Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/2/21: Omicron Spreads, Trump Covid, CNN Cuomo, China/Wall St, Maxwell Trial, Metaverse, Twitter CEO, Class Politics, and More!

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Krystal and Saagar talk about the new Omicron travel restrictions, Trump's covid coverup, Chris Cuomo's suspension, China's relationship with Wall St, Ghislaine Maxwell trial, Meta gold rush, new Twitter rules, culture war vs class war, and more! Thank you all for supporting us over our first 6 months, the best is still yet to come!!!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/Amory Gethin’s Book: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248427 https://wpid.world/ Amory Gethin’s Paper: https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjab036/6383014?searchresult=1  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? All sorts of big stories in the news this morning. So we now have some pretty bombshell revelations about the fact, remember that debate with Trump and Biden, and just days later, Trump reveals he's had COVID. And we had this clue because Chris Christie, who had been in the debate prep, also got super sick with COVID. Almost died,

actually. He was in the hospital. It was very serious. They performed last rites over him in the hospital. That's exactly right. So now we know that Trump had, in fact, tested positive before that debate. He then took a negative test and was like, oh, well, that's the right one. So we're just going with that. So pretty revealing about the character of this individual. Also, big news over at CNN. Surprise, surprise. They actually took action against Chris Cuomo. He is indefinitely suspended. We'll tell you all the details there and how long we think that is likely to last. Also, updates about that tennis player Peng Shuai who was missing and now there are a lot of questions about just how safe she is and how much she's being controlled, how much she's being censored.

The Tennis Association making a big move of pulling all of their tournaments out of China. Quite different from how the NBA responded when there was pressure with regards to China. So we'll talk about that. Also the Ghislaine Maxwell trial is ongoing. Some big, big revelations there. But we wanted to start with the fact that there is now officially a case of Omicron here in the United States. Dr. Fauci informed us yesterday. Let's take a listen to some of the details there. As some of you may have heard, the California and San Francisco departments of public health and the CDC have confirmed that a recent case of the sequence was confirmed at the CDC as being consistent with the Omicron variant. So I know there are a lot of questions, but here's what we know right now.

The individual was a traveler who returned from South Africa on November the 22nd and tested positive on November the 29th. The individual is self-quarantining and all close contacts have been contacted and all close contacts thus far have tested negative. The individual was fully vaccinated and experienced mild symptoms which are improving at this point. So this is the first confirmed case of COVID-19 caused by the Omicron variant detected in the United States. And as all of you know, of course, we've been discussing this, we knew that it was just a matter of time before the first case of Omicron would be detected in the United States. And as you know, we know, I've been saying it and my colleagues

on the medical team and others have been saying it. We know what we need to do to protect people, get vaccinated. If you're not already vaccinated, get boosted. If you've been vaccinated for more than six months with an mRNA or two months with J&J and all the other things we've been talking about, about getting your children vaccinated, masking in indoor congregate settings, et cetera. So this shouldn't be a big surprise, something that's been expected. We knew Omicron had spread to all sorts of corners of the globe. This individual actually came from South Africa before South Africa had even flagged for the world.

That's right. The existence of the Omicron variant. We still know very little about how transmissible it is, how severe the disease is, all of those things. But of course, everyone is paying close attention and the market is still freaking out about this. Let's take a look at this tariff sheet that we can throw up on the screen. From the New York Post, stocks sink after Omicron makes way to the U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 462 points, or more than 1.3 percent, as it became clear the U.S. would not escape the latest COVID wave.

At least it doesn't look like that, and we are seeing increases in cases here as well, just overall, not just with Omicron. Markets actually had started the day, they say, with relative optimism. The Dow was up. But when South Africa reported nearly twice as many new COVID cases on Wednesday compared with Tuesday, they started falling. And then when the CDC said Omicron had been identified in a fully vaccinated person in California who had recently traveled to South Africa, the bottom fell out. The White House is responding with some relatively modest changes to their travel restrictions. Let's put this Politico tear sheet up on the screen.

So initially, they considered some more onerous burdens for people who are traveling internationally. Effectively, they were considering quarantines after you get here to make sure, make extra super sure that you don't have coronavirus before you are released into the general population. They have scaled that back. Now their plan is, so previously you had to get a test within three days of your trip if you were vaccinated. Now everybody has to get a negative test within one day of their trip. So that's the shift, which again is relatively modest. Their overall response, in addition to what I think at this point is just like foolish and wrongheaded and punitive, frankly, travel restrictions from countries in the southern part of Africa.

But in addition to that, they want to encourage boosters. They want to encourage testing. They're going to start covering having insurance cover at home tests for people. What took so long? Right. I mean, this was obvious stuff. They're going to give paid time off for people who want to go get boosters. They think that the best way to deal with this, according to what's come out just this morning, is not to do lockdowns and not to do super onerous burdens on people's lives,

but to continue to encourage vaccinations, to continue to encourage boosters, and to make some sort of modest changes like this tinkering around the edges of the travel testing regime. My worry on this, Crystal, is that this will be the precursor and then they're going to point to people who, you know, people aren't getting enough vaccination. I mean, look, at this point, if you're not vaccinated, it's a very conscious choice. And I doubt very much expect on the edges that people are going to be pushed over the case or over the edge in order to actually do so. So from this point forward, is this the precursor to perhaps the more onerous restrictions?

I simply don't know. It could be laid out, like you said, the fact that they were considering that one-week quarantine in Australia-type policy for any international traveler to the United States and more. A lot of it does seem like theater. And that's what we were pointing to on the travel ban and the restrictions. We have no idea where Omicron came from. There's actually not necessarily a lot of evidence that even originated in South Africa. And it may have been in Botswana. It also was in Europe. So look, we have literally no idea. That's right. And you know, you point to these little things, which always just reveal to me how ridiculous this country is. In Britain and

in Germany, rapid tests are either free or they're $1. Here in the US, I can tell you, when I had COVID and I encouraged everybody, go out and get those rapid antigen at-home tests. And I was like, oh, they're not that bad. They're only $25. I think at the end of it, I spent about a hundred bucks, actually more, like $150 on those rapid tests. Look, it's fine for me. But for a lot of people, that's a lot of money. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars on those. I was going to say. I mean, I've got kids. You have the PCRs too for your kids. That's right. Every time anyone has anything, you know, from sniffles to stomach issue, anything, just give them a test just to make sure. Right. And so, yeah, we've spent hundreds of dollars on those things,

which for me is not a big deal. But for a lot of people, that's a lot of money. I mean, $25, if you're working a minimum wage job, that's multiple hours that you're working just to afford one test. And then, yeah, the PCR test that if you're a parent, your kid has to get, not even if they had COVID, but if they were exposed to anyone who had COVID at school, they have to quarantine. Policies are different at every school district, but at least in the districts around where I live, this is basically what the standard has been. If they have to quarantine, they have to stay home for about two weeks, and then to go back to school, you have to get the PCR test. That thing is expensive. If insurance isn't paying for it, it's a hundred bucks or more.

So yeah, making these tests free and accessible is like the most obvious no-brainer of no-brainers. Should have been doing this back, I mean, over a year ago. And it always just shows you how decrepit our actual institutional state is. And Biden also going to be announcing the current mask mandate for airplane, trains, buses, and transit hubs extended until mid-March. I personally don't think you're going to be getting on a plane without a mask anytime soon, unfortunately. And I do think, though, it is important to point to kind of the holistic picture on how this is all working out. And also, once again, to how insane how much of our current policy is being dictated. Put this up there on the screen, please. From Bloomberg.

The new COVID variant prompts the WTO to postpone its conference, likely ending prospects for a 2020-21 agreement to waive patent rights for vaccines. You want to riddle me that? So we have a COVID variant, which comes out of maybe the developed world. We don't actually know where it came from, but clearly the variant and more of that was caused by, or at least accelerated in the developed world where there's not a lot of vaccination, where there's a combination of lack of vaccine supply and a ton of vaccine hesitancy, to be completely honest. But at the end of the day, on the margins,

as we continue to say here, when sub-Saharan Africa is at 6% and South Africa is at 30, getting the whole continent up to 30 actually would be pretty good from a public policy perspective. And these morons are canceling the conference where they could accelerate the development of the actual vaccine in order to make it work. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, this is New York. Have they not heard of Zoom? I mean, honestly, the whole world has been meeting remotely for years at this point. You can't figure this shit out?

I mean, seriously, it's insane. So a new variant is stopping a major conference that could help stop other new variants. Because that's the whole thing. Wherever this particular variant originated, which it seems to be spreading the most in South Africa, although they also just have the best, apparently, testing in place. So I'm also outraged for them. I feel bad for them. They did the right thing. They were ahead of the curve. They alerted the whole world. And then they're being penalized basically so that we can have some COVID security theater here and in other places around the world. But on this patent thing, I mean, I know I beat this like a dead horse, but this is so morally unconscionable that these vaccine makers, the funding of these vaccines came from you.

