Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/10/22: Ukraine Warfare Continues, Biden Humiliated By Saudis, Inflation Hits New High, & Cultural Hysteria feat. Anna Khachiyan!

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Krystal and Saagar break down the battle in Ukraine, corporations pulling out of Russia, US aid to Ukraine, Biden's response to surging oil prices, gas prices going up across America, economic numbers, NYT reporter expose, why Biden is failing, restraint in a time of hawkishness, and Russophobia with Anna Khachiyan!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/Anna Khachiyan: https://www.patreon.com/RedScare  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there. And if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. L'Oreal, Jelly Roll, Sean Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McRae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. 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.

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today where you get to watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Of course, lots of breaking news on Ukraine, on Russian oil ban, what that means for all of us and how the Biden administration is handling that messaging wise, how they're handling it, handling it practically, where they're going to try to fill the gap in terms of that loss of oil.

The very latest on gas prices, the very latest on the economy, some troubling numbers about just how many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Now, those numbers are going up. On the other hand, we have some great news that three more Starbucks voted to unionize. So those union drives are now six for seven. There's about 120 more stores that have votes scheduled. It's unbelievable what's happening there. Some great media reaction on gas prices. Some great undercover video of a New York Times reporter saying what he really thinks about January 6th.

We need to elevate him. I feel like this dude might be watching Breaking Points. I hope so. If he's not, he should be. Matt, if you're listening, you're welcome on the time. We also have Anna from Red Scare Podcast is going to join us for a talk about some of the sort of anti-Russian mania that is sweeping across the country. But, Sagar, we wanted to start with the very latest from the ground in Ukraine. That's right. You guys know we want to start first with the map.

Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. We rely on SimTac here, the same mapping service that we've continued to use, which is that Russian forces continue to gain some terrain in their advances towards Kiev. You can see that in the far left side of the map. They claim to have caused significant losses by Ukraine for the Russian offensive. We'll get to some of what those losses actually could look like. On the eastern side, Russian troops managed to seize the northern portion of a city of Uzum, while a separate offensive in the same sector is aimed to circumvent Kharkiv, but was halted by the Ukrainian defenses. And then finally, additional Russian forces have

been observed moving from Melitopol to support the active combat operations in the Donetsk region. So not a significant amount has changed on the ground in the last couple of days. Really what it is, the main top line story, is just how much the Russians have faced both a defensive and now we're going to have to move into the next phase of the campaign. So there's an estimation currently that they've now deployed 100% of the combat power that they have amassed on the Ukrainian border. Now, remember, not 100% of the combat power that they attain or that they have 100% of the combat power that they had originally portioned to the operation. That does not mean that they don't have a ton more in reserves. They have a very large standing army. Just remember that in terms of

what the future looks like. The most troubling one, and this is another thing that the Russians continue to do. Let's put this up there on the screen. There was a major warning that the Russians were attacking or removing some critical infrastructure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Now, what exactly happened here is very unclear. What they claimed is that the high-voltage line was disconnected from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant due to damage caused by the occupiers. Now, keep in mind, this is all from the State Service

of Special Communications of Ukraine. So they have an interest in promoting the most, you know... Dire situation. The most dire situation. They said they could, you know, the most dire situation. They said they could, you know, have a partial meltdown as a result of this, that their fire extinguishing system was not working. Obviously, people were very concerned about that. However, and you were telling me, and I went ahead and found this, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Association or agency, they said that they are not, they said, quote, they see no critical impact on safety.

So this is the second now power plant that has come under attack by Russian forces. It's also unclear, Crystal, in the original report we had that they were attacking the nuclear power plant directly. It seems they were attacking the area around the power plant. I'm just going to go ahead and say, like, don't attack nuclear power plants. Bold stance you're taking there. Yeah, bold stance. Really what it is, though, is it shows you the strategic power of nuclear, which is that Ukraine receives a significant amount of its power from these nuclear reactors.

Hence, capture by Russian forces gives them the ability to deny energy to their populace. And also they can use it as a chit in future bargaining. hence capture by Russian forces, gives them the ability to deny energy to their populace. And also they can use it as a chit in future bargaining. And especially whenever you occupy the country, the use and the need to have power over the actual power plants themselves is going to be a significant thing that they have to make sure that they have control over to try and get the populace to bend to their will. So that's like the main thing. Yeah, so the Ukrainians have an interest in sort of freaking everybody around the planet

out about a potential nuclear meltdown. And so you saw, you know, look, it's understandable when you have fighting going on close to Chernobyl, close to that other very large nuclear power plant that a significant proportion of Ukrainian energy comes from. And we looked at the numbers. It's like a majority of Ukrainian energy actually comes from nuclear. So the Ukrainians want to sell this as like, this is a massive risk in terms of nuclear meltdown. What's probably really going on is what you said,

which is that the Russians want to seize these critical points of infrastructure so that they have more control over what's going on for the population of Ukraine. With regards to Chernobyl, I did a little bit of digging on the specifics here. So what the Ukrainians were saying is you have these spent fuel rods that are in like a pond covered with water and that water needs to be cooled in order to keep the rods cooled so you don't start another sort of nuclear chain reaction that results in the kind of meltdown that nobody wants and release of massive amounts of radiation. Their position was sort of like, we have to have that water cooled or else this is going to be a problem. What the IAEA said is, listen, these are spent fuel rods from like 20 years ago.

So they've been cooling for a long time. As long as water is still covering them in the short term, you're going to be fine. Now, is it a great situation to have Chernobyl with no electricity? Of course not. Because another issue is if something does go wrong, they have no ability to deal with it. They have no ability even to communicate, to sort of sound the alarms and remedy whatever the issue is. So you have this bizarre situation right now, both at Chernobyl and also at that other large nuclear plant, the name of which I'm forgetting in a sort of complex, and I couldn't really pronounce it anyway, where the Russians have seized these areas and they are, you know, in control, but you still have the Ukrainians,

whose job it is to maintain this, who are actually doing the work to, you know, keep things safe. So this was obviously anytime these nuclear power plants are in anywhere near the fighting, it's a very nerve wracking situation. People are rightly very concerned, but at least according to the IAEA, there is no imminent danger from Chernobyl that we know of. Right. And then actually just this morning, we have some bad news, but not unexpected, which is that the latest round of talks between the Russians and the Ukrainians appear to have broken down. They fail to make any progress towards ending the war. In terms of the actual demands, we brought you the last time that Dmitry Peskov had said that there were three separate, Dmitry Peskov is a Kremlin spokesperson, there were three separate demands

of the Ukrainians. Number one, they have to recognize Crimea and the Eastern Separatist Republics. Number two, they have to guarantee in their constitution that they will not join any bloc, aka the European Union and NATO. But three, and this is where things get murky, around quote unquote demilitarization, Are they going to give up their arms? And also the political leadership of Ukraine itself. Would they settle for Zelensky remaining some sort of puppet prime minister or president, and then they get to appoint a Russian prime minister? So obviously those last two things I noted are the total non-starter.

As to why I expect this to go into a hot and burning civil war for a very, very long period, or not a civil war, a war for a significant long period, including an insurgency. But let's get to this next one. And this requires a lot of parsing and is actually very, very dangerous. So let's put this up there on the screen. Late last night, the press secretary issued this statement, quote, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine or to create a false flag operation using them. This is a significant statement because if you guys are not familiar, what happened over the last couple of days is that Victoria Nuland, who is a U.S. State Department official,

was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee and was asked by Senator Marco Rubio, well, you know, Russia and China have accused the United States of having these bioweapons facilities inside of Ukraine. And she said, and I think that this is important, that they were biological research facilities, using the term research, not weapons, but that there was a concern that the Russians would take them over. Now, this has caused all sorts of consternation online. I think the takeaway on this is that it's a dangerous situation when both the Russians and the Chinese and now the West are accusing each other of deploying chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. That could be the pretext and the justification on the Russian side if they do so, as the West is claiming, in order to have a significant more military response. And vice versa, right? or biological warfare by the Russians, then the West could then claim an escalation on their part,

as we did, obviously, in the Assad regime. It's a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the, you know, Chemical Weapons Convention, and all of that. So we have to watch this very closely, Crystal. There's a lot of propaganda going out there. What exactly the facts are is extraordinarily unclear as to whether these research facilities are even affiliated with the West. I mean, research does not necessarily mean bioweapons, but of course, given Wuhan and all of that, we have to be very weary of what happens within these. So I'm pretty concerned about this. Yeah, this is one to just sort of put a pin in and keep an eye on because it's very hard to sort of sort through the layers of propaganda and what's actually going on here.

I mean, with that thing with Victoria Nuland, it seemed like Rubio was expecting her. He was trying to swat away some of the Russian propaganda about WMDs and this sort of stuff. That's right. And so he was expecting this just blanket like, no, of course not. And so when she gave a different answer and was like, well, and seemed sort of uncomfortable.

This created a whole, you know, fracas online. And then you have Jen Psaki coming out and basically saying, listen, of course, we're in accordance with law and no, there's no biological weapons. And on the other hand, we are worried that this propaganda is out there, that they may use it to create a false flag operation. You know, I listen on the higher level point about Russia sort of using this pre allegations of some bio research lab, that still obviously wouldn't justify an invasion of Iraq. Of course. Even in the worst case, this would not justify an invasion of Ukraine. So just this is one to be really careful with, to keep an eye on, because it is kind of a dangerous, dangerous potential situation, especially as Russia, you know, the war is in this really weird phase where Russia is not making a lot of gains. Meanwhile, civilians are really suffering in these cities, many of which have been cut off from any sort of heat, electricity, food.

