Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/6/22 - Georgia Senate Runoff, Ukraine Strikes Within Russia, Putin Goes To Crimea, Landmark Scotus Case, Fauci Deposition, Yemen War & MORE!

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on the Georgia Senate race, the war in Ukraine, Fauci's Deposition, American loneliness, Saudi war in Yemen & 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/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. We still do not have intro music. We promise we're going to get on that very soon. Should we set a deadline? No. No, let's not set a deadline.

It's too much pressure. We're definitely going to do that. I'm Ryan Grim. This is Emily Jashinsky. We've got a lot to get into. That's right. We got war in Ukraine expanding. But first, in Georgia, the end of the midterms is coming. And potentially, maybe, I'm curious for your take on this, the end of an era. Let's put up A1 here. Raphael Warnock is heading into today with a small but significant polling lead. but also more importantly, with more than a million votes banked so far in Georgia, a significant lead among those votes. We don't know how those people voted, but we know what party they're in. And we'll talk about this later. 52% of the votes in so far are Democrats. 39% are Republicans. The rest are independents.

And we know in the polls, he's winning independents, which means Hershel Walker on election day would have to win that day's turnout by something like 17 percent. And if you look at the polls, this is just polls as of Monday. Warnock plus five, Warnock plus five, Warnock plus three, Warnock plus four, Warnock plus five, Warnock plus four, Warnock plus five, Warnock plus two. If you go to polls from Friday, Warnock plus four, Warnock plus three. I'm not seeing any- Put up a two here. Not since November 7th am I seeing a poll that has Herschel Walker in the lead on RCP's aggregation. Right. And as a result, Larry Sabato's crystal ball moved it over to lean

Democrat. Now, polls are often wrong. But what you want to do is you want to combine the polling data that you get with other inputs. And one of those inputs being votes that have already been cast. Another being rally sizes, all the intangibles. This is something conservatives have been frustrated with Walker about, right? He kind of took off, like there's only a month of the runoff, but on a bunch of those weekends, he was just kind of MIA. Yeah. So, I mean, yes. And 1.9 million votes have already been cast, which is pretty shocking. That's a record for Georgia. They've had about 300,000 people voting early every day in recent days. I mean, that's just an insane number. Whatever Jim Crow 2.0 did, it did not manage to stop people from voting.

And I believe Brian Kemp actually cut early voting days from 17 to 5, which again, I mean, we're talking about 1.9 million in, and just I want to give some perspective on those numbers because they're really shocking. The total number of votes that were cast in the 2018 midterm and the 2022 midterm before the runoff was 3.948 and 3.961, respectively. So about 4 million votes cast. 2 million have already been cast early. In the 2021 runoff, there were about 4.5 million votes cast. Again,

2 million of those votes are already in. As you mentioned, Ryan, we have the polling, but we also have the breakdown of voters that have already come and cast their ballots. That number clearly favors Democrats by a margin of 52 to 39. So, Herschel Walker was a Trump sort of suggested candidate. Georgia Republicans, some Georgia Republicans in the party probably would have preferred someone else. But it looks like Herschel's going to lose. And what does this say about Trump? Like, does this, is this a Georgia specific thing that Georgia is going to continue to be for however long a kind of a red state where Republicans are in control on the state level? They can gerrymander all of those state legislative seats.

They can keep winning the governor's mansion. But on the federal level and the presidential level, is it just becoming a blue state? Or is there something more specific to Trump here? There's something more specific to Trump here. Specifically, if you look at Brian Kemp, the numbers that Brian Kemp put up on election night. more specific to Trump here? There's something more specific to Trump here, specifically if you look at Brian Kemp, the numbers that Brian Kemp put up on election night. He beat Stacey Abrams, who I would consider a pretty bad candidate, by a healthy margin. He got 53.4% of the vote, 2.1 million votes. Stacey Abrams got 45, about 46% of the vote. That's a pretty

healthy margin there, about seven points, easy victory, whereas Walker wouldn't even come. And so you could say that that's a candidate quality issue. You could say it's a Trump issue. I think both of those questions are correct. Now, Kemp had fallen out of favor with Trump pretty famously over overturning Georgia's results in 2020. So it is, I think, very telling that somebody, Trump, a very high profile Trump enemy, Trump appointed enemy, like Brian Kemp, who we have an ad, I think, from Kemp, from Walker that shows Kemp giving his support. If that tells you anything that's been running over the course of the midterms, he did well. Oh, and if you want to put up A3, that's the website that has these early voting numbers.

You can check it out yourself. It's targetearly.targetsmart.com, and it's a Democratic data firm that is able to tell which votes have been cast and whether or not that person is registered as a Democrat, independent, or Republican. You can fiddle around with all the numbers on their site. But no amount of fiddling makes it any better for Walker. So the numbers you're talking about, that means that about 200,000 plus Republicans went to the polls on election day, cast a ballot for Kemp, and then either voted

for Warnock, a write-in, a libertarian candidate, or didn't vote at all, just left it blank. And if you have a sizable enough number of those people, is that a signal about Trump's kind of drag on the party nationally? Or is there something unique about Georgia because of his history there, of his fight with Kemp, his perfect phone call where he's like, I need 11. I don't care how you do it. Just get me 11,000 votes. Just get it done. And then the Ravensburger leaks the audio of the phone call. He then barnstorms the state, practically for Democrats in the 21 runoff, helping both Warnock and Ossoff win. And I say for Democrats because A, he set up the $2,000 check fiasco for Republicans. After they signed the $600 checks, Trump's like, hey, why don't you do 2000? Democrats are like, great, do 2000. And then Warnock and Ossoff ran on,

make it 2000. But then also he was telling everybody that it was rigged and there's no point in voting. So Trump did so much to hurt Georgia Republicans in 2020. Is he more toxic there? Or is he equally toxic around the country? And this is going to be a drag on him, despite the fact that, let's be honest, he's still polling ahead of Ron DeSantis. He's still, or I guess not in every poll, but he's still Trump. But how much of a drag is this on him? So if you look at the numbers, about 30% of people nationwide say they're more of Republican voters, say they're more loyal to Donald Trump than the Republican Party. And that number has actually shifted recently in favor of the Republican Party and less in favor of Donald Trump. So that means the amount of people who say they're favorable to

Donald Trump and not just the Republican Party over the Republican Party has decreased, while people who say they're loyal to the party over Trump has changed. And so that is, I think, a really important thing to keep in mind, because there's this hardened faction of the electorate, for very good reasons, that supports Donald Trump and Donald Trump only, or Donald Trump above the Republican Party. And that's a faction of the electorate that really matters. And I think that might's a faction of the electorate that really matters. And I think that might be a faction of the electorate that doesn't go out and vote, let alone vote for Herschel Walker, because they just don't trust the results. So as opposed to it being that Trump is uniquely toxic in Georgia, I would say

it's possible that you just have Trump voters who don't trust the election, even though Kemp ushered in those electoral reforms that were decried as Jim Eagle, Jim Croce, you can go down the list. It seems entirely possible to me that Walker's results may actually be a glimpse into what happens when you have that remaining faction of Trump voters who won't support Kemp and just won't vote, period. Like maybe they're just straight up. Maybe only Trump can get them out. Right. Exactly. And that's a problem for Republicans around the country, because you can't run Dr. Oz in Erie County and expect to win the same margins as Donald Trump with Dr. Oz. You can't do it. And so, again, for Republicans, it's about finding that sweet spot that right now, electorally, mathematically, Ron DeSantis has done it, but it's going to be difficult.

