Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/10/21: Bezos Bailout, Billionaires Pay ZERO Taxes, Hellish Dem Future & More!

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

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Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn

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Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're going to be totally upfront with you.

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So what are you waiting for? Go to crystalandsager.com to become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. We love you guys. Enjoy the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Some great stories to dig in today. We've got taxes of the wealthiest Americans have been revealed. Some stunning, though ultimately not surprising, revelations there, but fascinating to dig into that detail. We're going to start with that incredible Reagan brain from Art Laffer, total contempt for the poor. We'll get into that.

Virginia governor's race, the Democratic primary was this week. Also, some breaking news about breaking points that you don't want to miss. We've got, yes, indeed. We should actually, we should have led with that because it's the most important news. We've got our monologues, of course. Breonna Joy Gray is going to join us to talk about the Dems' latest excuse for inaction. That would be Senator Joe Manchin. But we do, in fact, want to start with the revelation of those tax returns. That's right. So we'll go ahead and throw this up there on the

screen. This is from ProPublica. This is actually an amazing story. So the secret IRS files, trove of never-before-seen records, reveal how the wealthiest have avoided income taxes. Okay, so the most important top-line story here is that the highest income tax rate is 37% for people who have earnings about $628,300. Well, the true effective tax rate for the world's wealthiest, this is according to ProPublica, and their review of 25 of the wealthiest people in America is 3.4% between 2014 and 2018. Here's the kicker, which is that in that same period, they earned a collective extra $401 billion, paid only a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes during those five years. So this is incredible because what it shows, Crystal, is yes, okay, they showed and they paid $13.6 billion. Okay. But during that time period, middle class, lower class, everybody basically, even there's a famous adage like, oh, poor people don't pay taxes. Well, they have to pay like

Social Security and FICA taxes. Guess who's paying even less than them? The wealthiest people in America. Yeah. I mean, I want to read you a little bit of this piece, which by the, I mean, ProPublica did. Yeah, amazing. Phenomenal job here. And they say that they received a massive cache of documents detailing how the rich go about avoiding paying taxes. This appears to be the first story of many as they dive into that data. They've been sorting through it already for months. So make sure you keep your eyes peeled for what more they reveal. But just to read from the beginning here, they say, in 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multi-billionaire and now the world's

richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved that feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros, famous liberal, paid no federal income tax three years in a row. They go on to say, many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70K annually and paid 14% in federal taxes.

So that's your average American household struggling paycheck to paycheck, 14% in federal taxes. Meanwhile, the richest paid 3%. Insane. And they dig into the way that they hide their income. And of course, there's a lot of different strategies that they use. But one that they go into detail on is basically, they hold these shares that are worth billions of dollars. And rather than cashing out those shares and using that money to live on, because that would trigger a tax event, that income would then be taxable, although it would still be taxable at a lower rate than the income tax rate. They borrow against the value of those assets. So they, in essence, never have a taxable event. They do this their entire lives. And then when it comes to pass it on to their heirs, in theory, we have the estate tax or the death tax, as conservatives

like to call it. There are a myriad of ways that they avoid paying that as well. So this wealth, billions and billions of dollars is effectively never taxed. Meanwhile, regular wage earners- Yeah, you can't hide your wealth. Working for a living, your income goes up, your taxes go up. Regular people are paying so much more in taxes than the richest among us. And it is truly disgusting. And what's depressing about it is it's very hard to know what to do about it. I know. No, what's actually really stunning here is that Warren Buffett, for example, remember when Warren Buffett did that whole thing with Obama and he's like, we should pay more taxes. Yeah, get this. So his wealth growth was $24.3 billion.

The total income he reported was $125 million, on which he paid taxes of $23.7 million, which means what? His true tax rate was 0.1%. Now, take Bezos. This is actually an even better example. In 2011, a year in which Bezos' wealth rose at $18 billion, he filed a tax return reporting that he lost money. His income that year was offset by investment losses. What's more, because according to the tax law, he made so little, he then claimed and received a $4,000 tax credit for his children.

So in the same year that his wealth rises by $18 billion, he not only paid nothing, he took advantage of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit system in order to claim government money for his family. Now, that just doesn't sit right with me. Now, if you look even more, tax avoidance is striking. Between 2006 to 2018, which ProPublica actually has the data for, Bezos' wealth increased by $127 billion, but he reported only $6.5 billion in income. The $1.4 billion that he paid in taxes is, sure, it's a lot of money, but that is a true effective tax rate on his fortune of 1.1%. This is what they get away with all throughout the system. And it's actually very useful because a lot of the

billionaire class and the multimillionaire class in New York will always use this talking point. If you look at the amount of taxes we pay in absolute terms relative to everybody else, we are like the vast majority of the system. I accept that to be true. However, go ahead and look at their true effective tax rate relative to everybody else. Just because they're paying more in the actual dollar amount, it is not fair necessarily that they are paying so, not just a lot less, like not just a little bit less, a lot less relative to the general population, especially the working man and woman who have to pay Social Security taxes, FICA taxes. They can't

hide any of that wealth. So yeah, maybe they don't pay income taxes. They actually still have a higher federal effective income tax rate than the wealthiest people in America. It's grotesque. Just to lay out one, I know we're hitting you with a lot of dollar figures, but this stuff really matters. Just to lay out one more metric for you, okay? So the way that the progressive taxation system is supposed to work is as your wealth grows, you pay more in taxes. That's the like basic idea underlying this. That's what everybody sort of accepts, except for some like weirdos on the right, some like weirdos in a libertarian camp, that that's like the basic idea of fairness, right? The more you make, the more you're supposed to pay in. However, that is the polar opposite of

what is going on here. So they crunched the numbers and found that for every $100 of wealth growth over the period that they studied, typical Americans paid $160 in taxes. So for every $100 of wealth growth, $160 in taxes. Jeff Bezos, for every $100 of growth, paid $1.09 in taxes. That gives you a precise number of how wildly unjust and unfair this current system of taxation is. And I thought they had a line in here that I want to read to you because I think this really sort of nails the core of why this is so incredibly enraging. And not just enraging, but also gets to the heart of this breakdown of a sense of trust and belief in this society. They say, look, there's a more fundamental issue than which programs get funded or not. Taxes are a kind

of collective sacrifice. No one loves giving their hard-earned money to the government, but the system works only as long as it's perceived to be fair. Yes, that's right. And what you see from these numbers is this is wildly, wildly unfair. And the solutions to it, look, leftists have offered wealth tax, which I think is a good idea. It's been shown to be a little bit complicated. Some countries have tried it. It's been hard to implement. The biggest problem is that what the rich do is they just they'll move their income from if it's, you know, the taxation system changes here, they move it over overseas to somewhere where they're going to get more favorable treatment. So it's actually a hard problem to really get at and really deal with.

