Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/16/23: US Pushes Tik Tok Sale For National Security, Stock Chaos, "Lehman Moment", Jamie Dimon Bailout Meetings, Neocons Attack Trump/Desantis on Ukraine, Michigan Rolls Back "Anti Union" Law, The Fed Must Be Stopped, Biden's Controversial Ambassador

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the US pushing for a Tik Tok sale citing National Security concerns, Stock Chaos as the Credit Suisse bank struggles incite new fears, Nouriel Roubini claims we are in a "Lehman moment" as bank bubble bursts, meetings between Jamie Dimon and the Biden Treasury reveal the disgusting cronyism at the heart of the SVB bailout, CNBC humiliated over Big Bank defense, Neocons freak at Trump and Desantis takes on Ukraine, Michigan rolls back Anti-Union "Right to Work" law, Krystal and Saagar react to a Conservative author who wrote a book on Wokeness but can't describe it in an interview, Saagar looks into how Biden's pick for former Mayor Eric Garcetti to US ambassador of India isn't going well, and Krystal looks into how The Fed must be stopped after Silicon Valley failures.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of big stories breaking this morning. Big news on TikTok, continued market fallout after that SVB bailout, and another bank that may be on the brink, and it is a really big one. So we'll definitely talk about that. We also have some new details about what exactly happened behind the scenes in terms of crafting that bailout.

Jamie Dimon was involved. Nancy Pelosi was involved. Former Obama officials who are now bankers were involved. So definitely want to break all of that down for you. involved. Nancy Pelosi was involved. Former Obama officials who are now bankers were involved. So definitely want to break all of that down for you. We also are tracking the free count over Ron DeSantis' comments on Ukraine. Big news out of Michigan, where right to work has now been repealed. It's anti-union legislation. It's the first time in 60 years that a state has gone in the other direction, actually repealed right to work. And a big old debate on wokeness that Sagar

and I are going to weigh into. You guys probably have already seen this viral clip, but we wanted to react to it, potentially debate it. I don't know. We might agree. We might not. And we also have Lever News in the show. They have been doing phenomenal reporting on SVB and they have a couple of new, brand new blockbuster reports there about the deregulation that helped contribute to this entire crisis. Sagar, obviously not in the studio today down in Texas handling some personal family business. Yes. Thank you, everybody, for bearing with me. My dad got into a little bit of an accident. My

mom is in India right now on the other side of the globe. So I had to come down here on the drop of a hat and help him out. So everybody bear with me technologically and all of that. But we're still going to have a great show for everybody. Just as a reminder, though, Spotify, for those who are watching us, our beautiful faces on the premium show. Thank you so much. I really want to say to everybody who's been signing up for premium and enabling the video on their Spotify premium feed. People are absolutely loving it. I'm hearing so many from so many different listeners and others how much they like it. So as a reminder, if you become a premium sub now, you can watch the full show in the Spotify app. It's a great experience because it auto updates as soon as we possibly can.

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So people are loving it for CounterPoints as well. All right, let's get to the news because we have some big news that broke late last night. Go ahead and put this up on the screen, guys. So the Biden administration is taking a much more aggressive stance with regard to TikTok. The headline from The New York Times here is they say the U.S. pushes for TikTok sale to resolve national security concerns. The demand hardens the White House's stance toward the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese Internet company ByteDance. Let me just read a little bit from this report. They say the Biden administration wants TikTok's Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban. TikTok said on Wednesday as the White House hardens its stance, the new

demand to sell the app was delivered to TikTok in recent weeks. Two people with knowledge said it is owned by ByteDance. The move is a significant shift in the Biden administration's position toward TikTok, which has been under scrutiny over fears that Beijing could request Americans' data from the app. They had been trying to negotiate an agreement that would apply new safeguards to the data and eliminate a need for ByteDance to sell its shares in the app. But the demand for a sale hardens the administration's approach, harkens back to the position of former President Donald Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company. So, Sagar, what do you make of this? What is the significance of this shift? And, you know,

do you think it's the right move? Oh, I absolutely think it's the right move. And let me just take a step back and explain to people why the Trump administration's attempt here failed. So the reason that the Trump attempt to force a sale of part of TikTok to Oracle failed is because U.S. investors in ByteDance, the Chinese holding company, were able to sue and say that it was a violation of their fiduciary rights. Now, what has ended up happening is that the Biden administration has endorsed a bipartisan bill in Congress by Senator Mark Warner and some other Republicans that would actually give the president the unilateral authority to ban the app without having to go through the process

in court. So what Biden has communicated to TikTok here is you can either force a sale or when this legislation passes, we will just straight up ban you. It gives them the hammer that Trump did not have in his arsenal while he was the president. And also, frankly, just straight up ban you. It gives them the hammer that Trump did not have in his arsenal while he was the president. And also, frankly, just because he didn't do it in a competent enough manner and basically just lost interest. So a forced sale here would require ByteDance to completely divest itself of any ownership stake in TikTok. That is going to be very difficult for a number of reasons. Number one, even if ByteDance and its CEO, Zhang Ximing, agreed to sell TikTok to a U.S. investor, A, it needs to be valued properly for

ByteDance shareholders in China, but B, it has to be approved by Chinese regulators. Now, why would China voluntarily allow one of the greatest spyware apps of all time that potentially over 100 million Americans are coming to contact with almost on a daily basis and approve that on a regulatory manner. To them, the money is secondary and the soft power use of TikTok has always been number one. And then two, on the Biden side, having the authority to ban it and to try and force a sale, they are going to have to then get involved on the deal breaking brokering process, almost like they are within the banks, because it will be difficult for somebody to raise the amount of capital to actually buy TikTok. I mean, we should remember this is a social media app

on par with Facebook and with Google. I mean, it's a gigantic company. It's making oodles of money in its advertising. It's actually quite innovative in terms of not only its algorithm, but a lot of its new advertising strategy. So I'm personally a bit dubious, Crystal, that a forced sale will occur because even if somebody were to come up with, who knows? I mean, we could be talking about $100, $200 billion in a financing deal in the U.S. or even some sort of conglomerate ownership stake. Will the Chinese regulators even sign off on this? So I don't think that the future is long for TikTok in this world here in the U.S. So you think they're basically going to dare the U.S. administration to ban TikTok rather than allow it to be sold?

Because then they, you know, they're not really getting anything out of it if it gets sold to a third party. Let's think about it from our perspective. Right now, China does not allow any U.S.-based social media company to operate in China. Let's say China was like, OK, Facebook, you have to sell Facebook to a Chinese company. Would we really allow them to do that? Like, just think about it from our perspective, our tech. ByteDance is a sign of serious pride inside of China. It's one of the most successful technology companies literally of all time. It's genuinely revolutionary in the social media world. And it's also, they have proprietary algorithms and technology that they use on their own version of TikTok inside of China. So just for that reason, I'm dubious that

they would actually allow the intellectual property and the sale to go through. But look, I could be totally wrong. It could be that ByteDance and its CEO are able to finagle this through the CCP. But given the way that we know that Xi Jinping has approached Chinese tech companies, I think that the day of deference to money, to capitalism and to these tech CEOs, it's kind of long been over in China. That's why they threw Jack Ma basically in a prison for a couple of months and showed him who's boss took the alley IPO and all that off. And it was specifically to show them they're like, look, the party is in charge. All private business is subject to the interests of the CCP. Again, I could be totally wrong, but, you know, just from

a pure capital perspective, look, we're in a down market right now. Tech companies obviously are not doing so well. It's probably the worst time to try and pursue a forced sale. And on top of that, Chinese regulators would have to pursue it. So it is certainly possible. I shouldn't speak too declaratively, but for a lot of the reasons that I'm laying out here, I think it will be difficult for them to try any sort of sale. It's possible, though. It certainly is. Well, there are some corporate aligned incentives for the Biden administration to ban it because obviously TikTok has been eating everyone's lunch, especially where teenagers and young people are concerned. So, you know, Zuckerberg would be super happy. Elon would be

super happy. And especially Google, owner, of course, of YouTube, would be incredibly happy because all of these companies have been trying to effectively replicate the magic that TikTok has with their algorithm, their for you page, these short, you know, viral videos that have caught fire among young people in this country. So, you know, they would be happy certainly to have one of their competitors knocked off the playing field. And it always makes something more likely to happen when corporate America is going to be on your side and going to be behind you in terms of taking that action. That's such an excellent point. No single company has suffered more because of TikTok than Meta. I mean, Facebook and Instagram daily active users amongst teenagers plummeted. TikTok basically is eating their lunch.

YouTube has, you know, they're attempting with shorts, Instagram, obviously with reels. And I'm sure, you know, Twitter, Snapchat, I know also has been trying to play in this game. But you're right. And one of the this is why it's complicated. I don't want to say we should ban it in order to benefit Facebook. I think a better way to do it would be the way that the Indians have it. So Instagram Reels did not necessarily take the lion's share of what the Indian user base was using TikTok for. There were a variety of new competitors that sprang up in the space. So I think it would be ideal to have some maybe a revival of Vine. But in my, you know, in my opinion, a brand new or a new

actual Wild West type competition for this type of technology and this user, so it doesn't just get rolled up into a larger technology company. So I want to acknowledge that you're right, which is that there's a reason that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, after basically at one point, allegedly offering to name his child after Xi Jinping in 2015 to get Facebook in there,

is now like, I am a great big American warrior. And that's why we need to ban TikTok. I'm like, get out of here, man. You would sell your soul if you could go into China. And it's not like any of these people are like really serious about privacy concerns either. So that's all, you know, that's all a farce. I mean, listen, let's be real. The most likely thing to happen if TikTok is banned is that those users are going to go to the existing platforms because they have gigantic monopolies.

