Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/15/22: Desantis vs Trump, Matt Taibbi Interview, Tik Tok Ban, Jan 6th Texts, SEC Catches Influencers, Labor Victories, Interest Rates, and More!

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Krystal and Saagar discuss Desantis vs Trump, Fed Rates, SEC catching Influencers, Marshall Law texts from Jan 6th, Elon banning Private Jet account, a bipartisan bill to ban Tik Tok, Revolutionary Labor moments of the year, an exclusive interview with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files and our upcoming live show in Austin Texas!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. A lot of financial crimes to get to this morning and potential financial crimes to get to this morning. A bit of a mystery. We had the latest inflation information come out. And before that data from the government dropped, in the minute before. There were massive market moves. So huge question of whether or not that info was leaked so that people could jump out ahead of the news and profit to their benefit. Also, the SEC charging some sort of social media influencers with manipulating the market. So we'll tell you about that.

We also have new text messages from many Republican members of Congress who were very interested in Stop the Steal and overturning the election. These were text messages exchanged with then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. We also have, again, some new Elon Musk moves. He had originally said when he was taking over Twitter that he was not going to ban this account that shares the publicly available data about where his private jet is flying. He has now reversed course. He's also threatening to sue the 20-year-old who is running this account. So we'll get into all of that.

We also have some new polling that we're going to lead the show with that has Ron DeSantis taking a significant lead over Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Matt Taibbi is also going to join us this morning to talk about the Twitter files and what his biggest takeaways are there. But before we get to any of that, live show. I get to say it again. Live show. Put it up there on the screen. This is the last one, folks. Austin, Texas, Paramount Theater, February 3rd on Friday. We will be there. This is going to be a wrap up of the tour. Just for the West Coast folks, I would recommend coming to this one because it's probably going to be a little while before we do anything there. This is going to be a wrap up of the tour. Just for the West Coast folks I would recommend coming to this one

because it's probably going to be a little while before we do anything again. Paramount Theater February 3rd Friday Austin, Texas Crystal Saga and Friends

maybe some other fun stuff that we're going to do while we're down there. A barbecue of course is what I'm talking about. Torchy's shout out to Torchy's Tacos. Alright so go ahead

and buy tickets if you're a premium member. It's going to be exclusive the pre-sale to premium members for the next couple of days and on sale to the general public afterwards. Premium members, just look in your email that you are going to receive today. The code will be in there for you guys to go ahead and buy tickets. As a reminder, Lifetime members, just go ahead and buy your VIP ticket,

and then we will reimburse the cost for the last couple of live shows. We are working on the reimbursement currently. It will be credited to your account on the credit card that you signed up for your membership on. All right. Enough with the... Well, I have two more things to say. Number one, very excited to come to Austin. We've been wanting to come to Austin for a long time. We had an Austin show on the books before COVID hit. So this has been a long time coming. That's number one. Number two, you're welcome because this is obviously the perfect Christmas gift. You loved one in your life. So there you go. It was actually a little bit strategic announcing before the holidays,

just in case. And it's right before Valentine's Day, the show. Anyway, I'll stop. I'll stop now. It's a fun, it's going to be a fun time. It'll be fun. We're looking forward to it. Love to see all of you guys there.

All right, let's get to the show. Our 2023 special. Let's start with Ron DeSantis. Some polling that really just shook the world. Should we take it seriously? I don't know. Let's talk about it. Let's put it up there on the screen. First and foremost was USA Today with a poll headline, Trump in trouble, Republican support for a 2024 bid falls amid political and legal setback. So what they point to is actually a double digit drop amongst GOP primary voters who prefer Trump to Ron DeSantis. And in fact, they are now showing

a lead for Ron DeSantis amongst GOP and GOP-leaning voters on a two-to-one margin. Only 31% said that they want the former president to run, while 61% preferred some other Republican nominee who could continue the policies that Trump has pursued. Two-thirds of those Republicans said that they were inclined specifically to vote for Ron DeSantis by a 56 to 33 margin. Just, I mean, there's no way of getting around that. It's a disaster for Trump. To be clear on the poll itself, 1,000 registered voters, margin of error plus or minus 3.1 points, sample of 374 Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party with an error margin in that sample of 5.1 points, sample of 374 Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party with an error margin in that sample of 5.1 points. The reason it matters, though, is that it comes

amidst a slew of other polls all pointing in the same direction. So let's go to the next one. This is from the Wall Street Journal. And this was a hypothetical matchup between the two. Very similar results here. DeSantis beating Trump at 52 to 38 amongst likely GOP primary voters, contemplating a race in which the first nominee votes will be cast in just about a year. The reason why I think I take that one a little bit more seriously, Crystal, is the USA Today poll was GOP and GOP-leaning voters. GOP-leaning doesn't mean anything in a primary. This one is the Wall Street Journal specifically polling likely GOP primary voters.

That was another tell to me. Registered voters versus likely. Likely is almost always far more important and more indicative. But again, we have just gone through multiple cycles now of polling being off, being completely and totally wrong. The order of the states still matters as far as I know. RNC is still going up in Iowa and in New Hampshire. Those are two very Trump-friendly states. DeSantis himself, the Florida primary, I believe is either on Super Tuesday or after Super Tuesday or around there later on in the cycle. So that would be

where there'd be a true test. One of the things that got Marco Rubio to drop out in the 2016 race is when Trump actually beat him in his own home state in Florida. And he was like, okay, well, if you can't win your own home state, it's time to go. So we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Just to dig into the numbers a little bit more, Trump's approval rating has fallen off among GOP voters, fallen to 74%. In the previous poll, it was 85%. The share that view him actively unfavorably has risen from 13% to 23%. Digging into the Trump versus DeSantis head-to-head, among those who call themselves very conservative, they still favor Trump over DeSantis, 54 to 38. Those who say they are just somewhat conservative back DeSantis over Trump, 59 to 29. So there's a

bit of an ideological divide. There also is an education divide, which continues to be really interesting. Trump beats DeSantis among those with a high school education or less, while DeSantis does better among likely GOP primary voters who are college educated. So you can see there's also a bit of an urban-rural divide. There's an education divide. And then there is also an ideology divide there. So all really interesting in terms of how the GOP base is sort of sorting itself out here. Let's go to the next one here because, as I said, it wasn't just one or two. We have now four different ones.

So Marquette had DeSantis up by 20 points in a hypothetical two-way contest. The Wall Street Journal had him up by 14 points. The YouGov poll had him up by five points. And Quinnipiac plus two. I don't know, maybe average it. Even then, it's just all over the map. It's been a year. I mean, we have a year. It's crazy to look at like, how do you get such different results? That's what I mean. I mean, and then having come off the heels now of an election where the

Democrats actually did better, maybe you could extrapolate that and say, well, you know, amongst these polls, maybe we should wait Ron DeSantis even more because the polls were off in Republican directions in 2020, sorry, in 2022, but then in 2018 and 2022, GOP support is dramatically underrated. Trump's support in the polls was always way off. I mean, if we'll remember New Hampshire, I believe, which he won like in a blowout in 2016. They had it much tighter. Also, I also recall when he was winning 40, 50 percent of the vote in some of the later primaries that were happening in Wisconsin and Nevada and elsewhere. Trump was back in 2016. So the polls actually understated a lot of his support.

