Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/28/23: General Milley Says Ukraine Must Negotiate, Hillary Calls For Putin Regime Change, SCOTUS Student Debt Relief, Trump Attacks Fox, Brett Favre Serves Pat McAfee, Nina Turner on CNN, Affirmative Action, Private Equity Destroys Shopko

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Saagar and Ryan discuss General Milley's interview where he states the Ukraine war needs to be ended at the negotiating table, the US paying Ukraine teachers pensions, Hillary calling for Putin regime change, SCOTUS on Student debt relief, will SCOTUS end the Elizabeth Warren agency, Trump attacking Fox News over Desantis praise, Brett Favre serving Pat McAfee threatening bankruptcy, Nina Turner on CNN slamming Joy Behar for shaming Ohio residents for the train derailment, Saagar looks at Buttigieg's failures exposing Affirmative Action, and Ryan looks into how Wall Street destroyed a beloved midwest institution Shopko.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. Ryan Grimm is here for Crystal Ball. Ryan, it's great to see you, my friend. All these crestfallen faces. No, there's no crestfallen faces. What are you talking about?

Everyone was very excited about the girls' show. We have to make sure that we supplant them with the boys' show, so let's go ahead and get those comments as positive as they were for the girl's show for the bro show. So we got a lot of good stuff in the show today. We got Ukraine. We're going to be talking about negotiations. We got SCOTUS. There's two big cases. The CFPB, Ryan, you were very involved in covering that at the time. So we'll talk about that. We'll also talk about student loan, which is up before the court. Biden administration in a real bind right now because they have to both argue the pandemic is over, but also that it's not before the court.

So that'll be fun. Fox News, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, who's getting more Fox News treatment. Trump is very pissed off at the way that Fox has been handling it so far. I know there's a lot of interest, Crystal. I had to cover this for her. The Brett Favre case versus Pat McAfee. This guy has got to be one of the most arrogant. I'll save my words for that. But anyway, he officially served Pat McAfee in the case. He's making some outrageous legal threats. I really want to see Brett Favre go down like this now that he's conducting himself. And then finally, Nina Turner just absolutely stunning a CNN panel in her comments on East Palestine. But let's start with Ukraine. Let's

go ahead and put this up there on the screen. General Mark Milley making some crazy comments on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, being the senior most military official of the U.S. government, saying that there is no way this thing ends without negotiation. Let's take a listen to that. How do we move toward an endgame? How do we move toward a negotiated peace? Well, I think that's up for the Ukrainians to decide that. So what is acceptable to Ukraine, that's territory intact, whatever that answer is going to be. Is it militarily possible for us to get Russians, for the Ukrainians to get every Russian troop out of their country and Crimea? I don't think it's militarily possible for the Russians to achieve

their initial strategic objectives, political objectives by military means. I don't think that's possible anymore. On the flip side, the Ukrainians, I think for this year, it would be very, very difficult, not impossible, but very, very difficult for the Ukrainians to achieve their political objectives. And their stated political objective is for every single Russian to leave every single inch of Ukrainian territory. I think that's a very high bar. I think from a military standpoint only, that'd be extraordinarily difficult to achieve militarily this year. So he's choosing his words there very carefully, Ryan. And this actually comes on the heels of a New York Times report. Let's go and put this up there on the screen,

guys, flagged by Aaron Mate. From this report, they say, quote, around the same time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, argued in internal meetings, Ukraine was unlikely to make substantially greater battlefield gains and should move to the bargaining table. Quote, the White House quickly squelched such talk. This actually happened. Several leaks came out from the Joint Chiefs at the time about how he was saying, look, guys, he's like, I understand, you know, all this 50 billion. He's also been, as I understand it, one of the heads of leaking to the New York Times

and others, the fact that the Ukrainians are very likely to expend all of their battlefield aid by sometime this summer and that that is very likely going to be the end of the package. What do you make of his comments? Probably the most pro-negotiating comments, ironically, coming from the military. Yeah, and it's well said that he was choosing his words. And you could see that he had kind of been kind of cracked down on a little bit. He had made some comments publicly that were similar to those back in the fall. It's nice to see from the New York Times that he was saying those internally.

Not so nice to see that they're just squelching that. Who else made comments like that at the time? Barack Obama, if you remember. I do. Remember the Progressive Caucus came out with that letter that they immediately said, never mind, never mind. Sorry, did we say that? No, we retract that letter.

Ben Rhodes, once you have the Pod Save crew saying like, hmm, maybe this is something we ought to think about, it becomes part of the conversation, which they very quickly squelch. So here he is back again saying like, look, and he's setting up a real logical conundrum for people here. Because the people who say, look, it's up to Ukraine, and it's all about sovereignty, and we need to support Ukrainian sovereignty until Ukraine says that they have fought to every last man, woman, and child. If Milley is saying that that is not possible, then what are you advocating for?

You're advocating just to keep arming Ukraine indefinitely, which is a forever war. And if that's your position, then make it. Yeah, you should say it. That's fine. And maybe because of Russia's aggression, maybe that is an appropriate position. A lot of people will take that position. A lot of people will take that position. A lot of people will take that position. But take that position.

Say that we're in this forever. Now, Milley says over the next year, but if you would have pressed him on that, it's not obvious what conditions change that makes Crimea attainable for the Ukrainian military other than European boots in there, U.S. boots in there? We're already giving roughly what our manufacturing capacity can send there. So it's not like we're going to necessarily expand our manufacturing capacity just to finance a takeover of Crimea. So that raises a real question. What are you for at this point?

Well, it's interesting, too, because what you can see is that, and what we've pointed here to a lot of the show is, you should remember, Ukraine is not just the West and Russia and Ukraine. It's also a global war in terms of the support, in terms of Russia. China now coming out with its peace proposal, which effectively just freezes the battle lines that are in place. Ukraine saying that's a complete nonstarter. The West saying it's a joke. It's supposed to help Putin. But then at the flip side of that, you have Brazil, President Lula coming a complete non-starter, the West saying it's a joke, it's supposed to help Putin.

But then at the flip side of that, you have Brazil, President Lula coming to Washington and being like, no, I'm not going to send a single piece of military equipment to Ukraine. India, which they talk about actually quite a bit in the piece, is that much of the strategic negotiation talk, both Russia, Ukraine, and the West, is not aimed at each other. It's aimed at the rest of the world. Everybody wants to try and convince the rest of the world that they're going to try and bring this thing to the end. The Indians have made the strategic calculus. They're like, look, as long as we're going to get cheap oil, we're going to get it. We don't really care

what's happening here. Russia, yeah, we would prefer that you hadn't invaded Ukraine. But if we're going to buy it at a discount, we have one point something billion people that we have to feed and we have to keep going in a growing economy. We're just going to take it. The Chinese, on the other hand, are in a different conundrum. So initially they were caught off the guard, right? They were like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this actually happened. Then they were playing some rhetorical games and saying kind of putting Putin aside, saying that we weren't very happy about what happened. Now, you know, the U.S. military is on high alert saying that it looks like lethal aid is about to start going from Beijing to Russia.

Not only that, Russia very likely to start beginning even more strategic purchases from Russia or China in order to boost the Russian economy and keep it sanction-proof. By all accounts, the sanctions have been a total mixed bag, right? The Russian economy certainly has contracted, but not even close to the level of what we expected a financial nuclear bomb to do to a foreign country.

It's actually really exposed what it means to have trade. And whenever you don't have total 100 percent control over global trade, well, countries can exist, especially when they have hard assets like oil. General Milley is looking at this, seeing the increase in military aid from China, seeing the continued situation where India is going to backstop at least to some certain extent the Russian economy. And he's like, I don't see a way that the industrial output of Russia is going to end anytime soon. And like you said, I don't see a way that without 100 percent depleting our stockpiles and moving us to almost a total war manufacturing trajectory that we could supply them with the sheer amount of ammunition that they need. I mean, I don't think people really understand what it means to eat up $50 billion in weapons in just six months by the U.S. military's estimates. Well, how else is this thing going to end? And there was a nice column in the New York Times by some guest author that made a parallel to the Korean War that I thought was apt and something I had been thinking about previously in the sense that in 1951,

the war had kind of reached a stalemate where they're going kind of back and forth. And the world allowed that war to continue for another couple years. Stalin had his own reasons. He said it was giving the Chinese some training and fighting and it was draining the West and making them look weak. It was hurting Truman back home, which it was, he said it was giving the Chinese, like, some training and fighting, and it was draining the West and making them look weak.

It was hurting Truman back home, which it was, actually, hurting Truman back home. Yeah. So he said, let's drag this out. And the U.S., once the U.S. is in a war, like, they're in that war. Like, you really have to tens of thousands of lives. And so unless you can envision some path where the world is going to look fundamentally different than it does today, then what are you sacrificing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives over the next several years for? Rather than, as Milley said, get lucky and touch wood. I had never heard that phrase before. It's like, he's like, we can get the diplomats in the wood, they can, in the room, they

can touch wood. I'm like, okay, all right. I mean, look, it's gonna be difficult. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible. I mean, the Ukrainians now, I mean, to their credit, let's give them the credit where they do. They fought tremendously well. They have an immense, they have one of the most homogenous like populations that are left inside of Ukraine who are absolutely willing to fight for every scrap, for every inch. Up to them to when they want to go to the negotiation table. But as I've always said, it's also up to us to how much we want to backstop them to what extent. Let's not forget the Ukrainian war effort ends tomorrow without U.S. military aid. They could try and subsist on the European aid.

