Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/6 Special: The Real Reasons Why American Democracy is in Crisis feat. Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Krystal and Saagar go deep into the real reasons why American democracy is in crisis on the anniversary of the Jan 6th Capitol attack that will not be covered on mainstream media such as population decline, overdose deaths, distrust in institutions, media failures, economic instability, deep state subversion and more larger issues. They also break down the job market, vaccine healthcare, masking kids, China's steal, and how the deep state will proceed following January 6th with Glenn Greenwald.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/Glenn Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Well, if you are not living under a rock, you may know that it is the one-year anniversary of the January 6th insurrection or whatever you want to call what happened on that day. I know it's very controversial, the labeling of it. So we have our own breaking points look at what led us to that, what has changed, if anything, going forward, how the media has handled it. And also some numbers today that I think are really relevant to the conversation.

We just got new jobs numbers that show pretty good job creation, also show mass resignations continuing at historic levels. So everything very much in flux there. Also some additional news with regards to Omicron and some very disturbing decision making that is happening out there in the world. And this may be my own personal bias, but having suffered in some very small ways during the snowstorm in Virginia, we're going to take a look at the horrendous treatment of all of those people who were trapped on 95 for more than a day. The governor is now basically blaming them. Yeah, he's blaming the drivers.

Completely shirking any sort of responsibility for what was an absolutely dehumanizing, dangerous situation. So I have to give you those details here. Also, we have Glenn Greenwald on to help us understand what some of the more dangerous implications of the way that 1-6 could be weaponized to further strengthen the deep state. Always great to talk to Glenn. And we did want to start with some of our reflections on January 6th. And basically what we wanted to talk about here at the top is, has anything changed? The metrics, the underlying metrics that led us to a day that both of us considered to be terrible. This was a horrible day for the country. And obviously the individuals who were involved had agency in what

they decided to do and the crimes that they decided to commit. And the president was the most proximate cause of the events of that day. But in addition, there are a lot of underlying social factors, the types of things that we talk about here on this show all the time, that contributed to creating such a horrendous, inflammatory situation that people under false pretenses would think that they were acting patriotically to storm into the Capitol and try to subvert an election. I mean, that's the reality. So where are we now as compared to a year ago? And we have to say on most of the metrics, things have actually gotten worse. Yeah, way worse. So the core rot that has led, I think everyone would agree, as to such a dangerous place as the country has in many ways gotten worse. So the first thing we

wanted to put up here to demonstrate that fact is there's a new poll. This is from the Washington Post, University of Maryland. One in three Americans say violence against government can be justified, citing a variety of, you know, corruption was one of the things, authoritarianism, fascism, all sorts of different reasons why people across the spectrum are saying, hey, in certain circumstances, violence might be justified. These numbers are the worst, the largest numbers ever recorded on this metric. When you dig into it, it's pretty revealing what people are saying. There was a quote from a woman, a mother, 32 years old, who's a Republican. She says, the world we live in now is scary. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it feels like a movie.

It's no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It's a war between good and evil. And when you get into that type of binary good versus evil language, yeah, that ends up justifying a lot of things that can lead to catastrophic and horrible consequences. There was, you know, there was a rise in the numbers across partisan lines. Independence actually had the highest numbers on this metric. 41% of independents said violence against government can sometimes be justified. 23% of Dems and 40% of Republican Party. I want to say, I feel a little bit complicated about this one, Sagar, because, I mean, the nation was founded in violence. Obviously, if you have truly a tyrannical, oppressive,

authoritarian government, then in some circumstances, violence can be justified. However, we are nowhere near that place, I hope. And the fact that you have so many more Americans feeling like, well, we might be getting there is a very, very worrying sign. And this sort of binary of good versus evil narrative that has taken hold in corners across the political spectrum is a really dangerous place for the country to be. It's just a complete lack of faith in all of our institutions. And at this point, anybody who defends the institutions, in my opinion, is kind of an idiot. I mean, I was thinking about it today.

There was some discourse online talking about whether school closures amount to as bad of a situation as the war in Iraq. I think that's a little bit of an overstretch, but I was trying to think about it. And I was like, well, okay, well, where is this person coming from? Like, what exactly is it? Which is that you have an institutional state and a media which push a line, which becomes completely, obviously a terrible decision, which continues to be perpetuated. And then two years later, a very, very small group is allowed to criticize it a little bit. And it gets to the point where it becomes self-sustaining such that now the president of the United States, the leader of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden says, I don't think school closures are a good idea. And right

now today, one third of the children in the state of New Jersey are not in school. Okay. That's, that's like hundreds of thousands of kids. So when you start to think about it that way, I think, Hmm, you know what? That's not a terrible point. The point is, is that we have government, which makes terrible decisions. Consistently. We try to have democratic elections of change every single election since two barring 2004, which was just such an anomaly because of 9-11, we have had a desperate want of change. And every single time we've been denied that over and over again from institutional corruption. And that is what led to the fact that these people, mostly boomers, had so much faith in a guy in a charlatan like Donald Trump. I mean, we have a graph here, which you put on the screen, please,

which is Republican loyalty to Trump post-January 6th. Check this out. Trump, his general loyalty remained above 75% the entire time, like pre and post. His post-suffering was like marginal at best. But look at Mike Pence and especially Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell dropped from 50 in terms of his loyalty to in the minus 35 range. The reason I think about that is that the people who are in charge of Republican institutions do not represent Republican voters. Many Democratic leaders

do not. Nancy Pelosi does not represent the mean Democratic voter. When you have that type of situation, what are people supposed to feel? They turn to Trump and he tells them to storm the Capitol and they do so. I know they have agency, but I will always think about that ProPublica piece that was published right afterwards, where it was this guy, he lived in Alabama, he was part of a union, he lost his job post-financial crisis, and he went kind of nuts. And he started to believe, he voted for Obama in Alabama, a union member, and then ended up going all in on Trump. He died on January 6th from, I shouldn't be laughing, from a heart attack because it was like one of the most exciting days of his lives. But that's something that you have to think about. And you know, they're all citizens. They get votes too. I'm not saying what they did was

a good thing, but you got to try and understand why did this happen? You explain that number. Look at the number, explain it to me. The only way is through the polls, thinking back through institutional failure, 2008, guy loses his job, union. I mean, there's no other explanation. Well, and here's the thing is when you feel like legitimate avenues, like the official channels of political change have effectively been shut off. Yeah, that's right. That's when these sorts of very troubling metrics start to rise because people think, well, what else can we do? And so that total lack of faith in institution, that total lack of belief that anything you do at the ballot box is going to make a lick of difference.

That's how you end up in a place like this. I've actually been – Kyle and I are interviewing Jordan Peterson next week. So I've been reading a lot of Jordan Peterson lately. There's one thing that he said, he's not my favorite on everything, but there was one thing that he said that I thought was really interesting, which is that when you don't have

this sort of like value system in place, people either fall into nihilism or they get, you know, subsumed by an ideology and can be preyed upon, this is a little bit of my take on it, not exactly his, but can be preyed upon. This is a little bit of my take on it, not exactly his, but can be preyed upon by people like Trump, by these sort of like charismatic leaders where you become so and you're so desperate for some kind of value system that makes sense. It makes you vulnerable to, you know, whatever charismatic figure happens to come along. And so

on that metric, things have certainly not gotten better. And there's, you know, a lot more core raw, just evidence of the, you know, symptoms of decline and despair in this country. We can throw the next one up on the screen, which is that, you know, an increasing number of Americans say they're actually worse off financially this year than last year, somewhat worse off or much worse off, the largest share since the pandemic when we were in total freefall. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I mean, this makes sense too. You had some relief checks that went out. You had unemployment. You had some programs that were helping bolster people, helping, you know, keep some money in their savings accounts, keep them going, bills paid. All of that has been spent down over the past year. And all of those programs and supports

have been pulled. At the same time, you have inflation. Yeah, you have wages going up, but you have inflation eating into that and then plus some. So if finances, which I mean, if you look through on history, economics contributes to a lot of social turmoil. To the extent that's a factor here, which I think it is, things are getting worse. You also have on metrics, you know, of despair, overdoses reaching new heights over the past year and over the past couple of years. Let's throw this next tarot sheet up there on the screen. More than a million, more than a million Americans have died from overdoses during the opioid epidemic. So that's from 99 till today.