Some of that had to do with momentum. I mean, look, I think we've all been through enough cycles here to say, hey, who the hell knows? If I'm Ron, though, I'm probably feeling better than I was before. Do I revise some of my analysis? Honestly, maybe, but I'm just at a point now, Crystal, where until the votes get cast, I just have no idea. Until, not even the votes get cast, until we see an actual race,

until we see them going at each other, some kind of debate. Yeah, I feel like you do. I mean, we've seen in a lot of cycles where, you know, you'll have a candidate, Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or whoever, jump to the top of the polls, Michelle durable base of support here than those sort of like flavor of the month candidates from the past, because I think he has been whatever you think. And I don't think much of the sort of policy postures he's taken of the ideological position that he's leaned into. But it has been very clever in terms of appealing to a GOP base. The other thing that comes across in these numbers is it's not just that the people who know DeSantis like him, he's very well known among the Republican base. So he has very high name ID and very high favorability. Now, it's one thing when you're sort of in the abstract, when you haven't really been on the national stage, when you certainly haven't been trading direct blows with the former president who does maintain a significant amount of popularity,

it's another thing when you are in that head-to-head contest. But listen, there is no doubt about it. These midterm elections were very damaging to Trump. I mean, they were really damaging to his brand. It was just as clear as it could possibly be that the closer tied a candidate was to him, the closer tied to his like stop the steal insanity that they were, the worse they performed. And then you have the counterexample of DeSantis down in Florida just cleaning up, just romping the entire state going in a different direction than the rest of the country. that I'm sure is compelling for quite a few Republicans who are interested in actually winning and see that they really are not in a good position to do so at this point with the former president. And also the man has done himself no favors. I mean, lackluster campaign announcement, boring as hell, and has done nothing since then except basically like hang out with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. So it hasn't been a really stirring and inspiring

campaign that he's run this far. He did tease some sort of a big announcement on True Social today. So we'll see what that is. And maybe after the holidays, maybe he comes out with a more with a fuller schedule. But it seems like people are tired of him and he's sort of tired of, you know, running and actually being out front in the way that he used to absolutely adore. And DeSantis is trying to outflank him from the right. One of the things I've heard a long time from the DeSantis folks is one of the big attack lines would be, well, DeSantis was anti-lockdown before Trump was. Trump is the one who ultimately let Dr. Fauci, he let the lockdowns occur under his reign. And DeSantis continues to do that. Let's throw this next one up there on the screen. DeSantis is actually currently impaneling a grand jury investigation of the COVID-19 vaccines, basically pointing a gun at

Big Pharma to, quote, investigate any and all wrongdoing with respect to the COVID-19 vaccines. The grand jury panel, which was also impaneled with the round table with the Florida Surgeon General and a bunch of other panel of scientists and physicians, some of which were skeptical of the way that the vaccines were rolled out and the role of the pharmaceutical companies, said, quote, we'll be able to get data on whether they want to give it to us or not. In Florida, it is illegal to mislead and misrepresent, especially when you are talking about the efficacy of a drug. So, I mean, actually it could be kind of interesting if we get some of these folks who are under oath and elsewhere in terms of other motive. But I think it's an interesting sign in that they believe this COVID

attack will work. I still remain deeply skeptical of it. First of all, like we live in a republic. The reason DeSantis was able to do whatever he wanted in Florida and New York was able to do what they wanted is because the federal government doesn't actually control anything. Like Trump was not the actual arbiter of whether the state was going to be in lockdown or not. It, you know, for better or worse, all the president can do is like, please do this. Remember when the South Carolina governor wanted to open the state in May and Trump called him out to scream at him and he did it anyway. The president doesn't have that type of power, especially over these like mostly state and local decisions. So that's one. But, you know, maybe narratively it could work. But second, look at the votes. Not a single voter put COVID in

their top five, some not even in the top 10 of voting. So I just don't know if that's going to hit. It's possible. It's possible that people could still be salty about it and all that. But I think a lot of people have moved on. So I really don't know which way to Yeah, I mean, they've been signaling for a long time that this was going to be the critique that they had of Trump. I also am somewhat skeptical about the resonance at this point, not only because, listen, everybody's kind of moved on and it just doesn't hit in the way that it used to. But also, you know, Trump kind of has him dead to rights on when he when DeSantis wouldn't admit whether or not he got a booster. And things like that, like putting him on the spot over, you know, he ends up looking very sort of slimy, very disingenuous. It ends up being very clear, like, oh, you're posturing because you think this is the right political move to ultimately make. It was interesting to me to read the back and forth

in this NBC News article from people in Trump's orbit who would talk to them and then, you know, the DeSantis view. But you had Roger Stone who told them prior to this, DeSantis' position was identical to Trump's, and he advocated the efficacy and safety of vaccines. That's his record. You have someone else saying this is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to. We had another one who said the fact is we've seen this coming for a year ever since Ron started to get anti-vax. Yes, there's a portion of our base that is anti-vax and some people could walk away from Trump over it. That's why Ron is doing it. It's so transparent. The official, Stephen Chung, who's an official spokesperson for Trump, said in a written statement that, quote,

after China unleashed this deadly virus onto the rest of the world, President Trump's administration worked tirelessly to secure medical equipment to save the lives of Americans who were infected. Operation Warp Speed was a once-in-a-lifetime initiative that gave people the option of utilizing therapeutics if they wished to do so. He also fought against any attempt, as you were saying, Sagar, to federalize the pandemic response by protecting every state's rights. So that is their line. That's the way they're playing. It is like, number one, this dude was saying the same stuff as we were until he decided there was a political move he could make here. And number two, Trump is apparently very, and I think justifiably so, proud about Operation Warp Speed. He sees it as a significant accomplishment of his administration. And so he

sort of has stubbornly refused, even when he's been booed at times by conservative audiences, to let go of that or to let anyone ultimately diminish that. So maybe it is a point of vulnerability. Maybe it is an area where he's out of step with the base. Is it the sort of driving, controlling issue, the way that, say, like the Iraq war vote was ultimately for Hillary against Obama? I'm not sure. And it's also the record is a lot more mixed and a lot less clear cut than on something like, did you vote for the war or did you not vote for the war? Very well said. And finally, though, and this is real, a point against Trump. And this actually, to me, might be the most salient one. Put this up there on the screen. Every poll out

there shows us that Americans have little appetite for a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. It is possible that the GOP, and maybe the debate, maybe, and I say this with extreme skepticism, has reached a point of exhaustion with Trump. And given the electoral consensus where there was a major pushback against Stop the Steal and Trump MAGA-style candidates, that they could have just said, well, maybe I'm done with them. Again, I just remain skeptical. Many of the people and others that I've seen back Trump, some of the things that they love the most about him are part of the reason the broader electorate has objected to him. They like the trolling. They like the tweets. They like, you know, everyone's like Trump, DeSantis is Trump without the X. I mean, in my experience, like the X is the only thing that they really love the most about Trump. I don't think they give a damn about the policy either

way. Yeah, I agree. Anytime you meet a really diehard Trumper, they will twist themselves into knots about why, like when he did something that was bad, it wasn't his fault. It was John Kelly or something like this. This is why Blue Maga is like that too. You know, like Blue Maga, they do the same thing. Oh, it's not on Biden. That's, you know, the people behind him force his hand. It's like, these people are, they have agency. He was the most powerful man in the whole world. Like he ultimately was the one who decided. So maybe they've come to my thinking. I have yet to see any real evidence of that. Yeah. And the other part of that poll about the Trump versus Biden rematch is like, ultimately,

though, they're like, yeah, if he's the nominee, of course, I'm going to vote for him. And then Democrats, too. I mean, actually, there's a large majority of Democrats who want to move on from Joe Biden, continue to want to move on from Joe Biden, even after, you know, a better than expected midterm result. Really, I mean, it's sort of a low bar, but really a sort of historic result in terms of modern midterm outcomes for the party in power. But people are still like, you know, the thing with Biden is it I think is a less I would like it to be an ideological critique of him. It is more of a like style critique of this guy just seems really old. And I'm just not sure that he's up to this job anymore. Maybe we should get some new blood in here.

Seems reasonable, in my opinion. It does seem reasonable. Yeah, I agree. All right. So let's get to this little bit of a financial mystery that is quite interesting. This is crazy. Crazy, has huge implications. And by the way, the White House is totally downplaying. So we had, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen.

The Consumer Price Index data came out, okay, was released at 8.30. At 8.29, one minute before that data ultimately dropped, there were huge market moves. So you can see that on this chart. The giant spike there that you see in the markets going way up, that spike happens between 8.29 and 8.30. So again, that inflation data, which showed sort of lower than expected inflation, which was, you know, people took as a really good sign, took as a sign, oh, the Fed is not going to continue to hike rates. This is going to be good for us. That data drops at 830 and the market is already moved most of what it's going to do at 829. OK, the White House, they say, brushed off those concerns over a leak of this information, calling it minor market movements, but stock and treasury futures

made major moves. So basically, the allegation is these people knew what was coming. Somehow, they got tipped off to this information that should not have been public to everybody until 830. Because of course, if you get a jump on that data, well, you're in a position to cheat. You're in a position to have forward knowledge that is not supposed to be public and be able to benefit from that in advance. So how do you explain the fact that there were thousands of moves made

before this data officially releases? Let's put the next piece up on the screen. This is from Bloomberg. This is about the White House is dismissing these moves. But just to give you a sense of how significant this market movement was that they're downplaying as being minor, stock futures suddenly spiked more than 1%. Trading and treasury futures surged, pushing benchmark yields lower by about four basis points. Those are major moves in such a short period of time, bigger than full session swings on plenty

of days. People are saying regulators really need to look into this. To give you a few more specifics here, over that 60-second span between 829 and 830, over 13,000 March 10-year futures traded hands during a period when activity is usually non-existent. So 13,000 futures traded hands when normally that number would have been pretty close to zero. So listen, people got, somehow they got word of this beforehand. That is certainly what it looks like. They asked the agency that puts out this information and what they said, Sagar, is like, listen, to our knowledge, there was no leak, but by law or by regulation, we have to distribute this info to a variety of government officials. So the idea is somebody is getting paid to give out this information early and or, you know, they're having somebody buy for them ahead of time so that they're able to get a jump on the information, too.

