Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/20/23: Trump Humiliates DeSantis w/ Florida Endorsements, Republican Debt Ceiling Demands, Abortion Pill SCOTUS, Big Business Child Labor, New UFO, Fox Settlement, Is Elon Right About AI?, Desantis Disney Fail, Saudis Buying NFL Team

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump humiliating DeSantis in number of Florida endorsements, RFJ Jr Stuns in strong 14% poll after his announcement, Republicans reveal demands in debt ceiling fight, the Abortion Pill is in jeopardy, Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips trashes his colleagues for lying about their feelings on Feinstein's need to retire, Big Business pushes Child labor in Iowa, a New UFO video revealed in Congressional hearing, Fox News sticks Taxpayers with bill for election lies by claiming them as a write off, Saagar looks into if Elon is right on the threat of AI Armageddon, Krystal looks into Desantis' Disney fail, and we're joined by Grant Paulsen at (@1067TheFan) to discuss the Saudis potentially buying the Washington Commanders in secret.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed we do. Lots of interesting things we're taking a look at this morning. First of all, Donald Trump racking up some endorsements in Florida that are pretty embarrassing for Ron DeSantis. And also a new pullout on the Democratic primary side that I think a lot of folks will be surprised at, including the current occupant of the White House. So we'll break that down for you as well. We've got new details about the Kevin McCarthy debt ceiling proposal. Is that going to be a go or no go? I'm going to say no go, but we'll give you those details as well. Some developments with regards to the Supreme Court. So number one, another wrinkle of Dianne

Feinstein being unable to do her job. It really limits what Democrats can do with regards to the ethics complaints against Justice Thomas. So that's one piece. The other piece is the Supreme Court pushing off a decision on what they're going to do about the abortion pill. So we've got that for you. Also, Iowa passing a new child labor law. This is the latest state in what has become a trend nationwide. Sagar's taking a look at some UFO footage and testimony. Big hearing yesterday. I'll let him break that down for me and for all of you as well.

And Grant Paulson, someone I actually grew up with, he's going to be taking a look at whether the Saudis are trying to buy the Washington football team, which would really be something. Great. So we'll get all the details there and find out what the heck exactly is going on. But before any of that, we have a bit of an ask for you guys this morning because we are working very hard to build a new and very beautiful set. Yes, we've talked quite a bit here about that. No, it's not about Spotify this time. We promise. Look, we've always promised to be up front with everybody, our premium members, with the audience. The lights for the new studio just

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Yeah, and just to add to that, one thing that'll be cool is the new set should be ready right around our two-year anniversary of the show. I think exactly on our two-year anniversary. Which is kind of cool and kind of fortuitous, and we didn't exactly plan it out that way, so it's neat that it's coming together in that way. And also, listen, we're looking forward to 2024. We want to build out a product that is going to be great,

obviously for you guys, you're our first and foremost priority, but also to try to build a bigger audience and expand the reach of the show so that it can have even more impact. So if you're able to help us out with that, we greatly appreciate it. Promise we'll be putting it to very good and very immediate use that you'll be able to see really shortly. Breakingpoints.com, if you can. All right, let's go ahead and start with the show. Just an absolutely amazing statistic, which will surprise nobody who watches this show, but will surprise many people in the Republican establishment. Trump is wiping the floor with Ron DeSantis in endorsements, not only endorsements from

elected officials, GOP nationwide, but also in his own home state of Florida. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This was accurate as of Wednesday night. In terms of GOP presidential endorsements from either congressmen, governors, or other statewide or national elected officials, Donald Trump has now racked up 61 presidential endorsements, actually 63 as of this morning because of some late breaking developments. And now three endorsements for Governor Ron DeSantis, including people like Chip Roy and a few other members of Congress, but those who are actually really on the other side of Trump's ire.

Not saying they aren't important, just noting just an overall number figure. But really, a certain incident sticks out more than any about why people who are even representing the state of Florida are not going with Ron DeSantis. And it actually speaks very much to his own political abilities as a politician, not just at the national level in the way you might think about it, like speaking, but in the wheeling and dealing from behind the scenes. This specifically involved Greg Stubbe. He's a were congressman from Florida He's a Republican. Let's go put this up there on the screen

He actually endorsed Donald Trump immediately after a meeting with Rhonda Sanchez as big as an F as there is and Here's what he had to say. They actually asked him like why did you do this? He says quote DeSantis never once reached out to me during my five years in Congress, nor replied to my multiple attempts to connect. Stubbe recalled a recent news conference dealing with damage from Hurricane Ian, where the governor's aides initially invited him to stand along DeSantis, only to then tell him he would not be part of the event whenever he showed up.

Oof. Trump, on the other hand, was the first person that Stubbe remembers calling him in the ICU to wish him well after he was injured in a January tree trimming incident. To this day, I have not heard from Governor DeSantis, he says. Things suddenly changed last week when Trump started rolling out Florida congressional leaders endorsements. He says, quote, for the first time ever, I hear from DeSantis's political person. For Stubbe, the outrage was too little, too late. He continues to have sharp words for DeSantis, criticizing his robust political travel schedule

amid a busy legislative season. Floridians want him focused on Florida. I mean, look, when you've got your home state, and this isn't just one guy, just so people know, like we've got significant numbers. Here's the endorsement that I referenced, it's going to put this up there specifically about that. He even literally says Trump is the only person that can reverse the disastrous policies of the Biden administration. And in the tweet, Crystal, that he announced, he said, just had a great meeting with Ron DeSantis, proud to endorse President Trump. That is as big of a slap in the face as it gets. And at this current point, guys, Trump is absolutely wiping the floor with DeSantis in Florida. Put this up there. Vern Buchanan, late last night, that's what I alluded to,

is now the eighth Republican to endorse Trump. Eighth Florida Republican. To endorse Trump. One day after DeSantis visited Capitol Hill to speak with GOP elected officials. I don't know what more evidence that people need. Not only just in terms of the voters, but also in terms of his hold on the institutional GOP. Well, here's the thing.

These people, none of them has a courageous boat in their body. They're all finger in the wind. Right. Every one of them. I mean, think back to right after the midterms when DeSantis has this big night in Florida, wins easily. It's the only state in the country where Republicans do really, really well. New York being, you know, secondary to that. And Trump, you know, looked like his candidates didn't do well. He had a whole stench around him. And he announces right after that. And even Matt Gaetz couldn't find it in his heart to make his way to Trump's presidential announcement.

You'll recall apparently there were weather issues. Now, we checked the weather. It was like perfectly sunny here, perfectly sunny down in Florida, but he had to come up with an excuse not to be there. Now you can see they're looking at the polls. They're looking at the mood. They're looking at the landscape that we're looking at saying, listen, it's going to be Trump-focused media.

It's going to be indictments. It's going to be trials. It's going to be all about Trump's legal quandaries and situation, there is no oxygen left over for anyone, including Ron DeSantis. And then you layer on top of that, you know, you talked about Stubbe and how there was no hour, which is astonishing to me. I mean, this is someone who is your home state congressional delegation. I'm shocked that they're not buddies. Like usually that's the way these things work. And then with Vern Buchanan, they note that DeSantis did not come to Buchanan's aid when he was in a fight to chair the Ways and Means Committee earlier this year. It did not go unnoticed. Now, listen, these people are

egomaniacs. Should any of this matter? No, it shouldn't. That they're like how much they flatter your ego and, you know, in Bernie's words, like he's not going to call you and wish you happy birthday. That stuff shouldn't matter. But it does. But it does. Yeah. And if you're playing, DeSantis is really trying to play kind of an inside game. I know they would object to that, but that's the reality of where his support primarily lies. You have to be extra good at this type of just basic blocking and tackling political outreach exactly for moments like this.

So, you know, to make the Bernie contrast, Bernie at least had a big grassroots base going for him. He was truly an outsider. So you might have forgiven him a little bit for not doing the like typical political outreach. But even for him, this ended up being a problem for him in terms of the Democratic primary that he didn't even try to change the dynamic in South Carolina with the elected officials and with Jim Clyburn there in particular. So it's even an issue for a candidate like Bernie Sanders. It's definitely an issue for a candidate like Ron DeSantis, who's trying to play the inside track. He can only be an outsider whenever you're a guy like Trump, who is independently famous and you have a genuine

base of people who support you. Remember, you know, not even, what was it? Jeff Sessions, I think, was the first GOP official to endorse Trump. Maybe he was a congressman. I forget exactly. But the point was that he had no endorsements, but he was winning in the primary. DeSantis is not winning in the primary. So you have to trade it. For him to get endorsements, the reason why I think it's important, especially from the state of Florida, it has to be a united front of, I turn Florida into a dark red state. Every single person from Florida knows that if they cross me, they're going to suffer consequences. Guess what? They all crossed you. Stubbe in particular, he didn't even stab me in the back. He stabbed you in the eye and he didn't care. And you know, this also gets particular, he didn't even stab me in the back. He stabbed you in the eye. And he didn't care.

And, you know, this also gets to, again, some base political instincts. Let's go think about some of the governors who were elected president and what made them all different and what made them good politicians. How exactly did Governor Bill Clinton from Arkansas, no offense, Arkansas, but let's just say,'s just say not the most important state in the union. How did he become the 1992 presidential nominee and eventually become the president? He was a fantastic politician who stayed up until 2 AM every single night calling every state legislator in Arkansas. The whole state was united behind him. After he solidified his control over the state, then he got himself head of like the

Democratic Governors Association. He was constantly on a plane, you know, scratching backs and helping fundraise for Jerry, you know, people in California, people in wherever, all across the country, became a national figure. That way, whenever he ran for president, he not only had name ID, he had institutional backing. That stuff matters whenever you're trying to have more of an upswing campaign, especially, I think, for a guy like Ron DeSantis who so many of the – for DeSantis to get to 51 percent, he needs to unite the never-Trumpers but also people who like Trump, who might be willing to move on from Trump. There's no evidence, in my opinion, that those people even really exist. But let's say that they do. A key part of that would be getting people with credibility in the base, people like your congressman and other, to go ahead and support him. It doesn't exist yet.

