Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/8/22: Ukraine War News, Gas Prices Surge, Biden Polling Data , Media War Propaganda, & More!

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover Ukrainian President Zelensky's rejection of Putin's demands, gas prices surging to record highs, polling data on Biden after SOTU, Media spreading fake news, White House correspondents meltdown, Zelensky thirst in pop culture, the return of 1970s politics, and everything about energy prices with an expert in the field!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/Rory Johnston: https://commoditycontext.substack.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots to get to this morning. First and foremost, gas prices have hit a record all-time high. And actually, we just checked this morning, and it's up another 10 cents from when it already hit the record yesterday. We're going to talk to you about that, the overall economic picture. We also have an expert on energy markets specifically to break down what exactly was going on, what we can expect for the

future. There have been some indications that Biden might have gotten a little bit of a bump post-State of the Union. And also potentially with his response to Ukraine, we're going to look at all of the relevant polls and see how real that is. We also have the latest in the media's handling of the Ukraine situation, and Sagar's got a little scoop for you. Some super inside baseball, but it actually really matters in terms of who gets to ask people in power questions. You guys will enjoy it. I have some inside the room audio exclusive here to the show of some corruption inside the White House press briefing room as to how exactly the legacy press is rigging

the game. Something near and dear to my heart because I once was inside that room and I wanted to show all of you. So we're going to break all of that down. I think you'll enjoy it. Yeah, it's actually a fascinating look, sort of peek behind the curtain. But we wanted to start with the very latest on the ground in Ukraine. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've been doing these and you guys have found them very, very helpful. So let's continue. We have the map here from Simtac. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. The battle situation on the ground remains a bit static. So the Russian offensive in Kiev is continuing with some pretty intensive fighting up there near the city along the Irpin River. Over on the east, you have near Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces actually pushed the Russian forces back along one

of the major strategic highways. But bombardments on military and civilian targets are continuing across that. The siege of Mariupol continues down in the southern eastern region. That's actually the most important one from a humanitarian perspective because that's where a lot of the corridors that are trying to be set up are happening. And unfortunately, many of those corridors have not stood the test of time. And we are seeing a lot of civilians getting killed or injured or unable to flee whenever that's happening. So that's where a lot of the eyes of the world. And the same thing in the strategic city of Odessa, there continues to be heavy fighting. But there was no major change in the overall

battle picture. The most important thing came with the breaking news that we brought you at the top of our show yesterday about some Russian demands in which they said that they could find a ceasefire. And the demands that they laid out are murky because on the one hand, they sound a bit reasonable. Here's what they are. Number one, Ukraine must recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea. Number two, they must recognize the independence of those Eastern separatist regions, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. But number three is where things got murky. So they said that they wanted a constitutional amendment by Ukraine to guarantee neutrality and no entrance into any bloc. That would include the European Union and into NATO. Now, if it was just those three,

I could see a reasonable deal to be struck there. But there were also reports that inside the room that there was a suggestion made that the Ukrainians would continue to have to abide by, quote, demilitarization, which is not going to happen after you've just invaded their entire country. And two was about the political leadership of the country itself. The suggestion that Zelensky might be able to stay

as some sort of puppet prime minister or president, but then that Russia could install the man who actually runs the country. Obviously, that's just a frank, total non-starter. And the Ukrainian president Zelensky was asked about this on ABC News yesterday. Let's take a listen to his full response. When the Kremlin says these three conditions to end the war, that you must give up on joining NATO, recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and recognize the independence of those two separatist regions in the east, to Vladimir Putin, who will get this message from you,

you say it's a non-starter, not willing to those three conditions right now? The question is more difficult than simply acknowledging them. This is another ultimatum, and we are not prepared for ultimatums. But we have the possible solution, resolution for these three items, key items. What needs to be done is for President putin to start talking start the dialogue instead of living in the informational bubble without oxygen i think that's where he is he is in this bubble he's getting this information and you don't know how realistic that information is that he's getting so that was the response from president zelinski saying that putin is delusional i think

he could be referring to some of those more secretive parts of what's being talked about in those rooms. There's also been some crazy developments there. But overall, there's a statement from Dmitry Peskov that came yesterday. Let's put that up there on the screen. He said that Russia will stop, quote, in a moment if they meet those terms. But as we said, what those terms are and what they mean is very, very nebulous. It may sound reasonable and they might say, but then in terms of what the full demand and what it would look like in practice means that a stop in the fighting, Crystal, is not going to come anytime soon. And obviously, just every single day that this continues, A, tension between our two countries, the United States and Russia continues, but people are dying. I mean, that

really is, of course, the chief people we should be concerned about. And the civilian situation on the ground in Ukraine is just continuing to worsen, not only because of Russian shelling in certain parts of the country, but because you also have, the number I saw was a thousand villages and cities that now are without any sort of power, electric, water, you're talking food shortages. So even on those sorts of metrics, especially in the city of power, electric, water. You're talking food shortages. So even on those sorts of metrics, especially in the city of Mariupol, you have people who are really struggling and suffering right now. And that is one of the ways that Russia is putting pressure on Ukraine to try to force their capitulation.

You know, on this, the deal, quote unquote, that was offered here by Russia, murky as it is, I think you're right from our perspective that if it really was, okay, you can have Crimea. Okay, you can have the Eastern Separatist Republics. And okay, fine, we'll put a constitutional amendment in to agree not to join any bloc. From my perspective, that's the best deal you could get. Because, listen, I understand— If you kept autonomy, though, over the rest of it, right? Exactly.

But I also understand from the Ukrainian perspective how they don't see that to be a reasonable deal at all. I mean, I don't think we would, if we're talking about the U.S., feel too great about just agreeing like, okay, you can have Florida and you can have a couple other states as well. California, sorry, see ya. So I'm not sure even if it was just, quote unquote, those pieces that the Ukrainians would agree even to that. But then you layer on top of that demilitarization. Forget about it. I mean, you were just invaded.

There's no way that you're going to agree to lay down all of your weapons and completely disarm. The Russians, the way they spin this is they say, we really are right now finishing the demilitarization of Ukraine. We will finish it. So they're saying, listen, we've got that part taken care of. We've almost demilitarized the whole thing. That belies what the reporting on the ground is, which is that Ukrainian resistance has been greatly bolstered, of course, by us and other NATO allies. They also have been much logistically and tactically smarter and sounder than the Russians. I was actually just reading this morning that the things that, you know, you never know you're going to learn until it comes to a crisis like this. The Russian military is very dependent on rail.

And especially because I guess the situation with roads in Russia is not always the best. So when it comes to rail and when it comes to their own country, they're very, very strong. But once you get outside of a large network of rail yards, that's when you start to have problems. And then, of course, as we've been tracking, since this didn't go as quickly as they thought, they really weren't provisioned for the long term. And so that's why you've seen trouble with fuel, trouble with food, trouble with morale. I was also reading most Western countries have a sort of system where from the ground you're sending back reports of, okay, we need these supplies, we need these provisions. Russia tends to operate more on a sort of push system where there's like a regular basis that they're trying to resupply troops and ration troops.

And that because this has gone on longer than they ultimately expected, they didn't achieve their objectives in the timeframe that they thought, that has also been a problem in terms of reprovisioning. And, you know, so all that being said, the fact of the matter is, even though the Ukrainians have put up a fierce resistance that was more than most analysts expected, the bulk of the military might still lies on the Russian side. Most analysts still think it's a matter of time before they take Kiev, before they, you know, take Odessa and actually achieve the objectives in terms of the cities that they want to claim here. So that's why when we're

looking from the outside and we're like, yeah, giving up Crimea and the Eastern separatist republics, that might not be great, but that's probably the best that you could possibly get if you put aside the other pieces, the giving up, having the puppet government, the demilitarization. So listen, that's why this is at a standstill and we're likely to face a long sort of grinding civil war insurgency kind of dynamic. Yeah, I think that's the key point. I want to say this to the Ukrainians. Look, I would fight like hell if I were you. I get it.

I mean, I'm just an outside observer. We're interested in peace and we have our own grand strategic achievements. So, you know, you do you and ultimately it's your country. That's the problem, which I think is that they are going to find it just so incredibly difficult to not succumb to any deal without being guaranteed their actual sovereignty. And at this point, I mean you've been invaded. Like you don't have any reason. And this is why I just don't see any situation. There's no face save whenever it comes

to Putin. And same when it comes to Zelensky. He's a proud man and the people around him, too. As long as he's alive and he's the president of Ukraine, as long as Putin is alive and he's the president, this thing is going to go on for years and we're going to see some sort of guerrilla insurgency. You know, war is about attrition. But, you know, the Russians are finding out some of the things that people have found out the hard way when they invaded them. That term you're talking about, for the reason why they're so reliant on mechanized rail,

is because of something called Rasputitsa, which is the term of the muddy season. Now, this matters. I just read Andrew Roberts' history of the Second World War, and this was something that bit the Germans in the ass during this Battle of Stalingrad. And they were like, hey, none of our mechanized tanks work. We're literally stuck in the mud.

