Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/2/22: Ukraine War Escalation, WH Correspondents Dinner, Economic Outlook, Ministry of Truth, Student Debt, Workers, & More!

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Ukraine war escalation, White House Correspondents' Dinner cringe, stock market and economic outlook, Elon vs medical establishment, CNN's brief moment of reflection, Amazon union vote, Biden's new 'disinformation' board, student debt cancellation, and an in depth exploration of the economy with Prof. Richard Wolff!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/Richard Wolff: https://www.democracyatwork.info/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Cable news is ripping us apart, dividing the nation, making it impossible to function as a society and to know what is true and what is false. The good news is that they're failing and they know it. That is why we're building something new. Be part of creating a new, better, healthier, and more trustworthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to 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 everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big stories to get to. First of all, Pelosi and a congressional delegation making an unannounced visit to Kiev.

We'll give you those details as well as some big spending the Biden administration is proposing to continue funneling weapons into that country. Noam Chomsky giving credit to a very, very unexpected person. So we will play that for you and we will also react. White House Correspondents Dinner, a.k.a. Nerd Prom, over the weekend. We have all the cringe for you to save you the trouble of having to watch it all for yourself. Also, the stock market, I don't know if you've been paying attention, has been kind of falling all over the place lately. So we'll talk to you about what's going on there, what the Fed moves are likely to be this week. They are meeting once again, so that's very significant for all of us, not just people who happen to have money in the stock market.

Elon Musk giving some medical advice, very much upsetting a large group of people. Break that down for you. And we also have to share with you CNN attempting a little bit of self-reflection. Doesn't get too far, but a little bit of self-reflection. Still enjoyable. Also welcoming back to the show, Professor Richard Wolff. He's also going to talk about the economy. We had that surprise drop in GDP last week,

so we're excited to talk to him about that. But we wanted to start with Pelosi and that trip to Kiev. Yeah, the Pelosi trip is basically the highest-ranking U.S. official, number three in line to the presidency, who is visiting Kiev. Let's put this up there on the screen. So Speaker Pelosi met with President Zelensky and his team, bringing along an additional delegation, including Adam Schiff, of all people, on the ground, which makes sense given that he's the chief Russiagator in all of Congress. But the top level U.S. congressional delegation there,

Pelosi praised the, quote, ferocity and the resolve of the Ukrainians in their face-to-face meeting. And more importantly, here's what she says in terms of a commitment of U.S. policy from the branch of Congress. Quote, our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done. Quote, we are on a frontier of freedom. Your fight is a fight for everyone. Thank you for your fight for freedom. You all are welcome, Zelensky apparently told the delegation. So yeah, I'm not sure what else he would say. But I think that it is a important declaration because we've pointed as much as we can to the president. Obviously, he has mostly unilateral action, but he still has to submit these funding requests and more to Congress. And it just goes to show you the immense bipartisan support, both in the Speaker

and Leader McConnell and others, that they have not only for the Biden administration policy in Ukraine, but if anything, they want a more hawkish policy crystal. Correct. Yeah. So this delegation happened to be all Democrats. But as you accurately point out, most of the sentiment around Ukraine has been wholly bipartisan with very, very, very few dissenting voices or even voices just saying, like, hey, let's slow down and think about what we're doing here for a minute. Ilhan Omar famously said, why don't we slow down and think about some of these sanctions and everything that we're doing that's so indiscriminate and was completely, completely smeared for having the audacity to do such a thing. To your point about how a lot of members of Congress want even more than what the Biden administration has done. You had Democrat Representative Jason Crow of Colorado,

a veteran and a member of the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, saying that he went to Ukraine with three areas of focus, weapons, weapons, and weapons. There you go. I think it also bears pointing out that even though, yes, the fight has largely moved to eastern Ukraine, making Kyiv more safe, this is still not without risk. So the U.N. Secretary General recently met with Zelensky in Kyiv just last Thursday, and a missile strike rained down on the capital barely an hour after their joint press conference. So probably Russia trying to send, you know, kind of a middle finger there. But again, just to point out that these trips into an active war zone, still not without risk. And in my opinion, you know, rather ill-advised, continuing to be rather ill-advised, given the fact that, you know, if you had a member of Congress who was injured in an attack, if something, God forbid, were to happen, what that would mean in terms of an escalation is very clear. I mean, it would be a complete disaster.

You'd be facing a hot war directly with Russia and likely, you know, nuclear attacks and all of that entails. So I continue to think that these missions to demonstrate our solidarity and that we're really with their cause are rather ill-advised. Yeah, and I think that there's, you know, it really bears a people will say, well, oh, well, Churchill visited, you know, the French in the middle of the Battle of France. Yeah, the UK was at war with Nazi Germany. Right. We're not at war with Russia. So by going into an active and a hot war zone, you're putting the United States and its policy at risk as much as a nice, you know, show of support might mean. I don't know why I can't meet in a more neutral country like right across the border, in a NATO country, actually. It'd be probably far more advisable. But all of this is on the heels

of, and let's put this up there on the screen, Joe Biden now asking Congress for $33 billion more in additional aid to Ukraine, as they even describe it here in the Western press, a, quote, dramatic escalation of U.S. funding for the war with Russia, and the Ukrainian president is pleading with lawmakers to give it a swift approval. So here's what it says. $20 billion for weapons, ammunition, and other military assistance. $8.5 billion in direct economic assistance to the other Ukrainian government, and then $3 billion in humanitarian aid. And it always makes me sad whenever I read these appropriations, and I just look at $20 billion in humanitarian aid. And it always makes me sad whenever I read these appropriations. And I just look at 20 billions in weapons and ammo. I'm not saying the Ukrainians don't need weapons

and ammo, but we have some, what, 5 million or so displaced people. We need to be actually probably spending a hell of a lot more on the humanitarian response in order to make sure that these people are taken care of. NATO obviously stepped up and so has the European Union. But always, you know, everybody says, show me what your priorities are by pointing to what you actually fund. And right now, the funds are all towards the war with Russia and specifically on the behalf of the Ukrainian military to wage war on that military. I'm not saying that isn't obviously a priority, but it just shows you that we have no real hope for anything else within the conflict and no

strategy to try and bring this thing to an end and find peace. Well, that's it. We know what just shows you that we have no real hope for anything else within the conflict and no strategy to try and bring this thing to an end and find peace. Well, that's it. We know what the macro strategy is because they've said what the macro strategy is. It isn't to negotiate a peace. It isn't to try to provide Russia with an off ramp and bring them to the table. Not at all. I mean, they've now explicitly stated what people at the beginning would have been accused of being like, you know, pro-Russia and conspiracy theorists, etc. If they came out and said, no, we think the U.S. policy is actually to weaken and ultimately try to push Putin out of power. Well, now that's effectively the stated policy of the United States.

And so this massive increase in weapons funding for Ukraine should be seen as part of that strategy. They want to keep Russia tied up in Ukraine forever. That's not good for the world. It's not good ultimately for Ukraine. And so that's how you should view this policy. And, you know, we throw these big numbers around here. It can sort of like be hard to wrap your head around how much money exactly this is. But this full package, just this piece of it, represents 20 percent of Ukraine's entire GDP.

There you go. OK, so that's the size and the scope of what we're ultimately contemplating here. Again, with, you know, I would expect that this will likely sail through. The only potential legislative hiccup is Democrats are considering tying it to COVID aid, in which case. Yeah, that's not an objection to the policy. Exactly. Then the Republicans will be like, I don't know if I want to do COVID aid, in which case, then the Republicans will be like, I don't know if I want to do COVID aid too. But in terms of this specific package, I think it has overwhelming bipartisan support. You're likely to see, I mean, you may not see a single voice speak up against it or even offer a word of caution about what

exactly our policy is and what exactly we're doing here. Yeah, I think that's, you know, really, really well said. And if you want to know the other insanity in Congress, this is the poll of power, which gets no scrutiny by the press. Put this up there on the screen. Representative Adam Kissinger saying, Words matter, but so do our actions. I'm introducing an authorization of use of military force

as a clear red line so that POTUS can take appropriate action if Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. We must stand for humanity and we must stand with our allies. So what he's saying is that Representative Kissinger wants to create an authorization for the use of military force for the U.S. to be explicitly allowed by Congress in order to declare war on Russia if it uses biological, chemical weapons in Ukraine. Now, that seems completely nuts. I'm not saying that that wouldn't be a horrific act, but should that trigger a potential nuclear war with Russia?

That's what Representative Kissinger is saying. I mean, this is somebody who has pushed the no-fly zone and more. Look, the no-fly zone is off the table for now, but don't sleep on these efforts because the media is not looking at this and reporting it with the level of scrutiny that it really deserves. Same with the Pelosi trip. I mean, it's like it's just a foregone conclusion that the number three in line to the presidency is going to just waltz into an active war zone. And to put it in perspective for everybody, I really think that we need to look at the level of aid that we've been given to Ukraine in the context of history. Put this up there on the screen, please, which is that we are now

providing Ukraine more money than the U.S. has sent all but four countries in total since 1946. So look at this. Israel, $132 billion. Afghanistan, $111 billion. Egypt, $79.9 billion. Iraq, $67 billion. Keep in mind, Iraq and Afghanistan, we basically ruined. So that level of aid is not really commiserate with our foreign aid. That is where Ukraine now ranks on the map, more than Pakistan, more than Vietnam, more than Jordan, more than Turkey, which is a NATO ally, more than Russia, ironically enough, and more than India, also an Indo-Pacific ally to the United States. Just consider it within that level of context. And we're not saying that Ukrainians don't deserve help. Of course they do. God bless them.

