Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/21/21: Housing Disaster, Domestic Terrorism, Supply Shortages, Crumbling Infrastructure, and More!

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

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which is available in the show notes. We love you guys. Enjoy the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Yes, we do. Indeed, we do, I should say. Can't say it differently. Can't say it differently. People freak out. Okay, so we got new developments in whatever's going on in the housing market, which is insane. That's what we're going to start with today. We've got some new developments in Biden's push against domestic terrorism and what exactly that's going to mean, as well as some new questions being raised about what exactly happened on January 6th.

Texas is having another electricity meltdown. So what exactly is going on there? MSNBC appears to be doing a little bit of good old-fashioned union busting. Jeff Bezos is crying. We'll tell you why. That's a little tease for you there. But we did want to start with that housing crisis. Yeah, this is pretty amazing. Also, before we start, we have some beautiful mugs here, union-made in the USA mugs, Breaking Points mugs. Many of you have asked where you can get them. There's a link down there in the description. So this is actually a vitally important story that we've been focusing on ever since even we were at Rising, in terms of how private equity is gobbling up the housing market and distorting it. Okay. Now, as we told you, I think when we were down in Austin and we said,

oh, there's all these people out there being like, oh, who cares? BlackRock, it's cheaper housing, higher housing prices for the owners. It's fantastic. Well, the quiet part is now being said even more out loud. Let's put this up there on the screen from Bloomberg. From Carl Smith, America should become a nation of renters. Quote, The very features that made houses an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.

Rising real estate prices are stoking fears homeownership, long considered a core component of the American dream, is slipping out. That may be so, but a nation of renters is nothing to fear. In fact, it's the opposite. Basically, here's what it comes down to. Carl's argument is that there's nothing we can really do whenever it comes to the housing market being totally out of control. Thus, we should accept our fate as a nation of renters.

And actually, renting has all these benefits, like being able to move different places and all that. Carl conveniently ignores one thing, which is housing is, oh, just the number one way that we accumulate intergenerational wealth in America. If you want to know why we have a black-white wealth gap in the United States, it's largely because of housing policies from the 1950s and 1960s rather than anything that even came before that. Same thing after 2008. Why exactly did we have the largest drop in black wealth in modern history? It's because black and Latino homeowners were disproportionately more likely to get evicted from their homes, lose mortgages. Oh, and now they have nothing in order to pass on to their children who are then now currently in debt, have nothing to borrow against. I can go all the way down in terms of the tax benefits of housing, the social

benefits of housing, the communitarian aspect. This is pure neoliberal brain of, oh, you know what? Screw you. You basically should just be a widget in a machine. And you know who you, I've been saying this, the housing, the private equity people have been salivating at the idea of having middle class people pay their mortgage payments not basically to themselves, but to the bank. It's the most profitable transaction in American history. That's what this is all about, Crystal. This is very troubling in order to see this type of stuff, but this is how they think. They don't think like human beings. Right. So your housing investment, instead of helping you and your family to accumulate wealth, is now helping the people who already have all the wealth accumulate wealth. That's basically what we're talking about here. There's actually a lot to say about this. So this Carl Smith guy, he's like a think tank tax policy guy. Actually, kind of smart sometimes. And I mean, it reminds me a lot of the sort of arguments that were made about free trade, where it's like, overall, the market will be more efficient and will add, you know, half of a percentage point to GDP.

So overall, this will be a good thing for people. That may be true if you're looking at this like a psychopath who doesn't care about like the individual humans who are involved. They throw around terms like creative destruction. What does that mean? That means your town is screwed. That's what that town means. That's what that term means. It means that we're going to suck all the jobs out and we don't really care if your town never comes back. We don't really care if your town becomes like this abandoned hust with Main Street shut down and all the factories rotting out. Like, frankly, most of the country became because of those types of policies. So he's making becomes like this abandoned hust with Main Street shut down and all the factories rotting out, like, frankly, most of the country became because of those types of policies. So

he's making the housing equivalent of that argument. Like, overall, this is going to make markets more efficient. The housing stock is more liquid. So this is actually a good thing if you ignore the human cost of what this looks like on a person-to-person basis. Yes, if you're already a homeowner and you want to sell, great. It's good for you. You're building wealth. The housing prices are going through the roof. You've got BlackRock competing with individual homeowners coming in with all cash, coming in above asking price. Great for you. If you're in the class of people, the majority of Americans who haven't made it to be able to own a home and accumulate any wealth whatsoever,

then this is a disaster. And the Wall Street Journal has a look at, they've actually surprisingly been doing some of the better reporting on this. Who are these like based people at the Wall Street Journal? There's like rebel reporters at the Wall Street Journal. But anyway, they talked to a number of prospective buyers, individual people who are trying to buy homes and finding that like, even when they come in above asking price, if they don't have a either all cash or significant cash down payment, they're getting outbid every time. So you see the gentleman here that's pictured, he's one of the people that they spoke with. And in fact, the numbers back this up. So half of existing homebuyers in April who use mortgages put at least 20 percent down. So you've basically got to have

at least 20 percent of the purchase price in order to be able to come close to touching a home at this point. So that's very different from what we've seen in the past decade. And now this was an interesting quote from one of the realtors that they talked about, too, which just shows you, to your point about the people who have wealth and they have family and generational wealth that they're able to pass forward and get you into that class of homeowners and people who can accumulate assets. One of the realtors that they talked to said, I'd say at least 50 percent of my first time homebuyers are getting gifts right now, meaning that they've got parents or grandparents or whoever in their life who can help give them the money to be able to put down that 20 or 30

