Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/2/24: Zelensky Caves On Territory, Syrian Rebels Take Aleppo, Stoller Debunks Andreesen On Debanking, MSNBC Scoffs At Bernie In DNC War

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss Zelensky caves on Ukraine war, Syrian rebels take Aleppo, Stoller debunks Andreesen on Joe Rogan, MSNBC scoffs at Bernie in DNC Chair war.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every

morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. All right, let's talk about Ukraine. This is very consequential. President Zelensky now giving an interview with Sky News the first time that he has said that he would accept some loss of Russian territory if he says he also gets NATO membership. Let's take a listen. No one has offered us to be in NATO with just one part or another part of Ukraine. That's for once.

The fact is that it is a solution to stop the hot stage of the war, because we can just give the NATO membership to the part of Ukraine that is under our control. Yes, it could be possible, but no one offered. But the invitation must be given to Ukraine within its internationally recognized border. You can't give invitation to just one part of a country. Why? Because thus you would recognize that Ukraine is only that territory of Ukraine and the other one is Russia. So, legally, by law, we have no right to recognize the occupied territory as territory of Russia. And here we must not make any mistake.

But if we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That's what we need to do fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory. Got it. Okay. So first of all, I was told that that's Russian propaganda, to accept or even be told that you're allowed to have some sort of diplomatic solution that would not require

Zelensky to give up some territory. But the other part of this that I'm not going to let slide, because this is very obviously his bid for what the new peace deal will look like, is that is a perfect articulation of why they should never get membership into NATO. Because as he said, it would be ridiculous to recognize, quote unquote, NATO nuclear umbrella over the currently recognized areas of control of the Ukrainian country, and then say that it doesn't apply to Crimea or the other internationally recognized border. Letting a country that is literally in the midst of a war into NATO is insane because it allows

the invocation of Article 5 and the ability and the necessity of the United States and NATO allies to come to their military defense. Also, Putin invaded Ukraine over NATO. So giving them NATO membership would be the exact impetus to Putin to say, no, you should not take a deal and you should keep fighting the war. So it doesn't make any sense on either side. If we need to give Ukraine some fake security guarantee that doesn't actually require us on either side. If we need to give Ukraine some fake security guarantee that doesn't actually require us to go to war, fine. I will, you know, I'll allow it, even though I don't want it. But NATO membership, absolutely not. So like, anyways, this is the opening ground from Zelensky. This is how it always looks. You know, you make a maximalist demand and all of that. I'm very curious for how it will all play out. To be honest, things not looking too fantastic in terms of who Donald Trump appointed. He's appointed

General Keith Kellogg as the quote unquote special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, who has previously appeared multiple times on Fox News as very pro-Ukraine, even including supplying them with whatever weapons they want. We have a taste here pulled by Michael Tracy from one of his Fox News interviews. Let's take a listen. Bottom line, Ukrainians want to fight. They don't want U.S. troops. They don't want NATO troops. All they want is equipment, and they're going to fight this to the end. It's very clear to them that this is a very aggressive Russia move. It's targeted on civilians. It's targeted on infrastructure. We went out pretty far to the northeast, and we saw some absolute incredible destruction out there by the Russians.

And it was targeted on infrastructure. It was targeted on hospitals. It was targeted on schools. In fact, the mayor of Kiev told us later that this is genocide. And I think when we look at what's going to happen over there, I believe it's very important we get them the equipment to fight. They have no intention to negotiate. They want to eject Russian forces from Ukraine. I don't care if it's a Donbass.

I don't care if it's Crimea. And they're committed to it. And I talk to a lot of government officials, military officials, civilians that are out there. It's a very committed nation. If anybody doubts their loyalty to Ukraine, they're badly mistaken. And again, as I said, I think it's a fight to the finish. Yeah, I mean, you might as well work for Joe Biden, you know? Like, what are you doing here?

This is to the right of Joe. I mean, he's more hawkish than Joe Biden. He would be the type that, oh, we haven't done enough. We haven't shipped quickly enough. We haven't given them what they needed soon enough, you know? And to be honest with you, that actually is a more logical position than the Biden. Let's just like dribble it down over time. Yeah, I guess the only defense that I've been given on Keith Kellogg is he's a good soldier and he takes orders from Trump. I mean, OK, fine.

