Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/7/22: Ukraine War Crimes, Biden Humiliated, BLM Corruption, CNN+ Fails, Recession Forecast, Taibbi On Regime Change, & More!

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Krystal and Saagar look at the war crimes in Ukraine, media warmongering, Chomsky's comments, Obama humiliating Biden, Amazon Labor Union updates, Black Lives Matter corruption, CNN+ pathetic numbers, Stacey Abrams grifting, more recession indications, and the case against regime change with Matt Taibbi!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/Matt Taibbi: https://taibbi.substack.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Your hard-earned money is gonna help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Great show for you this morning. Lots of stuff to get to. We're going to give you an update on Obama's big return to the White House,

why Joe may be kind of regretting that he sent out that invite to start with. Also, some pretty remarkable comments from President Biden with regards to Amazon and unionization that his press secretary then immediately walked back. We'll give you all of those details. Also, some new questions about the stewardship of funds over at the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. Great reporting there digging into how all of that money has been spent or not spent. Also, some numbers for you on the big CNN Plus launch. You guys are definitely going to want to stick around for that story. Sagar is looking at Stacey Abrams. I'm looking at key recession warnings. We've got Matt Taibbi here to break down the latest with Russia and

Ukraine. And that, in fact, Sagar, is where we want to start. That's right. As usual, we got to start with what's going on with the war. Our friends over at Simtac with their mapping, always doing a great job. Let's put that up there on the screen. So as Simtac notes, combat over the remaining Ukraine-controlled area of the Donbass is intensifying as Russia is trying to extend its breakthrough at Izium. Meanwhile, Ukraine has more or less regained control over the north, and it continues to advance on the city of Kherson. So some of the predictions have largely come true in terms of the withdrawals, where the Russians are actually going towards, and everything seems to be concentrated within Donbass and the Donetsk region. So the reason that that matters is that control over this particular area, obviously, this is where the kind of diplomatic whole snafu

started in the first place in terms of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk Republics, the breakaways, and where the civil war has been concentrated. And now the fierce fighting in that region is probably going to define the future borders of Ukraine and Russia, and also possibly could be either the thing that will stop peace or what will actually begin the peace process as to how exactly Ukraine begins and Russia ends. That's why there is a mad scramble happening right now. On the same time, we don't want to get anybody's hopes up, Crystal. It could be that this fighting could go on for years. I mean, it's gone on for, what, eight years now?

It's important to remember that there has been a war going on in this particular region for, yeah, eight years now. So the idea that hostilities could continue there a possible end and then also a future in terms of how everything could be concentrated there, especially if both sides are not willing to give up any sort of territory or come to neutrality agreement. In terms of peace deal, no update for you, unfortunately. However, here on the U.S. side, things continue to scale up a little bit. Let's put this up there on the screen. In response to the atrocities in Buka, the U.S. and its allies set to impose more Russian sanctions on Russia, or sorry, sanctions on Russia, following outrage over the possible war crimes. And what they point to in these sanctions, and I've been wondering the same thing. I'm like, what exactly is left?

So some of the people that were targeted in this one are the children of actual Russian leaders, including Putin's daughter and Sergei Lavrov's daughter. Many of the additional measures are coordinated across the European Union and the United States, with the EU ones apparently being the ones that are most effective, just because that is where more Russian assets and children and others actually reside. So it's an additional round of sanctions that are being put on by the United States. And in terms of what that means for the overall peace process, like we said, there remains no update. Part of the problem, though, is that, as we warned from the beginning, the longer that this goes on and there is retrenchment, unfortunately, you are going to see the brutality increase.

This is something that we saw in the Syrian civil war, which is, you know, there was a semi-conventional conflict in the beginning. Within six months, it turned into a massive insurgency. And then within a year, you just saw, like, widespread war. I mean, I remember the guy eating somebody's heart. Like, that's how bad things got. And, you know, we're beginning to see that slow slide on the ground. Let's put this up there on the screen. This is no way to try and diminish either side here. We're just showing you that war is hell. And the New York Times has gone through and has verified a Ukrainian soldiers killing some captured Russian soldiers outside of a village west of Kiev. This was on March 30th.

Last week, they point out specifically from the video footage, they say he's still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he's alive. He's gasping as the Russian soldier has a jacket pulled over his head, and he's shot twice. At the same time, also on the Russian side, let's put this up there on the screen from the Wall Street Journal, which is that you can see the execution of a village mayor is now becoming a symbol of Russian brutality in Ukraine, not to mention what happened on the ground in Bukha. So you have these atrocities which are happening on the ground, and it's just the hallmark crystal of a prolonged conflict. The longer this thing goes on, there's going to be more atrocities within the fog and the hell of war. And more and more people are going to die. And the overwhelming drive of U.S. foreign policy should bring this thing to a close as soon as possible so that less people have to die. That's exactly right. And with regards to this mayor who was slaughtered,

it was her, it was her husband, and it was her kid, all found in a shallow grave. It's a brutal situation. And as the Russians withdraw and reorient, that has allowed reporters to go in to document more of the atrocities that have been occurring. Obviously, New York Times here reporting also

on some alleged Ukrainian war crimes. And we'd already seen some indications that there was criminal treatment of Russian soldiers who'd been sort of like paraded in front of cameras and used in Ukrainian propaganda. So listen, we're trying to be even-handed about these things. Very hard to sort through information accurately in the fog of war. So that's why we're bringing you everything that we possibly can. With regards to the new sanctions, you know, in comparison to what we've already done, this is basically nothing, right? And the really foolish thing here is that even though there are clear signs that not only is our policy of really indiscriminate and quite extraordinary sanctions not working, it's actually backfiring. As we've been telling you about here, it is actually, you know, endearing Putin to the Russian people. It's giving him a convenient scapegoat.

It's forcing out anyone who might have been in effective opposition. And so, and it also has not had quite the devastating impact on the economy, although that's another thing that's kind of hard to judge, that Westerners hoped it ultimately would. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at our history of levying sanctions around the world and say that while they might feel good to the American people of like, we're doing something and they're paying a price, Number one, the morality of them is highly suspect, given that you were targeting people that have nothing to do with these atrocities that we're witnessing right now. And number two, they just haven't worked. And I think

it says everything, that instead of reassessing, instead of actually pushing for some kind of peace, some kind of negotiated settlement, all right, let's figure out what we're going to do with eastern Ukraine. Maybe, you know, we don't officially like recognize it as part of peace, some kind of negotiated settlement. All right, let's figure out what we're going to do with eastern Ukraine. Maybe, you know, we don't officially like recognize it as part of Russia, but maybe we kind of keep some sort of a peace in place. Like Crimea, you know. Exactly. Yes. I mean, there is a deal that could be possible if the U.S. was actually committed to pushing for a negotiated settlement and pushing for peace and trying to strengthen Zelensky's hand in that regard. But, you know, I think, again, what Biden revealed about the real endgame that they're looking for is Putin out of power

just tells you that the U.S. government is not really committed to fighting for what will be a very difficult negotiated settlement. And in the meantime, Ukrainian civilians are going to be slaughtered. So it really is a depressing and horrific situation with little signs of how this is going to come to a close at this point. Yeah. Look, in terms of the U.S. policy, if our de facto only acceptable outcome is regime change, then we're actually virtually guaranteeing a stalemate on the ground for decades. Possibly 10, 15 years in terms of what's happening. And I think that for the people there, for the people of Ukraine, that's a bad situation. So to the extent, because we have already foresworn no military power, which I think is the correct thing to do, then it should be our

goal in order to bring a rapid peace. But if the de facto policy and declaration of regime change is going to remain, that's just going to make that completely impossible. And we will see the retrenchment just like we did with the Kim regime, the Hussein regime, the Maduro, whoever is in charge now. The Maduro regime. Who else is on our sanctions list? The Ayatollah regime. Are we starting to get the picture in terms of how this generally works in terms of U.S. foreign policy? So that's where it is.

Not a lot to update you, unfortunately. In terms of the stalemate, it seems to be concentrating now within the East. And actually, that's the time when wars get the most bloody. Yeah, and you see now civilians, reports of civilians fleeing the East en masse as they expect fighting to ramp up and these brutalities to increase. That's awful. I mean, you have some, what, 10% of the country now, which has already fled. That's crazy. I mean, especially because those people are probably the most educated

and the most economically well-off. And you saw the same thing happen in Syria. The entire middle class of Syria is gone. We all know Turkey now. I mean, you look at these pictures coming out of Ukraine. I mean, the country, parts of it are rubble. I mean, it's just totally destroyed. So, sad situation.

It's awful. And unfortunately, you won't hear many of the sensible kind of straight talk that we're trying to give you here on the show from a lot of the mainstream media. And I think the White House press corps continues to beclown itself. They've lost their minds. There was an especially good example yesterday, whenever a reporter pressed Jen Psaki. Like, why? How can you continue to rule out World War III? Let's take a listen. Just to put a finer point on some of the questions that have so far been asked,

why shouldn't the images of the atrocities from Bucha compel a worldwide, unified, coalition, kinetic response? You mean a military war? Tell me more about what you mean. A military response led by the United States and the international partners. As in bringing military troops on the ground from the United States and NATO? Well, the president's described outrageous things. You've called them atrocities. You've said perhaps we should brace ourselves for worse. Why not? I think what the president's objective is and

his responsibility is to make decisions that are in the interest of the United States and the national security of the United States and the American people. And that is not to go to war with Russia. It is to do everything in our power to hold them accountable, to support efforts through international systems, to do do exactly that and to provide military assistance, security assistance and support to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government. That's exactly what we're doing. But it is not in our interests or in the interest of the American people for us to be in a war with Russia. Go ahead. How have they pushed me into agreeing with Jen Psaki? I know. I was watching. I was like, she handled that pretty well.

