Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/18/22: Ukraine War, Elon vs Twitter, Biden Polling, Stock Ban Progress, CNN+ Fail, DC Rules, Free Speech, & Amazon Workers!

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover Biden's escalating rhetoric towards Putin, Ukraine war updates, Elon vs Twitter board, Elon vs Saudis, media's free speech meltdown, Biden's midterm landscape, bipartisan movement on stock ban, CNN+ numbers, Christian Smalls on Tucker, history of online speech, and Jordan Chariton reporting on Amazon worker organizing!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/Jordan Chariton: https://www.youtube.com/statuscoup  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for you today. We are back in beautiful Washington, D.C. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. And thank you to everyone who tuned in for the live stream out of New York City. We had a blast.

The comments on it were really positive. So we'll be looking for more opportunities to do similar things. Yeah, we're going to do stuff like that again. Yeah, it was a fun format. I think people enjoyed sort of how we switched it up. In the show today, all right, big moves with regard to Elon Musk and Twitter and total media freakout about the whole thing, which is very revealing in many ways. We also have some new comments from Joe Biden's pollster who helped him to win the presidency, saying that this is the worst political environment for Democrats that he has ever seen, which I think is just, I mean, pretty undeniable. But for him to admit it,

he had some interesting comments here. Also, movement on the stock ban for members of Congress will tell you what the sort of sticking points are and where that lies in the process. New news about CNN Plus. You guys know we can't resist. How much the wheels are already coming off, big layoffs and budget cuts already planned. We also have Jordan Cheriton in the show for an update on union efforts and union busting efforts over with Amazon. Okay, a couple other announcements for you here, guys. First of all, we are not going to do a normal show on Thursday. We will have content to post every single day like we normally do. I unfortunately have suffered a death in the family, so I'm going to be attending a funeral, and it is Soccer's birthday. Yeah, that's right. And Marshall is not available to fill in,

so we just said, you know what, guys, we're going to call it this week. We tried our best. Yeah, we tried our best, but we're going to record a bunch of extra stuff so we won't leave you high and dry. Another thing that we will reveal at the end of the show, we have at long last

gotten the Lifetime members plaque complete. It is in the studio. It is sitting to my left as we speak right now. It was a very difficult logistical challenge to figure out exactly how to pull this off. Especially Made in America. Do you know how hard it is to make stuff in America?

We can tell you a whole thing about it. Yes. And finally, before last announcement, before we start the show, is thank you to James for putting together the newsletter. We're going to continue forward with that because he seems to like doing it and you guys seem to like getting it. Our premium guys really love it. It is a, like a reminder, it's basically a written roundup of the entire show. It includes all the links, all of the elements that are within here. So if you want to check our stuff, what exactly that we're citing and go and read deeper for yourself, that is something that we make available to our premium members.

We want to make the show not only to be able to watch, to listen, but in order to consume it in the best environment possible for you. Something we've been working on for a long time, and I hope you guys really enjoy it. Yeah, and by the way, guys, we have some other announcements coming up this week, new partnerships we're continuing to look into. More people. More content, more people, more folks in the circle of friends here over at Breaking Points. The Breaking Points extended universe. The extended family here, So stay tuned for that. All right. With all of that out of the way, let's get to the very latest in terms of Russia's war in Ukraine.

President Biden making some new comments, continuing to up the rhetorical ante in ways that I personally find to be less than productive. Let's take a listen to his latest comments. I call the genocide because it's become clear and clear that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian. And the evidence is mounting. It's different than it was last week. The more evidence is coming out of the literally the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine. So here's the trajectory, guys. You remember first, President Biden made some comments

off the cuff that Putin was a war criminal. Then he sort of codifies it, puts out an official statement, really leans into that. So it wasn't just, you know, one sort of flippant comment. Then he says he wants him to actually be tried as a war criminal,

something that our own war criminals have never subjected themselves to. And now we are moving up the chain of rhetorical escalation here, saying that what Russia is engaged in in Ukraine is, in fact, genocide. And just to put the definition of genocide out there, because sometimes we throw these terms around loosely without really thinking through what they are and what they mean. It was a Jewish Polish legal scholar who coined the term in 1944. And he said that the term doesn't necessarily signify mass killings. More often, genocide refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. I think that certainly could apply to what is happening in Ukraine right now. So I'm not saying that the term is inaccurate in terms of,

you know, Putin has clearly not just a war on Ukrainian soil and a desire to annex parts of not all of the country, but also really denies that Ukraine is even a thing. So there is some justification here. But the broader picture, as we always try to point out, is that, look, ultimately, we want there to be peace. We want there to be negotiated settlement. We want there to be an end to the violence. And it's very clear from the president's words and from the administration's posture that they're not really interested in that. And Sagar, we talked last week in New York about Ron Klain also made some comments on a podcast. He said, I don't want an exit ramp for Vladimir Putin. I don't think

that's our concern. Our concern is punishing the Russian aggression and defending the rights of Ukrainians to have the kind of future that they deserve. No one is denying the Ukrainians deserve to be free. They deserve peace. They deserve all of that. But when you don't want an exit rant for Vladimir Putin, that means you don't want peace. That means you actually want Ukraine to continue suffering. And we're going to bring you some more reports on the civilian casualties here. You want this war to continue because you're more interested in punishing Russia than ultimately reaching a settlement here. Yeah. And look, the words of a president matter. That was the very first thing that Joe Biden said whenever he was running for president. In 2019, you can all go

back and watch his announcement video. But here's the problem. The enduring legacy of never again is burned into all of us. And I think that's a good thing. I actually do. Post-World War II, we decided that it was a just cause that 400,000 Americans died in order to restore both peace in Europe and to stop the genocide of Hitler and the Nazis. The greatest regret of the United States in the 1990s is that they didn't do anything whenever it back, the Clinton administration refused to use the word genocide. There's a famous clip of Susan Rice refusing to use the word from the podium at the State Department. And the reason why was because if we acknowledged it as a quote unquote genocide, that would require and compel action on behalf of the United States. So there's actually a two-pronged problem here. If this is a genocide and we do nothing about it, then that begs the

question, why are we doing, why why are we doing the maximalist approach? Why are we not bombing whichever Russian contingent is responsible for the war crimes in Bucha? Why are we not taking out chemical weapons factories or denigrating the Russian ability to wage war? Now, there's a grand strategic reason we're not doing that. It's because Russia is a nuclear power and because doing so would very likely invite a major escalation between a war between NATO and the United States. And so Biden needs to choose his words more carefully towards an actual strategic aim. Instead, he's speaking aimlessly. Putin is a war criminal. This is a genocide. And he doubles down on genocide. The thing is, I don't think it is aimless. I think

it's very intentional because they don't have any intention of bringing this thing to a close. I mean, that's just become increasingly clear. At the beginning, I was sort of 50-50, whether it was just, you know, they're just reacting and bumbling through and it's just all response to whatever's happening in the moment. But I think it's become increasingly clear that their only goal here ultimately is to punish Russian aggression to the point that Putin gets pushed out of power. I mean, that's what Biden let flip in that famous moment that, you know, they kind of cleaned up, they kind of walked back and then he kind of also leaned into. I think that was revealing what the true aim is here. And I think that that's foolish. I don't think it's going to happen. And ultimately, I think it's going to contribute to even more Ukrainian suffering. And so that's really the issue here is I think that the U.S. administration is really actively

standing in the way of peace at this point and guaranteeing that we are going to enter this new Cold War era of a new Iron Curtain and a new world divided and a new conflict and competition, which is wonderful if you're an arms dealer or weapons manufacturer. It's wonderful for the neocons here in this country. It's their greatest dream. But it's a disaster if you actually care about a sort of, you know, if you actually care about peace, it's ultimately a disaster. Yeah. To me, it's all about ambiguity, which is that whenever Biden leaves terms open like genocide and war criminal, he is inviting a position of the United States in order to use military force. This is something that we all know in our DNA. Rightfully, we're good people. We don't want to see people massacred across the planet. But when

you use rhetoric like that, and by the way, it's not just me saying that. I've heard even from many, even quote unquote, like moderate type interventions. Marshall is one of these people. And he was denigrating the Biden ministry. He's like, you can't say that. Because if you say that, you are saying the United States should be bringing the full force of its power. We have shameful times in our legacy, turning away Jewish refugees in the 1930s in order to not antagonize the Hitler regime. I mean, remember, like these are things which we've all been taught correctly in graduate school as a black mark. And so when you, as the president of

the United States and the leader of the free world, use this type of rhetoric, you justify and actually open yourself up to the question, well, why are you not taking direct military action in order to stop this? And we know why that answer is, and we should acknowledge that. Right. That's right. And that's why you see actually a majority of American people saying we're not doing enough. Yeah. Even though we have taken extraordinary actions, both in terms of, you know, the weapons support, the intelligence support we've provided, the training we've provided to the Ukrainian military over years and years now, and of course, the economic warfare that is of

almost unprecedented scale that we have launched against Russia at this point. That's how you get to a place where you can have taken all of those extraordinary and some of them, I think, foolish and morally wrong actions and still have people feel like, yeah, but you're not doing enough. It's because from the beginning of this conflict, you've had a certain contingent here in Washington who was perfectly willing and comfortable to say, this is World War II again, this is Putin again, and to throw around language like genocide, which, as you said, Americans are good people. The country has not, certainly the leadership has not lived up to the values that America is supposed to be all about. But the American people, by and large, really do believe in those values and support those values. So when you casually use those terms, it does absolutely open the door for people saying, OK, then why aren't we doing more? Why aren't we? Isn't this a just cause? Why aren't we using our men and women to stop the atrocities?

Right, and look, I mean, I just have to repeat it again, which is that, yes, what can happen in Ukraine is horrific. What's going on there is, like, catastrophic. And Biden's not descriptively wrong whenever he says that Putin does not acknowledge Ukrainian identity as a sovereign people. This is a long time coming in the history of not just Russia, many of the subordinate peoples to Russia. I mean, I actually just saw a fascinating thing today about Russian troops from eastern Siberia who are Buddhist.

