Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/29/23: Republicans Humiliated In Debt Ceiling, DeSantis Trashes Trump On Ben Shapiro, Lawyer Caught Using ChatGPT, Jobs Flee Big Cities, CNN Admits Bidens "Horrible Numbers", History of AAPI, DeSantis Elon Corrupt Bromance

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Republicans humiliated in Debt Ceiling fight as they get much less than they thought, Conservatives revolt against McCarthy's deal making, DeSantis goes on Ben Shapiro to trash Trump on Fauci, Mail in Voting, and Leftist Talking Points, Lawyer caught using ChatGPT with Fake Cases, Low paying jobs fleeing big cities, CNN admits new Biden Poll numbers are "Horrible", Saagar looks into the history of the fake AAPI month, and Krystal looks into the corrupt Bro-mance between Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We've got lots of big updates on the debt ceiling,

but many questions remain. So we will break all of that down for you. Also, Ron DeSantis taking his strongest shots yet at Donald Trump. Kind of interesting the way that he is attacking him. So we will play those comments for you as well. Also, some pretty interesting revelations about chat GPT and just how it just invents stuff all the time, all the time, like way more than maybe you thought, certainly more than I thought. So we'll dig into that. We also have some new numbers about where jobs are moving within the United States and, of course, workers along with them.

And some new comments from Jake Tapper about Joe Biden's poll numbers, which are kind of astonishing. So that is all very interesting. But before we get to any of that, this is officially our last week in this particular on this particular set in this studio. It's sad. It's sad. It's going to say it's going to be hard to say goodbye to this desk after we designed it ourselves, Crystal, and shepherded it this entire set. There's a lot of emotions flying through the studio, but we're really excited for what comes next.

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So let's get to the very latest of what we know about the debt ceiling. There is a tentative deal that has been reached between Biden and Kevin McCarthy. I'll give you the details of that in just a moment. Important to keep in mind, though, that they've got to sell this deal to the Democrats and maybe most dicely. That's not really a word, but you guys know what I'm trying to say. We'll make it work. To the Republican caucus, a number of whom have already come out and said, like, hell no, this is horrible. This is disgusting, et cetera, et cetera. Let's take a listen though, to start with how President Biden

was selling this deal to the press yesterday. Take a listen. And the agreement also represents a compromise, which means no one got everything they want. But that's the responsibility of governing. Especially you want to try to make it look like I made some compromise in the debt ceiling. I didn't. I made a compromise on the debt ceiling, and I didn't. I made a compromise on the budget. That's what they wanted, is you make a compromise on the budget, and that's what you've done, even though you haven't gone as far as they wanted, isn't that right? Sure, yeah. Well, can you think of an alternative?

I think he negotiated with me in good faith. He kept his word. He said what he would do. He did what he said he'd do. And I have no idea whether he has the votes. I expect he does. No idea whether McCarthy has the votes. I expect he does. Nobody got everything they wanted. There was a lot of cope in there about them being like, well, you said you weren't going to negotiate and now you're negotiating. He's like, I didn't negotiate at all. This was on the budget, not the debt ceiling. Okay, dude, whatever. So we still don't have

all the details of this tentative agreement. So, but we have some of the outlines here, top lines. Here's Jeff Stein's reporting from the Washington Post. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So he says summary of deal, as I understand it, again, important caveats because nobody has all of the specifics yet. Debt ceiling raised for two years. So gets Joe Biden passed the next election. Domestic programs frozen next year and then up 1% in 2025. So it's an inflation adjusted cut that was more along the lines of what Democrats were pushing for, Joe Biden was pushing for. It does lift defense spending and also Veterans Affairs money. There is some tightening of work requirements on TAMF, which is the welfare

program, and SNAP, which is food stamps. Energy permitting details to be determined. I think Joe Manchin got his pipeline deal in there. Clawback some new IRS dollars, but not as far as Republicans had originally floated. He goes on to say work requirement for food stamps moves from age 50 to age 54. Trying to get more clarity on TAMP. Sorry, I'm not sure. We'll update when I learn more details. My understanding is the energy permitting changes are very minimal. Go ahead to the next piece here. Some additional small details. Remember, one of the things that Republicans were pushing for was to end the student loan debt forgiveness program. He says there is a student loan provision as well. The

agreement, as I understand it, codifies into law the administration's existing plan to end forbearance so payments will restart. Theoretically, if there is another emergency, they could again enact a moratorium. No change to Biden's student debt cancellation program. He goes on to say, I'll be watching very carefully to what precisely happened to the portion of the federal government that covers anti-poverty programs over two years and inflation adjusted terms, it could look like a more significant cut than flat funding suggests. You know, interesting, we actually have gotten some more details about the SNAP cuts in particular. It's not even clear that it will be an overall cut to the program because while they are tightening up work requirements for people

age 50 to 54, they are eliminating work requirements for people who are homeless and also for veterans. So you have you're sort of just shifting who is eligible for SNAP without work requirements. So it's not even apparent that that is a cut across the board. So Matt Iglesias, I think, had a good analysis. And then, Sagar, I want to get your view of all of this as well. Put this up on the screen from his sub stack. He says, I thought this was maybe the best line. If you ignore everything about the circumstances of how this came together, it's really not a bad deal. In particular, the big GOP win here is they forced Biden to agree

to flat nominal discretionary spending for one year and then a 1 percent nominal increase the year after that, which is a significant cut in inflation adjusted per capita or GDP terms. But, and this is the key point, that's something Republicans could and would have gotten through the normal appropriations process anyway. He goes on to say, by giving Republicans a policy win in this way rather than through the normal appropriations, that's the budgeting process, Biden has validated the debt ceiling hostage tactic that meaningfully increases the odds of a future substantive disaster, either in terms of policy concessions or a breach. So overall, as I look at this saga, first of all, it's sort of enraging that we have this whole like potential global crisis

catastrophe, which by the way, has already had real economic impact and probably increased our government's borrowing costs and injected all of this uncertainty and chaos and disaster, etc., for something they could have gotten through normal means. Three months ago, also. And so I certainly blame the Republicans for using these tactics, which I think are disgraceful and should be out of bounds. And I certainly blame the Biden administration for giving in to these tactics. And I think Iglesias is exactly right here that, OK, if you ignore everything else, you'd be like, it's not it could be a lot worse. It could, you know, could have been much steeper cuts that hurt a lot more people and also did harm to the economy. But what you're doing is validating this tactic. So you can bet two years down the line, they're going to do the

same thing all over again. Yeah. And right. So two years from now, you know, we'll see what happens. But, you know, on its face for the quote unquote merits of the deal, we'll save some more of this analysis. But this is a huge loss for Kevin McCarthy and for maybe not Kevin McCarthy is a massive loss for the Freedom Caucus members of which they are making it known. And on on its face, like for Joe Biden, this is I think this would be a victory for him because he can both, look, I think we both also know that there is a fetishization of bipartisanship

for a lot of voters. For some reason, they think it's a very good thing. It can be, it can't be. It depends on how we talk about it. It depends on the details. It's all about the nuance, right? So bipartisan rail safety, good. Bipartisan feigning concern about the deficit while you increase military spending in AT Ukraine.

Yeah, maybe I'm just going to go ahead and say that's bad. And that's what's happened here. But, you know, Biden gets the rhetorical win of I negotiated. He didn't really give away the store. There are not really meaningful cuts. If you are a genuine economic libertarian type, this is ludicrous. You know, if you're looking at this, if you're somebody who cares about the debt, even on the IRS piece, which was a huge thing, they are only able to claw back apparently some 20 billion or so of the 40 billion. And with that

20, what they're going to do is they're just going to defer the spending cuts in the future. So they'll just still be fully funded for a shorter period of time. It actually won't meaningfully change IRS enforcement at all. This is another thing I was getting so annoyed about because they are correct in saying that the IRS disproportionately targets people who are poor. I've done entire monologues about this. What I've always advocated for is that there's actually a simple change in the law you can make, which is say, don't use this funding to go below anybody over $1 million or so. And of course, they never want to insert these programs. So the entire thing is just ridiculous to me. What makes it especially offensive is that they are not only

increasing military spending, but specifically trying to increase some of the backwards aid to Ukraine, not the, in terms of refilling stockpiles and helping with the depreciation costs. And they're hiding all these other nonsense provisions in there, which are basically just box checks for things that they say that they're against on paper, like the IRS, and they didn't even do that. So overall, the deal itself, it's not going to change much. I mean, you know, I guess it's good for everybody's stock for 401ks. Now, this is all presumes if it passes, because that is actually kind of up in the air right now. I mean, Crystal, we haven't yet received word from the progressive caucus to whether they're going to vote for it or not.

