Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/14/22: Market Crash, Crypto Black Monday, Ukrainian Military, Trump Grift, Amazon Union, Gas Prices, & More!

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the stock market crash, crypto sinking, Ukraine war updates, Trump's 'stop the steal' grift, Amazon workers rally, liberal fawning over Liz Cheney, DHS Board censorship plans, Dems supporting J6 GOP candidates, and hidden forces jacking up gas prices!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/James Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLi  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Cable news is ripping us apart, dividing the nation, making it impossible to function as a society and to know what is true and what is false. The good news is that they're failing and they know it. That is why we're building something new. Be part of creating a new, better, healthier, and more trustworthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal?

Indeed we do. A lot going on this week. As you know, the January 6th hearings continue. There were some interesting nuggets there that I think we've actually been covering before about the way that Trump raised money and completely fleeced his supporters. So we got some more details there we'll break down for you. Also, a massive market crash yesterday ended in bear territory. Lots of speculation about what the Fed is going to do this week. Not to mention, I mean, crypto falling off a cliff. The hashtag Black Monday trending on Twitter. So it's hard times out here for us, folks. Not good. Not good for those who have invested in any sort of crypto asset. We also have some big developments in Ukraine.

Some new indications that this is really pretty stunning. I mean, you all know how much we're sending in terms of millions of dollars worth of weapons and aid to the Ukrainians. And it turns out we really have no idea what they're up to. They're not giving us the full picture of how things are going or what their plans are or any of that. Apparently, we're not really pressing them for that. This all comes as there are new indications that they are really struggling with Russia in the eastern part of that state. So we'll tell you about that. Also, big day for the Amazon labor union yesterday as Amazon is trying to pull their own little

stop the steal situation and overturn those rightful election results. We also have, you knew this was going to happen, the most cringe possible presidential candidate floated, floated by a supposed progressive, Liz Cheney for president. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we've got that for you as well. Also very excited to talk to James Lee this morning. You guys know he's one of our partners of Breaking Points. He's been doing some incredible videos that I know you guys have really been enjoying.

So we're going to have him as a guest in the show to preview his very latest. But we wanted to start with the markets falling off a cliff yesterday and what this means going forward. Let's go ahead and put that CNBC tear sheet up on the screen. The S&P 500 tumbles nearly 4% to a new low for the year, closes in bear market territory. Listen, the last time we have seen a stock market collapse like this, it was right before the COVID crash when, of course, Congress acted and injected a lot of money into consumers' pockets, but even more overwhelmingly, the Fed acted, injecting trillions to backstop the stock and the bond markets.

Here are the details. We have the S&P 500 falling 3.88 percent, bringing its losses from its January record to more than 21 percent. That, of course, means we are now in an official bear market. Some people apparently only count it when it ends for the day at the bear market. So this is the first time we have been in that territory. We have the Dow Jones dropping 2.79%. We have the NASDAQ tumbling 4.68%. At one point during the trading day saga, every single stock in the S&P 500 was down. Only five stocks in the benchmark closed the day in the green. So that is what we're facing right now. It's really such a disaster.

You think about people's retirement portfolios or 401ks. I mean, the most thing that people are invested in are these index funds, which they always tell you like, hey, S&P 500 returns 14% on average. It's like, well, yeah, it's certainly true. It was true for a while. But a lot of people are looking at this and they're just watching their retirement savings just fade away. Remember, we have an increasingly aged population, so this actually could increase the amount of time that they even have to continue to work. Or honestly, what's even worse is it could force early retirement. People say, screw it, and they tap into Social Security at this two-thirds benefit at an early time. It has all sorts of screwy effects whenever these things start to happen. And what is our great president saying about this

big market crash, this drop, this pain that Americans are feeling? Well, he's telling you that none of it's actually real. Let's take a listen. The job market is the strongest it's been since World War II, notwithstanding the inflation. We added another 390,000 jobs last month, 8,700,000 new jobs since I took office. An all-time record. Never that many jobs in that period of time. Unemployment rate is near historic lows.

Millions of Americans are moving up to better jobs and better pay. And since I took office, families are carrying less debt on average in America. They have more savings than they've had. And we're doing it all while cutting the federal deficit by $1.7 trillion this year and $320 billion last. I don't know how they're still selling this. What are you smoking when you think that that is a compelling sell? Yeah, you know what?

He's right. People are employed. That's great. Here's the problem. Their wages went up by 2%. Inflation, depending on where you look at it and what the people are most affected by, well, that's like 17%. So you're hosed. I mean, you're substantially poorer today than you were two years ago.

I did some back-of-the-envelope math yesterday, Crystal, and so get this. The average American nets $2,700 per month after taxes. So at $5 a gallon, the average American consumes somewhere around $250 to $300 worth of gas, depending on where you live as of right now with the current driving standard. That means just 10% of after-tax income is going to gas. 10. That used to be 2% to 5%. And obviously, that money has to come from somewhere. Then you include food and housing, both of which have double-digit inflation. So you are watching the slow erosion of all of the ability for people to have consumer spending. I don't know why the president cannot speak to that and continues to try and gaslight people.

This is Obama 2.0. I remember it so vividly. You know, 2011, Obama's like, the economy's great. We're coming out. We have the, you know, they had all these fake charts, just like Biden. And meanwhile, people lost their homes and they were working two jobs and they were underemployed.

I mean, if anybody other than idiot like Mitt Romney had run against Obama in 2000, he was eminently beatable. I read George Packer's book. It's called The Unwinding. It was actually written in 2013. And it was a real precursor to all of the problems that we have now. And he specifically spends time all across the country, like in Obama's America at the time. And it tells the same story. He's like, man, a lot of blue collar people, they're just getting, at the time. And it tells the same story. He's like, man, a lot of blue-collar people, they're just getting, they have all this credit card debt, housing debt, even they lost their homes. They have no ability in order to climb out.

A lot of them tapped into that Social Security, like I'm talking about previously. Same exact situation. And the president is gaslighting all of us. He's living in parallel realities. Credit card debt has reached an all-time high. Yeah, that's right. As of last month. That is a flashing red warning sign. And I mean, just look at you ask people how things are going. They tell you it's not going well. Country's on the wrong track. My economic situation is going backwards. Things feel worse like, oh, the media is just not really telling you how great the economy is.

You don't really understand how good the economy is and how much we've done for you. Not going to work, guys. Not going to work. And it just makes you seem, because you are, completely disconnected from the stress and the pain that people are feeling right now. And, you know, with regards to the stock market, of course, you know, it's a relatively small slice of America that really benefits from the stock market when it goes up. But these sorts of things, you know, a bear market doesn't always precede a recession, but it oftentimes does.

Like I just said, the last two that we had, one was before the COVID crash, which ended up being brief because of all of the trillions of dollars that the Fed and Congress injected into the economy. The other was before the housing crash, which ended up being brief because of all of the trillions of dollars that the Fed and Congress injected into the economy, the other was before the housing crash. That's the territory that we're looking at right now. And on the way down, you end up with this sort of like mutually reinforcing negative cycle where those people who do depend on or have significant retirement savings, they start to get nervous. They start to pull back. Everybody starts to pull back in terms of their spending. They start to save more, have a lot less liquidity.

You add on top of that, of course, the inflation that is already squeezing people and making it so that they have less and less and less that they can spend just in discretionary spending. You've got a very, very dire picture. And those signs are being picked up by anyone who's really paying attention, the very latest that we have. This is from Morgan Stanley, CEO James Gorman, who now says there's 50-50 odds of a recession ahead. We've had other bankers who are looking at this and saying that it looks very dire as well. You also have, as we talked to you about yesterday, the Fed meeting this week. And previously, the expectation had been, all right,

we'll have another half a point interest rate increase, which is, again, significant, but not crazy. Now, they're talking about, OK, probably the baseline is 0.75. And some are even projecting we may have a full 100 basis point Fed hike. Go ahead and put this Bloomberg report up on the screen. Well, this is the J.P. Morgan Morning Trading Note. CPI changed the narrative of recession as inflation accelerates. Again, go ahead and put the next piece up from Bloomberg. Pockets of Wall Street raising the possibility that the Federal Reserve could go to extreme lengths on Wednesday in an attempt to control the hottest U.S. inflation in four decades. Consensus expectation still half a percentage point. But you have two banks

revising their calls for the potential of 75 basis points as well. And you do have some outliers who are saying they may go all the way to 100 basis points. Stephen Englander, global head of G10 FX research at Standard Chartered Bank, he says 50 was the big round number six months ago. Meanwhile, 75 is a very middling type of hike. So the Fed might say, look, if we want to show commitment, let's just do 100. So when you see the market reacting the way it is this week, this all comes on the heels of that dramatic inflation report we had last week and their expectations of what the Fed is going to do to significantly tighten the economy and probably ultimately they're going to trigger a recession. I mean, it's just hard to see how they avoid that at this point. And the problem with these interest rate increases, Sagar, as you know, is it takes something like nine months to a year to actually see the full effect of what they're doing now.