Oh, and that's how two million people froze in a field in Stalingrad. So it's something that they're now repeating the mistake of people who have invaded them from the east. Interesting. And Napoleon as well, apparently it happened to him. And the term is so famous that it's a military terminology and has its own page and everything. I think it matters though, because the hubris that the Russian military displayed in this episode is they have forgotten the lessons of their own experience in Afghanistan. They have forgotten the lessons of their own

experience in Chechnya. And they have forgotten the experience of the United States in Vietnam, of the United States in Afghanistan, and the United States in Iraq. We keep going back to Iraq. Look, it's only been, what, 14 days, something like that, since the invasion. It took three weeks for the U.S. to cruise to Baghdad, and we bombed the hell out of that country with shock and awe. And then it took 10, what, 12 months before the insurgency really began really to form. And within two years, you had a full-blown civil war. By my last count, they had 200,000 troops in the country. At the highest, we had 150,000 in Iraq.

And Iraq was roughly similar there to the size of Ukraine. So good luck. I mean, you broke it. You bought it. You're going to be dealing with this for many years to come. What happened in Syria is much more likely to happen here in Ukraine. Big population, lots of weapons flowing in from all, you know, different various foreign interests, a collapse into- Foreign fighters flowing in too.

Foreign fighters. It's happening too, you know. Like you said, there are many Eastern Europeans who are going. Apparently there's some Americans going over there. You've got Chechens on both sides. Right. Chechens are flooding in, kind of the shock troops of a lot of the Russian military. So, look, this is turning into a massive mess, the accidental guerrilla syndrome, which is that, you know, you create a bunch of guerrillas by invading the country and then pushing them to the most extreme elements. Yeah. All seems incredibly likely with all of this. The more brutal you are towards civilians, the more guerrillas you're going to ultimately create. I mean, this was another lesson that the Soviets should have

learned in Afghanistan because those were the dynamics there. And I think there's one other factor that is going to, you know, one more obstacle in the way of any kind of a negotiated settlement here, which is that the Ukrainian people really believe that they can outright win. I saw a poll. I mean, any polling during this time is highly unreliable. But I did see a poll that said 80 percent of Ukrainians think they can outright win. And so if you think like, oh, we're winning this thing and we're going to be able to repel the invaders, then you're not in a mood to compromise on anything. So I think that is another thing that, you know, I understand, like, obviously, they've been heartened by the response, by their ability to keep Russia out of Kiev, keep Russia out of Odessa, repel them in

key places. But the fact that they are convinced that they can over the long term completely prevail here in the next few weeks, that's going to prevent any sort of significant concessions. And let's be clear, there would have to be really significant concessions in order to have any kind of a negotiated settlement. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I know this may sound trite, but I always think about the scene from Gladiator whenever they're like, people should know when they're conquered. And he's like, would you? He's like, would I? Yeah. And look,

of course not. It's a good point. Yeah. And look, the civilians are the ones who are paying the price. Let's put this up there on the screen. As of yesterday, well, this was about the third round of talks. Let's go and put the next one up there in terms of the refugees from the UN Human Rights Council. They said 1.7 million people have fled from Ukraine. Actually, that number just got updated right now. And in 12 days, only 12 days as this conflict has happened, we've had 2 million people flee the country, a country of 44 million. So you could see there, I think it's like five something percent or whatever. I mean, that's just going to continue to increase over the next couple of years. And that's the same thing. You thing. Syria, 2.0, a lot of people fled in the beginning. The worst things got more and more people to fled, caused massive geopolitical

instability all across the Middle East and in Europe. Now, same thing. Whenever it comes to Europe, this is going to be a long and a grinding war. 12 days is just not that long amount of time. I mean, almost every conflict lasts for a minimum of like one year. Very short wars, extraordinarily rare. The shortest ones can be several months, and that's when you have an outright strategic objective being taken, which does not look likely for the Russians. So it's a bad situation. On those refugees, yesterday when the numbers were 1.7 million refugees, I looked up where they were predominantly going to, and it's overwhelmingly to Poland. So when it was 1.7 million refugees, one million plus of those were in Poland alone. The next largest single country was Hungary at 180,000, then Slovakia at 128,000, and down the list of ways was Russia at 53,000. You know, that was another thing from the talks yesterday because they did,

the two sides did meet and, you know, attempt to negotiate and have some sort of a diplomatic interaction. And they said there was very limited progress, but they did potentially make some progress on these humanitarian corridors so more civilians could escape. And what the Ukrainians are saying is that the Russians, the escape routes, the corridors they wanted to open up were for people to go to Russia. Yeah, right. The Ukrainians are like, I don't think that much of our population is really true. Some of them.

Some of them do want to go to Russia. Some of them. We should be clear on that. I mean, you can see by this number what the proportion is. You've got a million refugees in Poland. You've got 53,000 in Russia, according to those numbers. But yeah, so that was kind of a non-starter in terms of the actual roots. But they say there was some minor progress made. So we'll hope that civilians are able to evacuate if they want to. There you go. All right. Well, let's get to gas. All right. This is big news.

We've got some breaking news, though, Crystal. I just want to inform you. It just came across the wire that the U.S. will be banning imports of Russian oil. Wow. Yeah, just literally broke just the second. Really relevant. Is that from Biden? This is from the, this is being leaked out to the White House press corps from Bloomberg, Jennifer Jacobs, scoop U.S. to ban Russian imports, White House announcement as soon as today. Wow. That's going to have a massive impact on what we're about to talk about. Yes. So yesterday, gas prices hit an all-time high at $4.06 for national average. Let's go ahead and put the numbers up on the screen. This morning, it has already spiked again. What are we up to now, Sagar?

$4.17? Yeah, it looks like a $4.17 in terms of the gas price here. This morning. So we've never seen this before. And obviously, looking at this map, so the red states are the places where it's highest, West Coast, Alaska, California, and Hawaii. Also the Northeast has high prices and Illinois apparently. And then you have this swath down the middle where the prices are lower. But when you're talking about lower, you're still talking about $3.75 in places like Texas and Oklahoma. So

this is a, I mean, this is just brutal. There's no way to spin it. It's absolutely devastating to working class people. Not only, obviously, are they the ones who have limited means, whose pocketbooks and wages have already been depleted by inflation. By the way, we're supposed to get new inflation numbers out this week. But they're also the people who tend to have to live a ways away from where they work. So they're also most dependent on their cars because you can't afford oftentimes to live in the city where your job actually is. And our public transit is total shit. So people are reliant. I mean, that's the reality. So people are having to drive miles and miles and miles from wherever their home is because they're priced out of the neighborhood where the jobs actually are.

And so this hits the working class extremely, extremely hard. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen because it gives you a little bit of the overall economic picture, Wall Street is starting to really downgrade their forecast of where the S&P 500 and the stock market is going to end up at the end of this year as oil prices surge. And so to give you the sort of big picture, you had huge stock market declines yesterday. Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 800 points. You had the S&P 500 declined close to 3% in one day, falling deeper into correction territory. You had the NASDAQ losing 3.6%. The NASDAQ now sits in bear market territory, more than 20% from its all-time close. You have Brent crude, which of course is like the thing that everybody always looks at, spiking to $139.13 per barrel.

That's its highest amount since July 2008. That's before, you know, the Russian oil ban. And you also have, on top of all of this, you have a Fed that is still, because inflation is very high, expecting to lift rates. And that is coming very soon. So you've got, you know, good jobs numbers last week, but wages decimated by inflation, further decimated specifically by gas prices. You have a stock market that is collapsing due to oil prices increasing and geopolitical instability, and also the Fed still planning to raise rates because of that inflation. And it is a very, very dire picture on the Russian oil ban front.

Yesterday, there were some there's a broad bipartisan consensus around this, not only among politicians, but also among Americans who really want to stand with the Ukrainians, really want to feel like we're doing something. And so basically anything short of actually troops on the ground, Americans are overwhelmingly in a bipartisan fashion in favor of. And that goes for banning Russian oil. Now, will that support continue when it hits their pocketbook? And I don't think there's been a lot of consideration. And gas prices continue to go up? And I do want to say, I mean, even when you ask people, okay, if this means that gas prices go up, are you still in favor of it? They still are.

But the abstract theoretical possibility is very different than, oh, I can't make rent and I can't fill up my gas tank and I can't put food on the table. So the fact that we are going forward with this Russian oil ban is a massive, massively huge consequential deal. You had Democrats in the House yesterday kind of putting pressure on the Biden administration that has been more resistant to doing the oil ban because they're concerned about some of these follow on consequences, which is why they're reaching out to Venezuela, why they're reaching out to, you know, they're continuing to negotiate on the Iran deal. And they're reaching out to reportedly Saudi, which of course is way worse humanitarian abuser than Russia is at the moment. But they know that gas prices are going to be a massive problem for them politically and possible driver of domestic instability.