But somehow the word got out there. It's just no other explanation for this. What bothers me is actually the lack of media scrutiny on this. So I actually recall a really crazy example was when Trump was president. So the president by law actually gets the BLS numbers early. And he tweeted something where he was like, big news coming tomorrow. Very good. Which traders could have assumed was the BLS data. And they were trading based upon that information. A lot of people freaked out because they were like, well, oh my gosh, like Trump is violating the sacrosanct principle that we should keep these numbers secret up until the day of. Well, look, there's only a couple of people who get this info. The White House

Chief of Staff, the President, Secretary of the Treasury, the Labor Secretary, and then presumably whoever the guy is who brings the folder over to the White House. One of them talked. It's, listen, 13,000 futures, 1% rally. That doesn't happen. These people, you think they're going to gamble multi-billion dollars based upon nothing? They're not that stupid. They know what they're doing

whenever they want to make a shitload of money. And so I'll look at this. It is so clear that there was some leak. And I think it's insane that the White House is not attacking this. Because just think, maybe it wasn't Biden, but maybe it was. Maybe he was on the phone to an advisor and he was like, hey, you know, we got great news tomorrow to a friend, to a family member, someone just saying, you know, we got great news coming out tomorrow. He's known for not having rhetorical discipline.

I'm so excited. You know, CPI is going to show X. That person calls a broker, broker calls someone, next thing you know, word is out on Wall Street. That's a federal crime. That's insider trading. Like you have to go to jail. And I'm not even saying that there was necessarily nefarious intent. Somebody over here, something here, somebody over here, something there. You call somebody because you're privy to something. That's a major violation of the chain of custody on sacred information like this, which trillions of dollars in market value can be won or lost based upon it. But it also, and again, we're not saying this was by, this is just pure speculation. I don't know who it is.

We don't know who it is. But there also, it also very well could have been nefarious, though, because there's huge amounts of money at stake here. And so if you're someone who's sitting there on a government salary, and a lot of these people feel like they should be, you know, as rich as the Wall Street ghouls that they're hanging out with. This is, you know, an opportunity to get a little bit of a tip out there and be able to cash in to better yourself, as Dan Crenshaw might say. You know, that is a real possibility, too. But you have to get to the bottom of this because this is as clear as day. And it wasn't

just like, you know, if the word gets out to one person, then it's going to be hard to see huge market movement. But when you had, I mean, the bulk of the movement on this news happened before the news even came out. So it wasn't just, oh, one or two people got word. This information was apparently widespread. That's really the only explanation for what happened here. And the lack of curiosity from the White House, the lack of a desire to get to the bottom of, you know, how this happened and how people were able to get a jump on this data coming out at 830 is really stunning and really, really bad as well. We have some other financial news from yesterday, which is the Fed,

which has been on a course of extremely aggressive rate hiking of 75 basis points. They have now scaled back slightly to a still aggressive but somewhat less aggressive hike of 50 basis points. That is part of why the markets responded in such a large way, because once they saw those inflation numbers, they felt more confident than, OK, the Fed is going to sort of dial back what they've ultimately been doing. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Federal Reserve is about to hike rates one last time this year, how it may affect you. And now we do have the official news that it is 50 basis points. This is and I also saw Bank of England this morning made a similar move. There are other

European central banks that made a similar move and they're all sort of following suit in the same direction. This is important for a variety of reasons. Obviously, we've had a lot of concern here about what the Fed is doing and how it may ultimately impact your wages, your job, your ability to buy a house, all of those things that enable you to live and live decently and not be so stretched thin at the end of the month. Let's go and put the next piece up on the screen. This is the substance of what was in those inflation numbers. They did slow more sharply than expected in November. Their description here for The New York Times is that this is an encouraging sign for both Federal Reserve officials and consumers that 18 months of rapid and unrelenting price increases are beginning to meaningfully abate. So we had a

7.1% inflation, which, you know, I do have to say, 7% inflation, it's still a lot. I mean, let's just, I don't want to sugarcoat it. Things are headed in a better direction, and that is important. But people are not getting wage raises. Like, they're not getting raises to compensate for this amount of inflation. So, it continues to be very difficult for people. Yeah, I hate whenever people are like, great news, it's still only inflation at seven. I'm like, yo, seven is still really high. Anyone else still go to the grocery store and still can't imagine, like, why stuff costs as much as it should? So, I mean, I'm pretty sure that's not just going to go away. One of the things that

we really learned from the election, which I think is very heartening, is that people were like, well, this really sucks, but I need to go and vote for somebody who's going to do something about it necessarily. They're not just going to blame the president or whomever just for being in office and presiding over a really bad economy. They want to hear real stuff. That was interesting, but we still can't take away the pain. There's a lot of pain that remains out there. I actually just saw yesterday the savings rate as an all-time low. Advertising is taking a massive hit, also indicating that retail sales are not catching up with where they traditionally should be. A huge amount of retail sales happen right now because of Thanksgiving and Christmas during the holiday season, massive amounts of profits

not going to the direction where they should be in a traditional boom year. So you can just see that, yeah, okay, unemployment, it's not great, not bad. But inflation eating away at wages and earnings and housing, it's one of the most wonky and, in my opinion, structurally biased economies against, I won't even say working class people, I'm going to say all the way up to straight middle class. Up to middle class and onward, you're good as long as you make over 100 grand. But the vast majority of the public, let's say 65% or other, basically the economy is rigged against you right now. I totally agree with that. Yeah. And I mean, something we have really tried to focus on is

housing market. Housing has never been less affordable. And the Fed really unable to deal with the core issues that have led to this inflation to start with, which is, I think, why it's been so sticky and so hard to deal with, because we aren't actually using any of the policy tools that would require legislative or executive action in order to deal with those issues. So anyway, that's the picture as best we know it right now. You've got some good old-fashioned Wall Street rigging and government collusion and corruption that the White House is apparently content to basically overlook. And you have the Fed continuing their march towards higher rates and potentially destroying your livelihood. That's where we are.

This is such a fascinating story that we thought paired really well with the CPI. So we did that recent segment with Coffeezilla. He's been exposing a lot of scammers. And it seems the SEC is really waking up to some of the pump and dump schemes that are happening online. So this phase focuses eight different social media influencers

now been charged with the SEC for manipulating and banking almost $100 million. Let's put this up there on the screen. Eight of the social media influencers from across the country, Texas, California, New Jersey, Florida, were charged with a pump and dub scheme in which they, quote, cultivated hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, in stock trading chat rooms on Discord. Seven defendants purchased certain stocks and then encouraged their substantial social media followings to buy those stocks by posting price targets or indicating they were buying, holding, or adding to their positions. However, when share prices and or trading volumes

rose in the promoted securities, the individuals regularly sold their shares without ever having disclosed their plans to pump securities while they were promoting them. And the defendants used social media to amass this following and resulted in fraudulent profits of approximately $100 million. Just to give you an idea of exactly what some of the tweets that some of these gentlemen were engaged with, our producers went ahead and pulled my personal favorite. Let's put this up there on the screen. Mr. Zach Morris, quote,

I love pumping. Okay, could this up there on the screen. Mr. Zach Morris, quote, I love pumping. Okay. Could go a lot of different ways in there. Yep. A little bit of ambiguity. Not though, whenever you pair it with the SEC complaint. Also, our producers did a phenomenal job and pulled these text messages, which are just so hilarious that give you an example of how brazen that these guys were. Let's put this up there. So they literally go and say, if you didn't bank with the gang today, IDK what's wrong. I gave this alert on Twitter. Hope everyone banked on this one. Did exactly what I said. And then new high of the day. I didn't want to just keep talking about it. All right, goblins, I'm out for the day.