The development of this was funded by you. The technology was developed by you, by your taxpayer dollars. These should be public goods. There should be factories around the entire world that are spinning out doses of the vaccine because yes, you're right. Especially in places in the global South, there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy, but we also saw what happened here. Vaccine hesitancy declined precipitously once a lot of vaccine hesitancy. But we also saw what happened here. Vaccine hesitancy declined precipitously once a lot of people around you were getting the vaccine. When people were getting the vaccine around you, then there were a lot of people who said, okay, I see. This was fine. You didn't have any major issues. You're good to go. So I am going to go ahead. So there

is a population that could be persuaded if they had people in their social circles who they saw get the vaccine and be fine. So the fact that this is being prevented from being distributed on a mass scale at an affordable price or ideally for free is completely insane. And then the fact that you're letting this variant stop the WTO meeting. I mean, let's be honest, nothing was going to happen there anyway. It probably was not. Because Biden, for all his words about how he thinks we should lift patent protections, he has stood in the way of the existing TRIPS waiver put forward by India and South Africa, has not provided an alternative to that, and then has most importantly not put any pressure on Germany or other countries that are standing in the way. If we really wanted this to happen, trust me, it would happen.

And so Biden can offer whatever words he wants, but at the end of the day, he's just as much of an obstacle as the countries who are affirmatively blocking progress. To your point about we don't know where it came from and my outrage on behalf of South Africans. We now know it was circulating in Europe before it even was flagged by South Africa. So thank you to that country for being on top of their game and alerting the world that there was something new here going on. Again, guys, we don't know that much about this variant. We don't know if this is going to ultimately be a blip on the radar that ends up being no big deal. We don't know if it's going to be more or less transmissible than Delta. We don't

know the severity of the disease. We don't know how it's going to interact with the vaccine. We don't know any of that at this point, but certainly something to keep an eye on and a significant development that we now have confirmed at least one case of Omicron here on our insurers. You know, I heard a very good proposal, which was that instead of punishing South Africa with a travel ban, especially when we have no idea if it even came from there, we should actually develop, and the entire world should,

a fund in which if you are the first to report a variant or something, you actually get money. You get, like, international aid. So instead of punishing, we would incentivize all developed, not just developed, all countries all over the world in order to consistently monitor what the variants are. That makes a hell of a lot more sense. You know, these are reasonable things. You'd be like, oh, a rapid test. I don't know why it is December 2nd, 2021. And we're just talking about insurance covering this, or, you know, making a, creating an

international regime that would actually reward countries for detection, that pushes where, you know, this is my dead horse. This is an endemic disease. There will be many, many, many more Omicrons. Vaccination and mitigation are going to be the number one way in which we deal with it. Almost everyone on earth will very likely contract COVID at some point of some form. We have no idea what form that will be. So moving public policy more in that direction, not freaking the American public out and not creating some mask forever regime on top of these travel bans, more chaos, more fear, as opposed to the fact we have a Pfizer pill, we've got a Merck pill, we've got vaccinations, we've got booster shots, and more. South Africa showed us that early detection regimes work quite well.

This is the future, people. I know it doesn't sound nice, but you can choose to live your life in a defensive crouch and freak the whole public out and have all of these things. Or you can say this is very likely what the future is going to look like. We're going to hack on top of it. There's no current indication right now that this disease kills more of the elderly, even if it does jump the vaccine, transmissibility, et cetera, zero indication on that whatsoever. So if that's the case, we just have to live our lives. Yeah. That's, that's, that's where I think the future should be. And, you know, if enough people embrace that, I think we'd be a lot better off.

And if you're vaccinated, you have very good protection. And I hate that the media has fixated on the numbers of the breakthrough infections and how there is a decline in the efficacy of the vaccine versus the thing that really matters is the severe illness. Which actually remains static across time. And the protection is still very good against Delta. And we'll see. Actually, I saw some indications, this was from Israel, that the vaccine is actually pretty effective in preventing severe illness with Omicron. Those are very early indicators, but at least the early indicators are good in that regard. One other thing I wanted to say about Biden is, look, dude's approval rating is in the toilet right now. And people don't trust him on much of anything. His highest marks,

though, continue to be on his coronavirus response. And I think it is because moments like this, where he has struck a pretty good balance between, all right, let's take some precautions. I'm critical of the travel ban. I think it's just theater. But let's take a few precautions. Let's tighten things up around the edges. But he seems to have a political instinct not to do the more onerous restrictions. Because every time these are floated and there's like a right-wing, oh my God, we're going back to lockdowns or whatever, they instantly, he almost instantly comes out and says, we are not going back to lockdowns. And I think there's a recognition, seems to be from him, that the public just is unwilling to go there again. And I also think that they also have no interest in giving people the

financial support and resources they would need to get through another lockdown. So my personal view has long been, I think it is highly unlikely that we go back to those sorts of onerous restrictions. But listen, this is an unpredictable disease. It's an unpredictable political climate. So you never know. Yep. Never know. Okay. All right, guys. So I think that this is completely wildly unconscionable. As I was saying before, you will recall before that Biden-Trump debate, there were questions about whether Trump had tested positive for COVID and knew he potentially had COVID when he went to debate Joe Biden, because just days later, it comes out that he has COVID. He gets very sick, has to be hospitalized. I mean, some of the details after the fact is it was really ugly there for him for a time. I mean, his life was truly in danger. So, and they were always really squishy about when did you get the first positive COVID test? They would never give really straight answers about that. Well, Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, is out with a new book. And this has been confirmed not just by Meadows, but other people

who are former aides to Trump at this point, according to reporters at The New York Times and other places. Trump did, in fact, receive a positive COVID test before that debate. Let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. This is from The Guardian. Trump tested positive for COVID few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new book. He was effectively, he was feeling not too great. He took a test. He was on Air Force One. Meadows describes a pretty dramatic scene where they get a call and they say, stop the plane because Trump has tested, the president has tested positive for COVID.

Trump basically says like, oh shit, they do another test. The second one comes back negative. And so then he's like, okay, well, we're good to go. Let's just go forward with everything. Even though he's feeling poorly, even though he got the first positive test, even though they know. And Meadows says he told all the staff

to treat Trump on that trip, I think was to Pennsylvania, as if he had coronavirus. So Meadows and the staff knew there was a good chance that he had COVID, but he just pushes forward as if absolutely nothing has happened. And the consequences of this, I mean, first of all, what kind of a person, like, I think we all know the type of precautions that we've been taking in this era to keep the people that we love, the people, anybody around us safe from this disease, especially in a time before there were vaccinations. Joe Biden is an old man. He was at incredible risk. And Trump is an old man. I mean, and he's hanging around with a lot of people who are old people. And so we all know the sort of precautions that we took

over these years, especially before we were vaccinated, to make sure that the people around us were safe if we even had the tiniest suspicion of anything. And so for the president to go to this debate, knowing that he potentially had COVID, and then it gets even worse than that. Let's throw this Military Times tear sheet up on the screen. So not only did he do that debate, not only did he have an indoor press conference and apparently brief the press on Air Force One, some of the reporters ended up getting COVID from that. Yeah, that's right. He then went and did an event with gold star military families that was also indoors.

And then I don't know if you guys remember this because so much of it is like, you know, with Trump, there's so much happens that it's hard to hold on to all the details. But he basically when he did come down with COVID, he effectively blamed these gold star families for giving it to him. Well, yeah, they were like he she they hugged hope hicks he said he said i went through like 35 people and everyone has a different story they come within an inch of my face sometimes they want to hug me and they want to kiss me and they do and frankly i'm not telling them to back up i'm not doing it but obviously it's a dangerous thing i guess if you go by the COVID thing. So he basically blamed them for giving him COVID when the reality was he was putting all of these families who have lost so

much already at tremendous risk because of his own just completely selfish and irresponsible behavior. It's disgusting reflection on who he is as a human being. It's really strange too, because the timeline also really never added up. And actually, other aides at the White House, Alyssa Farrow, she was talking this morning, where she was saying, like, look, I actually asked a lot of times, when was the actual first positive test for the president? And she was never given a clear answer. They would never tell her. Yeah. And she was strategic communications director at the White House. So just to give you a little bit of a preview into how this works. So from Mark Meadows' book, he said that he tested positive and that there

was another test then after the tested negative. And that after that period, they didn't do any more tests, including up to the actual presidential debate. When they were supposed to. So the president was supposed, and this also goes, was this intentional or not? The president was supposed to be tested before that debate with Biden. But because he relied on late and because he was the president, they were like, well, he says he's negative. Yeah, they said it was the honor system. We're going to go on the honor system where the president is the president. I assume he was probably tested more than any individual on planet Earth, or at least that's what we all thought at the time.

