Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/7/22: Ukraine Battle Updates, Oil Prices Surge, Media Censorship, Economic Warfare, and More!

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Krystal and Saagar bring the latest on the Ukraine battle, oil price spike, protests in Russia, China's response to Russia, US polling on action in Ukraine, censorship of media in the west and Russia, Trump's latest comments on the situation, what Vladimir Putin is thinking, Ukraine marking the end of covid culture wars, and the corruption of Biden's FDA commissioner!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/Revolving Door: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots, of course, of breaking news to get to this morning. We'll have all the very latest for you on our sanctions and on oil prices and on China's response and new public polling and some potentially worrying trends there.

Also the insane censorship crackdown both here and also in Russia and Trump's latest very unhelpful comments on the whole situation. We also have a government transparency expert coming on to talk about potential corruption of pharmaceuticals at the FDA. So we'll dig into one non-Ukraine story here as well. But we have to start, of course, with the war in Ukraine and the very latest that we can glean, which is happening on the ground. Let's go ahead and put this first tweet up on the screen. More escalating rhetoric here from Putin. He says that Ukraine could lose its statehood. The whole tweet says Russia's dictator Vladimir Putin said that if Ukraine, quote, continues to behave in the same way, that will bring into question the future of its statehood that during a meeting broadcast on TV, there were some additional eyebrow-raising comments that we'll get to later as well from

Putin about, you know, who he considers to be combatants, that are sanctions, or he considers to be an act of war. So a lot of escalating rhetoric there. One of the worrying situations that we were tracking over the weekend is that there was fighting very close to a large nuclear plant. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen. Thankfully, things did not go completely sideways here. There was no nuclear meltdown. But the basic idea is that Russia is trying to take control of these power plants, especially the nuclear power plants, because this is how much of Ukraine gets their energy so that they can have control over the electric grid. Exactly. There were fires nearby that had people extremely concerned.

Turns out the fires and the shelling was of a building on the site, but not actually the nuclear reactor. Now you have this very strange situation where the power plant is actually still being run by Ukrainians, but the Russians are in charge. This is similar to the dynamic that we saw already at Chernobyl. Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear here. This is an outrageous act. I mean, beyond also just the civilian targets, Russia is supposed to be a responsible nuclear power. Attacking a nuclear power plant is an explicit violation of the IAEA, of which Russia loves to talk about, especially whenever it comes to the Iranian nuclear deal, something which we would love to see in terms of compliance. And this is the issue, which is that by attacking this plant, they were trying to take out 25% of the power that the entire country gets from this power plant. And they are risking a

serious escalation here in terms of what that means. Already, IAEA inspectors and others had said that the Russians have not allowed them in order to have any communication or have any inspection of the plant. And this is outrageously dangerous. Now, look, I just did a whole monologue on how nuclear power is safe, effective, and all that. And all of that remains true. But attacking a nuclear reactor with shelling and weapons seems bad. I'll go ahead and just say that for the record. It just goes to show you the tactics that they're willing to use. That's right. And how dangerous this really was. Because even if, you know, the intent was just to take control of the plant and we're just going to show like to the side of the nuclear

reactor, this other building that's on the site, obviously you're creating an extraordinarily dangerous situation and not just for the Ukrainian population, but for their own population as well and for the entire region. So that was something that people were watching with a lot of obvious concern and it was crazy too because there was actually a live stream, did you see this? Of some of the fighting while it was going on and you had tens of thousands of people watching some of the fighting unfold in real time. Big picture, let's go ahead and put the battle map that we have up on the screen from Simtac. This is the same map we've been showing you over days. There really hasn't been a whole lot of movement in terms of Russian advances. In fact, you know, they've been trying to make their way to Odessa, a key strategic port city on the Black

Sea. They have been at the very least held back. And there are some reports that they have actually been pushed further back from their positions in one of the cities that is en route there between Mariupol and Odessa. At the same time, the situation in Mariupol is really quite dire. Those are the reports from the ground. Of course, that city has undergone quite a lot of shelling. It also is under siege. And so they don't have heat. They don't have electricity. They don't have water. It's still very, very cold in Ukraine this time of year. So civilians there are really suffering. And let's put this next piece up on the screen. Very murky, to be honest with you, what happened here. So Ukrainian officials are saying that

we do know there was a ceasefire that was agreed to, a temporary ceasefire, in order to establish humanitarian corridors to try to allow civilians from Mariupol to evacuate. That ceasefire quickly collapsed. Ukrainian officials are saying that Russians were shelling civilians, creating a very dangerous situation there. Russians are saying that Ukrainians were using people as human shields. And I do want to say, late yesterday and not in time to be able to pull the element, but even our own defense officials are saying they were unable to corroborate the claims from the Ukrainians that Russians were violating the ceasefire. So very murky exactly what happened to cause that temporary ceasefire to collapse and allow civilians to evacuate. But we do know that they were unable to establish those humanitarian

corridors and be able to get people out. At the same time, the UN Human Rights Office is saying that at least 351 civilians have been confirmed killed in the conflict. It is likely more than that. That's just the numbers that they are able to count right now. Yeah, it's very likely. And look, I mean, we have no idea about the humanitarian corridor. The fog of war makes it so that it's very difficult to discern. I watch a lot of this happen in Syria, and I can tell you that there was a lot of blame to go around on many sides. And unfortunately, there's a lot of currency to be made, both in terms of the other person violated it, and oftentimes they can be used for military advantage. All we know is that it's hell on earth for the people who are actually involved.

So let's go ahead and put this video up on the screen. I'll talk a little bit over it. But this just shows you, this is what a supposed humanitarian corridor is supposed to look like during the evacuation. This was in the city of Arpin. Now this comes from an account claiming that it was Russians shelling. Again, we do not know exactly what it was. All we can say is that's a beautiful city that is now on fire in the middle of what's supposed to be a humanitarian evacuation. And that's just the civilians that are always who are the number one people we should really be thinking about here in

this conflict. We did have some breaking news, Crystal, this morning. Gone Ahead and Verified hit from the Kremlin spokesperson. So I'm going to go ahead and read this to you. It's breaking literally as we're doing the show, which is that Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, says three demands for which Russia will, quote, stop its military action in a moment, in a moment, is what he says, if Ukraine meets these demands. So let's go ahead.

Quote, Russia told Ukraine it could halt the operation, quote, at any moment if Kiev meets Russian conditions. Ukraine must recognize Crimea as Russian, as well as the independence of the DNR and the LNR, the Donetsk and the Luhansk People's Republics, which are there in the eastern separatist regions. That was one of the pretexts for why this operation started in the first place. Finally, it says that Ukraine must amend its constitution and renounce its claim to join any bloc in a reference to both the European Union and the NATO alliance. Now, the one thing I do want to be clear here is it is unclear currently whether the quote-unquote demilitarization aspect remains on the table. So there is a report from the largest Eastern media company that before issuing this demand crystal, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, had already said that Russia will complete demilitarization of Ukraine.

So the first two, I think you and I could probably see some sort of deal on that happening. Amending the Constitution saying, look, we're not going to join the EU. We're not going to join NATO as long as you guys go ahead and pull out. Sure, even Crimea and the DNR, there's some quibbles to be had on where exactly the front line and all of that might happen. But the demilitarization aspect, especially after literally getting invaded as a country, it's not going to happen. That's a non-starter. There was, I just want to say this, and this was a report out there, that this is from Christo Gravzes. He says that two persons close to the Ukraine-Russia negotiations tell him that Russia proposed that Zelensky could remain the pro forma president, but that Russia would get to choose who the prime minister was. So they're also indicating behind the scenes that they would have, they're like, okay, you might be able to say, but you would have no power, but we would really run the government.

Our guy's going to really run the show. And that pairs with the thing that we first put up there that Putin said that Ukraine could, quote, lose its statehood. So the demands in English that are being put out seem relatively reasonable. Behind the scenes, there are still some demands which could be complete non-starters for this conference.

Yeah, and that's what's really important. Because if it was just, I mean, this may sound horrible, but the reality is where things stand today, if it was, hey, we're going to give you Crimea, which is effectively already done. We're going to give you the separatist republics and we'll figure out the lines, and we're going to agree and put it in the Constitution.

We're not joining any bloc. You take that deal all day long. If they actually leave, too. Yes, absolutely, 100%. I mean, if that's really an actual deal on the table. But when you start to talk about demilitarization after your entire nation has just been invaded by your next-door neighbor, that's a total non-starter.

And then also, I mean, think of what an ideal situation that political dynamic you laid out would be for Russia, where you keep Zelensky as the technical figurehead, lending the government some air of legitimacy among Westerners who now love this guy, when really it's just a puppet government of the Kremlin. So that would be, of course, an ideal political situation for them. And I have to think for Zelensky and the Ukrainians. That is also a non-starter. But, you know, this continues to be an extremely dangerous situation in terms of a broader escalation. And there was news that came out yesterday about just how many weapons we have been flowing into this country. I mean, it is beyond what you could possibly. This is Syria 2.0. They're calling it Berlin Airlift 2.0. This was reporting from the New York Times.

So just for comparison, there was a $60 million arms package to Ukraine that was announced back in August, and that was not fulfilled until November. But now the president approved $350 million in military aid on February 26th. So that's nearly six times larger. And 70% of it was delivered in five days. So they are rushing in everything they possibly can. The U.S. and NATO in less than a week have pushed more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania into Ukraine. They also detail a lot of technical support that we are directly providing to Zelensky to help keep him alive, but also to their military forces to help them, you know, using our own intelligence and satellite capabilities to figure out where the Russians are and what their plans are. And they are coming very close to the line

of being considered a co-combatant in this conflict. And one of the things that they lay out here is that, look, by our definition, we haven't crossed the line, but the Russians have a different definition. I mean, from their perspective, they've already said that even just our sanctions are an act of war. So you are really playing with fire here when you are getting so directly involved. There was also and Secretary Blinken spoke to us trying to work out a deal with Poland so that we could, in fact, get the Ukrainians these fighter jets. The idea is basically Poland has the type of, you know, Soviet fighter jets that the Ukrainians know how to fly. So the idea is Poland would give them those and we would replace the Polish fleet with our own jet fighters. So we're not directly putting them in, but we're basically facilitating the transfer.