When Jen Psaki is the reasonable one in the room, the world has gone mad. And you can see, look at the words that were used there. Why does the United States and the international community use a coalition in order to go in and stop kinetic? He also used the word kinetic. I'm like, oh my God. Like he's literally calling for a U.S.-led military response, a la a coalition perhaps of the willing, to go in and to stop this. It's madness. The whitewashed language is very dystopian. Yeah, exactly. Like the way that they now. Say it.

Say you want a war. The way they now refer to like missiles and guns as lethal aid. Same thing. And that's why I appreciated her response because she forced him to say. She's like, why don't you be super specific about what you're actually asking for here? But I think it says everything that what sort of questions and what direction is acceptable in polite society and what's not. And of course, you know, and we've, you know, portrayed this for you many times before, the mainstream press only ever pushes in one direction. They only ever reward

one direction. And so even though what the U.S. has done already is extraordinary, I mean, however you feel about it, they have gone way beyond what people were expecting at the beginning. Remember, at the beginning, the big marker for whether they're going wild with sanctions or not was SWIFT. And in a blink of the eye, they run right past Swift and way more stringent, way more indiscriminate sanctions. And nobody takes stock of that. It's only whatever you did, like the most hawkish thing you did, we want you to go even further. We're going to continue pushing you even further, even further, even further. That is like the acceptable, supposedly liberal or progressive position in polite society right now.

And that's absolutely bananas. And, you know, it'd be one thing if this dude was like a total outlier asking like playing devil's advocate, pushing the envelope. And you've got a bunch of people on the other side saying, all right, what do you do? Have you enabled Zelensky to be able to pull back sanctions and negotiate a deal? What are you doing to try to create an off ramp? How are we pushing for peace? But you don't hear those questions at all. All you get is this direction and these sort of euphemisms for basically starting World War III. A hundred percent. And I think that people should not underestimate how much of an impact this is having. I mean, look, this is anecdotal, but I live in Lib Central, and there are more Ukrainian flags than there are American flags. And there are now bumper

stickers. I just saw one yesterday, Ukrainian flag, and it says, silence kills. I mean, what we're getting from all of this is that that's being channeled through the White House press corps. We're creating a situation where a sizable but influential constituency will not have the conditions of peace be acceptable to them from a domestic political front. And they're pressuring the White House and putting them in a situation where they always have to have an answer ready for why they're not starting a war. And instead, if they had to have an answer ready for what they were doing in the peace process, then that might change actual national security policy. Here's the question. We do a show here, obviously, and I look for as detailed as a possible response as to what is next in the peace process. The last three days, what have we found, Crystal? Zero. I mean, maybe there would

be one. Perhaps there would be a clip we could show you if the press corps were to actually ask a question based upon that subject. They're not asking that. We can't even give you an update. We don't know what the red lines of the United States are. All of this should have to be articulated and pressed at the daily press White House briefings. Instead, we get, why are you literally not starting World War III? And I think we should spend some time on this again, because some people are justifiably extraordinarily upset about the situation and looking at what's happening with Ukraine, and they want to know what we can do. And there is a

caricature being made of, I think, people who push restraint like us saying, oh, any action is going to cause World War III and a nuclear exchange. That's not true. But let's explain very clearly how quickly these things can get out of control, which is that let's say there's a military response, a la what we did against Assad. That's actually a good example. We used Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a neutral ship in order to strike whichever Russian unit pulled off this war crime. Okay, so now we have a situation. We just sent a cruise missile and killed a bunch of Russians. Well, there's a couple of things that could happen. Number one, they could use some of their anti-missile defense systems against that ship. Now you're in a war. Number two, they could use it as a retaliatory strike against a NATO base, which carried out that unit. Now you're also in a war. Or we could have a

situation where they then strike a commiserate NATO unit, which is in Poland or somewhere else, which is not American, but is NATO, which tripwires Article 5 of the NATO treaty, and now you're in a war. So in all three of the situations I just laid out, you're in a massive war with Russia, and it just happens so quickly that people really cannot understand. In any of these situations I just laid out, the road to nuclear exchange is maybe seven days out, simply because of the way that hundreds of thousands can be killed, even in a conventional conflict that you're against Russia. The last conventional conflict that was fought with Russia, 23 million Russians died, and I don't even know

how many Germans died in terms of the Eastern Front. So this is not a joke. And I think that that is the forgetting all of that and the lack of asking, well, what exactly is a commiserate response going to look like? What does a war, an actual war, look like in the 2022? It's not a pretty answer to that question. And you, if you think that they're bluffing, would find yourself amongst a long line of folks who thought the same thing in 1914, who thought the same thing in 1939, who thought the same thing in 1861 as to whether something like this was going to go off with a hitch and would end in a matter of weeks. And here's the thing, you know, I've seen some credible analysis that's basically like, yeah, he is bluffing.

He's full of it. The only thing he respects is like power and strength and you, you know, kicking him and thumbing your nose at him. And that might be true. But guess what? There's a chance that it's not. And the risk and the danger of the alternative that that analysis is wrong is not worth taking. And so we're not saying, oh, 100%, this would lead to nuclear World War III and Armageddon, et cetera, et cetera. We're saying that that outcome is so horrifically unfathomable that

we can't even have a small chance of putting ourselves in that situation, which I think is what Chen Psakiaki is also trying to say here. You know, even the coverage of these new sanctions that are being put on and, you know, the ever-increasing call for more sanctions, more sanctions, and why aren't the Europeans getting on board? And basically, I mean, Germany would be screwed if they just totally cut themselves off of Russian gas and oil in a way that, like, our population would never accept for ourselves either. So we should have a lot of understanding of what's going on there. But there's only a push in that direction. There's

very few voices, precious few, that are willing to look at the impact of sanctions so far and say, is this actually working? Is this actually pushing us in the direction that we want to go? We covered Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times where he very gingerly walks up to the edge of saying, like, look, guys, here's the history, just so you know how this normally goes. And he doesn't even go so far as to say, like, we're doing the wrong thing and we should take another course.

He just says, like, here's the history and here's what you should know as we continue down this course. That is a very, very rare sentiment because, unfortunately, even asking that question, should know as we continue down this course. That is a very, very rare sentiment because unfortunately, even asking that question, even putting that information out there is considered totally unacceptable and not even allowed in mainstream discourse. Instead, totally okay and totally commonplace to basically call for World War III. That's what's acceptable in polite society now. Right.

To that end, we have some new comments from Noam Chomsky, who, of course, many people respect and admire. He gave a new interview to the New Statesman. He covered a range of issues, climate crisis, Trump, how he sees this moment right now as one of the most dangerous moments in history because you have all of these forces coming together. But we wanted to talk a little bit about his comments on Ukraine, which I thought were really interesting. Let's go ahead and put this tarot sheet up on the screen.

And I'm just going to read you his whole quote here. He's asked about what's going on in Ukraine. And he says, it's monstrous for Ukraine. But why did he do it, he being Putin? There are two ways of looking at this question. One way, the fashionable way in the West, is to plumb the recesses of Putin's twisted mind to try to determine what's happening in his deep psyche. The other way would be to look at the facts. For example, that in September 2021, the United States came out with a strong policy statement

calling for enhanced military cooperation with Ukraine. Further, sending of advanced military weapons, all part of the enhancement program of Ukraine joining NATO. You can take your choice. We don't know which is right. What we do know is that Ukraine will be further devastated and we may move on to terminal nuclear war if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement. So there's a lot that's noteworthy there. First of all, I think he's completely right that there is a lot more comfort in the West with sort of like Putin psychoanalyzing than actual clear-headed thought about how we ended up in this place. And I think it's very important, too, he does not deny the monstrosity of what Putin and his cronies are doing in Ukraine. So this isn't to take away agency or say, oh, it's all the West's fault or anything like that.