And at this point, they've had some time to try to build, you know, capabilities and functions on their own platforms that replicate some of what TikTok ultimately did. But, you know, I think the security, national security concerns here are obviously legitimate. And just one final note on this. Apparently, the CEO of TikTok is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week. He's, of course, expected to face questions about the apps tied to China, as well as concerns that delivers harmful content to young people. So that will be something to keep an eye on. All right. We want to shift to what is happening this morning in terms of the stock markets.

There has been it's been kind of a roller coaster ride ever since the Biden administration announced their big bailout of SVB backstopping all the depositors, not really just SVB or even Signature, but really kind of tacitly all depositors across the country, announcing a new lending facility at the Fed to try to shore up the balance sheets and profiles of midsize banks. So initially there was encouraging signs, then shares dropped, then they were back up. And then the latest fallout has a lot to do with the fact that Credit Suisse, which is a gigantic bank, announced that they were on shaky ground. And one of their biggest financial backers also said they were not going to give them an infusion of cash. So that created more uncertainty in the market. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is the very latest from CNBC this morning. Apparently, Dow futures are down. Regional bank shares dropped. Their

analysis here is that futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell Thursday as regional banks slid once again on growing fears of a crisis in banking within the U.S. and Europe. Credit Suisse announced overnight they will borrow up to nearly $54 billion from the Swiss National Bank to try to assure short-term liquidity that did offer some relief, but ultimately looks like not enough to quell fears on Wall Street this morning. And just to give you a sense of what things have been looking like in these markets and what a wild ride it has been this week, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. You can see here, there's a chart. This

from Neil Irwin. He says, just your standard issue, 40 plus basis point drop in the two year yield on treasuries blowing through Monday's lows. Very cool, very normal. And for those who aren't, you know, well steeped in all the financial jargon, et cetera, all this means is it's a sign that investors are fleeing for safety. That's what this indicates. They're worried about the volatility and they are fleeing to what they consider to be the safest of assets, these two-year treasury bonds. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen because it spells out the issues with Credit Suisse. So what happened here is they put out a statement that said effectively, like, we got some problems. And they went to one of their top lenders to try to secure some additional funding. They said no. And so that is what created this fallout in the European markets.

Now, yesterday, we got an announcement from the Swiss National Bank that they will provide liquidity to Credit Suisse if necessary in hopes of shoring up the fallout that's happening there because SVB is nothing compared to the size of Credit Suisse, truly. So if there were really major issues there, that would be a huge problem, not just for Europe,

but for all of global banking. This is really crazy. And it's actually interesting to take a step back and realize that what happened to SVB, while SVB very much was irresponsible with the way that they handled their balance sheet, it did reveal a ticking time bomb, kind of the center of all banking, which is that because they were reliant so much heavily on treasuries and in their asset balance sheet in order to cover their deposits, whenever the Federal Reserve was increasing rates and decreasing that amount, you had the exact same time you had capital crunches across

the entire industry and you made money more expensive to borrow, people were actually tapping into their real hard-earned cash. So you both devalued the assets that a lot of these banks were purchasing that they deemed safe, and they also had to increase the amount of cash that they were giving out. So this isn't quite what happened with mortgage-backed securities, but I think it's an unintended consequence of the Federal Reserve. And to me, look, I mean, it just – it reveals all of these people who are so-called geniuses that make the financial system run from the Federal Reserve to the Department of Treasury to these highly paid multimillionaire, hundred millionaire bankers. They don't know what they're doing. And when they don't know what they're doing, who actually steps in?

In this case, it might be the Swiss taxpayer. Who knows how much more the U.S. taxpayer may be on the hook here. But clearly, we are seeing contagion within the market that goes deep. And I think that says a lot. Also, because, Crystal, now the bankers are more upset about the Fed. Now the financial media is willing to step in and talk about the Federal Reserve and its problems, not when they were trying to intentionally make people be unemployed. No, no, no, no. That was completely fine. It didn't bear any scrutiny. Yes. But now that their asses are on the line and those of their friends,

suddenly there's a lot of freak out and a lot of attention being paid to what exactly the Fed is going to do, whether they're going to continue to lift rates or whether they're going to go in the opposite direction. And I actually, in my monologue, I'm doing a deep dive on the many, many Fed failures that contributed to getting us to this point. And that, you know, that doesn't absolve the sins of the bank managers at Silicon Valley Bank or any of these other places. But, you know, they were, as regulators, completely asleep at the switch and helped with their interest rate actions, both in providing easy money for so long and then with the speed that they've been hiking

interest rates, they helped create these conditions of panic and contagion that we are seeing now. Just to give you a little bit more of the backstory here with regard to Credit Suisse, which I think is important, they announced on Tuesday they had found, quote, material weakness in their financial reporting process from prior years. So that's what set off the initial freakout. Then they went to the Saudi National Bank, which is their largest financial backer. And they were like, nah, we're not going to help you out on this one. So that's what really led to the spiraling situation. I think it's also important to point out, and we've probably done some reporting on this in the past in our show, that Credit Suisse is not the most above board of banks. I mean, Swiss banks, obviously famous for being like, you know, places where the worst

people in the world go to bank because of their intense secrecy and privacy laws. They, you know, were caught maintaining there was a big leak of their data. They were caught maintaining bank accounts for a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend, executives who looted Venezuela's state oil company, corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine, et cetera. In any case, so there's a lot of legacy issues, let's say, with Credit Suisse. And now this latest turmoil is not just impacting them, obviously not just impacting Switzerland, but European stocks have really taken a hit. And stocks of large banks, including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, they all have suffered as people get more concerned about where this could all end up. So let's talk about some of the

analysis, some of the more alarming analysis of how this could all ultimately play out. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. Or I guess we have a thought actually from Nouriel Roubini, who's a famed economist, talking about the fallout from Credit Suisse and warning that this could be a Lehman Brothers moment for European and for global markets. Let's take a listen to that. However, the problem is that Credit Suisse, by some standards, might be too big to fail, but also too big to be saved. It's not clear that unlike the United States, the federal system has enough resources to engineer a bailout. The SDP was only about $150 billion of assets, while in the case of Credit Suisse, we're speaking about at least $700 billion.

So anything will happen to Credit Suisse will be of systemic effect for not just the European financial system, but also for the global financial system. So if Silicon Valley Bank creates ripple effects in the global financial market, something bad happening to Credit Suisse will be an order of magnitude more severe, something more like a Lehman moment. Something more like a Lehman moment. What did you make of that, Zagar? Yeah, I mean, look, I think we should take it. You know, I referenced this.

I was reading Too Big to Fail, also rereading it on the flight down here to Texas. And something that really comes through throughout all of it was the greed with the bankers up until the very last moment where they wanted to get the best deal possible, even though they were the ones that caused the system. But also the indifference of federal regulators who they're really just playing completely off the seat. You know, sometimes they're like, no, we're not going to have moral. We have to make sure we don't put moral hazard. We're going to to have moral hat. We have to make sure we don't put moral hazard. We're going to let Lehman fail. And then, oh, and then they completely panic, bail out AIG, pass TARP, bail out every large bank and broker deals. But Bear Stearns get one deal. Lehman doesn't get another one. The haphazard nature of it just shows you these people, again, they're not gods and

kings. They're just like the rest of us. They barely have any idea what they're doing. But the consequences are so, so high. So the lesson of Lehman moment really, to me, is we have no idea what's going to happen. The best answer was to have to have good regulation in place is step one, which we know that Dodd-Frank was insufficient to start with. And then it's been shipped away and rolled back in the ensuing years. And then you have regulators that obviously were not paying attention. I mean, with Silicon Valley Bank in particular, we know a lot of details of what went wrong there at this point. There were internal concerns that were raised with executives about exactly what their balance sheet looked like. I mean, so this was entirely predictable and was, in fact, predicted not only by people who were inside of that bank viewing, you know, what the balance sheet looked like and, you know, using their brains to realize that they had tremendous, tremendous risk due to the Fed continuing to hike rates and the concentration of their clients and relying on depositors that were all Silicon Valley venture-backed startups. So you had that. You also had an outside short seller who has been for months saying Silicon

Valley Bank is in trouble. Just look based on publicly available information. Look at what this balance sheet looks like. But somehow regulators were caught completely unaware. As you pointed out previously, Sagar, not even on the list of potentially troubled banks. So I thought it was interesting. Ray Dalio, who is the founder of Bridgewater, he had an analysis of what is going on now. And again, I do think it is really worth emphasizing. None of these people gave a shit about the Fed hiking rates until suddenly it was the

banking sector that was having trouble. When it was regular people whose jobs were at stake and the policy was actively being engineered to hurt them, they didn't care. Suddenly, they're very interested. OK, let's put Ray Dalio's LinkedIn post that he has up on the screen here. He says, what I think about the Silicon Valley bank situation and his analysis. And I think this is interesting. He says, I think it is a very classic event in the very classic bubble bursting part of the short term debt cycle, which lasts about seven years, give or take about three, in which the tight money hiking rates, leads to a self-reinforcing debt credit contraction

that takes place via a domino falling like contagion process that continues until central banks create easy money that negates the debt credit contraction, thus producing more new credit and debt, which creates the seeds for the next big debt problem until these short-term cycles build up the debt assets and liabilities to the point that they are unsustainable. And the whole thing collapses in a debt restructuring and debt monetization, which typically happens about once every 75 years, give or take about 25 years. So to put that in the plainest language that I can, basically, the Fed created a bubble, inflated a bubble over years and years of basically zero interest rates. And certainly during the coronavirus crisis, when they, you know, injected trillions of dollars into the system to backstop bonds and all sorts of treasuries and all sorts of other things. OK, so they created this bubble. They have now popped this bubble and there's going to be a

cycle of, you know, potential recession, contagion, freak out, et cetera, until the Federal Reserve versus course and starts reinflating the bubble. And they will continue in this cycle until you have some massive sort of blow of explosion that is too big in terms of our economic situation for them to be able to resolve just with hiking rates or loose or loosening policy? Well, you know, the actual answer to this is called Congress. It's called fiscal policy. We're not supposed to be run by barons in the Federal Reserve. We are supposed to have a democratic republic where we get to weigh in and pass laws so that the ways that we conduct commerce don't put us all in danger once every 25 years.