But given the sheer amount of numbers, it's not a joke. It's a joke compared to what the U.S. has provided them. We're basically the sole determiners of whether how the conflict is going to go. And according to The Washington Post, others who have been getting deep leaks from inside the administration, the word is from the Biden admin. They're like, look, guys, this is it. This is probably the last large age package. I'm personally a little bit skeptical of this because I was thinking about Afghanistan and even about Vietnam. Afghanistan, everybody wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. Then we did it and it turned out to be politically unpopular because people have some crazy idea that withdrawing from

a war is apparently very easy. Vietnam is a great example. Nixon was elected in 1968 on the pledge to try and withdraw from Vietnam. Actually, what he ends up doing is pursuing the peace with honor two-pronged strategy, actually ends up escalating the war to try to de-escalate the war. Here's the truth, people. That was very popular. For all of the student protests over the bombing of Cambodia, most people did want, quote, peace with honor without Vietnam, even though a Saigon-type exit was probably inevitable from literally day one. 1965, one of the first U.S. military advisors go over, or 1968, when the first hundreds of thousands of troops go over there. I'd say on the flip side, though, it happened in July of 21. Was it even remotely an issue in the 22 midterms?

Not wrong. And I think there's something skeezy about even talking about war and lives lost in those political terms. But unfortunately, it is determinative of policy. And so it is worth pointing out that you actually can leave a 20-year war in an off year, and then it'd be a debacle, the departure. And then a year and a half later, when voters go to the polls, they're like, oh, yeah, Afghanistan. We didn't like the way we ended, but there was not a single person who ran on the idea that we should actually go back into Afghanistan. That's an important point. And actually, I did a monologue at the time.

People can go back and watch it about how Gerald Ford's approval rating actually went up after Saigon. So, you know, it's one of those where you never really know. But he did end up losing the election. So I don't know. All right. Let's go to the second part here. Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, on the ground in Kiev yesterday with a very important announcement, I think, for the future of U.S. aid. And if you think that the U.S. military aid to Ukraine may end anytime soon, this is probably going to be the future battle lines of where.S. aid. And if you think that U.S. military aid to Ukraine may end anytime soon, this is probably going to be the future battle lines of where things are. Let's put this up there on the screen. Secretary Yellen was already abroad attending an international conference, made a secret trip over to Kyiv. She penned a New York Times op-ed here. It says, quote, Janet Yellen in Kyiv, economic aid to Ukraine is vital. But you know what I found more interesting, Ryan, is the actual headline on the New York Times website was Janet Yellen, colon, Zelensky is right.

We must provide economic aid to Ukraine. So they did a little bit of a change job here, just noting that for everyone. Essentially what Janet Yellen, the secretary of the treasury here, is talking about. It says, quote, since the start of the full-scale war, the United States provided close to 50 billion in economic, security, humanitarian assistance for Ukraine. Quote, we are proud to be Ukraine's largest bilateral donor and just as proud to be joined by an international coalition of supporters, including the European Union and other members of the Group Seven. But what actually really stuck out to me was the type of economic assistance we were providing to Ukraine. I don't

think people understand that this isn't just about the war effort. Quote, we have helped Ukraine mount a vigorous response to assist a million people who've had to flee their homes, providing, quote, social assistance, housing and utility subsidies, pension payments for millions of vulnerable Ukrainians. Bearing the economic brunt of the war, our aid has enabled the civil service to continue to operate the government, ensuring that it remains stable. So this kind of illustrates what I have always said about the Ukrainian war effort and really just about the extent to which the U.S. is backstopping this. The Europeans are nonexistent in this type of military aid. The $50 billion that we provided in just economic, not military aid is more than every other country combined in all aid, literally combined. So what does that mean for us? I mean, that means that this country, Ukraine, and look, we can't help but feel sympathy, but

we're talking here about, you know, our own pension funds don't get bailed out. We're paying the pension funds of the Ukrainian society. We're paying their teacher salary. We're paying their social assistance. We're paying their homes, their rent. I mean, presumably in the future, it's not like the Ukrainian government, which has already suffered some 35% drop in GDP, is ever going to be able to pay that, at least in the next decade, whenever you consider the rebuilding effort. So this underscored actually just how much the tap is going to have to remain on for Ukraine to be even a semi-functioning society for what, the next 20 years or so, which by the way, it's the U.S. taxpayer. You know, I always say this, we literally

are balancing the Ukrainian budget. If you're one of those people who cares about balanced budgets, like we are balancing theirs before we're balancing ours. You could say they need it more. I certainly think that that's true, but we should be honest about what exactly this entails for us. And I think because we haven't been in a war since World War II that required full-scale mobilization, I think we forget as a culture what it means to wage total war. And Janet Yellen is correct that if they withdrew those payments,

their war effort would collapse. Yes, literally collapse. If you don't have the teachers, if you don't have the... It's a home front. If you don't have the home front, everything falls apart. Right.

And so if you're supporting the Ukrainian war effort, you have to support that. Now, setting all this aside, I actually have a contrarian view on this type of U.S. aid. I'll lay it out for you, see if you buy this. So to me, start with the U.S. should not be the global empire that it is. But it is.

So we're going to start from the assumption that it is a global empire. To me, the idea that a country like Ukraine is going to pay back the United States misunderstands the power imbalance. Like the rest of the world is always and constantly paying us back. Yes. Like we are the richest country in the world because of our power, because of our military, and as a result we get cheap labor. In fact for decades we were getting cheap software developers in Ukraine. True. Specifically. And so you're getting cheap software developers in Ukraine. True. Specifically. And you're getting cheap raw materials. You're getting cheap food around the world.

You're getting cheap energy supply. All of that is subsidizing the lifestyle of the American people. And so it's kind of off to say that this type of funding is actually draining U.S. coffers because it's actually filling them up. We're not doing this for Ukraine. And don't be fooled by that. Well, I think that's fair. That's a typical kind of soft power, civil society aid argument.

I think that's fine. I mean, my main question is, this is one of the most corrupt countries in all of Europe. Are we actually paying enough pensions? She talked a lot about all the safeguards they put in place. No, that's fake. But then if you get to the bottom of her piece, you're like, our safeguards are through the World Bank. Correct.

Because very specifically in our law, Rand Paul pushed for more money for the IGs, pushed for, let's attach some actual transparency to this spending, and Congress rejected that. So Janet Yellen had to say, well, we're funneling the money through the World Bank and the World Bank is checking it. So don't worry. The last time I checked is famously unscrupulous institutions never had a scandal. It's not like they've ever misappropriated U.S. funds. Oh, wait, hold on a second. And that's exactly my point, which is, look, if this was actually paying Ukrainian teachers and pensions, I mean, I'm still a little sketchy about that, but OK, you know, I can understand. But, you know, how much of it it actually is? What did we just learn?

The former defense secretary of Ukraine just gets fired for, what, quadruple charging for food. Listen, what did I just read you? If they can't even pay their utilities, their pension bills, you think they're buying their own food? We're the ones who are buying the food, aka we're the ones who are paying overpriced

and somebody's making a profit somewhere. And that's actually where I look at the real crossroads for what this will look like. We need to accept that by being in this and if this is gonna be continued US bipartisan policy, we're signing up for 10 billion checks in terms of civil society aid, probably every what, three, four months?

I mean, that seems to be what we seem to distribute it, at least in economic aid. Well, all right, is it being spent properly? No. Actually, the U.S. Treasury Department says they have, quote, no indication that any of our funds have been misused. And then, as you said, you read a little bit deeper, and you're like, oh, well, they have no indication because they're not checking. Well, okay, I could say a lot of things. I have no indication X is happening, but if I'm not looking for it, then what do I know about whether it actually is? And the second part here,

let's put this up there on the screen. This also just goes to show you, for all the Republican talk about no more aid to Ukraine, they secretly passed an extra $10 billion aid package for the second year on Friday, hours after announcing $2 billion in additional military aid and a new round of sanctions against Russia. I don't even know what those sanctions possibly could be. But the point is, is that this extra, quote, $10 billion is being dispersed by the World Bank

Public Expenditure for Administrative Capacity Endurance Program, aka PEACE. I can see what they did there, which they say is, quote, crucial to Ukraine and to provide healthcare, education, and emergency services to its citizens. So again, we are literally paying Ukrainian doctors fees, medics, all this. I'm not even saying that this is bad, but I want people to realize it's not just weapons and ammunition that is happening here. The entire Ukrainian home front is backed up by the U.S. taxpayer. And it just shows you the level of control for all the talk of whatever Ukraine wants. It's like, well, hold on a second. That's a little bit different from whenever you are. Let's say that Ukraine is like the Soviet Union in World War II.