Again, listen, guys, at this point, even though the Ukrainians have, you know, held the Russian forces back way better than anyone anticipated, partly I think this helps reveal part of how they've been able to do this is with overwhelming sort of like military capabilities given by the U.S. and NATO and also by our technical support. But, you know, we have to be focused on keeping this conflict to Ukraine and not escalating it any further. And when you're taking these types of actions that Russia could easily view as escalatory and the U.S. becoming directly engaged in this war, you are really playing a dangerous game. Yeah, that's my great fear. That's why I referenced Syria. I mean, whenever you think about Syria, remember it started off as an actual conflict of Syrians and the Qataris and the Saudis and the Americans and the Libyans and the Russians

and everybody starts getting involved. And five years in, you have rebel groups, right, which are armed to the teeth in terms of their military technology, and which necessitates then also, whenever the political objective of the Assad regime and the Putin government for keeping Assad in power was total annihilation of those civilian populations. And everybody suffered. That's part of the reason the death toll was so high and the tactics were so brutal.

I'm sorry, but I do think that that is just the most likely scenario here. Given the demands here and given the tactics of the Russian military, we saw that they were able to do it in Aleppo. And we also saw them do it in their own country, in Grozny, in the Chechnyan civil war. Almost certainly, this seems to be an outright play-by-play of what happened in Chechnya. At this point, the Russian government just simply has gotten too much invested in order to pull out, just like they did there, from a political objective and from Putin saving face. And that means a full bore and, you know, use of some of the most brutal military tactics that the world has seen in a long time, especially on a stage like this. And, you know, with the U.S. providing ISR capability, which is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to the Ukrainian military,

it will prolong the conflict as well. I'm just, you know, I'm not saying a moral judgment. It's just a fact. It is going to do so. And a lot of people are going to lose their lives here. I really think that we are on the precipice of something way worse than what we've already seen, the history of warfare, and particularly of the main actor in this Russian military shows us that what is actually possible. A lot of analysts are basically preparing, have the expectation that this is going to be a long grinding conflict that, you know, eventually the Russians with their military superiority and their larger amount of resources brought to bear. There's also reports they're actually recruiting Syrian fighters

who are knowledgeable in urban warfare to help them take the city of Kiev that eventually they will be able to take over the regions that they want to and specifically the capital city of Kiev. And so you'll have this long-going conflict with the guerrilla insurgency, much like what they faced again in Afghanistan. And we also have the lesson of history of what happened when we armed that resistance to the teeth. And, you know, I don't see a lot of hand-wringing about who and how we are arming the Ukrainians right now. And, you know, it is very well documented that a part of their National

Guard are avowed neo-Nazis, especially actually down in that Black Sea region around Mariupol. That's where the Azov Battalion is based and is strongest. So, you know, there's a lot of worrying developments here. And in particular, you know, for us walking right up to that line of being drawn into this conflict, there's also reports we may be sort of bolstering the Ukrainian cyber capabilities. Yeah, almost certainly. Because they haven't faced the level of cyber attacks that were expected. So if you're watching from the outside, you're thinking maybe the U.S. is helping to harden their tech

to make sure that they are not so vulnerable to cyber attacks. There's also speculation that we may be intermittently disrupting Russian communication. So that's pretty direct involvement. So again, this is a very, very dangerous posture for the U.S. to be taking. And even though the Biden administration has been very clear about no boots on the ground, you know, if Russia views us as a party to this conflict and strikes some of our facilities, kills any of our people, I mean, the way that we could get brought in, do you think that people wouldn't flip on a dime if there was that kind of provocation? Of course they would. What you're outlining is why we need great care whenever we consider this. There's a big difference between Javelin anti-tank missiles and then using the U.S. military to disrupt Russian communications, right? One is an act of actual cyber war. The second one is on these Polish jets. I'm sorry, I do not think that

a small handful of former Russian jets that the Poles have is going to make a significant difference in the air war over Ukraine. And that is a direct facilitation by a NATO ally of something which is just constitutionally different, I mean in terms of its makeup, in jets versus missiles and planes. It may sound foolish, but whenever you have planes like that, that kill Russian soldiers or shoot down Russian planes, it is a level of escalation in the level of aid. And it's all also in the eye of the beholder. What do they consider to be a level of escalation in the level of aid. And it's all also in the beholder, in the eye of the beholder, what do they consider to be a matter of escalation?

Right now in rhetoric that they are saying, you know, anybody who facilitates these types of things itself is considered a co-combatant. They can say that, are they going to do anything about that? Obviously those are two different things. So we need to take great care in the level of aid that we do go ahead and give, and also to make sure it doesn't come back to bite us in the future. And we have to take great care in also not feeding what the Russian narrative is in terms of funding groups, which they say that this is all about in the first place. So this is all in the interest of we want peace and we want less loss of life. And in the past, it shows us that lacking in consideration can make the conflict actually go much, much longer, which is terrible for everybody. Yeah, indeed. Okay, let's go ahead

and move on here to the oil front. And obviously, this is something which is very important, funding the Russian war machine. Here at home, though, it has huge political consequences. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that the national average in the United States for a gallon of gas is already $4 a gallon. That's the highest price at the pump since 2008. It actually went higher than I possibly expected, Crystal. And the price of Brent crude for a barrel is currently $136, which is, you know, $150 is considered a catastrophe. So we're already on our way to some record high gas prices. A national average of $5. I said $4.50 previously. We could see it soon. I didn't expect $4.00 this quickly. I think $5.00 is now very much on the table. And next month, I watched over the weekend, every day, as the price continued to increase

at the pump, which is really just a catastrophe for major working class Americans. So obviously, this is going to go ahead and ignite a massive fight here at home over banning Russian oil. So this is the big fight with the United States and its allies, because we actually do not import that much Russian crude oil. So I went ahead and checked this morning. It's about 3% of imports. Some estimates, it's 10%. That being said, it's not going to have a major impact, at least here at home, although 10%, you know, still a decent amount. When you're paying $4 a gallon, any little scrap helps. But where it is going to have the biggest effect is Europe and China. So, Europe and China

take 85% of Russia's crude oil exports. Europe in particular are importing nearly as much as China with millions and millions of barrels per day that are imported to that country. So if there is a ban, it is going to have a massive supply shock. And that is currently what is being considered by the European Union, the U.S. allies, and the United States. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was talking about this over the weekend. Let's take a listen. We're adding to the sanctions virtually every day. We're doing it in coordination with Europeans. When there's a difference between us, if there's a loophole on one side or the other, we're closing it. That's part of the work that I was doing here. And when it comes to oil, Russian oil, I was on the phone yesterday with the

president and other members of the cabinet on exactly this subject. And we are now talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way at the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there is still an appropriate supply of oil on world markets. That's a very active discussion as we speak. So that is the biggest news that came out of that, Crystal, considering the Russian oil ban. Now, this is going to cause a major domestic political fight about a couple of things. Obviously, high gas prices, people freak out. And they should, especially at $4 a gallon. That's a tax on every working class person in this country, on every average household finance. And that is also going to cause a major discussion around drilling here at home, around energy capacity.

And it's going to expose some little bit of holes in diplomacy. So first and foremost, we saw from Nancy Pelosi say that she does support a ban on Russian oil. As Speaker of the House, this is something which Congress could also act on in terms of export controls and all of that, but does not support any new drilling. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Your Honor, Speaker, there's been a push by some Democrats to ban the import of Russian oil.

And I believe that Senators Manchin and Murkowski are going to put forth a bill on that today. Where do you stand? I'm all for that. Ban it. Ban the oil? Ban the oil coming from Russia. Yeah. From the sprawl. And I'm not for drilling on public lands. So this is going to be the big domestic political fight, Crystal. You and I were talking about this. I actually support any sort of drilling or fracking, which is going to bring down the price

in the immediate term. But you make an excellent point, which is that we don't actually have that good of a refining capacity, which is that fracking in particular, you can get oil out of the ground in not that particularly long period of time, which could relieve some price pressure. But the choke point that we have right now in our refining capacity makes it so that even if we did drill, it is not going to bring down the price in the way that we would need. Yeah. So oil, I was reading for, you know, to bring like new oil onto the market, it takes at least six months. So even that is not going to bring the price down in the short term. In addition, I mean, there's kind of this narrative because of some of Biden's rhetoric around climate that he's reduced the amount of drilling. He actually hasn't. They went through with the largest sale of public lands, 80 million acres in the Gulf of