Their cause is righteous. But when runaway military aid like this happens, we have seen this story before with Libya, with Syria, and more. When you have just free, like floating weapons all over a war zone, stuff changes hands. I mean, it's conceivable that some of this aid will find its way even, you know, let's say it gets captured by the Russians, and then they start giving it to Chechens, and then they start using it elsewhere, either at home or even, you know, against the Ukrainians or, God forbid, against somebody else. It's just always a consideration when you're providing massive amounts of military and ammunition into a hot war zone. War is messy.

And sometimes those weapons go missing, as the Pentagon likes to say. Well, I mean, we know that there are fringe extremist elements within the Ukrainian fighting force. I mean, we know that, right? That's, you know, and so we have been to this play before. We've been there in Afghanistan arming the Mujahideen. We've been over this a million times. I think the most important thing is to consider the macro policy and the foolishness and ultimately destructiveness of that macro policy of saying, we don't actually want peace. What we want is

to keep Russia in a stalemate, to weaken and bleed them and, you know, kill as many Russians in Ukraine as we possibly can in hopes that Putin is put under enough pressure and, frankly, that the population of Russia suffers enough that they put that pressure onto Putin to remove him from power. That's the clear policy of the United States. You know, when we talk about regime change, it's not necessarily like we're going into Russia to invade. No, I don't think that is on the table whatsoever. But the idea is the U.S. finds it politically useful to have Russia tied up in a long war in Ukraine. Is that good for the Ukrainians? Ask yourself that ultimately. Right. Okay, so this was surprising. Noam Chomsky has been, you know, an outspoken,

I would say, dissident voice on Ukraine, as he often is when it comes to foreign policy and certainly the media's coverage here in the U.S. of foreign policy. He recently gave an interview in which he gave credit to a very unexpected person, given Chomsky's overall views of this individual. He actually credits Donald Trump for some of the things that he has said on Ukraine. Let's take a listen and we'll react on the other side. So going back to the one Western statesman, he didn't mention all of this, but he suggested something similar. Moved towards negotiations and diplomacy instead of escalating the war. Tried to see if he can bring about an accommodation, which would be roughly along

these lines. His name is Donald J. Trump. Okay, very important to note that in the very next breath, and I think we have this tweet from Glenn as well, he goes on to say Trump is a dangerous figure. I mean, he uses quite, you know, he says that he is one of the most dangerous figures in the world. So he's not saying like, oh, now I think Donald Trump is great. I also think it is very much worth noting and very important here to say Trump has been everywhere on like all over the ideological map when it comes

to Ukraine, basically throwing out every talking point from the extreme hawkish to the, you know, more like what I would like to see pushing for a negotiated settlement, that type of language. He has truly been all over the map. So the idea that he's been like consistently pushing for peace is ludicrous. The statement that Chomsky is referring to there, let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. He did issue this one statement that I also thought was pretty decent. He said, it doesn't make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren't sitting down and working out some kind of agreement.

If they don't do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage. This is a war that never should have happened, but it did. The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now, not later, when everyone will be dead.

Okay, that's true. Fair enough. He also, though, remember he floated that idea of like, let's paint Chinese flags onto our, yeah, fighter jets, and then bomb the shit out of Russia. Something like that is basically what he said. He's floated all kinds of really terrible ideas,

and he's also used similarly extreme language to describe what is happening in Ukraine and also his view of Putin. We have a little bit of that from his recent interview with Piers Morgan. Let's take a listen. So what would you do right now in Ukraine if you were the president? Putin uses the N-word. I call it the N-word. He uses the N-word, the nuclear word, all the time. That's a no-no. You're not supposed to do that. He uses it on a daily basis.

And everybody's so afraid, so afraid, so afraid. And as they're afraid, he uses it more and more. That's why he's doing the kind of things he's doing. He's doing them because he thinks nobody's going to ever attack us because they're all stupid and they're afraid to talk about it. I totally agree with you. Okay? So what do you do with that? And instead of, excuse me, it's a little complicated.

I'm sorry. Instead of, you know, kowtowing, instead of Biden saying, oh, he's got nuclear weapons. He keeps saying he's got nuclear. We have better weapons. We have the greatest submarine power in history. So what would you say and do? I would say we have far more than you do, far more powerful than you, and you can't use that word ever again.

You cannot use the nuclear word ever again. And if you do, we're going to have problems. When you see the scenes, Mr. President, of maternity hospitals being bombed, when you see refugees being attacked as they flee, grandmothers, children, babies. You see the decimation of previously prosperous cities living in a thriving new democracy. When you watch what's happening, I mean, do you agree with my assessment that Vladimir Putin is now an evil, genocidal monster? Yeah, but I also, when I look at it, I do. Sure. Who wouldn't? with my assessment, that Vladimir Putin is now an evil genocidal monster.

Yeah, but I also, when I look at it, I do, sure. Who wouldn't? So, again, he's been all over the map. I mean, I also, so that first thought, he's basically saying, oh, if he kept saying we're going to, you know, potentially use nuclear weapons. Right, then we'll do it. Then we're going to threaten him right back and be like,

oh, yeah, well, ours are bigger and better. Okay, so maybe not the statesman and like the peacemaker that we would want him to be. It was funny whenever he was saying, he's like, Putin should never use the nuclear word. I'm like, I remember a little episode called Fire and Fury. Yeah, how about that? The world, the fire and fury, like the world has never seen before. How about that? And I also, I was terrified at that time. I legitimately thought a war with North Korea could break out until, you know, I thought that the best thing, one of the best things he did as president was just go meet with Kim Jong-un. I mean, look, Kim Jong-un obviously is a problem. It's not like the nuclear program has been shut down or any major diplomatic solution was reached. But I mean, what was that, like six years ago now that he met with Kim Jong-un? And we haven't had similar, you know, similar escalation in rhetoric

or nuclear testing. So it clearly did something, and I think that's a great thing for the U.S. policy towards North Korea. So I would encourage the side of Trump, obviously, that wants diplomacy, but it also, I almost found Chomsky's statement kind of disingenuous in that way, where I was like- It was a little like tongue-in-cheek, I, I think. Look, Trump says a lot of stuff. What does he mean? He said everything you could imagine saying on a train. For every statement saying that Trump wants peace, we've played here, Trump would be like,

it's a holocaust, what's happening? And I'm like, dude, these words of a president matter. Joe Biden, who said war crimes. Biden wants to call it a war crime. Biden wants to call him a genocidal maniac. Biden says, by God, this man cannot remain in power. I mean, essentially, you're seeing a uniparty in terms of the agreement between the two in terms of rhetoric. Now, on the margins, one says MIGs or not. I'm against sending the MIGs there, to be 100% clear. But that really is just the divergence of two different approaches, or same side of the coin, so to speak, whenever it comes to both of their policies. So unfortunately, we do not really have any major statesmen in the United States right now calling for peace at the highest level of U.S. politics. And that, I think, is a tragedy of which we may rue the day for wanting that to happen. It may seem like things are on a downswing there.

Listen, that war with Ukraine, the civil war in Ukraine previously, that lasted for eight years to happen. It may seem like things are on a downswing there. Listen, that war with Ukraine, the civil war in Ukraine previously, that lasted for eight years, guys. Like, we are still in the very infancy of, it may turn out that we may not even think about this period of the war. We may remember the first couple of days of which it was clearly, it didn't work.

A new major offensive and all that stuff, sometimes it takes months. Who knows what's going to happen? All I know is right now there are not diplomats meeting with each other. There are U.S. diplomats going over there and saying, hey, here's all the weapons you could ever possibly want. Who knows how it works out? Yeah. No, I think that's all well said.

And this new funding request, it's meant apparently to fund them through September. So it tells you, I mean, they certainly don't see like any sort of immediate cessation of hostilities. And then how much are we going to send after that? And then what? And then what? And then what? Every escalation, every day, every week, every month that this continues,

every additional risk that we take, like Nancy Pelosi showing up in Kiev along with a congressional delegation, inches us closer to disaster, to the edge. I mean, you know, it's easy at this point to get kind of complacent about the actual risk that you're facing here. And I do think that the Adam Kinzinger tweet that we put up earlier that he wants an authorization for use of military force, he wants to authorize, like preemptively authorize a war if Russia takes certain egregious actions.

I think the timing of that is also really noteworthy because he wants to get ahead of it when it seems like, yeah, it's not really a live issue. And so it's easier to sell the American people on something like that when it's not imminent, when it's like, oh, yeah, we want to we want to send this strong signal that, of course, we're going to back Ukrainians. Whereas when you were actually faced with the question, okay, guys, are you ready now to go to war? It would be a very different question, very different sentiment from the American people. So you can just see the way that people are being manipulated. You can also see the way that any sort of dissenting voices are just completely shut down, censored. I saw PayPal banned a couple of independent news outlets recently. For what? Mint Press and another one. I don't know. I mean, they're basically, they view themselves

as anti-imperialist. I honestly am not that familiar with their content to like co-sign or not what they're doing. But I do think it's another indication of how our own, like how dominant our tech sector is and how much the U.S. dominates the global financial system. That's being weaponized against Russia, but it can also be weaponized against our own citizens. And that's what we're starting to see increasingly. Yeah, that is just the scariest thing. So, okay, speaking of the press, how they piece people shower themselves in glory, there was the White House Correspondents' Dinner here in Washington over the weekend.