You know, they're running out of medicine. They're having to hide in underground. It really is a terrible situation for the civilians. And every day that goes by, it becomes more difficult, more painful for the civilians on the ground. And yet Russia isn't really making that much progress. So you have this very sort of strange, grim dynamic right now that's playing out. And I guess what we're all waiting for is

like, what's the next big shoe to drop? What shakes this out of its current more or less stasis? Yeah, let's give everybody an idea of the stasis. Put this up there on the screen. Also, keep in mind, this is coming from U.S. intelligence, so take that with what you will. That being said, on the Russia conflict, you know, they've generally gotten it better than not. So here's what they say. U.S. estimates the Russian military assets lost in operable range as high as 8 to 10 percent, close to double the estimate last week as the U.S. has gathered more information. The U.S. estimates that the Ukrainian military has lost a similar percentage of its forces. Three estimates mostly account for the losses of military equipment, aircraft, tanks,

APCs, and trucks, since they're easier to verify. The U.S. estimates that Russia has lost somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 service members, though this assessment comes with low confidence. So once again, nobody knows how many people the Russians have lost, except the Russians. Here's what we know. At least 500 are dead. Those are the ones that they've admitted to. It's probably on the higher end. Two to 4,000 does seem very high. 4,000 something is about the entirety of U.S. losses in Iraq throughout the entire war. So to put that in perspective, even if it's not 2,000, that's a lot of people to die in two weeks on the Russian side. In terms of losses on the Ukrainian, they don't say. I would say it's probably one to one. Maybe, you know, could it possibly be even higher? Although the Ukrainians

themselves, not like we can rely on their data. On the battlefield, here's what they say. Russian forces have advanced more quickly in the south, less so in the east and the north, though they continue to surround cities in the north and the east. The U.S. believes that Russian forces are still several days from being able to surround Kiev, and afterwards will face a protracted battle to control the city center. So that is the view from the Pentagon. You take it from what you will, but I do think it is somewhat useful information. Obviously, the Russians say that it's going swimmingly, that they're not particularly concerned about exactly what's happening whenever it comes to the ground.

One update for everybody, which is actually a very good update, let's put this up there on the screen, which is that after this convoluted cockamamie scheme, which I will discuss more in my monologue, where the U.S. was trying to deliver fighter jets to the Ukrainians by basically strong-arming the Poles and the Romanians, saying, hey, you need to give them over. The Poles and the Romanians were like, no, we're not doing that.

Then the Poles came up with a great idea. They were like, okay, we'll take the jets and we'll send them to you, to Ramstein Air Force Base, and then if you want, you can send them over to the Ukrainians. And the Pentagon was like, whoa, hey, hold on a second. They're like, we're not doing any of that. So as of right now, the fighter jet thing is not happening. I personally think that's a good thing.

Anytime, you know, NATO, as actually the Pentagon pointed out, they're like, it's just a bit too much to send a plane directly from a U.S. Air Force base in a NATO base into hot airspace delivered for the purposes of war. I can't tell you why that's different than an anti-tank missile, but it just kind of is. And it's one of those things where the significance for escalation and more, especially if it would require a U.S. pilot to fly it over there, that's a whole other

ballgame. Well, that's a key piece. It's like, alright, they're in Germany. Who's gonna get them on the ground? That's different. Right, and so I think that's where the Poles were like, ah,

we're not, we're not doing that. Leave us out of this. And then when it got, that hot potato got like sort of put in our corner, Pentagon also was like, nah, this is not a good idea.

So, good. Thank God. Although it was a stupid scheme from the start. One decent decision, you know, is it totally off the table and they're going to give up on this? No, it's not.

No, I don't think so. But, yeah, I saw Tom Cotton tweeting, like, that this was a terrible decision. Of course we should give them fighter jets. And how is this more escalatory than the anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles that we've already given? And it's like, well, somehow it is different. Number one, because you have to figure out what pilots are going to actually deliver these jets. And also, you know, you raise a good point that maybe we have already escalated too much with the amount of weapons that we've floated over a very short period of time. Massively, sort of indiscriminately arming the Ukrainians, given the way that that has played out for us in past history.

That's right. And then finally on the diplomatic front, as we said, the talks have broken down, but there is an opening on the Ukrainian side. Let's put this up there, which is that President Zelensky has said he is, quote, open to compromise on the status of the two breakaway Russian territories. Furthermore, he said that Zelensky would no longer be pressing for NATO membership for Ukraine, basically being like, look, we know that they don't want us in there. So at least on two of these things, he hasn't said yet on Crimea. He said he's open to compromise whenever it comes to the Eastern republics. But I just think that the problem, Crystal, is even if you give up Crimea, the Eastern separatist republics, and NATO, if they still demand demilitarization

and lack of sovereignty, how can you take that deal? You can't. Because they've already invaded your country. Right. You know, it's like, this is why I just see the both sides, the situation is totally untenable. And somebody has got to win. And I don't say that glibly, but winning means a tremendous loss of life. Like, we're really not prepared, I think, for what's coming.

Given the state of the Russian advance, it's been two weeks. Things are not going as planned. They need to ramp things up. Will they use a false flag attack or not? We'll see. You know, obviously there's a lot of information. But regardless, they need some justification to ramp up the use of force. And already we're seeing the terrible signs of this.

It feels like Syria all over again. Everybody's seen the family, you know, the photo of the family laying dead in the streets. The lady's a chief accountant or whatever for some Silicon Valley firm. Her young daughter, 18-year-old son, you know, dead, being attended to, literally just on the side of the road. These are mom, kids. This is going to repeat itself over and over and over and over again until we can possibly find some solution to this conflict. So it's dark days ahead, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, today what it feels like we're heading for

is years of long, intractable, grinding conflict. I don't see it that way. And, you know, I mean, Zelensky, I think all from before the invasion even started was willing to offer real concessions, not paper concessions, like real actual concessions to try to respond to the Russian demands here.

And, you know, it would seem like saying, hey, yeah, we won't join a bloc, we won't join NATO, and we'll compromise on those two breakaway regions. We're willing to talk about it. That should, if you had anything approaching a good faith actor on the other side, open the door to real negotiations and a potential negotiated settlement,

which is what we should all be cheering for here, because otherwise you are going to just have continued loss of life, long grinding, intractable conflict. But it doesn't seem like, you know, even meeting those demands is close enough for what the Russians want here, what Putin specifically wants. So it's a sad situation. And at the same time, let's go ahead and transition to this next piece. It's a not as bad situation in Russia, but, you know, their people are going to suffer with the consequences of this as well. I am reflecting in my monologue about how quickly things have escalated and how things that were

like completely off the table just a couple of weeks ago are now being rushed through with little thought, little debate, little reflection. So in particular, you know, at the beginning of this, we were all thinking that swift sanctions was as far as this would possibly, that was the furthest extreme of what was being contemplated. And we just like this rushed right past that. Oh, by the way, we're also going to sanction your central bank. You know, oh, by the way, we're also going to sanction your central bank. You know, oh, by the way, we're also going to ban Russian oil. And then you have all of these Western companies sort of looking at the writing on the wall. This is not out of the goodness of

their hearts, but they're under pressure and they see the writing on the wall. They're all exiting Russia. And the latest is you have, you know, the Russians making really clear, the Russian government making really clear that they consider this to be all out economic war. Let's go ahead and put that tear sheet up on the screen. This is actually from these comments about economic banditry are from a couple of days ago. The most recent is the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the West was engaged in, had declared an economic war on Russia and they are waging this war. He said, you see the bacchanalia, the hostile bacchanalia. Is that how you say that?

I think so. Which the West has sown. Wow. They really have a flourish for the dramatic. They do. I mean, you know, there's a deep, there's a very rich cultural tradition in Russia that no one could possibly deny. But so they definitely, well, we've done this from our population standpoint, kind of casually with little debate, you know, and a lot of just everybody pushing out, what can we do more? How can we do more? These sanctions are

effectively the sort of global financial death penalty and really do make Russia a total pariah state. The impact is already being felt very much by the Russian public. These are completely indiscriminate weapons, and they will impact every single ordinary Russian citizen, even the ones who are anti-war and, you know, all of the ones who have nothing to do with any of this conflict. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen, which shows just the complete exodus of Western companies from Russia. I mean, everybody from McDonald's to Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi, they are all leaving the country, General Electric as well. This article notes that some of those companies have really long histories operating in Russia.

They point out that PepsiCo entered the Russian market in the early 60s at the height of the Cold War and helped to create common ground between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I didn't know that. This part I did know. McDonald's famously one of the first U.S. fast food companies to open a store in Russia. On January 31, 1990, thousands of Russians lined up to try a hamburger at the first McDonald's in Moscow. By the end of the day, 30,000 meals had been rung up on 27 cash registers. That was an opening day record for the company and kind of a, you know, seminal moment in the opening up of Russia.

That was a huge moment. I went back and watched the TV news clips of them being interviewed, and people were like, I don't know what I just ate, but it was good. That was a direct quote from some old guy who lived through the entire Soviet Union. Yeah. I mean, these cultural ties, this is what the real soft power of the United States is, you know, which is both a dark thing, but also empirically true. Like McDonald's, Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi, you know, Subway, these things are places you can't go anywhere in the world without seeing them. This is a power projection. I also just want to remind people of this, which is that it is not out of the goodness of these companies' hearts.

As we have said before, the sanctions make it so that about 85 to 90% of this, it's happening anyway, especially whenever they have to do legal compliance. And they can't really do business there. If you can't wire your money back, there's no point except to stop doing business. Yeah. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Here's what happened. They asked their lawyers, is there any way that we can get around this?

And the lawyers were like, no. So they're like, okay, I'll go ahead and just issue a PR statement and be like, in solidarity with Ukraine, we're pulling out. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. This is all based on policy. So at the same time, though. This is all based on policy. So at the same time, though, this is a significant pullout. I mean, McDonald's had 850 stores in the country.

I mean, think about Coke and Pepsi. You can go to the poorest village in Thailand, as I have, you can still drink a Pepsi or a Coke. And that's now something you cannot get inside of Russia. This is straight up back to the days where they were begging people for blue jeans to come into the country in terms of what it looks like from their experience. I read a couple interesting reports from the ground. One was that before everything closed, Russians were lining up at the Ikea and other places to try to like, you know, this is like my last chance to get that whatever weirdly named table that I want or whatever. Skarsgård night table. Exactly. You know, there's a real run on these stores.

I heard an interview of someone who was having a coffee at a Starbucks who was very anti-war and was, you know, saying like there was no justification for this and this is going to be, you know, the Ukrainians are suffering so much and this is also going to be bad for us, although our sort of suffering pales in comparison, obviously, to what they're going through. So I also saw a report that they're considering nationalizing the assets of these companies that leave, which is a real, like, you know, all right, get out and stay out. Well, that's a Venezuela move. That's what they did in Venezuela. It would make sense, actually, in order to cope with sanctions. Yeah, so that'll be interesting to see.