But what's really outrageous, too, can throw this next tear sheet from our tweet from CNN up on the screen. The Biden administration's response to this so far, their response is to investigate how the tax information was released, not to investigate the billionaires or the tax code or any of that. They're enraged, apparently, and going to investigate aggressively the fact that this information got into your hands to start with. And again, I want to say kudos to ProPublica. Yeah, I mean, come on, guys. Right. And ProPublica says, look, this is a little bit of a tricky issue because we're talking about people's privacy, et cetera. They got this cache of information. They actually don't know who or where it came from. And it came in a raw form. Came in raw form, which speaks to some

of the debates that we've been having over the years about like what journalists should do, I mean, the Hunter Biden emails, right? This is an easy case, by the way. The Russiagate, the WikiLeaks releases, all that stuff. There are all these questions and hand-wringing about whether to release information if the sources that it comes from are nefarious. ProPublica did the right thing here and said, look, we don't actually care or know where this data came from. We were able to validate that it was accurate, and that's why we're releasing it. It's exactly the right call. No, it was absolutely the right call. And I think the part that really comes and strikes to me is this. The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018 was $1.9 billion. The bill for wage

earners was $143 billion. So it's not like they're even paying an absolute dollar figure more than the rest of us. $143 billion is what regular working men and women paid into the system in 2018, while these people are only paying $1.9 billion. And here's the thing. Given the pandemic, these people are going to pay even less. There are all sorts of employer tax credits and all this stuff which is passed through the American Rescue Plan, which I support for small business people. But when I see this grotesque nature in 2018 and then you see so many of the different programs that we are implementing now in the last year or so, and you see Jeff Bezos' wealth rise by $70 billion, we just know for a fact that they're probably going to pay even less than ever in one of the worst years on record for most Americans and actually one of the best years on record for the billionaire class. Imagine that people like Elon Musk are able to

be like, yeah, I lost money this year. I mean, it's just not true. I like Elon, but it's like, dude, that's not true. And it's even, I mean, obviously it's these people, you can think whatever you want to think about them, their intentions, good, bad, whatever. This is about an entire system that is disgustingly unfair. And it also ties into the paper we were talking about this week with Thomas Piketty asking the question, when you see numbers like this, when you see massive skyrocketing inequality, when you see during a pandemic, while everyone else is getting screwed, these people getting richer and richer than ever at an accelerating pace. the fact of these sort of like shiny object distractions, the hollow, like just linguistic signaling culture war type battles that Washington and our political elites tend to be focused on. That's all a distraction from this. Like this story exactly is what they do not want you to focus on, talk about, organize around, center your politics around. This is the core of it right here. So as ProPublica continues to release more data here and continues to release more information about these tax returns, we will certainly continue to be on it.

That's exactly right. But we wanted to turn to some really, I mean, these comments from Art Laffer, great friend of the show. Just kidding. Yes, good friend. Total enemy of the show. Deep friend of the show. Just kidding. Total enemy of the show. Recent comments on Fox News talking about exactly who he thinks deserves a living wage. Let's take a listen. Okay. Austin wants to talk about the current McDonald's CEO, Kamsinsky. He's noting that artificial intelligence technology has 85% accuracy with filling orders, with workers having

to step in for approximately one in five orders. It's going to be a big leap, he says, to go from 10 restaurants to 14000 restaurants. But there is no doubt they are working in that direction, Art. Yeah, for those people, Sandra, who are coming into the labor force brand fresh, not old timers who've been around for a while, the poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised, those with less education, young people who haven't had the job experience. These people aren't worth $15 an hour in most cases. And so therefore, when you have a $15 an hour minimum wage, they don't get that first job. They don't get the requisite skills to earn above the minimum wage. And after a few years, they become unemployable. And after becoming unemployable, they become hostile.

And that what you'll find happening is this technology has created an underclass of people who were really just bid out of the labor market and will remain out of the labor market for most of their lives. And this, I think, is just a tragedy. I love the technology, but the technology is replacing the jobs for these people.

And it's a killer. It's a killer for just the people who need the help the most. I mean, it's an incredible, it's the whole thing. I love how he was like the poor, the minorities, the young. I was like, dude. Right, right. The less educated, poor minorities, disenfranchised or disadvantaged, I can't remember which word to use, and the young, aren't worth $15 an hour. Aren't worth. That's the language that he used.

Yeah, this is the- They're not worth it. This is your brain on Reaganomics. I mean, this is what it is. And this, here, I mean, I know it may seem gratuitous to dunk on Larry Kudlow and on Art Laffer. These are the mainstream brains within the Republican Party. I want people to understand that. Yeah, right. Art Laffer was literally advising the president of the United States. As recently as six months ago, seven months ago, during COVID for all of the CARES Act,

the rescue packages, opposition to the stimulus bills, Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Larry Kudlow, the three of them together worked incessantly to make sure that the American people delivered or got less aid while Trump was in the White House. Now, look, I'm not blaming them only. Trump's the idiot who listened to them. So don't think this is me writing them off. But these guys are very, very powerful. They remain immensely powerful. If you go and you ask, let's say, the median Republican senator, and you're like, hey, who do you turn to for political or economic advice? They'll say Stephen Moore and Art Laffer.

They're like, these are the people that I listen to. And Laffer, in particular, has just been a ridiculous figure. He was the first person that Larry Kudlow invited on his brand new Fox Business show in order to go after stimulus checks for Americans. And to say like, oh, this is going to lead to widespread inflation and all this other fear-mongering, complete nonsense, like why the economy doesn't need more stimulus. These people have been proven wrong for 35 years plus, and yet he still gets to go on Fox. But worse, it's not just the Fox thing.

People listen to this man. A lot of people in power. And so that's what we're trying to show you. This is what they actually think about you. They think of you, I use this term because it's what they use, human capital stock. They usually think of you as livestock. And that's the perfect example. At best.

At best. Probably less. I mean, really, it's less than human, less than even a sentient being at all. It's like you're a cog. You're a cog, and we think you're less. $15 an hour, just so you understand, is the bare minimum that you can survive on in only a handful of places can you even survive on $15 an hour. Like, in most parts of the country, that's not even a living wage at this point. Especially in metropolitan areas. Especially in metropolitan areas. Which

is where half the country lives. If you look at housing prices, especially at this point, how many places in this country can you even afford a one bedroom apartment on $15 an hour? That number is diminishing every single day. And so when he's saying he doesn't think the poor, minorities, young people, disadvantaged people are worth $15 an hour, he's saying you aren't worth enough to even live on, to even attempt to live on. And this is like quiet part out loud because that's what really undergirds the whole philosophy is just this level of dehumanizing contempt where all you are is a cog in the marketplace. All you are is like a dollar value of worth. And if the second that a robot is a penny cheaper, you're out the door.