Soviet Union unquestionably needed the U.S. aid to survive. But they had industry. They had a functioning state. They had a society. They had millions of people willing to fight. And so it was a real question of their sovereignty versus USAID here. That's not even in the question here. This is 100% backstopped by the American taxpayer, which just demonstrates to you that as a polity, Ukraine doesn't exist as independent polity. I'm not saying on paper, OK? I'm not saying Ukraine is not a real country. What I'm saying is that they don't have any self-capacity whatsoever beyond the willing to fight to actually

survive. And that is a problem, you know, if we look at it in the future. Right. And so it goes back to what we were talking about in the first segment there about how long you want this to go on. Because Ukraine, I think, has a tighter and more powerful national identity today than it even did one year ago. But if they want the state capacity to actually buttress that, they either need, in the midst of the war, constant foreign support, or they need to get to an end of the war so that they can then reconstruct and rebuild their country. And the sooner that happens, the sooner they get back to a place of actual sovereignty. Because

you're right, if you want to make this argument all about sovereignty, how much sovereignty do you have if you're 100% dependent on the whims of the American superpower, American Congress, which every other country throughout history that has made itself dependent on the whims of the United States other than Israel has lived to pay that price. Yeah, that's a fantastic point. And then finally, Hillary Clinton making some headlines here, dispensing some news as to how she would handle this conflict, encouraging people inside of Russia, please, please kill Vladimir Putin. Here's what she had to say. The people closest to Putin, those who have to deal with him, those who he's keeping at the end of 40-foot tables while he issues bizarre orders,

they're the ones who need to act. They need to act for the good of Russia. They need to stop him. It's dangerous, and it's dangerous to the future of Russia. So my hope is that the people who are watching him, those who get close enough to see in person his behavior, which is so erratic, that they can try to prevent him from doing things that will not only be tragic for Ukraine, but tragic for Russia, too. This should be stopped for Russia's sake. This is the thing that people apparently don't know history, which is there has never or OK, let's say maybe one time Boris Yeltsin and every other time

there has never been a Russian leader who was deposed and more of a peacenik person who has come into power In fact Khrushchev was literally taken out of the government because they saw him as capitulating right to America during the Cuban Cuban Missile Crisis then when you look even further You know the people who replaced him were hardliners even though they knew that Khrushchev had pursued diplomacy In fact all indications that we have is that Putin has purged any real dissenters who believe in better relations with the West, who believe in diplomacy, who would politely end the war. And even if they are against the war,

the infrastructure that remains inside the Putin regime is 100% geared towards Ukraine. I'm not saying that he isn't a cult of personality and he doesn't have total control. But if you look at the talk of Medvedev, for example, this person, the Russian president at the time, the fake president while Putin was prime minister or whatever, he was supposedly like, oh, he speaks English. He wears nice suits.

He's a guy who we can get along with. He speaks our language. He's the one who's talking about dropping tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine. He's the one who's like, we are now in total war with the United States. You can't even survive in the Putin regime. By many indications, the only controlled opposition inside of Russia are the people who want more war, not anybody less. All the people who want less are either in jail or they left Russia. It's over. And so when we consider like a the practicality of what she's saying, but be if you do not think that Putin and his people are not playing that stuff on loop over and over again. The former U.S. secretary of state, one of the most identifiable politicians in the entire world, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, you're crazy. You know, by some reporting, Ryan, Putin watches on loop that video of Gaddafi getting a rod shoved off his ass and getting killed in Benghazi. And he watches it as a reminder.

He's like, this is what they will do to you. I'm not saying that isn't crazy because it definitely is. But I mean, when you like you got to get inside the mind of a person like that whenever you're going to talk this way. Yeah. You know where else that's relevant? Have you seen that Hillary Clinton hot mic clip where she's talking about Gaddafi? Oh, of course. This is famous. You guys can Google this one up. She says something like, we came, we saw, we killed, and just this cackle.

Just this sadistic giggle where you're like, okay, yeah, Gaddafi's terrible, but that was funny? If you watch that, you're like, that's funny? It's a horrific video. And Putin also set aside the truth of the matter. Putin also blames Hillary Clinton for interfering in his election in, what was it, 2014? Yes, that's right, 2014. And absolutely, the U.S. was funding NGOs

that were supportive of you know, Putin's opposition like that like In fact, I'm sure the US was doing more in the public record to support Putin's opposition Then Putin was doing to support Trump But that is that is a grudge that he has held to this day Oh for so he so he knows and then he tried to take her out in 2016. And I think, you know, the hack, people talk about the Facebook ads,

the hack of Podesta. Yes, that was it. That's the move. Lucifer and all that. Forget the Facebook ads. Yeah. So you've got her laughing about Gaddafi. You've got him watching Gaddafi on loop.

Now you've got her on, not in a phone call or on a secure link, you know, the way that secretaries of state used to try to overthrow other governments, but on cable television saying, go take this guy out. It also goes to the problem that we have of getting to touch wood, as Milley said, which is that we have convinced ourselves that Putin is a complete lunatic and psychopath. And therefore, you can't negotiate with a lunatic and a psychopath. Right.

Therefore, all you can do is war. And, you know, that type of rhetoric doesn't get you any closer to a place where you can then sit down. Because then how do you tell the American people, oh, actually, we've made it. We've made a deal. You can be a lunatic and a psychopath and you can still, you can be irrational in many – I mean invading Ukraine was very irrational. It definitely did not work out for him the way that he wanted it to be. It doesn't mean you still can't negotiate. I actually think about – I've talked with some of the people who met with Kim Jong-un and with the North Koreans.

The North Koreans are crazy. They're also very intelligent. And what they would say is they – the negotiators are like, you guys got to give up your nukes. They're like, yeah, how'd that work out for Gaddafi? He gave up. They just say it over and over again. And then they're like, well, we're never going to do anything to you. They're like, that's what Saddam Hussein thought. You guys gave him weapons, you gave him a sign to deal with him. And then he was killed. He's like, we're never giving these up. You know why? Because it's the only guarantee that you won't do what you've done in the last 25 years. You tell me. Doesn't sound that crazy to me. It is crazy whenever you're

using artillery to chop up your uncle or feed him to dogs. Yeah, I agree. But from a pure calculus perspective, you've got to try and get yourself in the minds of these people. I wish dictators didn't exist. I wish that he wasn't the president. But he is the president of Russia. So you have to take that as a reality and manage that with your strategic balance of what you want to do and what you don't want to do. And this is probably the least possible, most helpful thing. And unfortunately, it's a bipartisan problem. We had Lindsey Graham saying the exact same thing early days of the war, which we'll remember. And of course, you think that wasn't played on loop inside of Russia? This helps absolutely nobody. So anyway, Hillary doing her best. I just say, thank God that lady was never president of the United States.

All right, let's move on to SCOTUS here. So Ryan, I'm really curious what you think of this. The Supreme Court is officially hearing the student loan debt relief case. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. It says a decent summary of what the arguments for and against ours. So if we will return to what the actual plan was, $10,000 in federal student loan debt is getting canceled for those making less than $125,000 or households with less than $250,000 in income. Pell Grant recipients who receive more financial need

would get an additional $10,000 in debt forgiven. College students would qualify if their loans were dispersed before July 1st of 2022. That made some 43 million people eligible for the plan. The White House has said already that 26 million have applied for the relief and 16 million had already had relief approved. The Congressional Budget Office said it would cost about $400 billion over 30 years. However, the problem is that the current case before the court

involves a student named Myra Brown, ineligible for debt relief because her loans are commercially held, and an additional student, his name is Alexander Taylor, who is eligible for just $10,000, not the full $20,000 because he didn't receive a Pell Gantt grant. They say the Biden administration did not go through the proper process in enacting this plan. A Texas judge actually ruled on behalf of the students, ruled to block the program. He said that the Biden admin did not have clear authorization from Congress to implement the program. Now, this goes to what the Biden administration actually did. They used something called the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act was passed after September 11, 2001, which said that initially it was passed to keep service members from being worse off financially when they fought in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reasonable. Now, though, it allows the Secretary of Education to waive or modify the terms of student loans in connection with a national emergency. So this ties specifically to the COVID-19 pandemic because the Biden administration in court is arguing we are still in the middle of a COVID national emergency. But the president has said rhetorically the pandemic is over. We have rescinded, as I understand it, Title 42, what was happening down at the border. We were using COVID as a pretext to expel migrants. We have a new effectively remain in Mexico policy that is in effect.

So in many legal grounds, Ryan, from eviction moratoriums to the border, the Biden administration is no longer trying to argue that COVID is a national emergency. But in the case of student loan relief, they are saying it's a national emergency. And I saw the Secretary of Education this morning on television was asked, are you really saying that it's a national emergency in court and not a national emergency to the American people? He said, yes, that's what we were saying. I said, well, that's going to be interesting before the court. They also have an add-on argument, which I think is fair, which says that the student loan crisis was badly exacerbated by the pandemic.

So even if you stipulate that legally and actually the pandemic is over, let's just stipulate for the argument's sake, the crisis still happened because of that, and the law allows us to respond to a crisis that happened during that time. And because of the pause, and because of the economic, the pause in loan repayments and because of the economic shock that came from the pandemic, so many people losing, losing their jobs, uh, that you could say that there are many people who desperately need this. And I think that's actually true. I don't think that that's kind of playing games with stuff because you have so many people who are now used to not making that three to six

hundred dollar payment which they kept extending and extending right and 25 months their their balance if they had continued paying over the last three years would be substantially lower even though they got a they got a pause on interest rates uh than it than it is now so now all of a sudden if the court rules you know with these with these angry borrowers, you now are going to all of a sudden have to start paying this money. Now, I actually don't think they will. I think Biden would just keep indefinitely pausing it for everybody, which is hilarious. Like, wait a minute. So you can't cancel $10,000.

