Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/27/23: Trump's Wild Rally In Waco, Krystal and Saagar Debate TikTok Ban, Biden Bombs Syria, Putin Deploying Nukes In Belarus, Malcolm Nance Ukraine War Grifter, ESG Green Energy Scam, Tim Urban New Book

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump's wild rally in Waco, Texas, Desantis donors beginning to question him, Trump promising "Death and Destruction", Krystal and Saagar debate if we should ban TikTok, TikTok CEO appears in Congress, Biden bombs Syria after US contractor is killed, Putin promises to deploy Tactical Nukes in Belarus, MSNBC Resistance Hero Malcolm Nance exposed as a Ukraine War grifter, Krystal looks into a Big Green energy scam in ESG, and Tim Urban joins the show to talk about his new book "What's Our Problem?".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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible.

If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big stories breaking this morning. We are still on Trump indictment watch that could come potentially at any time. So we will keep an eye on that. Also, this comes as he just had his first official big rally. It was in an unusual, notable place, Waco, Texas. So we'll dig into all of that. We're also going to dig into the debate over banning TikTok, some interesting reactions,

some interesting videos to show you from the congressional hearings around that. Putin is announcing that he is moving tactical nukes into Belarus. What will that mean? What are the dangers there? Also, the U.S. with new airstrikes in Syria. What the hell are we even doing in Syria at this point? Great question. We can dive into thatS. with new airstrikes in Syria. What the hell are we even doing in Syria at this point? Great question. We can dive into that as well. And a new report about all of the grifters from the U.S. who have flocked to Ukraine, including one Malcolm Nance. Also very excited to talk to Tim Urban on the show today. He is out with a book called What's Our Problem that has gotten a lot of attention that I know many of you have been really interested in as well. Yeah, that's right. And don't forget,

we've got the premium show on Spotify. I know a lot of you guys have been taking advantage of that. So breakingpoints.com, you can watch the full premium show there on Spotify. We are reducing the lag time and all of that as best as we possibly can. Shout out to the team at Supercast and at Spotify for supporting us. I know that they want us to build an awesome alternative so that you can have and watch the show anywhere that you want. So there you go, breakingpoints.com for premium. And one last thing before we dive into the show, Sagar, why don't you tell the people why you're not in the studio today? Yes, that's right. Today's kind of a promotion day for Breaking Points. Crystal's on Russell Brand's show. I'm going on the Flagrant podcast, so I'm here in New York City. I can offer a little

bit of eyewitness accounts about the security situation in midtown Manhattan whenever we talk about the possible Trump indictment block and all of that. So I'm on the ground for you folks. But more importantly, Crystal and I are getting out there and making sure that people can hear the awesome news about what we're doing here and bringing people the news. There you go. I'm sure it's going to be a great podcast. I can't wait to watch it myself. All right, let's get to the news here. Big Trump rally over the weekend, as I said, happening in Waco, Texas, at the same time that we're right in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the siege of Waco. So a lot of people drawing parallels with Trump trying to make a point about government overreach and persecution, just as, of course, it was outrageous government overreach and

persecution 30 years ago. Some pretty wild sounds coming out of that rally that start with potentially the wildest moment, which was Ted Nugent calling Zelensky some names. Let's take a listen to that. I want my money back. I didn't authorize any money to Ukraine to some homosexual weight weirdo. I want my money back. What do you think of that one, Sager? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm against a lot of additional aid to Ukraine. I'm definitely skeptical of Zelensky. But in terms of ad hominem attacks and all that, it doesn't seem like this one is it. If anything, Ted, I think you're not doing the skeptical case for Ukraine aid any favors by acting this way.

Yes. Fair. Yeah. It also is such a throwback to like, you know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago to just be like call people gay as some sort of a slur. Anyway, that was Ted Nugent. That's how things got kicked off. But, you know, a lot of people were watching the rally speech from Trump himself to see exactly what he would say about his own potential prosecution and indictment and also about his potential opponent here, Ron DeSantis. Let's take a listen to Trump going in on DeSantis and also the crowd reaction, which was interesting as well. Take a listen.

When a man comes to me, tears in his eyes, he's at almost nothing in the polls. And he's fighting somebody that's at 42 and he's got almost $30 million in the bank. He's at almost nothing. He's got no cash. And I said, I can't give you an endorsement. There's no way you can win. You're dead. But he fought a little bit, like 150. He was certainly no Jim Jordan, that I can tell you. He fought a little bit, just a little bit on impeachment hoax number one, impeachment

hoax number two, meaning on television, because I didn't know him very well. But I saw him. So he came and he really won it. I said, you can't win, can you? How do you can win? Sir, if you endorse me, I'll win. Please, please, sir. Endorse me. I said, let's give it a shot, Ron. And I endorsed him and he became like a rocket ship. Within one day, the race was over. He got the nomination. Now, he's been telling this story about Ron DeSantis for a while now. It seems to get more and more over the top every time he tells it. The tears were streaming from his eyes. The crowd is kind of quiet. They did chuckle like kind of in spite of themselves at one point when he was talking about the whole endorsement situation. Certainly

not the same as the way he would get the crowd going with his attacks on Hillary. But, you know, they stand there and they listen to it. And I think it shows once again, Sagar, that while he is out there, you know, saying whatever he wants about Ron DeSantis, DeSantis is kind of, you know, take a little jab here or there, but really not anywhere near in the fight the way that Trump is. Well, didn't you hear, Crystal? It's silly season. It's officially silly season. And that's what this is. Look, I mean, in terms of the crowd reaction, Ron DeSantis is still viewed fondly amongst many Republicans.

Nobody hates Ron DeSantis, even in the way that many people came to hate Ted Cruz. However, that came after a prolonged battle. We should also remember Ted did come in second in the GOP primary, and there was a significant amount of overlap between Ted Cruz voters and Trump voters that ultimately sealed the deal for Trump with the primary. And of course, all of them showed up to vote for him in 2016. So I would not take a lot of this crowd reaction. The fact that they didn't boo is probable and are really just willing to sit there and let kind of Trump air his grievances. I think that is still a potent symbol. And look, we can just, all we need to do is take a step back,

look at the polling. GOP national polling across the board has been terrible for Ron DeSantis. DeSantis' allies are out, you know, with recent like head-to-head polls which show him either tied in some of the early states. I actually find that kind of nefarious for a couple of reasons,

which is since when did we imagine this was going to be a head to head race? Like you can't say, well, head to head, you know, I'm tied with this person. But OK, that's great. But, you know, head to head, Ted Cruz would have beat Trump in Iowa and in New Hampshire. But it wasn't head to head because there were multiple other candidates in the race and there are already multiple other candidates here in the race. So, look, the strategy is working. He's locking his people down. Overall, GOP national polls are not very good for Ron DeSantis. The fact that people are willing to sit through them.

And, you know, you can't deny from Trump's position, the reason that he's doing this is to show what the power dynamic is. He's like, no, you serve me, not the other way around. You can't be my successor if I'm the one who's in the race and I'm the one who anointed you. I told you in the audience before I interviewed Trump right after the 2018 elections. I was one of the first people to actually interview him about his midterm performance. The very first, even though it was a disaster for him, of course. But guess what? Even then in 2018, he said, look at this guy, Ron DeSantis.

He was nothing. I endorsed him. He shot up. This has been deep in his mind now for years. I mean, that was almost four or five years ago. Well, you're 100 percent correct that it's all about the power dynamic. I mean, to show him, you know, the way that Trump paints it as DeSantis is practically there groveling with tears streaming down his face and he knows he's nothing without me. It's an absolute sort of like alpha power move. And DeSantis basically has decided, and I'm not sure this is even the wrong choice,

to effectively take it. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this, Sagar, because I'm like, okay, what would be a better strategy for him? And I'm not sure that there is one because it's not like DeSantis can compete with Trump on this terrain. It's not like everybodySantis can compete with Trump on this terrain. It's not like everybody who tried to get down in the mud with Trump in 2016 ended up just getting instantly obliterated.

So probably his best option is what he's doing, which is to kind of stay quiet, to kind of, you know, take a little bit of a jab to show he's just not completely getting rolled over by this dude and that he is taking notice and that he has some ability to punch back, but to hope that some other circumstance takes Trump down that he has nothing to do with and that he's basically their second in line if that does happen. That probably is his best play. And I think what you bring up with Ted Cruz is a really good point. Now, I do think Ron DeSantis is in a better position than Ted Cruz ever was, but it's easy to forget how much of a darling Ted Cruz was with the Republican base during the Tea Party era. I mean,

he also had his own national brand and identity and, you know, a lot of warm feelings among a lot of Republican voters. And ultimately, it really didn't matter. Once Trump decided to lighten to him, it was basically all over. While DeSantis and his allies may be citing a few new polls, one out of Iowa, one out of New Hampshire, Trump at the rally had his own favorite poll that he decided to tout. This was literally a Twitter poll by a Twitter user named, I kid you not, CatTurd2 that Trump cites favorably at this rally. Take a listen. You'll see some numbers that are incredible. You'll see some numbers that we just had one today, 69 for Trump and I think 18 or 19 for DeSanctimonious. Yeah, we were at 69 in one today. Classic there.

Classic move, citing a literal Twitter poll as evidence of his dominance in the race. Amazing. Yeah, a little too much emphasis there from Trump on the 69. I mean, look, with Trump, he'll take my favorite thing when he was in office, he'd be like 98% of Republicans support Trump. Thank you. And it would come from a poll that showed him at like 32% approval, but with 90 something percent with Trump. I mean, no matter what the numbers are. I've also been thinking a lot about it, too. I got a very thoughtful message from somebody who's been watching the show for a long time, Crystal.