So when you see these inflation reports coming in, they're acting right now and they're making these dramatic moves, potentially a full point. Well, you don't actually feel the impact of that till a year from now to see what that actually did to the economy. That's why this is such a blunt tool. That's why it's so difficult to gauge this appropriately and not go too far and trigger a really, really painful recession. And that's what we're facing down right now. And the other, you know, kind of wildcard piece of this, too, is it's not just the interest rate hikes. It's also what they do with their balance sheet. As you guys know, because we've talked about a number of other times on this show, the Fed, in order to backstop the stock in the bond market, they bought a lot of assets. They

have a huge, unprecedented, huge balance sheet. They're allowing those assets to roll off. At what pace they do that, well, that's like adding on another maybe half a point interest rate hike on top of what they're already doing. And there's very little precedent for how the markets actually respond to that, what that actually does to the economy, because this is really sort of uncharted territory. Yeah, absolutely. I think people should realize, remember when we were talking a couple of weeks ago about how there was this one Fed governor who was saying, hey, maybe we should hike it. He was only talking about a 0.75 basis point bump. And people were like, wow, that would be crazy. It would be really nudging the market in a different direction. Well, now 100 is on the table.

And now look, I know basis point sounds mysterious. It's not. A basis point is basically like it's a percentage. So 100 basis points is 1%. So 0.75 basis points is 0.75. So remember, though, just what is it? Didn't you tell me this? Just a couple of interest increases in the mortgage rate alone accounts for double the price of your mortgage. Yes, that's right. So this is a very real, very real effect whenever it comes to not only your mortgage loan, which is the vast majority of loans outside of credit card that most Americans will experience, but they also mean car loans. I mean, if you take a look at the car price right now, the financing rates that people are getting used to be 2% or

3%, not even four or five months ago. Now you're looking at like 5% if you have great credit, 9%, 10% if you don't have it. So consider then what that means for you and how much more you're going to be paying in a cash basis for all of these new assets that you might have to finance on top of existing credit card debt, which we already know is sky high, and it already has ridiculous interest rates. So to have a 100 basis point increase even on the table is insanity because it will almost certainly trigger a massive sell-off on the Dow and on the S&P 500. And like I said, it dramatically decreases the available capital to these businesses, which means they can't invest,

which means they have to cut costs in order to maintain profitability and even try to keep their stock where it is. So all of this means, at the end of the day, less power for you, both in your wallet and in your ability to really have gainful opportunity and employment. This stuff bleeds through the economy like a virus. And unfortunately, the real issue to me is it's not really going to do anything except put us into recession. I was just reading this morning, the complex market conditions which led to cheap gas over basically the last 10 years, that's never going to happen again. We were all basically being subsidized by Wall Street traders who were pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into these oil companies so they could drill and drill and drill.

Well, now they're like, they're fed up. They're done. They want profit. So there's not a lot you can do there. On top of that, we have a massive supply crunch given what's happening with the Russian oil embargo by the Europeans. So the complex market conditions that existed for cheap gas are now gone. I was talking with Peter Zaihan recently. He said something which has really struck with me, which is that the globalization of the last 1990s have basically made it for the last 30 years. That's why inflation was so low, because we adjusted to just-in-time delivery. We stopped having inventory. We made our much more efficient economy but less resilient. So the higher efficiency meant that we

had low inflation. But all of the supply-side factors are disappearing overnight on top of an over-financialization of the economy. And that leads to where we are today. So it's a real tragedy. I don't see a way out of this for, I don't know, five, 10 years. I mean, it takes hundreds of billions of dollars to crawl out of this hole. And here's the thing, because we basically live in a failed state where the president and Congress are unable or unwilling to act, and the Fed is left as the only thing that we're like, well, you guys do what you can do, that means either way you get screwed. I mean, if they hike interest rates to curb inflation and they spark a recession, you get screwed. If they don't do that and inflation continues to run rampant, you get screwed.

I mean, it's just completely the whole thing is it's a disaster. And the Fed's policies up to this point have also helped to fuel that inflation. I mean, the reason we had all these asset bubbles to start with was because of the trillions that the Fed injected into the economy. They helped to fuel this massive inequality that we have as well. So, you know, since we don't have any other mechanisms at our disposal, the only thing the Fed can do is make it so you have less money to spend, so that to curb demand from you, that's the only thing that they can really do to deal with the situation.

Dealing with the supply chain issues, dealing with gas prices, they don't have any control over any of that. All they can do is curb stomp demand. That's it. And so that's why this landscape is so dire and why, you know, I mean, this is something we've been looking at

and predicting and worrying about for quite a while, but the moment has kind of arrived. It's here. landscape is so dire and why, you know, I mean, this is something we've been looking at and predicting and worrying about for quite a while, but the moment has kind of arrived. It's here. Yeah, it's very, you know, it just shows you that the supply side stuff that's on this is just not going to get dealt with. Instead, you know, policymakers are very likely to adopt a fiscal crunch at the same time that you have a major crunch. So you're basically going to get squeezed from both ends. And unfortunately, I think we're headed in for very hard times. So let's move on to the crypto part of this. Just basically, people are calling it Black Monday as to what happened yesterday. Let's put this on the screen. Did a decent job of just summarizing this. This is from the Indian press.

But Bitcoin and Ethereum crashing over 70% from their peaks, with investors losing over $2 trillion in eight months. So the price of Bitcoin, even right now, is trading at a low that we haven't seen in a long time, $21,000. I believe that that is the lowest price since 2020. So almost two years of gains erased in those markets. Ethereum also as well. Bitcoin, obviously the original kind of cryptocurrency that absolutely took off. But Ethereum was one which had been used quite a bit in the NFT marketplace, and others kind of became a secondary asset. It has much more ability in order to have faster transactions and these things. That obviously also crashed. And if you consider that, let's go to the next one, which we are seeing chaos in the crypto trading exchanges themselves.

So Celsius, which was one of the largest crypto trading networks, actually banned trading for a long time yesterday, freezing withdrawals as all of those assets began to plunge. Here's what they said, quote, due to extreme market conditions today, we are announcing Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, swap and transfer between the accounts. Quote, we are taking this action to put Celsius in a better position to honor over time its withdrawal obligations. So anytime that you have a bank or a quasi-financial institution say, you can't take out money and you can't do anything about it, people are obviously going to panic.

And Celsius definitely took it on the chin. It reminds me also of a filing. I believe it was an SEC filing by Coinbase, which put out, and they said, look, we're not in a position right now where we have to stop trading or we have to do anything. But it is possible that one day, should market conditions arise, that you won't be able to withdraw your Bitcoin. So it's like, wait, hold on a second. What? And that was buried in one of their SEC filings. This has always been, and I always warn people whenever they get into this, I'm like, listen, there ain't no FDIC that's coming to save you in terms of $100,000.

If you have crypto, it is not insured whatsoever. You're basically putting your faith in that financial institution. And we've now had several instances, not only Celsius, but we'll remember that stablecoin story that we talked about here, TerraUSD, which basically just stopped floating one-to-one to the US dollar. There's major, major problems that are happening. And like I said, let's put the final one up there, which is that they're referring to this as Black Monday. I mean, look, the reason why it's going down, I think there's a lot of cope that people are talking about. I think the basic fact is that Bitcoin, and look, I love Bitcoin, but let's be honest here, Bitcoin people, which is that it's basically trading as an asset that tracks with the S&P 500. Same with a lot of these places.

And with the ability and the crunch in cash in particular, lack of liquidity, people are pulling out of all assets. And that also includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the crypto market. So it's actually an interesting theory that I've seen floated by a couple of friends of mine before that loose monetary policy actually was juicing the crypto markets, which- There's zero doubt about it. Zero doubt about that. Seems to be true. Yeah, no, there's absolutely zero doubt about that. I mean, ultimately, crypto is not used very much at all for as like actual money mode

of exchange. It's something to bet on. I mean, it's a highly speculative asset, you know, with nothing really hard backing it. And certainly no sort of government institutions like the FDIC backstopping your losses and preventing bank runs. I mean, that's the thing with Celsius is this is just basically a bank run with no government protection around it. So there's all this language and lingo around crypto like this is something totally new and totally different. And in some of these instances, it's like nothing really new. Just you as the consumer are less protected.

