Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/6/21: Cuomo Fired, GA Gov, SCOTUS, Jobs Report, Trevor Noah, Omicron Madness, Kamala Collapse, Oliver Stone Interview, and More!

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Krystal and Saagar discuss CNN firing Chris Cuomo, Georgia's Governor election, SCOTUS argument on Roe v. Wade, November jobs report, how Trevor Noah made liberals mad, Omicron insanity in Australia, Kamala staffers quitting in droves, JFK assassination with Oliver Stone, and more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Oliver Stone Doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3F7rT_eNQ&t=1s  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member today, where you get to watch and listen to the entire show 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, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show up, everybody, today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. A number of big stories we're tracking. So, big news for the brothers Cuomo. We will break all of that down.

The very latest in why CNN may have actually moved this time when they did nothing in the past. A big election shaping up for governor of Georgia with major implications for both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the influence of Trump in that party and all of that stuff. So we'll give you the details there. Lots of court analysts, lots of court watchers saying that Roe versus Wade may actually be overturned. We'll break down the arguments that were being made by the conservative justices that are leading so many analysts to think in that direction. And also, what are the potential political implications of that landmark decision being overturned? Disappointing jobs numbers out last week, although it may not be quite as bad as it looked at the top line figure.

We'll break down all that data. Trevor Noah making some news. Telling the truth and then people getting mad at him. Actually saying something decent for once. Still not really all that funny. But anyway, let's start with the Cuomo brothers. Yes. Oh, this is just so much, Crystal. It gave us great joy.

Of course, we reported to everybody that Chris Cuomo was indefinitely suspended last week. Well, over the weekend, CNN actually hired an outside law firm. And after a single day of investigation said, quote, additional information came to light and they fired him unceremoniously. The best part is Jim Acosta was forced to read the firing statement on CNN's air. It just gives me great joy. Let's take a listen. This is CNN Breaking News. And we have breaking news to report to you right now about CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Earlier this week, Cuomo was suspended from CNN after documents revealed he had been involved more than previously known in shaping his brother, former Governor Andrew Cuomo's defense,

Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, we should point out, has now been terminated here at CNN. That's the latest breaking news about what's happening here at CNN. I want to go to CNN. There you go. They actually went to Brian Stelter for a reaction, which is kind of incredible. Stellar analysis, I'm sure. I'll read you guys the full statement and let's put it up there on the screen please chris cuomo was suspended earlier this week pending further evaluation of new information that came to light about his involvement with his brother's defense we retained a respected law firm to conduct a review and have terminated him effective

immediately while in the process of that review, quote, additional information has come to light. Despite the termination, we will investigate as appropriate. Cuomo then put a statement out. Let's put his statement up there on the screen, please, where he said, well, this is not how I want my time at CNN to end, but I've already told you why and how I helped my brother. So let me now say, as disappointing as this is, I would not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Primetime, the work we did as CNN's number one show in the most competitive time slot. Not saying much, by the way. I owe them all, and we'll miss that group of special people who did really important work. As you said, Crystal, not a single word of apology. The only real acknowledgement there of the people who worked for him are now screwed because he screwed around while trying to help his brother. But honestly, a pretty surprising turn of events, from my opinion. I did not think they would actually fire him. I mean, he's gotten

away with this for years, right? I mean, I've pointed out here, he's been having Andrew Cuomo, his brother, on his television network since before the days he was even at CNN, hired in 2013 while he was at ABC News interviewing Andrew Cuomo. While he was at the top of the network, again, a grain of salt, but still interviewing his brother. Routinely, it was greenlit by the very top and the new executives and more. And I assumed they were going to, I mean, if Jeffrey Toobin can get away with masturbating on a phone call or a Zoom call and still only get three months punishment before he gets to come on and somehow talk about abortion on their air, I'm like, okay, this guy will probably survive. But my personal opinion is that new management was like, that's it. He's got to go.

No questions. Zucker's on his way out. And then, of course, the thing that was very intriguing in the CNN statement is that they found even more that had been revealed. And just to remind you guys of what had already been revealed, we already knew. First, we learned, oh, we'd been on some phone calls. Then we learned, oh, he may have helped to draft some statements. Then we learned, and this was the thing that led to the initial suspension, that I, like you, thought it was a way for them to take some of the heat off. They'd wait an appropriate amount of time. Then they'd bring him back in, which probably was

their intention. Yeah, you're right. But what came out there is that he had been using his professional and journalistic resources not only to try to track down info about what shoe was going to drop next, when the next Ronan Farrow piece was going to come out and how many women were going to be involved, but also to try to dig up dirt on at least one of his brother's accusers and very clear from the exchanges as well that he knew what he was doing was not okay because he's texting Melissa DeRosa, delete this thread. So all of his protestations about, oh, it's my brother and family first. And I just didn't even think that there could be anything wrong. I didn't even think about myself, the professional implications. Come on.

You knew what you were doing was wildly inappropriate. But these guys, they get so arrogant. Yeah. Because he really got away with it all for so long. I am positive this is not the first time that he was consulting his brother and helping his brother behind the scenes in this manner. This is the way he's been operating for years and getting away with it. Number one, because he's very influential, even if his ratings aren't amazing. These guys are very

influential with elite circles. Number two, close buddies with Zucker. And number three, he'd already seen the pattern of how Zucker had handled this in the past, basically sweeping it under the rug and not really caring. So I think the straw was probably a couple things. Number one, seems pretty clear, he lied to CNN. Yes, he straight up lied to his employers. And so that's a hard thing, especially if this is someone who's supposed to be your buddy, supposed to be your friend, and you realize they've been lying to you and making you look like an idiot and an asshole. That's a hard thing to overcome. And then the fact that you also have Zucker on his way out and new management on its way in that may not be quite so buddy-buddy with Cuomo at a time when their ratings are trash. So, you know, the fact that you're the highest rated guy on the network doesn't really weigh

that heavily anymore. I think all of those pieces together contributed to this moment. But there's also one other piece we wanted to bring into the conversation, which is, again, the most intriguing part of this is this idea the investigation almost immediately revealed. Within, what, 24 hours? Additional information of something that he had done. Well, one potential direction is not about his brother's improprieties, but potentially about his own.

Let's go ahead and throw this tweet up on the screen. says that CNN fired Cuomo one day after she arranged to provide CNN's outside attorneys with documentation of allegations that he had sexually harassed a client of hers. She cites hypocrisy of Cuomo, telling viewers that he cared profoundly about Me Too. And we did already know, remember, this kind of got, like, you know, glossed over. But there was that op-ed that came out where he was caught dead to rights grabbing a married woman's ass in front of her husband yeah and apologized so this wasn't like he said like he apologized for it she had the email so it was you know pretty well proven and generally speaking when someone engages in that type of just like blatantly inappropriate

behavior it's probably not the first and only time that has happened. I completely agree with you. It doesn't happen in a vacuum, especially in a workplace, especially with your boss. So there's a lot of especiallys that come into play here. Look, I mean, the really interesting thing was Brian Stelter basically saying the quiet part out loud on his show over the weekend. We didn't want to play it for you because we didn't want to force you to listen to too much CNN. But essentially, even I have a limit. We'll cover Noah later, so we're really begging your patience.

I have a hard limit on what I have to listen to while we're bringing you guys the news. But Stelter said this, which is that he was a headache. And I love the openness of it because it wasn't like he did this stuff that was wrong. It was like, man, you know, he called it death by a thousand cuts. He just continued to cause headaches for the CNN network. Headaches. And remember, Stelter is the man who apologized for him in the past when he was on Stephen Colbert's show saying, this is such a crazy situation.