Mexico during his term. So if more fracking and more drilling was going to be our key to low stable prices, we would already have them because we've had administration after administration who has had exactly that policy. So that's why I actually agree with the idea that what we should be focused on is, and we're going to talk about some of these other deals around the world. We're talking to the Venezuelans, which is very interesting. We'll get to that. Potentially Iran, the nuclear deals on the table. They're also talking to Saudi, which I think that part is insane. Like if you're doing this for humanitarian reasons, the Saudis are currently, with our help, perpetrating the worst humanitarian crisis on the entire planet. becoming actually energy independent, where we have a stable renewable supply, including nuclear, that isn't going to leave us at the whims of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran and Russia into the future. So I know it sounds like, oh, well, let's just drill more and then that'll

lower the prices. The reality is that's not going to do anything in the short term, and it's just going to make us more dependent on those sources in the future. I think it's a dual source, which is you've got to show the American people you're going to do anything in the short term, and it's just going to make us more dependent on those sources in the future. I think it's a dual source, which is you've got to show the American people you're going to do everything possible in order to bring the price down in the short term, in the near term. We already know that this is going to happen now for the next year or so. So I would say go ahead and drill. But that is not the thing that is going to solve the contest in the long run. And that's why I think it has to be paired, obviously, with a massive nuclear investment. The problem I have with our current fights is that you see the fossil fuel guys and Joe Manchin and the coal people make it seem as if you just drill, then that's going to solve all of our

problems. It's like, look, we already found out that's not the way it works. We have a global path. It's not like, you know, natural gas and fracking doesn't bring down carbon emissions by 50%. But what if I told you there's this technology that has 4% to 5% of natural gas? It would be a shocker in order to find that out. Now, on the diplomacy side, this is another reason why we need to wean ourselves off of this. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that American officials are traveling to Venezuela, a Russian ally. The reason why is that they want the Venezuelans to pump oil and they want to buy some of that oil. The reason that it matters is that we had not even recognized the Maduro regime

as legitimate over the government of Venezuela. And there have been all sorts of sanctions that have been put into place. We're still pretending it's Juan Guaido. That's right. We were pretending that Juan Guaido, I forget what it was, like the speaker or whatever. We said that he was the president of that country. But now that we need the oil, we're like, okay, Venezuela, let's start pumping and let's get some of this here into the U.S. Deploying some diplomats to Saudi Arabia specifically to try and shore up relations with MBS to get them to pump more oil to relieve price pressure as well. MBS has been playing footsie and really playing his hand. Most recently I saw him talking about pulling U.S. money out of the United States and about, you know, very openly kind of acknowledging that he's screwing with our domestic politics in terms of oil production. And the reason why is right now they have the most leverage over us humanly possible. Part of the reason why the Biden administration wanted to take a stand against Saudi Arabia on

the Jamal Khashoggi killing, but Yemen and other things like that, and now making it so that we're going to have to go beg them hat in hand. And it just exposes, like you said, which is that, okay, to punish the Russians, now we have to go hat in hand to the it just exposes, like you said, which is that, okay, to punish the Russians, now we have to go hat in hand to the Saudis and the Venezuelans. It's like, pick your poison. We have Venezuela, Iran, what is it? We have Saudi Arabia. There are other, in terms of the other countries that pump oil, not a lot of them, particularly great US allies. This is why it has to be paired, I think, these diplomatic efforts, but also you have to show America that you're trying to do

something to drop the price of gas. In the long run, you have to sell it with some sort of, we can never, I mean, we need a speech from the president being like, we can never let this happen again. Let's go ahead and invest. We need to never be in this situation again. So let's do everything in our possible power in the next year or two to bring the price down. And in the long run, we are making sure that this will never, ever happen to America and its allies. I think we're in for a real crunch. I think this is going to be a massive, massive economic impact in terms of the lost dollars that are going to be spent otherwise. I mean, gas is a relatively inelastic product. You have to drive. Most people do. They may decrease in the short term, but we found out

in 2008, 2009, most people did not reduce the amount of driving that they did. They just had to curtail spending in other areas of their lives. There's a lot to say about this, and I'm sure this is a topic we're going to continue to talk a lot about. With regards to Venezuela, I mean, I don't support the sanctions that we have on them anyway, which are causing help contributing to the misery of the population there, just as I think that we've gone too far with the sanctions against Russia that are causing misery among the Russian population. It's also, you know, some of the demands that we have in this negotiation are sort of amusing and show how uh bad our policy towards venezuela has been with regard to the whole like juan guido coup attempt situation part of what

we're demanding is the release of some of the green beret former green beret i should be clear commandos who were down there thinking that they were involved somehow in the coup i forgot you remember all that yeah so that's part of the very back part in order to read to lift the sanctions and reestablish relations and all of that. That's one of our demands is like we want our Green Beret commandos that were running around causing trouble in your country back. But I think it's also important to note that right now the latest polling says 80 percent of Americans support banning Russian oil. Now, I would also say that people can be very unreliable on issue polling and support, in theory, the idea of banning Russian oil, but then very much not support when they go to the gas pump and it costs $5 a gallon.

$5.50 or something like that. Yeah, just wait. You know, I think you see a huge bipartisan push right now. Marco Rubio also in favor. You see a huge bipartisan effort of like, let's go all the way and let's ban Russian oil because they see that broad public support. But again, just because the support is there for the idea in theory does not mean that when people who are already really stretched with inflation and struggling to be able to make rent, make mortgage payments, put food on the table, keep body and soul together, those costs are going to take a big chunk out of the American public. And, you know, I think there will be a political price to pay for that. There's just no question about it.

I mean, that's the way it goes when you look at history. People really rightly are, you know, it really hurts them when gas prices go up because we are so dependent on it right now. Yeah, this is the thing that nobody ever wants to acknowledge. Fine. It's like for most people, energy policy means heating bill and gas. That's it. That's literally it. That's what most That's literally it. That's most what most people

care about. And so when you're going to look at the fact that we already have record high heating prices, luckily it's getting a little bit warmer, at least here in the DMV, but that was a big tax on a lot of Americans. Heating oil and all that was up like 90%. Add in now $4 a gas. Average price, hearing from people in California, I believe that California averages $5, which is already, that's what, 50 million people living. That's like a sixth of the entire country. Fresno apparently has $6 a gallon. So we could see a situation where the national average is five. Then you have the nation's largest state by population, which has 650 or something like that. That is a massive economic drain out of the country. So this is going to be,

this is, you're going to be hearing about this all day long. And I think rightfully, it's got a lot of lessons about what we need to do in the future and especially about how we run our policy. But most importantly, it's going to have an impact geopolitically because I do think that they are probably going to go ahead and go through with this. And they're not thinking through the consequences. All of us are going to be paying a go through with this. And they're not thinking through the consequences. All of us are going to be paying a lot more for gas in the near term if they do go ahead and ban this. Because remember, even if we don't import that much Russian oil, oil is a global market.

And the price of barrel contributes to the price at pump. So whenever our oil is sold out into the global market, it's priced by everybody, not necessarily by U.S. demand, although there is some impact there. So just think about that whenever we're thinking about what exactly to do and more. And in terms of the sanctions, because this is one of those that could have a significant impact here at home and on our own country's domestic politics. What I saw is roughly 50 percent of the price that the gas pump is determined by the price per barrel on the global commodities market. So the fact that we don't personally import that much Russian oil doesn't mean that you won't be affected. Exactly. All right. There was one, you know,

other story that we wanted to track here in terms of breaking news. Let's go ahead and put this first piece up on the screen. There continue to be widespread protests in Russia against the war. It's really quite remarkable. An independent tracker here says that more than 4,300 people were arrested over the weekend at anti-war protests. These occurred in cities really across the country. 21 Russian cities, they say here. I saw numbers as high as 53 different cities where anti-war protests have erupted since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Of course, these individuals know they're going to face arrest. I actually talked to one person in Russia who said his boyfriend had been arrested and they had been involved in activism before. They weren't too fearful about it.

They said right now, like, you're going to spend a night in jail. You're going to get a fine. But they were more fearful of what may be coming down the road if this sort of opposition and dissent continues. And you already see some of those more aggressive actions being taken. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. So Russia is cracking down on information, period. We've got them banning Facebook. They're restricting Twitter. I saw also, and this is kind of noteworthy because of TikTok's connections to China, but TikTok has stopped allowing Russians to upload new content. That's right. So what does this mean? I mean, this makes it even more difficult in order to organize

protests and take collective action. We're going to talk in the censorship block as well about the crackdowns on any kind of independent media, including threatening up to 15 years of jail time for spreading, quote, fake news. Another one of our terms to come back to bite us here. But, you know, it's just extraordinary to see the number of people who are willing to risk their freedom in order to push back against this war. And I think we have to we have to really acknowledge how courageous that ultimately is. There's no way of knowing what public sentiment is, you know, what percent on which side. It's very hard to have reliable polling out of Russia. There are some polls that are sort of state-affiliated that indicate that Putin's approval rating has gone up since the invasion.

Again, there's no way to know whether that is the case. But it's extraordinary to see this number of people in the streets. the sort of, you know, backlash among Russian society is apparently Anton Dolin, one of Russia's best known film critics, just said, there's no more Russia. We are suffering a catastrophe. No, not an economic or political one. This is a moral catastrophe. And he announced his departure from the country. And that's another thing that's being tracked is the number of people who were just leaving Russia who have the means, who are sort of, you know, the global citizen types who are saying, we're out of here. The most cosmopolitan people.

Yeah, so they could definitely be facing, you know, a brain drain of those type of people. Those people are all definitely going to leave. I mean, this is, yeah, look, it's a catastrophe for the Russians. I do want to temper expectations, like you said. Yeah. Currently, there have been tracked, I think, 7,300 protesters have been put in prison.

That's not that many, whenever you consider the population of Russia. And Putin is broadly put in prison. It's not that many whenever you consider the population of Russia. And Putin is broadly popular in Russia. We don't know how popular, you know, they claim 80%. It's probably more like 60, maybe 55. That's still actually pretty significant. Whenever you consider that, how this is all being messaged to the Russian public, I mean, how are they going to know? You know, somebody I was listening to recently, the propaganda by the Russians against the U.S. and the West and the allies on their own population over the last 15 years has been so remarkable that it's difficult for us to understand that they live in a totally separate reality from us. And I'm not saying they're stupid or whatever. They have legitimate grievances with the West West and they all suffered the 1990s economic

sanctions. And actually most recently, Soviet nostalgia has been going up in Russia amongst the youth. So people need to understand the domestic political conditions over what's happening there. And in that context, why a war in an operation like this, especially if you control the information environment like the Russians do, well, you're probably going to see at least some support. I still think the most potent weapon against Putin's regime are going to be the body bags that are coming home. They already have acknowledged 500 dead. We have no idea what the real number is. It's probably more like 1,500 to 2,000. They only lost, what, 15,000 people in the Soviet Union during Afghanistan. That caused a domestic political backlash. And when you have, you know, moms who lost their sons,

they're not going to shut up. You can try, but they're going to talk whenever they go out or whenever, you know, they're talking to their friends. And those whisper networks are part of what brought down the Soviet Union, in in part in terms of confidence within the regime. So the more people die and you can't keep death from people's relatives at least for too long, that's going to have an impact, I think, there at home. You can't ignore coffins that are coming back. Potentially. Yeah. Potentially.