But Democrats in the House kind of forced their hand on this. And now we see that they are, in fact, caving in Russian oil. This is breaking, obviously. And so how monumental this is, is really hard to overstate. I mean, in terms of the amount of crude that we actually get from the Russians, it's not necessarily that high. Estimates range from 3% to 10%. I was reading, though, yesterday that the island of Hawaii is going to get decimated by this. About 25% at worst of times of their gas actually does come from Russia. And they have high prices anyway. I think the average price there, you can check on the map, it's like $4.70 already a gallon. Now, you mentioned the Europeans. $4.72.

Yep. There you go. Wow. Look at me. Let's go ahead and put this next one up there on the screen in terms of the German chancellor. So this is also very important around how the EU is going to handle this. Because as I mentioned there yesterday, the European Union and China actually import the vast majority of Russia's crude oil. So that's where it would have the biggest impact in terms of a ban. Germany, highly reliant on Russian energy, especially gas, natural gas, and as well as oil, is pushing back on the idea of an import ban. However, I would remind you that Germany was one of the initial people to push back on kicking Russia off of SWIFT. But as the Western allies increasingly pressured them

and more, it came to a deal where the Germans actually acquiesced and not only killed Nord Stream 2, but kicked Russia out of that swift, including the central bank sanctions and more. This is another way, too, where the bipartisan hawkishness in Washington in Congress basically forced President Biden's hand. There was reporting we were both reading last night that the president was, well, he was on the edge on whether the Russian oil ban actually made any sense, but Congress was about to pass its own law, which would force his hand and probably would have a veto-proof majority. Now, this may be unpopular for me to say, but I think we should all step back and consider the consequences of this. Number one, is everyone really prepared to pay $5 a gallon for gas? I just checked. The average tank size in the United States is somewhere between 12 and 15 gallons. So right now, it is costing, on average, to fully fill your tank between $50 to $60. That's a lot of money, considering how much you often, you're driving, depending on that, obviously.

Then let's kick it up to $5. So you're really telling me that you're willing to pay 60 to 65 gallons on average in this country. This excludes California where there are already many places where their gas price is already up to $6. We're talking about a massive tax. I mentioned yesterday, California, 12% of the US.S. population lives there. They have an average gas price right now of $5.40 a gallon. I mean, if you see $6.50, $7 out there, and a national price average of $5.50, that's crazy town. And look, go ahead and throw this next one up there. Look at what's happening over in Europe.

They're currently trading at 500 a barrel in terms of the equivalent. This is natural gas, but this matters because it comes down to heating. Now, luckily, you know, it's getting a little bit warmer here and the heating prices aren't going to be the same, but these things have a longstanding impact in the way that we not only heat our houses, but produce energy for natural gas-fired power plants. A huge amount of energy for the United States comes from that in terms of the data that I've looked at. There are longstanding, massive economic consequences. And you laid out the picture perfectly, which is it's not just gas, and my whole monologue is on this. We have record

high food prices. The developing world is going to see double-digit food inflation. This is the stuff of riots and destabilization. Red prices directly related to the likelihood of riots and domestic instability. There you go. We all know this. I mean, we are truly entering a period not just of the 1970s, which I'm drawing analogy to, of the 1910s, of like the crazy recessions of the silver times in 1920. I cannot overstate this.

The other thing from a grand strategic point of view, let's think about it this way. If Russia invades a NATO ally now, what do we have left short of war? I mean, look, we were going to go to war anyway whenever it came to NATO, but let's say whenever it came to some other country, which is around then.

Moldova's not NATO, right? I think it might actually be. Or maybe I'm thinking Montenegro. I forget. Anyway, one of those countries, non-NATO country, what do we have left in our arsenal? We have nothing. I mean, oil ban is about as big as it gets. We've sanctioned their central bank.

We've effectively canceled them through our sanctions, through the entire global financial system. Oil was the last tool in our arsenal. So we have now thrown the full playbook at Russia and we are all going to suffer deep consequences. I saw somebody jokingly say online yesterday, Joe Biden is making the great mistake that many presidents have made, letting foreign affairs affect the comfort of Americans. And unfortunately, I do think that that is true, which is that, look, even my own friends, the people who are not political, everybody's got a story of watching the gas price in the neighborhood go up 20 cents a day. And this is getting deeply hurt on the pocketbook level and also discretionary spending.

You know, a lot of small businesses just went through the ringer, and they are depending on discretionary spending being high. But if food, rent, and gas are going to suck up, what, 65, 70 percent of your paycheck, what are you going to do? You're going to sit at home and do nothing, you know? Yes, absolutely. And I also have to layer on top of this. Biden is like, everybody needs to go back to work in the office. It's like, we can't afford to get there. I mean, that's more of a white collar problem, but still, I mean, it's bad. Exactly. So, yeah.

And I mean, there's also I want to talk a little little bit more about Germany because I think this is really important because they're not just saying like, ah, we're not team players here and we don't want to go along with what you guys are all doing. Germany's chancellor said, Europe has deliberately exempted energy supplies from Russia from sanctions. Supplying Europe with energy for heat generation, mobility, electricity supply, and industry cannot be secured in any other way at the moment. He's saying we literally can't do it. It is therefore of essential importance for the provision of public services and the daily lives of our citizens. So they're saying, guys, we cannot do this. Like maybe we made mistakes in the past of being too dependent on Russia, but we are where we are and we have no way to make up this supply. I saw an estimate that they would have to reduce their consumption.

Europe would have to cut demand by as much as 15% to make it through the next winter in the event of a full cutoff of Russian supply. Okay, that's a huge chunk, 15%. And listen, we may just be coming out of winter right now and feel like winter's a long way off, but it will be here before you know it. Their natural gas prices in Europe today, right now, are 14 times what ours are here. If any of you use natural gas in your homes, you already know how expensive it is. So 14 times the price. This is hugely consequential. And so it's going to hurt European people, working class people. It's going to hurt American working class people. It's going to devastate Russia, including their ordinary citizens who are already being hit hard by these sanctions. And it's not clear at all

that is a smart tactical play. In fact, part of what we've been talking about is the way that these aggressive moves, which remember, Russia considers to be acts of war. At least rhetorically and has said that. Have said that. And I think at this point we should all listen very closely to what they are saying. True. That these things can further escalate the situation because your opponent always gets a say in what the next move is and in how they respond to our actions here. So I know that we are not in the majority sentiment of the country, but I think this is a foolish move. I think it is a disaster for us. I think it's a disaster for the world. I think it's a disaster for Russia. And I think it only makes it more likely that this situation is going to escalate beyond Ukraine. Yeah, I think it's very possible that, A, in terms of the escalation, but in terms of domestic impact, I don't think we can underestimate what it means to have a country with $5.50 average gas price. That's just crazy. I mean, and let's say it hits six. I just checked last year, the number

was 8%. I said at any time, it's between three and 10%. Do we have any guarantees about who's going to replace all that gas? I mean, as we pointed out, we don't necessarily have the refining capacity and we can drill right now. It takes any between six and 18 months in order to get that stuff up. So what's going to happen in the meantime? I mean, are the Venezuelans going to pump? I wouldn't. If I were them, they're going to demand sanctions relief, which, you know, look at our Congress. You think they're going to allow that to happen? Same whenever it comes to the Saudis. I mean, the Saudis are giggling in Riyadh because they love the fact that, you know, we punished them over the Khashoggi killing and diplomatically isolated them. And they've been holding back for a long time intentionally in order to screw us. They

want nothing more than to see Biden suffer domestically. So there's no guarantee we're going to be able to replace that. That's, you know, eight, somewhere around 8% on average of our national crude oil, especially when we're already in a crisis like this one. I would just say, even if you do support this and defunding the Russian war machine, number one, I do think that we should have held it back for something that could have come in the future, something of the most maximalist action. And then number two, I just do not think anybody is considering the major domestic ramifications of this. It seemed like a good idea in 2002 to pass the Patriot Act and do

all kinds of stuff when there was a real mania in the air, and look how it all turned out for everybody. I know it's not exactly one-to-one, but it just goes to show you that in these times of fast-moving and emotional consideration, there needs to be people who pump the brakes. Our system of government is supposed to be for that, and this is one of the reasons I'm so annoyed with Congress, which is foreign affairs is supposed to be up to the president. And Congress is forcing President Biden's hand on this. And you also, and this is what I'm looking at in my monologue, you have a media that primes the pump for people to push for more, to push for the most escalatory behavior, the most hawkish behavior.

There's never anyone, you won't hear anyone on cable news saying, here's how this is going to play out, and here's why this is a bad idea, and here's why we should be more reticent of going to all-out economic warfare, which is what these moves really constitute. So this is a huge deal, guys, and it's going to completely reshape our politics and global politics. There's no other way to say it. That's it. I think that's a good way to segue, actually, into the very latest indications of how people are feeling about President Biden. We've got some conflicting signals here, to say the least. Let's put the good news for the president up here first. NPR Marist poll had a significant bump for him following the State of the Union. If you can see

there down in the corner of the screen, the charts, you see with every group basically like a spike in their approval rating. You know, it's still at 47 percent. That's up eight points from the NPR poll last month. So still not over 50 percent, but in modern times, 47 percent is pretty decent. That would put him back to where he was before the Afghan withdrawal when he really started to sort of take on water. Since 1978, there have only been six times when a president saw an approval rating improve four points or more following State of the Union addresses. Three of those bounces were apparently for Bill Clinton, who's a famous, famous orator. Somewhat less renowned. Joe Biden is somewhat less renowned for his oratory skills.

