Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/25/22: Ukraine Crisis, Poll Numbers, Assange Case, Capitol Police, Mask Mania, Everything Bubble, The Rock, & More!

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Krystal and Saagar break down the Biden administration's aggressiveness on Ukraine, midterm disaster for Democrats, legal updates on the Julian Assange case, Capitol Police surveillance operations, mask mania in mainstream media, the everything bubble, the case for The Rock 2024, & more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're gonna be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media.

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ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of good stories to get to this morning. President Biden had some rather choice words for Fox News's Peter Doocy.

We will bring you the details of that. Julian Assange actually wins a significant court battle in the UK. They're going to allow him to continue challenging his extradition. So we've got all the details for that. Some new troubling reports about all of the ways in which our civil liberties are being compromised post-January 6th, as well as a really over-the-top reaction from some commentators on The View and on CNN to what I thought were relatively anodyne comments by Barry Weiss on Bill Maher's show. So we will break all of that down. And we wanted to start with Ukraine, but first we are having a little bit of camera issues this morning. Everyone, please bear with us. Usually you see some switching shots, something,

there's a problem here in the studio. We'll get it sorted out for Thursday's show. But if you notice something a little bit different, that's what it is. Let's start with Ukraine. This is very important. So the Pentagon press conference yesterday, separate and almost at the exact same time at the White House, in which they are say they are preparing at higher alert, heightened readiness for the preparation of 8,500 troops to Eastern Europe. Let's take a listen. I want to provide some facts on these preparations that will reinforce our commitment to NATO and to the NATO Response Force and increase our readiness. Secretary Austin has placed a range of units in the United States on a heightened preparedness to deploy, which increases our readiness to provide forces if NATO should activate the NRF or if other situations developed. All told, the number of forces that the secretary has placed on heightened alert comes up to about 8,500 personnel.

8,500 personnel, that's a lot, Crystal. That's almost exactly what we had in the latter days of the occupation of Afghanistan. And obviously, it would also be included there. It would be included in the total number of NATO forces that are already in those countries. So it would be in addition to the Estonia, the Eastern Europe, the Poland troops that are within NATO, all of this, again, in reaction to Ukraine. The reason that we're focusing on this is that right now the most alarmist rhetoric and actions that are coming about the Ukraine crisis are from Moscow and Washington. Yes. Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Paris.

So as in- Not even Ukraine. All right. So I was about to get there. Also not Kiev, where, you know, the actual Ukrainians. And the reason they're freaking out is because the White House and the administration from the podium is basically going as far as one can go in ramping up the tensions, at least from our side, vis-a-vis obviously, what Putin is doing by massing his troops on that border. Yesterday, Jen Psaki urged all American citizens to leave the country, an extraordinary step,

probably as a result of what happened in Afghanistan. Just take a listen to that. Well, I think the reason that the State Department issued the guidance they did, which, again, is a standard process that the State Department does regularly with a range of countries where we have security concerns, was to make very clear that American citizens – our recommendation is that U.S. citizens currently in Ukraine consider departing now using commercial or other privately available transportation options, use the online form in our updated travel advisory to tell us their plans so they can best conduct our ongoing contingency planning, and register in step to ensure they receive alerts

and guidance from the State Department. There is not an intention for there to be a departure or an evacuation along those lines, so we are conveying to American citizens they should leave now. Oh, that's pretty something, Crystal. And just to give you guys awareness about how extreme both the rhetoric and this action is, this is from the foreign minister of Ukraine, the country that actually could be invaded. Go ahead and put this up there on the screen. There are 129 diplomatic missions in Ukraine. Of those, only four have declared the departure of family members, US, UK, Australia, and Germany. The rest, including the European Union, the OSCE, the COE, NATO, and the United Nations, have not expressed their intention to follow such

premature steps. They say, we are grateful to our international partners for solidarity. It is important to avoid activity that could be used in the information space to increase tensions in society and destabilize the economic and financial security of Ukraine. This, again, is the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of actual Ukraine. And they are telling us and the world that Washington is acting in such a way that is increasing tensions in the region. Obviously, the Russians are the ones who sparked this, but how we respond and all that matters a lot too. Yes, that is exactly right.

And while, of course, we've been talking about the broader context that, yes, in the immediate term, Russia, by massing their troops on the border, have escalated tensions, but we have played our part in creating this volatile situation over the years by expanding NATO way beyond where we said and promised that we ultimately would during the unification of Germany. So now you have the Ukrainians saying

as clearly as they possibly can, please stop. You are not helping. You're making things worse. And I don't know what the Biden administration thinks they're playing at here. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. And I want you all to the Biden administration thinks they're playing at here. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. And I want you all to understand that. God forbid that we actually come head to head blows with another nuclear power. This is the re this is going back to the worst days of the Cold War and the type of dangerous tensions that you could see playing out into worst case scenario, some kind of World War III, because you've got people who are making bad decisions, escalating

tensions when they should be doing everything they can to bring the situation to a peaceful resolution. It seems to me like what happened here is Biden went out and did his presser, said what he actually thought, which was, eh, NATO's kind of divided. If Russia comes in a little bit or they do a little bit of something, we're going to have to talk about how to respond. He gets massive backlash from the press. They switch tactics and now are taking the most aggressive posture they possibly can. I guess the best case scenario is that they're playing for the media, playing to the press, trying to appear tough, when in reality, they've got some cooler heads behind the scenes.

But it almost doesn't matter, because when you're in this kind of a dangerous situation, things can escalate. You can end up out on a limb, having beat your chest, having played the tough guy. Then when Russia responds, then what do you do? Do you back down? Then everyone, all the hawks in the media on the right and the left will say, oh, now you look weak. Now you've got to escalate even further. That's how you end up in a situation where no one wants to ultimately be. This is extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah, it is. And I want to explain this too, whenever we talk about tensions. Part of the reason why is that whenever you have lots of troops around each other and then you have things of games of chicken, the consequences for failure go up. I'll give you guys examples.

Back in, I think it was 2001, there was a U.S. spy craft around, I think it was called Hainan Island in China, that was flying very close to a Chinese fighter. They actually collided midair and the air crew actually had to bail out and was basically held hostage by the Chinese. People forget about this because it happened around the same time as 9-11, but this was a huge international crisis. The same thing actually happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis whenever a plane was shot down. The same thing could happen here when you have deconfliction and you have high tensions and you have more troops in the region and you possibly have Russian jets and U.S. jets around each other. All it takes is one guy to die or one guy to act rashly or badly in a situation,

and then the other person to overreact, and you are in the middle of nuclear warfare. We all had this figured out in the middle of the Cold War. And I want to emphasize again, the actual continental Europeans think we're acting nuts. Put this up there on the screen. From the European Union, from Brussels, the EU is not following the U.S. withdrawing its diplomats. Their top diplomat, Josep Borrell, says there is no need to dramatize the situation while diplomatic talks with Russia continue. I cannot emphasize this enough, which is that the people actively involved,

and by that I mean the continental Europeans, I guess minus Germany, because they also followed through on this, are not nearly as concerned or acting in the same way that we are. It's their continent, not ours. They get to decide. These are people who, for their own reasons,

have decided that they are mostly okay with Russian aggression against Crimea. Look, once again, I mean, I don't think it's a good thing, but they're the ones who ultimately decide to renew trading relations with them. What are we supposed to do? We're supposed to enforce the borders of Ukraine? I've also said this, Ukraine, it's a very complicated situation in terms of how the population itself there feels about Russia and, you know, ties with the West or even NATO. And as far as the, I looked into this because some people were claiming that we never promised that we would not expand. Here's what Secretary of State James Baker said. So Gorbachev has said, no, there was no official promise. James Baker, the Secretary of State of the United States in 1990, said that NATO would not expand one inch east.