Everyone should have banked with me on this initial call. Love you guys. I'll see you all tomorrow to make stupid money with all of you again. Next, I'll never get sick of pumping, quote, dot, dot, dot, money into my followers' bank accounts. Let's all get rich. Next, every member of admin have the same goal. Get as many people away from the nine to five slavery into the area of financial freedom and F you money. Our gains are seeing stories of our others paying off debt and banking is much more rewarding. Next, congrats to all the longs that banked with me on this one. I know I called it right as the market opened. If you caught this one, you should be thanking me now. And then the final, next week, I'm going to have a nice one for us, I promise. I might even say something along the lines of get a P word, we're going to the moon.

Wow. Just, it really is like stunning in how brave. You're a terrible saga, by the way. I really can't imagine, I can't imagine buying or selling stock based on the word of such morons like these guys. I fucking hate these people. I'm sorry I don't drop F-bombs on this show, but this is disgusting. Yeah, it's terrible.

I mean, they literally banked over $100 million while doing pump-and-dup schemes, including penny stocks. The SEC is suing them for all of their ill-gotten gains and seeking a ban on securities trading for all of them. But it's really gross. And one of the reasons why I like this enforcement action is like with FTX, a lot of this is happening online, not just in the realm of crypto, with these influencers and others. And there are young dudes, mostly dudes out there,

well-documented at this point, who look at this and look exactly at the manipulative language they use. Get rich, escape the grind, escape the nine to five, pay off your debts. Don't be a P word. Yeah. It's like, that's really bad. Like trying to appeal to the macho ego and like, you know, don't be emasculated. If you want to get in, like get in. And I mean, this is the thing

that makes me so disgusted with these people. First of all, there's nothing new about this. It's a classic pump or dump scheme. It's just using social media and it means that you have a wider reach. So you can prey on people who are particularly vulnerable. I mean, you know, we got asked this question, actually, that we answered at one of our live shows about why it seems like it's mostly dudes who are in crypto. And the best answer I can come up with is,

as a society, generally, what we put out to men is to be a real man, you have to be able to provide. And then we have systematically undercut the ability for men and women too, but for men in this particular instance, because this is like the societal core value, to be able to provide, to be able to provide for a family, to be able to get that house, to be able to get that life that you're supposed to be able to achieve. And then you also have layered on top of that a complete lack of trust in the established financial system, understandably so, especially after the financial crash. And it's made a lot of people vulnerable to like, hey, I have this secret special knowledge. And if you just do what we do, you're going to be on the right side of things. You're going to be able to make this cash. You're stupid. You're a pussy if you don't do it.

And unfortunately, obviously, a lot of people are vulnerable to it and fall for it. It's the same thing with these freaking celebrity influencers, Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon and all these other people who are pushing their pet crypto schemes that they were getting paid cash for. They didn't care what happened. But people, for whatever reason, like trust and believe in these people. And so they're like, oh, if Kim Kardashian says it, then I guess I'm going to go buy. It sounds ridiculous, but people really literally did that. It's so disgusting.

So they would push this to their followers, say it's guaranteed money. Basically, you're stupid if you don't do it. And then the minute that the stock price goes up, they're out. They didn't tell their followers that they had jumped ship, that they were out of the position and continued the whole fraud up until now.

So kudos to the SEC for going after these guys because it is just so disgusting to manipulate and take advantage of people like this. Yeah, and there's a lot of celebrities getting sued right now. Tom Brady, Gisele, Steph Curry, David Ortiz, all of whom endorsed FTX and are being sued because some people put their life savings in as a result. I mean, look, again, look, would I put my life savings in? There are a lot of people that admire. If they told me to do that, no, I wouldn't do that.

That said, some people did listen to them and you do have a responsibility. And that's why, you know, anytime you do talk about securities and all this other stuff, you're supposed to be like, this is not financial advice, could be a risk, you know, et cetera. But even then, it's really gross. I'm glad that we had the text messages and more. I wanted to just expose to you that there's a lot of these online scams who are out there. Our audience, obviously, they're getting the news online. So you may well fall victim to this, just like anybody. Or you could see some of this deceptive advertising and other. And if you do see it, just know that at least somebody is taking it seriously and going after them. Because it's been just such a Wild West environment for

too long. And it's not a sign of weakness or personal failings or whatever to fall for these sorts of things. Every human has a sort of psychological vulnerability. And what good con artists do is they're able to exploit to find exactly where you're vulnerable and be able to exploit you. And so even, you know, the ones that like don't land for you, even as you can look on the outside and be like, that's ridiculous. Why? How would anyone fall for that? Like we're all vulnerable to the right, correctly worded scheme ultimately. So anyway, I just feel bad for the victims and I'm very happy that the SEC is going after these assholes. Speaking of assholes, we have new text messages from, I think it's like 34 different Republican members of Congress over the course from like election day through January 6th, where they were text messaging with

then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and trying to come up with some kind of scheme to get the election results overturned, floating all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. Hey, Eric, if you could actually put the second element up first, let's start with the second element here, because this was the original story from TPM here. They got a hold of these text messages. The headline is Mark Meadows exchanged text with 34 members of Congress about plans to overturn the 2020 election. The one that is getting the most attention, both for its extremism and also for its poor spelling, is from a representative, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who texted on January 17th, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office. So this is after

January 6th. This is when Biden is about to be sworn in. He texted, quote, Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly and reading about the Dominion lawsuits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation, we are at a point of no return in saving our republic, two exclamation points. Our last hope is invoking martial law, which he spells like the way that Marshall Kosloff, our friend, spells his name, not like the way that you're supposed to spell it. Please urge to president to do so. So you have, you know, crackpot. You've got everything in this text. You've got the crackpot like Dominion lawsuit conspiracies. You've got absolute authoritarian extremism calling for the president to institute martial law. And you also have, you know, some grammar and spelling issues here as well.

There's so much more, though. I mean, you've got this dude, Representative Brian Babin, who I've never even heard of before from Texas, sent at least 21 messages to Meadows, received at least four responses. One of them, he said, Mark, when we lose Trump, we lose our republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We're with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. I wish that Biden was actually Marxist. I would like that better. Gosar says, when is the 40 days up? What date starts the clock? November 3rd. If it is, then it is December 18th. China bought Dominion in October for 400 million. If that's not interference, then should have a report with details and specifics. There he's, this is a member of Congress,

literally referring to an unhinged conspiracy theory that was floated by Alex Jones on Infowars, okay? That's the level of correspondence that we're talking about here. And then one more to give you a little more color here. Jim Jordan, who is very powerful, well-known, et cetera, he was actively collaborating in terms of trying to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results. And obviously, that's sort of like

what January 6th ultimately centered around. He says on January 6th, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedents. No legislative act wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 contrary to the Constitution can be valid. The court and Hubbard v. Lowe reinforce this truth that an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all, is a proposition no longer open to discussion. So again, he's using these like grand words from our founding fathers to justify nullifying the legal votes of American citizens. That's why I think it's so important. It's insane. It's so important to underscore these. They believe this stuff. And people always ask me,

they're like, are these congressmen really as dumb as you seem? Yeah, actually. They really are just boomers who watch Fox News. And I think that comes through in terms of these text messages. And they also literally don't know how to spend Marshall, apparently. The man is literally a lawyer. Kind of amazing. Oh, my God. So when you look and you watch all of this over, I think it just goes to show how deep the brain worms were. And we have tried very hard to split, not split the difference, but to, like, tell the story of Jan 6th.