And then I think there's something that I'm starting to sort of reflect on, which is the whole idea of how we won the Cold War was really through this projection of soft power and, like, you know, the promise of blue jeans and Coca-Cola. And it's possible that after, you know, a number of decades with blue jean and Coca-Cola, the consumerism is a little bit it's a little bit hollow. You know, and we didn't also we did the shock doctrine economically. We, you know, helped to create this system of rapacious oligarchs.

We didn't focus on helping to build real democratic institutions. Of course, our country, you know, is pretty shaky on that ground anyway. But it's, it'll be interesting to see what the reaction and the backlash is domestically in Russia to the flight of all of these Western brands in such a short period of time. I mean, a total transformation of the urban landscape. Yeah, and of their lives. I mean, this is the last iPhone they're ever going to have. They don't even have phones. Like, they don't have phone companies in order to do, I don't know what they're going to do. Guess Nokia, maybe if they also do business with them. But that's about it. The most significant one in the near term, let's put this up there on the

screen, which is that Russia could default as soon as next month. This is per Morgan Stanley, but a lot of the other big banks concur. The analysts are comparing it to Venezuela in terms of its default on foreign debt soon. Obviously, that could also have a pretty big impact, both on the Russian but on the broader global financial system. Because as we were explaining in the beginning of this crisis, a lot of people were holding Russian bonds and Russian debt and were using that as collateral for other loans. And then the moment that the sanctions hit, those bonds all went to zero on the balance sheets of the banks, which required them to margin call all of these billionaires. Like, do not underestimate how much of the sketchy Swiss, German, and, you know, Cypriotic financial system is based upon shady Russian money, and also amongst billionaires

and other rich people in those countries leveraging Russian debt and other things in order to take out loans. This could have a cascading effect throughout the financial system, and also obviously it will zero out a huge amount of wealth inside of Russia itself. So I look beyond McDonald's and Coca-Cola, and I just think about you can't use your visa. You can't use your debit card. You can't use your credit card. Your Apple Pay is done. all of the comforts of daily life, the accoutrement of any sort of connection to the Western life, which even the Chinese middle class,

the Indian middle class, I mean, the middle class of Asia and Africa have, that is no longer there for you. Your life is over in any sense of how you know it. I mean, even cars. Their biggest import is cars from South Korea and Japan. That's not gonna happen anymore. They're not going to be able to replace their cars. They're not going to be able to replace their phones. I mean, they're basically, as we

said, they're going to get sold to the Chinese for a song. I hope everybody there starts to learn Mandarin soon because you're going to need it. It's a total transformation of life. Yeah. And like that. And already because of this potential for a debt default, you have Russia's central bank limiting withdrawals of foreign currency from Russian banks, prohibiting banks from selling foreign currency. And the analysts are saying that that debt default could happen as early as April 15th, because that will mark the end of a 30-day grace period on coupon payments that the Russian government owes on dollar bonds. So, you know, this is a dramatic economic transformation. What I saw, it's like, especially if Europe follows through with a Russian oil ban as well,

you're talking about GDP shrinking potentially 15% in a year. I mean, that is just a stunning, stunning collapse. Not to mention, like you said, this, you know, dramatic sort of lifestyle change. And we don't know what the numbers are, but there are reports that there are many thousands of Russians who are fleeing the country and a potential sort of brain drain ongoing right now. The last thing I want to say in this part is, I don't know if you guys, do you guys remember Maria Butina?

Yes, yeah, you were telling me about this. Yeah, she was like kind of connected to the Russiagate stuff because it was like, see, there's an action. And she legit was like a Russian spy who had infiltrated these sort of Republican circles, in particular the NRA. And she was dating this big Republican donor. It was a whole

thing during Russiagate. She went to the Russian bar that I like here in D.C. Oh, for real? Yeah, Russia House, which was then vandalized. Which is now vandalized. And you said it's not even owned by Russians, actually. I don't think so. Okay, we don't know. But even if it is, you shouldn't vandalize it. They have nothing to do with this, okay? We're going to talk to Anna

more about that. So she served time in prison. Then she went back to Russia. She became a member of parliament in Russia. And she did this bonkers interview on BBC yesterday. I've got to give credit to their interviewers are very good at, like like they're very effective. And it's also to me, very interesting in an argument against the sort of censorship and deep platforming that they routinely have on Russians who are Kremlin loyalists, just to see like,

how are they pitching this? How are they portraying this? And the level of propaganda, I don't know if she really believes this or not, but she basically accused the Ukrainians of bombing their own cities. She said that they're bombing themselves. Yeah, she said that. They're bombing themselves. Yeah, that they're bombing. It was bonkers. She was like, he said, so you don't believe that the Russians are, you don't accept that Russians are bombing civilians. She's like, we don't do that.

And he said, oh, what about Syria? What about Chechnya? You know, I mean, it was really something. So it just shows you, especially with the complete crackdown now on any sort of independent media shutdowns of social media in Russia, there is a an impenetrable wall of complete alternative reality that is being sold to people there. So we have to keep that in mind as we're watching the reaction from the Russian public as best we can. Right. All right. The last piece here that we wanted to give you in terms of updates is on our own actions through the legislative branch, the latest that we've done. Of course, we have the Russian oil ban, and there had originally been a plan to sort of like, we're going to pass this through Congress. In fact, the fact that there was a bipartisan move in Congress kind of led by Nancy Pelosi to pass a bill mandating a Russian oil ban seems to have been what pushed Biden. He was waffling. He was like, I don't know. He wasn't sure, but he didn't want the specter of them getting ahead of him and making him look weak.

Right. So he jumps out in front and now he's doing that unilaterally. But in terms of actual U.S. legislative action, let's go ahead and put Jeff Stein's tweet up on the screen here. They passed a big Ukraine package of aid with a whole bunch of different pieces. You've got $6.5 billion for Department of Defense. He says that's dollars for European Command Center and replenishing U.S. stocks that were sent to Ukraine. You've got $4 billion for the State Department. That includes migrant were sent to Ukraine. You've got $4 billion for the State Department. That includes migrant aid. Of course, we've got millions, well over $2 million migrants who have fleed from Ukraine at this point, macroeconomic dollars for Ukraine,

financing of Ukraine's military purchases, $3 billion for USAID. That's things like food, healthcare, etc. So you have all of that passing through. I mean, the refugee piece of this is something I don't think we can even wrap our heads around yet. And Poland is bearing the brunt of that. They've received already over a million refugees from Ukraine, and they're going to need, you know, they're going to need a lot of help resettling and helping people make new lives there in Poland and throughout Europe. There was also, this was kind of a, you know, good idea that's been floated by the administration, a rare good idea that we're seeing come out of all of this. Again, let's put Jeff Stein up on the screen. Wanted to highlight this. It was kind of buried in a longer piece about banning oil imports.

One of the things that the Biden administration is contemplating is, he says, there's early discussions over, quote, heat pumps for Europe, programmed to use U.S. manufacturing power to send massive numbers of energy efficient pumps to Europe to buffer Russia's energy blow. They're exploring use of the Defense Production Act and Department of Defense money. Of course, there are major logistical hurdles because of the supply chain crunch and also just because we can't really seem

to get our act together on anything. But if we could pull this off, this would be a good idea, Sagar. That would be a great idea. This is exactly the type of stuff that the Biden administration should be doing. And unfortunately, we don't have a president who talks about it in public, who reassures them. I mean, we're about to get to some of this.

This is really the purpose of my whole monologue. But it's just so depressing to watch. And I also do want to say, this is what I predicted at the top. This is why Putin's move was a folly. $14 billion in aid overnight getting shipped over there to Ukraine. That's just a little taste of what's happening. Already McConnell says that we need to increase the defense budget by 10%, just as I said it would. And that's exactly what's going to happen.

There will be a bipartisan push in order to do that. All of our nuclear development, hypersonic development, deployment over to the east. We now have more troops in eastern. We have 100,000 troops right now in eastern Europe. Or not in eastern Europe, in all of Europe. 100,000. What year is it? Like 1962. This is an example of when he did this, he has ensured the deployment of U.S. Western forces all the way to the eastern flank. Just this morning, Kamala Harris is over in Poland, so God help us all uh said that we are going to be deploying uh what is it patriot missiles to poland missile defense systems to there are there

apparently well yeah they already have some now we're going to be putting even more these again are with this in the past would have been seen as a very hot not hostile but you know aggressive move this is one of the things that we told you before the invasion was one of the rubs for Putin that he considered to be aggressive and a national security threat. And I just want to say on that front, when we're talking about some of the conditions that led to this invasion, I just always think it's important to say just because the outcome was somewhat predictable that this would piss him off and lead to some sort of a backlash doesn't mean that there wasn't agency here. It doesn't justify it.

The fact that it was predictable doesn't justify it. And that's certainly the case with these Patriot systems. There we go. Yeah. That's what the Russians have gone ahead and guaranteed. Okay, let's go ahead and get to this next one on oil, obviously something we've been tracking very, very closely. Let's put this first one up there on the screen. This is a complete embarrassment, Crystal, to the United States. So we brought you previously that the Biden administration had been considering sending envoys over to Saudi Arabia to try and convince them to pump more oil. Look at the way that they've embarrassed us on the national stage. The Saudis and the Emiratis have declined calls with the president during the Ukraine crisis. But you know what makes it even worse? They just had calls, both of them,

with Putin last week, declining to speak with Mr. Biden. They have agreed to speak with the Ukrainian president. And the Saudi to speak with the Ukrainian president, and the Saudi official said that Prince Mohammed could try to mediate the conflict. All of this comes down to the fact that the Biden administration stood tall to Saudi Arabia on the issue of Jamal Khashoggi, not on the issue of Yemen or weapons sales or any of this. But this is just such a slap in the face to the United States after propping up this idiotic regime in Riyadh now for 40 years. And I was telling, it also goes to the impotence of the Biden administration that they're trying to do this all behind the scenes.