That was the word of the Secretary of State of George H.W. Bush at the fall of the Soviet Union. Was it an ironclad promise written out in document? No. But he said not one inch east during the? During the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and also with the reunification of Germany. So it's not as clear cut as, oh, we never said it. It's also not nearly as clear cut as the Russians say, which is, you basically wrote it out as a promise. In spirit, at the end of the Cold War, there was an agreement here in Washington. The George H.W. Bush famously did not declare victory of the Cold War because he did not feel that we should be rubbing it in the face

of the Russians. And then when we expanded eastward, and especially by inviting Ukraine and Georgia in, we basically greenlit a lot of the revanchism with that means kind of like the renewed greatness movement inside of Russia and empowered somebody like Vladimir Putin. That's right. And that's why, I mean, the consequences of the expansion of NATO were entirely predictable. George Kennan said it. The father of containment said that this would reignite tensions between the United States and Russia. This was the foremost Russian expert who invented the containment strategy of the Cold War, Crystal. And to your point about how volatile and how on edge the situation currently is, the New York Times has a piece out this morning floating all of these different potential scenarios. Maybe Russia's

going to seize a power plant. Maybe they're going to release toxic gases. Maybe they're going to come in in this way or in this place, in that place. And so you can see if your soldiers that are there on the front lines, if your Ukrainian soldiers there on the front lines, how anything that seems out of the ordinary, even if it wasn't intended as an aggressive, offensive assault from Russia, could be easily misconstrued. And then you're in a terrible situation. And once again, you know, the U.S. seems to be on this side, the most irresponsible actor getting called out by the Ukrainians, getting called out by the EU, saying you are not contributing to peace in this

situation. So I just want all of you to understand that, listen, this may be resolved in a way that ultimately is de-escalatory and peace reigns and we're all praying for that situation, but make no mistake about it. This is extraordinarily dangerous. You can call me a Russian asset if you want. I think we should give the Russians what they want. I think we should just tell them that, yeah, Ukraine's not going to be part of NATO. Okay. I mean, I don't think it's that complicated. It's basically up in the air whether Ukrainians themselves even want to be a part of it. NATO alliance has no business even allowing Ukraine into NATO. And so if that's all it takes, fine, just say it. I don't see any long-term consequences. But geopolitics and the world of hard power requires you to not look through such rose-colored glasses sometimes. We have no real trading relationship with this country. We don't necessarily have a long diplomatic friendship or whatever with this country beyond the 1990s.

There's no ties between us that merit any sort of American blood. That's very, very, very stark in order to put that language. But that's what happens when nukes are involved. And you certainly do not have an American population that's ready to go to war with Russia over the borders of Ukraine. Sorry, but that's the reality. That's the other reality. Americans don't want it. And frankly, should they trust the ghouls who took us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan over this?

No, you would be an idiot to do so. We'd be in a better place today if we never went into Iraq, certainly. And also if we never went into Afghanistan, Americans would be safer. But a lot of people around that live around here would have a lot less wealth in their pockets. It's funny, Crystal, I've argued with Russians, Chinese people as well. What's the number one thing they always tell me, which is shut your mouth and why don't you tell us about what happened in Baghdad? I mean, what am I supposed to say? Sometimes the number one thing they always tell me? Which is shut your mouth and why don't you tell us about what happened in Baghdad. I mean, what am I supposed to say?

Sometimes the number one thing, when you talk to the Chinese military people, they'll be like, yeah, what about Baghdad? What about Kabul? Whenever we lecture Putin about democracy, he'll always, he says the same words. We do not want the type of democracy that we see in Baghdad. Okay. I get where they're coming from. So as I've said, you have to consider that the enemy gets a vote whenever it comes to warfare.

And most importantly, is to try and put yourself in the mind of the other person if you actually do want to have a lack of escalation and you want, most importantly in my opinion, for everybody to actually have peace. I want Americans to be safe. I also want the Ukrainians to be safe. And I don't want some larger tension over something which is frankly not worth it. You know, whenever you put people in harm's way, it's the most serious thing you

can do. And Washington is not acting responsibly. With follow on effects that you can't even imagine at the time. There you go. All right, guys, someone less serious story. But when we had to bring to you, there was a little bit of an exchange yesterday. Biden gave a press conference. He wanted to talk about supply chain issues, inflation and such things. And at the end, as things are wrapping up, as reporters do, they were sort of shouting questions at him, getting him to respond. One of those reporters was Fox News' Peter Doocy. Here is how that unfolded. That's a great asset. More inflation.

What a stupid son of a bitch. So, it's a little muddle there, so in case you couldn't hear, Doocy yells out, hey, Mr. President, do you think inflation's a problem for you in the midterms? To which Biden sort of mumbles into the microphone. Yeah, it's a real asset,

dumb son of a bitch. I'm going to be honest. This is the high watermark of the Biden presidency. A lot of people have faux outrage about this. I personally thought it was so funny when I was in the White House press corps when Trump would nuke the Jim Acostas and the Peter Alexanders of the world. I personally think Trump's finest hours when he pointed at Acosta and said, you are fake news. I thought it was hilarious. The difference is, and I want to give Doocy a lot of credit,

he brushed it off. He went on Fox immediately and he was like, nobody's fact-checked the president yet. Yeah, he goes on with Jesse Waters. That was funny. And Waters is like, I got to agree with the president on this. You are a dumb SOB.

And Doocy says, well, no one fact-checked it and said it was false. He went on with Sean Hannity. So the next phase of the story, which this part I don't appreciate. Biden actually called him to sort of apologize. Weak. Come on. Come on. Just own it.

Stand by it. Anyway, Doocy characterized the call as them clearing the air, but not exactly all the way to an apology. And Sean Hannity was trying to get him to, like, play the victim. Like, shouldn't you have apologized? And, you know, that's not a real apology. And Ducey's like, look, we're, like, on the edge of World War III here.

The man took some time out of his schedule to call me and clear the air and say it wasn't personal, pal. So we're moving forward anyway i guess the one thing you can say about it is um the there's a lot of hypocrisy all around because of course liberals when it was a costa they were oh the freedom of the press now they love it you know it's he owned peter ducey etc etc there's a lot of faux outrage on the right of like, how could he? This is so horrible. Of course, when it was Trump, they were like, yeah, get him. So naturally, there's a partisan lens being applied here. We're about to get to real assault on freedom of the press in the next block, which is what's going on with Julian Assange and the continued prosecution of him. But let's stick with Biden here for a moment in terms of what his midterm political

prospects actually are. And they are about as dire as they could possibly be by every metric, enthusiasm level, who they people trust, how they feel about the country. Just every single thing you can think of is bad news for Democrats. And it's gotten so bad that even NBC meet the country, just every single thing you can think of is bad news for Democrats. And it's gotten so bad that even NBC, Meet the Press, their focus group, their talks with voters is surfacing words like downhill, very negative language from both sides of the aisle. They did a big report on all of the new data that they've got coming in. Let's take a listen to that. Asked to describe America in their own words in our NBC News poll,

voters used the words divided, negative, lost, bad, and downhill. I think it's just getting harder to live that American dream. For all this progress, I know there's a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country. And we know why.