You know, it's like and they're being conscripted and deployed to Ukraine. Really? Wow. What do these step people have an interest in fighting in Ukraine? You know, it's like, this is ludicrous. So many, many people have different types of ethnic groups have long suffered under the great Russian thumb. However, that doesn't mean that we should risk a nuclear war in order to try and intervene within that country. And when you use language like this, I'll just repeat it again. The words of a president legitimately do matter. And just so you know, it's bipartisan because President Donald Trump also called it a genocide the day after and he called it a Holocaust previously. Yeah, and we've called on his

rhetoric as well. And we should call on that rhetoric. So when you have the two leading political figures in the United States, it depresses me to say that they're the two, but they are, of the two factions and the president and the former president, likely next president, you put that together, it's not a good situation for U.S. policy. And you have to understand the broader implications of the machine that that wars up here in D.C. Well, the last thing I want to say about this, too, is just on the hypocrisy front. Of course, we've talked about a lot about Saudi and Yemen. But if you're following the news out of Israel, how you can apply the term genocide to Russia's

aggression against Ukraine and not what Israel has been doing to Palestine for decades. I don't think you're applying an even standard there where it comes to those things. All right. Latest from on the ground. There are some big news from the Ukrainian side and also some very big, significant news from the Russian side. Let's start with the Ukrainian side. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So an incredibly significant Russian warship called the Moskva sunk in the Black Sea. Now, the Ukrainians and the U.S. say that Ukrainian missiles hit and sank this warship. The Russians say, no, no, no, it caught fire. You guys had nothing to do with it. And then the ammunition exploded. And actually, like, it was just, it just happened.

It really wasn't you guys. I'll let you decide what you think actually happened here. But let me tell you why this is so significant. This is the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet. It was being towed to port when stormy seas caused it to sink. That's according to the Russians. That's their version of the story. And why it matters so much is this was a 510 crew missile cruiser. It was a symbol of Russia's

military power. It led the naval assault on Ukraine. So it's been very significant player in terms of this particular war. Some analysts are saying this is more of a symbolic blow than it is actually a sort of military tactical blow. Although the tactical blow matters as well because this is the largest vessel, the biggest Russian warship to be sunk in action since World War II. So that's kind of the symbolic blow. But on the actual tactical blow here, smaller vessels were the ones that were actually conducting the bombardments of Ukrainian cities. But this ship was providing them with wide area air cover. smaller vessels were the ones that were actually conducting the bombardments of Ukrainian cities. But this ship was providing them with wide area air cover. It had longer range missile defense systems. So it was able to provide air cover for these smaller ships that were actually doing the

bombardments. So there's kind of a dispute over how significant it is in terms of the direction of the war. But there's no doubt that this is definitely a symbolic blow to the Russians. And there was kind of a freak out on Russian state TV purportedly over the fact that this ship was sunk. This obviously was something that the Russians could not hide from their people, even though they're trying to spin their own version of events here. And so on the one hand, there was the Russian state TV, they were sort of freaking out about it, but they were also of freaking out about it, but they were also saying this was an attack on Russia herself. And this was causing them to use the words war more frequently. And so there's also concern that this is sort of being used to prepare the Russian population for a broader conscription, calling up of more military age men

and saying, listen, now we have to like fully commit ourselves to this war in Ukraine. Whereas before, of course, they've been spinning it as this limited special military operation. Right. And actually this morning we bear the consequences of what that looks like, which is that Russian missiles struck this morning, the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine, at least seven people. But the reason that Lviv strikes are always important is that is the major conduit of NATO weapons into Ukraine. And also, it's a direct shot at many of the civilians and others who had fled. It invites significantly also more escalation on behalf of the Russians. It's so embarrassing for them, too. They're supposed to be this great power. Their Russian fleet has long

been a complete joke. We all found that out in Syria when it would steam this disgusting, you could basically watch it smoke, try and get all the way over in Syria when it would like steam this disgusting you could you could basically watch it smoke you know try and get all the way over to Syria in order to try and project naval power but it just shows you that things are not going well for them at all and they are becoming an embarrassment on the world stage militarily which invites its own problems let's go and put this next one up there on the screen around the retreat from Kiev and what people have found which is that more than 900, the Associated Press, please, more than 900 civilian bodies found in the Kiev region. So the bodies of more than 900 civilians were discovered in the region

surrounding the capital, most of them who were fatally shot, an indication that many people were simply executed. Now, to be fair, this does come directly from the Ukrainian police and the head of the capital regional police force. So look, they also have an interest in discussing this. That being said, I don't disbelieve photos of literal dead bodies in the ground. And it just shows you how much of a tragedy that war really is. But finally, and this is the try to present a very balanced picture of exactly what's happening here. Put the next one up there, please. It's on the screen, which is that the city of Mariupol is very much on the cusp of falling almost completely to Russia. There are some heroic stories that are coming out of Ukrainian soldiers there basically saying that they're

going to fight to the death in holding that city. And really, it reminds me of some of the Soviet campaigns against the Nazis when many of the Soviet soldiers would willingly sacrifice themselves and say, look, we know we're going to die. And there's a famous story, I remember Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, where they scribble on the side of the building and say, let it be known that the soldiers of whatever fought to the death, you know, for their country. So really heroic story coming out from the Ukrainian defenders, but it doesn't change the grand strategic situation, which is that it's very likely that Mariupol will fight to the Russians, but that doesn't mean it's going to be incredibly

costly. Some of the defenders themselves saying, we are doing this in order to pin the Russians down here, make them sacrifice every possible man. And they say they will fight to the end of every block of the city is going to have to be. So, you know, Russia, you're going to find out what we had to find out the hard way in Fallujah, what we had to find out in urban warfare. It's hell. It costs a ton of lives. And when you face a devoted enemy, as the Ukrainians are in this situation it's going to be a bad time for you but that doesn't mean that they aren't willing in order to incur that cost that's right and um just to put some of the numbers on this i believe maria paul is a city of about 450 000 people remaining in the city is only about 100 000 people that's still a lot of lives there. And the only known remaining resistance left in the city in terms of armed resistance to the Russians are sort of holed up in this steel plant.

And Mariupol is—this would be the most significant victory of the Russians thus far in this war. It's very strategically important. That's why they have devoted a lot of resources to Mariupol from the very beginning. It's been under a seven-week siege. The humanitarian conditions on the ground are horrific. People couldn't get in food, medicine, electricity, water, just mass suffering throughout the city. And the reason it would be so significant is because it would allow them to fully secure that land corridor, that land bridge we've been talking about from the beginning, to the Crimean Peninsula, where they obviously already had sort of taken over,

that they had seized from Ukraine in 2014. And it would deprive Ukraine of a major port and some of its prized industrial assets. So as I said, this would be an incredibly significant victory for the Russians. It would be their most significant victory, tactical victory here in this war thus far. And it appears that Mariupol at this point is all but lost as that heroic resistance does continue. This has potential implications also for the peace process. And this is according to President Zelensky. Let's go ahead and put his tweet, this tweet up on the screen. He's saying that negotiations with Russia would come to a halt if the Ukrainians defending the

port city of Mariupol are killed and defeated. He says we are not bartering using our territories and people. The language I've heard from him most recently is very adamant that they're not willing to give up any of their territory in the east of the state. And a Ukrainian foreign minister told CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday that the situation in Mariupol was dire and heartbreaking, adding that it could have significant implications on peace negotiations with Russia. Here's his quote. He says, after Bucha, it became particularly difficult to continue talking with the Russians. But as my president mentioned, Mariupol may be a red line. So as these continued atrocities unfold and the Ukrainians suffer more losses, both of their civilian population and their soldiers, of course, it makes it more difficult to sit down at the negotiating table and be able to come to some sort of a resolution here.

And Putin himself had said that a second offensive is likely to launch in the eastern part of the country. So things look really not good in terms of what's happening over there. Really thinking about everybody in Mariupol today. All right, let's go ahead and move on to Elon Musk and to Twitter. So on Friday during the live show, we had the breaking news that Elon Musk had offered $54 per share to Twitter and that Twitter was considering it. We can now bring you the news that Twitter has rejected that offer with a so-called poison pill. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So the Twitter board adopted this poison pill after Musk's $43 billion bid to buy the company. Now, it's a little complicated, so let me just try and explain

it to the best of my ability. The way that these poison pills work is that they were invented in the crazy hostile takeover days of the 1980s, where the Twitter board says that if any person or conglomerate accumulates more than 14.9% of Twitter stock, They will begin issuing millions of more shares to broader public investors. The reason this matters is that the Musk offer is a per share offer. So what it would do is A, it would dilute the stock, but B, what it would do is make it much more of an expensive ability in order to offer to buy the broader company, especially whenever you create millions of shares out of thin air, it would significantly inflate the purchase price and make it much more difficult in order for Musk and them to acquire the company. Now, this has spawned a lot of

discussion around corporate governance, shareholders, and more. And the way that we have to understand this is, while yes, it matters as to who the broader shareholders are, publicly traded companies are subject to the governance of their board of directors. Those board of directors, despite owning less than 2% of the entire company, which is less than Elon Musk, which is less than even Vanguard and many others, still have the ability to reject and determine the course of action for the company. And it really raises a lot of questions of like, okay, like how exactly do these things run? It seems a little ridiculous, you know, when you think about ownership and then corporate governance. But it's a longstanding corporate practice in order to try and reject hostile takeover efforts. Apparently Netflix did the same thing when Carl Icahn tried to run a similar thing on the company back in 2012. That's the most

recent example of a tech company kind of rejecting these hostile takeover type bids. Let's put the next one up there on the screen because what you can see is that there's also a lot of behind the scenes shenanigans which are happening, which is that Musk himself now is no longer the major Twitter large shareholder. Now, Vanguard Group actually upped their stake in the company all the way up to 10%. Now, we don't exactly know the reason why Vanguard has decided to up its stake. It does seem very much in direct reaction to Elon Musk, and perhaps it's an effort to perhaps influence the board more

and perhaps show that they effort to perhaps influence the board more and perhaps show that they are allies in the system. It just, look, many of these board members and BlackRock and other large shareholders don't have any interest in Elon Musk taking over the company. And, you know, not unfairly, because the one thing I do want to say is this. Musk gave an interview on Friday where he said, quote, I don't care about the economics at all of Twitter. He's like, I view this as a editorial project of which I want to protect free speech. I don't care about the business of the company. So if you're a shareholder,

I mean, that's not the best thing. At the same time, Musk is offering you a buyout. And it's kind of hilarious that Twitter's board is actually being advised by Goldman Sachs in terms of how in order to defeat all of this. Well, it turns out that Goldman Sachs itself has a sell rating on Twitter and says that the price target on it should be $30. So by their own analysis, the Twitter as a company and a business is terrible. And using Musk's metric, he's offering you an insane- He's offering to overpay. I mean, not just overpay, almost double what Goldman Sachs says that the company is truly worth, which is kind of hilarious. So you put it all together, the Twitter board then

has outright rejected it. We don't yet know how this is going to play out. Things inside of Twitter are a bit chaotic. However, we do know this, that Musk has said that there was a plan B that he said that was on the stage. He said he is looking to work with possible other shareholders. So this saga is not over yet. I think the best way to think about it is Marshall made this point during our live stream. I thought it was excellent, which is that this is like him buying a newspaper. He wants to look at this thing. He's like, I have a vision for Twitter.