We've also tracked how for some demographics, overdose deaths are now the leading cause of death. The number spiked significantly during the pandemic. You know, we'll be learning over the coming months what that looked like in the year that just ended. Inequality accelerated by the pandemic. You know, we'll be learning over the coming months what that looked like in the year that just ended. Inequality accelerated by the pandemic. Let's put the next one there up on the screen. The share of wealth held by a 10 percent of the world's richest hit historic levels amid the pandemic. So part of what was going on is, yeah, I mean, listen, the oligarchs of the nation and of the world, they're always in position to profit off of crisis. I mean, every single time, whether it's war or climate change or a to prop up what ends up being the top percentage points, mostly of Americans. And while there was support that was pretty effective, ultimately, that was given to regular people, I mean, it came nowhere close to what was being pumped out by the Fed, which, again, widens inequality. And, you know, outside of it being a measure of fairness, when you have this system that is so dramatically unbalanced, that also contributes to social

instability because you lose that sense that this is just or fair at all. And when you lose that buy-in in society, I mean, again, history is littered with examples of revolutions that are sparked and pitchforks that come when that situation is exacerbated. So yet another trend that was accelerated by the pandemic, making things even worse than they were at this time last year in a lot of senses. Something Andrew Yang said during his campaign, which always resonated with me, is that there's only one, there's like the most stark metric is are people living or dying? And well, we have the data now for 2021. Let's put it up there on the screen. The U.S. population growth has stalled to the lowest record, lowest rate on record, thanks to the pandemic, even slower than during the Great Depression. Now, you may think that this is because of increased pandemic deaths, but it's actually not. It's because of lower birth rates, lower rates of migration, and yes, an increase in mortality. But the all-cause mortality there, COVID is only a part

of it given that it was disproportionately amongst the elderly. We just pointed out record amounts of deaths, 18 to 45 from fentanyl, which is now the leading cause of death amongst that elderly. We just pointed out record amounts of deaths, 18 to 45, from fentanyl, which is now the leading cause of death amongst that demographic. One million Americans died from opioids. And if you look at it regionally, it's actually even worse. So if the 2010 to 2020, 50% of the counties in the United States lost population population 50%. We are increasingly getting divided by education, class, and the people who are lower middle class and working class who are moving out are generally living in the burb areas, commuting in in order to serve the most wealthy as they continue to get richer and richer. Think like Uber Eats drivers, that type of thing. The service economy of the rich is actually one of the most growing sectors. I remember once some neoliberals were cheering the fact that the most highest growing types of jobs are like personal trainers, nail technicians, and something else.

I think delivery drivers was another one. And I was like, look, there's zero nothing wrong with those professions whatsoever but like all of those are just basically trickle-down effects of like people who are really rich yeah who can afford to outsource you know beautician aesthetics right all that type of thing to others i mean unless you're one of these like superstar soul cycle type personal trainers it's i'm sure very also you probably don't make that much yeah you're you know you're don't certainly don't have a union you probably don't have benefits much money. Yeah, you're, you know, you're, certainly don't have a union. You probably don't have benefits. And many of these jobs, you're, you know.

Actually don't, I've talked to some of them. You're basically a gig worker, an independent contractor with no protection from the labor market. Yeah, that is what our economy is spinning out, is these very precarious, low wage, low benefit type of jobs. We do have a little bit, I mean, we're going to talk about the great resignation. So there are some hopeful things. I don't want to be all gloom and doom here, but we have to take stock as, you know, we enter 2022 here and a year out from one six. The easy thing is to look at, you know, the individuals who are specifically involved and listen, there are millions and

millions of people in the country who have suffered, who did not storm the Capitol. So again, there is personal agency involved here, both in people's choices that day and also their own choices to allow themselves to get sucked into these sort of conspiracy theories that led them to take that action that day and really think they were like doing the right thing as patriots. The other easy thing is just to, you know, say, oh, well, it's just the Republican Party and Donald Trump. That is bad. All of that is fine and true. But it doesn't solve the problem to just say, oh, well, you know, this percentage of the country is bad. And so what can we do about it?

I can already hear the naysayers. Economic anxiety, you know, disproven again. Okay, look, I mean, you have, it's a general social pathology that you understand in every other society except America for some reason. Yeah, that's right. You know, it's like, you can look at Egypt and be like, well, high youth unemployment, you know, this, this, and this leads to the conditions of revolution. Well, you've got a youth bulge here in this country, Greece or whatever, Spain is another one. But then, you know, you can't turn a real honest eye to your own country.

It's the same thing. That's exactly what's happening here. And I think about it kind of like a statistical distribution, which is that if the statistical distribution is going to be high of the amount of wealth inequality and the, you know, the normal distribution, so to speak, yeah, most people are going to be like generally miserable. But what is part of that? Which is that on the tail ends, you have the extremities. And what you want to do is move the distribution over so that the extremity becomes smaller and smaller. And unfortunately, we continue to slide towards a point where the median point for most Americans is that they are underpaid. They're blown tire away from bankruptcy. They feel as if the next year is going to be worse than this year. And, you know, we didn't even mention COVID policy

restriction and anxiety, gas prices, all of that feeding in. It's not a good time to be an American right now. That has downstream effects on our democracy and has outsized effects on the extreme events that you're going to see in terms of politics. So if you want to know why democracy is in crisis, if it even is, this is why. You're not going to hear any of this on the news. Yeah, I would say that it definitely is. I mean, when you see this level of number of people who are, you know, contemplating the possible what could possibly lead them to justifying violence against the government, when you have such low trust in institutions, when you have so many people first. of Trump's election and spun up a whole fantasy about Russiagate to justify why they lost an election that a lot of, you know, a lot of the country believed and continues to believe, by the way. And then you have Republicans who just invented the most insane shit you've ever heard

to imagine that their side didn't lose. When you get into this, nobody is believing in, you know, the sanctity of the election. They're not buying into the results. Yeah, I would say democracy is in trouble. The last thing that I'll throw in here, and I was thinking about it because we were both, I think, listening to Joe Rogan with Oliver Stone yesterday. And I think he makes a good point about how JFK's assassination and, look, personally, I think it was a cover up and the CIA was involved, but whatever you think about that, the fact that there was very clearly an effort to control the information that was coming out, the fact that you still have such a high percentage

of Americans who do not believe the official narrative on such a seminal event in American history, that also serves as a kind of a spark of a long-term rot. And when you see, certainly on that metric as well, the continued power of the military-industrial complex, the continued power of the deep state, that's another thing that really makes people cynical about their own government, makes people suspicious of their own government, makes people not trust their own government, and oftentimes for very good reasons. So I think that's also a sort of factor you have to throw in here is the lack of transparency and the nefarious doings of our government.

You can look to Julian Assange and the war crimes that were revealed in the Bush era. All of these things contribute to a place where people just do not trust the official narrative any longer. Yeah, you see the people in the media being like, why doesn't anybody trust the government? It's like, well, there was, let's start, you know, okay, JFK's assassination, that was crazy. Then Vietnam, that was pretty crazy. Then, what, Watergate, that was pretty nuts. Yeah, Watergate was pretty nuts. Then the church committee, and you're like, oh, my God.

Like, I can't believe all this stuff was happening, and now here's all of the stuff where it gets outright admitted. Then the 80s were like, okay, you know. There was, like, recession and all that stuff. The 90s were probably the best time. There was a lot of Cold War funny business. Cold War finally ended, and then, you know, the dot-com stuff was pretty fun. And then, boom, you know, the crash of 2000. Funny business. Cold War finally ended, and then the dot-com stuff was pretty fun.

And then, boom, the crash of 2000. Bush gets elected, 2001, and then that's it. We're totally off to the races. So you have the interregnum period of the Watergate, where you really destroyed what once people used to think when the president spoke, it was the truth. I mean, this was a thing under Kennedy and Eisenhower, which you cannot even fathom today. But when you read about it, the level of trust between the American government and the president post-World War II is unbelievable. And, you know, under Johnson, the term credibility gap gets coined. And from that point onward, distrust in the government becomes a mainstream thought of American society. It never existed, or at least, you know, since like the Civil War times, that's not something you can just get back. And then you have Iraq and the financial crisis. People my age are like, forget it. You know, my default assumption when they say something, especially on COVID, is I don't believe you. You know, prove it to me. I have to, or I have to go and see it with my own eyes for me to be like, okay, this is a real thing. That's not a

healthy way. But once again, you ask questions. Why is democracy in crisis? This is why. That's the only reason. Indeed. And how has the media been doing? I was going to say, well, how exactly are staid media handling themselves from this? I'll say this at the top. I think it was probably pretty

scary to be in the Capitol on January 6th. I personally think if I was a representative, this is one of the reasons why I piss people off before we even play the clip. I actually was kind of sympathetic when AOC was really seeming to have like an episode around post-January 6th because I'm like, hey, look, if I was her and I got cornered by some of these people without security, I'd be pretty scared.

I think it actually would be scary. And I say this as any of those types of Nancy Pelosi, any of these people, given the people that were inside the Capitol and lack of security and they are very hated and it only takes one person for things to jump off. We've seen that in a lot of the reporters that were there that day are making this all about themselves and are acting as if they were serving in a war zone, which is simply not true. I think it's analogous to being in a place where a terrible event happened, but they are now trying to make the event all about themselves and worse, are using it as an excuse for why they don't have to then cover the Republican Party fairly. We have kind of a perfect clip from Reliable Source's CNN's Brian Stelter, the show over the weekend, where when you listen to these people,

it's literally like they were deployed in a war zone. Let's take a listen. I know this for myself, but in talking, you know, there's a bit of an informal network of reporters who've been through it that day and are still coping with that, who are leaning on each other and talking to each other. I also talk to members of Congress, their staffs and law enforcement, members of the Capitol Police. And we're all still dealing with that and feeling like we need to convey to others how serious it was. I mean, just one example, there are still members of the U.S. Capitol Police out with injuries that they suffered that day. From a year ago. Wow. And some journalists have been candid about PTSD and trauma. We're going to get into that. But on the topic of that day and the cell service and the lack of full

awareness, I think it's really important to remember it didn't look as bad on TV as it actually was. And that's not the fault of any television network or any producer or anything. It's just most of the live shots were from far away. We didn't see inside the Capitol the horrible violence, the attacks against police. There were only a few of those videos that came out during the day. It took several days to reckon with just how violent this was, and then several weeks to learn about the security failures and all the rest. So in other words, it was worse than it looked on live TV. And that's why people like you have been having to tell people what really happened. I mean, one hallmark of post-traumatic stress

disorder is sort of having flashbacks and almost eerily clear memories. And for me, the single one that really haunts me is this moment when I was on the phone with my editor. Look, I mean, once again, I think it was probably scary. But they are making this all about themselves. And that's the problem here. And you know the other thing I keep thinking about? When things are really crazy, you don't have to tell a damn person. 9-11.