Like that's the innovation. I mean, they have a quote here actually from someone whose name is Corey Clips, and he's a CEO of a different, of Swan Bitcoin. So he's like a pro crypto guy. But with regard to Celsius specifically, he says, this was yet another bank run. You're not reinventing anything here. They were promoting their services as a better savings account that sort of like, you know, shaky underpinnings is being exposed right now as, you know, the markets fall and crypto sort of leads the charge. Because of course, when the markets drop, the very first thing to drop the furthest and the fastest are the most speculative assets. That's crypto. That's NFTs. I also just want to say one other thing. The chief executive of Celsius, this is how disgusting some of these people are. This guy's a scum. Hours before they suspended withdrawals, totally screwing over the people who had trusted them,

he hit out at critics on Twitter denying users were having trouble withdrawing funds and accusing them of spreading FUD, a popular crypto acronym for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, hours before they pulled the plug. That's how scummy and sleazy some of these actors ultimately are, how they will directly lie to the people who have, like, trusted them and enriched them the most. And that's why all of this, you know, it does really upset me because I think there are a lot of people who are going to be, they're going to be beside themselves.

I mean, who really believed and put their life savings into it. I mean, really risked it all thinking they were getting in on the new big thing. And now that, you know, there's everybody expects a recession and you see the market's dropping and the writing is on the wall,

but it was not that long ago that the sort of conventional wisdom was this mania of the stock market on the wall. But it was not that long ago that the sort of conventional wisdom was this mania of the stock market only goes up. It will only go up. There's no risk. You can only, you know, no matter where you get in, it's just gonna keep going up and up and up. And crypto is the safe hedge against inflation

and all of these things, total fairy tale. And that's what really disgusts me the most here is the people who are involved in these like pump and dump schemes and just really took people for a ride and in many instances totally destroyed their lives. NFT one is where I'm particularly sensed because I'm not going to call out anyone in particular, but there are a lot of people on YouTube and online who have been pushing younger men mostly in order to invest a lot of their life save or even take out loans in order to invest in NFTs. They're like, you're getting in on the next big. And look, we all know, you know, people and all those guys. Yeah, they made one hundred million dollars. But a lot of these people got really left holding the bag. And considering also that we just had that story a

couple of weeks ago about the OpenSea head of product getting indicted for insider trading. Right. That was a rife amount of fraud. Yes. That was, you know, pretty obvious, I think, to a lot of people within this. I do think that, you know, people who are in the crypto space and others have a duty in order to try and push back against this. And unfortunately, you know, I watched, I've been kind of in the space since 2017, and

I watched it really, it all get taken over by a lot of scammers. Really? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you go back to the ethos of kind of the original Bitcoiners, it really – look, I know you may not agree, but it was very – it was a utopian kind of ideal. No, I agree that it was idealistic to start with. Yeah, and it was like, look, the financial crisis, it shook our faith in the markets, the Federal Reserve and quantitative easing. We're going to have this asset, which will allow free flow of money that the government can't crack down on in some cases. And there was a lot of utopian ideals about like Bitcoin nation and like reimagining government. And then, frankly, I think the Winklevii kind of coming in and starting the Gemini trading exchange.

Oh, really? Trying to start. What they did is they tried to normalize it on Wall Street. So what they did is they came in, they started the Gemini Trading Exchange, and they kind of tried to start like a Bitcoin ETF and try to get certified by the market and push financial institutions into Bitcoin. And then from there, you saw the explosion of not just Ethereum, because the Ethereum currency had been around for a while, but building stuff on the Ethereum platform. And from there, and I'm sorry for those who are getting a bit wonky, something called DeFi kind

of came on the scene, decentralized financial instruments and currencies. That's where we started seeing the US dollars and some of the scummiest kind of behavior. Because I would see people who are giving out basically high interest loans on these things that have no... Imagine this, it's almost like mortgage-backed securities. You have a speculative asset like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and then you take out like actual cash loans at a 20% interest on that. Well, you know, it works until it doesn't work. And now that's really where we're at now. So I've seen in the last five years, an explosion, very much moving away from the kind of screw the man ideals in the crypto space. Maybe it'll return to that. I don't know. I mean, an explosion, very much moving away from the kind of screw the man ideals in the crypto

space. Maybe it'll return to that. I don't know. I mean, you know, I'd be happy if it did. There'd have to be some like dramatic reform because now it's just- I mean, it's down to 21,000. Here's the thing. When you don't have money, a lot of stuff just falls to the waste. I just saw Coinbase, they just put out this morning, just came across the wire, they're going to cut 18% of their staff. So, I mean, that company just went public to a multi-billion dollar valuation. I know that probably your impression of me, people out there, is that I'm just a crypto hater and always have been. That's not actually the case. Like, I was open to it. I was like kind of crypto agnostic. And I do actually think what really

turned me was the advent of NFTs. Because then I was like, oh, this is just bullshit. Like, this is just bullshit. And that was kind of my window into seeing how the original promise of crypto, which again, like the initial manifesto about what it was all going to be about. It's cool. It wasn't about like, this is going to be a new casino that we can all bet on and get yours.

It was about, this is going to be an alternative mode of exchange. That this is going to be an alternative mode of exchange, that this was going to be practical and pragmatic. It was actually going to ease transaction. That just has not happened. Instead, it has just become a casino. And it has, of course, attracted some of the scummiest promoters

who they don't care about any sort of idealistic values, whatever they say to sort of lure you in. don't care about any sort of like idealistic values, whatever they say to sort of lure you in. They just care about getting theirs. And they care about being, you know, up higher on the pyramid scheme and fooling, finding the next greater fool. So it really does, it really does upset me because like you said, it's a lot of young men who, you know, they're going to, their whole life is going to be set back if they invest significantly in this, if they bet their future on this, they thought this was going to be their way to be one of the players in the game instead of always getting played and always getting screwed. And instead they just ended

up being another mark. It really, it really is sad. Hold fast, gentlemen. That's the lesson I've learned over several years. Don't sell it just yet. Let's move on to Ukraine. Obviously, a lot going on there. Crystal, you flagged this particular story. Yeah, so let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen. U.S. lacks a clear picture of Ukraine's war strategy, officials say. The subhead here is intelligence agencies know far more about Russia's military, even as the United States ships billions of dollars in

weapons to the Ukrainians. And this is not just like some random analyst's opinion. Avril Haines, who's the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, testified at a Senate hearing that, quote, it was very hard to tell how much additional aid Ukraine could absorb. She went on to say, we have, in fact, more insight probably on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side. They go on to note in this article that, of course, the United States, and we've covered this probably more here than almost anywhere else, has been providing regular, real-time intelligence updates to the Ukrainians, helping them to target incredibly significant individuals and assets like that warship that we talked about. And yet, in high-level conversations, U.S. military

intelligence officials are not getting that reciprocity from the Ukrainians, of course, since they've been a quote-unquote friend of ours. We didn't develop any sort of like intelligence capabilities to spy on them and figure out what they're doing. But we do, of course, have that capability with the Russians. That's why we understand more about what the Russians are doing and what their losses are. So it really is an extraordinary situation. I mean, and the thing that boggles my mind too here, Sagar, is we have a lot of leverage in this situation. So if we just said to them, look, we're not sending you any more until we actually know how you're doing, what your plan is, what are the tactics, what does it look like, where are these weapons going to? We could very easily say

that, but apparently we are completely comfortable just flying blind here and crossing our fingers and basically trusting the Ukrainians who have every incentive to, I'm not blaming them or researching them for this. They're in a fight for their survival. They have every incentive to lie and manipulate us in whatever way is convenient for their war effort.

We're just accepting that as fine. Look, I mean, it's always so difficult to have these conversations without sounding callous. Nobody's saying the Ukrainian cause is unjust. I think that they're better actors in this situation, but they have their own incentive. They're fighting, like you said, for the literal survival of their country. And let's also be honest, they would not be even around both today and – well, both in the past and today if it weren't for the United States and for the West and NATO countries. So I think that given the fact that we basically saved them from complete ruin, we deserve a hell of a lot of say into actually what goes on on the battlefield. And instead, it seems that the Ukrainians don't really want to tell us anything. And I guess in a way, you shouldn't blame them.

I don't blame them. I blame our officials for not demanding it. Keep it coming. They're like, keep the checks rolling and all of these tanks and bullets. Oh, it's going great. Don't worry about it. Right, yeah. But don't you dare stop it because we need it.

And yet, the current indications that are coming out are actually not great, which also raises a question to me, which is what the hell was the point of all this $44 billion if it's not even actually making as much of a difference as we were originally promised? So let's put this up there on the screen. Ukraine is now telling specifically both NATO and the West that they fear defeat in the East without a surge in military aid. And actually, the new information that we're getting is that this is according to the Ukrainian government, is losing between 100 to 200 soldiers, KIA, killed in action every day. That is with about five times that number that are injured daily. This is not a joke.

100 to 200 casualties, or sorry, 500 or 600 casualties per day on the battlefield. And when they point to the amount of Russian firepower that is being brought to bear, it is genuinely stunning. I mean, they are talking here about Russia, despite the fact that, and this is what we warned about, yes, they have lost a significant amount of materiel. They've lost a lot of lives. They have lost prestige on the world stage. All of that. They are still a great power in their own right. They have a tremendous amount of military capability. And the Ukrainians talk here about being outgunned at a pretty significant level. And that also raises the question, it's like, well, where did all this $40 billion go? So according to this, President Biden has released $700 million in these new weapons deliveries to Ukraine. That's the first slice of the $40 billion aid package. Well, what are we doing with the rest of the $39 billion? What's happening here? And again, I mean, I really have no idea.