Yeah. But then you also have to reckon with Marco Rubio. No, you know, Mike Waltz. That's what they say about all these guys. You've got to don't worry. You've got a bunch of neocons in there who are all like, you know, very hawkish when it comes to Ukraine and other conflicts around the globe, by the way. And that's the problem is that in this case, appointing personnel who, again, even if Donald Trump says go get a peace deal with Russia, if you have been on television and you previously advocated for full scale war with Russia, why would the Russians listen to you? They're going to be like, hey, you advocated for war with us. I'm not listening to you. Absolutely not. With Trump, I mean, or J.D. Vance, any of these figures, they have way more credibility to be able to go to Moscow and to actually talk to these guys and get something

done. Nobody's going to like it, but that's what an actual successful end to the war would look like. Did you see the comments from Seb Gorka, who also now has a prominent position as well? He went on probably Fox News, I can't remember, and said Trump's plan to end the war is to threaten Russia with we're going to give Ukraine everything they want. The words he said is what Biden gave them is going to look like peanuts compared to what Trump is going to promise them. And that's what's going to force the Russians to the negotiating table. And I mean, I he's claiming to speak for Trump. Who knows if he's really going to speak for Trump? Who knows if, you know, Trump doesn't change his mind? That's also a possibility if you floater that at one point, but he's actually going to do something different. But that kind of made sense to me and kind of squares the circle of how you end up with all of these extremely pro-Ukraine,

very hawkish figures throughout his government. We're not talking about just one or two. We're talking about almost every key position of power at this point. And Trump claiming that he's going to bring this war to, you know, claiming that he's going to bring it to a swift conclusion. So he's got to kind of like escalate to de-escalate mentality, potentially. Good luck with escalation, right? Because who's going to pull the trigger? Put this up on the screen from the Financial Times. Their own people are deserting the military en masse. They can't even find anybody to recruit. Go read their own papers. They're talking about, look at this, 60,000 cases of troops abandoning positions in 2024, double the number of the

past two years. The latest Pew Research polling shows that half the population is willing to enter peace negotiations. So at this point, you can give them all the long range missiles that you want. They can't even hold the territory. I mean, go to the next part, please. It is sad. I agree.

I mean, you basically wiped out. It's literally like World War I for the British, the Germans, and others. You took the greatest generation, some of the most patriotic folks who believed in the quote unquote, cursed region of Russia, a literal invasion of Russia, by the way, of which we're giving them weapons to, to defend themselves makes a lot of sense in a war about territorial integrity. The entire thing just is ridiculous. And in terms of how this all works out, and you know, Zelensky himself, I don't underestimate him. I think Zelensky knows exactly how to play Donald Trump. Zelensky, even though he way overplayed his hand and he attacked J.D. whenever he was here on his little campaign stop for Kamala Harris, he knows at this point about how to frame negotiation, the play to Trump's ego. He will be appearing, it appears, on the Lex Friedman podcast.

Let's put that up there on the screen. That will be very interesting, actually. And I thought it was a mistake for Rogan to say no to him because that would have been an interesting conversation as well. I would have taken it too. I agree. I think it would have been a good idea. I mean, at this point, so many of these leaders and whatever are going on Rogan, so you might as well at least hear what he has to say. Absolutely. And the thing is with Zelensky, as we just learned from the Sky News interview, this guy, when you push him a little bit, you sometimes get interesting answers. We saw this even in the past with NBC News and others,

and he would give away little tidbits about how he views negotiation and truth or what it actually would mean, you know, or even if he's still sticking to the Maximus position, that's equally interesting too. I'd also like to hear his version of the 2022 invasion, because remember, he was the one saying, don't freak out. I'm not worried about an invasion. Also, you know, in terms of NATO, like what he actually still thinks, what his historical version of the war and all of that would look like. So I'm glad Lex is going to do it. Congrats to him for securing the interview. What I'm interested in too, though, is how the Trump administration, its very first day in office, approaches the war. Because you have two options. You can continue doling out

the billions that currently have been authorized by Congress at the discretion of the president. If they continue to do that, that's a sign. If they pull it away, that's also a good sign. I want to see whether Keith Kellogg is even received by Putin or even received by the Russian government, whether Lavrov himself will be allowed back into the United States. Maybe he'll have another Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump. Frankly, I think it would be a good idea to actually have some exchange. But I want to see the level of emphasis that will be interesting about what level these negotiations take place, whether Zelensky himself is immediately here in Washington, which I'm sure he will be, to try and get a meeting with Donald Trump, how he's received and what the communiques

and all of that start to look like. But escalation through de-escalation is a nonsense policy. Correct. It has never worked under Joe Biden. It would make America way less safe. And that is the problem with Donald Trump appointing a lot of these folks is there is immense danger. And frankly, if you were Putin, you're just gonna be like, okay, if that's how you're gonna play it, then I'm gonna play it too. I've got all these North Koreans at my back. I got a lot of ammo, some nice suicide drones from Iran. Let's go. We can just keep going. And Trump is very easy to manipulate. So it really matters who he puts around himself and who has his ear ultimately.

You know, one last thing that I'll say on this is I do think, and one of the parts of conventional wisdom that was proven wrong in this election was that voters don't care about foreign policy and it's not going to be consequential. Now you have very few people like to play devil's advocate, you have very few people who said that foreign policy was the number one reason why they were voting. But when Griffin went and interviewed those AOC Trump voters, in other interviews I've seen with people who flipped to Trump, one of the main things that we hear over and over again is about Gaza and is about Ukraine. And the sense that the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration, was more concerned about those foreign conflicts and endlessly shipping money and weapons to these other countries, and in Israel's case, a country that is perpetuating, committing a genocide, that they seemed more concerned about that and more committed to that than they were to delivering for people here at

home. I think that Trump's ability, you know, ability to convince people falsely, but ability to convince people that he would be anti-war, that he would be the bring these conflicts to a close. I think that was a very potent part of his appeal. I'm not going to say it was the only part of his appeal, but I think it was an undersold part of his appeal and his ability to win, you know, a convincing victory, including winning the popular vote, which is something that Republicans have long struggled to do and which he's never been able to accomplish. So he does have a mandate from the voters to try to bring this conflict to a close.