I mean, I don't think you can run Brian Kemp for president. That's not going to be, I think, the ticket that a lot of people get behind. So that's a sweet spot that's incredibly elusive. Speaking of the Republican sweet spot, Glenn Youngkin did not campaign in Georgia, despite Republicans hoping that he would. Does he come out of this? And we could put up a four, which is the polling numbers that Emily talked about. All those blues you see over there on the right are the polls coming in for Raphael Warnock. And obviously, Youngkin has a 538.com up on his toolbar there.

So he sees this and he's like, yeah, you know what, Herschel? I think you're all right on your own. Not going to come down there. So does he come out of this looking better than he did ahead of time? Like, is that where, is that the analysis Republicans are going to come to? I think they're definitely looking at Youngkin and DeSantis as people who were able to get that coalition together of what they saw,

what they see as parents, sort of anti-woke independence, but not turn off people by being, what does Biden say, ultra MAGA, hardcore MAGA, whatever it is. And that's sort of what people see it as. Although DeSantis has been pretty hardcore MAGA, even though Trump has been attacking him recently. But also another thing to keep in mind here, if we put A5 up, we're talking about 80 million dollars that have been spent just in this runoff. That's a truly remarkable number. Seventy nine million into airtime in the runoff. Just unbelievable number. And people in Georgia right now are also debating what to do with their elections going forward because the runoff tacks on weeks

to an exhausting election season and makes them spend, I think it's like $75 million in election costs for a runoff. Yeah, state election costs. Oh, because of all the, because you got to send the envelopes back out. It's a lot. You got the employees to count them again. Right. So that's another thing to look for into the future. And I think we should go ahead and just for a taste of what that airtime has looked like, where that $79 million, $79 million in just a few weeks has gone. Let's roll a couple of their ads, a couple ads from, we'll roll an ad from Warnock and then from Walker, or maybe it's the other way around, and just get a taste of what people in Georgia have been seeing. Let's roll A6.

Character is what you do when nobody's watching. Mm-hmm. And Warnock thought no one was watching when his ex-wife called police to report his abuse. And he's a great actor. And Warnock thought no one was watching when he evicted poor people from their homes. He really evicted for $119, $119.

Treat me like s***. Character is what you do. When nobody's watching, you find out who Reverend Warnock really is. I'm Herschel Walker, and I approve this message. New details tonight about accusations that continue to follow Senate candidate Herschel Walker. Walker's ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, got a protective order against him. Her sister submitted an affidavit saying he stated unequivocally that he was going to shoot my sister, Cindy. Put the gun to my temple.

You had the gun right to your head? What did he say? I'm going to blow your effing brains out. Over the years, two other women have accused the Senate candidate of threats. A woman telling police she was very frightened of Walker, making threats to her and having her house watched. In another incident, a police report shows a woman who was involved in a relationship with Walker said he told her that he was going to blow her head off. At one point, with a loaded pistol in his car, he admits he set out to kill a man over a trivial business dispute. Oh yeah, I did want to kill her.

Yeah, I did. He says he doesn't remember a lot of details of these. He may not, but I certainly do. Capping it off with Walker being like, yeah, I wanted to kill him. Yeah. I feel like the first ad, which is the hit on Warnock, is so deeply undermined by the last three seconds,

which is, I'm Herschel Walker, and I approve this message. Because then you're like, oh, okay, well, if it's a question of character, you could be like, hmm, let me find out more about what happened with Warnock and his ex-wife. Let me see who I agree with or disagree with in this dispute. And then you're like, oh, but if it's a question of character between walker and warnock you're that that's not terrain that republicans want to be fighting on they want to say forget character what matters is how you're going to vote in the senate and what your kind of political values are because if it's going to be on character there aren't many people that would lose to herschel walker in georg Well, I think it's fundamentally something that can also neutralize, though, the character

question. I think that's probably part of the strategy here. And Herschel Walker is loved in Georgia by many, many people just for his athletic career. He's an icon. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, I think a lot of people do admire champion athletes. Now, whether that means they want to put them in the Senate, if they seem to have other character issues that come out over the course of the campaign, I don't know. But it is one of those things that could potentially depress independent turnout for Warnock to say, hey, look, he's saying that he's going to be the man of integrity and character that gets into the office,

and you have to block Herschel Walker from getting into the office. But if you think, hey, maybe these two guys are both kind of, you know, lame. Maybe they're both losers. Then maybe you stay home. And what's another interesting thing is just this $80 million runoff has been nasty. Basically what you noticed in both of those ads, and this had come out before just the runoff, but allegations of domestic abuse. Warnock's ex-wife alleges that he ran over her foot with a car. They're in a nasty custody

battle. So he has problems with that as well. And there are many, many allegations of abuse against Herschel Walker. He said that he's had mental illness. He's actually copped to a lot of bad stuff that he's done in his past, which has been an interesting strategy. But it's just really been a nasty one. And the Warnock one was an issue in the 2020 election. The police report came out. Basically, he and his ex-wife were having a fight near the car. He backed the car up. She claims that the car ran over her toe. The police said that they saw no evidence of any injuries and so didn't do anything at the time. And I think that kind of helped Warnock put it behind him.

And nobody wants to say, well, I almost ran over my wife. Once you're in that, it's not good. But like I said, compared to he put a gun to my temple and said he was going to pull the trigger uh and then him saying yeah i wanted to kill that guy or and multiple other women also saying that he had made these like severe traumatizing threats although the last thing i'll say maybe we can pop um a8 up on the. This is a quote from Marshall Walker. Oh my God, so good. He says he hasn't seen any lack of enthusiasm from voters.