But you can extend it. You can basically cancel all of it forever. Okay, that's weird. So I think that making that case that, look, this was a crisis created by the pandemic should allow you to use the law around the pandemic. So that's, if I were, and I've heard them make versions of that argument, we'll see. It's going to be this morning. Right. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, just a couple of hours from where we're, actually not that far from where we're filming right now.

And one of the things that the justices are expected to focus on, a couple of hours from where we're actually not that far from where we're filming right now. And one of the things that the justices are expected to focus on a couple of things. Number one is whether the states and the borrowers even have a right to sue over the plan in the first place. This is called standing. If they don't, then they can just say, you don't have standing to sue for us before the Supreme Court. So ergo, the decision stands and the plan can go ahead. The other thing that what they have to prove is that the states and the borrowers have to show that they are financially harmed by the plan. I mean, on the borrower's part, that's not hard to imagine. But on the state's parts that are joining the suit, that might be.

And then otherwise, they're also going to question exactly whether the HEROES Act even gives a Biden admin the power to enact the plan. Now, look, a lot of this is partisan, too. And I would say, based on from what people I've talked to, Kavanaugh is going to be one of the swinger votes. And that's why, because if we go back to the original eviction moratorium, eviction moratorium was challenged before this record. Kavanaugh said, look, legally, I don't think you guys have standing. I don't think you guys have a foot to stand on. That said, from what I have looked at, we still have a COVID emergency. I don't want to kick people out of their homes. So I'm going to punt it to you. Congress, you have 60 days to extend the eviction

moratorium. The Biden administration doesn't do it. Congress doesn't do it. And then it ends up before the Supreme Court again. He's like, look, I told you you had 60 days. You don't have 60 days anymore. And this came all the way down to the national emergency declaration. So one of the reasons why I think it will be very important and it's very likely to get struck down at the court, possibly not even just 6-3, it could even be 7-2, from what I understand is that national, the student loan one, that specifically is going to rest

on the National Emergency Declaration and the ability to use the HEROES Act with COVID as a pretext. And you know, irony is, Ryan, as I understand it, they had a much easier way to cancel all this debt. Nobody asked them to go through with the HEROES Act. There's no reason why they had to. And it's probably the most legally precarious out of all of them that they chose. Right. They could have used the Higher Education Act, which has some provisions that would, that give the education department a lot more, a lot more flexibility, which is what Trump used,

you know, in the very early stages to pause this before they enacted, before they amended the HEROES legislation. So one possibility could be that the Supreme Court could use the Higher Education Act to legalize it. You don't have to rely on the reasoning of the litigants in your ruling. You're the Supreme Court. You can supremely do whatever you want. John Roberts showed that with the Affordable Care Act. Remember they said, this is a mandate.

They said, well, you can't do a mandate. And Roberts said, well, actually, it's not a mandate. It's a tax. And so he rewrote the reasoning for the law to then legalize it constitutionally. And so they could do that. And so it'll be interesting to watch to see if the Solicitor General for the White House says, even if you don't believe any of this HEROES Act justification, but you want to protect this, here's another argument that you could use if you chose to.

I also think the standing is interesting, but it's shot through with a lot of politics. It's hard to see how these students are being harmed because they're paying no matter what. Not being part of a program is definitely not harm. And so it may be sad. I feel bad that you didn't qualify for this thing. That's unfortunate. But it doesn't make you worse off than you currently are. I'm not sure.

Because the problem was is that there were all these suits. And the one suit that clearly people being harmed are who? Debt servicers. Those are the people who literally are payment collectors. They are materially being harmed. They actually could argue that. As I understand it, that case didn't end up moving forward. The challengers thought that this would be the best way to strike it down.

Not the most sympathetic. Not the most sympathetic, certainly. That said, from what I have heard, I could be completely wrong. Some of the court watchers I know, they think this is a clean sweep at court and that this thing is going to be struck down. And the real reason that's a mess is if they've already distributed $16 million or 16 million people relief, I don't know how you claw that back. I think you just pause it again.

That is an administrative nightmare to literally claw back people's relief after they've already given it out the door. Just get ready for some of the worst government stories of all time. Let's go to the second part here. You are very familiar with this, and I want you to set it up. So put it up there on the screen. The constitutionality of the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is currently up before the court. So can you explain this to us for the layperson? Even I barely understand it. It's something to do with Congress and funding and an independent agency. All the articles refer to this as Elizabeth Warren's

baby, but I spent so much time covering it. It's actually my God baby. Okay. So yeah, I covered this every day for a couple of years while Warren was pushing it through the House and the Senate in 2009 and 2010. And the big, the huge fights were over how it would be constructed. And there were two key questions. One, which has been litigated and they have successfully won, was would it be a commission where you get two Republicans, three Democrats, three Democrats? Right. Like the FEC, the FCC. Or would it be a single director?

The progressives fought for a single director because they said if you have a single director, it's going to be much tougher. The banks wanted a commission that they could then capture. Yep. Like they've done with all the other ones. They litigated that. They lost. So now the other major fight was the funding stream. Republicans wanted it funded in an annual appropriations way.

Yeah, like a normal, like the Department of Defense, something like that. Right. So that way if the Republicans control or if a bank bank friendly Democrat controls the financial, you know, the bank banking committee over the Senate, they can write to the CFPB and say, you know, we're not giving you funding until you change this rule. That is part of the process of corporate capture of our regulatory institutions. And so they came up with this. They call it unique. I don't know if it's exactly unique, but it kind of is. This structure where the money is sent to the Federal Reserve for the Federal Reserve's operating expenses. And then the Federal Reserve can then funds the CFPB with no more than 12% of the Federal Reserve's operating budget. And their earnings or something. I don't really understand.

Yeah. Now, the argument for why it's constitutional is that the Congress appropriates the money for the Federal Reserve's operating budget. It appropriates the money for Social Security, for Medicare. It doesn't do it in an annual way, and that the Fed could not produce from thin air this type of funding. But as long as it's authorized by statute, by Congress, and if Congress doesn't like it, they can change it. And there have been efforts in the past by Republicans to, when there's like a CR going through in the early days to change the structure of the way that the CFPB is funded. And those failed. But if you're Kavanaugh and you're going to be consistent,

you should say, look, Congress, if you don't like this, why are you complaining to us about it? You wrote this law. You don't like it. Go change the law. And Democrats are so sick of hearing that from the Supreme Court. That was the Clean Air Act. Like, you want to add carbon to this?

Go ahead and add carbon. Nothing's stopping you. And so you could make the exact same argument to Republicans here saying, look, you don't like it? Win some elections. Change it. But as of now, the statute is very clear, and Congress wrote the statute. It's not like the administrative state wrote this statute.

So I think that's why only this one judge on the Fifth Circuit has ruled that this is an unconstitutional funding structure. Like, everybody, like, from the, I don't want to, like, middle right over is, like, you have to be way, way Fifth Circuit. You have to be like a radical on the Fifth Circuit where other Fifth Circuit Republicans are like, whoa, that guy's out there. But that doesn't mean, though, that it won't still get struck down. It doesn't. It doesn't.

It seems like the conventional wisdom seems to be that it'll be fine. Okay. Got it. So let's put this on the screen because David Dayen wrote up a little bit of this. And he says, The conservative legal strategy to kneecap the administrative state continues yesterday with the ruling that calls into question the operation of the CFPB. If ultimately successful, the ruling would lead to significant collateral damage that destroyers of consumer protection haven't thought through. The case found that the funding mechanism, CFPB unconstitutional, would throw all consumer financial markets into upheaval because it would potentially toss aside every agency and federal program that is not funded directly through discretionary

congressional appropriation, threatening healthcare, retirement security, food and drug safety, all kinds of other actions. So what he's getting to is that the way that agencies are funded is different than the way that, let's say, overall appropriations, discretionary spending is given out. And that by opening up discretionary spending to the political process, you could make it kind of like the IRS or any of these other organizations. So it is an interesting case, actually. He points out like the OCC and the FDA and other places like that that are funded by industry, like FDA is heavily funded by user fees, which is not user fees which is not great either also also not unconstitutional yes and he he makes this he makes a funny point in this in

in his piece there banks be careful what you work wish for the administrative state that exists now is is a place to not just to support support the people and consumers, but also businesses. Oh, of course. There's a bunch of safe harbor protections that exist within the regulations that say to a bank, if you follow these laws, or any type of lender, if you follow these laws, then you have safe harbor from lawsuits

around these types of things. And banks are well aware that plaintiff's attorneys are extremely powerful. Yes. And so they like those legal protections. Yeah, because they can play inside the game. And so if those legal protections go away, guess what? All of a sudden now everybody's getting sued all over the place.

That'll be fun. I don't know. I don't know which one I wish for on this one. Let's go to the next part here, Fox News. This is some interesting stuff happening. We can't help but take a look. Donald Trump attacking Fox News. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen.