You and Crystal were big advocates for Bernie Sanders to go after Joe Biden in 2016 or 2020 in the primary. So why are you not saying the same thing about DeSantis? Well, I think it's important to note that Joe Biden never had the level of approval amongst a Democratic base. And still doesn't. That Donald Trump, exactly. That still doesn't, that Donald Trump, exactly. That still

doesn't, that Donald Trump did in terms of his beloved nature. And so that's why I think it would backfire. In fact, one of the things that we really identified at that time was that there was an opening for a critique against Biden in the primary with a certain subset of voters that could have resonated in some of those early states that Bernie explicitly chose not to take. Whereas in this case with DeSantis, there is not the similar opening lane of Republicans who want to hear a criticism of Trump. And mainly the reason is, is that many Republicans conflate any criticism of Trump. And by the way, I'm not saying this is a correct thing.

I don't think it should be this way, but they conflate that with going soft, being a tool of the left, part of the reason why people hate Liz Cheney and really any tepid criticism of Trump whatsoever. So it's one of those where he is in just such a pickle that I agree with you. He's probably doing the best thing he possibly can. But that just illustrates to me where as long as Trump is in the race, like it's just not going to happen. And I can't imagine to try to subject myself to all of this. I mean De DeSantis is a young man. He's like 40 some, 43 years old. He has small children. It's like, why would you want to go through this? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a great segue into the next piece. But before we get to it,

I did want to ask you, Sarg, what did you think of the choice of Waco, Texas for this rally? Oh, very smart, actually. Because, you know, obviously we cover, we had David Thibodeau on the show, the Waco survivor. The segment did incredibly well. And it's not a surprise. There's still quite a bit of organic, I would say, interest in what happened at Waco. And especially with the rise of the Internet and the ability for a newer generation, people like us whose lives weren't defined by Waco as a seminal political event to kind of reexamine it in the cold light of day. And everybody's like this was a complete disaster. So I think it was a smart move, especially, you know, politically trying to conflate it

with January 6th and look at government overreach, which is something that the base feels especially passionate about. Let me spend a second there, too, which is a lot of people talked about, like, why is Trump talking about January 6th when clearly, you know, MAGA stopped the steal and all that was such a disaster for him in the midterms? I actually agree with that, but that's general election analysis. That's not primary analysis. That's right. Amongst the primary, amongst the base, people who watch Tucker Carlson every single night amongst the Fox News dads, they are obsessed with January 6th,

with the political persecution and all of that. So it's an easy way for him to, again, conflate the entire Republican movement and persecution of them and himself as a bulwark against the left and elevate him once again over to Ron DeSantis. Well, this is the thing that Trump does so effectively and has always done so effectively. He defines and selects the landscape of issues that he wants to make central to a political campaign and forces people to, you know, pick a side, to be on one side or the other. And with regards to the midterms, which, yeah, were, you know, really ended up being kind of a disaster for Trump and the candidates that he endorsed. But in terms of the Republican

primaries leading into those midterms, stop the steal was one of the key issues, if not the key issue. He managed to make it the central dividing line in the Republican party. And it's one that is very difficult for candidates like Ron DeSantis who want to maintain elite donor support to try to navigate. So it's another for him. I mean, yeah, I think it will be horrible for him in the general election. I think it's horrible for the country. But in terms of a Republican primary electorate, this is an issue that's very beneficial to him. So you can see the way that he's sort of already setting the table with his position on Ukraine, which again, Ron DeSantis has struggled to navigate. He sounded very different depending on the day and depending

on the interview, even though I think if you look at his comments in totality, I don't think they're directly contradictory of one another. But clearly the tone was different with Tucker Carlson versus when he was sitting with Piers Morgan. And it becomes clear that, you know, he's leaving himself some wiggle room and looking kind of like a typical politician trying to navigate Ukraine. So that's been a difficult one for him. The other one that I think is so intelligent and that is in a lot of ways going back to classic Trump 2016 is him leaning into Social Security and Medicare and very much like which side are you on on that one? That's another really challenging one for Ron DeSantis, but also basically every other potential

Republican contender in the field. And then when you throw Stop the Steal into that mix, again, that's a difficult one. That's going to be a difficult one for Mike Pence. That's going to be a difficult one for Nikki Haley. That's going to be a difficult one for Ron DeSantis, because this is an issue where they're going to try to have it both ways. They're going to try to do some version of the what you always call the highbrow Stop the Steal. And that is not going to be acceptable to the base. And Trump is not going to let that slide. So I think the landscape of issues that he has laid out is making it very difficult for Ron DeSantis and all of these other contenders to try to navigate. Yeah, I think you're right on that, Crystal. All right. So let's get to it's not just

us that are that have some questions about whether Ron DeSantis will be able to ultimately succeed in this Republican primary and whether there's really any move on the chessboard that he could make that would enable his victory without some extra exogenous event occurring to effectively take Trump out of the running. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is a report from NBC News. The headline here is Ron DeSantis' donors and allies question if he's ready for 2024. They say at a recent gathering of 16 prominent Republicans, a number of DeSantis supporters discussed if he should run against Trump or wait until 2028. Let me read a bit of this report because I think it is quite stunning. One of the individuals, the strategists they interviewed for this had, I thought, a really

great quote. He said, DeSantis is doing a book tour. He's barnstorming the country and his polls are going down. Meanwhile, Trump's potentially under indictment and Trump a book tour. He's barnstorming the country and his polls are going down. Meanwhile, Trump's potentially under indictment and Trump's going up. It's just not a good look for DeSantis. The piece begins by saying Ron DeSantis may be missing his moment. A number of the Florida governor's donors and allies are worried. His recent stumble suggests he might not be ready for a brutal fight against Trump. Some feel he needs to accelerate his timeline to run for the GOP presidential nomination and begin directly confronting Trump if he's to have any chance of thwarting the

president's, former president's momentum. Others believe DeSantis should just sidestep Trump altogether and wait until 2028 to run. This was based on some reporting they did at this Sunday luncheon following a Red Cross ball in Palm Beach, Florida. So this was in Florida. This was, again, not a bunch of Trump backers. These are DeSantis people, or at least DeSantis friendly. One attendee described them as a mix of DeSantis backers and Trump skeptics, and they were all discussing misgivings about the governor standing for the future. They liked him. Many of them might even support him, the person who was at the event set of DeSantis, but they thought on ballots his long long term future was better without him trying to take Trump head on.

He will get scarred up by Trump, the person added. They also mentioned this conservative billionaire shipping goods magnate Richard Yulian and his wife Elizabeth, who's $500,000 in combined contributions, ranked them among the most generous donors to DeSantis' previous campaign. And they said a person familiar with their strategy said on spending, they are pumping the brakes. The polling really made different people pause. And this all comes after DeSantis has sounded different notes on Ukraine, really in particular stumbling and delaying how he reacted to Trump's indictment. And just, I think also the increasingly apparent landscape where because Trump is dominating the news so much and because these various indictments are likely to come down and

really make him the focal point of the party once again, it just makes the landscape damn near impossible for anyone to try to navigate and get ahead of him in the polls. Yeah, it's very difficult. I thought that the Ukraine thing that he did was a massive mistake because he tried to have it both ways. You know, to Tucker Carlson, territorial dispute,

he takes the heat for it. The donors come out and actually get upset with him and then immediately does an about face with Piers Morgan and now is like, oh, Putin is a war criminal. He must be held to account. Now, as you said, technically on paper, he didn't reverse anything that he said. They're not intellectually inconsistent. That said, this is about tonal and rhetoric comparison. Rhetorically, clearly, it was a backtrack. And he actually accused the mainstream media of distorting some of his comments. So it's like, well, which way is it, governor? Did you say it was a territorial

dispute? Are you skeptical of ATU Ukraine? Or do you think that we should take a more hawkish position towards Russia? Obviously, this is a donor backed pressure. And this ultimately shows you why Trump has always been able to be successful in the first place. Like, yes, he might be due the bidding of the donors inadvertently whenever he allows the tax cuts and all of that to go through. But on issues, whenever he diverts from them, he's just going to say whatever he thinks. And, you know, I have no idea how much of that pressure or whatever actually does come to bear. But this seemed quite obvious of a pressure campaign. And it's also one where if he can't stand his ground on Ukraine, then, you know, how are you going to stand your ground on many of the other fights that are going to you're going to have to now navigate where the

base feels very differently than mainstream public opinion? Overall, I thought it was a political disaster the way that he handled himself there and actually gave a great gift to the Trump very differently than mainstream public opinion. Overall, I thought it was a political disaster the way that he handled himself there and actually gave a great gift to the Trump campaign who has been smacking him over the head with Ukraine. For sure, no doubt about it. And do I think that Ukraine will be the number one issue for Republican primary voters?

