Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/14/22: Ukraine War Developments, Iran Nuclear Deal, Polling Perils, Online Censorship, & How Biden Can Lower Gas Prices!

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Krystal and Saagar bring battle updates from Ukraine, arms shipments from the west to the battlefield, diplomatic developments, Iran deal future, more polling on Ukraine, online censorship of anti-war views, Trump interview censorship, Facebook's Ukraine policy, sleepwalking to nukes, deranged media punditry, and how Biden can alleviate the gas price surge!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/Skanda Amarnath: https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/spr-esf-dpa/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

High key. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell,

and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct.

And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar.

We're going to be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member 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, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of breaking news and big developments to get to you this morning. Of course, the latest coming out of Ukraine. Also, missiles fired towards our consulate in the Iraqi city of Erbil.

An Iranian Revolutionary Guard taking credit for that. So we'll talk to you about that and the Iran nuclear deal. The latest polling, how the American public is feeling about our response to what is going on in Ukraine. Also, the very latest from the U.S. side on censorship, just some really outrageous banning and taking things down and kicking out, you know, Russian pianists from concerts, just wild stuff that's going on right now as part of this mania around the war. Also, Facebook changing their policies in these couple of very specific ways to allow threats of violence just against Russian soldiers

and also praise of the neo-Nazi affiliated Azov Battalion, which was previously banned. We'll talk to you about that. We also have a first-time guest on the show, an economist who has a plan that is meant to reduce gas prices in the short term. So excited to talk to him as well. But we want to start with the very latest on the ground in Ukraine. Let's go ahead and start where we have been starting for weeks now with the Simtac map of where fighting is occurring. Put that up on the screen. I mean, we continue to be in this sort of grinding, horrible status quo. Russia's still

struggling to make advances. They have made the most advances in the south and the east. That is where the sort of most aggressive fighting has been. However, there are reports this morning that there was shelling in the actual city of Kyiv. That is, of course, the capital city. They're in the north, and that would indicate that they are coming closer to city center when they've been stuck fighting in the suburbs for quite a while now. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. This is a tweet or a tear sheet from Sky News about the mayor of Melitopol. That is one of the few major cities that Russia has been able to fully sort of capture and take control of. There is footage circulating

that purports to be the former mayor or current mayor of that city, having a bag put over his head and being kidnapped by Russian forces. Ukrainians are saying that they are feared that he is being tortured right now. There have, Russians have installed this new sort of puppet mayor, someone who previously had been in the city and was known to be like a Russian affiliated politician. And she is telling the citizens of that city that they need to stop fighting and, quote, accept the new reality. So this is a grim, grim new development. This is the first government official that we have seen that we know of who has been purportedly kidnapped in this manner. The other situation that is continuing to unfold is the city of Mariupol

is in just absolute dire straits. Let's go ahead and put this New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. At least 2,187 people in that city have died since the start of the war. The Red Cross is warning that time is running out. Mariupol has been basically under a siege by Russian forces. They have no water. They have no food. They have no electricity. They have no heat. And it is still very, very cold there. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are stuck in this city. This has been a place that, you know, they've tried multiple times to establish humanitarian corridors so that people could flee. Every single time those corridors have failed, so people have been unable to get out now for quite a while.

And what eyewitnesses there on the ground, Sagar, are saying is that it is just an absolutely apocalyptic landscape. You see dead bodies left in the street. People are dying because they are lacking medicine. Everything is running short. There is no food getting into that city. I saw just this morning that the president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, was saying they have a convoy of food and aid that they are trying to get there. But it's impossible at this time because the roads are completely blocked in the city under siege.

So this is just one of the humanitarian catastrophes that is unfolding right now in Ukraine. So there's a couple of things there. With the mayor, that's very much of a preview of what is to come if we do have occupation. So they're going to face a problem, which is a hostile population. They're going to try and install their own officials. It just remains to be seen whether the population is compliant, how much of it is actually Russian. And then on top of that, they're going to remember what the conditions of a siege are like, like we're seeing right now in Mariupol. So that's obviously a huge problem. And we need to establish humanitarian corridors. In terms of who keeps violating these ceasefires, it's very

difficult in order to tell. Obviously, propaganda flying around on both sides. The end result, though, is that a large population of civilians are suffering who are trapped inside of these cities. And just as a signal of what we've been warning here, which is that the campaign is going to ramp up. And let's go ahead and put this tweet up there on the screen. There were reports in a video actually released by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He appears to have arrived outside of the city of Kiev in order to bolster and talk to some Chechen special forces who are fighting in and around that

city. Given Mr. Kadyrov's record inside of Chechnya and also the Chechen civil war, and he is kind of seen as the attack dog of Vladimir Putin, he's already put out a video saying, hey, you know, Zelensky, you need to step down and apologize to Putin. You need to give up. He's kind of seen as the harbinger of the most harsh tactics of the Russian military, very much, unfortunately, probably coming to a city near you. And that brings us to the final escalation, really, in the campaign. Let's put this up there on the screen. The most significant strike was a Russian airstrike right along the western Ukrainian border near Poland on a base that had been receiving western military aid. So that is an

incredibly significant move, Crystal, because it signals that, as we're about to get to in our next segment, they consider western military aid shipments to be, quote, legitimate targets. But more so, this strike, which was only 15 kilometers from the Polish border, something like 10 miles or so from right there, is a direct sign of, hey, we're coming for you. And right now, a lot of the Western aid workers, journalists, and everybody, they're in the city of Lvov. And Lvov, I just saw today, is wrapping statues. They are preparing stained glass windows. Synagogues and elsewhere are all boarding up because they are preparing for a full-blown onslaught. That Russian strike and their capability to launch missiles into the western part of the country is a signal, hey,

nowhere is safe. And by the way, Wes, if you guys are going to ship military equipment here, we're going to blow the hell out of it. Yeah. Let's be clear. This is right on NATO's doorstep. Yeah, right. I mean, miles away. And this center,

it's known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, long been used to train Ukrainian military personnel, often with instructors from the U.S. and from other NATO countries. It's hosted international NATO drills, reported 35 people dead in these strikes. The Ukrainians said they were able to shoot down some of the incoming missiles, but certainly some of these missiles found their targets. And it represents a significant escalation. And as we keep tracking, inching closer and closer and closer to direct conflict between Russia and NATO countries.

So this is one more extremely significant escalation. And let's go ahead and transition to the next piece here, because these all fit together. Put that Guardian tear sheet up on the screen. Russia's deputy foreign minister is saying that the Russians will treat armed shipments to Ukraine from NATO countries as, quote, legitimate targets for military action in what the Guardian and every other news source I saw described as a dangerous new escalation of tensions. They said Russia had, quote, warned the U.S. that pumping weapons from a number of countries it orchestrates isn't just a dangerous move. It's an action that makes those convoys legitimate targets. Again, why this is so significant is because you're talking about inching closer and closer to direct conflict between NATO countries and the U.S. specifically and Russia.

And that is an utter disaster. This comes on top, of course, of Russia saying that our economic warfare is considered, they consider it an act of war. So we have been trying to walk right up to the line and not over of being a co-combatant in this conflict. And Russia is laying down their lines of what that actually means and saying, if you continue to ship in those Javelin missiles and everything else that you're doing, we are going to consider those legitimate targets of attack and we will go after them. So then immediately after they say that, that's when they strike this base miles from the border of Poland, again, showing that they are very serious about this new line and rhetoric that they're drawing. Yeah. I mean, you know, this strike is a direct kind of middle finger to the West with a

direct acknowledgement that you're playing with fire here. And if you continue to ship military aid, we are going to consider it a legitimate target. And by the way, if your soldiers happen to be in it or something like that, that's on you, which again brings this to light. Remember that we all brought you that story of the fighter jets. And this was very important because we tried to pressure the Poles and the Romanians to transfer these MiG fighters from their territory to Ukraine. And the Poles and the Romanians were like, no, we're not doing that because they're NATO countries and because they understood that doing so would mark a significant escalation. The other problem is how do you get them there? You need a Polish fighter, a NATO pilot to fly into Ukrainian hot airspace,

which is contested with Russia. Oh, what could go wrong? The Poles then, bowing to US diplomatic pressure, were like, okay, here's what we'll do. We'll take the fighters and we'll fly them to Ramstein Air Force Base. And then you can fly them from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany by a US pilot into Ukraine. And Biden was like, we're not doing that. And there were people in his administration, including Blinken, who wanted him to take that deal. And also reportedly, Poland actually wanted them to do that. And so, I mean, listen, we're plenty critical of Biden here and some of the actions he's taken in this war.

But at least according to the reporting, he was the one with the cool head to say, absolutely not. We are not doing that. This is a key part of my monologue. We are only an aged 79-year-old heartbeat away from a full-blown confrontation with Russia. And this is exactly— Oh, you don't think Kamala Harris would be super cool under pressure, Sager? Yeah, well, you know, she's got a great diplomatic track record abroad. And this is part of the—hey, listen, as we covered this weekend, women can, in fact, and do start wars.

So that is not something that is outside of the realm of possibility. At the same time, let's go and put this up there on the screen. Another aggressive move by the Russians and another line in the sand. They went ahead and struck a facility where they claim 180 foreign mercenaries were killed. And they also destroyed a large amount of foreign weapons. This matters because there's been a string of foreign mercenaries. It's hard to tell exactly how many. There are some people from Sweden, people from Poland, Romania, the United States, all across kind of the allied west who are flooding into Ukraine.

Some of this is just LARPing. Some of it is real in terms of what these mercenaries are, but they are being very much put on notice by the Russians. They're like, hey, we're going to kill you. Like you are in now a active hot war zone. There's also been some talk on the Russian side where this also shows some hypocrisy. They're like, hey, it's illegal to have foreign mercenaries.

