Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/28/22: Biden Calls For Regime Change, GOP Primaries, Oscars Drama, Cosplay Class Politics, War On Fitness, & Reddit vs Wall St!

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover the Biden comments about Putin he made, bloodthirsty media neocons and liberals, terrible polling for Biden, Trump's 'Stop the Steal' Georgia rally, SCOTUS Justice Thomas's grifter wife, drama at the Oscars, the Left's betrayal of Amazon workers, MSNBC's war against fitness, and how Wall Street crushed Gamestop redditors!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/Tobias Deml: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViEKPjkjEWI  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And again, guys, go to breakingpoints.com in order to subscribe. Thank you all so much. We love you and we appreciate you. Enjoy 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.

Some of what we have to describe as catastrophic comments from Biden in his European trip. What will the fallout of that be? Also, how is media basically like doing everything they can to run cover for him in what was a clearly disastrous moment? We also have some polling indicating that the American people not loving Biden on basically any issue. Trump had a rally down in Georgia. It didn't go so well. Some new comments from him. Some new texts have been revealed from Justice Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginny Thomas.

She is a longtime conservative activist. But she apparently, during January 6th and in the lead up to all of that, was texting then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, going all the way down the conspiracy rabbit hole. So we have those texts for you and what the implications of those might be. Also, some moments from the Oscars last night that are sparking a lot of controversy. Some vehement disagreement. Yeah, we're going to come to blows over this one potentially.

That's fine. We'll see. Apparently that's legal. And we also have a documentarian who produced a film on the GameStop phenomenon that we have covered when we were at Rising. But we want to start with those comments from the president when he was overseas in Europe. So in addition to calling Putin a butcher, he ad-libbed a comment that seemed to imply the U.S. had a potential policy of regime change in Russia. Let's take a listen to both of those moments. And you're, you know, you're dealing every day with Vladimir Putin.

And look at what he's done to these people. What does it make you think? He's a butcher. Did you make additional commitments? Thank you, butcher. Did you make a difficult commitment? Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power. God bless you all, and may God defend our freedom, and may God protect our troops. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Thank you. So he ad-libs there, this man cannot remain in power.

Now, this feeds directly into Putin's own propaganda that the real goal here of the U.S. is regime change. And of course, given our track record of regime change around the world, that is less of a crazy thing to imagine than you might think. Add on top of that the fact that you have aides, as we discussed last week, who are saying at private events, you know, the only end game here really is Putin out of power. And you start to create a narrative of what is really going on behind the scenes in terms of the discussion that high-level officials are having about how they actually think this will all end. Because what have we been talking about?

You have to create the conditions for peace. You have to create an off-ramp. You have to create pressure so that there are negotiations. Instead, all we've had is escalation, making it much more difficult for this thing ultimately to be resolved in negotiations, which are going to be painful and which are going to be difficult. How are you going to welcome back into the community of nations someone who you have said is a butcher and a war criminal and who you have gone out and publicly said you want to see out of power, that he, quote, cannot remain in power. Well, the White House clearly knows what a problem this ad lib statement ultimately was, kind of giving up the game of what the Biden administration is actually wanting. And we're not saying like tanks on the ground in Russia, but the economic sanctions and the pressure being put on the state in a foolish hope and naive hope that this is ultimately going to push Putin out of power.

So here's the White House statement immediately backtracking, trying to spin this, saying the president's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia or regime change. Listen, we all heard what he was saying. And again, this isn't the first time that word has slipped out from this administration that what they really think the end game here should be, should be Putin out of power. This only strengthens Vladimir Putin's hand domestically and makes escalation and more brutality and more death more likely. Yeah, that's right. And look, we are not about placating Putin. What we're talking about is mitigating the risk of a nuclear exchange. I don't know how many times I have to reiterate it here.

I'm not a genius. It is written in Russian nuclear doctrine, as reiterated by Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, that they will and have the option to launch nuclear weapons in the event of a threat to the direct power of the Putin regime. This goes all the way back to the days of the Soviet Union. This is incredibly, incredibly destabilizing. And also, the word butcher in particular. Let's remember, when's the last time that we started using butcher against a despot in order to launch a war crystal? Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad. That's

exactly what the Bush administration said over and over again. Saddam Hussein, he's a butcher. Look, that's true. I mean, that's empirically true. Was it worth the Iraq war? I'll let you be the judge and the decider of that one. I personally would say the other way. That's why I think that these comments are so clearly reveal both the quiet part out loud of what the Biden administration is thinking, but also the worst of all worlds, because now he said it, and then they pull it back. So now we're in this weird strategic ambiguity. We're like, what is happening? What is the policy of the United States?

And it happens at the same time that there was a very odd clip in which Biden was speaking to the 82nd Airborne Division, some guys who were about to deploy over to Europe, intimating that they may be deployed to Ukraine. We have a little bit of video from that. Let's take a listen. And you're going to see when you're there,

some of you have been there, you're going to see women, young people, standing in the middle of the front of a damn tank, just saying, I'm not leaving. I'm holding my ground. They're incredible. What is he saying? Is he, I mean...

Is it a senior moment? They tried to clean it up, saying, oh, he's talking about refugees and he saying? Is he—I mean— Is it a senior moment? They tried to clean it up, saying, oh, he's talking about refugees and all this. Is he? I mean, what's happening here? You're talking there to members of the U.S. Armed Forces who are deploying over there. You combine that with an explicit declaration of regime change from the president of the United States. I mean, these are real things that have real consequences, validating the worst fears of the Putin regime. This could very much be the pretext of which they completely break off relations between us.

How are we supposed to have any diplomatic resolution at this point? Now, you might say, oh, you know, you guys are playing into the Russian hands. It's not about being soft or even about strength in this particular key. It's what's the strategy? What is the endgame? And if the endgame from the administration, as Neil Ferguson has been writing, is a de facto policy of regime change

and a complete rejection of Vladimir Putin's regime from the community of nations for all time, then what incentive do the Russians have in order to stop the war in Ukraine? I would remind everyone, Zelensky, President Zelensky did an interview last night with russian journalists where he said we are quote ready to discuss neutrality there is an off-ramp in ukraine zelensky is ready opening talking about nato talking about neutrality said he's not going to leave and opening the door to peace talks

but the west as it was from the very beginning, is making it very, very difficult for the situation on the ground there to come to any sort of resolution before hundreds of thousands of people die. Well, and what Putin has been telling his people, this is the propaganda coming from the Kremlin, is they want to destroy Russia. They're going to levy sanctions and they're not going to go away no matter what. And so when our president makes comments like these, you are just validating the narrative

that Vladimir Putin has been selling to his people and you only strengthen his hand and make it even less likely that he ultimately is going to be removed from power. I think it's incredibly foolish and naive to think that there is anything close to the conditions to seeing the end of the Putin regime. So if this is indeed their calculation, they're a bunch of fools and idiots because that is nowhere close to happening. So all you've done

is you've made it so much more difficult to see the end, see any kind of a resolution to the current war. You've made it much more likely that you could ultimately have an escalation outside of Ukraine that leads to a hot war, that leads to a confrontation, a direct military confrontation between two nuclear powers. Look, do we want to see Putin out of power? Of course we do. Of course we do. He is guilty of all the crimes that he is being accused of. No one is saying otherwise. But when you're president of the United States, this is a different deal. And your words really matter. I seem to recall Joe Biden talking about exactly that. The words of a president matter.

When he was running for president. I mean, it is a sort of Trumpian just like off the cuff, like saying whatever happens to stumble into your brain at that moment without any consideration of what the impact and the ramifications are ultimately going to be. There was a quote from, you know, this isn't just like our thinking. There are a lot of sort of mainstream experts in this town who were very distressed by these comments. The Washington Post had a quote from Michael O'Hanlon. He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He said that he was trying to run cover for him, but he said Biden's head wouldn't be in a place where he's saying Putin must go. The only way to get to war termination is to negotiate with this guy. And when you say this guy must go, you've essentially

declared you're not going to do business with him. However appealing at an emotional level, it's not going to happen. We can't control it, and it probably won't take place anytime soon. How are you going to do business with this person? How are you going to have negotiations? How are you going to roll back sanctions when you've said he's a butcher, he's a war criminal, and that his reign in power must end? Yeah, and how are our allies reacting? Not great. Let's put this up there on the screen. President Macron doing his best to say

let's not have, quote, escalation after Biden brands Putin a butcher. The French leader told broadcaster France 3 he saw his task as achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of Russian troops by diplomatic means. Quote, if we want to do that, we can't escalate either in words or in action. So the actual diplomat on the European continent, the people with all a lot at stake here, are not too happy with President Biden's comments. So Biden clearly got taken in at the emotional moment of being there and seeing the refugees. And look, I think that's a good thing for the president to go and see those people. But you're also supposed to keep a level head and keep all of us safe here at home. So there is no way to describe this other than a complete diplomatic catastrophe, the likes of the ramifications of which we are only beginning

to see. The Kremlin is obviously going to react in its most maximalist way possible. This is the best thing that could have ever happened to Russian propaganda. This is going to absolutely hurt any peace efforts between Russia and with Ukraine. And he has made us all significantly less safe. I mean, look, everybody says, oh, people are fear mongering around a nuclear confrontation. Once again, if the chance is 1%, that's way too high. And I think it's a lot more than 1%, given the state of these comments, given the ability for escalation to occur. I don't know what he's talking about there with the 82nd Airborne. There's a lot of reporting about what's happening in Poland at these bases in terms of military assets and stuff being moved forward. I'm not saying that they're going to be moving into Ukraine, but what are they doing?

What's happening? I mean, these are all things which can go awry very quickly. Don't listen to me. Listen to the generals who we have quoted here before, who've even said, look, you have young guys and these pilots and the ramifications of these things can escalate significantly. All it takes is one person accidentally fly across the border for two seconds, gets shot down. Now we're in a whole other situation. How are we supposed to talk to each other if you branded the man a butcher and you said that he shouldn't remain in power. This is exactly the rhetorical conditions which led to the invasion of Iraq. And I think we should all be very, very skeptical and not just skeptical, but we should really be afraid and caution our government officials from using this

type of language, given what has happened to our country in the most recent memory of the last time these people were in charge. One of the selling points of Biden during the campaign was like, the grownups are going to be back. Yeah, the adults are back. The adults are going to be back in the room. We're going to handle things. We're going to do it in a measured and strategic way. And so when you just off the cuff, I mean, we've had a couple of different moments now.