I mean, it's just never happened before. It's like, no, actually, conflicts of interest are incredibly common in the news business. Part of the problem with the news business, your own network has had to deal with it many times in the past. It was clear that they just let all of this go. I think all of this really comes back to this. It is a major indictment of Jeff Zucker's leadership, period. Allowing Andrew Cuomo to come on CNN, Chris Cuomo's show,

and tout his accomplishments when all the times were good and he was having the good press and then disappearing him whenever the bad press was happening is a blatant, I mean, it's so difficult to even describe how much of a breach of ethics of appearance for a purported mainstream news network that it could possibly be. There's just no way that you can be impartial one way or the other, which is why there was supposed to be a hard policy. And the second is this, Cuomo didn't happen in a vacuum, just like with sexual assault or harassment or whatever that's been alleged. His misconduct and his, you know, the blatancy in which he conducted himself happened because

at the end of the day, he thought he could get away with it. I don't blame the guy for trying to help his brother or for wanting to help his brother, but he should have felt constrained by the organization that he worked with hard rules from upper management that, hey, you will get fired if this type of thing happens. In the past, when Jeff Zucker was confronted with the previous facts, Crystal, which were enough to fire him, he said punishing him would just be punishment for the sake of punishment. What does that even mean? Number one, that's not even English. But number two, that is exactly why he thought he could get away with it, lie to his face and get away with it. I still think that if they didn't have a new CEO in terms of discovery and management over CNN, I still think Chris Cuomo wouldn't have been fired over this. I mean, listen, it's pretty astonishing what he was able to get away with for

so long. And this idea of, oh, I'm just there for my family first. Look, I think we can all relate to that family loyalty feeling, but you also have a responsibility to your audience. Yeah, correct. And that gets left out of the equation entirely. So, okay, if you need to be there for your brother in this moment, and that's your number one priority, resign or take a leave of absence rather than compromise the integrity of what you're supposed to be doing there. A couple other things. I mean, number one, just from being around some of these cable news scandals myself, when Stelter referred to a thousand cuts, one of the things was that some of Cuomo's staff on a show really didn't like him. And this is the thing that,

you know, ultimately, I saw it with Matt Lauer, I saw it with Keith Olbermann. When you've got a star, when there's a chink in the armor, if your staff hates you, the knives are going to come out. Twist the knife.

The knives are going to come out. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is I just can't help but reflect on the incredible downfall of these two men, you know, two of the most well-known, powerful, influential, tied into elite circles in all of New York who were riding high just not so long ago. And now Andrew Cuomo is no longer governor. Any sort of political future, highly uncertain. More and more damaging information continues to come out about him and Chris Cuomo out of his prime time slot at CNN, where again, look, we make fun of the ratings all the time in the post-Trump era. But the reality is that cable news, especially on CNN

and MSNBC, extremely, extremely influential in this town. No question. So the dramatic downfall of these two individuals who come from a storied family and have these deep ties into every influential circle in New York is pretty astonishing to watch. Yeah, I know. I think that's well said. And, you know, all eyes on who's going to succeed him. My bets on Don Lemon. Oh, you think? Oh, yeah. I saw rumors about Tapper. Maybe. I mean, he's based here in Washington. D.C. hard news stuff doesn't generally play for the for the, you know, primetime audience. They generally don't like to do that. It's certainly possible, but in the Biden years, politics is so boring, at least in the way that they are reporting it. You know, their January 6th stuff, which is Tapper's specialty.

I don't see him succeeding in that network. They need somebody bombastic. I mean, the amendment is extremely low-rated. It's terrible. Listen, we're talking about both men who are awful. Yeah, but I mean, taking aside my own judgment of them and their ideology or whatever, he's very low rated. I mean, he's like catastrophically low rated in his time slot. So against much less competition than Cuomo's in the 9 p.m. slot, which is against Maddow and Tucker, which are the only two people in cable news.

Again, these are like normal, like moral judgments and endorsement of their views. That's not what I'm talking about, but they're two of the only cable news hosts that actually have audiences that show up for them that I think could succeed outside of the, you know, cable news ecosystem in an actual free for all for audience. So it is a tough time slot. I am, I don't know. I think they'd be, it would be a foolish decision to put Lemon in just because you already know he's not performing well, even in a much easier time

slot. They could do the reshuffle then, move Anderson Cooper from eight to nine, and then give the 8 p.m. slot to like a Jake Tapper or somebody, because 8 p.m. is not as competitive as nine. So I guess it would make sense. This is cable news thinking. We don't have to worry about it. Right. And the other thing is, remember Tapper was the one who early on was like, I don't see any world in which people think what he did is appropriate. Tapper's been gunning for that slot for a long time. He's been gunning for it. And, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see them slot him in there. So we'll see.

There we go. We'll see. All right. Another dramatic situation that we are watching down in Georgia. So Georgia's governor's race is in 2022, was looking like it might be a matchup between current Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who, of course, got crosswise with Trump and the MAGA movement when he wouldn't just like, you know, brazenly hand the election, illegally hand the election to Trump. When he wouldn't indict his own state's election infrastructure. Exactly. So he got crosswise with them. And now, because he has fallen out of favor with some of the Republican base for doing the right thing, he has a very tough competitor in the Republican primary.

Let's throw this tear sheet up on the screen. This is from Greg Blustein. I don't know if you guys remember, we had him on a bunch when we were at Rising, just as an analyst when we were leading up to the presidential elections. Fantastic reporter down there for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We'll try to get him back on this show at some point to break down this race as well. Former U.S. Senator David Perdue is jumping in this race, plans to challenge Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary next year, according to multiple people with knowledge of his decision, setting up what he describes as a divisive contest between two of the state's leading GOP figures ahead of a likely general election matchup with Stacey Abrams. So

Perdue told allies, this is more reporting from Blustein here, he was motivated to join the race because he fears that Brian Kemp cannot defeat the Democrat again. Now, keep in mind, Perdue just lost his Senate bid to John Ossoff. Okay, so he just lost in the state, at least significantly in part because of Trump and all of his stop the steel nonsense, which effectively de-energized the Republican base and handed Democrats both of those Senate seats in those runoff elections. Apparently, the former president has publicly encouraged Perdue to run. He recently warned that, quote, the MAGA base will just not vote for Kemp. Kemp, though, has his own allies in the state. The Georgia Chamber has backed

Kemp. And actually, I think they were reluctant about him in the past. They've had sort of divided loyalties there. Also worth remembering, another thing you might remember David Perdue for is, of all of the senators and their stock trading scandals. Yes. Oh, yeah. He is actually the worst, the most just in terms of the number of trades and how active he was in the market, especially during the coronavirus, during coronavirus, but also with regards to defense stocks and other things that his the committees that he sat on had direct insight into. So this guy was really bad in terms of sort of corrupt, potential corrupt stock trading deals, but sets up quite a match there in the Republican primary.

I looked it up. Kemp is still overall decently, he has net positive approval rating of plus 10%. But the reason it's as high as it is, and it's still not amazing, it's 44% approved, 34% disapproved. That was as of, I think, a couple of months ago. A significant number of Biden voters actually support him. So that's part of what's propping him up. In a Republican primary, the landscape is pretty tough for him, even though he is the incumbent. This is going to be a very interesting test to me because Virginia basically had zero stop steal in it. Glenn Youngkin was like, get the hell out of here. I want nothing to do with you, Donald Trump.

This is Trump front and center having to try and win back. David Perdue, look, he's probably going to win the primary, almost certainly. But David Perdue is going to have to try and win the Glenn Youngkin suburban voters of Fulton County and around the city of Atlanta, traditional Republicans who went and voted for John Ossoff, for Warnock and for Joe Biden, while also trying to drive out MAGA base. Glenn Youngkin was able to do that because he, well, look, he just rode, you know, the road of discontent all the way to the governor's office, didn't really play footsie or whatever would stop this deal. And they, in Virginia, there's a couple different ways you can run a primary. Yeah, that's right.

They decided to not have the type of primary that we think of where everybody just goes to the polls. Effectively, the party apparatus chose Youngkin so that he didn't have to try to appeal to the MAGA base too hard during his primary. Because they wanted to avoid a Corey Stewart situation, which is what happened previously. He almost knocked off Ed Gillespie and Corey Stewart's like a confederate sympathizer. And they were like, we're never going to have this again. So this is essentially what it means.

A hard-fought primary where David Perdue prevails over Kemp, which stopped the steal at the center, makes the real test of, is stop the steal enough to either turn off or not drive out those suburban voters who traditionally would have come out for a Republican in a wave election like 2022? And it also comes to the fact of, I don't know enough about the Georgia primary system about how exactly it works. But Kemp is really making sure that he brands himself as like MAGA in policy, but not obviously on Stop the Steal where the divider is. He has a statement in reaction to Perdue. Let's put it on the screen. And yeah, I mean, basically what he's saying there is Governor Kemp has a proven track record of fighting the radical left to put hardworking Georgians first, while Perdue is best known for ducking debates, padding his stock portfolio during a pandemic, and losing winnable races. All true. By the way,

Purdue is also the former CEO of Dollar General. So you're telling me that he was up to some shady stock? I never would have thought something from Dollar General, which is apparently now, no, Dollar Store. One of them is now the $1.25, not the Dollar Store, which is kind of interesting. But you can see here, he says, Perdue's only reason for running is to soothe his own bruised ego because his campaign for U.S. Senate failed to inspire voters at the ballot box twice, which is pretty savage. That being said, I think Kemp is going down in flames. The other question, too, is that who is the Democrat? Well, it was just announced. Let's put it on the screen. couple of days ago. Stacey Abrams is going to be gunning for the Georgia governor's race

in 2022 as well. Now, Stacey Abrams being a much more identitarian candidate. Yes, she did come close, but that was in the blue wave of 2018. I see it almost impossible for her to replicate the same level of success in 2022 in what's clearly going to be a red wave election. I just don't know how this plays out, Crystal. It could come to the fact where Stop the Steal and Trump, who's going to be deeply involved in Georgia because also Herschel Walker, he wants him to run. I think he's going to be on the ground in Georgia much more. They Stop the Steal. They put Georgia really at the center of the whole

ballot conspiracy and all of that. Trump is not going to be able to resist it in the same way that he was in Virginia. He will be on the ground. It is certain that if there was a Trump-style candidate in Virginia, he would have lost as governor. There's no question. So is Trump still going to be able to override the red wave and all of that in order to stop and potentially keep Stacey Abrams in the White House? At the same time, she is not the person I would have chosen or anybody would have chosen in order to run and try and prevail in that type of environment. So the wins are really against both of these candidates. And I think it's more about who's going to do the most harm to them. Personally, I'm going to bet on Trump because I think he's just so noxious and odious to so many people that that will keep them from turning out to vote, which could move in a 1% margin election in Abrams. But look, the likely favorite is probably whoever wins the Republican primary, which is probably David Perdue.