Yeah, it's a very revealing thing into Trump. And what I see in particular from Mark Meadows is Meadows has this bumbling attitude here in the book as if he was like, he didn't really know what to do. And he was like, well, you know, it's like, come on. I mean, at that point, you have Secret Service agents, you have staff who are traveling with him, you have the Gold Star families, you have Secret Service agents, you have staff who are traveling with him, you have the Gold Star families, you have so many more. You actually have a lot of control over who Trump would interact with or not. I mean, look, I've talked with some people who worked in the White House before, not necessarily under the Trump administration. There are safety

protocols and more where the Secret Service and them can jump in and say, look, for your own good, like we're taking over. And I mean, you know, like 9-11 type circumstances. I don't know necessarily if this qualified or not, but, you know, with these tests, because I assume these are those rapid tests. One of the things is, is that if you test positive on them, you are very, very likely to be positive. That was something that was reiterated to me whenever I had to take those at-home COVID tests is that, yeah, they might get a false negative, but getting a false positive is actually quite rare in order to look at it. And so then, yes, again, it would make sense because they're talking

exactly about those Binax system rapid antigen tests where the next one might be negative, but even that very common interpretation, I don't know if you guys have ever done these, but there's like two lines in the second line, especially when you're coming out of COVID and you're trying to see if you're still testing positive or when you're going into it. It's a little iffy on the interpretation exactly, but you know, when you see any kind of anything there, it's pretty clear that you probably have COVID and this is how it's been explained to me in terms of the test. So look, he probably had COVID in those three days before, especially when I mean, there's no doubt about it. He wasn't feeling good when he tested positive.

He ended up in the hospital the next week. Well, yeah, right. Went to the hospital three days later, and we'll remember he had a very bizarre performance in that debate. Yes, that was the one where he was, like, totally unhinged. Where he was unhinged. And people thought, oh, you know, this is just, like, was his strategy or, like, you know, look, I mean, whenever you're not feeling 100%,

you're much more likely to behave erratically. And half delirious. Very, very, very much could have been. And look, he was what, 74 years old at the time that that was happening. It's really not a joke. And that's why he was ultimately rushed to the hospital. Since then, it's actually come out that while he was in the hospital, that the situation was much more dire than the doctors let on, like his blood oxygen levels and more were much lower, and they were very, very concerned for him. That's why he was given Regeneron and a few other things. And I think the most stunning image that will always resonate in my mind, because I do think this actually, out of all the, that was the craziest part of the Trump presidency is when he got COVID. I truly

thought he could die. I was like, this is crazy. He really could have, yeah. And whenever he, remember he came back on Marine One and he ran up the stairs and he was just breathing so heavily when he was on, I think it was on the Truman balcony. I can't remember exactly. And he

put his fist up in the air and I was like, man, he does not look good, I think it was on the Truman balcony. I can't remember exactly. And he, like, put his fist up in the air. And I was like, man, he does not look good. I think he probably would breathe pretty heavy running up a set of stairs. Very likely, yes. But, yes, he did not look good. And when he went to Walter Reed and he walked, I mean, yeah, it was terrible. And the other thing that we've learned since this, according to Chris Christie, is so Christie was in the debate prep room.

Right. And in a hotel room. I mean, they're all close together, right, prepping for this debate. He comes down with COVID. Obviously, former Governor Christie has struggled with his weight his entire life. And so he's at tremendous risk. Also, not a spring chicken. That man almost died.

You were saying they administered him last rites. He said they administered last rites to him in the hospital. And according to him, this is his side of the story, Trump calls not to check on him, not to wish him well, but to make sure he's not going to say that he got it from Trump. That's the kind of guy this is. That's the kind of guy this is. It's just,

listen, we try not to do too much Trump derangement here, but this is a stunning insight into how this man operates, the type of personal, just ethical code or lack thereof that he has, because I cannot imagine treating my best friend or my worst enemy the way that he callously treated everyone around him in that time period. Everyone from his close advisors in the room with him to the press corps to Joe Biden to the Gold Star families just pushing forward totally callously, no regard whatsoever for their safety or well-being. And, I mean, it's just, I just can't imagine. I just can't imagine behaving that way. It's truly disgusting. The last thing in terms of the timeline, the thing that led up to, that happened right before he gets his first positive test was that Amy Coney Barrett.

Oh, that's right. Swearing at a ceremony. Yes, it was outdoors and it ended up being a major super spreader. It ended up being a major super spreader. Isn't that when Hope Hicks got it? That's also when Hope Hicks got it. A bunch of people that were at that ceremony came down with COVID. And then, you know, it was very shortly after,

it may have been the next day that Trump got this first positive test and wasn't feeling well. So anyway, disgusting all the way around. There we go. Okay, let's move on. CNN's Chris Cuomo. I've been excited to do this segment now for some time. So Crystal and I were shocked when CNN actually did something

after those revelations that we gave you on Tuesday came out where Chris was actively involved in using his sources, in using his platform and more in order to aid his brother's campaign, in order to keep his office after being accused of sexual assault. He was using his own sources in the media to try and dig up dirt on the women accusing his brother of sexual assault. Low life. Lower life than can even really be imagined. Not necessarily helping your brother, which I guess I admire. Lying about it to your bosses. Lying about it to the American people on your network. And basically portraying yourself as just, oh, I was a little bit involved when you

were actually an intimate advisor. You have to pick one, especially when you work for a purportedly unbiased news organization. So let's put the tear sheet on this one. If you want to be family first, good. Resign from your job. Or take a leave of absence. Be like, look, I'm sorry. There's no way I can cover this fairly. I actually would have respected him a lot more for that. Anyway, CNN has suspended Chris Cuomo indefinitely. The New York Attorney General's office released transcripts and exhibits Monday that shed new light on Chris Cuomo's involvement in his brother's defense.

The documents, which we were not privy to before their public release, raise serious questions. When Chris admitted to us he had offered advice to his brother's staff, he broke our rules, and we acknowledged that publicly. But we also appreciated the unique position he was in and understood his need to put family first and job second. However, these documents point to a greater level of involvement in his brother's efforts than we previously knew. As a result, we have suspended Chris indefinitely pending further evaluation. Now, there's something really interesting happening here, Crystal. And I actually do believe that the new ownership of CNN actually has played a role in this.

So, purportedly, this is the reporting and I've been following. The Hollywood reporters are not such political hacks as our people, so they just tell you what's going on. So the new Discovery CEO, this is from Ben Mullins of the Wall Street Journal, who covers Hollywood, was actually in Time Warner Center in New York

on the day that all this happened. Pre-planned meetings with Jeff Zucker. So they actually had an entire staff meeting that was ready to go when the revelations came out. Now, reportedly, the new CEO was in the room with Zucker where the suspension decision was ultimately made. And then it was Zucker's job to call Chris in and be like, look, man, you're out. Like, I'm sorry. But I really, and this is 100% my speculation, but given the CNN shareholder who we brought you guys

saying I would like to see a return to news, there have been leaks out in Hollywood where the new CEO is actually moving, that the new CEO is not happy with CNN as a product whatsoever, that Jeff Zucker is going to be leaving his job in 2021. That was relatively planned, that they have a new vision for the network, that they are planning even in firing some hosts that Jeff Zucker is going to be leaving his job in 2021. That was relatively planned,

that they have a new vision for the network, that they are planning even in firing some hosts and not, was very unhappy, and that this was a straw that broke the camel's back. I personally, I don't believe that Cuomo was suspended without the new CEO in charge, the Discovery CEO in charge of the entire network. That's very interesting. Yeah, because Zucker and Chris Cuomo are friends. Yes. They're buddies. Close. And also, Zucker made Cuomo the linchpin of his nighttime programming. I mean, he plucked him from that terrible New Day show, the morning show, and gave him the 9 p.m. primetime slot on CNN. He had the highest rated network, which is not

a lot. Low bar. Yeah, very low bar. Always the point. Much less than what we do here. But he had the highest rated show that was actually on that network at the time, and Zucker reportedly views his talent like his family. This is from people I know who've spoken with Jeff Zucker, and he's like, you know, really reluctant. So I do think that this is a foreboding sign to the people at CNN who've been getting away with this nonsense for a very long time. This new CEO, I mean, look, it's always take it with a grain of salt. There will still be very annoying things that happen on that network. But even this, the new boss was like, I don't think so. He's like, no way. Also, because their ratings are such trash now, that always, even though from a business perspective, the ratings don't actually matter that much to the bottom line because it much more is about, you know, the cable carry rates. That's where

most of the money is ultimately made, especially for, you know, for CNN, part of obviously a much larger conglomerate. But it's very demoralizing when you're at a network, having been at MSNBC when ratings were totally trash during the second Obama administration. And so it's very demoralizing and it creates a lot of agitation within the organization for change. And so if you have someone come in a position of power that has a different vision they want to implement, that gives them the cards to play to make some big shakeups and make some big changes. We'll see. But that is very interesting. And I'm sure that the other anchors and contributors there are definitely

taking note that Chris was actually punished for this because there is no one who had more power as an anchor than he did within that organization, both because his ratings among the terrible ratings were the highest and because of this extremely close relationship with Jeff Zucker and also because he's a Cuomo. I mean, he's, you know, networked in and wired into all of the power centers in New York City and in the state at large. So the fact that he is being punished really says something. Now, look, is Chris Cuomo going to get fired? I think that's very unlikely. I think they're probably going to do what they did with Jeffrey Toobin. Right.