We didn't even talk about, you know, he got asked about, okay, what if there's a chemical weapons attack? That's right. And he says, we'll respond in kind. What are you floating chemical weapons attack on Russia? Again, the way they had to clean it up, of course, he's not floating that. Of course, that's not what he meant. of these comments that the last thing you want to do is back Putin into a corner where he feels that his only option is to escalate, that there is no off-ramp that doesn't involve him out of power or complete and total humiliation. Because that's the disaster scenario we all have to be

doing everything we can to try to avoid. When you openly float regime change, you are making that outcome that much more likely. And it is just pure catastrophe. Yeah, the nightmare scenario, what we talked about on our Thursday show, is that the Russians use some sort of small tactical nuclear weapon. And when I say small, I just mean hundreds of thousands,

not millions of people who are dead, not actually small. And then, you know, the US, which has already said a senior administration official that, quote, all gloves are off. If that happens, we don't actually have a treaty obligation to do so. So there would be a huge split in the global community. It would shatter, you know, all of the conventions around the use of weapons themselves. And the next thing you know, you end up in a very messy conflict with the U.S. population and the global population split on what exactly should do. And hundreds of millions of people could die. I mean, once again, it's unlikely, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility. And he's making that even more likely. There's a reason that we

treat all of the language around these things with extreme caution. And I actually, worse, I don't think this is a senior moment for Biden. This is who he is. This is Mr. They're going to put you back in chains. Mr. Gaff for the, of his career. This is the man. This is exactly who he is. If you go and you read about him all the way back from the 1970s and the 1980s, he has an extreme narcissistic faith in his own ability in order to read the moment, read the room, doesn't care what his aides think and hates the media for criticizing him. And it's because of that that he has now put us all in a much more dangerous situation as president. So I really, that's the only way we can hope to describe it at this point. All he had to do was frickin' read the speech on the teleprompter. I know, I know. Like, that's it. Is that so hard?

Just, like, read the frickin' speech off the teleprompter. So it's a disaster. And, you know, of course, the media is going out of its way to play clean up for him. Oh, you know, of course, the media is going out of its way to play clean up for him. Oh, yeah. The media is going big time in order to clean up for this guy, which is really shameful. So first of all, they had the U.S. ambassador to NATO on all of the programs to try and clean this thing up. And it is just ludicrous the way that they are trying to spin it. Let's take a listen. With me now from Brussels, fresh off the NATO summit with President Biden,

is the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Julianne Smith. Thank you so much, Madam Ambassador, for joining me. Let's start with President Biden's comment yesterday that Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power. The White House said quickly that he was not discussing Putin's power in Russia or regime change. Was that comment a mistake? Well, look, the president had spent the day visiting with Ukrainian refugees. He went to the national stadium in Warsaw and literally met with hundreds of Ukrainians. He heard their heroic stories as they were fleeing Ukraine in the wake of Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. In the moment, I think that was a principled

human reaction to the stories that he had heard that day. But no, as you've heard from Secretary Blinken and others, the U.S. does not have a policy of regime change in Russia. Full stop. So this week has been remarkable. It's been historic. I thought the speech was completely pitch perfect. And I think this will set us on a good course for continuing to support the allies, support Ukrainians and apply pressure on Russia to get them to stop. So he didn't mean what he said, but it was pitch perfect. But it was pitch perfect. Got it.

I'm out here doing cleanup, but the speech was pitch perfect. But it was pitch perfect. So that's the administration. The media is actually running with it even more, saying it actually was pitch perfect. And what he said was exactly right. Joe Scarborough over at MSNBC put this up there on the screen. The line has gone out to these people and they are trying to compare this to Reagan joking about bombing Russia. First of all, Reagan should not have been doing that whenever he was president and we were in the middle of the Cold War.

He says, quote, Reagan knew what he was doing. He won the Cold War. So does Biden. Well, you know, maybe there is some mental fortitude comparisons between the two. Let's put this next one up there on the screen, which is that people are accusing CNN of actually being biased. Tom Nichols here says, quote, this is irresponsible. This chyron makes it seem like this is somehow a war aim. The chyron at CNN, aka the text down at the bottom, says Biden, quote, Putin cannot remain in power. I mean, that's what he said. So why are they criticizing the media for accurately reporting that? Next is Bill Kristol. Quoting him as irresponsible.

Quoting the president as irresponsible. Or maybe the president's irresponsible. Here's what Bill Kristol says, quote, gaffes by U.S. president per the U.S. foreign policy establishment, as if he isn't a member of that. For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power. Joe Biden at Warsaw. And then he compares it to Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this wall. Yeah, those are not comparable in any way. And yet they are trying to cast him as some great, you know, leader in history confronting Vladimir Putin.

My personal favorite was this one, D.J. Rothkopf over at Foreign Policy. He says a brief, cool-headed foreign policy analysis on why the president's saying Putin has got to go is not a problem. Number one, it's true. So long as Putin is at the helm of Russia, the country will be isolated and its people will needlessly suffer. Two, offending a sociopathic mass murderer who has serially violated international law and has the deaths of tens of thousands is not actually the wrong thing to do. And then finally, this is another one of my favorites, Ian Bremmer, all the people I'm naming, by the way, are very respected in the quote-unquote foreign policy

establishment. He says, quote, a world where a man like Putin has control over thousands of nuclear warheads, vast natural resources, and the lives of millions of people at his personal disposal is a world we need to change. That's not a policy of regime change. It's basic humanity. And, oh, sorry, we do actually have a final one from producer James. Got to get Russiagate in there. Rick Wilson, our Russiagaters, he says, so Biden saying Russia needs regime change is an outrage while Russians actually succeeding in causing regime change in the U.S. in 2016 is just fine. Am I reading this right? Has 11,000 retweets, which makes me want to drink some poison

like that guy in the meme. But this is where we are, folks. The mainstream of the neocons on MSNBC and on CNN are not only saying that it wasn't a gaffe, that it was the best thing that the president could have possibly said. This is a mask-off moment. They want regime change in Russia, and they want the United States to bring the force of military power to bear in order to make that happen. They want an actual war with Russia. And as we continue to say here, what's the end, then what? In 1998, I would have said, yeah, I was like six years old, but here's what I would have said if I was here. I would

have said, hey, it's a good thing for Saddam Hussein to go in power or out of power. But if you would ask me, should the US military be brought to bear and we should spark a 20-year insurgency and a $2 trillion war, and actually we would end up causing the deaths of more people than Saddam Hussein and trying to get him out of there and end up splintering the country into three and turning into an Iranian client state. Would it have been worth it? I would have been like, yeah, no. And that's the difference, which is that, yeah, we can say accurately, I think, that the Russian people have suffered under Putin, that he is absolutely guilty of many of these crimes, of killing his political opponents, being an autocrat, all of

that. But as we found out the hard way in Iraq, be careful what you wish for. There are 40th order consequences to these things. Who knows who else would replace him? How do you know it would be somebody who's close to the West? It could somebody be even more, you know, Russian, Eurasian, Slavic or whatever in his desire. So I think that's what the level of nuance is missing from all of this, Crystal. And I finally really do understand how Iraq happened in all of that hysteria from watching these people. Because all of them were centrally involved. They have learned nothing. That is definitely the case.

I mean, this is one thing we talked about last week with the Katonji Brown Jackson hearings. Oh, that's right. It was a great monologue. Where, you know, you've got Lindsey Graham and you've got John Cornyn melting down over her defense of Guantanamo detainees and just exposing that they still support all of those Bush-era policies, that they've learned absolutely nothing

on the liberal side, rather than saying they were all shocked and now we're, oh my God, did you ever insinuate that George W. Bush was a war criminal? And rather than being like, yeah, because he was, they were like, no, no, she didn't really say that. And here's the context, et cetera, et cetera. That just revealed that, yeah, nothing has really changed in this town. And so I have no doubt that some of the people that we just cited,

if they were really being completely upfront, they would say, yeah, we should actually risk that confrontation. And we should, it would be noble. It would be the right thing to do for us to have a direct military confrontation to remove Vladimir Putin from power. Now, I do think the Biden administration, this I will give him credit for. He has been very insistent on resisting calls for no-fly zone, on sort of, he was reportedly the one who decided like, you know, this whole fighter jet thing, probably not a good idea. So he has been very clear from the beginning, we are not going to have a direct military confrontation. However, you know, I think behind the scenes, the administration, what they're talking about is trying to use economic pressure to ultimately

force Vladimir Putin out of power. And that's dangerous as well. And by the way, if that is actually your goal, our policies of indiscriminate sanctions are likely to make it less likely that that is actually the result that occurs. Because again, you're giving Putin the ability to say your pain and your suffering is because of the West. They hate Russia. They hate you. They want to destroy us. They're, you know, when we're banning like sports and celebrities and anything that can vodka, anything that comes out of Russia, you make it very easy for him to persuade his population that actually I'm correct. And they just hate everything Russian and want to destroy us. So even if you, if this is your goal, if you think there is no end game except Putin out of

power, which again is what Niall Ferguson was saying, you know, that some aides are privately saying, you are making that outcome much less likely to happen. And by your completely undisciplined like diarrhea of the mouth multiple on multiple occasions, you are also making that end less likely to happen. And most importantly, in the near term, you are making escalation beyond the war in Ukraine as it exists right now. You're making that more likely. We talked a couple of times about this idea of gambling for resurrection. When you have a leader who's backed into a corner, who feels like their only move on the chessboard to avoid complete defeat and humiliation is to take some outrageous move, dangerous move that you would look at from the outside and say,

this is completely insane. Well, you are making that outcome much more likely. And that's why this is so dangerous. But ultimately, I mean, you've got like a couple of, you've got one part of just like neocon instincts still having never learned the lessons of Iraq. You've got another part of just always wanting to cover for whatever the administration does. And you end up with this very toxic brew. Yeah, that's exactly right. And look, I mean, already we see signs of some destabilization in Russia. The Russian defense minister, Sergei Shogoga, he was missing for like 20 days. Clearly, you know, probably there was some recriminations

happening behind the scenes. He's gone ahead and reappeared. Many Russian generals have reportedly been killed, possibly on the front, also possibly not on the front. These are all things of destabilization within the regime, very characteristic of a Russian leader who has his back against the wall and who himself is grasping for power. And it would not be outside the realm of possibility in order to try and up the ante. Everybody go and read the history of the Cold War.

