Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/8/22: Dems Mask Shift, Facebook News, Rogan Drama, Portnoy Scoop, Les Wexner, CNN Implosion, Class Politics, & More!

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Dems shift on mask mandates, Facebook's stock tumbling on a user drop, Rumble offering to take on Rogan's podcast, Dave Portnoy's scoop, GOP Governors taking money from Epstein donor Les Wexner, CNN hiring neocons, CNN's broken business model, Rogan vs The Rock, and Race & Class with Dr. Adolph Reed.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/Adolph Reed: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3945-the-south https://classmatterspodcast.org/ https://harpers.org/2022/02/separate-and-unequal-adolph-reed-jr-the-south-jim-crow-and-its-afterlives/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Some interesting stories we are tracking this morning. First of all, you all may have seen last week, huge stock price drop for Facebook.

They lost like the most amount of value that any company has lost ever in history in one day. And now there's another big development there. Peter Thiel, longtime board member, is stepping down from that board. So we'll tell you what all of that means. Interesting move from Rumble with regard to the Joe Rogan controversy. They're making a move. We've got some other updates about the folks who may have been behind some of these, the smear campaign. Leslie Wexner, you may know him as the billionaire who effectively propped up Jeffrey Epstein and his lifestyle for years. Well, he had stepped away from political giving for a long time. Well, he's back, Sagar.

Oh, good. Apparently his money is still green and the Republican Party is happy to take it. So we'll give you those details. Also some moves at CNN that we are tracking both in the show and in my monologue. Sagar has an update on his feelings about The Rock for you to share. It was a long and tortured monologue, but it had to be done. I haven't read it yet, so I'm interested to hear it too. And one of my favorite human beings and one of the most interesting thinkers,

I think, in American life today, Adolph Reed Jr. is going to join us to talk about his new book, The South, which is wonderful and I highly recommend. But we wanted to start with what is, I think, a pretty significant shift in how blue states are thinking about the pandemic. Yeah, this really caught my eye yesterday. It was a big watershed movement. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So simultaneously, four different Democratic states all basically announced they were going to be ending their mask mandates. Delaware's indoor mask mandate was going to be lifted on Friday, the governor, John Carney, announced. That's significant to me, particularly, Crystal, before you even get to all of the other

ones, because it is Biden's home state. And because Carney is a well-known kind of to be a Biden surrogate, very much a mind meld. Some of the Delaware senators and others are the people who kind of speak for him, quote unquote, whenever people try to get an idea of where the president lies. So that is one of the most significant data points. But let's go ahead and move on to the next one. This was very significant as well, which is that the New Jersey governor is ending the school mask mandate in a move to normalcy. And I'm going to read you specifically what he said. We are all cautiously optimistic in New Jersey that this most recent surge seems to have peaked. However, and what he says specifically is that we have to recognize that this virus is endemic,

from moving to a pandemic to endemic, using the endemic language from a Democratic governor. And we also shouldn't remember, we should also not forget, Crystal, Phil Murphy did not have as close to a re-election as he wanted to. It was much, much thinner than anticipated. Governor Youngkin obviously got all the press, but Phil Murphy came pretty close to getting defeated. So that's certainly one of the reasons behind this. The mass, obviously, was a huge

controversy in Virginia and also in New Jersey. New Jersey, overwhelmingly more Democratic, so he still got there. But this move, very much a signal. Let's put the next one up there on the screen as well. Almost, you know, while we were planning this segment, this came out almost immediately. Governor Ned Lamont over in the state of Connecticut, also in the Northeast, and a Democratic state as well, saying that he will be removing the mask mandate. And then, late last night, we learned that Oregon has put an expiry on its indoor mask mandate. So all of these are very significant. They show that the tide is turning whenever it comes to politics. Here in the state of Virginia, it's

still a little bit, or it's not here, but in the DMV area across the river, let's put this up there, there was a Supreme Court case of the state of Virginia that rejected a challenge out of the Chesapeake County to the governor's executive order, which gives parents the right in order to determine whether their kids should wear a mask in school or not and repealing the indoor school mask mandate. So it's still up in the air as the legal technicalities for that. So it's not the final blow to the actual order itself. But all of these you put together, you can't deny the tide has turned nationally. Let me lay on the Virginia piece a little bit more. There were a number of court challenges to the governor's executive order. The controversy here is that schools and some parents are saying, hey, this should be left to

the local districts. And there's an ambiguity in the Constitution, the state Constitution over whether the governor at the state level has the power to institute this executive order, which doesn't just say it's up to parents. It also says school districts cannot themselves decide to have a mask mandate. So the one that was just rejected the Supreme Court level, there was not a finding based on like the evidence and there was no finding there. It was just rejected for procedural reasons. There continues to be an ongoing lawsuit from seven different counties, and I think we have a tear sheet for that as well. They have found temporary relief,

an injunction issue that allows them to keep their mask mandate in place while appeals are ongoing, and this continues to be litigated. So the parents' challenge that they took, my understanding is they used a sort of extraordinary measure to take it straight to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court says, no, we're not going to look at this case. We're not going to rule on it. So that one is gone. But this one regarding the seven school districts still continues on. In terms of the larger politics, though, I mean, this really is kind of a turning point. I don't think it's an accident that all these states made the same decision at the same time. There's kind of strength in numbers. If you're one state, if you're one relatively blue state

like New Jersey or Connecticut or Oregon, and you make this decision alone, you'll probably be subject to a lot more scrutiny, a lot more pushback because we know even though

when you look at the overall polling, the broad population, including a lot of Democrats, are on board with, hey, we've got to live with this thing. About half. We've got the are on board with, hey, we got to live with this. About half. We've got the vaccines. We got to figure out how to live with this thing.

We got to rethink how we're approaching some know, people who have been led by the media to, I think, overestimate the risk to kids, the risk to themselves, the risk to the community, who are deeply concerned about things like taking masks off of kids in school. I always think it's important to remember, and this is evidence that you and I have both tried to go over as responsibly as we possibly can. First of all, there are no studies that have sort of stood up to scrutiny that prove that masks in school have been an effective preventative measure to start with. So let's start there.

It also is important to remember that the U.S. is really an outlier globally. Major outlier. In terms of masking children. In Europe, their recommendations are no masks for people under the age of 12. We also have evidence at this point of some of the detriments of wearing a mask. So it's not just like, you know, an inconvenience or annoying for you or for your kids. It has been detrimental in

terms of child development, in terms of developing empathy, especially for young children. Of course, it makes it harder to understand what the teacher is saying, to understand what your friends are saying. This is a particular challenge for kids who are developing language and all of those things. So there have been costs associated with the mask mandates. And I think now, given where we are in the pandemic, it's very clear that moving away from mask mandates, especially in school, is the right move, both from a just looking at the evidence and evaluating it, but also from the political angle. I mean, from the political angle, people have known this for a long time and watching people catch up with this is kind of hilarious. Even Oregon, I mean,

they're going to end it on March 31st. I mean, that's still a long time. That's a month and a half. But look, better late than never. Mayor Bowser, by the way, here in Washington, I hope you take a little bit of notice. But here's the real point when it comes to the politics. It was clear with this new photo that was released from Stacey Abrams in which she attended an event. And there's been some information that's come out on this event, where it was like a school reading with a bunch of children. She actually required, she said, I'll only enter the room if everybody is masked. Well, everybody who was masked include a bunch of kids. And actually, Stacey Abrams was not one of the people who was masked. It became a symbol, really,

of a lot of these policies and of the coming fights. Let's put the photo up there on the screen. So that photo was posted along with another series from her campaign, but it was very quickly deleted, Crystal. And let's go ahead and put the next one up there on the screen, please, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, showing that the deleted Abrams tweet shows how school COVID policies are in the 2022 crosshairs. Almost immediately, she was targeted by both Governor Brian Kemp, who's

running for re-election, and David Perdue, who is running to primary. Brian Kemp, one of those two men, probably David Perdue, will be the Republican nominee for governor. But both of them went absolutely hard against her. It is the greatest gift. And it became a national symbol as well as why are all these people, you know, there was another, I think it was a Long Island politician who did the same thing yesterday, took a photo of her without a mask on while there's all these kids behind them. How about the L.A. mayor? Yes. He took the photo and said he held his breath with Magic Johnson. I will confess, I posted the photo on Instagram and I was like, I hope she held her breath during the photo.