If they do, this deal might almost get 100 percent Democratic support or somewhere near that. And then you don't actually even need that many Republicans to support it. Although McCarthy has said, I will not bring the bill to the floor without a majority of the support. Although that's only, what, you know, 100 or so members out of the two. I forget the exact number of there. It's really not that many people when you consider how many defections he could have, which would then be a huge internal blow to him for his speakership. That's right. So the reason that he is going to commit to and has already committed to we have to have a majority of the Republican caucus behind this is because his ass would be on the line. And you'll recall as part of the deal that he brokered in order to become speaker, he made it a lot easier for them to toss him out as speaker

of the house. So that's in the back of his mind. And you already have a lot of house freedom caucus members who are, you know, they're not being subtle about this. I mean, they hate this deal, railing against it on Twitter. You can bet there's going to be a lot of conservative media that is very against the deal. There's a lot of incentive to posture as being against this deal in terms of support from the grassroots base. So he's in a bit of a tricky position. And I'm not sure that he made things easier for himself by saying some like relatively nice things about Joe Biden. We may like appreciate that level of civility. Yeah. But there are plenty of people within his caucus who will not appreciate that level of civility. Yeah. But there are plenty of people within his caucus who will not appreciate that level of civility. Let's take a listen to a little bit of what

Speaker McCarthy had to say. The president said he wouldn't negotiate with us for 97 days. He wouldn't even allow us to talk. After we passed a bill, we were able to get in. But it wasn't until the final two weeks that we would really be able to sit down and communicate with one another. I do want to thank the president's team that he put together. Very professional, very smart, very strong beliefs that are different than ours. And I think at the end of the day, people can look together to be able to pass this in the House and the Senate together. So very professional, very smart is what McCarthy had to say about the Biden team. Let's go ahead and put up the next piece, though,

of some of the House Freedom Caucus reaction, which is a little bit different tone from what we're hearing from House Speaker McCarthy there. This is just some these are some of the sort of selected key players and the way they're reacting to it. You've got Ralph Norman saying this, quote, deal is insanity. A four trillion dollar debt ceiling increase with virtually no cuts is not what we agreed to, not going to vote to bankrupt our country. The American people deserve better. You've got Congressman Bob Good saying, I'm hearing the, quote, deal, I'll put deal in quotations marks for some reason,

is for a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit. If that is true, I don't need to hear anything else. No one claiming to be conservative could justify a yes vote. You've got Chip Roy. I do not like the quote deal as I understand it from the cheerleading so far. I will have more to follow once I see more details. You've got Dan Bishop. Of the $80 billion Democrats appropriated to the IRS over 10 years, the quote deal rescinds $1.9 billion. You read that right. That's the kind of get that's so good. McCarthy agreed to increase the debt ceiling $4 trillion. I saw Lauren Boebert. There were others who were also being highly critical. And Sagar, Chip Roy is a key player here because, you know, some of this is

so arcane. But one of the parts of the deal that McCarthy also made to secure his speakership was stacking the rules committee with some of these hardline House Freedom Caucus members, Chip Roy being one of them. This thing has to get through that committee in order for it even to get to the floor for a vote. It's looking right now like the swing vote on that. So it's six Republicans, four Democrats on there. Usually in recent political history, the opposing party on this committee never votes for whatever the party in power wants, like never. That just doesn't

happen. So the four Democrats are assumed to be a no, although they could in theory cross over and vote for the thing. You've already got a number of Republicans who are on the committee who are on the record saying, no, I'm not voting for it. And so Thomas Massey, who's this sort of like quirky libertarian type out of Kentucky, may end up being the swing vote. Now, ideologically, on spending at least, he tends to be more aligned with the House Freedom Caucus. But he also has been turned into somewhat of an ally of McCarthy. He was with him from the beginning in terms of the speakership. So there's a lot of dicey dynamics at play here still. I think the problems are more on the Republican side. We've heard a lot more vocal

opposition to the deal on the Republican side than on the Democratic side, but I guess you never know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, in terms of whether it will pass or not, I genuinely have no idea. As people have pointed out, the Rules Committee, it's very possible, given the gravity of the circumstances on the debt ceiling, that the Dems might actually vote. And then you wouldn't even need many of the Republican votes. You could have some defections. The other question is also, even if it does get through the House, we're up against a deadline of June 5th. And it's going to take a couple of days.

We're not going to have a vote here on this thing until Wednesday. Then it's going to immediately make its way over to the Senate. Now, people should remember that the easiest way to get something through the Senate is something called unanimous consent, where they waive the 30 hours of debate rule on the floor. Senator Mike Lee, who is also a libertarian, has come out and said that he wants to do everything possible if he doesn't like the deal to slow it down on the floor. So all you need is a single senator or Rand Paul, for that matter, to object to that. And then you're immediately triggering that debate and the amendment process, et cetera. And who knows how much longer that could take. So we could even be up against a technical default, even if it does get through both of those chambers. That said, Senator McConnell came out with a statement last

night and said, I support the bill. Let's immediately pass this thing. So I don't think it will meaningfully have any problems, but there will be some fun intra, like intra game chamber games about committees and objections and all of this stuff as to how exactly it makes its way through. But I do think the biggest, the biggest thing that's up in the air right now is will there be a GOP revolt? Another question is what about Trump? You know, Trump is not an idiot. He's going to be reading Lauren Boebert's tweets. He's going to be reading all of these. He's said before that Republicans shouldn't give in unless they get every single thing that they want. There's no, no world where McCarthy could spin this as this is everything that I got. His talking points, which you have in front of you, are the stupidest thing you can imagine.

This is, okay, so Sahil Kapoor got his hand on the GOP talking points that they're using to sell to their own members. Put this up on the screen. First of all, they're calling the Fiscal Responsibility Act. A little bit of branding there says Republicans will restore fiscal sanity and hold Washington accountable. Number one, a stop out of control, inflationary spending. Now, they mentioned cut spending year over year, including a rollback of non-defense discretionary spending. Now, they mentioned cut spending year over year, including a rollback of non-defense discretionary spending, because God forbid we cut the Pentagon to 22, 2022 levels, fully fund VA medical, limit top line federal spending to 1% annual growth for the next six years. Now, that's not actually even accurate because the deal is only for two years. But

there's like a theoretical like, yeah, maybe we'll do it for a while longer after this, but none of that is binding. So even the six year part of this, which is what the Republicans wanted and not what the Democrats wanted, is really spin and propaganda. Number two, lift more Americans out of poverty. That's about the work requirements on SNAP and on welfare. Clawback tens of billions in unspent COVID funds. Okay, fine. Nobody really objected to that all that much. Reign in executive overreach and act into law the first ever statutory administrative pay go to hold President Biden accountable for the full cost of executive rules and regulations. Cut red tape and streamline energy and infrastructure projects. That's that permitting

reform, which we still don't have a lot of details on. Slash funding for Biden's new IRS agents. It's a relatively modest cut there. Restart student loan repayments. Well, they were planning to restart them anyway. Make Congress work again. Compel a functioning appropriations process by imposing a temporary 99 percent CR level cap until all 12 appropriations bills are enacted. So requiring all 12 to go through the House. Protect our seniors, veterans and Americans national security. That's the hike to the Pentagon budget and block Biden and congressional Democrats demands for new taxes. That was where they were like, no, we don't want to close the carried interest loophole or, you know, tax corporations or the wealthy any more than we already do. So they're claiming that as a win.