You didn't have to be there on 9-11 to be like, oh my god. You didn't have to be in Afghanistan to say, man, this is a real shit show. You did not have to be on the ground at an event in order to internalize what exactly it means. The problem and reason that they're doing this is because they don't feel that people are outraged enough. And it's because people are able to put things in context. Something that can happen can be absolutely terrible. We can all also feel very bad for a lot of the people who are there and who are suffering, you know, as a result, or made it as an experience that was very difficult to process. But I cannot tell you the narcissism that I continue to see from these

people because they use their own personal experience to say, why is national policy thus not moving in the direction that I want it to move? And that's where, you know, that is where you actually violate the central proponent of being a journalist. Whenever you use that in order to talk about and try and move coverage and take the populace and try to shake them and say, you should care about this. That is not your job. It is absolutely not your job. Your job is to tell people about what happened. They can make up their minds for themselves.

Try to do that here every day. I just, I don't know why it's so difficult. There's also, I echo your sentiments, that I have no doubt if I was in the Capitol that day, I would have been very scared that it would have been a terrifying situation, that it was in fact a volatile, dangerous situation, that we're lucky that there weren't more injuries and fatalities ultimately on that day. But we also have to acknowledge that 1-6 was the last time that any of these people got decent ratings. And so, listen, I'm sure it was a seminal event

for them personally. And it also happens to coincide covering this relentlessly and having this sort of putting themselves at the center of the story, which is a, you know, a sort of a vanity move. There's a financial incentive there too. I mean, all of these companies, all of these cable news channels, including Fox News, all of the major news outlets, they've had a precipitous decline in clicks and subscribers and ratings. So that also helps play into why they have focused on this, because they don't know what else to do to try to get back some of the juice that they had during the Trump era. And there's this bizarre disconnect between what cable news has spent most of their time covering and what the country actually cares about. And this is not just about

1-6. I mean, this was throughout the Trump presidency. There were a million terrible things that this dude did that deserve coverage and deserved explanation and deserved criticism. But they spent so much of their time on these invented things like Russiagate, that not only are they fabricated gigantic conspiracy theories, but they're also, if you poll most of the country, they're like, this is not what is driving my day-to-day concerns. So you're just making yourself, it's this sort of very elite conversation, and you're putting yourself at a distance from the actual concerns of the population. It's much harder, though, and much

more uncomfortable for them to dig in to some of those underlying causes that we talk about here. Why? Well, it's not an easy partisan narrative. And there are people to blame and institutions to blame all the way around. And so if they're concerned about, you know, their access and being a good standing member of whatever team and club that they're a part of, then it becomes very uncomfortable to talk about those. So what do you fall back on? You fall back on these types of segment, very shallow analysis, which ultimately, look, they want to probably spin it into something about, you know, attack on free press, attack

on journalists, but none of these people have any credibility on that when they have nothing to say about Julian Assange's continued prosecution. So that's the bottom line there. To, once again, the reason why they care so much about Marjorie Taylor Greene and January 6th and the January 6th Select Committee and Steve Bannon is because that's the last thing that rated for them. They are suffering. And that is why the New York Times and CNN, Washington Post,

all these people, in addition to the personal experience that they have, have a financial incentive and really a relevancy incentive in order to keep pushing it, which leads to idiotic editorials like this. Again, not cherry picking. This is straight up from the editorial board. Every day is January 6th now. And the substance of it is, oh, the Republican Party truly bankrupt and focusing on this. I even probably agree with some of these

underlying sentiments. But at the same time, all it is is trying to A, delegitimize another political party. But really, it's about narcissism and ultimately about

trying to drive clicks. And this is how it's working out for them. Put it up there on the screen, clicks. And this is how it's working out for them. Put it up there on the screen, please. Check out exactly how it's happening. Traditional media traffic is down over the last 12 months. The New York Times is down 34% in traffic. The Washington Post is down 44% in traffic. Network television is down at CNN, 38%, Fox, 34%, and MSNBC, 25%. They are suffering existential crises in the number of people who are tuning out. And the reason why that their numbers were so high in 2019, 20, and 21, and around that period, was because people were coming to them for real information.

Do you remember those COVID briefings? I had to watch them. I mean, we all did. I was like, well, especially because we were doing the show, and I would sit there. I was glued to the television. Anytime there's chaos, this is whenever live TV is really the only valuable product

because they're on the ground. They can beam images. You can see it exactly for yourselves. They love it whenever there's stuff like Afghanistan. That was a bonanza for them. I mean, once you start to understand it from that perspective, you look and you see, well, maybe they want to encourage these types of things. Or they don't want to get to the bottom of it in the sense because they kind of want it to keep happening or they need it to keep happening. All of this is a subconscious level. It's not intentional, but the incentives and the personal experience align such that a lot of people can look at this and say,

you people are not telling me the truth. And I mean, that's a very sad thing for the country. And another reason why one might say our democracy is in crisis. Trump and these people had a perfect symbiotic relationship. Oh, yeah. Perfect symbiotic relationship. I mean, you know, one of the most satisfying things, I think, about Trump for people was how he would just, you know, totally vilify some of who are the worst actors in society. He just had disdain. He was disgusted by it. That was, I mean, I enjoyed seeing that too, right?

But you have to grapple with the reality that he made them stronger and got them famous and rich and book deals and ratings through the roof and all that stuff. I mean, cable news was struggling before he came along, and he plucked them right out of the grave and put them back on top. And again, a bunch of names that we'd never heard before. Adam Schiff. Nobody knew who Adam Schiff. Eric Swalwell. Some of these commentators who Jim Acosta.

People didn't know these names and they became like household names thanks to Trump. So yeah, it was a perfect symbiotic relationship. And, you know, I'm sure that secretly after Trump got elected,

there was Zucker and a couple others who basically admitted like, yeah, this is great for us ultimately. Yeah, they loved it. And they need something like that back because right now they basically have no reason to exist. So personally, I would like them to continue to trend towards irrelevance. Yeah, keep it up.

Talk about January 6th and talk about January 6th and Marjorie Taylor Greene all you want. We'll be doing just fine. In the least substantive way, least useful, least actionable way. Josh Barrow made this point. He's like, what's the point of this commentary? Like, what's the point of all of these columns? What do you actually want people to do? And that's the thing is if ultimately the answer is, like, what we want people to do about journalists, PTSD or whatever from that day?

It's it doesn't lead in any particular direction to move us in a better place in the country. And ultimately, that's what we should all care about. We did have some promising numbers. That's kind of the flip side of the coin and points to maybe a way out of the bad place that we're in right now as a country. So these little signs. So, of course, we've been tracking the great resignation and we just got new numbers in that were another record breaking historic month for resignations. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen with the numbers there. More quit jobs than ever.

And most of the turnover is in low wage work. More than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in November. That was up from 4.2 million in October. It was the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track. And as I indicated, the place where, you know, that saw the largest turnover was in low wage work in these positions where previously workers didn't feel like they had a choice. They may have hated their job. It may have been wildly insufficient in terms of their wages and their benefits. The scheduling may have been abhorrent. They may have been treated completely inhumanely, but they didn't feel like they had a choice to leave. Now you have millions of people every single month saying, I other forms of workers exerting their power. And this is actually very, very encouraging because one of the main, if not the main,

structural issue in my mind in the country has been this dramatic imbalance where, you know, you have a few people and corporate entities that have so much power and everyone else is just treated as a pawn, which gives you ultimately, if you care about things like freedom and choice, that ultimately you may have the illusion of some sort of freedom and liberty. But if the only place where you can work is Walmart and you just have to take whatever deal they're going to give you. What kind of freedom is that really? So this to me is a sort of central metric of people having actual liberty and choice and freedom and ability to change the direction that their life is going in. And the reason I love this too is an entirely blue collar phenomenon. It is all turnover in previously lower wage work. Now the wages, obviously we talk about inflation, regressive taxation, all of that. That is absolutely true. But the amount of bargaining power that blue-collar and lower-paid workers have right now is its highest point ever. Almost 30-something million Americans

turned over their jobs, which is, this is the other one. It's wild. Think about it, too, in terms of popular cultural representation. Nobody is talking about this. To the extent I do see people talking about it, it's like doctors and health care workers. They're like the burnout amongst these folks. No disrespect to the nurses and the doctors out there. I'm sure it has been a very difficult year. But the real focus to me are the delivery drivers and the McDonald's workers and the Starbucks workers that we had here on our show. And the people that we've discussed with and said, hey, I got treated like crap, $11 an hour. I said,

screw you. I quit in a dramatic fashion. And I went and I got a job the next day for $15 an hour. Everybody can relate. Almost every small business you walk into in the country has a help wanted sign outdoor. People are paying $15 an hour, $17 an hour. You see signs at like Taco Bell saying, we hire on the spot. Just come in. We'll give you a job. Let's go. I'll give you a bonus, $100 in cash. These are the most positive phenomena that we've seen yet. And it's necessary because these people are driving record profits. Remember, corporate profits are at an all-time high. The S&P 500 is at an all-time high. Pre-pandemic, even highs have been beat. The richest Americans have a disproportionate

amount of wealth. And because of a variety of circumstances, of which they're very multifaceted, early retirements, reassessment of life, geographical dislocation, pandemic, etc., a lot of people are willing to say, no, I'm willing to go take this new job. I'm willing to take a risk. New businesses are being started in a, we literally are an example of that, are being started at a record rate. But all of this is flying under the radar of kind of the comfort class who are zooming in from work and have from the very beginning. So that's why it deserves real, I think we should hail it as a very positive phenomenon. And if I were to have any hope about the future, this is what I would point to.