And that's what he's talking about here with automation is like, and he's trying to play this on. I'm so worried about it. And really, you know, I'm a humanitarian for wanting your wage to be like $5 an hour. When, look, it all depends on what your values are. Do you value human beings have a decent, dignified living? Or do you value this like absurd, radical, you want to talk about radical fringe, like this type of ideology is extremely radical and fringe. But you're right that within Republican Party elites, it's incredibly mainstream. Let's not forget Florida this year, as they voted pretty overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, also voted even more overwhelmingly for a $15 minimum wage. It is the bare minimum. Honestly, at this point, we should be asking for more than $15 because we've been asking for that for 10 years.

The minimum wage has not moved in the longest period in history that we have ever had in the history of that program. And oh, by the way, you know, for the Biden people who claim this was like the central promise that they made to progressives. I mean, this is what it made to Bernie. Remember that? Yeah. In that first endorsement video that was so painful to watch, the one thing that he really emphasized to Bernie was I support $15 minimum wage. When's the last time you heard them talk about it?

It's completely fallen off the radar. Why? They're listening to Larry Summers. They may not be listening to Art Laffer, but they're listening to Larry Summers. Right, because Larry, this is how elite structures of power work, which is that, yes,

Larry Summers and Art Laffer may be totally discredited in mainstream economic thought, government policymaking, all of that. It doesn't matter because Art Laffer goes on Fox News and Republican senators have to respond to people who are on Fox News. Now, if you're the Biden White House, who do you have to respond to? It's MSNBC and the op-ed pages of the New York Times. And guess who's writing op-eds scaremongering about inflation? Larry Summers. And so look, he may be on the outs. He may not be in the White House. Guarantee you, a lot of people in the White House read that op-ed and said, hmm, maybe. And if that influences their decision-making, then he has had a tremendous more impact than you or I or any of the people with actual ideas about how the economy should run and more, or really about how human beings

should be valued in the labor force. They have no say whatsoever. This is a prime example of how elites leverage their networks of power in order to influence the policymaking process. And that is exactly how policymaking is disconnected from your life, from my life, and others. Because people don't care what regular people have to say. They only care what these people have to say. And that's the real tragedy of it all. Washington Post, it might have been Jeff Stein, actually, that broke the story. I'm not 100% sure. But we love Jeff, so we'll just go ahead and give credit here. Reported that Biden spoke with Larry Summers last week. Yeah, see, there you go.

I mean, it tells you, and this is what we focus on in the Trump administration too. Like, forget about what he's saying publicly. Who's he talking to? And that's the whole structure of our system. Like, who are they spending time on the phone with? Who are they surrounding themselves with in meetings? Who's their social circle?

That's what dictates the policies by and large. And so while Art Laffer, like, we can look at this and it's preposterous and it's laughable and you can ridicule it. This man has been winning in terms of economic policy. 40 years. For decades. For decades and decades. And still he's allowed to go on Fox News and say that drivel. Not even challenged for a split second.

Yeah, I can't believe it. I mean, Sandra knows better. I mean, she should at least challenge him a little. Hey guys, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here I am again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen

to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to crystalandsagr.com, which you can click on in the show notes. But at the same time, we had some major primary results in your home state. Indeed. So we got Crystal, for people who don't know, is a resident expert of Kentucky and Virginia

politics. So Terry, TMAC, Terry McAuliffe, let's put this up there on the screen. He's going to go ahead and won the primary. What does this mean? I mean, it's OK. So it doesn't mean that much, to be honest with you, because this is widely expected. Terry McAuliffe, of course, longtime Clintonite. He basically sort of made his political bones by being Bill Clinton's best friend. Oh, and being the greatest bundler that politics has ever known.

Massive fundraiser. I've been around Terry a lot. And just from my run in Virginia at the same time that he was running for governor and stuff like that. And I mean, he does have this classic politician, larger than life personality. Big man.

Dominates a room, all that stuff. It was always when you're at an event, one of these Democratic Party events, he's always the last person to sit down because he's working the room, just classic sort of like glad handling. I don't know if you remember this. When he first ran in the Democratic primary for governor, it was back in 2009. And he actually lost to Credits, who went on to get destroyed by Bob McDonald and what presaged then the Tea Party wave. And that's why these Virginia elections are ultimately important. Virginia and I think New Jersey are the only states that have gubernatorial elections this year. New Jersey,

obviously, is like solid blue at this point. Virginia is pretty blue too at this point, but still it's a little bit more of a bellwether. So that's why these things tend to be viewed as a canary in the coal mine. So number one, what people were looking at is what would his margin be? And his margin was overwhelming. 62% of the vote. He won every single city and locality in the entire state. And look, I mean, the guy's a former governor. People broadly liked him when he was governor. He wasn't amazing. I mean, in terms of progressive values, he certainly wasn't great. And the area that, of course, I find particularly enraging and also important about Virginia politics for the national political scene is this state at this point, it's controlled by

Democrats at every level, two Democratic senators, Democratic governor, Democratic House, Democratic Senate. And it is still ranked as the worst state in the entire nation for workers' rights. OK, Democrats control everything. Still ranked as the worst state in the nation for workers' rights. So McAuliffe, as part of his campaign, last time around, he did not even support at all. He said no to the repeal of right to work. Now he's moved a little bit and said basically, well, if it ends up on my desk, I guess I'll sign it. But mostly he spends his time illustrating how it doesn't have a chance of passing even a Democratic House and Senate.

Very revealing comments. Let's take a listen to those. Well, lifting workers up is really important. I get asked a lot about right to work, And I'm very honest with everybody. And I have, you know, most international union support are with me. And I tell them, I got to work on the things that I know I can get done. Right to work has never seen the light of day in the Democratic Senate, as you know. And in the House of Delegates, it just went down to defeat in a Democratic legislature, 85 to 13. So I understand numbers, I can count. But what I can get done, which the unions and others care about, they care about collective bargaining. Let's get the collective

bargaining piece done and all the other issues that are raised. I work on things I know I can get done. And I will lean in hard on those issues. If it came to my desk, sure, I'd sign it. But listen, you can't get it through the House and Senate. I mean, so let's talk about, Chris, what we can actually get. We've got a lot of work to do over the next four years. So on the one hand, he's sadly right that in a Democratic House and Senate, it hasn't stood a chance of passing, which is pathetic. But also as governors, aren't you supposed to push legislation? That's the thing. If you actually supported it, but clearly he doesn't. I mean, clearly he doesn't actually support the law. And this is,

he's the businessman and he bills himself that way. So he just has this fatalistic attitude of like, well, I can't possibly pass, so forget about it. But yeah, I guess, sure, if it got to my desk in theory, I'd sign it. That's pathetic. It is absolutely sad. And this is the type of politics that I worry about within the Democratic Party. What's happened in Virginia is the state has become more and more suburban. Northern Virginia suburbs basically dominate the politics of the state. And that's why the state has turned blue. And so as working class Virginians have come to be less and less central to its politics, you get progressive progress on some issues. And, you know, some of them are significant and some of them are more sort of just like signaling issues. Yeah. But on core issues regarding working people that would

benefit all working class Virginians, it's just completely disappeared. It's a nonstarter. You did a great rising monologue, I think, where they passed the Equality Act or whatever the state version of the Equality Act is, but then at the same time did not move on right to work. And this is probably, I think it's very important. And the reason we cover Virginia and Kentucky is not just because you know them. These are bellwethers of the national party system, which is that Virginia is the future of the Democratic Party, which is that you have many former Republicans. NOVA was not always blue country. These were, you know, Loudoun County, many others, famously voted Republican not that long ago in the distant past.