We, as Robert McNamara said, we came this close to nuclear war. The only reason that we avoided it was luck. Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational. The only thing that we avoided it was luck. Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational. The only thing that saved us was luck in the end. I don't want to be put back in that position. And as they found out there, in 13 days, John F. Kennedy wakes up one morning. Within two days, the nation is literally on the brink of a nuclear exchange. That's how quickly it can happen. And that's why when the stakes are this high, it matters in terms of managing the environment of which all of this can possibly occur.

And unfortunately with these media people, they've learned nothing. They have an immense sway over the Democratic Party and the Democratic population. And they're all over TV. I mean, there was a rally here in Washington calling for a no-fly zone, which Bill Kristol himself spoke at. So that's the level of insanity that we're dealing with right now. By the way, trying to hold up Reagan as the patron saint of great foreign policy is troubling in and of itself. And that tear down that wall moment is a bit more sort of myth-making after the fact than it was in reality a game changer in the Cold War at the time. The media didn't actually, he tries to say, well, the media like-

That's true. It didn't become popular until the 90s. Right. They didn't really even pay that much attention. That's true. To the line. It didn't represent a significant shift or anything in foreign policy. In fact, what a lot of historians say is that he was trying to project this sort of like tough guy image because he was facing some pressure from his right flank over the fact

that he was in dialogue with and was opening with the Soviet Union and with Gorbachev. So this was a way to sort of signal to the domestic population that, no, I'm still the tough guy. So anyway, the Reagan comparison. Let's retire that one. All right. Polling. Some not so great news for Joe Biden on how the public is feeling about basically anything right now. This is per a new NBC News poll. Let's go ahead and put Ken Vogel's tweet up on the screen.

Biden's job approval rating has declined to 40 percent. That, per this poll, is the lowest level of his presidency. Last time it was measured in January, it was at 43 percent. That's within the margin of error, but it does look like he has ticked down here a smidge. 71% of respondents, Sagar, expressed low confidence in his ability to deal with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Given what we were just discussing, I can't imagine why they wouldn't be feeling super confident and great about how he's handling things. Yeah, it's absolutely shocking. And if you actually dive even deeper into it, I just love this because for all the talk of the culture war, for all the Will Smith think pieces that we're all about to have to live through,

all people care about is inflation and gas. And that, frankly, that's what they should. Let's put this up there. As Nate Silver put it, it is common on this platform, he's referring to Twitter, to hear critiques such as the media devotes way too much attention to inflations. But voters care about inflation much more than the media does. It outpaces all issues, including Ukraine, and now by a wide margin, COVID. So going and looking at this poll, ranked by percentage of most important, number one, cost of living in terms of their first choice and combined choice. Number two, jobs in the economy in terms of the first choice and the combined choice. Then war between Russia

and Ukraine. Then voting rights and election integrity. then climate change, then taxes, then immigration, and then coronavirus. So number one, the COVID Karens have finally been slayed in terms of their influence over broader society. But number one is just how much cost of living and jobs in the economy overshadow the war in Ukraine by almost two or threefold. And yet the level of attention that it is getting in the mainstream media is just completely scant. I mean, we try to do a very hard job, which is here, which is we know there's an immense amount of interest in the war in Russia. And also given the stakes that we try to focus on that. But we always have some focus on the oil, price of gas, crude markets, how exactly that's going to affect you, you know, some focus on the oil, you know, price of gas, crude markets,

how exactly that's going to affect you, food prices, heating oil, all these things, because we know, I mean, so many of the people who watch our show are just normal folks who are fed up with the mainstream media, and they want somebody to speak to the concerns that actually animate their lives, and the administration is just completely inept in their handling of this crystal, and they're getting hammered for it, And I think they deserve to. They really do deserve to. I mean, they're not doing anything. Doing nothing.

It's very easy to look at the trends. Like, when he was doing well, and it's easy to forget, but at the beginning of his administration, he had a very high approval rating. You know, he was really popular. People were really happy with what was going on. Guess what? He was actually doing stuff to try to make people's lives better. Checks were going out. Vaccines were being distributed. There was a plan for, you know, build back better. And we're going to do a lot more that's going to be over the long

term to make things easier for you, whether it's regarding child care or elder care, making sure that, you know, you can afford your prescription drugs. Now they're just totally bogged down. There's no vision. There's no leadership. There's no sense of urgency around the struggles that people are facing in their day-to-day lives. The other thing I wanted to comment on with regard to that Nate Silver tweet that showed the breakdown of what people's top choice issues were. So COVID is now the first choice issue for only 3% of Americans. And I do think that is directly attributable to the fact that Biden in his State

of the Union basically said, we're done fixating on COVID. Remember, he said, like, people should go back to school, people should be back in the office. I kind of disagree with that one. But he's saying like, OK, we're moving forward. We're going to have a different set of priorities. And he kind of declared the covid wars over and partisans have followed suit, I would say, is is what's going on there and why it's so significantly dropped off the cliff. Even at a time when, you know, we may well see a surge here from this new, more infectious variant. But because he signaled basically, we're kind of done here, I think that has shifted the priority of hard partisans who were fixated on this. I think the media affects that too, obviously. Yeah, well, they take their cues from him as well. And so, of course, this is all, you know, it's all sort of compounding effects. Let's dig a little bit more into what some of this polling

showed, because there are some war numbers about exactly how people feel that Biden is doing on the economy. Let's put the NBC News tear sheet from Mark Murray up on the screen. They say Biden's job approval falls to lowest level of his presidency amid war and inflation fears. So on the issues, 51% of adults actually say they approve of Biden's handling of the coronavirus. That's up seven points from January. I think, again, that is directly attributable to a very clear shift in messaging and framing on the issue. People are more satisfied with that. And also, you do have numbers down on COVID. And so we've seen approval ratings on COVID kind of ebb and flow, just depending on how pervasive the infection rates are at this point. So he's actually doing a little bit better there.

Unfortunately, only 3% of people say that that's their number one issue. 42% approve of his handling of foreign policy. So he is underwater there. And this is the one that's really devastating though. Only a third, 33 percent, approve of Biden's handling of the economy. That is down five points. So you continue to see this significant slide on the issue that is most important to people across partisan lines here, guys. And when you're at only a third, 33 percent approval, you've got a lot of Democrats in that mix who are saying we're not happy with what you're doing here either. You also have catastrophic numbers in terms of right track, wrong track. 71 percent of Americans say they believe the nation is headed on the wrong track versus just 22 percent who say they think it's headed in the right direction.

This is also devastating. 62% of respondents say their family income is falling behind the cost of living. 31% say they're staying even. And 6% say their income is going up faster than the cost of living. So you've got 62% saying this inflation is causing me to fall behind and not really be able to make it. And only 6% on the other side saying, actually, things are going pretty well for me. You look at that landscape and it is no wonder that, you know, Republicans, through no doing of their own, are poised to make significant gains in the midterm elections. And some of these things are not Joe Biden's fault, but his reaction to the events that

have played out, that's 100% his fault and that's 100% on him. 100%. And who is to blame for inflation? What's to blame for inflation? These numbers matter even more, I think. Which is that President Biden and his policies tops out at 38%. 40% of the public nearly believes

that Biden himself is to blame for inflation. Number two is corporate price increases. Number three is the COVID pandemic. And four, at the tiniest, smidgiest little part, is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Well, and they shouldn't be surprised because Republicans have been very consistent in saying it's because of Biden. It's because of Biden. It's because he put a little bit of money in your pocket. That's the real problem here.

And Democrats have been hand-wringing about, oh, I don't know if we want to blame corporations. And maybe we should. Maybe we shouldn't. There are some people in the administration who wanted to. Occasionally they put out a little statement about the meatpacking industry or something. But you had a very clear, compelling case of how corporate profiteering is making life more difficult for workers. It's something that people intuitively sort of respond to. But they were unwilling to effectively prosecute that case.

And so in the vacuum, the Republican talking points here, they've been completely consistent on. That's what ultimately is going to win the day. I would add, too, that in a way they're not wrong because it's not even the act of policy. It's his inaction, which is a policy itself, which is partially to blame also for inflation, which is he's not doing anything in order to ease the global shipping crisis. I mean, I just checked yesterday, the rates of shipping between China and the United States are still like fivefold relative to what they were in 2019. We still have a massive container problem. Gas remains, you know, I just got back from Los Angeles where I was last week. It is not uncommon

there to see gas at 6506.50 a gallon. I'm checking right now. The AAA average in the state of California is $5.91. That's crazy. In the statewide. Somebody sent me a photo from Mendocino, which is apparently the most expensive one. It still is $8.50 a gallon. I mean, can you imagine?

Where do we live in Europe? But, you know, that's not really the case they're making, though. They're just saying, like, oh, he spent too much money. No, no, no, I totally understand. I'm saying why it's resonating is because people are like, his inaction is a choice. And so whenever, in the, look, as you say, in an absence of action, a vacuum has to be filled. And that will be filled by whatever the Republican case is being made. I disagree with it.

I don't even think that they're making the correct one in terms of that. And they'll certainly suffer whenever they too have inaction and that inflation will be a problem. But the Biden people, I do believe it is their fault for doing nothing and for allowing this to happen. I mean, combat is a two-part thing. You know, our political combat is a two-party sport. If you're just allowing one person to wail on you the whole time, then you're by definition losing by the fact that you're not doing it. Well, and things are likely to get much worse for them because you've got the Fed now lifting rates. That's right. And saying they may go even more quickly than they expected because inflation remains high. I mean, look, when you're talking about the Fed raising rates,

you're basically talking about slowing down the economy. And there is a real danger that they actually spark a recession, something that more and more analysts are saying they think is what is going to happen. So as bad as things are right now, there is definitely a chance that they could get significantly worse. I mean, it's actually kind of incredible. They did the head-to-head, like generic Republican versus generic Democrat. Who would you rather have control of Congress after the midterm elections? Kind of surprised that Republicans only have a two-point lead on that answer, which I think is also an indictment of the fact that they stand for nothing. People don't have any great confidence that

Republicans are going to ride into the rescue and really have a plan to deal with this. We have a fun segment for everybody on Wednesday coming all about this. Yes, indeed. Indeed. The last one I want to number I wanted to pull out here about the war, because obviously it is important, is you have 82 percent of Americans who say they are concerned that the war is going to involve nuclear weapons. So, you know, I think that there is I think that's very justified. I agree with them. As we're saying, especially with Joe Biden and some of the comments he's making, but, you know, even if it is a small percentage chance,

this is something that people are feeling and they are right to be concerned that this could ultimately escalate to that point. So, you know, sort of chilling numbers there of the way that people are evaluating what is happening right now on the ground in Ukraine. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to the former president. We've got to watch him closely because he's very likely to be our next president. And he's been having some rallies down in Georgia. Now, what we've been trying to track here is what is the power of Donald Trump in these GOP primaries?