It really is hard to wrap your head around the information ecosystem that they're experiencing. And, again, some of it, they have a legitimate point. I mean, when they say, like, oh, the U.S. casually invaded a sovereign nation of Iraq and made up this fantastical story about WMDs, they didn't get sanctioned. Their people weren't punished. And so even the New York Times was reporting that there was some segment of the population that because our sanctions were so broad and so indiscriminate, it was pushing them more towards the Kremlin narrative. Because then you have, you know, when this war sort of came out of nowhere from their perspective where they were sold, oh, this is a peacekeeping mission and we're just focused on these Eastern separatist regions. And then now you're getting word that there's this broader, they call it special military operation. Not allowed to call it a war and invasion, but special military operation that happens to be across the entire country. Well, that's kind of a, huh, well, that's not exactly what we expected.

But now when you have, you know, a very familiar villain here in the West blanket punishing ordinary Russian citizens in a way that they can rightly point out is hypocritical based on our own behavior, that does help to push people potentially towards the Kremlin's narrative on this. So I just think it's important to highlight these individuals, not because I really expect it to have a big impact on the government, but because I think their bravery and their moral fortitude here is really commendable and worthy of us taking a minute to take a look at. 100%. I mean, you stand up to a regime like this, it really means something. Let's continue with this thread then in the next block, because this matters a lot in terms of the sanctions and how it's changing the

entire geopolitical world potentially. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen in the way that Putin is viewing the sanctions. He has said in a speech over the weekend that the Western sanctions on Russia are tantamount, quote, to a declaration of war. That's a direct quote. And threatened Ukraine with loss of statehoods if its leaders continue to resist his military invasion. And actually, while you and I were just speaking, President Zelensky of Ukraine is giving a speech in which he says, you know, Ukraine is continuing to stand. And in addition to asking for a no-fly zone on the economic part where he has a lot more sympathy here in the West, he is urging a ban of Russian oil and continuing economic sanctions against them. So I think it's very important for people to understand that on the sanctions front, the most maximalists are moving in that direction.

I also want to say there's been a lot of talk about companies pulling out of Russia and all that. I went ahead and asked around, Crystal, and here's what it is. About 80% of these companies, they're pulling out anyway. The reason why is the sanctions, so that the sanctions are underlying the policy. As in, think about it this way. If you have the sanctions that we currently have and you're doing business in Russia, well, you can't wire any money from there to here. So then you're like, okay, what do I do? Well, what I do is I just use the PR of saying we're pulling out of Russia before I'm forced to say we literally are unable to do business there. So it may look like a lot of virtue singling. Wait, you mean the capitalists aren't doing this on a virtuous desire to uphold human rights? I can't believe it.

I just want people to know that most of these companies are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. I went ahead and asked around people in the Treasury Department, and they were like, oh, yeah, these people don't care. I'm like, they're doing it because we're forcing them to do it. So that's clear. It's mostly an action of government policy. That doesn't erase some of the most excesses, which we'll get to later in the show. The most significant one, though, and this is almost, again, from what I hear, a result of sanctions. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that Visa and MasterCard,

which process the vast majority of transactions across the planet, are pulling out of Russian banks, which is going to force a very interesting thing. Russian banks are now having to switch to the Chinese card system, UnionPay, the second largest and fastest growing global credit card network. Now, this is a financial bifurcation that we have really never seen before. China has set up an alternative financial system in their country through Alipay, through Didi, and so many of the companies that they have there, which integrates very cleanly in their social credit system. They don't really have a lot of cash over there. A lot of it is online because that way the government can control all of it. Well, that matters, though, because that alternative payment system is totally and completely, quote unquote, sanctions proof from our reach because they built

it from the ground up from the 1990s. So now Russian banks are turning to this Chinese-led financial architecture, which is absent from any ability of us in order to sanction it. This geopolitically is a significant development because the fact that the U.S. controls kind of the rails of the global financial system is what makes our sanctions so potent against the rest of the world. You can ask Venezuela and Iran and any other country

that has U.S. sanctions about how exactly that goes and how easy it is in order to find somebody to do something as basic as process your credit card. These are things that you think are immutable, but in fact can be pulled out by America. Well, as Balaji Srinivasan points out, let's put this up there on the screen, Ukraine may not be becoming a Russian client, but Russia could be becoming a Chinese client economically. Now, this pairs back a little bit with what we were talking about previously, which is that Russia exports the vast majority of its oil to Europe and to China. So if the EU and the United States and the rest of the world does ban Russian oil, China is going to be

the last remaining buyer of a lot of Russian oil. Then you have Chinese companies like UnionPay guaranteeing the financial architecture of the entire Russian financial system, China being the second largest economy in the world and the ability to provide them not as good of a customer experience, but somewhat. They could give them Alipay to replace Apple Pay on their thing. And there's a lot that they could be able to provide them. It could actually push not Russia into the hands of China, but make them pretty economically dependent upon them, giving the Chinese a lot of diplomatic leverage over this entire situation. This could be good and it could be bad. It depends on what the Chinese want to do, Crystal. You know, I've been listening, David Cullin, he did an episode on the Realignment podcast I was listening to. It was fascinating.

And what he was saying is that the Chinese could decide that this is their moment to try and broker some bigger diplomatic solution. So if they have their influence over Russia in the way that they do right now, especially economically, just as the US declared itself independent and tried to score a diplomatic score during the Suez crisis in the 1950s, China could try and ascend to the world stage and broker some sort of talks between the West and Russia in this situation. That would be really interesting. That would be the best possible case scenario. It would rewrite the entire global order, but it would be a good thing in terms of this

immediate conflict in particular. So it just goes to show you that the soft, not even soft power, the financial power of a country matters immensely to its ability in order to, you know, have deals or project diplomacy. And China could, could, I want to be clear, could flex its muscles here after, in my opinion, miscalculating in its total alliance with Russia ahead of this invasion. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be the reporting, is that they didn't really take the threat seriously. They kind of bought into the, oh, it's just saber-rattling,

or it's just going to go as far as the Eastern separatist republics. There's a few things to say here. The other part of Balaji's tweet was, he said, we may see China buy Russia for a song in the largest Belt and Road deal of all time after the West dropped the price. And so I think that is the way to think about all of this. It's also worth pointing out, first of all, American Express joined Visa and MasterCard. So you have sort of like unified front now from the American credit card processing companies. What that means in terms of Russian citizens is that they are going to be unable or

have difficulty making foreign transactions. The Russian banks have rushed to switch to that Chinese card union pay, and it's backed by their own internal system, MIR. I don't know how you pronounce that, Mir. So for domestic transactions, they're trying to smoothly switch over the system so that people can still engage domestically and use their cards and have all of that ultimately work. It's for foreign transactions that this is a problem. And we should also point out, as you are, that this new financial architecture, both in Russia and more in China, this has been years in the making. Russia started to build up its mere domestic transaction system after sanctions were imposed back in 2014 over Crimea. So again, this is sort of that law of unintended consequences. Us levying these sanctions, it's not that it doesn't have any blowback to us because the way that we have thrown our economic might around in the world has led both of these countries to say, hey, we can't depend on these people.

We need to try to make ourselves sanctions proof. That led to also Russia building up all this foreign reserve currency. We kind of took that off the table by sanctioning their central bank, which, again, is an extraordinary and, you know, has never happened in history before with regards to a G20 central bank. But you have the Chinese having built up their own architecture as a potential alternative to having to exist in the U.S. system, including their own alternative to the swift banking communication system that is so central to the global financial system. The big fear that people worry about is what if there is a move away from U.S. dollars as the foreign reserve currency?

I think that's that would be very bad. I think we're probably not quite there. But, you know, the more that we sort of use these types of measures, the more that we create an incentive for countries to protect themselves by having this alternative architecture ready to go. And we are seeing that play out right now in real time in Russia. Yeah. And we'll end with this interesting report from the Wall Street Journal. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that China had went ahead and declared that its friendship with Russia had, quote, no limits. Given Ukraine, they're starting to have some second thoughts.