And yet, what does that mean? It means that with all these rich people basically become Democrats, this is the type of politics that you're going to get, which is Terry McAuliffe, former Clintonite. He's, you know, buddy-buddy with the richest people in the whole country. Apparently, that's literally how he became prominent, by bundling money from rich people. And then Bill Clinton was like, yeah, you should run for governor, even though you've never done anything before except raise money. And he's like, I'll throw all my support to you. And he was like, OK. And he became a dramatically successful politician. I think he signals exactly in the right way to these more suburban voters. And so

as the country becomes democratic, or especially the Democratic Party, and it becomes more suburban, more affluent, and those are the people in the driver's seat, this is what's going to happen. Now, back to your point, though, this is the important thing. I did that monologue, I forget what the data, civics data, which showed that even still, one third of working class whites voted for Joe Biden in the primary. 31% of all Democratic voters in 2020 were working class whites without a college degree. They are increasingly just completely left behind in this coalition. And they don't have a lot of representation in the future of the Democratic Party of Terry McAuliffe. And Virginia is a key state where there's actually a large working class

white population, and they're largely left out of these type of politics. Yeah. I mean, the Appalachian part of Virginia is just like disappeared. Yeah, they don't care about them. Disappeared from relevance. I remember, I think as part of that monologue you're talking about, or it might've been a different one, there was a state rep who, like, went and did a tour of Appalachia. It was like, you know, it was a sort of, like, anthropological tour of her own state. Horrible. And, I mean, look, kudos for going, at least making the effort. And I don't want to, like, crap on this person who's really in good faith trying to understand the different, like, dynamics and cultures within the state.

But it's just sort of pathetic that you have to make that kind of effort, like make a big show of it. And there was a whole like travel log of her journey in this strange land. You know, it's it kind of says it all. I do want to say, though, on a hopeful note, this isn't inevitable. Like it doesn't have to be that this is the Democratic Party coalition. In fact, if you look at the state of Nevada, you see a very different approach. Absolutely, yeah. And it's not an accident. In fact, it is essential to that model that you have a very, very strong union presence in the state of Nevada. And so this was also really demonstrated in the Democratic primary, right? Bernie Sanders wins overwhelmingly in the state of Nevada, where you have this working class coalition that is focused on these economic populist issues versus Virginia.

My God, that was the blowout of all blowouts for Joe Biden, where all of these affluent suburbanites just like that flipped on a dime and were 100% with him. I mean, he just blew the doors off in that state. So yeah, like I said, I mean, there's nothing too surprising here, but we can never accept and just take for granted the fact that Democrats in control of every lever of power in a blue state, when it comes to rights for working people, they're just like, no, we can't do it. We won't do it. We don't want to do it. That's pathetic. That is pathetic and is a very bad omen for the future of the Democratic Party. I think that's right. And we have some very triumphal news. This is very self-indulgent. So please, everybody stick with us. Let's put this up there on the screen. I think you guys are going

to like this. Let's put it up there, which is that Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar, the show that you're watching or possibly listening to. I need to remember to describe things better in order for our large now listening audience. We are now the number one political podcast in the country. This is insane. It literally has blown me away. The top of the Spotify charts and Apple as well as Apple. Blowing out Pod Save America. Sorry, Jon Favreau.

And there we go. And we went ahead and pushed that icon of us at Up One and the Daily Down One. That is seared into my brain as one of the best things. I'm going to get a tattoo of that. I literally should. I mean, it's just so incredible. I was looking today. Apparently, we're the number three podcast on all of Spotify behind Rogan and then some like wine mom

like murder mystery thing. That thing's actually kind of cool. I'm sure of it. It's a true crime thing. It's like historical true crime. Anyway. No hate on the wine moms, but so be it. It's just, I think what the success of the show,

at least so far, has shown is that people are so sick of the corporate media. That really is what it was, is that our message of saying, like, we need to hate each other less and hate the corrupt, ruined class more has resonated in ways that, like, I did not even think humanly possible

in order to manifest itself at the top of the charts like this. And people are beginning to take notice. That's the fascinating part. All of a sudden, people from out of the woodwork, people who would hate our politics normally, who did their best not to acknowledge rising and more like oh congratulations oh like what an amazing thing you guys have built and i'm like yeah yeah like i i know your game suits hashtag no new

friends yeah exactly no new friends we've got our break breakers what do we i don't you guys we got we gotta figure this out breaking the army is another one that i've heard i don't know you guys float some ideas i kind of like the army personally but anyway we've got you guys we've got to figure this out. Breaking Point Nation. Beat the Army is another one that I've heard. I don't know. You guys float some ideas. I kind of like the Army one, personally. But anyway, we've got you guys. We've got our fans. They're the only people that we actually need. But looking and saying what this says, I think,

about the hunger for a new type of media, for a new type of politics that we both really do stand for, I've just been absolutely blown away. And beating the New York Times is one of the most satisfying things that has ever happened in my entire life, so thank you. Well, we asked you guys to help us beat CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

We didn't know that it was possible on the list of ads to be like, can you help us beat the New York Times? We were like, we're gonna go ahead and make sure you beat the New York Times, the Pod Save Bros, Bannon, all those people.

And Steven Crowder. Steven Crowder. I didn't know he had such a big following, to be honest with you. I didn't know he had such a big following. I knew the guy was big on YouTube. But like, hey, Matt. Anyway, I guess props, Steven. Good for you.

I guess he's doing well for himself. Anyway, but we're beating him, so no big deal. You know, it actually, so to take it a little bit out of the just self-indulgent go us, because this really is like, we asked you guys to help us beat some of these mainstream outlets, and you've already helped us to do that. So thank you, number one. And then, you know, the Vanguard guys, and I don't know if you guys ever watch them on YouTube, but I think they do a really good job, Gavin and Zach.