Ukraine handling. And, you know, when you dig down into the numbers, all of his numbers in this particular poll have jumped up. So his handling of the situation in Ukraine was up 18 points to 52 percent. His handling of coronavirus had jumped up to 55 percent. That's up eight points. His handling of the economy had jumped up eight points to 45 percent. And, you know, Americans kind of split overall when you ask them whether his approach on Ukraine has been about right or too cautious. Only 6% say what we're saying, which is too aggressive. But overall, this paints a very good picture of how people responded to the speech and are responding to his moves with regard to Ukraine. Let's take a look at the average from 538 because we all know that looking at one single poll is a very foolish thing to do.

Even looking at the average of polls sometimes is a very foolish thing to do. But some of the indications we have. You can see he's got a little bump here. He was down at like 40% approve. And with some of the new polling post State of the Union, he's up to about 42% approve. So he's still significantly underwater. It does show a little bit of a bump. But I do have to say, again, to the cautionary note of looking at any one particular poll,

there was a new Quinnipiac poll yesterday that had him at only 38% approved and 51% disapproved, which was almost completely unchanged from their last poll. So there you go. And I think the other thing to consider here is the way that massively spiking gas prices, food prices, inflation, stock market crash, all of those things are going to affect public sentiment. And, you know, some of these things are Joe Biden's fault. Some of these things are not Joe Biden's fault. But it doesn't really matter because he's in charge and he's going to get the blame for people feeling like and the reality that they cannot make ends meet and they are struggling and falling behind rather than getting ahead. Yeah. I mean, everybody here knows I love a good historical parallel. So I was thinking about it, which is that the 1991 presidential election, you know, days before, in 1991, President Bush, at the height of the first war with Iraq, the war against Saddam Hussein over the invasion of Kuwaiti oil fields, has a, at his height, let's see, 82% approval rating and goes on to lose a historic failure and be only a one president.

Only about 600 days later, have a 32% approval rating. So why does that happen, everybody? Well, people were very impressed by the stand-up of President Bush, of the successful operation of, I'm blanking, the Gulf War. I forget exactly what it was called. Desert Storm. Desert Storm, there we go. Everybody was caught up in Schwarzkopf and the Desert Storm and all that.

And then a recession hit. There was a variety of reasons as to actually why. But the economic recession, H.W. Bush thought that he could float on his prestige of his foreign policy chops. I mean, look, under his presidency, the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War literally ended. It was the triumph of Reagan foreign policy. The Gulf War, it was the unipolar moment. America was strong on the world stage. And then, boom, overnight, he loses 60% of his approval rating. So how did that happen?

It happened because the 91 and the 1990 recession was hurting people economically, and there was a feeling that the president was out of touch with those daily realities. There's the famous scene, right, where he didn't seem to know what the grocery scanner was. I mean, these pocketbook issues are longstanding. It's the economy, stupid. Was he, wasn't it the, didn't know the milk, price of milk? I think it was the price of milk. Yeah.

You're right, he didn't know, which to me, I don't even know. I think it was Trump who didn't know the grocery scanner. Yeah, yeah. I'm not trying to trump him. You might be right. I don't drink milk, so I can't tell you what the price of milk is. All of that is to say

that there are presidents in the past who, you know, having ridden the tide of public opinion, had very, very high ones. And then whenever it came down to election time, when the economic consequences really started to hit people and there was a feeling, as this president has had repeatedly now throughout his term, that the president did not care about the actual things that were hurting people at home, that Bill Clinton was able to come in and destroy him. I think he won over 300 electoral votes, which is crazy, you know, for an incumbent president to go down in that regard. So on the 2022 side, I think it's still probably obviously going to go against him in the same way just because of how high the gas and the food price are going to be and because the Dems didn't do anything in their first year in order to do any of that and really any of anything. And then you combine that with, look, the number one thing before Ukraine started, what was the feeling?

The president does not care about the things that I care about. Yeah. The president does not care about the things that I care about. Yeah. The president does not care about the things that I care about. Over and over again. Focus group after focus group after focus group. Now consider double digit food inflation, gas inflation on top of the Fed raising rates. And then you're about to lose the rich people because the stock market is not crashing. So everything is turning against you if you're Joe Biden.

And I see a very, you know, 1990 type curve in his future. Let's also say that a great president can step into a crisis and can enlist the American people in a national project and a shared vision where they're able to then withstand the suffering of the present moment because they see the trajectory out of it. I mean, this was the case with FDR, right? Even things were still really difficult and really bad. But people saw the project and they were invested in this national mission. And so they were hopeful and they were bought into it. This president, you know, he had an opportunity with the State of the Union. And there are some indications that that speech was well received. But I don't know why you're

not going all in on a national project of we are going to get off fossil fuel. Here's where we're creating the jobs. Here's where we're building the nuclear power plants. Here's the plan. Here's how it's going to benefit you in the short term. Here's how it's going to benefit you in the short term. Here's how it's going to benefit you in the long term. And I dare you, any of you Republicans or Joe Manchin or any of you people to go against me and tell us that we should remain dependent on the oil of Russia and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, you know, dare them and inspire people into that vision and that mission. That's all on the table. So, yes, you know, dare them and inspire people into that vision and that mission. That's all on the table.

So, yes, you know, I always say not everything is the president's fault. Obviously, he's not a magician. And, you know, some of these things are just bad bounces of the ball that really had nothing to do with him. But how you respond in the moment, that's 100% on you. And I just see no ability to marshal the American people even at a time when you do have a lot of bipartisan sentiment around where we stand vis-a-vis Ukraine. I don't see any, any of that ability to marshal the American people around some sort of cohesive, pride-giving national project whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, we talked about so much of this during our State of the Union livestream,

and that was the theme, which is where is the theme? Where is the message? Where is the thread that ties it all together? I mean, okay, look, let's put it all on the table right now. Let's build a ton of nuclear power plants, technology, neutral tax credits on all this stuff. You know, one part of the buy, build back better agenda was those EV tax credits, those electric vehicle tax credits. Now's a great time in order to pass that. I mean, make it. And frankly, I think it should be also company neutral. I should make it so it's like a $10,000 flat subsidy to anybody.

Yeah, I'm not a U1 must fan, but it should be. No, I do. I do believe it should be. You know, all it is to say is strip out those types of parts and just make it so that people can buy an EV at least cheaper than it currently is.

Also, I don't know if anybody has seen the spot price of nickel is up higher than it has been in a long time. From an international security perspective, we need to go and secure some nickel deposits and other things elsewhere because we need those to build EV batteries. Same thing whenever it comes to gas, and then obviously whenever it comes to nuclear

energy. This could be a uniting moment for the country, which is, look, everybody, and this is going to piss a lot of people off left and right. We're like, we cannot continue to depend on fossil fuels forever. In the meantime, we are going to ramp up production of people off left and right. We're like, we cannot continue to depend on fossil fuels forever. In the meantime, we are going to ramp up production of as much as we possibly can to lower the price at the pump for every single American. You can know that that is on me. In the long run, in two to five years, I will make it so this will never happen to us again. We will have sustainable, clean nuclear energy all across this country, technology-neutral tax credits, throw money to the universities, not in the way that we currently are, but in a way that actually

works, and then pass an EV tax credit for the entire country, ramping up production by Ford, GM, Tesla, and otherwise. And hey, look, we have the Defense Production Act and many other places. If Tesla and Ford and all these other people have problems with the EV supply chain, let's get to work. Let's all get to work. There are different ways that we can lower the cost of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, the installation costs, that you can have it so that these tax credits have,

which we already have for solar power in people's houses. I mean, you know, look, I'm just a guy on YouTube, but this isn't that hard. I mean, I agree with everything except the drill baby drill part. I think it's a fake solution. I think politically would it be popular? Yeah, I think it would probably be popular.

But it's a fake solution. It doesn't actually lower prices in the short term. It continues our dependence on fossil fuel. It kicks off into the future. The ability to actually get off of fossil fuel independence, but we'll continue to have that. That's fine. Continue to talk. All right. Let's talk about the media.