Basically, it's been a catastrophe, obviously, for Russia, given Ukraine, they're starting to have some second thoughts. Basically, it's been a catastrophe, obviously, for Russia. The global public opinion has turned against them. The Chinese see what's happening with the Russian military. And worse, they see that what the potential consequences for them are if they go ahead and invade Taiwan, which is that, you know, the world has responded in such a way and now has a playbook for which they could deploy against China if they wanted to, which would, if you think this is crippling Russia, I mean, China's economy, while yes, they're internally not as dependent in terms of the West and its exports and all that, we could destroy their economy 10 times over in the way that

Russia is as well. So they're looking at this. They're not happy with the way it's played out on the global stage. Actually, it could be a good thing, given the leverage now that they have looking at this. They're not happy with the way it's played out on the global stage. Actually, it could be a good thing given the leverage now that they have over the Russians. And we're hoping that they might be able to facilitate some sort of peaceful process. I hope they're a good actor in all of this. I mean, that's the sanctions we already have, if we also ban the Russian gas,

that would mean their economy would contract about 14% this year. I mean, that's insane. And the Chinese realize, like, on the one hand, we're gonna have a lot harder time pulling back from our engagement with the Chinese economy, but the fact that we are so interdependent means it's also extremely vital for them. I mean, they know that the reason that they have grown to be this economic juggernaut is because of their interactions with us and with

the West. They need oil way more than we do. Yeah. So that road definitely goes both ways. And also, you know, they're trying to establish themselves as sort of good players in the global system and all of that. And to be seen as siding just directly with Russia on this is, I think, making them, potentially making them uncomfortable. And we've definitely seen the rhetoric shift a little bit for them to express some wariness over this conflict. That's right. So that's as best we can tell the Chinese perspective. So what is the perspective of the American public on all of this? There's some new polling that shows basically Americans are super on board with everything except for actual boots on the ground, including measures that are terrible ideas and would probably result in boots

on the ground and World War III and potential nuclear conflict. Let's go ahead and put this tweet up on the screen that kind of just a good summation of this latest economist, I think it was economist YouGov, but definitely YouGov poll. Net support in the USA for sanctions, plus 51. Sending money, plus 43. Sending weapons, plus 38. Sending troops to NATO, plus 31. Here's where things get really scary. No fly zone support, plus 25. Also scary, Ukraine in NATO, plus 20. Then you get to the place, okay, cyber attack on Russia. There's basically like equal split in favor and against. This is also a terrible idea, guys. Sending soldiers to help but not to fight.

Okay. That has minus five, only minus five. Also a little scary. Drone attacks on Russia, minus 19. Airstrike on Russia, minus 33. And sending soldiers to actually fight, minus 35. So again, the fact that you have such bipartisan, strong support for no-fly zone, which I hope we have adequately explained to you here multiple times, you're talking about World War III,

is deeply, deeply disturbing. And why do you have such broad support among the public for something that is so dramatically escalatory and extremely dangerous for the world? Well, in part, it's because the media has done a terrible job of helping people to understand what this actually means. And not only that, they're pushing, we played you the clips of them pushing Kamala Harris and other officials like, why won't you do more? Why won't you do a no-fly zone? Here's the latest

iteration of that. Chuck Todd pushing Secretary of State Tony Blinken. Why are you ruling out a no-fly zone? Let's take a listen. The president's been very clear about one thing all along as well, which is we're not gonna put the United States in direct conflict with Russia, not have American planes flying against Russian planes or our soldiers on the ground in Ukraine. Because for everything we're doing for Ukraine, the president also has a responsibility to not get us into a direct conflict, a direct war with Russia, a nuclear power, and risk a war that expands even beyond Ukraine to Europe. That's clearly not our interest. What we're trying to do is end this war in Ukraine, not start a larger one.

So, you know, good answer there. Great answer. From Tony Blinken. And thankfully, this is one of the few times where I'm glad that the politicians are actually bucking public sentiment again because I think a lot of the political rhetoric too around he's Hitler, this is, you know, we can't have appeasement, we can't be Neville Chamberlain, all of this rhetoric, Trump saying it's a holocaust. Well, it leads people to want to take relatively extreme actions. I mean, that is the logical next step conclusion. So it's hard for you to say, as Nancy Pelosi did, that basically like this is Germany and Hitler and Nazis and then say, oh, absolutely not to a no fly zone. People rightly look at that and are like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Let's go ahead and put the New York Times up on

the screen. Right now, most U.S. lawmakers are saying no to the no-fly zone. Guess who one of the few exceptions to that is? Our friend, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who just loves to be terrible and wrong on every issue, I guess. What's he doing here, Crystal? He says, I would take nothing off the table. For us to hesitate or for anyone to hesitate in the free world is wrong. And just so you know, again, what the stakes are, what Putin said in that same news conference that we've been quoting because he said a lot of noteworthy things about a no fly zone is that it is. He says we hear calls to impose a no fly zone over Ukraine. It is impossible to done from the territory of other states, but any moves in such direction will be seen by us as participation in an armed conflict by the country that will create threats to our servicemen. So he's directly saying no-fly zone means you are part of this war.

Yeah, I think, look, here's what I would implore you. Please send anybody who supports this what we've talked about here over and over again. And I will use the words of Philip Breedlove, the former NATO commander who supports a no-fly zone, who still at least explained what it is. It doesn't just mean shooting planes out of the sky. It also means that if Russia retaliates against our jets, that we would then have to take offensive action against their air defense systems inside of Russia. And then after we do that, that the Russians would have to take offensive action against their air defense systems inside of Russia. And then after

we do that, that the Russians would have to take action against our jets, which are outside of Ukraine in NATO territory, which means that you have now created a situation where just in a span of a few days, they have a full blown hot war between the NATO alliance and Russia in which the consequences and the chances of going nuclear are at, what, 50%? I would say higher, personally, based upon what I've read about Russian military doctrine. Another thing I do want to say, which is very important for everybody at home, in terms of the idiocy, which didn't make it in the show, but we saw Lindsey Graham out there. Oh, God. Calling for the assassination of Putin, saying, oh, we need to see, you know, who is the Brutus in Russia?

First of all, read the second half of Julius Caesar there. OK, find out exactly what happens. But in terms of what that means, Russian military doctrine, military doctrine in terms of use for its nuclear weapons, specifically includes an attempt at regime change inside of Russia. This is written in very specifically as a threat to the West. Do not screw with us. If you are calling for the destruction of our regime, that is grounds for the launch of a first strike by the Russian government. So it may seem cavalier by these people. Oh, you know, we need, somebody needs to take this guy out,

talk of a no-fly zone, beating the chest. I posted about it. Some people were like, well, is he wrong? Well, yeah, actually, he is wrong because here's why. If we are seen to be engaging at this at any level in the U.S. government, it feeds paranoia in the Russian government, increases the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation. And worse, what it really does show you is that we are slow walking ourselves in a public that does not understand these consequences. We have to use real rhetoric. No-fly zone means war with Russia. It's inevitable.

It is a fait accompli. And if you message it that way, people will understand. So all of you who watch this show, listen to this show, do the Lord's work and spread the gospel. Because we have got to get people understanding the consequences of what we're talking about here. Yes, that is exactly right. It is so, so important. Because how long are these politicians going to hold the line

against their own hawkish instincts here? And Senator Graham also, it's not like he's some backbench senator. I know. I mean, this is someone who has traveled broadly, is widely known among world leaders. So for him to be saying something that is so irresponsible and so insane is in and of itself just a horrific turn of events. Even he later sort of like, you know, walked it back a

little bit and, you know, but it was it was bad. And, you know, but it was bad. And people on his own side of the aisle were saying, this is terrible. Fox News was saying, this is terrible. This is irresponsible. Don't go forward with this kind of crap. So that's where the American people are today. It is another reason why I'm sort of uncomfortable with the like rising levels of Zelensky thirst.

Because, and this is not to take anything away from him. I think he's a hero, but he's doing what's good for him. Right, and you have to understand there's a propaganda campaign around the sky too, and anytime you have this sort of political hero narrative, then it gives that person more standing

when they do what he's doing, which is calling for a no-fly zone and calling for banning Russian oil and calling for more fighter jets and these sorts of things. So you're like, well, if the hero Zelensky is saying it, then it must be the right thing to do. And it makes it harder to resist those calls once you've built a person. I already know, Crystal, the fact that you even acknowledge

that there are some limited number of neo-Nazis in Ukraine. People are going to say, oh, you're parroting Russian propaganda. We're trying to tell you the truth. We're just trying to be honest. It's a dynamic situation. And in dynamic situations, it's important that you at home understand the consequences of everything. Because if you are just getting spoon-fed,

you look just as foolish as some guy who's telling you that the Ukrainian government run by a Jew is full of Nazis. You have to acknowledge both the good and the bad so that we can make a clear decision whenever the consequences are in nuclear exchange. People think I'm fear-mongering too whenever I talk about this. I mean, look, you're welcome to believe that, but if you've read enough about Russian military doctrine and also about how the many times in our history that we've come close to pushing the red button, you would be, I think, just as afraid as I am. History teaches us that we should be 10 times more cautious and less cavalier about nukes

than we are, especially in a confrontation with these great power conflicts. So look, you know, it may sound good. Oh, there's no fly zone. Yeah, just make sure so nobody can fly. What does that mean? It means war. And as you understand that, the people who are the most in the know all do understand that. God bless the fact that Joe Biden as you understand that, the people who are the most in the know all do understand that. God bless the fact that Joe Biden seems to understand that for now. Let's keep it that way. Indeed. All right. Let's move on. We also wanted to track some of the insane censorship efforts that we're watching here. And then we'll also tell you about what they're doing overseas in Russia.

Let's start with the CNBC terror sheet. So RT America is done. It's over. They shut down operations here immediately amid the Ukraine invasion. Basically what happened is DirecTV, which is the largest U.S. satellite TV operator, they stopped carrying RT America earlier this week. And then Roku followed DirecTV's lead and also removed the network from its Roku channel store. But my understanding is that DirecTV was the big sort of distributor and revenue source for RT America.

So, you know, that is – that's done. That's over. Western governments and tech platforms have banned the Russian news network RT, which is, of course, the Russian version of RT America. The EU has accused it of systematic disinformation over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I don't doubt that that is the case. And we've also seen, even so far as, you know, Russian artists overseas being banned from, you know, losing their jobs or having their concerts canceled and things like that. So you see this sort of like xenophobic hysteria as well. Let's go ahead and put this Lee Camp tweet up on the screen.