They made this comment that I thought was really interesting, which I hadn't even really particularly thought of, but I actually think it is true they were saying you know what crystal and saga did is they were able to use these like corporate mainstream organs to build something and then we're able to like take that thing independent yeah so it's that very rarely happens you're starting to see it happen more and more so you might point to like, Iglesias could be an example. It happens on the individual writer level for Substack. Exactly. It has not happened for a show yet. Exactly. Before us. And a show that can, is at least attempting to sort of compete in these mainstream spaces as well. So I do think

that that part of it, I find it exciting. I hope you guys find it exciting too. I think you probably do. But I got to tell you guys, I mean, neither one of us expected. Obviously, we're hopeful. We're excited. And we kind of had resigned ourselves to like whether it's really successful or moderately successful or not that successful, we have to just care about the content that we're putting out and that we're living our values. And like that's the core thing. So we'd, we'd really set our expectations for as long as we're putting out into the world, the thing that we want to, that's true to ourselves

and that we truly have like the artistic and creative and journalistic freedom to go where we need to go, then the results will be what they're going to be. Like, you can't obsess over those things. So we are truly blown away to see those kind of numbers. Neither one of us, me and my wildest dreams, did I expect to see those kind of numbers and that kind of response. So you guys blew me away. What can I say?

No, you're right. And you know, it's true. Actually, I was prepared for a world where this was less successful than rising. And because I was like, hey, we're going to be talking a lot more about the deeper issues. We're going to be longer. It's not going to be as like in the news cycle, so to speak. The algorithm is going to screw us on YouTube. The algorithm could screw us on YouTube. I mean, you know, when you're fully independent, like, you know, there's not that much separating from you from some dude in the basement. But all that being said, the hunger, I think, for what we're trying to do, it gives me a

lot of hope about some of the future and the ways we can continue to build, continue to improve here for all of you, for everybody who showed up and became a premium member here for Breaking Points. It allows us the ability to build the best possible product that we possibly can true to the two of our values. That's just the greatest thing ever. I remember leaving here on Tuesday and I texted you. I was like, I'm exhilarated. We just talked. It flowed. We designed it the way that we wanted. The topics were perfect. They were so true to the things that we care about. Even today, I mean, IRS, Virginia politics. I mean, these things, they flow together and fuse

together in a way that you're not going to hear any of this on any corporate news channel. And I think they're so dramatically important. And at least what I think we both really want is to try and speak to the things that are in people's lives. I said this before, people know that the system is rigged. People know the media is lying to you. But they can't explain exactly how, exactly why, exactly what conditions. I kind of view it as our responsibility to serve as the actual role of the media in order to tell you, like, here's why you're being screwed. Here's why Jeff Bezos pays not just less in taxes than you on an effective rate, but like 50,000 times less than you.

This is why you can't buy a house. This is why whenever you go and you vote or you're part of a union and you can't get anybody else in order to join you, this is why. It's because of these types of politics. This is why the country and economic policy moves the way it does, despite the fact that 80% of people may support some sort of policy. So really, it's just been absolutely amazing. And thank you everybody for bearing with me on some catastrophic dental surgery. You might be able to tell. You've done a good job.

I hope so. And actually, all of the success yesterday while I was in the surgery chair for seven hours, I was just sitting there, I had nothing else to do. So I was just sitting there refreshing our numbers and I was just like, all right. I'm gonna be okay. Yeah.

No, you've been hanging tough. I'm very impressed, actually. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. But, no, we love you guys so much. Keep sending in your comments and your feedback. You know, we really want to continually improve. We're going to continue to sort of workshop the look and the feel and the flow of it. But we both, even in these very early days, have found it so liberating.

And it's kind of one of those things where, you know, we had our, obviously we had our reasons for wanting to leave the hill. But I don't even think you realize some of the things that are constraining you until you truly sort of like break free of it. And so the format of the show and the feel of it and the topics and the length of time we're able to spend on it and just the freedom and flow of the format has already felt just, it feels incredibly liberating. So thank you guys for kind of catching us when we took that leap of faith. We couldn't be more grateful. Seriously. And we hear you on some of the other stuff.

1080p. Let me just explain what exactly is going on. Oh, yeah. Which is that, here's the deal. We promised our premium members and everybody else that it was going to get up as soon as possible. Now, we are being smacked, and maybe if you know a solution around this,

with horrible processing time, because our show usually runs around, what, an hour and 22 minutes? Yeah, something like that. So we wrap around like 10.30 by the time, some edits, you know, stuff like that. By the time you export in Premiere, which takes a long time,

you're looking at maybe 20 to 30 minutes of processing time for a video. That's just not enough for an hour, 22 minute video. So I was like, okay, let's just go to 720p and make sure it gets up faster. So I'm going to explore some other options. I'm going to do my absolute best. But one of the things is that we didn't want to compromise on time. People like the show. I mean, I guess tell me, like, if you were a premium member and you would rather wait a half hour, we can do that. Maybe we could do Vimeo first and then, you know, you can watch on Vimeo and then maybe you can watch on Unlisted YouTube channel. I'm thinking about it, but like I said, absolutely hear you on that. We'll hear you on the audio as well. We're working on it. The producer track won't be in the show for today. Any other administrative things that we're doing?

No, I think that's it. I think the bottom line is, like, we're trying to weigh all these pieces to give you guys the best experience possible. So when you provide us feedback with, like, hey, actually, we'd prefer you to, if there's a trade-off here, we'd prefer this choice versus that choice. Like, we prefer the 1080p versus, like, getting it as fast as possible. We do weigh into all of this the type of feedback that you're giving us.

There you go. Thank you, guys. I'll get you 1080p as fast as I can. We're going to work on it, all right? I promise. We'll figure out what we can. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices

because here I am again asking you to become a premium member at crystalandsauger.com so you don't have to hear these pleas. And as annoying as I know this is, it's not a Viagra commercial like you're going to see on cable news. So go ahead and count your lucky stars. As you're about to notice, the free show does not include the discussion after each of our monologues, which is one of our premium benefits. Help us beat the corporate media today. Get access to the full show. Take care, guys.