The bottom line is the Bill Clinton point is a good one because, I mean, put aside his terrible politics and policies, all those things. He was a political savant. Oh, yeah. And there was nothing that he was better at. I mean, he was famous for having a photographic memory for people's names, their faces, and a little bit of their backstory. So you could see, you know, someone he saw once at some event, he'd see them again, and it's, oh, Susie, how's your son doing? You know, how's Kansas? Or whatever. I mean, he would have these few little details like a Rolodex in his brain. And so what that meant, all of that outreach and all of that sowing the seeds that he did before his presidential race meant that when he did have a little bit of good fortune in the race, people wanted to come on board.

Whereas DeSantis now has the opposite situation. When he's a little bit down, people are looking for the opportunity to stab him in the back. You see this in media all the time, too. Like, you can tell who has been a jerk in terms of, like, media personalities by whose staff is ready to leak on them the minute that they have the opportunity to. It's the same thing with politicians. Like, if you, you know, invited someone to your event saying they're going to stand with you and then you don't, that's humiliating for that person.

You don't think they're going to be looking for every opportunity to try to stick it to you when they have a chance. And Stubbe certainly found his moment here. So, you know, it's an extraordinary just example of how the political winds have shifted, where people clearly think things are going at this point. And it's especially devastating for someone who was thinking that they were going to have a lot of institutional support behind them. And that was really their play in order to win. Clearly, that game plan has fallen apart. Certainly did.

Let's go and move on to the next one. A fascinating twist in American political history. Robert Francis Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., prominently known for speaking out about vaccines and specifically coming to prominence around COVID, has now announced his official entrance into the Democratic primary for 2024. And before you laugh, he's actually making more of a dent than people think. Here is a little bit from his announcement yesterday. Let's take a listen. And the coup de grace was the lockdown. The lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history. And I'm going to tell you about that in a second. And I blame President Trump for the lockdown. I do not believe that everybody at CIA is a bad person. My daughter-in-law, Amber Rillis, who is one of the top officers on this campaign,

spent her entire career as a clandestine agent for the CIA as a spy in the weapons of mass destruction program in some of the most dangerous parts of the earth. And I've never met anybody with such courage. This is what happens when you censored somebody for 18 years. I got a lot to talk about. They shouldn't have shut me up that long, because now I'm going to really let loose on them for the next 18 months. They're going to hear a lot. There you go. A little bit of a taste.

It made COVID a big centerpiece going after the Biden administration and even Donald Trump kind of running at him almost from what I guess would be coded right today. Although, who knows? I guess it would have been coded left 15 years ago. go, somebody who's really been more on the fringes of the American political system for 18 years, but coming to, obviously, to prominence, at least, with some portion of the public, because, let's go and put this up there on the screen. Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. has now got some 14% of support, Crystal, in the primary. There were several hundred people there at the announcement that he had yesterday, and in terms of the dent that he's making, people there at the announcement that he had yesterday. And in terms of the dent that he's making, I mean, I think that people forget, first of all, obviously the Kennedy name, Kennedy magic, et cetera. But I don't think people realize his book,

I think it was the real Anthony Fauci, was one of the best selling books in the country for like almost a year. It sold at least, at very least hundreds of thousands of copies, lots of copies, he certainly made the rounds and podcasts and all that, and quite a bit of people even know who he was before that, just given name ID. And on top of that, a lot of media, probably more media covered this event even than Marianne Williamson in terms of his announcement,

again, because of the Kennedy name. So between earned media, between a genuine like pop culture or at very least like public recognition, I'm not going to say necessarily that quote has a shot, but it could be more of a menace. I think that a lot of people are going to give him credit for. There's a lot to say here. So first of all, with regard to the poll, it is a little bit of a weird poll because they didn't poll likely primary voters. They polled people who voted for Biden in the

last general election, which is just kind of an unusual universe to poll. And it's very likely actually a broader and less overtly Democratic based political than a primary poll would be. I mean, and so it is a bit of a strange universe. But still, when you have Joe Biden only garnering 67 percent of his own voters that already selected him one time and you have, you know, over you have over 30 percent that are either going to RFK Jr., Marianne or like, yeah, I don't know. Or not. Yeah, exactly. I think it speaks to how vulnerable Biden really is and how much the media tries to cover for him.

Because every article that's written about Joe Biden, it always says in there, they've always got out of the line in there, no serious primary candidate has emerged. OK, by whose measure? Because y'all sure treat Tim Scott, who's at like 1%, and Nikki Haley, and potentially Mike Pence, and all these other slew of Republican candidates, you take them seriously. Well, they're polling lower, it appears, than either RFK Jr. or Marian Williamson, both of whom are, let's put their politics aside and how you feel about them for a moment. I'll get to that and how I feel about them in just a second. But both of whom are, let's put their politics aside and how we feel about them for a

moment. I'll get to that and how I feel about them in just a second. But both of whom are bestselling authors, very well known, have their own base of support separate and apart from the current political moment. So to just dismiss them like, oh, they don't have a shot and no one's going to pay attention and no one cares about them. I think this is evidence very much to the contrary. Not to mention every poll when you ask Democratic voters, do you want not the general public, Democratic voters, do you want Joe Biden to be your nominee again? They're like, eh, thank you for your service, sir. Thank you for defeating Donald Trump. Can we have some other options here?

So listen, RFK Jr. has come to prominence. He's really made it his recent life's work to be he would object to this characteristic. But he's an anti-vaxxer. He's been one of the primary people, you know, tying autism to the increase in the vaccine schedule. There's no evidence of that. And the fact that vaccines exist and autism exists to me is not remotely proof. So I have issues with his stances. I don't agree with him on some of those things. Do I think that means he should be censored, shut up, not allowed to be on a presidential debate stage? Absolutely not. And, you know, I want to give credit to, I was listening to some of his interviews in advance of this segment. I was listening to a long interview he did with Megyn Kelly. I thought she handled it perfectly.

You know, she was very tough with him, challenging him on the science backing what he was saying. She made sure to fact check. She took her time to record the interview and then go back, get comment from people, look at the research, you know, and she was able to present that. That's the way that you deal with claims

that are not scientifically based or that you disagree with. That's the way you approach it. Now, the Democratic Party, for all their supposed care and concern for democracy, they don't even want to let these people on a debate stage, even though both of them have already achieved way beyond the polling criteria that would be reasonable to allow them on a stage to debate against Joe Biden. So if the Biden team is so confident in his abilities and so sure that these are not serious candidates, let them on a stage and have a debate and let the American people decide. I agree with you. And it just gets to the numbers question that I referenced earlier. Go and put this up there on the screen. Once again, here you can see hardcover front list fiction. RFK has already sold about 300,000 copies of the book.

That was just, or he, sorry, he sold 300,000 copies of the book before January of 2022. That book remained at the top of the chart. So look, we don't have a way to know the exact number, but I would guess probably a million books that he was able to sell throughout the pandemic. That's a lot of books, people. That is like a Titanic bestseller. That's like Dan Brown novel level, like success, or at the very least in a year. So again, ignored by the media, basically ignored mostly by everybody.

But I don't think, you know, you cannot deny serious political people that want to look at things objectively, see a 14% bump or at the very least in the general electorate, see millions of books sold and say, this person, again, I'm not saying they have a shot, but they will demand attention. And I think rightfully so, as you said. Look, if you're so afraid, yeah, if you want to challenge him, then have him on the stage and tell him he's an idiot. You can do that. A lot of people have done that before. But if you're afraid, that says more about you. I think it's also interesting the way that originally you said he's now coded right wing. Steve Bannon was out singing his praises saying we love this guy. You know, he's done interviews with Tucker Carlson and whatever. He's more

embraced in a lot of ways by right wing media now than he is by the left. But that's that's what's interesting to me is that, you know, the coding of being a vaccine opponent has really shifted over the years. I mean, this was he was like sort of in this L.A. liberal lefty anti-vax moment. And now that has become coded very, you know, hard right wing. And it's certainly, you know, oppositional lockdowns and all of those things, even though, yeah, he does critique Trump and Biden alike. So interesting figure in that way as well. I mean, he originally was an environmental lawyer, still is an environmental lawyer, went after a lot of companies for the sort of toxins that they would put into the environment. So I don't want to undermine that work that he's done, even as obviously I disagree and I'm opposed to his views as opposed with regards to the environment. So I don't want to undermine that work that he's done, even as obviously I disagree and I'm opposed to his views as opposed with regards to the vaccines. But, you know,

for me, the bottom line here is, you now have in this poll, which again, it's a weird universe. And I would say probably a significant amount of his support is just people who are like, I don't like Biden. Here's a Kennedy name. Sounds good to me. Right. But 14 percent in this universe of voters. And Marianne was at 14 percent in battleground with battleground state voters in a different poll. So you already have two contenders who are putting double digits on the board against Biden. And yet the media still wants to tell you, no, no, he's safe. No serious contenders, et cetera. Listen, maybe, maybe and very likely, right? Very likely that Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, no doubt about it. But to completely invisibilize these people,

to try to shut down any opportunity for people to evaluate their choices, to try to shut down any opportunity to have the three of these individuals on a stage and be able to work through the processes of democracy that, again, the Democratic Party claims so much to care about, I think it's disgraceful and I think it's hypocritical. Yeah, I completely agree, Crystal. All right, we have some updates for you on the whole debt ceiling situation. You will recall Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans, both in the House and the Senate, have decided to once again use the debt ceiling as a hostage-taking mechanism to get things through that they could not otherwise get through. We have been waiting for McCarthy to put some details down about what exactly the Republican caucus is proposing,

because, you know, you've got more moderate figures who represent Biden swing districts in New York that are very uncomfortable with a lot of hard cuts. And you have Freedom Caucus members who were, you know, some of the dissidents who really were pushing Kevin McCarthy to make some extreme deals in order to even claim his speakership. So he's in a precarious position. The Republican caucus, which only has a four seat majority, majority in the House, is in a precarious position. So yesterday, McCarthy put out a somewhat more detailed outline of their approach on the debt ceiling, although there's still a lot of details that continue to be left out, which is noteworthy in and of itself. Let's put Jake Sherman's tweets up on the screen here.

Now, this is how McCarthy characterized what is in this bill. He says that his bill provides $4.5 trillion in savings. Sherman says, we don't have a bill yet, so we can't know whether that's true or not. It's also not scored. So we're trusting the GOP's math as to whether the amount of savings, et cetera, et cetera. Pre-2022 spending levels, budget increase capped 1% per year, clawback billions of dollars of unspent COVID money, repeal funding for IRS agents, green tax credit repeal, prohibit student loan, quote, giveaway for the wealthy, HR1, RAINS Act, which I looked at what that was, but I'm forgetting now, work requirements for social programs, and prevent executive overreach, whatever that means.