He says, Fox News is promoting Ron DeSantis so hard and so much, there's not much time left for real news. Reminds me of 2016 when they were pushing Jeb, the new Fox poll, which they have been purposely terrible for me, has Trump crushing DeSanctimonious, but they barely show it. Instead, they go with losers like Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, and now even Jesper. I'm trying to figure out who that was, who have been wrong about everything. Isn't there a big, beautiful network which wants

to do well and make a fortune besides. Fake news in all caps. So what is he talking about here? And ironically, if you actually take a look at the poll that Trump is referencing, this poll is great for Trump. Let's put this up there. Actually look at the poll that he's referencing. It has Trump at 43% in the Republican primary. It has Ron DeSantis at 28%.

Haley at 7%. Pence at 7%. Greg Abbott at 2%. And Liz Cheney at 2%. So I'm pretty sure that that shows him with a dramatic lead. And not only a dramatic lead, Ryan. But it actually shows him increase his margin on Ron DeSantis from previously. So I'm not exactly sure what he's upset about.

I mean, it's certainly true that Fox has been very kind to DeSantis from previously. So I'm not exactly sure what he's upset about. I mean, it's certainly true. But Fox has been very kind to DeSantis. And I guess, you know, they've aired some, you know, we actually aired the Jeb endorsement here on the show yesterday. And it was, frankly, very bizarre because there was, like, music involved. And Brian Kilmeade was like, so, Jeb, like, do you endorse Ron DeSantis? He's like, yes, I endorse Ron DeSantis. And they played orchestral music. Yeah, I was watching.

I'm like, what is happening? How is this possibly on television? It's humiliating just for any politician. Let Trump or DeSantis or whatever aside. But at the same time, all of the Fox polling, and to the extent they're even airing pro-DeSantis stuff, there's still a hell of a lot of Trump support on Fox News. So I mean, it also tells me that given the fact that he hasn't addressed Nikki Haley, he hasn't talked about Mike Pence, he doesn't talk about Vivek Ramachandran, he doesn't care about anybody except for Ron DeSantis. That's it. The irony is that for all their trouble, Fox is getting dragged into court.

Yeah, you're right. On his behalf. Might cost them a couple billion dollars because they were steadfast in support of his utter nonsense. True. And so it's funny that Trump can't see that these guys who are going through these depositions, and they're like counting their cash balance. They have something like a $3 billion cash balance, and they're like wondering, is that going to cover what we did for this guy? Yes.

He can't imagine why they might be giving something less than perfectly favorable coverage to him. It's like, dude. Yeah, it's a little odd. And it also just gets to the dynamic where clearly he sees DeSantis as a threat. Now, I think DeSantis certainly is a threat. I think he's the only actual threat that Trump has. But how much of a threat is he actually? And this, you know, it really hit home for me where there's this idea that DeSantis would have a runway sweep if Trump wasn't in the race. But put this up there.

You know, this is a new McLaughlin Group poll of Republican voters, primary voters specifically, without Trump. And it really still only has DeSantis at 35%. It says DeSantis 35, Trump Jr. at 10, Pence 7, Haley 6, Candace Owens at 4, Ted Cruz 3, Romney 3, Pompeo 2, Tim Scott at 2, Abbott at 1, Rick Scott at 1, Kyrsten Ohm, et cetera. I can go on forever. But why does that matter? Because 35%, now, OK, Trump actually did win their GOP primary in 2016 with that. But one of the arguments against him Now, okay, Trump actually did win the GOP primary in 2016 with that, but one of the arguments against him was, well, he's not a unifier. The majority of the people are still not against him. I found it fascinating that he was still only up to 35%. I'm not saying

they wouldn't win a primary then, but he's not as much of the unifying figure without Trump as people are letting on. Does that make sense? Yeah, because, tell me if you think this is right, but I think that the hardcore Trump supporters who used to love Ron DeSantis when he was Trump's sidekick, now that he's a rival, like hate the guy. I wouldn't say they hate him. I think they appreciate him, but they're skeptical. They're like, hey, what are you doing?

Are you trying to upstage the man? And that's the other thing, the big divide, where DeSantis, a lot of the people who love Ron DeSantis are new Republican voters. So we're talking about Cubans, a lot of Latinos, specifically Latino men in Florida, but a lot of hardcore traditional Republican, small business Republicans

who are gonna vote Republican every single time on the ticket. They love Ron. He's a traditional, you know, the Mitt Romney voter loves Ron DeSantis. DeSantis' political genius is he's willing to bring in people who are new to the Republican Party and hold down the traditional coalition. The Trump people really don't fit into any of that. Trump certainly did get some of these newer voters, but still less than, I think, than DeSantis. Trump's genius was Republican, traditional Republican, small business Republicans, willing to hold their nose and vote for him. And then all

these people that he never voted before ever in modern American history. DeSantis, as I'm not sure yet that he's been able to compete on that. And a lot of those people now vote in the GOP primary and they vote for Trump. That's what I think the difference is. Right. I think he has a hard time with those folks because he's not funny. It's all of the Trump culture war stuff, but without Trump's joking about it. I think you're right. And a lot of people, I think wrongly, but a lot of people, I think, sensed less hate coming from Trump because they didn't think he actually believed it. They thought he was just saying it just to go after people and be funny.

DeSantis just kind of comes off as mean sometimes. Maybe, yeah. I don't know. I mean, he's still very successful. I would say, what I would say is he doesn't have the same charisma, even close, as Donald Trump. I think that's a problem.

Also, I didn't know this, but Trump is not wrong. He is quite short. I didn't know he was only 5'7", which, look, I'm not saying that it should matter, but it does matter. We haven't had a president in the modern era below 6'1", in like, what, 50 years or something? More than that. Maybe more, actually, when I go back and think about it. If you ever met Trump, I guess I've had the privilege of seeing the last couple presidents.

I believe W is the shortest one I've seen. He's like 5'11". Yeah, he's like 5'11". Clinton is huge. I mean, he's got one I've seen. He's like 5'11". Yeah, he's like 5'11". Clinton is huge. I mean, he's got big hands. Obama also was taller than people. And Trump, you know, I met Trump many times. And Trump is a big, big man.

John Ford was like quarterback. Yeah, Ford was a big guy. Nixon was a scrawny little dude. I guess, you know, Kennedy is, yeah, he really probably was the last one. Kennedy was, I believe he was tall, but, you know, obviously had some health problems. But he seemed vigorous. And again, I think that aesthetically, that stuff absolutely does matter whenever you think about leader and what that should all fold into. With the Trump primary and Trump knocking Fox here, it all comes down to the question of what Fox is going to do.

And that, I don't see any reason to suspect. You know, for all Trump's talk of 2016, what happened in 2016? Ted Cruz is on the record saying Roger Ailes sometime in 2015 went all in for Trump. And I just could not get a fair hearing there. They were no longer treating me the way they was in the Tea Party era. And the reason why, if you go back and you read the history, Ailes could read the ratings. You know, Ailes had had Trump in a regular Fox and Friends spot since 2011 for just a phone in. Why? Because he used to get very high ratings. Ailes could see the spike in the ratings for Donald Trump. And that's why he decided to go

all in for him at the network. Rupert Murdoch is in some of these more recent, he's in some of these more recent depositions saying, oh, we tried to destroy Trump. Listen, all Rupert cares about is money. He doesn't care. He may find him personally distasteful. He liked Obama. That didn't stop him from hiring Glenn Beck. These guys are multi-billionaires.

All they care about are the dollar signs at the networks, and that's all they've ever cared about. But they did put that, Rupert did put that order in to put a hit on him in that debate, right? Where Megyn Kelly started it. And guess what? Nothing happened. With that question, you've said all these terrible things about women,

and Trump came back with a Rosie O'Donnell line, and Rupert and Fox at that point are like, oh, what have we unleashed here that we can't actually put back on the leash? Right, yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to see what happens, but I personally don't think that Trump has anything to worry about. Fox, at the end of the day, is just gonna fall in line.

I mean, all of them do. It's more audience capture than it is anything else. All right, next part here. This is a fun one, really thinking about Crystal. So we've covered the Brett Favre, Pat McAfee case quite significantly here on Breaking Points. It actually predates obviously pat mcafee what ended up i'm actually personally disappointed brett farve did not sue us

because we said exactly what pat mcafee did uh which is brett farve allegedly uh for his repulsive lawyer uh allegedly repulsive lawyer uh said in text messages that he did not want the press to find out that he allegedly was working with the mississippi state officials to bilk tens of millions of dollars to build new facilities for a volleyball team at the school that his daughter attended using state allocated resources for poor single moms in one of the poorest states in the nation. That is a fact in terms of the allegations that have been laid out. Backed up by some fairly credible evidence. Not just, I mean, we're talking about straight-up text messages.

The Mississippi State Auditor said, what, this is the largest public welfare scandal in the history of the entire state of Mississippi. Brett Favre, of course, is worth tens of millions of dollars. largest public welfare scandal in the history of the entire state of mississippi brett farve of course is worth tens of millions of dollars mcafee and shannon sharp when they were on the show covering it said allegedly pat played that clip he said look i'll see you in court pal i'm sure that we said allegedly well farve is not backing down he's continuing to humiliate himself mcafee tweeted this out yesterday let's go and put this up there on the screen. He says, officially official, you got served with the meme, and it shows a cover sheet, civil case filing form.