I don't really care about the business. It's actually kind of a terrible business if you look at it. And so this is the vision of the world that I want to see. Well, and there's so much that's fascinating about this. I mean, first of all,

like, as I've said before, I sort of view all these billionaires the same, but there's a lot of, like, partisan filtering of which billionaires people like and which ones they're comfortable with. And we're going to get later to like the media freak out over this that you certainly did not see when Bezos was buying The Washington Post, for example. But I think if you do think of it in that framework of this is like buying a newspaper, then people start to understand more like, oh, then this isn't just purely a money-making venture. Because that's what makes this so unusual is usually when you have these hostile takeover bids, activist investors, all of these activist shareholders, all of these things, it usually is about, I think this company from a

financial perspective is being run poorly. I think we could make more money here. Not like, I think their values are wrong. And so you have this complicated mix of like ideology and financial incentives that makes the picture confusing for people to understand whose motives are what. In that live stream interview that you referenced, Elon Musk spoke to the TED conference. It was so cringe, whatever. I can't believe it's still around. I know. I was thinking the same thing. I was like, oh, we're still doing this. Anyway, he spoke to TED 2022 in Vancouver

in a live streamed interview. And he partly laid on his vision for making Twitter's algorithms more publicly accessible, something I would certainly welcome. Limiting content moderation, something else I would certainly welcome if it's done in a consistent and, you know, again, transparent way. He acknowledged he's not sure that he's actually going to be able to pull this thing off and buy Twitter, though he did say he has sufficient assets to fund the deal if accepted. You know, most of his assets are tied up in equity in his companies. So he'd probably have a big tax event if he had to. You know, he'd have to, like, sell his stock or whatever and have an actual tax event and pay some taxes. That's not a bad thing. But Musk did say there is a plan B if his initial offer to buy the company and take it private, which he called his best and final offer, is rejected.

But he isn't saying what that plan B ultimately is. from the poison pill that's been adopted here and Musk's comments directly from him is that this is far from a done deal whether or not he's ultimately able to pull this off and ultimately able to take over Twitter. And he wants to take it private, by the way, too. That's the other plan here. And I completely believe him that his motives have to do, they are not just directly financial. And so, yeah, if you're a shareholder and you're just in it for the money, even if you don't care at all about content moderation or free speech,

if you're looking at this guy who's gonna take it over and is like, I don't really care what the returns ultimately are, yeah, you're probably not gonna be too excited about that. Yeah, and you know, this is keeping with his behavior. I actually read over the weekend, reread actually, 2000, I think it was 17 book, a biography of Musk, Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. I highly recommend it if you want to kind of understand how Musk ticks.

This is longstanding in his behavior. If you look at SpaceX, for example, he refuses to take the company public because he does not want SpaceX subject to the same whims of Tesla. As you've seen with Tesla, like short sellers, quarterly earnings. He's like, you cannot plan for the future or the realistic company whenever you're subject to the whims of the stock market. So even though Tesla, and then SpaceX, I think is worth like 70 something billion dollars, refuses to take the company public exactly for this reason and doesn't want to be subject to the street. So he has a longstanding kind of love of private companies. And the only reason he even wanted Tesla to go public in the

first place, because at the time he actually needed the money and has long hated kind of Wall Street's machinations all behind the scenes. Anyway, it's interesting and fitting with his broader worldview. But let's go to the next part of this because it's hilarious. Put this up there on the screen, please. Which is that the members of the Saudi royal family are very upset by Elon Musk's offer. Here is what Prince Al-Lawid Talal says. I don't believe the proposed offer by Elon Musk comes close to the intrinsic value of Twitter, given its growth prospects. Being one of the largest shareholders, the kingdom and I reject this offer. Yeah, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Revealing. Rejecting our offer. Very revealing. Elon replied, let's go and put this

up there because there's a lot to say and it reveals a lot about our broken financial system and some of the Saudi influence I've talked about here. Interesting. Just two questions, if I may. How much of Twitter does the kingdom own, directly and indirectly? Number two, what are the kingdom's views on journalistic freedom of speech? I think we all know the answer to that question. You know, this is, I didn't even put it together until this all happened, but Brian Fogel's documentary, The Dissident, showed me that a massive proportion of Saudi citizens are on Twitter. Right. And the reason why is that they have anonymity. And a lot of Saudi politics happens in terms of Twitter discussion. There are. Oh, you've experienced that directly. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're very racist. You can figure that

out. But the imams issue fatwas on Twitter. It's really become a central part of Saudi discourse. And the reason that MBS and the Saudi government were so obsessed with Jamal Khashoggi and other Saudi dissidents is because they have big Twitter followings. They were living here in the West and some of their stuff was reentering Saudi discourse and bringing dissidents against the kingdom. Now, the kingdom has responded by, you know, if you think Russian troll farms are bad, the Saudi troll farms are a whole other level. They're always like, and I've experienced this firsthand, they're like, MBS is the greatest, you know, and they'll call me some darkie or whatever, whatever people are saying about Indians these days. I don't even know what the slur is. I don't particularly care. So thank God I don't live over it. But what you can see

in their reaction is that the reason why, Crystal, I realize that they have such a large stake in Twitter and are on the board of directors is because they need to control the political organ through which their politics is mediated in their country. And I can't believe it because it cuts directly against the original promise of Twitter. I'm going to be talking about in my monologue about free speech, about the ability of the internet to serve as dissidents. So to allow these Saudi despots, these people who chop people's heads off and treat women in ways that you can't even believe, to own an American publicly traded company and then try and work against, in our system, our financial system, to protect their hold over 70 million

people and a huge proportion of the world's oil supply. This is the most corrupt view as to how legal this all is. I in the kingdom reject your offer. How about we reject the kingdom? That's my answer. First of all, Sagar, are you okay? Do we need to have a Taylor Lorenz style public airing of how you've been bullied online? Let me know if you're able to continue with this segment. Here's my plan. I just never want to go back to the Gulf. Sorry, people. Your country sucks. Just don't read your metrics. That's all. It's very revealing because the Saudis having a gigantic stake in a company that obviously is central to their discourse, but more significantly

for us. It's central to our discourse. I mean, this is where elite opinion gets made, which is why, you know, there's such a freakout over this and why E-Line is so, you know, interested in what's going on with Twitter. Twitter is really the hub of elite discourse and opinion making in the U.S. that the Saudis having a major stake and being, according to them, the like one of the largest shareholders that goes by without any very little concern. A lot of people be like, hey, whoa, that's a big problem. What's happening? Exactly. But that's sort of like, oh, we're OK with that, because I guess they're much more comfortable with any regime of censorship than they ultimately are with a regime of actual free speech.

And to your point about how focused the Saudis have been on Twitter, I had forgotten this until this whole incident. Remember, there were a couple of Twitter employees who were arrested. Oh, right, the Saudi spies. They were Saudi spies. Yeah. And they had they had access to all kinds of, you know, data that should be kept private about users who are on Twitter who may have been critical of the Saudis. So they were accused by the Justice Department of using their positions, their access to Twitter's internal systems to aid Saudi Arabia by obtaining information on American citizens and Saudi dissidents who oppose the policies of the kingdom and its leaders. So again, I think it's revealing as to which sort of directionally, which ideologies American elites find very threatening. The cozy relationship with Saudi obviously is always there and somehow they get a pass on all their wars and atrocities

and human rights violations because of how much money flows through American pockets coming from the kingdom. And just the utter corruption of all of it, I think is what's really on display here.

It disgusts me. It really disgusts me. And I remember confronting that with Brian Fogel's documentary, The Dissonant. This guy, and we had him on the show, by the way. People can go back and watch it. This guy created one of the best documentaries in the history of Netflix, Icarus.

Won an Oscar, made the Netflix documentary team, makes this incredible documentary on Jamal Khashoggi, the killing, exposing the Saudi regime. And nobody will buy it. Netflix, pass. Amazon, prime. Jeff Bezos' company, who was Jamal Khashoggi's boss, passes on the documentary for his streaming service. Why? Because he wanted to buy souk.com in Saudi Arabia, which is their online retailer. It's repulsive to me, watching the way that anti-Saudi dissidents is just completely squeezed out, and nobody talks about it. And, you know, good on Elon. Look, I don't know what his motivations are, but at least here, people need to realize how much power the Saudis have in our country. And it's a very good reminder, especially, you know,

in the midst of all of these high gas prices. But speaking of Bezos, we could not let this slide, which is that the media freak out when it's not one of their billionaires who wants to control elite discourse is just been chef's kiss. So let's put this up there on the screen. We put together a little highlight reel for all of you. Here's from the Los Angeles Times, which by the way is owned also by a billionaire, biotech billionaire. Elon Musk's paradoxical vision of running Twitter, less democracy, more freedom. Did they say the same whenever a billionaire bought their paper? No, that's exactly right. Let's go to the next one. This is from The Guardian. To be fair, The Guardian is not a billionaire owned and controlled. They just have a cringe ideology.