This is a quote from Politico. Walker said, they're not less motivated because they know right now that the House will be even so that they don't want to understand what is happening right now. You get the House, you get the committees, you get all the committees even. They just stalled things within there. So if we keep a check on Joe Biden, we're just going to keep a check on him, Walker said. Now, it sounds there like he thinks he's running for the House or he's mixing up the words House and Senate. I don't know. But the point I was going to raise is there's a difference, I think, in Warnock's contrast and Walker's contrast in that Herschel Walker isn't running as, you know,

an erudite statesman, whereas Warnock is running as a sort of, I mean, he's running on his religious credentials. He is running. Reverend Martin Luther King's church. I mean, it's. Right. And so with Herschel Walker, it's like, yeah, but it's all kind of baked into the cake. I mean, it's right. And so with Herschel Walker, it's like, yeah, but it's all kind of baked into the cake. I mean, what are you going to say? He's he's a football player and he is, you know, has had a checkered pass. Well, he'll tell you the same things. Right. And so this. So Friday, to pick up the thread we talked about there, audio emerges of him saying, I live in Texas. He took a homestead exemption in Texas. He talked about making the decision to run for Georgia, for the race. I was going to say Georgia Senate, but it's not obvious he knows he's running foraking here. But the funny thing is, you're not sure. Like, you have to sit with the possibility that he thinks he's running for the house. Yeah.

But you can't immediately rule it out. And everybody watching that knows you can't immediately rule that out. And that's amazing. He might have been misspeaking. Maybe he thinks they're both called houses. And he's going to the upper house. And there's the lower house. Something. Maybe he thinks they're both called houses and he's going to the upper house and there's the lower house, something.

But you're like, I'm not, I would not bet my life that he doesn't think he's running for the House. Also, his point is also wrong, even on its own terms. Republicans already control the House. So one more seat in the House wouldn't actually help them. And Democrats have a majority in the Senate no matter what happens. That's what was confusing to me. It's that there wasn't a, even, you could take it in the most charitable possible way, and it's still the logic didn't check out with reality. It didn't match up to reality. But, you know, with Herschel Walker, it reminds me a lot,

we were talking about this last week, of the runoff between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. And Roy Moore is a pretty different ballgame, but in the respect that there are Republicans who are single life or single issue voters on pro-life issues. There are Republicans who are single issue voters right now on basically wokeness issues. That's what we're going to call it. And what I would say is just basically these people are mostly warm bodies anyway. I think the public is increasingly aware of that. Someone is just a robot who's going to vote either the way the sort of anti-McConnell people want them to vote or the anti-Schumer people or the anti-Pelosi people want them to vote,

or they're going to vote down the line with McConnell, with Schumer, with Pelosi, with McCarthy. And as long as you can determine which side of that they're on, you probably know what's going to happen and you just need them to pull the lever. And last point on these early voting numbers that you can fiddle around with, it looks like Warnock is up probably 15 points in the early vote to start. But if you look at youth vote, here's what's interesting. Youth vote, 18 to 29, made up almost 11% of the electorate on election day, which is a huge amount. That's well above what young people used to do, say, 2014 and before. So far in the early vote, they're only 7.9%.

And so there are two possibilities here. One, which is what I think, which is that young people procrastinate and they're more likely to vote on election day if you only have a couple of weeks to vote. Or they're going to go back to their 2014 kind of turnout levels and youth turnout will be way down. I don't think that's right. But if it's right, then Walker could be closer and maybe only lose by a couple of points. If youth turnout on election day surges and hits what it was during the general election, 10.9 percent, you could see a significant Warnock win, which would be kind of startling because, you know, he only won by 30,000 votes in the general election. So finding a way to go from 30,000 to winning by several hundred thousand

is difficult in the same state a month apart, but Walker may have figured it out. You know, it's interesting to kind of hypothesize about what this race would have looked like had it been the determinative factor in control of the Senate. And again, it's not, and there's still $80 million that poured into it because obviously that vote is extremely important either way. But, you know, when Republicans sort of realized what wasn't at stake in Georgia, it does seem like, and I saw a quote in Politico from a GOP guy down in Georgia saying,

it's like everybody's just kind of hoping for the best right now, but, you know, that's all you can do. And it's so crazy to think that Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin only got a couple million bucks from the party and lost by like 20,000 votes. And that's also a Senate seat. But again, we're looking at these numbers right now. And I think we don't have a poll that shows, a recent poll that shows Walker winning. We have the early vote numbers that favor Democrats by a really sizable margin. And the polling in the last,

what, five plus years just really hasn't been great. So you never know. It's raining in Georgia. Who knows who that favors? Polls close at seven. But certainly here, I think we're expecting a Warnock win. Yeah. And results should be in by nine, 10 o'clock. We'll see. We'll be watching. Let's move on to Ukraine. There's a lot of news on this front. Just in the last 24 hours, we're going to start with a video of Vladimir Putin driving across the Crimea Bridge. This happened on Monday. Let's roll right now. B2, the video of Putin. The bridge was hit by a truck bomb on October 8th. This was a surprise visit from Putin. Now,

on Monday also, New York Times has this sentence in its report on what happened between Ukraine and Russia. Quote, Ukraine executed its most brazen attack into Russian territory in the nine-month-old war on Monday, targeting two military bases hundreds of miles inside the country using unmanned drones, according to the Russian defense industry and to a senior Ukrainian official. They got within 100 miles of Moscow with one of those. Brian, this is huge news. I think the New York Times is correct to say it's the most brazen attack into Russian territory.

What did you make of the development yesterday? Just monster escalation, it seems like. So what Ukraine did here is attacked the airfields from which Russia has been launching a lot of its attacks. war crime attacks on the kind of infrastructure, the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine heading into the winter, trying to plunge the country into cold and darkness throughout the long Ukrainian winter. And so they sent drones to these two air bases, one of them Engels Airfield, I guess, after Frederick Engels. It's a Soviet era name. It's near, I guess, the town of Engels. They didn't rename that. Although there's still love for Engels over there. Yeah. It's a base in the south of Russia. Right. And one of them was, what, 100 miles away from Moscow. Russia claims that they were able to shoot down that drone, but that as it crashed, it ended up killing a couple of servicemen and hitting,

like, I think one aircraft. Yeah, two planes. It had slightly damaged two planes the fall of the Soviet-era jet drones, that's what the New York Times is reporting, that Russia said were shot down. Slightly damaged two planes and, according to Russia, killed three servicemen and wounded four others. And again, we're talking 300 miles from the Ukrainian border. One of these is 100 miles from Moscow. You can see there in the New York Times headline, it says, deep into Russia, deep in Russia. And I think that's absolutely correct. Ryan, the Putin video happening, I mean, that visit happened earlier on Monday.