All right. This is a fun one. Let's go ahead and put this on the screen. When MSNBC airs the myth once again of the, quote, ghost of Kiev from a Ukrainian member of parliament. Let's take a listen. This deal with the provision of fighter's one of those things where we are seeing the proliferation of myths on social media like this so-called ghost of Kiev, who by all accounts does not exist, or the Snake Island story, which frankly I fell for. I posted about it on my Instagram and I had to look like an idiot and deleted it because it turned out that many of these Ukrainian soldiers did ultimately surrender and they were all alive. And this was ultimately confirmed by the Kiev Independent. And this is a difficult one because it's one of those where you don't want to appear like a contrarian being like, look at all this fake news that people

are falling for. But at the same time, fake news in any form is pernicious, especially if it is working and you being used in order to further a hawkishness in the public. So let's put this on the screen, which you found a very tortured explanation from the New York Times, where they're basically like the fact of the myth-making blend of Ukraine's information war, like the ghost of Kiev and the Snake Island, they are of questionable veracity, but they are propaganda or moral boosters, and perhaps both. And so basically they were saying, look, fake information, yeah, it exists, but if it's Ukrainian, it's okay, and if it's Russian, it's bad. And I just don't think that that is a mature way for us to be able to handle this. And that's why I thought it was

important that we cover it in this way, which is, it's emotive. Look, like I literally just told you, I fell for the Snake Island story. People want to believe the ghost of Kyiv story. But then you look at the videos and, you know, these videos either were old or, you know, many of the claims and things they're making is that they're trying to perpetuate an image that they are fighting at a level which does not actually exist. And I just think we all need to be realistic about this. While you can still acknowledge the unbelievable bravery of President Zelensky, the unbelievable bravery of the civilians who are joined up in the Ukrainian Defense Force, I just think it comes down to the fact that war is not pretty. It's not black and white. It is a deeply – it's a deep tragedy whenever it occurs. And it's incredibly complicated, which a lot of people just don't want to hear. Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't be, just because you believe the Ukrainian cause to be more righteous than the Russian cause doesn't mean that you should be like, ergo, their lies and their propaganda is okay.

That's right. And that's what, you know, I mean, MSNBC, by sort of platforming that, even though this thing has been long debunked, and then the New York Times, this article is really quite something. First of all, they go through the debunking of the Snake Island thing and the debunking of the Ghost of Kiev story, which for those of you who haven't followed this closely, the first video that went viral, which was shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account, was a computer rendering from a combat flight simulator originally uploaded by a YouTube user with just 3,000 subscribers. Then there was a photo that supposedly confirmed the fighter's existence. It was shared by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. And that was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. And what was interesting is when Snopes, the fact-checking website, published an article that debunked the whole Ghost of Kiev thing, citing this evidence, there were a bunch of replies that were like, why can't we just—this one person literally said, why can't we just let people believe some things? If the Russians believe it, it brings fear. If the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.

Then they go on in this piece to quote experts who are justifying war propaganda and lies. They talk to this guy, Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at New America, which is apparently a think tank in Washington. Do you know what their deal is? New America? They're more of a centrist people. I actually like Peter Singer. I read one of his books called Ghost Wars. So he says, if Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity

of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose not just the information war, but it would lose the overall war. He also says a key to information warfare in the age of social media is to recognize that the audience is both target of and participant in it. Hopefully, sharing out those messages makes them combatants of a sort as well. So a full piece basically saying, if it's Ukrainian lies and propaganda, it's kind of okay. Like, we're going to tell you that they're not really accurate, but we're also going to tell you that it serves a noble purpose, so it's all good. And these are the same people who, how many articles about misinformation and disinformation and calls for deplatforming and the unfettered conversations that are happening on Parler and all these places,

but then when it comes to lies and misinformation in support of something that they believe in, and that, you know, is a cause that they back, then suddenly a little bit of misinformation isn't going to hurt anyone. The reason, again, this matters is that when you get something wrong, no matter who it helps or not, you just have to admit it. It may suck and it may be annoying. Listen, I don't enjoy doing it as often as I have to. That being said, it's better in the long run for your credibility and B, so that people can live in reality. Reality is actually very important. And it's a disservice to Americans,

to my neighbors who have put Ukrainian flags up, for them to think that something is happening there, which is simply not. Yes. Which may then lead to them to encourage and buy into the most hawkish rhetoric. That's right.

And especially whenever it comes to the media. The media has a responsibility, whether you like it or not, in order to tell you something, whether it's true or it's not true, in order to fact check something regardless of the circumstance. And the problem is that it leads then to what they call noble lies. Well, it was a noble lie to buy into the most maximalist things on Russiagate because Trump was a bad guy. It's like, look, no defense of Trump up here, but it doesn't mean that it's true. Or it was a noble lie when Fauci said masks don't work.

We need to understand reality with all its warts because then we can respond to reality. Right. Especially when the stakes are as high as war, peace, World War III, nuclear annihilation. We need to have as clear a picture as possible of what is actually going on in the ground, what are actually the chances of the

Ukrainian military repelling the Russian military. Like we need to be as clear eyed as that, at that as possible. And so when you have storied outlets like the New York Times basically saying like, oh, propaganda on the Ukrainian side, it's really okay because it's good for them. That is not a good state of affairs. And I think we've been up front with you guys about how hard it is to really decipher what is actually happening on the ground. And this is part of why, because you can't trust a single U.S. media outlet to actually be skeptical about the claims of the Ukrainians. I mean, so everything that they're printing, we're having to discount. We're having to look like, all right, who's the source?

It's the Ukrainians. It's our defense officials. Like all of it has to be discounted and caveated. And of course, the Russian propaganda, you know, has to be even more discounted and caveated. But it makes it so it's impossible to actually figure out specifically what is going on. And that means that it's impossible for the public to make informed choices about how we should actually respond. That's why this stuff matters. And whenever it gets reflected in our popular media, this is kind of how it shakes out, which is that we have here a clip. We played a little bit of the answer yesterday. It was important you see the questioning. Look at the way that Chuck Todd seemingly advocates and demands a no-fly zone from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. This type of browbeating sets the tone and the framework of the conversation and then the way in which

all of us are thinking and talking about it. Let's take a listen. Why rule out the no-fly zone? Why not make Putin think it's possible? First, again, my admiration for President Zelensky has no bounds. And if I were in his shoes, I'd be asking and looking for everything possible from everyone in every place around the world. And as I said, what we've already done is extraordinary. And just to remind people, over the past year alone, from the United States alone, more than a billion dollars in security assistance, lethal defensive weapons that are being put to very effective service by Ukrainians now in defense of their country, and other measures that we're looking at going forward. Just in the last week alone, Chuck, we have delivered more than

$200 million worth of security assistance into the hands of Ukrainians. So all of that is ongoing, all of that's continuing. The president's been very clear about one thing all along as well, which is we're not going to 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. Let me ask you this. And by the way, keep in mind what, again, keep in mind what a no-fly zone, just so people understand too, what a no-fly zone means. It means that if you declare a space no-fly and a Russian plane flies through it,

it means we have to shoot it down. There you go. See? He's actually explaining it properly. But look at the pressure. Give the Ukrainians something. It's like that level of pressure on public officials, you cannot discount this. Luckily, Biden stood tall on Afghanistan, so it's not like he did cave to it in this one area. But for all of the people around him, you know, I think I said this somewhere. I forget exactly where, but we're only one heartbeat away from Kamala Harris being the president. And if you do not think that she's not going to be influenced by stuff like this, we're going to be in a full blown hot war. I look, maybe I sound crazy. I don't think she has

any mental fortitude whenever it comes or any real worldview, foreign policy worldview, the way that Biden does. She would be dramatically influenced by people like this. And Biden is a very, very old man. And, you know, that if you want to ask what really keeps me up, it's that. Yeah, I mean, I have to say of all the presidents in my lifetime, granted, it's a low bar. But at least Biden has shown an ability to stand up to this kind of a pressure and, you know, take what was a massive approval rating hit that he has never recovered from since the media just completely piled on, you know, they cared for like three weeks what was happening in Afghanistan and then they

disappeared the moment it no longer served their interests. But when you create these totally one-dimensional hero narratives and you create this drum, we have to do something, we have to do something, we have to do something, then it should be no surprise that you have three-quarters to 80 percent of the American public like, yes, no-fly zone, especially when no one is really effectively educating them about what that means and the consequences that would ultimately result. Yeah, I think that's well said. Okay, well, speaking of media, I've got a fun exclusive story for all of you. So as you guys know, I used to be in the White House press corps before I started the show with Crystal. And there's a lot of backbench internal politics that determines where you seat inside the briefing room, who gets the assigned seat. The front two rows are the establishment media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. They all have prime seating up there in the front. Naturally, they then get called on first. They get

the first questions, the follow-up questions, and the most important ones. Now, whenever I was in the White House, the Trump administration did not abide by the longstanding, quote-unquote, tradition that the Associated Press gets the first question and he gets to decide, or she, whoever that person is, to when the briefing ends. As in, they can say, thank you, Jen, that's enough. As if it's a deference to that reporter, he can determine how long this briefing goes on. Obviously, some people like me who were former, you know, non-legacy media outlets can understand why if it's up to them when the briefing ends, that that could screw you over. And let's just give you a taste here. This is generally how it looks whenever the White House briefing ends. Let's take a listen, just so you guys can see. Okay. Thank you, everybody. We'll do this again tomorrow.