No, I do not. Most voters don't vote on foreign policy. But do I think that this whole episode gives off an incredible stench of like politician with his finger in the wind trying to figure out the right answer of where he should be rather than what he actually thinks? Yes, absolutely. And so in that way, I do think it is damaging to him, even though, you know, again, I don't think that Republican primary voters, I don't want to pretend they're following all the ins and outs of how Ron DeSantis like navigated Ukraine in a couple of different interviews. But again, this is we're talking about an elite donor set that he's going to be very dependent on if and when he runs for president. They're certainly paying close attention to this and clearly have a lot of nervousness around not just the Ukraine answers,

but also, and you picked up on this right away too, Sagar, that there was such a delay in how he responded to a potential Trump indictment that it took him days and days before he even said a word about it. And then when he did say something about it, he once again tried to have it both ways, tried to take a shot at Trump over, you know, hush money to porn stars, which the base did not take kindly to and which there's a big backlash online over, but also then going after, you know, the quote unquote George Soros backed DA. So, so yeah, I think there's just an increasing realization this landscape is going to be very difficult. And like we've been saying the whole time, the indictments, again, might be bad for Trump in a general election. But in terms of the Republican base, it's just like when Mar-a-Lago

was raided. It forces people to come out and defend him. It sort of strengthens his hand within the Republican Party. And this potential indictment that we may or may not get this week is likely to be just the first of a number of potential indictments here. Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what might happen this week. Now, as a refresher, the indictment we're talking about right now has to do with the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels leading up to the 2016 campaign. The allegation here potentially is that there was both a business fraud, which would be typically a misdemeanor where the payments were misclassified in terms of his record keeping, but also the way that they're potentially interpreting this as a felony is that this was in service of campaign finance fraud. And so that is the legal theory that they may be pursuing

with this grand jury in Manhattan. Trump, of course, at his rally reacted to these potential indictments. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. The new weapon being used by out-of-control, unhinged Democrats to cheat on election is criminally investigating a candidate, bad publicity and all. You get bad publicity. It's the craziest thing. I got bad publicity and my poll numbers have gone through the roof. Would you explain this to me? Explain that to me, Dan. Mr. Congressman, you got to explain it to me because nobody

else has ever heard of it. But you know what? It gets so much publicity that the case actually gets adjudicated in the press and people see it's bullshit and they go and they say it's unfair. Also worth noting, he had pre-printed signs that placards that those fans were holding up that said Winch Hut on it. So he clearly is leaning into this fight saga. Yeah, he is. I mean, and again, this is probably one of the most potent things that he has in further Republican base because they view him so tightly as a representative of them, and any persecution of him is one that is by definition a de facto persecution of them. And the fact that they appear, again, appear to be starting with this hush money bookkeeping scheme about to a porn star, it just seems like a major mistake. Because narratively, what you would have wanted to start with is the Fulton County case about Stop the Steal or a federal case about Stop the Steal or the secret document. Now, obviously, with the classified documents, that one went a little bit out the window

after Joe Biden himself had classified documents himself. So the best one they really had was Fulton County and January 6th. Starting with the bookkeeping one, it's gonna snowball now all into one thing where people aren't necessarily going to parse the details of every single prosecution investigation and all that. So look, we don't know again.

It's Monday. We don't yet have an indication whether the grand jury is going to meet and Trump will be indicted tomorrow. As I said, I'm here in Manhattan and there is quite a bit of security in Midtown, including Secret Service. Nobody actually quite knows what's going on. Specifically, it's around the Peninsula Hotel, but the entire block is blocked off. There are garbage trucks everywhere. There's Secret Service detail. There are dogs. NYPD is out in full force. All things certainly smell of Trump. Why he would know he would be staying at a hotel and not at his own house, I don't certainly know.

But it's one of those where there's quite a bit of speculation here in Manhattan. There is security, I know, down at the courthouse and elsewhere in preparation for any type of indictment. So at the very least, people in the city appear to be preparing or authorities here in Manhattan are preparing for something. And apparently, I look this up, the grand jury typically meets on Monday. So today would be one of the typical meeting days, Wednesday and Thursday. Last week, we reported they canceled the Wednesday and Thursday meetings. They didn't come in and they didn't meet. So potentially there could be something happening today, but no one knows.

And the other thing that I just think it's really important to throw out there is we've been taking it as kind of like a, you know, a done deal that Trump is going to be indicted by this grand jury. And it's likely that he is, but I just want to say that there's no guarantees. You're still talking about human beings who have been presented with certain evidence in a case and will be making up their minds whether or not to indict him. So it's not like this process. Yes, it's controlled. The process is controlled by Alvin Bragg, but it's still dependent on, you know, regular citizens of New York to ultimately make the decision here. And I just want to put out there that there are absolutely no guarantees that they will decide that they should indict him.

Former President Trump also reacting on True Social as he does. Put this up on the screen. This was apparently a late night post where he's warning of death and destruction. If he gets arrested, let me read you the whole thing. It says, what kind of person can charge another person, in this case, a former president of the U.S. who got more votes than any sitting president in history and leading candidate by far for the Republican Party nomination with a crime when it is known by all that no crime has been committed and also known that potential death and destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country. Why and who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truly hates the USA. And Sagar, this reminded me

of after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump made some similar comments, basically threatening, you know, nice country, you got there. If I'm indicted, it's all going to go to hell. Yeah, I mean, this is vintage Trump. He's never been above using it. He quite literally already did it. So it's one of those people should probably take it seriously. In terms of how people will react, though, that's the real open question. I have no idea. As we actually previously showed, not a lot of people showed up to the planned protests outside of the Manhattan DA's office, even though that was called, or at least stoked a bit by Trump and some of his allies. So whether they will and will heed the call

and whether they view it even as a fruitful exercise for protest is actually one where we really don't know the answer to that question yet. Yes. So will there actually be death and destruction? I guess we're just going to have to wait and find out. Another great day. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens, as Trump as the Trump always said. All right. Let's let's talk a little bit about TikTok. I know that there was a lot going on over the weekend. We covered previously how the TikTok CEO appeared before Congress. At this point, we will show you some of his comments. But more interestingly, what happened is that there was effectively unanimous opposition on the committee itself around national security issues surrounding TikTok. Overall, the hearing is regarded as a massive disgrace for the TikTok CEO. He didn't handle

himself particularly well. Also, it was a disgrace to many members of Congress, which we will absolutely get to. The major debate, though, happening right now has been sparked by Representative AOC, who posted her first TikTok ever over the weekend in which she came out against banning TikTok. I wanted to make sure that we showed all of you and broke down some of what she said. Let's take a listen. The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders. And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it. Some of the arguments about banning TikTok have come with respect to discussions around Chinese surveillance and utilization of data that is tracked and the enormous amount of tracking on U.S. citizens and data that is harvested by TikTok. And they say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app. However, that doesn't really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don't know about without really any significant

regulation whatsoever. So I think this is important. I want to spend some time on this, Crystal. I know you and I have talked about this a lot, but people obviously, there's a lot of renewed interest in this. So part of the reason why I want to take this seriously, our own James Lee actually did a fantastic segment over the weekend about this as well. The reason why I think conflating data privacy with this issue is that, yes, it is certainly true that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are cynically using the TikTok national security issue to push their own business. That said, that does not mean that we should disregard the core issue at hand.

At the end of the day, Facebook, Google, Apple, all of these companies are subject to US law, to the US judicial system. If we have a problem with that, we can change it. We can actually change the way that they conduct business. I and you have both advocated for changing those laws. One of the reasons actually why TikTok is so exceptional is that they are not subject to U.S. control and are instead directly subject to the Chinese authoritarian system in which they directly

have to do whatever the Chinese government tells them to do. We also know at this point that TikTok, owned by ByteDance, CEO Zhang Ziming, has directly made company decisions at the behest of the CCP and so-called government-controlled actions. Now, the national security case on this is that you're going to have an app with 150 million Americans being used that is not subject to any Democratic, small d, Democratic control. And yes, let me just stop there and let me, I want to hear what you have to say. Yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, I actually found some of the questions that James Lee raised, which I do want everybody to go and watch because he did a fantastic job on that video. I found them persuasive. And I also found Glenn Greenwald did a show on this

last week that I thought also raised some really important questions. A couple of things that they brought up is, as you were indicating, Sagar, and as AOC also mentioned, okay, if your concern is data privacy, then why are you focused on just this one app when Meta in particular collects way more data than TikTok does? So the data privacy concerns are hard to take seriously when you haven't seen a serious effort by Congress to deal with this in any real way in terms of, you know, all of social media. So that's number one. One of the points that Glenn raised that I control over and hold onto is the one that they are going after to ban. So I think that's noteworthy. And I also think that, you know, it's also worth considering that this is just a truly extraordinary act. You are talking about 150 million users on this platform. It is the most popular platform among teenagers in the country.

So the extraordinary nature of this act, I think, should also not be understated. And you also have a lot of people who are very self-interested, not just the executives at Google and Facebook and other places, but also many of these members of Congress have stock in these companies that they stand to personally benefit from banning TikTok. So I did actually think that a number of those concerns were significant and worth consideration. I think that those are all incredibly valid points. And unlike a Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, I would not say that that's not true. I think they're all actually completely true. That doesn't yet absolve. And part of what I would say is, OK, we run our country. We have small D democratic input. We can vote for candidates. And yes, this is incredibly hard.