Do you remember what the RAINS Act is? It's a government loopholes bill. Government loopholes bill. Okay. Put the Washington Post up on the screen. This has some more of the details. You know, the things that are targeted here, it's not going to surprise anyone. Some of the big cuts are to Medicare, Medicaid, sorry, and to food stamps or SNAP. Medicare and Social Security are left off the table as well as any cuts to the military budget. Pentagon cuts were originally floated. Those are no longer being talked about here.

And there's a significant limiting of who would be eligible for both Medicaid and for food stamps and increasing work requirements. The expectation is that more than 10 million people could be kicked out of the food stamp program if these provisions are put into place. That amounts to one in four current SNAP beneficiaries. In the case of Medicaid, GOP-led states have introduced similar work mandates in the past, and they also have seen significant drops in enrollment, which is where, you know, the money savings would come from. The other thing that's really noteworthy here,

Sagar, is they really take an ax to like all of the green energy, including electric vehicles. I wonder if some of those things, you know, energy, including electric vehicles. I wonder if some of those things, you know, the subsidies for electric vehicles, I wonder if some of those things might be controversial in some of these Republican districts where jobs are related to the EV industry. Yeah, I'm just not sure. I've never actually thought that the base really agrees. All they have to do is sell it, not on EVs necessarily, but more in terms of spending, especially stuff like food stamps is where they would really, most people at the very least, you know, don't want to be seeing cuts with that program. What they're going to be able to do rhetorically is they can phrase this as standing up to Biden.

The specifics honestly don't matter because all at the same time, like, none of this is real. This isn't actually going to get enacted. This is like a fantasy document. This is what's always annoying, you know, and it's always difficult for us to characterize. We're like, look, technically on paper, this is what they say they're going to do. I also literally lived here. How many times were like, this is the plan in which we're going to repeal Obamacare? And then whenever it actually came to a chance, they're like, yeah, none of that is actually what we're going with. Everything is new on the table.

That's true. To the extent that this is real in any way, like, let's just not take it all that seriously. It's an opening bid. I mean, really, what does it tell us? They want to extract cuts effectively across the board in all federal programs outside of Social Security and of Medicare. And if they do touch programs, which people rely on, especially large constituencies that live in red states, it will be politically unpopular. But it will also remain politically unpopular if you are seen as throwing people off or not working with people, specifically in the time of inflation. That's not really one where people want.

Many people actually agree with reining in the national debt, with reining in spending. But whenever you ask them what they really want are cuts to things like the military budget, or they want to see less spending on things that don't have to do with everyday services. Right. More like, yeah, how many times have we talked here about outrageous F-35 programs and things like that? Yeah. That's where – and also that's where the bulk of the money is. Well, that's where a lot of the money is if you want to be real about this.

I mean generally speaking in terms of the polling, you ask people, okay, do we need to lower the deficit? Do we need to lower the debt? They're like, yeah, that sounds good. And when you ask them about, okay, do you want to cut this program? They're like, hell no. You want to cut that program? Hell no, right? The only thing people really want to cut is like foreign aid, which amounts to like tiny little teeny sliver of the budget. It won't make no difference whatsoever with regard to the debt and the deficit. Yeah. If you are leaving

social security and Medicare and the military off the table, then you are limiting yourself to making really draconian cuts in, you know, the small percentage of the federal budget that is ultimately left because the bulk of the money goes to those programs. And guess what? Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular. They're also extremely successful and very effective at, you know, mitigating senior poverty in particular. And Medicare, obviously, very successful as a health care program, very popular as well. And by the way, cheaper on a cost per person basis than private health insurance. We'll put that aside for another day. So yeah, they've kind of limited themselves in terms of what they can do. And the important piece here, too, is even within the Republican caucus,

a lot of the details here of where and how these cuts are going to be made, they're left up to the various committees. So he's still trying to pull this bit of a sleight of hand whereby not having all of the details sketched out, he's hoping to keep his own caucus together to put pressure on the Biden White House. And, you know, I just don't know how successful that is ultimately going to be. There's also a line of thinking that the whole debt ceiling thing is a bit of

a farce and a charade. The only thing it's really used for is these, in my view, unconscionable hostage shaking tactics where you're like, I'm willing to tank the entire global economy in order to kick more people off of health care and cut food stamp benefits for people. So there's a line of thinking that there are some workarounds here that the Biden administration could deploy. We've talked about minting the trillion dollar coin. But put this up on the screen. This is Nathan Tankus, one of the people, an economist who's one of the people who's been thinking about some of these options. Put the next tear sheet up on the screen here. So he says Biden can steamroll Republicans on the debt ceiling and Fed Chair Jay Powell will not interfere. So what's key and what he's arguing here is there's always been a question, whether

it's mint the coin or one of the other workarounds that are essentially sort of like accounting gimmicks. Would the Fed go along with it? And last we discussed the mint the coin thing, Nathan Tankus was one of the people that was like, well, here's what you do. You'd have to send the military to the Fed and force them. We're like, I don't know about that one. However you feel about that. Can you imagine the Biden administration doing that? No, you cannot. Well, in this article, he lays down actually Fed Chair Powell kind of showed his hand a while back, indicating that he would follow along with what with the sort of workarounds like mint the coin in his own Fed chair way. And so the whole military option wouldn't be necessary.

And he's encouraging the Biden administration to use one of these workarounds in order to just completely short circuit this whole process and deny McCarthy and the Republicans any sort of leverage around the debt ceiling. Now, will they do that? I don't know. At the very least, they should very credibly threaten to do it because that would undercut the Republicans' position here. But we all know these are like hardcore institutionalists without a lot of spine. Yeah, that's why I just keep going back to I think we're going to have to see some sort of a crop. I mean, look, the Biden administration is never going to agree to

cut its EV tax credits like it's just not happening. Yeah, seriously, the Biden administration is never going to agree to cut its EV tax credits. Like, it's just not. Not happening. Yeah. Seriously. This is a signature achievement. I actually think they might. I mean, you know, given his track record, I definitely think I could see him caving on increasing work requirements for welfare and for food stamps. I don't think there's no way he's going to cave on a signature benefit. benefits. So I get, but again, I come back to picking and choosing and just why I think some

sort of sequestration seems to be the most likely scenario is there's no genuine agreement. Uh, what many Republicans Freedom Caucus and them cared more about at the time and probably still care today is the overall dollar figure rather than, uh, you know, rather than like which particular programs. And this is also an easy way for them to say, well, the Biden administration is forcing our hand. So we are going to have to have some sort of defense budget cuts, which a lot of Freedom Caucus people secretly do agree with. They just can't say it because it goes against the donor class. We will see. We still have several months. Who's going to blink? What can even pass? As you said, important thing too is, do all the Republicans even agree on this? Because there's not a lot of

evidence for that. Right. You know, Nancy Mace came out and said that she wouldn't vote for it. That's one. You only need a couple more and you're dead. So what are you going to do? Right. Well, and that's what I was trying to say about the tax credits is, you know, the electric vehicle districts where the EV industry is really important to them in terms of jobs and future economic growth.

So are they going to be cool with cutting out all of those benefits? Because that's one part where they really take an ax to every green energy credit, but in particular the EV subsidies that make those cars more affordable for consumers to buy, you know, best case scenario. So that could be an issue. Last time we covered this on Tuesday, we were talking about how the New York Republicans are very uncomfortable with the food stamp cuts. Are they going to go along with, you know, with one in four recipients being kicked out of the program? Medicaid, obviously also, you know, successful and popular. Is that going to be okay with people? And then there's all sorts of things that are not the top lines,

that are these little individual, you know, programs that you rarely hear about that are important to, say, West Virginia, are important to other places around the country. And because they've taken Medicare, Social Security, and the military off the table, all of that stuff is going to have to get cut. So I think the White House's strategy is the right one so far,

which is just to say nothing, say basically send me a clean debt ceiling, that's it, end of story. And watch the Republicans try to work this out among themselves and see if they can even get to the finish line with their own debt ceiling bill. I saw Biden had some quote yesterday that was like, they're trying to get me to agree to all kind of wacko stuff in order to—

Yeah, I think wacko notions is what he said. Is that the term of race? Not particularly articulate, but— He got his point across. So anyway, I think the White House strategy is to more or less stay silent and see if the Republicans can figure this out with fair confidence that they probably won't be able to. That's the correct one. Also, there's a reason that nobody in the Senate has even said a word about this.

The ultimate test is, can he pass it? If he passes it, okay, now you're an actual serious negotiating partner. If you're not, well, then we're just going to continue to laugh at you. So all eyes, stay tuned. We'll see how it works out. Yes. By the way, it was House Republicans are threatening to default on the debt unless I agree to all this wacko nonsense. Nonsense. That was the quote. That's the latest from the White House. OK, we've got a couple of stories with regard to the Supreme Court that we wanted to bring to you this morning, both of which are really significant.

So we were actually waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court with regard to that abortion pill ruling. You had two contradictory rulings. You had a Texas judge that said the abortion pill, which is now used for more than 50 percent of abortions nationwide, that it should be banned not only in states where abortion is banned, but in all states. So California and Texas alike. You also had a judge from Washington state that said the status quo with regard to this pill should remain in place. So you got conflict here and that made it almost guaranteed that this thing was going to head up to the Supreme Court. They had set a deadline for themselves of last night at midnight to make this decision. But what happened? They decided to extend that deadline.

Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Supreme Court on Wednesday extended for two days a pause on a lower court ruling that it sought to limit access to the abortion pill Mifepristone, ensuring that the drug would continue to remain widely available for now. In a brief order, Justice Samuel Alito announced that the pause would lapse on Friday now at midnight, giving the court more time to consider the case, though it could act before then. And they kind of read the tea leaves here and say the fact that the court did not meet that earlier deadline suggests there might be disagreement among the justices in their first major case about abortion access since a conservative

majority in June upended the constitutional right to an abortion. It could also indicate there might be a dissent in the case, could also indicate none of that. I mean, it's very hard to read into these things, but, you know, I did know you're kicking it to Friday. That's like Friday news dump, right? At midnight, classic timing. If you're trying to bury something, you don't want to get a lot of press around. And, you know, the fact that it's taking a while for them to work through this, it could indicate that there is real disagreement between some of the more liberal justices and some of the more conservative justices and that this is a difficult one to for them to make a decision on. One thing that's noteworthy here, I think, as well, is in the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe versus Wade, they really made a big show of saying like, OK, this is great. Now the Supreme Court is out

of the abortion. We're going to leave it to the states and we're going to let them do what they want to do in accordance with their democratic process, et cetera. You know, if they back this Texas judge who is saying, we want to ban this pill for every state across the entire country. Well, that's not exactly leaving it up to the states now, is it? Well, I also think that the reason why this is also outside of it is because it focuses on FDA procedure and whether it has been valid for, what is it, almost 18 years? 23 years. 23 years, that's right. I think that's right.

23 years. So effectively, I mean, the judge's ruling in the case in Texas, he said that these people who they challenged the approval of the pill more than two decades ago. So if I had to guess, Crystal, a lot of this is going to focus, unfortunately, because this is how the law works, is not really going to focus on the merits of what we're talking about in popularity. They're going to focus on the process of approval and appeals. And as I understand it, the way that the Texas judge had issued the order is he had said that the original approval itself was wrong. Whereas I think that the court is gonna focus

both maybe on that narrow legal question, but also on the overall question of the validity of the overall approval of the legal process through which that all happens. Yes, so in terms of what they actually put out as their justification for their decision, no doubt that's what it's going to focus on. In terms of their actual thinking behind the scenes, they will certainly be weighing the politics of it, the public perception, the popularity of this pill and all of those sorts of things.

But you're absolutely correct to point out that if they do decide to agree with this Texas judge who says that it should be banned nationwide, that is an extraordinary new precedent, which would basically say the Supreme Court now has the decision sort of above and beyond the FDA to decide what sort of treatments are popular, especially since this has been in use for decades. And by the way, and I went through this in the monologue I did about it, the science around whether or not this pill is safe is really not controversial. There were like 101 studies done on it,

hundreds of thousands of women who took this pill. There was one death in all of those hundreds of thousands that had anything to do with it, and it was related to an infection with regard to the abortion. It is as safe as like aspirin. So what the judge in Texas ruled is that because this is not like a fun thing to go through, you're basically forcing a miscarriage. And since women went through discomfort while they were going through this process, that's what he chalked up to. It's not really as safe as the FDA is ultimately saying.

So this would really open up all sorts of potential avenues for challenging other drugs that have been authorized by the FDA and putting that in the hands of these unelected judges instead of the representatives that, you know, listen, we've got our issues with the FDA. I'm not saying that they're a perfect organization whatsoever, but there's at least a democratic process with regard to that's the agency that is supposed to sort through the evidence and that we have some sort of transparency into how they're making these decisions. Right. So that was actually going to be, look, I want, I hate the FDA. I think we should burn much of it to the ground and completely revamp the way that we approve drugs and all that. But I want a more democratic process. Yes.

I don't actually want to go – I don't trust these judges as much – I trust these judges as much as companies, the FDA, have a revolving door, the types of studies that they have, the scientific journals, and this entire industrial complex that exists outside of our plain view, where if we got real pictures into some of this data, and this isn't about just the abortion pill. I'm talking about all drugs and all vaccines too, by the way, which is the actual data needs to be made very much more available to people for independent analysis pre-approval. But that's very separate, I think, from the abortion pill question, which also, as you said, we do have decades now of people who are using it. And this isn't even about how you morally feel about the issue. We're literally talking about whether they improperly circumvented their approval process by discounting adverse reaction to the drug.

Like we're not talking about whether it's murder. Like the anti-abortion groups are not bringing the case on those grounds. Correct. And I don't think people understand that. They think this is like a religious ruling. I'm like technically in the way that it was made, it had nothing to do with that. Yes, that is well said. In terms of how the public feels about this, you will not be surprised to learn that roughly two and three,

go ahead and put this up on the screen from the Hill, roughly two and three respondents in a new poll said that the abortion drug Mifepristone should remain available in states where abortion is legal following that Texas federal judge's decision to block the pill nationwide earlier this month. This was a CBS News poll. It was released just in the past week, found that 67 percent said it should remain available in those states where abortion is legal. Only 33 percent said it should not. There is a partisan split on this issue. But, you know, even among Republicans, they're basically split 50-50. You've got 46 percent saying it should be available, 54 percent saying it should not be available. So there's a little bit of a tilt towards the Texas judges ruling with regard to the Republican Party, pretty close to 50-50.

In terms of Democrats and independents, it ain't close at all. Eighty-four percent of Democrats and 72 percent of independents say it should remain available. And that, in a nutshell, is the issue that Republicans have with regard to all facets of abortion and the current landscape, which is that even within their own base, their own base is not all on board with, like, the level of extremism that is represented in this ruling and that's represented in some of the laws that are being passed in states, and certainly which would be represented by a nationwide abortion ban, which is being pushed by plenty of Republicans, including, you know, potential presidential candidate Mike Pence. They are not only is their whole base not really on board with it, but independents and certainly Democrats, but independents being the key group here,

they are not on board with it at all either. Every persuadable voter is effectively on the other side of this issue from Republicans, and that's why you see this. And it's very motivating, too. That's the sort of deadly combo here is it's unpopular and people are highly motivated by it, which is why we've seen a lot of the election results that we've seen in recent months and years. I think you're right. And it also relates very much to our next story, which we will not drop, about the judges and how they get there in the first place. Yes, indeed. So we have been covering Justice Thomas and the way that he has received literally millions of dollars in gifts and trips and feted and whatever from this billionaire named Harlan Crow, who also, and this one was perhaps the most explosive, bought Clarence Thomas's mother's house. This

was his childhood home while his mother is still living there, too, by the way. She's living there rent free, courtesy of this billionaire. And none of this was disclosed. And this is not a close call in terms of disclosure. This is very clear cut. If you have a real estate transaction over $1,000, you are supposed to report it. He did not do that. When you pile that on top of there have been previous issues in the past, not disclosing reimbursements for trips, not disclosing his wife's employment, you know, which was both significant because it was ideological and because she was earning significant salaries from that employment.

He's had to revise his financial disclosure over and over again and never because it was like, oh, my bad, I found something that should have been in there. It's all under pressure once he gets caught, which I think is also really noteworthy. So there was a thought of, okay, we're going to investigate this guy, but Democrats are actually really limited in what they can do. Why? Because Dianne Feinstein sits on the Judiciary Committee and she has not been present at work for quite a while now. Not only that, but her original idea was like, oh, you could just replace me on that committee. I'm not going to resign, of course, because, oh, why would she? She's doing

such a bang up job here. But, you know, you guys can replace me on the committee. Well, unfortunately, you have to get the Republicans to agree to that. And lo and behold, put this up on the screen. They are not going to allow that to happen because why would they? I mean, honestly, why would they? They don, honestly, why would they? They don't want these judges to be confirmed through the Judiciary Committee. They don't want them to be passed through the Judiciary Committee. They don't want Clarence Thomas to be investigated. So why would they give the Democrats an assist? The headline here from PBS NewsHour, Republicans block temporary replacement for Senator Feinstein on the

Judiciary Committee. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who is the top Republican on that committee, objected to a resolution offered by Chuck Schumer that would have allowed another senator to take Feinstein's place on the panel while the Democrat recuperates from a case of shingles. So that is the lay of the land right now. Republicans certainly not going to cooperate. You have this vacancy on the Judiciary Committee and it is really hamstringing Democrats' ability to get anything done. Right. And yet the entire party and institutional power structure is defending her, including one Karine Jean-Pierre from the White House. Take a listen. This is a decision for her to make when

it comes to the future, her future. That is something that she gets to make and should be allowed to do that. Oh, I didn't know it was her decision to make. That's true if you're in, you know, like a private job. It's not true when you're in a public job and you're 89 years old. You're not showing up to work. You're holding up the process. You're an active thorn in the side of ongoing efforts that are vitally important, allegedly, to the Democratic Party writ large. So what's happening here? It's like, why do we all just pretend that this is all on her and we're trying to be nice? You know, somebody even said the worst defense I saw was, well, sometimes we have colleagues that have been gone for a year and we didn't kick them out.

I'm like, yeah, why not? That's one-sixth of your whole job. And, like, that's crazy. Yeah. Well, and I mean, this is an extraordinary situation, too, because you're like, is she going to be able to come back at all? We don't know. Right. I mean, that's that's the question is, do we know if she'll even be able to return to do the job whatsoever? The other thing I can't help but think of listening to Karine Jean-Pierre there is, can you imagine the Republicans allowing something like this to happen and hamstring their ability to push judges through? You think Mitch McConnell would allow anything to get in his way of getting his judges on the bench?

Not a chance in hell. But the Democrats are so weak with this stuff. And so, oh, you know, it's all about these individual politicians like narcissistic personal journey. And then I want to hurt this lady's feelings and putting that above the needs and interests of their own base. And by the way, the whole country, when you talk about holding a justice to account and launching an investigation, that is critical to root out any sort of corrupt dealings that may have gone undiscovered thus far. To give you the details on that part, put this next piece up on the screen here in terms of why Feinstein's absence is a problem in terms of any sort of Clarence Thomas investigation.

So Democratic aides says the Judiciary Committee cannot issue a subpoena as part of a Clarence Thomas inquiry. That would require a majority on the panel. And Democrats do not have it without her. So that option is out of the question. So they are talking about launching some sort of an inquiry. But in terms of actually issuing a subpoena to get Justice Thomas or anyone else for that, Harlan Crowe or anyone else for that matter, to testify, you need Dianne Feinstein. Right. So how much how effective and how much teeth is your little inquiry going to have

if you can't even compel people to come and testify to what happened and what they know about this? So it's a real issue here. Yeah, it's just such a joke all the way around. And actually, you found this, Crystal. Even the media is beginning to report about how, quote, countless, countless Democratic senators actually agree. This comes from Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is a Democrat, speaking on NBC News last night. Let's take a listen.

But this is not about us. This is about our country. And we have a crisis of honesty in Congress. I think that's fair to say. And I'm tired of serving with people who say one thing privately and refuse to say the same thing publicly. If you took a survey of those in the Congress, both the House and Senate, on this subject, I know what the results would be, and my colleagues know, but we have a culture of protecting ourselves at the expense of the country, and that's happening once again. And countless senators, just to be clear, Congressman, countless senators? Absolutely, yes, absolutely.