There was a narrative that it was ironclad, unshakable. But that's beginning to really start to at least fizzle in the current age with some of his primary people that he endorsed losing in the polls, possibly going to be losing in the primary, and the specter of kind of his performance there not really as powerful as it once was. All eyes are on this primary where Trump promised that he was going to come to that state and campaign as hard as he could against Brian Kemp for governor of Georgia and endorsing David Perdue, who lost his Senate bid there, who has gone full-blown, stopped this deal. Let's put this up there on the screen. Trump visited

Georgia for a rally there for David Perdue, who has not been doing so well in the polls. He attacked Governor Kemp, saying he's waging a war on, quote, rhino sellouts. Here's what he said, quote, Brian Kemp is a turncoat, a coward, a complete and total disaster. Before we can defeat the Democrats, socialists, and communists, we first have to defeat the rhino sellouts and the losers in the primary this spring. Referring to Kemp as the Republican in name only. Defining, obviously, Republican as whether you believe in Stop the Steal or not. He also said, I always find hilarious. I liked this. If Brian Kemp is re-nominated, he will go down in flames at the

ballot box because Stacey will steal it from him and humiliate him. Maybe like she will in the Star Trek series. So he's not just like, this one in the past was stolen, but he's going ahead and predicting a future steal as well here. Well, that's a very smart political strategy in a state where we already lost twice, or

three times, actually, between the Senate race and the own presidential. But what's happening actually with the poll? Let's put this up there. This is just from three weeks ago. Governor Kemp is showing a big lead over David Perdue in that primary race for governor. The poll had Kemp at 50% and Perdue with 39% despite receiving the endorsement of Donald Trump. And the remaining 10%, they were unsure or would vote for somebody else. Now, why does that matter?

Because if Kemp prevails in this, he was the single biggest adversary within the GOP towards Stop the Steal at the time because he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I mean, basically, his governor had to certify the election results in Georgia. He had no choice but to do so. And then what ended up happening is that Trump and everybody, you know, concocted this cockamamie idea that he could have somehow, you know, swung the election in the state of Georgia. And despite, you know, all the inquiry and looking into this, it doesn't matter to many of these people. They consider it that he betrayed the president. Now, we thought that given the Republican base in terms of their affinity for Trump and more, that they were willing to swing completely on his word. But that just doesn't seem to be how it is, both in Georgia and in Alabama, where Mo Brooks, who he previously

endorsed and not been doing so well, also because he departed there from Stop the Steal. And another important thing to note here is how big exactly was the crowd in Georgia? Something that Trump loves to obsess over. Let's put this up there. Well, as this is from the GBP, the Georgia Public Broadcasting, Trump's Republican Revenge Tour falters in Georgia. And what they specifically point to is how the crowd that gathered at this rally had a huge percentage of out-of-state people. But even worse for him, Crystal, is that the crowd size was about one-fourth to one-fifth of what he drew whenever he was running for president. Now, his spokesperson said that's

fake news. Let's put this up there on the screen. Good old Liz. Very Trumpian fashion. They said, oh, it's ridiculous. It's fake news. There was a massive crowd between 25 and 35,000. Let's put this next one up there on the screen, though. If you compare it to the previous rally, there were not 25 to 35,000 people. The crowd was far smaller and far quieter than the other rallies in Georgia. And the actual attendance is somewhere between 5,000 people. So, you know, it's a classic Trump move in order to say that this was, you know, it was ridiculous. He didn't draw a crowd. We shouldn't erase it and say that, you know, it's not like thousands of people didn't come. But compared to the crowds that he was drawing in 2020, they were five times larger than what

he was drawing there last night. It's again, it shows you that he appeals to the most diehard people who all they care about is stop the steal. But Trump's ability in order to connect with the broader American electorate was always this. People are willing to overlook some of the most annoying, boorish stuff that the guy does, but they're like, I hate the left, especially the cultural left. And the guy seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to the economy, which, you know, we can dispute that, but that's how people feel whenever it comes to the conditions of their lives and why they ended up voting for him. When all you care about now is election conspiracy, then you're only going to be able to draw out and really appeal to the people who most care about that. Now, that doesn't mean he

still wouldn't be able to win the election because he couldn't do that again. But in terms of how he's conducting himself with the Republican base, he's showing us and giving us a true test of how many of them are there for him specifically on no matter what he talks about. It's not nearly as large of a number as, frankly, I would have even predicted. It's really interesting because in that poll that we put up there that has Kemp leading Perdue by a margin of 50 to 39. They dig into who still has a favorable view of Trump within the Republican base. The numbers are still pretty strong, though I would say probably not as strong as they used to be. You've got still nearly 80% of Republican primary voters who have a favorable view of Trump. Among those that still favor the president, 52% support Perdue while 39% support Kemp. So even among the people that are in that 80% saying, look, I still like Trump. He's still my guy.

They're not going along with who he's telling them to back in the primary, not overwhelmingly anyway. And then on the other end, the people who are done with Trump, who are still Republicans but are in that 20% who have an unfavorable view of him, there you have an overwhelming support for Kemp, 70% to 15%. So even though you still have pretty high favorability numbers, though, again, I would say not as high as they used to be, you don't have that same sway that he wants you to exercise of people basically saying, hey, if he says that Perdue is my guy, then I'm going to back up Perdue. And I think that does come directly from you're obsessing over an issue

that is not top of mind for people. I mean, we just went over the polling. What do people care about? They care about the economy. They care about inflation. And if you aren't talking about that, you're losing them. So even though it should, look, Biden has made a mess of things. People aren't talking about that, you're losing them. So even though it should, look, Biden has made a mess of things.

People aren't happy with him. It should be a cakewalk for Trump in 2024. But his obsession with this issue, which even for his own base is not even close to the number one priority, makes it very, very much less likely that he ultimately would succeed in ascending to the presidency. I'm not saying it's not possible. But I think once people, again, are being fed Trump all day, every day, the way they used to, and all he's talking about this stuff, well, ask the Democrats how it went when they were obsessing over the Mueller report

and over Russiagate for years and years, which, again, was not the top priority of the American people. You know, their ratings fell off a cliff, and they handed Trump a gigantic victory that obviously he didn't really deserve. Yeah, 100%. which, again, was not the top priority of the American people, you know, their ratings fell off a cliff, and they handed Trump a gigantic victory that obviously he didn't really deserve. Yeah, 100%. I mean, we kept saying this throughout the election. Trump had the most winnable election in modern history, and he almost won, and he's still able to screw it up.

Look, never underestimate Trump's ability also in order to F things up. For those of you who are hardcore MAGA and you claim to care about the issues, I watched him screw up DACA. I watched him screw up the government shutdown. I watched him screw up every possible thing that you people supposedly care. Iraq, Afghanistan, withdrawing the troops. Every single thing he said he was going to do.

Oh, that BS phase two China deal. The only thing he did was cut corporate taxes. That's the legacy. That's it. And, you know, I always try to remind people the lowest point of Trump's presidency was the day that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed per a public approval rating. It was not Charlottesville. It was not, you know, even COVID. It was the day that they cut corporate taxes at the most record rate. That's an important lesson for people out there to have. And, you know, people try to build Trump up into some mythos.

He's one of the most useless presidents who ever held the Oval Office, simply because he allowed all the people around him in order to run things. But this is ultimately all the man cares about. I think everybody should just be honest about that. Yeah, and by the way, social media companies are not doing the American people any favors by keeping them from seeing that this is all he cares about all day, every day. And by the way, for our own censors, obviously the election was not stolen and everything he's saying is complete nonsense here so that we don't get pulled down. Thank you for not taking us off YouTube. Although

let's see how it works out. Let's go ahead to this next one on Ginny Thomas. Now, this was certainly a bit of a story. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. For those of the uninitiated, Ginny Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Now, per these text messages, which just came out from The Washington Post, reported by Bob Woodward and by Robert Costa, Ginny Thomas urged the White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election in these text messages. These text messages, 29 in all, show a pipeline between Ginny Thomas.

On November 10th, after news organizations predicted Joe Biden the winner, Thomas wrote to Meadows, quote, help this great president stand firm, Mark, with very questionable pronunciation, or sorry, questionable punctuation and capitalization. Yeah, I've never seen the three exclamation points followed by three periods. Never seen that one. This is pure boomerism. You are the leader with him who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice. The Evil always looks like the victor until the king of kings. Triumphs do not grow weary in the well-doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Thomas replies, thank you.

Needed that. This plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it. Now, the messages do not directly reference Justice Thomas, to be very clear. But it does show that she used her access to Trump's inner circle, basically, you know, in order to pressure them to do the most bonkers stuff in terms of stop the steal. And I think what this shows you is the very peculiar institution of the Supreme Court. You vote for these people, they're up for there for life. In terms of ethics

in all this, they don't have the same in terms of you or I or even in terms of members of Congress or members of the executive branch. They literally aren't subject to any code of ethics.

Even other members of the judiciary are. Yes. Members of Congress even are subjected to some level of code of ethics. But we just have

like an honor system with these people. Yeah, and let's put this next one up there. It just shows you the actual text message, the direct quote of this. And that's the only way that I can really choose to, full disclosure, by the way, I've met Jeannie Thomas a couple of times. And from what I understood always about her within the kind of conservative movement, and this is just my experience in terms of what I've heard,

is she's always been, let's just say, an odd bird uh she's somebody who was very very into the tea party movement and the rallies this is somebody she actually caused a lot of consternation at the time because of these same ethics questions they're like is it really appropriate for the wife of supreme court justice to be so politically involved um in these movements now obviously that doesn't seem to apply in the media to members of the left, but whatever. Now, in terms of this with Ginny Thomas, I don't think there's any way of describing this as outrageous behavior, because what she has done is leverage her position as a private citizen and the wife of the Supreme Court justice to really

become a conservative activist in her own right, trading off of her husband's name in Washington, D.C. This is somebody who, you know, been writing columns for a long time, in her own right, trading off of her husband's name in Washington, D.C. This is somebody who had been writing columns for a long time and used her position in order to score meetings with Trump. Some of the craziest meetings with Trump, Crystal, happened because of Jimmy Thomas. I remember covering this at the time. It was like 2018. She would barrel her way in there, demand the use of a conference room, demand and set up meetings with Trump in order to push conservative activists who she said were true and full MAGA in order to try and put them in the administration. She reportedly handed him a list of who she thought were like deep state contributors,

you know, conspirators or whatever. She's a true, I mean, she's a crank, but I think she's a true believer. She is a true believer. For sure. I think you can at least say she does believe what she's saying. I don't know if that excuses it. I'm going to read a few more of these text messages because there were 29 in all.