And then they broadcast something from Russia where they said, oh, but Mr. President Putin, there are people from around the world who want to support our forces in Russia. And he's like, well, maybe we'll give them airplanes. So a lot of those people are, you know, they consider themselves brothers in arms from the Syrian civil war. So a lot of pro-Assad forces who, you know, obviously they owe their lives and their entire military success to the Russian military are now putting on, it's hard to tell how much of it AstroTurfed or not, but I mean, I guess I could see it, you know, both, but there are possibly Syrians that could be flying on Russian planes to come and fight now in this conflict, which the more that we allow this to happen, and I'm not saying we should do

anything about it like militarily, but the more this conflict drags on, this is the same thing that happened in the Syrian civil war. First, it was between Syrians. Then you get all these Arabs start coming in, all this Qatari money and the Saudi money, Libyan arms. I mean, if we start seeing, you know, now we've got the Chechen guy in there. So now we've got Chechens coming in, and then you have these Syrian forces coming in, and then foreign mercenaries on the Western side. This is all a global conflagration waiting to happen. And, you know, it only takes one death here in the United States or one miscalculation in order for the whole situation to go completely sideways.

So I'm not going to lie. I'm pretty scared about this whole situation. That's very true. And actually in Syria, and this could be the case ultimately in Ukraine, there's some indication that this is possible. In Syria, you actually had Chechens fighting on both sides. Oh, yeah. Yes, that's right. You had Chechens who were allied with the Russians. You had Chechens who were allied basically with ISIS, who are also Islamists, who were fighting against Russia because that's their big enemy.

And so you can easily see how this spins out of control with all of these people flooding in. And then you add into the mix our massive indiscriminate flow of weapons into the country, which happened like this. And I know that we've talked to you about this a number of times, but I really don't think we can emphasize enough just how much we have flooded the zone in mere days and now weeks of time. Let's put that New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. They called this comparable to the Berlin Airlift 2.0. That is the scale and scope of just how much we have flooded 17,000 anti-tank weapons, including Javelin missiles, in less than a week over the borders of Poland and Romania. For comparison, back in the summer, when a $60

million arms package to Ukraine was approved, it took months to get that in. It was approved in August. That was not fulfilled until November. But when the president approved $350 million, so a lot more than $60 million, in military aid on February 26th, it took only five days until the overwhelming majority of that was put in. So we have really just decided to completely throw any caution to the wind. Thank goodness they decided not to go through with that absolutely foolish scheme regarding fighter jets. You still have lots of politicians who are out there saber rattling Tom Cotton and others pushing for us to get fighter jets to the Ukrainians, ignoring what a potentially disastrous decision that would ultimately be. And now you're starting to see, we've always said, the question is what will Russia's response be And now you're starting to see, we've always said,

the question is, what will Russia's response be? And we're starting to see the way that they are treating this and viewing this and saying that these will be legitimate targets for their attack. I think they're probably drawing a line in the sand because they can see this mid-conversation happening in the West. I mean, they're not stupid. They watch the debates and the diplomacy and the back and forth. And they're like, hey, one way in order to deter further military aid is to bomb military aid and consider it a hot target. That's the other thing, which is do not underestimate. There are a lot of Americans right now in the city of Lvov. I actually have a friend who's in the city of Lvov as a journalist, and he's reporting from there. And apparently the coffee

shops, cafes, and all the places with Wi-Fi basically are all just foreigners. And so if this place becomes a hot war zone, I mean, this again has a serious escalation. We mentioned there was. Ukrainian forces were also in the area at the time. He was killed. I think he was shot in the neck and his partner, a cameraman, was shot as well. Apparently he survived at least for now and I hope he continues to do well. But the more that we have those types of incidents, we should not forget one of the impetuses for U.S. involvement in Syria and the civil war was when one of our American journalists had his head cut off, right? That is what really brought America into that conflict. So foreign aid workers, journalists, and others, if they're going to be in this city, which is receiving tons and tons of military aid from the West, and now the Russians are making it very clear, hey, we're going to bomb the hell out of you while this happens. Again, you see a glimpse of where escalation could come from. So you put all this

together, the amount of weapons that are flowing into the country, new diplomatic wrangling over weapons. By the way, I don't think these MiGs are still out of the question. I think it's- No, I don't think it's off the table either. I think it could still happen. And NATO and Germany and all of them are going to be pressuring us very hard. It just goes to show you, though, that they forget, look, it doesn't matter. If the Poles get attacked, we go to war. If we get attacked, the Poles go to war. We're all in this.

In terms of NATO, it's a tripwire for a reason in terms of Article 5. So the debates around all of this are getting very, very close to the line. The Russians are making it clear that they are in a dire military situation. And I guess we can go ahead and move on now to the diplomatic front because this matters. After we cut the show,

the most important thing that came out was that Russia actually submitted, Crystal, a formal military request to the Chinese government for military assistance. So this is the most outright ask that they've made so far of the Chinese regime. They paired it with an ask that they also help them economically. Now, this is where all eyes are in terms of the diplomatic front. Let's put this up there on the screen. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and China's Foreign Minister Yang

Zhe will be discussing Russia and Ukraine today in the city of Rome for the, quote, regional and global security implications. All eyes are on Beijing, both in terms of these talks, the carefully worded statements, and how they are going to respond here to the Russian request. Russia has really put China in a tight spot because China's been trying to both sides this saying, hey, well, we want peace. And, you know, they're very carefully worded statements aimed at not antagonizing the Russians, but also not being seen as if they're fully on their side. Now they have to make a choice. Are we going to buy Russian oil? Number one, are we going to bolster, buy their wheat as well? And two, are we going to provide military assistance? It shows you also the kind

of the dire straits that the Russians are in. I mean, it's a great power military one month into, frankly, not that hot of a conflict relative to global security, and now they need military assistance. It's also possibly a gamble in order to force Beijing to take a side here. And all eyes also are inside Beijing of what are these people thinking. This was a very interesting article making the rounds here. Let's put it up there on the screen. A scholar affiliated with China's central government has given a critical take on Russia, suggesting that it is time for Beijing to cut ties with Putin.

Now, let's be very clear here. This article is written by Hu Wei. He's the vice chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor's Office of the State Council, the chairman of the Shanghai Public Policy Research Association, and more. He's an important figure inside of China. That being said, sometimes they translate stuff in English specifically to get us to talk about it. And I guess in that way, they have succeeded. However, we are trying to read the tea leaves.

On the one side, the most hardcore propaganda, Global Times and more, very, very measured whenever it's coming to Russia. There's no calls for, we need Chinese troops. We need Chinese equipment flowing in to take on the Western imperialists. So the absence of that call is itself something. And then within the bounds of the debate, the fact that this is also put out there in English, it could be a way to bolster China's image in the West, but it also could be a legitimate signal to our foreign policy elite of, hey, we kind of recognize this is crazy. Like, we want an off-ramp on this, too.

So we'll see what comes out of this meeting. Within the next two weeks, if they don't greenlight military assistance to the Russians, that in and of itself is a very interesting sign about what's happening. Yeah, and we should also say both the Chinese and the Kremlin denied that that happened. So let's just put that out there. But what was so interesting to me about this very well-reasoned, in my opinion, article. It was good. It was quite well-written.

It was quite well-written and it was quite well-reasoned. And what they effectively argue is that trying to play neutral is not working. Playing neutral is being seen as taking Russia's side. Yeah. And now you are on the side of this basically pariah state that is being completely isolated in the world. This is ramping up tensions with the West and with the U.S. competition with us that, you know, we're not really ready for and that we don't actually want right now in terms of like us also facing some sort of global isolation. It's also sort of getting Europe and the West act together so that they're all on the same page. And so that was the bottom

line here. There's a line here that says China should avoid playing both sides in the same boat, give up being neutral and choose the mainstream position in the world. At present, China has tried not to offend either side and walked a middle ground in its international statements and choices. However, this position position does not meet Russia's needs and it has infuriated Ukraine and its supporters as well as sympathizers, putting China on the wrong side of much of the world. So this was pretty interesting that they put this out. There's a couple other things regarding this meeting today between Jake Sullivan and Chinese officials, which is in addition to whatever happens and whatever unfolds and the pressure that is put on China with regards to Russia and Ukraine. There's also the question of the Iran nuclear deal. That's right. That will be discussed as well.

And we're going to get to that in the next block. And what exactly is going on there? Going in, they've said there are really a lot of hope. There's not really a lot of hope for a big breakthrough here. They said this meeting is not about negotiating any specific issues or outcomes. It's taking place in the context of Russia's unjustified and brutal war against Ukraine. This is from U.S. officials. And as China has aligned itself with Russia to advance their own vision of the world order. So they are setting expectations low. But, you know, if there's going to be any path in the short term

out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it's going to have to involve China, at least behind the scenes, putting some pressure on Russia and certainly denying them military aid. It is pretty extraordinary, if it's true, that Russia has had to ask China for military aid when typically the flow of arms goes in the other direction. It's usually the Chinese buying weapons from the Russians. So for them to have to come in this early on and say, hey, we need some help here is rather extraordinary and rather telling. Yeah. Once again, I don't even know if they need the military equipment. I think they're trying to force Beijing's hand into make it some sort of like buy, you know, kind of a dual alliance

against the West. But Beijing doesn't want anything to do with that. They have a lot more riding on the global economy and on trade than anybody else. And if they have even one tenth of the geopolitical isolation of Russia, their economy is dead. Something that we'll talk about certainly tomorrow, which is that the COVID zero lockdowns in Shenzhen are already going to spike inflation here. So, by the way, if you want a semiconductor or anything, good luck because Apple just had to pause production at the Foxconn facility.