There has been a range of reports. I'm sure we can get you more details. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Thank you. So do you notice all of those shouts in the back? Now, those shouts are from the people who weren't able to get a question. Now, once again, if it's up to the White House and if they want to end the briefing and they don't call on you, fine, that's on you. It happens to me all the time. But why is the Associated Press determining whenever this ends? And put this up there in terms of the seating chart. They just revealed it, which is that it continues to be the case that all of the major legacy media outlets in the front two rows continue to keep their seats, which is up to the White House Correspondents Association. Now, this is the point of contention that led to the conflict

which we're about to show you from yesterday. This is audio I've exclusively obtained and also talked to people who were in the room at the time, which is at the end of the briefing, Stephen Nelson of the New York Post called out the Associated Press and say, hey, why did you end the briefing? I still had a question to ask. And so did a lot of other people there. And then you're going to hear a woman's voice. Her name is Lynn Sweet. She is the White House correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times. Now, Lynn makes a very excellent point. Lynn castigates the front row.

And the person she's speaking to is Steve Portnoy. He's the head of the White House Correspondents Association, also one of these front two-row people. And she says, look, why don't we just end the tradition of the AP calling it? If the White House wants to call it, then that's fine. And just listen to how both Portnoy and the people in the front row protect their guild access and even admit that it was up to the White House to bring back this tradition, which opens up all sorts of allegations as to whether there is a collusion between the AP and the White House as to when the briefing ends on their time, denying the ability of legacy media outlets in order to ask questions. So with all of that pretext, let's now take a

listen to the audio we've exclusively obtained, which shows you how bad this fight got inside the room yesterday. Let's take a listen. You know, you don't have to call the briefing over. AP, if I could point at themselves in charge of calling it. We had questions back here. You don't have to say thank you to call the briefing over. Let's just be collegial here. And Mr. President, I think the solution is, you don't deserve to have this on you. It's not your job. No one of us works for the White House. And I

understand all the traditions that we have here. Oh my God, I'm sure we could do a historian report on the tradition. Maybe it's time to end your tradition. and Jen and her colleagues are fully capable of saying, I've got to go now,

and let them, let's just end it. No one deserves to have to feel that responsibility. So could we think about just letting the thing end when the White House wants it to end? I think that when Jen came in as press secretary,

she made a conscious decision to try to honor the long-standing conditions of the room. She obviously must have felt, and I'm sure she does today, that it was either in our interest or something that we would have preferred. Obviously, the people before us

have a different view of that. No, no, could you speak to my suggestion? Right. Okay. us have a different view of that. No, no. Could you speak to my suggestion? Right. Okay. I have a narrow suggestion, very specific, so that everybody could at least feel that they had a shot. Okay. I'm not even complaining about the first two rows. God bless you all.

I understand the dynamics here. I'm just saying, very basic stuff. Can we maybe think about ending the tradition of having one of our own end the briefing and let the White House end the briefing? So that is the decision for the White House press secretary to make. I'm not going to suggest... Wait, so wait, then here's... If one of our own never ended the

briefing, what would have happened? Well, I would hope that the briefing would continue, but I will say... So you're kind of skirting my little narrow question. Can I just say something here? The problem is that the briefing gets postponed and delayed and delayed and delayed, right? So we're all primed for something to happen and then it doesn't happen. And then the time that is there between the next event or something going on at 3.30 now that is important to a lot of us to you know, here at the White House.

So the time is being pressured by these continual delays. So maybe we could also mention that. There are a number of things. Could you address this little baby stuff I'm suggesting? I will think it over. Thank you. And then I just want to add Before we do, I want to make a point.

I think that Josh is right. We all have jobs to do. It's not right that one reporter should command the floor and hold it for too long. That's not straight. I don't want... But we all... In 25 minutes, there are millions of people across the country who will be listening to CBS radio stations and will not be hearing me on the air because I won't have time to leave.

Well, I know, Mr. President, the duties of the office are great. But if you have just answered my narrow little question, and now I finally have it, you're going to consider it. Let's not do the whole world of things in one particular time. And specialty media needs an opportunity. So, a little preview of how exactly things went in there. And props to Lynn Sweet. She really pressed him in exactly the way. And this stuff drives me crazy because, like I said, I had to go through

the whole ringer. You know, I was one of those people who had to stand in the aisle and get their hours early just to try and get in the sight line of the White House press secretary. Some days you don't get called on. That's OK. It's up to the White House. But it is outrageous that the Associated Press gets to decide when the briefing is over. Who elected you? Nobody. And the way that the briefing room is all set up, the way that all of the access to the corridors of power is one that rewards the legacy media people because they know they're dying. Cable news is irrelevant. I love how he says, I've got to listen to millions of people on the radio. Look, I actually know Stephen. He was very nice to me

whenever I was at the White House. He said something like, millions of people aren't going to hear me on the radio. I'm sure they're going to cry themselves to sleep. I don't want to speak to you. I don't know him, so I'll say it. He's a very nice guy. I just think that that mindset

reflects you, reflects an old way of thinking, which does not reflect a dynamically changing media environment. You know, people, our premium subscribers have asked us in the past, why don't you send somebody to the White House press briefing? This is why. How am I supposed to get them called on? I would love to send somebody to the White House press briefing. I would say, too, in terms of why this matters.

First of all, I like Lynn Sweet. She has, like, spunky wine mom vibes. Yeah, she does. And I enjoy that. I love that. That's number one. Number two, we've covered a couple different stories on this show. We're just asking the right question.

Oh, it's huge. Actually sparked change. Right. And as much as we feel like, oh, it's impossible to get anything, it's impossible to move these people, whatever. Sometimes by their answers, they reveal something to the American public that actually requires them to change. So I'll give you two good examples. One from the White House press briefing. Remember when Jen Psaki got asked about, hey, why don't we send tests to everybody?

That's right. That was such an important moment. Yeah, and she was like, oh, what? You just want me to send coronavirus tests out to everyone? And the entire country was like, yes. And why do you act like that's some crazy idea? Other countries are already doing it. And then because her sort of sneering contempt at the very question revealed something about the White House's thinking, they had to change.

Another example, Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, I'm a stock band. The stock trading band. She gets asked a question about, hey, you think it's okay for members of Congress to be trading stocks and profiting off of the decisions that they're making when they're legislating? And she gives this totally unacceptable answer about how, well, it's the free market and I just think we should all participate on it. Well, that sparks a massive bipartisan backlash among the public because, again, she's revealed the way that she is thinking about this thing and it forces her to move off her position. And now there's a chance there will actually be some kind of a stock trading ban and there's movement, bipartisan movement on both sides of the aisle. So that's all a long way of saying that these

things can feel really inconsequential or really inside baseball ball or really just about some little palace intrigue. But who gets to ask the questions? How many questions get asked? Those things actually really end up mattering a lot. And we've seen just recently some very clear examples of why that ultimately is so true. You know, it's also for the posterity of history. When I was in the press corps, I realized very quickly that all these people were complete idiots and that they did not understand what was happening. And so right before the second time that the Trump administration struck the Assad regime, I asked Sarah Sanders, because there wasn't a confirmation whether sarin gas or any of that stuff had been used. And by the way, there still is a lot of questions about

what happened exactly. I asked Sarah, I said, hey, are you setting the standard that you don't have a confirmation? And what if this was a use of chlorine gas? Would that not then change the calculus over striking the regime? She had a terrible cookie-cutter answer. But I asked that question because I knew that 20, 50 years from now, people were still going to be looking back at the history or whatever, the Syrian civil war and our use of cruise missiles in order to enforce the Geneva Convention. It's kind of crazy when you think about it, that somebody can go back and they can read the transcript and say, hey, somebody did ask this question. And this was the exact response when the administration wrote that. And that can end up in some textbook obscure that weirdos like me read. The point is, is that asking the question is important for the sake of history and also for the sake of changing policy.

And so when you rig the way that people get to ask questions, then you're rigging the entire game itself. Especially when you have in the modern era, I mean, Trump was this way and Biden is this way as well. Biden's very limited in terms of his press access. Trump was not limited in his press access, but he mostly sought out, you know, the Sean Hannity's of the world that he knew he was going to get friendly interviews from. So when you have this little tiny window where there might be something adversarial, it becomes even more precious. Very true. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, Houston, we have a problem. The public is overwhelmingly in favor of a no-fly zone. And a no-fly zone almost certainly means

World War III. And World War III very likely means nuclear war. And all of that has me completely terrified. As we mentioned yesterday, a new Reuters Ipsos poll finds 74 percent of Americans, including wide majorities of Democrats and Republicans, support instituting a no-fly zone. In fact, yesterday, thousands of people in Chicago marched through the streets demanding we, quote, close the sky. guy. Digging in even deeper, an Economist-Yuga poll found a 25-point margin in favor of instituting a no-fly zone. There was almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Actually, the big divide here was generational. There was a 23-point gap between the no-fly zone support of the oldest generation versus the youngest generation. Now, it's important to know, however, that in every generation, there were more who said it was a good idea than those who said it was a bad idea.

Among our youngest Americans, the largest group was actually not sure. But that is better, I guess, than the majority pro-World War III sentiment among the 65-plus crowd. All of this, though, is a complete disaster. So how exactly did we get here? I don't think it's an accident that hawkishness on any number of measures is strongest among our seniors. This age cohort, for one thing, will not be sent overseas to fight, but they're also the ones who happen to watch cable news. Median age of Fox News viewers is 68.