So Lee had a show on RT America, and he also had his podcast of 12 years removed from Spotify. And according to him him with no notice, his YouTube videos are also banned across Europe and the UK. So there is this, you know, mass movement to take off any podcasts, any sort of commentary that can even be considered to be affiliated with Russia. And, you know, this is not something that we support whatsoever. This goes completely counter to the idea of free exchange of ideas. And we've talked about even in the most extreme

situations where you have direct Russian propaganda from, you know, Sputnik and Pravda or whatever, having access to the way that they're processing events, the way they're spinning to the public is incredibly important for our own understanding of what is happening and how the Russian public is perceiving it. It happened this morning. We saw a statement come out from the Kremlin and I was like, oh man, is this the correct translation? I was like, what does that mean? I said, well, I got to go check TASS, which is the Russian state media organization. So I go on TASS and I read it in English, the official state media translation. I'm like, okay, I feel comfortable sharing this on the air. So I had to use Russian state media. Whenever we talk about China, I do the same thing. I go and I read the Global Times. Now I should have access to that. No, the more

that we have bifurcated information environments, the more screwed we are. You have got to understand what is the Russian point of view. My entire monologue today is actually going to be about this in terms of some of the thinkers that the Russians are listening to, what the most extreme view of that looks like. Guess why I'm bringing it to you? Because you need to understand their mind. Maybe sanctions are exactly what they want. Maybe we've actually achieved Putin and some of the most ultra-nationalist, wildest dreams. I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it anyway, but understand the implication. Know what it means. Know the mind of your adversary, what they care about, and what they don't. Like I said, too, cavalier statements in our country could be perceived as wildly off-base, offensive, and escalatory in theirs, like the regime change

one that Lindsey Graham talked about. It's important for us to know, how did we react on the nuclear thing whenever we were trying to tell people how serious it was. We showed and read people a statement that was read directly on Russian state media about how well if the world isn't going to exist then why or if the world if Russia doesn't exist then why does the world worth it? Something I'm paraphrasing. Yeah. That was important to tell people. That's what people at home are hearing and consuming. They do the same to us. So all I would say is with some of these efforts, they're completely ridiculous. Most of the PR stuff that you're seeing is going to happen anyway because of sanctions.

But like EA Sports removing Russia from FIFA. I mean, with the conductor or whatever getting fired. The International Cat Federation banning Russian cats. Okay, like enough. I mean, come on. And I mean, it really does get into a kind of like witch hunt, neo-McCarthyist direction because, and we saw this in the buildup as well.

If you said anything that wasn't part of the sort of like sanctioned approved network, people are very happy to call you a traitor. You know, this is. You should be tried for treason. It's a type of hysteria that is incredibly anti-productive and just straight up scary because, listen, this is a complicated conflict and you have to have the ability to tell the truth about what's going on, about parsing out, okay, who's involved in the conflict. Ukraine has been accused of war crimes as well.

You know, we have to be able to be able to talk honestly about those things too. They've been sort of trotting out Russian POWs. Yeah, which you're really not supposed to do. Which you're not supposed to do. Yeah. And so, and you know if the Russians were doing it, which I think they may be as well, but if the Russians were doing it, people would be confident and comfortable calling that out. We have to be able to be fair-minded and even-handed here as best we can and sort through the propaganda, which is clearly being fueled by both sides of this conflict. We also wanted to highlight, though, I mean, there is an absolute crackdown on any kind

of independent media or journalism happening right now in Russia. Oh, it's not even, it's not close. Okay. So let's go ahead and put this Daily Mail tear sheet up on the screen. Basically every Western news outlet, TV news outlet has stopped broadcasting in Russia. They track their CNN, ABC, CBS News, Bloomberg, BBC, Canada's CBC, they're all temporarily suspending operations. I believe some of the print publications have remained. The Times and the Post, I believe, are still there. But this is all in response to actual legislation that is being passed, which says that if you are, you know, if you are found guilty of spreading, quote, fake news, then you could be subject to up to 15 years in prison.

So they are really cracking down. There have been rumors of potential martial law. Putin swears that's not going to ultimately happen. But this type of legal official punishment for having wrong think and, you know, accurately reporting on what's happening, for example, calling it a war or calling it invasion, this is really pretty wild. And here's the other thing that we should say is for a lot of the population, this will work. I mean, it will make it much harder to get any kind of other perspective on what is happening right now in Ukraine. And so it probably will help to bolster their propaganda's effectiveness. And worse, to what I just said about how we need to understand the Russians, they need to understand

us. They need to be able to read us too and see some, they need to read what's happening on polling and how people are feeling and seeing how exactly their actions could also lead to a miscalculation and an escalation. And the worst thing that we have for this country is a return to no cultural understanding of each other. That makes us more reliant on official channels in order to explain what people are and you really want that. I want Moscow correspondents out there being like, hey, we're here in the Kremlin. This is what it looks like. This is what the population is. Here's a picture of the protests so that I can at least look at that and try and suss out for myself. Otherwise, I'm relying on the freaking State Department in order to tell me what to think. That's not a good situation. One of the biggest

miscalculations that we would make in the Cold War is when we did not understand what they were thinking and they did not understand what we were thinking. In the age of the internet and of globalization, it's madness to have this level of cultural separation between our two peoples. And to see a return to that level of posture is a total disaster. Total disaster. It makes it very easy to then go from, we don't like Putin and to the entirety of Russia and the Russian people. They're setting themselves up for that, too. You already see it happening. I mean, you see it happening in real time

with people's comfort with the level of we must make them pay and there are no innocent Russians anymore. There are no neutral Russians anymore. People are boycotting a restaurant in New York called the Russian Tea House, which is apparently not even owned by the Russians. So everybody calm down.

This is, that's absurd. Everybody calm down. All right. Speaking of calming down. Speaking of absurd. And absurdity. Let's move on. Our former president.

So we brought you the news that Sean Hannity had proposed. Some plan in which we bomb the Russian convoy, but we put a fake Chinese flag on it so that they go to war. I thought he was dumb enough to come up with that with his own, but it seems that we have the original source. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So Donald Trump recently, over the weekend, speaking to a donor conference,

he told the donors, quote, we should put a Chinese flag on our F-22s, then bomb the shit out of Russia. And then we say, China didn't. We didn't do it. China did it. And then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch. Let's go ahead and put this next one up there, which is also very important, which is that Trump went ahead and said that NATO was a, quote, paper tiger and added of Ukraine, at what point do we say, can we not take the massive crime against humanity? We can't let it happen. We can't let it continue to happen. This, again, is the sheer incoherence of the Trump administration, you know, musing one of the dumbest possible ideas. You could say he's joking. Okay, maybe. But look, in geopolitics, like I just explained in our censorship block,

whenever that stuff gets printed out on the page, the words of the former president, and they're read in the Kremlin or in Moscow or in Russian state media, what do you think that they're going to say? Look at the insanity of what they're trying to do over there. And then also, the more he keeps up this, it's a holocaust over there. It's a crime against humanity. Those terms mean something. They mean that the world should act. And in almost every case that they are used, they are used to justify military action. By preparing and using this language to the GOP base and to Republicans in general, you're setting up a faction, an empowering one, which will pursue a war with Russia, something your administration rightfully wanted to not have and came in, which I supported, a det, look, I know I sound like MSNBC right now,

but the words of a president do matter, especially whenever it comes to a hot conflict and especially somebody who may himself be the chief executive three years from now dealing with whatever the fallout is here. Even if it was a joke, it's not one that should be floated in public in any serious way. So I don't know what to say. I mean, it scares the hell out of me, honestly, Crystal.

Yeah, well, and it's not just that he was the former president, that he might be the once and possibly future president. Could be the president. But he's very influential. Millions of people believe every word that the man says. And this is one of those situations where, you know, when things sort of jump off and people aren't sure where they're supposed to be, they look for these sort of signals of where is my team? Yeah, that's right. What is my team's posture and stance in all of this? And he is one of the people that for the Republican base is most influential in setting what that posture and stance is. So when you say things like it's a

Holocaust, when you say things like we can't let it happen, we can't let it continue to happen. OK, well, what does that mean? What does that ultimately justify? And we've already seen just in the span of the past couple of weeks a huge shift in the Republican base on their orientation towards this conflict. Originally, there was more of a sort of attitude of this isn't really our problem. We should be limited and very judicious ultimately in our response. Now you're seeing, we can put this next piece up on the screen, this is from the Washington Free Beacon poll, you're seeing now a large level of support for the plurality here is impose the strongest possible sanctions on Russia and seek

a diplomatic resolution. So that's the most, the only one that they, you know, that was more hawkish that they didn't go along with was sending U.S. troops to support the Ukrainian resistance. That's good. But you now have 80 percent of the Russian base saying we need to do more, that we're not taking a tough enough stance. And so that creates an opening for people to say, all right, well, that do more is a no-fly zone. That do more is a cyber attack on Russia. That do more is, you know, some of the things, frankly, the Biden administration is already doing, floating fighter jets and 17,000 javelin missiles and all of this massive flow of arms into Ukraine.

So that's why Trump's words here are really significant. And I think the GOP base has significantly changed over just the past couple of weeks to take a much more hawkish position, when in the beginning it was actually the Democratic base that was in the more hawkish stance with regards to Russia after, of course, years of Russiagate. And look, escalation seems like nothing until it's everything. I mean, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in 13 days. That's really not that long. That's, you know, it's less than two weeks. Think about that in terms of how quickly the geopolitical situation can escalate all the way up to the top and the brink of nuclear war. And all it takes is one wrong situation. And when you have a base and people who are pushing for something and people want to appear tough with big language, boom, that's that in the matter

of seconds, you've just created an incredibly dangerous situation. So Trump's rhetoric here is, you know, worse than useless. It's actually, you know, it's escalating in terms of what he's saying about Chinese planes and all this stuff. Some of the, it's always, he never ceases to amaze me whenever it comes to this type of action. And look, if he's the president again, we're going to have to grapple with that. Yeah. And then he's got his own propaganda network, apparently in Sean Hannity encode to spread whatever insanity he, you know, cooks up in his direction. I knew Sean, you know, I should have known that this would have come directly from Trump's mouth. It's funny because you're totally right.