This is from Robert Reich, the former US labor secretary, who says that Elon Musk's vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense. He says that the Russian people know little about Putin's war on aggression. So, of course, he has to start with Russia. He says pundits assume the internet would open a new era of democracy and all of that. But, again, he's pointing to the pervading objection amongst elites to Musk's Twitter by is that more moderation is needed in order to have more democracy, which is really incredible. Like when you think about it, the people are not and should not be exposed to all sorts of ideas. We as the elite should mediate what is disinformation and what is not, what is misinformation, disinformation, and what is not. And then we use those definitions in order to control the public discourse on these tech

companies in order to control overall public opinion. That is the opposite of democracy. And yet, look closer. And they just say the quiet part out loud. The next one here, I love this. Elon Musk's vision of free speech will be bad for Twitter. Now he says, this is by Ellen Pau, the former CEO of Reddit, famously, you had to get run out of. Published in the Bezos post here. Exactly. Which is published straight out of the Bezos Amazon Washington Post and points to how the need for more moderation and more content controls are necessary for a free country. And she tries to cast it as bad for the business.

And here's one of the best things about Elon's extraordinary wealth. By my count, he's worth $257 billion. It doesn't matter. He doesn't care about the money. So when you don't care about the money, and yeah, people are like, oh, this might be bad for't matter. He doesn't care about the money. So when you don't care about the money, and yeah, people are like, oh, this might be bad for the advertisers. He doesn't care. He just wants people to be able to use it and not be censored whenever they're speaking. And look, whether that would bear out under his leadership, I have no idea. We obviously need to see that.

But I'm willing to suspect that it's going to be better than what it currently is. And, you know, another Bezos Washington Post columnist put this is. And, you know, another Bezos Washington Post columnist put this one up there, Max Boot, quote, I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media, anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less. This is why I hate. They define democracy only in terms of things that I like and not things that other people like. Well, Max Booth's one is my favorite because, I mean, he just puts it out there.

Democracy equals content moderation. It's just like I thought our democracy had a whole free speech thing to it. That was kind kind of core to what we were. Common sense and all that. The whole project we were supposed to be committed to here. And of course, free, of course, speech has limits that we've long recognized, right? It's not absolutely anything goes, but you know, we have started to hem in and hem in and hem in what is allowed.

And then when you do that, ultimately what you're doing is handing more control over to the billionaire class, over to the people who own these platforms, and the people who influence the billionaires who own these platforms. And that's my objection to this whole thing. I mean, I just see, listen, so many people are viewing this through the lens of like which particular billionaires they think align with them ideologically, when what the real takeaway from all of this should be is whether you like Musk, whether you like Be what the real takeaway from all of this should be is

whether you like Musk, whether you like Bezos, whether you hate all of them, the fact that you are allowing this very small class of billionaires to control things that are so essential to our democracy as speech, that's the big problem that we're facing here. And that should be something that everyone could come together on and say, you know, maybe we shouldn't be just like left to the whims of whichever billionaire happens to buy up the public square this time. Right. That's the big issue that I have here. And so as we're going through all these different articles, it's just noteworthy that, you know, when it was Bezos buying the Post or other billionaires buying other newspapers, a lot of times these people were comfortable with it. It also reminded me of, remember when Bernie made those comments about, hey, maybe the Washington Post doesn't like me because it's owned by Jeff Bezos and I want to raise his taxes. And there was a total meltdown. There was outrage. The

liberal commentariat was up in arms. How could you say that about the Washington Post and how dare you, sir? And then when it comes to, you know, someone that they are less comfortable with and has at least purports to have a different ideology than they do, then suddenly they see the risks and the problems of billionaire ownership here. My personal favorite was Washington Post saying, quote, this is Elon Musk at peak billionaire in the Washington Post. Yeah. No, peak billionaire is when the richest man in the world, who is Jeff Bezos, buys the Washington Post in order to influence political discourse here in Washington. Look, I think both of those things are peak billionaire. That's my thing. an even standard here and recognize that, look, do I think that we're probably more likely to get better content moderation out of Elon Musk and Twitter as a private company than we do

under whatever the dude's CEO's name is now, Agrawal? Yes, I do. I do think. But the problem is leaving these incredibly consequential issues to the whims of billionaires, that's the problem. And so, you know, there's a reason why elites are so freaked out by this, because I think what all of this has reminded us and revealed once again is how important Twitter is to elite discourse. And so this is a real battleground for them where they want their ideology to be enforced by the leadership of Twitter versus having it be, you know, truly open and people allowed to say some things that you don't like. And by the way, if your goal is to, you know, get Donald, keep Donald Trump out of office again,

I don't think by censoring him ultimately you've done yourselves any favors. Yeah, 100%. Okay, guys, interesting polling commentary from Biden's pollster, John Anzalone. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. There was a lot here in this conversation. I actually listened to the whole thing this morning. Written up in Politico playbook, Biden's pollster, who came up with his winning strategy in the 2020 election, says this is now the worst political environment for Democrats of my lifetime. There was a lot here that he said. And Ancelone, so here's his deal. He really sees himself as like Cummings and white working class, kind of a D.C. outsider, even though he really is a D.C. insider. He lives in Alabama right now. He's working on a race in Nevada.

He sees himself as like separate and apart from the sort of D.C. chattering class. And his commentary tends to be like it's that sort of thing where he'll say a lot of things. You're like, yeah, this guy gets it. This guy gets it. And then he'll say one thing where you're like, wait, what? That totally contradicts everything else that you just said. So that's kind of who he is. He really came up with not just Biden's general election strategy, also the primary strategy. He had this idea of, all right, you can sort of ride

out Iowa, New Hampshire, and even Nevada, even though no one's ever done that before. And we'll make it all about South Carolina and Super Tuesday. Of course, he had the assistance of the media coming in for Joe, everybody dropping out, Barack Obama intervening, et cetera, et cetera. But he really sort of saw how those ships were ultimately going to fall. So a few things that he said here that were very noteworthy. First of all, on his prediction for 2022, he says it's the worst political environment I've lived through in 30 years of being a political consultant. And there's a big difference between losing seven and 10 seats in the House and getting your ass kicked and losing 35 to 40. He believes they might still have the ability to keep the Senate. I think the only thing that

could possibly save them at this point is if the Republicans nominate a bunch of like completely unelectable people, which they have the possibility. They've proven themselves able to do before. You can see, you know, Todd Akin and Roy Moore, if you need a reminder of how that ultimately goes. He also says what Democrats need to do is, number one, voters are always asking, what have you done for me lately? And he decries the fact that on economics, Democrats really haven't delivered. It says they really need to get something done, whether it's a skinny build back better or something that actually speaks to voters concerns. Imagine that crazy idea. He also says that they need to lean into a populist message on taxes.

He says we're scared of our own shadow on taxes and it effing makes no sense. People do not begrudge people making a lot of money and getting wealthy. People have a problem and are pissed off about them not paying any effing taxes. And why as a party we don't elevate that in our messaging is beyond me. The last part of this that I thought was really interesting is he talks about the myth of Latino voters and says something that should be obvious to literally any human being, which is he says, listen, in D.C. among Democrats, they think you only talk to Latinos about immigration. Like, immigration is the 12th issue they're concerned about. Guess what? They're concerned about the same things everyone else is concerned about.

It's about the economy or inflation or healthcare or schools. So, you know, what I would say to all of this, because then he goes on to have some commentary that's in line with like, the left is the problem. Well, you've just outlined something here in the tax risk messaging that comes directly out of the left flank of the party and is being stymied by the corporatist, moderate wing of the party. And so I think he's absolutely right in the fact that there are obvious directions that Democrats could go in to seize the messaging and put Republicans in a very difficult spot, and they just don't do it. Yeah, I mean, look, I think the cultural left is the problem. But, I mean, they're dominant amongst the establishment left, which is part of this why they're so unpopular. It's like when you have cultural leftism and then terrible economic policy.

Well, this is what always irritates me is there's no ability to separate out the culture left policy and economic left policy. Yeah, 100%. I don't disagree with you. And what's interesting, too, about what he says is that Republicans do a much better job of branding Democrats than Democrats do of Republicans. We don't do a good job of branding. And it's interesting because what they try to do is brand Republicans as cultural extremists, when in reality, they're more than enough today in 2022. They're like roughly dead center, at least when you compare it to what the dominant cultural liberalism is. It's on economics that they're all the way out here at like 12%. And yet, when they don't do a good enough job of talking about that and putting them in those types of positions, you're getting outflanked on the economy and on inflation. It's like, no wonder the Steve Moore FreedomWorks definition of deficit reduction inflation is being accepted by the broad majority of the American people, when Biden himself has just no

ability to articulate or do anything whenever it comes to the most pressing concerns. I mean, people should remember, too, we've seen some fluctuation in gas price right now. It has zero to do with Joe Biden. What it has to do is China is locking down, and so global demand is down, and so gas is slightly down. I was talking with Rory Johnson, the guy we had on the show. He's like, yeah, there's been no structural change to U.S. oil markets by the Biden administration since this crisis has begun. That's crazy. It's almost two months to the day since Russia invaded Ukraine. Two months can sound like a short time, but you can get a lot done if

you want to. You know, people forget this country changed in just 100 days under the FDR. There were 15 major pieces of legislation. Go back in time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed after an 83-day filibuster. That's not that long. Same with Medicare, the Great Society, Social Security, the history of these programs. They were conceived of and enacted in a quick environment because people had a real strategic vision and grand vision for the country itself. Biden doesn't have any of that. They just released some new rule on federal leasing and lands. It's complicated. It's bureaucratic. Nobody really understands it. In terms of its impact on the oil market, it may have one nine months from now. Right. What are you doing? This is the point.