I mean, I can't help but just ridicule this absolute nonsense. It drives me crazy watching these little kids with their masks on. But the really important part was whenever it came to how Abrams responded. Month reading event to fuel a pitiful and predictable critique. So basically, she's playing the race card. Black History Month. So yeah, Black History Month has to do with why you're wearing a mask where all these other kids are. I mean, it was one of the most outrageous things I've seen in terms of her defense. But let's be honest, very in character for Mrs. Abrams. And I think this is why she's going to go down big time in this governor's race. There's a lot of these people, Crystal, who were made under the Trump years.

Abrams and Beto specifically. They actually did decent enough electorally. But it was off of the backs of all these suburban whites who just hated Trump. They're actually terrible politicians. And they're going to find out for real how much people don't like them whenever bad old Trump is no longer on the national scene. That's an interesting point. I mean, I think the problem, and there are a lot of problems, but it just symbolizes how you don't even really believe in all this, like the obsession over the pandemic protocols that you've been touting. Because when it's inconvenient for you, you're happy to cast it

aside. So what is this really about? It's about the theater of signaling your virtuousness. That's what this is really about. And I think that's what the photo exposes more than anything. As we head into the midterms, I mean, you can see the writing on the wall. Democrats are changing their policies at the state level. There isn't a push at the federal level for like new lockdowns or new mandates or anything like that. They're kind of also accepting,

all right, we got to move forward with this thing. So you're going to have on the one hand, Democrats actually shifting their positions and no real threats of like massive lockdowns again. But Republicans are going to hold on to things like this to say, hey, these are the people who they will paint a caricaturish view of what Democrats would do were they back in power. And things like Stacey Abramson, this photo certainly feeds into that narrative. And I'll tell you what else is going to happen. Republicans are going to win. It's going to be, you know, an ugly year for Democrats. There's no doubt about it. Do I honestly think that coronavirus is going to be the central issue in this election? I actually don't. I don't think it's going to be the central issue.

The Republican base is already energized around it. That's a done deal. The economy is going to be the central issue, as it typically is. That's what voters are telling pollsters that they care about. They feel like their concerns in that regard, with regard to inflation and just the sort of chaos and uncertainty of where things stand right now, are not being reflected in urgent action by the Biden administration. You've got, what, 70% of the country that says we're on the wrong track. That's what's going to be a problem for Democrats in this election, more so even than, you know, obnoxious pictures like this, which are certainly a political issue for her. I agree. It's absolutely the economy. I would only point to COVID in such that restrictions are causing chaos and misery in people's lives.

That's where I think it becomes important, not on COVID itself. I also am really enjoying this sprint by the Biden administration. It just came out this morning. Perhaps we'll go into it later. Biden officials are trying to recalculate U.S. COVID-19 hospitalizations, as in they don't want the national figures to reflect the with COVID hospitalizations because they want to try and not freak people out. That's interesting. They want to be able to show there's a huge decline. Exactly, exactly. So they can show progress. Which is so they can show their lib base. Be like, don't worry, it's not as bad. It's just there are so many things that they're trying to acknowledge now with the mask mandates,

now with recalculating COVID-19 hospitalizations. Well, because wasn't it only basically New York that was really doing that, that we could get the data out of? And it was also county by county. That's the other problem with the health care system. It's like county by county data, you know, in Miami and stuff. We should have that information.

We should have had it for years. Yeah, I think that's really relevant. But it's become especially relevant with Omicron, which is significantly more mild, but also so infectious. So you have a much larger number of people who are showing up at the hospital for other things but happen to have Omicron sort of incidental to whatever real reason. So I would say now more than ever, that data is actually really important to get in

and to understand. No, I would say I support it. I just am watching this whole national conversation just change dramatically along with the polling. And part of the problem is going to be a lot of people who are deeply radicalized on this stuff that will fight tooth and nail for some of these restrictions that have made it part of their identity. And that central tension will become a big electoral liability on top of, obviously, just the economic chaos in the country right now. So the tide is turning. That's some good news. But there are still many other people within the regime who are ready to fight back.

So it's not all but one. That's all I would say. Yeah. I mean, I think the blue states that are shifting right now, the truly blue states that are shifting right now, is the most telling indicator we have that Democrats have decided, all right, we've got to move on from this thing. This is killing us. You're very right. Okay. Speaking of moving on, let's go ahead to Facebook. So this, as Crystal alluded to, was a stunning market development that we've been wanting to cover and spend a little bit of time on because it's significant to the future of social media and almost everything that we know. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen,

which is that Facebook stock actually plummeted 26% in its biggest one-day drop ever, erasing some $250 billion off of its market capitalization, which is 230 from its market cap, bringing it down to $660 billion, the largest wipeout of company valuation in the history of the stock market. Pretty astounding. But there were a lot of questions around exactly why. And the reason why highlights an ongoing discussion and frustration I think we both have had, which is Facebook, yeah, it's powerful, but also a lot of the discussion around antitrust and more kind of lags where the current trends are. Facebook is a dying enterprise. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that the reason why it went ahead and went down, and this makes the case against why Zuckerberg may not care,

but the reason why it lost $200 billion in a day is that they point in the article that this is the first time in the history of the 18-year company that the daily active users on Facebook went down. Now, this is a little bit more of a counter to the point that I was making, which is that while, yes, the active user drop has dropped by about a million in terms of daily active users, the first time that's ever happened, they still have like 1.9 billion people who are on the platform. And because of their acquisitions of Instagram and of WhatsApp, that they have increasing numbers of people on alternative or even non-Facebook blue platforms.

So it's complicated. Facebook, the big blue app, is kind of dying. It's becoming much more something that is used by elderly people. I'm speaking specifically in the United States, not necessarily abroad. But they're younger, you know, the Instagram and WhatsApp are actually doing okay. WhatsApp especially exploding abroad. It's a complicated story, though. Yeah. So still, even with the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the core revenue for Facebook is their advertising.

And the biggest, actually bigger than the issue with losing daily active users, which is a huge deal, is the fact that Apple changed some of their security procedures. You've probably noticed this on your iPhone. It asks you whether or not you want an app to track you across the platform. And so when you opt out, that means that Facebook is no longer getting all the information and all the details about you that it used to. And so that has really hit their sort of core revenue. And I mean, this isn't a secret. They talked about it on the call that these changes from Apple

have really hit their revenue and hit their ability to profit to the maximum amount off of your personal data. So that's a big issue for them, and that's not really changing. So that's a big problem. Then you have the fact that it's not just that the top-line numbers for the first time in this company's history have gone down. It's that young people are not on Facebook. I saw the numbers, gosh, I wish I could remember them. But over the course of a decade, it went from something like 94% of young people being active on Facebook to like 12. I mean, it is a precipitous collapse

in this sort of like coolness and relevance, because of course, young people set the sort of cultural tone of Facebook. So you've got problem with daily active users declining. You've got problem with the who, the demographics on the platform. You've got a problem with the revenue model. And then you have a gigantic question mark in what the next business move is that Zuckerberg is pursuing, which is, of course, leaning all the way into the metaverse. That's why. Yeah, that's why they changed the company name. And spending a whole lot of money developing the metaverse in hopes that that is going to be the next big thing. Personally, and I did a monologue on this before, the metaverse sounds like a horrific, dystopian hellscape of late-stage capitalism, and I hope it fails.

I'm not saying it will fail, but I hope it fails. But there are also big question marks about how appealing this is actually going to be to people to, like, you know, have their office meetings with a VR headset on instead of just doing it by Zoom, et cetera, et cetera. So they're placing a big bet there, spending a lot of cash for extremely uncertain returns while their core business model kind of crumbles. So those are some of the things that are going on. I also saw one analyst, and I thought this was an interesting and smart point, say that part of how in the past Zuckerberg has been able to remain relevant and, you know, keep Facebook in sort of like relevant with young people and with these demographics and keep the daily active users growing and move into the fields of social media that are more interesting was through acquisitions, right? Snapping up Instagram, snapping up WhatsApp, very smart purchases.