All right, Sagar, what are you looking at today for your breaking points? Well, one of the most frustrating parts about covering American politics today is the culture war. People hone in on a position, then they go immediately into absolutes. They decide that the other side alone is the only one that is wrong, and worse, that your own side can do no wrong. The culture warification of politics kills nuanced debate. It kills the ability to understand complete problems, and worse, it allows nothing to get done in Washington. And when nothing gets done, that alone is a massive in-kind donation to the oligarchic elite of America. There is no issue that this is more frustrating to me

than China. It's hot on the American right currently to be anti-China, which, hey, I mean, that's cool with me. But I think that China is bad for the world, worse for America, and has pretty explicit ambitions to turn our free, open, and market capitalist society against us. But how did things get that way? If you hear most of the people on the right, they'll blame a lot of Democrats, very fairly in some cases. But conveniently, they leave out a key part of history, which is that Republican politicians of the 1990s, like George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush themselves, are probably more responsible than any Democrat alive for empowering the authoritarian China of today. Worse, shipping millions of middle-class jobs

overseas. It was George W. Bush who signed permanent normal trade relations with China into law in 2001. That was the final nail in the coffin for many American union jobs. It was George H.W. Bush who pioneered and pushed NAFTA and so-called free trade policies while he was in office. And the guy in between them, Bill Clinton, was a huge believer in free trade with China as well. All three of these men pushed these policies, possibly in good faith. But beneath the surface, there's always

been questions. Was it because they believed in free trade? Or maybe they were getting something out of it personally? I'm bringing this all up again because an important but under-noticed story popped up across my social media feed a few days ago, and I wanted to share it with you. Axios is reporting that a non-profit affiliated with former President George H.W. Bush agreed to accept $5 million from a policy group at the very center of Chinese-U.S. influence operations. The grant to the Bush-China Foundation is from the China-United States Exchange Foundation to, quote, improve Sino-American relations. But what's really interesting is this.

If you take a look at the books for the Bush China Foundation, a, quote, substantial portion of its revenue is all coming from a group with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. This is crazy stuff. This is the foundation in the name of former President George H.W. Bush to improve relations with China. It's now majority funded by China. It's crazy. But it's actually not so insane once you

look even deeper under the hood. The head of the Bush China Foundation is none other than Neil Bush, the lesser known son of George H.W. Bush and the brother of Jeb and George W. Bush. Neil has had a long and lucrative business career, you guessed it where, in China. Lucrative, not owing to his expertise, but yeah, a longtime financial relationship with the very heart of the CCP. All the way back to 2003, when his brother was president of the United States and driving this country into war in Iraq, Neil Bush was quietly getting 400 grand a year to provide business advice to a Chinese computer manufacturer. This is especially

crazy in retrospect, given that the Chinese, who were obsessed with semiconductors at the time, so they could be less reliant on the US market. They wanted to be less reliant because they're not as dumb as us, and they realized you probably shouldn't make ingredients for all the modern technology in the home of your primary adversary. And what better way to learn the ropes than to buy off the president of the United States brother? Ever since then, Neil Bush has been a longtime Chinese lackey. In 2019, during the Hong Kong protests, he literally appeared on Chinese state TV propaganda to say, quote, one country, two systems has been working, quote, very, very well so far. Hmm. Yeah, that's while the government was

literally slaughtering democracy protesters in the streets. And in 2016, he served as the chairman of a Chinese real estate company, which just so happened then to donate $1.3 million to the Jeb Bush campaign. I'm sure it was just all out of coincidence, right? Look, I'm choosing to highlight the story to take it out of the modern age. It's not just Hunter Biden. Hunter is in a long line of presidential relatives of the last 30 years who have been bought and paid for by the Chinese government. The Chinese know us better than we know ourselves. The only thing you need to play America is to just have money.

Our financial, cultural, and political elite have completely sold out to the highest bidder. I keep coming back to this clip that I played on Rising many months ago from Chinese professor Di Dongsheng. He just says the quiet part out loud.但现在呢现在我们看到拜登上台了传统的精英 政治精英 这个建制派 他们跟华尔街的关系 是非常密切的

所以大家看到吧 拜登的儿子 被特朗普说 你在全球有什么 基金公司发现没有 谁帮他建的基金公司啊 明白吗 这里边都有买卖

那么所以这个 To me, the best part of that clip is when they all just laugh at how transparent the American political system is. Neil Bush, Hunter Biden, Chelsea Clinton, Jared Kushner. If it all starts to meld together after a while, the only way to make things right and to actually make our political system work again is to recognize the immutable and fundamental truth that not only are both parties 100% complicit in getting things to where they are today, but both parties do not have credible answers as to how to get us out of this current morass. Something I passionately believe is that all policies based upon lies eventually fall apart. The only way to actually correct America's

disastrous China policy is to dispel with the fiction that the entire political establishment is not directly complicit with getting us to where we are today. And that's the thing, Crystal, which is that... It's me again, guys. We hope that you're loving the show. If you have any questions, you know where you can ask them. Go to crystalandsagra.com, become a premium member, and then you'll get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anything. The link is in the show notes. All right, Crystal, what are your breaking points today? Well, if climate change is an existential threat, Biden is letting us drown. That was essentially

the message of Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse as he laid out the silence and lack of action from the Biden administration on what Democrats claim is the existential threat of climate change. So here's Senator Whitehouse's Twitter thread calling out the Biden administration. He says in part, OK, I'm now officially very anxious about climate legislation. I'll admit I'm sensitive from the Obama climate abandonment, but I sense trouble. Number one, climate has fallen out of the infrastructure discussion as it took its bipartisanship detour. It may not return. So then what? Senator Whitehouse continues, two, I don't see the preparatory work for a close Senate climate

vote taking place in the administration. Why not marshal business support? In the very next tweet, he answers his own question, however, about business support, writing, corporate America is still completely AWOL, if not worse, on climate and Congress. All the major corporate trade associations suck. All of them. Senator Whitehouse concludes by saying, we need planning, organizing, and momentum. It's not going to be easy, and it has to work. We are running out of time. Now, the climate crisis, you'll recall, was one of the top reasons given by the Bernie Sanders left for sucking it up and voting Biden in spite of his horrific record on war,

on mass incarceration, on Wall Street, on trade, and, well, pretty much everything else. As Glenn Greenwald was quick to point out, this was the primary reason, for example, given by Noam Chomsky for passionately making the case that Biden must be elected over Trump. Remember these ads? Another four years of Trump may literally lead us to the stage where the survival of organized human society is deeply imperiled. The most important issue that humans have faced in their history is the impending catastrophic climate disaster. According to a new report, experts say that we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe.

Trump is the worst person in the world on this issue. Now look, I voted for Joe Biden and I think Chomsky was more or less correct in all that he's saying here. He wasn't arguing Biden would be amazing, just that maybe with Biden there could be a shot and with Trump there was definitely no chance. Well, whatever shot there was under Biden to shift course on climate is rapidly slipping away. By handing his agenda to Joe Manchin, the Senate parliamentarian, and the gauzy lure of never-to-be bipartisanship, Biden has made it plain that whatever he or other Democrats might say about the existential threat of climate change, they don't actually mean it. As Senator Whitehouse points out here, endless and likely fruitless negotiations with Republicans have already stripped climate change from the infrastructure package. That infrastructure package is itself no guarantee. But if it does pass, it will surely be

the last piece of significant legislation in the first four years of the Biden presidency. Now, progressives are actually dipping their toe in the water of playing some hardball politics. Martin Heinrich tweeted that an infrastructure package that goes light on climate and clean energy should not count on every Democratic vote, a sentiment which AOC agreed with there in that tweet. It's not quite the hard line that the right-wing Democrats draw like Manchin or the no salt, no dice crew, but at least they did a hint that maybe possibly going light on climate could risk losing their votes. I don't want to be cynical here, but I'm also not going to get my hopes up that any sort of red line is actually going to be drawn in a hard and definitive way. New data, though, should bolster the progressive case that the threat is at least as significant as Biden previously claimed to believe. Carbon dioxide levels are now at an all-time high, that in spite of a million pandemic era Earth is healing memes. Scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institute of Oceanography,

they recorded carbon dioxide levels at 419 parts per million in May. That is a new record, and it's 50% higher than in pre-industrial times. Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at Scripps, told the LA Times that it's rising as fast as ever. Fossil fuel burning is the center of the problem. It's what's driving CO2 up and is the major cause of climate change. The truth is this. Democrats are playing you for fools. They love to use existential rhetoric, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not justifiably, but they never, ever act in a way that matches the words. Just ask yourself this. If Trump was an existential threat and a fascist leader, why did they willingly hand him huge military budgets and surveillance powers?