Yeah. I think that a lot of people are really pissed off right now, and that's really terrible in the moment. But that leads to new choices and new things. And maybe you were previously miserable, like a slow-burning misery, and you said, screw it, I'm finally going to take care of myself. I'm finally going to go and do something that I actually enjoy. So from the ashes rise the phoenix, like so people say. And I really hope and believe that we're in a point like that right now. We desperately need a rebalancing of the scales.

And we desperately need, I mean, the only cure for what ails us is rather than moving in the, you know, increasing police state and lockdown state direction, which is, again, something we're going to talk to Glenn about, is having more people involved, more people having faith that their voices count in the process. And that's not just at the national political level, but also in the workplace, which is why these union efforts are so important, why people, you know, standing in solidarity and being able to fight against these big corporations and win some minor concessions. I mean, mostly these workers aren't asking for that much, just sort of like, you know, a basic fair bargain for their incredible labor that they're putting in. And so this is just a sign that workers, that the scales have tipped a little bit.

I mean, the downside, which is a huge downside, is that according to this article, only 17% of workers say that they've gotten a raise sufficient to keep up with inflation. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why you have this very strange economic landscape of, on the one hand, I mean, these metrics about the Great Resignation are phenomenal. Tight labor market, people being able to jump jobs and get big pay raises. All of these things are good, but then it's being totally swallowed and eaten up by inflation. The pandemic support programs have all mostly, you know, all, but I think the student loan relief have been pulled at this point, and that's set to be, to go away here soon. So people are spending down their savings accounts. That's why they are such an incredibly pessimistic feeling about the direction the economy is going in and how people are doing personally this year versus last year. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing we don't want to miss, some good news up there on the screen,

U.S. businesses actually added 800,000 jobs in December despite the emergence of Omicron. And this is from new data by payroll processor ADP. So the ADP report, which is generally a very closely watched gauge of private sector growth, showed the private payrolls twice as many new workers as analysts had projected. So, look, it's just one data point. It is December. But this could be, you know, we've had those dismal jobs months before. Maybe we're on an upswing.

I generally begin to think that we are. Yes, Omicron may have had some disruption in that. So we might see that maybe more in the month of January because some of these crazy restrictions, which we're about to talk about, are still in place. But there is a reason to be hopeful. And there is transformation that is happening. Part of the thing about dynamism is sometimes it's uncomfortable, but I think we're getting there. Let me say, because we're kind of wrapping up a little bit of our January 6th blocks here. So to tie it back together, part of why I find the media coverage that is really pernicious,

this direction of rather than talking about these underlying issues, these structural issues that both parties are complicit in to various degrees, just sort of demonizing people who, you know, in some cases do things that are genuinely bad or acting like total assholes or committing crimes, et cetera. Because the only way out of this is if we have actually more faith and more trust in each other and can have more democracy not less and so if your whole project and this is matt taibbi hating something we've talked about here a lot but if your whole project is just let me convince you let me play to you let me titillate you let me scare you let me freak you out let me convince you. Let me play to you. Let me titillate you. Let me scare you. Let me freak you out. Let me make you angry by convincing you that this half of the population is evil and bad and irredeemable. There's no direction forward from that.

I mean, there's no way forward from that. The way forward from that is further sort of police state, deep state, security state, getting stronger and locking down because you've got to keep those bad ones in check. Or the other direction is let's make sure that these people can't vote. Let's push them outside of the public square. Let's push them off of Twitter. Let's ban them from YouTube. Let's make sure that they're just sort of pushed to the margins and shut up as much as we possibly can. That's no way to live. That's no way to have a society ultimately. So that's the other reason why I find, you know, the media coverage that goes in that direction so pernicious.

That's why I find it so troubling, a lot of the direction that the conversation out of 1-6 was in some of the tactics that it's been used to justify is because that's the opposite of the direction that we need to go in. So the one place where I really see hope and sort of budding democracy and people standing shoulder to shoulder, putting their faith in their brothers and sisters in their workplace is with these strikes, with the great resignation numbers, with this movement among the workforce. And I think that's the place that personally I'm looking to 2022 with a lot of help.

I agree. If there is a glimmer of hope, it's going to be here. I'm not saying things won't be terrible. I do think that the midterm elections are going to be fun. And we'll have some fun in covering that here. It's going to reveal a lot about what you guys are actually thinking. And people in this town are going to start waking up. At least that's my hope.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you're probably right. I probably should be cynical. What can I say? All right. Speaking of cynicism and why I should be, this has got to be—we continue to track this hyper-disturbing phenomena of elites and media corporations pushing a line and using, in this case, quote-unquote medical ethicists, the idea that we should deny healthcare to people who are unvaccinated, that we should shame them, push them outside of society. As we said, that is actually a dream of many libertarian

think tanks here in DC who have long wanted, on behalf of the insurance companies, to set the precedent that we should be able to deny healthcare to people like smokers, people who are obese, if you care about racial inequality, people who are poor and have longstanding chronic health conditions and more. And we have had to fight against that idea in our healthcare system for a hundred years. And somehow this is the first time that I've actually seen it become

popularized in elite mythology, and it is setting a very damaging precedent. This was the latest example from CNN where they literally have on a medical ethicist. Just listen to how this guy has to say. Just listen to him. Yeah, again, I get the idea of creating a moral standard here and really judging, being willing to judge and say things out loud. The question is, and I also get protecting the vulnerable kids under five can't get vaccinated. People who are older and maybe have medical conditions, even if they are vaccinated or vulnerable. And I get acting in ways that make their lives safer. But by and large, if you're vaccinated and boosted, even if you get infected, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine here. It's the unvaccinated who are

going to be hurt. So why should anyone who is boosted bother at this point to do anything that makes the unvaccinated more safe? Well, look, I want us to act as a community. I want us to act as a team. When you're fighting a war, you need all hands on deck. I don't want to reject those who still haven't done the right thing. I'll condemn them. I'll shame them. I'll blame them. But I don't want to exclude them. They've got to come around. We can't win this war. We're going to be talking about COVID this time next year if we don't get more people to do the right thing. So we can't win this war. We're going to be talking about COVID this time next year if we don't get more people to do the right thing. So we can't write them off. We can penalize them more. We can say we're going to pay more on your hospital bill if you weren't vaccinated.

You can't get life insurance or disability insurance at affordable rates if you aren't vaccinated. Those companies should not treat us as equals in terms of what the financial burdens are that that disease imposes. So I can think of a number of ways in which we should say, here's the stick, get on board. At the same time, we do need everyone. It's a war. You've got to have all your troops unified if we're ever going to win it. Yeah, it's still, by and large, it's the unvaccinated who aren't wearing masks. It's the unvaccinated who aren't social distancing. You know?

The framing there is really interesting, isn't it? NYU Director of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine. This guy's teaching doctors ethics, Crystal. I mean, oh, yeah, we don't even push them out, but we should destroy them financially. Well, that was the part of it, the framing of it, that's really interesting to me, is he tries to frame it as, like, compassion. Oh, we can't destroy them financially. Well, that was a part of it, the framing of it, that's really interesting to me, is he tries to frame it as like compassion.

Oh, we can't leave them behind. We can't give up on getting them vaccinated. But I'm all for shaming them. I'm all for making sure that their hospital bills are higher and that their insurance bills are higher, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, again, where does this kind of thinking end? Because this really does feel very much like the sort of right-wing libertarian arguments that were made of like, well, if you haven't taken personal responsibility for your health, well, that's on you. That's your fault.

You should pay more. And look, I mean, I get where you're coming from. But once again, yeah, when you don't want to take a vaccine and other people say that, which is why that we set the precedent. No, we don't discriminate whenever it comes to health. to health because who are you going to put in a position to judge all of our like put this guy life choices and weigh in okay what are your genetic factors and what's what is your background and what what have you suffered to get you to this place i mean it's just it's a terrible place to be we shouldn't be in a state of saying some people these ones over here are worthy and these ones are unworthy, whether the line you want to draw is on vaccination status or anything else. I abhor this whole direction. I'm thinking we covered that editorial from the Bezos Washington Post saying if you are unvaccinated, you shouldn't get unemployment insurance.