Well, and here's the thing is it's very hard for you to blame the left when the left has no power. Like you all are in charge. This entire program, the entire economic program, the entire strategic program, the entire rhetorical program. This all comes out of Bill Clinton DLC. I mean, it's the same old, same old in charge of the party. None of that has changed. So it's like no matter who's in charge, no matter what they do, they always want to say, oh, it's the fault of the left. You all have all the power here. The left is completely impotent and has proved themselves that time and time again. So if it's the worst political environment of your lifetime, and it's your dude who's in charge, and it's your guy who's running the Senate, and it's your gal who's running the House, like, when are you ever going to do a little bit of soul searching and say, hey, maybe we need to rethink how we're ultimately approaching things here. Because yeah, listen, as we've talked about on the show a million times, if you don't deliver for people materially, if you only, if you basically put that off the table, then of course politics is going to be all about the culture war. Of course, Republicans are excellent at prosecuting their culture war

case. That is not the landscape that you ultimately want to be fighting on. But because Biden has basically broken his promises to every core constituency within the Democratic Party base, then you end up with this worst of all worlds where, of course, the right is highly motivated to come out and vote in the midterms. And just as Obama did to the Democratic base, you've totally depressed the Democratic base. Something I think I'm going to do my monologue on for tomorrow is in this recent poll that just came out that had Biden's approval at 33%, was it 33% in Quinnipiac? His approval rating with young voters was lower than Trump's was in the same poll during his presidency at the same time. And I want people

to understand that that doesn't mean like, oh, Republicans are picking up young voters. No, young voters are disgusted. They're much more ideologically in line closer to the Democratic Party's ideals. They're not like interested in either the Republican cultural positions or the Republican economic positions, but they're completely disgusted with Democrats. So they're not going to show up. I mean, you see the same thing. I'm still following the French election. You see very similar dynamic there where young people are like, the entire attitude of the Democratic Party establishment is complete contempt and disgust with the young base of the party that was supposed to be the future, that was supposed to be the coalition of the ascendant. So when you consistently screw over

your base, when you don't deliver for independence, when Republicans are highly motivated, yeah, you're going to end up getting your ass kicked. Yeah. I think they're, they're going to real, real bind here. And they look, they're so impotent. Theyent. First of all, we talked about on the foreign crisis. People either feel like he's not doing enough or hasn't done enough. So there's no support for his handling of Ukraine. On the economy, it's a disaster. Inflation, higher, higher, higher. He's not taking on corporate profits, not putting on markups, not lowering gas prices. Doesn't seem generally focused on the issues that you care about. Recipe for a complete route. And he deserves it. There really is no other way to say it. You are lying in a bed of

your own making. That is very true. All right. Some interesting, potentially hopeful movement on the congressional stock trading ban. Let's go ahead and put this insider report up on the screen. So a bipartisan group, 19 lawmakers, laying out three key parameters for a stock trading ban following the House's first hearing on the issue. So important that the House actually had a hearing on reforming the rules around stock ownership in Congress. They are planning to, this bipartisan group is planning to pressure the Committee on House Administration to move forward on an outright ban on stock trading by members of Congress, according to a source with knowledge of the effort. You have Democrats like Jared Golden of Maine, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia. You also have Republicans like Matt Gaetz of Florida,

Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, very odd fellows, kind of a mix of folks here, truly across the ideological spectrum, too. You've got the corporate wing represented, the moderate wing represented, you've got the more progressives represented, you've got, you know, right wings like Matt Gaetz represented here as well. And so the three key sticking points that we really wanted to make sure to highlight for you, because there are very different directions this bill could go. And it could turn into something that's just like sort of the toothless virtue signal that has a million loopholes that people can get out of. Or you could have something that is actually consequential and actually has a meaningful constraint on members of Congress and what they're able to do. So the first piece that

is a point of contention is whether or not to include spouses and dependent children. So there's a lot of different potential bills floating around. Some of them include the spouses and dependent children, people like Nancy Pelosi's husband, Ro Khanna's wife, you know, the adult children who are still dependent. That piece is really important to making this thing ultimately have teeth. Because if the spouses, if the husbands and wives can still trade stock, this ultimately ends up being fairly meaningless because obviously your spouse can just tell you like, here's the inside tip that I'm learning in my committee hearings, then you go make the trade. So that's a really important part. And it seems like pressure is building in the direction of making sure that these spouses and dependent children are included.

The other one is this question of some people are saying like, oh, the blind trust, this isn't really fair because it's expensive to set up. And then, you know, I can't be a member of Congress because I can't afford the fees. The vast majority of your millionaires. I don't want to hear it. Well, and not to mention, and, you know, credit to Abigail Spanberger, I'm not a huge fan of her. On this one, she's like, okay, then just sell it. You don't have to pay a blind trust. That's fine. Just divest. No big deal. So that's the other piece is, you know, pushing towards divestment or blind trust. And then the last one in this one also really matters is, okay, let's say you violate the act, then what happens? Are you going to

actually give this thing some teeth so that there's a significant fine and real consequences for violating the ban on stock trading. Because what we've seen with the Stock Act, which just requires transparency, which ended up being important because it helped to galvanize public pressure around moving further. But when it's routine that members just don't file the stuff they're supposed to file. Yes. And there's no consequence for it. It's like a $200 fine or something utterly pathetic,

and no one seems to really pay attention or ultimately care, very few people. So that's the other piece is making sure this thing has actual teeth so that members have to comply. And also, did you know that there's no public record disclosure required on whether you actually paid the fine? What kind of enforcement mechanism is this? That's nothing. Ludicrous.

Literally nothing. This is what happens whenever they are in charge of regulating themselves. And the only check on it is our public outrage. That's right. So from the beginning, lay out the timeline. Unusual Whales on Twitter begins publishing reports as to how exactly these guys are beating the market,

which is crazy because the best paid people on Wall Street routinely do not beat the market. Then we began talking about it here on our show. It begins to become a meme on the internet. TikTok gets a hold of it. Gen Z gets really invested within the story. It becomes a groundswell. And eventually what happens is Nancy Pelosi is asked about it after other journalists began to do investigations into stock trades, bipartisan members of Congress. She says, well, it's a free market, all of that. That was a great moment for us because obviously she looked like the out of touch, ultra net worth high individual that she is. It was a mask off moment. And the public was like, hey, screw you. You shouldn't be able to

trade stocks. This became, I mean, I saw Dave Portnoy talking about it. I saw people on the left talking about it. It became a real piece of the internet zeitgeist. From there, Congress had to begin to respond. John Ossoff introduces a bill. Josh Hawley introduces a bill. There are now 20 separate bills that are working their way through Congress. However, the establishment is fighting back in every way that they can. We know that Joe Biden was supposed to have it in the draft vision of his State of the union was supposed to call for a stock ban on Congress. And it was taken out. Every other laundry list. I know box thing was in that state of the union.

Oh, identity politics. Every little identity politics. Every LGBTQIA gets a little checkmark. But stock braid stock ban. Oh, no, we can't have that whatsoever. That's what the priorities are in Washington right now. So just goes to show you, really just shows you how powerful that the people inside are fighting back against this. And remember, the average net worth in Congress is well over a million dollars. Most of these people are wildly,

wildly rich and successful, which is great. It's a free country. And if you want to keep making money, don't run for Congress. If you actually want to serve, then you don't, then you have to give up that part. I mean, service, do we, do we think about what we ask the people who sign up for in the uniform, right? Our service members, they get paid dog, like nothing. They don't get paid well. Their lives are subject to the whims of the military. They have all sorts of restrictions on what they can and can't do even outside whenever they're off duty. But we recognize it as a service and then we take care of them after they leave the uniform. Or yeah, well, we should. Obviously, we don't do the best burn pits, you know reform etc but there's a social contract now with Congress we don't seem we seem to have thrown all of

that completely out of the window and let these people become wildly rich I mean Nancy Pelosi and her husband have increased her net worth by something like a hundred million dollars since she first entered office that's crazy town and with active trading of options and things based upon things which are moving through Congress in which she's the Speaker of the House. It's ludicrous. I think it's important to think about why there's been movement on this because it's so unlikely, right? Because this is something that actually impacts like directly members of Congress's ability to cash on in on their position. So why is there any movement on this thing whatsoever?

And I think when the snowball really started to pick up speed was actually when Kevin McCarthy said, hey, we're going to run on this in the midterms. Yes, that's right. And whether or not they're full of shit or have any credibility on corruption ethics whatsoever, the fact that there was this horseshoe, bipartisan, populist outrage about this thing, that's what made this movement so powerful. Because if it was just on the right, then Democrats would just dismiss it and ignore it. If it was just on the left, then Democrats would also just dismiss it and ignore it because they're perfectly content to stick it to their own base all day long. But since you had it coming from all parts of the political spectrum, it made it very difficult ultimately for them to resist and also made it so that, you know, some of these members realized that it was to their

political benefit to try to get out in front of it and be the face of some sort of reform effort ultimately here. So that's what made it so incredibly powerful. And I'm talking in my monologue today about Christian Small's Amazon labor union going on with Tucker Carlson and the freak out over that. But if you really want to have something that actually happens in this country, you have to have a movement that brings in some different ideological perspectives. That's the only way you ultimately really can put pressure on these people. Otherwise, they just respond to their donor base and that's that. So I think that has been such a critical part of why there's

actually been movement, why you've just had the first ever House hearing, why you have so many different versions of this bill, why the provisions are being debated right now. It's one of the few hopeful things within the actual political system. And so to study this and understand how this all went down is so important. So I think the two key moments are Nancy Pelosi mask off saying, well, it's a free market. That comes because she actually subjected herself to some question, get asked the right question and actually says what she thinks, which creates this large level of outrage that causes the right to jump in on it. Kevin McCarthy saying, we're running on this on the midterms. And then you were kind of off to the races to put forward some kind of proposal that people are going to respond well to and feel like you were actually

somewhat responsive to their needs. Yeah, it really is just an amazing, amazing story that we should all, once again, Chad out to Unusual Wales. He's the guy who started this whole thing. And we owe him a very big debt. All right, let's move on. Finally, this is a story very near and dear to our hearts. For those who are sick of hearing him talk about it, you can skip this.

But this is not something that we can just simply let slide. So we brought you the disastrous launch of CNN+. And our friend Sarah Fisher, let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, reporting already. Big cuts now coming for CNN Plus after a slow start. So the official number of people has yet to be acknowledged by the people inside of CNN. But we do know now about the numbers.