But the problem with the metaverse is there isn't a player to acquire. Right. So he's demonstrated his acuity in sort of recognizing players out there that are worth acquiring and adding to their business, but he has not developed his, he has not demonstrated his acuity in recent years

of developing what that next big thing is. So that also makes it a lot more speculative and a lot more uncertain than it has been in the past. Certainly true. You know, the real thing that I want to emphasize is that bet on the metaverse and all these weird, creepy commercials and also integrating Oculus. They actually changed the name to MetaQuest, which I hate. Oculus was a way cooler name. Yeah, I think it sounds cool. Yeah, it sounds much cooler MetaQuest, which I hate. Oculus was a way cooler name. Yeah, it sounds much cooler. Sounds sort of like Matrixy. They're bringing it all under the umbrella of the Meta company, and they're going all in specifically because, look, it doesn't

take a genius to see, okay, we are not popular with young people, but we're printing a ton of money. So that's the one thing I don't want to say that they're failing. They still made $37 billion last quarter, okay? $37 billion. And they're using all that money in order to pump in to development of the metaverse, try to make it take off, try to get people on Oculus headsets. It was interesting. You know, Oculus was one of the top most downloaded apps post-Christmas, meaning that it was given as a gift to a lot of kids.

So they're playing VR games. I don't want to, you know, overstate it. I'm not saying millions and millions of people are using it every day, but it's a sizable, you know, little chunk and we'll see if it takes off. The real question here is what does the future look like? Because as you pointed to, young people are not just not on Facebook, they're actually fleeing Facebook. And this is where TikTok is just dominating in a way that it's difficult to describe. If Facebook's own internal leak data shows that teenagers are spending like double the amount of time on TikTok vis-a-vis Instagram, TikTok is the most downloaded app in the entire world, has a billion daily active users. It's time on app, which is actually what matters most

to these players, is higher and has a much bigger retention rate amongst people who are younger. It's obviously the driver of a lot of young culture right now today. That is an existential threat, really, to Facebook in terms of its long-term viability. And that's really a thing that they have no clue on how to do. The other thing we wanted to point out is that billionaire Peter Thiel, who I think he wrote the first big check to Facebook, like half a million dollars, split this up there on the screen, is leaving the company's board after he joined in 2005. So pretty interesting. 18 years later, the reason being that Thiel is actually wants to leave so he can pursue, basically pursue pushing what he called the Trump agenda, which is kind of fascinating.

So he was causing, Peter Thiel has been causing problems for Mark Zuckerberg for a long time. And I don't, I'm not saying anything he's doing is bad, but his open embrace of Trump, and especially speaking in 2016 on the stage and endorsement of Trump caused an outcry within Facebook itself. And Thiel's ongoing political activity has made it very difficult for Zuckerberg because he's obviously got activist employees. But also, you know, when you're a generally publicly traded company, in my opinion, you really shouldn't be, you know, actively political on either side, although a lot of them seem to be aligning there with the left. But his departure, I would think, is still a watershed moment in the history of Facebook

because it just shows you that the original roots of what made them so big and such a force in the first place, that's gone. We're in phase two. And it's an open question whether Facebook succeeds in phase two. I personally think they're going to be a lot like Microsoft. They'll exist, but they're not cool. It's not the cutting edge thing. Yeah, Microsoft made a lot of money, but you know, Microsoft is like boring. It's for people in offices. I think that's the future of Facebook. Yeah, because it does have these just sort of like transactional oriented. Right, exactly. Their marketplace and that sort of stuff. I haven't been on Facebook in a year, so I couldn't even tell you all the things. Apparently, you know, you and I have fan pages on Facebook.

I had no idea. Somebody sent it to me. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, I really haven't been on there in years. But I know they have, like, there's, like, a marketplace function that people use. I think people like the community boards and stuff like that. I used to use these in college.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think there is functionality there that is not clearly replaced by another social media company that probably keeps it from because of course the big question is like well we saw the way my myspace was this huge thing and then just sort of instantly collapsed so could you can you have social media companies that just suffer a precipitous decline and effectively completely crumble out of existence in a relatively short period of time. Yeah, we've seen that happen before.

I think it's unlikely that that's a path for Facebook because of this other functionality that's unlikely to be replaced in other places. And also, you know, the boomers are going to be around for a long time. Yeah, boomers are. They're very committed to it. It's true. It's integrated in their social life

and how they keep up with people and their grandkids and whatever. So I wouldn't say that it's going to just like collapse and die. But is it going to be super relevant? Yeah, not that much. And the other thing that I think is significant, I'm not a big Peter Thiel fan, but he was one of the voices, one of perhaps the only voices on the board that was pushing in more of an anti-censorship free speech direction in terms of their content moderation choices. And so the fact that he is out, it reminds me of the move at Twitter. Twitter wasn't perfect under Jack, but Jack had some genuine commitment to know, commitment to try to maintain the openness of the platform. We see the new dude does not share any of that same commitment. We've already seen

significant policy shifts made by Twitter in the wake of Jack's departure. And I wonder if we'll see similar shifts with Peter Thiel off the board. Yeah, I think that that's correct, which is that he was, you know, one of the most vocal people on that issue. And also he was an increasing critic of big tech. That was the other thing. I think this is going to unleash him. Thiel has long been a foe of Google, has called them out publicly, both in terms of their critique of Facebook, I mean of social media, of Silicon Valley in its current form for not creating anything useful. The famous line is, we were promised flying cars and all we got was 120 characters, I guess now updated to 240 characters.

He's like, we don't actually build anything cool anymore. So I wonder if him leading the board will actually unleash him in terms of his public rhetoric and perhaps even his future on how that looks. But, you know, it's a party that's coming for a long time. Is he investing in surveillance companies and stuff too? Well, that was like Palantir, but I mean, put money in SpaceX, obviously, and in I think, what, some other

space-type companies. I'm not, well, biotech. What do you think he sees as when he says he wants to invest in the Trump agenda? Like, that could mean anything. What is his version of that? I mean, you can look at the people who are most closest to him who are running. So J.D. Vance, full disclosure, you know, somebody who I know and have known for a long time. Blake Masters.

I don't know Blake Masters. But those two people who are both running for Senate in Arizona. Blake actually co-wrote Zero to One with Peter Thiel. J.D. worked for Peter at some point. They're both very hyper-nationalist type candidates. So these are people who are, Peter is an interesting kind of more a heterodox figure, but I would describe him as a nationalist figure

in terms of economic orientation and in domestic political. So that means questioning trade orthodoxy. That's one of the things that really drew him to the Trump agenda. Censorship and being anti-PC culture, something Peter has been on the other side of for a long time, famously going after Gawker, all of that. So I would look to the Blake Masters and J.D. Vance's, the people, and Hawley actually, who Teal also backed, I think in 2017, as his vision for what he thinks Republican politics should look like. Yeah. And right now I just saw some recent polling, uh, primary not going that well for J.D. Vance in particular because of his past anti-Trump commentary. What about Blake Masters?

So Masters is an interesting, so full disclosure, once again, from what I know and I've asked around, he apparently has Trump's favor. He was at Mar-a-Lago. I think he did a fundraiser, which is a good thing. But Trump is not endorsed yet in the race. And the most recent polling showed Masters in, like, fourth place, behind the Attorney General. But the thing is, is that this is all some MAGA BS, so forgive me. But everyone's mad at the Attorney General for not stopping the steal. So it's possible that Trump does get involved to make sure that this

guy doesn't win. But some, what I've heard is that the governor, Doug Ducey, may also throw his hand and ring in there. What is it? His hat in the ring, his hand in the ring. The governor may throw his hat in the ring and he may run and he's actually quite popular. And even though Trump hates him, I think he probably could overcome that in a Republican primary, although that's up in the air and up for debate. So it's a big mess. And this is all to run against Mark Kelly. Correct. To run against Mark Kelly. The long and short of it is, is that it's very likely neither of these two men win, you know, to be totally clear. So it's kind of an odd pairing. We see this oftentimes with billionaires where they think because they're good at like

investing or developing technology or whatever, they're going to be good at politics, and it doesn't always pan out. It doesn't always happen. Interesting little couple developments we wanted to track for you on the Joe Rogan front. So, of course, we went through the whole thing yesterday. The very latest development was that Spotify sent out this sort of angsty, soul-searching email to their employees. The long and short of it is, we're going to keep having conversations and thinking about how we can do better, but we don't believe that canceling Rogan is the way to approach this. Okay, great.