I mean, it's not that long since 2008. The really crazy part when you read these books is how many of the same people are running the same banks after they crashed the economy into the ground in 2008. So we have the very same people in charge here. What the hell is going on? I don't know. I can't help but step back and take a less detached view of this and say we have got to step in and do our jobs to make sure that this stuff doesn't keep happening. But we don't because everybody is making too much goddamn money at the top. Yeah, well, and there it has been since the Clinton administration that we were we had a president where there was not extraordinary action taken by the Fed. So we are on this merry-go-round that Dalio describes here. And it's sort of spinning faster and faster because, you know, the bailouts in 2008 were really obvious and really clear and set our politics on a crazy course that we're

still reckoning with now. But, you know, the bailouts during the coronavirus crisis were extraordinary as well. And again, it was because there's an understanding that Congress and the actual like parts of our democracy that the people have a say in are utterly dysfunctional. So they have these mechanisms in place that with regard to the Fed, they're able to leverage to backstop the wealthiest and best connected among us, while anybody else is just screwed and hoping that maybe one day the Congress will get around to dealing with their problems. And, you know, it's become particularly clear because it is true inflation affects everybody. It's devastating for working class people.

It really is important that it be dealt with. But as we've been wondering from the beginning and raising a lot of questions about, it was never clear that hiking interest rates, the Fed hiking interest rates, was actually gonna deal with that issue. And in fact, it hasn't, right? We just got new inflation numbers that were not good.

So even though they've embarked on this extraordinary course and, you know, potentially broken some important things in the economy, it still has not gotten inflation under control because the Fed can't end the war in Ukraine. The Fed can't, you know, unscrew our supply chain issues. The Fed can't end the climate crisis, which is also contributing to additional supply chain issues. And so even though they continue tightening and tightening and tightening at the expense of working people, it's not actually dealing with the issue that they claim and purport to be trying to solve. Yeah, I think that's well said. There's two ways to solve inflation, supply side, demand side. You can try both, but we're only trying one. And when you try

one, crazy stuff happens. I don't think there's another way to say it. And I have one more piece here for you, sort of echoing what Dalio was saying. Go ahead and put this up on the screen from The Guardian. CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, says that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank could just be the start of a slow rolling crisis in the financial system with more seizures and shutdowns coming. So a lot of warnings here about where we are headed. He says it's too early to know how widespread the damage is. The regulatory response has so far been swift and decisive actions have helped stave off contagion risks, but markets remain on edge. I mean, I actually have some real questions about that. In some ways, I think the fact that the federal

government had such an over the top response actually may have freaked investors out more because what we've seen more, what we were warned of was bank runs of depositors pulling their cash. And that may have happened to some extent. But what we have seen much more than that is investors who are herd beasts freaking out because of the over-the-top reaction of the federal government and, you know, pulling their money from the stocks of these various banks. I think that's a great point. And I don't think we should lose sight, though, of who is actually making a ton of money from that. And this is the banks. Like, you're right.

That may be the case in terms of their stock. But, you know, they have got that extraordinary Fed bailout that they've been able to backstop on. And I think your point is a good one. Another lesson from 2008, whenever investors realized that the federal government was taking the actions that it was in some cases that actually triggered stock collapses because people were like, if the Feds have to step in, there's no private market solution, then this thing is dead if we have to rely completely on the government to save it. Right. Yeah.

No, I think that's a great point. And it's also a great way to transition into we now have three different behind the scenes looks at the way that this bailout came together. You know, they're all like, oh, my God, an extraordinary 72 hours, et cetera. The framing of all these pieces, I don't know whether it's really accurate or not, basically, is that Biden was very reluctant to do much of anything here. And then through a series of conversations with various wealthy and individual and well-connected people, they came around to doing, taking the absolutely extraordinary measures that we have detailed here at great length

on this show. You're going to love, let's go and put this first one up on the screen. This was flagged by Peter Conte Brown, who, by the way, is a great follow in terms of if you're interested in different financial analysis. Very interesting guy. He says, he points out that Jamie Dimon was flagged in this New York Times piece

as being influential in convincing the Deputy treasury secretary that there were real problems here. He says, if the fact that Jamie Dimon told the deputy treasury secretary there was potential contagion without a banking bailout played a significant role in this, I might lose a part of my soul. And this is from the New York Times report. What they say is on Friday afternoon, this is when, you know, the regulators have already come in and shut down SVB. The deputy treasury secretary met with Jamie Dimon, CEO, of course, of JPMorgan Chase & Co. at Mr. Dimon's office in New York.

Could the failure of the SVB, the mega startup lender that had just collapsed, spread to other banks and create a systemic risk to the financial system? There is potential, Mr. Dimon said, according to people familiar with the conversation. So basically what you have here, Sagar, is the deputy treasury secretary going to ask a banker if he thinks that banks should get a bailout. Some things never change, Crystal. Jamie Diamond being one of them, the other being, if you actually read that article too, it's astounding. They're like, Wally Ademio met with Diamond at his office. And you're like, wait, why is the Treasury Secretary at the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase? I thought that the government was the one who was in charge and that they are supposed to come to you.

So you're basically going in. And then, you know, this is how I love how all this stuff works, because it just it takes the entire curtain back and we can all see. They're like further conversations happened at a private dinner where top banking regulators in the Senate were with a bunch of Wall Street billionaires. It was a prearranged dinner. And you're like, wait, so why were you on a dinner rehearsal? Yeah, here I've got that part. Let's go in for the New York Times piece up on the screen, because I mean, we have to go through some of these details because it truly is just absolute mask off for who our government cares about, who they're talking to, how things actually happen and get done. The headline here from the New York Times is how Washington decided to rescue Silicon Valley Bank's depositors. Officials were initially unsure

about the need for the measures they eventually announced to shore up the financial system, but changed their minds quickly after conversations like, you know, the ones with Jamie Dimon, et cetera. Here's the part you were referring to, Sagar. They say a dramatic government intervention seemed unlikely on Thursday evening when Peter Orszag, former President Barack Obama's first budget director and now CEO of financial advisory at the Bank Lazard, hosted a previously scheduled dinner at the bank's offices in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Among those in attendance were the aforementioned deputy treasury secretary, pair of influential senators, Mike Crapo, Republican of Crapo, I guess I'm supposed to say, Republican of Idaho, Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Both were

sponsors of that terrible law that actually rolled back regulations. You also had Blair Efron, a large Democratic donor whose firm Centerview Partners had just been hired by Silicon Valley Bank to advise it on its liquidity crunch. Mr. Efron and the deputy treasury secretary spoke as it became evident that SVB was running out of options and that a sale or some bigger intervention might be necessary. You also have details here about how Lael Brainard, who's the new director of Biden's National Economic Council, was flooded with phone calls from, you know, wealthy investors and other people who had real skin in the game in terms of Silicon Valley situation, you know, telling her that she really needed to make sure that they were doing what was necessary.

They have this great line here. They say other officials across the administration were skeptical, worrying that the lobbying blitz Ms. Brainard and others were receiving was purely a sign of wealthy investors trying to force the government to backstop their losses. A couple more highlights that I cannot leave out here. Gavin Newsom, who Ken Klippenstein has reported, had accounts at this bank. I guess they were involved with like the financing of his wineries, vineyards. None of that was disclosed, of course, but he was pressuring Biden aggressively for government intervention. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, was cornering Steve Ruschetti, a top White House aide at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington.