So to date, $300 million has been spent on the subscription service, including a sizable marketing investment, up to $100 million. And yet, the start has been such a disaster that they are already planning on cutting a huge portion of the staff, some of the original plans for it, and are scaling back how it's going to look. I've done a lot of reading into this, and it's amazing that the CEO of WarnerMedia, Jason Kylar, before the merger with Discovery, finally was forced to admit that now the plan is in order to roll CNN Plus into HBO Max. Basically, have it a standalone subscription if you want it, but really just make it bundled content

while people are watching movies and whatever awesome shows are on HBO, and then not have to reveal just how much of a disaster the thing really is. Because Jeff Zucker was intent on making streaming CNN Plus its own standalone thing that he thought that people would pay for. And what's really incredible about this is that they say CNN executives worked with the consulting firm McKinsey to think. McKinsey, the famous consulting company,

told CNN they were going to bring in 2 million subscribers in the United States in the an average CNN broadcast, sorry, four times what a CNN broadcast is getting during prime time right now, Crystal. Their average is 677,000 subscribers. My math might be a little bit off. Sorry, math people. But that's just how many multiples of that. And now the rule in the subscription business is that about three to seven percent of your big audience will pay. So it's clear these people have no idea what the hell is going on. Yeah, it's like the most basic understanding of how this ultimately works out. New York Times subscriber base is like seven million people. And they thought they were going to get 18 million? They're going to get double in New York Times? What? Yeah, okay. You're insane.

Yeah, I love the addition to the story of McKinsey. Of course. All the greatest players are insane. Exactly. Well, I think if you've ever needed to understand how fake the meritocracy is, I think this story is the perfect example. You have the highest levels of elite media figures, supposedly the greatest minds in American media trying to figure this thing out.

You put it together with the brightest minds of the McKinsey consultant world, and they come up with something that is absolutely dog shit and completely insane. Right. And the numbers, like how, if you had asked any just random person on the street how this would have gone, tell them you're like, here's what we got. Here's what we're investing in. Here's what we're spending money on. They would have been like, like, are you out of your mind? You spent $300 million on this thing. This is insane. And so we talked about this some last week,

but as a reminder of how this is actually going outside of their, like, highly paid consultant world, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN Plus on a daily basis two weeks into its existence. That's according to CNBC. Fewer than 10,000 people. I cannot begin to communicate how utterly pathetic that is.

If we got that, we would be a failure, a huge failure. Oh, we couldn't last beyond like the first month if we got that. No way we'd be able to keep the lights on in the studio. Or pay our, or do our, we would not make payroll if that was what we were doing. Literally, if they opened up the windows at their headquarters in New York and yelled out the window, they would reach more than 10,000 people. Literally. Yeah, you're right. Literally true.

Yeah. And so what they're finding is they're learning that when they have to actually compete in the free market, guess what? No one really wants anything you have to offer. And I don't know why you didn't know that to start with. I think the other thing that it kind of reveals too is how fake the YouTube algorithms are because you see, you know, the numbers that they're able to get on YouTube when they're actually like competing in the free market here, you see how utterly pathetic it is. So you see how sort of propped up their numbers are on YouTube as well as independent media is being surprised. Oh, 100%. Because it also shows you

the engagement also of their audience, which is that they get these fake views, which are pumped out into the news tabs and the algorithms and all that stuff. But it's not actually engaged groups of people. And look, we said this. We beat that 10,000 figure within the first week of launch with $50,000 of our own money that we had to invest in this product. That is compared to the $300 million that they had to spend in order to do less than what—no, look, I'm not saying we're as powerful as CNN from a popular culture perspective in terms of their impact on the news. Obviously, they have news gathering and all that. And I've praised many good journalists who actually work over there.

But clearly, they have a major editorial problem. Whenever they're shedding viewers, subscribers, like I said, 677,000 in primetime is a total disaster. Yeah. And look, it just shows you how fake this whole business is. It's rigged because what happens here, they make a billion dollars a year in profit just from being part of the cable bundle because a lot of people really like live news. But as that begins to diminish, whenever it comes to negotiation time, seven, eight years from now on their live news property, they're screwed because a lot of people are cutting the cord. And in a cord cutting environment, you got to compete not just with us. I mean,

you got to compete with TikTok. You got to compete with Instagram. You got to compete with whatever your uncle is emailing you. This is a true free market where you don't just have three options. You have a gajillion options. And we've been very lucky that many people have showed up for us. But that takes a lot of time and a lot of trust to build it up over many years. And as we always remind you, that doesn't mean they're going to give up and they're going to be defeated and we're going to win. It means they're going to try harder to rig this market too. And there was already another piece in the New York Times trying to take Substack down a peg and all of that going on. So you have to see these things as a piece.

I mean, the Elon Musk Twitter story sort of fits into this as well. This whole regime of censorship and telling you which platforms you can go on, which content sources are okay, which platforms are okay, what podcasts are dangerous now. All that's an attempt to keep control over a market that they really aren't able to compete in just on their merits. Yeah, and we're going to see – I mean the Substack article from the New York Times was a perfect example of – they tried to cast it as some crazy right-wing company which is elevating all these horrific voices. I went and checked.

OK? I actually ran. The number one person on Substack is Heather Cox Richardson, who is a huge Biden lib. Number two, I think, is the Dispatch. Or maybe it might be Matt Taibbi. They switch back and forth all the time. The Dispatch is a Never Trump magazine. The Bulwark is also a Never Trump magazine. Then it's Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, who are within the top five. But of the top 20, the majority of the outlets are actually establishment-type liberal ones. Matt Iglesias is in the top 20. Judd Legume, the guy who's always going after corporate sponsors of Fox News.

By the way, whatever. It's a free country. He can do whatever he wants. There are several establishment, never-Trump-type organizations. People who have CNN contributorships who are owners of some of the top substacks. It's just ludicrous to say that it's a right-wing company. The Internet is a massive place. That means sometimes people like yours truly will succeed, and we will succeed right alongside many other people who are filling different niches. That's the real promise of the technology from the beginning. Right, and like you said, I'm not like, oh, it's terrible that some annoying resistance person is doing.

I think it's cringe. But it's a free country. Okay. She's obviously providing something. She does history. People like it. And people like it. Okay.

That's cool. That's great. Whatever. So anyway, if you're secure in your ability to compete in that marketplace, that's the attitude you have. And if you are like CNN and you know you're going to fail in that marketplace, then you have to, you know, you got to put it down. You got to smear it. You got to try to make it so that people aren't allowed to go or talk or speak in these various forums. Absolutely right.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, something very related to that, actually. Something pretty interesting happened last week. Amazon labor union president Christian Smalls went on Tucker Carlson's show to talk about their David versus Goliath victory against Amazon. So, they have the most significant labor leader in the country going on the most popular right-wing show in the country. Here is how that went. It's a short segment, so I'm just going to go ahead and play most of it for you. Take a listen.

Sandy Cortez spends a lot of time telling you that she's on the side of the worker. She's a modern wobbly. She's the Walter Ruther of our day. And that's why last year she got to stand alongside striking workers at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse. And we're for that because they need the help. But at the last minute, Sandy Cortez bailed on the whole thing. And that infuriated labor organizers who just want a big vote to unionize the Staten Island facility. Now, Amazon is stepping up its effort to crush the union. Amazon has just banned words like union. It's an employee chat app. Christian Smalls is a union leader at Amazon, and we're happy to have him join us now. Christian, thanks so much for coming on. So were you surprised that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has said repeatedly that she's

on the side of the worker against the corporation, wasn't standing with you at the barricades. Yeah, I mean, you know, it wasn't just her. It was all of them pretty much, you know. It's not fair. You know, I don't want to make it just between us and AOC because, you know, a lot of them didn't show up. And, you know, once again, we have no ill will against them. We know that whether they showed up or not, they didn't make or break our election. We just had to continue to organize.

Yeah, I mean, it's just it's a weird moment because, I mean, I'm on the right. I've never been particularly pro-union, but it does seem like Amazon needs some counterbalance. Like it's this huge company. The workers have no power. And maybe we could, I don't know, share a little power with people who work there. So that's my view anyway. So tell us where you are in your organizing efforts. Well, right now, you know, we're fighting for a contract. You know, Amazon's disputing the election results.

So we're walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time. We're fighting for a contract. We're preparing for another election in two weeks on April 25th. We're going to be voting at a second location directly across the building that we just unionized. So we're in the thick of a fight right now, you know, a legal battle. And, you know, we just have to stay grounded and pretty much begin our campaign all over again. You'd think that Amazon would be open to a union when you it's a very progressive company. Why do you think they're trying to thwart you from organizing? Amazon hasn't been unionized in this country since the beginning of its existence.

And they're very anti-union. You know, they want they created a system that hires and fires people. They create a system that they have full control of the working people. And having a union obviously brings representation for the workers that will benefit the workers at the bottom, like myself, hourly associates, entry-level workers

that don't get the right to negotiate. So forming a union gives us the right to collect a bargain with the company, form a contract to protect ourselves. So that's exactly what we're trying to do with the Amazon labor union. We're hoping that we'll be a catalyst for something that'll take place nationwide. Well, I certainly am rooting for you. I mean, maybe if they throw some more woke slogans at you, you'll forget you can't feed your family. Right. Chris, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thank you for

having me. Okay. There's a lot to note here. So first of all, amazing tax rich jacket. Second of all, Tucker clearly most interested in the AOC rift angle. And as I've shown here before, Fox News is so committed to attacking AOC that they will even temporarily pretend to support workers unionizing in order to attempt to own her. But Christian Smalls is no fool. He quickly parries that point, noting that he's got no ill will and that no politicians showed up before moving on to the reason he wanted to do the segment in the first place, to explain to Tucker's audience why workers need unions. Second, I actually laughed out loud when Tucker described Amazon as a progressive company. There is nothing progressive about a

tax-dodging monopoly with a business model reliant on chewing workers up and spitting them out at a rate of 150% turnover every single year. The fact that they are aggressively union busting, including using blatantly illegal tactics, should disabuse everyone of the notion that Amazon is in any way progressive. And that should be made obvious by the report Tucker cites from The Intercept revealing that Amazon was banning words like union

and wage slavery and even restroom. Finally, Tucker reluctantly himself makes a pretty solid case for unionizing. He acknowledges he's not in general a big fan of unions, but that Amazon seems like it needs some counterbalance. That's what he says. He goes on to say, like, it's this huge company. The workers have no power. And maybe we could, I don't know, share a little power with the people that work there.