Sad, in my opinion, that you can endorse this nonsense and still get elected just because people hate Joe Biden so much. But that's more of an indictment of Joe Biden. Yeah. I mean, listen, if we just think about it, taking all of those factors out and think about 2018 was a great election year for Democrats and Stacey Abrams still lost. Now she's going to be going up against, you know, either Perdue or potentially Kemp. Kemp is the incumbent, so that gives him an advantage. But even if it's Perdue, 2022 is not going to be a good year for Democrats. So when you just compare, so much of what we've talked to you guys about is the fact that all of these individual factors, sadly, actually weigh a lot less than whatever the national mood is.

All the politics are so national now. Candidate quality, whether we like Stacey Abrams or hate her, like Kemp or Perdue or hate them, it's so much more about what the national mood is. And Virginia, a state that Biden won by 10 points, has just been won by Republicans. Now they ran a good race and Trump stayed out of it and all those things. Georgia is already a much more difficult climb for Democrats. Virginia is effectively a blue state at this point. Georgia is not. Georgia, you would still have to say, is a red state that is trending towards Democrats, but it's not there yet. So it would require an extraordinary year and an extraordinary performance by Stacey Abrams. Is 2022 likely to provide that kind of landscape for her? Very doubtful.

The only chance that they have is that Trump just makes it so toxic for suburbanites that they, you know, I could see them very much splitting their ticket. But I think the national wins are what you would be most likely to bet on in Georgia. So we'll see. That's why this contest is so interesting. What happens to the Republican primary? What does the influence of Trump look like? How are the national wins in 2022? Is there any room to escape the nationalizing of every single race if you have Trump coming in and being a noxious force and turning off a lot of voters.

So those are some of the questions that we're going to be exploring there. Yeah, that's right. At the same time, something that may be shaping the political landscape come- At exactly that time. Yeah, come election time is whatever the Supreme Court decides to do about Roe versus Wade.

So let's go ahead and throw this vice chair sheet up on the screen. As you guys probably know, the court heard oral arguments last week about it's a Mississippi case that was, I mean, it was intentionally engineered to get to the Supreme Court and challenge the legitimacy of Roe v. Wade. Effectively, most court watchers listening to the arguments felt very confident that it was likely, Roe v. Wade was likely to be overturned. This particular legal scholar says one million percent chance Roe v. Wade is overturned. One million. I can't emphasize that enough. Another individual analyst that Vice interviewed here pegged it at 70 percent. And this person, Jesse Hill, said that before they listened to oral arguments, they said about 40 percent because the kind of reading of the court was they'll try to come up with some more compromised position

that Roberts seems still to be reaching for around maybe where the viability is at 24 weeks. Maybe they move that back or change that standard. But after listening to the arguments, this watcher moved their percentage from 40% to 70%. There were a few things that really caught people's eyes. One of them was that Justice Kavanaugh rattled off a list of a bunch of cases where SCOTUS had overturned past settled precedent. Because this had always been the argument of like, this is precedent. You can't mess with this. We're talking about 40 years. It's called stare decisis. Yeah. We're talking about decades now where Roe versus Wade has been the law of the land. All of our sort of law,

everything has been shaped around that precedent. So to go and overturn that, oftentimes the court is reluctant to do that. So the fact that Kavanaugh went out and rattled off this list of instances when precedents had been overturned and said, I have a quote from him, he says, if we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn't the history of this court's practice with respect to those cases tell us what the right answer is, that it's actually a return to the position of neutrality, code for basically states decide what they want to do, and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn't. Amy Coney Barrett also seemed to be very much,

you know, making arguments in favor of overturning Roe versus Wade. According to Vice here, the only conservative justice who didn't seem totally sold on overturning Roe versus Wade. According to Vice here, the only conservative justice who didn't seem totally sold on overturning Roe was Justice Roberts, who now wildly is sort of a centrist voice on the court. He was repeatedly asking about the importance of the so-called viability line. Under past abortion jurisprudence,

states are blocked from banning abortion ahead of fetal viability. The developmental benchmark at which fetuses are able to survive outside the womb, that typically occurs at around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That was kind of the direction that most people thought going in, that this would go in rather than a full overturning of Roe. Now that oral arguments have been had,

it looks much more likely that they are going to actually get rid of Roe versus Wade. Yes, and so it's interesting. Let's put that New York Times one up there on the screen and actually encourage people to go and read it. We'll put the link in the description because it actually does a decent enough job of just quoting a bunch of people who have different opinions on this stuff,

both from conservative professors, legal people, arguing, look, you know, Dredd versus Scott, Plessy versus Ferguson, all these other laws which have been overturned in the past. You don't necessarily have to stick to jurisprudence if you think it's bad jurisprudence. Others pointing to a much more politico-social view of the court and of the fact that there is plunging legitimacy found in the Supreme Court amongst Democrats over the last, I think, 20 years, but the last 10 years in particular, given that Trump was able to put three Supreme Court

justices. The person most susceptible on the Republican side to that type of thinking is the chief justice, John Roberts. John Roberts' nightmare is packing the Supreme Court and any sort of judicial change to that. He's like, that is the thing I want to avoid the most. I want to die with nine justices on the court and I want it to have some sort of legitimacy within the American public.

That's why he's been willing, you know, with Obamacare, with DACA, with the census question, in many of these cases, citing against Donald Trump or citing much more in the favor against necessarily where people thought he was going to stand, where towards trying to find some sort of balance in public opinion. What have we learned over the last 40 years in the abortion debate? I don't think there is much balance, unfortunately, for most people. It's just such one of those issues. It's like you're the for or against. And it seems to be one of these issues where he's going to find himself in a bind, especially, Crystal, because it's a 6-3 court. He's not the swing boat. He could even dissent and it wouldn't really matter. So with 5-4,

then the question comes, how are they going to write that? Justice Gorsuch obviously is one who is actually on the wrong side of a lot of the social conservatives because of the way that he voted in the, I forget what the case was actually called, but it was about something about transgender sex equality in terms of how you interpret it with Title IX and in the civil rights law, whether gender identity is included or not. That really, you know, put him on, I would say, the wrong side of a lot of the social cons who are within the movement. I also think it's important to note that the social conservatives, the people who are hardcore on abortion and on all this stuff within the Republican coalition, they're not

actually the majority. It's probably 32, 33%. But it comes to the tyranny of the dictatorship of the small minority point that I've brought up a lot about Nassim Taleb. These people, this is pretty much all they care about. They will crawl over broken glass and have for the last 40 years specifically to vote for this moment. And so if it doesn't happen, they're going to freak out. So this is one of those cases where, you know, even though one third of the people who voted for Trump actually described themselves as pro-choice, they rate it much less important on the spectrum than the people who, I believe it was only 3% of the entire American electorate cared about abortion as their number one issue in the 2020 election. And something like 90% of them voted for Trump. As in it was like, so again,

the people who are pro-choice, they may say they care, but on the list of priorities, very, very low. Could Roe versus Wade change all of that? We'll see. Our friend Rachel Bovard actually wrote this piece. She's a big social conservative. She's kind of a court watcher.