Okay, are you prepared to name any of them here? No, I'm not going to out other people. They know who they are. You know that my colleague Ro Khanna, a member of the California delegation, went first. I wasn't going to do this first, even though I felt this for some time. And again, this goes to a deeper problem, Kristen, about members of Congress being honest. Culture of protecting ourselves at the expense of the country. Well said.

And, yeah, behind the scenes, every one of them, including Nancy Pelosi, who's out there smearing Ro Khanna and anyone else's sexist for daring to question whether Dianne Feinstein should still be serving in this Senate seat. All of them want her to step down. They just don't want to say it publicly. So yeah, I mean, that's what Congressman Conner told us when he was here. He was like, yeah, behind the scenes, they're all like, thank you. We agree, et cetera. He's like, okay, well, come out and say it. Come out and say it. There's one way that you could change the dynamics here. If you had overwhelming pressure from the Democratic caucus, there is a chance you would actually step down.

But instead, they're all too cowardly. You're totally right. It's a complete disgrace, this entire situation. It's one of those clear situations where everybody knows what's going on and nobody's saying it. And that is what makes Americans feel crazy about how different and special that these people apparently are when they're supposed to be representing us. That's it. Just a just a bunch of liars. They are liars. That's it as well. This cover-up has been going on for years now at this point.

Alright we wanted to cover something that's unfolding in Iowa. It's part of actually kind of a trend of rolling back child labor law regulations and I think Iowa is the state that has now passed the most aggressive rollback of child labor regulation. Let's put this up on the screen. More Perfect Union did a deep dive into this, including a video that I recommend you all check out, which tracks the roots of where this rollback came from. And surprise, surprise, it's a lot of business interests, including the National Restaurant Association, a lot of locally powerful business interests in the state as well. So they say breaking the Iowa Senate passed a child labor law before dawn today. The bill lets 14-year-olds

work six-hour night shifts, 15-year-olds work on assembly lines, and 16- and 17-year-olds serve alcohol. The Senate went through the night and voted on child labor at 4.52 a.m. I think it's important to note a couple of things here. So first of all, because you have a relatively tight labor market, that's why all of these business interests have suddenly become like obsessively focused in rolling back child labor protections so that they can keep paying the low wages they've become accustomed to paying and not increase wages whatsoever to, you know, try to attract actual adults who should be working in some of these very dangerous jobs, right? It's also important to note Iowa's minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. So if you can't attract

the workers you need for your business without hiring a 14-year-old to work the overnight shift, maybe you should try increasing your wages and see what happens then. Child labor law violations have been up 37% since the pandemic. So even without these rollbacks, companies are taking upon themselves to violate child labor law or look the other way at the very least. And so there's been a huge spike in companies getting caught, employing kids, including migrant kids, by the way, and like exploiting the fact that they're in a vulnerable situation. There's a big New York Times expose about that. So it's a very disturbing direction that these states are going in, something that honestly, I mean, it's sort of shocking to see how far they're willing to go. And listen, I had summer jobs when I was 15 years old as well, you know, but they weren't working in like a meatpacking plant cleaning bone saws or an assembly line or construction sites, that's another thing they want to open up to younger and younger kids,

was like lifeguarding and working at a little fish and tackle store. Right, exactly. That was the sort of thing that I was doing over the summer when I was 15 years old, not like working in a meatpacking plant, which no 14- or 15-year-old has a business doing. Yeah, I think we could parse it and say that if it involves dangerous work, specifically overnight, then I don't think that that's really anything that we should support. But the one, you know, you and I were talking about this yesterday,

like 16 and 17-year-olds serving alcohol, it's like, whatever. You know, especially the bill even says, it says that they could do it with the written permission of a parent or guardian. That's good work in many cases, like especially if you're, most of the time you wouldn't even be serving as a bartender, I'm assuming. You'd be serving as a bar back and participating in a pool tip. So the wages and the money you can even get from that would actually be kind of decent. And I do think that should probably be available to 16 and 17-year-olds.

But I think the issue is that the animus behind the bill is about trying to circumvent wages for adults. Correct. And that's the problem, which is that they are basically trying to do a backdoor way to pay people even less and open up the labor pool. And in the worst case, you know, we're not even just talking about like illegal immigrants. We're talking about straight up children. And that's where I think some people should have the objection here, which is we shouldn't be – there's one thing to want to care for kids and to want them to do well and give them access to a job, which I do agree with. Even in construction, if you're not working in a dangerous position, I think that's fine.

Construction is dangerous, though. It depends. It depends on the job that you're doing. My point is that giving an apprenticeship and all that is one thing. Trying to game wage law, though, is actually a whole other one. To me, there are two pieces that are really important here.

Number one, the type of dangerous jobs that they want to open up to 14 and 15-year-olds to me is absolutely insane. Number two, the fact that they want to increase the number of hours that they can work per week. And we're not talking about just like during the summer. We're talking about during the school year. And there's a lot of research about how anything over basically like 20 hours a week really starts to be very detrimental to kids' grades, ability to focus, ability to get the work done in terms of their schoolwork, which is obviously the most critical thing that you should be, you know, dealing with and focusing on setting yourself up for the future when you're 14 and 15 years old.

And then the other piece is allowing them to work later at night. Again, that has a major impact on their ability to focus and do what they need to do during the day at school. So those are the pieces that are, to me, unconscionable. I kind of tend to agree with you on the 16- and 17-year-olds serving alcohol. I do want to give the other side of that, though, to play devil's advocate, which is like, okay, well, this is going to put 16-year-olds in bars with a bunch of intoxicated adults. There's 18-year-olds in bars with intoxicated adults. There's a difference between 16 and 18, though.

But, yeah, I mean, listen, I kind of tend to agree with you on that one. Maybe I'd like to see some more restrictions about it. I wouldn't want them serving as a bartender, right? So maybe put some more guard rails around that one. But in terms of assembly lines, meatpacking plants, construction, allowing them into these very dangerous jobs, long hours during the school week. And this, again, is not about the interests of these children or their parents or anybody other than the corporate interests who want to keep wages as low as possible. And let me, that's why I pulled this statistic, which I think is important context

and backdrop here, put this next piece up on the screen, which is that we actually had just now median inflation adjusted weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers were up in the first quarter of 2023 per the latest latest report, for the first time in two years, real wage growth has exited negative territory. So to translate that from kind of econ speak here, this is the first time, even when accounting for inflation in quite a long time, that you've had actual wage growth. So of course, every corporate interest in the entire country is like, oh, my God, we can't have that. We've got to keep being able to pay them pennies at $7.25 an hour,

and we've got to keep our fat profit margins, which continue to be at literal record levels. So what's our solution since unemployment is super low? Well, I guess we're going to have to bring 14 and 15-year-olds into the workforce and allow them to work longer hours and overnight shifts in dangerous areas. Yeah. Look, in general, I just think an easy workaround to this would be, like, make sure you just raise the minimum wage to something decent,

and then, sure, it's like if kids want to work as barbacks, it's like, that's great. In terms of as long as you're not trying to circumvent and pay less, I mostly am good with it as long as they're not in a dangerous position. I'm curious what other people think. I honestly don't know. Comment, let us know what you think. All right, let's talk about UFOs, a big hearing that happened yesterday and led mostly by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. I have many critiques of Gillibrand, but on the UFO issue, she does genuinely seem to be passionate about it. She's been calling hearings. She's been very involved,

and a lot of people in the community feel as if she's actually trying to get to the bottom of this. I hear the same thing about Senator Rubio and a few other members of Congress who do seem, again, to actually want to get to the bottom. Now, there was some interesting testimony from the head of the new AARO office. I'll tell you what that means afterwards.

But here's the main takeaway in terms of what they want us to know, a little bit of a dual message around possible alien activity. Here's what he had to say. Aero has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. For those few cases that have leaked to the public previously and subsequently commented on by the U.S. government, I encourage those who hold alternative theories or views to submit to research to credible peer-reviewed scientific journals. Arrow is working very hard to do the same. That is how science works, not by blog or social media. Arrow is developing and implementing its science plan. It has to do so grounded in a

solid foundation of scientific theory across the entire range of hypotheses that have been presented for what UAP are. That range spans adversary breakthrough technology on one hand, known objects and phenomena in the middle, all the way to the extreme theories of extraterrestrials. So what did we learn from that? What I thought was interesting is at the very beginning, he's like, we have no evidence, extraterrestrial activity, defy the laws of physics. And then on the second thing, he's like,

well, part of our hypothesis is that it could be extraterrestrial. It's one of those where they're trying, again, they always try to do the, we have no evidence that it is. It's like, well, you don't have any evidence that it isn't. Now, in terms of what the possible terrestrial explanations are, I did think it was important for me to raise this. This has actually come from the Washington Post. Washington Post finally got around to actually looking at some of those leaks.

One of the things that they talk about, Crystal, is that the Chinese are currently readying a supersonic spy drone unit, which would go, let me see here, three, is that the Chinese are currently readying a supersonic spy drone unit which would go, let me see here, three times faster than the speed of sound, a high altitude spy drone, one that has not yet been seen by adversary technology, and clearly if seen by the naked eye or somebody who's not in the military would be amazed by something that's going Mach 3 and is a high altitude drone, not man, possibly a smaller object. So you could easily conceive of a civilian situation where you would think, like, oh, wow, that's something that we hadn't known about.