And I think they just show she went all the way in. I mean, she was referencing some of these conspiracies that Trump had had mail-in ballots watermarked so that they could track the fraud and that it was all going to come undone she's she was yeah we forgot about that one right yeah memories um she was saying like it's

time to release the kraken and after a while you can see meadows who's basically just like you know he's like a hack and just likes being in a position of power is how i read him he's got to play all these people right he's trying to sort of placate her and read him. He's got to play all these people, right? He's trying to sort of placate her. And even him, she's trying to push, like, you've got to put Sidney Powell out front. I don't understand why she's taking a step back. Because remember there was that moment where she really went off the deep end and she gets kind of like pulled out from being the public face of Stop the Steal. And he even says to her, like, Sidney Powell doesn't have anything.

Unless she's keeping it from us, she doesn't actually have anything. And Ginny Thomas to her, like, Sidney Powell doesn't have anything unless she's keeping it from us. She doesn't actually have anything. And Ginny Thomas just responds, wow. Here's another one of her texts. This was on November 5th. She says Biden crime family and ballot fraud co-conspirators are being arrested and detained for ballot fraud right now and overcoming days and will be living in barges off Gitmo to face military tribunals for sedition. Got it.

So that's part of what she said. So anyway, the point is, she's all the way in. She said, we are living through what feels like the end of America. Most of us are disgusted with the vice president and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.

Those who attack the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT. So in any case, there's a lot to say about this. I think you framed it well because the only reason Mark Meadows is responding to this lady's text is because of who her husband is. Yeah, that's right. And it's not just in this instance where she uses her, trades off her husband's name and power to herself achieve proximity and be able to lobby the president and his team directly. She actually runs a consulting firm where it literally says on her website, I can open, I can open every door in Washington. And when you think about like, you know, we talk about corruption a lot on the show and just take out of this, like what the political persuasion that these are

right-wing people that we're talking about, we know that even the appearance of corruption is a real issue. So you've had cases before the Supreme Court that her husband has never recused himself from, that she is involved with organizations that are filing amicus briefs, you know, involved in the cases. You even have an instance where she is actually getting paid by one of the people who is involved in the case. You have like a direct financial relationship with people who have a vested stake and interest in the outcome of these cases. And as you said, there is no actual code of ethics. You just have to rely on these individuals who are appointed for life. And the only recourse is impeachment,

which is obviously an extraordinary and extreme measure. You have to rely on them to be good faith stewards here. And I think it's worth pointing out that other justices have handled these types of direct conflicts of interest very differently. And I'll give you two examples on sort of different sides of the partisan divide. Justice Stephen Breyer, his brother is a judge, a federal judge in the Northern District of California. And anytime a case comes before them that has even gone through his brother's court, he recuses himself because he doesn't even want the appearance of conflict. In 2021, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, this is all from Jane Mayer, he recused himself from a case that apparently related to a family member. It looks like there was a nonprofit advocating, an amicus brief had been filed. So not even, he's not even like directly involved in the case, but an amicus brief had been filed by a cosmetics trade association that Kavanaugh's father used to run.

Okay, so it's very tangential. It's an amicus brief filed by a cosmetics trade association. His dad's not even involved in it anymore. But again, because he doesn't want the appearance of conflict, he recuses himself. So all of this is to say that the fact that Justice Thomas on any of these issues has never recused himself once is an outlier in terms of behavior. And when you see the way that she is like using her name and her proximity for profit and access and to lobby people in power, it really is truly disturbing and it's gross. And from what I've heard about Thomas, he's one of those people,

he hates the left, he will never give in because of the whole Anita Hill thing. A true culture warrior, kind of you can see here reflected in his choice of partner. My personal favorite thing, Crystal, is that she texted him a YouTube video about, this is the title, and I'm not joking here. Trump sting with CIA director Steve Pizanik. The biggest election story in our history, comma, QFS blockchain. Various levels of capitalization. So this is very on par with your boomer uncle's email forwards and believing every single thing that somebody says. In a way, look, she clearly believes what she's saying.

I think it's more of an indictment of conservative media for feeding vulnerable people this type of stuff. But on the broader message, it is one of these people need to have some sort of ethics codes that we could enact in order to have better confidence. It should not be up to the discretion of various different justices to recuse themselves or not based upon their personality. And I personally think it's an outrageous conduct for somebody like this. And we call out corruption wherever we see it, even though it is quite annoying to know that all this is also being covered by MSNBC. But it is what it is because that's what the news business should be. Yes, indeed. And I hope you guys have experience with us that we are consistent when it comes to corruption.

And we were just as happy to talk about Nancy Pelosi as we are to talk about Justice Thomas. All right, guys. We've got a couple little Oscar stories here that we have to talk about. So first of all, we have an update on the whole Zelensky at the Oscars thing. So he did not. It appears it did not happen. We were waiting with bated breath. But I also think that the way that this story was originally presented was not accurate.

Because when we covered it the first time, Amy Schumer was sort of trying to take credit like this was her idea. That she had floated the idea of Zelensky speaking at the Oscars. And that this gets, you know, shot down by they didn't want to go there, but I'm willing to go there, et cetera, et cetera. It appears that that was more of, like, Amy trying to sort of virtue signal on the hot issue of the day. Because in reality, the reporting is now that Zelensky himself was trying to angle to get an Oscars appearance. And you have to remember that this is a man who comes out of media,

and not just him, because this is the part that people forget. His entire political party came directly out of his television production. He literally turned his production company into his political team. So it's not just him that has this sense of the media that he obviously has been able to utilize,

I would say, very effectively in almost all instances. We'll leave Israel aside because that one didn't land so well. But he has a keen understanding of how to message to people and the importance of these sort of like cultural events, although I would say that the Oscars are much diminished in terms of their ultimate cultural power. You have a lot of actors, though, who really want to sort of signal, I think Amy Schumer is the perfect example of this, of just how invested they are in the Ukrainian cause, just what good people they are, the activities that they are undertaking. And the person who went above and beyond rhetorically

was actor Sean Penn, who said that he would melt down his Oscar if Zelensky didn't get to speak at the awards ceremony. Let's take a listen to that. If it turns out to be what's happening, I would encourage everyone involved to know that though it may be their moment, and I understand that, to celebrate their films, it is so much more importantly their moment to shine and to protest and to boycott that Academy Awards. And I myself, if it comes back to it, when I return, I will smelt mine in public.

I pray that's not what's happened. I pray there have not been arrogant people who consider themselves representatives of the greater good in my industry, that have not decided to check in with leadership in Ukraine. So I'm just going to hope that that's not what's happened. And I hope that everybody walks out if it is. Him appearing on Jim Acosta 2 for this is, and speaking of arrogance, arrogance, my God.

Adam Kinziger co-signs this idea from Sean Penn. Let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. He says that Sean Penn is 100% right.

I mean, I will say, I feel a little different about it knowing that it was Zelensky himself that floated this because when it was Amy Schumer,

I was like, dude is in the middle of a war like what are you thinking he clearly has better things to do but obviously Zelensky himself did not feel that he had he felt that this would be important for him I also think

that the Sean Penn is actually in Poland right now because he just filmed a documentary in Ukraine about Russia's invasion there starting in 2014. So I kind of get that it has this emotional connection to the Ukrainian people as well. So I do want to put all of that out there. I also thought, frankly, that the Academy's reason they gave for not having Zelensky was kind of bullshit. They were like, we don't want it to be political. Well, of course, I mean,

Oscars are always political. Everything is political. kind of bullshit. They were like, we don't want it to be political. Well, of course. I mean, Oscars are always political. Everything is political. And I hate this excuse of like, well, we don't really want to get into it. All of that being said, am I really cheering for an opportunity for Zelensky to make an emotional appeal for like a no-fly zone and sparking World War III?

Am I sad that that didn't happen? No, I am not. Yeah, I agree with you. Also, my biggest conspiracy theory that I buy into is that Sean Penn is somehow some sort of CIA asset. He, the guy, is always abroad. It's even one that ended up as... El Chapo!

Right, yeah. El Chapo was literally got because of him, which you know, that's some sketchy circumstances there. In terms of that happening, he's always in Cuba and Venezuela. Look, he seems to be a very volatile character and I guess God bless him for standing with the Ukrainian people and being there. In terms of that happening, he's always in Cuba and Venezuela. Look, he seems to be a very volatile character. And I guess God bless him for standing with the Ukrainian people and being there.

I guess that's a good thing. That being said, I think his ever-presence in these conflict hot zones is a questionable origin as to why exactly this is all happening. I think it's just the celebrity arrogance around people must take a stand, all of that. Look,

the last thing that all of us want is for you people taking stands and telling us how to live our lives or how national policy should be. If President Zelensky wants to make an appeal, then that's up to him and it's also up to the Oscars in order to make that happen. But for everybody else up there that night, just let it be.

Thank your people. Move on. Enjoy your life. All of the movie. I think the part of it, because I'm trying to figure out, like, why I'm having this reaction to the idea of it. Yes. I think it's because, like, clearly Ukraine has become the cool kid issue of the day. Yeah, that's why all of us are looking at it in this way. So that especially when it was like framed as Amy Schumer, who has no connection to Ukraine and is clearly just trying to like, you know, signal that she's she's with and she cares and she's bold and she's courageous and whatever. But then she ends up looking even worse because it seems like it wasn't even she sort of framed it like this was her idea and it was really bold and courageous.

And that doesn't even seem to be the case. You also have Myla Kunis, who is Ukrainian. Right. And her husband, Ashton Kutcher, didn't even know they were married because I'm so culturally clueless. What, do we live under a rock? I completely, I literally do live under a rock. Anyway, they raised like $30 million for, I think, Ukrainian refugees. Like, more power to you.