Give him three months. Sit him on the bench for a little while. Let things calm down. Let memories fade about what this whole mess was all about, and then when it feels safe, bring them back in, and there'll be minimal outcry. I think that's kind of the plan they have in place for him. There was one, I just had to share this one little nugget from that CNN tear sheet that we put up before, because this is their in-house write-up by their media critics, I think, who are also both hacked, and Oliver Darcy,

who wrote this up. And they had this line in there that I just thought was really funny, as they're trying to spin what is just an unconscionable, embarrassing situation for CNN. They said, while many media critics said the suspension was necessary, some viewers expressed disappointment that he was taken off the air. I loved that sentence. Trying to spin this like it was just the media that cared about it. This was just media critics who cared about it. The viewers are demanding Chris Cuomo come back on the air. I thought that was amusing. But Chris Cuomo is not the only one who came off looking really bad in this new report that came out from Letitia James,

AG of New York, who has been on top of this thing from the beginning and is now running for governor. So Katie Turr at MSNBC, let's go ahead and throw this tweet up on the screen. Katie Turr, while she was reporting on new developments of Andrew Cuomo live on the air, is effectively reading text messages directly from Liz Smith, who of course was a Mayor Pete advisor, but also was a longtime Cuomo advisor and was intimately involved in the sort of cover-up and defense of Cuomo throughout all of this. Liz wrote, I'm texting with Katie Turr. Katie is saying my spin live like verbatim. Okay. And they went back and pulled the video of what Katie Turr was saying at that point. And she was literally reading text messages off of her phone. So she was actually at that moment just completely regurgitating the spin that Liz Smith was giving her on behalf of Cuomo and not telling her audience that that's what she was doing. And so because this was kind of buried in the report and didn't get as much attention as obviously like the big news of Chris Cuomo getting suspended, you know, MSNBC has nothing to say about the fact that

one of their stars was just nakedly repeating the talking points being handed to her in real time from a political operative. These people have no shame. That is unbelievable. Also, NBC News did not respond to a request for comment. Well, and here's the thing is like, this is par for the course. Yes. This is not a one-off. They just got caught.

Yes, this is not a one-off. This is not a fluke. This is totally standard operating procedure. Because these people all run in the same circles. They're friends. They hang out. They're friends. They all know each other.

The reporters, they don't see themselves as, you know, holding power to account. At least not when it's their team. They like to be in the club. They like to feel like they're in the know. They like to feel like they're getting text messages from someone who's close to the powerful person or from the powerful person themselves. They love that feeling. And not only that, they're rewarded for it because that access then pays dividends down the road. CNN contract. And so.

Break stories. So the closer you are, the more chummy you are, the more ingratiated into these social circles you are, the higher you're going to rise at these organizations. That's how Cuomo gets to be the, you know, primetime major anchor of their network in the first place. So the whole thing, incredibly revealing, peek behind the curtain of how these people operate day in and day out and why they never say a critical thing. They never want to push too hard. They want to ask too hard of a question, all of that stuff. Or they'll just ignore stories entirely when it's inconvenient for someone who's, you know,

in their circle. This is, and they're not upfront about it either. I mean, that would be, if you have a conflict of interest and you're upfront about it, like, that happens. People exist in the world and they know each other and you're upfront about it and there are ways to deal with that. But all of this is they're pretending to be neutral, objective actors, and really they're texting Liz Smith and repeating her talking points. It's not hard. You and I have done this before. People are running for office. You're like, look, he's my friend. Like, J.D. Vance, talking voice. It's not hard. You and I have done this before. People are running for office.

They're like, look, he's my friend. Like J.D. Vance. I literally, he's my friend. Like, I don't, you know, I can't cover him objectively. It's not going to happen. Same, what was it, J.D. Shulton? There are all these people. Yeah, Nina Turner.

Right, hey, it's a personal friend. This is how it happens. And you just have to be upfront about it. Just be like, listen, this is how it is. You know, I can try to give you some objective analysis on this, this, and this, but that's just going to color your commentary no matter what. And this guy was his brother.

Like, it wasn't even his friend. That's what really makes it crazy. Cuomo did address it on his SiriusXM show. I'm sure it has a lot of listeners. There's like five people, and they all work in media. Yeah, and they're all media reporters. It says, quote, It hurts to even say it.

It's embarrassing, but I understand it. I understand why some people feel the way they do about what I did. I've apologized in the past and I mean it. Yeah, your apology in the past. He goes, it's the last thing I ever wanted to do was compromise my colleagues. I know they have a process that they think is important. I respect it. So I'm not going to talk about this any more than that. You know, his apology in the past, though, was packed full of lies. Yeah. I mean, he really misrepresented at best. No, he is a liar, 100% about his role in this. What he was actually doing here. I mean, pumping his, just to remind you guys, we covered this story on Tuesday, but what came out is he was using his sources in the media world to get information about what was

going to come out so that he could help his brother respond. He was tracking down leads on at least one of the women who had made an accusation. I mean, just wildly unethical behavior. And then he was telling Melissa DeRosa, who was the top Cuomo aide that he was texting with, delete this thread. So he knew, he knew in real time that this was not remotely okay, what he was doing. And the way he portrayed it to the public was like, maybe that he'd been on a couple calls, but that was really about it. Yeah. He's such a liar. Just to give you guys a preview of what that chummy little relationship looks like. Yesterday was Jen Psaki's birthday, and our friends in the press took the time out of their day to sing happy birthday to her

during the press briefing. Not a joke. Let's take a listen. Zeke, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. 25 feels really good, guys, as you all know, so I appreciate it. On the topic of COVID. As someone who was once in the press corps, yeah, that was never happening under Sarah Sanders and probably a good thing. Okay? Happy birthday to Kaylee. It's so embarrassing.

Sean Spicer. What is wrong with you people? I mean, really, like, they know they're on camera and they just don't care. I actually,

I wouldn't mind if it was consistent, like, they sang happy birthday for everyone. I wouldn't actually mind because they're human beings. Yeah, right.

That's the whole point. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's the whole point. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's all you need to know about that story and the people that generally try to bring you the news, quote unquote. So let's move on to this one.

It's really interesting. The women's tennis organization has, from the very beginning of Peng Shuai's initial disappearance, and then they put out these hostage videos in China and that hostage statement from her basically saying, hello, everyone, this is Peng Shuai. I'm fine. I may return and promote Chinese tennis. By the way, those accusations against the former vice premier of China are totally not true. And everything that the WTA said was a lie, pointing at the women's tennis organization. Now, to their eternal credit, the women's tennis organization has taken one of

the most brave stances that I have seen in Western sports so far, when it's come to with Chinese political entanglements. Their chairman, Steve Simon, has repeatedly come out and said, we don't believe this statement was written by Peng Shuai. We think she's still, you know, in danger. We're very concerned about her safety, about her initial accusation. And I already know this segment will be demonetized. I don't really care. But she and her initial accusation on Weibo on Chinese social media said that she was raped by the former vice premier of China, one of the most powerful men. Allegedly, he's a billionaire.

He really runs a lot of the things behind the scenes. It was taken down within 30 minutes from the entire Chinese internet. It was scrubbed. And then she disappeared for a matter of weeks. Her account was locked. You couldn't respond to her. Locked. Nothing. She was totally locked down. And then the fake statement came out of her saying that it wasn't true. Now, from the beginning, WTA has been saying, we don't believe these statements. We do think the initial accusation was true. Now, from the beginning, WTA has been saying, we don't believe these statements. We do think the initial accusation was true. We're very concerned about her safety. We haven't been able to get in touch with her. They put out that statement, et cetera. Then initially they released those hostage

videos. I put you those where she was like, hi, it's me, Pong. I'm out and dinner with my friends. By the way, the date is so-and-so. Yes, I always say the date in the course of when I'm having dinner with my friends while also they're filming me. If that happens, it's usually a weirdo. Okay, so the WTA has now put out a statement, a very brave statement. Let's put it up there on the screen, saying that they will be suspending all tournaments in China from here on out. Now, this is a huge deal because of Peng, actually. Women's tennis was becoming quite popular within China.

And merchandise and more that Peng was associated with was becoming big. You know, she was held up by the Chinese state as a propaganda saying, like, look at this amazing tennis player. I mean, she is one of the world's best women's tennis players, especially in doubles. And so they were holding her up as an ideal of the Chinese woman and the Chinese athlete on the world stage. They say she's a household name in China. A literal household name. Remember, household name there is a billion people. So women's tennis was actually a tennis organization that would draw a lot of people. I can tell you, I lived in Qatar when I was a kid.