What do you make of both of these things happening on the same day? I thought Putin would use a horse, would ride a horse across the bridge. Isn't that kind of his thing? No. I mean, so that's his flex to try to assure the Russian public that this is not going backwards for him. He's also, there were reports in the Post, the Times, that Putin is building up bases in Mariupol, trying to strengthen his hold on key parts of Ukraine that they're currently occupying, even as they lose ground elsewhere around the country. Now, I think it's useful for de-escalation that Ukraine did not use kind of American weapons.

If Ukraine had used American drones or American weapons, you'd have Russia calling an attack by NATO, and then who knows what that response would be. I think it shows that Ukraine isn't really afraid of Russia escalating inside Ukraine. So, you know, Russia has played the card of humanitarian catastrophe by constantly attacking all of these power plants and other civilian elements of infrastructure. Then they've kind of, they don't long, they don't have a threat that they're going to, you know, go that much more brutal. Because at the beginning of the conflict, you kept hearing people who were sympathetic to the Russian side saying, well, they have gloves on still. They could really be punishing Ukraine, and they're not so far. So don't do this or don't do that. Now that they're trying to plunge, they're trying to freeze everybody to death over there, then that takes away kind of a stick.

So I guess Ukraine is in a we don't have anything to lose frame. Now, certainly they do. There are still nuclear weapons that Russia holds. And the world has plenty to lose in a nuclear fireball if this continued to escalate. So to me, it shows the importance of actually getting this thing to the negotiating table because you don't know any morning you could wake up with somebody stepping over a line that can't be walked back. Right. Absolutely. And on that note, actually, did you read the national interest story? We have a graphic of it. We have a tear sheet of it that we can put up right now. It was about what a potential peace proposal might look like. Did you get a chance to take that? No. So tell me about this.

Well, basically what the sort of contours of a legitimate proposal being passed around might be. And that is something that really should have been a conversation months and months and months and months ago. Obviously, there are some people who have been talking about it for months and months and months. But it's basically like seven-year waiting period for Ukraine to enter NATO, which, you know, that doesn't really solve any problems at all, actually. And it may be something that can call off, everyone calls off their dogs in the moment. But also, you know, I think this would necessarily involve ceding some territory to Russia.

Which is a non-starter for Zelensky, for a lot of people in the American government. But it has to, I mean, you have to have something on the table in order to deescalate. Right, and it goes back to this rhetoric where we've set Zelensky up, I think, to be humiliated in the way that the U.S. has consistently said that, you know, Zelensky and the Ukrainians are the ones

that are fighting on behalf of and negotiating on behalf of Ukrainians. And the United States is just here to help. That has been our posture the entire time. The United States, maybe there's a time throughout our history where we have stuck by our word on something. I can't think of it offhand. Maybe somebody out there can find an example. But people who have relied on the word of the United States have consistently lost. And so the idea

that an empire like the United States was ever going to indefinitely turn over its foreign policy to a smaller country like Ukraine that is funding and backing in this war against Russia was always absurd. It's a nice thought when sovereignty and self-determination, these are nice thoughts ever since Woodrow Wilson proposed them. They've been lies ever since Woodrow Wilson proposed them. They've been lies ever since Woodrow Wilson proposed them. Every country who believed that Woodrow Wilson was serious about their own self-determination paid the price of our betrayal. These are words. These are not things that the United States is going to act on indefinitely. And so a peace deal, it is not going to be only up to Ukraine. Yeah. And here's from National Interest. They say a proposal that's transmitted

through a Ukrainian contact has been drawn up by, quote, some Western countries, which is a euphemism for the United States. They put in parentheses and has been initially accepted by the Ukrainians. The cards on the table for Russia make interesting reading. In this agreement, there is a complete cessation of hostilities and a withdrawal of troops from Ukraine by Russia. The thorny question of NATO will be postponed and Ukraine will join after a minimum period of seven years. A hundred kilometer wide security zone will run along the borders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus and will be policed by six Western countries. Crimea will become a neutral area and the Russian Navy would leave the Black Sea. They say there in the national interest that has initially been accepted by the Ukrainians, Crimea becoming a neutral area and the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine, I just,

I don't see Russia doing that. I don't see Crimea becoming a neutral area from the Ukrainian perspective. So the idea that that's sort of been initially accepted by Ukrainians is pretty surprising to me. And then the question is, or else what? Right. So if the United States, if let's say, hypothetically, the United States is offering some type of a deal like this, the question then, or what? Like what happens if Russia does not accept the terms of a deal like this. The question then, or what? What happens if Russia does not accept the terms of this deal? According to this, the Ukrainians are like, okay, we'll take this. Something along these lines will work. How much more support does the United States

offer? And I don't know if we have the element for this here, but The Washington Post is reporting this morning that indefinite support for the war in Ukraine is steadily fading among the American public. Now, there might be enough support to last long enough to get to a place where Russia has to eventually capitulate. And there might not. Also, there is a gap, a significant gap between kind of elite and Washington support for the war and public support for the war. And in that gap is the kind of gap of our democracy. Like when it comes to foreign policy, the American public gets some say, like they get to sort of like offer an opinion, but it's not democratically decided. Like foreign policy decisions are often bipartisan, even if one party would go slightly different direction than the other party. And so if the American public turns against the war, that doesn't mean that the war support stops. Eventually, the weight of opposition can work its way kind of through the broken,

rusty machinery of our democracy. But it takes many cycles. And to wrap up, and we started the segment with Putin driving over the Crimea Bridge, the Crimea Bridge, and national interest said, you know, this leaked peace deal for what it's worth is basically being rejected by Putin by the fact that he was continuing to bomb Ukrainian infrastructure. And then Ukraine retaliated and Russia, by the way, retaliated back. So again, the idea that there's a plausible peace deal being circulated by both sides right now, I mean, it's very important to have terms on the table, period. But the idea that we are meaningfully close to an end, I think, is unfortunately, tragically elusive at the moment. And you could at least say that calling Crimea neutral would be a win for Russia.

Because right now it's called officially legally Ukrainian territory that Russia has illegally annexed. And so if they move it back to neutral, then that's arguably moving it in Russia's direction. That plus lack of prosecution, maybe there's enough pressure on him that Putin can find some way to declare victory. Let's turn to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the transcript of his interview with, who was it, the Missouri AG? He's been deposed in a lawsuit brought by the AGs, the attorney generals of both. Put a C1 here. Yeah, so this is both Louisiana and Missouri. They have a lawsuit against the federal government, also against the Biden administration for allegedly colluding with social media companies to suppress speech.