Same at MSNBC. CNN is attracting a comparatively youthful set of 64-year-olds. And when it comes to war coverage, the three networks have more or less converged more than they've differed. As we've covered here, politicians are almost exclusively pushed to the right on hawkishness. The drumbeat is consistently to do more. So the first damaging aspect of cable news coverage is just their baked-in pro-war bias. They melted down when Biden left Afghanistan. They cheered when Trump bombed Syria to the point where Brian Williams practically had an on-air orgasm over at MSNBC over our military might. Go into greater detail. We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the

eastern Mediterranean, I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons. And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them a brief flight over to this airfield. The second problem with cable news coverage is their prioritizing of sensational human interest stories over actual information. Now listen, I have no problem with highlighting the human suffering and pain that is part of this war, as it is of every war. But what we really need to know, in clear friggin' language, with absolute precision and certainty, is what exactly a no-fly zone is and what it means. We should also know exactly what our sanctions are doing, and how Putin views them as an act of war, and how they are brutal on ordinary people.

We should know precisely how banning Russian oil will be considered an even more aggressive and escalatory act. We need to understand precisely what the term co-combatant means, how our definition might be different from that of Russia. We need to understand the history of our proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and how that all turned out before we commit to years of arming and training and insurgency with some decidedly unsavory elements. The public needs to be relentlessly brought up to speed on some really key facts here, because they're going to shape whether we head towards a giant war or away from one. And it is really apparent that the

media is completely failing in this job. After all, you've got a clear majority of Americans who say absolutely no to boots on the ground, so it makes no logical sense to say hell no to boots on the ground and hell yes to a no-fly zone, which will almost certainly lead to boots on the ground, and hell yes to a no-fly zone, which will almost certainly lead to boots on the ground. That disconnect tells you everything you need to know about how the media is faring at get the absolute essentials into the public debate. And to take it just one step further here, if all you're doing is human interest, tugging at the heartstrings without making it crystal clear the risks of taking action to alleviate that suffering, you are actually directly contributing to a hawkish response from the public. So from the baseline pro-war posture

to the unseriousness of the coverage, we've already got a terrible information environment locked and loaded, just waiting for politicians to pull us into the next war. But there is one other piece we should talk about, and that is the media-stoked President Zelensky thirst. Churchill in a t-shirt, that's how Ukrainian President Zelensky is being described. And there's no doubt about it, it is hard not to be inspired by the example that this man has set. Zagranai praised him for his earnest efforts to avoid conflict, his willingness to put difficult concessions like giving up on joining NATO on the table. Once Russia invaded, he decided to stay put, risking his own death in a bunker in Kiev. By now, you know the contours of his literally made-for-TV story.

Before ascending to the presidency as an outsider running against the corruption of the ruling elite, he was a comedian and he was an actor. In his most famous role, he played a history teacher whose anti-corruption rant went viral, landing him in the presidency. The show was such a hit that Zelensky launched a political party named after the show, and the rest, as they say, is history. But the moment that Zelensky thirst fully emerged on the scene, I started to get a little nervous. First of all, hero narratives, they're just inherently flattening, turning flawed and complex individuals into one-dimensional caricatures,

casting aside anything that is inconvenient to the narrative. We all learned the perils of that during the era of the Cuomo sexuals. Well, the Zelensky sexuals are even more dangerous because we're talking about potential nuclear war here. How has the Zelensky hero narrative already shaped our media coverage? Well, for example, the hero narrative can't abide reporting accurately on alleged Ukrainian war crimes. So the Ukrainians have been circulating degrading images and videos of Russian POWs on social media and to the press.

That is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. The Churchill in a t-shirt narrative also can't abide talking about Zelensky's elaborate offshore holdings, as revealed recently in the Pandora Papers, or the allegations that have some evidence that Zelensky and his partners have received millions in payouts from a bank owned by an oligarch with a trail of multi-billion dollar fraud. Useful information, I'd say, about someone we're throwing potentially decades worth of aid and billions of dollars behind. But the real danger is that when we create political heroes who can do no wrong, it gives their words undue influence. It makes us more susceptible to believe their propaganda, to believe their narrative, and critically, to back whatever course of action they would recommend. Why, after all, would our white knights steer us off course? And what course of action is Zelensky pushing for consistently and relentlessly? Well, it's escalation. He wants

fighter jets, he wants Russian oil banned, and he also wants that no-fly zone. So you paint a picture of immense suffering. You fail to educate viewers on just what it means to alleviate that suffering, how it could contribute to vastly more suffering. And then you elevate a hero to serve as an ideal messenger for the pro-war cause. It's no surprise then that three-quarters of the public

are out there clamoring for a no-war cause. It's no surprise then that three quarters of the public are out there clamoring for a no-fly zone. The only marvel is that more politicians aren't. How long will that situation hold? And I was looking this morning, Sagar, Zelensky sort of like upping his rhetoric

and castigating Western governments for failing to act. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, everyone, it's not a fun monologue to deliver.

Across the country, financial Armageddon, I see, is coming, which is going to have a big impact on domestic politics in a way that people in the White House, Washington, and the media simply do not yet comprehend. And they all stem from the most important thing in the world, the household balance sheet. If you had asked me before the Russia and Ukraine crisis what the 2022 elections would have focused on, I would have said the economy and COVID. But now my answer has changed. It's gas and then the economy, both obviously intertwined. Gas prices right now in this country are catastrophically high. As of yesterday's morning, in just one week, the crisis began, gas prices already up 12%. And if you compare it to one year ago, they're up 46%. Now, look, a huge part of that is a demand increase as COVID restrictions loosened. But in the near term, it is driven right now by an economic response to

Russia. And I say this with no comment on whether we should or should not. I think it's complicated, but I do know that the decision seems more likely. A lot of people in this country are going to pay. Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency, 54% of the price of gas is comprised of the price of crude oil, which is set by the global market of supply and demand. Now, this is critical because it means that no matter how much we produce at home, a big portion of the price is set by the global market. And as I just showed you, the uncertainty in the market has pushed crude as high as $130 with an average price of roughly 110 barrels of this writing. So obviously the question is, well, what do we do about it? All kinds of thorny questions arise. Should we drill more at home? What's the cause of this? Do we even have refining capacity?

Can we convince the Saudis and the Venezuelans to pump more oil and to give us some, even though they hate our guts? Fundamentally, the answer is one where we need more supply. But it leads to the question of why is there no more supply? And while politics is a big part of the answer, financialization is just as much of a part of it, too. I was shocked to discover. Basically, before COVID, shale gas industry lost like $500 billion by expanding too aggressively. Then they got destroyed during COVID times by low gas prices. After losing that

much money, now all investors on Wall Street want is cash flow. So in effect, they are actually now reaping the financial rewards of high gas prices because they are making their money back finally on the stuff that they lost already after being burned and drilling in the past. So now they say, screw it. I don't want to invest my money in that anymore. The lesson of this to me is that we cannot let commodity markets and private investors screw with American energy security. Yes, the market has a role to play here in uncertainty, especially times like this with gas and a massive tax right now on the balance sheet of working class Americans. And it's not like people can stop driving. Gas is about as inelastic as a product as it gets. And with prices like this, this high, people have no choice like they did in 2008, but to just cut costs in all other areas of life. Who knows how many people now

aren't going to get summer vacations, better food, have to stop their kids from attending an extracurricular activity in the summer, all so that they can simply fill up the tank and get to work. It is a nightmare for millions of people. One analysis in 2021, it showed that the lowest income households, they spend as much as one-fifth of their entire income just on gas. And that was when gas prices were half of what they are right now. Consider that gas could skyrocket to as high as $5.50 or $6.50 a gallon on a national average. You're looking at a financial bomb dropped on Americans' household finances. And what I laid out in our show yesterday, too, was key. Let's look at this. The only thing Americans also literally have to spend money on, too, is food. Guess what?

Prices are increasing there as well. Wheat futures contracts are up 60% when the war began. Corn up by 15. Russia and Ukraine together account for literally one-third of all internationally traded wheat. And given that those commodities, too, are set by the global market, what we produce here at home does not matter as much as we might think. Only the price for the consumer does. Food inflation, which is already at record highs, is going to get a lot worse. The head of Tesco, which is Britain's largest grocer, says, quote, the worst is yet to come on food price. High food prices, obviously,

are going to have a massively destabilizing impact, not only here at home, but across the world. Many developing countries already are dealing with double-digit inflation, which of course will further destabilize their own domestic political situations and perhaps lead to more conflict. I say none of this to scare you, simply to prepare you for the dark reality that we now face. Our political leaders, they don't have any good options right now. All of them are fraught with consequences for the long run. Worse is that the prices that many working people will feel in their everyday expenditures

are going to go up by a lot more, and it is going to decimate them financially, which we know for certain has major domestic political consequences. The more I see the future, this is the way more I think that we may one day yearn for the culture wars of COVID. Because the wars over oil, food price, what the hell we do about it in the long run, they are going to be more potent than anything that we might have seen in quite some time. The 1970s are truly back. And while it turned out okay in the end, then it was not so fun to live through. And it looks like we're going to inherit the same curse of many of our parents. That's really all it can come down to. I told you a friend of mine was

waiting in a gas line in New Jersey. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Breaking news this morning that Joe Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports to the U.S. Luckily, we have a great energy export. His name is Rory Johnson. He is the author of the Commodity Context Substack, of which we'll have a link down there in the description. Rory, thank you so much for joining the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Absolutely. So, Rory, originally we wanted to talk just about the entire gas supply chain, crude oil, all of that. But just start off with your immediate reaction to the Russian oil ban.