COVID-19. At a news conference on Wednesday, President Biden promised a reset, saying he would engage more directly with Americans, but he was also defensive. I don't believe the polls. Though the two parties are deadlocked on the question of who should control Congress,

Republicans now have a double-digit advantage on interest in the election itself. Disparities like that led to big one-party waves in 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. There has been a significant drop in interest among the Democrats' core voting groups since October. Urban voters down 16 points, young voters down 17, and African Americans down 21 points. You seem to be a little bit disappointed. I am.

The majority of his voting block, I feel that he's ignored us. Do you think that President Biden has fought hard enough for the priorities of black voters? I do not. President Biden is walking a tightrope. In addition to flagging enthusiasm in the base, he faces eroding support among independents. In Atlanta, I sat down with several Biden voters who did not vote Democrat in 2016. Leaning into the argument about elections and election fairness in either direction turns me off. What could Biden do right now to make you feel less like a reluctant Biden supporter? I mean, we've got a lot of problems. We've got a high inflation. We have supply chain issues.

The economy and jobs is the top issue for voters, replacing COVID. Republicans have a 33-point advantage, driven by gains among independents. While job creation is up and the unemployment rate is down, 61% say their family income is falling behind the cost of living. And I actually think that last piece there might be the most important stat in that whole package. Sixty-one percent say that their family income is falling behind the cost of living. I mean, what could be a more important metric for how people are feeling about the state of the country right now? And they said Republicans have a 33-point advantage when it comes to the economy. And it just shows you, I mean, the foolishness of, take what the right

policy should be out of it for a moment, the foolishness politically of Biden's strategy, which has pleased absolutely no one. In the midterms, you have to have your side excited and feel like there is some reason for them to show up to the polls what reason could they possibly have when you have control of the presidency and the senate and the house and you're still like yeah but we can't get anything done it's like well why am i gonna bother to put you back into power so you can continue to do nothing to deliver for my material needs. And, you know, the talking point, OK, the Republicans are worse. Sure. That's not exactly highly motivating people at this point. Clearly, when you look at the fact that voter interest on the side of the Republicans, I think we have a tweet we can show about this, too, is way higher

than it is for Democrats. They hold a double digit advantage in voter enthusiasm. Similar levels of disparities have led to massive shifts. In 2006, you had Democrats on the other side of this equation with high interest, and it led to them picking up 30 House seats. In 2010, the Tea Party wave, R plus 17 And we know that that resulted In massive gains for Republicans So they are in Really bad straits right now And you know, no

I don't think that calling Peter Doocy Even if he called him a dumb son of a bitch Every single day between now and the election I'm not sure it would rescue him Well that was what was so dumb about it Which is that, you know, Biden should be taking Every opportunity that he can In order to say, here's what I'm trying to do about inflation. Here's what I'm trying to do about gas. I truly do not understand this man and the entire institutional Democratic Party, which is so bad at politics. Like, I knew they were bad, but I didn't think it would be this bad. Yes, they're this bad. And look, it's like, is it this hard? I'm just a guy on YouTube who can figure apparently this out better than everybody else. Put this next tweet up there

on the screen. Look at the mood of the country. Right track, 22%. Wrong track, 72%. Income falling behind cost of living, 61%. Staying even, 30, going up, 7. I want to meet those people. Polarization will only grow, 70. Is there a threat to democracy? 76%. These are dire numbers. That income falling behind cost of living, I'd be talking about that every single day. You know, we recently looked at a poll which said that voters are very aware that corporate monopolies are using their pricing power in order to gouge them. Yeah.

Okay, break them up. You can actually use the DOJ antitrust division. You could be talking about this every day. Like I said, gas is up 50%. Almost 50% of inflation is gas alone. Get the Saudi king over here tomorrow. Call OPEC together and basically say, we will sanction the living hell out of you.

We will make sure that none of you ever get weapons ever again, unless we start seeing gas flowing now, today. Summon the heads of Exxon, Chevron, BP, all these people and be like, what do I got to do, guys? Let's go. I don't get this. I mean, this is the president of the United States. You can call anyone on earth and they will answer in two minutes. You can get these people to come to you. You can use the power of the presidency and of the people who have bestowed an enormous amount of power in your hands to help them. And you don't even have the appearance of helping them. That's why I see that, you know, stupid son of a bitch question thing or answer and retort as so dumb,

because what he's doing is these liberals, resistance liberals on Twitter are like, oh my God, this is awesome. Yeah, go ahead and please them and see how that works out for you. And it's like, why is it so difficult in order to conduct yourself in a way that people can at least see and say, you're doing something, you're at least trying. That's what the words of those people in that NBC News interview were saying. They're like, yeah, we got a lot of problems right now, supply chain and cost. And I don't feel like this election stuff, you know, I keep telling you the voting wrestling, nobody cares if you can't pay your bills. And if you've pointed this out, what's the point of

filibuster reform if you can't pass anything? I mean, all of this is completely useless. And then on top of all of that, Crystal, is COVID, which is, of course, broadening the entire economy. And the trust ratings for the government agencies, Fauci and others, has plummeted. Put this up there, too. On COVID statements, trust has fallen and the do not trust ratings have risen for the CDC, Anthony Fauci, and even states governors. You know what's interesting? Trump's numbers also fell during that time. Everyone.

That's the one silver lining here is that he still is less trusted on COVID than everyone else. The problem for Democrats is that COVID isn't the number one issue anymore. And so while, you know, when COVID was the dominant issue in people's minds, they had an upper hand because they had been more responsible. Trump was wildly irresponsible, making stuff up, saying privately, yeah, this is going to be a horror show. It's nothing like the flu. And then publicly being like, it's just like the flu. No big deal. But the bottom line is people are more interested now in their jobs and inflation and being able to pay the bills, pay the rent, pay the mortgage, whatever it is that's ultimately on their plate.

And they feel very concerned about being able to do that. And by the way, when you look at the numbers, the bank accounts have been depleted. Anything that people got during the stimulus phase is gone. It is long gone. Now the savings rate is lower than it was pre-pandemic. And so, yeah, there's been a tight labor market. People have been able to leave their jobs. They've been able to get higher wages. They've been able to go on strike and win concessions. All of those things are great,

but it doesn't matter a whole lot when costs are going up so much that it's undercutting any wage gains that you ultimately are able to see. And so you have this very negative sentiment across the country. And I think your point about, you know, the poll we saw that said a majority of voters do believe correctly that monopoly, corporate power, corporate greed is a big part of what's driving inflation use that go out there use some of that you know dumb son of a bitch energy and direct it towards the corporate plutocrats very true like use the power of the pulpit to call these people out and by the way this is an area where you actually, as the executive, do have a lot of power.

You've put good people in place with Lena Kahn and with Jonathan Cantor, as Matt Stoller has talked about. So use them and actually have a credible threat that you're going to break them up or actually break them up if they don't stop price gouging consumers and get costs under control. And I still come back to, people don't expect you to have a magic wand.

They don't expect the president to be able to fix all of their problems with the stroke of a pen or anything like that. But they don't see you trying. All they see is you making a bunch of excuses for your failures rather than looking at the chessboard and saying, okay, here's the pieces. And yeah, it's a tough landscape because we've got these narrow margins. We've got mansion, we've got cinema, but here are the things that we can do. And here are the people and the institutions that I'm going to call out. They don't see you fighting for them. And so as they look at their incomes dwindling and worry about how they're going to make rent and make mortgage

and buy groceries and fill up the gas tank next month, they don't see you out there trying to make their life any easier. And that's why Democrats are doomed. I mean, this was all, look, historically, midterms are tough for the party in power. That is reality. That was reality going in. But this type of disaster was totally, totally avoidable if they had actually played their cards right. And, you know, on the other side, to be losing to the Republican Party at this point is just utterly pathetic. It is pathetic. They don't have to promise anything. They just have to be in opposition to whatever the hell this is.