And they were, so Fauci was deposed, I believe, last week. Yesterday, the full transcript dropped, and it is long. I think it makes Fauci did not look great. This is A.G. Landry. He's saying in his press release, Fauci's recent deposition only confirmed what we already knew. Federal bureaucrats in collusion with social media companies watching control not only what you think, but especially what you say. During no time in human history was this more obvious than during COVID-19, where social engineering tactics were used against the American public not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government-sanctioned narrative. And you can see if you read the full transcript, which is extremely long.

He was deposed for a very long time. Almost 500 pages or something. Yeah, it was hours and hours of deposition on Fauci's behalf. You can see, I mean, Fauci uses the term, I do not recall, the famous term I do not recall many, many, many times. He leans on that very, very heavily. I do not recall. I do not recall. And again, that's very common of people in positions of power whenever they're deposed. The American public is well aware of that. And in a long deposition, you would imagine there would be some I do not recalls, but I want to put up the statement that we got from Justin Goodman with White Coat Waste Project. That's going to be, yeah, let's pop that up on the screen because

Justin, I reached out to him last night, White Coat Waste, we had him on the show a couple weeks back. They've been doing a lot of insanely good FOIA work that in a lot of what we know about what the government knew in the early days of the pandemic has come from them. So Justin immediately gave the statement to us here at CounterPoints and said what really jumped out at me from this deposition is that in his in the deposition, Fauci definitively states at numerous points that it is, quote, impossible that the animal experiments that he funded in Wuhan could have sparked the pandemic. At the same time, he claims he's only vaguely familiar with the project he was funding there and that he barely knows the key players, including some of the scientists and people may be familiar with Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. And Fauci, Justin says, cannot have it both ways. Hopefully the incoming House GOP majority's promised COVID origins investigation

can refresh his memory and get the truth. All right, Ryan, I think that is a really big tension for Fauci. And in the deposition, you can see him repeatedly saying, I'm vaguely familiar with Daszak. I'm vaguely familiar with EcoHealth. I'm vaguely familiar with the EcoHealth Alliance. But also, it is impossible. Impossible is what he's saying publicly that the animal research here created the pandemic. My favorite part was that he also doesn't know how to pronounce DASAC.

Yes. Which I still don't. I've been reporting on the guy for two years. Let's just go with DASAC. Go with Dazak. Yes. Which I still don't. I've been reporting on the guy for two years. Let's just go with Dazak. Dazak. Go with Dazak. Dazak. Says, the lawyer says, how do you say his name, if you know? And Fauci says, I'm not sure. I think it's Dazak. I think so. But completely unhelpful transcript because it just spells the name. Like, I need to go listen to the audio. And then he says, we've met once or

twice. But I don't know. But we may, like, I'm not sure if we've met. And he says, there's a picture of us at a scientific conference, which, and he rightly says, like, look, that happens a lot. I meet hundreds of people at scientific conferences. They're like, it's Dr. Fauci. Let me get a picture. They snap selfie. Years long later, they might start a pandemic. And then now all of a sudden, you're getting blamed for the pandemic because this person snapped a selfie with you. But you're right that he consistently says, yes, it's true that NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance. But this particular project, did we fund that particular one? Who knows?

Well, and they also get into a ridiculous debate about gain of function. And this is something that you've covered a lot about Fauci and the medical establishment being very cagey about what the actual definition of gain of function is. Because that might mean the grant that was given to EcoHealth Alliance, a government grant given to EcoHealth Alliance that would have had to have been approved by Fauci. And he's saying in this deposition, he doesn't think, he doesn't remember, but he doesn't think it was at his level. It may have been a deputy that it came across their desk, not his desk, something to that effect. The money was going to something that was intentionally gain of function. There had been a cessation of a federal cessation of gain of funding for gain of function research. And he's basically concedes at one point in this deposition, you know cessation of funding for gain-of-function research. And he basically

concedes at one point in this deposition, you know, one of the terms in the grant could mean amplifying the virus. Certainly could. And so I'll just read a little tiny bit of that. The lawyer says, so you refer to conditions under which such research should be done when you're generating potentially dangerous viruses. It's like, right. First of all, is that kind of research generally referred to as gain-of-function research? And here, I'll just stop. Gain-of-function, this is Fauci. Gain-of-function is a very potentially misleading terminology. And that was one of the reasons why several years ago, outside groups, not the NIH, made the determination that they would much more strictly define the guard

rails of experiments that would require additional oversight and did away with the terminology gain of function because it can often be very confusing and misleading. So read between the lines of what he's saying there. In order to stave off government regulation, these outside organizations said that they were going to self-regulate, that they were going to police themselves, put up their own guardrails. And also, by the way, they were going to get rid of this pesky term, gain of function, so that if somebody comes asking, like, are you doing gain of function research over here? Well, there is no such thing really as gain of function research. And we've put up all of these guardrails. And this giant debate is happening between 2012, 2013, 2014. Obama, to his great credit, I wasn't even following this at the time,

clearly got a very good briefing on this issue. And it was like, you know what, this looks dangerous. And he paused all gain-of-function research. Not long after the pause was lifted, I guess the Trump campaign comes in, Trump administration comes in, and Fauci, who has 40 years of bureaucratic knife-fighting experience, is like, oh, cool, new administration, new rules, I can get this lifted. You get it lifted, a couple years later, we have a pandemic. That alone does not prove anything, but the timeline is frightening that if what is alleged to have happened in the Wuhan lab did actually spark the pandemic, it only took a couple of years of this risky research.

We're still doing it, and we're doing it at a much greater clip around the world at this point. We hosted a few months back, I think it was over the summer, a debate between someone at MIT and someone at Johns Hopkins on what gain of function is and if it's worth it. So I really, that was a very clarifying conversation. So if folks are interested in that, they can check it out. That was back at the Hill.

But it was fascinating to pit experts against each other because this is a question experts disagree on. Now, I think most of the public is probably in our camp run. That's like, this is, no, I can't stop. And so to Justin's point, the House GOP, now that we know they'll have the majority, McCarthy has said, he's told me, he's told other people that he absolutely will be investigating the origins of COVID. I think though that this deposition, which is hours long, hundreds of pages long, is a great glimpse into what that's going to look like if they try to get Fauci to testify.