Now it says, short style of case, Favre v. McAfee. In the circuit court, party filing and initial pleading was the attorney. Check if not an attorney. And it shows you that the official legal filing is now commencing. More so is the absolutely insane rhetoric that is coming from the Favre lawyers. So let's put this up there. I mean, this is unbelievable. Brett Favre's lawyer says Pat McAfee, quote, will go bankrupt. I'm sure he will with his deal with these sports betting companies. And, quote, will learn his lesson after the defamation lawsuit.

So here's what he had to say. The McAfee, you know, of course says that he said allegedly whenever he was discussing the case that lawyer Eric Hirschman says otherwise. He says, quote, when you listen to Pat McAfee, he never read any of the complaints. He didn't read the motion to dismiss. He just decided to get on a show and try to get as much attention as he could. He accuses Brett, so we're clear, about stealing from the poor in Mississippi. I mean, yeah, he did accuse that based upon the documents that were the text messages and all the public officials. So then he says that he is going to be bankrupt. It is going to cost Pat McAfee millions of dollars. If it bankrupts him, he will learn his lesson.

You don't try to promote yourself by inappropriately and improperly attacking someone else. This drives me crazy because this is pure, straight-up intimidation. Brett, first of all, I bet you Pat McAfee has more money than Brett Favre. I'm just going to go ahead and lay that out, given how big his show is. But second, Brett Favre is a public official. You and I, Ryan, know this, as in this game. Brett Favre has to prove not only that Pat McAfee did not say or may not have said, allegedly. He has to say that McAfee in his mind knew at the time that what

he was saying was wrong and attempting to defame Brett Favre's character intentionally with the words that he had used. You can actually say something mistakenly and still not be liable for defamation when you're talking about a public figure because we have a very high bar in this country, as we should, that when you're discussing people of public figure because we have a very high bar in this country, as we should, that when you're discussing people of immense wealth and power like Brett Favre, who apparently, allegedly has enough control over the state of Mississippi to misuse funds laid out for poor people, that reporters and journalists and commentators, people like ourselves, are able to discuss this case with zero fear of butthurt multimillionaires trying to sue you

and intimidate you before the eyes of the public. The other thing that McAfee has going for him is that this stuff is laid out in those court documents. Yes. Yeah. He's bulletproof. In defamation law, that is a huge protection because you're like, look, I'm not saying it. Yeah. He said it. The state attorney general said it, and I'm referring to that. Right. And the second, maybe actually the seventh big problem that Favre is going to have is he has to also prove, even if he could prove all of those other things we just laid out, which I don't think can prove any of them, he would also have to prove that he was harmed specifically by McAfee's claims and if the New York

Times and everybody else and every poster on Twitter is saying the same thing then how do you prove to a jury that this guy's comments are actually the thing that caused you and it can't just be emotional distress you can't say I really hurt feelings, the mean tweets and the mean podcast. You have to actually demonstrate real material harm that came to you. Were you not able to get future jobs because of what McAfee said? Did you lose access? What happened to you because of what McAfee said?

And McAfee can very easily go back and say, it was the attorney general's documents that have caused you all of this harm. And underneath that, it was your alleged behavior that caused you all that harm. Just to get to this is that he's also suing the auditor. I mean, good luck. You're going to sue the auditor, the guy who uncovered this entire scheme? The funny thing is he's not even facing criminal charges. And allegedly, you know, if some law enforcement allegedly person were to look into that, I don't know, it seems like a pretty standard case to me. And one where you may want to make an example of multimillionaires allegedly bilking the system. And that's the real issue that I have with this entire thing is that you have

people in power. I face this. I'm sure you have to. I'm going to sue you. I'm going to sue you. It's like, oh, yeah? I just got one this weekend. Yeah. Good. And you know why that we are able to report and talk in confidence? I know the law is on my side. And I also know what I don't know if Brett Favre knows is, by the way, if Pat McAfee rides this thing all the way through, which he has said that he will, he's going to force Favre to pay his legal fees. The most likely scenario is that. Is that Favre has to

drop the case and recoup all of his legal fees. So, personally, that is the outcome that I am wishing for. Yeah, I think, right, because go in front of a jury and explain the entire scheme that was laid out in these court documents. You have to defend that.

Then you have to forget it. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, and the funny thing is, is he's accusing McAfee and the auditor of shamelessly falsing, attacking Favre's good name to gain attention for himself, including appearances on television shows like CNN, HBO,

as well as interviews for print and online media. So the allegation here is that Pat McAfee, one of the most famous sports podcasters and presenters in the United States, who is also on WWE, needs to talk about Brett Favre for publicity. Is that the allegation? By the way, I actually went back and checked, and this is the funny part. The original clip of McAfee talking about this had like a couple hundred thousand views after he sued him which is good but you know for mac he he's a megastar right he's massive

he doesn't need brett farve to bring the clip of him saying bring it on pal that's over 1.5 million so he actually got more attention this is pure streisand effect farve is drawing more attention. This is pure Streisand effect. Favre is drawing more attention to the case than originally by suing him and putting it in the minds of people. And this is just a classic case of these people. They think they're untouchable gods. That's really what came through the alleged text messages. Press isn't going to find out about this, right? Yeah. Look, he thinks he runs the state of Mississippi because he was good at playing football. Sorry, pal. You know, this is America.

It actually is a little bit different. And we in the fourth estate could use a W in defamation court. Oh, yeah, you're right. After Gawker got wiped out. Oh, well. I'm not sure I have all that much sympathy for Gawker. I know, but that's the thing. Every time somebody gets crushed, even if it was justifiable,

it's blood in the defamation waters. And people like Favre think that, oh, maybe I have a better shot of winning in court. So every time you catch a W in court, it pushes back and builds more cultural support for a free press and for the First Amendment. So I hope McAfee fights this one all the way and wins. In a polite way, screw around and find out, Brett. You're going to have fun in court, and I am going to laugh whenever he ends up having to recoup McAfee's legal filings. And, you know, all credit to Pat.

Congratulations to you, sir. I admire your standstill in this, or the way that you've carried yourself in all this, because I know it's scary. You know, for people like us who cover politics, we're used to it. You know, people threaten us all the time. Oh, I'm gonna sue you.

I'm like, no, you're not. And even if you do, good luck, all right? I've got good lawyers just like you do, and we'll fight this thing all the way through. But people who work in sports and elsewhere, they're not used to this level of public pressure. So I think people should really give him credit for standing tall on this.

He's absolutely right. He didn't do a damn thing wrong, and we are really gonna enjoy carrying this all the way to the forward, of public pressure. So I think people should really give him credit for standing tall on this. He's absolutely right. He didn't do a damn thing wrong. And we are really going to enjoy carrying this all the way to the forward. And we'll continue covering it here and giving Pat all the support that he needs. Not that he necessarily needs us, but I'd like to give him the support regardless. Let's go to the next part here. Nina Turner, absolutely stunning people on CNN in a crazy turn of events where she speaks

against the Joy Behar's of the world and others who are blaming the residents of East Palestine, Ohio for voting for Trump and just talking with disgust at the way that they've been treated in the media, drawing connection between the white working poor, black working poor, and all really poor people in America who are neglected by infrastructure, by our broader society and left behind. She spoke so eloquently. Let's take a listen to that. The state administration is not doing enough. I'm not pleased with Governor Mike DeWine, who actually drunk some of the water,

giving people confidence that that water is OK, when in fact that EPA didn't do the deepest dive that they can do to deal with the carcinogens that are there, the air, the water. For the neoliberals who say that the residents of that area deserve what they are getting because they voted for President Donald J. Trump, it is abhorrent. This is about poverty.

This is about poor, working-class white people who are enduring some of the same things that poor, working-class black people endure, whether it's Flint, Cleveland, or Jackson, Mississippi. And so I want to lay it out. The cultish behavior in politics right now, it is a sin and a shame that when people are suffering to this magnitude, you got people who will fix their miles,

to quote my grandmother, to say that they are getting what they deserve. What they deserve is clean air, clean food, clean water. They deserve relief, both in the short term and also in the long term. Extraordinary well said. And Crystal found this. You can't even make this shit up, Ryan. Put this up there on the screen. So during a panel where they were talking about the railroad and East Palestine, they have a commentator who lobbied for Norfolk Southern, and they did not tell its audience at any point during this discussion that lobbyist David Urban, and you know this guy. He's one of the – what is he? Supposedly the pro-Trump guy or whatever.

Of course, CNN political commentator who's supposedly pro-Trump apparently is taking money from Norfolk Southern Railroad. All right, well, what do they say here? He and his firm collected at least $1.14 million for lobbying on, quote, transportation issues related to railways. Now, what issues, Ryan, exactly were they lobbying the government on? The ones that led to this exact derailment, which has now poisoned these people in East Palestine. Right, and her fundamental point is so well said,

that your dignity as a human being should not depend on how you vote for. But her other point is also even better said, which is that this is about power. And even if you want to say that, oh, they voted the wrong way, and if they'd have voted a different way, then they wouldn't have gotten what they deserve. The David Urban example is perfect because that's CNN.