So that's their marker that they put down on the table. So Rumble, sensing a little opportunity to make some news for themselves, throws this piece on the table. Hey, Joe Rogan, we're ready to fight alongside you. See the note from our CEO, and it says, Dear Joe, we stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. We'd like to offer you hundred million reasons to make the world a better place. How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new,

with no censorship, for a hundred million bucks over four years. This is our chance to save the world, and yes, this is totally legit. Okay, so that's

their little play. I mean, listen, obviously they're trying to grab a little attention for themselves. Right, I mean, Rogan signed a breach of contract

and neither is Spotify, so it's probably not going to happen. Of course it's not going to happen. It's also not enough money. I mean, Rogan signed a breach of contract and neither did Spotify, so it's probably not going to happen. Of course it's not going to happen. It's also not enough money. I mean, that's an insane thing to say. But also, let's say that you did have some mass artist exodus

and Spotify went back on their word and they canceled the contract or whatever and canceled Joe. It would be ridiculous for him to go exclusively with anyone. Yeah. I mean, he doesn't need to. Right.

That was always the thing. He got big on the open system. Yes. And that was, and that open system meant that he was much more protected because ultimately

the only pressure point was him. He wasn't going to censor himself. And so it was only when you got these other entities and other, you know,

corporations involved. And yes, Rumble appears to be very committed to an anti-censorship stance. But why would you go with anyone when you could obviously just go on your own and make more money than the $100 million that they're offering here and have complete freedom, which is, in my opinion, much, much more important. I also looked it up. Rumble's valuation is at $500 million. So I was like, do they even have the cash? Because usually these valuations are like 10 times what you've raised. So it's like, so they only have $50 million in cash.

Where is the cash coming from? Who is behind Rumble? It's actually, to our previous segment, it's not only Peter Thiel, also J.D. Vance. They're both big investors in the company. So, I mean, it's very possible that they have someone like Peter Thiel. Who's like, I'll give you money. Yeah, if he'll do it, then sure. I mean, knowing that it's very unlikely

that it's going to happen. Yeah. I think it's, look, it was a good play from a publicity point of view for that to happen. Obviously, we have friends who are on Rumble. You know, they're having a good time. So, I think it's an interesting development. I always do and look at these kind of alternatives as, it's just not the right answer to me. And the reason why is because the network effects of these big, massive social media companies make it so that the litigation that happens within them is just so vitally important. Yeah, like you can generally peel off 2% to 5% of somebody's user base, but that still means 90% of people are somewhere else. And that is just something where you have to grapple with that, especially if you're trying to change actual public discourse in American culture. That is a problem which I have not yet

seen anyone solve this. This is no disrespect to Rumble. This is actually more of a, not even a defeatist attitude, but a recognition of like, okay, in the internet, there really is generally one winner in a space. That's just how it works. You can't solve this with a private company play. I don't think so. It's just not possible. You need government policy. I mean, that's the only way you're going to, you need antitrust, you need regulation, or you need to nationalize these companies that are effectively now the public square. And I've thought a lot about this, too, because part of the problem is, and this is now not

specifically about Rumble, but about a lot of these sort of like alternative platforms. Like a parlor or a gab or whatever. Getter. Why do so many of them actually sort of collapse into gab being probably the most notorious example into truly like terrible, a truly terrible ghetto with a lot of really odious people? like terrible, a truly terrible ghetto with a lot of really odious people. And it's because they're trying, their whole appeal is we're going to be Twitter, but without the censorship.

We're going to be YouTube without the censorship. Right. And so for people who already have established platforms on Twitter or YouTube or whatever, they're not going to make the switch unless they're really ideologically committed to that thing. So you're going to get only this very specific, likely very ideological sliver. I think Substack has succeeded because they didn't have this model of like, we're going to be just like this other thing, except without the censorship. They created a new, there wasn't an existing easy newsletter platform. And so you look at who's on Substack and it really is across the board. You've got super cringe lib resistance people.

You've got super cringe like never Trumpers. You've got, you know, people like Matt Taibbi. You've got Glenn Greenwald. You've got me and Kyle. I mean, you've got just the entire gamut of ideologies on Substack because they were actually providing something that was new rather than just making this kind of ideological play. So I think that's why it's worked out in that instance. But I just don't think that there's a private market solution to this issue. I think it has to come from some sort of government intervention,

as unlikely as that feels right now. I'm lucky enough to be friends with some people in tech, and the way that they describe it is this way. Whenever you're talking about an actual product, Substack not only solved a market problem, it expanded the market. As in, it created and solved the problem of, I want to charge people for my newsletter, exclusive content, you have an economy, a scale, an audience, it actually makes total sense. But then by its very existence, it's actually created new marketplaces and a new expansion of the economy. That's what a great product does in the tech space. Alternatives, by their very definition, they can't do that. Because what they're doing is they're trying to be an alternative to something that has already both created the market and expanded the market.

So it's actually not the particularly best business play. And I'm speaking specifically from business. It's important that you guys understand this because if you do want to solve this problem, you have to recognize what phase of what you're in and where exactly the problem is. Like the problem with the whole Substack thing was not regulation. It was that the market, the mechanism itself didn't exist. Whereas here in, like, no, like, we have pretty good technology to give people a video based on a recommendation algorithm. Like, this is a, we don't have a market problem yet that has to be solved, which is big enough to generate hundreds and hundreds of billions. Remember this, YouTube is making more money than many Hollywood studios, and they don't spend one dime on original content or on talent.

That's a great business model, and that is something that you have to try and reckon with whenever you're thinking about these problems. So it's an interesting thing, and it's a little bit of a tangent, but people need to understand, too, where and how these alternative platforms exist and spring up and what they're trying to solve is that whenever somebody's telling you, like, this is the market or whatever, you have to try and think in terms of what does this mean to, like, the vast majority of people because the internet is so big. Right, not just the most sort of, like, ideologically committed folks who are willing to take the hit

in terms of starting from scratch and building up and being on a platform that just does not have, I mean, that's the power of social media is all about network effects, how many people are on the platform. And so, yeah, that's why power of social media is all about network effects, how many people are on the platform. And so, yeah, that's why I think a lot of these plays don't work out when they don't have a unique value proposition. I think Call-In could because it's different. Because it's new.

It has its own new functionality. It has its own new thing. People seem to really like that direct engagement for their audience. Anyway, we'll see that as a tangent. But there was one other piece that we wanted to bring to you. So, okay. You will recall that one of the ways that the Rogan situation sort of exploded and entered a new phase was the resurfacing of this video compilation of him saying the N-word some 20 times. That's right.

Okay. And so there was immediately a question of like, hmm, well, where'd this come from? Yeah. Who was involved in... Who's pumping this into the ecosystem? Who was pumping this into the ecosystem in what feels like a very sort of strategic and coordinated way?

Ah. You have done a very good job tracking this, so I'll actually let you set this piece up. So it's called, there's a group called Patriot Takes. It's partnered with another group called Midas Touch. Midas Touch is run by three brothers who are these Mesilias brothers. They, one of them used to work for Ellen DeGeneres. Her social media manager, right?

That's right. So they run a cringe resistance media operation. It's basically like a blue Lincoln project where they promise everybody that they're fighting really hard with these crazy ads. And then they take your money and then they spend it on more of those ads, which generates more donations. And per the Rolling Stone, they haven't actually done anything to affect democratic politics. So if you're one of those people who's giving them money, you're basically just creating a little ecosystem. You're not changing electoral results. But this democratic organization and Super PAC,

which has been given money by Reid Hoffman, who's a Silicon Valley billionaire, and Bette Midler of West Virginia fame, well, these gentlemen have been found to be behind all sorts of different cancellation campaigns. And one of those was noticed by Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, who had noticed that an organization on Twitter, which continually would resurface clips of Dave himself, you know, saying the N-word also within a context, I want to be very clear, or, you know, any of these anti-barstool campaigns was followed by these gentlemen. And he accused and called them out saying that they're behind not only the cancellation of Barstool, but also of Rogan. So Dave held a live stream in which he confronted the three brothers.

In the live stream, he specifically calls out one of them saying, I have definitive proof. One of you used the N-word in 2014. Do you deny it or not? Look how uncomfortable these gents get. Let's take a listen. I have definitive proof of one of you three using the word in a text conversation with a friend from 2014 that somebody sent to me. It shouldn't be used, but I swear to God, I have. Okay. That's a lie. Yeah. You think I'd lie about that? I think you would lie about that. Does anyone hear a fiance named Lexi? I think you'd absolutely lie about that. Am I lying about what I just said? And if someone has a fiance named Lexi, that that is the decision right here?