Look, if the Saudi prince is not going to take a call from the president of the United States, he should go out and give a press conference and say, you know, Riyadh, I'm nearing a deal with the Iranians right now. By all accounts, that's what's happening. That's something that you guys don't like. In the past, we've guaranteed you $100 billion a year in military aid. And not a single missile is leaving a U.S. port for Riyadh until you start pumping more oil. The Saudis are utterly defenseless without the United States. They need us far more than we need them. I'm not saying that it wouldn't cause problems here, as we are all discovering whenever it comes to oil and more. But in terms of Riyadh and their secure hold on power and all that, look at all the Americans, having lived in the Middle

East, we run their economy whenever it comes to our level of soft power influence in the Middle East. We need to bring all hard power to bear and tell them a very hard line. You're going to pump more at our request. All of this, decline our calls, etc. Good luck on your own because we're going to sign. Otherwise, we'll sign a deal with the Iranians and they'll pump as much goddamn oil as we want them to because we need they want their economy rescued. And they're your sworn enemies. You decide. You pick. Yes. There's a foolishness. Well, there's in our dealings here. I mean, it makes me so angry that he's, you know, embarrassing us like this. I mean, we just some ally we have here. I mean, it's just grotesque. Like, we have to cut the cord with these people. And, I mean, both Saudi and UAE. It's also completely sort of absurd in points to our own hypocrisies

that we are banning Russian oil for humanitarian purposes, but then we're desperately seeking Saudi oil because that's better while they're doing this in Yemen. I mean, it really makes no sense if you're trying to apply any sort of consistent principle here. The Saudis, I guess, this is their demands. Just to give you a sense of how grotesque this relationship is and how it completely undermines any credibility that we have on the world stage about like human rights and democracy. They want more support for their intervention in Yemen's civil war, a.k.a. them causing what is right now the worst humanitarian crisis on the entire globe.

They want that. They want help with their own civilian nuclear program as Iran moves ahead. And they want legal immunity for Prince Mohammed in the U.S. And he's facing multiple lawsuits in the U.S., including over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. So it's disgusting that we're in bed with this regime. And the sooner that we can get off the sauce and cut the cord, the better. Because clearly they don't have our back in any way whatsoever. They never had our back. These people are so greedy and they think they can play us. I mean, in a way they have.

I mean, look, I went to Georgetown for my master's program. Every day I walk out of the building, it says this building was donated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Oh, there's so much Saudi money in this town. And all of the foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia, they speak better English than you or I because they went to Georgetown. Okay? Look, I think we should kick all of their kids out. Every single one of them. They're all living here

in Washington, D.C. Screw you. Get the hell out of here. You start pumping more oil? Okay. Maybe you can stay. If it sounds callous, once again on the weapons, we prop up their entire military. But this again goes to, if we start playing with that, then you're going to get some very angry calls out in northern Virginia to these defense contractors who have deep relations.

The Saudis have this town wired whenever it comes to lobbyists. They have the best lobbyists in the game. They have all sorts of economic intertwinement. All of the, what is it, all these former Trump officials, including Jared Kushner, are trying to get Saudi money for their private investment groups. We've got Saudi money in Uber. We've got Saudi money in some of the biggest technology companies, the Saudi Private Investment Fund. Obviously, you know, already we did that whole story about the PGA. They're already trying

to come for an American sport. The amount of influence they have in this country. But this is, again, this is leverage that we have. We can say, no, okay, go ahead. Like, you don't want to do this? That's fine. You're cut off culturally, completely cut off. The ruling elite of this country really loves their Western consumerism as well. So that's another, you know, soft power that we have. Exactly. There too. And, you know, I'm just looking at this landscape and you have this, it comes back to this total lack of vision from the Biden administration that you're going to be talking about in your monologue.

The inability to use this moment of crisis where Americans have come together. Like, I think that a lot of the things that the public wants and is pushing for are uh wrongheaded and very dangerous but i do think it comes from a very noble place from a noble place of like you know it comes from this noble place of like we see the suffering like what can we do and when the government's like you're gonna have to pay higher prices at the pump that's the way we help the ukrainians shockingly like 80 of people are like okay we'll do it like, okay, we'll do it. You know, they say they'll do it. Yeah. But we'll see how they feel. But that's the sentiment that exists right now. And so to not use that moment when the disgusting behavior and hypocrisy of the Saudis is on display, when people actually, you know, for the moment are like, okay, we'll, we'll like take one,

you know, for the country here, if it, well, we'll like take one, you know, for the country here. If it's going to help Ukraine to do something dramatic to make sure we never end up in this situation again, I will never get over that failure of leadership. Like if we're not going to significantly move away from fossil fuel dependence during this time, I don't think it's ever going to happen. Because also just on the naked economics, when gas is so freaking expensive, then suddenly these other energy sources are much more competitive economically.

Yeah, especially renewables right now. Yeah, so you have that. You have a public that gets it like, oh, this isn't just about some climate issue in the future that isn't really connected, that I don't feel in my daily life right now, even though, you know, obviously we're already seeing the impacts of climate change. This is about our national security and our national pride today and gives us the ability to, you know, stand on our own two feet and not rely on disgusting regimes that don't stand for

anything that we claim to believe in, even as we, you know, fall short in our own ways. Like, if we don't take that opportunity right now, I'm just like, when is it ever going to happen? And you have an administration that apparently doesn't know how to use the moment to enlist people in a vision and give them something to do that not only makes them feel like, okay, we're helping the people of Ukraine, but also that we're doing something to bolster our own country. That's the thing that we really need. There is some good news, at least. Relations with Venezuela seem to be getting better. Let's put this up there on the screen. The Venezuelan regime has gone ahead and released two Americans after the visit from U.S. officials who went down there and basically begged them to start pumping more oil.

There is a point, though, that I need to make, and this was flagged to me by an oil expert. Part of the issue is that Venezuela's oil is very, very thick. They have, like, the thickest crude on the planet. I think it's called extra heavy crude. The problem with that is it actually requires a ton more refining. So, again, this is the thing. Even if the Saudis start pumping tomorrow, even if the Venezuelans and all of them start pumping tomorrow, the immediate relief at the gas pump is just not going to be there. I mean, our shortest road here is going to be domestic production ramp up in the near term of like six months to seven months.

This actually is a Wall Street issue. There's been a lot of this on talk of this. We actually have a lot of these companies, they have the oil leases, they're just not drilling. Now, this is part of the issue. Why? Well, Jen Psaki yesterday was asked about this, and she was like, what, do they need an invitation to drill? Well, actually, they need money, because part of the issue is, we've explained this before, the oil producers drilled $500 billion worth of investment in 2018. They lost a ton of money on that because the gas price went down during COVID.

So now, during high gas prices, whenever we ask these questions outside of just naked greed, why in a period of extremely high gas price that we don't then have drilling here at home, The reason why is that the profits that these guys are reaping is what's feeding back to the investors. So Wall Street is like, no, you're not drilling. We want our money back, all of this. What's the solution? Government. That's the only way. There's actually a couple of ways you could do this. Ed Markey has some legislation back in 2010, which says that you can levy a financial tax on any oil producer who owns a lease and is not using it for production, basically letting it lie fallow.

This also doesn't even necessarily mean that you have to expand new drilling. We have plenty of oil leases, which already exist, they just aren't using them right now. So this doesn't fit the culture war narrative, but, and a lot of people are just simply not going to say it, but we need to drill where we already have drilling. And it's a government problem that we don't have some sort of solution in Congress. I mean, look, they're on the Republican side and we're going to get this to the gas price thing. On the Republican side, they have the best of all worlds. You ban Russian oil, price is going to go up. And they can be like, why didn't you build the Keystone pipeline two years ago? And also they can be like,

we need to expand federal drilling on federal lands, all of that. On the Democratic side, they're uncomfortable because they don't want to be seen subsidizing drilling at all. So with the topic and the framework becomes new drilling instead of current drilling. And this is why parsing the conversation, and I've looked as deep as I can into this and talked to some experts, just doing that alone, once again, you are not going to get price pressure relief in the next six months.

But, you know, look, this war is going to go on for a long time, and people are going to keep driving cars for, what, the next 15, 20 years, at least, on gas price. We could increase our domestic production just on what we already have. It's just that we have a Wall Street disconnect.

So the only time that that happens with national security, that's when the government should step in. It's a difficult thing. It's a difficult problem to solve. They're raking in massive profits.

Right, to recoup a lot of these losses and also to make money. Right, and are delighted to have these super high prices and whatever. Maybe we should just nationalize them. That'd be another solution.

I'm totally on board, though, with the idea of coming to some sort of detente with Venezuela and lifting the sanctions that were imposed on them. That, once again, are really devastating their own population. And also give Maduro, you know, he allows him to say, oh, if you're suffering, it's not my fault. And with some justification, it sees Western sanctions. So I'm in favor of that on the oil front there, in addition to the extra thick crude, which sounds kind of hot, I got to tell you. In addition to that, they also apparently, their just like equipment and oil industry is sort of struggling from, it needs massive infusion of cash and upgrades to be able to pump to what they could actually do.

It's sort of like decaying. So they would provide some sort of backfill for what we would lose from the Russian oil ban. And it's going to be, one of the things that we'll see how quickly it can happen

is you're going to have this sort of global shift of where people are getting their oil from and how quickly can that happen and those adjustments be made. I don't think anyone really ultimately knows. To your point on the Democrats messaging on this, obviously gas prices, you guys know, have been rising for a while before we had any sort of situation here with Russia and Ukraine. But what the Biden people want to say is if you're suffering at the pump, it is 100 percent. Oh, it's all Russia's fault. And they're you know, so that's they're leaning very hard into that messaging. We heard that from the president just recently. Let's take a listen to that. It's going to go up. Can't do much right now. Russia's responsible.

Can't do much right now. Russia's responsible. What is happening? I'm going to talk as much as I can in my monologue on this. That is the most impotent statement by a president who just got slapped in the face by the Saudis. You know, that whole thing I just told you guys about, about production, this is not hard to figure out. If people, like, it took me, what, four or five hours of reading and five or six phone calls to various different people in government to be like, okay, I have a pretty good grasp now of what the actual choke point is.

He's the president. He could have all that done in a briefing for him in 30 minutes. Not much right now because they think it's a political winner whenever it comes to saying, oh, it's on Vladimir Putin. And apparently, Crystal, that's the talking point now. Well, listen, for political messaging, I get it, blaming Putin. And I think it will have some salience to American people. But the piece where you're like, eh, nothing we can do, that's where the impotence really shines through.

Just useless. Because, you know, not only do you say, we're doing everything we can to, you know, keep prices as low as they possibly can, be recognizing that this is going to be, I mean, you have to set people's expectations. Like, this is going to be painful and this is going to be difficult. And as you guys know, I was opposed to banning Russian oil anyway. But you have to set people's expectations now that that action has been taken. But then you have to lay out, here's what we're going to do.