Sadly, Crystal and I did not score an invite. Not sure we would have gone even if you had been invited. I know you're shocked. We weren't on the guest list. Absolutely shocked. We have a little bit of a highlight reel here from what happened. Let's take a listen.

I think ever since you've come into office, things are really looking up. You know, gas is up, rent is up, food is up. Everything. No, it really has been a tough first year for you, Mr. President. And yes, I know a lot of you are worried. And yes, it is risky making jokes these days. You know, I mean, we all saw what happened at the Oscars.

I've actually been a little bit worried about tonight. I won't lie. You know, I was like, what if I make like a really mean joke, you know, about like Kellyanne Conway, and then her husband rushes up on the stage and thanks me. Just hope we all stay calm. You guys are relentless.

Every day you show up and every day you demand answers on the pressing issues of the day. And then Fox News asks about Hunter Biden. And I'll be honest, though, I actually think that's a good thing. I really do. I think people need to be held accountable if they're using their dad's name to get ahead in life. And I can't think of anyone better to ask about that than Peter Doocy. Yeah, wherever he is, Chris Wallace laughed at that joke. You know, but I think that they should be happy to know that you just recently announced that you're proposing a new 20% minimum tax on the super wealthy. And I will say,

President Biden, that you were a big man here, a really big man. You could have targeted Donald Trump, but instead you chose to only raise taxes on billionaires. That was big of you. Really nice. Prove me wrong, show me the taxes. So, like did none of you learn anything

from the gridiron dinner, nothing, huh? Like do you read any of your own newspapers? I mean, I expect this from Sean Hannity, but the rest of you, what are you doing here? You guys spent the last two years telling everyone the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings. Then the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan. Huh?

I mean, Dr. Fauci dropped out. That should have been a pretty big sign. Fauci thought it was too dangerous to come tonight. Pete Davidson thinks it's okay. And we all live with Pete. Okay. All right, then. Okay, all right.

So we all had to suffer through that. So did you. By putting it together. shout out to producer James, who had to watch all of the tapes. I thought the inflation joke was good, but I mean. You know, he actually had another one that I thought was, that I chuckled a little bit at, which was like, I didn't understand why Biden invited me, but then I figured out he gets his highest approval ratings

when he's standing next to a biracial black dude. Okay, that's kind of funny. Okay, all right. Credit to that. That's pretty good. All right. But the thing is about the White House Correspondents Dinner is it's not just about the dinner. It's not just about the comedian. It's about all the parties that happen afterwards. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which I think just typifies everything to its maximum extent. The multi-billionaire owner of the Atlantic hosted a party for Democratic Party officials and the Biden cabinet. In attendance were the U.S. security state operatives, including the CIA director and various journalists from The Atlantic, NBC, Washington Post, and CNN.

I mean, when you look at this list, Crystal, it is like— Wait a second, Sagar. Yes. Are you telling me that there are billionaire owners of media companies? Oh, wow. I thought we were supposed

to be terrified of that. What? What? This is outrageous. I had no idea. I just love this. I mean, it is outrageous, but it's also been going on

for a long, frequent time. This is the deep state of DC in a single paragraph. You have David Bradley and then Laureen Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow. They're the owners of the Atlantic hosting single paragraph. You have David Bradley and then Laureen Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow. They're the owners of the Atlantic hosting this party where you have the secretary of state, the CIA director, the commerce secretary, Jen Psaki, the deputy attorney general,

various different senators, the FCC chairwoman, various different congressmen, the Homeland Security Advisor, and then Jeffrey Goldberg, Ann Applebaum, Russell Berman, Franklin Foer, David Frum, Elaine Godfrey, Adam Harris, Mark Leibovich of the New York Times, Jake Tapper, Jose Andres is there because of course he is. I thought I was in Ukraine. A bunch of other journalists, Wolf Blitzer, Jonathan Capehart over at MSNBC, John Dickerson from CBS News, Jen Palmieri from, I forget, what is she from again? Whatever. It doesn't matter.

She used to work for Hillary. That's all I know about her. Anyway. She's CNN now. She really floats around. Whatever. What it just shows you is that is the actual D.C. established ruling class. You have the CIA director, secretaries of state, at the house of Steve Jobs' widow,

all who are partying and hanging out together. Now you wonder then, why do the press repeat these people's talking points? Because they're all friends. They hang out with each other. They are part of the established set. And, you know, I said this at the time, and I actually got attacked for this by a bunch of people who are apparently pro-Trevor Noah, but I'm curious what you think. I said, the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2022 seems like the last gasp of a dying era. You have a historically unpopular president

speaking to an increasingly irrelevant press presided over by the failing host of a once great television show. Like, it felt to me as if it's a transition from an era, but that doesn't mean that those people in the era still don't have all of the power. As the rest of the world moves on, though, they still run the country, so it's such a weird dichotomy. And I think they don't, they have so little self-awareness about why. They know they're hated at this point. Yeah, that's right. But I think

they don't understand why. And, you know, for the Trevor Noah defenders, like, I don't have anything against him personally, but I think it's just a fact that the Daily Show used to be really sort of agenda-sending. I mean, it really was very culturally relevant, and now it's very culturally irrelevant. Yeah, that's a fact.

That just is a fact. And certainly, Jon Stewart definitely showed a willingness to not just make jokes about both sides of the aisle, but really sort of cut them to the core in a way that hurt. And of course, Stephen Colbert came out of The Daily Show and we all know he gave the most epic White House Correspondents Dinner performance of all time. So yeah, I think it's a fair assessment. And when you see the photos that come out of all these people together and it's Democrats and Republicans and the security state and the media and all of them, buddy, buddy, and all of them together. Yeah, it does make you realize how,

on a touch, they are. It makes you realize how clubby the whole thing is. And so a lot of times when we talk about, when we do media critique, we talk about like the money that's involved and the personal self-interest in terms of how to advance your career and all those things are definitely factors and they matter a lot. But I do think it gets undersold sometimes how much just the social pressure in that club. It's immense. It is immense. I mean, this is how human beings are wired. It's very difficult to resist that. I mean, it's very unusual that you have a figure like, you know, as much as Bernie was able to stand apart from the Democratic Party to the extent that he did for a long period

of time, like that's very unusual. Most people, when they're in a group, they want to be accepted by that group. They want to be part of that group. They want to conform to the norms of that group. And so when you have this group think where journalists and politicians who are supposed to be adversarial, like that is what that relationship is supposed to be, but they see each other as buddies and drinking partners and old friends, yeah, it's going to make it a lot harder for you to do your job. And then you layer on top of that your incentive not to piss these people off because you want them back on your show or you want to be able to get that next scoop from them, so you want them to still be in your buddy-buddy network and circle,

that's how you end up with a press that is routinely more interested in fawning over elites and typically much more comfortable sort of training their fire at people who are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the power structures here in D.C. So there's a little window into that, I would say. And here's a perfect example. Let's put this up there on the screen. George Conway and Ilhan Omar posing together. He says, quote, we have reached the singularity.

Now, I happen to think Ilhan has been one of the most courageous people, especially on foreign policy in Congress. But, yeah, I mean, George Floyd. It's cringe. Like, whoa, what's happening? Also, I got to say, one of the ugliest human beings. And Congress is like a neocon, isn't he? Yes, absolutely.

And just on a superficial level, hideously ugly. I'm sorry, but, I mean, just look at the man. That's not the point. And then let's put this next one up there on the screen, which is, you know, peak White House Correspondents Dinner, Garden Brunch, as they say, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. Do you think that they talked about their shared hatred of Kamala? Right, exactly. That would definitely be what unites them. Also, their shared hatred of each other.

Like, it's clear. Klobuchar despises him. You know, it's like, why do we all have to pretend? This is the thing I just don't understand. Remember when Jen Psaki said Biden and Obama are real friends, not D.C. friends. Washington friends. Not Washington friends. This is a whole weekend dedicated to fake-ass Washington friends.

It's so true. Yeah, and I know you haven't been to the actual – you've been to the surrounding part. You know what this whole scene is like. I mean, I went to this several times. And, yeah, the whole thing is just so gross and phony. And you've got all these social climbers trying to, like, you know, scanning the room. They might be talking to you, but they're, like, scanning the room to see if there's someone more important, more powerful, more beneficial to their career that they could be talking to. It's really gross.

And, actually, they all turn into little fangirls whenever actual celebrities show up. Oh, yeah. I'm still, unfortunately, follow a lot of these people on Instagram. I was going to say, so Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson were there, and they're all like, oh, my God. They're just as lame as everybody else. I don't know. I hope I wouldn't act the same in that situation.

Like I said, the one year I was supposed to go, and my friend's wedding was on the same day. Obviously, it was way more important. So it just shows you that this is what the established set is like. In terms of the jokes and all that. Trevor, of course, has to wax lyrical about how great the press is and all of that. Oh, yeah. It's not like I don't agree with freedom of speech. And he's like, I made fun of the president, and I'm still standing.