That's what makes them so awful. I mean, look, they came in with the easiest layup in history. You can blame COVID all you want. They brought the mask back, destroyed their credibility, kept the restrictions, didn't forcefully push back on the school lockdowns. At the same time, you have the supply chain crisis getting completely out of control. He hasn't done anything. How hard is it to put a hard hat on and go to the port of L.A., Crystal? I mean, am I a genius? This is basic politics 101. I truly don't get it. How hard is it to sign

executive orders, call out companies from the podium, summon them to you, have actual meetings, same with the governors. Every way of American life is becoming more miserable. I keep focusing on that. And they're not doing anything about that or even trying, and people are punishing them for that. And they deserve it. I don't know what else to say. So let's move on to, from a fake assault on the freedom of the press against Peter Doocy to a real one in the person of Julian Assange. Significant development yesterday. Let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet that we have up on the screen from NBC News. So this was a victory for Assange and for, you know, advocates of a free press. WikiLeaks Assange can take extradition appeal to UK's top court in December. The high court in London overturned a lower court's ruling that Assange should not be extradited due

to mental health concerns. I want to read a little bit more from the New York Times here because this is, it's a little bit complicated what the ruling actually was, and I don't have deep knowledge of the UK judiciary system either. So I just want to read what the New York Times wrote. They said, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett of the High Court, in announcing the ruling in a brief court appearance on Monday morning, endorsed a further appeal of the case to the Supreme Court on one narrow issue, which is the timing of when the United States provided assurances that, after a lower court had considered the case and ruled that American prison conditions were too harsh to extradite Mr. Assange, citing his mental health and the risk that he could be driven to suicide. So a lot of you guys know the backstory here. Of course, you know the prosecution

of Assange, which started under Trump, has been continued under Biden. Grave threat to press freedom. The top threat, I would say, in the world to freedom of the press. Biden rejecting the Obama DOJ's decision that, hey, we can't, we would like to charge this guy, but we can't charge him without also implicating the New York Times and every other publisher and journalist out there. So, listen, we're going to make Assange's life miserable. We're not going to be nice to the guy, but we don't feel like we can prosecute him. Trump comes in, takes a much more aggressive stance, and Biden has continued that prosecution. So now they've been seeking his extradition from the UK. That effort to extradite him hit a bit of a speed bump

for the US government whenK. court ruled that the conditions here in U.S. American prisons are so terrible that Assange would be at risk of grievous harm and potentially suicide. His mental health has been so compromised by these many years of isolation and being holed up in the embassy and now being in prison, that they worry very much that he would survive this. And having spoken, of course, both of us to his brother, he says outright, they are trying to kill him and they may well succeed. So what this decision means is not really on the merits of the case against Assange, but they're saying, hey, U.S. government,

you, after we ruled against you and said American prison conditions are too harsh, you gave us all these assurances, which are basically meaningless, and they've got a million loopholes in there. But anyway, you gave us these assurances, but they came too late. They came at the wrong time when the court,

when this case was already before the high court. And that is the narrow issue that they are looking at, that they're saying, okay, we will allow you to continue this process to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, Britain's Supreme Court. Stella Morris, Julian's fiance, spoke out yesterday claiming a victory here, but reminding us all that there is no real victory so long as Julian continues to be imprisoned. Let's take a listen to what Stella had to say. What happened in court today is precisely what we wanted to happen. The high court certified that we had raised point of law, point of law of general public importance and that the Supreme Court has good grounds to hear this appeal. The situation now is that the Supreme Court has to decide whether

it will hear the appeal. But make no mistake, we won today in court. But let's not forget that every time we win, as long as this case isn't dropped, as long as Julian isn't freed, Julian continues to suffer. For almost three years, he's been in Belmarsh prison, and he is suffering profoundly, day after day, week after week, year after year. Julian has to be freed, and we hope that this will soon end.

So important note there, now the Supreme Court, this is what happens next, gets to decide whether they're going to consider Julian's appeal on this one narrow grounds. And listen, the bottom line here is the Biden administration, Merrick Garland's DOJ, they could stop this prosecution at any point. They claim to care so much about freedom of the press. And you were talking earlier about the things that Russians and Chinese throw back at us like, oh, you've got such a great democracy there. This is one of those issues that any foreign adversary can look at and say, oh, freedom of the press, tell me about Julian Assange and the way that you have him locked in prison.

I forget which prime minister. I think it might have been Turkmenistan. It was one of those Central Asian countries who pushed back against a BBC journalist who asked her about freedom of the press. And he goes, you journalist who asked her about freedom of the press. And he goes, you want to tell me about freedom of the press? He's like, your own country is locking up Julian Assange right now. Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan. Yeah, sorry. That was, I was, apologies to the Turkmenistanis out there. But what, what I found always interesting about

those is that you have, look, obviously there's no comparison necessarily between like hundreds of people in one, but when that one exists and it's such a clear one, then it's very clear what you should do. And all of these journalists out there, you know, Jim Acosta apparently has his own show on CNN, Crystal, recently found out about it. And it's amazing to me because the way he conducts himself, it was so clear that all of this freedom of the press stuff during the Trump years, it was a farce. It was too enriching himself. He wrote a book, right?

Theater. Attack on the press, theater, in order to get his own television show on CNN. Very low-rated television, sure, I'm sure. I can't wait till the ratings come out. But what's important to understand there is at the very same time as all that was happening, there were real attacks on the press.

There were those journalists who were imprisoned in Myanmar, in Burma. Nobody talked. In the White House press corps, it's like they didn't exist because they're narcissists. They don't actually care about the press. They care about freedom of their access to power and protecting that at all costs. And when somebody challenges that,

and ultimately Julian's crime, his real crime, was exposing Hillary Clinton. I mean, let's be honest, that is what turned the entire international intelligentsia against him. Before that, he was a hero for standing up against either. I mean, the spying, the things that, you know, he and his family have talked about, the way that they had this just insane surveillance of him. They certainly wanted to prosecute. I mean, they made his life hell as well because of him spilling the secrets of the powerful. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. And this is an attempt to send a message to journalists and whistleblowers everywhere that if you are going to expose our dirty laundry and our deep, ugly secrets, we are going to make you pay. And of course, the people whose wrongdoing he actually exposed, there's never any accountability for them. Just like Steven Donziger, who just spent his

900th day on home confinement, just as it is for him. The whistleblower we talked to yesterday, Matt Johnson. Targeted by the FBI. Targeted by the FBI for exposing animal abuse at an Iowa pig farm. It is always the whistleblowers who pay the price and they make sure that they do it so people will be too afraid to come forward and do the right thing. And sadly, it's highly effective. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And at the end of the day, most people won't say a word about this. And, you know, for those of you who might be skeptical, I've said it here before, it's very simple. The way he would be prosecuted would criminalize journalism, and it would almost certainly be used as a pretext by the DOJ to come after people like us and to come after any anti-establishment person who reveals real crimes of the regime. And so to protect that, our founders gave us the right, and we need to protect it at all costs.