It definitely originated with Trump. When I first saw it, I thought, oh, he didn't even come up with this idea himself, Trump. This came from Sean Hannity. No, no, no. You're right. It came from Trump. It's the other way. Yeah.

This is a Trumpian. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, what is Vladimir Putin thinking? It's a trillion dollar question in a lot of ways. And one of the biggest problems Americans make is thinking of their adversaries across the world in unidimensional terms. Like, Putin is bad. China is bad. United Kingdom, good.

As usual in these situations, it's complicated. Someone can be both bad and foolish, but to different degrees than others before him in history. I've stated before, the real reason I never thought that Putin would ever invade Ukraine was simply because he would be such an idiot to do so. He has now guaranteed a strong NATO with deployments to the east. He has invited geopolitical cancellation, effectively, of Russia, financial isolation, poverty for his citizens, a more hawkish Europe, and the distaste of the entire Western and allied Asian publics. So why would any of this happen? Legitimate security concerns around NATO, they're not a good enough answer to stomach the response that Putin has now gotten.

The only thing that really makes sense is ideology. And that's a powerful lesson for all of us. Too often people think that money is the root of all evil. And in many, many cases, it is. But when it comes to geopolitics, ideology actually becomes even more of a powerful drug. The only thing that can trump greed is an ideological commitment to something deep. And with Putin, it's really just a matter of seeing what his ultimate ideology is. Now, in the most extreme form, I found somewhat of an answer.

In Alexander Dugin, he's a Russian philosopher and a geopolitical thinker who, perhaps more than anyone in Russia, typifies what seems to be the Putin thinking in invading Ukraine. Let's go ahead and put this up there. Dugin's most influential work, it's called The Foundation of Geopolitics, it was written in the 1990s. It's recommended reading by the Russian military, and which Putin is almost certainly familiar with. It raised three distinct possibilities in 1997, that Russia should invade Georgia,

it should annex Ukraine, and should attempt to separate Britain from the rest of Europe, and that the seeds of discord should be sown in the United States. Now, resistance liberals are having a field day with the latter two as evidence of a Russian plot, but the first two are way more interesting,

as they're ones that the Kremlin actually can and did do. So the question for Dugin is why? Fundamentally, Dugin is opposed to what he calls Atlanticism. In other words, the influence of the United States and the West on the Eurasian steppe, which organizationally he calls NATO. Now, firmly putting Moscow in the latter category separates Moscow from the rest of the European continent. What I find so interesting about Dugin is how simply typical he is of a Russian thinker if you're willing to go back far enough in time. The seminal conflict of the Russian Tsardom from the time of Peter the Great onward was do we modernize or do we stay true to our roots of Russian autocracy? Seemingly, every czar from 1600 to 1900 was a battle between the influences of the West,

the need to modernize the economy, but then the embrace of a Russian bear character, an embrace of autocracy and an outright rejection of fanciful notions like freedom. This matters because it already aligns with Putin's landmark speech before the Ukrainian invasion, which I outlined for all of you here. One where Putin's landmark speech before the Ukrainian invasion, which I outlined for all of you here. One where Putin cast himself not as the heir to the Soviet empire, but to the Russian empire of long ago, where Ukraine and many of these former Soviet republics were not independent states, but subject to his total control. Dugin's prescience on today's move into Ukraine really is noteworthy. He cheered the 2008 operation in Georgia, and in 2014 he cheered again the Russian annexation of Crimea. In fact, his only beef with Putin at the time was that he was succumbing to Western influence by only taking Crimea.

He predicted that a war with Ukraine was, quote, inevitable, and noted that he and many of his thinking felt let down by the Kremlin because of what he saw as the interest of the moneyed elite and the liberals in Russia. While Dugin was effectively taken off Russian state media at that time and marginalized for his criticism of Putin, he didn't go anywhere. And in the interim seven years, it seems that Putin has found himself purging his government of as much Western influence as he can and following the Dugin playbook. All of us got a taste of that in Putin's speech recasting history and justifying an invasion, which has been cheered on by Dugin today.

Go and take a look at this. Here's how Dugin is responding to this war. Quote, This is not a war with Ukraine. This is a confrontation with globalism as a whole planetary phenomenon. Confrontation at all all levels geopolitical and ideological. Russia rejects everything in globalism, monopolarity, Atlanticism on the one hand, liberalism, anti-tradition, technocracy, a great reset in the word in the other. It is clear European leaders are part of the Atlantic liberal elite, and we want war with her. He scoffs at the idea of sanctions, saying, quote, Russia has taken a course to build its world, its civilization. Now the first step is being taken.

In the face of globalism, only a large space, a continent state, a civilizational state can be sovereign. No country will last a complete blackout for long. Russia is now creating a field of global resistance. Her victory will be the victory of all alternative forces. He's got a flair for the dramatic, for sure. But if you read that, a lot of what's transpired makes a lot of sense. I and many others see it as a catastrophe for modern Russia to be geopolitically cut off, financially cut off, culturally isolated. Dugin, and now perhaps Putin himself, they see it as the end result that they desire. It's an autarkic state backed into the corner with no choice but to choose its own path,

wholly diverged of the whole West. I can understand that point of view, but I'll end it, though, with a warning that nearly all of those who advocated the same view in Russian history found out the hard way. In the end, the story of Russian autocracy is one that ends in disaster, revolution, hunger, famine, and destruction.

In the end, for all their noble talks of the United Orthodox Peoples, the breakaway republics did everything they could to get out because life was so miserable. And for the vast majority of the Russian people, life under the Tsardom was one of relative misery, while the privileged few did better than any of their monarchic counterparts in all of Europe. If Russia chooses its path, I'm certain it may work, maybe in some time, but history has a way of catching up with such idealism and ideology. I laid this all out for you so that you understand at least in part what we're dealing with in Russia, how our response may really be giving Russia exactly what they want, and to inform what we must think and deal with such

actors. History does not give us any really good answers. It gives us some, though. And it's up to us to try because the alternative is a really terrible war. I think it's very important that we understand who we're dealing with here. Because when he talks about war... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as if living through a pandemic was not bad enough with the fear and mourning and economic loss and the social isolation, on top of all of that, we've also had to suffer through this. Well, look, I want us to act as a community. I want us to act

as a team. When you're fighting a war, you need all hands on deck. I don't want to reject those who still haven't done the right thing. I'll condemn them. I'll shame them. I'll blame them. But I don't want to exclude them. They've got to come around. We can't win this war. We're going to be talking about COVID this time next year if we don't get more people to do the right thing. So we can't write them off. We can penalize them more. We can say, we're going to pay more on your hospital bill if you weren't vaccinated. You can't get life insurance or disability insurance at affordable rates if you aren't vaccinated. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody's gonna know what they're talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people

could recognize there's a person there. So it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous. First and foremost, I am obviously unvaccinated. You follow the story of me trying to get a COVID test in Aspen, and I only had to get a COVID test to show that it was negative because I was unvaccinated. So I didn't go through those jumps and hoops pretending to be vaccinated. I am not getting this vaccine ever, never gonna get it. I don't care if I'm on my deathbed and they say it can save you, I'm not gonna get it. I'm principally now opposed to it, and I do not understand why anybody who is healthy, able-bodied, and young would ever get this vaccine if you're not at risk of COVID. I am so done with it. They are ruining our country, these vaccine Nazis.

And I'm sorry, I know I'm using the word Nazi, and everybody gets mad when I say it, but that's exactly what they are. They're vaccine Nazis, and they need to- Because you think this shows the fascism of the elites. They are the fascists. Ah, the COVID culture wars. You know, in some parts of the world, COVID actually brought populations together. In Denmark, for example,

72% of people said that COVID actually united them. In Canada, at least before the trucker protests, 66% said the same. Now, there might have been some point in our history when it would have done the same here, but that point in history is not today. In this nation, we fought over literally every aspect of the pandemic and its response, from how it even began, to how deadly it was, to how to treat it.

We fought over masking. We fought over pool parties, over school openings, over school masking, whether ivermectin was only for livestock, vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, and of course, the vaccines themselves. Signs proclaiming their faith in Dr. Fauci and in science itself sprouted in liberal lawns. As we speak, there are some number of truckers and their supporters camped out in Maryland to protest COVID policies. But a potential sign of the times, that trucker convoy has kind of seemed to lose the thread. One of the leaders told news outlets that in addition to COVID mandates, he was protesting issues as wide ranging as illegal immigration, foreign oil, trucking regulation, and critical race theory.