And the Ukrainians are actually begging the European Union to also pass some new measures and to deliver new weapons systems. I mean, have we not already delivered a bunch of weapons systems? Like, are they telling us that we're so incompetent that we can't even give them the material that they need? This is where it matters for our government to actually understand how things are going on the ground. Because that really changes what the smart move is. I mean, you know, for a while when Russia really faltered and flailed to start with, and basically, I mean, this is also the military analysts, the defense intelligence analysts, they completely overestimated Russia's capabilities,

just as they completely overestimated also the Afghan government's capabilities. They don't have a great track record here. So Russia dramatically underperforms. Then there starts to be this heady idea of like, oh, maybe Ukraine can win. So let's flood them with everything that maybe will get the maximalist outcome. They'll be able to completely win. They'll be able to push Russia even out of the territory that they had occupied prior to this invasion and this war. Well, now that situation has very much shifted and the Ukrainians are even being forced to admit at least part of the reality that they are suffering significant losses in the eastern part of the state. So all of these dynamics have a dramatic bearing on whether it makes sense for us to continue the flood of weapons into the state,

whether it makes sense for us to, you know, this is what I've been pushing for the whole time, to really put pressure on for both sides to come to the table and try to negotiate a settlement, which is going to include pain and significant concessions on both sides of that equation. But if you don't actually really know what's going on in the battlefield, what the plan is, how many losses are being suffered, what kind of equipment they have remaining, you can't make that calculus in any sort of an intelligent way. I'll also say this.

When is enough? What's enough? Because if 40 billion ain't going to cut it, how much more do you need? 500 billion? 600 billion? I mean, look, the conflict has now, let's put this next one on the screen, which is that things are not going well for the Ukrainians. The Russian forces have apparently cut the last, I'm not even going to try and say this. Severodonetsk. Severodonetsk escape route in the Donbass region. And the fighting in the Donbass, the Ukrainians are not going to give up anytime soon. So the front line is basically where the front line was eight years ago. And now you have a long, grinding war. Both sides have lost tens of thousands of people, both in killed in action and in wounded.

There's no giving up on site. We have basically committed ourselves to giving the Ukrainians whatever they want to accomplish, whatever they want. So are we just signing up for an annual appropriation of $40 to $50 billion for the Ukrainian military? Well, an annual appropriation, that lasted apparently like a month.

Well, this is my question. I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't understand like what exactly is going on in terms of our government policy because there was a promise kind of in the beginning. You're like, oh, this is it. This is the final push. But they're going to need more. Already the $40 billion they say is not enough. They're begging the Europeans and them to send more. And look, I think Europeans should be sending the bulk of the weapons and that we should then be sending, you know, relative to

our own security situation. But the real question I think for the U.S. is at a certain point, we actually do need to make a choice and say, okay, enough is enough. We've given you as much as we possibly can. And yet we, there is no discussion of that here in Washington whatsoever. And I also really do question, given what I talked about in our earlier block, which is that all of the structural factors that led to cheap gas prices, they're gone. And one of the biggest ones that you where we can actually have Russian oil reenter the market. But unfortunately, for political reasons, I don't think that that is the case. I also want to say this, which is that there's been a perverse incentive where, you know, all these Russian sanctions, you know, Russia's actually doing okay right now. They have an account surplus of $110 billion for the first four months of this year from $32 billion in the same period last

year. Why do you think? Because oil prices are sky high. And because the West aren't the only players in the game, India, China, many other countries, you think they're not going to buy discounted Russian oil if they can in an overall hot market? They'd be idiots not to. So Russia is actually making a boatload of money. Their IMF says that their economy might shrink by about 8.5%. Now, listen, that is devastating. I don't want to downplay that. But Ukraine is going to shrivel by 35% as a result of this war. That's a disaster. It's so easy, too, to ignore. Of course, the most pain is in Ukraine with the people who are being slaughtered and their towns destroyed and their lives upended.

No doubt about it. Partly because of this war, we now have almost 50 million people facing famine around the world. Yeah, that's also true. And so, I mean, you have not only the oil prices, gas prices going up and up and up, food prices going up and up and up. I mean, these are real consequences for people around the globe, especially the most vulnerable people around the globe who were already struggling. It's all exacerbated by, you know, rising climate droughts and extreme weather events that have also caused crops to fail in significant places that are contributing to the catastrophe. So these are not costless decisions. I know sometimes it feels like when Congress strokes a check for $40 billion, oh, it's, you know, what difference does it really make? But it's really not even about that as the austerity that is being imposed around the globe. And again, in a lot of instances

and 50 million instances with absolutely dire and devastating consequences. So there's no end game inside here. I mean, to be honest with you, probably the window for negotiations where the Ukrainians would have been in the strongest position is after they had pushed the Russians back out of a number of cities. And it seemed like they were on the march and it seemed like, oh, they maybe they have the upper hand. Maybe they can actually win this war. That was when they were in the strongest negotiating position. Now that they're having to admit to these significant losses, you know, they the Wall

Street Journal piece that we had up before, Ukrainian officials are saying that this is, and this is, keep in mind, this is their spin, and this is an attempt to get more weapons funding from us and from the Europeans. But they say without a broad and rapid increase in military assistance, Ukraine faces a defeat in the eastern Donbass region. But that's not all. They say that would pave the way for Russia to pursue its offensive to Odessa, Kharkiv, after regrouping in coming months, they say, potentially all the way back to the capital Kiev after that. So the fact that Ukrainians were able to push them out of some of these places, that's not set in stone. Those gains can be reversed, especially if Ukraine is outright defeated in the eastern Donbass region.

And right now, from what we can tell, it is not going well. Yeah, it's just all about political pressure on Putin, which is right now he doesn't have a lot of incentive, obviously, in order to, especially with the high oil prices. Right. That's not going away anytime soon. Yeah, that's floating his economy. It's okay. Float the economy and bankroll a lot of what's happening here. So, look, yeah.

I mean, the fact that we have given them so much and this is the end result. Look, they obviously are heroic. They've been able to push back and more. But the more and longer this grinds on, the worse I think it is going to be for the Ukrainians just because that's how it works when you fight a superpower. And that is the longer and more likely that we get pulled into this thing in the long term. Because the longer that conflicts run, the more likely that things can go wrong. All it takes is one new advanced weapon system that the Ukrainian guy barely knows how to use. And that is open source. That's been out there, that we have to train these guys how to use these weapons because they literally have no idea and have

never had any training on them before. Yeah, it's a different plot. They're complex, highly technical. I'm not denigrating them. It just is what it is. And so, look, all it takes is one of those to get fired into the wrong place, one commander, and that's it. And then now we're in a whole other diplomatic snafu.

And also remember, this is the other kind of chauvinistic mindset for a lot of Americans. We're not the only player in this game. There are the Lithuanians and the Estonians and the Romanians and the Brits and the Germans. I mean, in France, these are all NATO countries. So we also have to trust that they are doing the right thing in terms of what they're helping the Ukrainians with, because an attack on them is also going to eventually bring us into this. And we have a massive alliance. Now Finland and Sweden are apparently going to be in this thing as well. So the potential for a massive escalation, which is completely

accidental, remains. And everybody continues to say like, oh, well, none of that has happened yet. It's been four months. It's been 100 days. The idea that you can evaluate the efficacy of your policy after 100 days is insanity. 100 days after the invasion of Iraq, we would have said there was an explosion of freedom in Baghdad. And then, you know, the invasion of Iraq. 100 days after knocking Gaddafi off, you could have made a case. You're like, hey, Libya, look at this. People are choosing freedom. All of this. Call me in five years and we'll figure out exactly how this thing all worked out.

Yeah, very true. Okay, let's move on to a story which, you know, we've talked in humorous terms about the January 6th Committee. However, I do want to give them credit for one area which we have covered consistently since the very days that we were on Rising, which is that whether you believe the election was stolen or not, the idea has been that the administration, the Trump administration and the Trump campaign were raising millions of dollars, $250 million to fight election lawsuits. They were begging their campaign donors in order to fund them so that they could fight it. And many people, rightfully, mostly boomers, believed that the election was stolen. Well, Trump took their money and he didn't spend any of it on actually contesting election results. And now, actually,

they have uncovered what some of that money actually went to. So let's put this on the screen. Number one is a million dollar donation to the Conservative Partnership Institute, specifically for a sinecure for Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff, a million dollars to the America First Policy Institute, which is where Larry Kudlow and a bunch of other people who worked in the administration are now having their cushy little jobs. Rick Perry and them are on the board. $200,000 to the Trump Hotel and Collection. And then $5 million to a single organizer to Event Strategies, Inc. Hmm, that's really interesting. But how they lay it out in their presentation, actually, look, I'm not saying this is ever going to change any minds.