But it's very important that you understand how we got here. If, number one, you don't want to repeat those mistakes. And if, number two, you want to actually bring this conflict to a close. And then the other part that he says here, which should not be controversial, but is very controversial, is that he says, we may move on to terminal nuclear war if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement. That's the voice that you are not hearing anywhere from the U.S. press. I think the thing is with Chomsky is he's literally so old is that he remembers what the last time that this was like. And that's actually important. Like he was actually alive

for it and remembers. He was literally alive. He was a grown adult during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is somebody who actually lived through the pre-New Start era. I mean, that is just something

that I think sears onto your consciousness, which we have just lost today. I've been thinking a lot about this. In graduate school, we read this great paper called The Nuclear Taboo. It was written by a woman named Nina Tannenwald, and I just looked it up. What she talked about is that over the course of 50 years from Hiroshima up until when she wrote it, I think it was like in the 90s, that the development of the nuclear taboo was not a foregone conclusion. There were a lot of times, and I talked about it

here, in the 1950s where President Eisenhower was presented plans to use limited, again, a joke, limited nuclear weapons at Dien Bien Phu in order to defend the French, at the Suez Canal in order to save the British and the French. Sensing a theme here in terms of that. Henry Kissinger and others talked about the possible use of tactical, again, in quotes, nuclear weapons in Vietnam. There was a long history of talking and presenting the option of nuclear weapons that really started to turn the tide after the nuclear crisis of the Cuban Missile One because it was then when the world was faced with the actual destruction. And also people forget, the Soviets tested a bomb. It was called Tsar Bomba. And it horrified

the world in terms of what an actual, I think, I'm forgetting the actual term for the type of thermonuclear explosion. It was like 56 megatons or something like that. And when it was observed with human eyes, the mushroom cloud, and exactly what it looked like, and the level of destruction and the glass that it literally turned the soil, people were like, oh my God, this is what these weapons actually look like. But the thing is, it's been 60, 70 years since that happened. And so only people like him who were 90 something years old were old enough to remember. And now we're slow-walking ourselves into all these debates that we had already. Although it's interesting because actually, typically, if you look at the polling,

the older you are, the more hawkish your view is on this. Yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah, I don't know. And so I think there's also a cable news effect, frankly, of older Americans are much more likely to be consuming Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. I mean, their average age is like 66, 67 in terms of their average viewer. And so they're just relentlessly taking in this we got to do more, we got to do more, we got to do more propaganda. Now, even among those groups, when you say, well, what if we actually put boots on the ground? They're like, hell no. But everything up

to that, even things that would very clearly lead to that, because the media has done such a poor job of explaining and educating and instead only does like human interest stories. Again, nothing against human interest stories, but that can't be the entirety of what you're doing on this conflict. You've really got to understand and explain what is going on and what the potential geopolitical implications are. Because that's been their direction, you have this very hawkish instinct among older generations who are also still very steeped in this like Cold War, it's us against the Soviet Union kind of a mentality. I mean, these are the people who still think that Russia is communist, even though it's like completely absurd. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to look at this more like how

Noam Chomsky looks at it and to be really committed to how do we get to peace? How do we make sure that we don't end up in this situation, how do we evaluate honestly what the U.S.'s role was in leading us to the brink of war, again, not taking any of the agency for the actual invasion from Putin. It's a good point. And actually, now that I think about it, it might make sense that many of the boomers who did this were either not alive or children during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And instead, their memory is of Ronald Reagan

bringing back rollback into containment policy of the U.S. versus the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War. So they're probably much more triumphalist in what it might look like. However, they forget what the precarious days when there was actual nuclear parity between the U.S. and the Soviets actually looked like. So maybe it's only the septuagenarians that are old enough. Maybe if we just had like the 90-year-old cohort and the 80-year-old cohort because Bernie's pretty good on this too. Yeah, that's true. So maybe there's something to that.

I'm not going to defend septuagenarian leadership, but perhaps there is a small slight advantage to that because they're old enough in order to remember. All I would say is that when I seek renewed calls and the disregard of risk, it just seems that we've forgotten so much history. And the people who lived through these great wars, World War I and World War II, they never forgot what they saw. Same with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was imprinted on their consciousness until the day that they died. And I think that the misfortune is that we haven't had a population or even a leadership that has that. To the extent that younger people like us who are very against war and are much more minded to restraint, it's because all we have watched are utter failures in our lifetime. I was a child when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

I watched Iraq. I watched Afghanistan. I watched Iraq. I watched Afghanistan. I watched Libya. I watched Syria. What confidence do I have in the ability of the United States? Well, that's true. I mean, our formative experience as being Iraq is very, you know, that'll leave an impact for sure. And I also think that older generations, and this is like very typical, are more susceptible to propaganda because,

you know, as you, as sort of like new means of propaganda are developed, new generations become sort of more savvy to them. I mean, I think of my dad, who is extremely brilliant person. He's a PhD physicist and he would get these chain emails during the Obama era that he would like sort of take seriously, you know, because you just haven't built up. If you're of an older generation, you came of age at a time when that sort of just like outright lies and propaganda wasn't something you had to inoculate yourself against. So I also think that the younger you are, the more questioning you are of the information that you're being fed, the less that you're reliant just on the New York Times and CNN or Fox News for your information diet. And so the more open you'll be to seeing things through a different lens than what the entire mainstream establishment media is presenting you. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you look at it all together and it's a scary situation, but I'm glad that Chomsky could warn us all, at least in this instance. Let's move on over to Obama. So there was Obama's triumphant return to the White

House. Speaking of boomers. And it didn't go so well for the current president, the former president really upstaging him. So first, we're going to show you a joke he made about Biden being vice president. It'll be relevant in a moment. And second, just in terms of how the former president was received as a rock star at the current president's White House. Let's take a listen. Vice President Biden, Vice President, that was a joke. That was all set up. Mr. President, what do you say to Democrats worried about the midterms? What do you tell Democrats worried about the midterms? We got a story to tell, just got to tell it.

What's happening in Ukraine making free finger clip, guys. This one shows President Obama being fetid at the White House, while you can also see at the same time President Biden in the background basically being ignored the entire time. That's brutal. For those who are just listening, I'm sorry. But we had to make sure that people just saw how President Obama's shaking hands. Even Kamala is there. And the president of the United States is seated in the background. And this did not go unnoticed by some of Biden's advisors. Let's put this up there on the screen from Alex Thompson saying, quote, I can tell you not everyone in Biden world thought that the Vice President Biden joke was all that funny.

And really, it just goes to show you, Crystal, that Obama still is the rock star of the Democratic Party. Biden was always the reluctant choice. And even at his own White House, he's upstaged by the former president. It's frankly humiliating for the former president. I mean, for the current president to be treated in such a way. I don't even mean with a joke, but really in terms of you could see the energy that was there for Obama himself. And with Biden, it's just not there. And that's, I mean, yeah. What else do you say about that? That's really embarrassing for our current president.

Yeah, the moment that we showed where he's kind of like standing awkwardly around at the party trying to jump into a conversation. I think we've all had that moment. Sure. Very relatable. Not as president. We haven't all been president of the United States. I think the other thing that all of this shows is it's no accident Obama is brought in now as Democrats are fully pressing the panic button on the midterm elections. They see the polling. It's not getting better. In fact, in some ways it's the polling. It's not getting better. In fact, in some ways, it's getting worse. The landscape looks extraordinarily dire. I mean, I'm seeing

projections now that on the current track and with demographics, especially Latinos, shifting to the Republican Party, you could end up not only with Trump in the White House, but with him having a freaking super majority in the Senate and control of the House. So Democrats have sort of like fully awakened to the absolute disaster that is awaiting them electorally. And we'll get into some of the specific mistakes that they have made themselves. And so what do they reach for? They reach for Obama, who has been proven time and time again to, even though he remains a lot of, he retains a lot of personal popularity within the Democratic base, but he has never demonstrated an ability to bring anyone

along on the ride of his own personal popularity. Barack Obama is very good for Barack Obama, and that's about it. So it's also very sad indictment of the Democratic Party that all they know how to do is of course NAFTA and many other sins during the Clinton years, an entire shift of the party away from its working class base and towards sort of like upwardly mobile suburban professionals. The Obama years are going to wear poorly over time as well and already have been in a dramatic sense rejected in terms of a policy perspective by the American people. That's why Trump got elected in part. And yet this is all they know how to reach for instead of actually trying to deliver material benefits to the American population that might in the long run inure to their political benefit. It's also very telling that this, you know, excuse to bring him back to the White House, it was all about sort of shoring up his core legislative initiative, Obamacare, closing one of the convoluted loopholes that they left in there in order to try to appease this or that

Republican talking point. And so even the fact that they're still leaning so heavily on Obamacare after all these years, a policy that is an improvement over what it was before but has major problems and effectively was a giveaway to the health insurance industry is also very telling. So with regards to some of the own goals of the Democratic Party, there's some new polling that really puts a pretty fine point on it. Let's put this up on the screen. So we've talked about this a little bit before, but we've got some new polls in this regard. You'll recall that as part of the relief package that was passed last year, they included one year of child tax credit, relatively universal benefit that went to families. It was extremely effective in helping to eliminate child poverty and child hunger.

Well, they did not renew it. The whole assumption was this will be so good that, of course, we're going to renew it. Like, of course, Manchin and whoever will get on board, and even some Republicans may come on board to make sure we retain the child tax credit. Well, that didn't happen. So the benefit has dried up. And you used to have, among the group of people who received the child tax credit, the child tax credit recipients,

Democrats had a 12-point advantage with this group. Okay, so if you were getting the child tax credit benefit, you were more likely to vote for Democrats by 12 points. Now that that benefit has dried up, this very same group actually narrowly favors Republicans. So for all of the conversation about how culture war is everything and it's the only thing people care about, it's the only thing people vote on, that's just not true. It's just that neither party actually offers a material plan that voters might get on board with and not have yanked out from underneath of them after like a measly few months. We also talked about with regards to Obamacare, another thing that they passed in that relief package was expanded subsidies to make Obamacare more affordable.

These are subsidies that should have been there in the bill from the beginning, but they were worried about like, oh, they're gonna say we're spending too much money, which of course they said that anyway, so it didn't even matter. So they didn't pass the subsidies to start with. They put them in for one year in this relief package because again, they were worried about, oh, we can't put it in permanently because it'll cost too much money.