And you had a host of other influential Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and others, Maxine Waters and others from the California delegation who were also very critical. I could go on here, but I think you get the point of exactly how many like wealthy, influential people who had stood to lose money or whose friends stood to lose money were involved in crafting this bailout. Yeah. What's the George Carlin saying? It's a big club and you ain't in it. I mean, look, that that's that's my only takeaway. You're a small business. You have a problem. Good luck. You're going to be on the waiting list for your bank. Wait an hour and a half. You're somebody who has a problem. Your bank adds an extra fee for your checking account, two and a half hours on the phone to maybe get yelled at and told no by a customer service representative. You're a multi-billionaire. Your money goes down in Silicon Valley Bank. You just call the head of the National

Economic Council. You get to see somebody at dinner and buttonhole them. This is the clearest evidence and shows you the system is rigged. It's not for you. It is literally not to your benefit. It is 100% designed for them to protect all of their wealth in the guise of public service. And it's specifically the California governor who's, remember this too, it's not just the feds that took over Silicon Valley Bank. It was also California financial authorities of which we can assume he has some say over. It's a massive, massive conflict of interest all the way here up to the top. Will he ever recuse himself or apologize for any of this? Absolutely not. It's just, I don't know. I don't know what else to say. I want to say the reporting here from the Times,

Washington Post, go ahead and put the Washington Post up on the screen. This was in part one of the journalists on this was Jeff Stein. This is very revealing. And I'm very grateful for this reporting about who they were speaking to, et cetera. This is actually the one that talks about the gridiron dinner. They also highlight sounding alarms where the likes of Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, a major VC, a prolific donor to Democrats, including Biden. He took his concerns to Democratic lawmakers and administration officials. Ron Conway, another of the area's leading investors with original stakes in Airbnb, Facebook and Google, worked with Pelosi and Newsom to put pressure on the

White House, Treasury Department and elected officials. Politico had their own piece. They really focused on the fact that Biden's inner circle, in order to try to pressure him, go ahead and put this last air sheet up on the screen, there it is, in order to try to pressure him into taking the action that they had been persuaded by Jamie Dimon and Reid Hoffman needed to be taken, they emphasized a potential impact on workers' paychecks. They believed it would resonate both with the president and the public, said one of the people familiar with the deliberations. They urged Biden to speak to the public before U.S. markets opened to ward off runs on other regional banks. And again, let me just say for the millionth time, none of these people cared about the Fed policy of hiking rates explicitly to push workers out of the job. But now they're fixated on, you

know, the impact on workers' paychecks. Now they care when it's, you know, wealthy, well-connected, their friends and buddies who are blowing up their phones. Suddenly they need to push for extraordinary action here. It's so incredibly revealing of exactly how this town works. You know, people in East Palestine who still don't know whether their water is safe. They're not able to buttonhole Steve Ruschetti at the freaking gridiron dinner. They don't have previously scheduled dinners in New York at some bankers offices with Mark Warner and Crapo and the deputy treasury secretary, and they are left completely out in the cold. This level of access and control by the wealthy, the well-connected, the influential, the big donor class, you know, Reid Hoffman is maybe the largest Democratic donor.

It is so revealing the way this all ultimately came together. Yeah. Listen, those meals at the French Laundry, they don't pay themselves. Somebody's got to pay the tab. You think those haircuts are cheap? Looking like a vampire 24-7? That's an expensive game. So somebody's got to pay for it.

Might as well be us, right? Might as well be the taxpayers, apparently. There was an extraordinary moment. So Elizabeth Warren, every once in a while, you get a little bit of vintage Warren comes out and reminds you what she used to be and what she used to focus on. So she has been very aggressive in terms of, you know, the bailout. And she has for a while been very aggressive in questioning the direction of the Fed. She clearly

is not a fan of Jerome Powell, the current Fed chair. She got asked one of the dumbest questions I literally have ever seen asked in an appearance on CNBC when the host asked her whether it would be sufficient for banks to just stress test themselves. Take a listen. Even those are much smaller, though, than the bigger banks that are more than 250 billion. And we've had a number of those CEOs on the shows in the last few days, Fifth Third, Schwab. They do their own stress testing. Not everyone was behaving in a risk profile, in a risk manner that Silicon Valley Bank does. I'm sorry. I taught school for many, many years, and I did not let my students do their own testing. The testing that is meaningful is the testing that comes from the outside.

And it's also the testing where you don't give the answers in advance. The whole point of stress testing is for someone on the outside of the bank to say, hmm, what could go wrong here? And to make sure that the bank could withstand those kinds of problems, like a sudden increase in interest rates. That's the point behind the stress testing. And for these banks to say, not to worry, we're testing ourselves is truly laughable. I mean, honestly, she probably could have just ended her answer after laughing in that lady's

face. Yeah, that's all that you should. CNBC is truly wild because it's one of those where they every once in a while, sometimes they do really good stuff. I know some people who work there and when they keep it down the middle. Shout out to Brian Schwartz, he's a great journalist. Right. Yeah. Brian Schwartz does some of the best reporting in the game in terms of big donor money and how it's all working up there at the top. But man, mask off moment. These banks stress test themselves. Can you imagine saying that? Especially, I couldn't even say that in a normal time. Why would you say it now in the middle of a potential Lehman moment financial crisis? And you're like, why should these banks be stress tested by the, what? You know, by the way,

they do, They were stress testing themselves in 2007 and 2008. How did that work out? That's the entire point of the goddamn stress test. It's nuts. Yeah. I love to the way she frames it. She's like, well, I've been talking to a lot of CEOs of these banks and they assure me they're good to go. They do their own stress testing. No need to worry. It's like, oh, my God, it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. At the same time, Warren, like I said, has been very aggressive on this. I think she and Katie Porter have been kind of standouts in terms of demanding answers. So there's now been announced there's going to be a review of Silicon Valley Bank, the poor risk management decisions and the bonuses that were handed out

on the day of the FDIC regulators coming in and shutting down the bank, the stock sales that occurred in the weeks and months prior to the bank's utter collapse. And Elizabeth Warren put this up on the screen. She has written a letter calling for Jay Powell to recuse himself from the review of SVB. What she says here is Fed Chair Powell's actions to allow big banks like Silicon Valley Bank to boost their profits by loading up on risk directly contributed to these bank failures for the Fed's inquiry to have credibility. Powell must publicly and immediately recuse himself from this internal review. It's appropriate for vice chair, for supervision Barr to have the independence necessary to do his job. So she is certainly

using this opportunity to push Jerome Powell even further than she already has been in previous interactions with him, some of which we played here. Let's hope, but unfortunately in Congress right now with the way that the Republicans have already been acting Nancy Mace, I think, was out there being like, why are we pointing fingers in the middle of a crisis? I'm like, well, wait, isn't that the whole point? Whenever you have a taxpayer bailout? I mean, and look, for all the semantics, you could say whatever you want. Maybe no taxpayer money will be involved. I still actually have yet to see any proof of that. When the full faith and credit of the United States is the only thing holding up your private business, then you're not actually a private business. Okay. You know, here at BP, we stand on our own feet as every other small business, literally across the country. We don't need somebody to come in and say, actually, your cameras are worth more than they actually are to make sure that we can float and stay above. They would laugh in your face if you're any other business on earth.

No, they wouldn't laugh in your face. They would like send you to prison. Yeah, you're right. Called accounting fraud. Yeah. Right. But, you know, if you're if you're friends with Jamie Dimon and you're going to dinners at, you know, bankers offices with Mark Warner and Creepo and whoever, then you'll you'll

get a little bit of different treatment. And I do want to say, you know, with regards to anything happening here, first of all, the Biden administration dropped the ball. If they wanted new regulations put in place, the time to push for it would have been before you offer the bailout. You have to get something from these people at least to start to demand, like, this is what I want to see on my desk from Congress in response to these actions. So that's number one. Number two, Mark Warner, who was one of the, what was it, 16 or 17 Democrats who voted alongside all 50 of the Republicans to deregulate these banks in particular back during

the Trump era, he was asked on the Sunday shows, hey, you know, would you rethink that vote? Did you maybe take the wrong approach here? He doubled down. He stood by it. He's like, no, I think they needed a lighter regulatory touch. It's like, really? Even now, as you look at this, you can't admit that this was a disaster and a mistake. No, he's standing by it, Sager. Yeah, you know, of course he is. And all of these people, this is part of the problem. We talked about this with Iraq. Iraq is on the mind because we're coming up on the 20th anniversary in a couple of days. And, you know, it's the details get convoluted and the general public knows that things are wrong, but they're not following every single nitty gritty reason as to why something happens.

And then enough time passes before the truth eventually comes out. And then, boom, by Big Short, and from a lot of the books and analysis of the global financial crisis, maybe a year and a half so afterwards. But by that time, Dodd-Frank was basically all lost. So by the time it entered into the public consciousness, public policy and everybody had all just kind of moved on. And of course, the media, as we showed with the CNBC clip, they're just carrying water for these people. So it's tough. I don't really know how to fix it. 100%. 100%. with a CNBC clip, they're just carrying water for these people. So it's tough. I don't really know how to fix it. 100 percent. 100 percent. All right, let's move on to a little bit of a freakout over some comments that Ron DeSantis made and also comments that Trump has made with

regard to how they would approach the war in Ukraine. Our friends, Emily and Ryan over on CounterPoints, covered the responses that DeSantis and others sent in to Tucker Carlson. You'll recall he put out a questionnaire and said, hey, if you're running for president on the Republican side, I want to hear from you. Here are the questions I have. Go ahead and fill it out and send it in so we can talk about it here on the show. And a number of people did, including Ron DeSantis. And he positioned himself, you know, he's been kind of like trying to have it both ways in terms of Ukraine. And he's still with the even with this statement kind of left himself some wiggle room, but much more clear statement on the side of the Ukraine skeptics. And this has created a full blown freak out among, you know, a bunch of the Rupert Murdoch properties that have been very friendly to Ron DeSantis.