I don't think he has any fear of testifying. That's why he goes on every different show that will have him. He wants to talk to people. He's arrogant to the point where he thinks he can explain away that he can basically talk through any of these questions. So I don't know how productive it is to continue the investigating, continue probing Fauci because he's, he doesn't admit to anything. He says, you know, he'll get into these at one point, the attorney basically says, you know, stop going on tangents in the deposition because it does seem to be an intentional sort of deflection technique where he's talking for a really long time and going in different directions in order to distract from one question or another. I doubt that Fauci himself is, that you're going to get any productive lines of inquiry out of

Fauci himself at this point because he is ready to talk in circles around absolutely anyone without revealing pretty much anything. All right. So let's move on to the Supreme Court. Big case, potentially a landmark case in front of the Supreme Court. All arguments happened yesterday in the 303 Creative case, which I really think could be a landmark First Amendment case now that the balance of the court has shifted rightwards. Folks are expecting this to change what happened in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, which a lot of people might remember. Jack Phillips, he's a Colorado baker, ended up in the Supreme Court because essentially he was being compelled

legally to create what he sees as art, which would be the decoration of a cake, the baking of a cake, the decoration of a cake for causes like same-sex marriages that he didn't agree with. He said, I'll happily serve any customer. It doesn't matter race, sex, religion, sexual orientation. I will serve any customer. I can't create art that violates my values. So that ended up at the Supreme Court as to whether the government for the sake of preventing discrimination can compel him to do that. Lori Smith is now in front of the

Supreme Court, she's also from Colorado and she is doing the same thing basically, she's a graphic designer, a website designer. So she's saying she doesn't want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Colorado has that protective anti-discrimination law. That's what got Jack Phillips, ended up having the court case of Jack Phillips a masterpiece in the first place because of Colorado law. Ryan, I... So what was the precise result of the cake, wedding cake decision? It keeps going back and forth. Was the cake maker told that...

Because I know the law was upheld, but there was some carve-out for the cake maker or something? Yes, yeah, it's exactly that. It's not a clean cut, and that's what the right is hoping for in 303 Creative, that you would have a clean-cut protection of conscience in this case so basically they carved out like all right you don't have to make this particular cake yeah it was and everybody else has to follow the law and jack phillips continues to get sued um to do the same thing to make the same types of cakes and so it's one of

those things where the right is hoping that there can be a more clear-cut protection in this case. And, you know, the oral arguments yesterday were interesting. Ryan, we both had a similar reaction just looking at some of the stuff as it goes down. Let's actually put, let's play the SOT D2 because we get the audio clips from the oral arguments, which is always fun. So here's one from yesterday. In light of what Justice Kennedy wrote in Obergefell about honorable people who object to same-sex marriage, do you think it's fair to equate opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage? Yes, because in how the law applies, not in discussion with folks, because of course, honorable people have different views on this issue. Yeah, and there was a lot of back and forth that went in some very strange hypotheticals were floated.

Black Santa? Yes, and it went in the, that was, you were hearing the voice of the Colorado Solicitor General, Eric Olson, who was defending the comparison of race and sexual orientation. A lot of justices pushed him on that note. And the people who analyzed courts and analyzed these oral arguments seemed to think it was pretty clear where this decision was going to go, which was favoring Lori Smith. What did you make of what we heard from the court? It does seem like they've got the votes and they're going to try to ram this through. The question will be how wide or narrow it is. But let's be clear here about what Lori Smith is asking for. Nobody has come to her and asked her to make a website for a same-sex marriage. Like, that hasn't happened yet.

And she's, it seems like she wants to make one of these sites where basically you fill in your name, your date, like, when your wedding is, you can upload your photos. Like, you're basically the one that's doing the designing, but, you know, she'll but she'll make the fonts and the

pretty part in the background. And she wants to put up on, she hasn't built this yet. She wants to build it. She wants to put up on her site that same-sex marriages need not apply. You need not try to do business at her shop. This is only for opposite sex couples like she wants to she wants to be able to put that on her website rather than um somebody having walked through the door and said hey we we'd like a website uh and so that takes it that that i think is is where the landmark element comes in because if if she can do that, then why can't Facebook do that? Why can't Twitter do that?

Why can't any other private company say that we don't allow same-sex couples to use our services? But that's not what she's... I mean, she will serve any same-sex couple. She won't make a website for a same-sex wedding. She won't make a website for a same-sex wedding. She won't make a website that is specifically for the act of a wedding. And I would think—

But that's what her business is going to be. Right, right, right. But that doesn't mean she wouldn't— Right, but it's the marriage itself. That doesn't mean that she wouldn't design a website. And it's the same thing with Jack Phillips. It's not that he wouldn't make a cake or decorate a cake for somebody's birthday, whatever their sexual orientation happened to be or whatever their race or sex or whatever it was, they will still be served. They happily will be served by the business. But the wedding itself, if it violates your religious values. And that's why I think this case is so interesting, because this is a really fundamental question about the First Amendment.

And you're right that, like, I actually talked to her a few months back, and that was one of the things that I was getting at is, you know, what is taking this to court? Where is this going and why? And the Jack Phillips case was—it really did shake a lot of Christians in Colorado who said, we're just trying to operate businesses here and follow our values at the same time. And you've heard similar cases like this come up from Muslim businesses, from Orthodox Jewish businesses, and it's becoming a real point of tension in society. And I think that's why a case like this and somebody like Lori Smith is saying, I want to, whatever you think of the motivation to seek the protection, people, the protection in and of itself is a pretty

big tension point in the country right now. And it's the same one that the kind of diner owners in North Carolina in the 1960s were using, right? That it was the First Amendment right of somebody who owns a lunch counter to just serve whoever they want to serve. Yeah, and that's the Barry Goldwater argument, too, who was very involved with the NAACP, who was saying it's not the federal government's responsibility to determine how a business owner wants to discriminate, which we have obviously rejected with the Civil Rights Act and in federal court since then. But that was the argument being made.

I think, and I think, right. And so I think we, and the Supreme Court, I think, still believes that. I don't think even this 6-3 majority would say that, no, actually a public accommodation like a diner can, in fact, is free to discriminate based on, that's not speech. Like, that doesn't count as speech. Yeah, you can't discriminate based on race. Right. Yeah. But can you discriminate based on sexuality? Well, and that's, again, where the Civil Rights Act was always a really interesting test case for this because if somebody claims their religion is racist, right, they outright say, my religion discriminates based on race. Well, the federal government has stepped in and basically said, we don't care if your religion says that you should be discriminating and segregating.

If you have a pro-segregationist religious belief, you are not able to practice that as a business owner in your private property. The federal government is stepping in. Now, I think that is a very, very reasonable distinction. Now, in this case, what's happened is that our public opinion on same-sex marriage has shifted very very quickly and it's a similar sort of test point but at this at the same time I think it's it's pretty much within the boundaries of you know she has a position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama had about ten years ago, literally 10 years ago.