It's like, dude, you are as close to a, like, regime bootlicker as it gets on cable. Well, that's the other – listen, I can never listen to Biden talk about, like, the importance of freedom of speech and the free press and whatever when – listen, I mean, Julian Assange is, like, set to be extradited to the U.S. right now. So, you know, anyone who hasn't spoken out about that and claims to care about freedom of the press, free speech, whatever, like your words are hollow. You're full of shit. So I just can't take anything that any of these people say seriously when it comes to like, oh, my God, the press and freedom of the press. It's so important when they clearly have been consistently on the wrong side of that issue. And Biden continues, you know, the Trump era prosecution of Julian Assange, which he could end today right now. So. So anyway, you know, they're all hollow.

They're all climbers. They're all more interested in their own friends and their clicky social circles and their own ambitions than they are about actually holding anyone to account. Yeah, there you go. All right, guys, I don't know if you've been paying attention, but happened to catch my eye last week that the stock market has been did not have a great month in April. And we will tell you why that matters potentially to your life. Go ahead and put the numbers up on the screen there from CNBC. Dow tumbles more than 900 points. The Nasdaq drops 4 percent on Friday to close out a brittle month.

So let me read you some of the details here. They say U.S. stocks on Friday, Nasdaq composite notching its worst month since 2008 as Amazon became the latest victim in April's technology-led sell-off. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell nearly 4.2 percent, weighed down by that Amazon post-earnings plunge. The S&P retreated by 3.6%. The Dow shed 939 points or close to 2.8%. NASDAQ finished at a new low for 2022, and the S&P did as well with the main stock benchmark taking out its previous low in March. They point to here a couple of things. First of all, they mentioned Amazon with a bad earnings report. They lost about 14 percent, biggest drop since 2006 after reporting a surprise loss and issuing weak revenue guidance for the second quarter. And Amazon, of course, being a global retailer,

subject to the same supply chain issues and global forces as everyone else. So when they saw Amazon taking this surprise loss, that seemed to trigger broader losses across the board. And of course, Amazon, you know, being such a giant, just like that loss in and of itself is a significant blow. By the way, Jeff Bezos, his fortune plunge, this shows you how insane his net worth is, his fortune plunged by more than $20 billion just Friday, just during that one stock route on Friday. The big picture here is nothing that you all will be shocked about. Of course, you've got the ongoing supply chain issues. Of course, you have lockdowns in China contributing to concerns.

Of course, you have the war in Ukraine, which is causing all kinds of problems and again, fueling those supply chain crises, not to mention increasing issues both with gas, but also with food prices. Then you also have the Fed. Let's go ahead and put this Wall Street Journal tear sheet up on the screen. So they say here, Fed prepares double-barreled tightening with bond runoff. What does that mean? So obviously, with inflation continuing to be high, the Fed has already hiked interest rates, but only by 0.25 percent. So relatively mild. But the ideas they're meeting this week, they're likely to do a 0.5 interest rate hike, and they are also beginning the process of unloading all of those assets that they have piled up on their balance sheet. Now, you don't need to get into the complicated mechanics of this. However, you should just see this as another way that they are tightening financial fiscal policy. So in addition to the interest rates increases, which are, you know,

they're going at a faster clip now and they're trying to pull back consumer demand, you also have selling, they may not sell off the assets, they just let them run off, but unloading these assets that also contributes to fiscal tightening. So that's probably the big thing that is causing the markets to be spooked right now. And Sagar, as we've covered here before, it is significantly dangerous because we are in uncharted waters with regard to the massive amounts of assets that the Fed has piled up on their balance sheet. And even the experts don't really know what the impact is going to be of allowing these assets to run off.

They are also indicating they may even be so aggressive as some of the assets to actually sell, which they have never done before. They didn't do that even in the brief period when they let some of the assets run off before. So they don't know precisely what this is going to do for the economy. So that means that there is a big risk that instead of the soft landing, quote unquote, that they want to be able to engineer, that they're going to trigger a massive crash. Why? Because these assets are massively overinflated. I mean, there's huge asset bubbles. It appears that the stock market continues, even after these declines, to be hugely overvalued. So you have a

very, very risky situation ultimately. And the last thing I'll say about this, which I thought David Dayen said quite well, is basically like, you have a supply chain crisis that is fueling inflation. What does the Fed increasing interest rates and curbing demand have to do with that whatsoever?

Like that doesn't ultimately solve the problem. It's a very blunt tool. It's effectively the only tools that the Fed has. And since everything else in this town is dysfunctional, that's basically what we have to rely on, and that's a very risky gambit. Yeah, there's only one organization in America that could fix this supply chain crisis. It's called Congress, and they would have to have a massive industrial project over the next five years to both set investor expectations and also fix the structural problems in our economy. Absent that, not much you can do. And in this article, they say that Jerome Powell was quoted in March saying that this is equivalent to an additional quarter point bump in the interest rate, which again, you should all be very concerned about. I think the part

here which does concern me, and I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but basically, instead of both a passive runoff, there is a consideration of actively selling mortgage bonds on the open market. Now, what that would be is it would actually raise the mortgage rates, and borrowers would be less likely to refinance into a new loan. Thus, they would be slower to mature. So it would be, in effect, an ability in order to push the mortgage rates even higher than they currently are. Now, my concern on that would be, look, I think that the mortgage rate already has risen more than

any time in modern American history. That's kind of nuts. I mean, we went from 2% to 5% in the span of a single year. Now, that's obviously going to slow down the market. Let's say mortgage rates get up to like 7%. Now you're in a situation where you're actually going to be increasing a rent crunch because people who were going to buy are not going to borrow at a 7% interest rate. Well, guess what, guys? We already have a 21% inflation when it comes to rent in a single year. I was talking with some people who were in Idaho and in Arizona. Both of those places are seeing double digit, like 40% rent increase in some areas because of the runoff from California, Austin. I got friends moving to Austin very soon. The rent increase and mortgage increase and price there is in a world that you cannot even conceive

of in terms of houses there were already selling 300,000 over asking price. Now, I'm not saying that that's a good thing, but we could be obviously in a situation of overcorrecting. And with all of these blunt tools, and especially with our financialized economy, you have no idea how this is going to play out. And what do we always warn people? You may not make money on the way up, but you're going to lose money on the way down. Because if there is a crunch, that means that it's harder to make payroll. It's harder for businesses to take out loans. It means more firings.

It means more macroeconomic conditions that make unemployment more desirable, which literally, this quiet part out loud, when they say they want the economy to tighten or to slow down is they want higher unemployment because unemployment right now is like 3.9%. So that's a real disaster for a lot of people who are out there. That's it. What the Fed can do is basically make it so you have access to less money. There you go.

That's when we use all this fiscal tightening and all this. That's what it actually means. It's a euphemism. That's what it actually means. And so it's effectively the, of course, inflation is a massive problem. Inflation at the level we have right now means that workers are taking a pay cut every single month, like their wages are going down every single month. And obviously that cannot persist. But when we just rely on the Fed, that's how we got into this problem to start with, is that we have over-reliance on the Fed. And so we leaned on them to basically backstop the entire economy. And by the entire economy, I mean the entire

Wall Street economy, because that's all they can really do without some novel and creative approaches, which we can debate with an expert on another day what might actually be at their disposal. But in terms of the tools that they think are available to them, that's all they can do. And so when you over-rely on the Fed, they can shoot trillions of dollars at Wall Street. They can make sure that the stock market is completely buoyed. They can make sure the bond market this time is also completely supported and risk-free. Can they actually fix the real economy and iron out these issues with the supply chain? No. And so you have a terrible potential scenario where they are acting to slow the economy and make sure you have less money in your pocket

and available and access to in order to spend. But the things that are causing inflation don't actually abate. So you continue to have these high levels of inflation even as you're triggering a recession. I mean, that's a very real possibility that's on the table. And again, because we've never quite faced this exact scenario with a combination of interest rates, hikes, plus runoff of the assets on the balance sheet, plus potentially even selling off

some of the assets on the balance sheet, there is no one who knows exactly what that is going to mean ultimately for the economy. So yeah, they may say it's probably equivalent to another quarter point increase. That might be true. It might be less than that. It might be more than that. These are all like educated guesses as to what it's actually going to mean for the economy. There was one other piece here that I wanted to share with you. So there's an analyst, another analyst who's predicting a massive stock market crash. Let's go ahead and put this insider tear sheet up on the screen. They say a notorious market bear who called the dot-com bubble warns there's a strong possibility

of a 50 to 70 percent crash ahead and breaks down why stocks are primed for a decade of dismal returns. Now, let me say this guy, his name is John Hussman. He's the president of Hussman Investment Trust. And he is a little bit of a perma bear. And he has been predicting a crash for a while now and obviously hasn't come to fruition. However, on certain, his track record outside of that is actually very good.

He predicted in March of 2000 that tech stocks would plunge 83%. And lo and behold, the Nasdaq index lost exactly 83% during a period from 2000 to 2002. So he kind of nailed that one. He predicted in 2000 that the S&P would likely see negative total returns over the following decade. And then it did. He also predicted in April 2007 that the S&P 500 could lose 40%. And then it proceeded to lose 55 percent

in the subsequent collapse. So he does have some record of correctly calling crashes in the past. He looks at, you know, whether markets based on his calculations are overvalued and he effectively looks at the markets even after these declines and says they are still massively overvalued. And the real key here, I'll just read what he says. He says, the main thing that determines whether an overvalued market continues to advance or drops like a rock instead is whether investor psychology is inclined towards speculation or risk aversion. When investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it. When investors become risk-averse, they tend to be skittish and selective. Such sentiment is already here.