A lot of the sort of like donor class, very upset about this. And of course, neocons like Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, et cetera, who are current office holders. But let's start with this. This pertains specifically to Trump. And Sagar, I want to get your reaction to all of this because I know you have many thoughts. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Guys, this is from the former NATO chief. He says it would be a geopolitical catastrophe if Trump were to be nominated because in the campaign, his influence would be destructive. He's talking about the fact that, you know, even if he just wins the nomination and loses the general election, that he is pushing the Republicans to be more Ukraine skeptical, more skeptical of

additional aid. Let me just read a little bit more of this. He says the former, by the way, this former NATO chief, whose last name is Rasmussen, serves as an advisor to the Ukrainian government and recently came to Washington to see members of Congress and Biden administration officials. He is lobbying them to supply more and heavier weapons and to make long-term security guarantees to Ukraine. He also predicts that Biden will wind up sending warplanes, calling it merely, quote, a question of time. So this person is, says that Trump's views on Ukraine are a geopolitical catastrophe. These people don't actually believe in democracy. If Donald J. Trump is nominated or Ron DeSantis is nominated by the GOP primary democratic process, that is a reflection of the views of people in the United States of America.

Now, listen, I have a definite critique of our primary system. There's a lot of things that we could do. But based upon all the polling data that we have, this is not a fringe view. Almost 50 percent of Americans agree with the way the approach and the rhetoric that Trump and DeSantis laid out there. As you said, let's be careful with DeSantis. He did leave himself a significant amount of wiggle room. But what really strikes me is the anti-democratic nature of all of this, which is shut up. This is about democracy. This is about autocracy. This is about, you know, things that are much bigger than you could ever understand, like NATO and all that.

And that's part of the reason why we're not really allowed to ask any of the real politic questions here about, well, what if this does draw us into a broader war? At what point do Ukrainian interests actually subjugate American interests? At what point would American interests diverge completely from Ukraine? Whatever's in the best interest of Ukraine and whatever's in the best interest of America, the neocons like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are saying that they're one to one. There is no state on the planet of which there is a one to one relationship for the U.S. and anyone else. So their inability to articulate it that way is fundamentally anti-democratic. And it reminds me of the way that a lot of the generals and the foreign policy intelligentsia reacted to the Trump candidacy in 2016 when he laid out a consistent rhetorical – again, not on policy – rhetorical America first vision of the U.S.

approach to NATO and specifically really to the U.S. of the world with our trade deals. Everybody in the kind of Atlantic religion of basically what I've been starting to call it in terms of their pledging support to Ukraine and all that, it has much more to do with ideology than it ever really has to do with making a case to people. So if you believe it would be a geopolitical catastrophe, then run on it. I think that DeSantis and Trump's view is extremely underrepresented in American politics. And should it come to the national stage in a clear choice between hawkishness on Ukraine and dovishness on Ukraine, A, it would be a very easy vote for a lot of people to cast, frankly, including me. And I think that it would be and

spark a genuine debate and challenge the assumptions that a lot of these people put forward in the media. What did you think, Crystal? Well, I 100 percent co-sign, especially your comment that, you know, this guy does not actually believe in democracy. And he gives up the game. He has this quote in here. He says, the mere fact that Trump's thinking appeals to a certain element, a certain segment of the American public will push American politics in the wrong direction. So what does that mean? He knows that the American people, some percentage of which, not all, is at this point 50-50 and within the Republican base more, are more on Trump's side on this. He knows that. His whole bet is like, let's just make sure no one can say any of this, and then we can keep a lid on things and keep things moving in the same direction they've been moving. So very, very revealing, the thinking of this individual.

At the same time, Nikki Haley, now taking some more shots at DeSantis. Let's go and put this up on the screen. She says this is kind of funny. She says, oh, this is sorry. This is Cornyn on DeSantis. He says poll tested answers are not leading. Put the next one up on the screen here, guys. This is Nikki Haley. She says Trump is right when he says DeSantis is copying him, first in his style, then on entitlement reform, now in Ukraine. I have a different style than Trump. And while I agree with him on most policies, I do not on those. She goes on to say, Republicans deserve a choice and not an echo, which is kind of a clever line there. But I also find it so revealing that even as,

look, she's separating herself from Trump on a couple of issues here, but all the fire is trained at Ron DeSantis, who is not winning in most of the polls right now. But clearly these people continue to have this like fanciful notion that Trump is just gonna somehow magically disappear. And so the person they really need to take head on

is Ron DeSantis. I took that away as well. So there are two things to say. Number one, I actually do think Nikki Haley is correct. Ron DeSantis has previous very hawkish views on Russia. He said that there's no distance between myself and Ronald Reagan. He criticized President Obama for not sending enough heavy weaponry to Ukraine. Again, look, maybe he changed his view. I have no idea. Rhetorically, I still think it is a victory that he is not taking the neocon line.

But as Michael Tracy and others have been pointing out, while he intimated that it is not a core national security interest to support Ukraine against Russia, he did not necessarily use the ironclad language. And if you parse what he said about not sending F-16s and about not getting U.S. ground troops involved, that's basically the Biden policy. DeSantis did not go as far as Donald Trump, who literally is calling for immediate peace talks between Ukraine and Russia and promising to bring the conflict to a close in 24 hours. OK, I don't think that's actually going to happen.

But Trump is by far the farthest out there away from the Washington consensus and is a genuine break from the Biden foreign policy, not only saying we're not going to send more weapons, not just saying it's not a core national security interest to not only support Ukraine, but also to not support regime change in Russia. Trump is the clear choice here for anybody who wants to see or wants more peace in Ukraine, at least without a maximalist supporting aims of the Ukrainian government. So I kind of do think that Nikki Haley is correct. DeSantis is a very, look, I mean, to the extent that he's genuine as any politician is, I have no idea. But given his basic sea change on this issue, it does seem to me that he doesn't have as well grounded views in foreign policy as Trump.

Look, again, he got rolled on a genuine policy level, but his consistent rhetoric on foreign policy and the way America was getting screwed was basically correct and was consistent for almost 35 or 40 years. Again, it did not manifest itself in his actual dealings in the White House, but his worldview and his outlook was effectively consistent throughout his entire adult life. So that's why whenever I look at these two things, I can't help but say Nikki Haley is not necessarily wrong here. Yeah, no, I agree. I have zero confidence or faith that either one of these would either one of these guys would actually do the things that they're claiming they would do. DeSantis because of his history and some of his ties. Trump, because when he was in office, like we saw what happened there. So I would just want to put all

of that out there. But yeah, I mean, if you Trump has clearly leaned in harder on the Ukraine skeptic side of things. And another thing that I noticed, Sagar, is that DeSantis, who, again, his rhetoric was not as strident as Trump's, is getting is has created a total freak out among the establishment Republican class that I have not seen a similar freak out. Maybe I just missed it over Trump making far more strident comments. They just are kind of like, well, I don't really want to take this guy on. But this one I'm going to lose my mind about. I think they also were hoping that DeSantis would be an ally in their hawkishness. New York Times had a breakdown of a lot of this. Here's a Jonathan Swan tweet highlighting Lindsey Graham not taking DeSantis'

Ukraine statement well. Quote, the Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well, said Graham, comparing DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. Put the next one up on the screen. This is the full New York Times report. You know, they got all kinds of quotes in here. They got quotes from Liz Cheney. DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan. Hugh Hewitt. Oh, Mark. I'm sorry. Marco Rubio talking to Hugh Hewitt says, I don't know what he's trying to do or what the goal is. Senator John Cornyn, as I said before, says he's disturbed. Governor Chris Christie says it is naive and a complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what's going on. This one I really enjoyed, Sagar. They reached out for comment to Charles Kupperman, who served under John Bolton as deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration. He said Mr. DeSantis had shown a very poor understanding of our national security interests. And this one was interesting. A very well-known conservative Wall Street Journal columnist, Strassel. She urged DeSantis not to join what she called Mr. Trump's GOP surrender caucus. Quote, the governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign

policy with Mr. Trump's opaque retreatism. And I say that's noteworthy because obviously Wall Street Journal is a Rupert Murdoch property and they have been pushing DeSantis relentlessly on Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and other of their outlets as well. Yeah, you know what I took away from this, which is that it hurts more whenever it's like the one who you thought was going to be the guy to take on Trump. With Trump, so much of this is priced in. That's why many of these senators and others

don't even really bother responding to what he says. Also because there's a bigger political price. But with DeSantis, it's kind of like an Anakin Skywalker thing. It's like, you were the chosen one, man. He's like, you were the chosen one. You were supposed to deliver us from Trump, not embrace him. And yet that's what's kind of rhetorically that he's been doing here. Yeah, I honestly, I've been really been enjoying the freakout. Also, you know, once again, just to show you how historically illiterate and really just brain dead a lot of foreign policy thinking, are we able to have any conversation without bringing up Neville Chamberlain? I actually was not aware that history

began in 1938. You know, color me shocked. It turns out that relations between states, especially in this part of the world, in Ukraine and Russia, goes back, oh, I don't know, several thousand years, hundred years, even, you know, just select for the last 500 years, you're going to get a very different view, not only of the conflict, but also just of the way that many different types of conflicts are brought to an end. And that's ultimately what the question is, is like, is Putin Hitler or is he a run of the mill Russian czar slash slash Soviet apparatchik? Because those are actually two very different policy responses.

Because other things have happened in history other than World War II. Very important, very significant, very horrific event. But other things in history have happened besides World War II. So we have some pretty significant breaking news this morning, Sagar. We actually have footage now, official footage of that U.S. drone being taken down by a Russian fighter jet. It's actually pretty crazy because you see the Russian jet spraying, it appears to be fuel, onto the drone. Twice they come by and like spray the fuel on the drone and then the drone goes down.