And I think it's fine to say that businesses should be able to choose, you know, what business they want to do. Like if somebody comes into a t-shirt shop and wants a pornographic t-shirt made, a t-shirt shop can be like, no, we like, that's, that's not the, that's not the kind of thing that we do. Or if it's a kind of one of the if it's like a right let's say it's a right-wing t-shirt shop they shouldn't have they shouldn't have to make uh you know uh gun control t-shirts or if it's a left-wing one they shouldn't have to make um you know ar-15 t-shirts like i i get that. But to say that an entire class of people, which are, you know, gay people are not entitled to use this product, I think is different. Now, I don't think that you

should, you know, force a poet to write a poem for a wedding that they don't support. I don't think you should force a harpist to play at one. Like if you're a, if you're an artist, that's one thing. You can pick and choose. Now, I- But Jack Phillips sees his work as a part of it. Although I don't, actually I don't think, no. Let me take a harpist back.

So does Laurie. Let me take a harpist back. Like I think a harpist, if you do wedding businesses, you should do all wedding businesses. Within reason. If you're booked that day, you can't do it. You can turn down business. But to turn down business, well, no, I won't play harp at a gay marriage.

That, I think, a gay wedding, that I don't think is okay within the bounds. That's not your speech. That's just a service. So I don't think— But she the bounds. That's not your speech. That's just a service. So I don't think... But she says it as her art. And then you get to this question. But she's already made... But the government is then...

It's like a fill in the blanks website. Like I think she needs to get over herself with like whether this is her speech. It's not her speech. It's not her wedding. It's their wedding. It's their love. Like stop.

It's not you. Like it's just your website. You disagree that what she's doing in terms of website design is creative. And that, I think, so, but then the government is determining whether baking a cake is art. When Jack Phillips, who's been doing this for decades, sees it as art, he sees it as his life's passion. And he won on that ground, right? Yeah. And then, so again, this is the government coming in and drawing the line as to what constitutes art, what constitutes speech, what constitutes, I mean, like all of these questions, I think are good ones to work out. But my colleague, David Harsanyi, wrote a decent question.

He was talking about, so he says, would Cole, who says the ACLU has been this nation's leading defender of free speech for more than a century, call for the state to intervene in the case of an evangelical customer who wants to compel a gay designer to create a website for an organization that wants to overturn same-sex marriage laws and preaches or preaches that acts of homosexuality are a mortal sin. And that's why, again, we get into this a lot with like evangelical Christians have a very particular cultural connotation right now, but this happens to people that lot with like evangelical Christians have a very particular cultural connotation right now. But this happens to people that are not just evangelical Christians. It happens to Muslims.

It happens to Orthodox Jews, as we just were talking about. And if the protections, I think, are not enshrined, it will happen to other people. It will happen to people who are pro-LGBT and get pushed on this by people who are anti. And so I just think this protection in the sort of broad, from the broader perspective, is a worthwhile one. And I think just this discussion is a testament to how interesting these questions are and how fundamental they are to the way we function as a country. And I wonder if the country can get to a place where the war is so thoroughly won on that question that if there are a couple of businesses that don't want to do it, that it doesn't

hamper people's ability to get it done. Because you, like, throughout history, there's always tension between overreach and how much you force people along. Like, if you take, like, the French Revolution, where they basically just, like, annihilate the Catholic Church. Like, that ended up not working out so well for them eventually. And so maybe, so if they had, you know, been a little bit more, if they had created more space, as they did later in the revolution, you know, for people who were like, look, I'm not against the revolution, but we just want to keep our priests. They were eventually like, okay, you know what, that's fine. And that's a good point because I think we're basically, I actually think we're pretty much there. And that's been the case with Jack Phillips. It's definitely the case with Laurie Smith. And it's definitely the case with Barry Mel Stutzman

up in Washington state, a florist. There are plenty of options at the same price point in all of these places. What happens is these, in some cases, it's activists are intentionally pushing the question and intentionally trying to get it to the courts. Which this one was, right? How do you mean? Yes. Yeah. This case basically from start to finish. Yes. And again, we're working it out in the court. So, but to your point, you know, pending this decision, but I think the good news is, you know, customers can get the product that they're looking for at this stage in the country, regardless of where they fall on that question, there are people who will serve you.

And I think it's hard for, but I think it's hard for people in particularly LGBTQ community to feel comfortable in their gains at this point because of the backsliding that they're seeing from, say, like from the Fox News world, you're getting all of these kind of drag queen story hour panics being built up. And so I think it's like, while from the right, you guys look around and you're like, you guys won. What are you worried about? You've got it. Just let us have our little web design company here in peace.

From their perspective, they're still under siege. And when both sides feel under siege, it's really hard for either to kind of reach a compromise, I think. Absolutely. And I think that's what we see when we get these kind of test cases making their way through the court system. So we'll continue to follow this one for sure. On the question of people coming to agreement, perhaps your monologue today is going to get at something that people can come to agreement on.

There we go. What's your point today, Ryan? Ending this war in Yemen. So we can report today that Senator Bernie Sanders is planning to force a vote on a war powers resolution aimed at blocking U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. As soon as next week, he told my colleague at The Intercept, Dan Boguslaw. An agreement for a ceasefire in Yemen between the Saudi-led alliance and the Houthis, who are backed by Iran, expired October 1st, though both sides have tenuously maintained that peace.

Now, backers of a War Powers resolution say that a strong vote in the Senate in the lame duck will send a signal to Saudi Arabia that it does not have a free hand to restart hostilities, despite the Biden administration's more placating posture amid its hunt for lower oil prices. Anti-war advocates had become a bit frustrated that Sanders had until today not announced if and when he'd be moving forward with the vote, though it's fair to say that Sanders has been heavily occupied. He led the fight last week against forcing a contract on rail workers that they had democratically rejected,

and he worked with House allies unsuccessfully to add seven sick days to it. He's also fighting the effort to add Senator Joe Manchin's energy permitting reform to the National Defense Authorization Act. Now, a vote would not take significant floor time, though, and antiwar advocates have been pushing him hard privately to move ahead with the vote. The news that he's finally doing so will surely hearten those who've been pressuring him. Now, a War Powers resolution is, quote, privileged in the Senate, which means that the sponsor of it can bring it to the floor for a vote without the need for approval by the chamber's leadership once a certain amount of time

has elapsed. At that point, the resolution has what we call ripened, and the one sponsored by Sanders is now ripe, meaning it can come to the floor. On Wednesday, a coalition of groups pushing to end the war in Yemen planned to release a letter to Congress calling for a War Powers Resolution vote during the lame duck. And today, the House Foreign Affairs Committee holds a hearing on the issue. The House version of the War Powers Resolution is sponsored by outgoing Representative Peter DeFazio, and it needs the support of Representative Jim McGovern to get through the House Rules Committee. It's much easier to move the House version once the Senate version passes if it does.