Now they're going away. And guess when people are going to get the letter that says, oh, your health insurance premiums are about to skyrocket? October, right before the November elections. And as I mentioned last time, the group, and it's the American prospect who did the great reporting on this, the group that is most likely to see skyrocketing health insurance premiums because of all the weird quirks and means testing in this law, middle class, older Americans, the very group that is most likely to vote. So all of this is a long way of saying that there have been many world events which have transpired, which are not really Biden's fault. What he has done with

him and his failures and his complete utter lack of leadership and the fact that all they can do is like pull Obama out of the bag and beg voters to please show up, even though Obama did his thing again and being like, well, I can't promise that much, but you should vote for us anyway. That's all they got, and it's sad, and it's pathetic. If all you got is to resurrect a law that you passed 13 years ago,

there's a little bit of a problem. Remember when we did something that was moderately okay sometimes for you? We can not even do that anymore, but you should vote for us anyway. Actually think about where you were 13 years ago,

and then be like, wait, they still want me to remember that and then vote on that in the election? What are you doing? That's why we pulled that clip of me like, we've got a story to tell. Just got to tell the story. What? What does that mean? As usual, he continues to keep this up. Vote for us because we're better than the other guy. How's that working out for you? The child tax credit polling is great. I mean, look, the other thing is, like you said, with Biden, there's a lot of stuff that's out of control. But losing by five and losing by 12 is a totally different ballgame in terms of the Senate, in terms of the midterms, and more.

As we saw many times throughout history, there are still elements within Biden's control which he has flubbed. And you can't just blame it all. Asking Obama to bail you out, it's not going to work. Ask Hillary. Yeah. And as we began the block with, like, the comparison was not particularly favorable for Biden in the end here. So, yeah, a kind of sad statement on the Democratic Party. Because we are fair-minded people, we did want to go. We already gave Jen Psaki credit for some stuff today. So let's go ahead and give Biden some credit for something that he said seemingly off the cuff at a big conference of labor unions. Clearly, what's been going on in New York, Staten Island, JFK 8 with Amazon Labor Union has been a little bit on his mind.

Let's take a listen to what he threw into the speech. That's what unions are about, in my view, about providing dignity and respect for people who bust their neck. That's why I created the White House Task Force on Worker Organization Empowerment, to make sure the choice to join a union belongs to workers alone.

And by the way, Amazon, here we come. Watch. Watch. So I saw that and was like, OK, Joe Biden, you're a little bit late to the fight, but that's all right. You know, throwing your weight behind encouraging the Amazon workers and putting the weight of the presidency behind it. I'm all for it. Bernie tweeted it out to sort of like a minute. I was like, all right, that's that's decent. I'll take it. There are a million things you could have done to make this fight easier. You've completely abandoned the PRO Act. You haven't used your

executive power to do all the things that you said you would on unions. But at least you're saying the right things about the Amazon labor union. But it wasn't even one day, just a couple of hours later, Jen Psaki at the podium gets asked about Biden's comments, and here's what happened. Can I ask, President Biden today told union members, Amazon, here we come. Was he endorsing the efforts of workers to unionize Amazon facilities? What he was not doing is sending a message that he or the U.S. government would be directly involved in any of these efforts or take any direct action. What he was conveying is his longtime support for collective bargaining, for the rights of workers to organize, and their decision to do exactly that in this case, something that he has long supported broadly over the course of his career. He really is like, the government's going to do anything. And I know what they're thinking,

but you could very easily answer this question without having to create all this distance between Biden and the fact, look, the government is supposed to encourage unionization and collective bargaining. Like that is written into the law. So the idea of him just saying something positive about the Amazon labor union should not be all that controversial. Yeah, I couldn't understand that. And perhaps it would make more sense if we included this little tidbit. Let's put this up there on the screen. You might remember Jay Carney, Biden's top aide, former White House press secretary, is now currently the global head of communications at Amazon. And here we have news that Mr. Carney has sent a series of frustrated messages to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain

about perceived slights against Amazon, according to people familiar with the messages. Now, that's a little bit of a problem and obviously a massive conflict of interest to have your former top aide there be in charge of literal comms at Amazon and Bezos' number two with the direct line to the White House chief of staff. And perhaps, Crystal, it is informing some of their both-siderism strategy whenever it comes to this. Well, it also, you know, harkens back to the block we just did on Obama and the real legacy of the Obama era that Jay Carney was such a trusted and high-level aide and then could walk right over to Amazon and be such a nefarious, I mean, truly nefarious and malign influence. Part of what this article reports is that, do you guys remember when Amazon corporate put out these weird snarky tweets, like clapping back at members of Congress?

They went after Elizabeth Warren and they went after Mark Pocan when there was a conversation about workers urinating in bottles, specifically Amazon delivery drivers. And remember they put out that snarky tweet that was like, you don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? And of course, that led to Ken Klippenstein and other reporters being like, here's literally the evidence. Here's literally a memo from internally at Amazon proving that you know that this is happening and you understand that it's a problem. So don't try to tell us that, you know, oh, this is just fake news. Amazon ultimately had to retract those statements and apologize, calling it an own goal. Well, I don't know if this had been reported before,

but this piece reports that it was Bezos and Carney in particular who crafted these tweets. That these were like, you know, they came together in a conference room, all the high-level executives, and came up with this stupid, idiotic strategy. And that was, you know, former Obama-era top dude Jay Carney. So it says a lot. It does say a lot. You know, Bezos has become incredibly arrogant. He's actually lost a lot of what made him a good leader and CEO in the first place into building Amazon. And he has really lost touch with the public. What I have understood is that they are riding high on

consumer data, which shows that Amazon, and this is true, is one of the most trusted and beloved corporations in the world in terms of how Americans feel about them. But they forget that on the workplace matters, their own workforce has a real problem. And that also can snowball real quickly. We were both looking at a graph yesterday, I wish we had a cut for the show, about musculoskeletal injuries at Amazon warehouses. Musculoskeletal injuries per 10,000 full-time employees is almost, what, five-fold more at an Amazon warehouse than a non-Amazon warehouse, and I think eight-fold more than a normal private business. This is a per rate of 10,000 full-time employees. Perhaps we'll do a

broader thing on this in a later show, but I mean, that's crazy. The injury rates at the other warehouses are really high. If you just think about them in the absolute, and then you look at Amazon, it's just multiple times higher. So out of 10,000 workers, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 of them, so one in 10 is suffering a musculoskeletal injury. That is extraordinary. And yeah, when you look at the conditions, it's no surprise because they track your every movement. They look to chew up and spit out their workforce. And, you know, this is something that Christian Smalls has been talking about.

I actually heard him say yesterday, like, you hear these numbers about all these workers that Amazon's hiring. That's not all because they're creating jobs. It's also because they're firing all these people or these people are having to drop out because the work is so incredibly arduous and because you're treated in such an inhumane way. I would just say to Bezos, to your point about his arrogance, you know, the president of Amazon Labor Union, Chris Smalls, he is doing a very effective job of not only advocating for his workers, but really

shifting the mindset of what a job is supposed to be. I think his most powerful message is when he says like, no, we're not quitting our jobs anymore. We're going to organize. In other words, it's not enough freedom to say, oh, I'm going to leave this crappy job and go to another crappy job. No, I'm staying right here and I'm going to be a part of determining what the conditions of my employment actually are. You're going to have to deal with me, and you're going to have to deal with my workers, and we're going to make this into a good job, not go on to the next crappy job and the next crappy job and the next crappy job. And to show you what an effective job he is doing at sort of winning the culture, It's like a culture war kind of a thing. Not only did Jimmy Kimmel cover him favorably, we've seen him treated fairly on CNBC, on MSNBC, on sort of

like mainstream news networks, and even what was actually quite a good interview here on TMZ. Take a look. What is it you think, Chris, that scares Amazon the most about you organizing this union? What is the one thing that they just, they oppose the most that you're going to have the toughest battle with them? Well, Amazon has a system that's been implemented for the last 28 years that hires and fire people all the time. When you hear about them hiring 150,000 people, it's not because they're creating jobs. It's because they fired 150,000 people and they need to replace these people. So once again, forming a union is going to provide a system that benefits the worker at the bottom.

Jeff Bezos made $88 billion during the course of the pandemic. He just went to space and came back and thanked us for paying for that. He bought a half a billion dollar yacht. That's all the expense of our labor. So we deserve a lot more. We're deemed essential workers. Our value is a lot more. And I think everybody's really realized that throughout the course of the pandemic. And this is just a way to fight back and collect a bargain. You've unionized a local. Is it your intention to go beyond that and go around the country and do the same thing? Yeah, absolutely. We got a second

election coming up in three weeks right here in New York that we're hopefully going to be successful for. But I can tell you, since we won on Friday, April 1st, we've been contacted from over 50 buildings nationwide. And also we got several buildings overseas that reached out to us, India, South Africa, Canada. They're all interested in forming the AOU chapter. So this is just the beginning. That's right. Yo, he goes on at the end there. They're trying to wrap up and he makes sure to make a point and say, listen, celebrities were there for you. You ought to be backing up workers in your hometown. So, I mean, how can you like how can you argue with that? It's very hard to dispute what he's saying there.

I think there's going to be a lot to change here. And what people should also remember is what did Amazon just do in Hollywood? Well, they just bought a major studio. So we are going to see which celebs are really not going to want to tread. Who's there. And who are actually going to show up. You know, a lot of progressives out in Hollywood, right? Let's see which ones are the real ones.