I don't know that I would claim that as a win, especially because obviously that doesn't, that goes against their aims of reducing the deficit and the debt. So that's the way they're selling it. And I mean, it's very weak tea in terms of what the demands of the House Freedom Caucus were. Look on it, on like on any objective metric and the Democrats are silently saying this, we want the House Republicans completely folded. I think ultimately what happened here is that it came down to the wire because the Democrats, the White House and all of them did have a decent amount of leverage as well. They were saying, no, we're not going to fold on this. We're not going to fold on this. And the business community, as you and I know, has been freaking out behind the scenes. And I bet,

you know, we're willing to bet. And McCarthy's close with them. Exactly. And look, yeah, he is raising money from all these billionaires. And if you don't think Jamie Dimon and all these other folks don't have his cell phone, they're like, you need to get this done. You need to get your people in line. And then it just came a question of, well, who's the smallest minority here? It's the Freedom Caucus. And if you have enough Democrats who are willing to go along and pass a bill, if he can have defections of 30, 40, even 50 votes, get this thing through, he will be a hero to the business community for all time for getting this through.

Which for a lot of these guys, that's what they want, right? Well, he secures his post-congressional career opportunities working as a lobbyist for these people or serving on boards or whatever, cashing in whatever way that he wants to, similar to what Paul Ryan did after he left the House as well. I do think the Trump factor kind of looms over this. You know, does he say anything? Does he weigh in? I think if he weighs in,

he will weigh in against the deal, don't you? It's very likely because that's where the energy on the base is going to be. That's where the energy in conservative media is going to be. And so the question is just, you don't have a lot of Republicans who are in those districts that are truly swing districts that Joe Biden maybe even won, or at least that were really close that are particularly worried about their general election prospects coming up in 2024. The overwhelming majority of the GOP caucus, they're going to be looking to their right, worried about, is this going to sink my chances in a primary? Is this going to become some sort of like litmus test that is used in some sort of Tea Party-esque fashion to kick me out through the GOP primary process? If they start

to feel like there's a lot of momentum and there's a lot of anger against the deal and conservative media is all unified, and of course, the Lauren Boebert's and those folks are going to be incredibly vocal about their opposition to this deal. That's when you could see things start to crumble. And then you're left with things like, you know, you could still theoretically have a discharge petition where the all the Democrats vote for something and you get those five, 10, however many actually more moderate Republican members that represent these swing districts to join with them. So even if it all fell apart, it doesn't necessarily mean the thing is dead in the water, but that also takes a lot of time.

So it's looking like there between the likely strong support from the Democratic caucus and some support from the GOP caucus. It's looking like they're going to be able to push this thing through, but there are still a lot of roadblocks and, you know, a lot of possibilities that it could come apart in the next couple of days. Keep everybody updated on what the updates and all that will be. Remember about the 72 hour period where they do have 72 hours now to actually review and to read it. So watch the Twitter feeds of some of the Freedom Caucus members. One of them is Dan Bishop, I think. He likes to live tweet what he finds in the bills.

It actually can be quite informative. Yeah, so I recommend his Twitter feed. I will be checking that out as well. All right, speaking of Trump and some possible contrasts, let's get to the next part here. Ron DeSantis, of which I now have more respect for because he actually came out and is the first candidate declared so far not to talk in such mealy mouth terms, although still just a little bit, and actually take a shot at Trump, defend himself from the accusations that have been hurled his way in an interview on the Ben Shapiro show. Here's what he had to say. So how do you see a difference between your candidacy, what you've been trying to do, your record and President Trump? Well, I think it's interesting because he's been attacking me by moving left. So this is a different guy than 2015, 2016. He attacked me for opposing an amnesty bill in the Congress. He did

support this amnesty, this good lot to two million illegal aliens. He wanted to amnesty bill in the Congress. He did support this amnesty, this good lot, too. Two million illegal aliens he wanted to amnesty. I opposed it because that's what America First principles dictate, that you're opposed to amnesty. We both faced COVID-19 and we both responded in the way we did. He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States. I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way starting in April of 2020, whether it's the schools, the businesses, the mandates, and our state has never done better

as a result. And I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump's last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci's lockdowns. I said very clearly, you know, if I'm president, somebody like Fauci is in the government, I will bring them in and I will tell them two things. You are fired. So, I mean, look, Crystal, I have to at least respect him for prosecuting a case against Trump. He's literally the first person to do so. Now, will I think it worked? We'll see. So on the first part on amnesty, I think it's very interesting rhetorically where he's talking

about how Trump is attacking him from the left. Obviously, immigration, probably the number one reason why Trump was the nominee in 2016, an issue that matters tremendously to the base. The problem I see for DeSantis is, well, rhetorically, you know, sorry, on policy, you may be right. Rhetorically, can you really outdo the Donald whenever it comes to the guy who literally created the wall? Or at the very least- Rapist murderers, some I presume are good people, etc. It's going to be tough, I think, to be able to come out against him and to convince people that you're the real deal.

Although, if it were to work, this is probably the only way. The Fauci thing, I also think is interesting. I'm curious for your thoughts. I just feel as if running backwards, as in re-litigating COVID policy from three years ago, is not the winner that some of these people seem to think. COVID policy, lockdowns and all that stuff, it matters a lot to a lot of

people on the internet, and it also matters a lot to people who are very, very online, at least in my experience. But normal voters who I have seen out, especially interviews as well, whenever they talk about DeSantis and Trump, not one of them mentions COVID. They say, I like that he doesn't have the drama. I like that he kept Florida or he made Florida nice. Some of that has to do with COVID, but focusing on the COVID piece just seems a little out of step where I think some people are going to vote for him anyways. I mean, we've seen the numbers. People don't care. People have moved on, and understandably so. We're all moving forward, right? So I think in a sort of like rational, sane world, I think some of these attacks may land.

But I just see no evidence that the GOP base is actually that ideological. And DeSantis made this comment in that attack where he's like, you know, this is different than Trump in 2015, 2016. Is it? Because they tried the same line of attack against Trump back then. Ted Cruz in particular, it was like, he's not a real conservative. We're further to the right here. You know, he was a Democrat. He was he supported Planned Parenthood. He's not what they were trying to attack him from the right and say, we're the true conservatives and he is this rhino. And it just didn't work at all. So I do

remember this does feel like almost another deja vu moment of the type of attacks that they launched at him last time around, which ultimately fell flat. Now, I agree with you, like respect to him for at least trying, because this is at least a lot less humiliating than like Nikki Haley. I'm not kicking sideways or even Tim Scott, who's like, I love Trump. His his time in office was fantastic. And it's like, OK, well, why are you running against him? And that doesn't make any sense. Or certainly Mike Pence, who it's just humiliating that, you know, because of Trump, people are running around the Capitol threatening to hang him.

And he can't even come out strongly against him even now after all of that. So it's a much less humiliating approach. And, you know, to be honest with you, I also don't think that he's going to pay a huge price for going after Trump in this way because it is very policy based. Do I think that it's going to be sufficient? No. And this gets back to like, you know, we were being hard on DeSantis about you gotta hit him and you gotta do this and you gotta do that. And I just look at the landscape and I'm like,

I'm just not really sure there's anything you alone can do to knock this guy off. So it's a solid attempt. Do I think it's really gonna work? Eh, probably not. Yeah, it probably won't work. It's great the point that you brought up. Like Ted Cruz and Rubio and Jeb tried this. They're like, he's not a work. It's great the point that you brought up. Ted Cruz and Rubio

and Jeb tried this. They're like, he's not a conservative. He supports social security. And he's like, yeah, I support social security. They're like, he supports universal health care. He's like, yeah, everyone will have health care under my policy. He's like, he just not supports free trade. He said, yep, he's right. I don't support free trade. In many ways, Trump's moderation on policy was a huge net positive to him on top of his rhetoric in the 2016 campaign. He was extreme on the right issues for the base and then not extreme on the issues that didn't necessarily matter. So immigration, though, this is, I think, a good attempt. And you've got to at least respect somebody who's going to fight in the primary.