Exactly. That's literally all that unions are ultimately about. He closes by saying, quote, I certainly am rooting for you while making sure sure to take a shot at, quote, woke slogans. But you know what? If opposition to woke slogans and Tucker's large conservative audience, numbering in the millions, gets to hear a conversation that is overwhelmingly pro-union from both the host and the guest. It is not a close call at all. If you believe in the labor movement and worker power, this was absolutely wonderful to watch. But predictably, a liberal meltdown quickly ensued, and the attacks on Chris were as silly as they were dishonest. So one of the folks who runs Media Matters took a single screenshot from that interview with a chyron mentioning the AOC beef and used that to characterize the entire segment, tweeting, quote, yeah, this isn't it, before going on to explain,

quote, Carlson is a hateful bigot and he uses his program every night to spread his hateful bigotry. Someone like Smalls appearing on his show only gives Tucker credibility he doesn't deserve. Guys, listen, Tucker is a popular host who already has a massive audience and a primetime show. Christian Smalls cannot do anything about that, but he sure as hell can provide that large audience with some actually useful information for a few minutes, which is exactly what he did. So Media Matters dude continued, saying, Furthermore, spare me the whole get the message out bullshit. On his best nights, Tucker has 1% of the population tuning in.

I'd imagine it's the least likely to be swayed 1% of the population in America. There are more effective, less harmful ways to get the message out. Okay, dude, then if Tucker is so insignificant, what are you so upset about? And further, what is even the point of your project at Media Matters if the right-wing media ecosystem is totally fringe and totally meaningless? He closes his thread with this condescending mess, quote, Tucker Carlson is your enemy, and if you don't understand that, you have no idea what we're actually up against. Imagine having the audacity to chide an actually heroic working class movement leader for failing to follow your arbitrary and failing code of DC conduct.

Some of these supposed allies of black and brown people sure do have a lot of patronizing contempt for the largely black and brown working class, as it turns out. Now, Chris has been underestimated from the beginning. He's been smeared, he's been dismissed, and he still is to this day. Listen, put your minds at ease, professional liberals. Chris Smalls has got this. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he sure doesn't need your dumbass advice. As Dr. Thrasher put it on Twitter, quote, very curious how many liberals want Chris Smalls, whose rising coalition is winning in arenas they never have, expect him to conform to their norms and behaviors, even as their coalitions are consistently losing. But there's also something bigger going on here. Listen, part of the right has basically boxed themselves into a rhetorical corner during the Trump years.

They were happy to say the words working class pretend like they support workers while giving tax cuts to the rich and stacking the NLRB with union busters. Their support for workers through symbolic gestures like putting workers on stage at the RNC or Trump donning a hard hat and pretending to mine. It had all the substance of Nancy Pelosi kneeling in Kente cloth or Amazon putting Black Lives Matter up on their homepage. But this rhetoric was basically safe so long as workers were powerless and represented no real threat to the established order. Now they're faced with the uncomfortable situation of their rhetoric about support for the working class bumping up against actual working class people challenging corporate bosses, who the right, by the way, has characterized as woke or progressive. And while Republican elites didn't mean a word of what they were saying about workers, the American people, by and large, actually did. That's why Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly back the strikers at John Deere. That's why support for unions is near record highs. That's why the number of shops filing for union elections

has jumped up 57% year over year. And Tucker, by the way, is not the only right-wing media figure who's offering at least modest, tacit support for the Amazon union effort. Our wonderful friend and new Breaking Points partner, Max Alvarez, just joined Megyn Kelly for a thoughtful interview in which Megyn acknowledged both that trickle-down economics was not working and that right-to-work was a misleading concept. The whole thought about right-to-work states and so on was that it would give corporate America to work was a misleading concept. The whole thought about right to work states and so on was that it would give corporate America to do right by the workers. You don't want to be told what to do by the unions. Do right by the workers and you won't have to deal with this

problem. And if you don't do right by the workers, things are going to go south. They are going to revolt at some point. And we're seeing it just feels to me like we're seeing more and more of that. A lot of corporations not doing right by the workers, not wanting to take care of their staff in the way they should. And I mean, I know you've been talking about Kroger. That's a great example.

Now we're seeing Starbucks, big union push there. The numbers are, okay, Starbucks said quarterly profit jumped 31% at the end of last year to 816 million.

That's amazing per the New York Times. Meanwhile, more than 200 Starbucks locations across the country and some 30 states have filed petitions to organize

because the old trickle down doesn't seem to be happening outside of the coffee pot. You're right. I mean, like in the end, it really is that simple. Like, you know, the trickle down theory was nice. It sounded good in principle. We have enough data to see now it didn't work. It didn't work for us. Right. It worked for a very small few people, right. But for the vast amount of workers who, as I said, have been working longer, working harder and been more productive over the past half century and yet have seen the majority of their wages stagnate as the cost of living continues to go up. Just as recently as a few years ago, you would never hear anyone, even nominally on the right, acknowledge that unions can be good, right to work sucks and corporate giants are abusive and that trickle down is a lie.

Never. And while I'm not deluding myself that this represents any meaningful shift among elected Republican elites, it does open the door for exactly what we are witnessing among regular people right now, a newly energized grassroots labor uprising which crosses cultural, geographic, and political divides. I might also add that the opportunity to talk about actual working class power with an ideologically diverse audience is part of what makes me so proud of this show. We've had quite a few folks who consider themselves to be on the right reach out to tell us how they are rethinking long-held anti-union views. And every time I see one of these messages, it absolutely delights me and would not be possible if we were just here preaching to a choir

of people who share my views on the left already. Now, if the Democratic Party was worth anything, they would seize the moment. They would use this opening to press the case on labor rights. They would fight like hell for the PRO Act and obliterate any politician, Democrat or Republican, who tries to stand in the way of the rights of workers to organize. Make it clear to the American people who actually stands with working people and who just wants to use them as political props. Instead, elected Dems will settle for being marginally better than the Republicans by staffing the NLRB with non-sociopaths by offering rhetorical support for union drives before quickly walking it back, of course. And the professional liberal activist class will chastise working class leaders who don't abide by their D.C. code of conduct.

And Chris Smalls, the Amazon workers, the Starbucks workers, and many more will keep winning whether or not a single elite actually cares to help. This was such a clear demonstration of so many of the things that we've been talking about here. 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, in the year 2022,

it almost feels trite to do a monologue about free speech on the internet. It often feels like everything that has to be said has been said. And it's entered

the culture war years ago. It's fueled a debate fundamentally. The way that we mediate conflict in our society as reflected on the internet. But the debate comes front and center again with this year, with Elon Musk's bid in order to buy Twitter. Admittedly, as he said, not for economic reasons, but to stop what he believes is too much censorship on the internet. Now, before we mediate the conflict of today, I really think it's worth, let's take a trip down memory lane. What was the original promise of the internet? So we can just see how far that we have come. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee laid out a system of interconnected

computers at CERN and what would become the earliest conception of the internet. He wrote, quote, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organization and the projects it describes. He adds, for this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. Now, look, it's important to say Berners-Lee was not talking about technical constraints on information, but about the observation is still key. From the day the internet was born, it was recognized that placing restraints on information, not allowing it to flow freely, would disrupt the promise of sharing across a distributed network. This promise was alive in the 1990s vision of the web, and it was with the explosion

of decentralized protocols and anonymity on the internet where centralized choke points for information did not exist. But that couldn't last forever. As humanity onboarded to the internet in millions by the month, it became a mess. Finding stuff became a real problem, and thus began the first moves at organization. First were walled gardens, but eventually they were supplanted by Google, a simple index of the internet. The indexing system was brilliant in its regard, organization. First were walled gardens, but eventually they were supplanted by Google, a simple index of the internet. The indexing system was brilliant in its regard, but of course, what Google discovered is that when you become the index agent for the internet,

you get to control the index and what people see. All of a sudden, we had a centralized choke point. More importantly, we had a vision of what would come for the web. Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all of them involve a platform which derives value from its network effects. We get the benefit of their use. They get the benefit of everybody using it, which allows them to aggregate data and have the greatest advertising softwares known to man. But with great responsibility and power and wealth and more came a new problem. What do you do with all this content? In the earliest days, these companies, they all confronted the same problem, illegal content, controversial content, the need to figure out what to do with it. From that point came the de facto and original promise of the internet that generally governed how platforms companies would serve and most of the humanity.

We will remove the least amount of content possible and seek to have a broad trust with the public. Hence, the don't be evil Google mantra. The mindset dominated Silicon Valley about a decade ago when then Twitter CEO Dick Costello famously pronounced, we are the free speech wing of the free speech party at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. That declaration was important. It represented at the time the Western elites saw the promise of the Internet as one that was able to allow free exchange of ideas in authoritarian countries, which then led in some part to the Arab Spring protests in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere. The same was often repeated by Mark Zuckerberg himself inside of Facebook, who as a Jew would often hold up Holocaust deniers as an example of worse types of speech that he would still defend having on his platform. He said, quote, I don't believe our platform should take that down because I think

there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong. It is hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I think, as abhorrent as some of these examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. Humble answer there. That seems like a lifetime ago, but that was 2018. You can just see within a span of a few years, the free speech wing and the free speech party caved quickly. It began first to bow to foreign government pressure abroad, but eventually to social pressure here in the U.S., which has turned out to be far more powerful.