No, no. I'm asking, is that- There's no right context whatsoever to anybody using your- Is Lexi a person in one of your lives? Yes. Jordy's fiance is Lexi. Yes, my fiance is Lexi. And so one of your lives? Yes. Jordi's fiance is Lexi. Yes, my fiance is Lexi. And so that means Jordi did it. I'm saying I have definitive proof. Okay. You have definitive proof. But that doesn't define everything.

And I've never done a private conversation. I've done three times all on air. I think context very much matters. So I asked Dave. I was like, hey, man, can you give it to me? Full transparency. I sent him an email. He said that per his source, he promised he wasn't going to out it,

but per his opinion, it is absolutely real. So you take it for what you will. Those gents got very, very, very, very, very uncomfortable. There was another exchange with them, too, where it came up again. And, yeah, Jordy, the one at the top. Yeah, Jordy. What's happening, Jordy? His face gets blurry, like, yeah, nothing to see here.

Didn't work out so well, huh? I mean, look, the whole point is that nobody here is condoning the use of this word in any context. However, it does matter what the context was. I mean, I don't know how anyone can not agree that there's a big difference between using this as an active racist, horrific slur and quoting someone else, for example. So he's exposing that there may be some hypocrisy at play here in their moral virtuousness, which speaks to a larger point, putting the N-word aside, that, listen, guys, all of us have effed up at some point there is no you know perfectly pure and noble person among us who has always had the perfect opinions and never done anything that was wrong or mean or you know cold-hearted we are all flawed human beings and if there is no room in the society for forgiveness and some process of reconciliation then yeah then it's gonna be it's gonna be an ugly path for all of us look yeah

like i said do i think that jordy is a racist because he used the n-word in 2014 no because it's a dumb ass standard but you know jordy you're the one who's putting it out there so by your own standards stop firing off about all of this nonsense and maybe stop trying to generate clicks and all this other money based upon what is clearly both a democratic off but also probably a money grab. And let's just move on. All right. Let's go ahead and get to the next segment here. This is an important one. So Leslie Wexner is a fascinating character.

He's the founder of Al Brands, Victoria's Secret, obviously, a multi-billionaire in his own right, and was one of the most powerful and richest men in the world in the 1980s. It's difficult to forget exactly how central he was to kind of American commerce before the tech sector really took off. Well, what happened with Mr. Wexner?

He, it turns out that we know now, was the original source of Jeffrey Epstein's immense wealth and a lot of the different connections that he made throughout the 80s and 90s, which culminated, obviously, at the time where he was victimizing young women, but really in some of the worst excesses that we saw from Epstein. Wexner has basically been banished from polite society, you know, rightfully, but he's resurfaced recently in the political world. Let's put this up there on the screen. Longtime Epstein associate gave $250,000 to the Republican Governors Association just last month. That's according to three sources with the knowledge of the donation. And actually, it's the first six-figure political contribution that he's given since 2018, 2018 being the year that the Epstein scandal exploded onto the scene. But here's why it matters.

I don't think people truly understand how crazy this is. Wexner gave Epstein power of attorney over his finances in 1991. And he gifted him that creepy famous mansion, the $56 million mansion in 2011, which means that their relationship spans from the 80s up until the 2010s. Now, there's a lot of questions. How exactly does a multi-billionaire like Leslie Wexner just get taken in by Jeffrey Epstein? You're going to just sign over power of attorney over your finances when you're a multi-billionaire? Yeah, that's really interesting. Put this up there, which is actually there's been a long investigation into Mr. Wexner and how exactly that all worked out. And what they say here and strongly insinuate, Crystal,

is it's almost certain that Epstein had something on Wexner. You know, the idea is that he was somehow bamboozled and taken in by him. I simply don't believe it. That's the narrative that Wexner has put out there. Wexner's only addressed it once, basically saying, you know, I never would have guessed that a person I employed more than a decade ago would have caused so much pain to so many people. Basically use the same Bill Gates defense of, I wish I never met him, but let's move on.

Right. Yeah, well, he sort of almost portrays himself as like a victim. Yeah, he wants you to believe he's the victim. That he's the victim. He was taken advantage of. Poor little innocent billionaire. How could he have possibly known? That second tear sheet you put up there from

the New York Times? What that also demonstrates is that Epstein was using his proximity to Wexner and the Victoria's Secret brand to hold himself out like he was a modeling agent. Right. Yeah. So he recruited a lot of young girls. Right. So this was part of his scheme to get close to a lot of young girls. And it is documented that Wexner was alerted to this behavior. There were two senior executives that warned him that this was going on. So for him to pretend like he had no idea and, oh, my goodness, how could anyone have known? And I feel so bad that I could have been associated with such a nefarious person. Come on now.

You had at least some warnings that there were some things going on that shouldn't have been going on, and yet you continued to not only associate with him, but to provide him with the funds to have the lifestyle that enabled his behavior, allowed him to get into all of these elite circles, which came not only with access to high corridors of power on both the Democratic and of blanket like, OK, and that's it. We're not going to have any more lawsuits after this for many of these other victims. And by the way, I'm going to let all my associates off the hook as well. All of that was set up and enabled by Leslie Wexner. And for Republicans, after a couple years of saying,

well, rightfully talking also about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Epstein, which is a totally legit case, why are you taking this guy's money? But now that the attention is a little bit dimmed, they're happy to take his $250,000 to the Republican Governors Association. And you also have to wonder whether Wexner may be thinking about his own liability and thinking about, hey, you know, might not be a bad thing for me to continue to have some friends in high places, just in case there is some sort of investigation or potential accountability for me down the line. It's funny, too. You know, he claims he was taken in in 1991.

He's only 84 years old. Okay, I wasn't even born in 1991. So that means he was like 50 years old. Oh, yeah, a feeble old man at 50? Right. I don't think so. Yeah, right. It's not.

Yeah, it's like, oh, the poor little 50-year-old was taken advantage of. Poor thing, poor thing. It is clear as day to me, given what happened and how many people inside of his own company warned him about what Epstein was doing and some of the other dramatically shady behavior. And then the eventual gifting of the mansion, that Epstein had something on Wexner 100%. There's one other piece of this, too, which is that one of Epstein's survivors, Maria Farmer, alleged that Epstein actually assaulted her at Wexner's Ohio compound in 1996. Right. She said she was held against her wishes there for 12 hours. Wexner and his wife say they had no, they, of course, had no idea. By the way, they deny all of this for the lawyers.

Yeah. Yeah. They deny all of this for the lawyers. Yeah, they deny all of this. But I think if nothing else, that shows you how close these two men were that he felt entitled to just have carte blanche at Wexner's estate and carry out his evil and heinous acts. I also think it's gross

because I think this was probably orchestrated by Mike DeWine. It seems that, so apparently Wexner is the wealthiest Republican donor in the state of Ohio, and he's been giving donations only to Ohio-based candidates, people like Representative Joyce Beattie, also to Representative, or Senator Rob Portman and Mike DeWine previously. I think it's clear here that DeWine probably pulled some strings, facilitated the donation.

Look, I'm calling on them, and I think everybody should in order to return this money. Screw him. Screw his ill-gotten gains. We still have a lot of questions, and Mr. Wexner isn't welcomed on the show at any time. I would love to interview him. Yeah. I'll hold my breath.

Okay. A little bit of update for you uh with regards to cnn let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen so you will recall stephen hayes and jonah goldberg uh quit from fox and put on a statement and you know they were they were upset specifically about tucker carlson's false flag documentary thing about January 6th. Hayes landed on his feet at NBC. And now Jonah has also landed on his feet over at CNN as a contributor. Just, Sagar, why don't you run down some of Jonah Goldberg's past hits here?

I've got a few of them. During the Iraq war, he argued in favor of it, saying every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business. He defended colonialism in places like Africa as more beneficial than it's generally given credit for. He admitted after the fact that invading Iraq was a mistake, but he claimed it was a noble mistake. Yes, that's right. So no harm, no foul, I guess, Jonah. My personal favorite was in 2005. I predict Iraq won't have a civil war.

It will be a viable constitution. A majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years' time, agree that this war was worth it. That's the kind of analysis they pay for over at CNN. That's what the people expect and demand, Sagar. Here's my thing with Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg is an absolute egomaniac who sees himself as the arbiter of American conservatism.