COVID zero in China is literally going to cripple the global economy. But that's another question for another day. Just goes to show you. We'll talk about that. Yeah, we will absolutely be talking about it tomorrow. But it just goes to show that in China, their economy is very precarious as well as a result of their COVID policy. Now, on the diplomatic front of Russia and Ukraine, let's put this up there. This is interesting. So in terms of what Moscow is insisting, this is from Kommersant. Moscow insists on Ukraine

recognizing Crimea as Russia, as the Luhansk and the DNR as independent, and, quote, neutrality for Kiev. Now, here's the key phrase. We've talked about demilitarization. They say no offensive weapons. Now, that is a very interesting phase. Not demilitarization, no offensive weapons. What they mean by that almost certainly are the anti-ballistic missile systems that we have in Poland, as well as obviously nuclear weapons. So by reining in, at least publicly, in terms of what their demands are, not full-scale demilitarization, but instead no offensive weapons and also not joining any EU or NATO bloc, that is a pretty significant change in the Russian posture. How that works out in practice, obviously a huge

question. Zelensky still rejecting it, but apparently they could be considering it. And also the political regime that gets to stay in charge of Ukraine, who knows, right? All of those questions remain. I'm not saying that this is a chance in hell, but it is a change in the Russian posture. And on the same side, let's put this up there in terms of what's happening. There is a tentative, tentative sign of peace talks. Russian MP Leonid Slutsky says that there is a, quote, substantial progress that in the coming days could turn into a unified position of both delegations and documents ready for signing. That's from Russian state media. Once again, he's a Russian MP. He's not the Russian foreign minister. He's not the Ukrainian

foreign minister. We have no idea whether any of that's actually happening or not. But this is what they are saying to their domestic populace in state media. I don't think they would do so if there was absolutely nothing whenever it came to the actual negotiations themselves. And it's possible that the Ukrainians behind the scenes are a lot more willing to negotiate. So Zelensky outside pressuring as maximal military assistance as possible from the West, using that as a bargaining chip at the table with the Russians, which would be the best case. You do see some language from the Ukrainians that seems to indicate there are some shifts and there's some potential deal in the making.

They're supposed to be having talks today virtually. So we'll see if we get any progress out of that, even on things like humanitarian corridors out of Mariupol. But the fact that you have some indications from the Ukrainians, by the way, one of the things that they want out of the negotiations are reparations for their destroyed cities from Moscow. So we'll see if that's a deal breaker for Russia. But the fact that you have Ukrainians sort of hinting at there could be a deal on the table and the Russians and state media saying the same, it's enough to have a tiny shred of hope. Not a huge amount that this is going to get resolved today. But when you see, you know, previously sort of hardline positions

being softened, being shifted a little bit, that's at least some sign of potential progress. Yeah, these are all good things, and we should encourage as much diplomacy as possible. Okay, let's go ahead and move on. Speaking of diplomacy, this is also a very important story in Iran. So in the city of Erbil in Kurdistan in Iraq, northern Iraq, there was a surprise rocket attack with missiles launched from Iran. We have a little bit of a video of that. Let's just take a quick look. So, not great. That was actually near the American consulate in Erbil. To be clear, not on the American consulate in Erbil, To be clear, not on the American consulate in Erbil,

but nearby. There were no American personnel who were injured or who were killed in the attack. So it's not the same as that rocket attack that we saw during the Trump administration, which eventually led to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. We're not there yet. However, this is still a very important development. Let's put this up there on the screen. Because the Iranians specifically took credit for that missile barrage near the U.S. consulate in Iraq. Now, all of this matters in the context of the JCPOA or the Iranian nuclear deal, which was reportedly nearing finalization with the P5-plus-1 powers. That's everybody as well as China in terms of the UN Security Council. Now, why does this matter? Because we're nearing the deal, and then all of a sudden we see this Iranian missile attack.

Now, this missile attack is almost certainly occurring and was launched by the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Now, we've spoken with Dr. Trita Parsi before. He was my professor in graduate school, and he has kind of a deep view inside to the Iranian regime, and he explained it this way. Not about this attack specifically, but in previous provocations whenever there was a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran, which is that Iran is not a monolith. The IRGC is separate from the Iranian military, which is separate from the Ayatollah, which is separate from the president's office. What happened is that there are factions inside of Iran which do want peace.

The civilians are suffering, obviously. But the IRGC, they make a ton of money circumventing the sanctions and by running some of the most lucrative smuggling routes to a large population for the Iranians. Thus, the nuclear deal, which would lessen sanctions, is actually a direct economic threat to people who are inside the IRGC, who are looting the country, and who are using the sanctions in order to have dramatic markup and use their navy and all that in order to bring illicit goods into the country, as well as oil and all of that. So this can be seen in the context of the hawk hardline elements in Iran trying to sink the Iranian nuclear deal as it nears finalization. We saw the exact same thing happened actually near the signing of the nuclear deal back in 2016 when Barack Obama was president.

Remember everyone that the Iranians took hostages, you know, those two U.S. Navy boats signing of the nuclear deal back in 2016 when Barack Obama was president. Remember, everyone, that the Iranians took hostages, you know, those two U.S. Navy boats? There's a lot of questions about what happened with those boats. But basically, they were taken into custody in video and it's humiliating and John Kerry had to go, like, save them or whatever. And this was a huge political problem, obviously, for Obama. Well, they're trying to create the same situation, the Iranians specifically, to rub it in the face and humiliate the Americans in order to discourage a nuclear deal, especially the IRGC. So just keep in mind here, this is being done by elements within Iran who don't want peace. A nuclear deal is a direct threat to them. That doesn't

lessen the geopolitical tension and the situation on behalf of the Biden administration. Already, this is obviously being claimed by the most hawkish elements on the right or even in the U.S. to say, hey, now look, we can't have any nuclear deal. We got to kill the nuclear. They didn't want the deal anyway. But now this is ammo. And, you know, people understand our politics and the way that they can play into that. But this is very much a test crystal of the Biden administration as they near possible completion of the nuclear deal, although there is some problems. Yeah, we'll get to that in just a minute. It was very noteworthy that the Biden administration was at pains to say this was not an attack on our consulate.

So, of course, they condemned it, but they made it clear that they did not see it as a direct attack on our interests there. Iran says that this was in retaliation for an Israeli strike in Syria that killed two members of the Revolutionary Guard. So that's what they're publicly saying, that this is about Israel. And we just told you what a mess it is in Syria and how this created these proxy wars and tensions all around the globe. So they're saying that's what that's about. Other observers are also pointing out that what is happening in Iraq right now is they are trying to form a government. And there's questions about how many of sort of Iran's proxies and affiliated politicians will end up in that government.

So that was pointed to as another potential cause of this attack. And then obviously, from our perspective, the other clear thing here is because it was so close to our newly being built actually consulate there in Erbil, that this was also trying to upset the apple cart with regards to nuclear negotiations. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen about where we are with regards to the Iran deal, because this isn't the only threat to that deal coming together. Let me give you a little bit of backstory. So Biden, when he was running for president, he said he wanted to reenter very quickly into this deal. But at the beginning of his

administration, he and his administration, they really dragged their feet. And this became a problem because in the meantime, there were elections in Iran and, you know, the previous sort of more open faction was kicked out. And now you have more hardliners in charge. They took that opportunity after the election to say, oh, hey, we want to give us some time because we want to rethink our strategy. What they were really doing was upping their nuclear program in an attempt to put more pressure on us to come back to the table so that they could secure a better deal. So now here we are back at the table. All signs indicate that they were very close to coming to terms on a new deal. And then all hell breaks loose in

Ukraine with Russia. So what Russia is doing, and they have a say in this deal, they are party to it. What they're saying is, hey, we're not down with this thing unless we get specific written guarantees in the Iranian nuclear deal that we are going to be sanctions free when it comes to Iran. And we're going to continue to be able to do free trade with them and collaborate militarily. We want to have written guarantees there. The U.S. is saying absolutely no way, non-starter. We're not using this deal to have these other sort of superfluous agreements involved. The two potential paths forward are a sort of more narrow deal,

something that the Iranians have already ruled out. Or the very latest thing floated by the U.S. is, if this is truly a red line, Russia won't go along, maybe we'll just take this same deal and basically take it out of this particular framework and try to do the deal without Russia. Would that work? Would that happen? Would the Iranians go for it? No idea. But, you know, a lot of blame does fall at the feet of the Biden administration who dithered when they could have gone reentered this deal very quickly after he took office when you had

more favorable circumstances. And now by waiting, here we are on the precipice, and the whole thing could very well fall apart. Now, it may still come together. I mean, some of these things, I feel like it always looks like they're, you know, hanging by a thread and they're about to come apart when they finally do come through. But they have really risked their ability to rejoin this agreement, which, just a reminder, we were the ones that left, and the Iranians actually held up their end of the deal for quite a while after we backed out.

Yeah, that's a good point. Also, I misspoke earlier. P5 plus one includes Germany, not China. China is in it, but they're part of the permanent powers. Anyway, what's important is that those powers, specifically the Europeans, what are we dealing with right now? An oil crisis. What do the Iranians have? A lot of oil. And so this is part of why Russia, in a way, which is also party to the deal, they don't necessarily have an interest in allowing Iranian oil to flow because it could make up some of their back channels. So they might want to kill the deal. Now, the Chinese have always bought Russian oil and they like Russian or sorry, Iranian oil. They like it. So do the South Koreans. So there is pressure from Asia in order to get this deal done. The Ukraine conflict both complicates

this, but also makes it so that the West is probably more likely to give up as much as possible to the Iranians, given that they need oil prices to come down. So in a way, it's both the best and the worst time in order to secure this deal. We'll see if it ends up happening. But the missile attack, it's a test against the Biden administration. Which way are they going to fall? How hawkish are the elements inside of the United States? Can they exactly push things one way or the other? They're a big test of European diplomacy and of their posture whenever it comes to energy policy. And finally, it's also a test of China and of Russia and how they're going to conduct themselves. Everybody's got

competing interests. And so how exactly the deal ends up shaking out, we'll see. But in terms of the attack itself, it's not a good sign for if you want to see this eventually get inked. That being said, it doesn't completely rule it out at the same time. I know there were a lot of questions around that. Yeah, and as you said, important to this whole context is I'm looking today's national average gas price is $4.33. Filled up my tank this weekend and sucked. That definitely puts more pressure on the West

to try to do what it takes to get this done. You see that in the rhetoric from the Biden administration trying to say what it takes to get this done. And you see that in the rhetoric from the Biden administration trying to say, hey, this attack, we condemn it, but it wasn't really about us. All right, let's bring you up to speed on some of the latest polling with regards to Ukraine and Russia. And this is pretty interesting. Very different response from the American public on the idea of a no-fly zone, depending on how it is presented. Let's go ahead and put Ryan Gerdusky's tweet here up on the screen. This is from a new CBS News poll. There's a lot in this poll. Actually, we may dig into more

of it tomorrow. But when you just ask people, hey, do you support a no-fly zone? Very strong majority support, 59% support, 41% oppose. But when you say, hey, do you support a no-fly zone over Ukraine? If it is viewed as an act of war, which by the way it would be, then support drops significantly. So you have only 38% in support and 62% in opposition. This tells you a lot of things. First of all, I think, you know, the most important point here is that clearly the media has done a horrific job of helping people to understand what a no-fly zone actually means. Because when you just hear the words no-fly zone, you're not a military expert. You just think, oh, okay, that would help protect Ukrainians.