According to one weekly survey of investors, sentiment is at its lowest point since 2009. It's kind of a funny thing to measure, sentiment. But that's why he thinks he's issuing this dire warning about what could be coming next. Yeah, I think that in general, everyone should be very on the watch. The S&P 500 is down, I think, 14% year over year, which is not obviously the norm. We've had a decade of mega growth. And actually, in Silicon Valley, I think I referenced this previously. I spoke with David Sachs.

He's a venture capitalist. He was saying in some of the private markets, you have VC valuations dropping down by 70-something percent, which is that has a major ripple effect on capital in the private markets, which then obviously is going to bleed into the public. So if the publics are down this much, imagine what private valuations, and remember, people take huge loans and margins based upon the valuations of their business. This also impacts the type of technology and other stuff that gets invested in in the middle of a bear market. So it's very possible after a decade of growth that we could be entering a decade of decline. And my biggest fear is a true return to the 1970s, which is if they tighten and we still have high inflation by the supply chain crisis and we have high unemployment, you have straight up stagflation all over again.

Not to mention a gas crisis. It's like you can't make it up in terms of how it just – that situation was so traumatic for an entire generation of people. It impacted fiscal policy for two decades. We could be back in that situation again. Yeah, it was so dire because now Paul Volcker, who was the chairman of the Fed then and who just decided, like, I'm just going to lift interest rates until inflation stops. And he did that. And it was extremely painful. And I feel like some of that pain gets lost in the telling of the Paul Volcker hero narrative.

Yeah, we don't really remember that. But it was so bad. You had, you know, farmers who were going bankrupt who literally, like, you know, drove their tractors up to the Federal Reserve building. It was an intense period of financial and economic pain that was far from just confined to Wall Street. So that's why we're kind of trying to stay on top of, you know, what the Fed is doing, what it means, how investors are reacting, because I think it's undeniable that, you know, the markets have been dramatically overvalued. They've been pumped up by the Fed and, you know, they're backstopping of the entire thing. And so the question is just, is the music going to stop and the whole thing collapse? Or will they be able to actually engineer this soft landing that they are trying to pull off in very difficult circumstances?

Yeah, that's right. EBD. Okay, let's move on. This is just a fun one that I really enjoyed. Elon Musk truly is the new Trump. As in anything the guy says, the media and the establishment has to just be like, no, it's not true. Even though he has a good point. And even if he does have many failings in his own right. So this is a particular one which I

really enjoyed. So let's put this up there on the screen, which is Musk is slammed with backlash for saying that the antidepressant Welbutrin is, quote, way worse than Adderall and should be taken off of the market. So the medical industrial complex and the antidepressant industrial complex is very, very upset with Elon for talking about this. You have doctors who are saying, Elon Musk is not a doctor. You shouldn't be listening to him. Wellbutrin is a great tool for a psychiatrist. Look, possibly true? I don't know.

All I'm going to say is we have a massive amount of antidepressants floating around in our general population right now, and people seem more upset than ever. Is that because of antidepressants? No. But is it causing and curing the problem? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. I am also not a doctor. Do not take medical advice from Crystal or I. Yes. Let's put this next one up there on the screen, though, which is that Elon instead promoted the use of psychedelic treatment based upon his anecdotal experience of talking to people. I don't know if he's ever done it, but he's saying he's spoken with people who have found that the depression was cured by that. And that's actually something backed up by Johns Hopkins University here with the use of psilocybin. I'll personally, I can tell you my mind has completely changed on this

by reading Michael Pollan's book. That's awesome. It is a great book. We both read it. He's a great science writer. He's somebody who clearly showed me that psychedelic drugs in particular are not casual and are literally the opposite

in many cases, which is that the casual use of them, like, yeah, festival culture and all that stuff definitely exists, but whenever you're talking about it in a treatment facility on a wide scale, it's absolutely something that in a controlled setting, and which he emphasizes routinely in his book,

so please go and read Michael Pollan's book on this, How to Change Your Mind. I highly recommend it. I saw it and I was like, I can't believe this thing is not, you know, being fully funded by the FDA. Well, yes. Especially, you can't argue against the veterans,

like this MAPS organization and all that. Yes. So first of all, about Elon, you should take his advice on any of this as seriously as you take any random unqualified person, okay? And so, and I guess as to the freak out, like, I just have more respect for people to think that they're not going to be like, Elon Musk says I should get off my drugs. You know, I mean, I just, I do think you can probably process this information in a way that makes sense for you and consult people who have studied this and are experts on this and aren't funded by pharma but are neutral actors. So let me just put that Elon caveat out there.

With regards to psilocybin, I mean, of course, it's no accident this studies of the potential benefits of hallucinogenic drugs have been completely, you know, pushed off. I mean, they've been basically illegal until very, very recently. So you have increasing evidence from new studies finding that they are, that it is very effective for not just treating anxiety and depression, but dealing with addiction, dealing with like contemplating end of life. Not, I'm not saying like you're going to commit suicide. I'm saying if you are terminally ill and you have to cope with the fact that this is coming to an end for you, they found it can be very beneficial for that as well, coping with grief. There are all sorts of potential benefits to using psilocybin and other hallucinogenic drugs. But I want to be very clear, this isn't something you should be like just freelancing and treating yourself on your, and self-medicating on your own. These studies are done in a very controlled and clinical way so that you have support around you to make sure

that, you know, this is done properly and that you are more likely to get the benefit out of it than not. So I just want to put that out there too. Like, don't just go like freelancing and self-medicating and coming up with your own treatment regime here. That's exactly what he says in the book. Set and setting matter. Okay. With regards to antidepressants, and this is a very tricky subject because I think there are a lot of people who have gotten a lot of relief from these drugs. I mean, we should do a lot of deeper reflection on why it is that one in eight Americans are so miserable and feel so little hope that they feel they need to rely on a substance just to be able to get through. Marianne Williams had said something profound about that, which she's like,

I don't know that this is necessarily mental illness. This may be a sign of mental health, given the fact of all of the suffering in our country, in the world, and the, you know, just messed up situation that we all are witness to right now on a variety of levels. But I do think that that is an important conversation without saying, like, everybody just toss your drugs. There's also, Johan Hari wrote a great book also investigating SSRIs in particular and pointing out a couple of things. I mean, first of all, you know, these drugs are meant to treat one aspect of depression, which is decreased levels of serotonin. But, you know, research that I think is widely accepted says there are a lot of factors that go into this. It isn't just as simple as your brain has some problem that it, you know, isn't producing the right chemical balance. There

is a need for a more holistic approach. There's also solid research that he goes through that shows that, you know, these drugs can be very effective in the short term, but for a lot of people in the long term, the impact ultimately wears off. So that's why I've been excited about the research around psilocybin. You guys know I've covered this here before because it shows potential for a quicker impact and a more long-lasting impact to provide people with relief and be able to live happier and fuller lives. So I am hopeful about psilocybin. That's not based on like I talked to a friend who thought it was better than Adderall or thought it was better that this is based on reading the research, which is increasingly promising and everybody should be excited about it.

For me, it was just reading the doctors in Michael Pollan's book. I was like, okay, well, you can't argue with data. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. This is part of a broader phenomenon, which Elon is highlighting, and he was originally talking about Adderall, which is that right now, guys, we have an epidemic of these telehealth clinics, Cerebral and Dunn Health, allegedly prescribing basically anybody who wants Adderall is getting Adderall. We have a massive increase, so much so that Walmart and CVS are now blocking or delaying telehealth Adderall prescriptions because teenagers and people who are in college find it very easy to just go to one of these telehealth clinics, Crystal, and just get a basic Adderall prescription.

We've seen a spike in this during the pandemic. Guess why? Because of COVID regulation. We loosened telehealth regulations in the middle of the pandemic and has made it so that it's much easier in order to prescribe Adderall without ever having assessed a patient, meeting a patient. And look, these are powerful stimulants, drugs, which, yeah, might help you study. You don't know what you're getting yourself hooked onto. You don't know what kind of long-term impact that's going to have on your hormones, on your health, especially if you abuse

it with alcohol and with other substances. So I just think it's a highlighting that we have pill mills popping up all across this country. SSRIs, Adderall, they're not emphasizing holistic medicine or, listen, psychedelics. I mean, from what I've read, it sounds not one and done, but like maybe once a year or something like that for a lot of people who are out there. But guess what? There ain't no money to be made on that particular one. Same with exercise or losing weight. I mean, you know, exercise is one of the easiest ways in order to cure depression.

Losing weight, you're going to feel better. I mean, there are all kinds of holistic things that you can do in your daily life, which nobody can necessarily profit off on in the pharmaceutical industry, but which would make you feel a hell of a lot better. So I look at the telehealth rise in Adderall. I'm not against telehealth, by the way. I have a teledoctor who I speak to regularly. I'm very much in favor of telehealth. No, telehealth is great. I'm not against it. I'm saying that the regulation's such that you just have these pill mills popping up in order to just prescribe a bunch of Adderall, and then you have people who are very loose on the gun whenever it comes to SSRIs.