And I think they will hold him accountable if he doesn't do what he promised to do. I certainly hope so. I mean, he won't get reelected, but whoever takes his mantle, if you want to, J.D., if you're listening, if you actually want to J.D., if you're listening, if you actually want to run, you know, to be able to run on a successful foreign policy of bringing this horrible war to a close is something that I think American people actually want to see. And especially a lot of these disaffected working class voters disgusted by watching millions and billions of their taxpayer dollars being sent abroad and all this care and concern. You know, we literally have civil society programs paying yarn salary shops in Kiev. Must be nice. I know a lot of people who live in

Asheville, North Carolina, who got their shops blown apart. Nobody's paying their salary. And that's the point where, you know, everyone says that that's a ridiculous comparison. But at a deep level, Americans do know it's true. They know it's true that when your prices went up in the grocery store, just in my big grocery haul after a long time when you've got to stock up your fridge, and you're like, how is this even possible back and, you know, reordering stuff from Amazon. I encourage people to go look at what you were paying for paper towels or other basics five years ago. It's crazy. You're selling at 100, 200 percent increase in price. Wasn't that long, you know, that we all remember. And then meanwhile, we've got all the money in the world for a foreign conflict. So that is something where I think it hits home to every American. And I think you're right. I think the voters would actually punish him. The question is whether, you know, we can have somebody on the Democratic side who could successfully prosecute an argument about that, which I would hope to see as well, because I think

it's important to keep these things in check. I think Gaza and Ukraine really undercut Democratic arguments when it came certainly to being any sort of moral force. Yes. And also, you know, when it came to saying, oh, this guy is like chaotic and it's too much chaos when he's in office and they're looking at these foreign wars. And also, I think that fueled this sense that, you know, you don't really care about me. You're not going to really deliver for me. So I think in a certain way, even though, again, very few people would say foreign policy was their number one issue, I think it was very central to the case that Donald Trump successfully prosecuted against Kamala Harris and the Democrats. And it would behoove him to keep that in mind as he moves

forward with his administration. Hopefully. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.

Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Speaking of foreign conflicts and wars, this was quite a stunning and unexpected development. We can put some of these images up on the screen. The Syrian rebels have now retaken Syria's largest city of Aleppo.

This is as of Saturday. That's according to groups that are on the ground. You can see some of these images. Apparently, these fighters faced pretty small, limited resistance in Aleppo. I think they themselves were surprised at how easily this went. The pro-Assad, the government forces that were there basically scattered. Apparently, even the retreat was quite chaotic. And they've continued to advance since then.

So, you know, this obviously the Syrian civil war has been ongoing for quite a number of years at this point, beginning really under the Obama administration. The Obama administration famously really backing and going all in with these rebel forces. And just to keep everybody in mind at this point in particular, the main faction here at this point is effectively an Al-Qaeda offshoot. No, it is an Al-Qaeda. No, they have put out new rhetoric to try to be like, oh, we're different now. We're more moderate, et cetera. But the the rebels here are basically Al Qaeda. So that's who has been able to effectively retake Aleppo. And let's put this tear sheet up on the screen from The Wall Street Journal that helps to explain the timing of why this is happening now when, you know, this group of rebels, they've continued to be able to hold a certain amount of territory within Syria, even as the government has retaken a lot

of the territory that had previously been claimed. But you have, you know, Hezbollah has really been dealt a serious blow by Israel. And so they were sort of out of commission to be involved here. You have to back the Assad government. You have Iran also distracted. You have Russia distracted in Ukraine. So a bunch of the significant backers of the Assad government are kind of either undercut, have been devastating blows, or they're distracted in various other conflicts, in particular with regard to the Middle East and Ukraine. And so that created the opening here that the rebels were able to see. It's crazy to watch. I mean, you know, I've been covering this conflict since my very beginning of journalism, and to see Aleppo back in the conversation is wild,

especially for those of us who remember the Gary Johnson. What is Aleppo? One of the great moments in television history. Yeah, like you just said, though, let's all be very honest. We've got straight up Al-Qaeda aligned rebels who are the ones who have taken over control of this city. How that will play out, interesting to watch. It's honestly kind of terrifying because really what we have seen,