That is exactly right. And on a know, what this, on a personal level, what they have done to this man is abhorrent. And, you know, his fiance, his family, all they want is for him to be able to come home and live a normal life. Yeah, there you go. Okay, let's move on, you know, in terms of continuing with the theme of the FBI and the expansion of the national security state. This is one of those stories which got zero attention by people in the press because they mostly agree with it, but which is one of the most outrageous expansions of surveillance power on elected officials that we have ever seen. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that the Capitol Police is examining background social media feeds of some who meet with lawmakers. The little-known new

practice by the department's intelligence analysts since January 6th is highly controversial, given the civil liberties concerns it raises. And what they point to is that newly obtained written communications show that the Capitol Police are examining the social media feeds of people who are not suspected of crimes. These include people and staff and constituents who are being meeting with members of Congress, elected officials. The Capitol Police is like, hey, what's the problem, Crystal? I mean, what's the problem? We're just compiling, you know, publicly available information and dossiers on private citizens who are not suspected of crimes whatsoever. And another thing I want to always raise, Capitol Police is not

subject to the Freedom of Information Act because it's a branch of Congress and Congress exempted itself from the Freedom of Information Act, which means all of this can only be obtained by leaks. We have no transparency, no oversight into the Capitol Police, except for members of Congress themselves. They are one of the worst agencies post-January 6th, because here's the thing. Who failed more than anybody on that day? Those idiots. They didn't have their riot shields properly. They didn't prepare.

If they had 100 more people, the whole thing looks completely different. So they fail, and then we give them billions of dollars, and they expand offices all across the country. And now they're using their spying powers and intelligence analysts to spy on members of Congress, to compile dossiers on private citizens. I have. I'm not sure if you have. I've been to the Capitol since January 6th. Are they looking at my social media feed? I mean, look, go ahead. You know, fine. I don't care. But is there a file on us for meeting with people who are members of Congress? I mean, what is the bar? Shouldn't they have to have a warrant? Or at the very least, when they're obtaining and compiling this type of information, shouldn't they have to justify why they're doing

so specifically to people who are walking inside of the building? It's an outrageous breach of civil liberties. And it may actually be in violation of federal law as well. One of the people they quote in this article is a woman named Rachel Levinson Waldman. She's deputy director of the Liberty and National Security Program

at the Brennan Center for Justice. She says the practice is of questionable legality. It's a recipe for creating dossiers on people and added that federal law protects against, quote, collecting and keeping of data about people without a specified and authorized person. The fact that there is no transparency in this agency makes it all the more troubling because this is just what we found out from from a leak yeah of what they're doing which is you know sifting through and potentially creating dossiers on anyone who effectively has contact with members of congress by the way members of congress didn't know they were doing yeah they had no idea. They knew that they were asking for lists of people

that they were meeting with. That they knew. But when at least one member of Congress was presented with this information about what they were actually doing with those lists of people and compiling this kind of information, he outright called for resignations

because he was so troubled by the implications of private citizens, congressional staffers, people who are surrounding our elected representatives, people who are just going in for a meeting to express their concern about some issue back home or whatever is going on. You know, there are a lot of delegations that come to Washington from back home in their home state to raise issues about whatever it is, some infrastructure issue, maybe some schooling issue. So for all those people to be subject to this kind of invasive scrutiny and compiling of dossiers on who they are and what they care about,

it's deeply troubling. And of course, the bigger picture here is what we've always been afraid of, is that January 6th would be used as a justification for furthering the police state, for furthering the surveillance state. And this is another indication that that's exactly what has happened in an agency where we are able to get so little of a picture of what they're actually doing. The other thing we've learned is how many of these government agencies have, like, intelligence units. Yes. The post office.

Yeah. Like, what? Sifting through people's mail and gathering units. Yes. The post office. Like what? Sifting through people's mail and gathering info. Right. I mean, this is this is extremely troubling. Just the number of government agencies who are apparently spying on American citizens. Remember, we did that whole story on the DHS secret unit, which then was spying on the reporter.

Yes. That was a crazy story. I mean, this is like out of a CIA, you know, novel of meeting at a bar and gathering intel. With a fake ID. This is completely bonkers. And the reason why this matters is that it is a clear use of the intelligence services to, at the very least, pressure and provide fear in the hearts of people who might be meeting with members of Congress. And, you know, look, these are elected representatives. At the end of the day, what they do is the expression of the will of the people.

You may not like some of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lorian Burbert and some squad member, whichever side you're on, that's fine. But these people were still elected to the people's house. And to have the Capitol Police say under the guise of, oh, well, we're protecting them, to go and spy on the people who they're meeting with, you can see so clearly how this could get out of hand. And we've already had the example. Remember, there was a left-wing podcaster who was visited by the California Highway Patrol at the behest of the Capitol Police for, I don't even know what he did. It was like liking a tweet.

He liked a tweet which allegedly, according to interpretation, it's up to interpretation, was supposedly threatening to AOC. Again, a left-wing podcaster. And they visited him. They're like, hey, why did you like that tweet? How about none of your freaking business? Why did—well, excuse me?

I didn't threaten anybody, as he rightfully said. And yet he's being intimidated, essentially, by the regime forces. I mean, this is something that you see in third-world countries. I mean, you're not allowed to criticize lawmakers. Or if you're in the opposition party, whenever one party is involved, then what happens? I mean, let's say that there was an effort to undermine the Patriot Act, and you are meeting as a member of Congress, Rand Paul, some libertarian member, whatever, Thomas Massey, is meeting with people who want to take down the Patriot Act. Is

there going to be a dossier compiled on those people and those activists who enter the Capitol? This gets very dicey. What if I, as a United States citizen, a media personality, want to go and start lobbying for Freedom of Information Act in order to apply to the Capitol Police? Are they going to compile a dossier on me for threatening their right currently in order to remain silent. You can see so clearly how this can be easily abused. It's an outrageous breach of power. It deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. There are a lot of problems in this country, as we document on this show daily.

And a lot of those problems contributed to the ugly events of January 6th. Rather than deal with those problems, which would be hard and which would, you know, be uncomfortable for the donor classes of both parties. Instead, this is the direction they always go in, which is rather than dealing with this underlying mess under the surface, let's just try to clamp down. Let's actually give ourselves and the deep state and the police state more power. Let's address it in that way. And then guess what happens? Those attempts will always fail.

I mean, you clamp down harder, you surveil more people, you have the FBI conjure up more kidnapping plots, and people become more discontented because you've never dealt with those issues that are under the surface. You turn people against each other, then you end up with an even worse January 6th that justifies an even further escalation of violation of civil liberties. It is an ugly cycle that we're in right now, and so that's why we try to highlight little pieces of information like this that come out that show you the direction that this government is going in. Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's go ahead and move on. Let's talk about The View. Our favorite, my favorite block, the e-block, the media block.

So we can't play what exactly happened on Bill Maher's show because HBO is very litigious whenever it comes to copyright and all that. So I'll try and describe it to you. Barry Weiss appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher in which she had a clip which went viral. Now, personally, I didn't think it was all that special. I mean, credit to her, but she's basically been saying what we've been saying here for a long time, what a lot of people have been saying. She said, quote, I'm done. I'm done with COVID. She talked about how she was wiping down her groceries. She watched Tiger King. She

said that the vaccines were obviously given as the off ramp in order for stop government and do safeguards. You get the vaccine, you don't get back to normal. Now it's been two years, we don't get back to go. You find out cough masks don't work. You realize you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant, still be asymptomatic and be carrying Omicron. You realize, most importantly, this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.

I agree with all of that. Congratulations, Barry, and I guess for getting it out into our mainstream audience. Well, the mainstream is freaking out at this light suggestion that they are actually the crazy ones. First, she was attacked by The View in just an incredible clip where they basically suggest we'll be wearing masks forever, just like we have terrible TSA theater. Let's take a listen. You know, listen, nobody on the planet really wants to go through this. This is not something we're doing because it's sexually gratifying.