If our democracy is truly in danger of existential collapse, why are you just allowing Joe Manchin to casually torpedo the reforms upon which we were told our democracy depended? If we're in a battle for the soul of America, why is Biden engaging in all the same standard issue Washington corruption that has so damaged Americans' trust in our government? Now, on climate, the data speaks for itself. Establishment corporate democratic rhetoric claimed an existential threat, and on this particular threat, they were correct. But they treat it like any other issue, to be trotted out on the campaign trail,

used to shame and guilt reticent principled voters into voting blue no matter who, and then jettisoned as soon as it's inconvenient. Don't worry, it'll be dragged back out the next time they need young lefties to begrudgingly give them their vote. But by that time, it may well be too late. And this is a real test setting up here for the squad soccer because I think we have a great guest. I think we have an amazing guest. That we can bring in the one and only Brianna Joy Gray can join us on this conversation.

Picking right up on our conversation on Manchin, of course, Brianna, former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, co-host of the Bad Faith podcast, contributing editor of Current Affairs and all of that good stuff. It's great to see you, Bri. Thanks for coming on with us. Good to see you, Brianna.

We missed you. I've missed you guys too. It's such a pleasure. Congratulations. This is huge. Thank you. All right, before we get into serious stuff, I think I have a lot of respect for your design eye.

I know. So give us your unvarnished feedback on the set. All right, before we get into serious stuff, I think I have a lot of respect for your design eye. I know. So give us your, like, unvarnished feedback on the set and the look and all of that. Because you're – I haven't asked anyone else, but your view I actually respect on this. Well, you two get top marks. Your girl loves a brick wall. You guys always look very dapper. Personally, you look well put together. You look gorgeous. And. Personally, you look well put together. You look gorgeous.

And the set, the desk, Sagar, I want to give you credit for the desk. Thank you. You know the right way to my heart. You know exactly the way to my heart. The way to Sagar's heart is through desk commentary. It's through this desk. Through acrylic desk manufacturer. Serious, serious.

And you look like a great big zip. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was saying, like, jokes aside. This is something I've been curious. We were just talking about, Crystal was, about how some House progressives have come out and been like, well, we maybe-ish may not vote for this thing if it doesn't have climate infrastructure and more. And then you obviously have Manchin, who's out there, who will basically just declare whatever he wants. And it's pretty much accepted as gospel by the White House.

What do you think that, I mean, what does it tell you as somebody who worked for a campaign where the central promise to you by Biden and them was, we're going to listen to you. And, you know, even on some of these promises, which they've reneged on and more, like politically, what does that say about the state of the left movement right now? Well, I think it was a little foolish to believe any of those promises, to be honest, especially without any genuine commitments. I mean, Joe Biden barely went on the record outside of saying simply that Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing are going to be a part of the administration, those kind of platitudes. Look, I am both heartened by the fact that so many progressives are going on the mainstream news right now and calling the

corporate guys should have been calling out the whole time in which Bernie Sanders really made his bones with back in 2016. But I will confess, and maybe this is my brain being overly cynical, that there's something a little bizarre about the coordinated nature with everyone seems to have scuffed that Joe Manchin's incentives are driven by his donors, as opposed to the people who live in West Virginia at the point before Crystal. Obviously, it's true that West Virginia is one of the most economically disenfranchised states in the union and that a whole panoply of what are called progressive programs, which are in fact just regular programs, would inordinately inure to their benefit. So the question has always been, why isn't Joe Manchin willing to act on their behalf? Why is he opposing all of these policies that would help his constituents?

And the fact that just now people seem to have been given permission to go on Joyanne Reid and say what was always obvious, it's heartening, but it also begs the question, haven't they taken these stands before? Why haven't they forced this issue on any number of important issues, including the fight for 15 a few months ago? Yeah, well, and are they serious, right? it's one thing to go on and to send out a tweet, to do a cable news pyramid, you know, appearance, et cetera, et cetera. But okay. Are you going to actually draw a hard line? Are you actually going to make your vote contention on anything? To me, that's very much still an open question. And I do think this dynamic with Manchin is incredibly important to understand because elite media, because they have no understanding of the state of West Virginia, they just assume whatever Joe Manchin says,

because he's the only Democrat who can really get elected in the state at this point, that whatever he says about what people in West Virginia want, they take that as gospel, when in fact, what he's really doing is sort of like carrying water for Koch and other corporate lobbyists in interest, cloaking that in the mantle of like, oh, this is really what West Virginians want. And since media doesn't know any better, they just kind of take his word for it. Yeah, if Joe Manchin and any politician this is true of, if Joe Manchin doesn't feel more of a threat from losing his constituency because the narrative, true narrative is out there about him not actually respecting the interests. If that's not a bigger threat to his political

defenses, his ability to earn money, his ability to maintain power, then the withdrawal of the corporate backing that he has, that he's always going to choose the corporate backing. And this is what people like Ryan Grimm, who've been writing about these things, saying these things for a really long time, always say, they've got power, we've got people, we're never going to be able to outspend Joe Manchin, you're never going to be able to out maneuver him from the inside the way that these progressives seem to be arguably in good faith trying to do at this point. But what he can do is start to try to make it through the consequences of him doing the wrong thing are felt because he's not able to maintain

power because he's no longer able to spin this web where he deludes even his constituents into thinking that he's doing the right thing. And talking about some of these liberal touchstones, these cultural issues, that'll keep folks in his back pocket. But talking about where the money goes and how the money that is coming to him is causing him to not represent the economic interest of people in his home state, I do think that's a much more effective narrative for people to start to hit. Again, though, to your point, contrast what these progressives are saying to what Joe Manchin is saying. He's been pretty steadfast and certain. I'm not voting for X, Y, and Z. I'm not doing this if it's not bipartisan, knowing full well that there are never going to be 10 Republicans that get on board. The progressives are still using this kind of flim-flam language.