first of all, also, I can't forget this either. There are thousands of American soldiers who are in Syria illegally for no reason, who are now in the, or basically in the middle of a major conflict zone. Are they going to be attacked? Last time I checked, Al-Qaeda doesn't like us. And so there were actually just airstrikes yesterday from the United States and A-10s that were deployed, apparently against Iranian proxies. But then that gets to a bigger question. Who do we even want to win in this war? Previously, these al-Qaeda rebels were the ones who the United States backed. It's very clear. It was clear by like 2015 that all of the quote-unquote moderates were dead. They had no chance. The Islamists were the only ones

who had an effective fighting force, except for the Kurds, who we backed and then decided not to back, but a complicated story. The whole point, though, is that it's a mess. And what has happened here with Russia involved in Ukraine, with Iran basically all eyes on Israel, Hezbollah, of course, has now been decimated in this war. They're no longer seeing Syria as a majorly important battleground. The Assad government has lost a lot of the people who are its most effective, either fighters, funders, people who would pay it a lot of attention, and they've been very weak for many years now. So they can't rely on Russian barrel bombs to bail them out of the city of Aleppo.

Or maybe they can, I don't know. Well, another thing that was really significant that was noted in that Wall Street Journal piece is the Wagner paramilitary group. Oh, right. Now defunct. Because you remember they're headed by Progozhin and he tried to do the coup against Putin and then, oh, it turns out, you know, his airplane, something happened. Oops.

So Wagner paramilitary group was really critical in Syria, very important for backing Assad, and they're now defunct. So that may have been the most significant backer for the Assad regime, although I think Hezbollah was also incredibly important based on the reporting here as well. So the fact that Hezbollah has dealt such a significant blow by Israel, and I think do we, who would we even want to win is an important one because we shouldn't be left out of this equation either. Because even though, you know, we aren't as engaged in, you know, backing the rebels and arming them, at least not that we know, as we once were, we've continued our policy of really trying to sort of isolate and sanction Damascus and the Assad regime, which has left them also incredibly weak and helped to create this vulnerability

and, you know, what is now a hot war and additional instability in the Middle East as well. So we have our hands in this conflict, obviously. Our hands are all over this thing. We're literally the reason this country basically burned to the ground. I mean, there's a long history. And no one here is saying Assad is a good guy either. Or like,

there's no one like, no good guys to cheer for in this conflict. You don't have to be like, oh, he's a hero or whatever. You're like, okay, I have to pick between Al-Qaeda

and we have to, Al-Qaeda, Iran, and Assad. It's like, all right, well, it's a tough choice

in terms of like, what we want, what we really want out of Syria is some sort of, you know, regional stability. Yeah. Do you think Al-Qaeda can deliver, you know, real regional stability or whatever to the people of Syria?

Good luck. That'll be an interesting one for a lot of the religious minorities who live in Damascus and elsewhere throughout the country. So the likelihood of this just accelerating even more conflict over there is a huge problem. That's literally how ISIS was born, you know, in terms of the vacuum of the Syrian civil war. And so now we're back into this and it's just another great example of the 40th order consequences of American foreign policy. So thank you. One of the leaks that came out, you know, in the 2016 era was Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton. We're on the side of Al Qaeda. We're on the side of Al Qaeda. We're on the side of Al Qaeda in Syria. So, you know, don't take it from me. Take it from him. And, you know,

with regard to Israel, they love to see this, too, because it just means that their adversaries are further distracted with another, you know, hot conflict that they now have to deal with. Keep in mind, we haven't talked about it as much, but Israel's been bombing in Syria as well. They've been upset because they felt that Syria was a hub for various weapons transfers to their enemies, including Hezbollah. So they're, you know, very they're also delighted with this chain of events. or if the rebels continue to take ground, regardless what had been a sort of tenuous stability in that country has now definitely been broken. Definitely. All right. All right, let's go ahead and get to Matt Stoller and this whole debanking conversation

sparked by Mark Andreessen on the Joe Rogan podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette.

MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. All right, so we've got Matt Stiller standing by to weigh in on this whole debanking situation. He, of course, writes the big substack and is an analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project. Great to see you as always, sir.

Good to see you, man. Good to see you. All right. So let's take a look at these comments that Andreessen made, which sparked this whole conversation. Here we go. So, for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like there is no such thing as an independent agency.

And yet there it is. What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do though? Basically, it terrorized financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Oh, yeah. How so? Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.

Can you give me an example? Debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. Like they did to Kanye. Exactly. Like they did to Kanye. My. Like they did to Kanye. My partner Ben's father has been debanked.

Really? We had an employee. For what? For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations – okay, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off of your – to kick them out of your bank. You're not allowed to have them.

But what if you're politically on the left? That's fine. No. Really? Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked?

Oh, well, I mean, David Horowitz is a right wing, you know, he's pro-Trump. I mean, he's said all kinds of things. You know, he's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, all these things. And they debanked him for that. Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account. Just so people understand why Andreessen is so significant.