This is not—these are people that consider themselves probably politically to be on the left of the spectrum. And they don't know what they're— And you're for like—I mean, this is like a left-wing welfare queen type of argument nonsense of trying to make people unworthy of social supports in a society. This is a bad direction to go in, period. Oh, yeah. And, you know, the extension of the COVID regime is just continuing to destroy people's lives. And look, this happened yesterday to an MSNBC host. Let's put this up on the screen. Iman Muldeen. He said that his family was denied eating indoors at a restaurant in New York City because his four-year-old daughter was with him and they don't, quote, serve unvaccinated people. He tried to explain there is no CDC guideline requiring children under five to get vaccinated, but the restaurant did not care and only offered for him to be able to eat outside. So, number one, CDC guideline doesn't

require anything for anybody. That's why they're guidelines. Number two, there literally is no vaccine for people who are below five. And even further, the idea that you're going to have massive amounts of spread or whatever from a four-year-old is just the most ludicrous thing. But this is where the restrictions and the type of thinking leads to. It exactly is this, which is now, you know, New York City, Los Angeles, I think 48% of black residents there are unvaccinated. Now they're going to be denied entry to, you know, half the institutions in the entire city. All of this is complete madness. We continue to see how it gets extended to the most ridiculous parts of our lives. I was telling you yesterday, I'll share it here on the

show because this one really just drove me crazy, was somebody, an anonymous person I've chosen to protect their identity. They are required by their boss to show up in person. This is a white collar workplace. But because now everybody's allowed to admit cloth masks don't work, everybody has to be wearing an N95 at all times. Meals are not allowed to be eaten indoors. This is in the Northeast. It's cold as hell outside. It's like 20 degrees.

No in-person meetings are allowed in conference rooms. But staff-wide Zoom calls are still required, so they're all sitting in their cubicles with their N95 mask glued to their face, doing Zoom calls, sitting side by side, unable to eat anything. This is real life. I'm not exaggerating. Yale University, this is another one for the students. I know you shouldn't cry too much for the Ivy League kids, but they are kids regardless. Let's put this up there, which is that they are allowed now. Yeah, you can come back to New Haven even though they are boosted. But while you're

here, students must quarantine in their residences except to pick up food and tests until they receive results of an arrival test. Yale instituted a campus-wide quarantine until February 7. Students may not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants, even outdoors, except for curbside pickup. Dining is grab-and-go until public health conditions improve. Yale is currently set to resume in-person classes on February 7th. So not only are these people being charged exorbitant amounts of money, they're literally imprisoning them in their dorms and saying, oh yeah, all those restaurants around you, you cannot even go there to eat outdoors. It's complete madness. And this is happening across the entire country. It filters down from Yale's and to the Georgetown's and now to the GW's and the American's law schools. It completely comes down to the white collar workplace. And in the blue collar workplace,

you know, those people are treated just as shittily too. It's like we have an entire nation, which is just being tortured by this like COVID public health bureaucracy for literally no reason. I don't know. Maybe I sound crazy, Crystal. I'm increasingly starting to lose my mind. The thing with Eamon, I mean, Eamon's a longtime personal friend of mine, so it really bothered me when I saw that because it's just a terrible feeling to be treated like that when you're out with your family. I can't imagine. With your little child? Yeah. I mean, I have a four-year-old who's also unvaccinated because she can't get a vaccine because she's not five. Yeah. I mean, some people have just, this is, again, this is not reflective of science. Yes. And there's been a lot of veneration of the science, which was always, you know, kind

of a desire to outsource thinking about values and thinking about a society, thinking about politics to these supposed experts who were just going to, whatever they say goes, and then we don't have to really think too hard about it. But, you know, if you look at the science around children, if you look at the science around the risk for young college kids, like the risk level is very low, especially if you're boosted, especially with Omicron. Omicron is, you know, a less severe disease. We know that at this point. And we also know of the social ills and the anxiety and the increase in suicide and the increase in obesity and all of these other things on the other side. So these policies do not reflect

the science. And, you know, they reflect paranoia. They reflect virtue signaling. They reflect a sort of like, it's a tribalism. It's the liberal equivalent of, you know, the people who are anti-vax and, you know, anti-mask and anti any of the sort of pandemic precautions. This is the flip side of that. And it's also, it's also bad. It's also not good for society. So that's why we're taking a look at it. Yeah. I mean, and I, you know, I continue to think that you, there is, this is the center of gravity for a lot of the misery in the United States right now. And I think it's just being ignored. I consistently see like, oh, well, you know, one of the reasons why I think that any sort of cash

transfer or any at this point would not do anything in order to alleviate suffering in this regard, I don't mean in the financial regard, is specifically because the conditions of people's lives right now is both materially miserable, but also experientially miserable. And that's not necessarily the case for people in the more red states or in more rural areas, but in the urban environment and especially for the elites, maybe part of the reason so many of these media people coming back to our previous segment are miserable is because of this. I mean, life is crazy around here. It's difficult to describe for those of you who don't live in one of these megacities, it's like D.C. or Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A.

Even if you go five miles out, it's a totally different way of life. If you go five miles from there, it's like COVID doesn't even exist. And this level of trickle-down in terms of the restrictions and more in every elite institution, it's driving them nuts. Sometimes it's applied to the blue-collar workforce. After I tweeted out that thing, you know, people were contacting me all across America. They're like, you wouldn't believe my boss. You know, one guy told me that at his workplace, if you don't get the vaccine or whatever, they literally make you wear a badge that says unvaccinated on your clothes.

You're walking around at work. The other thing that bugs me is, so Virginia doesn't have indoor mask mandate. Which is beautiful. I love Virginia. And I mean, this is actually interesting because you and I, I think, have had very different pandemic experiences. Isle of Alton. It's true. Isle of Alton sticks. Things are pretty normal.

I mean, the kids do have to wear masks at school. I wish they didn't. And I have been worried a bit. But they're not shutting down school outside of snow in King George County at this point. But by and large, things are pretty normal. People are doing what they normally do at this point. Very different situation living here in D.C. So I think we've had very different situations. But one thing that does bug me is even though there's no indoor mask mandate, all of the service workers are required to wear masks. And I think probably there's a good number who would choose to wear masks just because of the number of interactions

that they have to have in a day. And they should be able to choose masks if they want to. But I really hate this like servant class requirement that you have to wear your mask all day. Bezos on his yacht getting served. Everybody who was, everybody unmasked except for the lady leading down on the yacht. See, I hate that. I really hate that. And you're right though. You know, these Chipotle guys, Starbucks, they're required in order to do it. For customers, you know, it's up in the air. Let the employees choose. I will give a shout out to Trader Joe's, who is the only place that I have noticed where they allow their employees not to wear a mask. Again, most of them do, which is fine. You could do whatever you want.

That is the only establishment that I've seen, even in the state of Virginia, where it's not required, where their employees do not have to wear a mask. I assume, given that it's not happening. Also, shout out to them. They were the first place, and I will always patronize them for this reason, who took away their mask mandate and said, we trust our customers. So thank you, Trader Joe's.

I deeply appreciate it. Okay, so madness on I-95, as you guys all know at this point this week. This stretched, this backup stretched all the way from D.C. down nearly to Richmond. I mean, this was— It was 90 miles. It was 80, 90 miles of cars totally stuck on icy roads during this snowstorm. This really, like really got to me.

Because I was just imagining. First of all, I have driven the stretch of 95 thousands and thousands of times in my life. This is around my area where I grew up and where I drive into the city and all of that stuff. So I knew exactly all the pictures that were coming out, where they were, and what a terrible situation, ultimately, they must have been in. And, of course, people were really mad.

They were like, how does this happen? I mean, yeah, it was a bad snowstorm. But D.C. and Virginia get a foot of snow on a fairly regular basis. Every couple of years. Yeah. I mean, it was probably like three, four years ago that we had one this bad. This is not like a once-in-a-l a lifetime kind of a situation. And people were stuck there. Not only were they stuck there getting no information, getting no help, no one reaching out to make sure

your kids are safe or that you're not starving or any of that for more than 24 hours. Pure insanity. So what was the response of the governor to this total, total breakdown of the state? Oh, naturally, to blame the drivers. Let's put this up on the screen. Ralph Northam blames the drivers for getting on I-95. No apologies for what was obvious government failure. We gave warnings, and people need to pay attention to these warnings

and the less people that are on the highways when these storms hit, the better. Look, that may be true, but to let yourself off the hook for abandoning these thousands of people in a very dangerous

situation with temperatures dropping down into the teens at night. Overnight. People running on a – people don't have food. People don't have sufficient clothing. And, you know, they're freezing in their cars. This is insane. And what they said is that, oh, well, the problem was that since the storm started as rain and sleet and then shifted to snow, we didn't pre-treat the roads at all. Because, ah, it'd just be a waste of the, you know, the resources that ultimately get washed away.

And I have no doubt that the fact that it started as rain complicated the situation. But surely, this is one of the busiest stretches of highway in the entire country and certainly on the East Coast. You have to at least put some stuff down and hope some of it sticks there because that was the issue is once people got stuck, then everything was just complete ice. And even if they cleared out the car, the tractor trailers that had jackknifed at the front of the lineup and whatever, people really still couldn't move because it was so incredibly icy. So what a complete disaster and failure ultimately. Massive failure. You know, Senator Tim Kaine, we'll put this up there on the screen, he was on the road for 27 hours. He was stuck there. And, you know, the tales that I started to hear and

have read about from some of these people is truly dystopian. There was a couple that had not eaten 30 hours that was stuck behind a truck. And they noticed that the truck had bread in it. It had like a bread delivery thing on the side. So they called the customer service line. And he ended up getting a call back from the CEO of the company who was like, put me on the phone with the driver. And he did. And he's like opening it up and give food to everybody else.