And obviously we wanted to bring her analysis as well to the table. Let's put it up there on the screen from the spectator. Cracks are showing in Roe versus Wade. What she points to is that a lot of the Republicans have been very skeptical of Justice Roberts and of Justice Gorsuch. So they were watching these oral arguments like a hawk. You should also put this on the table. A lot of this is tea leaves, trying to figure out where people stand. Clarence Thomas, I think, has spoken once in the last eight years on the bench, so it's not always the easiest thing. But what she's pointing to and what a lot of the stuff that I'm hearing is that they are saying

it's very likely that Roe versus Wade is going to be overturned. Now, the timeline as to when that is going to happen, given the 6-3 and all of that, could potentially be right before the midterm elections. And that's where the question of the political stuff that people have to bet on comes to the fore. Will people actually vote and freak out if Roe versus Wade is overturned or not? There's two schools of thought. Actually, I'm curious what you think. What I hear from a lot of the people who are big social cons, they're like, look, they say they care, but not that many people actually freaked out in Texas. Yes, it was like a one-day story or whatever,

but the people in Texas aren't going to come out and vote against Governor Abbott anytime soon. And a national repeal would certainly be big headlines, but come election time, then, you know, there's all this other stuff going on in the country that it won't galvanize like a women's march level movement. For me personally, I think they're completely underrating how exactly when something has just been stasis for 40 years and then you take it away, I think that's going to change American politics forever.

I could be completely wrong. I'm curious what you think because this is how the social conservatives are justifying this. Yeah. Saying that, look, we're going to, basically, we're going to have our cake and eat it to not suffer any electoral consequences. Because, I mean, look, you can look at the polling, 50-50, yes, kind of on how people feel abortion, but in terms of the first, I was going to say on row, it's actually much more like a 60-65, which they conveniently like to ignore whenever they're talking about this. Yeah, I mean, people do feel complicated ways about abortion, which I actually really relate

to. I think most people do. I think any human can. Yeah, absolutely. But on Roe, two-thirds of the public thinks that Roe should stand. So they're definitely not on the right side of majority opinion. There's a couple things that I think about this, and I'm kind of up in the air about exactly how this plays out politically and how it plays in the midterm elections, etc. But if I were to make the case that this will be a significant political event, there's two pieces. Number one, Republicans have used the social conservatives holding – dangling this in front of them like a carrot for decades now. I mean, how did Trump ultimately win? Yeah, it's because of this. It's because of this.

A lot of social conservatives were nervous about him. And there were two things that sealed the deal. Number one, putting Pence on the ticket. And number two, releasing the list of this is who my Supreme Court justices are going to be. And he was much more. He was more forward. He was more forward. It used to be that presidential candidates and senators, they would sort of dance around it. They didn't want to say that there was a list around abortion. And Trump being Trump was basically like, no, this is what we're going to do. We're going to overturn Roe versus Wade.

And that brought home the evangelical base, which has now been consistently actually his strongest supporters. So taking away that motivating factor, that could depress the Republican base somewhat who have been kept together through these sort of culture war issues. Mediating against that, I would say there's a whole other host of culture war issues that are equally sort of like salient and energizing for the Republican base right now that we saw play out in Virginia as one example. So I'm not really sure that it's going to have that much impact on them. On the other side, with the Democratic base and with the sort of new suburban coalition, if there was anyone who was going to be super energized by Roe versus Wade being overturned, it would be

like suburban liberal women who may vote kind of back and forth. But this, you know, since they have assumed now for decades that this was the law of the land and that these threats were not in danger, I could see it being a very motivating force in 2022 and potentially in 2024 as well. So I do think it shifts the political calculus in terms of who this is a motivation for. This is no longer going to be a really super effective motivator for the Republican base, and it may become a more effective motivator for the Democratic base. Overall, again, going back to kind of what we were saying in Georgia, I think 2022 is going to be a bloodbath for Democrats. I don't think whatever the court does on Roe is ultimately going to save them. But over the longer term

landscape, I think it would probably be better for Republicans if Roberts left this thing hanging by a thread where you still had Roe technically in place. But states, I mean, that's basically what we have right now. States effectively able to use all kinds of loopholes to basically ban abortion rights overall. And by the way, so in terms of what the actual impact of this would be, one analysis says that more than half of U.S. states, if Roe is overturned, would have no legal protections for abortion. So you'd have a sort of like, you know, half the country would be, you would still have these rights in half the countries you want. It would be left up

to the states. So that's- Yeah. I think in practice, it just means that there'll be like seven states in the South where abortion is illegal and it'll just be legal everywhere else, almost certainly. I mean, like in terms of- There's a lot more than that. There's at least 12 that have it automatically- The auto triggers? The auto trigger thing. Yeah. There's the difference between like 1990 Tennessee, you know, auto trigger law or North Carolina auto trigger law. And then like 2021, it actually gets overturned. Are they actually going to, I mean, state legislatures can flip all the time. So in practice, you're right. 12 states have the auto triggers. I know Texas definitely has one. In practice, I would say 20 years from now,

if it gets overturned, I really don't see it staying more than like seven, eight states. Well, again, I'm not saying like, look, if you live in Texas and all those places, yeah, like it's going to be a matter to you, but for the vast majority of the country and the population, it's almost certainly going to remain legal. One of the one of the thing that I will say here, I mean, listen, this is abortion. Like everything is also a class issue. If you're a rich woman, you're going to be able to get to do whatever you want. So you're talking about people who can't afford to travel to other states that ultimately will be impacted here by whatever happens. The other thing that liberals are concerned about, I honestly don't know if this has any merit or not, but other things that were settled, social cultural rights

that were settled, things like Obergefell and marriage equality, things like the right birth control, because that was also a Supreme Court decision giving people the right to have birth control. There's question, okay, well, if we're saying, well, to hell with precedent, who cares about that? Does that then open the door to re-litigating some of those other social cultural issues that we thought were settled? I don't know if it is or not. I don't think so. Do I think that that could be an effective talking point for Democratic politicians trying to scare Northern Virginia women that they may not have their birth control? Yes, I do think that is potentially potent. And on Texas, one last thing on this, because you were saying, well, the Texas thing didn't really matter. I do think in California, I do think it mattered.

I think part of why the polls swung significantly and Gavin Newsom actually outperformed, unusual for a Democrat, what the polls were saying, I do think it's because he could point to Texas and say, you don't want that to happen here. That was never going to happen in California, but it freaked people out enough for them to overlook the fact that they did not particularly love Gavin Newsom and get their butts to the pole to make sure that Larry Elder did not become governor of the state. Very true. And if anything, that would show it's a good base motivator, which, like you said, if you want NOVA women to come out, which they didn't, well, they did, but not necessarily in the same levels or more in the Virginia election, this very much could do it. Well, really what you should take away from this is it's complicated in terms of how it plays out politically. It could not play out bad for Republicans in 2022. And it could also open the door for like some Todd Akin bloodbath in 2024. That's right. Right. You know,

you never know how this stuff is going to play out and projecting it is really hard. Tried to give everybody all sides of this one. So I hope that was useful to everyone. Okay. The economy, very not good jobs report with some silver linings. We'll try and preserve as much of a well-rounded picture as we can. Let's put it up there on the screen. It came out on Friday. U.S. hiring stumbled in November as the economy added just 210,000 new jobs. Economists expected payrolls to actually increase by 550,000 in November. So job growth undershot expectations in November. What they were particularly looking at is the fact that obviously that this missed. That being said, the unemployment

rate did drop from the expected 4.2% from 4.6%. At the same time, that's because a lot of the people have permanently dropped out of the workforce, retired early, aren't looking for a new job, and all of that. It really is just very difficult to show. Also, what we're really learning from these, these forecasters don't know a damn thing whenever it comes to the pandemic. They miss every month. They're like, 800K, and then it adds like 3 million. Or it's like, oh, it's going to be 550, add 220. It's complicated.