Now, will he be able to do that to his face? Is he going to continue to keep it up? How will it respond to the poll numbers? That is the ultimate question. But one part that really stuck out to us is actually where DeSantis, again, correctly hits Trump on mail-in voting. And this was a fascinating part of this interview. It hasn't taken as much notice. Let's take a listen. Can you talk about your sort of on-the-ground strategy and how that would be different from what President Trump did in 2020 running against the Democrats? I think telling people not to send in a mail ballot

is a huge mistake, and it ends up reducing the pool of prospective voters. In Florida, we focused on some of these low propensity voters in my reelection. They usually vote in presidential. They don't always vote in midterm. And we converted a lot of them to vote. Most of them chose to vote by absentee ballot

through the mail. That was their choice. If we told them you could only vote on election day, some of them very well may not have voted. So understand the battlefield. It's your responsibility as a candidate to head off that. He's right. It's obvious. He's obviously right. I actually love that he said that. He's the first high-profile elected Republican to actually say it. Because guess what? Trump absolutely 100% would have won if he had just encouraged mail-in voting. That's the funniest thing.

It's the most patriotic way to vote. It's the MAGA way. And guess what? He would have won Georgia. He absolutely, in my opinion, would have won Arizona. And all he needed was to flip a single other state, and the turnout probably would have been even higher. Remember, guys, he got 10 million more votes. He was campaigning against the easiest way to vote. He got 10 million more than when he ran in 2016. Some, what is it, 75 million or whatever people came out to vote for him. It's

just one of those where it's so obvious. And the Georgia, if you don't believe me, the Georgia Secretary of State has already put out the data where if just a number of people voted in GOP primary by mail had done so in the 2020 election, whenever it was Biden v. Trump, Trump wins a state. He did not lose by all that much. So DeSantis coming on the heels of what I still believe is his best strength. I won. I turned this state 20 points purple to deep red. I did it because I'm a winner. I did it on policy

and I want to make America just like what I did down in Florida. That's a very compelling message to a certain group of people. Now, unfortunately, those groups are mostly general election voters, not necessarily primary voters. But with this, I at least have to say once again, respected the man for at least trying. Yeah, he's making a good case. Well, what's interesting is even Trump has changed his mind about mail-in voting. At CPAC, I think it was this year, he said it's time to change our thinking on early in mail-in voting. He also touted his campaign's plans to encourage, quote unquote, ballot harvesting, which of course had been like, you know, derided as practically legal, even though in some states it actually is

legal by Republicans. He says we have no choice but to beat Democrats at their own game. So even Trump at this point acknowledges that the mail-in voting thing was a catastrophe for them. Certainly in the state of Georgia, we have the numbers that if he had just embraced mail-in voting, he wins. There's another subtext here, though, which is about, you know, obviously what is a hot issue for the Republican base, which is stop the steal. Twenty twenty. Was it legitimate, legitimate or not? And the subtext of what DeSantis is suggesting here is that it was legitimate. And the reason your ass loss is because of things like your mail in voting. Now, this represents, though, another area where, you know, to this point, DeSantis hasn't really had to be

put on the spot about what he fully thinks about 2020. And it's another issue that hangs out there as a very difficult, tricky one for him to navigate, because on the one hand, you go full crazy. You're in your electability case is going to fall apart because we saw what happened to, you know, Mastriano and Carrie Lake and these other characters who were all in on Stop the Steal. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Republican base still thinks that the 2020 election was stolen. So this is one of the ones that's going to be very tricky to navigate. But yeah, I think the subtext of what he's saying there is you lost. And one of the reasons you lost is because you didn't embrace bail-in voting here. It's a Gordian knot. I really don't know how you get

yourself out of it. I feel for the man, to be honest, because it's like in any rational way, you're like, this obviously should work. But as he said, we don't live in a rational world. So we'll see. Not living in a rational world is a good pivot to the next part of this. That's right. And if you think that was nasty, the knives are out for each other between the Trump and DeSantis folks online. We've been paying quite a bit of attention. There was actually, this is actually everything. This Newsmax panel where actually somebody we've had on our show before,

Josh Hammer, was up against a Trump surrogate. And they were going at each other on Trump and DeSantis. Here's what it looked like. DeSantis' botched campaign announcement proves that he and his team are not ready for prime time. He proposes a national federal sales tax. He voted to cut Social Security. He has no plan to end the war in Ukraine. President Trump cut taxes, secure the border, reinvested in our economy.

He is the day one leader that America needs. Josh, just to wrap it up, he's going to Iowa. He's got time. Look, I mean, Caroline has her talking points and that's cute and everything. But the reality here is that Republican primary voters are ready for a winner. They are sick of losing. They are sick of re-litigating an election from two and a half years ago. They are sick of Stormy Daniels and all of the crap.

This country is going to hell in a can basket. It's time to put policy on the agenda and to start winning. All right. You're reciting your Democrat talking points. My talking points are truth and the polls prove it. I wish we had more time. Just getting started. I mean, we got a long way to go here until the Iowa caucuses in the very beginning of 2024. You sound like a Democrat. That's what they'll always hit you with that. I've seen it, too. They're like, oh, he's in the election school. You're a Democrat. It's like, yeah, really, that if that's what qualifies and you're

an idiot. Yeah, well, that's that's part of the Gordian knot, as you so aptly put it, is that Republican-based voters have been trained to think any attack on Trump is a Democratic attack. Like, anything you say about him, doesn't matter if it's from the right, from the left, on his character, whatever, especially when you're talking about things like he mentioned Stormy Daniels. Any of the character attacks, you should just forget about it. Like, not going to work. Because the Republican base is so conditioned to anybody who validates that is a Democrat. Stormy Daniels, any of the character attacks, you should just forget about it. Like, it's not going to work. The Republican base is so conditioned to anybody who validates that is a Democrat.

So actually, she's attacking him correctly. He is obviously correct on the merits. So it's difficult. And this is why I'm like, I don't I don't know how exactly you get yourself out of this. You know, at the same time, though, the interest sniping too between the DeSantis camp and the Trump camp has reached just very high posting levels. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. You can see here Alex Brucewitz, this guy is like a hardcore Trump person online and he's been putting out tweets where he's going after Christina Pushaw who is a former press

secretary for DeSantis, part of the DeSantis campaign. She's been going after some of the Trump surrogates online, calling them, basically calling out Trump both on policy. Then he's like, DeSantis' campaign argues with a 16 year old kid over Ukraine and Botox after actually they accused Christina Pushaw of getting Botox. Then on Friday, got Trump supporter Gavin Wax fired. Gavin, for those who don't know, he's a former New York Republican's head, and he was actually working for the Babylon Bee, the satire Republican site. He actually tweeted, what the F is wrong with you, Christina Pushaw? And then Seth Dillon, the CEO of Babylon Bee, actually fired him on Twitter. And then, apparently was accused about being part of some drug ring. So just to give you an idea of what

level the discourse is at, let's go to the next one there also as well. Because as you can see, she's going after Robert Barnes. He's somebody, I believe he has a very popular show with another guy on Rumble. And they say that, remember who put Fauci in charge of COVID response in 2020? Donald Trump did. And he said, why delete this? It's true because DeSantis campaign is going after Trump on Fauci, and there's a lot of warring over COVID.