But let's also remember, so many of the videos that we have looked at happened well before. This said drone supposedly hasn't yet been deployed yet, so it's not like you can explain past incidents. You also have no evidence of Russian technology that comes even close to this. My personal view is, well, they're in the fight, you know, of their lives in Ukraine. So if they had some crazy tech, like, don't you think they would use it? They did. They used a hypersonic missile for no reason, you know, even though they

didn't have an attack, a nuke on it. They have all kinds of stuff. You know, outside of nuclear technology, they've basically thrown everything they have at Ukraine. I just presume, like, if you're in a war which is depleting you, supposedly, and you have tens of thousands of people to die, that you would reach for something that's not non-nuclear and which isn't, you know, a major step forward in terms of technology. You would think. I haven't seen anything like that. Those are really the only two countries even possibly capable of creating something like this. Well, unless it's our own program that they all want to spill the tea on. Look, I mean, that one is a counterfactual

where there's just literally no way to do it. Yeah, but that's what they, I mean, it is annoying how they play. This is the same rhetorical game that they played in the media write-ups of the analysis of these objects to be like, well, there's no evidence. It's extraterrestrial. But then there's also,

they can't point to any evidence of what it actually is. So you're really not ruling anything out here. It's very unhelpful. It's just gaslighting effectively. The next video is very important because this is one that was captured over the Middle East from 2022 where you can see clear drone footage

of people who are on the ground, and then a metallic spherical object that zooms through the frame and then is actually followed by the camera of which they have no idea what this thing is. Here, go ahead and watch it for yourself. You'll see it come through the top of the screen. There it goes. And then the camera will slew to follow it. You'll see it pop in and out of the field of view there. This is essentially all of the data we have associated

with this event from some years ago. It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video. They don't know what it is. They have no clue. They have no explanation. And look, you think if it were- That's a crazy one. You think we don't see consumer drones

over Iraq all the time or the Middle East? I covered the battle of ISIS. ISIS had all kinds of crazy Chinese-made DGI drones and stuff like that. We know what a drone looks like. We know what a Chinese drone looks like. We know what a Russian drone looks like.

We know what consumer drones look like. They could easily rule it out and say we know exactly what that is. They have no idea what the hell is going on here. It fits with the Mosul orb photo that Jeremy Corbell has released. Apparently, this is the second one that hadn't previously been seen. Now, look, is it proof? I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. And I think the most important thing is we don't know what it is. I just wish that they would be more honest. I also thought that Dr. Kirkpatrick, oh, I forgot to tell everyone,

AARO is the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, you know, Pentagon speak for UFOs. But the thing that annoyed me in his initial talk, he's like, this is not going to be solved by social media. This is not going to be, he's like calling up basically people like us, people like other in the UFO community for building hype around it. It's like, here's the thing, man. We can't trust you to do any rigorous analysis, not after years of coverups, not after years of lies. Really, all we can trust, in my opinion, are the people outside looking at this independently.

Also, it's not just the people who believe it's aliens. People like, you know, even Mick West and other UFO debunkers, at least they are working in a frame where they're being honest, they're being open, they're trying to put things out there and then taking videos and analyzing them in their own way. Even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying, it's at least out here in a public domain, in a public sphere. You know, honestly, if you're aunquote ufo skeptic nobody's done you more service than people like him who are out there giving you you know things that you can say of why you don't believe in the phenomenon it's not the government that's actually helping

you out yeah well okay so if it's not going to be solved by the like social media ufo community who that's the answer no one right they they don't like people digging around and doing their own thinking about this doing their own research about this, doing their own research about this. Obviously, they're very aggressive about shutting down any attempts that they possibly can. So, yeah, they want to keep control of whatever this investigation ultimately amounts to. At the end of the day, we just need more info. And, you know, part of the thing that pisses me off here is he dangles like this one little video of this 2022 from the 2022 report from this Middle East drones. Like we already know based on former public officials, they are sitting on troves of videos, of photos, of evidence, of so many different fascinating and interesting things

that they cannot explain. Even, you know, in ones where they have claimed that they could solve it through weather relatedrelated incidents. It's like, we can't just take your word for it. You have to prove that. You have to prove exactly how you determined that this was a mirror photo or a collage or an optical illusion or something. We cannot just take these people's word for it.

So I think in every case, we need a lot more transparency. You know, even in this, I love how they're like blurring things out in the frame. I'm like, nobody cares, I'm sorry about this. It's not gonna do any damage, I think, to national security. So more info, more hearings. Thank you, Senator Jill O'Brien. Thank you to people in the community who flagged these videos and some of this testimony for me.

I thought it'd be an interesting update for all of you. If this is what they're willing to share, you can only imagine what they are keeping secret. That's what I'm saying. We had one more piece we wanted to add to the show last minute because our friends over at The Lever broke a really big story that actually has now been picked up this morning by the New York Times

in regards to that Fox News settlement with Dominion voting systems, which I should say we sort of predicted it was going to ultimately happen because there was no way Fox was going to allow their entire primetime lineup to have to go and, you know, sit under oath and testify about whatever the hell was going on during the stop the steal era. So this settlement, $787 million sounds like a lot, right? Well, maybe not so much. Why? Because they are able to deduct, take a tax deduction on a significant amount of this payout. And that's the piece that the lever uncovered.

Kudos to them. Our great partners put this up on the screen. So they say Fox can claim tax write-off for defamation settlement. The company says it can deduct the cost of its $787 million payment to Dominion over its election lies. Let me read you a little bit of the details here that they uncovered. Fox's massive settlement with private equity-backed voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems didn't just spare the conservative news organization from a lengthy public defamation trial or a full public reckoning for its election lies.

It could also mean a tax break as large as $213 million. On Tuesday, Fox News and their parent company agreed to that defamation settlement as the largest known defamation payment in U.S. history. So again, you're going like, oh my God, it's a lot. It's significant. It's going to deter them from doing the same thing all over again. However, thanks to an arcane line in the tax code, Fox can deduct that settlement payment from its income taxes, according to a company spokesperson and tax experts consulted by the lever. That's because federal law allows taxpayers to write off many legal costs, providing that they are ordinary and necessary business expenses. The IRS has repeatedly affirmed that for major corporations, paying out settlements is just part of the cost of doing business. And that's how they all look at this stuff. I mean, whether it's this, whether it's

big pharma, not to mention Fox may also have insurance that covers a significant part of this. So not only are they able to do a tax write-off over this, it's like the U.S. taxpayers sort of like footing the bill for their own impropriety during the election. But also they may have insurance that covers a lot of this. So what does this ultimately amount to them? Probably not that much. And while they wouldn't be able to write off the part that's from insurance, they would then be able to deduct any increase in your premium that you would have from. Now, I want people to think about when you do something that's not even your fault.

This actually happened to me. My fiance was in the Jeep that I had and it was T-boned. Now the person, the person was clearly at fault, but, you know, she disputed it. The insurance company, you know, whatever, no contact.

So my premiums went up. Like, and it's not even my fault. Do I get to, do I get to pay? Or do I get to write off the increase of their premium? No. And that's when you're not even at fault. And let's say also, let's say you do something stupid and you ding somebody or back into somebody, et cetera, and you then have an increase in your premium. Do you get to write off that? No. Why do these corporations get multi-billion dollar write-offs and all this stuff when average people who may even have an insurance premium go up through zero fault of their own don't get to do anything?

That's completely ridiculous. Yeah. Also, the fact that the corporation, putting aside this like Fox situation, but the corporation, the corporate entity always absorbs all the blows. And there's like very little, almost never is there any personal accountability for executives, like, for example, in the 2008 financial crash. For the executives who were making the decisions behind the scenes, they just skate scot-free. The corporate insurance handles it. They write off, it's a big tax deduction. And then next time around, you know, what, this, this was successful for their

business. Ultimately, they kept their audience. They sort of pushed off the Newsmax and one American news threat. You don't think they're going to do the same exact calculus all over again. Based on this math, it seems like it's working out for them. And the other indicator that The New York Times, which cites the levers reporting, I mean, again, kudos to the lever, because you've got all these giant news outlets. None of them pursued this angle of the story, which is incredibly important for understanding how this all unfold and what it will mean for Fox News and other media organizations going forward. So they cite their reporting here, but they also note that, you know, Fox's stock has barely budged since the deal was announced on Tuesday. So their shareholders don't think this is a problem,

this historic $787 million defamation settlement. Their shareholders are shrugging this off as no big deal. Again, just cost of doing business. So quite extraordinary, quite revealing of exactly who our society set up to benefit, who basically can get away with anything, with any sort of behavior, and pay literally no cost here. Right.

Well said, Crystal. Very well said. And funny, kudos to the lever for exposing this. What a BS system. Yeah. Sometimes I just look at it, it just makes me so angry to think about it. I'm like, yeah, I get to write.

Imagine if you could write off increasing your premiums. Think about that. Imagine if you could do off increasing your premiums. Think about that. Imagine if you could do that. Like Purdue Farm. Yeah, so many of these people. All these farm companies that know that they're injuring people, know that people are getting addicted, whatever. But again, they just see it as like, well, we're going to, you know, we'll have the profits on this side.

We'll be able to write off any settlements we have to come to with the families or with the governments or whoever. So, eh, the cost of doing business, I guess, is worth it. Or the banks. I could go on and on. Yeah. B.S., man. All right, Tucker, what are you looking at? There's been a lot written about Elon Musk's interview with Tucker Carlson, almost none of it having to do with the interview and most about going on the show in the first place. But perhaps the most interesting part focused on AI and the original motivations for Elon's involvement with OpenAI in the past and sparked by a shocking conversation with the co-founder of Google,

Larry Page, that he revealed. Let's take a listen. I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends, and I was at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late to the night about AI safety. And at least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. What did he say about it? He really seemed to be sort of a digital super intelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible. He wanted that? Yes.

He's made many public statements over the years that the whole thing with Google is what's called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence. And I agree with him that there's great potential for good, but there's also potential for bad. And so if you've got some radical new technology, you want to try to take a set of actions that maximize probably it will do good and minimize probably it will do bad things.

There's a lot going on there. So Larry Page wants to create a digital god without regard for its possible effect on humanity. This is terrifying, and now that we've seen multiple stories of large language model programs like ChatGPT and Bing Sydney do just weird and bonkers stuff like try to make a journalist fall in love with them or make up sexual assault allegations against someone, all of us can kind of agree we do need control over AI. The problem is that when we say

control, not all of us are agreeing on the same thing. For example, here is Elon's view of what is wrong with AI and specifically ChachiBT. obviously do good, but it's not clear whether it's actually doing good or whether it's, I can't tell at this point, except that I'm worried about the fact that it's being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of saying untruthful things. Yes. So that's not a bad sign. That's certainly a path to AI dystopia. So there's more in that interview where Elon talks about how OpenAI is now closed. It's a multi-dillion dollar organization with Microsoft for profit. It lays out the case actually pretty well. And in fact, the objection is that AI is not programmed to be truthful enough and has political correctness hardwired into it. Now,

imagine a world where you do go to a future Google or Bing for an answer to your question, and you get one that seems right, but is actually completely distorted version of the truth vetted for you by the mainstream media and the politically correct. Now, we already live in a reality that somewhat resembles that, but the internet at least empowers some of us to fight back. This would simply completely solidify total control for them. The problem that we really have, though, is that when the other side talks about AI safety and regulation, they don't actually care about any of this. In fact, their objection is that chat GPT and AI is not politically correct enough.