I'm not saying the government is incorrupt and our political system isn't there. That said, we can have some small D democratic control over the FBI. We quite literally have a Congress which is holding hearings about this. There are no such hearings in China. Secondly, and whenever it comes to this issue around data privacy and the self-insurgency nature, again, I want to say that that is 100% true. But I also want to inject a secondary issue to this, which I don't think that AOC, James or Glenn has addressed, which is about reciprocity. Look, at the end of the day, Facebook, Google, Apple. Well, OK, not Apple, but Facebook, Google and U.S. social media companies are banned in China specifically because China does not want any U.S. backed company to have any market share in their

country whatsoever without total authoritarian control because they believe that it would be used as a U.S. cultural psyop to turn their population. So how can we then allow their major platform in our – this is a basic – this is fairness. You cannot allow this company to operate in the United States when they ban our companies from operation. So I think that argument cuts both ways, because when China or Iran or other authoritarian regimes block American social media companies, we interpret that as their authoritarian despots. So when we do the same with their social media platforms, shouldn't we examine whether our behavior is similarly authoritarian and despotic? So I don't think that that argument, I don't buy

that argument because I'm not looking to replicate the authoritarian tendencies of a country like China. The other thing in terms of the data privacy issues that I think is worth raising as well is if we're concerned, and I think we rightly should, I don't think anyone should take the CEO at his word that like, oh, it's all stored in Houston and don't worry about it. Like they don't have any access. I don't think anyone should really buy into that. Okay. So I want to be clear about that. But the data that we're talking about that's being collected, a lot of this data, if not all of this data, is widely available for sale. So if China wants that data, like they've already got access to it. In a lot of ways, that ship has already sort of sailed. So I don't want to get caught up in a sort of anti-China hysteria. I think it is worth, you know, I have been in support of some of the efforts that we

have taken in order to make ourselves more economically independent and less dependent on China. I think some of the things we've done, especially with chips manufacturing, makes a lot of sense. This one, just to be frank, I still have some major, major question marks about whether or not this represents a dramatic overreach. And, you know, maybe it's because my spidey senses go up when you have such overwhelming sentiment from both parties and so few voices of dissent. And you've got the Biden administration, you know, aligning with, you know, almost every Republican in support of banning this thing. I start to I start to wonder what the underlying agenda is. And I do think part of it has to do

with national security state wanting control over social media platforms and also personal sort of financial investment in some of the companies that really stand to benefit from banning TikTok. As we've discussed before, all of these social media companies are basically desperate to replicate TikTok success. We see it very clearly with YouTube, which of course is owned by Google, where they're trying to do YouTube shorts and they're trying to compete and they're leaning more into their algorithm versus, you know, what people choose to select as their preferences on YouTube. This is all complete replication of what TikTok has done and the kind of magic that has made TikTok so appealing to teenagers. So I guess that's what I'll say is I have I the amount of questions I have about this

direction have dramatically increased. I think those are all fair. And I actually I find myself uncomfortable being on the side of the establishment, I guess, for once. And but here's the thing I will remind people. This was not a popular position three and a half years ago. I might have been one of the maybe like me and like three Matt Stoller and like two others And here's the thing I will remind people. This was not a popular position three and a half years ago. I might have been one of the maybe like me and like three, Matt Stoller and like two others were the ones who were talking about it.

Actually, the entire Republican establishment was against banning TikTok for this reason, because Wall Street had significant had significant investors inside of the ByteDance Corporation. The Biden administration also dragged its feet. If you can go back, you can actually go pull the receipts if people want. I've been doing monologues about this for over three years. I remember doing monologues when they had like 30 million users. And I was like, guys, this is reaching escape velocity. You've got to nip this problem in the bud before it becomes a problem. And, you know, I also want to say this, too, about what you were saying. At the end of the day, I respect national sovereignty. If Iran and China want to ban Facebook and Google, I don't actually think that's authoritarian, even though they are doing it for authoritarian purposes. As we also noticed, whenever Twitter,

for example, removed Donald Trump, many other democratic countries like Germany and France were like, hey, you can't be taking heads of state off platforms. And if you do, you're going to be subject to our regulation. All countries have the ability to conduct national sovereignty, which is why I think that our national sovereignty should be respected. The talking point around why should we act like China is actually one that a lot of libertarian activists and lobbyists for TikTok have been using here for quite some time. So look, yes, it is true that data privacy in the United States is a disaster. Yes, it is certainly true also that these companies are not acting in good faith and that there's a lot of shenanigans and corruption and all that going on. It is also true certainly that the FBI and all of those want something under their control.

But at the same time, we don't have no – we don't have no role to play here. We live in a democratic country. We actually can have input on this. I would view this actually as a victory for information and for democracy because the press, the people, and many of the politicians actually are the ones who caught up the least. It's really open source press reporting and pressure from the outside, which brought this issue really to bear. And look, let's also take a step and look, as you alluded to, to the actual TikTok CEO's testimony here, where he did himself no favors with some of his disastrous answers. Let's take a listen to one. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the

Chinese government. It's a private company. Mr. Chu, has ByteDance spied on Americans at the direction of the Chinese Communist Party? No. Has ByteDance spied on American citizens? I don't think that spying is the right way to describe it. This is committed to be very transparent with our users about what we collect. I don't think what we collect, I don't believe what we collect is more than most players in the industry. The problem here is you're trying to give the impression that you're going to move away from Beijing and the Communist Party. You're trying to give the impression that you're a good actor. But the commitments that we

would seek to achieve those goals are not being made today. I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data. They have never asked us. We have not provided. Well, you know what? I find that actually preposterous. TikTok accessed the home Wi-Fi network. Has ByteDance spied on American citizens? I don't think the spying is the right way to describe it. The only face data that you get, that we collect, is when you use the filters to have, say, sunglasses on your face.

We need to know where your eyes are. Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you're not seeing if they're dilated? American data stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel. We call this initiative Project Texas. Please rename your project. Texas is not the appropriate name. We stand for freedom and transparency and we don't want your project. You damn well know that you cannot protect the data and security of this committee or the 150 million users of your app because it is an extension of the CCP. From the data it collects to the content it controls, TikTok is a grave threat of foreign influence in American life. So what I like about that mashup is, first of all, does TikTok connect to the home Wi-Fi?

These people, I don't even know what to say about this. Some of these boomers in Congress, I know many of our boomer audience will get mad. I'm sorry, people. A lot of you got to go. We can't be having this in some of the top representatives of Congress where you have an immense amount of responsibility. It's just like the Facebook hearing where they're like, Mr. Zuckerberg, how do you make money?

I will never get over that one. That said, I don't think spying is the right word. Obviously ridiculous. I also think I should explain to people because it's not ultimately clear. TikTok is a subsidiary company of ByteDance, the Chinese holding company. Mr. Chu is a Singaporean citizen

who was hired specifically because he's not Chinese. Before that, they had an American who actually quit his job because of the national security concerns. But he used to work over at Disney. Mr. Chu was used and is a puppet of basically of Zhang Jiming, the CEO and the major holder of ByteDance. ByteDance itself is subject once again, completely and totally to CCP authoritarian control. Zhang has already had to take many apps off of the Chinese app store and apologize to the CCP for, quote, not upholding socialist core values. And of course, those aren't actual socialist values. Those are the CCP values. He also has held actual CCP Xi Jinping thought trainings inside of ByteDance. All I'm trying to say is that clearly it is directly controlled by the Chinese government.

Ask Jack Ma how it worked out for him when he got a little bit too big for his britches and he was basically thrown into prison. So I think it's important for people to look at this hearing as much of a disaster as it was, really on all sides, especially with some of these representatives not literally knowing how the Wi-Fi works. And that is where I do want to validate something that AOC did say. You do have to make the case for people. It has to be cogent. And you can't be having clips of congressmen saying, does TikTok connect to the home Wi-Fi and steal your data? I think a genuine case, and I've tried to make it here many times, laying out all the case here. I think Biden does owe that. Ultimately, I think he failed by allowing this amount of market penetration in the first place. But if you're going to allow that, a very cogent, important case needs to be made. Because the one thing she

is correct about is that a lot of people use the app. Half the country literally is using this app. And so at that point, now you do owe it because there is an act. I mean, that's almost as many people who voted just so people are aware. Well, yeah, I think I think those are great points. I mean, I would say that really this app reached a skate velocity during the Trump administration when these discussions first started and Trump started trying to, you know, force a sale or whatever. And it ended up coming to nothing. But there's a reason why Biden has pushed this, kicked this to Congress rather than claiming the authority to take action himself. And it's because he knows that this is likely to be devastatingly unpopular with young voters. And look, a lot of young people don't show up to vote, but some of them do. And a lot of them

vote for the Democratic Party. So he also wants to shift blame for this if they do end up banning TikTok in a bipartisan direction so that he doesn't completely shoulder the blame. Because I do think, you know, for a lot of young people, and I have some insight into this with how much my daughter, how much time my daughter spends on this app, this is a really like kind of central part of their life. This is really important to them. It's where they express themselves creatively. It's their entertainment. It's all of that. And so if you in one fell swoop ban it, especially without really laying out a case that they, you know, believe in, buy into, accept and are willing to go along with, then you're going to face some huge political blowback. And as much as he's trying to shift the onus in a bipartisan direction, he's president of the United States.

So I think from a political perspective, he's still going to really get the blame here if they do decide to go forward with banning TikTok completely. I've been very annoyed with the way that they've handled it. They've been dragging their feet. It's been several years now. He's been doing these fake reviews and tried to negotiate. You know, another thing I want to say is I know that we covered in our previous show, I think about a week ago, about how the Biden administration told them either for sale or ban. And what did I say? I said a for sale is never going to happen.