I mean, this is one of the most influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist funders. So what he say is quite consequential. It has a lot of sway with the Trump administration. Talk to us about what he says here. Yeah, so this is a con, right? And it's important to distinguish between two things, right? One is if you say something or you make a political statement that people don't like, can you lose access to your bank account? And that is a real problem because it does happen and it happens to

people on the right and it happens to people on the left. It's not that common, but you saw it with, in Canada, you saw it with Canadian trucker protests. You've seen it, you saw it with WikiLeaks. You saw it with a lot of pro-Palestinian advocates. You know, there's their Venmo accounts. 2021 PayPal said, we're concerned about people who might be spreading misinformation, right? So we're going to implement new policy. You do see this fear on the part of financial institutions, financial censorship. It's a real thing, okay? The other side, though, is that you have people that are engaged in what regulators see as potentially risky activity.

So this would be things like crypto. Right. If you're using crypto and you're engaged in sort of things that look a little bit like money laundering or if you're doing things like putting taking ten thousand dollars of cash and depositing into a bank account every day for a month, banks are going to be suspicious and they are going to file suspicious activity reports. They're required to. They are required to. And our banking system works by saying if a bank is suspicious of you for engaging in all sorts of activities, mostly money laundering and fraud or other forms of scams, they are required to take action. Now, those are different things, right? Those are very different things. And we do know that debanking for political purposes happens, but we also know that banks are required to actually implement law enforcement and to be a little bit suspicious. It's a little bit like you go to a stop sign, right? There's no due process at a stop sign. Even if running the

stop sign, you know, it doesn't going to cause any problems. You still have to stop at the stop sign. So that's the way our banking system works. Now, what Mark Andreessen is doing is he's conflating these two things intentionally. And the reason he's doing that is because he has specific investments in companies, two of them that I can think of, one called LendUp and one called Synapse that have both been put out of business by the Consumer Financial Protection Agency for stealing from customers, all right, or for collapsing and costing people their life savings. These are not crypto companies.

One of them is a payday lender. The other one is a fintech firm that connects people from apps to their bank accounts. And it was just forms of fraud. And the CFPB went after his investments. And he's mad about that. Now, the CFPB is a consumer financial protection agency. They don't actually do the things that, they don't go to banks and say, we're really nervous about you having these people banking. Those are other agencies. The CFPB is the one that protects consumers. And it's also one that in the past couple of years has actually tried to say as part of their regulatory authority, we don't want debanking based on race, religion, political views, et cetera, et cetera. And they've been stopped by

Trump judges from actually trying to prohibit those forms of debanking so that's what's going on the defense full disclosure i consider mark a friend but the actual defense of this that i have seen let's put the next part up there on the screen this is from a pro crypto advocate nick carter and he writes here about quote operation chokepoint 2.0 crypto in his crosshairs as i understand it the defense that Nick and others have put forward on Andreessen's comments is that the FDIC and the U.S. government have put in place very onerous regulations, basically disallowing crypto companies to be able to do business, allowing an effective monopoly to the banks.

And so what Andreessen there is talking about is about this U.S. government regulated SEC FDIC initiative, which allows them under this quote unquote Operation Chokepoint 2.0 to basically disincentivize crypto or fintech or whatever innovation. So what's your response to Nick? Well, that's not what he said. I mean, that's, you know, if Mark Andreessen is going to say, I don't like what the FDIC is doing, and I don't like what they're doing to prohibit crypto businesses from operating, he should say that. But he didn't say that. He said, I don't like the CFPB, right? Which isn't doing any of the things that he suggested. Right. And which this person doesn't even claim they are, right?

Right. And he didn't say- Nick has, to be clear, Nick has been like, I think he misspoke, and this is what he was talking about. Okay, well— I'm just saying. No, fair enough. But I'm only taking his comments. I mean, and he spent a while on Joe Rogan saying they're terrorizing financial institutions for political speech, right? And then, you know, they're kind of like, oh, well, he didn't really mean it. All right, well, then don't say it, right?

I mean, the point here is if you want to have a debate about crypto and we can have a discussion about crypto and, you know, the banking system and that that's fair. But the point here isn't to have that discussion. The point here is to say if policymakers are going to regulate crypto in a certain manner, it means that if you say something that they don't like, that they can debank you. And that's a con. It's not true. What they should be saying is they should keep those two things separate and say, we want to have a debate about whether you should be able to do your crypto thing, which, you know, or, and we're going to have a discussion about debanking because you say political speech. But I think it was pretty clear in that clip that Marc Andreessen put out

to millions of people that he was saying, you could be debanked because of what you say. Right. And that it's the CFPB that's doing it. Yeah, exactly. That's right. It's the CFPB doing it. And he didn't say, oh, by the way, I have these investments that ended up hurting a lot of people. And the CFPB came for, you know, for deception and not like, you know, and, and the

CFPB came in and said, you, you can't do that. Right. He didn't say that either. So it's like, I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. And with someone like Nick Carter, I mean, fair enough, the guy misspoke, but you can't just say, oh, well, yes, there are these massive conflicts of interest and, oh, he didn't And, oh, he didn't mean what he said, even though he said it to millions of people. And then I'm going to talk about the thing I want to talk about. It's like you can't, that's not a form of fair politics, right? I think that's fair.