Like, we're like, look, it was bad. There's probably some feds involved. Definitely wasn't enough security at the Capitol. Is it a world-changing event that inspires a new domestic terror law? No. Shouldn't be. Shouldn't be. You know, shouldn't be one of those things. We shouldn't overuse it and enhance the security agencies who may have been involved in the first place. So it's one of those where it's very difficult also, though, to acknowledge and get people to really realize like, this was serious. And you know, they really would have done it. I think if they had the possibility, they were just too incompetent and low IQ to do so. Yeah. And I

don't really know how to feel about that. I mean, on one hand, I guess thankful that they were too dumb to do so. But also, you know, the means of pulling off something like this, it's crazy. And I want people to realize that. It was real. It actually was real. They really believed the Dominion bamboo ballot stuff coming out of the mouth of Sidney Powell. I do think that is the most important takeaway is,

I mean, this is not a small number of members of Congress either. 34 members who were privately texting Mark Meadows this crap. You know, wild conspiracy theories, wild like legal theories that they thought they could use justifiably to overturn the election. And so, you know, it's always been difficult to adequately explain January 6th because on the one hand, obviously it wasn't going to work. It didn't come close to working. It was bumbling. It was ridiculous. The court shut every lawsuit down that they filed. Like every single one of them was absurd on its face. So you're like,

it was so incompetent that it didn't actually really pose the threat that they wanted it to pose. But make no mistake about it. Like they wanted, they genuinely wanted to overturn the results, right? There was a full, there was full will available, just lack of capability. I mean, it kind of, obviously I got like obsessed with this Reichsburger German coup plot thing, but there are echoes there because these, this group of like a fake prince and his 25 allies or whatever, like they're not going to overthrow the German government. That doesn't mean they didn't have real plans to do so and could have caused some problems and could have caused some violence and some have caused some violence

and some mayhem, et cetera. So that's I think that's what comes across in these text messages. We have a graphic, too, that has some of them that we can put up on the screen there that just shows, you know, some of the back and forth. This is some of the ones I read, you know, when we lose Trump, we lose our republic. Some of the conspiracy theories. You've got this dude, Mike Kelly, who's a Pennsylvania congressman, saying we're suing the Pennsylvania secretary of state for her illegal meddling in this election. Let me know if there's anything I can do to fight these MFers in Pennsylvania. Our president is heroic. Thank you for all you've done. Please tell the president just how much he's loved and appreciated in Pennsylvania. So

anyway, gives you a little bit of a flavor of what was going on behind the scenes during this crucial, crucial time and very tense time period. Good luck winning an election whenever this stuff is all out there. And as voters showed you, they don't agree with you and are not willing to look past it. Which, you know, I really am heartened by. Yes. Okay, let's go to the next one. This, we were originally going to talk about something more substantive. Jack Dorsey kind of put out a long thread about censorship, misinformation, how he wished he'd handled content.

His own missteps. Unfortunately, Elon decided to give us something bigger that we, of course, must address. So let's go ahead and put the first element up there on the screen. Musk is now threatening legal action against the Twitter user who tracked his jet and has actually suspended the Elon jet account, along with automated accounts that track the jet locations, not only of Elon, but of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other large private jet accounts. Now, Elon's reasoning here is that real-time posting of somebody's information is now going to be considered doxing by Twitter's terms of service and will be suspended as a, quote, physical safety violation. Post, quote, posting location someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis is not a safety problem, so it is okay. As in, afterwards, it's fine. His reasoning is that last

night, a car carrying his son in Los Angeles was followed by a crazy stalker thinking that it was Elon who later blocked the car from moving and climbed on top of the hood. Legal action is being taken against Sweeney and organizations, Sweeney being the person who ran many of these accounts, and any organizations that supported harm to his family. The reason why that this is getting some attention is because on November 6th, he said, quote, my commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk. Crystal and I were talking about it this morning. Can anyone sympathize with a man who would want to do anything in their power to protect their family,

especially after one of their small children is attacked. Yeah, I certainly can. That said, this was directly held up as a free speech absolutist position. And while I do sympathize with Elon, he is worth some $300 billion, and I'm certain has some security around himself, around his children, around his multiple ex-wives or baby mamas, whatever that you want to call them. And, you know, at the same time, like posting real-time information, what does that even mean? For example, I was once a member of the White House Press Corps. One of the things that we would do when we were in the motorcade is be like POTUS on the move from one place to another place. Why do we do that? In the public

interest so that the American people always know where the president of the United States is. I'm not saying Elon is like that, but the point is, is who wears the line on what's in the public interest, what's not? I mean, Elon, let's say he's traveling somewhere, not on business, but on an official matter and it's newsworthy. Well, that arises to the level, you know, his own personal safety. This is one of those things where we always have to balance. And in my opinion, it actually falls into the worst of censorship, which is it's always under the guise of safetyism. People think about, you know, all the banning of the dead naming and also like, oh, this is about safety. What does that even mean? Protecting people's lives, et cetera. It's BS. It's completely within the eye of the beholder.

So this is exactly why it shouldn't be in his hands. He just rewrote the rules literally a day later. And I get it. I sympathize. If I was a father, I probably would try and do the same thing. But this is exactly why it really shouldn't be in his hands in the first place. Stop waiting for the right oligarch to come along to save you on free speech. Because it's just never going to happen.

I mean, even if you are well-intentioned, which, you know, in my opinion, I don't think that highly of Elon, so I don't think that he is. But let's assume he has the best of a day. You are still we have seen multiple decisions made that are all about his own personal vibes and feelings and emotions about it. And as long as your speech is subject to the approval of some oligarch or another, that is not free speech. So there's a couple other things to note about this.

Number one, this is information that is already publicly available. Yeah, that's true. You can go on any FAA website. Sweeney doesn't have any, like, you know, magical knowledge or insider info here. It's literally an automated account that just reposts

already publicly available info. That's number one. Number two, they went so far as even to, he has an Instagram account that does the same thing, and they're blocking people from even sharing that on the platform. It really is almost like a Hunter Biden laptop type of treatment. I'm not saying it's that level of importance because we're not in a presidential election, but it really is. He decided he doesn't like this one thing, even though he'd already said that because I'm a free speech absolutist, it even applies to this one specific account. So he goes back on that. They actively rewrite the terms of service in order to fit this one specific case that bothers and in his view threatens him. Okay. So again, it's just subject to the whims of

Elon Musk. Another thing, you know, the supposed position of Elon, which he stated publicly, was that any speech that was illegal would be allowed on the platform. There was, in fact, a Supreme Court case, apparently, about this exact thing, the publishing of flight data, of flight location data. And they found it is free speech. So by any standard, if you're looking at this, it does not mean what he said his criteria would be, not to mention, I mean, at the beginning, it was like, oh, I'm going to have my content moderation counsel, and it's going to be different. And we just see. And I actually appreciate it because I think it's very revealing.

As long as these decisions are in the hand of some individual or small group of individuals or whatever, your speech is always going to be subject to the whims of their own proclivities and biases. I mean, to give you one more example about the like threats and the violence or whatever, Yoel Roth, who has become become like a villain in this story. And I think with some justifiable, I mean, you know, he has an ideology that he pushed.

And I disagree with what the policy he pursued with the platform was. But he's had to leave his house because of violent, you know, potentially legitimate threats against him. So he's, you know, Elon doesn't have any care or concern apparently about that threat of safety to someone else. It's only when it touches him and his family that he ultimately cares. And that's what makes it so difficult. Do I want people to threaten Yoel Roth? No, leave Yoel Roth alone. That said, I am going to still tweet and say whatever I want about Yoel Roth in a critical manner, because if some crazy person decides to do something with that, that's on them. What they try to do is silence anybody who is criticizing them and saying that if you do, you are somehow responsible for discussing

attacks. That is a ludicrous position. ACLU versus the town of Skokie on the Nazi rally had the exact same thing. The residents, remember, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, said that looking at swastikas and at white supremacists was directly harmful to them and was bringing back bad memories and was a threat against their own physical safety. The court ruled in the favor of the rally specifically because, yes, speech is very often not just uncomfortable, it can often be dangerous. And in terms of the things that we have in our statutes around what imminent incitement of violence actually looks like, it doesn't look

like this. So look, it just comes back to he banned Kanye for posting a swastika. Do I look like a swastika from Kanye's anti-Semitic bile? No. That said, what he posted was totally within the bounds of free speech absolutism. And Elon just said, well, it made me incite to violence, so I decided to ban it. Now on his own personal Jet account. Also, I've never been on a private jet. I don't know anything about private jets. But is it really that hard to actually conceal?

Or is it really just because when you own the jet and then you have to file paperwork, then they can just align with that jet. Why don't you just charter a jet? Am I just thinking too sensibly here or is it just too easy to own your own jet? Yeah. And that's why they don't all do it. I don't know. Again, I don't know anything about how else it works. I haven't really thought too deep about that.