Yeah. I think the other point he makes there that's really important that I think is part of why the landscape has changed at Starbucks and at this Amazon warehouse. And even, I mean, we saw a significant shift in the votes down in Bessemer, which is a very hostile landscape to unionizing, is the fact that you did have this language during the pandemic about essential workers. And they became a lot more visible than they ever had before. You became a lot more aware of how your packages were getting to your doorstep and who was still having to go to work. We didn't really do anything for those people, but there was an awareness created about their value and about the extraordinarily difficult circumstances that they were facing. One of the great weapons of people like Bezos and others who want to treat workers like their cattle

is that they're basically invisible. And so I was thinking about this when we were talking about Daisy Pitkin who organized laundry workers in Phoenix. I mean, talk about work that, you know, most people will never think about what happens after a hospital sheet or a hotel sheet goes off the bed and goes to be laundered. And so the more that you just are even aware of, and these workers are brought out of the shadows and, you know, their work highlighted and valued, that in and of itself creates a massive change that's very hard for Bezos or anyone else to be able to deal with. So it's pretty interesting to watch in real time. That's right. All right, guys, this is a story that gives me no pleasure to report on. And frankly, I just think it's extremely sad. But we have new reporting from a really strong and frankly courageous reporter at

New York Magazine on some alleged misuse of funds by the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. So let's put this first tear sheet up on the screen. So here is the headline. Black Lives Matter secretly bought a $6 million house. Allies and critics alike have questioned where the organization's money has gone. The reporter here is Sean Campbell, who this is kind of a follow-up on another in-depth investigation that he had done into the financial management or mismanagement of Black Lives Matter. And effectively, what happened was this, and then I'll get to the specifics of this story. So, you know, after George Floyd was murdered, of course, there was a national outcry about the horror of that situation. And there were a lot of good people

who said, I want to be part of a solution. I want to do something. I want to change the country. And the group that kind of became the catch-all for all of that energy was the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. They raised something like $90 million, okay? Tens of millions of dollars

flooding into this organization from people who saw this atrocity and said, how can I be a part of a solution? And lo and behold, you know, now that we've gotten down the road, we've learned a lot about the fact that, first highlighting is that they purchased a $6 million house mansion in California. If you look at the pictures of it, which are available online, it's quite an extraordinary property. When they were asked about what is this supposed to be used for, they circulated this internal memo of like, oh, my God, how do we deal with this story? And I just want to read to you this part because I think this is very revealing. They say that on March 30th, I asked the organization questions about the house, which is known internally as campus. Afterwards, leaders circulated an internal strategy memo with possible responses ranging from

can we kill the story to quote, our angle needs to be to deflate ownership of the property. The memo includes bullet points explaining that, quote, campus is part of cultural arm of the org, potentially as an influencer house where abolition-based content is produced by artists and creatives. Another bullet is headed, accounting slash 990 modifications, that's a non-profit tax filing, and reads in part, need to first make sure it's legally okay to use as we plan to use it. The memo also describes the property as a, quote, safe house for leaders whose safety has been threatened. The two notions that the house is simultaneously a confidential refuge and a place for broadcasting to the widest possible audience

are somewhat in tension. The memo notes, holds insecurity story use in public YouTube videos, because this had been the setting of some public YouTube videos that had posted to one of the founders' private YouTube accounts already. Again, I want to emphasize that a lot of the concerns about the mismanagement of funds came from local chapters and on-the-ground organizers, some of whom are in poverty, struggling to make rent, some of whom have even been made homeless because they haven't received support from the national outlet that they're supposedly affiliated with. So you had 10 city chapters that issued a public statement back in 2020 rebuking the global network for its opacity. You had families of some black victims of police violence complaining that they've seen little of

the funds that have flowed to the movement's most visible facet. And let me go ahead and put this original article up on the screen because there's another piece of this that I think is really revealing, which is a local activist that this journalist, Sean Campbell, spoke with, talked about how he was planning a counter-protest to like this KKK white nationalist rally that was happening in California. And so he was going to go as a more militant action, be there on the ground, counter-protesting, kind of in their faces, really standing directly up to the face of hatred in America. And not only did the national organization not support him, they actually told him to stand down. Why? Because on the same day, the national organization was doing an online F white supremacy

let's get free streaming event sponsored by UGG, the California boot company described as a worldwide electric slide. So instead of doing the on the ground, in your face, more militant, direct local action, they're saying, no, no, no, you can't do that because we want to do our corporate UGG-sponsored electric slide competition. And I'll remind you that the founders here describe themselves as Marxist. So that's what's going on. There's a lot of questions about how this money, what has happened with this money. They have not filed the forms that should have revealed where the money went and how they have spent it. And however you feel about Black

Lives Matter, you know, this started as a sort of more radical organization that had a fundamental critique that I really agree with that had to do with wages and housing and labor and actual true freedom. And now it's like devolved into this corporate managed thing where they're buying million dollar mansions and leaving the local organizers to hang out to dry. And it is really sad because you genuinely had people who were good hearted, who thought they were doing the right thing. And I don't think this is how they expected

their funds to be spent. I think that's the most disgusting part about it. Look, I mean, not a secret how I feel about BLM, but at the end of the day, it's a free country and people's money is being donated to something that they care about, and it's a scam. This is really the problem, which is that these people stole millions of dollars and are misusing it. What's even more disgusting is that the reporter, Sean Campbell, himself as a black man, was accused of racism for reporting this. And sexism. And sexism. They called him a racist and a sexist for reporting on their stealing, let's call it what it is, okay, alleged for the lawyers of BLM, because I'm sure

they can afford it. It's people who literally took this money, misused it, putting all these corporate dealings, refused to answer any of the questions. But I really encourage everybody to go and read both of these New York Magazine articles, because on both of them, they're both multi-thousand words. And when you see they're conspiring about how to paint those mansions, you're like, this is insane. There's another piece of this that's insane, which is that – so the New York Post, I think, was the first outlet to report on – one of the founders, Patrice Cullors, had bought like three different houses. Right. And they reported on this. And she managed to use her connections to get this labeled as abusive content.

And you can't post it on Facebook, Meadow, whatever the hell it's called now. Which is also pretty extraordinary. I do want to read in part her response so we can be even handed here. She says, and by the way, she's no longer with the organization. Basically, after the first questions of financial mismanagement came out, she stepped down slash was was forced down. And we'll get to who's taken over the organization now, which is also very revealing. But what she said in part is yesterday's article in New York Magazine is a despicable abuse of a platform that's intended to provide truthful information to the public. Journalism is supposed to mitigate harm and inform our communities. The fact that a

reputable publication would allow a reporter with a very proven and public bias against me and other Black leaders to write a piece filled with misinformation, innuendo, and incendiary opinions is disheartening and unacceptable. I think the truth is the fact that there has been so little reporting on this is really kind of a disgrace. And we see the way that, you know, that Sean has been treated here, smeared as personally like racist and misogynistic, tells you why people haven't wanted to touch this. And again, the original complaints didn't come from journalists, didn't come from Right Wing or New York Post or any of that. It came from the organizers on the ground, 10 city chapters and mothers who had lost their sons to police violence who said, don't use our names anymore for your fundraising.

That's where the original concerns came from. They have taken donate links off of their website. Amazon has kicked them off of their, like, partnership program thing. So this is definitely a real story. What I want to impress upon you is that it is really unfair to the people who gave money and thought that it was going to go to on the ground organizing and actual local politics and has instead been used in these other ways. So the last piece of this that harkens back to what I was saying about I don't know why I'm saying the word harkens today a lot. But anyway, that's a great word. It harkens back to what I was saying about the UGG corporate-sponsored electric slide competition is now you officially have had a Clinton world takeover of Black Lives Matter, making it sort of officially into this just like hollow, corporate-controlled, neoliberal thing from whatever its radical Marxist roots originally were. Let's put this tear sheet up on the screen. So the lawyer now for this organization that is trying to keep them out of any sort of legal

jeopardy and clean up whatever financial messes there are to clean up is Mark Elias. Is that how you say his last name? Yes. Best known for his funding of the Steele dossier. This guy was a Clinton lawyer, funded the Steele dossier, and now he's been brought in as official legal counsel. But there's more. Mignon Moore, who I don't know if you guys know who she is, but she is a longtime, like, DCA-lister, Clinton world operative with Bill and with Hillary, she has now been brought on to the board of directors. So to me, it really is sad because any sort of radical critique here that

was more fundamental, that was about wages, houses, unions, labor, and racial justice, that has all been a sort of capitalist critique. That has now clearly all been stripped aside, and it's a completely corporate-aligned entity at this point. Yeah. I mean, I would think that's probably the enduring legacy of what a lot of this is. And that's sad if you did care about that in the beginning. So I think you can just look at this. It's a really gigantic scam perpetrated on a lot of well-meaning people. I mean, like I said, I even disagree, but a lot of my neighbors have BLM stickers and stuff, and they, I'm sure, donated a lot of money to these campaigns. And that's wrong. Look, that's,

these hardworking people's money, and it's misused from what they wanted. And I think that anything that is used towards that end is just completely wrong. It's just wrong. And morally, in order to exploit somebody's legitimate or illegitimate moral outrage and then take their money and use it for nefarious purposes and then have the audacity to call somebody a racist. I mean, look, I think everybody's outrage over what happened to George Floyd was extremely legitimate. I mean, it really was this sort of like revealing moment of grappling with how abusive and unfair and racist this system can be. aims, okay, here's the agenda, it made it very easy to be captured by the Jamie Diamonds of the world and, you know, to be like channeled by Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kid day cloth because

they were able to sort of make it whatever was convenient for them. And now you see the end stage of that with Clinton people taking over the organization. And just like me too, these people are like rats. They really do find themselves everywhere. It's sad. Okay, let's move on. The fun story, the fun block. We got some numbers on CNN+. And it's even worse than we possibly thought. Yes, it is.