But I think it should be noted of just how much of the Trump campaign and so much more was a complete grift, not just for Trump himself, but really for MAGA Incorporated. So let's take a listen to how they lay that out yesterday. But as the select committee has demonstrated, the Trump campaign knew these claims of voter fraud were false. Yet they continued to barrage small dollar donors with emails, encouraging them to donate to something called the Official Election Defense Fund. The select committee discovered no such fund existed. The claims that the election was stolen were so successful, President Trump and his allies raised $250 million, nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.

Wow. So, you know, that just $100 million. And I just think that the more level-headed amongst and around him, I really just don't know what they were thinking at that time. Bill Barr continues to kind of be a gem on this one. It's kind of hilarious because he was asked about some of the Dominion voting conspiracies and about the new 2000 mules documentary by Dinesh D'Souza. And his reaction really is priceless. Let's take a listen to that. My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven't seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that,

including the 2000 mules movie. When the movie came out, I think the photographic evidence in it was completely lacking. I mean, there was a little bit of it, but it was lacking. It didn't establish widespread illegal harvesting. The other thing is people don't understand is that it's not clear that even if you can show harvesting, that that changes the results of the election. Courts are not going to throw out votes. So, lo and behold, Bill Barr, not terribly impressed with 2,000 mules. And the, you know, camera footage of people, like, putting ballots in the mailbox, something they are legally allowed to do under certain circumstances. But cell phone data, Crystal. Cell phone.

I mean, this is so silly. And he's right about, he says, they, like, say it very conclusively, like, oh, if you went by these drop boxes multiple times, then you must be a mule. It's like, well, if you're talking about a city and people are just, you know, as an Uber driver going about their route or going about their day, of course you're going to have people who drive by these ballot boxes, which were put intentionally in like, you know, highly trafficked public location anyway. It was silly, stupid, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, the grift part, this has always bothered me. I know it bothers you too. Oh, immensely, yeah. Because you have, the Griff part, this has always bothered me. I know it bothers you, too.

Oh, immensely, yeah. Because you have a lot of people who really believe in this man. And, obviously, at this point, I find that hard to really understand. But, you know, they trust him. And so when he's sending these missives, sometimes 25 emails a day, which, by the way, whatever candidate you like or don't like, unsubscribe from all of these campaign email funders. If you want to donate to a candidate, do it. You don't need them harassing you and haranguing you day in and day out and feeding you, like, total nonsense. Because he's by far not the only one who engages in this type of scummy behavior.

We saw it with him and with others like Ted Cruz in the lead up to the Georgia Senate elections where they were saying the Senate majority is on the line. We've got to stop the Democrats. It's existential. We've got to be all in. Donate now. And then they weren't even sending the money to the candidates that you thought that you were supporting. And they have no legal obligation to do so. And that's the crazy part.

You know, Zoe Lofgren, who's a Democrat who was running this part of the hearing, she was on with Jake Tapper and she got asked, like, is this a crime? Did they commit a crime? And even she wouldn't say that this is illegal. She's like, I don't know that it's a crime. It's just it's definitely a grift. send out an email, which is what the Trump campaign was doing over and over 25 times a day saying, donate to our election integrity fund, help us file these lawsuits and fight this fraud. And then there isn't even such a fund. Like it does not exist. They have no obligation whatsoever

to do anything appropriate with your money. They can send it to, you know, $5 million to some company led by their brother's friend or whatever. And that's what they did. I mean, they're also looking at this is the other thing that got a lot of attention. Kimberly Guilfoyle at the January 6th rally got paid $60,000 for a two-minute speech introducing her fiancé. Wow, that's great work. You know, it's great work if you can get it. Who amongst us has never been paid the average American wage for an entire year for two and a half minutes of work in order to give a speech and introduce your own fiat?

Interesting. This is that's look, it's the part that will always bug me the most. The people around him and watching just like this coterie of just disgusting grifters making millions of dollars off of well-meaning people. And look, you know, you can hate them if you want, but they're our citizens too. That doesn't mean that they deserve to get ripped off. I remember the Rush Limbaugh, there was a Rush Limbaugh clip that was going around at the time of the election. There was a guy, he was literally in tears. He was like, I don't understand. How can they just steal the election from Trump? They're like, we need to do something. And it's like, well, that's how January 6th happened. And again, you know, these people really trust him. They really and them were floating Russiagate conspiracies in 2017.

It's also pernicious now. Like, you don't have to draw a false equivalence and say that's completely fine. We will have longstanding implications of this both in our politics for a long time to come. But, yeah, good people, well-meaning people, they believed in Trump, and they gave him $250 million, and he didn't spend any of it actually. And these were not high-level, wealthy donors. Yeah, these are like normal people. These are regular people kicking in what they can

because they feel like their democracy is being stolen, their vote didn't count, and all this nonsense, total bullshit that they were being fed. I mean, I think as you're watching these January 6th hearings, if you are watching them, you have a feeling our audience is not really watching them, but I'm sure you can't avoid seeing some of the coverage and the clips that are floating around. I think it's really important to remember. I'm sure you had some people who were rioting at the

Capitol that day who were just like chaos agents who, you know, they didn't really care whether the claims were true or false. They like trouble. They like the action. They see themselves as these, you know, tough, whatever chaos agents. Okay. There's some of that. You had a lot of people who really actually believed they were doing the correct patriotic thing by like backing up Trump and going into the Capitol. None of the violence is justified whatsoever, even if you, you know, really believed that. But I do think that's important. Like, that's important context is that a lot of these people really bought this nonsense. They gave him money. He said, show up on January 6th. It's going to be wild. They did it. He said, walk to the Capitol. They did it. I mean, they really convinced themselves that this was actually the moral and just thing to do. And so the deeper question for all of us is how do you get as a country to that place where there

are so many people who can be persuaded that it's not just okay, but it's actually like noble and patriotic to storm the Capitol in this way. It's deeply sad. 60 grand to kill, but they don't care. I mean, at the end of the day, they don't care. They can rightfully point to Hunter and be like, well, look at him too. Yeah, listen, that's the problem.

Yes. All right. Okay, there's another little Stop the Steal story we wanted to get to you here. This one involving Amazon and Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Labor Union. So go ahead and put this NPR report up on the screen. Amazon is seeking to overturn that historic Staten Island Union victory. They had a hearing, a labor hearing in Phoenix yesterday. The reason it was in Phoenix

instead of in the local NLRB office there in New York is because they actually implicate the NLRB and claim that its regional office in Brooklyn, which oversaw that election, favored the union and facilitated its victory. So they're actually saying not only that, you know, Chris Smalls and his colleagues and organizers and worker organizers there with Amazon Labor Union acted improperly, they're also saying actually the government, you know, rigged this thing in the Amazon labor unions direction, which is crazy. I mean, if you know anything about the way these union elections work, their deck is tremendously stacked in the other direction. I'll give you the specifics of their allegations. They charged that organizers harassed and threatened employees who weren't supporting the union. They also charge that union organizers handed out weed

to workers in return for their support. In fact, this is the NPR, the way they phrase it. In fact, union leaders have spoken openly about providing workers with marijuana, but not as a bribe. They're asking for the NLRB for a complete do-over election. And remember that, you know, Amazon has already been caught cheating in such an egregious manner. And this is a truly extraordinary outcome that down in Bessemer, Alabama, the NLRB did order a do over election because of Amazon's unfair interference. That doesn't happen very often. It truly is, you know, an extraordinary situation. So they've already proven themselves to be nefarious bad actors here. And the fact that they are actually saying, like, the government rigged this thing for the Amazon labor union is—that's why it puts it in the, like, whole stop the steal conspiracy theory category because they are asserting some pretty baseless and over-the-top claims here ultimately. We'll see how it goes.