We are playing with biology and with our brains in a way which is not natural, and that there are a lot of other ways that you can approach this problem. Look, I'm in favor of legalizing and regulating all drugs. So, you know, you and I are in a different place on that. But the point of when you are selling, you know, when you're a drug company, you make a lot of money off of selling drugs, right? So you don't make a lot of money off of, you know, providing holistic support and, you know, healthy lifestyle changes. And certainly, you know, the government hasn't had much of an interest in promoting any of those things either. So, you know, when you just have this very narrow window of there's something wrong, let's give you a drug to fix it.

You know, that's definitely not an ideal direction for the country ultimately to go in. And then it's also, to your point, like certain things have been pushed. Other things like psilocybin have been banned because, and it's very arbitrary, right? There was a whole moral panic about psychedelics and this whole fear that like, oh my God, this whole generation is going to just be on acid and LSD and they're going to be lost to all of us and we're not going to be able to control. I mean, there was a whole thing about this, you know, what was it? The tune in, turn on, drop out, and everybody freaked out about this.

Because prior to that time, you can go back. I think I did a monologue on, I think it was back on Rising that I did this. I remember this. They did these studies. You can go back and watch the footage, like in the 50s, of administering psychedelic drugs in clinical settings. One of them was, I believe, at University of Maryland. Or maybe Johns Hopkins. But it was definitely in Maryland.

I don't remember where the campus was exactly. But yeah, you go back and watch, and they were doing these long segments on serious news programs about this potential wonder drug. And then you end up with it getting associated with the counterculture, and there's this whole moral panic and backlash. And it's like, oh, we can't talk about this. We can't do this anymore. Finally, some of that is starting to abate. Another area where this could be really a significant, super important breakthrough is with PTSD, especially with regards to veterans. And again, look, this is still early days. In a lot of ways,

we're sort of rediscovering things that had been studied and proven out before. But, you know, the evidence is very promising and very exciting and something that we should all be paying a lot of attention to. Yeah, certainly interesting. All right. We couldn't help but to take a look at CNN after the White House Correspondents Dinner. Brian Stelter and his panel trying to do a little deep soul searching about whether or not the media might be part of the problem. Let's take a listen to that. The White House Correspondents Center spilling across the U.S. Capitol,

spawning dozens of related events all weekend long. Remarkable normalcy. President Biden showing us he can deliver a good joke, ripping Fox's hypocrisy, mocking his own low polls, and showing that he does get let's go, Brandon. This event always has a bit of a reality TV vibe, especially in years when Democrats control the White House and especially this time around with Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson attending as guests of ABC News. But there was no laughing, no gawking, no selfie taking.

America's Democracy is not a reality show, but is the media guilty of making it seem that way? The night's entertainer, Trevor Noah Noah had some comments about that too. To me, it felt different than in past years pre-COVID, pre-Trump even. To me, it felt like this was President Biden trying to talk about democracy versus autocracy, which is, David, one of his favorite themes. It is. It's from the time he announced his candidacy, he's been saying that, and it's one of his keenest insights. And people kind of ignored it. Now we see what's going on. I think he really did with, the key phrase was that you just had up there, democracy is not a reality show.

That's what's wrong with the culture. But don't we treat it like that? Aren't we part of the problem? I try not to, and I think you try not to on this show. A lot of us do, but a lot of people don't. That's the problem. That's the other problem with it. So they acknowledge like, yeah, maybe, but it's not us. It's the other one. It's Fox.

He's like, oh, you don't. It's like, really? Because you're actually the peak person in order to engage exactly in that type of rhetoric. It's also just like, I don't really buy into the personal responsibility narrative of media critique. I mean, yes, you can be an actor within that system and make better choices and make worse choices. But if you're not acknowledging that the whole system is set up to be a reality show, like that is what CNN is at its core. You can maybe diverge a little bit from that in a segment or two or on your particular show or with your particular guests.

But that is what the whole thing is meant to be. It is not meant to be news. It is meant to be entertainment to keep people watching so that they will consume whatever corporate sponsor ads are coming in the commercial break. Cable news is about the commercial break. It's not about the filler. The filler is just there to try to keep you there. It really is about the commercial break. So if you don't see that that is the whole structure

of what you're doing, then you're like individual narrative of like, well, you know, we do a good job, but there may be some other people is only going to go so far. I actually remember Rush Limbaugh once gave an interview or something like this when he said, my job isn't to talk. My job is to get people to come back in or stay during the commercial break. He's like, that's how I make my money. It was an incredibly

honest way. Also, by the way, why we have a direct subscription model for the bulk of our revenue. Yes. Specifically so that we can program the show and do everything on Wellbutrin and talk about sell a Simon. And we're like, yeah, well, probably won't get good ratings. We're like, whatever. Or talk about the Fed and tightening policy. These are not things that they're spending a lot of time on cable for because they're not going to make a lot of money off of it. And because, look, their jobs all depend on it.

I just think, look, facetious, obviously, within that. It also, what drives me nuts is selective definitions of democracy. To these people, democracy means when they win and when they're right and that you cover it, autocracy whenever you don't. Democracy dies in the darkness, obviously, from the Washington Post. I mean, oh, it's anti-democratic whenever our opponents win, but it's not whenever we win. It's just, look, the hypocrisy all the way around. I think both of us here are legitimate, actual believers in democracy. We're not the ones pushing ministry of truths, which I'll get to in my monologue.

Trust people enough to make up your mind. I love what you said in our Elon segment. You were like, yeah, I don't think people are going to not take Welbutrin because Elon sent a tweet about it. I was like, I think people will make up their minds or read a book. That's what I did. You can change your mind. It happens all the time. It's fine.

This is something what real democracy is, is putting trust actually within the population. And that's what the media actually doesn't have, and they push the opposite impact. Yeah. You have to view the public as just like this unthinking, blind, cult-like masses that are just going to follow like, follow the word of whatever figure happens to be put in front of them. Yeah. To, like, that's necessary to be able to foment the type of panic attacks and moral outrage, like, that they depend on for their living, for their little reality show. So if you actually believe in a Dem, of course, there are people who are foolish and there are people who are silly and there probably are people who are going to like

listen too much to what Elon Musk says or whatever. But you have to ultimately believe in adults as being able to, in a democracy, process information and deal with it in a reasonable fashion overall, accepting that there is going to be some messiness as well. CNN, you know, they're never going to be able to engage in any real critique because ultimately then, like, you wouldn't continue on the network if you actually saw it really clearly. Or if you did, you would just be doing it for completely cynical purposes. Their whole thing, and this is not just CNN, this is MSNBC, this is Fox News, it's so personality-driven. Think about the Build Back Better conversation. Like, how much of that was actually about, like, the policy that lets away the pros and the cons, or even the Ukraine coverage, which, you know,

they've actually, they have reporters on the ground, and they're doing the, like, how much serious discussion have we had about, okay, here's what, you know, this increased amount of aid in terms of weapons, here's what it actually means, here's what it could lead to in terms of an escalation, here's how Russia's going to view, here are the trade-offs. That's not what they're really there for. They're there for the most sensationalistic coverage that makes you feel anger, outrage, fear, whatever emotional response they want to trigger in you in order to keep you tuning in. I saw the same thing. That's what their whole thing is about. I was actually realizing that whenever we were doing the segment on Ukrainian aid. And I was like, you know, I might

be one of the only people in broadcast who was like, of the 33 billion, here's what each individual piece is going to. Or put it in context. Be like, just so you know, this is an extraordinary amount of aid relative to, well, again, how many people people do that they're just like 33 billion of what what's in that that's a lot of money we tell us about what's happening they never do that build back better everything you know build back better which is like 3.1 trillion or 2.5 trillion it's like hold on a second what are you talking or it was all about the personalities that are involved and like listen i do think that mansion and cinema are like particularly nefarious actors. Sure, but like— But make the case, rather than just making it about like, this one slights that one and wouldn't take this one's phone calls

and would something happen on the houseboat. Right. Dig into what this policy would actually mean for the people of West Virginia and how they feel about it and, you know, what the impacts would be. You have all of the resources in the world to do that type of investigation that would be truly beneficial. But I mean, it's a waste of breath to even suggest it because again, that's not what they're there for. Like that's not what they're ultimately about. It is literally a reality show with just like lame political figures as characters instead of actually interesting people. I think that's really well said. One last thing we wanted to get to

before I toss it to Sagar for his monologue is first of all, from yesterday, happy May Day to all the workers of the world. And second of all, today they're going to start counting in the second Amazon Labor Union election, this one also on Staten Island, at a facility that I think is just across the street

more or less from the original warehouse. This one is what they call a sortation facility. It is, if anything, an even more difficult task because you're talking about a lot of part-time workers and Amazon has certainly escalated their union busting. They may have, to a little bit of an extent, not taken Christian Smalls seriously enough like many other figures underestimated him and now they take it very seriously. So we'll be watching, of course, to see what happens there. But we also wanted to quickly bring you this news item, which is just too freaking perfect. So the day after the union election in Staten Island, they announced what for many will be very troubling news.

Nationwide, they're no longer going to pay workers who are out sick with COVID or even inform workers when someone at their warehouse tests positive for COVID. And you'll recall that the whole spark for Christian Smalls originally of standing up to Amazon was over the fact that, you know, he was in kind of a supervisory role. That's the word I'm looking for. And so he had access to, and he has good relationships with the warehouse, all these different workers that he saw getting sick. And this was in the early days of COVID, the pre-vaccine days. And they're falling out and they're throwing up. And nobody's getting any information about it.

