask me, what does it feel like

when you go around the state? And like, what are people feeling and what's the mood? And like the mood is that no matter what they do, matter what who they vote for no matter you know what happens they just never have any power and the system is broken and it's never going to change and so so like one of the things i hear about the infrastructure bill is you know i hear the administration talking about oh we're put finally putting money into the country it's going to create all these good jobs and it's like yeah great it's going to create a decent number of good union jobs which is super but like here's the deal we all watched us spend 6.4 trillion dollars in iraq and afghanistan for nothing then we watched everybody in dc squabble over every single nickel they were going to spend here we got a fraction of that money to go through

and the worry is when i go around the state that like, yeah, maybe this is mission started, but we're acting like it's mission accomplished when we haven't actually seen if that money is going to help normal everyday people. Because, you know, people in our state have been told that the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, it was worth it. It was going to be good for them. Well, it turned out to be a big fat waste. They were told that the Wall Street bailout money was good. It was going to help them out. Well, guess what? Everybody got foreclosed on Missouri anyway. And housing stock prices went down, down, down when, frankly, Democrats nationwide were saying they'd save the housing economy. So like Missouri is the show me state. People have to actually see how this is going to

help them. And right now, like there's no indication that it's not going to be captured by the people at the top, the same people who capture money every single time. That never works out for everybody else. Why do you think that Democrats have fallen so precipitously in popularity in your home state? You know, Democrats used to be the party of working people. It's the roots of the party. We should still be there. But I mean, I hate to say it, but like our party's leadership decided at one point that money was what mattered most to them. They went for Wall Street. They went for big tech money. They sold out. And the results,

you know, they hit Missouri hard. I mean, globalization, consolidation, Wall Street shipping stuff overseas, corporate boards moving things out for quarterly profits. Like this gutted our state. And Democrats sold out just as much as Republicans. And that was really our bread and butter. You know, Republicans never claimed that. So there wasn't this sort of like loss of trust in quite the same way. And I mean, I give you a couple of good examples of just just going around the state here in Missouri. So yeah, go ahead. Do it. Yeah, super. So so and I'll give you one on a farm and

one in the inner city. And so, you know, I'm at this farm in Palmyra, Missouri, where, you know, these farmers have seen 90 percent of their fellow small family hog farmers just absolutely destroyed by a corporate monopoly called Smithfield in just a generation. So, you know, we've lost 90% of Missouri hog farmers. I'm meeting with about 40 or 50 farmers at a farm in Palmyra. They're talking about how upset they are about it, how oppressive it is, how they lost all their neighbors.

And then how the Missouri state legislature, well, so then how China how Smithfield wanted to sell itself to China in 2013. But they weren't allowed to do that because Missouri had a law on the books that said there'd be no foreign ownership of agricultural land in Missouri. And so then, and this is where you really get to the loss of power. Smithfield went and they gave a lot of money to Democrats and Republicans in the Missouri state legislature to change that law. And the Missouri state legislature did that. They changed the law. Smithfield, this company that killed all of our hog farmers and runs the profit off of

Missouri land now, sold itself to China because the state legislature changed the law to make that happen. And now these guys see like all the profits from their land going overseas. And so for them, it's just this idea that, you know, their state legislature, Democrat and Republican, would sell out in a position where they had absolutely no power. Like the normal people had no power other than what their legislature would give them. And, you know, they sold them out anyway. And now the profits go to China. And, you know, the land is getting treated worse than ever and everything else.

And so for them, it's just like, why would I ever have faith in anyone anymore? The system is broken, massive monopolies control my life. And like even worse, it goes to people that they say is our adversary. And then, uh, and then I was, and then I was in, uh, urban St. Louis at a place called the South side wellness center where the person who runs it, so this is a retirement home, an ant health center in an all black community. And so it's been run by this family for about 40 years. She's got all these pictures going back, taking care of people. And she comes to me with a similar message. And that's that, you know what, if there's one thing that I could ask you to do for me, it's this. For many years, we bought all our food locally. We had a chef here. We prepared everything

and made good meals for everybody. And then a massive corporation came in. They bought off our politicians and they convinced them that it was important for them to have a contract for all Medicaid food. And she said, so now I can't buy locally anymore. I have to buy from a single monopolistic company that comes out of, I don't know, it was like Florida or something like that, way out of state. They send us this crappy food. It's got too much sodium on it. It's increasing everyone's blood pressure. And now where I used to be able to keep the money in the community, in the black community