Fly commercial, fly commercial, and nobody knows where you're going. That's my response. There's a little trick for you, Eli. The one other thing I want to say about this, because I mean, I think it just adds some color texture to it. Like this guy, Sweeney, who's 20 years old. And by the way, also, he's being threatened with a lawsuit now from Eli. It's open and shut. He will easily win. That's absurd. Again, from the supposed free speech absolutist, you're threatening this 20-year year old with a lawsuit over information that is publicly available I mean come on it's ridiculous it's totally ridiculous but this guy apparently the

reason he started the account is because he actually was a big fan of Elon he wanted to he was like tracking like oh his big like business moves and how he runs his business and what he's up to and that was the genesis of the account so I mean, not that I don't think it substantively matters, but it does add a little bit of texture to the fact this guy wasn't out to get Elon. He actually was like a fanboy, although I think he is sort of rethinking his position on that. Yeah, apparently Elon once offered him like five grand for the account. And it's like, dude, come on. If you really want it to go away, you're going to have to pay a hell of a lot more than that.

You're the richest man on the planet. You should have paid him. If this is important to you. If you paid him $100,000, none of this would have happened. So that's the other reason. Don't be cheap, even whenever you're really rich. Well, and by the way, if he did buy the account, someone else could just make another one. Yeah, exactly.

And have the same algorithm, like, bot that just reposts the data anyway. Your beef is with the FAA. It's all publicly available. Right, exactly. And also, like I said, fly commercial, nobody knows where the hell you are. Just wear a hat or actually even these days, some people get on planes with masks and hats on. So you have no idea. That's true. That is true. All right. All right, so what are we looking at? Well, I often say we're not a serious country. It's something that appears to have resonated with a lot of you. I think it codes in a way

that you want, you know, both left, right wing. It just hits a deep nerve. We all know it's true. From our political fights to our economic leaders to the general feeling of malaise that all of us can relate in some way. And a perfect example of that to me is TikTok. When you say it in the abstract, I know it sounds laughable, but in the height of peer competition with a malvolent foreign government, we are allowing the most downloaded app in the United States, most used social media app, to be one controlled by that foreign government. We are allowing the most downloaded app in the United States, most used social media app, to be one controlled by that foreign adversary. An adversary which, by the way, specifically does not allow U.S.-based social media companies to operate there under the belief that doing so would allow us to shape their population towards democratic norms and corrupt

their society. On its face, it's ludicrous. From a national security perspective, from a basic fairness perspective in terms of competition, truly imagine at the height of the Cold War, the largest newspaper in circulation is owned by the Soviet Union and controlled by the KGB. You would never accept that in a million years. Yet, we have continued to let our society increasingly be reliant on said app with no serious effort yet by both Trump and Biden to do what obviously needs to be done. Just ban the damn app and be done with it. This is why I'm very heartened actually to see a serious bipartisan effort actually materialize to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, he's a Democrat from Illinois

8th District. Congressman Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Senator Marco Rubio have introduced the first bipartisan effort of its kind to actually ban TikTok. The legislation, as written, would block all transactions from any social media company under the influence of China or Russia. Now, it's worth noting the Democratic congressman language here. Quote, at a time when the CCP and our adversaries abroad are seeking any advantage they can find against the U.S. through espionage and mass surveillance, it is imperative we do not allow hostile powers to potentially control social media networks that could be easily weaponized against us. He adds, recent revelations surrounding the depth of TikTok's ties to CCP highlight the urgency of

protecting Americans from these risks before it's too late. This rhetoric from the Democratic Congressman is so necessary because the Biden administration right now is poised to fold completely to TikTok. A draft agreement seen two months ago would allow TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. with fake protections where some data is stored in the United States and some sort of fake auditor would be allowed to review their security practices. But it would still remain wholly owned and operated by Chinese parent company ByteDance. This is nothing but surrender on the issue, as we have now found repeatedly, ByteDance, through its control of TikTok in the United States, sees it as an arm of the CCP. The app has already been shown to have been used to specifically surveil and monitor the physical location of American citizens' data in a massive

data gathering operation that had nothing to do with advertising. In other words, they were not collecting location data for any legitimate business purpose. They could only have been doing for foreign spyware purposes. The deal the Biden administration appears to be going towards is a farce. TikTok has all sorts of fake practices in place right now where they claim ByteDance doesn't control them. But as we have seen from leaked recordings from inside the company, ByteDance and China controls everything about the app, according to the employees inside the company itself. All of this is happening while TikTok is literally eating the internet. Data from Cloudflare and Data.ai and SensorTower indicate TikTok's website was viewed more than Google last year. No app in history has grown further,

past a billion users, and at least one-third of the entire U.S. population uses it, two-thirds of all U.S. young adults, and a sizable portion of those young adults say they, quote, use it almost constantly. On that, I think it's important to say this. I deplore kids and adults being glued to their phones, but at the end of the day, that's your right as a parent and as a consumer. Banning TikTok does not mean in any way that technology or some other form can't or should arise in its place. In India, after they banned TikTok, clones were rampantly downloaded within days, and they're doing fine. The point here is about sovereignty. You may hate big tech and be suspicious of them. I've said here a million times now, there's still a big difference from a US-based social media app spying on you for profit

versus an authoritarian government for one thing. For one, we have democratic ability via our government to actually make ours stop if we want to. For another, when our government wants something from them, at least you got to get a warrant and they can still tell you to go to hell. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better. In China, in the middle of right now of COVID zero protests, guess what? There's mass censoring on that app. Also consider a time here when US public opinion is counter to China's interests. Ask yourself seriously if they wouldn't use that app to try and influence it. If you don't think that they would, I can't really help you, but I know that most of you know it to be true. It's time to ban it and to applaud legislators actually trying to do so.

Because if we don't today, it could be too late and Biden will let them off the hook. This is unacceptable. We really can't let it go. I thought it was really interesting to see Raja Krishnamoorthi go ahead and sign on to this legislation. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Unfortunately, 2022 is ending on a bit of a sour note for workers and for the labor movement more broadly. President Biden showed his true colors as a strikebreaker-in-chief, getting a congressional boost from Pelosi and the Democrats to force a bad deal on railroaders. The Fed continues to hike interest

rates in an overt effort to discipline labor, which has gotten a little bit rowdy, a little bit militant, and a lot organized over the past year. But don't let these setbacks distract you from the fact that on a whole, workers in 2022 took bold action. They organized, they struck, and they won in a way that is truly revolutionary when compared to every other year of my life. So with 2022 swiftly drawing to a close, I thought I would put together five big revolutionary moments that made 2022 the year of the worker. Special shout out up front to Labor Notes reporter Jonah Furman for his input on this list. And no list of notable labor events in 2022 would be complete without a mention of the epic Labor Notes conference. All right, with all of that said, let's jump in. Early in the year, we were all shocked by an absolutely seminal turning point in labor history. I will let the man

himself explain what he and his fellow workers were able to pull off. Well, I can tell you now, we got the juggler. We went for the juggler. And we went for the top dog because we want every other industry, every other business to know that things have changed. We're going to unionize. We're not going to quit our jobs anymore. And, you know, this is a prime example of the power that people have when they come together. Oh, they're going to have to negotiate with their workers now. You know, my message is that now we have a union

that they're going to have to collect a bargain with. That's right. Chris Smalls and his comrades came out of nowhere, did what literally no one else has been able to pull off in U.S. history with a new grassroots union called the Amazon Labor Union. They won a union election at a large and crucial warehouse in the New York City area. Fairy tale David versus Goliath story. Diverse group of ordinary workers able to take on one of the richest and most powerful men on the entire planet, and they won. This victory sent

an unmistakable message to workers across the country that while, of course, nothing is guaranteed, they had a chance to organize and to win at any workplace anywhere in the entire country. Chris's personal story, no less inspiring. Fired for speaking out during the pandemic, smeared as stupid and inarticulate by Amazon executives, and leading an effort out of nowhere that defied history. Chris issued a warning and a challenge to the whole nation. Workers were not going to quit their jobs anymore, as he said, and move on to the next low paid, low dignity workplace. They were going to organize and transform the workplace they were

already in. And that is exactly what many chose to do. In fact, another huge moment this year was the wildfire spread of grassroots organizing in fast food and service jobs led by the visionary workers at Starbucks. The first successful union drive at Starbucks actually happened just over a year ago, back in 2021. But it was in 2022 that that movement took off, coast to coast, bringing an unprecedented wave of organizing to an industry that many had assumed would be impossible to organize. Matt Bruning put together a phenomenal recap of the success that the Starbucks worker movement has enjoyed. His top line number here is astonishing.