I have long since accepted that my views and my general orientation are not in line with the national Republican movement. That's fine. I'm doing my own thing over on the show with you, Crystal. But Goldberg and Hayes like to portray themselves and say, no, our elitist position, both upon trade, he has a much more libertarian attitude whenever it comes to economics, and neoconservative disposition whenever it comes to foreign policy,

that is the true and tried Republican position. He's like the worst of the Republican Party. Right. Just because we used to work at National Review for 25 years? Okay, cool. I mean, I don't know why exactly that entitles you to do anything. And the worst part of this is he parlays his past credibility as a quote unquote Republican to then tell elite liberals what the real Republican party should look like, more warmongering and more shipping jobs overseas, and then covers his ass by saying, oh, and also Trump is just so, so awful. And that's how he made his entire new career under the Trump years. That, I try to say, is the best summation of why he's such an annoying and

odious individual. But what's amazing is that from the way the elite media just worships the ground that these guys walk on, Goldberg and Hayes have co-founded a media organization called The Dispatch, does quite well on Substack. I don't know who these people are, but some people like them. Okay, that's fine. But what they try to do there is both be the arbiters of what real conservatism, TM, really is, but also they take up perches in elite media and criticize Fox News. That's fine. Criticize Fox News here all the time. But then you go and work for CNN and for MSNBC, and it's just amazing about whose sins are forgiven or not. Let's not forget, Stephen

Hayes also just recently took up perch over at NBC News, put that up there on the screen. They're so happy to have him a contributor and a political analyst, a guy who literally wrote a book about the, quote, connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. And a hagiography of Nick Cheney, by the way, for good measure. And here's, look, some sins are not forgivable, in my opinion. Iraq is one of them. If you are tainted by that, get out. I never want to hear a word you say unless you're groveling to the American people with apologies for what you have wrought, both upon them and upon us.

And they refuse to do so. That's fine. Because they said something bad about Trump. It was a noble mistake, Socrates. Yeah, of course it was a noble mistake. According to Goldberg. The noble mistake we ever made is taking this guy seriously. But what's especially galling

is that Goldberg and Hayes, when they left Fox News as analysts over Tucker Carlson, here's what they said. Let's put it up there. Quote, We are not looking to occupy

the permanent anti-Fox seats at CNN or MSNBC. But we thought it worth discussing our decision and the factors that led to it. And then they literally get hired by those two outlets. That was in November, whenever they resigned because Tucker had a documentary. Now look, Tucker's documentary included the words

false flag about January 6th. I don't think that that's correct. But the documentary was directionally a lot more true than anything you're going to hear on CNN or MSNBC in terms of Fed involvement on January 6th. And this is not to absolve the riot of January 6th. I haven't watched the documentary, so I'm not going to say whether it is more directionally true or not.

But I will say that it is very telling who is a loud and polite society and who is not I mean what is tell me what's more odious like obviously this whole cancellation campaign against Rogan for things that he said in the past where's the cancellation campaign about the people who dragged us into war and lied about it and can continued to facilitate those lies for years and years and years. And get paid for it. To the massive cost of lives and treasure and, you know, disrupting the entire Middle East and making us all less safe and helping to fuel terrorism.

Where's the concern about that? And it also is interesting, I'm about to talk a lot more about CNN in my monologue. They have signaled that they're, you know, they're trying to rethink their, they want a hard news approach, whatever. They're clearly with this hire, just setting themselves up for the next Trump administration. They're getting their pieces into place. And it's incredibly pernicious the way that liberals have made common cause with people like this for the sole reason that they share distrust of Trump. And you can see the results of that, you know, in the way that the Biden administration has played out,

both in terms of foreign policy, but I think more importantly in terms of economic policy, where people like this are now part of the coalition. So when you ever try to do anything transformative, you've got dudes like this who have been put in positions of trust with the liberal base who are saying, oh, we can't do that too far. Afghanistan is a perfect example. The debt, inflation, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. There you go. It's a real pernicious force for the whole country.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as I just referenced, CNN is kind of in total freefall. And someone might need to do a wellness check on Brian Stelter in particular because he seems to be taking this whole situation with Jeff Zucker's ouster pretty hard. What do I mean? Well, just watch this little monologue that he delivered on his show this week. I want to end the hour with a final thought. And I'm going to go a little bit rogue here, so bear with me, okay?

Jeff Zucker's departure was shocking to the staff of CNN. But CNN was not built by just one man, not by only Ted Turner, and it was not led only by Jeff Zucker. CNN is so much bigger than any single individual. It is about teams and teams of people, thousands of individuals who make up CNN. But the people who say we're lacking journalism, that we've become an all talk channel, that we've run off and we're all opinions all the time, that Jeff Zucker led us astray? Those people aren't watching CNN.

They're not watching CNN. They're watching complaints about CNN on other channels that don't know what they're talking about. That's the truth. CNN is the reporters and the producers and the production assistants and the writers and the editors and the technical directors. CNN is the executives and the editors and the technical directors. CNN is the executives and it's the interns and everybody in between who keeps this place running 24-7. So when something

horrible happens in the world or when something wonderful happens in the world, you know where to turn. That's what CNN is. We lost our leader this week, but we're not going anywhere. Now, if you've ever watched Brian Stelter on TV, you may have wondered to yourself, how exactly did this dude get this job? And I am genuinely not trying to be mean here to Brian. He may well have other skills and talents, but he is just really not good at being a TV host. He is bad at writing the monologues. He is bad at delivering the monologues. He is bad at interviewing. He is bad at debating. His expressions, his tone, his mannerisms are all kind of forced and inauthentic. He is clearly uncomfortable, and it makes the viewer very uncomfortable watching him. And that's putting aside the

extremely cringe content, of course. But now, having watched that clip, you know the answer as to how we got this job. This impressively slavish piece of CNN propaganda is exactly why Brian Stelter is in that chair. In theory, Stelter's job is to be a media watchdog, to hold journalists and media organs accountable, including CNN. Instead, at the most difficult times, he went out of his way to protect his benefactor and patron, Jeff Zucker. That's why he famously defended CNN's handling of the whole Cuomo affair. That seems like an odd conflict of rules. It is an odd conflict, but I don't think if we open up the journalism ethics book,

there's no page for this. It's the craziest set of circumstances you can imagine. And his real job of being Zucker's loyalist and attack dog is why he never reported on the things that he surely knew about Zucker, his mistress, and the Cuomo brothers. To describe Stelter as managed opposition would give him way too much credit for ever pretending to be oppositional. Viewed in another light, you might also view Stelter's monologue as a desperate bid to save his own hide, to reassure the new regime that his real dedication is to CNN, the organization, and that he will be equally embarrassingly unethical in service of the new leadership team as well. After all, no one is more exposed than

Stelter right now with Zucker out the door. Tabloids are already reporting that his demise might be imminent. One source told the Daily Mail, quote, He's been Jeff Zucker's water boy for years, and no one believes he didn't know about all of this. He's been sitting on his moral high horse doing Jeff's bidding and ripping Fox and every other media outlet that Jeff tells him to while his ratings crash and burn. Where was he on the biggest story at his own network after chastising everyone else. In revealing how the real job of Stelter was to protect Zucker and target Zucker's enemies above all else, it was a real mask-off moment for CNN. And friends, they've been having a lot of those lately.