here, now I have to send it away and my people get worse food and they're worse off health wise. She's like, if there's just something you can do about this, I feel so helpless. I feel like I have no power. And so you just I mean, there's there's example after example, you know, people talking about the insulin cartel that's taken the price of insulin from twenty five dollars to two hundred and seventy five dollars a dose. I mean, I met someone the other day who's like, you know what? I'm insured. I have a decent job. And here's what happened. My refrigerator broke. My insulin went bad. The insurance company won't give you more insulin. They just give you the amount that you can have. And she's like, it cost me $5,500. I had to borrow money from my son's grandmother in order to get

insulin for him because there was no other way that I could just pay fifty five hundred dollars to get insulin. And it's just like, again, it's this feeling of I have no power. I have no control over my own life. And in these massive forces are buying off our politicians so that the laws don't work for us and they hurt us. Yeah. Luke, it's just so people can get a sense of kind of where you fall in the political spectrum of the Democratic Party. Who did you back? Which candidate did you back in the 2020 primary and why? So I was still in the Marine Corps then. And so I didn't get involved in partisan politics and I and I didn't I didn't back I didn't back anybody. And so who would you have

backed? I think so. People ask this question a lot, like like who do who do you like and uh and for me like i don't really consider myself a left-right politician everybody's like oh where on the spectrum do you fall from you know bernie sanders to chuck schumer or joe manchin or something like that and like my answer is just like look i grew up in missouri the guy that i that i appreciate is harry truman if you want me to pick a senator who I would like or you want to pick me a president who I liked it's that guy like he was a true populist like I believe in populism I believe that we need to have normal everyday people having power again not the set of elites that are taking control like and and so for me it's just I this is a

top-bottom race and I don't necessarily associate with myself or anyone directly. And people ask, well, who would you pick in leadership if you're in the Senate? Then it's like, well, you know what? I'm not taking any corporate PAC money. And the first thing that I'm going to do is say I want whoever leaves the U.S. Senate to not take money from corporate PACs. Let me ask you this then, Lucas, which is that Trump won your state by 15.4% in 2020. So for you to win, you would have to model yourself after, from my estimation, there's only one Senator, Joe done one time in the U.S. Senate in terms of the margin through which Trump has actually won for a Democrat? spectrum, you know, I'm raising all my money without corporate PAC money. I'm not taking fossil fuel executive money, not taking pharmaceutical executive money, not taking

money from a lot of places. Those are the only places Joe Manchin takes money from. So like, we have a complete grassroots campaign. You know, everybody goes to lucascoons.com and donates like that is how our campaign is being run. uh and so like last quarter and the quarter before that people will be shocked by this uh well last i'll just go with last quarter you know we outraised every single republican in the field and we did it with the highest percentage of grassroots donations of any candidate in the country what bernie sanders elizabeth warren john federman we had a higher percentage of grassroots donations than anybody. Joe Manchin is the complete opposite.

He had the lowest amount of grassroots donations. And so, like, I'm nothing like that guy. Our state, I don't know West Virginia enough to say, but our state might be very different than West Virginia. I mean, you know, Trump won by actually 17 points in 2016. But Jason Kander, another veteran like me, was the Democratic nominee for the for this same U.S. Senate seat. And he only lost by two point eight percent. That's like people here are willing. I mean, that's you know, that's a 15 point swing on its own. So people here are willing to make that swing. When Claire McCaskill lost in 2018 to Josh Hawley, our state auditor, who is a Democrat, won by the exact same percentage that she lost by. People here are

independent. They're individuals. But they truly believe that the system is broken. Unless they see someone who's going to change that broken system, they're not going to go for them. And so they believe that was Donald Trump. I do not think there is any way they would ever believe that was Joe Manchin. I think Joe Manchin would lose worse here than anybody else because he is he is completely opposite on on breaking that system. And that's what I want to do. Well, and you may be going up against some people are comparing him to sort of Todd Akin style candidate, which is how Claire McCaskill was able to hang on as long as she did. And Eric Grimes is the former governor. You guys can go look up the scandal and judge for yourselves. Finally, Lucas, just a couple of questions about where you stand on issues. You know,