Starbucks workers won 267 elections in just 365 days. Their win rate was equally jaw-dropping. Here you can see two different charts. One shows the number of union wins, which slowly builds and then skyrockets right around May of this year, building to that final tally of 267 stores organized in total. The other chart there on the bottom, it shows their win rate over this time frame, which ends the year at a stunning 80%. Most of these union victories, too, were totally lopsided. A number of stores had unanimous votes in favor of the union. Overall, if you

consider every worker that had a chance to vote for or against the union, 71% of all workers voted yes. The Starbucks workers really inspired a whole new model of organizing. It had previously been just widely accepted that retail and food service was just too difficult to organize because you have to go store by store by store and because turnover is ultimately so high. This wave of organizing disproved that whole theory. And workers at other fast food and retail outlets, they took note. Chipotle workers unionized, REI employees, Apple workers, Verizon workers, and a whole lot more besides. The service sector is one of the largest and fastest growing parts of our economy. If we could turn these jobs from being low wage, precarious, filled with indignity into solid middle class jobs.

That would be a whole revolution. And unionizing is the first step to that transformation. Brunig pulled another stat for his piece on Starbucks that actually leads me to my next big labor movement of the year. So the Starbucks union filed for 548 charges against Starbucks for their illegal union busting efforts, including firing and intimidating workers. And in a big break from the past, those claims are actually being received by a worker-friendly National Labor Relations Board. So listen, the NLRB is underfunded, they're understaffed, and they've been slow to act in areas where it could make a real difference. But the difference between this NLRB and the Trump NLRB is night and day.

And the general counsel at the helm, Jennifer Abruzzo, is an ardent supporter of labor who has taken some truly transformational steps towards making the law more hospitable towards worker rights. Let me give you just a few of them. This week, acting upon her recommendation, the NLRB just ruled that when workers are illegally fired or demoted for union activity, employers will be required to not only pay back lost wages, but also they're going to have to compensate them for all other associated costs. Things like child care, health care, late fees on credit cards, legal fees for defending against unpaid bills, etc. That ruling will make penalties on union busters sting just a little bit more and help to make those workers

whole. But that is not all. Abruzzo also instructed the NLRB to consider captive audience meetings in which employees are forced to listen to corporate anti-union propaganda while they are at work. She wants them to consider those to be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Now, these meetings have been the backbone of every modern anti-union effort, so making them illegal, that would be a major step forward. Finally, and most radically, Abruzzo is looking to reinstate the so-called Joy Silk Doctrine, which would make it far easier for workers to be able to unionize in the first place. I'm not going to go into all the details, but the top line here is that Joy Silk helped if a majority of workers sign a card and indicate they want to join a union. The burden is then on the employer to prove in good faith

that a majority of workers do not, in fact, want to unionize even after a majority has signed the cards. Joy Silk was critical in helping to even the playing field between unions and bosses. So for a fourth revolutionary moment, there has been a massive wave of Democratic reform sweeping unions. Because listen, not all unions are created equal. Some are beset by leadership that has grown closer to the boss class than to their own membership. That's why it's been thrilling to watch the success of a number of reform movements at major unions just this year. At the Teamsters, members who were disgusted with Jimmy Hoffa Jr.'s capitulation to UPS rejected his hand-picked successors in favor of a new, more militant team. Sean O'Brien was

sworn in in March as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and he is already taking on some major fights. In fact, he won his campaign for president of this major union on a promise to be more adversarial towards the largest single employer of the Teamsters, UPS. That contract is up next year and a strike is absolutely on the table, so keep your eyes on that one. Meanwhile, over at the United Auto Workers, members took advantage of their first ever opportunity to directly elect leadership by backing a reform slate of candidates nearly across the board. Stunning rejection of the one-party top-down control that workers at that union had suffered under for years

with workers voting both for more democracy and for that more aggressive, more militant approach. Even the incumbent president there may ultimately fall. It's going to a runoff in January. Finally, railroaders are not nearly done fighting after being betrayed by Democrats and, by the way, by their own union leaders. In a stunning upset, rank-and-file members just ousted the leader of one of the largest rail unions, the 28,000-member strong BLET. Now, this vote was a direct rejection of leadership's willingness to strike a bargain with rail bosses that failed to include the basic living condition improvements that workers so desperately need. But no year of the worker would be complete without workers taking action together, putting it all on the

line, and wielding what is ultimately their greatest weapon, their labor, as a way to fight back directly against the boss class. And this year had no shortage of workers taking to the streets to demand a fair deal. We had over a thousand UAW members out on strike right now at CNH Industrial as that company rakes in record profits. UFCW grocery workers at King Soopers won big wage and healthcare gains

early in the year after a successful strike. Frontline medical workers took to the streets too. Mental health workers in California, nurses in Minnesota, and our dear friends at Warrior Met Coal continued their now multi-year strike. Extra solidarity to them as we head now into the holiday season. Listen, all in all, an estimated 200,000 workers went out on strike this year, withholding their labor to try to get a fair deal at a time of mounting inflation, corporate price gouging, and record profits. Now listen, this is necessarily an incomplete list. It's just a start also in terms of where the labor movement needs to go. It is going to take a long time for labor to climb back out of its multi-decade decline.

But if you ask me what I'm optimistic about for 2023 and for beyond, this right here, this is it. Especially when you consider the way that the American people consistently backed labor at every single chance when they were given it this year. So knowing that there's still a long way to go, here's to the many fights and struggles to come and always to solidarity forever. So Sagar, this is my big recap of the year. Didn't want us to lose sight of how many gains were ultimately made because remember last year we- And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Matt Taibbi, always a pleasure to see you, sir.

Good to see you as well, Crystal. So I was wondering from you, now that we've had, you know, your pieces come out, Schellenberger's pieces come out, Barry's pieces come out. What did you think was the sort of most significant, most troubling, most interesting revelations that came out of the quote unquote Twitter files? I think there are two things that are the most significant. Probably the first one is what Barry did in her first thread, which basically just confirmed what everybody knew, but revealed concretely that there is such a thing as shadow banning. And not only does it exist, but they have an extraordinarily idiosyncratic system that basically allows these companies to have virtually unlimited control over the visibility of any account, person, hashtag, anything. They can dial it down all the way to zero.

You can't be searched. And all the way up to amplified to the max. And she showed that. We're seeing the screenshots of things like trends blacklist. It's incontrovertible proof. The other thing, though, the thing that turns me on about this story is the proof now in writing that the government, specifically agencies like the FBI and the DHS, are not just generally making recommendations about content moderation.

They are doing it at a micro level. We're seeing tons and tons and tons of these communications that say the FBI flagged this, the DHS flagged that. They are buying information in bulk, analyzing it, flagging it, sending it back to companies like Twitter for moderation. And there's no question they're doing that. They're not doing it in pursuit of charging a crime. They're doing it because they are in the censorship business. See, I completely agree. We highlighted the Yoel Roth meetings with the FBI, the weekly meetings in many of these cases with these security agencies. That seemed to be one of the biggest takeaways there from the story.

On top of that, Matt, you got a tremendous amount of color. What was it like wading through their communications of just how capricious the nature of all the decision-making inside the company was? Did it astonish you or did it just confirm what you thought? I think it's astonishing. I think it speaks to probably some group things that's in, you know, in any environment where a bunch of people are doing the same job and you get inured to kind of the morality of what you're doing, you see all these communications where somebody says, oh we got a flag from the state of California by way of the Stanford election

integrity project, let's see why don't we bounce that for 12 days and then reduce visibility part way, you know what I mean? Like they're making these decisions about how much people can see a certain piece of information and they're doing it in split seconds based on almost nothing. Sometimes we see Roth doing like a Google search where he sees an NPR article for a few minutes and then makes a decision. That's crazy to me.