And yes, I'm all in favor. Let's help the Ukrainians in whatever ways that we possibly can so long as it doesn't mean that we're going to war. Well, if the media had done their job, people would understand that those two things are basically synonymous. So the moment that you give people any kind of context of what this actually means, they're like, absolutely not. Definitely not. We are not on board with this whatsoever by a margin of almost two-thirds to one-third. So I thought that was pretty significant and interesting that they phrased it both ways to get at how people actually feel about these types of escalatory actions. Yeah, it's very important that people understand that. It's also why I take everything with a grain of salt whenever people don't seem to understand the

total ramifications. So, for example, let's put this next one up there on the screen. Majority currently in the U.S., per the same CBS poll, 69% believe that Biden has not acted forcefully enough versus Russia. Now, if you look at this, Americans think that there are a lot more hawkish options, but they don't understand what exactly that means. For example, people say, oh, well, we could have a cyber attack on Russia or, oh, we could have a no-fly zone. They don't understand the implications of what those are. So with the no-fly zone, it sounds like it's anodyne. They're like, oh, well, we'll just make it so nobody can fly. Yes. But to do that, you'd have to shoot Russian planes out of the sky.

And then when we do that, they're going to shoot back at us. And then we have to bomb their anti-aircraft. And then they have to bomb our anti-aircraft. And now you're having a full-blown nuclear exchange. That all could happen with the span of like two days. That's all it would take in order for that to escalate. And that's exactly what could happen with a cyber attack. Okay. So there was a discussion apparently within the Situation Room of, well, we have the capability to disrupt Russian attacks on Ukraine. That would require, though, hacking and taking down the grid that the Russian military relies on. Well, now you just committed an act of cyber war against Russia, which then makes it what? By disabling their military, that's affected a kinetic conflict, which then they are

allowed to, under their doctrine, to do the same to us. Do you see how these things could get totally out of control? What matters is that the media's framing on this. And I took some time out of the weekend. This cost me some brain cells, but I took some time to watch some of this coverage. Yeah. The MSNBC crowd is full-blown crazy. And I'm going to be covering this in my monologue around Hitler comparisons, which is the most extreme part of it. But the cavalier nature through which we discuss no-fly zones and escalation, they don't, for example, I was talking to somebody who watched the news and they said, oh my God, did you see that the Russians struck near Poland? And I said, well, did you know that they were bombing the weapons that we sent them there?

She goes, no, I didn't know that at all. And I was like, yeah, well, you know, it's because we sent, I'm not even saying I'm against it necessarily, but you send aid over there. That's why it happened. And they're like, oh, well, that's totally different than how MSNBC portrayed it. Exactly. The calls for war and including the platforming of these Ukrainian members of parliament who are calling for a total shutdown of trade with Russia, a no-fly zone, full-scale economic war against Russia, and also the most defensive elements whenever it comes to the West is all anybody's hearing on that side of the argument. And I think, fine, I'm willing to hear them out 100%. But we also have to present the other side of the equation. And that's what's missing, Crystal. This is the

same thing that happened in Iraq. They were like, hey, it'll be shock and awe. We'll take it completely over. You're like, yeah, but can we run a country of 40 million people with 150,000 troops? The answer is no, actually. And whenever it comes to the follow-on effects, nobody is being presented with the real information. And the media monolith here is just having tremendously damaging effects to the American psyche and constraining the number of options for policymakers. Cable news is infotainment. Yeah.

And it is not built for serious times at all. So in some ways, you think, oh, this is the moment that, you know, especially the CNNs of the world are made for. Like, they've got all these resources and they've got bureaus around the world. That's true. And they've got, you know, people on the ground and some of those reporters, I mean, really, truly brave what they are doing and working hard in order to gather information. But ultimately, their commitment is to sensationalism, sort of emotional sensationalism to get you to keep tuning in and tuning in and tuning in. And so in order to generate that, they focus exclusively on the human interest part of this. And there's no doubt about it.

Like there's a space for that. And the tales and the horrors that are unfolding for the human beings on the ground is and the refugees who are fleeing 2.5 million plus. And these are things we talk about all the time, too.

It's a really important to remember the humanity of the people who are involved in this conflict, as it is important to remember the humanity of people involved in other conflicts that they completely ignore. But that's the only part that they show you. There isn't any serious, level-headed discussion of what these terms mean, what our options are, how extraordinary the measures we've already taken really are. Cable news is not a space to have long extended discussions of the type that we try to have here about, okay, if we pursue this path, and I understand why emotionally you would want to, quote, do more. OK, these are some of the potential follow on effects.

This is how this could lead to potentially vastly greater amounts of human misery and grave costs for our own population. Cable news has no space or ability to conduct to do any of that. I mean, they're just it's it's forget about it. Like you will spend your whole life wishing that they would ever do anything like it. The format, the structure, the incentives, the talent, none of them are equipped to handle a serious situation such as this. And so that's how you can end up with the landscape we have now, where what the Biden administration has done is I mean, it is extremely hawkish. The amount of weapons that we have flooded the zone with within Ukraine, the really financial death penalty we have given to the state of Russia.

Russia, in a span of weeks, became the most sanctioned country on the entire planet. We're engaged in sanctions that we have never done before and still looking for ways to ratchet up the pressure and up the ante and, hey, we're going to ban Russian oil and let's pressure the Europeans to do the same. These are extraordinary measures. I keep saying it, but I really think it's worth remembering that just a few weeks ago, just the swift banking sanctions. That was considered. That was the outer limit.

That was like, oh, that would be crazy if they did that. And we just flew right by that like it was nothing and did SWIFT sanctions. At the same time, we did the central bank sanctions, which was something that even the Russians never anticipated that we would go that far. So the fact that you have a media incapable of explaining how extraordinary the situation is leads to things like, you know, people just sort of knee-jerk supporting a no-fly zone when it's presented out of context, or a majority saying, hey, this isn't strong enough when these are, you know, outrageous actions, like extraordinary actions, unprecedented actions that we've taken. And if you dig in more here, you see you have 65 percent who favor even tougher economic penalties. I mean, I don't even know what else we could really do. There's so much

that we've already done to basically cut them off at the knees. You have 61% who think the U.S. should send more weapons and supplies to Ukraine. I think, again, without understanding how absolutely extraordinary what we've already sent in is, and you've got 21% only, thank goodness, who think the U.S. should take direct military action against Russia because everyone knows what that means. That one you have total clarity. At least on that, people know. But the gray area is where they want you to push you as far as possible. Look, a Russian oil ban was considered non-starter here three weeks ago in Washington. Now it already happened. Did you guys know that Congress has revoked PNTR status for Russia, permanent normal trade relationships, making it so that they are eligible for the most high tariffs, revoking their trade relationship with us and now

the entire West. This possibly could affect their WTO status as well, where there's also going to be a diplomatic front. All we're saying is, let's have a discussion as to whether this is maybe enough. Is there an off-ramp? What does that look like? What impact is this going to have? Could this then affect Russian behavior? Things are moving at such speed that we are constraining the number of options in Moscow to less and less and less, which is basically capitulate and, you know, give up and see how much of status you get back or back into a corner and fight to the death. We'll see which one of those that they pick. The latter is, frankly, the much more likely option. And we

should consider whether that's something that we want in this world. Yeah. And the last poll number we have here for you that we're keeping an eye on is Quinnipiac. Let's put this up. 71% of Americans say that they support that ban on Russian oil, even if it results in higher gas prices. You also have an overwhelming majority, 78 percent, in favor of accepting Ukrainian refugees into the U.S., which is a beautiful thing to see. But, you know, this is where you should always be a little skeptical of the public opinion polling, just like we see with the no-fly zone,

you know, people overwhelmingly in favor until they're given more context. Here, I would very much suspect that there is a genuine decency in the American people where they say, listen, I am, this is going to hurt me. I'm already struggling. You know, 64% of Americans live in paycheck to paycheck, but if it's going to help the Ukrainians, I'm willing to do it. And you're hearing from the political class, this is the thing, you know, this is really going to, this is going to force the end of this cut. This is the way to help the Ukrainians. It's your patriotic duty, we heard from, you know, people like Larry Summers and these other multimillionaires to pay more at the gas pump to support the Ukrainians.