And they would always have these, you know, the stars that would come in, and they would do these, you know, exhibition tournaments and more. These are big money makers for the players and for the tennis associations themselves. They don't actually make all that much of their income on the big ones, the Wimbledons, the US Open, and more. So these are where your real money is made as an athlete, in the fees and all that stuff that it generates. So for the women's tennis organization to declare non grata, we are not coming to China whatsoever. Recognizing Pinchuai's message, they said has to be listened and taken seriously. The players, the women around the world, they're saying are not agreeing to play in China. This is, look, I don't really like Naomi

Osaka and her trauma BS or whatever in the past, but credit to her for coming out, putting that tweet, because it's over. Whatever you had endorsed in the past or any ad reads, you will be disappeared from the Chinese internet, from Chinese society. It basically won't exist over there. Same thing with Novak Djokovic posting these things. Serena Williams. I mean, these people, they work with Nike. And we know that Nike has used its lobbying organization to lobby against slave labor restrictions on cotton here in the United States in our Congress.

So this puts a lot of their business deals at risk. And you might say, look, these are people who are already rich. But we've seen in the past people who are already rich. Who are still like, oh, I don't want to risk making even more money. It seems like people who are rich, like it's never enough. No, James Harden and LeBron, I don't think LeBron's actually a billionaire, by the way. But he's probably pretty close. He's good.

Half a billion or something like that. Didn't stop him from licking the boots during Hong Kong. I mean, I think it's, and I think their statement is pretty interesting because they say, in good conscience, this is from the World Tennis Association, Women's Tennis Association. In good conscience, I don't see how I can ask our athletes to compete there when Peng Shuai is not allowed to communicate freely and has seemingly been pressured to contradict her allegation of sexual assault. Given the current state of affairs, I'm so greatly concerned about the risk that all of our players and staff could face if we were to hold events in China in 2022 as part of the statement here. And I do think the fact that you had so many top stars come out and, you know, make their feelings on this clear, and again, WTA has been good from the start, but I'm sure the fact that they had some of their most visible,

biggest stars. And look, I mean, all these players, they're close. They know each other really well. So I'm sure the fact that, especially when nobody even knew where she was, like that personal attachment and concern for someone that you know quite well, I'm sure really weighed heavily into all of this, but pretty interesting development.

I mean, amount of courage that really cannot be overstated because this is real financial consequences which will hit all of these athletes in the future. I'm certain of it. It could cost them tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement deals. Nike and all of them are 100% getting calls from the CCP telling these people to go ahead and shut up. And I wanted to show everybody here the other side of the coin. This is what the billionaires, this particular one I'm about to show you, Ray Dalio, is famous on Wall Street for being one of the first people to invest in China. He's traveled to China many times. He is one of the top apologists in China, or sorry, in the United

States and on Wall Street for China. He's basically saying, I don't really care what the Chinese government does as long as they make me money. He was recently on CNBC, the billionaire's network. Every once in a while, they get lobbed a difficult question. Watch this man twist himself in order to explain that China's disappearance of Jack Ma and of Peng Shui is just them acting like a strict parent. Not a joke. Let's take a listen. One of the quick questions I just want to ask you on China, though, is clearly there's human rights issues. There's questions right now about this Chinese tennis player, Peng Shui. There have been questions about Jack Ma. How do you think about that piece of it when it relates to investing there? Well, I can't be an expert in those types of things. What I basically do, and for 50 years,

I've invested all over the world. I look to whatever the rules are. If the government has a policy that I should do a certain thing and so on, but I can't be an expert in all of those particular dynamics of that. I really have no idea. So the guidance of the government is the most important thing. These are political. And then I look at the United States and I say, well, what's going on in the United States and should I not invest in the United States because other things are not our own human rights issues or other things, you know, and I'm not trying to make political comparisons. I'm basically just trying to follow the rules, understand what's going on and and invest properly in light of those rules.

But Ray, you recognize... Yeah, I mean, he goes on there to be like, you recognize that there's a little bit of a difference here. And actually, he can't really tell you the difference. I just think, look at the twists and the turns of this. And once, what we were just pointing to, Crystal, he's a billionaire, many times over. This is one of the richest people on the planet. Yeah, I mean, he's one of the richest men in the world.

Top hedge funder in the world. So you've got plenty of money. Why can't you just be like, yeah, it's pretty messed up. It may, you know, reconsider what I, you know, invest. It doesn't matter. You know, every single time, these people bend over backwards because they worship at the altar of money. Jamie Dimon, same thing just happened. Put this up there on the screen.

Happened over the Thanksgiving weekend. He was at a conference. He made a joke that the bank was likely to outlast China's Communist Party. He immediately had to come out and say, I have so sorry. I regret making that statement. I should not have made a joke that J.P. Morgan, the bank, is likely to outlast the Chinese Communist Party. How is that even a joke? That's not even funny. First of all, it's actually not funny. Yeah, it's actually not funny at all. So it's a terrible joke. I think we're being a

little loose with terminology when we call it a joke. Yes. But anyway. Jamie Dimon is a billionaire, okay? A billionaire. Well, well established on Wall Street. But they've got too much money in order to lose. And the Chinese Communist Party has made it clear that if you cross us in any way, even in your own country, doesn't matter. Boom, you're going to get hit with massive financial consequences. So that is just two sides of the coin. The WTA is going to lose money. And in the future, they will never forget this. I've spoken with people who were involved with Ai Weiwei when he got the Nobel Prize and all of that. Sweden never recovered economically from what China did to them. Previously with South Korea, people might

remember this, but 2015, 16 or whatever, we decided to put these things called the THAAD missile system inside of South Korea. It's a North Korean missile defense thing. China freaked out about it. Anyway, they started waging massive economic warfare on the South Koreans, canceling concerts, canceling tourism, one of the number one things that was happening with South Korea. It caused a real economic problem for them over there. That's what they do on the nation state level. On the private company level, H&M, again, a Swedish company, was massively lashed out for just for putting out a statement saying, we will not be buying cotton from Xinjiang. Same with Nike, having to put out that statement.

They disappeared H&M from the Chinese internet. It cost H&M billions and billions of dollars in sales, not to mention problems in terms of their supply. So this is a very real thing, and that's two sides of the coin. The bootlickers and then the people who are like, no, you know what, we're actually going to stand up and we're going to make a choice. It's not the easy one, and I think that not enough people get enough credit for making it. The interesting thing about Dalio, too,

is he's not consistently terrible. Sometimes he says things that are actually pretty Yeah, every once in a while. So, like, he said that he thought inequality was, he said it was like a dire threat to the, or an imminent threat or something like that. He's made some decent he said it was a national

emergency, that's what he said. So, he's like, not consistently terrible. Yeah, but then he's one of those people who'd be like, but the inequality is the Federal Reserve's fault or something. Yeah, but then he's one of those people who'd be like, but the inequality is the Federal Reserve's fault or something. You know what I mean? Right. Or the moment that you were like, all right, well, tax. He'd be like, socialism.

Hold on a second. Yeah, exactly. Look, you can't be an idiot and become a multi-billionaire. But this just goes to show you that, if anything, it's worse. Whenever you're able to elucidate something intelligent on one subject and then you twist yourself into a pretzel whenever you're asked one of the most basic questions about, well, does this... Here's the other thing. He didn't even say, are you going to stop investing in China? He's like, does this impact your thinking at all? I could have given a better

answer if I was a shill. I would have been like, you know, it's certainly something of concern, but our core metrics show that we're going to see growth for our investors, for ourselves, and we foresee a better future. I like it when people are just up front. We make a lot of money there. And I know I won't make that money if I say anything. Next question. Next question, Andrew. Honestly, it would have been better.

We would have been better off. Speaking of corruption, money, all of that at the highest level, let's move on. The Maxwell trial. We've had a first couple of days of what's been happening there. No bombshell revelations necessarily at the top, but more a lot of confirmation of what we already knew. The biggest accusation, actually, that we saw for the very first time, let's put this up there on the screen. The first alleged victim called in the trial, testifying anonymously, by the way, of Ghislaine Maxwell has testified under cross-examination that Epstein actually took her to Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old to meet Donald Trump. To be clear, she did not

allege any improper behavior by Trump or characterize the meeting. But this pairs with the fact that this trial is just revealing the depths of which Ghislaine Maxwell and which Jeffrey Epstein cavorted with some of the most famous and richest people on the planet. Their pilot of Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express, a picture of which was actually released recently, they went out and said that he's like, look, I've seen people like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, celebrities, Kevin Spacey on the plane. And he said, look, I've never seen any improper sexual behavior or whatever, but I saw a lot of young women. I saw a lot of these famous people on the plane. Well, he claimed he thought everybody was of age on the plane, too.