And here's, this is your chance. When you get asked that question, here's your chance to say, and here's how we're going to make sure that this never happens again. That we're never dependent on these nefarious regimes overseas that don't share the best of our values. Like we're going to make sure that we're never in this position again, where ordinary Americans are suffering because of the whims of the fricking Saudis and the Russians. So he he's that's the piece that they just are totally unable to deliver on. And it is such a profound missed opportunity to turn the direction of American energy policy. I will literally never get over it. Let's move on to this next one on gas prices itself. Right now, the gas price is at a record

high. Let's put this up there on the screen. Unfortunately, it actually went up since we made this just, what, five, six hours ago. Right now, the AAA national average is $4.318 a gallon. In California, it is $5.69. I really feel for you guys, my friends out there in California. I mean, even in the state of Texas, an oil producing state, it's $4.04. And then here in the East Coast, in Florida and in California, people are just getting absolutely decimated. I went ahead and I crunched the numbers this morning. They are up 16 percent over last week, 24 percent over last month. And they were already up double from what they were during the pandemic. So everybody out here, you are getting totally hosed and totally screwed. I really am feeling

for you. And yet the talking point has gone out from Joe Biden. Nothing we can do. It's even worse, actually. The high rich comedians of the high elite are telling us, hey, it's your patriotic duty to pay more at the pump. That's what we hear from Stephen Colbert. Let's take a listen. I'll tell you what, I will never complain about a destination wedding again. Russia has been hit with a series of crippling sanctions, and it looks like there's more to come because the U.S. and its European allies are now discussing banning imports of Russian oil. Take that, Putin. We're not going to buy our gas from a war criminal.

We're going to buy it from the good guys, Saudi Arabia. But it's going to cost. Since the invasion, oil prices have skyrocketed. Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4 per gallon. Okay, that stings, but a clean conscience is worth a buck or two. I'm willing to pay. It's important. It's important.

I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla. I just, I can't get over it. Like, I know it was a bit of a joke, but the message and the talking point now is so ubiquitous, Crystal, that it's your patriotic duty in order to pay more at the pump. And as you were saying in our previous block, look, maybe it'll work in the short term. But I look at increasing the gas price of 24% over just the last month. I don't think this can last for long.

The amount of household balance sheets which are getting eaten here and the way that the administration and the Dems apparently think that they can just be like, oh, it's all on Putin and it's on you to pay more. It reminds me a lot of some of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Just 15 days to slow the spread. I said, the coronavirus pandemic. Just 15 days to slow the spread. I said, oh, just $15 a gallon to slow the spread. They're like, oh, you have to pay more. It's your duty. And at first people were like, okay, I can stick with this. I'll stick with this.

And then two months happen. And then three months happen. And then a year happens. And by the way, this war is not going to end for many, many years in my opinion, which means that the gas price, what, we just have evergreen gas price of $5.50 a gallon? That's insanity. That's the piece is like, okay, so people are persuaded right now that they, you know, and this is according to the polling and it's overwhelming and it's bipartisan. They are persuaded right now that making this personal sacrifice is going to matter.

And the truth is, it's not. And that's the problem is, you know, us paying more at the pump is not really going to ultimately help the Ukrainians. And it is going to very much make the Russian people suffer in addition, especially we only get a small percentage of our oil from Russia. But if the Europeans follow suit, I mean, that's a whole other ballgame. Well, the U.K. said they're going to phase it out. Yeah, so that's a whole other ballgame. And the EU is coming up with a plan to reduce their reliance and all of those things. So that's a piece is like when you're three months down the road and the Ukrainianrainian conflict is still grinding on and you're like you told me that if i

sucked it up and paid freaking five dollars a gallon that this would matter and it didn't that's where the backlash comes in and so you have that then on the other uh piece of this the specter of like multi-millionaires telling you it's your like it's no big deal and it's an extra dollar for the price of a clean conscience by getting the oil from Saudi Arabia

by the way if you if you are in a position where this increase in gas prices doesn't really phase you or affect you whatsoever

whether you drive a Tesla or not like just keep your mouth shut because it's really you don't get to say I'm glad you were able to afford a Tesla. That's actually, look, I'm genuinely happy for you.

But do not, you know, cheer this on. You don't get to say for working class people how this is going to affect them and whether this is, you know, this is insanity. And I guess the one thing I will say is I do kind of like the joke because it is so revealing of this type of mindset. I mean, he really just puts it all out there on the table from the hypocrisy of thinking this is some morally righteous decision by getting more oil from Saudi to the hypocrisy of the rich being like, we're all in this together. And we're like,

this isn't affecting you at all. So just put that piece aside. Yeah. And just to see what it looks like in a non-joke form, Larry Summers, you know, major great economist. I love this is Skyping in to CNN from Scottsdale, Arizona, one of the richest places in the entire state. And actually, I think in the country in order to tell people, look, it's your duty to pay more for gas. Let's take a listen if you think about the sacrifices that are being made by the people of ukraine if you think about our stake in stopping a tear a tyrant who is uh trying to expand uh that is a price that is very much worth paying. So, yeah, Scottsdale, Arizona, Crystal, he's going ahead and said, look, $5 a gallon.

That's just what we have to pay compared to Ukrainians. Nobody is denying the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But we are also not Ukrainian. OK, that doesn't mean that we have to sit here and suffer for $5 a gallon in gas for years and years. And if you take a look at the inflation numbers, which we're about to get to in the economy block, well, people's household finances are hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck are decimated, increasing right now. Highest inflation that we've had in 40 years. Fuel, oil, and gas are two of the highest areas that we've had inflation in this country. And there is no, you know, expectation or chance right now that anything is going to happen.

And here's the thing is, you know, and this is what frustrates me so much, is you do have this really noble sentiment among the American public of like- Yeah, the American people are good people. Yeah, they're good. They want to do something. And they're even willing to suffer personal financial loss in order to do something.

But you're leading them down this pathway of a policy that isn potentially even going to lead to a backlash that pushes us away from the result of peace that we ultimately want here. So that's why I find this whole narrative so incredibly disgusting. And I think this is a great transition to what we wanted to talk about next, which is what is the financial economic landscape for Americans right now heading into this era of $5 gas prices? And we just got the numbers that inflation is expected to hit a four-decade high of 7.9%. Those are the latest numbers. That doesn't even reflect the oil and gas spikes of the past week. That's going to cause inflation to spike even higher. Obviously, we've had wage growth, but it has been completely eaten up and caused American workers to go even backwards with these high inflation numbers that continue to persist. So that's sort of the backdrop. Let's go ahead and put this other piece up on the screen, which is numbers we already had.

So at the beginning of 2022, 64 percent of the U.S. population is now living paycheck to paycheck. That is an increase from where we were in December, which when it was at 61 percent. And we're almost back to the highs of 2020 when it was 65 percent. That's according to a Lending Club report. And because costs have gone up so dramatically, you have Americans now saying that they need to be making about $122,000 a year. That's more than double the current national average salary to feel like they are at all financially secure. And that, of course, you know, that's in the country at large. Just imagine if you're living in a high cost city like San Francisco or D.C. or New York or Chicago, how much you would need to make to feel like I'm stable, I'm not precarious, I'm going to be okay.

So that's why these gas price shocks are such a body blow to the working class because they're already so stretched thin. I mean, all of the pandemic supports are long gone. There's no talk of doing anything that's going to materially, financially benefit the American people right now. The Biden administration is trying to spin like, oh, we're getting all these new jobs. And people are saying, yeah, but the new jobs still don't pay enough for me to be able to deal with these price hikes. And I'm falling further and further behind. So it's a pretty grim landscape

right now. It's very grim. I'm looking at some of these inflation numbers. Some of these are the highest price increases ever recorded by the BLS. This is from Heather Long. All of this is breaking this morning, so we don't have elements here. But hotels up 29 percent. Furniture up 17 percent. Chicken, 13 percent. New cars and trucks, 12 percent.

Flooring, 11 percent. Lunch meat, 11. Dry cleaning, 10 percent. Tools, 8 percent. Baby food, 8.4 percent. That's a bad one in particular for new moms. Full service restaurants, 7.5 percent. Pet supplies, 8.4%. That's a bad one in particular for new moms. Full service restaurants, 7.5%. Pet supplies, 7.5%. Toys, 6%. And car repair, 6% as well. So the hotel figure,

obviously we still see the demand shock in the areas which were super low during COVID and now month. But Jeff Stein points this out. This is the most depressing one. Your wages are just never going to keep pace with a 0.8% monthly cost increase. Right now, it is the equivalent of everyone getting a minus 10% raise year over year. Just think about that, people who are already struggling. Wages down 10% for most people over the year. The highest inflation since 1982, a 40-year high. Variety of reasons as to exactly why that's happening. But it's a disaster. I don't think there's any other way to describe it. And we're seeing some signs of slowdown.

Let's put this next one up there on the screen. In terms of the great resignation, which we were hearing here, the quit rate has ticked down for the first time in the year. Obviously, it's still at a record high. But the moment you start to see the quit rate go down, the labor market, which was so hot and so great there for working class people in order to have a job and an opening and bargain for more wages, that stuff is starting to go down, unfortunately. So look, hopefully it's just a blip, but we have to note it. The economic signs, it's really bad. It's just 1970s level bad right now. Yeah. No, I mean, there is no way around looking at this landscape and the takeaway is it's just getting worse and worse for people who have suffered from wage stagnation for decades now. And now the minute that you felt like, oh, the economy is getting back on track, we're creating all these jobs and there's this great

resignation happening. People who are going to new jobs, they're getting higher wages, but it's all just immediately sucked out by food, rent, gas prices and everything else. The one, okay, so we've got some bad news on the Starbucks front, some very bad news on the Starbucks front, and then some very good news on the Starbucks organizing front because this is where, you know,

this is where the greatest rays of hope are in terms of reorienting our economy towards the working class. This is where the greatest rays of hope are in terms of, you know, at the same time that workers are having their wages lowered, you have corporations making all-time record high profits. So they could afford to have you keep pace with inflation and then some. They're just not doing it. So that's why these union fights and organizing is so incredibly important to help to have a counterbalance in our economy. So Starbucks, of course, we've been tracking

how they're facing a massive unionization effort coast to coast. There are some wins that I want to report in just a moment, but we're also getting a look at just how aggressive and nasty their tactics are. Let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen. So Danny Rojas, who we had, we featured here on Breaking Points, who was a wonderful advocate and labor organizer at Starbucks. They fired Danny. And the pretext here is really ridiculous. Apparently, they were 26

minutes late to a 5.30 a.m. shift because they had trouble with their car. They then went above and beyond to make sure this was never going to happen again to the point of, because Danny works two jobs, also works at Trader Joe's, and closes. They shifted Danny's schedule so that they were supposed to then come in for store opening at 5.30 a.m. That means that Danny was getting like a few hours of sleep. And in spite of that, because of the car issue, Danny had come early, slept for an hour in the Starbucks parking lot just to make sure I'm on time and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. And they still fired them. So this is, you know, we've seen this is not the first time they've fired one of the key Starbucks organizers of

these unionization drives. They're clearly trying to send a message here and put a chill in anyone else who is thinking of organizing at their store. But the good news is that their tactics don't seem to be working. We had, let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. Just yesterday, there were three more ballot counts at three different Buffalo area stores, and all three of them went in favor of the union. So you now have about 120 more Starbucks workers who have union representation. The union has gone six out of seven in terms of store elections. And there are about, I think, 120 plus more elections that are scheduled at Starbucks across the country.