He also said the protest was to demand justice for Ashley Babbitt, the Stop the Steal rioter who was killed by Capitol Police on January 6th. It says something that the most committed of COVID culture warriors isn't even sure that they've got that much to fight about on the pandemic front anymore. Could it possibly be that the COVID culture wars are finally ending? These media-fueled fights have literally torn families apart, divided communities, and created world-historic amounts of cringe content. Could we be moving on from this hellish phase of discourse and mania, the real end of a terrible era? After all, almost all pandemic restrictions have actually now ended, even in the bluest of cities. LA, DC, New York, they've all lifted their mask mandates. The CDC says indoor masking is not

really necessary. Schools are broadly open. And Let's Go Brandon Mann himself had this to say during the State of the Union. We have the tools we need. It's time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people. People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices. We're doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers

will once again work in person. Our schools are open. Let's keep it that way. Our kids need to be in school. This was incredibly significant. Biden is the leader of the Democratic Party, and he used his State of the Union to officially declare an end to the COVID culture wars. Biden saying we've got to keep schools and businesses open means that this is now the officially sanctioned polite society position. Reactionary liberals can't scream that you're trying to murder children or whatever when your position is literally the same as Joe Biden's. And there's another factor as well. Last year in Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress, COVID dominated the speech and dominated the

political landscape. In last week's State of the Union, it was Putin's war in Ukraine that dominated the speech, the coverage, and the reaction. There's nothing like war, actual war, and potential nuclear annihilation to focus the mind. Squabbles over masking policy, they kind of seem like small potatoes when put up against the history-bending geopolitical turning point that we are all currently contemplating. Back over in the trucker chat, the war in Ukraine led to infighting as protesters debated whether they should somehow link their own cause in with the overseas conflict. Vice reports the Truckers for Freedom protest telegram channel, which has 96,000 subscribers, saw some vigorous discussions on how exactly to make people care about their scattershot

amorphous cause when the possibility of World War III was sucking up all the oxygen. One wrote, quote, truckers at this point can't compete with the world events and if the movement won't transform and adapt, we won't have the impact that we want. The organizer of that Telegram channel even pathetically insisted that their protest of driving around in trucks and RVs

was just as brave as the Ukrainians who were literally getting shelled and being starved by an invading army. Quote, what we see in Ukraine is not bravery, it's adrenaline and rush. Real bravery comes from a good dose of wisdom. The people fighting in wars are not brave, but pumped with adrenaline and lacking wisdom. This is bravery. Support the truckers. In the most telling sign, though, cable news seems to have moved on. As I write this, CNN's homepage of literally hundreds of stories has one post on COVID, and it's about how the numbers are getting better.

The situation, it's similar over on MSNBC's homepage, where the only COVID-related item is about Ron DeSantis' unhinged outburst about high school students wearing masks. On Fox News, COVID updates are buried all the way towards the bottom of the homepage. You have to scroll a long way to get there. And news items include updates on how 90% of the country is now officially maskless and the latest blue cities that are lifting mandates. I might add that Fox News is not featuring a single article about that trucker convoy, at least when I was taking a look at it yesterday. All of this suggests that COVID culture wars have lost their juice as cable news outrage generators.

And then there's one final factor, which is the reality of the pandemic today. Cases, hospitalizations, ICU visits, and deaths, they are all declining significantly as the Omicron wave subsides. These numbers should be improved even more by the arrival of spring in much of the U.S. At the same time, vaccination rates are actually quite good.

81% of those aged five and up have had at least one dose at this point, 95% of those 65 and up. Deaths, of course, are still unacceptably high at about 1,500 per day. But those who are dying, they're overwhelmingly unvaccinated, and that creates a much different moral landscape than when there were no vaccines. It begs the obvious question, why should we take steps to protect a population that isn't doing the basics to protect themselves? Now, big word of caution here, this entire picture could be turned

completely upside down by another variant. And with so much of the developing world still unvaccinated, that possibility is much too likely. That's why I've always said that the one COVID fight that would make the biggest difference is over pharma greed and patent protections. But with COVID declining at home, Democrats even embracing an end to restrictions, and the horror of war being the focus of our minds, it could just be that the fights over maskless Karens and

triple-masking libs might be coming to a close. And while I'm glad to see the end of this discourse, I can hardly call it a silver lining. After all, what has replaced this culture war are calls for literal war. So what do you think, Sagar? Think we're at the end of the COVID culture wars? As the Arabs say. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have Jeff Hauser. He is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, and he is here to tell us about the pharma ties with our new FDA commissioner. Let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen.

This was before he was confirmed. It says, will Biden's FDA be led by a pharma guy? Robert Califf, who's worked and lobbied for the big drug companies, looks to be the frontrunner for the job. He is now there in the job. And Jeff, just tell us why we should care here. Well, Robert Califf is unfortunately Biden's head of the Food and Drug Administration. Joe Biden right now is focused on addressing inflation,

reining in costs, and going after corporations. And yet he put in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, somebody who has eagerly revolved between big pharma and big tech and the US government. And he has brought his expertise in government to his corporate benefactors. He's made a lot of money shilling on behalf of shaky drugs, not the best drugs, and on behalf of Google's extremely dystopian move into health sciences, life sciences. So he is not somebody I think that we can trust to rein in the power of big pharma, to pursue the government's ability to lower drug costs.

And we just can't really trust the guy. Yeah. Okay, so let's go into some of those examples here that are laid out. Give us some of the worst examples in his career and why that matters in a time of, I don't know, a global health pandemic. Yeah. So he was involved with Johnson & Johnson, obviously one of the largest historical big pharma companies. And one of their products was a shaky drug called Xeralto, one of these made-up words that basically just means profits for big pharma. And he helped shepherd that drug to approval at the Food and Drug Administration after they had been a client

of his, and he had in fact worked on that drug. He is somebody who left the FDA. So he became head of the FDA in 2015 after having led a key component of the FDA. And there was serious Senate concern at the time. Joe Manchin, Ed Markey, and others who were very concerned about the opioid fight saw that Califf was somebody who was indifferent to their concerns about opioids and one of the many people in government who has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths on their hands for having allowed the opioid pandemic to occur. And they were opposed to him back then. So he left the Food and Drug Administration when Trump became president and went to Duke, where he took a ton of money into a new program he led at Duke. And he went to Google, which was

creating Verily, which is their effort to apply big data, looking into your personal life in order to presumably help life sciences. And obviously, you know, we want big data to be applied to health concerns, but we also want to protect people's privacy. And when I think protecting people's privacy, I very much do not thank Google. And so now that he is at the Food and Drug Administration, he'll not only be dealing with the ongoing COVID pandemic, but he'll also be dealing with all sorts of key issues with respect to technology, data, and health. And honestly, I just don't trust how he'll do that job. Jeff, the counterpoint that I always see offered from people who are like, oh, this is fine,

or even this is actively good is, look, you got to have people who are experts in the field, who have worked in the public sector. How are you going to have people run these agencies that have expertise and have zero conflicts of interest? So it's a sort of like appeal to the technocracy to justify these conflicts of interest. What is your response to those? Well, for one thing, the Food and Drug Administration has been run by, for the most part, by a series of insiders for the most part, by a series of insiders for the past several decades. So if we think that the current types of people being chosen are the

best to run the FDA, then you have to look at the record and say, can we do any better? And then you have to look at, do you want a complete outsider who has no understanding of the Food and Drug Administration and no understanding of the drug development process, obviously that is not the case. But there are many people who have spent their lives at universities where they have retained enough autonomy in their work that they are not people who are owned by big pharma. They may have at some point interacted with big pharma.

I agree, you're probably not gonna have somebody who's completely pristine, but there are many people, One who comes to mind is Dr. Joshua Sharfstein at Johns Hopkins, who has been a deputy at the Food and Drug Administration in the past, who is notorious within big pharma as somebody they can't deal with, as somebody who retains his independence. And I don't think Sharfstein is unique. There are people who have managed to retain independence, but are disliked by the traditional insiders who managed both the FDA selection process and the big pharma industry. Yeah. And so what are the biggest decisions that are on his plate now that he's the commissioner?

What's going to happen in terms of both COVID, we've got the pills, obviously, full approval. What are some of the most controversial stuff that we can point to? Because obviously COVID's not done and there's still a lot of big stuff to do. Sure, I mean, for the most part, vaccines are not where the money is made in big pharma.

Where the money is made are ongoing treatments for diseases that middle class and upper middle class and rich people get. And in that situation, if you look at the overall impetus of the Biden administration to try to take on COVID, to fight, I'm sorry, take on inflation and fight higher prices, the big issues are going to be, will Biden use the executive branch's authorities under Section 1498 and under March in Rights to wrest control from big pharma of some of the key technological advances, many of which were paid for by the National Institutes of Health and other aspects of the U.S. government, and make them more readily available at more realistic prices for both the American people and abroad.

I mean, with COVID, a lot of the issues surround vaccine access outside of the United States. Obviously, the more people suffer from COVID across the planet, that is not only bad for those people, which should matter morally, but it also creates a potential for more variants down the line, which obviously none of us want to see happen. So on COVID it is, will we make vaccines and treatment technology more widely available so the supply can get out there as widely as possible.

And in the United States, it's gonna be these efforts to take cancer drugs and digestive tract drugs, all sorts of important technologies where there are monopolies that are held by current big pharma companies. Can we share the benefits more widely? Can we rein in the monopolistic profits that are being earned by big pharma? And Jeff, bigger picture, what sort of rules or legislation, I mean, what could be done about this problem? Because it's just not just a problem of the actual conflicts of interest. It's a problem of perception, too. I mean, we have people who have so little faith in government. This is part

of why, you know, we struggled with vaccine uptake among some communities. So what sort of legislation do you and the Revolving Door Project believe would help to lessen corruption and the appearance of corruption in government? I think the single biggest thing that we need to see is that when you leave government, there has to be a longer cooling off period where between going leaving government and working with your former colleagues in government on behalf of a private sector employee. The one halfway decent thing about Califf is in order to get Elizabeth Warren's vote, he agreed that there'll be four years rather than two years before he deals with the FDA again, once he leaves the FDA.

Now we need more stringent enforcement. There have been promises in the past, and I don't necessarily agree with Senator Warren's vote on this, but we do need to see requirements like that written into law, not just pledges by people signed. colleagues for several years after you leave government on behalf of a private sector employer or some like, you know, think tank or business association that is effectively a private sector employer. We just need to make sure you're not in government in order to become a well-paid mercenary right after you leave government. And that's the single biggest thing we can do from a perception of ethics issue. Yeah. Well, really well done. Now people know a little bit more about the FDA Commissioner.

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He's got stuff so well for us. Stoller's got his finger on the pulse, man. He's got his finger. He knows the people. Look, it matters because your support enables us to support them with our infrastructure, editing, the channel, give more exposure, give you guys more content. That's what it's all about. That's what you're helping us build, and we really appreciate it. Gearing up for the midterms, not that far away. And remember, that's all over our minds right now. So thank you all so much for the support.

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