He's covering his butt as well. Yeah, he's covering his ass. And we actually already know from the past that Epstein forced some of these young girls to actually dress up in flight attendant's uniforms in order to get them on the plane and fly them all around the world. And one of those women actually was photographed giving a massage to Bill Clinton in an airport terminal. At the direction, actually, of Ghislaine Maxwell. Also important, though, for other cases is that he did testify that he had seen Virginia Gouffray, one of the most prominent Epstein accusers, on the plane. So this testimony could actually back up not only her accusations against Maxwell, but in her civil case against Prince Andrew,

which, in my opinion, those are the much more significant ones. I mean, it's very difficult here because, also, I didn't know this, but James Comey's daughter is the woman who's prosecuting Maxwell. Oh, really? Yes, she's the lead prosecutor on behalf of the Department of Justice. Yeah, small world, I guess. And one of the problems, though, is that they are charging her with crimes from 1999 and then 2004. And a lot of Epstein's connections, I'm not saying all of them, with the richest and most powerful, the most problematic ones, actually came after he was convicted as a sex offender because, A, it was already known that he was a sex offender, and, B, that's when he started getting involved with the Israeli prime minister, Ayyub Barak, Bill Clinton, obviously,

Hillary, and then we know also, you know, in terms of Bill Gates, all that relationship, that was post-sex offender conviction, Leon Black. That is when Deutsche Bank being fined, having known of his involvement in his past sexual offender history, that's when some of the most nefarious conduct from what I can see that he was engaged in actually is when it all began to happen. So look, we have a tear sheet. Let's put this up there. And to the actual accusation, the very first day of testimony, the anonymous accuser, her name was Jane, testified that Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein sexually abused her when she was 14. The key, though, in a lot of this for the Maxwell defense is that they allege that Maxwell is on trial for the crimes of Epstein. They're like, look, we agree. Epstein was a sex offender. Epstein

was doing all this. But Ghislaine Maxwell never participated in any of it. But per the testimony and more, she was not only sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, but Ghislaine Maxwell both procured her, groomed her, and in some cases actually participated in the sexual assault herself. She's no victim. The story of this Jane Doe accuser. oh, it's horrible. She's 14 years old. She sees this couple. She's at this sort of exclusive private school in Michigan, the Interlochen School, and they approach her very friendly. And also, her father had died and her mom had fallen on difficult financial times. So they're preying on someone who's not only a young girl but in a very vulnerable situation. And over time she describes the way that she's groomed by Ghislaine, which to me, I mean, that whole process is almost as disgusting as the act itself.

But not only that, she then is participating in the actual abuse. So, yeah, I mean, it's stunning. And the defense's approach is to basically smear these women. Say they're fame seekers. Say they're just looking for money. How can you be a fame seeker when you're anonymous? Right. Say that, you know, as you said, that, oh, Ghislaine's being persecuted for the crimes of this man and turn it into almost like a gender or feminist kind of an argument.

Given the amount of evidence that it looks like they're going to be able to marshal, I think it's pretty unlikely that that is going to work. But there's a couple things that always come to mind. I mean, first of all, why is this important? It's because of how they were able to operate for so long with all of these people in elite circles, just even after he'd been convicted as a sex offender and is on the list, there's still, you know, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and all of them happy to associate with him. That's the main story to me. Always will be. 100%. And the other part of this is Ghislaine deserves to spend the rest of her life in prison based on the allegations that we know.

But there were a lot of other people who were involved. Where are those charges? You know, where's going to be the accountability for all of the many people who were involved either in the abuse or in facilitating this? There is one part of this that's a little bit funny, which is that QAnon, which is very interested in child sex trafficking, they've been very upset by the fact that Trump not only did this accuser say she was brought to Mar-a-Lago at 14, but also that he was on the plane multiple times, which is against what had been said in the past. So QAnon is in overdrive trying to spin and defend Trump. Yeah, of course.

Because their whole thing is like, oh, there's this cabal of criminal sex traffickers, but they're all Democrats. I was saying, true, they exist. They are not all Democrats. Yeah. So they're trying to spin in real time what's going on here, apparently, which is kind of funny. It is interesting. My disappointment with this trial is always that, like I said, I don't understand why the DOJ is only prosecuting on these old crimes from 99 and 2004. From what I have read, the concern is if they do it after he was accused and had that deal with federal prosecutors, there could be some, not double jeopardy necessarily, but some stuff would come out about their own role in giving Epstein that sweetheart deal in the first place, deciding not to prosecute him federally,

turning him over to Palm Beach prison. So that's why they brought what they considered to be rock solid charges from 99 and 2004. The problem, like I said, is that the real juice, like so to speak, all happens after he gets accused of being a sex offender. That's when a lot of the elite connections are. Exactly. Well, that's when Epstein needed them more than ever, right? That's when he was both a sex offender. That's right.

And he was like, I need to launder my reputation. That's when he got involved with the MIT, what was it, MIT School of Journal, Media Lab or whatever. Yeah. And Joy Ito, and he was giving him anonymous dollars and meeting with all these scientists. I've talked with Lex Friedman before before and Lex Friedman actually knows scientists who met Epstein. And they were like, oh, he's purported to be very interested in their work. people like Bill Gates and them were willing to cast aside the known fact that he was a sex offender and associate with him anyway, in many cases, hang out with him like we've been learning from the

past. I mean, in that Katie Couric book, that's the era when she's being brought into these meetings, which are clearly about getting connections with the press so that he's able to get positive coverage or no coverage at all. That dinner was crazy because it was like Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and a few all at the Epstein mansion, you know, right there in downtown in New York City. And yeah, you consider that the fact that the Israeli prime minister just happened to, you know, stay there all the time for no reason. He had Epstein as an investor in his company. You know, his neighbor, the neighbors saw him staying there all the time.

And those are the parts where I am the most interested in and where I think, I hope that we'll learn a little bit more. But unfortunately, I mean, look, at the same time, can't erase the problems of the victims. But the international conspiracy and all that, not a lot of that is coming out of this trial. Not so far. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, we've covered many fancy trophy items that the rich are bidding up to prices that are truly insane. There's the burgeoning market for fancy trees. Apparently, the global elite have been engaged in wild bidding wars to buy particular trees that are deemed special that they then have transported to their homes at great cost, all to serve as some sort of living status symbol. There's the

record-breaking demand for art. Just this month, top auction houses were ready to auction off $1.6 billion in art, with expectations that some pieces would go for as much as 15 times their asking price. Art is not only a top market for the uber-rich, but also the criminally rich, although I repeat myself. There is also the pandemic-borne yacht boom, leading to a multi-year wait for new boats, and a massive spike in prices there as well. Now, these yachts are actually meant not so much as seagoing vessels, but as yet another way to ostentatiously display one's master-of-the-universe status. According to yacht broker Trenton Carroll, I know it sounds kind of crazy, but 60% of the people, 70% of the people,

may never take their boats out. They'll have friends on the dock, and they'll have little get-togethers. Hey, come for wine, Fess Parker, Opus One. And they'll watch the sunset go down, and they'll sit around and brag about how great they are and how they're legends in their own mind. You know, I actually kind of appreciate the full contempt that this guy apparently has for his clientele. But the latest buying frenzy might be the dumbest and most disgusting yet. Big money investors are snapping up fake plots of digital land to the tune of millions of dollars. It is just as stupid, gross, and dystopian as it sounds. Here is the Wall Street Journal. Quote, the latest hot real estate market is not on the scenic coast or in

balmy sunbelt cities. It's in the metaverse, where gamers are flocking and digital property sales are setting new records. Now, for the uninitiated, the metaverse is basically a virtual reality space that you can access by putting on a clunky headset, which will most likely leave you sweaty and nauseous after a few hours. Facebook is betting big on this digital alternate reality, even going so far as to rebrand Facebook as meta. Here's a look at their rollout video. Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space. It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually, it has things that are only possible

virtually, and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful. Hey, are you coming? Yeah, just got to find something to wear. All right. Perfect. Oh, hey, Mark. Hey, what's going on? Hi.

What's up, Mark? Whoa, we're floating in space? Uh-huh. Who made this place? It's awesome. Right? It's from a crater. I met in L.A.

This place is amazing. Boz, is that you? Of course It's awesome. Right? It's from a crater. I met in LA. This place is amazing. Boz, is that you? Of course it's me. You know I had to be the robot, man. I thought I was supposed to be the robot. Whoa. I knew you were bluffing. Wow. We could have a meeting that's even more awkward than Zoom. That's amazing. So investment firm Tokens.com, they just paid a record-breaking $2.5 million for real estate in a fashion district of a metaverse called Decentralands. According to the company's CEO, quote, we can create something that's the equivalent of a Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue where the Gucci's and Adidas's will come. Because what this world really lacks is more luxury shopping experiences for the 1%. Weren't you just sitting there in your studio apartment with the heat turned down to save on gas prices,

thinking that if the world just had another Rodeo Drive, then really everything would be perfect? Seriously wrap your head around the fact that millions of people are homeless or housing insecure, and permanent capital has millions to throw at real estate that is literally just pixels. Look, I'm not saying the metaverse won't catch on, earning these early investors millions and millions. Actually, I'm more disturbed by the possibility that it could. The term metaverse, it actually was coined in a 1992 sci-fi novel called Snow Crash, where people found refuge in a digital world because the real world was so hellish. Here's how CNBC described the plot of that novel. Said in the early 21st century, Snow Crash imagines a bleak future.