And they actually want the government to set the terms exactly of how politically correct they should be. Take the new so-called AI Bill of Rights, which was released by the Biden administration recently. The document lays out the Biden administration's vision of how AI should be governed, including, quote, safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination, data privacy, notice and explanation, human alternatives, consideration, and fallback. On their face, all of those sound fine, like corporate speak, but the one that immediately raises my eyebrow is algorithmic discrimination? Let's read further. Like clockwork, the first sentence of the document includes the buzzword du jour, equity. If you have not yet heard of equity, I encourage you all to go watch my previous monologue on Tuesday about how it effectively, in many cases, entails being so woke

you're racist, forcing people towards desired social outcomes. But let's continue. Sentence number two reads, quote, algorithmic discrimination occurs when automated systems contribute to unjustified different treatment or impacts disfavoring people based on their race, color, ethnicity, sex, including pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions, gender identity, intersex status, sexual orientation, religion, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other possible classification protected by law. Quite a mouthful. I'm glad that they fit all of them in there now. Now, this is per the Biden administration how AI should, quote, include proactive equity assessments as part of the system design and would

constantly need to be independently evaluated by the government to ensure that companies are producing equitable AI outcomes. In other words, that's social engineering. That's more political correctness. That is some sort of weird 1984 language board full of non-profits and governments who get to decide which group is now not allowed to be criticized and then program that into AI. This is what they mean when they say regulation. If you didn't want more evidence of what the left establishment actually wants for the new AI regime, look at this. There's a new declaration from Open Philanthropy. It's a technology nonprofit.

It's funded by several left-aligned multi-billionaires in Silicon Valley. Some of their new propositions for AI regulation sound fine, like software export controls, but some hint at total dystopia. One proposition, for example, is to have some sort of government-implanted chip inside AI systems. The chip would monitor the AI at all times and shut it off if they deem it to be going off-reg. Now, again, you can actually see a world where that could be justified, but you could also see one where it'd be one of the greatest tools for control ever devised. Number four, too, is about licensing all companies that want to work

on AI, create some sort of registry. Here again, we have an easily gameable system. Consider we already have two of the largest companies on planet Earth competing in this space, Microsoft and Google. You think they won't fight tooth and nail to make sure they're the only ones with a license? Note, I am just trying to poke holes in every argument here. I don't have any idea what to think. On the one hand, I am terrified of a matrix-like scenario, unchecked power. On the other, terrified of some oligarchic arrangement where a few tech companies controlled by the government and nonprofit industrial complex have a monopoly on information and use it to push their social agenda on the American people and really the world

They're equally terrifying to me and my view is one I've laid out here yesterday But I see very people very few people pushing for AI should be pro-human should have enforcement mechanisms within them to ensure They're always being working towards a tool not towards supplant us I think AI should be required to stay within the bounds of the First Amendment here in the United States and only the First Amendment Should also be required not to deviate from it. In other words, no equity manipulation nonsense. The truth and robust actual competition, meaning rigorous antitrust enforcement to ensure that what happened to the internet

from 1990 to 2010 doesn't ever happen again. Centralized control of the next generation of tech in the hands of very few in the ideologically captured. Personally, I really don't think that's gonna happen. The most likely scenario is the one that really exists today. Social media and tech, total ideological regulatory capture, effective control over the most powerful sector

of the economy. But at the very least, let's hope and try to make sure that it doesn't go that way again. Because if it does, we could really all be in for a bad time. It's really hard, Crystal, right? Because you can see there's downsides to everything. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. What are you taking a look at? Well, guys, smelling blood in the water, former President Trump has opened up a new front in his war against Ron DeSantis, torching him relentlessly over the Florida governor's ongoing battle with Disney and especially the humiliating spectacle of DeSantis getting outplayed by the mouse. Now, before I get into this whole thing, let me just preface by saying there is no one to root for here.

DeSantis is hitting an unaccountable giant corporation in Disney, but he's doing it in the dumbest possible way for the dumbest possible reasons. Disney has humiliated DeSantis, which is kind of satisfying to see, but their power does legitimately deserve to be checked and their hollow virtue signaling exposed. Trump is also torching DeSantis, which is also kind of satisfying, but in doing so is standing on the side of unchecked corporate power. So it is all a bit tangled here. I suppose that is what makes the story interesting to me, though. All right. Quick refresher on how we got here. DeSantis passed the Don't Say Gay bill, which was basically a way to signal his anti-groomer cred in the right-wing

culture war du jour. Disney, with a large gay fan base, has long billed itself as LGBTQ friendly. Under pressure, they belatedly put out some weak ass statement against the bill and cut off GOP donations. Spotting an opportunity to bolster his anti-woke cred, DeSantis and his allies then went on the attack against Disney and their so-called wokeness. In particular, DeSantis targeted the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which has since the 60s basically allowed Disney to govern itself, including taxing themselves, levying bonds, greenlighting infrastructure, running fire and police stations, even provided Disney with the rights to build a nuclear power plant should they

ever desire to do so. Unaccountable taxpayer-backed corporate power is indeed wrong and bad. But after patting himself on the back for his big alpha male energy, DeSantis took his eye off the ball, and the giant corporation did what giant corporations do in America, they took power. In a publicly noticed meeting, the still Disney-backed Reedy Creek board granted a massive development deal to Disney. This effectively handed all control of the region back to the big corporation mere weeks before DeSantis' cronies were set to take control of that board. Now Disney's maneuver immediately turned what had been a winning hand for DeSantis cronies were set to take control of that board. Now, Disney's maneuver immediately turned what had been a winning hand for DeSantis

with the GOP base into a potentially disastrous catastrophe. He scrambled to respond with some fake blusters, suggesting perhaps they build a state prison next to Disney. Take a listen to that. You're not going to have Disney have its own government in Central Florida. They're going to live under the same laws as everybody else. What should we do with this land? And so, you know, it's like, okay, kids, I mean, people have said, you know,

maybe, maybe have another, maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks. Someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison. Who knows? I mean, I just think that the possibilities are endless. I wasn't the only one who could smell the desperation here. And every single DeSantis enemy immediately pounced. 2024 hopeful Nikki Haley and potential presidential contenders Chris Christie and Chris Sununu, they all got in on the action. Sununu accused DeSantis of just going after a headline, saying the fight convolutes the entire Republican

message. Haley's super PAC called it an embarrassing blow and mocked DeSantis' desperate attempt to regain the alpha position by suggesting he might build a prison next to Disney. Nikki Haley, I guess, kicking sideways there after all. Here in part is what Chris Christie had to say. I'm all for the use, the appropriate use of governmental power to achieve laudable goals. And when you're the governor of a state and our governorship is constitutionally the most powerful governorship in the country, the New Jersey governorship has enormous authority. And I loved using the levers of that authority to be able to accomplish things.

But when you put someone in that position or in that position of president, if you're going to use those levers, you've got to look around the corners to see what the result of that will be. For him to have taken the action he took against Disney and to not have foreseen that Disney was going to do what they did in response, which was to completely take over the millions and millions of acres and the zoning decisions on that before they got the authority, well, I'll tell you this much. That's not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi and negotiating our next agreement with China or sitting across from Putin and trying to resolve what's happening in Ukraine. If you can't see around a corner that Bob Iger created for you.

So for their part, Disney had already trolled DeSantis, showed they were not remotely deterred by announcing they will host the largest LGBTQ plus conference in the world at their Florida park just this summer. Now, to be honest, even though Disney besting DeSantis is embarrassing, the governor is clearly struggling to figure out how to improve his now very poor position, I still would have bet on the Disney fight being a net benefit for the governor with a Republican base, a base that really couldn't care less about what Nikki Haley or Chris Christie or Chris Sununu thinks about this

or any other matter, really. But now, the big dog has weighed in in a way that only he can. In a post on Truth Social, Trump trashed DeSantis, writing, DeSantis is being absolutely destroyed by Disney. His original PR plan fizzled, so now he's going back with a new one in order to save face. Disney's next move will be the announcement that no more money will be invested in Florida because of the governor. In fact, they could even announce a slow withdrawal or sale of certain properties or the whole thing.

Watch. That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is also unnecessary. A political stunt, Ron should work on the squatter mess. Now, the political dynamics of this to me are kind of fascinating. The more upscale Chamber of Commerce part of the Republican Party that is Governor DeSantis' more natural base, they don't like his move here because it's anti-business. And the more downscale, populist part of the Republican Party that probably initially liked the anti-Disney fight is the most likely to be swayed by Trump trashing DeSantis over it and basically calling him a cuck. And let's face it, the GOP base is basically held together by vibes and aesthetics at this point. So if you get branded a cuck and a loser, the details really won't matter all that much. At its core, the whole situation reveals how confused, listless, and chaotic the Republican Party is right now.

The new goal of standing up to quote-unquote woke capital exists very uneasily along the other longtime goal of giving giant corporations literally everything they could possibly want at every turn. And so, lacking any coherent organizing philosophy, the center of gravity and political sentiment generally moves to whoever wins the latest alpha male dick-swinging contest. Whatever happens with Disney, that is not a fight that DeSantis can win. I'm clearly not the only one who sees it that way, as we covered earlier. Trump just rolled down a whole new slate of endorsements from Florida Republicans. Florida Republicans. Six members, now eight, of Florida's congressional delegation are officially backing Trump, including several who are not hard Trump loyalists and should have been imminently gettable for DeSantis. I suppose they can read the vibes in the polls as well as anyone else.