I guess Barnes is now with Trump. Is that what's going on? Barnes is a Trump guy. Yeah, let's go to the next one up here on the screen. Here it's another Twitter account. It says, who is Christina Pucha from 2018? She worked in Georgia, the country, by the way, as a registered foreign agent for former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili,

who I believe is actually Ukrainian now, last time I checked. Anyway. I think you're right about that. Sakashvili. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. I think she worked in Ukraine too, didn't she? I believe that she also did, or at least did some work with Zelensky, I want to say, way back in the day before she came to work for Ron DeSantis. Anyway, what do we learn from this? Knives are fully out against each other. And I'm just not sure it's going to work. I mean, look, a lot of it just seems like drama, which is on the internet. But I think what people should underscore is that, or should people take away? The biggest takeaway to me is the DeSantis team is actually willing

to go after him. There's no Nikki Haley people out there who are prosecuting, and outside of like Liz Cheney, Trump are like Trump is a threat to democracy this is like actual knives out real campaign fighting against each other it will be bitter and it will obviously going to be a long and hard-fought contest but they are willing to actually declare war and that shows that they have some confidence at least in their process now is it going to work we'll see there. There's a lot of K-Hive vibes among some of these people. Yeah, they're mean. With the viciousness that they instantly go to.

It is genuinely funny. I mean, I'm personally enjoying watching it all unfold greatly. Like, go at it. Let them fight. But yeah, it is definitely, it's game on. Like, no holds barred.

Clearly, DeSantis' launch has sort of opened up the floodgates. People are picking sides. It's going to be absolutely brutal and vicious online. And, you know, we'll see whether he's able to get some traction. I do think that this is, like, you can't just sit by and take the attacks and not say anything. Because ultimately, that's just, like, it's emasculating. It's humiliating.

I agree. So at the very least, even if you don't think your attacks are going to land, you got to stand up for yourself. You got to have some level of pushback. You got to have some knife fighters online who are willing to like go to the mat for you as well. And, you know, the other dynamics that are unfolding are everybody else are too afraid to go after Trump. And so they're training their fire at DeSantis. So if no one is going after Trump, save for maybe Chris Christie, when he gets in the race, he's sort of coming in like a, you know, guided missile to go directly at Trump and try to knock him off. So maybe between the two of them, you're able to get some traction for some of these

attacks and able to convince some people that they need to take another look. But I do think maybe the most revealing part of this whole segment was when on the Newsmax panel, the one dude is like launching very sort of grounded attacks on Trump, and we're done with the messiness and Stormy Daniels and all of this. Let's back a winner. And she's able to very easily dismiss it by you sound like a Democrat. That's hard to overcome when you have a base that has been really trained to see any sort of attack on Trump as coming from bad faith, coming from liberals, coming from the Democratic Party. I think it makes it a very difficult sort of situation for them to navigate, but we'll see. Well, we'll see. Let's go to the next one here. This is just

so fascinating. First, the thread was found by our producer, Mac, but it fits neatly with a story that I've just been obsessed with recently. So let's put this up there on the screen. C.W. Howell, who is a Duke PhD and a professor, actually assigned his students a really interesting assignment. He said that he had them all generate an essay, 63 of his students, which used a prompt that he gave them for ChatGPT. Their job was to then grade their essay and look for so-called hallucinated information and critique its analysis. Now, what he points out, hallucinated information is stuff we talked about here before, fake quotes and fake sources, real sources that are misunderstood and mischaracterized. He says that all 63 essays, every single assignment, what he found was that the biggest takeaway is that their students learned that chat GPT was not reliable because all of them included some sort of hallucinated information crystal. And it shows you that chat GPT, at least in its

current form and maybe for all time, who knows how difficult this is for them to solve, is that can easily hallucinate and create false information. As we have shown previously, it has created false sexual assault allegations against people before. People who have tried to use it for purposes will ask them questions that they have deep knowledge about, and then will get back answers that are said in a very declarative format and which are completely wrong.

Yeah, which are like page numbers of studies. It's like, what are you talking about? This is literally not what it says. And I actually thought, by the way, I love this assignment because it's showing people how to, it's like the real world example where he said, the real lesson for all my students was, yeah, you can't trust JTD for stuff like this. And I was like, wow, what a useful thing to actually teach somebody in university instead of some stupid essay, which they're not even going to think about. 10 years later, they're like, oh, I actually can't trust everything that I hear. Wow, it's more complicated. It's more nuanced. And it actually fits exactly with the same problem of a lawyer. Let's go and put this up there, who was

a lawyer for a man suing Avianca Airlines, the Colombian airline. The lawsuit was written by a judge, or sorry, by a lawyer who actually used ChatGPT. And in his brief around the lawsuit, cited, quote, a dozen relevant decisions. All of those decisions, however, actually could not find the decisions or the quotations cited or that were summarized. In other words, they were completely invented by ChatGPT. And the lawyer who actually created the brief had to come before the judge and issue an affidavit saying that he had used ChatGP to do all of his legal research, which he now has to admit is, quote, a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable. You think? Well, it is funny, though, because there are quite a few

tech bros, you know, who are online being like, legal profession is dead. ChatGPT can pass an MCAT exam. ChatGPT can pass a legal brief or what all that. And it's like, yeah, well, you know what else they have to deal with in the medical field? It's called liability. And if you, let's say you were right 99% of the time. Well, if you get it wrong 1% of the time, then what? Has Microsoft now just opened itself up to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit? And at scale, 1% is actually a lot of people. Think about this lawyer who's now in the New York Times written up for like this moron, just like outsourced all his work to ChatGPT and didn't fact check any of it. There's a funny exchange in here because

apparently he actually asked, he didn't fact check it himself, like go outside of the program to look up these cases and make sure that they actually existed. But he asked ChatGPT if they were real. He said, is Varghese a real case? He typed, according to a copy of the exchange he submitted to the judge. Yes, the chat bot replied, offering a citation, adding it is a real case. Then the lawyer dug deeper. What is your source? He wrote, according to the filing. I apologize for the confusion earlier, ChatGPT responded, offering a legal citation. Are the other cases you provided fake, Mr. Shorts, the lawyer asked. ChatGPT responded, no, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases. None of that was true. And I think, you know, this is eye-opening to me of how often

ChatGPT just makes stuff up on a whole cloth. Because we had seen some examples of people, they asked them a question of like, you know, what is the most cited like economic paper or something like that. And what it did is it took two existing economist researchers who I think had never worked together, or they certainly didn't create this paper together, created a fake paper with a fake title, but these were real economists. So if you look at it, you would think it's got sort of like the semblance of truth to it. You're like, oh, okay, well, it just may be haven't heard of that paper before. Let me go check it out. Totally fabricated, 100% hallucinated. They mentioned in here the sort of theory of how and why this happens. Because again, remember what this

thing is. It's a so-called large language models. You know, the programmers feed it all of this text and existing case history and everything that's online and books and whatever. And then it uses predictive algorithms to come up with what its responses are going to be. So what they say in terms of a theoretical explanation for how this happens is chat GPT generates realistic responses by making guesses about which fragments of text should follow other sequences based on a statistical model that has ingested billions of examples of text pulled from all over the internet. In Mr. Matta's, that's this guy who is the subject of the suit case, the program appears to have discerned the labyrinthine framework of a written legal argument, but is populated with names and

facts from a bouillabaisse of existing cases. So it used this predictive statistical analysis of what it thought should go next to it kind of figured out, okay, this is what a legal brief should look like. And then it just mashed together a bunch of information that didn't wasn't actually real, wasn't actually factually based to generate this brief. Very similar to what these students found when, you know, their professor assigned them this task. Very similar output here. And I thought it was interesting what one of the students said, Sagar, in terms of her concerns. She wrote, I'm not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I'm much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is. I'm increasingly thinking that's a real danger where people do outsource a lot of their original thinking to chat GPT or other large language models. And rather than, you know, it making

us better, it actually, in a sense, sort of dumbs us down and, you know, waters down our thinking. In a sense, you already see this in a lot of the culture. And I don't know if it's related to technology or what it's related to, but how many of our movies are recycled? How much of our music is just like taking beats from like when I was in high school that were popular and dumping it into a new song and putting some new words to it. I already feel like there is such a degrading of creativity and lessening of creativity. And I think part of that is like the capitalist system, but I could see AI play an increasing role in all it has to draw on is like the things we've done in the past. It's not capable of creating something new. So if we're increasingly relying on this chat GPT and other large language models that are just

drawing and regurgitating and recycling and mashing together things that are from our past, does that stultify our creativity even more than where we're already at? I agree 100%. There's an elegance to the human. One of my favorite scenes in a movie is from The Wolf of Wall Street where Leo DiCaprio is surrounded by his friends. And Jon Bernthal is one of the actors. And he's like, sell me this pen. And he hands it to one of his friends. And the guy starts going like, oh, well, this pen is beautiful.