This is a sea change for any number of reasons. Starbucks before this union drive has never had an American shop that was union. So now they have six in a very short time period. And you really have this sort of ripple effect and this domino effect. It's also one of the most difficult industries to organize is in like the service sector, you know, fast food type workplaces, because turnover is really high. And you're just talking about one store at a time. So you've got to mobilize in all of these different locations. They are beating the odds in an extraordinary way here. Yeah. No, it's really extraordinary. And obviously, that's the only bright side that we can kind

of shine. Look, as we said previously, periods of high inflation, post-World War II, for example, crazy labor market, people coming back, union strikes. There was a lot of settlement, like we just fought this great war. What is our society going to be about? It shucked out okay in the 1950s. So, look, hopefully that's a period of transition that we're in. That being said, it's not fun to live through periods of great change in the U.S. economy and great change in oil and all that. When balance and the good times come, let's at least remember what it was like during this. Yeah, we're in for a lot of

tumble. I feel so bad for so many of these people who are already suffering and poor. It's every time I go fill up my tank, I can hear people talking about it or at the grocery store too. Oh my God, I can't believe they're like, it costs this much here. You know, some friends I was talking to at the gym, uh, everyone takes a guess before they check out at the grocery store and they almost always are under counting what the eventual bill is to 50, 300, you know, for a lot of people out there, if you have to feed a family, that's real tough on a weekly basis. Right. That's right. I'm thinking about all of you right now.

Okay, let's go ahead and move on to this one. So our fun block, the media block. We've got to shoehorn something lighthearted in the show, right? This one is

New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg. He was talked to by an undercover project, Veritas Operative, I guess you would call them. Gave his unfiltered thoughts on January 6th

on The New York Times and so much more. Let's take a listen. Like, you could tell how much fun we had in January. Oh, that's great. Are you allowed to have that much fun on January 6th? I just thought you'd be mourning. I know, I know. So if you're traumatized.

But like, all those colleagues who are in the building, a little younger, who's like, oh my gosh, you're scary, oh, f*** off. Is that really the vibe? From them. I'm like, come on. It's not the kind of place I can sit and tell somebody to man up, but I kind of want to. You're like, dude, come on.

We're not in any danger. These f***ing little dweebs keep going on about their trauma. I'm like, guys, shut the f*** up. I guess it was scarier. Did they write about it? Oh, God, please tell me who so I can read. I don't know if they wrote about their trauma.

This chick named Emily Cochran and this guy named Nick Phandos. They were both in their 20s. Nick Phandos? Phandos. Phandos. Nick doesn't know. They covered Cochran. So they're congressional reporters.

The other elsewhere is that the left's overreaction, the left's reaction to it in some places was so over the top that it gave the opening the right leader to start introducing the idea of what these people are in control it's not a big deal as they're making it they were making too big they were making some organized thing that it wasn't and that gave the opening for the illusions on the right to be like, oh, well, nothing happened here. It was just a peaceful bunch of tourists, you know? And it's like, but nobody wants to hear that. We're the ones, not Fox, not Breitbart,

who actually went in and covered the fact that, like, there were a ton of FBI informants on the people who attacked the Capitol. That was us, not the right-wing cops. You need the sources from within to dig into those posts. You need the sources from within to dig into those posts. Especially over the CIA and the SA one. You need the sources from within to dig into those places. You need the sources from within to dig into those places. Especially over the CIA. If you work there, you get polygraphed every year and you're asked if you're still going to be a reporter. Your answer is everything but no, you're in deep trouble. You're often talking to former people who are talking to people who are still there. You're also talking to people who are recently left who are still talking to people on the inside.

People on the inside cannot talk to you. So, Mr. Rosenberg then sat down with James O'Keefe. They posted this video on their YouTube channel. The Rosenberg told him, I absolutely stand by my comments made on the video. I missed that piece of the story. Yeah, so I went ahead and checked to make sure to see what he had gone and said about it.

There's a couple of interesting things that come out of this, right? Number one, trashing his own colleagues. It's just funny because there are so many people like that who feel the exact same way, and they're terrified of speaking out loud, especially against these young 20-somethings. He's like, cry me a freaking river, January 6th. Look, I mean, it's nothing you say. You and I don't say all the time. People talk shit about their work colleagues when they think no one's listening all the time.

That's right. And I hear the same complaint from a lot of people in the mainstream media, at least the ones who will still talk to me and who are like, God, you wouldn't believe what it's like on the inside here. The slack, these people are idiots, they're out of control. But everyone's afraid. And that's what it looks like whenever it's unfiltered. In terms of Rosenberg himself, the very interesting comment there was about the

undercover FBI agents. Rosenberg was a very well-sourced Justice Department reporter at the New York Times, followed him a lot throughout the Trump years. And I always got the feeling that he wasn't one of those complete Russi know, Russiagate fanatics. And it's funny, whenever it came out, I was like, man, I know this guy. Because what we recently talked about was this tweet of his. Let's put it up there on the screen. He said, Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us, which actually got his colleague, Nicole Hannah-Jones, to be like, really? It's not an accident to see why racism is popular. So that's what he's dealing

with at his workplace. I guess a couple of things to say about this. He said he stands by it. So, A, props to him. Shows you what the real feeling is by some of the vets inside of these newsrooms with the inmates running the asylum. And then, then of course the news is about the undercover fbi agents involved on january 6th yeah three different things not did he say anything else about that do you know in the follow-up interview i watched the because he didn't say anything because the reporting that he's referencing there i think only only pointed out one FBI informant. Right. So that's where it raises questions of like, does he know a little bit more than what they were able to actually like, you know, report out for an official story?

That's where the big questions come in. diagnoses what happened in the political landscape, which is because Democrats and like the like sort of left liberals went so in on January 6th and, you know, made it even blew it up beyond the, you know, terrible day that it actually was. That did create this opening for a completely bad faith narrative on the right to take hold of like this was nothing. It was fine. They're just tourists. And, you know, this was nothing, it was fine, they're just tourists and, you know, this was actually a great day.

Or it was all FBI. Yeah, or it was a total false flag and all this, you know, it did sort of like open the door for that and listen, the right wing knows what to do with that all day long. So his assessment to me seemed very accurate of the entire situation and not entirely flattering to the right either.

It was not flattering to people who, especially the reporters who made it about themselves and their trauma on that day, but also not flattering to the people who ran with the narrative on the other side. I still see this stuff. I thought it was a pretty good analysis all over.

Yeah, you was right. I agree with everything he said. Thank you for saying it out loud, Matt. I hope that you continue to speak out and to use your platform. I appreciate it. I didn't know that he was like, yeah, I said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I stand by it. He was like, absolutely.

I stand by it. And then he was like, look, man, you caught me talking shit in a bar. If you think that's news, it is what it is. And then he got up and he walked out. And in terms of his interview with James O'Keefe. I have no doubt that he probably will have some problems in his workplace with some fake boycotts, but Matt,

you are welcome on this show at any time in order to talk about what happened, also to talk about some of the feds who were involved on January 6th, and anything else that you want, so it's an open invitation. Yeah, absolutely. That would be fun to interview. I would love to interview. I doubt he'll probably want. So it's an open invitation. Yeah, absolutely. That would be fun to interview.

I would love to interview. I doubt he'll probably want to appear on comedy. I do. I mean, the part I feel bad about is like, like I said, so many people talk shit about their work colleagues. I feel bad for the guy. I feel bad that that part came out

both for him and for them. You know, you're saying something privately at a bar that he probably didn't want to put them on blast in like such a public way, but whatever. It's amusing in order to see it, but it is newsworthy, I think, in order to see what the thinking inside of these top institutions are. So there you go. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, a constant throughout our State of the Union coverage from Kyle to Crystal to Marshall to myself was this. Biden needs to connect the struggles of today from the war in Ukraine to high gas prices, to high food prices, to the aftermath of COVID, to a national narrative, a struggle. Give America

a through line from our posture abroad to an ambitious plan at home. Instead, what we got was a fine recitation of the no American soldiers would deploy to Ukraine, but then a laundry list of democratic think tank wants with no vision whatsoever. It's a speech already in the dustbin of history. And the more I think about it, the more I think that Biden's response to this foreign and economic crisis here at home will define him in the eyes of history, perhaps even more than his lackluster and wanting response to COVID. Biden did not invade Ukraine. He's being president sometimes, though, means you get dealt a terrible hand. And the great ones rise to the occasion. They use and marshal the public towards a common goal. They give America a way out,

as long as it takes and as hard as it can be. And yet, as we already referenced, just hours after the banning of Russian oil imports to the United States, this was Biden's response when he was asked about the trajectory of high gas prices. It's going to go up. Can't do much right now. Russia's responsible. Nothing we can do. It's going to go up. Incredible. Nothing. Just nothing. First of all, if your plan all along was to ban Russian oil with no measurable way to increase supply, then you better damn well sure give American people an explanation as to why they are paying more at the pump beyond, well, it's Putin's fault. But second is this. A key

part of inflation is managing expectations. Firms raise prices not just from corporate greed, but from what they expect to pay in the future. Thus, this answer is literally the worst thing you can possibly say. Nothing we can do means the U.S. government is signaling they won't take any meaningful action, which in turn is going to push the price up even higher. And guess what? That's exactly what happened. Immediately after Biden's comments, commodity traders in all sectors from food, gas, and elsewhere bet big on the price going up, which in turn, of course, affects future prices, which fuels a vicious cycle for all of us. Seriously, compare that to some of our past presidents. Remember FDR, the bank run in the

first days of his presidency? His calming voice after taking office, asking his friends, the American people, stop taking money out of that bank, my friends. And if they would so kindly, maybe put it back in the bank. Explaining how and why it was necessary, rescuing America out of the immediate crisis at the time, connecting it to the more ambitious prospects of the New Deal for the American people. Where is that call for anything? For nuclear power, a nuclear New Deal, more tax credits for Americans? How about this? If Washington's going to raise all our gas prices to $5 or $6 a gallon, give stimulus checks to people. They better at least give us some release at the pump, no?