Yes, yes, you're right. So if you are with the network that is more associated with Democrats, then you don't deserve, according to that logic, to be drinking chemical-stained water. Yet you're supportive of a corporate news network aligned with the Democratic Party that employs a rail lobbyist without disclosing it, who worked with both administrations, Trump and Obama, to roll back safety regulations. So who are you supposed to support to get clean water? If you can't support the Democratic Party, if you can't support the Republican Party, then it sounds like the idea would be, well, just because you participate somehow in our society that you deserve then to suffer the

consequences of doing that. In the paywall section of Crystal's monologue, I made this point yesterday. I'm like, okay, let's say that you think that's true. I'm like, you think that by saying you dirty people who voted for Trump, you got what you deserve, you think they're going to change their mind? So first of all, it's not politically effective. Let's start with that. Number two, it's obviously morally abhorrent, but politically it's also very dumb. Here's my favorite part about what Urban said on TV when discussing the crisis. Quote, there's plenty of blame to go around on this, on these kinds, where these kinds of things happen. But what's important is we do move forward, right, to take care of people in these towns and communities. He then went on to criticize

the Biden administration for allegedly sloughing off the crisis. So plenty of blame to go around. Let's not point fingers. You participated. And look, this gets to the problem of these guests as well You think that guy doesn't tell all of his clients that he's a regular commentator on this is the dream Scenario for a company you get a guy who's a regular CNN commentator You pay him and then your time in the Sun comes your time in the barrel. What does he do? He's catching bullets for you. He's pushing it away. Look, CNN, for all of the stuff we talk about, low ratings and all that, the point is that the few people who do

watch them, they still matter. They have a lot of cultural power. So his ability to deflect on a flagship CNN show like this without a single disclosure is outrageous. Now, look, let's give him credit where it's due. They did invite Nina Turner. I'm glad that they certainly did. They allowed her to speak in that. But that exactly shows you, you know, the two sides of the devil. And then how often are, how often really is Nina on that show?

And how much more often is Dave Urban? Unfortunately, I've had to watch a lot of CNN in my day for my job. I've been seeing this guy on TV for the last six years. He's one of those Trump check boxes. They're like, oh, we got this guy who speaks for Trump, right? He's right here. And then that guy's cashing in all the way to the bank.

And I just love the framing of, let's not worry so much about what happened. Yes. Let's just look forward. Remember Obama has had that line about torture. Let's look forward, not backward. That's right. It's like Nikki Haley.

How does that work out? How does that work out if you don't try to figure out what just happened, yet you're going to make sure in the future it doesn't happen? Yeah, it's unreal. The rail lobbyist saying let's not point fingers is just so perfect. It really is just nuts. It's like the firm, $1.4 million in lobbying fees.

He was literally president of the lobbying firm, which was receiving the money at the time. And even right now, he's the head of, quote, BGR Group, a lobbying firm that represents- Known as the Death Star. There you go. Countless conflicts of interest for his on-air work. In his most recent lobbying quarter, they have continued to lobby on transportation issues. And it says, quote, our clients in the aviation, automotive, rail, shipping, and mass transit industries rely on BGR to educate public leaders about how vital these industries are to domestic and international commerce. So one big con job. BGR, yeah. They made their name by being willing to take

all the different dictators and politically toxic clients that even other lobbying firms were like, ooh, that's a pretty sweet retainer, but it's going to hurt us with our other clients. It's going to hurt us with our access. We're not going to do it. And BGR was like, we'll take you. We got you. There you go. You're absolutely right. And CNN's like, cool. Sounds good. You good for 320? We're talking the rail disaster. Yeah. Let's do it. Anything we should know? Yeah. Not at all. We're good.

Yes. Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is how bad pete budaj is at his job and while we've covered the specific ins and outs of failures on east palestine on the airline crisis on railroad and so much more an important point that i've really come around to is this isn't just about budaj specifically it's about the system which elevated him how much it represents our dystopian future budaj along with several other Biden appointees, are a view into our affirmative action-determined future. One where the identity of the individual is the only metric of which is considered for elevation, and one where job

performance is not only secondary, but which barely figures in the place of high importance. I was really struck by this last week at the White House press briefing, where White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre got multiple questions about Secretary Buttigieg and the president's lack of response to East Palestine. In the middle, she had to throw in this. Let's take a listen. I want to take the opportunity to lay out how diverse the president's cabinet has been, how diverse the president's administration has been. The cabinet is a majority people of color for the first time in history. The cabinet is a majority female for the first time in history. The cabinet is majority female for the first time in history. A majority of White House senior staff identify as female. Forty percent of White House senior staff identify as part of the racially diverse communities. And a record seven assistants to the president's are

openly LGBTQ+. So again, this is something that the president prides himself on, that he actually has taken action to show the diversity of this administration. That, more than anything, is the ruling ideology of the Biden administration. They are considered people for their most senior appointments. How about answer this question? How many of them went to East Palestine before the day of that briefing? Answer, zero. That's the only answer that should matter. But what we've learned now through the last two years is one that matters probably the least. And it's a problem that has been at the heart of the Buttigieg incompetence story. The Secretary of Transportation is gay. Did you know that? How could you not? When the airlines were melting down and they were busting

railway unions, warning about the disaster to come on Norfolk Southern, where was Buttigieg? He was on CNN pushing for the gay marriage bill. All of us know he cares more about that than actually doing his job. And apparently, that's all the president expects of him after doing him a favor and appointing him to the position. This problem pervades all of government right now. Even the person at the altar, Karine Jean-Pierre, she is so terrible at her job that when it matters, the matters of national security have to be discussed. They force Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby to come over from the Pentagon and deliver the talking points because they don't want her to screw up anything important

when it comes to Ukraine. He had never had to do that when Jen Psaki was the press secretary. I will also tell you this from my New Year's as a White House correspondent. The only time the press secretary ever relinquishes the White House podium is to a senior government policy official who is supposed to answer detailed questions about policy. Never to a more junior press secretary. The White House press secretary is supposed to be the premier U.S. government spokesperson. But they can't fire her, even though anyone with eyes knows she's terrible, because all Biden and apparently the media talk about is how she's the first black gay woman to be the Press Secretary. That's great, but performance apparently doesn't matter. Or,

take our own Vice President, Kamala Harris. Literally all of us know that she was not picked because of her ability to do the job. She was the worst performing candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary, often losing to people like Andrew Yang in her own home state polls. She was picked because she checked diversity box. Apparently, doesn't matter,

that she holds one of the lowest approval ratings for a vice president in modern American history despite having zero responsibility. Why am I harping on this? Because affirmative action is quickly becoming the religion of the elite in this country. We are only likely to have more Secretary Buttigieg's, Vice President Harris's, and Press Secretary Jean-Pierre's as the years go on. In his first months in office, Biden signed an executive order on, quote, diversity, equity,

and inclusion, accessibility in the federal workforce. The order, quote, establishes it is the policy of the administration to cultivate a workforce that draws from the full diversity of the nation. So how does it do that? Well, it creates an affirmative action regime that we have at major corporations and creates them in every department of government, including effective hiring quotas throughout the entire federal government. Just days ago, the Biden administration released the first diversity, equity, and inclusion report from the federal government with an increase in

quote, representation for women and some communities of color. The report effectively shows that racial hiring quotas and identity-based ones like sexual orientation are the new signifiers of status for government employment. Worse, a new director of the Office of Personnel Management says that the goal of the Biden administration is to have the federal government set affirmative action standards for every employer in the nation. Why is this bad?

The government is already the largest employer in the whole country. They are trying to spread this poison to the HR department of every large, mid, and small corporation in the world. The consequences of ditching merit almost entirely cannot be overstated. Already, top law schools, medical schools in the country, are coordinated scheme to de-emphasize objective merit criteria like GPA, LSAT, MCAT, and other test scores to preserve a racial admissions regime. They are

literally going to rig the system, burn hundreds of years of academic credibility that they have built up just to ensure their idealized racial makeup of their student body. And that, by definition, determines the higher elite of this country. As I have asked in previous monologues, can you actually have confidence

that your doctor knows what the hell they are doing in 10 years or that your lawyer you need to sue said doctor knows what they're doing either? Or how about your president or your secretary of transportation or your boss or your... The list goes on forever.

I like to think at a certain point, a system this week will fail. Maybe that's true. But how many people are going to miss out on opportunities or suffer under bad leadership until the fix actually comes? Only time will tell. Curious what your take on this,

Ryan. I know crystals vary against. Ryan, you're taking a look at something. What is it? Yeah. So over the weekend, I was reading a book that's coming out in May called Plunder, if we can put that up in it. And I've been covering, and you have too, private equity for years i'm glad somebody's doing a a real full full treatment on this and so i i wanted to do something a little different here and have a little fun with some monopoly money all right because what i realized is that i think a lot of people don't quite understand the scam that is private equity and the fact that it only exists because our laws allow it to exist, and therefore we can rewrite those laws so we can shovel it in a more productive direction. It didn't exist in the 1970s, for example.

Right. In the 1980s, you saw the advent, actually first under Carter and then Reagan, you saw the advent of what were then called corporate raiders, which helped produce the S&L crisis. And they then changed their name basically to private equity. Now, if you notice, they're changing their name again. Now they're like just investment firms. And that's how you know something is deeply toxic. Investment advisory. Right. When they have to keep changing their name, that's how you know something is wrong. And when you keep seeing kind of financial crises associated with them, that's probably also a bad sign. So let's pretend that you're a retailer.

Okay. And we can do, you know, let's call you Shopko. Okay, Shopko. In honor of Emily, because this was a huge kind of institution. We can put up the second one here. Second one. It was a huge institution in, like, Wisconsin and also the Midwest. Like, Shopko was, you know, for decades the thing.