He's like, no, that's not going to work. And he has one of the other guy who is his favorite salesman and Bernthal. And he's like, sell me this pen. He's like, hey, can you write something down for me? He's like, no, I can't. He said, yeah, exactly. That's why you need this pen. And there's such an elegance to that. And I just actually tried it with ChatGPT because it reminded me of this.

I've seen this experiment before and it falls for that lowest common denominator of, are you tired of ordinary pens? They're feeling lackluster, you know, like trying to describe, but it doesn't create the demand. It doesn't have that like understanding of the human dynamic of what's actually going on here. And I feel like all ChatGPT has done is increase the lowest common denominator. So it's better now for the lowest of low effort work. I think, okay, I mean, that's not a bad thing whenever it comes to white collar, but people really underestimate how much little minute decision makings and creativity and things that require human beings to do.

Can you automate all that? Maybe. But I always think about Noam Chomsky's op-ed where he talked, and yeah, Noam right now, very complicated feelings on Noam after the whole Epstein thing. But in his area of expertise on linguistics, what he wrote is that what LLMs fail to understand is it's just literally not how the human mind or language evolved. It's not about amalgamating a bunch of stuff and then spitting it out. You can never capture how language actually came to be in the way that communication really works, which I thought was a really cool way of putting it.

But I could easily see us falling into the trap, the laziness trap of, let me just use ChatGPT to do my first draft. Yeah. Oh, easy. And how much of, you know, I mean, we write a lot for this show. We write monologues, you know, all week, every week. And so much of my thinking comes from having to actually sit with the blank paper and grapple with it.

And I come up with new insights that I hadn't thought of before as I'm in the writing process. Sometimes it starts, I'm like, you know, this is weak. Like I need to change what I'm doing here. I need a different angle or whatever. If you're outsourcing even just that first draft to this automated technology, having this machine regurgitate and mash up for us things that already exist. And, you know, it dulling the sort of creativity and joy and variability of the human experience within our culture. So that's what this really underscored for me is actually some of the perils not of like I do think the the concerns about like what's it going to do and how smart is it going to get and how is it going to display? I think those are legitimate concerns.

But this underscored for me the opposite concern, which is rather than taking over, it just makes all of – like drags us down. Good point. Makes us dumber. Very good point. All right. Let's go to the next one here. This is absolutely fascinating. We've been keeping our eye on these meta trends. All right, let's go to the next one here. This is absolutely fascinating.

We've been keeping our eye on these metatrends. Put it up there, please, about domestic offshoring or sometimes called intrashoring, sometimes called like insideshoring. Nobody really knows how exactly to look at it, but I think it's really important because this is about how cities, which we have seen have domestic migration, in-migration, and cities that have lost places, are all not only following where

people want to live, but also low-wage jobs out of some key cities. So when we talk about low-wage jobs, we're thinking about call centers. That's one of the ones that they show here. Basically, jobs that don't pay enough to cover the cost of housing in cities like New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, have now been moving at a very fast pace in the last couple of years to less expensive places like Orlando, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. And what's really crazy about this, Crystal, is this data is only as recent as 2021. So we have two full years that have completely changed since this has happened. They also actually point to the fact that this increase in domestic onshorings or interest shoring, as I've said, has led to a huge increase in the number of jobs

that specifically not only low wage, but in some cases also executive jobs, in Austin, Denver, San Jose, San Diego, Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, Missouri, and then Phoenix, Arizona. And so what they point to is that within a lot of these places, you are seeing a huge increase. It also kind of fits with what we've talked here about,

where millions of people flee New York, San Francisco, Chicago. They're all going to the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt just seems to be booming in a way that I don't think a lot of people are understanding. Or they're going to places where it's a lower tax environment or still in the time zone where you're able to do business for remote work. I've talked about Boise before. Phoenix is another good example. Obviously, everyone knows about Austin, but that's not the only city in Houston that's growing. You've got Houston and you've got Dallas, all of the suburban area. Florida, obviously. Georgia, Atlanta right now is absolutely hot. But there's a lot of other

areas in the Sun Belt as well, which has seen a major increase. And I think this is really going to reshape the entire U.S. economy and really our politics. Because if capital starts leaving these big cities, it lessens their political importance. And it lessens the concentration that made these cities important and all that stuff in the first place. One of the biggest things that they're talking about here is how the only thing that keeps the Washington, San Francisco, New York City, and all these cities still high prestige is that they are where, quote unquote, high-end jobs are the most concentrated. So the highest earners and all the executives. D.C. is number one, San Francisco number two, New York

City is number three. I'm surprised D.C. is up there as number one. Probably has to do with government. I'm sure it's not a good thing. We are the legal capital of the world. So there you go. Well, what they talk to speak to here is a further sort of sorting and bifurcating of our economy where, you know, what really makes a place sort of healthy and vibrant is that you have an array of people, different cultures, different income levels, crucially. And we've already had this sorting happening in some of the largest cities. I think San Francisco, it's the most clear where you have very highly paid tech executives and other tech knowledge workers. And then you have, you know, people who are, you know, really struggling and you have this vast inequality and it leads to a true hollowing out where if you're a middle class person, like you can't live in San Francisco. There's a handful of them like hanging on there by their fingertips

because they just love the place so much. But what this is pointing to is that that sort of hollowing out of those middle tier jobs and them leaving, you know, the jobs themselves leaving the city and the workers along with them, of course, that's coming for a much broader array of society. They say as workers quit expensive cities, they leave behind a smaller workforce that's heavily concentrated with executive decision makers and other people who are highly paid. They write in this report, this growing economic and geographic divide threatens to limit opportunity for people in lower cost regions and could have social and political consequences. As America's high-end labor becomes concentrated in so-called superstar cities,

those living elsewhere could experience less social and economic mobility. I think this says a lot about where one's opportunities lie. If you're a customer service rep or working in that realm, you'll find most of your opportunities away from those coastal cities. That will influence your life, who your peers are, and the opportunities your children have. So it's a sort of further stratifying of American society, which, you know, there's a really good part of this, which is workers, remote work, being able to work in cities where it's affordable for them and being able to leave these cities that have been, you know, have a terrible quality of life and they're just wildly unaffordable. But the more that we sort ourselves, the more that we sort ourselves,

the more that we stratify, the more you're also vulnerable to that sort of like coming apart phenomenon that we've already seen and has now been accelerated by the COVID trend. You'll have cities that are these superstar, like almost like luxury goods for the very wealthiest among us. And then you'll have like the rest of the country and big divides in between. I've talked about it before, but they're basically openly admitting that the only way to save Manhattan is to turn it even more so into a rich person's playground. They're like, we've got to make sure the bars never close.

We've got to destroy all the commercial real estate. We've just got to turn this into a Dubai-like playboy haven for the richest people in the world. Which- That was Bloomberg's vision from the beginning. By the way, it actually will work. Grotesque. That's the gross part, is it will work.