what do you think about Medicare for all? What do you think the minimum wage should be? Where do you stand on free college? So these are populist issues in my mind. And so this is where, you know, people ask me, well me, well, Josh Hawley's a populist. How are you different than him? It's like, no, that dude is a faker, right? He comes in, he says he wants to change the system, but he won't do anything about the minimum wage. He's against raising it. He votes for every corporate judge that comes in front of him. He does. He's not for universal health care, something that will empower everyday people. And he doesn't care who goes to college as long as him and his kids do. And so so for me, you know, I got to go to college for free at Yale. I grew up I went on a Pell Grant. You know, we didn't grow up with a lot of money and we qualified for that and a bunch of other financial aid. And and with that, I was able to serve our community in a beautiful way. You know, 13 years in the Marine Corps, Iraq, Afghanistan, I led arms control negotiations with Russia. Like that is how my talent was developed and how I was able to do great things for our country. I think everybody should have that opportunity. We need to make that possible for people who can't afford it. Universal health care, like for me, this is about everyday people having freedom again. Right. And so like I

mentioned before that my family went bankrupt from medical bills when I was a kid. And my dad was actually at the time in the first job he'd ever taken out of college. And he was never able to leave that job. Smartest man I know, smartest man I've ever met is my father. And he was stuck in the exact same job for 30 years, 25, whatever it was before he retired, because he could never leave because his little girl needed insurance. Like the man had no freedom. He was completely trapped. He always wanted to start a business. He was super innovative and he wasn't able to do that because his little girl would have died if he didn't, if he didn't stay in the job. So for me, like, like we have to have universal healthcare so

that people have freedom again, so that small business owners can run a business without having to worry about being a health care provider, so that employees don't have to worry about, you know, maybe my employer's beliefs don't agree with mine and I'm not going to get the coverage that I need. Like, it is how we focus on our mission and keep everything going. I mean, you know, in the military, we had TRICARE, which is everyone gets health care, you go down to the the treatment facility you get taken care of so that you can focus on your mission and you know every American's mission is to is to just take their skills take their abilities and put them towards whatever opportunity they can and without universal health care they're never going to be able to do that they'll always be in a tough situation uh and so uh the third thing you asked was minimum wage uh pre-college yeah so yeah we talk college and health care like like minimum wage is uh is again it's a way that we give everyday people power and uh and and i just i mean 15 to me is a minimum so we have to have

minimum 15 uh we should have a wage that people can get by on. They don't have to work two jobs. I mean, we should all be able to, in this country, if we work hard and do our best, we should not have to live paycheck to paycheck or one disaster from bankruptcy. And I mean, I know that's what that's like because that's how I grew up. I remember my parents, my mom, writing a check at the grocery store and asking the manager not to cash it until the end of the month so that we could make it. And, you know, like I think the saddest thing about our country and particularly like where I go back to in Jeff City is that, you know, that corner store is gone now. People are going to like a Dollar General store or Walmart.

And the way that they get through the month now is a payday loan, you know, 360% interest or whatever it is. And so, I mean, that's bad for society. My family would have gone bankrupt way more than one time if we had to rely on payday loans to get through. Yeah, not to mention all that revenue then gets sucked down to other places. It doesn't stay local in the community. It all goes up and out. Yeah. Lucas, thank you so much for your time today. Let people know where they can learn more about your campaign.

Yeah. You can learn more about me at lucaskuntz.com. It's K-U-N-C-E and at LucasKuntzMo on Twitter or Instagram. There you go. Thanks, Lucas. We're intrigued by our campaign. We'll be watching. Yep, indeed. Catch you soon. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it.

You know, it's just been amazing at the holiday season. I mentioned you can buy a gift subscription for somebody if you'd like. I've been told to remind people of that. So many people have actually asked for it. So, hey, if you want to give the greatest gift you can, go for it. In all seriousness, though, you are supporting our work here as our ability, and we continue in order to have conversations every single day, how we're going to scale up, how we're going to build a show, make it a powerhouse in the midterms that Lucas was actually running in. And so to do that, we need your support. That's what my monologue was about today.

There's a war that's coming with the corporate media, and we want to get as big as we possibly can before they try to come after us. So we really appreciate all of those who you can. There's a premium link down there in the description, and we love you guys. Happy holidays. Love you guys. See you soon. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and we need to talk. It's Tapping In. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives.

Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. you get your podcasts. and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated,

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir.

Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that in a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios.

Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an iHeart podcast.