This is what we're doing to protect our families. And you don't have to do it, but stay away from everybody. Because if you're the one who's not paying attention and you're coughing and sneezing, you don't want to stay out of the public, man. This is not nobody wants this. I don't want it. And I think he's forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated. People who can't get little kids under the age of five or people with health conditions. How dare you be so flippant, man?

They're over it. Like a relationship. I'm over it. the age of five. Yeah. Or people with health conditions. How dare you be so flippant, man? They're over it, like a relationship. I'm over it. I don't feel like seeing it anymore. To the post-mask part, because I think there's a prudence we've learned with the mask, the hand sanitizing that kind of like 9-11 with flying is always going to be here now. There's a new normal. Oh, it's a new normal. No, it's not. You can live that way if you want. The rest of us are not going to. And the vast majority of people don't want to be as miserable as these people are. I don't know how many times we have to do this. This cudgel that they try and use with kids is outrageous. COVID is not a threat to the vast majority of children in this country. The flu is actually much worse for them. And even for the general population,

this is a simple fact. Vaccines turned COVID into the flu. We should celebrate that. We have created a gigantic scientific miracle. We have vaccinated and now have natural immunity in a huge portion of the U.S. population, adult population, which was at risk. Those who are at risk, age 65 and older, go get a booster. Data has come out that shows that their hospitalization rate is at the same for 25-year-olds or whatever, whenever you get your booster shot. Great. Go ahead. The rest of us, we don't have to live like in complete misery. And it's just amazing to me that something as anodyne as Barry's message is being attacked. She's pro-vaccine. It's not enough for these folks. So, I don't have any issue with

what this lady, I think her name is Sarah or something, what she has to say. She indicates that for her personally, she plans on always wearing a mask. Go for it. Fine. I don't have a problem with that. I'm not going to be mad at people. I mean, people can be kind of gross and we have a lot

of germs if you want to wear a mask around. Fine. I have no issue with that. I do have an issue with the weaponization, as you said, of kids. Listen, we all in the normal range of American life care about kids. We care about our kids. We care about other people's kids. We care about doing whatever we can to keep people's kids safe. At this point, we have data that shows that the interventions with kids specifically that we took were much more damaging to them on balance than the virus was. That's not to erase the

several hundred kids who perished from this disease and there's no making up for that but we weigh costs and benefit and risks in our lives all the time and again when you look at school shutdowns when you look at what the American Academy of Pediatrics said was a national crisis for young people in this country in terms of their mental health when you look at addiction when you look at depression when you look at learning loss when you look at depression, when you look at learning loss, when you look at the delayed IQs that we've seen, all of these things paint a very compelling picture that there was greater harm to kids from closing schools.

And even from, you know, the masks, there's not great evidence that masks helped to stop the spread in schools. There's not even good evidence that closing the schools helped to stop the spread of the virus at all. Okay. So this very easy and cheap talking point of, I guess you just don't care about the kids is really just unfair and untrue. One thing I do want to say about Barry's comments that the younger generations will look at this as a moral crime. I'm not sure that's true. And here's why. Because there was just pulling out in New York Times this morning showing that even though younger people are,

by the data, much less at risk for COVID, they're actually much more in favor of coronavirus restrictions than older people, all because they tend to be on the left of the spectrum versus older people tend to be on the right of the spectrum. They also, in their personal lives, are more afraid of COVID than people who are older, which is, again, doesn't fit with the science. It only makes sense when you look at the fact that, you know, there's a partisan skew in terms of how people ultimately feel about the virus. So you have on the one hand, folks who are on the right side of the spectrum who tend to underestimate their risk of disease and how severe it could be, especially if they remain unvaccinated. And then you also have people who

are overestimating how vulnerable they are. That's ultimately leading to, you know, to a lot of fear in their personal lives. And in some instances, bad public policy as well. It's so hard to find anywhere where these things are just like acknowledged, where you're actually trying to sort through the science in a real way, not an ideological way. When you're really trying to weigh the costs and benefits, there's just a lot of partisan thinking on both sides of this issue that's frustrating see to me the moral crime is that young people are afraid i don't think they should be afraid i think this is a terrible thing in order to be afraid whenever you're young well the media is a lot of college yeah and they are the people i mean they've they've really done a poor job of explaining clearly the relative levels of risk depending on where you are in society. And when you paint with a

blanket brush, then if you're a person who's consuming that type of media, it makes sense that you would internalize that as, I personally need to be afraid, even though, in fact, your own personal risk profile is much lower than someone who's, say, old, overweight, unvaccinated. And yet, what is the nuance that we hear over on CNN? Well, take a listen to the same reaction. You know, Dr. Reiner, to you first, because you did call out Bari Weiss on Twitter. You told her to grow up. Tell us why, you know, you had such a negative reaction to her comments. Well, first of all, her behavior was childish, which is why I told her to grow up.

She ranted about how inconvenienced she has been by by this pandemic and how it's not real anymore. Well, I'll tell you that for the 10,000 Americans who died last week and for their families. Yeah, it was damn real. And for the people who struggle to keep them alive and for the thousands and thousands of health care workers who have been doing this nonstop for two years, her behavior was childish and selfish. Look, this pandemic has gone on, you know, in large part because the virus has mutated and 25 percent of the American population of the adults in this country have decided not to get vaccinated. Now, she may be frustrated that life isn't normal, but we are in the hottest point of this pandemic in the last two years. Now, thankfully, in places like New York and D.C. and Boston, the virus is starting to recede.

But, you know, we've lost 860,000 people. And I'm afraid that, you know, by St. Patrick's Day, we're going to be staring at a million people dead in this country. And to hear, you know, somebody who has such a large platform like Ms. Weiss sort of say she's done with it. It's not real. It's a pandemic of the bureaucracy. No, this is a very real pandemic. And a million people in this country will have paid the price. First of all, Bari, why? I'm like, you don't know how to pronounce her name. It ain't hard, Brianna Keillor. Second, this doctor, this is such a disingenuous argument. The vast majority of those deaths occurred when people did not have

access to the vaccine. And then many of the people who are dying themselves are the people who have, per the CDC, who are vaccinated up to four comorbidities. And this will sound callous. Something was going to take those people out, okay? Cold can take you out when you're that sick. The flu can take you out when you're that sick. You're in a very vulnerable state when you're that immunocompromised. I feel sorry for you, but we don't shut society down whenever it comes to that. And especially in what he's saying around the healthcare workers and the weaponization of that, nobody is denying that it isn't hard to work in the healthcare profession, but that's also your job. We do not shut down all of American society because the ICU capacity,

it goes from 65 to 72%. We simply don't do that. And as you said, there is no consideration here of any of the risks. Do you hear anywhere on national television about how recent developmental studies of children find them two standard deviations below the normal baseline of the general population. Two standard deviations. That is a catastrophe. Ask any person who's a teacher right now. They say kids are more unruly. A lot of them have been not socialized properly for years. Their learning disability has increased. Math scores are plummeting. Testing, and you talk about this all the time, sometimes it's closed and it's open. And then, oh, now he needs a test because he was exposed to somebody and it cost me $500 or whatever out of pocket. This is madness in terms of, and I didn't even talk about the adults, in terms of suicide, fentanyl, alcohol, drug use.