It also probably will destroy any of the last cool things still that remain about New York City. But economically, probably the right thing to do. I've seen it in so many places, like the south of France, for example. Any charm in the south of France has long disappeared after all the richest people in the world decided to come in and buy it all up. There are whole neighborhoods of London,

which are basically not British anymore, and they belong to the Gulf Arab states. This is not a critique. It's just like, being there, you might as well be in Dubai. And it's all like the ritzy stuff all around you, and you're like, oh, well, all the history from this is basically gone. Any of the original people, this is all just basically serving money, which is just gross whenever you

see it. And yeah, I mean, that's what they want New York, I guess, to become. It probably is the end game for most of these cities, but it will lead to a further coming apart phenomenon that you're pointing to. And that's not a good thing. No, it's not a good thing. So it's a real mixed bag. I mean, I really cheer for workers to have a lot more flexibility. And the other part of this is certain jobs that are white collar jobs, but are more mid-tier level,

they can be relocated to, you know, a whole variety of other cities. People can live wherever and do those jobs. People who are, you know, picking up your trash, who are serving you coffee, like those service sector jobs don't have that same luxury. And so that's how you'll end up with this, you know, cities that look like San Francisco, where it's the haves and the have-nots, and there's not a whole lot in between. And that's just not a healthy, healthy ecosystem for anybody

whatsoever. Yes. We were pretty astonished to see some very critical commentary of President Joe Biden based on some new poll numbers over on CNN from Jake Tapper, who really did not pull any punches here. Take a listen to what he had to say about these new poll results. And we're back with our 2024 lead. Horrible news, horrible for Joe Biden in our new CNN poll. While the president leads his Democratic competitors by a huge margin, two thirds of all of the American people surveyed, 66% of the public, say that a Biden victory would either be a setback or a disaster. David, when it comes to how voters see Joe Biden and another presidential term, I mean, those are some bad numbers. Well, I mean, just your basic favorability,

favorable opinion or unfavorable opinion of Joe Biden. Look at how Americans are rating him, Jake. I mean, 35 percent favorable. That is remarkably low. Fifty seven percent have an unfavorable rating. But look at this decline among independents from December. Thirty five percent favorable rating in December. He's now down to 26 percent favorable with independents from December. 35% favorable rating in December. He's now down at 26% favorable with independents, critical voters in the electorate, Jake. That's a big warning sign. And David, how do Biden's numbers here compare to those of the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump? Right. Well, you hear Joe Biden say all the time, compare him to the alternative, not the almighty. And basically, they're both not looking good, Jake.

They're both basically equivalent there, Trump and Biden's favorabilities. And I think this is a hard thing for Democrats to reckon with because we understand the very negative emotions that a lot of people have about Donald Trump, a majority of people have about Donald Trump and feel it would be a disaster for him to be back in the White House. How do you grapple with the fact that people feel a lot of the same ways and a lot of the same numbers about Joe Biden? So to hear this lay down so starkly on CNN was really

something, I mean, just to go over some of those numbers again, 41% of Americans believe it would be a disaster if Biden won in 2024. 26% said it would be a setback. Meanwhile, very similar numbers for Trump. A little bit more, 44% say a victory for Trump would be a disaster. 12%, so lower numbers, say it would be setback showing the sort of like, you know, with Biden, people feel a little less strongly about him in either direction. But the fact that we have these two guys that overwhelming majority of Americans do not want, that a plurality say this would be a disaster if they got back in there and this is what we're likely to face in 2024. Yeah, we talked about like the decline of culture in our chat GPT segment. This is as stark a sign of the decline of this country as I can imagine.

Oh, absolutely. And it's reflected in the poll. Put that up there on the screen where you can see in the Democratic primary, Biden has only got 60 percent of the decline of this country, as I can imagine. Oh, absolutely. And it's reflected in the poll. Put that up there on the screen where you can see in the Democratic primary, Biden has only got 60% of the people who are affirmatively voting for him. RFK Jr. is at 20%. Marianne Williamson is at 8%. Someone else also at 8%. I mean, look, that's powerful stuff. And actually, that puts Biden right around where Jimmy Carter ended up in 1980. Now, I think he's probably better off because Trump also has such high negative ratings. But it really reveals to you like in an alternative universe where the GOP has not twisted itself into knots. I mean, it's the easiest layup election really of all time. Like if they were able to pull themselves out of it, they could.

And if they had some Reagan-esque type figure or Glenn. I mean, I honestly think like Glenn Young and somebody like very milquetoast or anything, could get like 54, 55% of the vote easily by just being like, I'm not crazy. And I don't like that guy. And neither do you. Everyone would be like, okay, sure. Absolutely. And that's one of those where the GOP, though, always finds a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Obama, you know, he wasn't as weak as Biden, but he was pretty weak, I think, going into 2012, which they acknowledged. They were actually somewhat afraid. Then Romney

got elected. They're like, oh, we got this. Yeah, this is easy. To their credit, though, they also ran a very effective campaign against Romney, brutally, like, you know, set the stage early for the caricature of him that they wanted to prosecute. He stepped in it with his like infamous 47 percent comments. But, you know, I just think also one thing I have to quibble with in terms of the Jake Tapper commentaries, he goes out of his way to be like, oh, he's very, very far ahead of his primary opponents. And it's like, yes and no. I mean, you're the sitting incumbent president and you're only getting 60 percent of the vote. And those numbers are not all that different from what Trump is garnering in the Republican primary. And you wouldn't go out of your way to be like, he's very far ahead and he doesn't have any, you know, any challenge whatsoever in the GOP primary.

So, and this is with, you know, the media completely shutting out both RFK and Marianne and doing everything they can to try to convince the public like, oh, he's got no serious primary contender. He's practically the nominee already. Like, it's just, you know, a matter of time and he's going to be anointed and no one real has stepped up against him. Clearly, there is a real hunger for there to be some alternative to him. And maybe the most stark numbers that I've seen recently is that you have an actual majority. It's 50-50 that think that Biden will even be the Democratic nominee, which shows you the lack of confidence that even Democratic voters and certainly the electorate overall has in the current precedent. So, you know, it's a grim landscape.

Neither of these dudes, as we've talked about, too, have any intention of debating. Like, you know, the political calculus for them is that they're not going to pay a price if they don't actually engage in democratic process. And it's just very sad. So it was kind of nice to see a little bit of unvarnished truth there slip through on CNN. Every once in a while, the truth actually breaks out. All right, so how are we looking at? Well, it seems every month these days is dedicated to some so-called marginalized community.

I have no idea where it all came from because when I was a kid, it was just Black History Month, and that seemed fine. But as May comes to an end, we are suddenly seeing the last chance and goodbyes to AAPI Month. AAPI Month for the uninitiated

is Asian American and Pacific Island Heritage Month. Now, as someone who is technically within that group, the term has always bothered me. What do I have in common with someone who is South Korean? And what do they have in common with somebody of Cambodian descent? And what do they have in common with literal Polynesians? It collapses on a rudimentary analysis. Yet almost everywhere you look these days, if someone was to classify me in some corporate America structure, it's where I would fall. I always was just annoyed by it, but didn't actually think much until my friend Richard Hanania put out a very informative thread that tells us a lot about modern racial politics. Per Richard's telling, the origin of the term

Asian American Pacific Islander actually has its roots in the U.S. government after the Office of Management and Budget put out Directorate No. 15 in May 1977 and created modern racial and ethnic categories for census purposes. These include American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, and White. Now, leaving aside how nebulous Hispanic also is as a term, consider that the only reason they did five is because that was the minimum and they didn't want to do more.