I know that they did at the Oscars, like, a call for people to donate. Totally appropriate. But as I said, there's just, there are a lot of good causes in the world. There are a lot of crises in the world. There's a lot of wars in the world, some of which the U.S. state is complicit in, I would say, in particular, you know, Saudi and Yemen. And so I guess that's why I have this reaction to this is it's a sort of like everybody's decided this is the cause of the moment. They want to associate themselves with it, whether they're actually doing anything good to resolve the issue or not. And as I said already, am I sad that Zelensky didn't get an opportunity

to make an emotional appeal at the Oscars for like a no-fly zone? Something that I totally understand why he wants, you know, for the interest of his people, but which is not in the interest of our people or ultimately world peace. Am I sad that he didn't get to have that moment? No, I am not. Yeah, I think that's right. The Mila Kunis thing is a perfect example.

She's literally from Ukraine. I remember reading that. I think she, I'm not. Yeah, I think that's right. The Mila Kunis thing is a perfect example. She's literally from Ukraine. I remember reading that. I think she, I was a huge fan of That 70s Show and how she literally, I think, learned English by watching television. Oh, really? While she was growing up. Yeah, a longtime lover of TV, the medium.

She obviously got her start when she was a teenager on the show. So I think it's perfectly appropriate for her and for Ashton Kutcher in order to do something like that because it's literally personal. But yes, the broader reaction that we're all having to is like, oh, can these people just, I remember actually this during the Iraq war, how infuriating it was to watch these celebs just glom onto it because it was the cool

thing to do. Like when Michael Moore would get up there and Michael's, you know, gone in a little bit of a different direction now. But at that time I thought it was righteous, you know, during Fahrenheit 9-11 and speaking out against the war because that was literally his job and, you know, and speaking out against George W. Bush. But for others, just clearly they were doing it in order to try and get screen time. And that's where it was aggravating. And frankly, I think it probably did more damage to the anti-Iraq War cause because a lot of people who hate those celebrities and that type of celebrity,

that idea of being talked down to by Hollywood elites will take a contrarian position just to take it. So that's what I can always see. Anytime I see a celebrity cause become something like this, I'm like, well, first of all, it's going to have the opposite intended effect. And second, it's like you people, given the whole Harvey Weinstein skeeviness that you've all engaged in, nobody wants to see you people be the moral arbiters. Yeah. They only ever pick issues. The Ukrainian cause is just. I don't want anybody to misinterpret what I'm saying here, but they only ever pick issues that are like, you know, sort of comfortable in society and like sanctioned by the cultural and oftentimes political elite.

Yeah, absolutely. debate happening here on Breaking Points and with our control room set. So I'm shouting out at all of them. You all might have noticed everybody's talking about it. Chris Rock took a slap to the face by Will Smith after entailing a joke about his wife. We have the uncensored version of that from Australian television. Let's take a listen.

Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it, all right? That was a nice one, okay. I'm out here. Uh-oh, Richard. Oh, wow. Wow. Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me. Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth.

Wow, dude. Yes. It was a G.I. Jane joke. Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth. I'm going to, okay? Oh, okay. Yikes. Props to Chris Rock for keeping his composure during all of that.

So we had to find a political angle to this story, and some politicians, two members of the squad, decided to jump in but quickly deleted their takes here. Let's put this up there on the screen. First one was from Representative Ayanna Pressley, who, to be fair, actually does have alopecia herself, much like Jada Pinkett Smith. She said, alopecia nation, stand up. Thank you, Will Smith. Shout out to all the husbands who defend their wives. Living with alopecia in the face of daily ignorance and insults. Hashtag Oscars. Women with baldies are for real. Men only. Only boys need not apply.

The second one, Jamal Bowmanman let's put this up there on the screen said quote teachable moment don't joke about a black woman's hair okay i have a lot of thoughts on this crystal uh i personally am completely on the side of chris rock these narcissistic celebrities literally live their lives for commentary by the elite will smith and her his wife literally do entire podcasts about cheating on each other and adultery. Yeah, they can do whatever they want. I don't care. What I'm saying is, is you live your life for the spectacle and want commentary. And when Chris Rock, a fellow black man, makes fun of your wife for entertainment, and it was also a G.I. Jane joke.

Losing your composure like that in the Oscars is very embarrassing for you personally, and also it's an outrageous kind of breach of decorum. So I'm completely on the side of Chris Rock here. I think Will Smith made a fool out of himself last night, but I know that you feel very differently, so I think the audience is here to take as well. Well, listen, violence is never the answer.

That's right. However, listen, if you're gonna joke about a man's wife's medical condition, and the joke is not even funny. It wasn't that funny. I agree that was the worst part of the joke. You have to expect there are gonna be some repercussions. Okay.

And I think people are going over the door like, oh, Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock. Yes. He slapped Chris Rock. Yeah, I agree. Chris Rock is perfectly fine. So do I think that this is a proportionate response to making a bad joke about your wife's medical condition? Yes, I do. Oh, wow.

Yes, I do. Okay, all right. So she has alopecia. This isn't like a hairstyle choice. Well, it's unclear whether he understood that. Whatever. I would honestly, that's on him to not know that, right? I would feel differently about it if this was just like a hairstyle choice.

By the way, Jada Smith is beautiful, and she can obviously pull it off very well. She looks great, as does Ayanna Pressley. But, you know, when you're messing around with people's medical conditions, that's not cool. And he, you know, it wasn't the greatest moment for Will Smith, but it was a proportionate response, a little slap to the face.

Yeah, no big deal. I think it's possible. Frankly, what I abhor is the racial angle to all of this. You know, I frankly am glad that you just put it that way. It's like,

you talk about a man's wife, okay, fine, then we can get into this. What I just am so annoyed by is exactly the Jamal Bowman type anger and trying to make this into some racial commentary. Look, I think Will Smith made a fool out of himself. Frankly, his speech afterwards where apparently he was in tears and he was like, I apologize to the Academy.

And this is why he's afraid, because he thought they were going to kick him out after he won his award, and it's unclear whether he'll ever— Did he win an Oscar, like, right after that? And he might get it pulled, apparently, because he violated the Academy's code of conduct. So what he's afraid of in that moment is, oh, my God, I'm never going to win an Oscar again. How am I going to get my award? Okay, so to what you were saying about the podcast and them talking about all of that, that was incredible. I don't know if you guys watched that.

It was incredibly uncomfortable to watch. So I do wonder if there's a little element of like Will Smith reestablishing his manhood here. That's a good point. The other part of this is it does feel a lot of people are pointing out he's laughing initially at the joke. Yes, right. And then I don't know if it's he sees Jada is upset by it. I think you're right. She's clearly instantly upset by it.

And so then there's like a very clear change in emotion here. And he goes up on stage and slaps Chris Rock. Right. I also want to say generally I'm more of a Chris Rock fan than a Will Smith fan. I'm a – Whatever. So I was devastated. I apparently missed Chris Rock.

I was at the comedy store on Friday night and apparently I missed Chris Rock. I'm such a big Chris Rock fan. But it's very sad for me. Look, I think it's a hilarious episode for all of us. So I guess the other question is, like, was this more performative from Will Smith? Well, it could have been staged. I actually did wonder whether it was staged. I wonder that, too.

I mean, they're both actors. Chris declined to press charges against the guy. Apparently P. Diddy is playing matchmaker. He's trying to mediate. He's like, we're all going to work this out. Why is this happening? So look, some fun celebrity moments here on Breaking Points. No, it's not the most important thing in the world, but apparently everybody's talking about it. So why not us as well?

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, y'all, you might recall that a while back, AOC grabbed headlines in trademark fashion by wearing a custom tax-the-rich dress to party with elites at the Met Gala, not wanting to prejudge. At the time, I said the dress was either a textbook example of cosplaying class politics to make elites feel virtuous while posing no actual threat, or it was a savvy use of celebrity and access to carry a subversive message. It would all depend, I said, on AOC's actions. Would she upset the apple cart of power or enable it? Well, now we have the absolutely final definitive answer. Because we just learned that at the same time AOC was at the Met Gala with her performative and ultimately completely harmless display,

she was abandoning Amazon workers who were actually in the fight challenging the billionaire class in a meaningful way with their jobs on the line. So here's the full story of what exactly is going on. There is an outside chance that the labor landscape could be completely remade this week with profound impacts for blue-collar and service workers across the country. This week, we are expected to get election results in two separate union elections at Amazon warehouses. There's a redo election in Bessemer, Alabama, and there's a brand new effort to organize workers at a large Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, which is called JFK 8. Amazon's impact on the nation's workers is profound. One out of every 153 workers is an Amazon employee. That means that the employer has tremendous impact on wages

and working conditions and unionization rates, not just for their own workforce, but for the entire nation. In a sense, even though union efforts at Amazon have thus far failed, these courageous worker organizers, they've already had some measurable impact. Amazon has recently launched a major PR push to improve the image of how they treat their blue-collar workforce, and they have upped their wages and some benefits over the past year, along with reaching a settlement with the NLRB, which required them to notify workers of their rights to organize. But in spite of these changes, made under duress, Amazon continues to be a drag on wages and conditions for workers nationwide. This is why this fight matters so much. When Amazon

talks about their wages, they like to compare their starting wage of $18 per hour, roughly, to the federal minimum of $7.25 and to low-paid service sector jobs like those at fast food restaurants or retailers. From that perspective, yeah, Amazon work looks pretty good. But warehouse work has long commanded solid middle-class wages and decent benefits, much closer to factory work than to retail. As Amazon seeks to turn warehouse work into just another McJob, they are dragging down standards for workers across that entire industry. In other words, if all was well with American workers, service work standards would be getting pulled up to match the solid wages of logistics and factory work, creating another pathway to a stable middle-class life. Instead,

logistics work is getting pulled down by Amazon to meet the precarity of the vast service sector, dimming the prospects for workers nationwide. In fact, according to a government accountability office report a few years back, Amazon had more workers on food stamps than any other American companies, say for Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General. What's more, research shows that when an Amazon warehouse opens, wages drop for all warehouse workers in the county and take five years just to get back to where they were before Amazon decided to come to town. So an example of that, in Robinson, New Jersey, warehouse workers were making $24 per hour before Amazon showed up. Afterwards, that average wage had plummeted nearly 30% to $17.50.