I can go on forever. There's none of these that are being reflected in this piece, and I just find it so dramatically disingenuous, Crystal. What I find gaslighting about what he does here is, on the one hand, he starts off by expressing so much concern for the, I think it was 10,000 people that he said died in the week before. And then he quickly switches to, and we know from the data that those people overwhelmingly were going to be unvaccinated people. Because if you're vaccinated, you're pretty well protected against hospitalization and death, unless you have just a massive number of comorbidities, as you said. So we know overwhelmingly those 10,000 people were going to be largely unvaccinated. So he starts by expressing all this concern for them. And then he turns around and is, you know, really blaming and sort of shaming this very same population.

And it's like, okay, well, listen, we need to have a perspective at this point of adults, some certain percent, it's actually smaller than you think, have made a decision, I'm not getting any of these doses. Oh yeah, his data is wrong. It's not 25%. So he said 25%. I suspect that is the number who haven't gotten two doses. Exactly. Because if you look at people who have gotten at least one dose, it's 85% of the adult population. So you're actually only talking about 15% of the adult population, which is not great, but not terrible, who have decided not to get any dose at all. And at a certain point, I think you have to take the perspective that, say, Jared Polis has and said they've had their opportunity. And, you know, we're going to continue to encourage them to get vaccinated because that'll be the best thing to protect them. But especially since the government's not coming in with any more checks or backstop in business or any of that anymore,

we have to move forward. And based on the data and the science, look at what the relative's risk is for these different populations and make appropriate decisions. So I just think that they use facts in a way that is very gaslighting and disingenuous, ultimately. And I do have to say, I mean, I think the most compelling argument on the side of people who are, like, in favor of stricter pandemic lockdowns and these sorts of things is the overwhelming burden on the hospital staff. Because I do feel bad for those health care workers who have been through hell and there have been so many resignations and the staffing levels are down, all of that stuff. But, you know, if that's where the issue is, let's flood the zone with resource. Let's pay people more. How about that? To get more nurses and doctors into these facilities. And oh, by the way, part of why we have these shortages in terms of beds available and in terms of capacity is because of our

for-profit healthcare system that has led to all of these hospital consolidations so that we are in this kind of a vulnerable situation when we really need to have that capacity. And to the extent that most of them are exaggerating, and I know this sounds callous, I'm sorry, but they never tell you ICU capacity is supposed to be like 65%. These things are expensive to run. So when they're like, it's at 75, it's like 10% above baseline. I mean, in many cases, we do not see triage care being vast majority across the country. The way that this is being exaggerated is just ridiculous to the nurses out there and the people. I stand with you. I want you to get paid more. I think it's outrageous that your hours are ridiculous and that there's not people there.

But that has a very easy solution as well. And so also the government has not expressed any interest in doing anything about that. And in that situation, what are we supposed to do? I'm not going to be held hostage because ICU capacity is 10 or 15 percent above baseline. And neither should everybody else. And I'm relatively much more free than most people. I can't even tell you the stories that I hear all the time. I've tweeted about this, this Johns Hopkins kid was a medical exemption from the booster shot from his doctor and the

university rejected it and said, we're going to expel you. I know people who work office jobs required to wear one mask and then put a KN95 over it and then still come into work so that the bosses can monitor them. Oh, and they're not allowed to eat in the cafeteria. This is nuts. We can't live this way. And to see the backlash against that by these freaks who are sitting at home thinking that we should all be in a a penal colony because, you know, things are harder for them at work and then exaggerating risks to children. As you can tell, I'm getting hopped up. But it really, when I see what happens to these young kids, it drives me crazy. Their lives are being ruined and it's because of people like this.

One last note here. The polling says that, especially in terms of kids in schools, even though our opinion may not be what you often hear on these channels, it's like two-thirds to one-third in recognition that they're more concerned about learning loss from their kids not being in school than they are a risk of getting sick in school. And that's with the media being wildly irresponsible with helping people understand where the real risks lie. So there you go. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, we all know what it's like to see a housing bubble burst, the decades of pain and dislocation that destroy economic lives as well as human lives. If you're my age, you know what it was like to see a dot com bubble burst. What would it be like to live through multiple massive bubbles bursting all at once? Well, we might be facing down exactly that type of horrific economic cataclysm right now,

according to one analyst who predicted the past two crashes to a T. Before we get to that, however, here is the latest. Markets are on track to post their worst month since the bottom fell out during the pandemic back in March of 2020. Yesterday was a total roller coaster. The Dow dropped 1,000 points before somehow mounting a comeback at the end of the trading day to close in positive territory. But most analysts are predicting that this sell-off is going to continue. Why is this happening now? Well, as we've been warning here, the Fed is pulling the plug on the stock market party. Jerome Powell's Fed has signaled that they plan on hiking interest rates and trying to climb down from the massive spending binge that propped up both the debt and equity markets. They'll have more to say Wednesday

after they meet, but with inflation continuing to mount, I would not expect them to change course. Markets are adjusting to the potential end of the free money era and the potential end of the policies that provided a multi-trillion dollar safety net for the richest among us. That all means there will be pain. It's just a question of how much, how widespread. Because while the gains were concentrated in the hands of a few, the losses could well devastate millions. And one guy who was right about both the dot-com bubble and then right again about the housing bubble is now saying, we ain't seen nothing yet. Jeremy Grantham, British investor who has a near impeccable record where such things are concerned, is sounding the alarms.

He believes the U.S. right now is facing down not one, not two, but three and a half super bubbles all set to burst with potentially catastrophic consequences. In a post titled, Let the Wild Rumpus Begin, Grantham lays out his case that we are currently in super bubble territory in housing, in stocks, in commodities, and a half bubble in bonds. Effectively, when the Fed was handing out free cash, there was a rush for the rich to put it somewhere, anywhere really. This led to record-breaking stock gains, massive spikes in asset prices, and everything from art to wine to yachts to fancy trees to NFTs to fake real estate in the metaverse. Closer to home, well, it led to huge spikes in home prices, with investors rushing in to buy single-family homes and pricing ordinary homebuyers out of the market altogether.

Crypto has been another major beneficiary of this exuberance. The huge spike in cryptocurrency value coincided with the Fed's extraordinary moves to prop up the market during COVID. And now that the Fed has signaled their intent to change course, crypto was among the first assets to see a huge drop. Bitcoin jumped up 305% back in 2020 under the easy money regime, but over the past few months, it is down by about half. Overall, in just one day, the cryptocurrency market lost $130 billion of its value. According to Grantham, the signs of these super bubbles right now are everywhere. Housing costs are at the highest multiple of family income in history, meaning that homes are less affordable than they have ever been before,

including before the great housing bubble crash. The stock market soared during the pandemic, even as millions filed for unemployment and pulled the family minivan into a modern-day breadline, fueling a belief that nothing could ever cause the market to fall. And commodities like oil, metals, and food are broadly overpriced, leading to inflation and stressing real incomes right as the bottom could be set to fall out. Take a look at this. Grantham also argues that we've already run through the traditional life cycles of the super bubble. He writes that in past super bubbles, shortly before they burst, they actually go through a period of acceleration,

which we saw mostly in 2020 and early in 2021, when the Nasdaq skyrocketed 105% from its COVID low. Next, the most speculative assets, things like crypto, begin to fall even as more traditional blue-chip stocks continue to perform well. The final phase, he describes, is the psychological dynamic that I mentioned before. It's sort of quasi-religious belief that the market can only possibly go up. By the way, that was kind of true so long as the Fed was pumping trillions into the markets. But now, that music has stopped. Looking at history, previous super bubbles have all ended, of course, with economic devastation for the masses. These bubbles caused the Great Depression.