I think, as I understand it, there are two things happening. There's this conversation about the debanking for political purposes. And I do think it's pretty clear that CFPB, Rohit Chopra in particular, has spoken out against debanking. So we've got to give him that benefit of the doubt. On the crypto side, I think what it is is a lot of regulatory fear. I mean, let's be honest, there's a big right-wing marriage, I guess, now with the crypto industry. And so that is the lens through which they're looking at it about, quote unquote, being debanked for these purposes. I do think it's an interesting conversation. For example, I saw David Marcus, who previously led the Libra project over at Facebook, or I guess Meta now, talking about being debanked. And I was

like, well, you know, to be honest, I think that was a good thing. I don't really want the global financial system to be run also by Meta. So there is a space. Also, I think Meta still has a bank account. Yeah, Meta still has a bank account. The point was, actually, you and I talked about Libra a lot at the time. Because Libra, for people who don't remember, is, what was it? It was basically like a platform for global financial transactions that would be run by Meta.

And I'm getting a lot of this, you know, technologically incorrect. But it was effectively run on a Meta blockchain, which they would adjudicate and run to get around the global financial banking system and effectively allow them to control payments, which has been very profitable for Visa and for all these other places. I would be very concerned about that. So I think it's a fair conversation around regulation. And I guess I'm not giving Mark, quote, unquote, benefit of the doubt or whatever, but that does seem to be like the high IQ version, I guess, of what's happening. It's just hard for me to accept that when that's not remotely what he said. I mean, it's like he didn't even talk about crypto, does he? I mean, he's just talking about political speech. Okay, later on he gets a crypto. But the other piece about it that irritates me is his characterization of this agency, which was inspired by Elizabeth Warren.

But Obama wouldn't even put her in as the first head of the CFPB because he was, I don't know, afraid. And then it's portrayed as just like her personal governmental arm. And they have the authority to do anything, including terrorize people. I mean, he's talked about that. He consistently said they terrorize and it's unconstitutional and all of these like ideologically freighted arguments about how we never had an administrative state, which is not true. I mean, that's just not a real reading of history. that the Trump administration is coming in on a populist wave. That is different, I think, than the traditional Republican Party. And I, you know, we all know people on the new right. They have different views about how to regulate the relationship, the government and the state, sorry, the government and private interests.

And one of the things that's happening is there's this attempt to kind of subvert the new right within the Republican Party by conflating legitimate points of disagreement like crypto policy with this other thing like should we have an administrative state that could protect people. And I can guarantee you that the CFPB can be a super useful tool for Trump to protect his new working class voting coalition. But it is also something that I think a lot of the billionaires that are backing him really would prefer out of the way so they can steal from that working class coalition, right? And that's the tension. And I think the danger here among populists on the right is that they fall for the cultural arguments that are, I think, legitimate but are conflated and I think dishonestly with the broader attack on the administrative state.

So that's what I worry about here. What do you mean when you say how Trump could use it? Like could you give an example? Well, I mean, you know, Synapse is a good example, right? Synapse is a company that, you know, it connected new fintech, you know, apps to a bank account. And they had a dispute with the bank that they were working with, which is called Evolve Bank. And there's hundreds of millions of dollars that are caught in the middle. No one knows what happened to the money. And now a lot of millions of dollars that are caught in the middle. No one knows what

happened to the money. And now a lot of people are missing their life savings. I don't know if those are Trump voters or if they're Biden voters. My guess is it's probably both. And the CFPB came in and is investigating and trying to get some of the money out and get some of the money back. That would be an example. But there's a ton of other examples from payday lenders to just Wells Fargo with the bank accounts, right? Opening up fraudulent bank accounts. It's just like anything that banks can do to screw you over or Venmo or any of these payment apps or the new big tech payment systems.

There is supervision that is coming from the CFPB. All of that stuff can be really useful. You know, I mean, think about all the surveillance that these companies can engage in over your payments and how they can manipulate what you pay. All that stuff can be overseen by the CFPB or by other administrative agencies. And, or it cannot be, right. Or you can just have let Meta

and Walmart and and whoever just kind of work together to charge you more when they know you'll pay versus not. And I think that's kind of the open question, right, is is where where is Trump going to go? And we can see that this is a move from Marc Andreessen, who's a very smart guy, to push Trump in a certain direction. As another example, just last year they returned $140 million to consumers who were hit by illegal junk fees in banking, auto loans, remittances. Over its lifetime, it's returned $19 billion to consumers. Kyle actually was hit with some of these legal fees that he was a beneficiary of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And I think your point, which has helped me understand what's going on here, is that it's very easy to be like, oh, Elizabeth Warren's associated with it. You

don't like her, right? She's this political villain, or I'm trying to create her as this political villain. Ergo, this agency that she's somewhat associated with must be part of the bad administration, administrative state that you want to just get rid of. When in reality, this is probably one of the parts of government that has been most effective in actually protecting and delivering for regular people. It is, that's exactly right. And I would say like another example that is not, you know, poor put upon consumers, but is maybe more what Mark Andreessen is talking about, which is competition. They just implemented what's called an open banking rule, right? Where they said your data at your bank account, right, is

yours. And if you want to take it somewhere else, you can. They have to make it easier to switch bank accounts with all of your bill pay and all the rest of it. And that, you know, one of the reasons, so I got screwed by Capital One. They said, oh, we're going to pay you a certain interest rate. And then a few years later, I was on my bank account. I was like, oh, I'm not getting it. What happened? They're like, oh, you, you know, there's some technical. I read about this.