This is from TechCrunch, actually. So not some crazy outlet that looked into a little bit of how their launch is going. Let's put this up there on the screen. CNN Plus launched on April 29th and is already showing mediocre results in terms of standalone mobile apps. Relatively kind characterization. Sensor Tower released its initial figures

that show the CNN app, which now houses the streaming service, added about 18,000 installs on the day of launch. During the seven days ending on March 22nd, it had an average of 9,000 installs per day. Now, the reason this matters is because, as we already showed you, CNN is already throwing millions of dollars in subsidy towards their lifetime subscription on this. And another one that they point to within here, Crystal, which is crazy, is that one person familiar with the numbers said that WarnerMedia has spent $ 5 million people to sign up for this thing in the first year and 10 million overall in order to make it commercially viable. That's insane. That's not going to happen. That

would be on par with a legitimate cable membership. And so when you look at this and you see the number of installs, it's a relatively good proxy for the level of enthusiasm. And if the $100 million can only buy you a 50% overall baseline increase in the installation of the app, and that doesn't necessarily tell us the actual subscription, but is pretty directly correlated as they point to here, this is a total disaster. Gigantic disaster. It honestly might overstate the subscription. They go out of their way in this article to say this isn't a complete picture because there's other ways to access it, et cetera, et cetera. But as you all know, just downloading an app doesn't mean that you actually put in your credit card number and paid for the service. That's right.

You can download the app and then open it up and be like, oh, shit, I got to pay for this? No, thank you. That happens a lot. So even the 18,000 guys, that is nothing on the first day is potentially an overstatement of the number of subscriptions that they actually got. And not only was their marketing budget $100 million, which is more than what the network apparently typically spends in a year, a CNN exec said that the launch budget was $250 million. A quarter of a billion dollars to get like 10,000 subscribers. And here's the other one, Crystal, which they point to

just in order to give everybody a good proxy, which is that on the, remember Quibi, that failed video app that they spent over a billion? Guess what? They had 300,000 install on their app on the very first day. When Disney Plus reached 4 million on their very first day. So CNN is now at 18,000 on its very first day. Catastrophe. Yeah.

And again, that doesn't even mean that those people are paying. Getting beat by Quibi, that's bad. Yeah, not just getting beat, getting beat like many times over. So, okay, according to the CEO, Jason Kylar, when he was asked about CNN+, he won't give you any numbers, but he says, it is ahead of my expectations in terms of where the subscribers are. He's credible, Sagar. of where the subscribers are. It's a credible saga. The other person says, we are off to a very strong start. I couldn't feel better about the journalism, the storytelling, the team, the product experience. And they also said that they were very happy.

This is a statement from the company. We are very happy with the launch of CNN Plus. They underlined and bolded very, by the way. Our first week's performance is well ahead of expectations. That's how you know it's true. Our audience has already indicated their love and interest of our programming, and we will continue to serve them more of it. We cannot comment on subscriber numbers as they are not public at this time.

If they were really happy with the numbers, you would know it. They would be all over the place. Of course they would, And that is how every business operates. Look, it's obvious that this is a colossal boondoggle and a failure. And I have been watching some of the stuff that they at least put out publicly. We're talking about Reliable Sources Daily with Brian Stelter. This is a man whose own show's ratings went up whenever he went on vacation. So now they have him on a daily. And in terms of the people that he's booking,

I mean, these are absolutely, I was just telling you today, the latest segment from Reliable Sources Daily was like, straight white men are doing too well in this world. I'm like, oh, wow, that's some content I really got to pay for. Can't hear that for free in our current media environment. It just shows you. The Jake Tapper Book Club, I mean, they're flying to Los Angeles, filming these things at crowded restaurants. They've got Dolly Parton. It just shows you. The Jake Tapper Book Club, I mean, they're flying to Los Angeles, filming these things at crowded restaurants.

They've got Dolly Parton. Wow, I've never heard that one before. Chris Wallace, have you guys heard of any of the interviews that the man has done? He had some, like, congressman or whatever on the show. William Shatner on. William Shatner. Wow, I'm going to pay for that, you know. What was our launch budget, Socrates? Our launch budget. How much did we pay for the table? Well, this was like $ pay for that. What was our launch budget, Socrates? Our launch budget.

How much did we pay for the table? This was like 10 grand. This was like 10 grand, which we had to put on the credit card. What else? I guess the rest of the set, all the other startup expenses. I don't know, probably 50, something like that.

Yeah, 50,000, which by the way. Which was a lot. Which was a heavy lift. I was like, ooh. It was a heavy lift, yeah. You're looking at your credit card budget. And secure the studio. Between all of that, yeah, I guess Which was a heavy lift. I was like, oh! It was a heavy lift, yeah. You're looking at your credit card budget. To bring on the crew and secure the studio. Between all of it, yeah, I guess it was about 50 grand.

Yeah, so there you go. I can't do the math, but we can figure out what a percentage of 250 million that is. I mean, the thing is, they're high on their own supply. No one outside of the CNN building would think that people would pay for this. Like, you have a network that is basically like on in the background as a default. That in no way indicates that people care about what your totally interchangeable and forgettable personalities have to say, you know? And so they just fundamentally misunderstood what it looks like to compete in an actual marketplace. I mean, they basically have like a sort of monopoly position in terms of the CNN cable channel where it's just the default.

It's a rigged market. People have very few choices, and that's what's on at the airport or whatever. When you actually have to get people to affirmatively choose to watch your content, that is an entirely different ballgame. And especially when you look at the ratings on the thing that people have no choice but to watch are dismal and terrible. So what made you think that it was worth spending a quarter of a billion dollars on just more of that? It really is mind boggling. And I think once again, is a very compelling case against the idea that we have anything approaching a meritocracy in this country, because the people that are running the show, they are not too, not too quick on the uptake here.

They're not up quick as at all. And remember, you know, they're so desperate. They're buying dynamic ads that ended up somehow on our breaking points podcast just to show you that we have no say over that because they're trying to target all of you. It's just funny. It's because, again, I said it, but the only reason that we are even able to thrive, be successful, and have an audience is because they suck so much. But they don't seem to understand that. The entire existence of alternative and independent media is a direct response to the utter vacuousness of the current mainstream. So just again, that's how it is. They'll never learn their lesson in terms of how they are so reviled by the actual free market. And don't forget, they're going to try and rig this. Yeah, that's right.

Because they are going to try and make it so that they'll try and cancel all their opponents. They're going to fake their numbers. They're probably going to roll it in to HBO Max. And the reason this matters is because this is the future. They know they're dying. They know that streaming is the future. And they know they're going to lose.

And so what do you do when you have a goblet of money from a fake rigged system like cable? Yeah. What do you do? You spend that inlet of money from a fake rigged system like cable? What do you do? You spend that in order to crush your opponents. Yeah, no, that's right. Their lesson from wasting $250 million on this launch is not going to be, oh, maybe we should try a different approach. It's going to be, how do we rig this system the way that we rigged the other system?

That will be the direction that they go in. And you already see it. I mean, that's part of what this whole censorship push is about, is to push anything that's not the elite sanctioned media out of the mainstream and make it yucky and make it unacceptable and suppress it in the algorithm and make it so you can't find it. They're just going to continue to go in that direction. So even though it's fun to laugh at and it's a dramatic failure, it does not mean that it doesn't also pose an existential threat to independent media. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, we spent a lot of time on this show repeating a fundamental axiom, follow the money. It's not always the answer, but nine times out of 10, it is to whatever happens in politics that's right before your eye. It's especially the case in the story that we're going to look at today, the remarkable rise of Stacey Abrams financially. The failed gubernatorial candidate

who parlayed her failure into national prominence and another shot at the governor's race while running on a whole bunch of nothing. To Tuesday morning, while preparing for that day's show, I came across a very interesting article. Headline reads, Stacey Abrams researched millionaire status before second campaign. Hmm, that's interesting. Let's dig deeper. Well, as I pointed out here, Abrams now says she is worth $3.17 million, according to state disclosures filed in March. That is compared with a net worth of $109,000 when she first ran four years ago. Even more remarkable when you consider this. When she ran for governor last time in 2018, she actually had 50 grand in unpaid taxes to the IRS

and an additional $170,000 in credit card debt and student loan debt. In other words, in 2018, she was worth negative money. Today, she's a multimillionaire. Wow. Classic American rags-to-riches story. Except she has never built or done anything except be a failed politician. Honest work, I guess if you can get it, to increase your net worth by 30 times in less than four years. Let's review how exactly Stacey made her money. Per her campaign spokesperson, Abrams made her money the good old American way. She gave 37 paid speeches in 2021, including a 12-stop fall tour of standalone appearances. Furthermore, she has written, co-written, or reissued six books since 2019,

with another reissue on the way later this year. Even better, Abrams was paid $700,000 over the last three years as the executive director of the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which seeks to, quote, improve economic equity in the South. Furthermore, the $3.17 million figure is just her net worth. How much is she worth right now? Per financial disclosure, she actually earned $6 million in the last four years, with the rest presumably going towards taxes and spending within allocated $5 million in payments for some books or speeches. So, of course, the question arises, as it did for Hillary's paid speeches before the 2016 campaign. Who are the people paying millions of dollars to Stacey Abrams for speeches? Well,

guess what? They don't want you to know that information. It took me a little while to track it down. I found a filing showing that Abrams was paid by Harry Walker Agency. That's a speaker's bureau. When you go to the Harry Walker Agency website, they've actually removed Abrams' profile because it actually listed the people who had paid her. Then I had to use an archived version of the website, The Wayback Machine, and voila, now we at least know some of the clients. Let's review. Per the archived version of the website, people who have paid Abrams include the Human Resources Summit, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Bomboss, the socks company, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, the Society for Social Work Research,

Pinterest, the company, and TED Talks. Pinterest in particular seems to have been very taken in by Abrams, telling the agency, quote, everything went swimmingly. Stacey was a huge hit. You could hear a drop of a pin in the room. It was so quiet and engaged. Now, maybe, like professional wrong person Jason Johnson, you think that's totally fine. She's only worth 3.7.