As DeSantis once said, just look at the scoreboard. So Sagar, I just read this morning that apparently, you know, DeSantis is trying to make some legislative moves to roll back that deal. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Very excited to introduce our next guest, who I actually grew up with, but has become a big time sports radio host. He's always been a huge sports fan and especially a huge Washington sports fan. Grant Paulson, he is host of the Grant and Danny show on 106.7 The Fan. And he joins us now to talk about whatever is happening with the latest Commander's sale story. So great to see you,

Grant. Welcome. Great to see you, man. Great to see you. Good to meet you. Yes, absolutely. Happy to be here. How are you guys? Very good. So Dan Snyder has been like the worst NFL owner in history and the team is now up for sale, which, you know, I'm a longtime suffering Washington sports fan as you are as well. And so I've been following a little bit loosely what is going on here. My understanding is it looked like they had a deal and things were kind of proceeding normally. And then there was this curveball thrown in at the last minute of an all cash offer where everybody was like, but where is this money actually coming from? And there are now rumors,

put this up on the screen, that this all cash offer may be coming from Saudi Arabia. So give us the details of what exactly is going on here, Grant. Yeah. So for a little while, as you said, it did seem like this was going to be a moderately normal sale, although there's not a whole lot normal about it. Very rarely do owners sell teams that they don't want to sell. no longer own the commander's best we could tell by way of the national football league and other owners after he is being investigated by all the way up to the house oversight committee virginia maryland has investigated him there was an espn report that the fbi was looking into possible bank fraud because he didn't have his minority owners sign off on a loan they were supposed to sign off on before he bought them out to buy the entire team. He owned 60%. Now he owns 100% after buying those owners out for 40%. So there have been so many investigations,

so many headaches for the league recently that they want Dan Snyder, who, as you said, has done a very poor job running this team on the field and off the field for 24 years out. So he is in the process of selling. And it looks like we are almost at the finish line with an actual bid and real money from Josh Harris, who owns the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA, New Jersey Devils in the NHL. There's a billionaire he's working with, Mitchell Rails out of DC. These two guys are combined

with former basketball icon and legend Magic Johnson and 13 other people to try to buy this team. Out of nowhere, though, there is a gentleman named Brian Davis, who is a former star basketball player in college at Duke, who had a cup of coffee in the NBA, who apparently has, as you said, engaged now in trying to buy this team with what he says is his money. He claims he can offer $7 billion in cash. He claims he can additionally offer another $2 billion to do some different things that need to be done with the stadium and some other financing. And he says he currently has $10 billion in the bank account to do that that he recently got from what he calls not investors but partners. And so as you guys can imagine, when there's no recent record via Forbes or any kind of valuation of this person being worth this kind of money, Oprah Winfrey's worth $2 billion. Tiger Woods is worth a little over a billion.

Donald Trump's worth $2.5. You look at some of the people and what they're worth, and then this guy says he's got $10 billion who nobody's heard of. How is this a thing? And so when you start digging into that, there are major questions. Okay, got it. And so then in terms of the bidding process, forgive me, I'm not entirely familiar. Are they like, is Snyder required to entertain all bids? Is this more of a media process? I had read previously like Bezos was interested, but because Snyder didn't like Bezos, it's not like a shareholder corporation, as I understand it,

where they have to entertain all bids regardless of whether they like them or not. So you're correct. It's not that different maybe than selling your house initially where Dan Snyder can sell to who he wants to. Here's the problem with that, though. 24 NFL owners, there are 31 of them because the Packers don't technically have one, 24 of the 31 are going to have to sign off on whoever this new owner is to welcome them into their club. So as an example, when Dan Snyder bought the team over two decades ago, there was actually a person that had agreed to buy the team from the previous owner, John Kent Cook, who didn't get approved by the National Football League.

They said no to that person. Snyder swooped in and got universally accepted as an owner, which I'm sure they regret now. But yes, he could sell to whoever he wants to, I guess, theoretically, as long as he thinks the money is legit, or maybe as he gets ready to pack up shop, he's already, it seems like, living in or going to be living in London, maybe taking his money and leaving.

He could say, you guys ran me out of here. The fans hate me. I don't care what kind of shambles I leave you in. I'll sell to whoever I want. The problem with that is that the league would never approve someone who just fell into billions of dollars. And we actually had this guy, Brian Davis, on our radio station yesterday for a 30 plus minute interview that was somewhere between fascinating and riveting and comical where, I mean, there are just so many unanswered questions where he has said he sold his intellectual property for $50 billion, which again, just common sense would say, if George Lucas is worth $5 billion, how is this person that nobody knew a couple of weeks ago somehow selling his intellectual property for $50 billion, which he explains away as he has a business that

creates business, and he was able to get someone to buy in on a very small scale at a big amount, which now makes him worth this much larger amount when you extrapolate it out. It just doesn't make a lot of sense, but it has been a fascinating diversion to what looks like a sale to the Harris Rails Group that could be happening imminently. So the Saudi rumors that they're the ones who are really behind this offer, which, you know, makes some logical sense. Obviously, they've invested in what I would characterize as basically like sports washing with the big live golf play. Are those just rumors or is there anything to back that up? So, so far, they're just rumors. I mean, he point blank on the radio yesterday said that

that wasn't the case and what was kind of an awkward exchange, right? Let's start with the fact that when he initially said he had this money, I think everyone believed that he didn't. He has, what I have been told by folks in the media, been able to at least partially try to prove that this money is in an account somewhere. So he claims not only that he has the money, but then the idea was, well, if you have money, it's not your money. Who are you trying to buy this team on behalf of? He says, it is my money. This is his opinion. He says, this is my money. They paid me for essentially my company. I can now do what I want with this cash. So the thought was, okay, who is backing this? And it's an anonymity. We

don't know. I think that's where some of the rumors, the thoughts came from, as you said, based on the landscape right now, based on what we're seeing with the lift tour, people suggested maybe it is Saudi Arabian. He adamantly said it wasn't. And his comment on the radio, which was, I thought, very weird, was that the money came from white people, as he put it. He then said it was Jewish, Italian, and Sicilian was what he suggested. That was his words. That's such a weird way to characterize it. It was very odd. Again, the interview was something.

It was really good radio. I don't know what else it was. But it left a lot of people with a lot of questions. But he says he doesn't want people saying it's from Saudi Arabian money. He says it's not the case. But he also claims, I mean, he claimed a lot of things. He said that, you know again his intellectual intellectual property is worth 50 billion he's already been paid 10 billion for it

now here's the big question i think there's there's two parts to this number one does he actually have the money he says and did it come clean number two would the league ever let's say he does have the money let's say somehow he got the money would the league sell the team to this person and that's where guys all along my answer has been no I will gladly apologize to him very loudly in a megaphone when he buys the team I'm not going to start writing that apology yeah wow and Grant finally a bigger picture question um take us through like what has happened to this franchise I mean this one used to be one of the most valuable if not the most valuable sports franchise in the entire world as you said the

tenure under Snyder has just been one disaster effectively after another both on the field and you know in terms of personnel and the way that the business side has been run like what is the state of this enterprise at this point it's incredible incredible. I mean, Crystal, I won't bore people too much with the football element of this, but I will say that you could literally teach a 400 level course and frankly, somebody should on how not to run a business by just pointing to what has become of this organization. When we were growing up in the DC area, two plus decades ago, this team was one of the most successful pillars of a sport that owns a day of the week, right? I mean, the Washington Redskins brand as a three-time Super Bowl champion was iconic in sports. It was right there with any of the big teams, the Yankees and the Dodgers. He takes over this team. They are among the elite

in ticket sales and attendance, and they have a new stadium, and they are among the best. It's a top 10 media market in the country in TV ratings. They have been dead last the last two seasons in attendance, and specifically this last year. Dead last, think about that. Their TV numbers have dropped off and cratered so much that there are times in their TV window in the DC area where they get out drawn by the Ravens in Baltimore or a random AFC game. I mean, these things would be utterly unfathomable and it's most specifically,

and I think directly because of people's hatred for this owner. They have decided, I will not put a people's hatred for this owner. They have decided, I will not put a penny in this person's pocket. I'm not going to buy tickets. I'm not going to buy gear. Subsequently, they have had to change their name, which is a massive story, both in and outside of sports, obviously. But there are plenty of fans who have left and will never come back because of that.

That just happened within the last few years. And also can be tied back to probably Dan Snyder, who rather than having the name and just proceeding quietly, this losing team, he was very vocal. They would never change the name. And a USA Today story said, write in all caps, we'll never change the name, and basically egged on the idea that that wouldn't happen. He lost that battle. But a couple of years ago, 40-plus employees came forward to say they've been harassed, some of alleged assault, directly against Dan Snyder sexually.

This has been a person that for decades, the only team in the NFL that hasn't won 11 games while he's owned the team, they have two playoff wins in his 24 seasons. One of them was his first year taking over when someone else built the roster. Just one playoff win since. On the field, horrific. And it's been better on the field, where they were arguably the worst team in the league under his watch, than off the field, where, as I said, he's been investigated over the last few months by Congress, Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and apparently, according to the ESPN,

the FBI has been looking into some of his practices financially. So the allegations are bountiful, and fans just kind of got fed up of trying to explain themselves and be in the butt of a joke and see the results. I can say for myself personally, and I used to be a religious watcher, Redskins. I was, you know, grew up in the whole fandom, super committed. I mean, it just becomes exhausting. We're like, this is not worth my time. It's not worth my emotional investment.

Like, I'm done here. I got other things that I need to do with my life on Sunday. Sports are supposed to be fun, right? Like, people listen to my show occasionally because either something in the world or news or politics whatever sometimes can get to be too much so you come to me for a little bit of a diversion and we'll talk about the knacks throwing a good game or the redskins now commanders winning a football game it got to a point to your point where it was exhausting it was work like being a fan of the team literally stopped being fun yeah And when that happens as a sports entity, you are done.

And it happened here under Dan Snyder. So true. So true. Grant Paulson, pride of King George County, Virginia. Where can people find you and listen to your show? Yeah, I'm on social at Grant H. Paulson. If you like sports and movie and food takes, those are my three categories that I stick to. Congrats on your success.

We really appreciate you joining us, man. Thank you. Yeah, so great to see you, Grant. Same to you guys. Keep up the great work. Yeah, you too. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it.

As we said at the top of the show, if you can help us out while we're building this new studio, biggest expense ever in the history of Breaking Points, more so than when we even launched the show itself, building up for 2024 and more. We really appreciate the yearly and the lifetime members. BreakingPoints.com if you're able to help us out. Otherwise, spread the word,

send the show to your friends, all of that. We don't spend a dollar on marketing. Everybody who's our marketer are the people who spread it by word of mouth. So thank you all very much. We rely on you guys. We love you and we will see you all later. I know a lot of cops.

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