And lo and behold, the Chinese regulators came out and they're like, yeah, we're like, we're not going to approve that deal. There's no way we're going to be sold because that's valuable IP for ByteDance. That's one of their crown jewels of the Chinese technology empire. Why would they let it go? That'd be like, imagine if China said, hey, Facebook, you got to sell Oculus. America would be like, no, that's not going to happen. We're not going to have no Justice Department regulators or whatever would approve that deal, again, for the same reason. So I think a ban is ultimately an inevitability. Personally, I think it's a good thing. I do think, though, and I think, look, we have a lot of young people who watch the show. Let's continue to raise these issues and to talk about it. I know,

frankly, a lot of them are skeptical. Maybe you should be. Maybe you should be. Hopefully, we can either convince you or we can show you that a real debate can and should be had here. And that's certainly not happening elsewhere. I think that's important. Yeah. Well, the last thing I'll say is, I am in the skeptical camp, for sure, just because I do think it is an extraordinary act. And I continue to be unpersuaded that the data privacy concerns here are significantly different than those with regards to other social media companies. But, you know, to broaden out, we really have to have some sort of a wider ranging reform of social media companies so that you are dealing with the metas of the world, you are dealing with the Twitters of the world, you are dealing with YouTube and all the rest, because

this sort of piecemeal approach is not going to be any sort of panacea, even if we do resolve whatever issues people have with TikTok. All right, let's go ahead and talk about Syria. Some extraordinary things happening over the last couple of days. An American contractor, as well as other several U.S. service members, were wounded in an apparent drone attack on a U.S. base in eastern Syria. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So some of the details are a little bit scant, but the initial indications that are coming out of this incident are really troubling. And the Pentagon has to answer a lot of questions. So as I said, the Pentagon is blaming Iranian-backed militias

and said that it was a, quote, Iranian drone or a drone of Iranian origin, whatever that means. Obviously, eastern Syria is a hotly contested territory. You've got Iranian-backed militias. You've got Islamic militias. You've got U.S.-backed militias. It's basically a free-fire zone. It has been now since the beginning of the Civil War. Occasionally, Israeli strikes will happen in the region against Hezbollah. It's absolute madness going on there. And of course, the question arises, like, why are American troops even there? Who are these contractors? What are we doing? Much of it is currently being conducted under the U.S. anti-ISIS mission. So yes, there have been some

limited number of airstrikes and operations against ISIS in the last couple of months, but it's one that very much flies under the radar until, as we all saw during the Niger attack, the U.S. service members just end up dead in a part of the world that we barely even knew that we were still operating in. What is especially insane about this attack, Crystal, is that the base's anti-air defense, the air defense system was not working properly and apparently failed, which is what the Pentagon is saying. And not only that, not only did it fail, it appears that the Iranian militias knew that it was failing and specifically choose that time to conduct an attack. So not only do we have

our guys stationed in eastern Syria for a reason that nobody has ever voted for or made a case to the American public. By the way, we're not at war with Syria. And then also, we're not even protecting them properly. And now a U.S. contractor is dead and several service members are wounded. On top of that, more attacks were then conducted over the course of the next several days. Let's put this up there on the screen, where you can actually see a number of drone attacks and swarms happened all across of Syria, in eastern Syria specifically, against other U.S. bases, which actually raises the question, how many American service members are inside of Syria? This was a major topic of discussion during the Trump administration.

When Trump ordered a pullout from Syria, that's ultimately why Secretary Mattis quit the administration in the first place. And the case that he often was making there, as many skeptics, people like myself were also saying, was, Lickinson, if you don't get out, then we're never going to leave. And it's been five years since that happened. And now we just had a service member or a contractor was killed there, several services members who were wounded. And on top of that, now we are being drawn further into this conflict. Let's throw this up there. The Biden administration conducting retaliatory airstrikes in Syria in response to this attack, escalating tension with the Iranian regime as well over this as if we don't have more problems going on elsewhere in the world. This is just, you know,

like a vintage story, I think, outside of the forever war. Yeah, I think that is exactly correct, where it reminds you, number one, of all of these conflicts that we have service members engaged in that the American public has had no ability to debate, that there was never any congressional authorization for. Number two, that, you know, this is all fine and good until you have some major conflict, as we have basically right now with, you know, an adverse and a significant adversary and a significant power player in terms of the region. You know, this leads us into sort of direct conflict with Iran, which can have all sorts of spiraling diplomatic consequences that can end

in disaster. You know, the reporting suggests that there is more than 900 actual service members in Syria remaining and hundreds more contractors. We don't even know what number that is. So there continues to be potential for disaster here as evidenced by this. This is also not the first time that President Biden has carried out strikes within Syria. There were strikes in February and June of 2021. There were strikes in August of 2022. And now this latest round. So I think it has all the elements of total lack of transparency, total lack of accountability, and a very potentially dangerous and fraught situation that the American people have really had no insight into or say over.

Yes, and I also think it's important for people to understand the U.S. Congress never authorized any troops inside of Syria. All of this is being done under the auspices of Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the U.S.-backed mission to support Iraqi security forces against ISIS inside of Iraq. Obama and President Trump expanded Inherent Resolve to a secret mission of, at one point, thousands of American service members inside of Syria. Syria, look, we do not recognize any government outside of Syria. The Assad regime clearly remains in power throughout the country. This is a sovereign nation, which U.S. forces are stationed on without the explicit permission, and in fact, the protests of the government who is in

control in that region. We are basically doing so in occupation of at least the limited bases and other territory that we have with no legitimacy from Congress or from the nation whose territory that we are operating on. This is, again, part of the problem with the congressional abdication of responsibility and the authorization of the use of military force that we saw in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where all of these missions like in Niger and in Somalia and, you know, God, where who knows where Mali, many of these other places are all done without any actual government approval. In many cases, members of Congress, even those on the Armed Services Committee and also others have no idea what these troops are doing there.

And look, let's be honest, does the Biden administration even know what's going on? Do they know what they're doing there? It really is just run outside of the Pentagon on complete autopilot. And then the world just wakes up as we did in Niger when somebody dies. So look, unfortunately, just like in that situation, most likely what will happen is the Pentagon will cover it up. They'll try and act tough. The Biden administration won't give any answers. And the troop presence will just continue. You know, you covered that Niger attack there at the time. This seems very similar where what the hell is going on here? We have people in far flung places. Air defense doesn't even work properly. A man is dead. Like you can't just, you can't whitewash something like this.

And yet they do it all the time. Yeah, I think that's all well said. Okay. Let's also talk about Vladimir Putin. This is important international news. So President Putin, let's go and put this up there on the screen, speaking in a long interview, saying that they will station tactical nuclear weapons inside of Belarus. So this isn't an immediate action that President Putin says that the Russians will undertake. But what they're doing is they're going to be building a new tactical nuclear missile base inside of Belarus. The reason why this is important is obviously Belarus is not inside of Russia and is its own independent country, of course, allied very strongly with the Putin regime. The tactical nuclear weapon issue also is not one that has been raised in

quite some time, Crystal. Putin actually kind of dropped the tactical nuclear weapon threats a couple of months ago, trying to tone down the temperature, saying, no, we would never do that. That's not something that's under consideration. After significant amounts of leaks and intimations by former President Medvedev that tactical nuclear weapons were under consideration inside of Ukraine. So clearly, this is once again trying to up the ante, and trying to raise the stakes ahead of a so-called impossible spring offensive by both the Russians and by the Ukrainians, and of course, ongoing Ukrainian fighting happening right now inside of Bakhmut. But overall, with the strategic picture, it of course, ongoing Ukrainian fighting happening right now inside of Bakhmut. But overall, with the strategic picture, it's something that is a bit of a

nightmare for the Ukrainians, and they are recognizing it as such. Let's put this next one up there on the screen, please. As you can see, what they are calling for is an emergency UN Security Council session over the nuclear weapons deployment, first of all, it would be a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It also would be one that is done explicitly kind of marching tactical nuclear weapons westward outside of the Russian border. Of course, the US and NATO has its own nuclear weapons bases, which they have long complained about the Russians and the Chinese. And this is something that they are basically trying to mimic that strategy of like, okay, well, if you can do it, so can we. Encirclement is something that the Ukrainians probably fear the

most. And there's been some speculation of these growing ties between Belarus and Russia militarily that Belarus would even authorize operations from the north in a future type of spring offensive to draw pressure away from the spring offensive that future type of spring offensive to draw pressure away from the spring offensive that's happening in eastern Ukraine. So overall, obviously, it's a troubling strategic situation to be facing right now. No doubt about it. And to underscore some of what you were saying there, this was Putin's justification entirely was like, well, the U.S. does it, so why can't we? He said, we're doing what they have been doing for decades, stationing these tactical nukes in certain allied countries, preparing the launch

platforms and training their crews. We are going to do the same thing. And I think it also exposes one of the sort of media tropes that has been put out there to convince Americans that there is no threat of further escalation, potential nuclear conflict, which was this idea that, oh, Russia hasn't, you know, they've drawn all these red lines and we've gone ahead and sent them tanks and done all these other things. They haven't actually escalated. Well, I think this is definitely an escalation. And they they point directly to the fact that Britain decided recently to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds that contain depleted uranium. This move, depleted uranium, is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process.

It's needed to create nuclear weapons. Now, we're not at risk of any sort of like nuclear explosion from these from this ammunition. But the rounds can emit low levels of radiation. And the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has warned of the possible dangers of exposure. So that is what they're pointing to as the reason for making this move right now. And also, as you indicated, saying, hey, you guys are doing it. So why can't we as well? Of course, this reminds all of us what a dangerous game is being played right now with potential ramifications that go far beyond Ukraine and why it is so critical to get this war resolved by diplomatic

means as soon as it is possibly feasible to do so. I also don't think it is an accident that this happened right after the meeting between President Putin and Xi Jinping. Let's go and put this up there on the screen from the Financial Times about the tightening embrace between China and Russia looking to try and build this bulwark against the West. China also obviously complains about this with respect to U.S. bases in Japan and in South Korea, also pointing to them as attempts to encircle them. So the point being that the alliance or seeming alliance growing between the two could, and this is only could, embolden either to take more aggressive action. Now, at the end of the day, a deployment is a deployment. It is not one with means that they're actually being used. That said, it's not usually a good thing whenever you

start moving tactical nuclear weapons around and specifically closer to a hot war, the largest war inside of Europe ever since World War II. I think that you put all of that together and you do see it's a serious problem here with respect to the strategic grand situation because if China starts having lethal weapons flow towards Russia, specifically if this call between Zelensky and Xi doesn't happen and if Zelensky ends up rejecting the Chinese peace plan outright, it will give them the easiest diplomatic cover that they've ever had to start helping the Russians even more so in a military capacity. This too could set the stage for either a grand spring offensive, which goes well or goes badly. And both, unfortunately, are disasters. A Russian spring offensive that goes well, obviously that's a bloodbath for the Ukrainians.