Really? It was a very nice story. So this couple, you know, they went, yeah, but he shouldn't have to do that. He's in the government. So they have to like call his CEO calls, like opens up the truck. One of those heartwarming like child raises money for cancer. So, you know, this couple, they're going out, they're handing out bread. Everybody's very thankful.

But I didn't know this, you know, in Boston, apparently this once happened in the 1980s. People died in their cars because they fell asleep and their exhaust pipes actually got snowed over. And people died of carbon monoxide poisoning while they were sleeping. I didn't even think about that. I know. It was totally nuts. Wow. Tim Kaine said he would sleep where he would turn his car on for 10 minutes, go to sleep, turn it off in order to save gas, then sit there for another 20, 30 minutes,

wake up because it was freezing cold, and turn it on again. I mean, this is just a complete nightmare of a situation. There was a reporter from Miami who was actually stuck in the middle of all this. And listen to him describe this. I think it was around hour 16, where he had not even seen a single representative, like a cop, state, anybody. Take a listen to this. Good morning from Interstate 95. The sun got up about, I don't know, maybe about 45 minutes ago. I've been stuck just south of Quantico, Virginia, on I-95 for at least 15 hours. I've been in the car for 20 hours and there is absolutely no sign that

this is going to change anytime soon. This is a complete parking lot I-95 and the road is just nothing but ice. Now I don't know who's in charge, but somebody better do something because there are cars and families just trapped here this entire time. And nobody seems to be caught. I haven't seen a state trooper in at least 12 hours. That's the last time I saw a trooper. I haven't seen a tow truck in at least 14 hours. There is nothing moving on Interstate 95. It is a parking lot.

Wow. I came. I felt so bad for people who had kids. Kids and eating dogs. Some people had their dogs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing, like, if you as an adult have to, I mean, it's horrible to go a day without eating.

But you're going to be okay. But for kids, ugh, terrible. And, you know, people having to go to the bathroom. Like, this is just absolute nightmare. And, look, I get it. It was challenging circumstances, but there was nothing you could do. You don't have any regrets about how the situation was handled. And then if nothing else, totally inexcusable that people were getting no information whatsoever. He's got their cell phones there. You can send

down a message. You can geocode it to the people who are in that area. They didn't do any of that, any of it. It just astonishes me that there's not any more sort of like, you know, apologies forthcoming about creating this very dangerous nightmare for people. I was also thinking about, you know, people who were having a medical issue. I mean, ambulances trying to get through. Insulin. There's all kinds of these examples. Exactly.

So, I mean, it's very, very dangerous and life-threatening situation. I saw Tim Kaine say, you know, at first, it just feels like this very frustrating, annoying situation. And then you sort of have to flip into survival mode. No, literally. Figure out how you're going to actually get through this. So, you know, thank God it's cleared now. But wow, no responsibility taken here whatsoever.

Yeah. Pretty amazing. Well, we don't want to miss the one most terrible media take of all time. Oh, yeah. I insisted on this one. Dana Perino on Fox News has an interesting reason as to why exactly the police were not able to get the situation under control. Let's take a listen.

I want to point out one thing that I do not believe has been said yet. I talked to a state legislator there in Virginia, and he pointed out to me that in the last several years, many on the left made a decision that local sheriffs should not be allowed to have military grade equipment, right? Because they said that that was a bad symbol and that it was too militaristic and authoritarian. But imagine if they were still allowed to have the equipment that they had just a few years ago. It probably would have come in very helpful today. What equipment? What are you talking about? Which military equipment clears the snow?

What exactly are you suggesting here? As Ryan Grim put it, yeah, the one thing Northern Virginia is really missing is military equipment. Yeah, home to the Pentagon. They're actually fine. Every defense contractor. As you also pointed out, right on I-95 is Quantico, which is like a massive Marine Corps base. So they could have if they wanted to.

Actually, a criticism of the governor is he did not mobilize the National Guard, which he should have immediately, in order to try and help these people. So I don't know what the hell these people are thinking. Yeah, I mean, it's just perfect. What are you saying?

Perfect. Do you understand? Right, and there's no follow-up of like, okay, what equipment and what would you do with it? How would that help the situation?

And there's even totally vague about whether it's even true that these police departments don't have military Yeah, I don't even know that to be true. I have no idea.

Anyway, good example of the way that partisan brain worms just rot people's minds and it's allowed to go, allowed to run rampant on these cable news channels. A fitting way to end our coverage on January, or at least our main coverage on January 6th. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as you know, the pandemic has been truly awful in a whole lot of ways. In the U.S. alone, more than 800,000 people have died. The economy was ravaged, and now a surprisingly strong recovery in some

ways has been hobbled by significant inflation. Our response as individuals and communities to the pandemic have been thoroughly politicized. Now we wear our ideological affiliations on our face with our masking choices. The discussion about vaccines is really one of the most toxic that I have ever seen. But we did catch one incredible break with this awful disease. It rarely severely impacts children. As of yesterday, per the CDC data,

less than 0.1% of deaths from COVID have been kids under the age of 18. That amounts to 803 total deaths over the entire length of the pandemic. Now look, every child's life, of course, is precious. But we also have to consider that represents a tiny fraction of the overall number of pediatric deaths during that period. So COVID deaths are far less common for kids than death from car accident, death from drowning, death from suffocation, firearms, heart disease. They're even less common than deaths from the flu and from pneumonia. With Omicron, this trend, thank God, has continued. Just as in adults, Omicron is milder in kids than previous variants

were. There's been an increase in kids who are hospitalized, yes, but that results from two simple facts. One, Omicron is just so incredibly widespread. And two, kids are much less likely than adults to be fully vaccinated. When it comes to COVID, at this point, we know very clearly the kids are all right. So it is absolutely inexcusable that we have continued to inflict widespread, well-documented, significant harm on our kids under the guise of protecting them from this pandemic. What do I mean by that? Well, major school districts across the country have once again shuttered, this time because of the Omicron wave. Places like Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Newark, they've all shifted back to remote learning to start the school year, to start 2022,

putting their neediest kids at severe risk. It's not just those districts, though. You can see on this map that while, yes, the majority of schools are remaining open, all across the country, there are districts switching to virtual learning. Red areas are in-person, blue is hybrid, orange is remote. So you can see those patches everywhere across the country. There is no excuse for doing this to our kids, none.

David Leinhart over at The Times, he laid out the data pretty starkly here in a lengthy Twitter thread and accompanying article. He wrote, American children are starting 2022 in crisis. I'm not sure that many people fully grasp the depth of it. He details the catastrophic learning loss, spikes in mental health crises, and suicide attempts. New test results make it extremely clear that kids have suffered devastating learning loss, and especially poor kids. Performance on a national standardized test plummeted as compared with the pre-pandemic numbers. The falloff was especially bad in majority Black and Latino districts. Kids learning to read and middle schoolers shifting from basic math to

algebra, those were the people who were particularly impacted here. This matches results coming from places as disparate as Ohio, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, all of which have reported large drop-offs in math and reading proficiency. But this learning loss might not even be the worst impact. The psychological damage we've done to kids and to adolescents is only now coming into view. The American Academy of Pediatrics, they've recently issued a declaration of national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. As David Leinhart also pointed out, suicide attempts have risen slightly among

adolescent boys and sharply among adolescent girls. The number of ER visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12 to 17-year-old girls rose by 51% from early 2019 to early 2021. That's according to the CDC. Teachers are also reporting large increases in behavioral problems, things from fighting, property damage, to kids just putting their heads down on the desk and refusing to engage at all. And as far as little kids are concerned, we still have very little understanding of how being cut off from socialization during a key moment of social development might impact them for their entire lives. Look, I really understand why parents and teachers would be very scared.

The media has done a terrible job of communicating the actual risks of this disease and specifically the very low risk for children. Fear generates clicks and reassurance does not. Or at least that seems to be the assumption of the mainstream press, although the fact that their ratings and clicks have fallen off a cliff might suggest it's time to reassess some of those assumptions. But I digress. David Leinhart's own outlet has done its fair share of favor-mongering here, publishing multiple pieces about what has turned out to be a rare occurrence, long COVID in kids. This particular piece enraged me so much, I did a

whole monologue on it titled, This is Really Scary. Kids struggle with long COVID lingering physical, mental, and neurological symptoms are affecting children as well as adults, including many who had mild reactions to the initial coronavirus infection. That's the one up on the screen right now. In fact, many kids did not struggle with long COVID. Research from the University of Minnesota found that fewer than 1 in 20 kids with COVID had symptoms lasting longer than four weeks. By eight weeks' time, nearly all had fully recovered. I don't doubt that there are many well-meaning people who are freaked out by this COVID porn news

who truly believe that closing schools is the right choice to best protect our kids. But the science on this could not possibly be more clear. If you are closing schools, you are not protecting kids. You're hurting them. The only people who are protected by such decisions are the adults who refuse to get vaccinated. And if they don't care enough to protect themselves, why in God's name would we sacrifice the well-being of our kids to their benefit? I know districts will face challenges dealing with staffing shortages as adults call out sick with COVID. But it should be a national priority to protect our kids and at all costs stop sacrificing their well-being to the failures and neuroses of the grown-ups.