People are like, okay, if that's right, then I'm down for it. What's going to happen, though, is this isn't ultimately going to end the war, save the Ukrainians. And then you're just stuck paying a lot more. What's going to happen the war, save the Ukrainians, and then you're just stuck paying a lot more. Yeah, six months later, what's going to happen? For gas. I just was reading here, AAA just had a new survey. We've been using their gas price figure. Currently, the national average as of when we're talking right now, $4.30 a gallon. $4 gas is the tipping point for the majority of Americans. So two-thirds of Americans felt gas prices were too high just a few weeks ago at $3.50 a gallon. Now, with the national average at an all-time high over four, Americans have reached

a tipping point. Fifty-nine percent say they're going to have to make changes to their driving habits or lifestyle. If gas were to reach $5 a gallon, which is almost certainly going to happen, which has never hit before in a Western country, or sorry, in this Western part of our country, three quarters said that they are going to have to adjust their lifestyle to offset the spike at the pump. And I would remind you, all sorts of consumer decisions are downstream of gas price. That's right. If you can't drive to a restaurant, you're not going to eat at the restaurant. If you can't drive to the store, you're not going to shop at the store. So it would actually be a return to

the COVID economy of staying home, Zoom meetings, buying more stuff on Amazon. So it'd be great for the big guys and it would not be good for mom and pop businesses and for small business. Also, not to mention all of the immense costs all of us are probably seeing right now at the grocery store. I certainly am. Fuel price gets priced into the cost of transport for goods. The transport costs for the grocery store chains and the trucking right now are astronomical, and they're only likely to go up. You know, diesel right now is completely out of control. It is well over $5 a gallon. Yeah, $5.35, $5.13, sorry, $1.35, what I'm reading there, for the national average of price across this country.

Now just imagine that for California and elsewhere where diesel price and gas price, yeah, I'm looking right now. The diesel price there, our highest record is already $6.29. That's 43 million people who live in the state of California, 12% of the entire U.S. population. Things are not good and could have a significant impact on everybody's lives. That's why we have The Economist on today. Yeah, we're going to get into more of this with our economist who will help hopefully provide some ideas of a plan that could lower gas prices in the short term.

Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to censorship. I mean, in terms of the social, societal, mass formation psychosis that we're seeing really around Russia, which has a, yeah, got to get us banned. Listen, I mean, at this point, who isn't getting banned from YouTube? So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Abby Martin, in her show, has now had 600 episodes of Breaking the Set taken off of YouTube. That is

completely crazy. And it just goes to show you that there's no reason given. Now, sure, Abby used to work for RT, but when you have Russian state media and these kind of blanket bans that they say are just all going to be taken off and that content that includes them, there's no context as to exactly why any of this content gets taken off. It's just included in sort of blanket ban. And there is no discussion as to whether that content is valuable. I mean, we have played here clips from some of her content whenever the Empire files, whenever they interrupted George W. Bush and called him a war criminal. These are things which are valuable to public discourse and are now unable to be seen by the public.

The other one that was taken off, let's put this up there on the screen, was Oliver Stone's documentary, Ukraine on Fire, which was taken off of YouTube, again, with no explanation, and has now been uploaded to Rumble. But the point is, is that nobody is talking about why. And listen, you may think these are out there. It doesn't matter. You know, I actually went back and watched all of Oliver Stone's Putin interviews. He has a series of Putin interviews on Showtime and elsewhere. It's a very good insight into the mind of Vladimir Putin. And if we're going to have a geopolitical conflict now with Russia, it would be, you know, maybe worth it to people in the West in order to understand how the autocratic leader of that country thinks. Yeah, especially when interviewed by a Westerner like Oliver Stone. So I just feel like

this total crackdown. We've explained here before. If you go back to our battle update earlier in the show, we are reading to you from Russian state media. Why? Because we need to know what they are saying to their own population in terms of what a diplomatic solution could look like. We would be fools not to do so. I mean, what, we want it translated multiple times by the West and then read it straight from there? It's better to go to the primary source. Anyway, we're watching a full-scale crackdown that's happening right now on YouTube with no consideration for the broader consequences of what this would mean in the long run for the information environment. And I do think it is going to be highly detrimental

to how Americans shape and see this conflict going forward. Yeah. And it's not just YouTube, by the way. And I always want to say, like, Russia is actively criminalizing and threatening jail time. Should we be more like the Russians? Right, exactly. We don't want to go anywhere near the direction that they're ultimately going in. I mean, Abby Martin, she was critical while she was on RT. She was critical of Russia's invasion of Crimea. Yeah. And so that just shows you how indiscriminate this is. It doesn't matter that her content at times was actually critical of Russia just because she's associated with RT. It's all bad. It all has to be banned. It all has to be censored. It all has to be taken down.

This is insanity. I mean, I watched Ukraine on Fire, that documentary, and you have to trust people to be able to take in information and be able to figure out what they believe and who's offering sufficient evidence and what claims are true and what needs to figure out what they believe and who's offering sufficient evidence and what claims are true and what needs to be balanced. And if you have a confident democracy, that's what it looks like. It looks like trusting your population to, you know, watch any kind of content from any kind of place and be able to still make sense of the world and participate as active citizens in a democracy. There's also this, we continue to track, this just really, truly reactionary hysteria around anything regarding Russia, even people and products

that have nothing to do with the Russian government, even people and cultural products that are actively anti-war and dissidents in terms of the Kremlin narrative. This is really, you know, this is an extraordinary thing. Let's go ahead and put this next tear sheet up on the screen. This 20-year-old Russian piano prodigy was supposed to make his Canadian debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He was dropped after some people emailed to complain about him, you know, just the very fact that he's Russian. So this is just like blanket xenophobia, even though he had been critical, like publicly critical of Russia's war in Ukraine. He wrote earlier this

month that the truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict. So he was vocally publicly against the war and doesn't matter because he has anything to do with Russia. He's got to be banned. We can't listen to his music. This is insane. And, you know, it really bothers me when it comes to music and art as well, because this is one of the great connectors of humanity. I mean, this is the way that we really, the piano, like you don't have to understand the language. It just connects on a human emotional level. And this is one of the ways that we sort of see each other as human beings around the world and create this common sense of our humanity. So it's a sad thing the way that people are reacting.

Just to give you an idea of how much we've lost our minds, during the Cold War, we actually made an explicit aim to elevate Russian culture and say that the Soviet Union was oppressing that. So we would celebrate Tolstoy and we would celebrate Solzhenitsyn and we would celebrate, you know, crime and punishment. We would celebrate the Russian symphony or ballet. Now it's the opposite where we're like, no, no, no, no. The Russian regime is the Russian people. The Russian culture itself is bad. I mean, first of all, I don't need to tell you this, but there are millions of Russian Americans who have lived here for a very long time who are proud people and who are proud of their culture. So number one, you're attacking, you know, part of your own citizens. But number two, this is the easiest way in order to turn this into some civilizational conflict and make

it so that the Russian people themselves say, okay, well, it's war between all of us. And that's the opposite of what you want, given the history between all of us. And that's the opposite of what you want, given the history in terms of what that populace looks like when it unites and decides to fight against something in what it considers a civilizational conflict. So let me also say, this is a point that Dr. Parsi actually made when we talked to him last week. So we all have this understanding that Russian policy is directed by Putin and a handful of oligarchs. That's who is in charge. And the Russian population has very little say in what is happening at the top.

But then how do you fit that together with, but we're going to blanket punish all of the millions of people who have nothing, who you've already admitted have nothing to do with this. And it's not their fault. And the other thing is Russian culture is rich and it's extraordinary. Like we're impoverishing ourselves to cut ourselves off from that. So it truly is a hysterical response. That's terrible. And you know, these poor piano prodigies, and I was just reading here in Washington, D.C., it does turn out apparently that Russia House, that bar I told you about, which was vandalized, is not owned by Russians, classic. Even though it was vandalized, there's like Russian tea rooms.

Anna Kachyan was on our show talking about how a Ukrainian woman opened a Russian restaurant because she thought it would have more popularity and now people are boycotting her restaurant, even though she's Ukrainian. Yeah, she's rebranding it as Ukrainian now. Yeah, she's rebranding it now as a Ukrainian restaurant.

Let's let all of this die. Like we said, even at the height of the Cold War, we understood the value of Russian culture, which has always had a dramatic impact on the West and has always kind of given us this darker view of humanity, which is important and is important to integrate also into kind of our more sunny, idealized versions. But speaking of censorship,

it wasn't just confined to the Russians. Let's put this up there on the screen. The Nelk Boys Full Send podcast, which included, what was it, about an hour-long interview with Donald Trump and had amassed 5 million views in just 24 hours, was deleted from YouTube. And this is due to another ridiculous standard, which is that YouTube has a policy where they are going to take down any floating of election conspiracy theories that the election was rigged, specifically by Trump. Even if you as a news organization were to play a clip of that happening, they would still take that down, even if you are playing it as a clip, in order to debunk it, aka what we're supposed to do in the news. Now, in this interview, to be fair to the NELC guys, they were just letting him talk, but whatever. I mean,

they're not professional interviewers. They were saying, look, they kept calling him Donald, which, look, guys, you know, he is the president, and that bothers me from a decorum perspective. That's the part that bothers you? It bothers me a lot, actually. When you address any president, former president, we should call him president, but they called him Donnie and they were letting him talk about

the election was rigged and it was kind of funny because they clearly just didn't know what to do while he's talking. Having interviewed Trump before, it is maddening whenever he goes off on these tangents. This is a very hard person to interview. Oh, very difficult. And yeah, I mean, they just kind of let him go. They just let him go. Like they asked him a question about Ukraine and he started like going off about

windmills. He has such a vendetta against. That's what he does. Yeah. It's fine. What I'm saying is that they're setting a ridiculous standard. what are we okay let's say trump agreed to a breaking points interview what are we supposed to do we know he's going to talk about the election yeah are we supposed to just say you can't say what you're saying because we want to be able to post this on our primary distribution platform well which is youtube here's the other thing this is a former president of the united states who is very possibly the next president of the united states and don't you think we should hear what this man has to say good bad that's why i watched it because i was like hey what's he

saying about ukraine well and i think your point yeah uh that you've made a number of times that being kicked off of twitter and deplatformed may well be the best thing that's ever happened to Donald Trump. Like, by pushing his most outrageous comments off of your platform, you're not helping things. Like, you're only helping him if your goal is to oppose him. Like, you are only helping him. First of all, he loves this storyline about being censored. He said it in the podcast.