And that's one in which guarantees the war even more and hundreds of thousands, even more so, will be killed on both sides, of course. But then if it goes badly, that could also make them feel as if they are having their backs against the corner, and they must then reach for the tactical nuclear weapon to save their territory, specifically in some sort of runaway Ukrainian scenario where it looks like they may be able to take Crimea. Now, neither of those, by the way, is all that likely.

Most likely is a stalemate. But it just shows you that the risk in both cases is ones that we have to watch and the risk in those cases is one which always results in a lot of death. Yeah. And that could even embroil the bigger conflict. That's exactly right. And thus far, in terms of how the Biden administration has treated this conflict, basically whatever happens on the battlefield is a justification for us shipping even more aid and escalating even further than we already have. If Ukraine is on the back foot and they're not doing well, it's, oh, we've got to strengthen Ukraine's hand to hopefully ultimately get them in a better

position for the negotiating table. If Russia is on the back foot, then it's, oh, Ukraine could actually win. Let's go ahead and, you know, build them up as much as we can so that we can actually end this war with a Russian defeat. And if it's a stalemate, then it's still we got to strengthen the Ukrainian position here to get them to the negotiating table. Of course, all of those roads lead to further escalation rather than actually getting anyone to the negotiating table. Not that I'm claiming that would be an easy feat whatsoever, but, you know, General Milley, the Rand Corporation, lots of mainstream individuals acknowledging this has to end in a diplomatic resolution and that the sooner we can get there, the better it will be for everyone, but in particular for the

Ukrainian people themselves and avoid further loss of unnecessary life and economic devastation. So with all of that as backdrop, let's get to this story from The New York Times. This is quite extraordinary. Let's go ahead and put it up on the screen here. You got to read this whole report because I'm only going to be able to touch on some of the high level details here. But their headline is, Stolen Valor. The U.S. volunteers in Ukraine who lie, waste, and bicker. People who would not be allowed anywhere near the battlefield in a U.S.-led war are active on the Ukrainian front with ready access to American weapons.

So basically what happened here is Zelensky, understandably, was like, hey, anyone around the world, please, who is able to fight, please come and help us. And so there were thousands of Americans who responded to this call. The New York Times puts it this way. They say they rushed to Ukraine by the thousands, many of them Americans who promised to bring military experience, money, or supplies to the battleground of a righteous war. Hometown newspapers hailed their commitment,

donors backed them with millions of dollars. Now, after a year of combat, many of these homespun groups of volunteers are fighting with themselves and undermining the war effort. Some have wasted money or stolen valor. Others have cloaked themselves in charity while also trying to profit off the war, records show. One of the individuals that they highlight here is Malcolm Nance, who became an absolute resistance superstar over on MSNBC during Russiagate. And he was one of these people who,

you know, when the Ukraine war started, he said, all right, I'm signing up. I'm going to go over there and I'm going to fight this, you know, I'm going to fight in this war personally. So they say that when he arrived, he made a plan to try to bring order and discipline to this legion of fighters that had been, you know, beset by infighting and chaos and, you know, had been lying about their military records and all these other issues. Instead, they say he became enmeshed in the chaos. Today, he's involved in a messy, distracting power struggle, one that it will surprise no one to learn, plays out often on Twitter, where Malcolm Nance taunted one former

ally as fat and an associate of a verified con artist. One of the things that they point to here, Sagar, which will also be a familiar pattern for those who followed his work on Russiagate, is he will use his counterintelligence background to throw out all sorts of allegations about people that, you know, are totally at least unproven. He branded one person as a potential Russian spy, offering no evidence. This individual, of course, denied the allegations. He defended himself, saying that as a member of the Legion with an intelligence background, he developed concerns that he felt an obligation to report this to Ukrainian counterintelligence. He has now left Ukraine, potentially was forced down, but we'll just say left Ukraine, but continues fundraising with a new group of allies.

And a number of these new allies are proven liars who have lied about their military experience, lied about their past work experience, et cetera. So a lot of shady dealings going on here that they're tracking the times. Oh, yeah, this is so disgusting. I mean, when you read this with Malcolm, I mean, clearly he got himself embroiled. Now he's raising money, denouncing other people. And you know what bothers me the most is, look, there are a lot of well meeting people here in this country, around the world, who care a lot about Ukraine, who gave their hard earned money to these people with the belief that they were supporting people who are going to Ukraine to selflessly give their lives and to support those military forces. And if that's the case, these people are the worst of society because,

and I guess allegedly I should say for the lawyers, they took their hard-earned money, are embezzling it in some cases, wasting it. And in the worst cases, Crystal, they are drawing resources from the Ukrainian military who has to deal with these morons, who are like, who are you? Why are you showing up here? In some cases, they had to kick them out

for fighting with each other. Now, many of them are squabbling online, all of them being well-heeled by donors. There's also a secondary part of this where if you read this, our producer Griffin made a joke this morning that this should be made into a movie. It really should be made into a movie, the grifters of Ukraine. But one of the ones that bothered me the most was a guy who showed up there who said, I've been shooting rifles all my life, no formal training, never been in the military, shows up there, starts fighting other American militia members, basically saying that they were delivered brand new American service weapons, basically out of a crate. When he was pressed,

he was like, yeah, I don't know where they came from. I think we all know where they came from. OK, so we're talking here about unvetted, untrained yahoos from the U.S., not saying they aren't brave. You certainly are to be going into an active war zone with U.S. provided and paid weapons and ammunition in their hands and throwing them at the Russians. Does that sound responsible to you? That's not responsible. And many of them, many of them aligning with these, you know, far right, potentially Nazi, Nazi ideology battalions. The dude you're talking about, this guy, James Vasquez had said he deployed to Kuwait, said he deployed in Iraq, all a total lie. He left the Army Reserve not as a sergeant as he claimed, but as a private first class, one of the Army's lowest ranks. Still, they say he had easy access to weapons, including American rifles. Where did they come from? Quote, I'm not exactly sure, Mr. Vasquez said in a text message. The rifles he added were brand new,

out of the box, and we have plenty. He also tweeted that he should not have to worry about international rules of war while he's in Ukraine. He admitted to misrepresenting his military record for decades. He acknowledged being kicked out of the army, but wouldn't talk about why. Quote, I had to tell a million lies to get ahead. I didn't realize it was going to come to this. If you read through, that's like the beginning of the article. If you read through all the way to the end, you'll find Malcolm Nance defending him and saying he's not a fake, he's the real deal. But these are individuals who would never make it on, you know, into the U.S. military. This guy was actively kicked out of the army. And yet in the context of the Ukrainian conflict, he's got access to apparently whatever weapons he wants.

So it also speaks to a lot of questions that we have raised about, OK, we're shipping all of this lethal aid, quote unquote, over there. Where's it going? Who's who's getting their hands on it? Well, we know one person who got their hands on it, Mr. James Vaxquez, who's been lying about everything. And let's not forget this. The Biden administration has assured us we have no indications of misuse of American funds that have been sent to Ukraine. You're looking at direct evidence right there. You got some crazy guy who barely served in the military who's over there with his hands on brand new weapons saying, Crystal, he doesn't need to abide by the international. What did he say?

The international rules of war. So are you saying you're going to commit war crimes with U.S.-provided weapons? Because that doesn't sound great. Is that something that you want your hands on? Nobody here is defending the Russians. Nobody is saying that they don't deserve to be beaten or any of that. But you got to be responsible with the aid and the weapons that you are providing to people. And over and over again, they have assured us that any questions about aid to Ukraine are treasonous.

They say that they're unfounded, that the Ukrainian military here can be trusted. I mean, I'm sorry. You can't be trusted if these are the type of people that you're willing to put weapons in the hands of. This is crazy. I mean, and as they find out, because they're kicking many of them out for having crazy behavior or for being grifters. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. It's a pretty shocking report. Kudos to the time for doing a good job on this one for once. I knew the guy, Thomas Gibbons Neff. He's a straight shooter. He actually was a U.S. Marine himself. He did a lot of great work in Afghanistan. So I'll read anything that guy writes. He's a fantastic reporter.