And that is the thing, Sagar, at this point it is inexcusable. And I have said it so many times. At the beginning of COVID... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, one of the most disgusting things about politicians is they talk a big game. They make big promises and they announce policies and even say that they're implementing them. Then they get a press conference.

Everybody claps, says job well done. Six months, though, or a year later when it actually comes time to see what actually happened, the answer is usually nothing. And worse, it's usually worse than useless. No policy area in Washington signifies this more than China, and especially trade with China. Donald Trump was elected with the promise of a trade war on China. And to his credit, he did implement it for a little while. And then in 2020, facing enormous pressure from the business community and his own staff,

who never really believed in what he said anyways, he cut a deal with the Chinese to remove tariffs on their economy in exchange for a promise by them to buy $200 billion of American goods over the next two years, most of those goods being soybeans. It was actually a pretty terrible deal. It didn't rectify our trade imbalance with China at all, didn't reclaim damages from trillions of dollars in IP theft, and it continued to sell out American farmers and workers decimated by China in the 2000s. But Trump was facing re-election, and it was obviously good in the short term for the stock market and sympathetic farmers who he signed it. So he hailed it as a victory, even though any

serious person thought it was actually a pretty dumb idea at the time. Within eight months of implementing that deal, it was obvious that the Chinese were not living up to what they said that they were going to do. In fact, by September of 2020, they had reached only 53% of its promises, and in late October of 2020, Chinese imports of U.S. goods were actually lower than before the trade war. This started in 2018. Now look, to be fair, that was during COVID. But since then, it's been more than a year, and the deal is set to expire tomorrow. Guess what? Yeah, they actually lied as usual, and they didn't do what they said they were going to do.

If Trump was as tough as he said he was, he would have easily predicted this, but I digress. Now, tomorrow when the deal expires, China will have fallen short by, listen to this, 17% on its agricultural commitments, 41% on its manufacturing commitments, and 62% on its energy purchasing commitments. It is clear as day that they did not even try. They blamed the pandemic. They saw our chaos domestically. They just thought, screw it. We'll just call their bluff. That's now the choice that Joe Biden faces right now. Inside the agreement between the U.S. and China is a dispute clause where the United States can compel China to make additional purchases by applying new tariffs and to raise revenues on the goods that they said they would buy. Now, as you can guess, the U.S. business community, the enemies of actual American workers and farmers, is now raising hell to push exactly this. They're basically telling Biden, look, man, it was just a crazy year. Just give the Chinese a pass. Just ignore it. Literally,

their advice is to ignore the terms of the agreement that we signed and move on, because then the Chinese would have to pay higher prices. And right now, all the very highly paid people who watch the space tell the Wall Street Journal, quote, trade analysts say it's unlikely Biden would escalate tensions with China as he seeks to tame inflation and advance his domestic agenda. Look, there's always a reason not to screw with big business, but it is pretty freaking simple. We had a deal and they broke it. It's the latest in every single international trade agreement in Beijing. Or he can grow a pair and he can actually put tariffs on now. There is always a reason not to stand up and rebuild America. In fact, I see it daily on Twitter when I see so-called economic experts say that the best way to tamp down inflation is reduced tariffs. Yeah, maybe the price will drop tomorrow. What about the next

pandemic or global shipping crisis? Should we be just as vulnerable then? That is what they are saying. Make no mistake, American greed is the reason that we are bent over a barrel in the first place. As Ryan Peterson, he's the CEO of Flexport, a supply chain expert. He recently said this in an interview, quote, what's caused all this, the supply chain bottlenecks, is modern finance's obsession with return on equity. To show great ROE, almost every CEO stripped their company of all but bare minimum of assets, just in time, everything with no excess capacity, no strategic reserves, no cash on balance sheets. We stripped the shock absorbers out of the economy in pursuit of better short-term metrics.

Large businesses are supposed to be more stable and resilient than small ones. However, the obsession with ROE means that no company was prepared for the inevitable 100-year storm. When we stripped ourselves of parts, the Chinese were very happy to pick up the scraps. They took our losses for decades in order to build capacity. And now, in a time of crisis, they know they can laugh in our face by signing a fake agreement and probably face no consequences that the music is not going to stop. But it will stop one day, one way or the other. It can stop when we become a defunct nation incapable of producing anything in a time of

crisis with a geopolitical adversary that controls the entire global economy, or we can at least take care of ourselves. It's a truly binary choice. Those that are advocating against this sensible choice are the richest, most powerful people in America today. I am under no illusion Biden will do nothing. Nobody except a few nerds like myself will frankly even notice. But the rich people will. And then that'll be it. The status quo almost always will win. But pay attention here at least to the particulars,

because one day we will be in a situation probably worse than we are right now, and we will come to understand the consequences of letting us all be sold out to the altar of corporate greed. This is another classic. We sign the deal. They don't live up to the deal. First of all, Trump is to blame for putting... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the one and only Glenn Greenwald. Of course, you guys know he's on Substack as well as Rumble and a bunch of other platforms.

Where do you mostly want people to follow you at this point, Glenn? Yeah, the writing is on Substack. I do video reports on Rumble. And then there's a new podcast app called Colin, which a bunch of people like Brianna Joy Gray and Matt Taibbi and many others are using. So any of those platforms will do. And also, of course, my frequent appearances here on Breaking Point, most importantly of all. Yeah, you do the Rumble video segments. I love those. Are really good.

I know you put a lot of time and effort into those, and that's not, you know, I guess I maybe have added respect for it because it's similar to what we do. So I'm a little like personally like, oh, he's doing a good job at that thing. Anyway, I wanted to bring you on to focus in particular on the dangers of how 1.6 has been weaponized to further the interests of the security state. Because in a lot of ways, I mean, 1-6 was like a dramatic failure in terms of being able to protect the Capitol and keep people down, keep the barricades up. So this massive failure for the security state that they then, as they always do, somehow turn around and use to make themselves only stronger. So I was hoping you could lay out some of those implications. Sure. So my reference point for the overall dynamic you're describing,

in which some event takes place that produces a justifiable level of fear in the population, which is then seized upon by authorities and centers of power in order to exploit and augment that fear more and more as the days and months pass from that event in order to gain more power for themselves. Obviously, for me, at least, is based in my experience doing reporting on and analysis of the first war on terror, which was very similar. There was obviously a traumatic event, which is the 9-11 attack that killed 3,000 Americans on the same day. But there was never any mass casualty attack anywhere close to it up until this very moment, 20 years later. And yet so many of the, quote unquote, temporary measures adopted in its name, such as the Patriot Act and a whole variety of other spying and detention powers, remain not just embedded as though it happened a month ago rather than 20 years ago, but they've been expanded wildly beyond their original intent. because fear is a very strong motivating factor for humans. Knowing that the more ethereal or abstract concerns on the other side of the ladder,

the erosion of civil liberties, the invasion of privacy, the breakdown of due process, are much more abstract and distant concerns that are often no match for reminding people of 3,000 dead Americans buried under a huge pile of rubble. So that is very much the similar dynamic. I think we see that with COVID, by the way, as well, where you talk about people dying in the hospital and nothing can compete with that in terms of the cost, whether it's children being out of school for two years and mental health crises from isolation and lockdown that just seem less visceral. The same is true here. Everybody saw the footage. Everybody agrees who's decent that those were horrible things to watch. We never want political violence in our politics. But the attempt to keep

it in perspective has been almost impossible, given the concerted effort to exploit the emotions surrounding January 6th and to turn it into something that it never was, an attempted coup, an insurrection, as though a thousand Trump supporters got anywhere close to overthrowing the most militarized, armed, and powerful government in the history of mankind. And obviously this week is an effort to rejuvenate that exploitation. Well, that's what you always point to, Glenn, in terms of the actual record of this whenever it comes to the justice system. Lay that out for us. One year later, as we assess it relative to the crackdown on people's lives and the actual militarization of Washington, D.C., the shutdown of the presidential inauguration, they turned our city into a legit green zone for months. One year later, what do we know about

the prosecutions and the way that the government has responded to this in an official manner? So I'll just use a different frame of reference just to set the groundwork for that, which is the Russiagate investigation. For years, we were told that there was rampant criminality on the part of the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration for having criminally conspired with the Kremlin. There was a lot of debate about whether that happened. They got a prosecutor, everyone trusted, Robert Mueller, to lead an 18-month probe with a huge team of prosecutors who were heralded as the most talented and aggressive, an unlimited amount of funds, subpoena power. And at the end of the process, a grand total of zero Americans, zero, was charged with

and convicted of the original crime that was alleged, which was criminally conspiring with the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 election. Not one single American was even charged with that because according to the Mueller investigation, they couldn't find evidence establishing that crime was committed. And yet it didn't remotely deter, even to this day, people from alleging that happened. Exactly the same thing, Sagar, is happening here. I don't know why media outlets feel entitled to refer to the January 6th riot as an insurrection, as though there's no debate about it, when we are now a full year into what the FBI itself heralds as the largest law enforcement operation in the history of the FBI. 700 people or more are now charged with a crime in association with January 6th.