Simply put, Amazon workers get injured more and paid less than other warehouse workers, and the company is destroying the standards of the whole industry, closing one more path to stability and dignity for workers right at the time when logistics has become completely central to the American economy. That's why these labor fights are so critical, beyond Bessemer and beyond Staten Island. They are truly the front line of the war to give workers back their humanity. No war but class war, as they say. Come as no surprise to you, the media has been largely silent about both of these new efforts after receiving significant political and media attention. The new vote in Bessemer has flown almost completely under the radar. You might think that it would be a big national story that one of

the nation's largest and most influential companies cheated so blatantly that they were forced to redo a union election. The corporate media doesn't choose which stories to cover based on what matters, preferring simply to push whatever storylines happen redo a union election. The corporate media doesn't choose which stories to cover based on what matters, preferring simply to push whatever storylines happen to fit their narratives. The Staten Island Amazon election is, if anything, even more significant. New York is the most pro-union state in the country. Workers are employing a novel strategy of organizing using a brand new worker-led union. Friend of the show Chris Smalls is leading this effort,

and his story is nothing if not compelling. Amazon fired him, you might recall, for daring to speak out about their lack of concern for workers during COVID. Top executives, including Bezos, were then caught attempting to smear him as, quote, not smart or articulate, deploying the most thinly veiled racism and classism of all time. Now, against all odds, Chris has spearheaded a brand new union, collected enough signatures at two different New York locations to trigger union elections. In other words, Amazon dramatically underestimated this man who has now pulled off what other established unions in New York failed to do by even bringing unionization to a vote. But what is much more profoundly disappointing, for me at least, is that the most reliable pro-union voices in Congress, they've not just been silent, but they have truly betrayed this movement.

As I already mentioned, this includes AOC, but also includes Mondaire Jones. They both represent organizing New York Amazon workers. And even Bernie Sanders himself, much as it pains me to say it, when Kyle and I recently spoke to Chris Smalls. He reluctantly shared how one after another, these politicians broke their promises to show up for Amazon workers on Staten Island, turning their backs on perhaps the most critical labor effort in the entire country. So we got politicians canceling on us the day before our rallies. You know, AOC, who else? You know, Mondaire Jones, you know, people I spoke to in person and personally invited them to come to Staten Island to talk to their constituents.

You know, they have people that work there in their district, you know, to try to help, you know, gain some support. You know, we had no politicians from the Landford squad show up yet yet i met cory bush as well you know there's pictures of all of us there uh we stayed on the steps i brought them food i brought them aou shirts i had workers with me four workers with me we tried to convince them to come up here aoc was real excited about it. She was like, yeah, I'm there. Take my information.

Talk to all their staffers. I met with the team several times. I had like three meetings over Zoom or whatever we were talking on leading up to our rally. Everything was good. And then the last second it was like, yeah, they can't make signs. They said it's a security threat for aoc and i'm like i was just sleeping on the steps where in dc he had no security where um yeah maybe one person there or whatever but it didn't make any sense because they said they canceled all her in-person

meetings for the rest of the month and then a couple weeks later she got the met gallon you know that is that's devastating. That's, you know, that's a devastating. Listen, I can't get into their heads and tell you why one after another they backed down on their promises, why AOC found the time to gallivant in a tax-rich dress with elites, but couldn't be bothered to show up for one of the most important efforts to actually threaten the wealth and power of the billionaire class. How the left more broadly has collapsed into Twitter wars and performative displays over any real attempt to do anything. Now, there are exceptions to this, no doubt.

Shout out to Jordan Cheridan, Max Alvarez, Jonah Fuhrman, Kim Kelly, and a lot of others who've gone above and beyond to report on these efforts. And look, there is no doubt these union drives, they're a long shot effort. But when the labor movement's supposed fiercest allies can't be bothered to show up or speak out, you end up creating a self-shot effort. But when the labor movement's supposed fiercest allies can't be bothered to show up or speak out, you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not to mention, as I mentioned, we've already seen how just the credible threat of unionization has forced Bezos and co. to make some concessions to workers already. There is no reason that the Amazon union

drives could not spark a nationwide domino effect, just as a Starbucks effort has. But unfortunately, as Amazon has quietly set about destroying what's left of the middle class, a self-obsessed left can hardly be bothered to notice or to stand with those who would fight back. And it kind of says it all, Sager. You can find the time to wear the dress at the Met Gala, but you go back on your promises. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Why can't people just be normal? It's the question that plagues most of us. If I meet people and they

tell me with respect that what I do sounds interesting, but that they hate the news, I completely understand where they're coming from. There is a general feeling amongst the American people at this time that the more engagement that you have with what is going on and with the higher institutions that are supposed to educate you, that it is literally poisoning your mind. And in that spirit, I found something over the weekend that while rightfully dunked on, really bothered me from MSNBC. They ran an editorial saying, quote, the far-right's obsession with fitness is going digital. My first thought is, oh, God, really?

We're going to turn fitness into a culture war? The one thing that anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic status, can actually engage in to actually feel better? And after reading it, it was actually even more sinister than I thought. They changed the headline to allay criticism, but here's the gist of it from Cynthia Miller Idris. She's a so-called professor of polarization and extremism research at the School of Public Affairs at American University here in Washington, D.C. Miller Idris alleges within her op-ed that fitness has always been a central tenet of fascism, citing Hitler's Mein Kampf.

And she notes that far-right groups across the West are encouraging fitness amongst its followers, but notes that we are seeing an emerging contingent here in the United States. Miller Idris cites a single example of a so-called far-right militia in Maryland recruiting at a gym to affirm her thesis. She then notes that since UFC and MMA fighters are dissident against the current cultural regime, thus the whole sport must be far right. At the end, she then calls for vigilance amongst gym owners and physical trainers to make sure that they are spying on clientele to make sure that they are not becoming too far right as they lift weights.

I tortured you by describing her argument in as much detail as possible, just so you could really understand the depth of the stupidity at the heart of this thing. And who is this person? Well, per my investigation of her biography at American University, she has testified before Congress several times, has regularly briefed members of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as the United Nations. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, and even in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom. She also happens to be on the International

Advisory Board of the Center for Research on Extremism in Oslo, which is considered the gold standard for that research. In other words, this is what qualifies as a so-called extremism expert in the world. Enough for our own government, charged with tracking threats and protecting us, is funding. And that is precisely why this is total insanity. This is the culture warification of fitness, of something that normal people do to make themselves feel better. And it is why people are turning on each other and hate the news. Why they feel as if the cultural elite is working overtime to divide all of us and ruin every aspect of our lives, even the ones that people cherish the most

and have nothing to do with politics. It's no secret that in the very last year, I've talked about my own journey into fitness. If you ask my friends, they're probably sick of hearing about it, that's okay. But I have a religious zeal of a comfort with the knowledge of how much I was missing when I was sedentary. This is the last aspect of our society,

which needs to be political. It needs to remain a realm welcome to literally somebody of any aspect of life. The barrier to entry being only physical and mental capacity, nothing else holding people back. What I really notice about this is how much actually fits within so many of the wars that we had over our culture and in COVID in the last couple of years. Think about it. Your baseline level of physical fitness, it was never discussed during the COVID in terms of how it would affect your health outcomes. The CDC and Dr. Fauci were

all loathe to tell you that if you're obese or even if you're fat, you're a lot more at risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID than somebody who is not. I mean, look even further. They seem loathe to tell you that about anything, be it cancer, diabetes, blood disease, alcohol use, anything. You are more likely to die or be ill if you're fat than if you're not. It's as close to a miracle drug that exists within science. And the medical community, they refuse to prescribe it with the same zeal as pills because there is less money to be made and because it requires more work on the patient's part. The medical establishment over the last 30 years has reached for the pill bottle more than it has reached for something that actually works. And beyond even the incentives within our medical

establishment, and of course by the cultural elites, their fear of being accused of fat shaming for telling basic truths about human biology and physical fitness, what's worse about the culture war on fitness is it just polarizes another aspect of daily life. Right now, you are literally incapable of watching ESPN without having the culture war thrust into your face. You are unable to consume sports as it is right now. Whether you wear a mask or not has less to do with science and more to do with social signaling. The same became the case with vaccines. And as Crystal and I have observed, the ultimate indictment of the United States is that while many other countries actually reported a significant rally around the flag outcome and came together as an approach to the pandemic. It was here in the United States that the level of polarization

that took two years to materialize in the rest of the West, it was present here within just a few months of our COVID policy. We do not trust the very basic goodwill and actions of our neighbors, citizens who share different beliefs, and the way that civil wars and civil strife happen are because the conditions of people's lives within the same supposed polity are so at odds that they see no commonality. And the war against fitness is a part of that. It is meant to bifurcate the way that we eat, the way that we work, what we watch, what we consume, how we raise our kids, what schools that we go to. All of those features right now are a class system. All of them grow us apart year by year, generation by generation, until your fellow citizen is barely recognizable to you.

So join me, not in working out to own the libs or getting fat to own the cons. Participate in a national culture of looking after yourself to live a more fulfilling life and be happier so that you can tune out the MSNBCs of the world, lives your life happily, fulfill what you're really meant to. Because the future of our country may actually depend on it. That may be a long-winded way, Crystal. You know, I read this thing, and the more I looked into it, I'm like, this lady's funded by the Department of Homeland Security. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. There's a new HBO Max documentary that happens to feature a little bit of yours

truly, but that's not the reason to talk about it. It's called gaming wall street and it tracks the entire, um, game stop situation and attempt to sort of push back on wall street hedge funds and the Titans who normally run everything both on wall street and frankly in the country at large. And we're happy to be joined now by the producer of that documentary. Tobias Demel joins us now. Great to see you, Tobias. Good to see you, man. Hey, great to be here.

So we've got a little bit of the trailer from Gaming Wall Street. Let's take a look at that. I've never seen a, hear a group of stocks that you can no longer add to. There is a lot of emotion here. All of this rage. Definitely the worst point in my life. What can we do to give a voice to it? The GameStop frenzy ripped the curtain

of how great our markets really are. They forced the broader public to start asking questions that they've never really asked before. And it's not just one firm, two firms, three firms. public to start asking questions that they've never really asked before and it's not just one firm two firms three firms it's all the firms that commit capital and that cracked open whole investigation lawsuit has been making money out of thin air so that's basically stealing right the level of illegal activities just astonishing the market does get manipulated in a lot of ways that we don't see.

How do you play a game when someone else makes the rules? Someone can cheat and you'll never know. It's intentionally hidden from you that you can't see where the problems really lie. This is our one chance to blow up the Death Star. I don't even care who the whistleblower is. That's why it's important that people come forward. This is just the beginning.