And they were a real pioneer in bringing in drug stores and other retail. And, like, I think they were the first that ever did a scanner. Like, this is not, like, somebody that got, you know, washed over by, like, the Amazon wave. This was a serious company. So they got hundreds of stores. So a private equity company comes in and they say, look, they ended up buying it for a billion dollars, but they put up, let's say about 20 of their own dollars. Then they go out and they go to pension funds. They get another $200 billion there. So how do they buy it for a billion dollars?

They go to you. They're like, we want you to take out a loan. So you're going to take out basically an $800 million loan. So I take out the loan at Shopko. So you're taking out that loan. So now they're using all of these, they're using your business as collateral, but that's not your money. Yes. So you have to give that to the owners of Shopko. But you, in order to kind of bribe you. I get to keep a hundred.

You're the old executives because why would executives sign off on this terrible deal? Because they get to walk away with that money. I get the payout. All right. So this money is gone. All right. Now I want a little bit of dividend for all the hard work that I did. Right. But you don't have any money and you're, and you're highly leveraged. Yes.

Tell you what, we're going to make you a $200 million loan that is also on top of your assets here. Right. So we're going to leverage you a little bit higher. Okay. But hand that back to me. Okay. Now this is over to you in the form of a dividend. It's a form of a dividend. So you loan it to me and now I'm paying it. Because these are profits. Yes. We ran a business. Yeah. Congratulations to us. We made a profit. So we started with 20. Yeah. We're already. I have 200 in the bank. Yeah. We're already looking good. And we'll give maybe a hundred of this to the pension. Right. They get a hundred. So the private equity firm itself has already made it. So they just made a profit.

They've already made a profit. Okay. But now I have all this debt. Yes. So that's a problem. So how are you going to pay off this debt? There are two ways. We can make more money or we can fire people and reduce expenses.

There's actually a third way that private equity has figured out, which is you actually own, because you're a smart business, you actually own all of these stores. Oh, real estate. Okay. You own the real estate under there. So what we'd like you to do, and actually we're just going to force you to do it. So we'd like you to sell all of those properties and then you, they call it a lease back. Then you're going to lease it back. And so they ended up selling, this one's ripped. They ended up selling all of their store, like the property underneath it for $800 million. That's a lot of money. Right? Yeah.

Hey, because you own a lot of property. Can I have that back please? Now you have it back. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate that. Okay. Thank you very much.

Yes. Now you have rent. Before, in hard times, because you owned your property. Never had rent. You didn't have rent and you could actually borrow. Yeah. You could borrow against the equity. To cover the hard times because you owned your property never had rent you didn't you didn't have rent and you could actually borrow yeah you could borrow against the equity to cut to cover the hard times right in the good times you're you're paying down so now you don't have that now you also have your your most of your operating income is now going uh to pay for the loans yes all right you

have to pay the uh you have to pay the interest. Yeah, that we've slapped on top of you. Also, I forgot to mention, because we helped with these transactions, this loan that you took out, we're taking a fee for that. Right, of course. And they actually, on Shopko, it was a million dollars a quarter just for the management fee. So we'll take this. But then we also took a few points for every little transaction we did. Of course. Also, we'd like you to merge with some of these other shopping retailers. Seems reasonable. That we have.

Right. And so we're going to do that merger. And so we're going to take a fee for that. So they do the roll up and they take the fee off. We're going to take some more fees for that. And as you said now, things are not as good. We've kind of cut back on quality, and the revenue is not coming in like it was,

and so much revenue is going to pay off your loans, we're going to have to do some layoffs. It happens. So we're going to have to take a little bit more. We're going to take a little bit more out of that. Okay. And now things are really not going well at all. Things are looking good for you. Oh yeah. No, no, don't worry about that. Yeah. But for over here, things are not going very well. So we're gonna try to put it up for sale, see if we can sell to anybody. And so in a lot of situations,

they will be able to find somebody to buy it at cost or whatever, so they can just pocket the rest of this. In this case, nobody somebody to buy it at cost or whatever, so they can just pocket the rest of this. In this case, nobody wanted to buy it, so they just liquidated it. So you still had two things. Yes. You've got all of the assets left that you haven't sold. Inventory, yeah. And you have a pension fund.

Right. So first we're going to sell off the assets. Yep. A couple more. Appreciate that. Okay. And now you have a pension fund. Yes.

So we're going to push the company into bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy goes to the federal government's kind of bankruptcy protection firm. And so you'll still get paid about 60% to 70% of your pension. Well, not me. I already got my paycheck, but the workers. Oh, that's true. The workers. Yeah, you're good.

I'm good. You're good. And we hired you as a consultant. It's cool. Of course. Appreciate all your advice. You helped us with some of these mergers, so here. All right. For your trouble. This is a house in Malibu.

Take another bit of that. And then we liquidate the entire thing, and we take the pension fund, and we use that to pay off our own pension funds or whatever other creditors we have and then let the federal government take care of the rest of it. Right, so the feds then step in and take the rest. And so in the Shopko case they bought it in like 2005, it was bankrupt by 2019 so in 14 years the firm, which is Mark Letters firm actually, that's if you remember the 47% video? Of course, yeah. That was at Mark Letters' firm, actually. If you remember the 47% video.

Of course, yeah. That was at Mark Letters' house. Yeah, his house. I remember. So over that 14-year period, they made just an absolutely extraordinary amount of money destroying a Wisconsin institution. A perfectly good business.

Yeah. Right, so we have set up a system that incentivizes destruction. And I think everyone across the political spectrum believes that we ought to have a capitalist system, if you believe in a capitalist system, you ought to have a capitalist system that incentivizes production, development, building something good. And there are lots of easy fixes that you could go in and say. Because the other reason that they sell a lot of these properties is that because they have reduced investment, because they've laid off so many people, now they end up becoming liable for a lot of things that are going on at these stores or at nursing homes or addiction facilities, statistics show that people die in private equity-owned nursing facilities

at a much higher rate than they do beforehand. And so then a family wants to sue, and guess what? A, you don't own the property anymore. That's right, yeah. And B, that one little facility is often owned by just an LLC. So you think it's a chain, but it's not actually a chain anymore. So there's nothing left. And then what you do with some of that money is you take one of those measly tens and you donate it to a lawmaker.

Here's for the Democrats. Right. Here's for the Republicans. So that in the middle of, let's say, a Build Back Better plan or what was the Inflation Reduction Act that a senator from Arizona- Here's an internship for Kyrsten Sinema who interned at a private equity owned winery. And then she voted specifically with the Republicans at that time

to keep a tax loophole for the private equity industry, which protects all those profits right over there. So they pay less of a tax rate than a small business like let's say Breaking Points or an individual like let's say somebody who's watching the show. And that's how corrupt it is. We didn't even get to the tax treatment of their income because they're making all this money, even if they were paid regular, even if they were paying regular tax rates, they'd be still pulling it in. But right. They do this two and 20 thing where they say that all of this money, they made all of this money. They say that this was

investment income. Right. But if you remember from the beginning, they put this much down. Right. So that's like me saying, like, I bought I bought a jacket to work here at breaking points and therefore all the money that I make is an investment. I should do that. Sounds like a good let's try that. It sounds like, yeah, I'm going to tell the accountants. They'll lock us up. They won't lock them up for it. That's right.

Yeah, we would go to jail if we tried to do that. So this is obviously not investment income. They're doing work. Like they're doing financial advice and financial transactions. These are not investments. And so that 20% that they take off the top, like that obviously should not be, you know, they, even then their management fee, they do this bizarre thing where they call it, they say, we're actually not going to take a fee. We're going to waive our fee, but we're then we're going to get 22% of our money and they, and they, they structure it.

So they're always going to get their 2% fee, but then they call their 2% fee an investment income rather than a management fee. So like even, even more corrupt, but that's what so many, it's just a little 2%. Like they did all of this, but they're even going to squeeze that last. Oh, they'll squeeze every, every single cent. And that is how they became billionaires. So I've talked about this before, the Forbes 400 list, the new billionaires, the easiest way to become a new billionaire in the United States today

is not to create a Tesla, is not to create an Amazon, it's not to create a business that let's say you're making masks in the United States, it's to do exactly what you're talking about here. The vast majority of the new billionaires in the United States are financial billionaires.

They are not people who have created value or really created a company industry at all. So it's, you know, if anything, it distorts it to look at the Elons and the Bezos. It's like, I wish everybody got rich that way. They don't. Yeah, and over something like the last 10 years, like more than a million,

something like 2 million retail jobs have been lost in private equity-owned retail operations. Yet the sector as a whole has added more than a million jobs. So private equity will tell you, well, it's all Amazon and there's no brick and mortar. Yes, there's a lot of Amazon influence. But the job losses are coming purposefully through destruction. And the rest of the retail industry is actually still adding jobs because they're not trying to destroy the company and liquidate it.

Well, smart stuff. This is actually very educational. I think people will enjoy it. So it was a good segment. And congratulations. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that very much. Thank you very much for sitting in for Crystal.

You did a great job. I think everybody will agree. And we will see you. Oh, you guys are going to have counterpoints tomorrow. So look out for more Ryan and Emily tomorrow. Chris will be back on Thursday. So we'll see you guys then. Have a great weekend, everybody. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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