Not a single one, not one of those people has been charged with insurrection, inciting an insurrection, attempting to overthrow the government, sedition, treason. They're all just common crimes of trespassing or violent assault for the ones who use violence, interrupting government procedures, processes. So if this were actually an insurrection or a seditious act or a coup, why is the Justice Department under the control of the Biden administration, not William Barr or Donald Trump, not charging anybody with what those crimes are that are alleged to have taken place. They're charging them with very common crimes that happened in protests and riots instead, because that's what that event was. You know, it's interesting because I see really now for the first time a significant number of liberals online who are upset about this, who are angry at Merrick Garland, who feel

like, where are, like, why do we just have these low-level crimes that are being charged and these, you know, low-level actors who aren't at the high level? Where are the big charges? Where's the big revelation of the plot that we've kind of been led to believe should be forthcoming by the leaders that we ultimately trust. So I kind of understand why they feel angry right now that they haven't gotten what they ultimately were promised by this narrative. I totally agree. And again, it's the same thing that happened in Russiagate. Remember, for three years, nobody was allowed to speak ill of Robert Mueller. We weren't allowed to remind people that he was the one who went before Congress as the FBI director and assured the Congress that they had definitive evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biological weapons. We weren't supposed to remind anybody

that he was the one who oversaw the rounding up of Muslims after 9-11 without due process, because to do so was to impugn the integrity of the brave men and women in the FBI who keep us safe. There was a prohibition on treating him as anything other than a hero. And then suddenly when he didn't deliver, when he closes an investigation without frog marching Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon out of the White House and Jared Kushner, whoever their fantasies were,

then suddenly everyone turned on him. And in fact, Adam Schiff in his book basically said that Robert Mueller was senile because they needed, it's like a, you know, it's kind of like an apocalyptic cult. If you keep promising everyone that doomsday is coming on a specific date and then it doesn't happen, you have to provide an explanation about why it didn't to keep the flock believing. The same thing has happened here.

They kept promising, you know, that Merrick Garland was going to come in, not even one six, but that they were going to prosecute Trump and Trump officials based on the obstruction of justice that Mueller laid out, that for some reason this honorable prosecutor and all of his aggressive prosecutors themselves didn't prosecute, but Merrick Garland was going to do that. He hasn't done anything like that. And they also think that, you know, like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and like Lauren Boebert and all the members of Congress that they hate are also going to be rounded up very

shortly and put in prison. And they're starting to see that's not going to happen either. And you're right, this disillusionment, they're now turning on Merrick Garland the way that they did finally turn on Robert Mueller, is normal and natural. But at some point, you would think these liberals would start to question whether the people they're listening to, the media outlets and the political leaders, are actually trustworthy. The way they keep leading them down this path that leads to a dead end and not to this promised land of nirvana and yet so far at least it doesn't seem to be happening they just keep blaming i saw today for example eli mistel the correspondent of the nation a beloved star of msnbc who was on democracy now ranting and raving against what he

called the two white prosecutors merrick garland and ro and Robert Mueller, for failing to do their job by not putting Trump in prison. This is still where their rage is going. And you know, Glenn, the lack of prosecution leads to some other interesting questions around the fact that we know for a fact that many of the people who are on video as ring leaders or people who pushed the actual riots on January 6th, have either not been indicted or taken off the most wanted list and more. Could you elaborate on that? I mean, that seems to be another area of inquiry. It's like, well, yes, there is lack of prosecution.

And that raises some interesting questions about what exactly was going on here. Yeah. I mean, you know, I spent 10 years devoting a lot of reporting time, as did several other journalists associated with the left. It was a very popular form of reporting on the way in which the FBI would infiltrate what they regarded as threatening groups of young, typically Muslim men in the United States and would use infiltrators and informants to lure them into plots that they themselves had never thought of and hadn't indicated any interest in pursuing, but the informants manipulated them into agreeing to join the plots. And then the FBI would swoop in at the last minute and praise itself and congratulate itself for disrupting a plot that they themselves had concocted. So we know for certain that the FBI is doing the same thing to far-right groups, which they say is the number one threat to American national security.

Not Russia, not China, not Al Qaeda or ISIS, but right wing domestic extremists. Because in the Gretchen Whitmer case, the kidnapping case that was such a big deal was made of that before the election. We now know that at least half, if not more, of the people in that pod, including the leaders, were acting at the behest of the FBI. We also know for sure, Sagar, that the FBI had at least two informants on the ground embedded in the crowd because the New York Times itself confirmed that. And you have a congressional committee presumably or purportedly attempting to get the bottom of what happened, and they have zero interest in asking why the FBI didn't do that, right? You would expect them to be angry that the FBI didn't. We were talking before about 9-11 and the failure that that was by the NSA with their billions of dollars every year not to detect this plot or the FBI. Why didn't the FBI have their tentacles in

these groups? Or if they did, what is it that they knew? And are there people who were ringleaders who aren't being prosecuted for that reason? It's a question that the people who have the capacity to answer that, namely the Justice Department and the 1-6 Congressional Committee, are steadfastly refusing to get near, which only makes those suspicions more valid. What do you make of the fact, Glenn, that, you know, the last time that cable news networks got good ratings was basically 1-6. And so they've devoted a lot of time and coverage to exploring that day, exploring their personal feelings on that day. There's this congressional inquiry. So Washington has really wanted to focus a lot of time and attention on 1-6, even as the public isn't really following them there. I mean, the top concerns for people are things like inflation, the economy, health

care. I mean, the same sorts of things that people generally are concerned about. So what do you read into the fact that the public has, by and large, not gone where the media has wanted to lead them? So, I mean, the dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from Donald Trump and his presidency and his campaign and then the aftermath more than that sector, the liberal wing of the corporate media. It saved enormous amounts of jobs. It generated enormous ratings. January 6 was the single most watched day in CNN's history. So of course they have an interest in trying to rejuvenate and remind everyone and get everybody all excited again. But one of the things I was always trying to say during Russiagate was that I don't believe that Americans wake up in the

morning thinking at all, let alone first and foremost about what the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin are doing, even though that was like 70% of what cable news and liberal outlets were talking about. And I think the same is true for January 6th. Why would they? It was like 900 Trump supporters, you know, two of whom had never left their couch, so they dropped out of a heart attack, a third of whom died of a speed overdose, and the fourth was shot in the neck by a member of the Capitol Hill police. They killed nobody. There were no weapons brandished inside the Capitol. There have been no repeats since then. The problem, Crystal, is that there's these really warped incentives where if you're the New York Times or if you're CNN, you only need to rile up a certain percentage of the population that's very

small, and it can be completely homogenized they're all liberals they're all like-minded but all you need is like two or three million of them to just get very invested in these fears again in order for them to become profitable again but the news itself is completely detached from the concerns of the overwhelming majority of americans who obviously are concerned with a million other things from school closures to the pandemic, to inflation, to their labor conditions, infinitely greater than the trauma of Hunter Walker and like other journalists who go on to Brian Stelter's show to do their therapy instead of doing it where they should, which is with a psychologist. So there's this enormous cleavage between what the media is trying to

talk about and what the public is interested in, which is why nobody watches their programs. Yeah. I couldn't think of a better way in order to spend January 6th, Glenn. It's a solemn day. This is the real reason that it matters to so many of the people in power and that it's not even to whitewash what was objectively a terrible event. But we've got to talk about it in the way that it deserves. So thank you, man. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Glenn. Great to see you.

Great to be with you guys on this very difficult day. My solidarity to both of you. Solidarity, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you want to know why we do this show, I actually do think today is a pretty good example. Being able to expose so much of the way that people in power weaponize objectively terrible things in order to try crack down on your life, be it COVID, be it January 6th,

and ignore their own role in creating the situation where people hate each other, where our lives are miserable. So, I mean, I'm very, very proud of the show that we put together today. I think it's a perfect representation of us. We appreciate your support, as always, but I'm just thinking about, you know, I don't know what I would do without the show.

Like, I think I would be sitting at home just losing my mind, trapped in some, like, corporate media job or something, whispering to my friends, you know, getting drunk on the weekend, and just being like, God, I hate my job. I'd be drinking a lot more. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's 100% the case. Yeah, I mean, look, ultimately, I think January 6th deserved coverage, but I think it deserved coverage that was productive that could lead us somewhere better. Rather than the easiest thing in the world to do is say, those people were idiots. They were assholes. They were criminals. They were bad.

The Republican Party is bad. Trump is bad. Okay. What now? Like, how do we end up in this place? What's next? Where do we, how do we, those are not, those 900 people being assholes or whatever,

that's not a solvable problem. There's always going to be some percentage of the public that are assholes and idiots who do stupid things, especially if they're led in a certain direction. So it's not ultimately productive, and it just makes things worse when the sum totality of all your coverage day in and day out

is why this half of the country is terrible and irredeemable. You know, if you're a liberal outlet, it's the Republicans. If you're Fox News or the conservative outlets, it's the liberals and the left. That doesn't lead us ultimately anywhere productive and useful. So did our best to put together a show that was a little bit forward looking that tried to delve into some of those deeper issues. And we appreciate you guys supporting us and our ability to do this so that soccer and I can stay away from being alcoholics. Yeah, no, like actually. Thank you guys. We really appreciate it. We've got big plans. We will see you all next week. Love you guys. See you next week. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios.

Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica.

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