And big revisions after the fact, too. Yes, exactly. Like hundreds of thousands a month later. Which is another reason why you should actually take all of these initial reports with a grain of salt. Yeah. Because they've upward revised the past few months significantly. And this top line number didn't really match with there's another survey, a household survey that they did, that showed more job creation than this one did. But still, I mean, listen, I'm not trying to sugarcoat it. That number is not a good number. It's a very bad number. The one which you should pay the most

attention to is leisure and hospitality, which is really the sector which is like the most blinking light of things are getting better, things are getting worse. Leisure hospitality only added 23,000 jobs last month. And I think that by that metric, you can see that with Delta and now with the Omicron freakout, which I will be talking a lot about in my monologue, I do think this is going to just be a noose around the neck of the economy for a long time until states decide, look, it's endemic and we have to move on because a lot of this is just going to continue. I won't give away too much, but that's obviously my own personal bias. That being said, I want to bring you guys some of the potential silver linings within the economy. Let's put this New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. Neil Irwin, he's somebody I respect. He writes the

Upshot blog. Where he talks about there is that most of the other evidence in the report actually points to a job market that is humming in some areas. So most notably, I already said the jobless rate fell from 4.2, 4.2 from 4.6. And the speed with which unemployment has gone from a grave crisis to a benign situation is astounding because unemployment was 6.7% last December. In one year, we've experienced an improvement that took three and a half years in the last economic cycle to actually come down from, from March 2014 to September 2017. Obviously, though, pandemic is very different than a structural change in the entire labor force and the economy. So they also point to the fact that among people in their prime working years from 25 to 54, the share of people employed

actually rose by an entire half percentage point, which is a lot. 78.8% in November, rapidly approaching the pre-COVID level of 80.4. So really what that shows is that, as I said, while you can see the hiring and there's a lot of early retirement, prime working male and women from 25 to 54, having them approach very close to that pre-COVID level, that's probably a good thing. Yeah. So what Erwin points to as one potential explanation for the fact that you have some, like the top line number, very bad, but some of the underlying numbers are actually good, including wage increases and including the fact that, as you're pointing to, the labor participation rate is up, get the workers in hospitality and retail that they want in order to fill those positions. Now, of course, those employers would be very upset about that.

But for workers, that's actually good news. I mean, that's part of the pandemic have started to abate and people have started going back to restaurants and those sorts of things is that a lot of the workers, they don't want to go back to those jobs because either it was very precarious. They were, you know, the first to get laid off when coronavirus hit. Their wages were already pretty low. These are industries with, you know, very unlikely to have health care. You're likely to have low wages, long hours, terrible schedules, lack of predictability, all of those things. So when they were forced to rethink things during the pandemic, a lot of workers decided, I don't want to work in these industries anymore. Either that, or they were the ones who were put

the most at risk when, you know, pre-vaccines, when this disease was really, I mean, not that it's amazing now, but it was really ravaging the country and it was extraordinarily frightening. So there's also an element of just choice here where our workers are saying, I don't care if you want me to work retail. I don't care if you want me to wait tables. I'm not doing that anymore. So in the report, as you pointed to, leisure and hospitality saw a gain of just $23,000. Retail actually fell by $20,000 last month. Now, that's on a seasonally adjusted basis, but that's pretty wild considering that we're in the midst of the holiday season. Retail should be booming.

And it's not. And it may be the case that it's because workers are just saying, nah, I don't want to do this work. This is not for me. I really think that's what it is, Crystal. And we've pointed to some people have made some crazy lifestyle changes. So put Heather Long's tweet up there on the screen, which is that some 2 million or so people, yeah, 2.4 million people have just not returned to work and perhaps at this point just have no intention to. 1.5 million are women. 900,000 are men.

And in that larger female figure, what we've pointed to in the past is that Washington Post piece by Henry Olson where what did he talk about? It's like some people are returning to a more single family model. And actually with the 900K men, it could also be vice versa. What you're seeing is that people are like, hey, you know, it's actually better for my life, especially with all the craziness with the pandemic and with school to have one parent who stays home and one parent who is the major earner. It keeps people out of the two income trap where they'll have to make more and more money in order to justify the relative same lifestyle. But it also just goes to show some people's priorities could be changing, which I completely support. I think it's a good thing in order to balance more towards

your home life away from your work life. And so having that change with 1.5 or 2.4 million people not having yet returned, that could just be a major social cultural change forever that we'll just have to grapple with. The concern is that it's not a choice. Yeah. Right. The concern is that it's a lot of, look, there's no doubt about it. As much as we would like to have more balanced gender roles during the pandemic, when kids were basically forced to be homeschooled, it was women that overwhelmingly bore the brunt of that, dialed back their hours or left their jobs or whatever they needed to do to be there with the kiddos to make sure that, you know, they were sitting in front of their Zoom and they were more or less doing what they were supposed to be doing. And so childcare is really,

really expensive. And it's one of the costs that has, you know, continued to go up. So you have to have the ability to earn a salary that is more than the cost of child care. Well, a lot more, too. Yeah, to justify it. And so that's a real barrier. If you separated from your job during the pandemic, that's a real barrier to going back in. Because you've got to find something that, you know, is not only going to work for your family, but is also going to make up, you know, the childcare costs plus some to justify the fact that you are

going to be then, you know, away from kids more and not have the flexibility and freedom that you had before. So that's a concern is that, look, if personally, I, you know, there are a lot of men and women out there who would love to be home with their kids, who would love to be homemaker. That's not what I would think I would go crazy personally, but it's not for me. But a lot of people are wired that way where that's what they want to do. I would love to have a landscape where that's an affirmative, positive choice that people can make and that they're supported and able to make that choice. The concern is that right now, because we haven't put those supports into place, it's less a choice than a necessity because of just the cost of child care and the unavailability of child

care too. Because there were a lot of places that shut, child care places that shut down. Yes, one of the hardest hit sectors in the economy. I'm a big believer in something called a family voucher where people can either spend it on child care or they can just keep the money for income support, give it to their grandparent in order to help them. But, you know, there's not enough sensible people in D.C. in order to actually give people that choice. That's right. When we run the country, that's the sort of things we'll do. Yeah, in soccer land, that's how it will work. Unfortunately, it will never be a reality.

Let's get on to this. Always the fun segment for last. I love this. So Trevor Noah, who we've both not funny, very clearly just not funny. It's been very sad and pathetic what's happened over to that once great show. Every once in a while, the guy has a decent take. And Trevor, maybe because of his experience in South Africa and his long skepticism of the drug companies, said something on his air which makes complete sense, which was maybe we should be skeptical whenever the CEO of vaccine companies say that we need more vaccines in order

to deal with a variant, which to this date, again, to this date, remains possibly more transmissible, but generally pretty mild in how it seems to have affected people. Here's what he had to say. We'll give you the reaction on the other side. On the one hand, almost all the Omicron cases have been mild so far. But on the other hand, the guy who stands to gain millions of dollars from new vaccines says we need new vaccines. If we don't make a new vaccine, this disease could be with us Ferrari. I mean forever. Sorry, I was thinking of something else. Now look, I'm not saying that the CEO of Moderna is lying. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, I don't think he's the most objective source on this topic. I'll wait to hear what neutral experts say about a new

vaccine. People like public health officials or the CEO of Johnson & Johnson. I mean, he's got nothing to gain because nobody's going to buy his vaccines either way. So I trust him. Not bad. Okay. The J&J part. Yeah. Maybe like a 60 seconds of funny, of a decent inquiry into challenging power. Well, didn't go over so well.

Let's go and put this up on the screen with his viewers and with a lot of people in the mainstream media. Daily show host Trevor Noah blasted for knocking Moderna CEO's vaccine push. The headline or the story reads, no one's laughing at The Daily Show Trevor Noah's new take on the coronavirus vaccine maker Moderna appears to be suspicious, who recently went public over how his concern would hold up with Omicron. So what they point to is that a lot of people online who are viewers of The Daily Show and others were going after Trevor Noah and saying that he was, quote, joining the death cult because he was suspicious of big pharma and believing in vaccines and science. He was like, you need to be able to separate the makers from the technology. I don't even disagree necessarily with the underlying point. But what we're really showing here is it is obvious to have skepticism about what these people are saying.

And especially on Omicron, where we don't know that much. And if these guys outright immediately are like, you need a booster, need a booster, need a booster. I mean, Israel just authorized a fourth shot, people. Okay? At a certain point, do we all have to ask the question of like, alright, what's happening here? When is enough? How do we balance public health? How do we balance the future? And all of that. And then, not to be able to have somebody in the mainstream. Once again, look, he has a very low rated show, not that many people watch him. But, enough people know what The Daily Show is that it has some cultural imprint,

and I can guarantee you the libs who watch that stuff probably have never heard that type of skepticism before, so I actually think it perhaps is even more powerful to have somebody like Trevor Noah say it. This really just takes away their ability to challenge and have skepticism of power at all at some of the highest levels

in the mainstream. So it's a really, you know, the criticism and the freak out over it tells us more about the environment than anything else. Yeah. And it also demonstrates the prodigiousness of allowing these things to be for profit, not just pharmaceuticals, but our healthcare system at large, because it is true that people who are anti-vax or vaccine skeptical, to use the term they prefer, have seized on the fact that big pharma has nefarious motives, that they only care about profit, in order to fuel a conspiracy that the vaccines don't work, that they're a bigger risk to you than the disease

itself, and that there's nothing to the vaccine, that they put you at risk effectively, when we have seen that that is not the case. But what the profit motive of big pharma does indicate is they would love to continue to charge premium prices to the developed world in perpetuity, allow this thing to circulate in the parts of the world that can't pay as much money so that they continue to, we continue to have to go back for boosters or new formulations and all of those things. And so it does, it is a problem, the fact that you have this profit motive underlying this entire system. But what Trevor Noah is saying here is 100% correct. And we've seen this also

with like the Merck COVID pill. They put on their data like, this is amazing. It works perfectly. Just don't look too closely. Just go ahead and approve it.