Here's the next piece is from Jordan Cheriton of Status Quo, and he has a reporter there on the ground, too. Phoenix cops actually showed up and kicked supporters of Amazon labor workers out of the hearing room, where he says Amazon's currently trying to overturn ALU's historic union victory. So using some pretty, you know, hard-handed tactics there in terms of the local police force not allowing workers to be in the room. So we'll see ultimately what the outcome is. The analysis I've seen before is that it is unlikely Amazon will ultimately succeed, that it would, you know, their claims don't seem to have a lot of merit, that it would take a lot to overturn this election, especially since the margin was fairly significant. But, you know, you don't want to take anything for granted. And this was clearly a major spark that lit a fire under workers across the country. This, along with the Starbucks labor

movement, which has seen more than 100 Starbucks stores unionized. And you now have workers at Apple, workers at Target. I mean, store after store after store saying, hey, we saw what they did on Staten Island and this is for us. So that's why this matters a lot beyond just, you know, and I don't want to say just, but just these thousands of workers who are represented here. Yeah, it's actually interesting because this is all part of a bigger crackdown, which we've been talking about here. Which is that you have actually recently an Amazon manager calls the sheriff's office in Campbell's Bill, Kentucky, the afternoon to report that there were people trying to start a union and trespassing on company property. The sheriff ultimately showed up and said, no, they weren't on company property. But what they're pointing to is that that is the type of anti-union activity that the company's been at and ramped up actually

since the success of that election. I think you did see that in the second Staten Island election that, you know, he kind of snuck in under the radar on that first one and they're like, okay, we're never going to let this happen again. So not only are they going to try and bankrupt them in legal fees by suing the hell out of it and making them contest this election on the, they're basically just going to war and firing union activists and others at every other warehouse across the country trying to nip it in the bud. Which actually is probably the bigger – that's probably the biggest legacy, right, so far of what's actually happened in the Amazon fight. And there are a lot of other Amazon shops that want to unionize. So that's something to keep an eye on. With the Starbucks

store, obviously, I mean, this is very obvious, but Starbucks have like, you know, 10 workers, 20 workers, this much smaller shop. So to organize one of these gigantic Amazon warehouses, it really is, you know, an exceptional, extraordinary feat. So, you know, there's a lot of promise there. And now the question is whether they can translate this one victory into a nationwide movement. And obviously, Amazon wants to roll back even this gain. And part of the problem for Amazon in New York is they really need this warehouse. So they can't really employ, at least not easily, the tactic of let's just close this one and try again somewhere else. No, they don't have that luxury, but they have been engaging in some additional illegal union busting tactics. So I don't know

if we played it here, but there was a worker named Pat who he'd been like a Trump supporter. He's like, you know, typical sort of New York, Italian type of vibes. And he was a really significant part of their organizing team. And he said he flipped hundreds of workers from no to yes in the final stretch of the campaign and said this publicly. Well, that made him a target for Amazon and they just fired him. Wow. So this is, you know, this is war as far as Amazon's concerned. The last thing they want to see is the kind of snowball wildfire effect that we have seen at Starbucks. And make no doubt about it, workers across the country will be watching to see how this all plays out

and see if you can actually win and sustain these gains. So we will keep an eye on it as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting, too. Stephen Greenhouse wrote an article in The Guardian about why Starbucks Union's Drive is moving more ahead than Amazon. And I hadn't even considered this, but it totally makes sense, which is Starbucks shops are like 25 people, 30 people.

So it's actually not hard. Whereas an Amazon warehouse is like 7,000 people. Yeah, you know everybody. Yeah, it's a lot easier. You're like, hey, let's do this. And they're like, okay, and then it's done. Yeah, it's less of a- I don't want to downplay what they've accomplished,

which is also exceptional. Well, it's just harder to convince people to't want to downplay what they've accomplished, which is also exceptional. Well, it's just harder to convince people to have an election. It's easier to administer. There's only 28 workers. That's how you can have hundreds of stores versus a different warehouse. Anyway, I hadn't even considered the sheer logistics of it. And I was like, wow, that completely makes sense as to why it would be a lot more difficult. Well, and it was for a long time the conventional wisdom that that dynamic was actually what made it so difficult to organize food and service workers.

Because it's like, oh, you've got to go store by store. Jesus Christ, it's going to take forever to be able to unionize in all these places. And that continues to be true. I mean, I don't know the current numbers, but I think just with that one Amazon warehouse, Amazon Labor Union probably represents more workers than across the entire hundred plus Starbucks stores that have now unionized at this point. So there are pluses and minuses, but certainly right now, just having that, knowing all the workers, knowing how to get in touch with them, how to talk to them, what sort of propaganda they're being fed, how to combat that, whether they're receptive from the beginning, that has made a big difference for the Starbucks workers and has obviously proved extraordinarily

successful. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, guys, this is just too perfect. I don't even know what to say about this. You know, someone was going to write it. It was inevitable. It was like a law of nature that this was going to happen. Robert Reich writing that we should have Liz Cheney for president. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. He says, Liz Cheney for president, question mark. And this is, okay, this is a guy who considers himself a progressive. Like, what are you talking about? He worked for Bill Clinton, you know.

I mean, he positions himself on economics and on cultural issues on the lefter side of the political spectrum. What? So here's what he says. Let me make his case. Cheney is a firm conservative. I've opposed many of her positions, but we are at an inflection point in this nation over a set of principles that transcend any particular positions or policies. If we cannot agree on the sanctity of the Constitution, the rule of law, we are no longer capable of self-government. The real battle in 2024 will not be between

Democrats and Republicans. It will be between forces supporting democracy in America and those supporting authoritarianism. Trump is the de facto leader of the forces supporting authoritarianism. Liz Cheney has become the de facto leader of the forces supporting democracy. Oh, no. What do you think of that, Sasha? Yeah, just, well, I mean, look, I actually hope they run her because it would be a great referendum on Cheney-style politics. Please, God, no. I hate the unidimensional nature in which we talk about politicians.

And, you know, Mitt Romney is like a freaking hero right now because apparently, because he impeached Donald, voted to impeach Trump. George W. Bush, I'm reading this book, I finally got around to it, that this will not pass, the recent book about the January 6th and the first year of the Biden presidency. And they talk there specifically about how Cheney and Romney and George W. Bush were all allied with Nancy Pelosi in order to speak out about Donald Trump. And I was just like, you know, Nancy Pelosi became the speaker of the House and a national figure in 2006 for speaking out against George W. Bush and the Iraq war, something that was good. And yet, because Bush is willing to call out, you know, authoritarianism here in America, whenever it was supposedly Trump, he's been rehabilitated in the eyes of the Democrats who rightfully, you know, rebuked him in office in 2006. And he had one of the lowest approval ratings of all time. He ruined this country, He ruined Iraq and much of the globe and U.S. global standing as well. But all of that appears to be fine.

I also remember Liz Cheney. Remember when she was on the House floor and Dick Cheney was there to support her on the Republican side? And all these Democrats, including Pelosi, lined up to shake his hand. I'm like, what are you doing? This is – there is no more – no family has done as much damage, other than the Bush family, to the standing of the United States, of our global standing, of our internal politics, more than these two families. I mean, they should be pariahs for all time. Having a decent position on Trump being bad and Jan 6th, it does not absolve much, much worse crimes that were committed. I mean, okay, there's several things I want to say about this. First of all, the idea that anyone who backed and continues to believe in the sanctity of the Iraq War and its attendant torture and war crimes and whatever, not a real friend of democracy.

Just throw that one out there, number one. Number two, it is the lowest bar of all time to be like, wait, you don't support the violent overthrow of our government? You should formulation and the reason this is useful is because this does reflect the sort of liberal worldview and ideology that is completely mainstream right now. how we ended up in a place where you could have people susceptible to Donald Trump's lies and nonsense and election conspiracies and all of that to start with. Here's the spoiler alert. If we have the policies of Liz Cheney, we're going to get more erosion of democracy, not less. Whether or not she, you know, says she supports the Constitution and whether or not she felt bad about, you know, didn't like January 6th or any of that. You are leading us down the path of more precarity, more instability, more political violence, more chaos. If you continue with the direction, with the policies that Liz Cheney would want to implement. Those are the policies by and large that we have had over the past 40 years that led us to this point. Doing the same thing again and thinking you're going to get a different result is the height of insanity. Instead, you will get more January 6th, not less.

That's the real problem with this whole formulation. Yeah, you know, Liz Cheney thinks that we should have been in Afghanistan forever. She opposed the Trump peace deal and all that. Liz Cheney also said at one point that our national debt is the biggest national security threat that we face as a country. This is somebody who is a dyed-in-the-wool, Dick Cheney-type conservative, which we all once recognized.