They caused the massive Japanese crash that led to the lost decades, the dot-com crash, and the Great Recession after the housing bubble crash. If Grantham is correct, we are in an even worse position than any of those scenarios because we're dealing with super bubbles in almost everything. Of course, there are massive, unpredictable political consequences

to this possible calamity as well. Think about how the housing crash led to Occupy, led to the burning campaign, and on the other hand, led to Trump and a nation that at times has been a literal tinderbox.

Some of those outcomes I consider to be actually good, but under no circumstances should you cheer for this kind of chaos. Does the state of the country today seem good to you? This is why the accelerationist argument fails. You are much more likely to get a worse Trump in a more dangerous insurrection attempt than you are to get a better Bernie actually able to win and rebalance the scales. As Grantham writes, Looking back in a decade or two, if bad things have happened to our democracy, the huge surge in income and wealth inequality of the last 50 years,

as CEO income moved from about 25 times the average workers to about 250 times, will have carried the largest share of the blame. Just think about all the horrors that we track here today. The core rot, deaths of despair, fears of a civil war, and increasing comfort with political violence. So much of the acute pain and misery in the nation right now goes right back to the financial crash. What would another even worse crash look like piled on top of all of that compounding instability? It is not a thing that I wish to find out. To be sure, while Grantham's

got a good track record, he could certainly be wrong this time. The Fed could lose its nerve and go back to inflating the asset bubbles instead of pricking them. That's kind of a dubious thing to wish for, by the way. Maybe the market moves through this correction without major calamity and we continue muddling through. I sincerely hope that this man, as prophetic as he has been at times in the past, is dead wrong this time around. I literally can't imagine what might become of the nation if he is, in fact, correct. One of the reasons I love working with Crystal is that she inspires me. She points things out, or phrases things in a way that makes me think, and something that she said yesterday is something that I was really excited about, for those of you who are premium members and watch our reactions.

It's something I just could not get out of my head afterwards. Her monologue was titled, Cuban 2024, and it pointed out all of these obvious things. Is another billionaire really what we need right now? No, probably not. Will Mark Cuban really be our savior from a policy perspective? No. But here's what she wrote, quote, our politics are so stuck and hopeless between two parties, owned by corporations and costumed on one side in fake identity nonsense, on the other side addled in conspiracy nonsense, I'm for literally anything that would help to break that system apart. That's the part that I'm obsessed with right now. It's something I think is increasingly true. Right now, we are so condemned on both sides of political leadership, it seems nearly impossible to imagine any sort of real Democratic consensus to be forged from our options.

Take a look at that poll that Crystal cited. It sums everything up right now. On the question of whether Americans want Donald Trump to run again in 2024, 27% say yes, 72% say no. On the question of Joe Biden running for office, it's nearly identical. 28% say yes, 70% say no. And yet, those are our two most likely nominees for president. Let's just say they don't run, though. On the Democratic side, that means Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee,

or Pete Buttigieg. Kamala, the least popular vice president in modern American history, more so than the guy who couldn't spell frickin' potato. On the Republican side, I don't know who it would be, but whomever it would be would be somebody who had to endorse Trump's stop the steal nonsense. In both case, the problem is this. They would not be capable of actually uniting Americans. While I believe at its core America's problems can only be solved by the policy, the problem that we have right now is the inability to even arrive at correct policy outcomes. We have a political incumbency that shrouds their corporate-friendly policy in the veil of the culture war. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have only upside to gain from opposing Joe Biden, no matter the issue, because just being opposed itself to the most

unpopular president in a long time is popular. Or when Trump was in power, Democrats could justify and do literally anything because they convinced their base they were opposing fascism. In this reality, we have only one option, throw out the entire existing class of politician and do something crazy. This was the rationale of Trump 2016. Now look, it didn't work out as planned, but it was a gateway to our future. Our current class of politicians are obsessed with becoming celebrities with large Twitter followings who do podcasts instead of governing. To that, I say, okay, fine, screw it. If this is the way it's going to be, let's get some real celebrities who are both likable, but also have the capacity at

least to unite us, at least in rhetoric alone, and discard the existing political class to the dustbin of history. There is a reason that during Trump's time in office, the only person he was truly afraid of running as a Democrat was Oprah Winfrey. That's also why I listened with great interest to a recent conversation Joe Rogan had with Jim Gaffigan, where he described the state of politics and he mentioned who he thinks would win. He said it was Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And I agree.

I remember many of you thought that I was cringe months ago when I said that the Rock should run for president. But this is why. I see a world where basic popularity and rhetoric could solve a lot of our problems. Take Black Lives Matter. Imagine The Rock saying something like this. Yeah, Black Lives Matter. Also, we need cops. Boom. Culture war literally solved. You need somebody so famous, so ubiquitous and above the fray that they are capable of connecting with people on a visceral level. It's very difficult.

And don't get me wrong, from a policy perspective, it may not work out. The Rock has recently been cringe posting with Jeff Bezos. You could say this about the guy though, he's just as positive in a way that we don't even recognize anymore in our politics. He loves America, he's known by almost every parent in this country because of Moana and other children's movies. He's also one of the most followed people on all of Instagram. Now, you might say, well, what is he going to do? On that, I would tell you this. What are any of these people going to do? The ultimate

state of politics right now is that we are having existential fights to get politicians to do the most basic stuff. Take Glenn Youngkin, for example. It was a Herculean effort just to get him into the office so that he could push back against unscientific efforts to force children to wear masks in schools. That is all politics are going to be about for three years. Masks on planes or not. Masks in schools or not. Let people live. Impose a biomedical police state on them. Under those types of politics, the stakes are both very high and also not at all. Perhaps I am too much of a nihilist. I think we need to blow up the entire political system. And for the FBI agents monitoring this, no, I don't mean literally. From the ashes rise the

phoenix. It is not something that happens quickly. It's something that takes years to shake out. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016, it opened the door to allow people like Crystal and I into the semi-mainstream, at least have the ability to engage on the same argumentative plane as the establishment. Now, something like that just didn't exist before, but that was not enough for a variety of reasons. The next step is having somebody who becomes president, who literally has no connections to the existing infrastructure and blows apart the very idea of what is possible. When reading history, a great paradigm shift only comes once in a generation. Sometimes it takes a great war or a global economic depression.

We've already had that once-in-a-century event. And yet our change still has not come. People are waiting. They are literally more fed up than they have ever been. They are crying out for something else. I believe that something else could be the people's champ. It's a great campaign phrase. And I'll quote a man who changed the entire way that I once thought about politics. What the hell do we have to lose? Hey guys, you might notice a little bit of a crazy day here in

the studio. We weren't able to film reactions to each other because we literally only have one working camera. There's a problem with graphics. There's a problem with the guests. So unfortunately, we've rebooked Dylan Radigan and some others that we had who are lined up. We will still have all of that content for you. We wanted to make sure that we could still get the show out on time. We're really sorry. I'm very sorry to

the people who are paying subscribers who we promised you those reactions. You will get that. We'll do something a little bit extra for you on Thursday. We'll make sure that you guys have everything that you need. Again, deepest apologies, but we'll get it done. Yeah, we'll make it right for you guys. Thanks for bearing with us today.

It's just one of those days where the equipment didn't want to cooperate. And apologies also to Dylan Radigan. We've got him rebooked for next week, so we'll get to hear his thoughts, which I'm very interested in hearing what he thinks about what's going on in the markets right now. He's always incredibly insightful and often prescient. So we love you guys. Thanks again for bearing with us, and we'll get it all worked out and ready to go for Thursday. We'll see you then.

It will be done. We promise. We'll see you Thursday. Enjoy. 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

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