So let's take a look at that. A minute ago, we just got dramatic new video from the Pentagon released by the military where you can see a Russian fighter jet as it was approaching the back of the American drone that has now been down 4,000 to 5,000 feet in the Black Sea. Yeah. What are your takeaways there? Yeah. I mean, that's, look, I mean, the number one is it was an intentional act. There's no-

Very clearly. There's no, well, we were flying closely and there was a flyby and it happened to, no, that was 100% intentional. For reminder, you know, I know CounterPoint's covered this yesterday, but this happened in the Black Sea. And I guess American and Russian forces now attempting or I guess Russians are attempting to recover it. They don't think that American forces will be able to. Obviously, they chose the drone for a reason because it's an unmanned aircraft. This is something that, you know, a lot of nations do whenever we're in either disputed airspace or whenever they want to kind of ratchet up the tensions but don't want to take it too far. Flybys of destroyers and others are

other classic examples. So I don't want to minimize it and say that it's nothing. But also, there's a reason that Donald Trump, for example, did not shoot down an Iranian plane in response because there's a proportionality to these things. I know that General Milley spoke with his top Russian counterpart as some sort of deconfliction. Clearly, the Russians are trying to fire a warning shot across the bow, and I think that's exactly the way we should read this. It can be dangerous, though, because obviously, that's a dangerous maneuver. What if the Russian pilot miscalibrates and then he dies and then they try to blame it on us? This is exactly what happened in the Hainan

Island incident with China. So we can't dismiss this and say that it's nothing. However, we should have a calibrated response. Yes. Very fraught situation here. And the fighter jet ultimately does clip the drone, which is what sends it down. Senator Lindsey Graham has some big ideas about how exactly we should deal with this. He was speaking to Sean Hannity a couple of nights ago. Let's take a listen. They shot down our drone. What should our answer be? Well, we should hold them accountable and say that if you ever get near another U.S. set flying in international waters, your airplane would be shot down. What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.

So what would Ronald Reagan do? He would start shooting down Russian planes. You know, this is the other funny thing, the whole fetishization of Reagan. Reagan both rhetorically was tough on the Soviet Union. He certainly was and did take a rollback, you know, a rollback foreign policy and did confront them in many ways, like in Afghanistan and others. At the same time, if you read any books about the way that he dealt with them, he was terrified of one-on-one nuclear conflict and very much wanted to avoid this at all costs, including part of the reason why he actually pursued some diplomatic overtures on nuclear policy and on others. So anyway, I think that people don't really seem to recall what actually happened under the Reagan

administration. And it just shows you the cavalier nature with Lindsey Graham is just willing to, you know, just casually push literal World War III and war with Russia. This is also why their use of every time somebody, you know, says something counter-narrative, as Ron DeSantis did, that they immediately call him Never Chamberlain, Surrender Caucus, and all of that. They're using, you know, this potent rhetoric when in reality, they are ones who are pushing extraordinarily dangerous rhetoric, and yet they seem to not suffer any media or political consequence for doing so because nobody's like, hey, that's actually completely nuts to advocate for something like that.

The Republicans really right now have a totally split mind. On the one side, you have people whose criticism of Biden is he's not doing enough. We needed at the beginning, we needed a no fly zone. We need to be shooting down Russian jets. We need to be sending F-16s. That's one side of the criticism as offered there by Sean Hannity and Lindsey Graham. The other side is the Trump and now sort of DeSantis critique of we should not be giving them a blank check. In Trump's case, at least rhetorically pushing for, you know, some sort of a peace deal

to bring an end to hostilities. So they're actually at completely polar opposite ends of the spectrum here in terms of how they rhetorically are saying that we should approach the conflict. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, Trump himself has actually been on both sides of that extreme, by the way. We should remember some of his early comments in this conflict. Yeah, I really have no it's difficult, right? The base clearly is in one place. Trump is trying to placate that on a policy level. He's completely all over the place. DeSantis is trying to calibrate towards the base as well. But the senators just are completely out of touch with the rest of the Republican Party.

They're basically in lockstep with the Democrats, if not more so advocating for hawkish action. So, look, you know, the whole bipartisan issue of our time actually is just being hawkish, unfortunately. And, you know, anytime I see a challenge to that, I absolutely welcome it. But know also, A, what they're up against and B, whether that person could be, you know, wolf in sheep's clothing. Yeah, well said. There's a story coming out of Michigan that I wanted to make sure to get in the show because this is actually quite extraordinary from a historic perspective. Put this up on the screen. So the Michigan legislature has now rolled back, voted to repeal the state's right to work law. That's, of course, an anti-union law. Yesterday,

since that law was originally passed back in 2012, Michigan has lost roughly 40,000 union members. I don't know if you remember 2012 saga, there were huge protests over this, Michigan being one of the hotbeds of initial union activity. I mean, this is like the heart and soul of the labor movement. So when Rick Snyder and the Republicans passed this right to work legislation, it was a really big deal. Part of why this is so extraordinary is because, let's put the map that we have up on the screen. There were, at least now there's 26, there were 27 states, and this has to be officially signed into law, et cetera, but there were 27 states that had passed right-to-work legislation. This is the first time in 60 years that a state has actually voted to go in the other direction and repeal right to work.

Now, there have been some encouraging signs in terms of a growing labor movement. Of course, we've covered extensively the grassroots efforts at Starbucks, at Amazon, REI, other workplaces. You also have, you know, public support for unions at near record highs. The numbers still continue to be extraordinarily grim, though, in terms of overall union density. You continue to sort of have that eroded and eaten away. But this is another hopeful sign that things politically, the winds have really politically shifted because, you know, even the Virginia legislature is a good example to contrast here. So the Virginia legislature's Democrats had, you know, they had the House, they had the Senate, they had the governor under Ralph Northam in the

previous session, and they didn't bother to repeal right to work. They didn't even really talk about repealing right to work. Now, Michigan is a different state that's not so suburban centric, but I even think just between that time and now, labor issues have come more to the forefront and Democrats have stopped just caving to Republicans or actively helping them in crushing unions and are now starting to push in the opposite direction. So I think it's a it's quite a turning point. I think it's because, frankly, of pressure from the amount of union votes that were starting to go to Republicans. And Michigan just came off that big victory for Democrats in the midterm elections. But we shouldn't recall or we shouldn't forget that Trump won Michigan in 2016.

He barely lost it in 2020. So if you want to make sure that you're going to keep some of that union vote and actually keep the state from being competitive, you need to shore up every single constituency for what you got. So it's actually not a bad thing, really, that they did it. But that's one of the, you know, they're capitalizing on the gains that they made based on the Roe versus Wade decision, and then trying to cement it with some of the economic ones, specifically because we saw so much union vote go to Trump in 2016. So I look at this as a smart, savvy move on the Democrats part. If they did it more nationally, they would do they would do better in elections. Right. Well, this is what was always so idiotic about them, either

abandoning the labor movement or actively partnering with Republicans to crush it, is that for them, just from a political strategy perspective, it was absolutely idiotic. This is the first time in 40 years that Democrats have held the House and the Senate in Michigan. So this was a really unusual opportunity presented to them by the combination of, you know, Roe versus Wade and also some of the like stop the steal insanity that people just viscerally rejected. It was a party line vote in the state Senate. So you had 20 Democrats and 17 Republicans vote against. And the House voted already to pass the law last week. Now they've got to sign off on the final language and then

it'll go to Gretchen Whitmer's desk to sign. But it was interesting of a sign of the times for, you know, in my opinion of Democrats changing their view of what's politically strategic for them. And also, I think you also have to say the success of these grassroots movements has also really put pressure on legislators to back up some of their words with real action. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And it is an extraordinary move. It also, what I'm curious is to see if Republicans, I'm not going to say they're going to is an extraordinary move. It also, what I'm curious is to see if Republicans, I'm not going to say they're going to start repealing it. I wonder, though, if anybody's going to keep running on it the way that the Scott Walkers of the world and others did,

specifically in these types of states. I mean, they would just be fools to do so. Even Trump as well. I'd be very curious to see where, you know, he may appoint a non-labor friendly NLRB, but I'd be curious to see, like, if he was asked directly about it, what he would actually say. Because something tells me that the winds are shifting, and I think this is just the forefront of that fight. Yeah, I think that's well said. All right, guys. So you may have already seen this viral clip of an author, Bethany Mandel, who went on our former show, Rising, with Robbie and with Brianna. And Brianna asked her what should have been a very simple question, especially Bethany just wrote a book that is effectively about, like,

her being anti-woke and a pushback on wokeness. So Brianna asked her a very simple question. It doesn't go particularly well. Let's take a look at that. Native Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke. And so, you know, when we talk we talk about traditional, would you mind defining woke? Cause it's come up a couple of times that I just want to make sure we're on the same page. So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um,

I, this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral. I mean, woke is something that's very hard to define and we've spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to re totally reimagine and re and re reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Sorry, it's hard to explain in a 15 second soundbite. So, listen. No bueno. Listen, I want to be compassionate

because I've certainly had brain malfunctions on air, but I will say her response to this, which went, I have millions of views on Twitter, everybody was passing this thing around. Her response really made things a lot worse because she tried to blame Brianna, who I didn't even think Brianna wasn't asking like an aggressive question. No, this is like a really basic, you know, okay, let's just make sure we're all on the same page and define our terms here. So Bethany went on Twitter and in part what she said is, just before we went on air, Breonna Joy Gray was on a hot mic. I heard her demeaning parenting

in general and colorful and nasty terms, stating parents only have kids in order to perpetuate their own narcissism. Robbie responded, there are some good ones and some bad ones. And she said that that threw her off for the segment. I mean of all i just don't believe you um but second of all yeah second of all like you're like seven minutes into the segment when this happens and it's like only then that the the parenting the hit on parenting before the segment even started really gets to you look take the l that's my response just take it sometimes you just gotta take the L. That's my response. Just take it. Sometimes you just got to take the L. That's it. Sometimes. Listen, I've been on the other side of that clip. I get it. All right. Yeah. Nobody's perfect. That said, I think that she did herself a disservice. And look,

the fair critique is if you are going to write a whole book about this, then you actually and you're going to go on TV to promote it. Yeah, you actually kind of do need a 15 second answer. And I could give you a better one, Bethany. Read my book because it's not something that I can summarize in a single sentence. There you go. That's actually a decent one. Or the hollow and false moral superiority on racial and gender issues. That'd be, that's not necessarily, in my opinion, the best definition, but that's one that you could probably put together in a single sentence. Or you could just say, look, it's one of those things like the famous Supreme Court quote on pornography. You know it when you see it.