Okay, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Last week, I discussed how the environmental goals of the ESG investing criteria have amounted to nothing more than greenwashing. It's an attempt to put an environmentally friendly sheen on standard bottom line capitalism. But a shocking report that came out pretty recently puts a finer point on the extent of the scam. One of the methods that corporations use to signal their green ambitions and meet net zero pledges is carbon offsets. Now, the idea here is pretty simple, if a bit morally tortured. Corporations can figure out how large their carbon footprint is

and then buy credits that represent an equal amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere. Now, this is usually done through tree planting or forest preservation. If an airline, for example, is spewing jet fuel producing CO2 in the atmosphere, they can clean their conscience, signal their virtue to customers, and make good on governmental emissions regulations, all by paying a company that will certify they have planted enough trees or saved enough trees to make up for that airline's CO2 emissions. Now, on its face, the concept already sounds kind of sketchy and misleading at best. For example, Shell just delivered a shipment of 70,000 tons of liquefied natural gas to Taiwan in a deal that they had the gall to celebrate

as greenhouse gas neutral. How can they get away with this preposterous claim? Well, they justify it based on the idea that they purchased enough carbon offsets to make up for the 190,000 tons of CO2 emissions that this amount of LNG will create. Here's some Shell big oil corporate propaganda that explains the concept. Nature can be used to compensate for emissions that cannot the concept. responsibility for the emissions produced from driving the vehicles, by efficient use and with the help of nature. By investing in forestry projects that store and capture CO2, carbon credits can be created and used to compensate for the emissions from the use of fossil fuel vehicles. So Shell is arguing, basically, we don't need to change what we're doing at all. We can just invest in a forest in Kenya and poof, net zero. The idea of a giant shipment of fossil fuels ever

being labeled zero emissions is, of course, insulting on its face. But a recent bombshell report from The Guardian and a consortium of other journalists shows just how much folly is truly involved here. Because apparently the whole carbon offset business is just one gigantic scam. At best, at best, these offsets do nothing. At worst, they are actively making warming worse by pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible consumers and complicit governments. Here's The Guardian, the headline sort of says it all, revealed. More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by Biggest Certifier are worthless, analysis shows. Investigation into Veracarbon Standard finds most are phantom credits and may

worsen global heating. Now, the article goes on to note that credits from this one company are used by Disney, Shell, Gucci, and dozens of other corporations. In fact, Vera is a giant in the space, making up three quarters of total voluntary offsets certified in what is now a $2 billion market. So this is big business, and it's a terrible situation for those who actually care about dealing with the climate crisis and not just confusing consumers with corporate virtue signaling. In order to analyze Vera's claims here, The Guardian, along with their partners, relied on two different groups of scientists and a team of journalists to further analyze the results those scientists found. They found that in, quote, 32 projects where it was possible to compare Vera's claims with the study finding, baseline scenarios of forest loss appear to be overstated by about 400 percent. Three projects in Madagascar did achieve excellent results and have a significant impact on the figures. If those

projects are not included, the average inflation is about 950 percent. Vera, of course, disputes the results and offered a different methodology, which they claim showed much more significant carbon benefit. But what the multiple research teams here show is that the amount of force actually saved by Vera's projects is wildly less than what they estimated in planning their projects and selling credits. It makes sense, of course. Vera and other similar companies have an incentive to cut corners and do their projects as cheaply as possible. Companies buying the offsets want the most greenwashing for the cheapest cost, so they certainly don't want to rock the boat here. And we all want to get a product with a little label or promotion telling us that our purchases are actually good for the world, not just contributing to a glut of planet-killing crap.

We feel better checking the little box when buying our airline ticket that claims for a small price we can offset the carbon generated by our weekend getaway. And governments, which know that climate action is popular, are similarly disincentivized from digging too deeply to expose that the whole thing is actually a farce. It is one giant, self-licking ice cream cone. In fact, in our own country, California has the most significant state-administered carbon offset program. Now, the idea is that homeowners and large landowners alike can be issued carbon credits for preserving trees they would have otherwise cut down. Then, those credits can be sold to private business as carbon offsets to help meet their state-mandated emission reduction goals. But, like other carbon offset systems, the whole thing is

easy to gain by claiming you were going to cut down trees that you actually never really intended to cut down. And sure enough, new satellite data shows that the decade-old program has accomplished literally nothing. According to this data, timber companies, they're not logging any less, and the offset project forests don't look any different from a carbon perspective than areas that are not part of these offset projects. One way logging companies appear to game the system is by claiming that forests they own, which have effectively worthless trees, are part of the offset program. These trees are not valuable on the market, so the companies were not likely to cut them down anyway. Meanwhile, they continue logging the areas that do have market-valuable species. This has the perverse effect of actually subsidizing the operations of logging companies.

That's obviously the polar opposite of what a green movement would actually want. As one expert told the New York Times, quote, the most basic problem with carbon offsets is that you're trading a known amount of emissions with an uncertain amount of emission reductions. But there's also the whole trading approach of companies being able to buy their way out of their responsibility to reduce their own emissions. This scheme is part of how corporate America seems to confuse and undermine our politics, tricking affluent consumers into thinking their choices are noble and tricking voters

into thinking that the masters of and tricking voters into thinking that the masters of the universe are actually good guys driven by real concern for the planet. In such a landscape, forceful government action isn't necessary, of course. It's a clean conscience for sale with zero challenging choices. Who wouldn't want to put the blinders on and pretend that it's all exactly as advertised? And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Super excited to be joined by the creator of a really popular blog called Wait But Why,

and also the author of a new book that we both just read. Let's put this up on the screen. The book is called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. Tim Urban joins us now. Great to have you, Tim. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, of course. So you lay out in this book an alternative way of seeing politics where, yes, you have a left-right spectrum, but there's another dynamic playing out that you describe as the difference between sort of higher mind approach to politics

versus a more primitive mindset. Just explain the general thesis of the book. Yeah. I think, you know, if you think about how language works, like when we have a term for something, or even better, like a framework, then our thoughts, you know, we have more thoughts about it. We can, we have more conversations about it. We can refer to it. We can develop nuance around it, but if you don't have a term for something, and if you don't have the right framework, then that should limits our

thinking. And I think that's a big part of what's been happening with our politics is we have this one dimensional horizontal spectrum, left, center, right, you right, and far left. That's it. And so that's very limiting. And I think it actually leads to people saying stuff they're not really, they're trying to say something and they're saying something else. So they'll say something like, we need more people in the center. And maybe they do mean that horizontally, but that's not really what they're talking about. They're not saying we need more people that are halfway between the right and the left position on tax cuts. That's not what they're saying. What they're trying to say is we need more people who are open-minded and who are down to really debate their ideas and who might change their mind about it and who get into the nuance and who aren't dogmatic and who don't, you know, who don't form their opinions via kind of a checklist. And so that to me, center is not the word. That's just another position on the horizontal axis. It sometimes correlates with what I'm talking about, but it's a different thing. So I said, okay,

let's make a second axis. Let's just like make it a square instead of a line. And the vertical dimension, I'll call it the ladder. And so you have kind of high rung thinking, high rung politics, and low rung politics, low rung thinking. And again, there's nothing novel here. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. It's just that we don't really have the frame. So high rung politics to me, and this again is a, this is a subset of kind of the broader concept of high rung thinking. It's concerned with, you know, moving towards a more perfect union, you know, as Abe Lincoln said, right? It's like, it's actually, that's really what's going on. They're really, you know, and there's heated debates. It's like people, it's not saying that a lot of people mistake, you know, when I'm saying high rung, it's for civility and for being nice and for being, no, no, no.

People get angry. They're heated. They can hate the other side. They can hate people who disagree with them. But they attack ideas. They don't attack people. They're not tribal about it. They don't think that we are the good, righteous people who agree with each other on everything

and you are the best. They're all over the place in any individual you know if you have individual thinking uh you're gonna have um true and you know a bunch of individuals truly independent thinking you're gonna they're gonna be all over the place with the reviews right and that's what you'll right and and they're you know if they apply you know a moral judgment they apply it consistently so if they think that you know, a moral judgment, they apply it consistently. So if they think that, you know, drones in Afghanistan are bad, they're not going to change that view. And it's a different president in office, they're not going to change their view on executive overreach, or on, you know, anything else when there's a different president in office, right? Because it's just that that's not how grown up thinkers do things, right? It's, so it's kind of consistent. It's open minded,

it's willing to change your mind. There's the core value is truth, you know, trying to actually figure out what's true. And and then they try to achieve what they want via persuasion. Right. They will argue and they will try to attack ideas. And, you know, you don't attack people if you're trying to persuade them. You attack the ideas and you try to show why it's wrong. And so that's what I call high-ranging politics. And to me, it's just kind of grown-up politics. It's what, like, any reasonable, it's how reasonable grown-ups behave in every other arena. If only they behaved that way in this arena, too.

Right. So the idea is, like, nuanced, open to different, open to having their mind change. If they have a principle, they try to apply it consistently, not just be like weirdo partisan cheerleaders. So then what are some of the qualities that are characterized by the lower rung thinking that you lay on in the book? Yeah, I think I call it political Disney world

because like I think of Disney movies, you know, there is villains, there's, you know, Simba good, Scar bad, right? Aladdin good, Jafar bad, right? And it's, you know, there's villains, there's, you know, Simba Goods, Scar Bad, right? Aladdin Goods, Jafar Bad, right? And it's, it's, there's these, you know, it's like this binary code of ones and zeros, right? And there's, and, and, and, and, and so, again, that's great for kids. You don't expect grownups to be thinking like, why, why would grownups be thinking that way? That's not, no one in their right mind thinks that's how the real world is, or that's how people are. There's not good, the good people and the bad people with the good ideas and the bad ideas. It's just not how

anything works, especially a complicated society's incredibly complicated political environment, right? It's not going to be like that. But politics is one of those topics that drags our mind into this kind of primitive zone where we're not thinking straight and we're not acting like ourselves almost. And so you have all these people that are totally normal and great in other areas really believe that they are on the good team of righteous heroes fighting for, they have all the answers. Their team is right about everything and the other team is wrong about everything. And every problem in the society is because the other bad not just wrong but bad evil team is is it's their fault and and um they they abide you know it's it's it's they abide by a checklist um so it's uh it's that

you if so that if someone who's really mired in political disney world or low-rung politics tells you their position on guns boom you. You know, their position on climate change, you know, their position on on, you know, whatever. Russia and Ukraine, you know, their position on abortion and taxes and social justice and every single other thing. Right. And so it's that's not thinking right. That's that's that's no. If you have 10 independent thinkers, there's no way they're going to happen to agree on 10 separate issues. It's only if you have this checklist that is kind of the tribes approved checklist of ideas that you're going to have that. And so to me, when I look at the problems, it's like there's two tiers of problems. One, you could say there's the horizontal disagreements.