I know what you're talking about. And then there was a class actually that lost because they, right. But I wanted to switch. And it was, it's a pain in the ass to switch bank accounts, right? Oh, absolutely. So this open banking rule, which was put into statute in 2010, right? And Rohit Chopra finally implemented it, right? It's going to go into effect and that's going to allow new companies, new banks, new fintechs

to come in and compete for your business, right? It's going to help innovation and it's going to threaten the big bankers. Well, the big bankers are really mad about it and are suing the CFPB about it. And that's kind of a big fight. Now, if you accept Marc Andreessen's argument that the CFPB is this Elizabeth Warren agency that's just out for terrorizing financial institutions that doesn't like competition, then why are the bankers suing to block the CFPB from forcing the banks to allow competition, right? That's kind of the question here.

And I think we have to move beyond these old kind of hoary arguments about the administrative state and get to the point which I think Trump is gonna realize, which is that this is a complex society and you have to figure out how to the point, which I think Trump is going to realize, which is that this is a complex society and you have to figure out how to govern it, right? And I don't think Biden figured that out. I don't think we've had effective governance

for a long time and we need it. And they're going to have to figure out something, right? And I think if you listen to Marc Andreessen, they're not going to figure it out, right? And then you're going to see the same thing we've seen for a long time, which is swings back to the other party, right? And that's the broader point.

It's not just about the CFPB. It's about can you accept governance, right? That's fair. Interesting rebuttal. Thank you. Appreciate it. Matt, always great to see you. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

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Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Bernie Sanders, whose model of class-first anti-billionaire politics has just been dramatically vindicated by the sweeping verdict against the Democratic establishment, had some advice for Democrats who are thinking about the upcoming DNC chair race in particular. He said, quote, If the Democratic Party is to become a small-D Democratic Party, the first job of a new DNC chair is to get super PAC money out of Party. The first job of a new DNC chair

is to get super PAC money out of Democratic primaries. APAC and other billionaire-funded super PACs cannot be allowed to select Democratic candidates. Now, that's something that I and others have been calling for. After all, sure, it will be difficult to get the Supreme Court to overturn the rash of decisions which have flooded

unlimited money into our politics. But at the very least, Democrats within their own party contests can model cleaner elections by banning super PACs from playing at all. This would prevent massive interest groups like APAC and crypto lobbyists from having more ability to pick Democratic candidates than Democratic voters do. Apparently, however, MSNBC, they found this suggestion from Bernie to be utterly preposterous. Just take a listen. So you have Bernie Sanders tweeting on Monday, if the Democratic Party is to become a Democratic Party, the first job of a new DNC chair is to get

the super PAC money out of Democratic primaries. AIPAC and other billionaire funded super PACs cannot be allowed to select Democratic candidates. They typically don't. They're not going to put their money into a DNC chairman's race. So, again, for me, as as the head of former head of a party, as county chairman and a state chairman, that to me is short sighted thinking about where the landscape is. One thing that has very little to do with the other. Super PACs and all those guys play in elections and campaigns. That's a different conversation than running for chairman and telling the people who are going to write checks, we don't want you writing checks.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. With all due respect to Senator Sanders, you know, you might want to join the party if you want to have something. Well, there is that. So, you know, just on his face, that's a little problematic for me. Now, in terms of the money, look, that's not the DNC's issue. You're exactly right, Mr. Chairman, that these kind of that kind of money is in local races and state races and the laws vary by state. So for the DNC to spend its time and energy on what state A says versus what state B says, what versus what C, Canada C says, just doesn't make any sense to me. There's so much work for the next chair to do. That would not be in the top 10 of things that I'd focus on. 11 or 12. Wow.

These people are so accustomed to swimming in the waters of big money, political corruption, and donor domination that they cannot even conceive of doing things a different way. As MSNBC has always done towards Bernie's incredibly common sense approach, they can do little other than scoff and sneer, deriding him for not officially being a member of their little club. It's worth taking note, by the way, of who these three actually are. You've got Michael Steele, a former Republican party chair who's considered apparently to be a more worthy ally and advisor than Bernie Sanders. Leah Daughtry is a former chief of staff to the DNC chair. She was prominently featured in a New York Times article in 2019 about panicked Democratic insiders who were organizing an internal effort to stop Sanders.