I think all of those are valid responses. I don't think that any of them really capture the essence of what it actually means. I actually think that that Supreme Court one I laid out is probably the best definition, unfortunately, just because, as you have showed, Crystal, because I mean, when you see the right claiming that the Silicon Valley bank bailout is all about wokeness, you realize the term has lost any sort of real meaning. And so it's in the context of that moment where people look at this and it's like, okay, this kind of gives up the game that you just are using the word wokeness to define anything that you don't like and that you object to. I think there are kind of two components. And the reason I wanted to talk

to you about this is because I actually do think obviously it's a contested term. Obviously, the definition of it on in some corners of the right has been expanded to just mean like anything I don't like. And I'm just going to, you know, throw this term out about a bank bailout or about environmental policy, like whatever it is I disagree with, I'm just going to say it's woke and use that as my catch all phrase for something that I disagree with. But, you know, the original idea of wokeness was like awareness of injustice, which, OK, I have no problem with that whatsoever, where my critique of wokeness comes in is when you add authoritarian tactics in service of supposed social justice ends. To me, that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is a level of superficiality that distracts from deeper problems. So this is some of what I talked about

in my monologue about how, you know, the anti-woke people, some of them have adopted similar authoritarian tactics that we should also stand against. But, you know, when you're using the tactics of censorship, canceling, et cetera, that's the authoritarian piece. The superficial piece is, you know, when you're putting up a Black Lives Matter banner on the Amazon website and pretending like this has anything to do with social justice or, you know, putting the first black woman vice president up there and pretending like this is some victory for all black people when actually the policy aims and core values that she's pursued have been very damaging at times for those communities. So to me, those are the two pieces of it. It's like authoritarian tactics,

plus a sort of superficial personal identity lens of politics that erases everything else. Yeah, I think superficiality and authoritarianism are the two hallmarks of wokeness. I mean, I live in a neighborhood where it'll be like Black Lives Matter flag, Ukraine flag, trans flag, gay pride flag. And then that very same person will lobby against affordable housing. And you're like, well, hold on a second. So what's going on here? Are we talking about your home values or are we talking about Black Lives Matter? Because

those actually are pretty incongruent if you were to get into it. But that's the whole point is you're not actually getting into it. So I think virtue signaling and superficiality and specifically authoritarianism even necessarily should be, quote, opposed to it. But I don't think that that is a functional way to have a society with 330 million people of differing views and backgrounds of ethnicities. We are one of the most heterogeneous nations literally on all of planet Earth. It somehow seems to work. Sometimes it doesn't. And that authoritarian mindset, by the way, and you pointed this all the way out too, you know, authoritarian, look, I'm here in my hometown of College Station, Texas. I don't, I, you know, I hate wokeness, but let me tell you something. I hate oppressive evangelical culture just as much because, and one of the reasons that I rebel against wokeness is because I know what it is like from the other side. You know, I grew up

in a place and in a time where questioning the Iraq war here in my hometown or really just anything on social issues or even, you know, raising a thought which didn't abide by the Southern Baptist Convention was crushed and was looked down upon with such nastiness and with censorship also, even from the highest levels, including some of my teachers. I've given the evolution example here before on the show. So I know what it is. And also, I lived in the Middle East in a very oppressive authoritarian country in Qatar. So these are places where, you know, it fundamentally comes down to, in my opinion, for some people,

a rejection of that authoritarianism. But it doesn't necessarily need to also be kind of a, how would you say, a Trojan horse for authoritarianism of another kind. Yes, well said. And I think where I really differ, because Bethany did go on Twitter and give her considered definition, short definition of wokeness. She said it's a radical belief system suggesting our institutions are built around discrimination, claiming all disparity as a result of that discrimination, seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint enforced by an angry mob. And I think where I really differ from people

like Bethany and other like, you know, anti-woke activists at this point is that the tactics are authoritarian and quite terrible for a democratic society, right? The tactics are completely unacceptable. But the aims are actually quite small. And, you know, to get a certain like quota, racial quota diversity metric on a board or to have some like corporate virtue signal, or like I said to just you know change that personal identity characteristics of the vice president of the United States and my half-joking definition of wokeness is that it's basically like a CIA op to disrupt progressive groups and keep them focused on interpersonal squabbles and cancel culture among

themselves rather than actually pursuing the more transformational end goals that their groups are supposed to ultimately be about. It's my half-joking definition of wokeism, but there's some truth to that. I mean, no one has been more hurt by this cancel culture direction of the left than progressive organizations who are supposed to be getting things done in the world. And instead, as Ryan Grimm has documented at great length, are spending all their times like fighting with each other and, you know, taking days off to deal with their supposedly toxic workplace. Yeah, I think that's very well said. You know, I think it is an op really on everybody

because it also, you know, there's a certain type of conservative mind, which this is all, this is all they think about. You know, I think we, we were all chatting privately recently about the more recent Shane Gillis, the special that he did, which is out there on YouTube, the comedian, he talks about his Fox news dad. He's that guy who lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He's like, do you believe what's going on on the Southern border? He's like, he's so mad. He can't even, and he can't even explain. And it's like, yeah, it's like that's, you know, it's weaponized in, in two directions as a distraction. So, and look, I can be guilty of it and shit drives me crazy too. I get it. I really, I get why all of this stuff works. So yeah, I think it was unfortunate for her, but I don't know, maybe honestly I have less empathy, uh, just because I'm like, if you're

going to do an entire book and you're literally going to go on a promo tour for it, then, you know, that's that's on you. That's one of the most basic questions, literally. And I think that's why I went viral. That's why I'm trying to be nice. But if I'm being honest, I don't want to be nice because it's such a basic question. It's like, come on, get it together. That'd be like if somebody you somebody asked you and I, if you were not on somebody's show and they go, what is populism? And I was like, well, I wrote a book about it,

but I can't explain it. It was like, come on. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, now that we are a few days out from the Silicon Valley bailout, I've had some time to reflect on some of the deeper problems in the banking sector and in our economy that has led us to this place of frequent crises, crashes, and bailouts requiring ever-escalating dramatic interventions. And all roads seem to lead back this bank failure, the details of this bailout, or you zoom out to look at how we ended up in Gilded Age Part 2 here, the Fed's choices are at the center of these stories. Now, the TLDR is this. Over the course of four presidents and two decades, the Fed has claimed extraordinary powers and then chosen to use them only on behalf of the wealthy and well-connected. First, let's start with the specifics of this particular crisis. Silicon Valley bank leadership deserves all the shame and blame in the world. But greed and idiocy are a permanent feature of human societies, which is exactly why we

build safeguards into systems to protect blameless people from the greed and idiocy of others. So where the hell was the Fed while Silicon Valley was loading up on uninsured deposits from a group of clients under severe pressure from the Fed's own interest rate moves, while also loading up with long-term treasuries subject to the exact same risk? This crisis was entirely predictable and was in fact predicted by at least one short seller who has been posting about it on Twitter for months. Making matters worse is the fact that Silicon Valley Bank's CEO actually sat on the board of the San Francisco Fed. Not exactly a great look.

The Fed was asleep at the switch, failing at one of their most essential tasks. What's more, Lever News is reporting that the Fed actually gave SVB a special waiver in 2017 that allowed them to double dip as both a traditional deposit-taking bank with a huge venture-backed clientele and also an investor in the very venture capital funds which were backing their clients. This left the bank doubly exposed to the tech winter, which has crushed startup valuations, dried up funding, and led to mass layoffs in large tech companies. So if the Fed can't be trusted in their role as regulator, what can they do? Well, the dual missions of the Fed's monetary policy are supposed to be unemployment and inflation.