OK, you know, what is the left and the right doing? What are they doing? Someone, you know, someone is more on track with each policy probably than others. What's happening there. But to me, that is dwarfed by the much bigger dispute going on, which is between kind of like sanity and, and just acting like reasonable grownups in politics who can actually move things forward and actually make positive change. It's a positive sum game. And this other game that's going on, this crazy tribal game that has huge hostility, by the way, not just to each other,

but to the high-run game. The low-run game hates the high-run game. They call them all kinds of enlightened centrists, spineless centrists. They say that you're giving, you know, the other bad, you know, dangerous ideas, a platform, um, you know, you know, debate is this negative thing done. So, so yeah. So anyway, this is the framework that I basically then built, built this book around. Yeah. You are reciting all the criticisms of our show there, Tim. So we're very well. We've heard every one of those. Yes. Yes. One of the things I actually like about the book and some of the infographics, which are fantastic, by the way. I recommend everybody go and follow Tim on Twitter and read weightbuttwide.com because the infographics that you put together are really easily digestible. And they kind of narrow home this point.

One of them being the media. You have the famous dog and the raccoon headlines that you have side by side that I have even pulled up in front of me just because I love it so much. Can you lay out the media role in this both not only only how they handle it, but then how that is then digested and used, as you said, by low-rung thinkers? Yeah. So there's been a seismic shift in our environment. I mean, if you take any animal and you take their nature and you change the environment, you're going to see different behavior, right? That same nature is going to output different behavior. So humans are no different. Human nature is not different than it was 10, 20, 100,000 years ago.

What changes is the environment and then our behavior changes. And one of the major elements of a modern democracy's environment is their media landscape. And there's been a seismic shift to that, that has obviously massive consequences of all kinds. And the shift is that there used to be three broadcast national news channels. And they weren't news channels, by the way. They were CBS, NBC, ABC. they did a lot of stuff and they had a half hour of news twice a day or something. And so, I mean, it's not that those were better people running those stations. I don't really think there's any of these stories about better or worse people. It's that they had incentives. If one of them, if NBC starts to get known for being really biased towards the left or right and really kind of like, you know, they'll rush to a story and tell it with no journalistic integrity.

And like they'll just like, you know, they're wrong all the time and they don't apologize. And the other two aren't like that, that NBC would become the laughingstock. Right. Everyone say, oh, you know, the kind of person who watches NBC will become a joke. Right. So they don't want to do that. They want to try to fight with each other. Who could be more professional? Right. Who can be more accurate? And you can never tell the political leaning of the anchors. That was a huge thing, right? It was like they were all famously secretive about it because that's not professional for a news person. Okay, so that environment, and they also had 30 minutes a day, right? So that's not much time.

What's really important today in the news? Now, that changes. You have cable TV. So then you have CNN, you have MSNBC, you have Fox News. You have all these just spring up in the 80s and 90s, really mid 90s for MSNBC and Fox News, pretty recent. And then you have, of course, the internet, right? And you have, you know, the Drudge Report, and you have Huffington Post, and you have

Breitbart, and you have all these things pop up in a million political blogs. And it's a totally different game. So what you realize is, if you don't have the burden of being broadcasting to the whole country and you can narrowcast, and really, Fox News kind of was a pioneer here, and a lot of others copied it. If you can narrowcast and say, you know what, screw the other half. We don't have to seem objective. Let's just really confirm the beliefs. Let's cater to one tribe. There are these tribes. Let's just be the news for that tribe. Totally, that's narrowcasting and it's tribal media. It specifically is trying to say,

the incentives totally shift because now your audience becomes very quickly, you know, the people who want professional neutrality, they're long gone, your audience becomes these people who are addicted to this gate, this tribal war that they're in in political Disney world. And so now the incentives become accuracy, not as much like neutrality, definitely not right Right. The sentence become tell these people why they're right and good and why those other people are so bad. How awful are those other people? Done. Yeah. So what's that going to do to that? How's that? Of course, that's going to have a massive effect on behavior. So what's happening is you go from news that was kind of informing high-rung politics to news that is just stoking low-rung politics, that is just completely igniting low-rung politics.

And Tim, you go through in the book your analysis of the version of low-rung politics that happens on the right. But you spend the bulk of the book going over what you describe as social justice fundamentalism. And I'm curious, since you started this book a number of years ago, if you think the landscape of what you call social justice fundamentalism, you might call it wokeism, cancel culture, like it has a lot of different words to describe, which I think is part of why you spend such a long time teasing out your specific definition here. Do you think that landscape has changed? And do you also see, you mentioned this a little bit in the book, but in the reaction to that social justice fundamentalism, I see some of those same

authoritarian tactics and low run thinking being deployed in terms of, you know, book bans or constraining curriculums and constraining protests, those sorts of things. So I wonder if you feel like the landscape has shifted since you first started writing the book. Yeah, I mean, so I created this term social justice fundamentalism because, as like I said, you know, the same thing with needing a vertical access, like you need more labels because right now it's either you like social justice or you don't. And it's like, well, you know, Martin Luther King was classic social justice activist, right? I don't know how many people who think he was bad or don't like him, right? So like women's suffrage and emancipation and the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, these are

all like what I would call liberal social justice and liberal meaning like lowercase l. Like they are trying to make the country more liberal. Right. They say that the liberal promises in the Constitution are great and we're not doing so great at them. Let's do better. Right. Let's break the laws that are illiberal to show how illiberal they are so we can make things more liberal. Let's use liberal tools like free speech and voting and protest and free assembly, you know, use the liberal tools to make this country better. Social justice fundamentalism, to me, is the polar opposite. It's not like it's, oh, those are the really far left, you know, extra social justice people. No, no, those are the exact opposite philosophy, which is that it's not that liberalism is as good, but we need to do we need more of it.

It's that liberalism is the problem. It stems from, you know, stems from Marxism and, you know, neo Marxist ideologies. And the idea there is that that liberalism is inherently oppressive and that you need something much more revolutionary than using free speech to fix bad policies or fix bad laws. You need to overthrow the order. And as Audre Lorde says, you can't use the master's tools to fix the master's house. So free speech is not going to be your friend. That's part of that's what they want you to do.

Free speech has to be shut down. That's part of liberalism. So the master's house and all the tools in it need to be shut down, right? That's part of liberalism. So the master's house and all the tools in it need to be overthrown. And then so you see that authoritarianism, which is illiberal, right, coming through in the tactics. Instead of persuasion, it will get you, you know, if someone says something you don't like and you're a liberal social justice activist, you'll say, okay, here's why that's wrong. I'm going to show everyone. I'm going to use free speech to show why that's wrong. What the social justice fundamentalists would say is we need to cancel that person. We need to punish them so that no one else argues that again, which is, again,

if you think liberalism is bad, this is how you behave. So anyway, the landscape, I've noticed huge changes since I started, which is at the beginning, I think people didn't even see any difference here. I think a lot of people on the left thought that what we today call wokeness, it wasn't called that back then, is purely good. This is our today's version of the civil rights movement. And then I think a lot of people start to say something's up here, something's wrong, right? This is not, these people are not doing it right anymore or something.

And they started to maybe have those conversations in private. And I think that we are just starting, and I'm not sure we're even there yet, getting to a place when I think some people are starting to feel, okay, maybe saying this more publicly. Maybe actually changing the policy at their company that is that has been created by social justice fundamentalism. And but then you see, you mentioned the right. And so, yeah, I think what I see it as is I don't see the problem as social justice fundamentalism and I don't see the problem is Trump. You know, I think Trump is a demagogue. Right. I think he is a classic kind of there's always demagogue people who want to be president and kind of use lies and basically play on people's worst instincts and, you know, kind of the dictator mentality. There's always those people, but why

is Trump rising up now, right? And why is social justice fundamentally, there's always ideologies that are illiberal that want to shut down liberalism, but they can't usually. So what's going on? And so I see a bigger trend going on, kind of this downward spiral the country's been in. And I think the media is part of it. I think there's a lot of things that go into it. You know, just we've become more, we've lost kind of the foreign threat in a lot of ways. So there's not that uniting force up there, kind of on the patriotic level. And also the parties have aligned so that there's not progressives and conservatives within each party like there used to be.

So there's a lot of, so now you just have this one concentrated tribal divide, right? There's nothing that's diffusing it above or below. There's a lot of things you can point to, but I think that, yeah, when I'm not surprised when I see then the right maybe acting more authoritarian

or maybe doing overreach of their own. Because to me, it's like, yeah, this is a whirlpool, we're all caught in it. And the whole thing is caught in it right now. And so you're not, it's like, yeah, this is a whirlpool. We're all caught in it. The whole thing is caught in it right now. And so you're not socially, maybe you'll get, maybe wokeness goes on the decline. We say, have you passed peak woke? Maybe we have.

Maybe it goes, something else, another movement is going to crop up and it's going to be bad. And another demagogue, maybe it's on the left this time. Who knows? Another demagogue is going to rise to power. So until we fix this bigger problem and understand what it is, this is not the last of it. Yeah.

Really well said. Well, Tim. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say the book is great. I think people should read it. There were pieces of it I really agreed with. There were pieces of it I disagreed with. But all of it, I think, made me a sharper thinker on these issues.

So I really appreciate your time, Tim, and I hope people will check out the book. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, guys. Yeah, our pleasure. Man, fantastic interview. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Reminder, we got the premium show for everybody on Spotify.

You can sign up at breakingpoints.com. I will be back in the studio, our beautiful, beautiful studio, which we are working on as well tomorrow. So I sign up at breakingpoints.com. I will be back in the studio, our beautiful, beautiful studio, which we are working on as well tomorrow. So I'm excited to do that. And it's a fun promotion day here at Breaking Points, but we'll see everybody tomorrow. See y'all tomorrow. This is an iHeart Podcast.