The global economy has collapsed, and federal governments have lost most of their power to a handful of giant corporations. Sounds kind of familiar, guys. I guess the more billionaires ruin the world, the more billionaires stand to profit from our desire for escapism. But you know, it doesn't have to be dystopian. I can, in fact, imagine some version of the metaverse that would, in fact, enrich our societies. Remember what it felt like to believe in the early promise of social media, let's say before and during the Arab Spring, we were pitched on the idea that we could create these new connections, new communities,

that we can engage with people anywhere who might share similar passions and interests, that we might flatten geography and overcome cultural differences in a way that heals our divides and soothes our sectarian souls. We might actually collectively achieve greater power to hold corrupt elites and institutions to account. But along the way, we somehow lost the path to that promised land and instead ended up in a more hellish place than where we started. Now it all feels inevitable, but it actually wasn't. The problem is that we let market logic and a few tech billionaires run what should have been a public commons. So instead of collective power, we ended up with mass exploitation. While our experience of these products is whatever message we're sending out or article we're sharing or video we're watching, the real point of the products is to profit by selling off every bit of data that they possibly can.

And rather than operate as neutral spaces, they manipulate our emotions. They prey on our anxieties. They serve us content meant to enrage us and silo us into warring factions. Increasingly, they also actively suppress any outside voices in favor of the sort of legacy media that won't scare off the advertisers. Now, could the metaverse actually be good? Sure. Is it going to be? Not a chance in hell. Instead, it's only going to lead to a few tech billionaires having control over yet another part of our lives. It will lead to unimaginable levels of surveillance, when our tech overlords are able to track everything from when we leave to go to the bathroom, to when our eyes furtively glance at an ad for some new shit product that we absolutely do not need, but we'll be persuaded that we must have. And to the uber-rich status contests escalating further into the digital world. It's trophy trees, mansions, priceless art, and yachts

used to host parties only with NFTs. In other words, rather than being an escape from the shitty world we live in, it will mirror and accelerate all of the current shittiness. The other possibility is that it will stay just as lame as Zuckerberg's presentation and completely and utterly fail. That is the best result we can possibly hope for. You know, Sagar, there's all these questions, oh, what it'll be like, etc. Look, these things are never ultimately an escape. No. They're a reflection. 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, like it or not, Twitter is the place that elites are. Twitter is the place the conversation is set. It's where most journalists are 24 hours a day. It is the place that news breaks. It is interpreted. It is observed, iterated on, and more.

It has spawned revolutions, social movements, and many controversies. Some real, some imagined. But that's life in the 21st century. In a relatively free society, on balance, we are 100% better off having a platform and the ability to publish pretty much anything for public consumption because it goes around the corporate news media. And the corporate news bosses, they know that. That's why over the last five years, they have undertaken a concerted campaign to browbeat, capture, and

persuade the people in charge of Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere that it's their job to censor. And not just censor, but to censor exactly what the mainstream media tells them to. That's a win-win. The corporate media keeps their monopoly on information. Social media companies, they don't have to deal with bad headlines. The only problem is the rest of us suffer. Some could say, well, just don't use Twitter. But we can't. Our job here at Breaking Points is to surface and explain the most important news right now in the country to you. That requires us being where the news is, which is Twitter, which is why the policies of Twitter, the new CEO, and how they think, it all matters a lot. It's why I'm greatly dismayed at the new

choice of Parag Agarwal, who on his very first day as CEO showed us why he should not have that job. Agarwal, for context, is the former chief technology officer of Twitter. By all accounts, he's a nerdy engineering type, which is fine. But here's the problem. Twitter does not have any engineering problems. Their problem is they need to figure out what the hell they are in the 21st century. Are they free speech wing of the free speech party as they once were? How will they deal with Trump when he runs again in 2024? What exactly does bullying and harassment mean? Does private power have the ability to usurp public will?

These are philosophical, political questions. They do not require ones and zeros. In my experience, the engineering types like this who don't have a clue are always the ones who are most easily pushed around by the woke mob because they have no grounding in critical thinking over big political questions. We already knew this was going to be a problem, as Agarwal gave an interview exactly one year ago when he explicitly said it is not Twitter's job to be bound by the First Amendment, that instead he was focused on harm reduction. That is social justice mindset already seeped in. Once that mind virus is inside you, it takes a lot to purge it. And sure enough,

on Agarwal's very first day, he showed us why he has no business. Twitter announced that going forward, it would no longer allow the sharing of private media, such as images or videos, of private individuals without their consent. Specifically, they say that this policy is to fight harassment or intimidation of private individuals, but they add an important caveat. They will take into consideration whether an image is publicly available and is being covered by journalists, or if a particular image adds value to public discourse and is in the public interest. Okay, there it is. Consider how dystopian that is. Some images of private individuals will be allowed, but Twitter will decide if they are in the public interest or not. Look, I actually get the impetus behind this policy.

Do I enjoy these videos that people take of people in public and then post them online? No, I don't. I actually think they're terrible. But consider the edge cases. What about George Floyd's death? Videos from the scene of Kyle Rittenhouse? Philando Castile's murder? Amy Cooper wanting to call the cops? Which one of those is in the public interest? I'm's murder, Amy Cooper wanting to call the cops. Which one

of those is in the public interest? I'm going to err on the side of all of them. And I for damn sure don't want the woke mob at Twitter deciding which one stays up and which one stays down. It is clear nobody at Twitter even thought about this. Their language for justifying this is that harassment is usually used against activists, which is actually kind of hilarious because we know that the annoying woke activists are the kings and the queens of filming themselves being obnoxious and making a scene in public. But look, it's a free country. They should be allowed to, just as it should be allowed to do so for someone filming them. That's the point. When you leave all this up to the discretion of a bunch of people who have shown

us before with the Hunter Biden laptop story, that they can't be trusted and will be partisan in their enforcement over legitimate journalism, we have to say, screw you. It is why it is so dangerous that Agarwal has already said he has no binding to the First Amendment, even its spirit, that all he cares about is, quote, harm reduction. Remember, what every grade school kid is taught, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now, maybe you guys think I'm making too much about this, but remember the Arab Spring was literally launched after a man self-immolated and images went viral on Twitter. The last power of a dissident in an increasingly unfree society is the ability to go around the center of power. That's why the internet, at its most promising, was supposed to be.

And it's been taken away from us one by one. I'm singling out Twitter, but it's been a long and dark road here. A friend of mine actually pointed out, the point of having principle and a standard is to make it so that it's easier to deal with edge cases and really dark stuff. Consider Holocaust denial, which of course is repugnant. Well, it was held up by Mark Zuckerberg for years as something that embodied free speech that he was going to allow on the platform and he would not get involved. And in October 2020, poof, oops, he just reversed it himself, despite bragging about it three years earlier. The moment you retreat from a standard of the First Amendment, you allow more exceptions, woke and unwoke, to creep in, the more censorship that you invite in the long run, they will never stop at just one.

It's why our laws are written the way that they are, and it's why the prevalence of this mindset at the very top of these companies, combined with people who really haven't thought very hard about what their technology means in a free and open society is a road to disaster. I've never been more convinced than I am today that we're on the precipice of probably one of the worst times in American politics. You might have thought that Trump leaving the stage made things calmer. I think his return, or whatever successor it will be, will only accelerate things towards even more dystopian levels of censorship, freakouts, and social movements. It will have long-lasting consequences, and we will be less free than ever as a result. You said this actually after January 6th, Crystal. You said we can be a free society or we can be a police... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have Amory Gatton. He is a researcher who has been doing incredible

work. He's a visiting fellow at Harvard and also co-founder of World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database. Great to see you, Amory. Thank you for joining us. Good to see you, man. Thank you for having me, Deisha. Of course. So we've been following the work you've been doing really closely. Some of you out there may have been as well. You guys have been digging into these education and income divides that we've seen here in America, but you're also seeing in a lot of countries in developed world democracies where effectively people who are high income are still voting a lot of times for right-leaning parties, but people who are high education are now oftentimes voting for left-leaning parties. We can throw the latest paper that you all just published up there on the screen. The title here is Brahman Left versus Merchant Right,

Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies Between 1948 and 2020. The dynamic that you point to is basically, you know, both sides of the political spectrum being controlled by different sets of elites and people with lower educational levels concentrating more and more on the right side of the political spectrum. Just dig into some of the data and what you found. Yes, absolutely. So the idea of this paper and more generally of this project that we have, which has become a book project, was to understand how voting behavior by education, income, but also by religion, age has changed over the long run. And put simply, in Western

democracies, what we find is that there has been a striking divergence between these two dimensions of inequality that are education and income. In the 1950s and 60s, social democratic and affiliated parties, so including the Democratic Party in the US, used to be supported very strongly by low-income and lower-educated voters,

while conservative parties used to gather more support from high-income and higher-educated voters. And in the past 50, 60 years, well, income does continue to determine high support for right-wing parties in general. Meanwhile, the effect of education has completely reversed. The educational divide has followed the striking reversal. And today, higher educated voters are much more likely to vote for the left. And so this leads to a separation between what we propose to call the Brahmin left,

a sort of intellectual elite educated left, and a sort of still high income merchant right. And so, Aymeric, let's go ahead and put your tweet up there on the screen. I want to see that chart because it's very important for where exactly the change happened. Can you explain why the percentage points of the difference of the percent of the top 10% in educated voting left and the percent of the bottom 90% switched in 1991 to 1995. What exactly happened there across all of the West? I think this chart shows not that something specific happened in the 80s or 90s, but it shows precisely that this has been a very long-run gradual process. So as you can see from the red line, for instance, the gap in left votes between higher and lower educated voters

used to be minus 16, which means that lower educated voters were more likely to vote for left-wing parties by 16 percentage points. And this has very gradually become less and less negative and then in turn positive in the 2000s. But it's really the outcome of a long run gradual process. And there are variations across countries in the intensity of this reversal,

but also on the level of the educational divide today, depending on how strong were class divides in the 50s. For instance, in Nordic countries such as Sweden, where class divides used to be very, very strong. Well, this reversal does not seem to have completely happened today. It may happen in the coming elections or decades. While in countries, for instance, like the Netherlands, where it started to some extent earlier,

well, it's been now a few decades that higher educated voters vote more for social democratic and affiliated parties. So this is really about a very gradual, long run process, which I think goes beyond specific contextual factors or crises or any specific event. Let's talk about the exceptions, because there are a couple of exceptions that stand out among all of these Western democracies that haven't followed the same trends. And effectively, just to make this simple for people, what you're pointing to here is a collapse of any sort of class politics, right? You have two sides of the political

spectrum effectively dominated by elites. Working class voters, at least in the U.S., kind of spread across both of the parties. So control of the parties effectively is happening at the elite level, and you have very little in terms of class politics, which ultimately leads to very little if you're interested in policies that lead to economic redistribution. But there are a couple of countries that have bucked the trend. Tell us what those countries are and why you think that they've not gone in the same direction as the rest of the Western democracies. So there are two main countries that we identify as not following this trend, broadly speaking, and these are Portugal and Ireland. These two countries have quite specific histories. I mean, in Portugal, democracy only came back in the 1980s.

And Ireland also has quite a specific history because it never really had any strong social democratic party or any kind of strong left-wing party at all. But in Ireland, since the 2008 crisis in particular, there's been the rise of Sinn Fein, which is considered to be more social democratic and left-wing. And in Portugal, especially since the crisis too, there's been a sort of rise of socioeconomic divides and redistribution and economic issues continue to play a very important role in comparison to other countries in the West. So in these two countries, we do observe the persistence of socioeconomic divides and the persistence or even rise of, to some extent, class divides today. On the fact that class politics have disappeared or declined, I think we should nuance this a bit too. It's not so much that they have disappeared, it's just that they have complexified tremendously.

When we say that higher educated voters vote for different parties than high income voters, education and income are to some extent two dimensions of social class. And what we observe in many Western European countries today, where the party system is increasingly fragmented, is a sort of split between voters depending on education or income. Typically, far-right parties tend to capture more votes from low-educated voters, but not necessarily from low-income or high-income voters, while green parties tend to be supported mainly by higher-educated voters, to some extent independently from income. And so we have this fragmentation of the political space, which leads to a sort of clustering of parties, depending on these two dimensions of

class, which are education and income. So Amri, let me ask you this, which countries are the leading indicators? There's a common phenomenon in your home country, in France, in order to say we want to stop the exportation of Western-style controversy, wokeism and all of that to our country and those types of political phenomena. So you look at Western democracies as a whole. Is the United States the place where this happens and then it's exported out to the rest of the West? Or is it a different, more interesting picture happening? No, I don't think the U is the leading example. This trend really

happens in almost all Western democracies. And what distinguishes them most is perhaps where they started from. As I mentioned before, Sweden was very, very strongly class-based in the 50s, for instance, which means that this process has not completely been done today. I'd say that the two countries that perhaps were the earliest in finishing this transition are Switzerland and the Netherlands. Switzerland today is really, in Europe, the country where educational divides are the highest. And this is directly linked to the fact that Switzerland has the largest far-right party, anti-immigration party in Europe.

And it also has, to some extent, the biggest green environmentalist bloc in Europe. So this kind of sociocultural divides, this cultural dimension of political conflict, plays a particularly salient role in Europe. So this kind of sociocultural device, this cultural dimension of political conflict plays a particularly salient role in Switzerland. The U.S. is, I'd say, too, one of the countries where it does and where it is the highest today among the West. Is it fair to say that the more a country focuses on what we'll call sort of culture war clashes, the more rapidly you see this sorting out. Because that seems to be one of the things you indicate in your research, is that as these culture war issues take more and more prominence and become the more salient dividing lines between the sides of the spectrum, that's where you see

the fragmentation of the class-based politics. That's where you see economic redistribution become less and less likely, and economics really to be not so much the focus of the political battles that are being waged. That's something certainly our audience would grasp and understand based on what we've seen here in the U.S. Is that a trend that, you know, first of all, is that what you found? And second of all, does that apply to a lot of countries across the world? So I'd say yes. So what we show in this article is that when you look at what parties propose and the kinds of issues that they emphasize,

well, sociocultural issue emphasis is strongly linked to support for this party in terms of education. Put simpler, it means that when parties start dividing much more on sociocultural issues, then educational divides are likely to rise. At the same time, I think it's important to nuance a bit and to remember that the rise of these issues is perhaps not deterministic and is also linked and the loss of confidence that many working class voters had in the 50s and 60s for social democratic parties. The decline in confidence for these parties has arguably contributed to the rise of this new dimension of political conflict. Wow. And finally, this may be, you may not want to speculate on this, but it seems like these

trends really begin in the 60s. And of course, the 60s in America and, you know, a lot of places very tumultuous, you know, a lot of emphasis on, you know, shaking free the cultures of the past, moving in a different direction. I mean, is it an accident? Do you think that this starts and continues from the 60s? Yes and no. I mean, arguably, the 60s played a catalysing role in accelerating this transition, just like I think that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s played a role in accelerating this transition. Perhaps the 2008 crisis or globalisation, all these various factors, I think, played a role in this transition. But the few countries where we have data, even before the 60s, seem to show a trend towards reversal of educational divides that starts

earlier than the 60s. So I do think it's a longer run process that also goes beyond these specific movements, these specific turning points, which are important, but I think are only part of the story. Got it. Fascinating stuff. I know you're working on a book also that is set to come out here shortly. We're excited to take a look at that as well.

Amory Gatton, thank you so much for joining us and breaking this all down for us. Thanks, Amory. We'll have links to all this stuff in the description. Really appreciate you joining us, man. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. Thank you guys so link to all this stuff in the description. Really appreciate you joining us, man. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching.

It's been amazing. This is our official six months since we started, Crystal. Can you believe it? I actually can't. It's completely and totally wild. It feels kind of like forever and also kind of like it happened in an instant. I swear we were designing this desk just yesterday. Your baby is growing up. It's pelled up pretty well. Not a lot of scratches. kind of like it happened in an instant. I swear we were designing this desk just yesterday. But look at it.

Your baby is growing up. It's pelled up pretty well. Not a lot of scratches. We got these nice pads and everything. In all seriousness, you guys have blown us away. We are already in discussions. We've upgraded here. The studio, we actually have new audio equipment and more

so we can have more people here at the desk in the future. We are building and preparing for the big election cycle for the midterms, bringing more people, seeing how we can best leverage our show, our resources, all of that. We can only do it with your support. So the premium link is down there in the description. You're helping us grow. We're literally just getting started. It's been an amazing journey. I really can't believe that it's, I mean, number one or top five politics in, we never dropped below number five in the Spotify politics one. 650 something thousand subscribers on YouTube. I put this out yesterday. We've been viewed a hundred million times on YouTube, which like boggles the mind. It's crazy. I can't even believe it's real,

like really, and to have the six-month period. So it's all credit to you. For those who signed up, thank you. For those who can't support us, it really means the world. Yeah. We love you guys. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic weekend.

We're going to have some great content for you, including our partnership with The Daily Poster and some other segments that we've got in the can that I think you'll enjoy. So have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you back here next week. See you next week. This is an iHeart Podcast.