Now, I think it does have some efficacy, but it's not nearly what they were saying. So there is no doubt that anytime you have an actor that has a

professional or financial interest at stake in whatever thing it is that they're pushing, you should be skeptical. Like, that's just good common sense. We try to apply that not just within health care, but we try to apply it when in our reading of the news, especially with national security stuff, who has an interest in spinning this story and who stands to gain what from this particular narrative being put out there. That's just, you know, a good analytical way to approach these things.

And the fact that big pharma CEOs are now like off limits as a topic of, you know, challenging power is really sad. That's a really sad place to be. It just points to what we've been talking. You can turn, you cannot turn these people into heroes, and especially into tribal teams. The moment you do, you lose skepticism. And you actually cede a lot of the ground to bad faith actors. That's the other problem.

You should be able to parse things with nuance. I mean, we have pointed here to the fact that Pfizer's own CEO has said that boosters every year is part of their proven revenue model. They have said that outwardly to their shareholders that they want to encourage yearly vaccination because they know that they'll have global purchasers in the large Western governments who will guarantee their profits forever. Now, look, if that was recommended perhaps by the CDC, the FDA, and all those other people, I'm still pretty skeptical of those institutions at this point, but I would listen. But when I hear that, I'm like, no. And a lot of other people hear the same thing. Now, you should be able to parse that. Same with the Moderna CEO. The fact that they're coming out and saying, oh, well, we may need Omicron specific boosters before we even know

what the variant does is pretty crazy. I mean, I don't remember hearing any of that for Delta, right? And yet they are latching and clinging onto anything they possibly can, and perhaps pressuring regulators like the FDA and others to authorize what Israel just did and go for the fourth shot, fifth shot. I mean, who knows? I mean, it was a meme. Five jabs was a literal meme, not even like three months ago. And now it's a possible reality. So having that ability to have skepticism of that in the mainstream, I actually think is vital. A, if you want people to get even two doses, as we pointed to, look, it's December 6th. These vaccines have been out for what, like seven months? At this point, if you haven't gotten it, it's a choice. I get it. It's on you and you live with the consequences of

your decision. But it's like, if you want to try and continue or perhaps increase some vaccine uptake or more, allowing and parsing through that type of skepticism is exactly what you have to do in the public square. And we don't see any of it. So I just think it's crazy that Trevor Noah can't have a very pretty good point like this and not just get smacked down by so much of the internet. I also guarantee

he'll never have a segment like that again and I think that's a bad thing. Well, his takes are normally so cringe that he's like, you know, winnowed away any part of his audience

that might have appreciated the point and is left with only the most like cringe resistance lib bots. Sadly true. All right, Saga, what are you looking at? Well, Omicron in this state, another one in that one,

one more here, one more there, one vaccinated, the other one was triple vaccinated. That's probably all you guys heard over the weekend from the media as the number of confirmed cases of the new variant began being discovered here in the United States. The new variant has spawned old questions anew as to how exactly should we deal with this? Are pandemic restrictions the answer?

Is enough enough? Should we learn to live with it? That's the question that it has taken me a long time to arrive at. And I'm hoping to share my thinking with all of you. For context, we were some of the very first people to sound the alarm about coronavirus to a large audience. From what I remember,

I was beginning to get freaked out in the first week large audience. From what I remember, I was beginning to get freaked out in the first week of February. And on February 26, we actually did a segment warning people about the virus while the Washington Post was still saying, hey, it's racist to care about this virus from China. And actually the flu is a bigger threat. The dominant media position was actually that at the time. So when the initial lockdown by Trump was announced, I supported it. We knew very little about the virus. The death toll initial lockdown by Trump was announced, I supported it. We knew very little about the virus. The death toll out of Italy and China, for elderly people especially, was terrifying. When the first anti-mask protesters appeared at the Michigan Capitol or elsewhere,

we respected their right to protest, though I personally thought it was over the top and pretty crazy. Now, still had some limited faith in the public health bureaucrats at the time. But what really broke the glass for me was the Black Lives Matter protests. When millions of people took the streets and it was wholesale sanctioned by the public health establishment and the media, I saw clearly what was happening. That the bureaucrats and the media and others were perfectly fine flouting pandemic restrictions for a higher ideal, in their opinion. By the way, that's actually fine. If you're cool with assessing risk to go out and do something you believe in, it really is all good. That's the American way. But it has to apply in both directions. And I think we all know that it hasn't for them and it didn't then.

In a sense, that actually made me a lot more civil libertarian and skeptical of pandemic restrictions. Because if they're not going to exist in good faith, as has already been proven, then they are a tool in the arsenal of the state for oppression of political opposition. Perhaps you're rolling your eyes. But look, I am not anti-vax. I have had two doses of Moderna. I have advocated strongly on this program for as many people as possible to get vaccinated to reduce risk of hospitalization and death, and risk overall of population widespread. But when I see the Omicron fear, and risk overall of population widespread. But when I see the Omicron fear and the debates here in my home city of Washington with calls to reinstate

a mask mandate, or Oregon making their mask mandate literally permanent for indoors, I see a permanent security regime which does not consider basic facts. Basic fact number one. With vaccines, the risk of coronavirus to our most vulnerable populations has vanished. Most of the people who are dying of COVID did not get vaccinated and are old and unhealthy. Look, I feel bad for them and their families, but they made their choice. Why does that mean the rest of us should live under the gun for the rest of our lives? Basic fact number two, contracting COVID if you're vaccinated, healthy, and young is not a risk to your life. Of course, I am talking statistically, but it's not. I got COVID

after I got vaccinated, and yeah, it sucked for a couple of days, and then I was fine. If you're vaccinated, you'll probably be fine. And now with therapeutics like the Pfizer pill and monoclonal antibodies, you can kick it in just a few days. We've actually created a situation where for most people, COVID really is just like the flu. We've actually created a situation where for most people, COVID really is just like the flu. Now, the fact of the matter is that COVID will be here forever. There is no situation where we can vaccinate the entire world. There will be many, many more Omicrons, COVID variants that jump the vaccine or spread faster that are immaterial as long as we have vaccines that reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, and we have great therapeutics.

In other words, more pandemic restrictions are not and should not be justified on a population-wide basis because it is simply a fact of life. If you're scared personally, be my guest, wear a mask. The rest of us, we're moving on. We have two choices. We can accept the situation, or we can lose our freaking minds. Which brings us to how some people in the world are handling this. We have two choices. We can accept the situation, or we can lose our freaking minds. Which brings us to how some people in the world are handling this.

A shining example of what we must avoid at all costs in America, even in spirit, and a good view into what the mentally ill public health bureaucrats would do if they could. The first is a video from Australia. It's at a quarantine camp for suspected COVID patients that went viral this weekend. Observe as a woman points out the absurdity of some of the restrictions, her conditions, and the way in which she's been spoken to by the staff in charge at this quarantine camp in Australia. Let's take a listen. Give you a warning, yeah? It's an official warning that you have to stand about and obey the rules all you get, yeah? And that's, we have to go to the room again. So am I allowed to go to the laundry? You're allowed to go to the laundry, but you've got to wear a mask, yeah? Yeah, righto.

And you definitely can't go up to the pension house, but you're allowed to go to the laundry? You're allowed to go to the laundry but you've got to wear a mask, yeah? Yeah, righto. And you definitely can't go up to the fence anywhere else. But you're allowed to go to the laundry, yeah? That's always been the case, yeah? Right, so if I was sitting just here, which is right near the fence, why are these guys in a cabin that's right near the fence? It makes no sense, does it? But you can't leave your balcony to go up to the fence to talk to somebody else. That's the only way to do it. So far we've had that balcony. does it but you can't leave your balcony to go to the stage to talk to somebody else

so far we've had that balcony so there's we always have there has to be lines everywhere and all the lines if you cannot leave a balcony and you cannot go to someone else where it makes no sense or doesn't seem right to you that is the line and that's what the law is yeah that's how it goes yeah the law there's a law that says that direction yeah there's a third direction yeah third direction, yeah especially in this area because it was much more highly infectious last year highly infectious when all of us people are negative

so, so the risk is still very high while you're here, can we just do that? otherwise the next time it's a $5000 fine it's a $5000 fine if what? if you breach again. If I walk out onto that path. Without your mask on.