Stelter's role is just one small piece of what we have learned throughout this whole Jeff Zucker situation. And honestly, the way that Zucker played it, blaming his departure on a consensual affair that almost no one really cares about, it was kind of a masterstroke. Since it involved sex and it involved tawdry gossip, it sucked up a lot of the oxygen and it satiated the public's interest in scandal. But Zucker's resignation really had nothing to do with sex

and everything to do with corruption, the core business model of CNN. And that is the real scandal. What actually happened is that fired anchor Chris Cuomo was about to blow the whole place up, exposing just how cozy Zucker and his mistress, Alison Gallist, were with Governor Andrew Cuomo. Rolling Stone reports that the investigation into Chris Cuomo had also unearthed unethical behavior by Zucker and by Gallus. Quote, the source says the investigation suggests Zucker and Gallus were advising the governor at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in ways not dissimilar to what

led to Chris Cuomo's dismissal. As Andrews sparred on a daily basis with then-President Trump over COVID messaging, the couple provided the governor with talking points on how to respond to the president's criticisms of the New York crisis. They also booked the governor to appear on the network exclusively, which became a ratings boon for CNN, with Chris Cuomo doing the interviewing. That is the real story. Now listen, you would have to be a fool to believe this type of outright collusion and political favoritism is a one-off, aberrant event. After all, cable news is built on a three-legged stool of access journalism, tribal partisan loyalties, and old people who fell asleep with the TV on. It's the kind of out-and-out corruption that Stelter and his colleagues justifiably railed against when it came to the incestuous relationship

between Fox News and the Trump White House. In fact, Stelter wrote an entire book on exactly that topic. It was titled, Hoax, Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. It is truly amazing to me that he can be so brazenly, blindly hypocritical that he writes an entire book on Fox's political corruption, but doesn't raise a word of protest when CNN's longtime boss is caught engaged in very similar behavior. But of course, Stelter is not the only one at the network

far more upset that their benefactor is gone than at the brazen political corruption that was at the core of CNN's coverage during a massive world-altering pandemic. Jake Tapper, Caitlin Collins, Jim Acosta, all of them in leaked audio were very much shook by Jeff's sudden departure than by his misdeeds. In fact, they aren't really troubled by his misdeeds whatsoever. Tapper painted the whole situation as Chris Cuomo the bad guy versus Jeff Zucker the good guy. Kaitlyn Collins echoed Tapper and was distraught that the organization would be rudderless without Jeff running the show and giving direction on their 9 a.m. planning calls. Jim Acosta, of course, feared that his own personally profitable business model of theatrical Trump resistance might be in jeopardy.

He said, if we had not had Jeff Zucker here during the Trump administration, we probably would have been taken out. New comments reported by Puck are even more emotionally loaded. Quote, I think that what you're hearing and what we're all experiencing is just a huge shockwave to all of our mental health. We don't understand why the death penalty was necessary. That was from CNN host Alison Camerota. Jake Tapper, he actually held what was described as a wake to mourn the loss of Zucker. That was at Tapper's DC home. Again, I want to reiterate, these supposed journalists just found out that their leading light was engaged in some of the very same blatantly corrupt political practices that they claim to abhor with Trump and Fox News.

And now, they don't care at all. Not even a little bit. And they are mournful and filled with despair, only that the corrupt dude who was the boss was caught and pushed out. Do I think that with Zucker gone, things will ultimately change at CNN? That new management will commit to journalistic integrity, clean house of some of the worst actors that ran wild during the Trump years? Obviously not. Don't get me wrong, some Zucker loyalists may well be fired. Lord knows they certainly won't prove their usefulness

to the new regime through ratings success. But as long as the cable news business model is what it is, nothing's going to actually change. They'll just be a new boss with new sycophants and cronies to preside over the network's precipitous decline. While Stelter was delivering his monologue, the chyron read, this is CNN. And it was a little bit too on the nose there, because the culture of clubbiness, political favors, access journalism, and holding power to account only so long as it doesn't conflict with the interests of their friends, their bosses, and their advertisers. That is CNN. And on this one issue, Brian is totally correct.

While he and Zucker and others might ultimately be turfed, that CNN ain't going anywhere. Sagar, the increasing comments coming out from these anchors about their mental health... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, a few weeks ago, I did a monologue here. It got a lot of attention. Why the Rock should run for president. It was based upon my long observation of the Rock as an American icon who could transcend the culture war, who seemed genuinely pro-America. And up until now, I thought an ideological ally at least against the worst strains of our woke culture.

But as longtime viewers know, I'm happy to admit, when I'm dead wrong. It seems that he was on a mission to make me so, with the most recent Joe Rogan controversy. Now, at the beginning of all of this, I was frankly excited. The Rock, unlike many celebrities, seemed to actually stand up for Rogan, commenting on his original response around COVID, saying, quote, great stuff here, brother. Perfectly articulated. I look forward to coming on one day and breaking out the tequila with you. When someone actually accused The Rock of clout chasing off of Rogan, he even responded, quote, I don't clout chase. I've been buddies with Rogan for many years. His response was articulate. Straight up and fair. For years, he and I have talked about me going on his show.

One day I will, and we will drink tequila. A lot of it. Great. As ringing as an endorsement as it gets from arguably the biggest celebrity in all of Hollywood. It actually meant a lot to the discourse at the time. And then in the course of 24 hours, everything changed. After a man named Don Winslow tweeted, quote, And you know what he did? He responded, quote, this. I hear you as well as everyone here 100%. I was not aware of his n-word use prior to my comments, but now I've become educated

to his complete narrative. Learning moment for me. Oh my god. I just gotta say, that is so incredibly disappointing. Nobody asked The Rock to comment on this thing in the first place. And then immediately afterwards, you denounce somebody who you now claim to be your buddy of

years? Why, man? Why? The Rock's brand is that he's authentic. The response to Rogan certainly seems so. But then in the span of 24 hours, you get some weird corporate HR doublespeak denunciation of somebody you claim to be a friend. This is contrary to everything that made him so likable in the first place. And the biggest problem is, by bowing to the mob in this case, The Rock is opening himself up to all sorts of hypocrisy. You want to play the who said the N-word game without any public context?

Okay, what about Mr. Don Winslow, who tweeted this in the first place? Turns out, Winslow has used the N-word dozens of times in his books. His book, The Force. His book, Savages. His book, Gentleman Hour, his book High Lonely, his book The Border. You guys get the idea? Winslow is a coward.

He even locked his Twitter account after all of this was exposed. But it just shows how dumb this game is. Take The Rock himself. He used the word tranny like a decade ago when insulting a random person on Twitter. Now look, I say all of this as a fan of The Rock, trying to point out to him and his ilk,

you don't have to play this game. And then when you do, you find yourself just as much muck as the person you were denouncing. You destroy your brand that made you popular in the first place. And worse, you create a system which has no bottom in American public life. Compare this with the sentiment that an interview in The Rock gave several months ago when he was asked about running for president. Quote, you know at the end of the day, I don't know the first thing about politics.

I don't know the first thing about policy. I care deeply about our country. I care about every effing American who bleeds red, and that's all of them. It's that type of talk which actually drew me to him in the first place. But it conflicts with denouncing your friend, who you've known for years, on a clip clearly edited out of context. The greatest irony to me about the situation is that these types of episodes are significantly red-pilling

for a huge number of people. And that's what leads people to vote for Trump, who at this point is almost certain to be president again in 2024. The antidote to Trump has always existed within the liberal elite who hate him so much. If they simply stopped acting like such insane hypocrites all the time, nobody would vote for him. A vote for Trump fundamentally is a vote with a middle finger to the mindset that made The Rock denounce Joe Rogan. I am the first on the show to say that's not a particularly good reason, but I'm simply telling you the truth behind Trump's appeal. The more these public and hypocritical witchhounds play out,

the more liberal encourage millions of people to say, screw you, to them in the only way they still have power in their lives. The ballot box. As Crystal pointed out yesterday, the GOP is poised for a historic victory while literally running on nothing. That's not a coincidence. It's a consequence of this mindset. In my monologue where I wanted the rock to run for president,

I said precisely that he should do so because the political system is stuck, broken, and nearly irreparable. That we needed a figure who could transcend our cultural insanity and say simple stuff like Black Lives Matter and so do the police to quiet down the culture war. Move on to the much, much bigger problems that we have. Unfortunately, this move only reinforces the culture war that we are in. It demonstrates as long as the culture war rules us, we are destined instead to reactionary backlash for all time. I don't know why this is so difficult to understand. But alas, it is.

Until The Rock and anyone else like him stands up against this push, we're in for it. I'm going back to despairing, but don't let anyone say that I don't admit whenever I'm dead wrong. That was a quick turnaround. Yeah, it was a two-week turnaround. We got a little how it started, how it's going thing in like two weeks. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is Professor Adolph Reed Jr. himself.

Great to see you, sir. Good to see you, sir. Oh, great to see you guys. It's been a while. Yeah, it's always too long. It's always been too long since I last spoke with you. So talk to us a little bit. I'll start right with the book. It's always too long. It's always been too long since I last spoke with you. So talk to us a little bit. I'll start right with the book.