He ghost-wrote his bio with him. Oh, not just ghost-wrote. I mean, she has been a, you know, she has been a harbinger of his politics and has been a big believer in it for a long time. Not to mention, she's actually very socially conservative. We all remember how she treated her sister, you know, during the campaign trail. It's like, how does all this stuff just get white? I guess

I was literally a child when all this was happening. I still remember the Cheney, you know, just like the controversy around Cheney and how the national conversation even happened around him. But everything is forgiven as long as you oppose Trump. And I think that's what drives me insane about both right and left politics, which is that you can be a right winger and be MAGA if you just support Trump, like Elise Stefanik, right? Elise Stefanik is, by most accounts of these so-called social conservative wars, she's a huge lib. But Trump says, oh, she's going to be the next GOP nominee. You know why? Because he only cares that she fought for him during the impeachment and during Ukrainegate and is like flirting with Stop the Steal. And apparently on the left, all it takes to be a Democrat is, oh, I hate Trump. There should be much higher standards for all of us as to what it actually means to be a part. This is why I refuse to affiliate with any broader political movement because I'm like, I don't want to be a part of your bullshit. I'm just into whatever I want to do. And that's how most people, that's how most people are. It's just, you know,

it really fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Yeah. The one six is a symptom of the problem. It is not actually the problem. And Liz Cheney is going to give us a lot more in the direct, pushing us more in that direction. This doesn't deny the agency of the wrongdoers on that day or say they shouldn't be held personally accountable or any of that. But it fundamentally misunderstands the problem that we are facing in this country, which started, you know, a long time ago, decades ago, has been perpetrated by both parties. If we don't have a dramatic shift, yeah, we are going to continue to head in this direction. Liz Cheney would just accelerate that trend, not ameliorate it. And don't, look, this is a real brain worm seeping through, you know,

elite liberalism. Put this on the screen. Don't forget this one. Biden-Cheney 2024 from Thomas Friedman. And, you know, Liz Cheney, even right now, she knows where her money and where her hide is going to get saved. Throw this up there from Politico. She's turning to Democrats to try and raise money and in order to try and win her primary battle in Wyoming, where she is being, where she, I think, is probably going to get

thrown out of office. She's going to lose. Is it an open primary in Wyoming? Is that the deal that Democrats can vote in it? So I believe, so she needs Democrats and independents to change their party registration. So it's not actually an open primary, but she's asking Wyoming Democrats. I didn't even know there were Democrats in Wyoming to come out and to do that and to change their party registration to try and save her. And the overwhelming amount of money is also coming from them. And the Wyoming GOP has already come out and censored her. So she's in a serious problem. This is very likely the twilight

of her career. But don't forget, you know, because she was mean to Trump, and if she goes out the right way, we all know that she'll be sitting on the board of Raytheon or one of these corporations the moment that she comes out of office. So it's not like she won't be well taken care of once she's out. Yeah, and she's, you know, she's got like the liberal stamp of approval now. There you go. So she's, you know, acceptable in mainstream polite society. I don't want to take away, like, I think she, of all, everybody who's been a presenter in the January 6th hearings, I think she's been the most effective. I do think it, like, she knew that coming out against Trump in this very public way, and she has gone, you know, to the mat for, you know,

in this direction. She knew this was going to potentially cost her career and she did it anyway. And I do want to give her credit for that. But that does not erase the entirety of everything else she believes. And so, again, I think we need to aspire to a little bit better than that if you actually do care about our democracy. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, this is really pretty stunning. As Democrats lead hearings into the events of January 6th, making their priority for the public and the midterms, this culminating stop this deal assault on democracy, they are at the same time directly making it more likely that election-denying radicals end up in positions of power for the next go-round.

What do I mean? Well, just take a look at this. How conservative is Ron Hanks? Hanks was rated one of the most conservative members in the statehouse. He says Joe Biden's election was a fraud. Hanks wants to ban all abortions, And he wants to build Trump's border wall. Hanks even sponsored a bill that would allow concealed carry with no permits. Ron Hanks, too conservative for Colorado. Democratic Colorado is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Okay, so that's an ad seemingly attacking Republican Senate candidate Ron Hanks as he tries to win the Republican nomination. So he's in his primary. Except it's not actually an attack ad at all. No one actually trying to take down a Republican in a GOP primary would argue the candidate was, quote, too conservative. Such attacks would only serve to bolster that candidate among a conservative base. And in fact, that is exactly the point here. These ads were placed by a Democratic Party group looking to boost the more radical candidate, the aforementioned Ron Hanks, over a more moderate businessman in the primary. The theory is that if they get the more radical candidate to win the primary, that candidate will be more beatable in the fall.

Of course, there's an obvious, massive downside to this strategy. If Mr. Crazy Pants gets through the primary, given what a challenging year it is for Democrats, there is no guarantee that Mr. Crazy Pants does not end up as your next senator from Colorado. Democrats also thought it'd be wonderful if Trump won the 2016 GOP nomination because he'd be so easy to beat. I'll have that one work out for you. And this particular candidate, he really is truly a nut job. He is 100% in on Stop the Steal. He even admitted to joining the rioting mob that breached police barricades on January 6th. Ron Hank's opening ad literally shows him blowing up a Dominion voting machine.

As Americans come to realize Biden's incompetence, a growing majority believe he was not fairly elected. Evidence of fraud in multiple states support their conclusion. I know because I attended recounts and audits in multiple states. As our next senator, I will fight for our conservative values and I'll start by targeting our broken election system. I'm Ron Hanks and I'm running for the United States Senate. I'm Ron Hanks and I approve this message. So while Democrats preen about the threat to democracy,

they are actively backing a dude who is outright telling you he is the threat to democracy. And he is far from the only one, or even the most significant. Democrats ran ads to help genuine crazy person Doug Mastriano win the primary for governor of Pennsylvania. In fact, Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro spent more on a single ad for Mastriano than Mastriano spent on ads in his entire campaign. And if you're worried about a few loony senators, you should really be concerned about a full-on stop-the-steal

governor in a key swing state who would actually be in a position to trigger a full on constitutional crisis. There are no guarantees whatsoever that Democrats will win statewide in Pennsylvania this year, regardless of how insane the Republican nominee is. Mastriano was so involved in stop the steel that he has literally come up in the January 6th committee's testimony. He was central to pushing election conspiracies in Pennsylvania. And like Hanks, he was also at the Capitol on January 6th. What in the world are Democrats doing promoting someone like this? In fact, the Democratic Governors Association is playing heavily in a number of key Republican primaries across the country, Illinois, Colorado, and Nevada, along with Pennsylvania.

So far, Democrats have spent more than $20 million propping up extreme candidates, many of whom are active election deniers. In each case, they are bolstering candidates who are considered too fringe to win in the general. But are you absolutely sure you want to bet on that? It's just one more instance of Democratic words and actions being completely at odds, like how they claim to be horrified by gun violence and by the imminent destruction of Roe v. Wade, but then they dragged an anti-choice, NRA-backed incumbent over the finish line. He's also under investigation by the FBI, so great stand for integrity there as well. I guess since Dems have decided not to do anything that'll actually make a material difference for people,

and since they have no illusions that the January 6th commission is going to actually change a single vote, this is all they've got left. I mean, I guess it makes a sort of sixth sense. If your goal is just to be a little bit better than the Republicans, making the Republicans worse means that you've moved the bar even lower and you have a lower bar to clear. An ugly race to the bottom that has no end in sight. And Sagar, since I wrote this, I've seen even more reports. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at?

While Washington was focused on January 6th, once again, another scandal has actually been floating under the surface, one which the press seemingly has no real interest in and one which is of actually great concern to millions of Americans. The Disinformation Governance Board, which at one point was headed by Nina Jankowicz, you'll remember her as the cringe theater kid TikToker in charge of the Biden Ministry of Truth, whose work was quote-unquote put on pause after a lot of public outcry. Now, we thought that that matter was settled, but new documents leaked by a whistleblower actually reveal the gaslighting the administration was doing at the time about how the board would not be censoring domestic political matters and would focus on foreign disinformation. Those are now revealed as outright lies. New documents show us that the Disinformation Governments Board actually

sought a meeting with Twitter on April 28th to ask them to, quote, become involved in the project. The meeting was planned between the board and one Yoel Roth. Now, Roth is the executive at Twitter, who along with the Twitter trust and safety team, who made the call to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in October of 2020. Just to give you an idea of who we're talking about here. Homeland Security or the White House or Nina Jankowicz herself ever admit these plans to the public. It was a secret solicitation campaign by the government with actual offers to provide government data to Twitter to spur an enforcement regime against information the government deems bad. Furthermore, the whistleblower documents show us that the government sought to censor information and label it as disinformation whenever, quote, clear and objective facts were clear. Hmm.

But, as they point to, there is no government-provided definition of that phrase. Consider how dystopian and Orwellian it is to see an actual effort by the government to provide data to Twitter to get them to censor anything that they choose which is not clear and objective fact. This is a scandal within the Biden administration that has been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. Recall, last year at the height of the campaign for vaccination, the U.S. government was labeling disinformation and providing it to Facebook in an effort to get the company to censor anything that it so requested. That included the famous call

by Jen Psaki for anyone who was banned from Facebook to also be banned from any other social media platform, a direct instruction by the White House that the big tech companies do as they say. The fusion of the national security state with big tech, that's been happening for some time. And look, in some instances, I'm sure it's warranted. ISIS, foreign terrorist recruitment, you know, enforcement against child porn. But these secret campaigns and overreach actually show you exactly why it's so worrisome to have major tech enforcement regimes working with the government in the first place. And the current mainstream media blackout on all this is especially obvious. It's why I want to double down on something I discussed yesterday. To what end are these January 6th hearings really informing

us, and what is their true purpose? Washington is alight with every detail, litigating an event from months ago, the details of which were all obvious from the beginning. Democrats and the media tell us it's all about accountability. Okay, what about accountability? Tell us. They already tried to impeach Trump through our constitutional system. They failed. Shouldn't that be the end of it? The yahoos who were there are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. What else do these people want?