I see that you're saying it may not have a major impact here at home, but talk about it if it goes global. What are the impact on this on the energy markets and what can Americans expect at home? Yeah, so just to put in perspective, so Russia is the third largest kind of producer of oil in the world. It produces about 10 to 11 million barrels a day. It exports about 5 million barrels a day of crude oil and just shy of 3 million barrels a day of kind of refined petroleum products like diesel and gasoline. So what we saw this morning with the Biden announcement was kind of, you know, an outright ban of all petroleum. So that's crude and refined products. The latest data we have shows that, you know, there wasn't a ton of imports coming in already, something on the order of about 400,000 barrels a day. Relatively small in the scheme of total U.S. petroleum imports. But it's one more

step in the direction of a larger ban on Russian energy, which even a week ago, let alone two weeks ago, was considered, you know, a red line, completely sacrosanct, given the fears that Western political leaders had about the, you know, the price impacts that we're already seeing. So when they initially proposed the suite of sanctions to oppose and to kind of punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, there were very explicit carve outs for energy to avoid these price spikes.

But what we've seen over the past week or so is that most energy companies have already essentially self-sanctioned. They don't want to deal with the hassle. They don't want to deal with the reputational risks. The only actual purchase I've seen reported of a major purchase of Russian crude was done by Shell a couple of days ago, and they got raked over the coals for it. It was, you know, there was a complete kind of blowback. Yeah, I saw they apologized this morning, actually.

Exactly. And I think, you know, what's interesting in their initial comment on it, they were like, you know, don't get angry at us. You know, the administration, the White House, and all of the Western governments have very explicitly said we should keep doing this, but it didn't really matter. And the reputational impacts were so dramatic that they've now committed to never buying Russian crude again for the duration of this conflict. So, you know, I think there's an open question about how much oil is even currently going to the U.S., you know, let alone kind of, you know, in Europe. So I think there's this open question of how much it's going to matter.

But it's certainly a political kind of symbolic move to, you know, one more kind of crack in that energy export facade. And they follow Canada, where I'm based in Toronto, that Canada actually did a similar move earlier last week and similar position. They don't actually import much, but I think it was a symbolic move. And the big question is whether Europe

and some of, you know, U.S. Asian allies will follow suit. So you're saying that, you know, in some ways the Russian oil ban is already in action and is already in some ways priced in. What does it mean, though, for the Russian domestic economy? I mean, you know, these are, you know, Russia's oil exports, energy exports broadly are entirely the lifeline of the Russian economy. Not to mention that everything else at this stage is already more or less explicitly

sanctioned. So, you know, this is something that initially there was debate about which direction the energy weapon, if you will, would be used. There was initially concern that, you know, Russia could itself, you know, hold back oil exports, kind of like we saw during the, you know, the OPEC, the Arab OPEC member embargo back in 73. But I think, you know, over the course of this conflict, we've seen that Russia really wants to maintain those export earnings. And what we've seen is the energy weapon used in the alternative direction, kind of this demand security vector. And I think that is, you know, this is this big question is whether or not Western governments and Western populations are going to have the wherewithal to stomach the pain of these kind of price, you know, pump price jumps.

Because I think you were saying, are they priced in? I think part of it's priced in, but I think the uncertainty is still so high that I think we could still very easily see prices jump from here. And you were talking a little bit earlier about the backdrop. And just to put in perspective, we've already been through a historic kind of record-setting rally in oil markets, back from negative prices in 2020 all the way up to $90 a barrel Brent, even before Russia and Ukraine entered the headline mix. And that was entirely driven on very kind of organic, slower moving, but very, very real fundamental deficits in the market. 2021, kind of the market was undersupplied by about one and a half to two million barrels a day, about 2% of global supply. Even if we lose 40% of Russia's exports of kind of crude,

let's say everything that goes to Europe, let's say, that would double the effective deficit. And we're already in kind of wildly tight territory. Jeez. See, everything you're saying there just shows that the uncertainty and more Americans can and should expect probably to pay more at the pump. Now, Rory, as an analyst, and you're very dispassionate from what I can tell, when everybody says what to do about it, what does that mean? I saw you castigating the word energy independence. People are talking about drilling more. I am in favor of something like that based on what I can see. Perhaps you can tell me that I am wrong. Tell us, is there anything that can be done in the short term to lower the price at the pump for the average American? I'm in the short term to lower the price at the pump for

the average American? I'm talking the next three to six months. I mean, so there's two things I think that can be done. And one seems a bit unlikely right now, and the other seems kind of downright terrible. The unlikely one is that, you know, U.S. shale producers really do ramp up. What we would have seen in pretty much any prior period, you know, before COVID would be prices well below this level would have stimulated, you know, absolute gangbusters growth in U.S. production, drilling kind of out the wazoo. And we would have seen, you know, in 2018, for example, with prices well below where they were even before the Russia kind of Ukraine price spike, we saw U.S. production growth of one and a half to two million barrels a day, which was more than global demand growth for that year. So this is this kind of fear that, you know, shale would always overproduce and kind of crush the price. We haven't seen that this, you know, since COVID. And a lot of that is because of this worry about maintaining cash flow discipline and trying to repay investors, which more or less took

a bath for the past decade because these producers were very, very bad at kind of not chasing the prices up and crushing prices once they were there. The other side is on the demand side. And I think what people are increasingly talking about right now in the kind of energy analytics space is that we're very quickly going towards a realm of demand destruction. Prices so high that basically it's a signal for people to stop consuming. And that's how these balances are finally going to shake out, which, you know,

no one knows exactly what level that is. But, you know, we could easily be talking about $150 plus a barrel, well over in Canada, $2 a liter for gasoline. I mean, how high, lay your marker down for U.S. consumers, how high do you think the price of a gallon of gas is going to go? I mean, five, six dollars a gallon is well within the kind of realm of possibility. If, you know, if it takes even longer, and this is the question, the challenge is we don't have great information on demand destruction because it's very rare in all of the oil market's history that prices have ever actually needed to prompt it. So, you know, on the one side, you know, we consume a lot less oil as a portion of our economy now than we did, you know, in the 70s or even back in the financial crisis.

So on one level, you could say, well, consumers can even, you know, can swallow even higher prices because of that lower overall mix of spending. But on the other side, you know, there's a camp that says, well, it's actually the rate of change that matters. And obviously, not only, you know, prior to the Russia-Ukraine spike, the rate of change was absolutely phenomenal. And, you know, this has just put it into entirely kind of unprecedented territory. So if it is the pace of kind of the shock that matters, then this is did decide to do so right now. Could they even alleviate price at the pump? Like how long would that take is what I'm saying.

Yeah. So the one interesting thing about U.S. production is that unlike most global oil production, which takes, you know, up, you know, five to 10 years to kind of sanction and kind of get into production. U.S. shale is known as short cycle, which means it can kind of come up and get going really quickly. Probably in the span of three to six months, you could see a very meaningful supply response if people started actually deploying the drilling rigs in the field right now. And there weren't all of these other kind of supply chain bottlenecks that we're seeing. Labor, you know, there's an issue with sand availability, which is used in the fracking process. So, again, these are all, you know, complex kind of supply chain factors that we don't have fantastic visibility on in the best of times. And, you know, the pace of things, you know, the pace of things are moving now. A lot of our data is lagged by upwards of two months, which two months was literally a lifetime ago.

So we're kind of, you know, analysts are kind of staring at this market to a degree kind of blind, kind of, you know, the only signal that is moving as quickly as the market right now is the price itself, which is kind of your signal that, you know, we're moving towards that demand destruction kind of, you know, threshold. Wow. Well, Rory, this has been very, very helpful.

We've got your link, your sub stack down in the description. Thank you for just for breaking it down for us and laying out a sad picture, but at least an accurate one. Yeah. Great to meet you, Rory. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Absolutely, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. All of your work, you know, all of your support makes it so that we can continue to do what we do. We've got a great number of partnerships, both Marshall and Kyle will be premiering on the channel tomorrow. We've got some fun stuff here in the pipeline on, pipeline, wow,

fun, with James Lee as well. We've got another very exciting partnership to announce soon. Matt Stoller's video continues to do well. You're supporting all that work and all the buildup here to the midterm elections, in addition to the dynamic coverage that we require of Ukraine, which, you know, put extra hours and making sure that everything is going smoothly. So thank you all so much for your support. It means a lot. And there's a link down there in the description if you can help us out. Thank you very much. Love you guys so much. Enjoy the content tomorrow, and we will see you back here on Thursday. See you Thursday. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter oh i know listen to high key on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

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