How about repealing for a time the federal gas tax and then cutting a deal with the states? Replace their gas tax revenue if they appeal theirs as well. That alone could reduce price maybe 30, 40 cents a gallon across this entire country. These are all things I just came up with in my home desk. These are people who are charged with running the country. They give us nothing. Their message to the people is, well, it's all on Putin. You go ahead and suffer.

Hope you make it. It's only in times of immense crisis that anything truly meaningful gets done in this country. Our history tells us that. And yet, we have a man here asleep at the wheel who's beginning to act with the obtuseness of Herbert Hoover in the middle of the 1930s. Those of you who stuck with me during the Trump years know that my main critique of the Trump administration is that they were mostly useless, full of D-list idiots who were incapable of doing anything at all. And the few things that they did do were accomplished by people actively working against the agenda that the American people had voted for.

Incompetence was the name of the game in the Trump years. And a central and a core part of the liberal elite's push for Joe Biden was, well, at least the adults will be back in charge. That alone was a huge part of the sell. And yet, what have we learned? The adults in Washington may not be as garish or boorish as the Trump ones, but they are equally useless. Take Biden's plan to send fighters to Ukraine. It was an ill-considered and it was a dumbass idea given how brazen it is and potential for escalation. But okay, he wanted to get it done.

So the U.S. announces fighter jets that the Ukrainians know how to fly are on the way. The Ukrainians obviously were ecstatic about this. But then what happens? The Romanians and the Poles, who actually had those planes, they came out saying, no, no, no, no, we're not going to just send fighters directly to Ukraine. We need them ourselves. After some initial talks, then the Poles came up with this plan. Okay, we'll release the fighter jets, but we're not sending them to Ukraine. We're sending them to Ramstein Air Force Base. And then the US was like, well, no, no, no, no, we can't do that because then the

jets would be coming directly from us into Russian contested airspace. So then they put the kibosh on the entire plan. Can't make it up. It's like a comedy and a dance of incompetence. Like I said, I'm against this stupid ass plan from the beginning, but they can't even execute it properly. These bumbling amorphous response will be the political death of Joe Biden. High gas prices, high food prices, a deal with it attitude from the White House on top of a hot war in Eastern Europe, when all over the response from the administration projects a tremendous amount of uncertainty into the global system and into the global economy. He has given us nothing to hope for, no confidence in his actions. America is a nation adrift, and it will likely be for the foreseeable future, given that the next person to take that office

is probably the only man as incoherent and as incompetent as Joe Biden is. So good luck to everybody out there. It's going to be a long eight years. I don't know, Crystal. I mean, you just think about it. That fighter jet thing is a perfect example, right? You can't even do that. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, we've been tracking this. There's a mass hysteria that's sweeping the country right now. A nasty anti-Russian xenophobia primed by decades of Cold War propaganda, years of Russiagate mania, and then whipped into a little frenzy by the media, it's freedom fries with a side of potential nuclear war. And history tells us that the voices we should look for in such times are those who are willing to urge the most unpopular thing

in the entire world. That would be restraint. The most scorned, derided, and reviled often end up looking wise and prescient once the madness of the time has passed. And make no mistake, we are in a time of madness. Russian restaurants, even some owned by Ukrainians, are being boycotted, flooded with nasty reviews, bombarded with phone calls, calling them Nazis, and in the worst cases, vandalized. On Tuesday, I showed you thousands of protesters marching in Chicago, demanding we close the skies. That's a reference, of course, to enacting a no-fly zone, which would almost certainly lead us to World War III. A new protest at the Guggenheim pushed the same message with a different tactic.

Artists gathered on every floor to send airplanes out onto the floor of the famed museum. But the most troubling mania is happening among the people with power. In Washington, we have rushed into a wholesale economic war on Russia with consequences almost no one has stopped to contemplate. Our tools of economic warfare are indiscriminate, they are brutal, and they are unprecedented. It's already easy to forget how quickly our actions and thinking have escalated. Just a few weeks ago, kicking Russia off of the Swift bank communication system, that was considered the most extreme potential response to their actions. Now, Swift is small potatoes. We've given Russia the full global economic death penalty, including Swift removal, the first in history sanctions against a G20 central bank, and now a ban on Russian oil and energy products.

Russia, of course, considers these actions to be an act of war and a warning of the price that we will pay from their response. The economic consequences will reverberate around the globe. Oil and wheat prices will continue to climb. And if there is one thing that I know, it's that skyrocketing energy and food prices do not often lead to more global peace and stability. At the same time, it is impossible to wrap your head around just how quickly we have flooded Ukraine with American-made weapons. During the Cold War, there was actually this kind of kabuki theater diplomacy requiring that we at least had some plausible deniability about the flow of our arms into the arsenals of anti-communists. We no longer have any reluctance about being completely brazen

here. The New York Times reports that we are rushing our most effective weaponry into the country with record-breaking speed in an effort of such scale it's being compared to the Berlin airlift. 17,000 anti-tank weapons in six days. 360 roughly roughly million worth of weapons delivered in five days. By comparison, a much smaller package announced back in August. That took months to get on the ground. The U.S. and our NATO allies have been messing around with the idea of getting fighter jets. The Ukrainian saga was just talking about that. Thank God that latest harebrained scheme failed to accomplish what they wanted here.

Someone was sensible enough to realize that the minute a NATO pilot, let alone an American pilot, flies a jet into Ukraine, we have officially entered World War III. It is worth recalling again that arming the Ukrainians against Russian aggression was highly controversial and not so long ago. When Russia invaded Crimea, President Obama resisted the immense pressure to arm Ukrainians, reportedly posing the following questions to his aides. Quote, OK, what happens if we send in equipment? Do we have to send in trainers? What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin then escalates? He also reportedly worried that, quote, arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians.

And so it will potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow. Listen, those questions all seem pretty valid, but few have the courage to actually raise them publicly today. We should all also be extremely uncomfortable with how many people are now throwing around the example of our arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, as if that whole thing turned out well for us. But remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. And although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisors to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn't end well for the Russians. There were other unintended consequences, as we know. But

the fact is that a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Obviously, the similarities are not ones that you should bank on because the terrain, the development in urban areas, et cetera, is so different. But I think that is the model that people are now looking toward. And if there can be sufficient armaments that get in and they should be able to get in along some of. Oh, really? Some unintended consequences. Why don't you elaborate a little bit on that, Hill? And to be honest, military aid is just the beginning.

We're also providing aid which is not being talked about by politicians or really debated at all. Did you know that a cadre of American lobbyists are influence peddling and giving PR help to Zelensky and the Ukrainian government right now? That means giving favorable stories plays, pushing his interests among their powerful friends, using all of their dark arts to skillfully manipulate the American public. Now, again, there is a lot to admire about Zelensky personally, but his interests are not the same as ours. And he, remember, is aggressively calling for the most hawkish possible response. Did you know that we may be leading an active cyber counteroffensive to fight back against Russian attacks on Ukrainian networks and have almost certainly collaborated to harden those

networks in advance? Did you know that we are using our own satellite images and electronic intercepts of Russian military communications to help send warnings and guide Ukrainian military decision-making? And those, those are just the elements of support that have been publicly reported. Lord only knows what secret programs have been launched with zero awareness and zero debate, but potentially catastrophic consequences. In terms of elected officials, we haven't seen a whole lot of courage. All of these actions have been overwhelmingly supported on a bipartisan basis with barely even pausing to say, maybe we should talk about this. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has actually been one of those very lonely voices.

On Army and the Ukrainians, she tweeted, quote, the consequences of flooding Ukraine with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons, likely not limited to just military-specific equipment, but also including small arms and ammo, are unpredictable and likely disastrous, especially when they are given to paramilitary groups without accountability. She was also prepared to be the sole lone vote against a Russian oil ban. Biden has since decided to institute that oil ban without the help of Congress. But here's what Congresswoman Omar had to say on the matter. She said, whether it is politically or morally, we have to think about what this means a year from now, what this means two years, three years

from now. I think ultimately this is not going to end well for the actual people of Russia, and it's not going to end well for the people of Europe as well. For these comments, which just urge humanity and restraint, Congresswoman Omar has been called every nasty name you can imagine in the book. On Twitter, she was sent pictures of dead Ukrainian children with the implication that their deaths were somehow on her hands. She was, of course, accused of being a Russian puppet, and she was even smeared as being an anti-white racist. These sort of attacks, though, they might be familiar to Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She was the sole member of Congress to vote against giving George W. Bush the blank check for war that he wanted, and that ultimately led us to decades of disaster and moral atrocities. Congresswoman Lee received so many death

threats at the time for her stance that she was assigned a personal security detail. She was called a traitor who hated America. People sent her letters proclaiming their desire that she had been among the dead in the Twin Towers. And take a look at this. Even the supposedly respectable Wall Street Journal said she was, quote, a long practicing supporter of America's enemies. But of course, now with distance from the madness and frenzy of the time, she was 100% correct, vindicated. Congresswoman Lee herself pointed at the time to the example of two other courageous senators who had been the only votes against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which of course authorized LBJ to, quote, take all necessary

measures in Vietnam. You might also think of the example in recent times set by Russ Feingold. He was the only U.S. senator to vote against the Patriot Act during that frenzy. Lone voices despised at the time, whose wisdom we would have done really well to heed. So as we lurch into more and more extreme actions, casually embracing measures which were previously unthinkable just weeks ago, please listen to those people like Congresswoman Omar who are trying desperately to stand outside of the mania and hold on in your mind to the wise words of Barbara Lee. She said, let's step back for a moment.