So Tobias, as a filmmaker, what was it about this story and what happened with GameStop that you thought would be compelling for an audience? That's a great question. So I started this actually as a niche documentary about Wall Street bets and this crazy little world online where all these people were having their own investing journey and just simplifying very, very complicated finance topics. And it was one of my entry points to learning about investing. My dad has a long activism investor, ESG kind of background. And I always kind of felt stupid. And so finally, during the pandemic, I had time like millions of others who just got interested in investing. And then, you know, I was like, Oh, this is this great online

community. And suddenly GameStop is one of the crazy things on Wall Street Bets that just blows up and becomes the number one headline. And so we knew that we had to do the doc right then. But as we kept going, we just kept going deeper and deeper into this wild world of Wall Street. And yeah, so that was much more compelling stuff once we started actually working on it. Yeah, I think the most important part about your film is when you actually interview a lot of the people on Wall Street and how they saw it as a commentary itself. Can you describe that for the audience and just like what exactly you found at the bottom of that? Yeah, so the deeper we went, the more we started kind of asking these really important questions. So we partnered up

with Biltmore Films. And I, as a director, I needed to get real experts on the producing team. So my producer, Tessa, who's been there from day zero, she's a great storyteller and knows a lot about the human stories and the sort of big picture components. But we wanted to really make sure that we would tell this super accurate and deeply researched story. So we teamed up with Biltmore Films, who is run by a hedge fund manager, John Fichthorn, and a securities analyst, Burke Koontz. So John and Burke, they really know what's up on Wall Street and have all these insider connections. And so I said, look, there's all these conspiracy theories on Reddit, like this crazy naked chart selling. It's definitely bullshit, right? And they're like, no, there's all these conspiracy theories on Reddit, like this crazy naked chart selling. It's definitely bullshit, right? And they're like, no, it's actually totally real.

And the more that we started really digging into it, the more I started realizing how fragile the system is and how easy it is for certain players, like you said, the titans that usually run the show, how easy it is for them to actually abuse the rules and the system that they've sort of helped construct. And so that was one of the biggest takeaways is that some of these things are so far beyond the surface that you really have to go dig, you have to expose it, and then you have to kind of,

you know, put the responsibility on the regulators and the larger forces to be to actually correct this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what was so compelling, both at the time watching this all unfold and also watching your documentary, is you had this moment where it seemed like it was actually working. Like you had this sort of like mass distributed movement of people who were like, screw you, you all rig the system all the time. We're going to make this play. We're in it. We're doing it.

It's happening. The price of GameStop which is like you know not really poised for great success in the future probably continues to go up and up and up that's probably gonna be controversial yes people are gonna get mad of and of and up right not exactly what you would think as like the stock of the future uh let's just put it that way and then what happens Robinhood app which is what has enabled all these retail investors to be able to sort of get in the game and make these trades, they've got relationships with these hedge funds. And they decide that they're going to stop allowing people to buy just this handful of sort of meme stocks, right?

You're still allowed to sell them, so you're allowed to put downward pressure on the price, but you're not allowed to buy them anymore. And frankly, it worked. Part of what's heartbreaking about the film is that you interview some of the people who really, you know, they lost money that was significant to them. And these were oftentimes people who'd already been fucked over by our financial system

during the housing crisis, who had lost homes or lived through their parents losing their homes and being foreclosed on. And here they thought this is one little way to, you know, push back on this rigged system and say, screw you to Wall Street. And in the end, the big guy still won. Yeah, this was one of the interesting takeaways, right? That as we go deeper into the story, you have the brokers like Robinhood that shut down, right? That as we go deeper into the story, you have the brokers like Robinhood that shut down, right? And as we peel back the layers, like, why did they shut down, right? There's a bunch of different possibilities what might have also happened, right? These additional interests.

But the primary thing was really the DTCC, the sort of central plumbing system saying, look, you got to pay $3 billion. But they knew ahead of time that Robinhood would not have that money. They could totally predict what the situation was going to be. And there's a responsible way to say, hey, we have a real big problem in the market. Let's talk with the SEC. Let's talk with the markets and figure out what's going on. But instead, the DTCC sort of said, you're on your own. Let's just see what happens.

And I think that's one of these things in the system, right? Who are these different players? The DTCC is a privately owned corporation. It runs the entire system. There's very little accounting and transparency there to the outside world. And we talked to Harvey Pitt, former chairman of the SEC, and one of his sort of striking quotes is,

you know, the DTCC is so powerful and so centralized and there's so little insight. And he used to run the SEC, the regulator himself, right? And so there's a lot of pieces to the system that need reform. That's one of the sort of biggest takeaways. And then the individual people who got screwed really by the buy button being shut off, it helped certain players that this buy button was off, right? There were certain players like Citadel that were very likely exposed very strongly to the short side

and possibly survived only because of this shutdown. And that part of the story has never been told, has never been properly investigated, right? The SEC report did never go into that. And so with the documentary, we went into all of these questions. We said, what happened to Melvin Capital's position, right? They got out of the stock, but what does this really mean? And so there's all these fascinating stories of what Melvin did with their position, what happened at Citadel. And so yeah, we tried to shine a light on all of that. Yeah. And I think that's what is the most important thing, at least I learned. I think it was an opening for a lot of people, which I always tried to emphasize. I was like, look, it's free to trade, but that just means that you're not the

customer. You are the product. People are upselling and front-running your trades who are big guys and are making a whole lot more money than you actually are. So what do you think the takeaway was for the average Redditor, Wall Street, you know, kind of Wall Street bets person? I've been a Redditor for like, you know, 12 years or something like that. It was kind of natural for me to, that's why I saw this bubbling up early, I think. But I'm curious what the feeling and the takeaway was for a lot of those people who you talked to as well. For many of them, it was, I think, their first real experience at seeing market structure in play. And I think for many people on Wall Street, it was that experience as well, right? You can work on Wall Street for 20

years. Nobody's ever seen that, right? Like John says in the documentary, you know, he's never seen a basket of stocks just being taken away on the, you can no longer add to that position. And I think for many people, you started seeing, and I think Dennis Keller puts this great, right, like rips the curtain off the system. And it shows you all the dirty gears and wheels in the back, and who is making decisions and why. And I think for many people, it was an incredibly frustrating experience. But if we take one step further back, I think what it truly represented was a show of power and a show of force by the retail crowd, right? By the individual people who said, I will stand up against the system that screwed me in 2008 and a system that pretends or believes that they're all powerful.

But in this one instance, we put this tiny bit of pressure on this one little stock or this group of stocks, AMC, GME, and so on. And suddenly, the entire market goes bananas. And I think that was ridiculed by a lot of the larger media outlets. Oh, there's just a bunch of crazy people online. This was the first instance where the system really saw, hey, we can't screw around with those people. These people will have people will have power and that power is only going to increase from here on out, right? It's all about literacy. The more that you know about the system, the more that you know how to interact with the system, the more you can hold it accountable. And this, in a really strange way, was a way to hold Wall Street accountable and say,

hey, don't screw around with us one more time because we're here and we kind of know how your system works now. Yeah, well, there were people on Wall Street who did take losses because of their short position. So it's not like it worked out all rosy for them, but ultimately they were in a position to absorb those losses. I mean, I think that's ultimately the moral of the story or what was revealed is there's all this mythology around like, oh, it's the free market and these stock values, oh, they just represent like the intrinsic value of this company. That's all bullshit. You know, I mean, it's all fake.

It's very much rigged and manipulated. But the moment that it was like regular people who tried to get in on the game, well, they had to bring the hammer down and make sure that you can never, ever have that happen. So ultimately, it was all extraordinarily revealing of how things actually work. Absolutely. Yeah, and it showed, I think, the weaknesses in the system, right? And the biggest loopholes. And I think that's all what this is about, right?

It's all about loopholes and exploiting loopholes. The short-selling mechanism is very easy to abuse by the largest players in the world. And I think one of the ironic things is a lot of people got ridiculed for saying, oh, you know, we'll stick it to the hedge funds because of 2008. And then people said, well, it wasn't the hedge funds in 2008. It was all the large investment banks. But the real joke of the story is that this practice of naked short-selling and many of the other ways of abusing the short-selling mechanism actually doesn't happen at the short seller or the hedge

fund. It happens earlier at the prime broker, which just happens to be all the largest investment banks in the world, right? And so this basket of six companies that basically runs the U.S. financial markets, they're yet again, in a way, indirectly at fault for some of these things that happened and have not been held accountable properly, right? They have not been held accountable in 2008 properly. They still have not been held accountable now. And one of the things that I think is really important from a sort of national security level is that a market needs to be trustworthy, right? And so if the main reputation of the US stock market is that it's a rigged system, a lot of regulators should

scratch their head and be like, hey, we're really going to do something and we're going to show some signal to the greater public, hey, we will actually go after those people. And sometimes it's not the SEC, sometimes it's the DOJ. But it's important that there needs to be a new system of checks and balances on Wall Street that is currently not really there,

which is namely jail time for individual people. If you betrayed a system, if you make a church cell, if you use the mechanisms in a way that is not intended and that is illicitly extracting profits from the system, you should face at least the consequences to your own personal liberty. Yeah, I think that's really well said. Really enjoyed the film. I encourage everybody to go and watch it.

We really appreciate you joining us, man. Yeah, great to have you, Tobias. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We really appreciate you joining us, man. Yeah, great to have you, Tobias. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. It was cool to be featured in that. I was telling him before, we got a text message like months ago.

I'm like, hey, did you guys know you were in this movie? I was like, what are you talking about? So that was kind of cool in order to have that exposure. Thank you all, though, to those of you who support the show. You know, in terms of our coverage and why we need you, that Trump block is a perfect example. We are not able to cover the news in the way that it properly should be covered. We should have been able to play a clip for everyone of Trump from the rally in order to give people a real feel of it. But because we have seen now multiple YouTube channels get taken down for accurately reporting the news,

playing a clip, and then describing those comments in context. You have no idea when these content policies are going to come for you. And in the event that they do, we rely on you 100%. It's a perilous time, as we've said previously, in order to cover the news properly, and especially with this Russia hysteria. So thank you all so much. You just give us that peace of mind. It really just means a lot. It means the world. Absolutely. We love you guys, and we'll see you all so much. Just give us that peace of mind. It really just means a lot. Yeah. It means the world. Absolutely.

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