The arrogance of that is unbelievable, I think. You know, one thing that Sagar actually brought up when we were talking about this piece of the government involvement is that it seems like a lot of these tools and this interaction was developed during the war on terror. And there was a lot of support and almost no pushback about them, you know, interfacing with Twitter and other social media outlets to say, hey, pull down this like ISIS propagandist or this Al Qaeda dude or whatever, like let's get these people off the platform. But it's a real lesson in the way that once those tools and that power is made available to these agencies, they don't stop and limit themselves to that one area. So as administrations have moved forward, they have continued, it seems to me, and I wonder if this is your impression as well, to just continue to

expand their intrusion and expand, go from war on terror to, okay, now we don't like this type of actor, now we don't like that type of speech speech and wade into more and more sort of controversial and fraught areas as they've moved forward. Yeah, absolutely. You can actually see the whole progression of of what they began with in terms of what their mission was on the moderation front and then where it's ended up. Later today, you're going to be seeing some material talking about how they deliver certain information to one agency, but more serious information, for instance, to the Pentagon. And that's probably a holdover from the war on terror when, you know, there were the DOD was probably asking companies like Twitter for information about certain actors abroad.

And they were just giving it to them. Right. Like that. That's kind of how that system worked, whether it was through FISA, national security letters, whatever. They could get whatever they wanted. but you see that they've massively expanded the mission and i think it was critical 2016 was critical here because after that they argued the foreign interference issue gave them uh the license to start doing it on a much grander scale than they had after 9-11 and you see that everywhere as well even in something like as seemingly um you know partisan as the hunter biden decision uh lurking in the background of that is this fear that somehow the russians are involved so we have to do this or that that's part of a lot of these discussions. And I think that's

the justification for them getting down to, I mean, they're moderating tweets that have like almost no engagement to followers. You know what I'm saying? That was so crazy. That's incredibly comprehensive. Yeah. And when we look at that, I mean, especially when I saw the FBI flagging specific tweets and they were like, FBI flagged this as if that means that they're supposed to be called to action. That shows you the apparatus has long been built. I mean, do we have any insight into any further apparatuses that were built post January 6th? Most of what you guys have focused on or released so far has been in the immediate aftermath. But the Biden administration collaboration post period has not yet been explored. Do you guys have any plans to release anything on that front? Yeah, we're looking at that right now. I mean, our methods of searching have kind of gone in different directions and our access has been kind of changed over time as we've refined this process. But they're back up and searching now. And, yeah, what I think some of us, you know, myself in particular, maybe a couple of others,

we're really trying to do is map out exactly where all that flagging comes out of the government and how it comes back to companies like Twitter. And one of the things that's fascinating is that there's just so many entry points for these, you know, like FBI flag material. It might go directly to Twitter. It might go via somebody they know at the company, like, you know, the former general counsel there. It might go in bulk. You know. The FBI sends bulk requests for possible violative content. It might go through the Stanford project. It might go through the Atlantic Council. There's a whole sort of geography of speech suppression that we're

just learning a lot more about every day. Matt, can you talk a little bit more about the process? Because there have been a lot of questions about how this unfolded. You just made a reference to our access has changed. So how have you been working? What has that all been like? And what did you make of Jack Dorsey at one point, of course, former head of Twitter, had suggested that, hey, they should just make all of these files public and then journalists can sort through them, independent or otherwise, make of them what they will. What do you think of that suggestion? Well, we're caught between basically two different kinds of criticisms.

One is saying you should release all of it. And I have some sympathy for that, right? Like I was a supporter of WikiLeaks and, you know, that approach is something that I understand. On the other hand, we're taking tons of flack for releasing people's personal information, even just names of people who were known to work at the company. And so you never know when you're going to release a gigantic data set, whether, you know, there's something in there that's going to trigger litigation or, you know, that's one of the reasons why you want to do it this way. I would argue that I think a good thing would be for journalists to at least take a first pass at identifying some of the key issues. And then, you know, I'm not opposed to

that concept in general. I think it's an interesting criticism, but I do think you have to take into consideration the other thing as well. Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I mean, look, it's your scoop. You guys get obviously the first pass. That's really my final question is how much more do you guys anticipate on going through? And then even more so on the process, like, is it a searchable archive? From what I've seen, it's a lot of screenshots. So it must take a tremendous amount of research and just like sifting through to even find the biggest stories. Many people are curious. That's the only reason I'm asking. Yeah, it's kind of hard to describe. I mean, I think I'd be talking out of school if I got into it too much, but people had this impression that we were sitting in front of a

terminal and just had global access to every single document in Twitter's history. It wasn't like that. It's gone through multiple iterations. The first way that we did this involved a process that we discovered was flawed. I mean as you know there were there was somebody fired as a result of that because the former deputy general counsel of the company was reviewing the material without our knowledge. Then there was there was another period where we were looking basically at a period of time because we wanted to investigate one story, which was how was Donald Trump banned. I figured we would see a lot of evidence of kind of government discussion there. That was one of the reasons I was interested in that.

So we only had a chunk of time and certain Slack channels that we were looking at there. Then we had some technical problems, and now we're back up again, and I'm actually not in the room. I'm on the other side of the country at the moment. One other question for you, Matt, is, you know, almost every source in journalism has some sort of an agenda for why they're giving you that information. So the fact that Elon has an agenda here is not in any way disqualifying. But given that you're sort of dependent on him and his process for what documents you're ultimately able to review, how have you been able to ease your own concerns that what you're looking at isn't somehow cherry-picked or skewed or selective versus a more complete picture? Well, I mean, the minute I get the indication that I'm being played or something like that, I'll, of course, you know, jump out of the airplane.

I mean, but I haven't seen that at all. I've had no indication of that. Look, people keep bringing this question up. You're doing PR for the richest man in the world. What about his motives? Blah, blah. And, you know, like, it doesn't matter. Like, journalists, we don't care where the information comes from. If it's true, we want to look at it. I know what my motives are. My motives are I'm looking at, like, I'm getting a unique look into the underbelly of how censorship works in this country and how the FBI, the DHS, you know, the Pentagon, like all of these institutions and how they operate in secret, that's an incredible opportunity. And I know what I'm looking for. So I guess there might be motives that he might have, but that doesn't matter.

For the integrity of the project, all we have to do is make sure that the stuff that we're looking at is true and accurate and that we're drawing the correct conclusions from them. Absolutely. My final question to you, Matt, is about the media coverage. What have you made of the response to this? It used to be something like this would have been covered all six networks. From what I have seen so far, there's only been one segment on any of the major television networks on this entire thing. To the extent that they have covered it in the mainstream press, they've smeared you as a, quote, conservative journalist, which is, of course, ridiculous if you know anything about your career. Has it been astonishing?

I mean, look, we're all kind of in this game together. We're a little jaded at this point. It didn't really surprise me, even though I'm repulsed by it. But I guess it's just like a longstanding repulsion. What did you think? I mean, it's by it, but I guess it's just like a longstanding repulsion. What did you think? I mean, it's just funny, right? It's hard to take it any other way.

Look, I think a clear subtext of this entire project is kind of a burn on traditional media. I mean, the whole idea of putting the material out on Twitter to begin with, it's kind of a double burn, right? Because you're flaying Twitter on Twitter, and then you're also doing it in what used to be the private playground, essentially, of the commercial media. And of course, this arouses lots of negative emotions. And, you know, they're hitting back and also pretending not to cover a story that everybody in the country and also in some parts of the world are talking about that just makes them look ridiculous. I mean, I get that they have opinions about it, but the whole thing is silly, I think. Yeah, agreed. I mean, I don't know how you can deny that the revelation of weekly meetings between the FBI and a major social media platform that they all acknowledge.

I mean, there's been plenty of coverage of Elon's takeover of Twitter and what that means. So they're sort of tacitly acknowledging this platform is really important, but, you know, only covering the pieces of it that they want to, that they pick and choose. So Matt, thank you so much. I know you're tired. I know you've been up late and all of those things. So we always really appreciate

your time here. Thanks for your work, man. Thanks for having me. Take care. Always. Anytime. Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching.

We really appreciate it. Live show, don't forget, Austin, Texas, February 3rd. Link right now for the premium members in your email with the pre-sale code on sale to the general public. Later, we got CounterPoints. They're going to be returning here to the set. It's going to be a lot of fun. They're going to have a great show for you guys tomorrow morning. What? Partner content, all that other stuff. Premium, you guys know the drill. We're really excited. It's been

a real privilege to wrap up the year with all of you. It's cool. It's like the first full-scale year that we've done all breaking points. First entire year. It's especially awesome. We love you all so, so much. Thank you guys for being with us, and we'll see you all on Monday. See you all next week. This is an iHeart Podcast.