Let me give you a little taste of that article so you can get a sense of her politics. Quote, from canapé-filled fundraisers on the coast to the cloakrooms of Washington, mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders in a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016. Because God forbid the guy with an actual organic populist following represent this decrepit party. And then rounding out the trio, you've got Alicia Menendez, who happens to be the daughter of the guy who was convicted of selling his Senate influence for gold bars and other goodies.

Gee, can't imagine why MSNBC has lost half of their viewership. In fact, while I and others have said plenty and written plenty about how Democrats need to embrace a populist class war frame, the obvious first and essential battle in this fight is the one that Bernie Sanders identifies, getting money out of politics. Ironically, since Trump just won while raising vastly less money than Kamala did, the old excuse that Democrats can't unilaterally disarm lest they be electorally destroyed, that is now totally bunk. They have got no plausible excuse left to keep orienting their party around the needs of their donors instead of the needs of workers.

In a new op-ed, Ro Khanna and Larry Lessig lay out some specific ideas for how to begin this fight. One battle is demanding, as Bernie did, that the next DNC chair ban super PAC money in Dem primaries. But the other front is in the courts. In fact, the corruption case against MSNBC host Alicia Menendez's dad provides a roadmap forward because it proved that Super PAC giving could, in fact, constitute a quid pro quo. That was something the courts had previously said was impossible. Now, they use that flawed rationale to strike down all limits on super PAC giving.

That's why billionaires can give $100 million to a super PAC, but individuals can only contribute a few thousand dollars directly to a campaign. But plainly, if Menendez can be convicted for accepting super PAC contributions in exchange for political favors, then super PACs can be part of a quid pro quo and thus subject to contribution limits. That alone would represent an absolute sea change in the campaign finance landscape. For example, Mary Mattelson just effectively reportedly bought our foreign policy with a $100 million contribution to a Trump super PAC. That's why evangelical end-time Zionist psychos like Mike Huckabee are now in key positions of power. If she could only kick in, say, $5,000 or $10,000, we might have gotten a little bit more sane foreign policy team out of Trump. And that is obviously just one example. Trump's political project? It's largely not that

antagonistic towards billionaires, which is why so many have backed him. They get their tax cuts and their government goodies. All they have to do is to stay on Trump's good side. His villains are immigrants and cultural elites like Hollywood and academia. So he can fully pursue his political project while sucking up hundreds of millions in billionaire cash with little conflict. For Democrats to answer Trumpism, however, they need to go full class war. And you ain't waging class war as long as your entire party apparatus and leadership class is designed to cater to billionaires. In their op-ed, Khanna and Lessig say that this dynamic results in what they call golden handcuffs. The treasure the Democrats raise from the

billionaire class then locks them in to a status quo friendly orientation. And you can actually see those golden handcuffs snap into place in real time over the course of the Harris campaign. My friend Branko Marcetic over at Jacobin ran the data, and I have yet to see anything more compelling in terms of understanding Kamala's momentum stall and eventual loss. So if you look at this chart, the blue line you see here tracks, quote, democracy rhetoric over the course of the campaign. That would include the use of words like authoritarian, checks and balances, insurrection, and the like. The red line tracks, quote, anti-elite rhetoric over the course of the campaign. So that would be words like elites, billionaires, corporate greed, things like that. You can see as the campaign went on, Kamala's brother-in-law and Uber exec Tony West got his way. The campaign backed away from their price-gouging corporate greed rhetoric.

They put Tim Walz on the shelf and they leaned into the Liz Cheney strategy. It was a disaster. Now, we've covered here the research from the Center for Working Class Politics that found democracy rhetoric was the least effective of all messages for working class swing voters. Conversely, a populist economics pitch was the most effective. And yet, the most powerful ad that the Kamala campaign cut, which focused on price gouging and greedy landlords, never even saw the light of day. That makes no electoral sense.

It only makes sense once you understand that the campaign's first goal was not to win, but to keep their big money backers happy, to not rock the boat. Now, if you don't change that dynamic, this party is never going to change. But of course, no one should be under any illusions of the difficulty of accomplishing this shift because not only are messages and issues selected to put donors at ease, candidates are as well. Have you ever wondered why so many politicians, both left and right,

are bland, talentless, well-credentialed hacks? The reason is they were not selected for their deep insights, oratorical skills, or leadership prowess. They are selected because they are either themselves wealthy South Funders or because they are skilled at separating rich people from their money. That was the secret to Kamlo's success, and it's the reason why so many of the Democrats in leadership are from New York and California, because that's where the money is. So if raising money is your primary skill and the key to your political power, you are probably not going to be too eager to shift to a model that might actually prioritize not being repellent to voters. Now, of all the questions facing Democrats as they consider a new chair, this one is non-negotiable. Will they

ban big money from party primaries? That answer will tell you whether Dems are serious at all about change or, as Bernie and I unfortunately suspect, just interested in keeping their lucrative racket. I know this is a little bit of a weedsy debate, but it's an absolute... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there.

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