He goes, he's like, just so you know, this is going going to be taken off youtube he put out one of his weird statements about it afterwards i mean he loves this he relishes it he's going to bring it up at rallies all of that stuff but number two like you want to keep people you know fresh in their mind of exactly who he is and how he's approaching things and what he is clearly completely obsessed about still. So you're not helping anyone or anything by not allowing people to see that. This man is the former president. Whatever he says, as insane or outrageous or wrong or lying as it might be, people need to know what it is that he's saying. So to me, this is just an outrageous, honestly, escalation of censorship. I mean, we already saw him kicked off of social media platforms. That was insane.

And then to pull his interviews is, you know, another completely, completely insane move. It's about news. We were talking about this earlier when in the Russian media block. What are we supposed to do? Our job. People trust us, millions of people, to try and parse information and deliver it to them. That requires sometimes airing a Russian news segment, if anything, just to show you that they're crazy. But now we have to tread incredibly lightly. By the way, thank you all to our premium members because you make it so that sometimes we do push it a little bit on the edge with full knowledge that it could get taken down.

Oh, we've been thinking about it a lot lately. Yes, and it's only because of the people who support us, so thank you very much. Yes. But the reason why that all of this matters is I do still believe in wanting as big of a platform as possible to have our information get to people. And in this environment where YouTube is the total information ecosystem

for so many millions and millions and millions of people, we have got to be able to present information in a fair and a proper light in the best way to inform you, not in the best way to avoid censorship of the algorithm or censorship of being taken down. And you put this together, which is what position are we being put in as a news organization? How are we supposed to cover the Trump 2024 campaign? Yeah. I mean, our State of the Union coverage, for example, we broadcast it live. We should be able to do that now if he's going to run for president.

Right. I mean, yeah, if he talks about the election stolen, fine. I mean, I will come on afterwards and be like, look, obviously I think that's wrong. Maybe it's not even necessary. But what I'm saying is we're all being put here in a very difficult situation by these policies, which may seem well-intentioned of, oh, we don't want to air election conspiracy theory. Oh, we don't want to aid Russian propaganda. But it has a tremendous impact on people whose job it is to parse and to deliver information to people. And it's making it such that we have to play some weird dance, and so does everybody else, whenever they're trying to do this. And it's the worst possible world, and also probably politically beneficial to Trump. Yeah, true. And here's the

other piece, and let's transition to our next segment. It would be one thing if the rules were consistent and applied consistently. I would love the censorship, but at least you could say, okay, I see how you're doing this. I see how you're conducting business. We can all figure out how to work with this. But here is a perfect example of how the rules are applied so haphazardly and are created in such a biased manner. Facebook and Instagram have decided in certain countries to allow calls

for violence against Russians during the war. So here's a little bit more from that. They say, as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech, such as, quote, death to the Russian invaders. We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians. This is according to a Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone. They also will temporarily allow some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. That's according to Reuters, citing internal emails detailing the change.

Let's go ahead and put Reuters up on the screen. Here are the countries that this apparently applies to. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. There's another piece of this that I'll get to in just a moment. Now, maybe this is a controversial take, but I actually think they should allow these generalized, non-specific calls for violence. I think they should be allowed, period. I mean, that's more consistent with our own First Amendment and rules regarding political speech. It's only when you get into very specific, credible threats that this becomes directly illegal.

But the issue here is that you can't just single out one country and one group of people. And say only violence against them. Just the leader of those countries and say, oh, you can call for violence against them, but nobody else. I mean, that just shows you and, you know, adds a lot of fuel to the fire of saying you aren't creating consistent standards. You're just doing the bidding of, like, the U.S. foreign policy establishment. And this isn't the first time that this has happened either. I mean, you also see, you know, they collaborate with Israel with regards to who they should censor. Yeah, which we talked about. Yeah, who they should censor in Israel. You've had a number of these instances where it very clearly seems like they are carrying water for the U.S. foreign policy establishment rather than trying to neutrally apply any sort of standard.

Right, which is, that's the ridiculous part, which is, I agree with you. I'm fully for a First Amendment call for anybody. I think most people should be able to say what they want. But to constrain the values for everybody, but then allow a call for violence to just one group of people, I'm like, OK, that's pretty crazy. Let's go and put this next one up there on the screen, which is equally disturbing, which is that before this entire thing began, Facebook temporarily was allowing praise of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian battalion, the Azov battalion, because it was fighting Russian invasion. And previously, the Azov battalion had been included on the company's dangerous individuals and organizations policy. And then it was reversed because, oh, now they're

fighting Russia. Okay, I mean, if you're fighting Russia Russia but you're a neo-Nazi, does that make you a good guy? This comes down to the ridiculous nature where Facebook employees are deciding who is praiseworthy, who is not. Whenever you're doing one thing bad but then fighting somebody who is more bad in your eyes than you're temporarily allowed to praise them, you can call for violence against Russians, but not against other people. It just comes down to a full-scale mania, which is sweeping these tech companies as to what exactly is allowed. Everybody, oh, stop Asian hate. Chinese virus was once apparently a racist term.

But full-scale boycott campaigns on Yelp and elsewhere against Russian restaurants, which is happening all across this country, oh, that's totally cool. And, you know, it's just total hypocrisy whenever it comes to the actual enforcement regime on all of this. And it just goes to show you that these big companies take their orders direct, not even just from the top, but from, like, the amorphous social mores of what's considered acceptable or not in the elites.

And it just shows us how full of it that they actually are. Yeah, so in this limited instance, the elite sentiment is like, it's okay to praise neo-Nazis a little bit. As long as they fight Russians. Yeah, as long as they're fighting Russians. So we're going to allow it for now. They really are telling on themselves in a lot of ways right now. They actually, in this Intercept report, they have published examples of the speech that Facebook now deems acceptable with regard to the Azov neo-Nazi battalion. They say, Azov movement volunteers are real heroes.

They are a much needed support to our National Guard. Or you could say, we are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last six hours. Or you could say, I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis. So that's the allowable pro-Azov speech. But they write, in a tacit acknowledgement of the group's ideology, the memo provides two examples of posts that would not be allowed under the new policy. One of them is, well done, Azov, for protecting Ukraine and its white nationalist heritage.

That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Look, in general, I would say, as a First Amendment advocate, that you should probably be able to say whatever you want. That being said, you can't have these selective enforcement regimes which make it clear that the rules are not rules. They are simply the whims of the liberals who are in charge. And if that is the case, that's very dire for the communication networks of YouTube, where millions of people get information, of Facebook, where millions of people get information, Twitter and their enforcement mechanisms. And it just leads to a fundamental distrust in how the information that is being received, being censored and more, which just leads to a population which when you distrust everything, then you believe nothing. And that's very difficult both to govern and in order to live for all of us together in a harmonious society.

And there's so little transparency here. I mean Reuters had to get their hands on internal emails to find this stuff out. And then the blacklist that has all these like organizations that you're not allowed to talk about or not allowed to praise on it. There's no transparency around who's on this list, how they're making these decisions. And so that's why I say they're really telling on themselves here, because polite society has decided for a moment that it's okay to hate Russian people, call for the violence against them, and to praise this one sect of, you know, neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi aligned figures, then Facebook's going to allow it for now. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, before Russia invaded Ukraine and Putin directly threatened nuclear war, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sounded an alarm. In their annual assessment of the risk of apocalypse, they kept the clock at a highly perilous 100 seconds to midnight. As they wrote at the time, the clock remains the closest it has ever been

to civilization ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment. You would have to imagine that given how close we've walked to the edge in recent weeks with the daily risk of a confrontation between the world's two nuclear superpowers, that metaphorical clock has got to be closer to doomsday than ever before. In fact, a viral Twitter thread asked this terrifying question that I've personally been contemplating myself a lot recently. Are we sleepwalking towards nuclear war? Mark Linus, he's a science writer and environmental activist, he writes, with each new Russian atrocity in Ukraine, calls for NATO intervention increase. Are we sleepwalking towards nuclear war? The appetite for risk is increasing with the horror of civilian casualties.

Putin is cornered and may escalate. What's the worst that can happen? And right on cue, just listen to the utter madness being spouted by one of the most dangerous neocons on the planet. That would be Senator Lindsey Graham. He rejects a potential peace deal, angles for a no-fly zone, casually dismisses the possibility such actions could land us in World War III, and once again calls for the Russian people to assassinate Putin. So I will be dead set against any deal that requires the Ukrainian

people to recognize half of the Ukraine belongs to Russia by force of arms. And if there's any chemical weapons used by Putin, that would be a war crime. And I would be supportive of a no-fly zone as response to that. You see war crimes being committed in front of you on television every day. In Ukraine, can't the U.S. and NATO allies do more? Yeah.

Without turning this into World War III? We could if we had a... Well, it's not going to be World War III. You know, this is all a bluff. Putin knows that no one wins a nuclear exchange. So if he ordered a preemptive strike on the United States, some general would shoot him in the head. I'm calling for the crushing of the Russian economy.

Even though our war and fight is not with the Russian people, it is with Putin. And the only way this war ends is with Putin either going to jail or be taken out by his own people. How do you make that happen? You help the Ukrainians. They need MiGs. Terrifying rhetoric there. Now, in a lot of ways, this is all kind of new terrain for anyone my generation or younger.