And there's very little in the way of any sort of safety protocols. And so he stages that walkout. They lose their minds. They fire him. They then say, we're going to make you the face of the Amazon labor union movement because you're not smart or articulate. And, of course, the rest is ultimately history. But it just shows you how strategic they are that, of course, during the whole lead up to that election, they're saying, oh, we love you. And you just have to talk to us.

Of course, we'll take. Family. Listen. And then the day after the votes are done, then it's, oh, by the way, no more sick pay if you're out with COVID. And we're not going to tell you if you're coworkers. That's actually brutal. Too perfect. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at?

When most people think of D.C. in relation to a movie or a TV show, they mostly have two paradigms in mind. Either D.C. is the West Wing where people are legitimately trying to do good. They're the best and the brightest. Or their House of Cards, conniving, evil, corrupt folks running the country to their own ends with a real plot. But after being here for more than a decade, I can assure you that while these people would run the country like House of Cards, if they could, that they are far too stupid and idiotic to do so. The only show that has ever captured Washington at all is Veep, and that's what it feels like I've been living in since Donald Trump came to office, especially in the latest announcement of which has garnered a lot of attention.

Both dangerous on its face, but also revelatory in who exactly the regime enforcers are of today. The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday afternoon the Biden administration would be launching a so-called disinformation governance board. Hmm. Well, according to the DHS, the board's job will be to counter dangerous disinformation that is being pushed by Russia and pushed towards migrants in South America making their way to the U.S. border. Oh, well, I mean, as somebody eminently skeptical of a censorship regime, when I hear disinformation, I automatically ask, well, will you censor establishment disinformation too? But on its face, what they listed sounds kind of reasonable, right?

Until you get to this part. The board will be led by one Nina Jankiewicz. She is quote-unquote disinformation expert. Hmm, I'm already skeptical. Any so-called disinformation expert is bound to be bad. But guys, it is so much worse than you could possibly imagine. Let's start with possibly the most egregious act of political censorship in my lifetime, the removal of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter at the height of the 2020 presidential election. Here's what Ms.

Jankowicz said at the time, quote, she both distributed articles claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian plant and reiterated lies that the U.S. intelligence community believed that the Kremlin is the one responsible for the Hunter Biden laptop story. So, on the most egregious act of disinformation pushed by the press, the head of the United States government's new disinformation board herself fell for, promoted, and distributed straight-up disinformation. That's dystopian. It actually gets worse. It turns out that this woman is a cringe, dyed-in-the-wool establishment liberal. Jankowicz was one of the carnival barkers online who claimed that Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson are responsible for harassment against activist journalist Taylor Lorenz simply because they literally said her name while criticizing her in public

and her publicly published work on national television. Then, at the height of COVID, the new disinformation head showed us exactly why we shouldn't have censorship in the first place. Back when Fauci was telling us masks don't work, she called for the advertising industry to stop placing ads on masks and stop spreading the disinformation that masks work against coronavirus. Less than two weeks later, she tweeted,

quote, America is, quote, too free spirited and that social distancing won't work unless forced upon us. So force us away. Lock us down. People are not taking this seriously. She literally wrote that. And last, but certainly not least, beyond her terrible views, I regret to inform you, Nina Jankiewicz is also a theater kid freak who apparently never grew up. Here is her in all her glory earlier this year. Yeah, it's real.

And that was only half of it. I couldn't even make everyone suffer through the full thing. Now I have some sympathy. I was a theater kid too, but I was mugged by reality. And by the time that you get to her age,

that should be stamped out. She also, and I promise you, I am not kidding, was very into, quote, wizard rock, a.k.a. Harry Potter inspired dance,

and took the stage to sing Nevertheless I Persisted in aka Harry Potter-inspired bands, and took the stage to sing Nevertheless I Persisted in a Harry Potter homage to Elizabeth Warren in the 2010s. That is the woman who is now in charge of determining what is disinformation and what is not for the U.S. government. Do you have confidence in her? I think I'm just giving you a compelling case, but let's just say you agree. Okay. But then consider the consequences of a Steve Bannon-led disinformation governance board. You still okay with that? Because that is what democratic turnover of government would look like. I have a better idea. These people should have no say whatsoever about disinformation, period. The US government itself has been one of the most ardent and pernicious purveyors of disinformation in the 21st century, which exactly demonstrates my point. The fusion of

the so-called experts with the tech censors and now the government has formed a new disinformation industrial complex whose sole job is to pump out disinformation that is comfortable for the elite ruling class and to cover up and censor any efforts at holding them accountable. When you target them, it's harassment. When they target you, they're doing their civic duty. The only hope we may have is that Ms. Jankiewicz is so incompetent, she is not capable to oppress us. The most likely scenario, actually. But we should not have to put our faith in the fecklessness of our elites to ensure our freedom. It should actually be up to us instead. And the slow march to some so-called

ministry of truth is exactly the threat to civil liberties that was once recognized for what it is, another step towards a completely authoritarian society. So Crystal, really what I'm saying is I'm calling for a total and complete shutdown of theater kids. 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, faced with collapsing poll numbers among young Americans and a completely stalled economic agenda, President Biden is finally considering some limited measures of student debt relief, probably no more than $10,000 and probably limited by income. There will be a million debates over how the politics of all of this will play out. Personally, I'd

expect it to be a net positive given that the primary problem Democrats face right now is complete demoralization and apathy of their base. At least if you deliver something materially beneficial to some part of your base, you might give them a reason to think Democrats are worth re-electing. I am quite confident it will be insufficient to turn the tables on the disastrous midterm situation Dems are facing down right now. But today I want to consider the moral justifications for student debt cancellation. Now, the TLDR of the moral case is really pretty simple. The holders of this massive and future-destroying student debt burden are victims of government-backed fraud. That's really how it is. In fact,

the student loan debt crisis and the housing debt crisis are twin evils which have devastated millions of Americans. They were birthed in the disaster of Clinton-era radical neoliberalism. Both were bootstrapping market-based solutions to the failures of neoliberalism, and they were pushed by an unholy alliance of government and business. This philosophy said, the government's going to abandon workers' unions and decimate middle-class blue-collar jobs with a disastrous corporate-backed trade policy. We will privatize everything and allow life to become more and more precarious, with stagnating wages, exploding healthcare costs, and risky 401ks instead of guaranteed pensions. And instead of doing a single collective thing to compensate for the way that we are systematically

destroying the path of the American dream, we're instead going to push the market-based, individualized solutions of college and home ownership for everyone. Here is Bill Clinton laying it out pretty clearly. works anymore. But we can guarantee to people that we're going to empower them to help themselves. We'll make homeownership more accessible. We'll make lifetime education and training more accessible. We'll make the things that make life work for people who are trying to do the best they can for themselves there. We have to begin with the basic things that make it worth doing. Now, I think education and home ownership are wonderful things, although by no means do I think it makes sense for everyone to go to a four-year college.

But Bill Clinton and the neoliberals who came after him did not go about their project by, say, subsidizing and scaling affordable housing, nor did they do what many nations have done by making college free, or even what we did in our own past by making college extremely affordable. Instead, they pushed Americans to take on ever-expanding amounts of debt, while allowing the costs of both housing and college to skyrocket at astronomical rates. Our government pushed the edict that you either must get in the game with loads of debt and compete for your slot in the meritocracy or die. It was a personal responsibility narrative that pushed the most reckless financial oblivion

as if it was sound decision making, while at the same time closing every other pathway to stability. So if you wanted a modicum of stability, what other choice did you really have? What choice was there but to take on the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt or to take on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in housing debt with payments that were escalating and possibly out of reach? To not do those things was actually even crazier. If you took the prescribed course offered by the politicians and their capitalist allies, then the path to middle-class stability was a narrow ledge along a rocky cliff. And if you didn't, it was a nosedive

straight into the rocks. Now, we all saw what happened with the housing crash. Wall Street was bailed out. But we were told we couldn't bail out the homeowners because they'd been reckless. They'd been irresponsible. That was the narrative pushed overwhelmingly by the right. Remember Rick Santelli yelling about moral hazard and asking, how many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? You see what he did there? Taking behavior that was pushed by our government and by Santelli's Wall Street buddies

as the correct and responsible thing to do, the only path to middle-class respectability, took that thing and he flipped it to turn it into something that was indulgent and reckless. This view was ultimately accepted by the Obama-era Democrats who left homeowners to wither and die on the vine. And here I will make a political point, which is that I have no doubt that the Obama admin decided

not to act to help homeowners because the polling was bad. Doing what was just and required may well have triggered a short-term political backlash. But it's now as clear as day that no single decision may have more directly led to the rise of Trump than abandoning Americans and their communities in their hour of need, but easily finding the money to feed the pigs at the Wall Street trough. The arguments made now against any and all student debt cancellation sound eerily familiar to the ones made against help for homeowners. The same narrative pitting

those who were supposedly responsible, saved ahead of time for their college or, quote, worked their butt off to pay off their debt sound a lot like the arguments about the good and responsible homeowners versus the reckless and irresponsible homeowners. First of all, both of these narratives ignore the outright fraud and abuse endemic in both systems. The mortgage brokers who targeted immigrants and the elderly and lied them about their loan terms or even went so far as to forge their signatures on mortgage products that they never actually agreed to. The fly-by-night for-profit colleges promising everything and leaving students with nothing but a lifetime of debt and misery. Or the more respectable versions of this, like NYU, we covered this year,