It's called The South, Jim Crow and Its After Lives. There's a few things to say about it. First, you very strenuously object to the idea that it's a memoir because I think it really genuinely isn't, even though it tracks some of the events in your life as they pertain to the dissolution of the Jim Crow order and what those changes looked like, both for yourself personally, but across America. But I also listened to an interview that you did in which you described it as somewhat in reaction to the framing of the 1619 project. So I wonder if you could lay out a few of those pieces for us. Well, yeah, I mean, I would say it's not exactly.

Well, the chronology is quite different because I actually started working on this around the beginning of the century, around 2002 or 2003. After, I think I mentioned this in the intro, too, after discussions with a couple of friends who both have roots in the Deep South, one about a decade younger than I, one about seven years older. And our recollections are on the turn of the current century that our rough age cohort was going to be the last in the United States with any living recollections of what life under Jim Crow was like. So that much preceded the 1619 Project. But the sensibility is different, right? And one of the things that I've been increasingly concerned about in racial discourse in the U.S. in the last decade or so, is the proliferation of a notion that nothing has ever changed, right? That white supremacy, and I should put it in scare quotes, is this kind of trans-historical

demon, basically, that has the power to do things and to decree things in the world. And of course, that's one of the reasons that some people, myself among them, are less than enthusiastic about the sensibility behind the 1619 Project, right? You know, the sense that, you know, the country was founded on slavery, the country was founded on racism and i think one of the problems that's both a political problem and an interpretive problem is a shift uh from seeing um racial inequality as being rooted in institutions and institutional practices, for instance, like slavery as a labor system, right? That's segregation or Jim Crow as a complex of institutions, structures, laws, and other constraints, to seeing it as all about attitude. And so that racism becomes, you know, the answer to the question, right,

of racial inequality. And as historian Barbara Fields, my good friend, famously said, you know, the way that people talk about slavery now, and you could say this about the Jim Crow era and sharecropping and whatever else, is that the point of slavery was to produce white supremacy, right? Not to produce cotton, rice, and tobacco. So I hoped. So yeah, my initial thought, and I didn't start writing this to write a book. I mean, I just started writing it to write it. I had no idea where

it was going. And I very quickly wrote myself into that 15,000 word no person's land, which was too long for an article and too short for a book. But my idea was just to sort of leave some sort of record about what concrete quotidian life was like in the Jim Crow order and what the order was itself, where it came from, what its historical sources and boundaries were, right? And it's only in the course of the last, I don't know, decade or less. I mean, I tend to think of it actually, you know, the high period of neoliberal anti-racism as bursting forth around 2015, 2016, when all of a sudden political anti-racism became arrayed publicly and aggressively against

a social democratic politics in the U.S. But yeah, it's only in that period, less than a decade, when I think the conceptual and ideological problems that appear in the 1619 Project became much more general and definitive in American life. Yeah. You know, if you were to ask me as an outsider to kind of look at your life's work, it would be emphasizing the role that class plays in American life and how you obviously cannot take that away from race, but that we have to talk about class for to solve so many of our problems. So could you outline then the book and its role in forming your overall outlook around class and perhaps even draw the Jim Crow to class pipeline that you saw that then

informed so much of what you've done for your entire career? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, to be completely honest, I didn't get any special insight, right? I mean, I've often said, I know I've said this only partly and just about Obama, but that it can be better, more important to be in the right place at the right time and keep your eyes open than to be smart. And I guess the sources of my perspective on the class bases of the white supremacist order, really, I just inherited the family business. I mean, my father and his father before him had you know, had that sensibility. I mean, I mentioned somebody not that long ago. I don't think I say this any place in the book, but

I recall my father often reacting when I was a little kid to what was then the hegemonic understanding among liberals that the imposition of pornographic white supremacy in the South at the end of the 19th century was an effect of the political triumph of the working class whites, right? And that kind of reinforced this absurd notion that the patrician upper class whites were the Negroes' best friends and so forth and so on. But my dad would often say laughing that, gee, you know, you'd think that if working class whites took power in the South, their first priority would

have been to do something for themselves, right? It wouldn't have just been to oppress black people. So like I grew up in circumstances and it wasn't that, you know, difficult to see it in one's own experience through one's eyes, especially if you've had the luxury of having been given the frame of reference that enables you to see it. But to see the class and political economic dynamics that were operating through the system. And I guess, I don't know, I just took that in early, like my catechism classes. And I held on to that and let the catechism classes go. It's interesting in the book, you detail some of the sort of strategies that are employed by people during that era, just as sort of like, you know, tools to get the donuts that

you want from the bakery or to be able to get the job that you want. And you also talk about how through the learning about the history and just seeing the photos of, you know, the segregated water fountains and the Jim Crow lunch counters, that there's kind of a flattening of the texture of what it actually was like to live through that, especially as a black person on a day-to-day basis. So I wonder if you could speak to what that experience was actually like to live through. Yeah, I can. Well, yeah. The first thing that was, was normal life, right? And that's what people need to understand. I mean, my son, who is an historian, a real one, often comments and says to his classes that, you know, people now like to talk about slavery or Jim Crow, like it was white people's permanent sadistic camp, right? But the fact is that there was normal life and people, you know, formed aspirations and tried to pursue them, you know, within the context that assumed that the, you know, the hegemonic political and economic order, right? So in that sense, it was mundane, right? Like it

wasn't, I mean, living in permanent fear that the Cossacks were going to come over the hill and eat everybody, basically. It was also the case that given where one over the ways that one engaged with the system or within the system and as much as possible insulate oneself. So, I mean, there was that. I'll tell you something else like on this point, though. So like I've in something else I'm doing, I've been writing a little bit about the recent monuments controversies over the last four or five years in the South. And a friend I was talking to who had been reading the book recently just reminded me of this. But one of the arguments from opponents of the monuments, people who want to take Confederate monuments down.

And Lord knows I've detested those things all my life and I'll be happy when the last one is gone. But there's this bizarre kind of psychologistic argument that carries the stamp of so much of contemporary political discourse, but about, you know, it talks about trauma and how black people who grew up around these monuments, you know, were traumatized every time they walked past them and so forth and so on.

And my friend reminded me that I mentioned in the book that the street, the closest street or block that intersect or street that intersected with the block that my family lived on, it was named after a fellow named General Ogden. And until I was well into adulthood, well into my 30s, I had no idea who this General Ogden guy was. And I found out during a moment of controversy. But General Ogden, it turns out, was the commander of the Crescent City White League that led an armed insurrection against the most odious of the four monuments that were removed in New Orleans was one called the Statue Commemorating the Battle of Liberty Place, which was that insurrection. Right. my 20s, I think, or until well into them, that monument had been located at the foot

of Canal Street, right behind the end of the streetcar line. And I walked past it, I don't know how many times, and I never really paid attention to what it was. It just looked like a war monument. I didn't read the inscriptions on it, right, because who would, right? Right, unless you were a tourist. And it's only much later spurious notions that, you know, black people lived in a nightmarish concentration camp basically,

under, I mean, Jim Crow, this kind of feeds into, well, well, with the current discourse of trauma as a basis for political claims, what I think transcends race, and it's kind of behind the curtain driving a lot of this. But anyway, I've talked so much, I can't even recall now whether this is a responsive response to that. It was responsive. That's what you're here for. You know, it's funny. I didn't know that you'd written on the monuments.

It's fascinating here what you wrote in 2017, which is very prescient to current discourse. A focus on the past must not sidestep the need to confront what actually reproduces inequality in the present. Expand on that a little bit. that the current narrative that just taking a monument down or that living in the shroud of this was just so traumatizing that simply taking it away enough is a victory is just simply not enough, which kind of brings us to our present-day discourse and a lot of the stuff that you wrote in the summer of 2020 about the growing anti-racist neoliberal movement. Why is that a threat to the type of politics that you believe in? Well, that's a good question, too. And and as luck would have it I'm kind of struggling through

trying to write something else about this that was sparked by a link to an interview that Joanne Reid did with, I always like to give her her props, that Joanne Reid did with Pete Buttigieg a couple of weeks ago, in which she gratuitously referred to, and then very snarkily, of course, referred to the infrastructure bill as the white guy's employment bill. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And I thought, oh my God, so are they actually working for the other side now?

Because that seems to be what that's like. And what I've been thinking and coming to is that, and this is what I'm trying to write about now, because I've been asking for some time, why is it that the strain of contemporary anti-racist discourse insists that we understand present injustice in terms drawn from the past. Thank you guys very much. Going to get the show out on time. We'll see you later. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

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