From there, things actually got even more interesting. Per his telling, after the creation of the Asian American term, it came time to include Asians in the Small Business Act so that they could give grants to minority contractors. Since we had a new minority, they had to be included because the previous law only covered blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Here, Congress took a stab at deciding which Asians count as disadvantaged. They landed on Cambodians, Chinese, Guam, Japan, Korea, Laos, the Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Samoa, Taiwan, and Vietnam. That was it for them. There's a lot going on, so not much in common with each other, of course, and already stupid, but it actually gets much stupider. From that point forward, other Asian races, so-called, I guess, got upset because they were not included. So they

slowly included the places like India, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nepal, Bhutan. And at that point, basically anyone even peripherally connected to the Asian landmass or the Pacific Ocean scrambled to get in because if they didn't, they couldn't take advantage of the tax benefits. Here, though, is where things get even funnier. By the 1990s, Pacific Islanders' inclusion with the AAPIs began to cause problems because for the Pacific Islanders, with the rise of affirmative action racial regimes in college admissions, they were competing against Asians when getting into college. This presented a problem. The federal government then created a new category called Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders just to make sure that they could get into college easier. So as Richard Soapsley puts it, quote, in contracting, AAPI are

united in being disadvantaged and in getting benefits from the government. In college admissions, they are separated so that the few PIs in the country don't have to compete with Korean and Chinese students. It's just all so absurd and too much to make up, but it has real impact. As you can see from the chart that he put together, the term did not exist in the United States until the government created it out of sheer laziness and nepotism. Now it is some full-blown fake cultural phenomenon. Reading Biden's executive order declaring AAPI month, you can't help but laugh. He says, quote,

this year I was proud to launch the first ever national strategy to advance equity, justice, and opportunity for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. The new national strategy, ironically, is actually supposed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion by actually collecting accurate census data on each individual subgroup. In other

words, by getting more accurate data, they are admitting that the entire thing is not representative of any group of people and that the current data and term is useless. AAPI to me best signifies that diversity Olympics that people who aren't white in America are subjected to, despite none of us ever asking for it. My own personal annoyance outside of being lumped in with Asian American is when people call us South Asians, as if Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis all have so much in common with each other. If they did, then they would be their own country. Why not just refer to people as Americans first? Then, if you reference prior descent, you can use nationality if that's what that person prefers.

Consider the absurdity that Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese are all supposed to be lumped together. It's almost as if bureaucrats who came up with the term, or the people who think about lumping them together as respectful, don't know that in actual Asia, these countries individually have very complex relationships. In some cases, despise each other, or have centuries of intra-warfare and conquest. By the way, as our previous discussion on Hispanics revealed, that term too collapses under the most basic of scrutiny alongside Latino. And finally, let me take this opportunity to speak to my fellow AAPIs. The biggest con of all by the diversity, equity, inclusion folks is to try to get us to go along with their nonsense while they simultaneously have architected an entire affirmative action regime designed to preference their admission to the cultural and financial elite at our expense. When they are forced to compete on merit, they fail miserably. So they are literally fighting tooth and nail to make sure it

is harder for us to get in and easier for them. They are also targeting the professions that Asians in America have traditionally excelled at, like doctors and lawyers, to reduce merit-based criteria and allow other groups an easier shot. Asians are minorities when they are convenient and oppressors when they are not. An easier way is to just simply consider people as individuals with their own story. After all, the reason that most Asians came to the United States was opportunity and to be freed of the suffocating social constructions of traditional Asian cultures. In America, you can be anything. We should keep it that way. Now, I hope you all have a good AAPI month. It's crazy that it was created. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as you all certainly know, Ron DeSantis struggled last week to launch his presidential campaign alongside billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Musk's personal social media platform. That would be Twitter. didn't go all that well. The attempted launch was beset by some catastrophic technical failures that has lasted nearly half an hour. Once functioning, half the audience was gone, the audio was still horrendous, the content so stilted and fawning that Megyn Kelly, who agrees with DeSantis on

a lot of his cultural takes, declared it Pravda-esque in its obsequiousness. Of course, this all made for unintentionally amazing schadenfreude content. But the deeper implications of the incestuous relationships between politicians and their chosen billionaires, those are anything but amusing. Literally the day after DeSantis launched with Elon Musk, he signed into law a gigantic giveaway to one of Musk's companies, that would be SpaceX. This new bill that DeSantis just signed into law protects SpaceX and other commercial spaceflight companies from any legal liability if a crew member or passenger is injured or killed due to the company's negligence, except in certain extreme circumstances. So participants

now must sign a waiver, which reads, quote, warning under Florida law, there is no liability for an injury to or death of a participant or crew in a spaceflight activity provided by a spaceflight entity. If such injury or death results from the spaceflight activity, injuries caused by spaceflight activities may include, among others, injury to land, equipment, persons, and animals, as well as the potential for you to act in a negligent manner that may contribute to your injury or death, you are assuming the risk of participating in the spaceflight activity. As long as the waiver is signed, SpaceX and all the other spaceflight companies, they're in the clear. Such protection

from lawsuits is even more relevant for Musk space exploration right now, given the company's most recent disaster. So about a month ago, the company launched the largest rocket ever built, got off the ground, but not before exploding the launch pad, hurling giant hunks of concrete with rebar into the ocean, endangering offshore fuel storage tanks. After mere minutes of flight, the whole thing blew up midair. Fortunately, no people aboard, but plenty of people, the whole thing blew up midair. Fortunately, no people aboard. But plenty of people on the ground did suffer. The launch and the subsequent explosions caused particulate matter, including sand, ash, and heavier materials that were kicked up by the launch, to rain down on a large area. Residents as far away as Port Isabel, that's a community about six miles away, were inundated with this type of material.

Researchers are worried that breathing the stuff in could cause long-term respiratory issues. They're still researching that. And as if that wasn't enough, the launch pad explosion also started a wildfire that spread across three and a half acres of state park land. Now, according to environmental and cultural heritage nonprofits, which are now suing the government over all of this, all of these impacts were predictable and should have been revealed by an environmental impact assessment. They say the FAA violated the National Environment Policy Act by greenlighting the launch of the heaviest rocket in history without engaging in this legally mandated thorough review. SpaceX, it turns out, successfully persuaded the FAA to use a less stringent process,

which allowed them to piggyback off of approvals for their much smaller Falcon 9 rockets. That's according to Substack or ESG Hound. This process led SpaceX and the government to wildly underestimate the impact and potential destruction of this launch on nearly every level. Such are the swamp-tastic results when government and industry are way too cozy, a disgusting American tradition which apparently Governor DeSantis happily continues in Florida today. So Ron DeSantis, of course, he stakes a good bit of his political career on a fight with corporate giant Disney. He frames this battle in almost leftist terms as a noble stand against corporate power, and on that level, he actually has a point. Disney has for decades in Florida

received huge tax breaks, been able to run its own government. But the launch with Musk and goodies to Musk revealed that DeSantis clearly doesn't have a problem with unaccountable corporate power, so long as it's his benefactors and partisan allies who ultimately benefit. Now, DeSantis taking on Disney has nothing to do with principle

and everything to do with political ambition. In fact, more than anything, the DeSantis Twitter campaign launch revealed just how little the governor actually cares about his supposed principles. He might stand up to Disney, but he's putty in Elon Musk's hands. He might decry social media censorship of conservatives on free speech grounds, but he will enthusiastically team up with a guy who just brazenly censored journalists in Turkey on behalf of a right-wing government. DeSantis and other Republican partisans feign deep concern about government power teamed up with social media oligarchs, but somehow see nothing wrong with the current governor and top presidential contender

receiving overt support from their own social media oligarch. They are rightly outraged by censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story under Jack, but apparently have zero interest in how the platform could be manipulated under Elon to benefit his chosen favored candidate. It is telling that DeSantis felt no shame signing Elon Musk giveaway bill one day after his Elon Musk sponsored launch. He doesn't expect the media to particularly notice, and he doesn't expect the Republican base to particularly care. When all the world is a culture war, principles really don't matter. Only who is on what side. And with DeSantis gamely accepting utter humiliation on Twitter and promptly handing over a giant gift to SpaceX, Elon will have no doubt that DeSantis is firmly on his side. And that as he's having his way with Florida, he would have his way with the whole nation or DeSantis to ascend to the White House. And I think what really got me, Sagar, is the brazen... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. It'll be sad to say goodbye to the desk, but we're ready to move on. I think we're ready to move on. Yeah, see if we have an emotional reaction to the removal of the brick wall. The new stuff is so cool. It makes it easier, I think, to say goodbye. That is true. We've got a lot of great stuff in the works for everybody, and we will see you all tomorrow. I always had to be so good, no one could ignore me.

Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves.

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