Governor Kemp is worth 8.5. David Perdue is worth 50. Look, man, I'm right there with you. David Perdue is corrupt as hell. Former CEO of Dollar General with questionable stock trades at best during the pandemic. Kemp is also a multi-millionaire real estate mogul, which as far as I know is probably one of the least honest businesses in the world. But that's the point, right? They're all slimy. Let's at least be honest about that. Instead, the level of vitriol that I received for pointing out the basic fact

that she's a millionaire was incredible. What, Sagar, do you have a problem with private citizens making money? Is this because she's black? No, absolutely not. My problem, as it has always been from the beginning, with stock trades or the revolving door, is when people make money not by creating economic value for other people but from parlaying political access into personal profit. Level up. Rise above the hidden forces holding your business back. Okay, I'm sorry. Last time I checked, this woman is not a successful business person in any way, especially before she ran for office. In fact, the only business credibility she has is co-founding a financial invoices company with her co-author of this book. I mean, good for you.

But look, it hasn't IPO'd yet, the valuation is currently secret, and most people have never heard of it. What does that, what does she really have to tell us about business? Why am I spending so much time on this story? Well, first of all, because corporate media won't. Somebody should at least detail how bipartisan the corruption is in this race, no? But because there is nothing I stand less than astroturf politicians like Stacey Abrams crying victim and then getting filthy rich off of it. Children's books about her speeches, business books, even though she's not in any way a successful business person. The vast majority of her personal income

is derived solely from the fame bestowed upon her by the media, even though I repeat, she lost the election in 2018. And if you think Pinterest and MasterCard paid Stacey Abrams out of the kindness of their heart to hear what she had to say, I have a bridge to sell you. Paid speeches are about as close to legal bribery as it gets in America for politicians. It was true during the Clinton campaign. It's true when GOP politicians like Paul Ryan do it. And it is true with Stacey Abrams. It's an iron law of politics that doesn't care about

what party you belong to. And I'm going to end you this to remind you of the before times. When Stacey Abrams was flirting with a presidential bid, many people, including Joe Biden, tried to recruit her for her endorsement.

Nobody could get it done despite immense pressure from all the various candidates. Until, finally, she did an event with one candidate. That man's name was Michael Bloomberg. And he personally had given Abrams Voting Group $5 million of his own money. She went on to defend his candidacy and even act as kind of a surrogate for a short time. That's who she is.

We already know she can be bought. That's true of both her opponents too, probably. But let's all be honest about who we're talking about here. I mean, a business book, Crystal? I mean, it's just amazing. Six million dollars in paid... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, we recently warned you about a key recession warning light that was flashing bright red.

The yield curve for Treasury bonds has gotten wacky before every single recession since 1970, flipping so that long-term yields are lower than short-term yields. That's the reverse of the normal relationship. That basically happens when investors get very, very concerned about the short term. Well, right now we are seeing the inversion of that telltale indicator. There are some reasons to think that this time could be different. In particular, the Fed has been messing around in the bond market a whole lot, so the market may not contain as much information as it usually does. But this week, we're getting a host of new warning signs and indicators that add to the dire picture. In fact, Deutsche Bank just became the first major bank to predict that our economy

is headed towards recession. Here's a little bit of what they are saying. They believe we'll be in a recession by next year, that stocks will likely drop by 20% by the summer of next year, and that unemployment will rise to nearly 5% by 2024. But that's not all. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is warning investors of, quote, unprecedented risks and the need to prepare for dramatic upheavals. Now, he does not outright predict a recession in this letter to investors, but it's hardly a rosy portrait that he is painting here. And if all of that doesn't have you nervous enough, famed investor Carl Icahn says we could be heading to a recession or even worse. Yeah, look, I think there very well could be a recession or even worse. I really think the one

thing that I do have experience in, and I will tell you sadly, that our companies, we sit on a lot of boards. I don't, but I have delegates on those boards. And some are good, some are fine. But when you get to understand what these boards do, the system is needing fixing. They're really odd. There's no accountability in corporate America. You have some very fine companies. There's some very fine CEOs.

But far too many that are not up to the task that I think is going to be necessitated. So I have that experience, I guess. And then I tell you this, I have kept, and I think we would have done a lot better, but I have kept everything hedged for the last few years. And I think now that we do have it, we have a strong hedge on against the long positions that we try to be activists in and get that edge. So that's the way I look at it. But I am negative, as you can hear. Short term, I don't even predict. I guess. Now, there are a number of reasons that a recession seems increasingly likely. Supply chain shocks, expensive oil, war in Ukraine, and overall inflation, which is not only a problem in and of itself, but critically is leading the Federal Reserve to move in a big way.

And on that front, we have some massive news indicating that they might well be ready to slam the brakes on the economy. First, let me give you a little bit of backstory and context here. So the Fed has been indicating for a while they're going to hike interest rates. And in fact, they just did so for the first time last month, a quarter rate hike that was more or less taken in stride. But now they look prepared to take a much more aggressive course than some were anticipating. And the more aggressive the action at the Fed, the more likely it tips the economy into recession as they try to squeeze out inflation. That's exactly what happened in the 70s. Fed Chair Paul Volcker is celebrated for dramatically hiking interest rates and successfully curbing inflation.

But at the time, he was hated. His decisions caused a brutal recession, with unemployment spiking over 10%. His actions were actually so painful and controversial, they led to the largest protests in the history of the Federal Reserve, as indebted farmers drove their tractors to the Federal Reserve Board building right here in Washington. This time around, it's not just interest rates that the Fed has as a weapon in their anti-inflation arsenal. During COVID, interest rates alone were not going to be enough to keep markets from tanking and the wheels from completely coming off the global financial system. The situation was so dire that even one of the safest and most liquid markets in the world, the one for U.S. Treasury

bonds, basically seized up and all but stopped functioning. This event completely, and understandably, freaked out everyone who was paying attention. So the Fed leapt into action and intervened in the market in truly extraordinary ways. They bought trillions of dollars of assets to backstop both the stock and the bond markets. Now, we can save the debate for another day, an important one, by the way, over whether they could have taken more creative action to directly help regular Americans rather than just shooting trillions of dollars at Wall Street. But suffice it to say, while this action may have been necessary, it created vast amounts of inequality, funneling wealth to the top, while regular people comparatively got peanuts. Regular folks, of course, had to depend on a dysfunctional Congress

while the rich could rest easy with the quick-acting Fed. As Christopher Leonard details in his book, Lords of Easy Money, this Fed policy of scooping up massive amounts of assets overwhelmingly benefits the very top as those assets are being purchased, but it creates massive risk for the entire public when they then try to unload these trillions of dollars in assets from the Fed balance sheet.

And because the Fed went so far and so fast, acquiring the equivalent of a third of our entire GDP in just a couple years' time frame, what happens with those assets on the Fed balance sheet? That is the real story to watch with regard to Fed policy. So with all of that in mind, we've now got bombshell new details about what the Fed is actually planning to do with those assets. Fed Governor Lael Brainard, she said on Tuesday that it is of paramount importance to get inflation down, going on to say the Fed, quote, will continue tightening monetary policy methodically through a series of interest rate increases and by starting to reduce the balance sheet at a rapid pace as soon as our May meeting. Now, I know these comments sound a little bit innocuous, but they landed like a bomb. Brainerd is one of the most dovish members of the Fed, typically advocating for looser policy and lower rates. So if she is saying they're going to go at a rapid pace, it really means something.

So now you're looking at interest rates likely to go up much more quickly. And at the same time, the Fed offloading assets, that's what is being described as a rapid pace. That's basically the equivalent of hiking interest rates even higher and more quickly. Now, the Fed believes that they can find the magic formula here, doing enough to control inflation, but not enough to sink the economy, a so-called soft landing. That is extremely difficult to pull off because the Fed only has blunt tools to use. And because the impact of their actions are not immediate, it's very easy to overshoot the mark and trigger a cataclysm for working class Americans. Add to all of this the chaotic landscape of war, climate crisis, food shortages, supply chain

messes, and you should not be surprised that people are starting to ask the question of when, not if, we're headed to a recession. Now listen, there are two last things I want to say on all of this, some takeaways, some things to think about. First of all, a major reason why the situation is so dicey and why the Fed has become so central to the entire economic system is because Congress has devolved into a body more concerned with culture war signaling and political theater than with actual responsive legislating. Some of the problems we're dealing with,

supply chain issues, things like industry consolidation that are leading to price gouging, those should really be dealt with through congressional action instead of by hoping that the Fed can magically fix everything. The other thing I'll say about all of this

is these strike waves and union drives that we're covering here, they have to move quick. Because part of why workers feel emboldened and are willing to get cheeky with their managers and corporate bosses right now is because there's a lot of jobs. They might be crappy jobs, but there are a lot of jobs. That's leading workers to do what Chris Smalls is urging, having the courage to organize at their current job instead of quit. After all, they try to organize. The worst that can happen is they get fired from their crappy job and they go get a different crappy job. In the best case scenario, they actually turn their crappy job into something that is truly worthwhile and sustaining. If we head into a recession with high unemployment, bosses are

going to feel bolder and workers are going to have a whole lot less leverage. So that's just one example of how much is at stake with these Fed decisions. Worker power, jobs, and actual human beings' lives, all of that hangs in the balance. And Sagar, after I wrote this monologue, we received notes from the last Fed meeting when they decided to increase... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, the man himself, Matt Taibbi of TK News, which you all should be subscribed to on Substack. Great to see you, my friend.

Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Good to see you both. So let's go ahead and put this piece you wrote up on the screen, which I rather enjoyed, but I'm sure, as usual, got you in some hot water. This should not be a controversial take, but your headline here is,

Regime change doesn't work, you morons. How many examples of regime change blowing up in our faces do we really need before realizing it's a disastrous policy? Will we really try it with a nuclear armed adversary? Matt, just give us a few examples for those who need like a little historical reminder of all of our attempts at regime change and how that exactly has gone. Well, obviously, the two most recent ones were Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iraq being the signature program because we well, actually, in both of those cases, we spent massive amounts of money, I mean, trillions of dollars and a lot of lives and basically ended up worse off than we were before the operation started. But even before that, we have a lengthy history of trying to overturn foreign governments, install leaders. The most recent incarnation of this idea is that we were trying to install liberal democracies everywhere.

But that wasn't always the case. Sometimes we were trying to install authoritarians who were more friendly to the United States, like in the case of the Shah. But the new fad is let's make countries everywhere liberal democracies. And that way we won't have any war or conflict. And it just hasn't worked because we can't – it's a naive belief that we can force other countries to adopt a system that they may not have any history with. Matt, what do you think that this impetus comes from? We were talking about this earlier in the show. I mean how can you – I don't understand how you can live through Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan in the last 20 years and be like, you know what? This time, the fifth time, that's the charm.

I'm being facetious, but it's a real thing. A lot of the people in our elite media actually believe this. Where does this come from? I have no idea. And I would add a lot of the countries in the former Soviet Union, because that's apropos to this discussion. I mean, part of the reason that I feel so hardened about this issue is that, you know, I lived in Russia and in Uzbekistan and some other parts of the former Soviet Union during a time when we thought that it would be as simple as, well, let's give these countries stock markets, elections, and some other institutions, and they will instantly become American-friendly allies.

And then before you know it, we're fixing elections so that they don't elect communists or other politicians that we don't like. I think there's a naivete about this, and I think there's also a lack of foresight about the number of things that can go wrong when you try to install a leader in a foreign country. People think that somehow that foreign populations won't react negatively to that. And they always do. Yeah, well, and even before we get to the conversation whether or not it works, it's also illegal. So, like, on its face, even if you could be persuaded that, like, no, this time it really would work, we still shouldn't do it.

You know, you have this line in here that I think is really interesting you talk about. I think this is Thomas Friedman who had, is that right, who had the McDonald's theory, which is— The Golden Arches theory, which is... The golden arches theory. Yes. When a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald's, it becomes a McDonald's country. And people in McDonald's countries don't like to fight wars. They like to wait in line for burgers. Now, I have seen a lot of sort of triumphalism from neoliberals who are basically like, see, our worldview is validated by what's happening in the world right now. And I just see it as complete opposite. I mean, in a lot of ways,

we were instrumental in architecting the Russian regime that exists today. And so for me, the events that are unfolding are a thorough indictment of that view of the world. Yeah, absolutely. And I can say that as somebody who, as a young reporter, was sent out to cover the ribbon cuttings of all those American institutions. Yeah, like, well, not McDonald's, but KFC, like, you know, Ikea, obviously is a Swedish thing. But yeah, there was a belief that once we gave them the consumer economy and some of the superficial trappings of Western culture, that immediately they would come over on board and they would be like us. And this, I think, stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea that cultures can be different, that they can have different histories and different reactions to things. So, yeah, both Ukraine and Russia had McDonald's, and now they're at each other's throats, and the McDonald's obviously didn't help a whole lot.

So, yeah, it's just further evidence that this is collapsing. But more to the point, what's going on is what I fear is that the United States is not letting Ukraine or not empowering Ukraine to make its own decisions about how to negotiate its way out of this war. And that is going to lead to a quagmire of the type that we're familiar with. I completely agree. I'll make a controversial statement. I think McDonald's tastes the best in authoritarian countries. It actually does. I had a taro pie in China, and that thing was good. All right, well, I can't speak to authoritarian countries, but I did spend six weeks while I was pregnant in India,

and I ate an inordinate number of McChickens in India, and it was like a lifeline. Maharaja burger is a real thing. On a serious note, Matt, what do you think is the Biden administration's policy? And I don't think you'll mind if I share that. We were kind of talking a little bit offline about this and we're saying like, you know, we've gotten some leaks of administration officials who were like, you know, the real end game here is Putin out of power.

Now they think they can accomplish that without going in militarily just by like squeezing them through sanctions and praying and hoping and hoping to foment some sort of protest movement that effectuates a coup against the government. But, you know, shortly after we're having that conversation about, well, maybe it's just incompetence and they don't really have a plan or a goal here. Biden comes out and says Putin cannot remain in power and, in my opinion, seems to sort of give up the game about what they're really thinking. So how do you read the tea leaves of what the administration is actually doing, what they're actually thinking, and what their real goals are here? Well, it sure seems like, you know, dating back years that they've had a plan about having a military presence there.

You know, they announced their intention to try to expand Ukraine, NATO to Ukraine. But more recently, I think what you've seen is a number of quotes by officials who are saying exactly what you said. Like the end game is we want to drag Russia into a quagmire. That was in a David Sanger piece in the New York Times. There was a Bloomberg piece that quoted some British officials saying that our number one option is to bleed Putin. You know, we want the conflict extended. And there's a logic to that unless you're Ukrainian, right? Because basically what the West is saying is

we think that this is going to be politically costly for Putin and that ultimately this will result in political instability back in Russia and he'll leave power. There are two errors to that thinking. Number one, it doesn't take into account the cost to Ukraine. The other one is, who's to say that the person who replaces Putin won't be worse than Putin? Because there is that wing of the Russian government that's waiting to come in and correct the embarrassment that they feel that they're going through. So I actually do think that that's what they're thinking is that we want this to go

on for a while. There's some evidence for that. And they think that, you know, it'll result in a new leader in Russia that will be more amenable to them. I think whenever we look at all this, Matt, what we just see is that when you have a lack of coherence in strategy, what fills the void are the most powerful, like immovable forces, which remains interventionism. And in that context, what are some of the danger points that we should look to? You know, people forget, it may seem like it's been a long time. We're a very, very short time in the history of most conflicts. They last for years. I mean, what are some of the potential danger points that we could be coming up on in the near future?

Well, I think we're already at one of them, which is where Zelensky asks for United States help in achieving a diplomatic solution and doesn't really get an answer. Because if the United States sort of essentially opts out of the diplomatic process, then Zelensky is no longer empowered to negotiate his way out of this conflict. And really, Russia's really at war with us and not with Ukraine. And that massively complicates the situation. In other words, if Zelensky doesn't have the authority to sit at the table and say, all right, I accept those terms, the sanctions will be over tomorrow, then we're at cross purposes. Then the situation gets much more complicated. So I think that's one

big thing is that if we don't participate in the peace process, then, you know, that's a major indication that something much bigger already than what's going on is afoot. I think that's all really valuable insight and perspective. Guys, go and subscribe to Matt Substack. His insights here are really invaluable. Thank you so much, Matt. Great to see you. Thanks, man.

Thanks so much, Crystal Sager. Take care. Our pleasure. It's great to see you, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. You know, look, it's been a fun week. I told you all the Taylor Lorenz segment got demonetized. Still zero explanation from YouTube as to what exactly happened there. And that's exactly the issue. Being reliant on these ridiculous content policies, be it the election or this harassment, whatever that means exactly, just means that the only people who can rely on are you. As we were actually talking about our

budget today, I mean, yeah, compared to CNN, it's not that big, but we have all these news. For us, it's a lot. For us, it's a lot. And in terms of our partnerships and the general cost of running all this and editing time and continuing to hire and explore better ways to give you guys the midterms. It's a lot of fun. And we have a very, very big announcement that's going to be coming on our Monday show about what's happening next week. I'm really excited to debut. It involves a little bit of travel on our end, so that's a little bit of tease, but there's going to be a big thing happening next week that you're all going to want to tune

into. And our premium subscribers are going to get a very thing happening next week that you're all going to want to tune into. And our premium subscribers are going to get a very, very special benefit that some of them have been asking for for a long time. So it's going to be fun. We can't wait to debut it. And we'll see you all next week. That's right. We're expanding. We're adding. We're traveling. We're doing all the things, guys. And we couldn't be happier to have your support

in all of it. So thank you. Enjoy your weekend. We're going to have some great content for you then. And we'll see you back here for a full promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait.

Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance.

Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son,

but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.