Let's just pause just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. And listen, doesn't mean that when you have the unpopular opinion, you're always correct. But we have seen repeated... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, a very special guest, Anna Katchian of the Red Scare podcast. Anna, thank you so much for joining the show.

We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, and thanks for pronouncing my last name correctly. Well, I interviewed you previously, so I remember how to say it. It's been working out. That's why it works out. I've had a little bit of experience. Anna, we were trying to brainstorm. We're like, who do we talk to about all of this russian cancellation the backlash we've got the guggenheim is throwing

planes uh into the center calling for a new no-fly zone i know you as an art person i know in particular we're going to be pissed off about that when we've got let's put this on the screen we've got the russian backlash against these russian restaurants and tea houses and all of this yelp bombs are happening just just give us a way to think about this. You're a Russian-American, a cultural critic yourself. What do you think this tells us about America? Well, the first thing that you can always count on is that the most pathetic and depraved examples of activism

across the board will always come from the art world. I saw the Guggenheim thing. I saw the Russian restaurants that they reported on this woman who is actually Ukrainian. And she called her restaurant Russian from the get-go because she thought it would have more name recognition. And that's really come to backfire. You see a lot, I live in New York, and you see a lot of yellow and blue flags, people taking a stand. I'm really kind of personally less interested in the specific examples of various corporate entities and activists getting in line with whatever the Western governments are already doing. We've spent the last five or six years owning the libs. We saw kind of slacktivism at its best with BLM and then with COVID.

I'm sure that as we speak, there is some woman-owned athleisure brand that is coming out with a blue and yellow pair of yoga pants named after Zelensky. But I feel like the joke is not funny anymore. It's like less satisfying now to own the libs. Anna, can you just tell people, you were actually, you were born in Russia, correct? Can you give people a little bit of your backstory? And then do you have family, friends that you're talking to in Russia right now?

So I was born in Moscow back when Russia was the Soviet Union. And actually, when we moved here as a family, we were sort of in limbo because we didn't have any kind of like citizen status in anywhere. And I do, my dad's entire family is in Moscow and I have been corresponding with my cousins. I think that among liberal, Western, educated Russians, the attitude is almost unanimously anti-war and anti-Putin. I have no sense really what it is for the, the rest of the country. I'm assuming they're much more supportive. Putin has something like a 70% approval rating, which again, I would take with a grain of

salt, but the, um, I think overall, I'm sure the vibe is mixed. Yeah. And I think, you know, as, as I would just quote, um, the Russians with attitude podcast, I think they said it best, that attitude, the kind of staunchly anti-Putin attitude, which I think in the West most people agree with, is the people that are mostly advocating it for it are, you know, it's a tautology. They're the most, you know, the most Western-leaning people in Russia are the most Western-leaning people in Russia.

Yeah. Well, and what percent, I mean, do you have any sense of, like, what is the rough percentage that would fall into that sort of Western-oriented, educated, more elite group in Russia that tends to be, that's anti-Putin and is now anti-war? Please don't ask me to talk percentages. I have no clue. I'm sure that it's the minority, which is not to say that

most Russians are pro-Putin or pro-war necessarily. But I think that as we've seen in the West, these type of events have a unifying factor. I saw a lot of commentators on Twitter complaining complaining about how everybody from political actors to corporations to kind of individuals of the activist ilk who are falling for the most kind of blatant psyops and propaganda are very heavily kind of stumping, shilling for the war. And to me, that was almost like a beautiful moment of national solidarity. Like for once, this torn and divided country is finally united. And I'm assuming the situation would be similar in Russia. And, you know, on the question of sanctions, for example, there's this idea, right, that sanctions are imposed to pressure kind of the oligarchs and the people to turn against Putin. But it's unclear whether that's

going to have its intended effect. Yeah, that's actually what I wanted to get from you in terms of your understanding. Now we see McDonald's is out, Coca-Cola, et cetera. And as we've kept saying here, that's not because of the goodness of their heart. It's because they're required to by Western sanctions. They literally can't wire money out of this. But what's your sense, Anna, of how is this going to impact life in Russia? It's easy for me to say like, oh, they're not going to have an iPhone, McDonald's, but I don't know what that means in the context of actual contemporary Russian life. Like how much of this is going to change their day-to-day, not just in Moscow, but in the, you know, out in the rural areas? Well, I mean, I think, like I said, again, I'm less

interested in the specific examples of sanctions and more in this kind of unprecedented reconfiguration of the global economic order, the global financial order. I think in the short run, it's going to be a very painful and arduous process. And it's unclear whether it'll be successful. I mean, Putin certainly pulled the plug on Western consensus, but it's really an open question as to whether he'll be able to pull off the rest. Yeah. and Anna, what do you think over the long term? I mean, one of the things that we've seen in other countries is that these kind of indiscriminate sanctions can help to bolster a national movement, like rally people around a cause.

Do you see any signs of that or think that that's a possibility here as well? Certainly. Again, I don't have a great kind of intuitive sense of what's going on in Russia outside of what the people I speak to tell me. And again, they're mostly like liberal and Western leaning. And, you know, I can't do anything but be kind of like supportive and respect their opinion. But I can see a situation where the sanctions do kind of unite and galvanize Russians against the West even more. Because, you know, I forgot who said this,

but nobody likes to be hated or targeted. And, you know, in the Western establishment, among the kind of elite and media and political class, Putin's invasion is seen overwhelmingly as like an unprecedented act of unprovoked aggression. I don't think that Russians see it that way. I don't think even resistance figures, opposition figures in Russia see it that way. For example, Navalny was open about the fact that NATO was a non-starter, you know, NATO at the doorstep of Russia. Yeah, I mean, even Gorbachev, I think Gorbachev said it

was, I was outraged by it. There's always been a lot of cope here in terms of which Russians we listen to and what they say, the opposition figures, and then the rest of the part that they don't say that people here don't want to agree with. I think one of the points that you're making around the Russian-American backlash, nobody wants to be hated. I feel like these examples of the Guggenheim or of these conductors getting fired or some of these poor business owners here in D.C., one of my favorite bars, Russia House, has been vandalized, had to take down its Russian flag. I just think that, and I mean, I appreciate your perspective on this, that it's going to have a tremendous backlash, both inside of Russia, but also how are Russian Americans supposed to deal with this?

You know, in New York City, when I was there, there were a lot of Russian Americans that were very proud of being Russian, even though they've probably lived there three, four generations. Right. And I think what's interesting is that, you know, after BLM and Stop Asian Hate, we have these kind of like hashtag movements. There's, you know, a precedent. People really like to kind of glom onto these movements. And it's very clear that there's going to be a rise in Russophobia. The thing with Russians is that you can't identify them as easily on the street, right? They can pass. So, I mean, I think that whatever is going on with Russophobia in kind of the United States pales in comparison to what's going on in the Ukraine. I'm sure it's probably a fairly painful and demoralizing experience for expatriate Russians in the States because most of them, again, I would gather are probably, again,

staunchly anti-Putin and anti-war. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's all well said. Anna, thank you so much for taking some time out to share your perspective with us. It's great to have you. It's great to meet you. Thanks, Anna. We'll have a link to Red Scare in the description. Guys, go subscribe to Red Scare if you're not already. All right. Well, thank you guys.

Thank you, Anna. Take care. Appreciate it very much. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. I mean, it's been such a crazy couple of weeks here. Our premieres of Kyle and Marshall did quite well on the channel yesterday, Crystal. We're very happy with them.

We've got great content, great partnerships that you guys enable in order to pay for extra staff or the infrastructure in order to support that. We're creating an ecosystem here where we can support independent channels without all of the headaches of the traditional model. I really think we are pioneering something new in terms of our partnerships with Daily Poster and Matt Stoller and now Marshall and Kyle. And we've got big stuff in mind for the midterm elections, how exactly we can cover it exactly in the proper way, hiring and partnering with the right people in the right districts to bring you holistic coverage. and also just give us something very different from what I think you're going to hear on the mainstream media. You guys are the ones who support that with our premium members.

So thank you all so much for helping us keep the lights on, helping us keep expanding. The more you show up for us, the more we'll continue to use your trust and your hard-earned money in a way to grow out the brand and give you guys the best product as possible. You're always our number one concern. Indeed. I also just want to throw out there, and Sagar can back me up on this, that it was not actually my idea to bring Kyle onto the channel.

That's true. It was Sagar's. Is that a conspiracy theory? Yeah, I floated it. Of course, everyone's like, oh, Crystal's bringing her boyfriend onto the channel. I asked Crystal to ask Kyle if he would do so. So that's 100% true. I didn't even know you were going to bring that up, but it is true.

I can vouch for that. Confirm it. Yeah, but people seem to respond well to it. So it's a very good. I didn't even know you were going to bring that up, but it is true. I can vouch for that. Confirm it. Yeah, but people seem to respond well to it. But hey, it did well. So guess what? It was a good idea. And here's the other thing that's very intentional about the model of partnerships that we're pursuing is that we really believe in a vibrant, independent media ecosystem. And so that means, like like we're one little hub. And then if we can support, you know,

Stoller and what he's doing and Jason Lee and Kyle and, you know, and help to bolster this entire media ecosystem, that's something we really, really believe in because there's no saving cable news. Okay. They're not going to change that model is what it is and we have to have an alternative that lands for a wide variety of people that has traction that has scale and i think that you know that this is our effort our little contribution to trying to do that and it looks it's great for us too because their content is fantastic and i know you guys are exactly and this gets to the traditional models in mainstream media they own your stuff. They have copyright, all of that. We don't do any of that. We don't demand any ownership stake, nothing. We're like,

hey, we put it on here. We promote you. We give you as much of a exposure to the audience as possible. This is how it's going to work in a decentralized media environment. And it is much better for everybody involved when we do so. So once again, you guys are the ones who are empowering that. It wouldn't exist without any of you. So once again, you guys are the ones who are empowering that. It wouldn't exist without any of you. So thank you all very much. Yeah. And if you're able to support us, we really appreciate it.

Yeah, we always really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. I hope you had a great week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. We've got some great content posting for you over the weekend. And we will see you back here on Monday. See you Monday. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode,

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