I might not get on board. You might see me not voting for this, which makes me feel like it's a bluff that's going to get called. So that's actually what my question is. I mean, I've asked you this a million times, but I see it happen over and over and over again. And say what you will, but I know a lot of people who are involved in the Tea Party movement, and they're laughing at AOC and others. I even have friends who are like, do these people know anything about politics? Because they worked in the Freedom Caucus and others, and they're aware that I host a show with you and some of these left debates. They're like, I can't believe that they just sit there and go along with Pelosi.

They said we would have been crucified by our base and by our other members of Congress if we acted this way. What do you make of that? Yeah, I hate to reopen old wounds, but it's difficult to ignore the gravity of a political moment in which the six to 10 progressives, however many you want to call like real progressives in the house, literally could have kept Nancy Pelosi, one of the least popular politicians in office, including among Democrats, from being Speaker of the House. Someone who some polls indicate have as much or more of a toxic effect on down-ballot races than the progressives

that people are always hand-wringing about. Nancy Pelosi was up for the speakership on January 3rd, and if a handful of progressives had decided not to vote for her, she would not be Speaker of the House, or in the alternative, she could be Speaker of the House, but with actual concrete concessions having been made to the left,

including those that could really implicate the power dynamic that exists right now as they're trying to pass these major bills. So the question becomes, if you weren't able to fight, willing to fight rather, back then when the stakes were ultimately so low. There was no COVID relief bill or unemployment checks or vaccine rollout hanging in the balance where you could argue, okay, we need to just do this so that America can survive so the world can keep on ticking. No, the only thing that hung in the balance was voting for a woman who's largely reviled by both political parties and who still wouldn't do it. That's what gives me some pause about their willingness to follow through in this moment. Of course, I hope I'm wrong. I'm always happy

to be proven wrong on these things. Yeah. So I think your point about Nancy Pelosi is actually really important, though, because there was just this new third way autopsy of Democratic underperformance in 2020, some of which I thought was correct. But of course, they had to go on, like, and it's, by the way, it's also the left's fault. Never mentioning, right, that Nancy Pelosi is so unpopular. I mean, she has been, like, a weight around the neck of every Democratic candidate for more than a decade now. I can tell you, when I was running back in 2010, right, Nancy Pelosi was the boogeyman and she still is today because she embodies this sense of like elite condescension. I don't even think it's about a particular policy

or anything like that. It's this sense of like, this person is looking down her nose at you. No one ever wants to talk about that. And how she may be, she honestly, as I'm thinking about it, the Democratic brand is such trash in most of the country. Like you have to run as far away from the Democratic brand as you possibly can. Nancy Pelosi is as much a part of creating this incredibly toxic brand that has caused the decimation of the Democratic Party in rural America as anyone else. There were literally studies at the same time that the mainstream media was crowing about how Medicare for all, which is overwhelmingly popular, even 49% of Republicans support it, you know, a minimum wage, which again, one with 60% of the vote at $50 minimum wage,

one with 60% of the vote in Florida, even where Donald Trump won. They crow and crow about how all these so called progressive policies are down ballot poison. But there were actual polls that demonstrated that Republicans ran just as many or more ads during the election season, trying to the Democratic Party to Nancy Pelosi and her ilk as they did the AFCs of the world. But there's never any introspection about the harm that is done by those kind of figures, especially since there's no upside for Nancy Pelosi. She's not inspiring anybody. She can certainly raise money. But as we've seen now in this new small dollar donation world, so can AOC. That is why she was able to withstand more money

being spent on her race to unseat her in this cycle by orders of magnitude than anybody else and still be safe. And despite having that kind of protection, despite being insulated by the vagaries of the corporate Democratic Party, it is frustrating not to see her have a more full-throated response to the party that she said she was running to be oppositional to. I hope this is the start of us doing something different. But I've got to say after the last five months or so, I'm not overly sanguine about that possibility. Yeah, we need to see some stronger language to start with. Right now, it's all, as you said, very, it's very sort of squishy and like, maybe, maybe not. And no clear,

like, this is what we require. Very different from the no salt, no dice type of line that you hear from the right-wing Democrats. Brianna, so great to have you. Thank you so much. So great to see you. Thanks, Brianna. My pleasure. Good luck. And thank you guys so much for watching.

Sagar, what's the pitch? Where can they find us? All the good stuff. Okay, everything. Down in the description notes. If you want to become a premium member and you want to watch the show full uncut and listen to the show full uncut, right down there in the description links,

we are 100% powered by Supercast. Awesome company, awesome technology, which if you're a podcaster, I actually recommend that you check out. Also, you can listen to the show if you like it for free. It's always going to be available here as clips and it's available as audio with breaks wherever you get your

podcasts. I highly recommend for the free people that you check that one out because we're beating the New York Times. Maybe we haven't mentioned that already. No worries. Yeah, no big deal. Wear the Captain Al suits. I actually wanted to say something really quick about why we chose Supercast

as our technology platform because I'm not a big, like Sagar knows more about the tech stuff than I do, but I thought this was really cool. They enable you to have personalized RSS feeds. That's right, for every user. It's pretty cool. Yeah, for every single user.

So every single premium subscriber gets their own personalized RSS feed, which we may play with a little bit as we go on some of the capabilities. Actually, it's kind of awesome. So like, you know, we could say like, hey, so-and-so, if you're in Texas, like we're coming to Texas. Or like, hey, if you're in New York, and that way you don't have to bother like everybody. There's just some really cool ways that you can use it. And also it's a lot like Substack. Like we have the relationship between

your, like the payment relationship in terms of our account and more, whereas Patreon does not give you that. They just give you the emails. There's a lot of other different stuff. It just allows us to sort of like be more directly connected to you versus like this platform having the connection. It's more in our ethos of like the direct relationship with our users. Like we own, you know, our relationship with our audience. And we always just want to be 100% like true to all of you.

So anyway, if you guys could do us a favor, go ahead and hit subscribe here on the YouTube channel, podcast, all that stuff as well. But honestly, here's the main ask. If you like our show, just share it with somebody. That's how I was talking with somebody and they were like an expert in the podcast world. And I was like, you know,

when you have one call to action, like what should it be? He's like, dude, organic share. So if you guys like the show, share it with someone and just tell them to check it out. It means the world. So many of you. We love you guys so much. So thank you. You guys are so awesome.

I think over the weekend we're going to be posting a few things. That's right. We're going to post a clip from the interview we have this week, Pete Davis on Crystal Kylan Friends. We also are going to be back with you for a full show on Monday. So, guys, have a great weekend, and we will see you then. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it.

To help other people find the show, go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Really helps other people find the show. As always, special thank you to Supercast for powering our premium membership. If you want to find out more, go to crystalandsauger.com. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

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Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter.

I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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