Zuckerberg himself made that Holocaust denial statement just four years ago in reference to why Alex Jones should not be taken off the platform. Well, you all know how that story played out. And 2020, of course, really was the year that everything broke apart. The COVID-19 pandemic gave expansive definitions of misinformation, as defined by the state, to the tech companies, who then used it to approve a censorship regime that people had never seen before. That's how the lab leak theory got censored. That's how discussions about masks and lockdowns

and vaccine efficacy were quashed without even the hesitation. And it was that infrastructure that saw the unprecedented banning by Twitter of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. And then on January 6th, the deplatforming of Donald Trump, the sitting president of the United States.

Now we see with regularity, the deplatforming of accounts that are dissident to the cultural milieu as Twitter itself is headed by a CEO that has said he sees no reason why he should be bound by the First Amendment and that harm reduction is their main concern. Donald Trump was taken off. An elite panic about right-wing terrorism was used to justify an even more censorious environment, and the rules continued to get bent. One of the seminal moments came around the same time, when Zuckerberg, despite defending Holocaust deniers' right to free speech on his platform, reversed himself completely in October 2020, saying his thinking had involved.

What was happening in October 2020, by the way? That's how quickly things change. The devolution of the promise of the internet into the chaotic mess that we have right now is a genuine tragedy for mankind. I maintain the original promise of the internet. Elon Musk fight aside, it is worth it for all of you to consider what we lost in such a short period of time, how valuable the original idea of unrestrained information and networks can have for the future of our society. It really is worth, you know, people don't go back and see some of the original. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Join us now, the founder of Status Coup, wonderful independent investigative journalist, Jordan Cheridan. Great to see you, Jordan.

Good to see you, man. Good to see you, man. Hey, thanks for having me. So listen, before we jump into this, you all have been doing indispensable reporting. Some of the few people who were there on the ground in Staten Island from the beginning who actually understood that Christian Smalls and his team, Derek Palmer and all the rest, actually had a shot at pulling this thing off. And I want to say to our audience, you guys, this outlet really deserves your support. So tell people how to follow you, how to support you if they believe in your work. Yeah, we're on YouTube, Status Coup, C-O-U-P. Click the bell for all notifications because they don't like to show us that much.

You get a text when we're live, statuscoup.com slash text. And if you want to support our on-the-ground reporting, that's statiscoup.com slash join for five bucks a month. Great. Awesome. All right. So with that out of the way, let's talk about what we brought you here to talk about today, which is the Amazon Union fight. And here's the lay of the land, guys. You all know they won a historic victory at that Staten Island warehouse. They have another vote that is coming up. At the same time, Amazon has dramatically escalated the tactics.

And you all had a piece up at Status Quo. Let's go ahead and throw this element up on the screen. Talking about why the New York-Amazon union victory was such a game changer. So before we get into the very latest news and their union busting tactics, just give us a little bit of the context here of why people should care so much about what is happening on Staten Island right now. Yeah, I think what really is important about Staten Island is they have gone against convention, and especially in organized labor, which hasn't really changed things up in the last 30, 40 years. They basically did a guerrilla campaign, kind of like guerrilla warfare, basically shunning traditional labor advice, consultation, traditional labor that told them what you're doing is basically suicidal in terms of victory.

And they are basically doing this in kind of a digital media meets barbecue kind of way. So, you know, barbecues for workers, free food, snappy TikTok videos. And I think that's really resonated because it's kind of like all politics is local. Well, for unionization, you really have to hit the demographic and the geography of where you're trying to unionize. Most of the workers in that massive warehouse were young people. I remember the union tent was right next to the bus stop. It was mostly, I would say, 18 to 26, 27-year-olds coming off that bus. So they have very strategically done this, and it's a blueprint for other Amazon warehouses or workers wanting to

unionize elsewhere to really, if you target the demographic of your warehouse or cafe, if you do things strategically and smart digitally, you really have a shot to overcome a lot of the union busting. So talk to us then about the upcoming fight. What are the central issues at stake? Is it any different from organizing and the effort of the original union vote? Amazon has definitely escalated. In the final weeks of the previous one, they actually, it seemed, allowed more organizing, maybe because of all the complaints that were being filed against them.

Here, they have added more security to the parking lot, basically to surveil the organizers, which are continuing to do the same type of organizing outside the warehouse. Inside the warehouse, they've already written up a couple of the union organizers in this other warehouse that's soon to vote for solicitation. And they've also shifted and moved some of their over $2,000 a day union consultants to full-time. So now some of those union consultants that were parachuting in and out for the last year, they're in the warehouse all the time pulling workers aside for one-on-ones. And it's really striking because most of this union busting backfired at JFK 8, but they're just doubling down on it across the street at LJ 5.

Yeah, well, and that's what I'm curious about because Chris also explained to me that the workforce at the, this is a sorting facility now that will be voting in just about a week, that the workforce is also different because it's a lot more part-time. That makes the organizing challenge even that much more difficult. It means that this may not be their main gig. They may have two, three other jobs that they are balancing to try to make ends meet. It means that concerns are also a little bit different. What they would want to fight for in a contract is different from what was going on at the warehouse facility. So as you pointed out, ultimately with JFK 8, those union busting tactics, they not only didn't work, they seemed to directly backfire. You all had video of a guy

that I love. I think he's called Uncle Pat or something like that. He was like, was initially kind of not too into the union. He's a Trump supporting Republican. He got pissed off at the fact that they arrested Chris Smalls and some of the other workers. He ends up not just being for the union, but flipping like hundreds of votes from no to yes to make some of the critical difference down the stretch. So we saw that it really backfired over across the street at the warehouse. Do you think that it is also backfiring at the sorting facility, or do you think that it's landing and gaining some traction with a very different workforce there? I believe it's backfiring because, yes, a lot of these workers are part-time, but again, a lot of these workers are young.

And, I mean, before this Staten Island victory, I mean, here or there, there was media coverage, but not a lot. There's been a tsunami of media coverage now, mostly positive. So all those workers, a couple of them I've spoken to, that honestly weren't as plugged in to what was going on across the street. They came to their job and left. They're now basically inundated in a good way of the victory across the street. Some of the workers from LDJ5 were at the press conference I just covered last week. So I think it's backfiring. I also think, yes, it's more difficult because a lot of them are part-time, but I think part of the pitch from ALU to those workers is Amazon thrives on having part-time and seasonal workers that they don't have to pay benefits to, that they hire and fire at a very rapid pace. So part of having a union, a big part of our demands is making you full-time and getting you those benefits.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, in terms of the people that you've spoken to and more, what's the enthusiasm level on the ground? Is it helping the case for ahead of the union vote? Because despite Amazon propaganda, are they getting access to better information? Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of donations have come in after ALU's victory, the Staten Island warehouse, the massive one. So they have more resources now. And I think Christian Smalls strategically going around the country, meeting with labor leaders, but also speaking with more collaboration with Starbucks Workers United, who is obviously having huge momentum, I think he's actually getting even more kind of strategic weaponry to tailor the message to them. And again,

I think these workers across the street, I mean, momentum is momentum. It cannot be ignored. So a lot of those workers, I spoke with one the other day who was just like, we honestly, we didn't think it was possible across the street. So now the victory there is giving a little bit more of optimism that they could win. But it is going to be harder for the reasons Crystal stated. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On the other hand, if this is your part-time gig and it's not, you know, your full, like, the full source of your income, that also may make you feel more comfortable to take a little bit of a risk. So that does cut both ways. The last question for you, Jordan, is, you know, I track this stuff closely, and you're seeing not just the Starbucks workers.

Their last, I think, four elections, they won unanimously. Not a single worker voted against the union, which is incredible. We see now Apple retail stores moving, filing for union elections. That's incredible. We saw Verizon retail workers winning the right to a union as well. And just the numbers, it's not just anecdotal. The general counsel of the NLRB says that union election petitions are up 57% year over year. So how's the victory with Amazon playing into this broader movement of worker uprising across the country? Yeah, I think even before Amazon, there was a political factor here. I mean, Amazon, Starbucks, workers I spoke to basically said very similar. Yeah, we got like a $1,400 check and a kick in the ass this pandemic. We have not gotten relief from the government,

even state unemployment. Workers I spoke to said they were getting letters in the mail that they have to repay their rental relief or unemployment for bureaucratic reasons or incompetence. So I think there was political reasons like, you know, Paul Revere hasn't come for a lot of workers around the country from the government. And I think Amazon in particular, if that, this could be a tidal wave, not to minimize what Starbucks has historically done. But if Amazon is two for two, they already have, by my count, like 115 warehouses that have reached out. I think then you could be looking, I don't want to

get people too hopeful. Then the next question is, when are you going to do Walmart? Which would be a Herculean task. Walmart obviously is the biggest company in America. But I think if Amazon starts to see the tidal wave that Starbucks has, then you start looking for the biggest employer. Well, people realize with this, like, oh, my God, if you can do it against Amazon, it's actually possible. Not that it's easy, not that they won't throw millions of dollars and fire you and intimidate all that stuff, But it is actually possible. So I know Chris has said that it's not just Amazon facilities that have been reaching out to them. They've been hearing from Walmart workers. They've been hearing from Dollar General workers and other retail and

warehouse workers across the country. So it really is one of the most hopeful things that's going on. And just to emphasize again what I said at the beginning, listen, mainstream media obviously is completely ignorant that any of this was even happening. This groundswell, which could turn into one of the most significant stories of the decade. Jordan Tarriton and his team was there on the ground from the beginning. They were some of the few that actually knew that this had a shot that took Christian Smalls and his team seriously, that didn't underestimate what was going on here. And so, listen, he beat the mainstream media with many fewer resources at their own game.

And I really just encourage you all to support him if you're able. The links, Jordan will put them all down in the description so people can find out where you guys are and how to support you if they're interested. There we go. Thank you, Jordan. Appreciate it, man.

Thanks so much. Our pleasure. Thank you guys for joining us so much. Yeah, thank you guys so much. That was an awesome show. It's really good to be back here in Washington. Just as a reminder, we don't have the show on Thursday due to a variety of personal scheduling circumstances. But we will be back here tomorrow on Tuesday.

As always, a special thank you to our premium subscribers and especially now to our lifetime subscribers. Let's throw to the plaques there. Look at that. Look at that. At the end of every single show. That's a thing of beauty right there. You will have that. We have our beautiful Made in the USA plaques,

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