And of course, the Fed has made a big show of dramatic interest rate spikes in order to try to curb inflation. Their explicit goal with these actions are to crush labor, spike unemployment, and lower wages under the theory that this will help to get inflation under control. Now, let's put the sociopathy of this policy aside and just ask, how's that going? Well, as some of us predicted, it doesn't really appear to be working well at all. We've got new numbers on inflation, and they ain't great. The top-line annual numbers showed some improvement, but under the surface, the news was all uniformly bad. The core consumer price index jumped 0.5% month over month. That was

the fastest acceleration since September. In other words, the medicine is not working, but it could very well be killing the patient. Elizabeth Warren has been warning of exactly this scenario for some time now, notably last week in a pretty hot exchange with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Take a listen. In December, the Fed released its projections on the state of the economy under your monetary policy plan. According to the Fed's own report, if you continue raising interest rates as you plan, unemployment will be 4.6 percent by the end of the year, more than a full point higher than it is today. Chair Powell,

if you hit your projections, do you know how many people who are currently working, going about their lives, will lose their jobs? I don't have that number in front of me. I will say it's not an intended consequence. But it is, and it's in your report, and that would be about 2 million people who would lose their jobs, people who are working right now making their mortgages. So, Chair Powell, if you could speak directly to the 2 million hardworking people who have decent jobs today who you're planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them? How would you explain your view that they need to lose their jobs?

I would explain to people more broadly that inflation is extremely high, and it's hurting the working people of this country badly. All of them, not just 2 million of them, but all of them are suffering under high inflation. And we are taking the only measures we have to bring inflation down. And putting 2 million people out of work is just part of the cost and they just have to bear it? Well, will working people be better off if we just walk away from our jobs and inflation remains 5, 6 percent? And you know what, Chair Powell, to be fair, he's got a point. Inflation does hurt workers. The Fed does have a limited set of tools to deal with it. There is no substitute for having a functioning

legislative branch that is more appropriate for dealing with the supply chain, war, price gouging, and climate crises related price increases that are at the core of this persistent inflation. But the current bailout response really exposes the game that the Fed is playing here because for them, as explained by Jerome Powell there, ordinary workers getting hurt, well, that's just unintended consequences, necessary pain. But everything that hurts rich people is deemed an emergency. They interpret their powers in an extraordinarily broad way when it comes to helping the wealthy and the well-connected, yet they throw up their hands when it comes to helping anyone else. Remember, one of the primary political justifications offered for this new bailout, which has created as a de facto policy that 100% of every rich person's deposits are backed by us,

dear taxpayer, and that every bank is now too big to fail, was that workers in Silicon Valley might lose their jobs. Now, I am sympathetic to those concerns. I genuinely, genuinely am. Losing a job can be traumatic, devastating, and in some instances, even life-ending. But why does the Fed care so much about these particular workers, yet have such a blasé, callous regard for the millions of workers that their rate policy is explicitly engineered to toss out of a job. The details of this bailout go even deeper, though. Allow me to get a little bit wonky here for a moment to try to explain a key point. In crafting its response, the Fed invoked its power under Section 13-3 of the Federal Reserve Act.

As explained by Nathan Tankes in his Substack Notes on the Crises, he notes that Section 13-3 of the Federal Reserve Act. As explained by Nathan Tankes in his Substack Notes on the Crises, he notes that Section 13-3 requires an emergency or what in the law they describe as, quote, unusual and exigent circumstances. Now, an emergency is, of course, all in the eyes of the beholder. The Fed clearly thinks rich VCs having to provide a bridge loan to their portfolio companies is an emergency. but the aforementioned millions of people losing jobs because of Fed policy is not an emergency. As Tankus writes, if this is an emergency, then basically any moderately sized event with a knock-on effect on the economy is an emergency. Unusual and exigent circumstances seem now to be little more than a day where there was

moderately bad weather. Or at least, I would add, moderately bad weather. Or at least, I would add, moderately bad weather for the bankers and investors that the Fed is deeply connected to and apparently very persuaded by. The fundamental problem is this. Congress is dysfunctional and corrupt, so our fates are all subject to the whims of courts and of the Fed. As one person on Twitter said, roughly speaking, the current definition of democracy is ruled by judges and central bankers. We desperately need a working, actual democracy. But hey, at least if we're going to be ruled by powerful undemocratic institutions, they could cut us in on the deal here. Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect floats one good potential idea with regards to the Fed. He says a banking public option, it's a pretty simple

concept. Right now, only banks can have accounts with the Fed. What if a banking public option, it's a pretty simple concept. Right now, only banks can have accounts with the Fed. What if everyone could? Now, the benefits would be immense to ordinary people. Every American could have a free basic checking account, zero fees, zero transaction cost. Transfers between these accounts would also be free and quick. Any government stimulus programs like the previous stimmy checks, they could be easily deposited instantaneously. And critically, by cutting out the rapacious banking middlemen, citizens could immediately benefit from higher interest rate earnings on their accounts when the Fed does lift rates. Right now, when the Fed lifts rates, banks basically do nothing. They keep savings account interest near zero. With a Fed account, you would instantly

benefit from the increase, thus ending a massive Fed subsidy that banks currently benefit from. Unfortunately, when the Fed asked their other banker friends about this idea, I'm sure they're going to argue it's terrible, it's disastrous, forget about it. They'll continue crafting policies that are of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Only massive public pressure of the sort that made Powell and the rest feel their power was at risk would make them change course. Otherwise, we will just continue to lock in a two-tier system. Rich people's minor problems are an emergency. Regular people's actual catastrophes, those are just collateral damage.

A lot has been revealed here, Sagar, about the Fed's actions. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? A very important story happening right now with U.S. relations in India. So the Biden administration about 16 months ago put former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti up for consideration as the U.S. ambassador to India. Now, you might be asking, what the hell does the L.A. mayor know anything about India? Why does this person even deserve this post literally at all? And a lot of Indians in India were wondering the same thing, and they viewed it as a snub. They viewed it even more so as a snub, though, because Eric Garcetti has been credibly accused of covering up widespread sexual harassment under his reign.

So let's go and put this up there on the screen from New York magazine. And I'm just going to go ahead and read from this. So this was reporting from journalist Yashar Ali. advisor and chief fundraiser was accused by at least a dozen people, including city employees of forcible kitchen kissing and touching, making crude remarks and gestures. Several people with knowledge, including those people who actually were victims of Mr. Jacobs, said that Garcetti knew of the allegations and witnessed some of the incidents, but ignored it because of Jacobs political value. Now, you know, Jacob says he didn't do anything wrong. And so did so did Eric Garcetti says, oh, I had no idea about literally any of it.

Here's the thing, though. A lot of Democrats actually did believe this, as well as many Republicans who viewed him as unqualified for the post. So a private back channel was made. Senators said, look, we don't want to publicly come out against Biden. Biden, you need to withdraw Eric Garcetti in terms of his consideration. He refused to do it. Biden, I guess, made some crazy deal with Garcetti, maybe because of fundraising or whatever during the campaign, and said, no, I'm going to back Eric. I'm not going to believe any of these accusers, even though there's pretty good evidence to support literally all of these accusations, on top of the fact that the guy is not qualified to be the U.S. ambassador to India. So they keep putting pressure. They keep putting pressure.

And finally, the logjam breaks. Democratic senators, in conjunction with Republicans, decide to vote for this guy. Here is Senator Bob Menendez, who is the head of the Foreign Services Committee, actually coming out and saying, well, these accusers, he said he didn't do anything wrong, so we're just going to go ahead and vote for him. Take a listen to that. There's a lot of review of his file, reviews of witnesses, and the bottom line, not only does he deny it, but other witnesses deny that, in fact, he had any knowledge. Is the national security imperative? We have to balance concerns people might have about the nominee against the real risk of waiting another year until we have an ambassador on the ground.

I have significant concerns over, you know, his nomination to this position. Why is that? The way, you know, certain the environment that was allowed to exist in his office over an extended period of time. So only Mark Kelly there even willing to say it. Todd Young says some people have some concerns. Look, we're not talking about like some one or two people here. We're talking about literally a dozen. And also one of them is a former LAPD officer. But let's take a step back. This is a massive snub to one of the world's largest country

countries, the world's largest democracy, ostensibly one of the most important geopolitical partners in the world, especially if your entire goal is to have better relations in Asia and try and form U.S. alliances against China, or at the very least shore up your alliances as the Chinese try to do the same thing. India is, of course, a natural partner. On top of that, what have we learned with the entire Ukraine situation, which is India, through the sheer force of its economy and its unwillingness to go along with the West in its view of the Ukraine conflict, has actually helped the Russian economy and has shown a real split in the Asia-Pacific.

That's something that the U.S. needs to do everything in its power to try and shore up, to have the best relations possible. And instead, this is an insult to actually send somebody not only accused of fostering and having a terrible managerial process where you're basically covering up sexual assault because of somebody's political value, but somebody who is so wholly unqualified for the job. So I can assure you that in New Delhi, that this is seen as both a snub as an insult. Of course, they won't say it publicly. But overall, the handling of the Biden administration here shows their unseriousness towards relations with India, which is a vital, not only trading partner, but geopolitical partner, if you do actually want to pursue

some semblance of peace across this globe. And then their handling of this also just shows that they're full of it whenever it comes to Me Too. So I'm curious what you think, Crystal, about all of this. You know, to be honest, I never covered this. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you bearing with me i'm down here taking care of my dad and call station i should probably be back in the studio on monday so everything would be good to go and uh thank you everybody uh for spotify who is signing up and taking advantage of the full show there i know that it's an awesome viewing experience so again if you want to

premium member and watch the full show on spotify only to our premiums, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com. Love to you, Sagar, and to your dad and to all of you out there as well. And we'll see you back here next week. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth

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