which charges students insane amounts of money, saddling them with some of the highest debt loads in the country for degrees that lead them nowhere in terms of the job market. The practices there are so outright exploitative that one female student at least was forced to sell her own eggs in order to afford this scam education. But the big thing these narratives ignore is that the divide between those who paid off their college and will struggle their entire lives with debt isn't about moral character. It's about luck, and it's about class. A much clearer dividing line is whether or not your parents were well off enough to avail themselves of the tax-free college savings accounts that are, by the way, a direct subsidy to upper-middle-class

families. After all, low-income people are disproportionately burdened by student debt, and the largest shares of student debt are held by the individuals with the least wealth. There's one more piece of this, too. A college education is not exactly living up to its promise anymore. This is extremely obvious if you watch what is happening right now in the Amazon and Starbucks labor union movements. Noam Scheiber actually had a good report on this. Increasingly after the Great Recession, college educated workers found themselves working at Starbucks or Amazon or other service sector blue-collar jobs in order to be able to make ends meet and be able to afford some kind of health care. Scheiber writes of these workers, quote, they have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents, go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, has broken

down, and they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it. And by the way, they are correct. In the long run, unionizing the service sector is a way more likely path to the good life than just continuing to follow these politicians and their billionaire capitalist buddies down the debt-laden primrose path. These failed promises have radicalized two generations now, pushing them to occupy Wall Street and the Bernie campaign, and now to the burgeoning new labor movement. After all, 57% of Gen Zers, they're going to go to college more than any other generation. Yet they are likely to follow the path of millennials, achieving every single life milestone from marriage to family to homeownership at a later date than boomers or the silent generation. And one of the key reasons why is because of that crushing weight of student debt that handcuffs them for literally decades.

This is not a failure of personal responsibility. It is fraud, mass fraud, perpetrated on millions, which deserves redress, and perpetrated most crushingly on those attending college during the pandemic, by the way, when they didn't even benefit from on-campus life. Debt cancellation is not a full solution, of course, especially not the timid, piddling, and means-tested version that Biden is likely to offer, if he bothers to offer anything at all. And of course, it does not address the wrongs done to other many victims of neoliberalism. But it's a start, and an initial national recognition that what has been done to these people is wrong and it needs to be fixed. The American people deserve better than lies, market-based fairy tales, and crushing debt. They deserve jobs, health care, and dignity.

In lieu of serious steps to secure any of these, at the very least, we can do a bit to lighten their load. I think that's statistic about how with every generation... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. End of last week, we got a kind of a shock report showing that US GDP had actually gone backwards. That was not something that economists were expecting. So joining us to break down what exactly is going on with that and also with our economy writ large is Professor Richard Wolff. He is host of Economic Update, Professor of Economics Emeritus at UMass Amherst, visiting professor at the New School and also founder of Democracy at Work. It is always a pleasure to see you, sir. Good to see you, sir. Thank you.

Glad to be here. Yeah, our pleasure. So go ahead and put this report from the Wall Street Journal up on the screen there. You see U.S. GDP falls 1.4 percent as economy shrinks for the first time since early in the pandemic. Professor, what did you make of this report? Well, you know, the first reaction I had is that it's the latest in a number of statistics where the reaction should be, we saw this coming, we knew it would happen. It really wasn't a question of whether, it was mostly a question of when and when just arrived. Let me explain what I mean. We've been suffering a serious inflation for a year now, and there's an effort all over the place to minimize it, deny it, explain it away, excuse it, make it temporary. It isn't. It's a very serious problem in this society, as has been the inflation long before a year ago, but an inflation that was restricted to the stock

market where prices zoomed and hadn't yet come to the daily economy we all live in. Now we see a shift. That inflation, which was with the stock market and wealthy people loved it, now has moved to hit the mass of the people. And if prices go up, and we're guessing these days 9%, 10% as a fair notion of what's really happening, we know without needing rocket science that people can't afford to buy goods and services rising in price this way. Never could. But after two years of the worst public health disaster in our society and the second worst economic crash, both happening at the same time, an inflation is going to have a magnified effect. And what that means is with less goods and services that people can afford to buy, less get produced, among other things, and you get the shrinkage of our economy that, quote unquote, shocks everybody but really shouldn't have.

So, Professor, can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon in the context of the Fed. We were talking about earlier in the show about the Fed possibly allowing both a passive runoff of bonds, but also tightening interest rates, which could trigger slowing down the economy. What does that look like in the context of the current inflation? What does that mean in the future? Well, two things. And they're not quite compatible, but that's the way our crazy economy works. On the one hand, there's a serious question of whether the Federal Reserve is even able to stop this inflation. You know, they were trying to avoid one before. That didn't work. They were trying to avoid the three, count them,

three economic crashes we've had in this new century. Dotcom in 2000, the subprime mortgage in 2008, and now this one associated with the COVID, their record is poor. So the first big question is, will the interest rate increases scheduled for this month, if not this week, will those in fact be adequate, will be effective in slowing the inflation? That's a big open question mark. But the second point, let's assume for the moment that they work, that either on their own, if they raise it a half a percentage point, or with more later this year, as they have said they will do. In that event, here's what it means. You're making all kinds of things more expensive in this society when you raise interest rates. More expensive to take out a mortgage for your

home, more expensive to make those monthly payments for your car, more expensive to make those monthly payments for your car, more expensive to make the monthly payments on your credit debt, and possibly even affecting the student debt in this country, which is now an enormous phenomena. That's all going to have negative effects on people's lives. And here's what that means. COVID, a crash that more than half the American people were unemployed in 2020 and or 2021 for weeks or months at a time, then an inflation, and now a recession brought on by rising interest rates. You know, the Deutsche Bank, which has no skin in this game because it's in Germany, they've already predicted a recession here. And they're advising their clients to adjust their investments in the United States on that assumption. They will be hurt if

they've made a mistake. But it should give you an idea that for most of us, we are watching a series of attacks on the mass of people's standard of living that will also, in my judgment, lead to real serious social changes and unrest in this country, which in the case of the labor movement, you are already seeing. Yeah, I completely agree. Could you lay that out a little bit more? How do you connect what we do see happening with the labor movement and votes are being counted today in the Amazon Labor Union's second union election there on Staten Island? Why are we seeing those bubblings up there, Starbucks,

other places across the country with the economic landscape as it is today? Well, I'm going to give you an answer, and I admit before I even do that it comes from me as a professor. I've been that all my life. I'm close to the academic world. I'm part of it. And let me point out to something that may have escaped your attention. I don't know whether you covered this already. There was a remarkable effort at Grinnell College in Iowa on the part of students at the college who happen also to be hourly workers. More and more in the United States, students are called upon to do labor,

partly because they're desperately financially strapped, taking out loans they can't afford, squeezing their parents in ways that are difficult for them. We all know that story. And by the way, it's a cheap labor force for the college. So it's unusual that the students would mobilize to unionize. They did. They made a real effort. These undergraduates, that's what they are, Grinnell College is an undergraduate college, well-known, well-respected college. They voted finally. They were strong enough. They got an agreement from the college to remain quote unquote neutral. They had their vote last week, and the vote was, if I have the numbers right, and I know I'm close, 327 in favor of unionization, six against. Wow.

More important than the fact that they won a union, which is very important, is the fact that they won it on such a lopsided outcome. And I think what you're seeing, and this is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg, what you're seeing is a whole generation that has absorbed these hits, there's no other word to say it, hits to the working class, the middle class of this country. They're seeing it in their parents. They're seeing it in their strained school finances. They're seeing it in the quality of the jobs their seniors, graduating seniors for the last two or three years have been able to get. The number of them that are looking forward to being a barista in a coffee shop or driving an Uber car or whatever it is they end up doing, that they're living out the constriction of the American dream.

It's being pulled away from them, and it's very painful for them to see the implicit promises made to them by the school, by their parents, by the society as a whole, shrinking out of view, out of their grasp. They are upset, and they're beginning to think through that maybe mobilization in a labor movement is some kind of way forward when there looked to be no other ways. And for those of us that have studied the unionization drive of the 1930s, that's what happened then. The Great Depression had to be in place from 1929 to 1932 before people began to realize, oh, goodness, we better join the union. That may make this bad time a little less bad than it would otherwise have been. Something like that is underway now.

It has been extraordinary to watch. And I know there are a couple of other colleges that are moving in that same direction. What made it so unique is that this was, you know, not just one sector of the sort of student labor economy, but the entire college in such overwhelming numbers. Professor Wolfe, it's always so great to see you. Thank you so much for making things clear. Thanks for joining us, sir. My pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Look, your guys' support just means the world. You know, we were talking in that CNN block just

about the incentives of cable news. It just reminds me how lucky we are to do this show, Crystal. We program it exactly the way that we want, what we think will be best in order to make people feel as if they're getting the best amount of information possible, highlighting the stories that aren't being covered. So you're the ones who make that possible. And we've got some big stuff in the works, which I'm really, really excited in order to debut as we approach our one-year anniversary. Thank you all so much for watching, and we will see you all tomorrow. Have a good one, guys. See you back here tomorrow. This is an iHeart Podcast.