If I cross that yellow line that I've broken the rule, I will be issued with a $5,000 fine. That's correct. Right. Yeah, that's crazy. But that's actual life in Australia. Or consider Ireland, where 91% of the eligible population is vaccinated, and in response to Omicron, they are closing all nightclubs, table service and social distancing in restaurants is coming back, they're going to 50% capacity for mass events before the holiday season,

we're saying three households maximum are allowed to mix indoors. Look, I'm not fear-mongering and saying this is coming to you in this exact form in the US, but it is a glimpse into what they really want, and worse, what all of this looks like when power is unchecked. When the mindset of eradicating an eradicable disease takes form in people's minds who have total authority over you, and just how much it matters to be publicly engaged. Because the more you look away and you don't pay attention, the more the infrastructure for restricting you actually gets put more into place. It is a most important thing that we have to avoid in the coming months and as we confront new variants. This is the thing, Crystal. I mean, first of all, that video is like totally,

completely nuts. Disturbing. Yeah, I'm like, oh. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, stop me if you heard this one. Kamala Harris's team is crumbling, beset by tension and dysfunction, and desperately planning a reset. So here is the very latest. No fewer than four staffers for the vice president have left or are planning their exits. Communications director Ashley Etienne, director of press operations Peter Vells, and deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, long title there, Vince Evans.

They are all on their way out, but the most high profile departure is senior advisor and chief spokesperson, Simone Sanders. Now, Sanders had become cable news fixture thanks first to her role as a prominent surrogate on the Bernie 2016 campaign, then her perch as a CNN pundit. She then jumped ship from the most progressive candidate in the race, Bernie, to arguably the least, Biden, and proceeded to run interference for Biden on all manner of issues, but in particular those relating to his history as Jim Crow Joe. Lacking a personal relationship with Biden, however, Sanders was ultimately given a significant role in the vice president's office in return for her loyal service to them during the campaign. So this quartet of departures has sparked a new round of leaks and reporting on the turmoil

inside the vice president's team. Axios reports that, quote, one recurring theme is concern, even fear about career harm by being too closely linked to a flagging operation. Axios has told some Harris staffers want to work on Biden's re-election campaign, while others don't want to be aligned with Harris in the event another promising Democrat runs for president in 2024. Read Pete Buttigieg. Now, this is pretty incredible. Kamala Harris was handpicked as the future of the Democratic Party just a little bit over a year ago.

She is now the sitting vice president. And with a remotely acceptable image, she would be the odds-on favorite to be the next Democratic nominee. But these ambitious staffers are hedging their bets, fleeing like rats off a sinking ship, rather than be tied to the politician who had so recently been anointed as the chosen one. Even more revealing, however, was reporting from the Washington Post. Amidst all the expected caveats about unfair expectations and sexism and racism, the Washington Post paints a damning portrait of a principal actor with no one to blame but herself, lashing out at staffers for her own inadequacies. Quote, staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing

materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared. It's clear that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work, one former staffer said. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you are constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it's not really clear why. That is brutal. Now, if the latest storyline out of Kamala World sounds familiar, it's because it is the same dynamic

that played out during her presidential primary campaign, and oh, by the way, the same dynamic that played out throughout her various roles in California politics. As a former Kamala aide told the Post, quote, One of the things we've said in our little text groups among each other is that the common denominator through all this is her. Who are the next talented people you're going to bring in and burn through and then have them pretend they're retiring for positive reasons?

Yes, Kamala's current problems were all thoroughly predictable, from the patterns of dysfunction that follow her from job to job, campaign to campaign, to her overly cautious nature, seeming inability to make a decision and stick to it, over-reliance on family members who undermine the work of paid staffers. There's also her spotty talents as a politician at best, and clumsy handling of interviews and public exchanges. But most of all, it's been clear for a while that the public just isn't all that keen on her. Kamala Harris was very good at winning approval in Democratic fundraising circles and in cable news green rooms, not so good at drawing a broad base of support from even the Democratic base, let alone the country at large.

It says something profound about the Democratic Party and their priorities and their contempt for voters that in spite of all of these warning signs, they pushed forward to select Kamala Harris as the future of the party. Don't forget, there was an entire movement of Democratic elites who orchestrated Kamala's assent, who sought to assuage Biden's concerns. After all, he had some reluctance given Kamala's assent, who sought to assuage Biden's concerns. After all, he had some reluctance given Kamala's insta-ready attacks on him, their first debate, and his own concerns about her popularity in her home state. Accounts of the process in the New York Times and elsewhere, they describe Kamala's selection as being more about checking off a laundry list of identity signifiers than

about evaluating a candidate's abilities or even popularity. As Harry Reid told The Times on Biden's decision, quote, I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman. They are our most loyal voters, and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice presidential candidate. I personally think the Black women of America, and everyone else for that matter, deserve leaders who have clearly articulated priorities for the country and the skills and abilities to achieve them. Not to mention, the fact of the matter is that the Black women of America overwhelmingly voted for white men, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders for president, largely because they liked Bernie's policy and they believed that Joe could beat Trump. Kamala neither has Bernie's policy positions

nor Joe's electability, but as usual, Democratic elites thought they knew better than the public, confidently entrusting the future of the party and, dare I say, the nation to a politician whose flaws were readily apparent and who had already been rejected by the Black women of America along with most everyone else. And now, thanks to their arrogance, we are once again staring down the barrel of yet another Trump presidency. But don't worry. I'm sure when Kamala loses to Trump,

it won't be the fault of her or the consultant class or anyone else in charge. It will all be those bad old voters who just can't seem to vote the way they're supposed to, no matter which terrible candidate the Democrats try. This latest abandonment of Kamala's mass staff exodus is part of the great resignation, I guess. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have a true legend, filmmaker Oliver Stone. Of course, he is behind many, many movies that you know and love. Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Snowden, JFK, and Now has just released. JFK revisited a documentary through the looking glass. Great to have you, sir. Good to see you, sir. Thank you, Crystal.

And Sagar. Yeah, thank you, sir. So let's start with the obvious question. Why now? Why take a look back now? Are there new details? What made you decide to release this new documentary? Well, actually, no.

It's like a long-term thing. This movie, JFK, was made 30 years ago, practically 28 years ago. And, no, I'm sorry, 1991 is 30 years. Yeah. And there's been the, as a result of the movie, the Assassination Records Review Board was created as a, by an act of Congress, which is a pretty serious thing for a movie. I think it's a unique, they existed for four years. There were five, six academics, but they were they had a good staff of technical people who knew what they were doing. And they questioned a lot of people again, brought them back, and in question some new witnesses too. So as a result, and they issued this report, their term ended in 98.

Their term ended, but Congress would not renew it. And all that information is details, Sherlock Holmes kind of stuff, looking at magnifying glasses, looking at all the details and picking up little things. They all add up. But nothing was done with it with the American media, of course. It was reported badly. It was ignored and it was disappeared. So in 2013, if you remember, there was a 50th anniversary of JFK's death. And was it 50th? 50th. Yeah, 50th.

I'm sorry. I sometimes get my years wrong. And if you looked at all the TV stations, they didn't have as much cable, as much as podcasts as they have then, and there was no mention of an alternative thinking about the Kennedy killing. It was pure celebration of the Warren Commission. Oswald did it alone, Lone Assassin, all that nonsense on every channel.

It pissed me off, and it seemed like we lost that battle in the American consciousness. However, you know, it's coming. There's no time limit on this. The point is that I was busy with other things. I was doing Snowden. I was doing documentaries. But my associate here, Rob Wilson, my producer,

insisted that we go back and do this. Leave a legacy, a record, a record of life, a record about this from another point of view, which is what we've done. JFK revisited, states the case again, doesn't cover everything. This is a two-hour version. There is a four-hour version available, which will come out in January or February. But it's serious stuff. We went to it, and it's all factual, documented, checked. And that's what I want people to have as an alternative to go to in case you hear the usual bullshit from the

government about the Warren Commission. So you know what's going to happen in next, in 63, in 23, there'll be the, 23 will be the 60th anniversary of his, no, it'll be 70th in 23. What would it be? Nobody can count around here. Okay, it'd be the 60th anniversary of his, of his death, of his murder. And on that occasion, I'm sure networks will do the same thing. Everything from National Geographic to ABC, NBC, you'll hear the same bullshit over and over again because they have to reinforce it in the American memory.

This is a very important case. This is perhaps the most important case of American government that we've seen in the last hundred years. I can't think of anything more important than his killing. Why? You want me to go into that? Why? Because since Kennedyedy was killed no

american president not one think about it has been able to touch the military complex or this intelligence agency complex budgets have gone up up up the the it's purposeless nobody does nobody says stop nobody says what about peace nobody talks about an alternative way of doing business in this country, a strategy for peace. No, it's all about a strategy for tension, for preparing for war is very important for America. Much more money is spent preparing for war. War is not a good thing, they all know that, but we're coming awfully close to lighting the fuse when we keep pushing in Ukraine, we keep pushing in Taiwan, we keep pushing pretty much everywhere on the map where we create tension.