We've grown up accustomed to planetary doomsday scenarios, but more of the climate variety, not so much nuclear holocaust. The Cuban Missile Crisis, that was something we learned about in history classes long after the visceral terror of that moment had passed. As we came of age, the Cold War arms race had ended as the Soviet Union collapsed. The language of non-proliferation treaties and nuclear deterrence kind of receded from the public square. Older generations were both more aware of this threat and more poisoned by Cold War ideology, committed to the arms race and to a McCarthyist view of the world. So that today, public polling reflects that the older you are, the more likely you are to take a hawkish view of this conflict and back the most escalatory

measures. Given this landscape, the loss of the visceral sense of the threat, the hard-baked Cold War sentiment, we shouldn't be surprised, I guess, that calls are growing louder and louder to, quote, do more. This is something we've been tracking really closely here. The mania that's taken hold with shocking levels of anti-Russian bigotry and comprehensively large and rapid arms shipments and the most draconian sanctions on the planet and possibly in history. The emotional manipulation of human interest stories lacking any counterbalancing narrative of just how catastrophic a more direct intervention would ultimately be. Huge percentages of the public backing World War III-inducing actions like a no-fly zone because

of the media-driven frenzy. In a Soggers covering today, the desire among some media figures to rehab Hitler, not kidding, in order to make Putin's attack on Ukraine worse than the Holocaust. Biden, thank God, seems to at least partially understand just how perilous the moment we're in, saying clearly we will not fight World War III in Ukraine. But that hasn't stopped him from taking actions against Russia, which were previously unthinkable and which have truly pushed us to the brink of catastrophe. Not to mention the foolish legal commitments we have made to militarily defend all 30 members of NATO should Russia move beyond Ukraine. We are now just starting to see Russia's response to our actions so far. So in response to the hundreds of millions of dollars of US and NATO arms which have flooded into Ukraine, Russia is now directly threatening

the convoys carrying those arms. Their deputy foreign minister informed the Biden admin that those convoys are, quote, legitimate targets for attacks. Potential disaster was narrowly averted last week when Biden personally sank the deal to provide fighter jets to the Ukrainians, an insane move that Tony Blinken, secretary of state, and other high-level officials reportedly were pushing for. Now, in response to our indiscriminate economic sanctions targeting everyone from oligarchs to babushkas, Russia has declared what should be obvious, that they consider our sanctions to be an overt act of war. At the same time, they're potentially scuttling one of the greatest accomplishments of nonproliferation, the re-entry into the Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran.

Russia is demanding sanctions relief as part of the new JCPOA, asking for a written commitment that their ability to, quote, have free, fully-fledged trade and economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with Iran is guaranteed. The U.S. says this is a non-starter. In an ominous sign that we covered earlier, Iran's Revolutionary Guard took credit for a series of as many as 12 missiles which were just fired from Iran towards a U.S. consulate in Iraq. So this is the landscape that we are all sleepwalking through, one littered with landmines and nuclear tripwires.

Let me be absolutely clear. Putin's bluster may be exactly that. Lindsey Graham's claim that on nukes, Putin's all bark and no bite, it could be correct. But none of us should be willing to bear even the shred of a chance that Putin is crazy enough and nihilistic enough to actually do it. And none of us should delude ourselves about exactly what that means. Our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still stand as the only use of nuclear weapons in conflict. We murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and the results were so devastating that they were hidden from the American public for decades. Extensive film footage that was recorded by the Japanese and by our own military of the immediate aftermath

was classified. In fact, it's never been viewed by the public in its entirety. Newspaper articles about that devastation were completely quashed as an airtight lid was sealed over the atrocities which we had committed, substituted instead with the rather antiseptic image of the fearsome mushroom cloud. The former editor of Nuclear Times Magazine interviewed the man who oversaw the filming and the cover-up. He said, quote, I always had the sense that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force, it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those film images out because they showed effects on man, woman, and child. They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had

done at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because we were sorry for our sins. I don't know about sorry for our sins, but it's clear such images could have led to a public uprising against our policy of nuclear arms race. And keep in mind, those bombs were nothing compared to the capabilities of today. Returning to our viral Twitter thread, Mark lays out what scientists say a nuclear war would look like today. So in a scenario where the U.S. and Russia deployed half of our nuclear arsenal, quote, about 770 million people would immediately die from the blast. Acute radiation sickness in just the first few days would take out many of

those. But that's not even the worst impact. Soot from firestorms would circle the globe, destroying the ozone, mostly blocking out the sun and leading to mass crop failures and famine. Over five years, almost everyone in places like China, Russia, the UK, and the US will starve to death as food supplies rapidly disappear. Some small percentage of humans will continue the species in the now barren wasteland of planet Earth, but their daily miserable violent struggle for survival will hardly be a fate worth envying. Painting the picture of nuclear Armageddon, to be honest with you, it can make you sound like a crazy person, a hysterical loon who will in all likelihood, hopefully, be proven wrong as history marches on towards a more likely fate of decline

brought on by the less instantaneous threat from the climate crisis. But as world historic idiots like Lindsey Graham casually dismiss this threat as fake and the drumbeat to quote do more grows louder, we've got to face with clear eyes what that could actually mean. The chance might be small, it might be tiny, but the results are so devastating they should thoroughly consume us all. If we are sleepwalking towards nuclear war, it is well past time we all sound the alarm to wake the hell up. And I think we have tried to carry this message a number of times. The chance might be small, you might be right. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

All right, Sagar, what are we looking at? Well, a few weeks ago, before the crisis began, I issued a warning here. Not everything is Hitler, people. There are actually many other parallels of history of the European continent than you can compare the current Russia-Ukraine war to, especially, you know, actual wars fought between Russia and Ukraine. But that nuance is lost on the media. It's lost even on the so-called expert class and what transpired over the weekend in one of the most revolting but important episodes that we've seen in media for some time. Let's start with how it all began. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, a Russiagator and a war hawk in his own right, went on Rachel Maddow's program to castigate Joe Biden for declaring that the U.S. will never put boots on the ground in Ukraine. In it, he intimated that Putin is actually much worse than Hitler. No, I'm not kidding. Let's take a lesson. And I want to just say one other thing. I was just on Ukrainian television just 30 minutes

ago. Brave journalists, just like our team covering the war there in Kiev. And one of the commentators said something interesting about how horrific this war is. And remember, these are people who suffered under fascism that fought the Nazis. And as Nazis came, and then the Red Army came back through, one of the Russian journalists said, you know, there's one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin. Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans. He didn't kill German-speaking people. That's a very, I think people need to remember that when we're talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kiev, there are large populations there, you know, up to a third and sometimes as much to a half that are Russian speakers and are ethnic Russians. And yet Putin doesn't seem to care about that. He slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate. Oh my God. There is so much to unpack there. Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans. There are a lot of disabled or resistance fighting Germans who might disagree

with that. There are also, you know, several hundred thousand ethnic German Jews unavailable to comment as even the Auschwitz Memorial highlighted in those ignorant comments. But beyond the reason to just show you how dumb these people are, is to consider that these are the people we are being led by, who have led us or are being led by right now. That man was the US ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama. He went on national television to say that Vladimir Putin is worse than Hitler. Why? Because aside from his historical ignorant nonsense, McFaul's statement is calculated to make you believe if Putin is worse than Hitler, we have no options but to fight him in Ukraine and declare World War III. You can choose to see this as an isolated incident, or you can recognize the underlying danger in the mindset.

The reason I see that is because people who are so-called Russia experts with real influence over our discourse and our relations with that country are insanely coming out to defend McFaul's statement. Anders Osslund is the author of an influential book on Russian crony capitalism, wrote, quote, Hitler recognized Poland but called for concessions, putting absurdly claims that Ukraine is not a state. Putin absurdly claims Hitler had left the League of Nations. Putin violates every international law there is. Hitler did not use chemical weapons. Putin is preparing to do so. Obviously, six million Jews disagree with that chemical weapons point.

But does history even matter? This is not an isolated incident. Pavel Meyer, he's a former lawmaker in Germany. He jumped in as well to the discourse, noting, quote, Hitler did not use his office to extract bribes and get into bed with organized crime. So we could say in terms of civic values, Hitler was even a more decent person than Putin is, as crazy as that sounds. Yeah, it sounds pretty crazy, my dude. Once again, you are witnessing before you a concerted campaign to get associational thinking between Hitler and Putin. If that is accomplished, then you, of course, have the response, it's simple, you declare war. It has to be stopped. I find this so dangerous because in

McFaul's case, he is a professor at Stanford. He was inside the situation room helping make decisions less than a decade ago. How many more of his ilk are inside the government right now? You might cringe at what he's saying, but they agree with him, at least on the merits. That's the cost of Russiagate. The elevation of legitimately insane people to the front of the national stage, who the MSNBC audience has now been conditioned to trust. McFaul has been a fixture now on TV for nearly five years. The audience is built to trust what he has to say. He is the face of a number of Russiagators who are pushing full-scale war in Ukraine. Look no further. Alexander Vindman, you'll all remember him. He was the supposedly heroic whistleblower. He sparked Ukrainegate and the impeachment

of Donald Trump in 2019. Well, Mr. Vindman, now having left government, is openly criticizing President Biden for tweeting that the U.S. will not fight a war with Russia and Ukraine. Vindman writes, quote, Mr. President, you're inviting disaster and emboldening Putin. This declaration invites Putin to pursue every means to subdue Ukraine. Of course, the American people don't want war with Russia, but they also don't want to watch Ukrainians slaughtered. We must do more. OK, Mr. Vindman, what does do more mean? They never tell you that because it means you might have to die for their insanity. You might say, Sagar, none of this matters. Joe Biden is clearly not listening to any of these people. And I would say, thank God, you're right for now. But again and again, I've been terrified of this possibility. Joe Biden is an old man. It's not a

secret. He's nearly 80 years old. And he's clearly physically flagging. His 79-year-old, barely beating heart is the only thing standing in the way of Kamala Harris becoming the president. And if you think she has the stomach to stand up to that level of institutional insanity, you are dead, dead wrong. I have found it incredibly difficult to parse what's going on in the last two weeks. I feel as if I'm on an island. It's okay to recognize that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a terrible act, which should invite a response. It's also okay to say that the U.S. should not actively engage in any escalatory behavior to increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation against Russia. And I think it should also be okay to discuss openly in public the utility and the efficacy of the sanctions that we have deployed and their possible follow-on effects. None of that is represented in our public discourse today.