The war between Russia and Ukraine, though, in which the U.S. has been supporting Ukraine without a declaration of war may complicate the politics of the resolution because some of the language as applied to Yemen would appear to perhaps equally apply to the war in Ukraine, though of course Congress is never under any obligation to be consistent in their interpretation across countries. The resolution defines, quote, hostilities in a number of ways, including, quote, sharing intelligence for the purpose of enabling offensive coalition strikes and providing logistical support for offensive coalition strikes, including by providing maintenance or transferring spare parts to

coalition members flying warplanes engaged in anti-Houthi bombings in Yemen, unquote. Now, that definition is legally safe in Ukraine, probably, since there's no evidence the U.S. is helping Ukraine target Russia inside Russia's own borders. Although we might be, it's not known. And there was just a major strike inside Russia's borders. If there's any evidence that the U.S. participated in that, that could trigger that provision right there. But the second definition reads, quote, quote, the assignment of United States armed forces, including of any civilian or military personnel of the Department of Defense, to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of the Saudi-led coalition forces in hostilities against the Houthis in Yemen or in situations in which there exists an imminent threat that such coalition forces become engaged in such hostilities unless and until the president has obtained specific statutory authorization in accordance with Section 8A of the War Powers Resolution, unquote. Now, as The Intercept has previously reported, U.S. special operations personnel have indeed played an active role in Ukraine under a presidential covert action finding. Despite

the ceasefire lapsing in February, though, the Saudis have yet to resume bombing. Anti-war advocates believe that the Saudi hesitation flows from a concern that opponents of the war in Washington would get an upper hand at the first report of civilian casualties from a renewed campaign of bombing in a war that has stretched on for some seven years now. The Saudis continue to maintain a blockade of Yemen, strangling the country's economy and producing a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions. And part of this, Emily, feels like fatigue. What's your point today? Christmastime can be really lonely, whether we're in a pandemic or not. Thankfully, most people believe

we're on the other side of COVID now, but ahead of Thanksgiving, economist Bryce Ward crunched some post-pandemic numbers for the Washington Post. Quote, our social lives were withering dramatically before COVID-19, Ward found. Between 2014 and 2019, he added, time spent with friends went down and time spent alone went up by more than it did during the pandemic by more than it did during the pandemic. More than it did during the pandemic. Ward was looking at the Census Bureau's American Time Use Survey. According to the data, right around 2014, weekly alone time started to increase significantly.

As Ward notes, our average weekly time spent with friends had actually been stable in the years leading up to 2014. That time period is really critical when you dive deeper into the numbers. It was right around 2014 that adult social media use started to stabilize. According to Pew, the percentage of adults who say they use at least one social media site smoothed out starting in 2014, oddly enough it's around 62%. Deloitte compared American time use in 2003 with 2017 and found we spent more time watching TV and less time working out. So we're spending more time alone, more time watching TV, less time with friends and family, and less time exercising.

These numbers are complicated, sure, but that is obviously a recipe for cultural chaos, especially with big changes happening over short periods of time. So who's the culprit here? Stagnant wages, division, the sexual revolution, maybe a combination of everything? Culture versus economics is an age-old

chicken or egg question. Earlier this year, Seth Stevens Davidovitz did a good overview of what we know about that question in a New York Times essay. Quote, a study of thousands of millionaires led by researchers at Harvard Business School did find a gain in happiness that kicks in when people's net worth rises above $8 million, he wrote. But the effect was small. A net worth of $8 million offers a boost of happiness that is roughly half as large as the happiness boost from being married. It's a little cheaper option. Arthur Brooks studies happiness full-time. Quote, one of the greatest paradoxes in American life is

that while on average existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. He wrote that in the Atlantic back in 2020 and added, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S. adjusted for inflation was higher in 2019 than has ever been recorded for every income quintile. And although income inequality has risen, this has not been mirrored by inequality in the consumption of goods and services. Meanwhile, domestic government services have increased significantly. For example, federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services increased from 2000 to 2019 by about

30% in inflation-adjusted terms. So if we shift back one more time, stay with me here to Stevens-Davidowitz in The Times, we see what might explain this great paradox that Brooks has identified. Stevens-Davidowitz wrote, the activities that make people happiest include sex, exercise, and gardening. People get a big happiness boost

from being with a romantic partner or friends, but not from other people like colleagues, bad news Ryan, bad news for me too, children or acquaintances. People are consistently happier when they are out in nature, particularly near a body of water, particularly when the scenery is beautiful.

So on that note, yes, we also know Americans are having less sex now too. My old editor Tim Carney wrote a wonderful book on all of this a couple of years ago called Alienated America. Tim pointed partially at the rise of the gig economy over the last decade. Think Uber and Lyft and delivery services and even independent contractor jobs. Quote, a hyper individualized capitalism is currently taking us toward a world where workers are available when needed, but no lasting attachment is formed, wrote Carney. Work can't form an institution of civil society because work is no longer a place or a company or colleagues. It's a series of gigs with no lasting attachment and no long term investment.

Young people are less likely to find mentorship and training. They're less likely to find the work stability that is fitting for family life. We all have agency as individuals. The right is correct about that, but it's also true that corporations are preying on our vulnerabilities in new and significant and specific ways. Consolidation of monopoly power is giving consumers less power to push back too. The government and big ed saddled generations with insane levels of student loan debt, amounts people say make them put off marriage and home ownership. By the way, we're also working more than we did in the past. This is a bleak economy, and it's a bleak culture,

with more alone time, less marriage, sex, and children. At least on that front, though, Briggs' paradox can become empowering if looked at from the right vantage point. The saga of the real workers has put on full display the corporate strategy of making normal life almost impossible for employees. The good news is we can say no to extra TV,

no to toxic food, no to dating apps, no to Netflix, and no to more time alone. It's not easy at all to toxic food, no to dating apps, no to Netflix, and no to more time alone. It's not easy at all to do that, and some of us definitely have a whole lot more free time than others. But with our spare time, whether it's a lot or just a little, we can go outside. We can date to marry. We can hang out with friends and family. There's no downplaying the importance of living wages and material stability. But while we fight the political class on that front, we can also push back in our own lives as well.

It's definitely not easy, but in some very big ways, it is free. Ryan, the loneliness numbers before the pandemic, if you look at the- Thank you, everybody. Have a great, not weekend. Have a great Wednesday. Because we'll be back here on Thursday.

See you then. This is an iHeart Podcast.