And that's something that Kennedy was totally against. He was a warrior for peace, made many speeches in his last year of his life, gave the peace speech at American University. And in September of 63, he signed the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, which was amazing. It was the first treaty between these two countries really since World War II. That was an amazing treaty. And no credit has really been given to that because people don't think about it. But him and Khrushchev, Khrushchev, the premier of Russia, and him really were on the path of detente. A lot more could have happened.

There was a space race agreement to cooperate. It was starting to happen, the detente. And the forces in our government, the hardliners, let's say, who don't want peace, who don't want to have any kind of arrangement with the Soviet Union, succeeded in their plan to get rid of Kennedy. Oliver, let me ask you this, which is, at what point did you realize that there was more to the official story? Why was it so important in your personal life? And then since then, why have you continued to try and update the American public,

create the compelling movie? I'll confess, I didn't watch JFK until I was in my teenage years. And I remember watching this and being like, oh my God, this is crazy. Everything we learned, it caused a whole rabbit hole for me personally on YouTube and more. And now, of course, your work in this new documentary has been integral in exploring that. Can you talk to us in the audience about why you think it's still important both personally to you and expand more on the legacy of the cover-up itself? Well, if you can't look at the past, if you can't see your own history, you're going to be very confused by everything that's happening in the present.

And that's what we have now, massive confusion. We have a media that we don't trust and a government that many people don't trust. So it's all a confusing morass of situations that justify going on with this budget. Nothing changes. We stay in the status quo. The budget on the Pentagon goes up, up, up. It's what, $800 billion now, and it's probably going to go, it's beyond a trillion with all the intelligence agencies and all the extra costs

thrown in. And above all, when you have, we have to realize our presidents are scared. They don't want to touch it. These are, this is the new third rail. You cannot touch defense of America because they scream national security. They scream, listen, unless we're out there challenging China, challenging Russia, challenging Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. These are our enemies. That's what they keep saying. And they keep inflating the threat. It's called threat inflation. It's been going on since since I was born, since 1940. Actually started really heavily in the 19, yeah, with the Korean War. It started in 1949-50. Without sort of spoiling the documentary for people, because we want them to go and see it, and I'm also very interested in watching the four-hour version when

that comes out as well, give us a few details that you found that were new that raise additional questions about the official narrative of how and why Kennedy was killed? Well, the Record Review Board basically interviewed many people. They went through the, for example, what was the Warren Commission? How was it put together? We found out a lot from those hearings. uh it was a crooked deal from the beginning because john foster dallas who was the cia chief who had been fired by kennedy was put i'm sorry alan dallas that's his brother's john foster dallas state alan dallas was put on the board as basically went to all the meetings and was not the head of the board.

Warren was, Justice Warren. But Dulles basically had controlled everything the CIA presented to them and cut off all the serious questions that could be given to them, which among them would be, what was the CIA doing in Cuba and trying to assassinate Castro? And what was the Bay of Pigs about, which is a key event in Kennedy's life? What was the missile crisis about? Dulles made sure that the commissioners didn't hear from the CIA, basically. They got bullshit information from them. When it came to, same thing was true about FBI.

Anything that was sensitive was derailed by Dulles. So it's like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop, as I said back when. Aside from that, the board went back into the details, the evidence, and none of the primary evidence that was used on that day holds up. None, not one thing. The rifle, the bullets, the fingerprints, everything that they blamed on Oswald, not one thing would be held up in court because there was no chain of custody on their information. You'd think they'd take care in a case like this to be ultra careful to log everything in which they tried to do, but so many mistakes occurred that it's clear that there was something at work to

derail an honest investigation. And we found this out and we go into the details of all that proof. You should see it to believe it. And on top of that- One of the things, sorry, one of the things that, I don't know if this was new or not, but it was something that was new to me, was the fact that there were other plots on Kennedy's life and attempts on Kennedy's life in that same year that had been uncovered and yet were kept secret from the public and were kept secret from the Secret Service agents who were tasked with protecting Kennedy. Talk to us a little bit about that piece, too, because that, to me, was really eye-opening. Well, we go into the detail, more details about the Chicago, the Chicago attempt in November of 63 before, and also the Tampa, Tampa, Florida attempt. In Chicago, they, a landlady spotted four Cubans with rifles in an apartment, and she

brought it to the attention of the FBI or the police, I don't remember, and they arrested two of the Cubans and they also arrested the man who was going to be the next Harvey Oswald. He was Thomas Vallee and he had also, like Oswald, had a job in a high office building where the car would have to slow down to make the turn, etc. He had been a Marine in a program in Japan, another base in Japan. He had defected to the Soviet Union, so it seems, as did other people, so it seemed like it was a program run by the CIA in the 50s to learn about Russia, sending defectors there. And that's what Oswald was. Came back to the United States, as you know,

without difficulty and was set up to take the rap in Chicago. But Kennedy canceled the trip. He was warned by, we don't know exactly by who, but he was warned and he did not go. In Tampa, it was the same thing, except he wasn't a Marine. He was a Cuban involved with the Cuban groups against Castro in Tampa and in Florida. There was a big station in Miami. There were a lot of Cubans involved. Kennedy had crossed the line with that. By not going into the Bay of Pigs, he refused to invade Cuba. He refused, and that cost him. In 1962, when the missile crisis came, the generals were very clear, bomb the shit out of them. We're going in there.

LeMay wanted to go in. This was an excuse to go in for them because the Russians had put missiles in Cuba. Kennedy, again, refused to go to war. He came very close. We owe perhaps our lives to his judiciousness in this case, because it was very close. And it was really Robert and Jack and the Soviet ambassador and Khrushchev who solved this issue at the last second. It was very scary. But it was clear that if Kennedy, the point, the bigger point is that if Kennedy is not going to go invade Cuba, why the hell is he going to go invade and send troops to Vietnam? That was the whole point. You have to think of Cuba. You have to think of Vietnam.

And you have to think of Berlin and Moscow. These are the three points of a compass. And you can put pressure on any one of those. But Vietnam was ridiculous. Kennedy said, if I'm not going to send troops into Cuba 90 miles away, why am I going to send troops 6,000 miles away? Remember, he only had advisors in Vietnam. This is the big historical point that gets confused because historians who are very conservative tend to be conservative are always trying to tell you that Lyndon Johnson transitioned, Johnson continued the policies of Kennedy. That's horseshit. He didn't. He changed everything except

the civil rights position on Kennedy. In Vietnam, he went right to war. He took a year and he sent troops to Vietnam, combat troops, and that was over. I was one of those combat troops, so that's why I have a particular interest in it, but I didn't know anything at the time. That's when you asked me a question. What did I, how did i get into it not at all i was a typical conventional conservative student uh and uh because my father was was republican and very very intelligent man and i bought all that stuff that the russians were out to get us. And that was very much the mood of the 19, early 50s. Many of my dad's friends were liberals, because he entertained different points of views,

but they were all scared in a way. They were scared of speaking up. There was this whole feeling that if you spoke too much, you were a Russian, you were a sympathizer. Same thing is true now, by the way. That's what you should reckon on. The same thing is with all this russiagate shit it starts again and they keep feeding us this russia russia russia now it's china you know you have to understand the nature of threat inflation this is the this is what our government is great at and the media

helps them they're great at it they've been doing it for many years. The CIA put assets in the media back in the 50s. And a lot of them are around this Kennedy case because they make sure that nobody gets very far with an investigation on it. They ridicule them. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you want to watch the full interview, it's about 40 minutes long. Become a premium subscriber today. That's what we go ahead and do for our premium subs. We do two long form ones per month with some special people. This time happened to be somebody like Oliver, nice long discussion. And that's what we give them along with, you know, all kinds of benefits. You get to watch the show an hour early, watch it full and uncut, reaction to each other's monologues. But look, more important, it is about being able to support

our work here so that we can continue to expand out. Obviously, we upgraded the studio. We're looking at bringing on more people, creating more awesome content for all of you. And all we're focused on right now is the midterms. Gearing up, be able to provide you guys the coverage that you're just not going to be able to see anywhere else. That's where we really want to become a major powerhouse. Planning starts now. We need your support if you're able to offer it.

So thank you. Love you guys so much. We've got some big guests coming up this week. So stay tuned for that. Have a great day. We'll see you back here tomorrow. This is an iHeart Podcast.