To me, it is obvious and has been from the day one. This is about laying the groundwork for a surveillance regime against half the country. It's about normalizing the ideas of the Disinformation Governance Board to work with the tech companies to censor ideas under the guise of so-called protecting our democracy. And look, I'm not standing up for stop the steal people. I think that if you believe the election was stolen in 2020, you are a grade A moron. And that is about as polite as I can say it while remaining family friendly. But that doesn't mean at the end of the day that you want the federal government under different administration determining what is true and what is not when it comes to those claims. Let the court system and the media decide.

From there, if the people still believe it, well, that's on them. Freedom means that you have the right to believe dumb stuff too. Just ask vegans. It's a joke, people. Don't come after me. But my point stands and it remains the only real way that we get out in the current system that we're in. I will end by focusing on just how destructive the media is in this.

At one point, it was the job of the press to investigate claims by the government and to always be skeptical of them. Instead, we're living in an age where every TV network is hopping over itself to broadcast effectively prepared propaganda by Liz Cheney and then the Democrats who are running the January 6th committee. Since when is open advertising like that supposedly okay in journalistic ethics?

And look, if you aired it and then you discuss it in a critical way, that's fine. But that's not what's happening. It's effectively because the media effectively agrees with the current censorship regime because it protects their power of monopoly over deciding what is true and what is not. That's how we're slowly seeing the fusion of government and corporate media and the tech companies. Each has an individual incentive to collaborate with the other. The only people who lose in that situation are independent, well, it's like us, but also all of you. So don't let stories like this one just get buried under the rug.

Yes, the people actually rose up and cried out to kill this ministry of truth. But that doesn't mean that it can't happen again in some other form, some less blatant one. Remember, the original reporting on this said that the subject of the subject said that the disinformation governance board had only been paused. So they're just waiting to bring this thing back as soon as they can when people get bored or they resume focusing on other distractions. But it's part of a larger and a more pernicious agenda that we need to continue to be very weary of as we enter even darker times. And I just think the blackout on this is nuts. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is our great partner of 5149, James Lee. James, it's great to see you, man. Thanks for coming back on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. investors, not output, how it's expanding the crude crunch. Just tell us about kind of what you've discovered in your new video and given your MBA experience and longtime breakdowns for us on business strategy and more. What does that tell us about the deeper rot in the American economy? Yeah, I think that's a good question. So when we think about the oil situation that we're in right now, I think the media doesn't do a great job going into the underlying rod, to your point. I think they focus on the pretty easy targets, which is like Biden. You can always blame Biden. You can always blame Putin. But taking a look at some of these, I don't know if the tear sheet is up there or not, but taking a look at some of the recent

earnings that have come out, we have oil companies earning probably, I think it was like their second highest cash flow ever. But if we look at how they're spending their money, their expenditures have actually gone down in the last decade. So they're flush with cash. They're not really spending it on new investments or oil production. So what are they doing with it? They're actually spending it on either stock buybacks or dividends to enrich their shareholders, basically. So if you look at the CapEx compared to stock buybacks and dividends, the ratio is actually flopped. So now they're actually spending more on just returning cash to investors instead of spending it on new production. So how does that make business sense? Because it seems like if you're in the business of oil production, and of course, I've got all kinds

of issues with fossil fuel and the climate crisis and all of that. But right now we're in this crunch. If you're in the business of drilling oil and selling it into the markets. How does it make sense to have lots of cash and then not do that? Yeah. So that's another good question. Why are they doing that? So I think when we look at investments, typically when we think about capital allocation for a business, they're going to look at two things. One, they're going to look at what's going to be my rate of return for this and how much investment do I have to put in. And they compare the two. And if you're going to make more money, then usually what you would want to do is invest.

But right now, I think with oil, I think you can think about oil as somewhat of a mature industry. So investors are just demanding more return for their money. So instead of investing that, they're more likely just to return it to their shareholders because that's exactly what they want. These managers are basically incentivized to do that. And I think right now, too, if you look at oil and gas, to your point on the fossil fuels and things like that, I think we are in somewhat of a transitionary period. I think greener energy is hopefully on its way. So right now they're kind of stuck on what to do with their cash because they don't necessarily want to invest fully into green energy. I think they're doing some of that, but not fully because obviously the risk on that is high as well.

And so right now the investors are just like, yeah, just give us our money back and we'll decide what to do with it, which I think is, I think it makes, you know, if you think about it from a business perspective, you know, the managers and you think about executives, they're basically there to make sure that their earnings and their valuations are as high as possible. And they're really doing that effectively quite well through financial engineering. So they've basically done their job, but there's very little consideration of kind of the effect that that has on the rest of the population. Yeah, absolutely. You want to know something funny? A friend of mine who works in the industry

was telling me that a lot of oil managers are retiring because their stock has never been at a higher level for their portfolio. So they're like, I'm getting the hell out of here. I'm cashing out my options. I'm good to go. And so actually, it's screwing the companies over even more because their top talent is leaving and it's all because of stock. So actually, that's kind of something, you know, you have a business background, you referenced CapEx. First of all, can you explain that a little bit to our audience who aren't as financially minded? But what does all of this financial engineering and more, it doesn't just tell us about oil. This is how every company in the Fortune 500 works today.

So what are the perverse incentives that it then leads them to do? Yeah, so in terms of CapEx, basically it stands for capital expenditure. And it's just, you can think about it easily as the investment you have to put in to make something like, CapEx would be like making a new factory, a new oil rig. And so just necessary investments

that you have to make to grow the business. And business is not just in oil, but basically in every single sector has been disincentivized to spend money on CapEx because Wall Street is really focused on this idea of asset-like companies. They like asset-like companies because there's not a lot of overhead. So you could think about that as like pharmaceutical companies, instead of making their own drugs in-house at their own manufacturing facility, would rather just outsource that to a third party. Either it could be in the U.S., but it could also be overseas. It's happening all over that industry.

There's other industries like Intel, microchip manufacturer. They're actually outsourcing some of their semiconductor production overseas to the Taiwan Semiconductor Company, which is all great and well right now. But you're basically giving a lot of power, you're basically empowering your suppliers to maybe one day take over what you're currently doing. So I mean, you have the case of Boeing, I'm sure some of you have seen the documentary on Netflix, where they're basically building planes without designing much of it, nor producing much of it. And that leads a lot of, that leads them to be exposed to a lot of

problems down the road. So basically, you know, you can think about America as these brands that are big and powerful, but they don't really have any underlying assets to back that up. And I think that's kind of a dangerous road to go down, especially for society. Although, you know, business doesn't have necessarily a moral obligation to society. And that's where I think the perverse incentives come into play. And how do you change that incentive structure? Or can you? I mean, I think you can. I think it's obviously very difficult. I think we have to untangle business from politics. I think if you look at the current Biden administration, they have a lot of their cabinet coming from this consultancy firm.

I think West Exec is what it's called. And I, I read their, their mission and motto. I think it literally says bringing the boardroom to the situation room, which is they're outwardly declaring that they want to, uh, bind together the public and private sector. And that's kind of, to me, that's, that's, that's really the, the, the crux of the problem is, is we have basically, if you think about business as, uh, about business as players in a game, you think about government maybe as the refs. We have the players who obviously want to win this game, but they're also tied up with the refs. They're changing the rules as they play.

The refs aren't really able to control the game. So you think about that. That's kind of the world that we live in right now. So then we have to have sort of independent government actors that are separate from the business players. If you think about it, a lot of times the government, you know, the members of Congress, they're also the shareholders of these companies, businesses, shareholders, everybody's a shareholder. So then it really makes it so that one small group of people are living quite well, where the rest of us who

aren't as, you know, privileged to have these connections and tied into kind of the financialized world are suffering because of that. Yeah, I think that's what it all comes back to. Well said, man. Yeah. The video drops this weekend, guys. I can't wait to check it out. You've been doing phenomenal work. Everybody go subscribe to James' channel, 5149. Check out his video this weekend. And great to see you, my friend. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us, man.

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We got an announcement coming on Thursday about the live tour.

I keep saying it, but it actually is coming, I promise. And look, if you are helping us out on the premium subscription, I know times are tough for some people out there, but if you can help us, it means the world. It enables us to partner with people like James, support his work, Jordan Sheridan on the ground for that Amazon vote right now in Phoenix. We have a reporter there.

We're going to have some of the footage. Having a footprint across the country costs money. We're looking into bringing somebody else on the team as well. So these are all reasons why we rely on you so much for your support. And we think about you every day. I know the times are tough for some of you. And obviously, regardless of the premium thing, all of that, I hope everybody else is hanging in there. Yeah, indeed. We love you guys. We'll see you back here on Thursday.