What I know is that though it may seem popular and in vogue to beat the war drums and scream at anyone who disagrees with you, that the consequences of not engaging in a thoughtful debate are dire. Look no further in our current history than the buildup to the war in Iraq, or even in the buildup to the war in Vietnam. In both cases, we saw Hitler and Munich analogies being deployed by the presidents. We saw large public support for the wars, and we saw the American people's goodwill misused against them. Today, we see widespread public support for punishing Putin. We can only hope that the American people's goodwill is not yet again squandered,

but the media environment today shows that that is very unlikely. I mean, the Vindman thing is a perfect example, right? Which is that this guy is a hero. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is Skanda Amarnath. He's the executive director of Employee America, and he's out with an interesting new plan in order to take on the gas price crisis. Let's put this up there on the screen. Caught my eye, an actually useful, actionable report here on what exactly the Biden administration can do via executive order. Skanda, thank you so much for joining the show. Go ahead and outline for us here how the

Biden administration could, if they want, actually take on gas prices at the pump for the vast majority of Americans. So thanks for having me on, Crystal and Sagar. The plan is threefold, right? So there is providing certainty about demand, providing certainty about financing, and providing certainty about supply chains. Now, I'm not going to say that the Biden administration has perfect authority in all these spaces, but they have authority that can move the needle. And right now what we see is obviously a pretty big imbalance between supply and demand in sort of crude oil markets right now. Russian supply coming offline, as it is U.S. production was lagging after the COVID-19 crisis hit. So we have had U.S. production that hasn't really ramped up and we need to provide more certainty about how we get investment and production to

really ramp up in the United States. Right now, there's been a lot of focus on all the things that the U.S. could do to lower gas prices that are kind of hitting at various sides of this, but not directly. And I would say if we actually were creating the sort of direction and incentive for investment to take place, that's one big part of the equation. We need a certain amount of oil for a certain amount of transportation demand to maintain a certain standard of living right now. Obviously, in the future, that can change. But to do that, we need demand certainty, which the SPR, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, could provide through engaging in future purchases of oil, which is what really matters for producers, providing certainty about financing.

The Exchange Stabilization Fund can provide affordable and available financing, which is a big problem actually for the oil production. For oil producers in the United States have had trouble getting access to stable financing. And then the third part of this is about supply chains, because actually supply chains have also slowed down investment in the United States. We've seen that supply chains for fracking sand or steel pipe are also a big part of why we've seen a slow ramp up in U.S. investment. And that's why U.S. production is still below its peak that we saw before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. So those are the three prongs of it.

Yeah. So just to recap, the problem that we face now is basically that we have an industry that we want to produce more in the short term, even as we want them to produce less in the long term. So what you've come up with is a plan to basically incentivize the short-term production of oil without sacrificing our ability to sort of, you know, pull back from fossil fuels in the long term. What are the responses to your idea that I saw? The thing I like about your idea is that I think it has some political possibility. None of the things that you've laid out, you know, it's I mean, I'm being honest, like

none of the things that you laid out have this instant like knee jerk, like, oh, my God, that's socialism or oh, my God, it's you know, it's horrible or it's going to destroy the planet. It's kind of balanced in that way. And so potentially politically possible. But one response I saw to it came from Matt Brunig at the People's Policy Project. And he basically says, yeah, with the right kinds of incentives, maybe the government could make the deal sweet enough to change the calculation of these investors in the short term. But why bother with that when the government could just buy out the industry and manage this process directly? Because you do have this weird landscape of short term, we want more, long term, we want less, isn't the most ideal policy solution to basically just nationalize

the oil industry and manage this process and its decline directly? Matt's a really smart guy. I really respect him. But I also think that this is an issue where both political constraints aside, there are challenges associated with state-owned enterprises in oil and gas. You can look at what's happened south of the border. That's a good example of where state-owned enterprises don't work that well. They can work well. Norway has done a good job with it. Brazil and Mexico have some problems

with sort of nationalizing industry. I think that if we just get back to some level of both political reality and I'd say who has the sort of expertise and knowledge here to actually do this effectively in the short run for this crisis? I would say there's going to have to be some give and take between industry and government. I don't think that's a bad thing right now. We have a situation where the oil industry has been burned by three oil crashes in seven years. So 2014 to 2020, we had this sort of big decline in the price of

oil that was directly tied to sort of OPEC policy. And also just in general, domestic industry was overinvested, I would say. And so we had a situation where that pushed the price of oil down. And if you're a producer who still exists now, you're reluctant to produce because one year from now, two years from now, we actually don't have a great sense of where oil prices will be. We know this Russia shock could last a long time. Maybe it may not. So that's a lot of uncertainty that they don't want to bear for some somewhat understandable and rational reasons. And their shareholders are telling them, no, don't invest. Give us back whatever profit you're making right now, because it's just too

uncertain. And every time you've kind of gone all in on an investment over the last three crashes we've seen, it doesn't pay off. So that may not be true in the future, but that's something that is an important part of why we got to where we got right now. I think it's an interesting case where shareholder capitalism is literally holding the energy markets hostage, Skanda. And, you know, there was a circulating clip of the Pioneer Oil CEO being like, listen, even if it's 150, 200 a barrel, we're not going to increase production. And I'm like, what the hell? Like, this is crazy.

And it just seems to me that the government is the only actor in this scenario which could at least realign or change the incentives, as you say, within a political world where, look, nobody on the left is ever going to subsidize oil companies, which is not going to happen. On the right, at the same time, they're like, oh, drill, baby, drill, but they don't necessarily want to spend any of the money. As you point out, we already have all of these facilities in place. So from that authority perspective, what would it take in order to see some of this actually get done? Because what I see right now is total helplessness in the oil markets. Ron Klain flying down to Venezuela being like, please drill. We need some oil. It's like that's not going to do anything, especially with this extra thick crude and our refining capacity.

Yeah. especially with this extra thick crude and our refining capacity? Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of complexities with respect to oil, but when it comes down to it, it really is supply and demand right now. And there is a lot of supply that needs to probably come online. A lot of the sanctions that we put in place are actually going to take Russian production down over time just because they are meant to sort of cripple the Russian oil and gas sector in sort of a two, three, four, five year horizon. So we actually do need to think slightly more long term as well as short term here that you're going to need a certain amount of oil, a certain amount of gas. We have enough gas in the United States, at least. Oil itself is something that requires a lot of investment just to keep production online. And we should be honest about that. And we should obviously we have like sort of bigger, longer term climate goals and environmental objectives, depending on where you sit on the

political spectrum. But we shouldn't be removed from the reality that transportation in the United States depends a lot on crude oil. And how we're going to produce that is going to take an all of the above strategy. It's going to take, and the U.S. is like the biggest producer of oil that, and really does matter for how we're going to get back to balance there. So that would be my main message here, at least. We're seeing crude oil inventories continue to go down. So there's clearly some demand outstripping supply, and we need to start thinking pretty creatively right now itself. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to hand wave away some of those concerns, though, because I mean, one of the issues with with this is that you do already have oil and gas companies

making massive profits. So to say like, oh, the American taxpayer should backstop them even further, that they should be subsidized even further. Number one, that's a hard pill to swallow. Number two, you know, as I look at this, we are so vulnerable. Why? Because we are still so dependent on fossil fuels. And if like producing our, you know, drill baby drill was going to solve the problem, well, the problem would be solved because we've been pursuing that strategy for a long time. The issue is ultimately that we are still so dependent on fossil fuels and, you know, environmentalist concerns aren't something to just like hand wave away. This is a dramatic problem that is causing massive crises in our

country and around the globe right now. So how does the what is the next phase look like where we, you know, are able to to move off of these fossil fuels when you have these companies that are so incredibly powerful? And obviously, their investor is very much interested in making sure that that never, ever happens. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing you say about what do the shareholders and the companies actually want and relative to the longer term objectives of getting off of fossil fuels, because they're not actually that misaligned in some ways and right now oil producers are taking a sort of keep it in the ground strategy right they are like reluctant to invest reluctant to um truly ramp up production to meet current needs because they're worried

about the um transition over time but also that they may just get burned by opec um deciding to ramp up production um on the other side, for environmental objectives, I don't think that, I think electric vehicles, let's be honest about how quickly we can scale that up. But I do think if we look at like a five-year time horizon or a five-year to 10-year time horizon, the ability to shift off should be much better. I think that is technology that is almost-

Why is that? Just because of the technological development or why? Well, there's technological development. Also, we don't have right now the battery supply chain is really screwed up. It's kind of a disaster. So we don't have the production capacity right now to do that. But we can over time. And I think that it's important that we do so.

I think that we have to be honest that there are real supply chain deficiencies, but also just only now is Ford and GM, are they actually investing in the sort of battery factories? You see these announcements that are happening across the country. It's going to take time for that to actually materialize to where we can actually produce cars and produce vehicles that are going to be able to shift off demand for motor fuel, which I think is something we all should be striving for in every single possible way, both in demand and the supply side.

I think just given the scale of how much Russian crude matters to the market, to the global market, we should be looking at this on the supply and the demand side. Yeah, I really appreciate all sides' analysis here, Skanda. I hope that somebody of influence will listen or read and possibly take notice. So we appreciate you joining us, man. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Thank you all so much for your support at this crazy time. I mean, we were talking in our censorship block. We have no idea when the

shoe will drop. It's very possible. I've never felt more vulnerable than currently. It's not like we're crazy conspiracy theorists. We just cover the news. And in that environment, the only people we can rely on are you. So thank you all very, very much for your support. Premium members, you're the only people who give us the security to try and push it as far as we possibly can. And in the event that it does happen, we will ultimately be okay because of all of you. But it's a very scary time out there. There's not a lot of consideration being made as to how this is going to impact the news business. And a lot of people's lives are getting ruined in terms of what's being allowed to spread or what's not, what's being allowed to question. Even playing news clips, I think that's totally bonkers and crazy, Cy.

Yeah, it's truly a hysterical environment right now. And you see the social media companies basically using that to engage in the agenda that they've been sort of pushing for a while. So thank you guys for always having our back and we will see you back here tomorrow. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country

with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to

Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. High key. Looking for your next obsession?

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about.

I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. This ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart Podcast.