or 50 percent so that they've got a shot in this game, because otherwise you don't stand a chance. You're dead. This guy who they profile here, he and his family, they gave up. They gave up. They said, you know what, we'll just keep renting for now, which means more years of not being able to build wealth. And we'll try to save for a larger down payment so that maybe down the road we can get there. But right now, it looks like a losing race for people who are first-time homebuyers. So just to give people, I was just doing some rough calculations here. So according to this journal piece from the NAR, which is the National, I think, Association of Realtors, the median home price in the United States right now

has gone up by 19% from a year earlier. 19%, that's astronomical. That goes up to $341,600. Now, according to this, you basically don't have a shot at being able to buy a house without a lump sum of at least 20% down. So what does that mean? That is $68,200, as in savings, an entire sum that you would be willing to put up, which is, I think, a standard deviation above the average family yearly income of the United States. How are people supposed to save up that type of money? This is completely impossible. This is what they say. I'd say at least 50% of my homebuyers getting the gifts right now showing that they also are getting preferential rates from the banks. So you are screwed at every step of the value chain. You don't have the savings, screw you. You can't even buy the house. Oh, you have 5% and let's say by a miracle you get the

mortgage, you're still going to get a higher rate and you're going to have a much larger principle that you're going to have to pay down for a longer period of time. Essentially, what we're seeing here is that, of course, like all things in the story of class in America, minority housing owners or minority would-be buyers are being totally screwed. And largely, the entire lower middle class, you don't even have a chance in hell at buying a house right now. And I think that's immoral because the way that we're looking at this is that this whole nation, America should become a nation of renters. Okay, if you're somebody like me, you live in the city. I've moved five times in the last four years.

You know, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but like I have the ability to do so. Everybody I know who's my age, 29 years old for reference, everybody rents. Nobody even buys a house. There's not even a chance in hell in terms of here in Washington, D.C. And there is some benefit to it, right? So like, oh, I heard this neighborhood over here is getting cool, all of that. But we are not the American economy and American body politic. And if you look at, and this is why I'm obsessed with this, which is if you look at the number one reason why people say that they're not getting married or especially not having kids, they say

they don't have the ability to do so. Housing is a huge part of that story. Whenever you're a renter, guess what you don't control? The price of your abode. And maybe, this is what happened to me, a landlord can just be like, yeah, you got to get out of here. Sorry, it's my place. I've decided I want to sell it.

I've got two months. You got to get, if you have a child, you can't do that. Yeah. What are you going to do? Oh, and by the way, rent prices went up 25% in the rest of the country. I found this yesterday. The Huffington Post profiled this. I didn't have time to get the tear sheet made.

But just to show you how insane the market is, this house in Colorado is listed on the market for $590,000. A lot of money. It's described as a little slice of hell. Urine saturated. The previous tenant, like, just completely destroyed. Stuffed animal feces into drawers. Destroyed the home. It's being sold as is, by the way.

This isn't like, oh, we're going to make improvements to it to justify $590,000. No. Spray paint graffiti all over the wall. Urine soaked carpets. Literally human and animal feces on the floor. A freezer full of meat that has been rotting now for months because the electricity was turned off. Okay. That's the state of this house. And this realtor has gotten something like 80 offers on it. In California? In Colorado. Oh, in Colorado? $590,000. She's received 16 cash offers, all cash offers, and got 89 text messages about it in one afternoon.

Oh my God. Okay, that's the level of insanity that we're talking about. Because in large part, you have a small amount of stock on the market, and then you have all this permanent capital, private equity, and all these institutional investors getting in on the game. And so even shitholes like this, literal shitholes, right? Literal. There's no other way to describe literal shitholes, right? Literal. There's no other way to describe that one. Yeah, I don't know.

For more than half a million dollars. So that's the level of insanity that we're talking about here. And to bring it back to the really serious, Heather Long has a new piece in The Washington Post. She's a phenomenal reporter. She's really got her finger on the pulse of these bigger trends that are going on right now. And she points out the eviction moratorium is about to end. OK. And we covered, of course, how a lot of the rental assistance that was passed by Congress never got out to the people who needed it. Right. So people

have really been hosed. You have this dichotomy where the economy is doing pretty well. You've got a lot of job creation. You've got a lot of openings. Things are coming back. Things are reopening, et cetera, et cetera. But you also have this mass of people who are way behind on their rent. And landlords have been chomping at the bit to be at the top level set to really expand and workers have some power in the workplace because employers really need to hire them and they're getting the wages are increased, all that stuff. You also are facing a potential situation where you could have a massive homelessness crisis as those rents skyrocket, because the story of the pandemic

and the post-pandemic economy thus far has been housing prices have been skyrocketing, but rents have stayed relatively low. That trend is beginning to change. Now we're seeing, especially these single-family homes that private equity has been buying up, rents for those are going up and up and up. And the expectation is that rent overall, especially once we have the eviction moratorium end, are going to skyrocket. And people are are going to be they're going to be screwed. I mean, there's just no other way to put it.

So at sort of every every level of the income spectrum, even those who don't even aspire to own a house right now would just like to get into an apartment are facing very, very uncertain prospects and potential homelessness here in just a number of weeks. Yeah, it's just it's tough times out there. If you're an average person, you want to buy a house, I feel for you because there is just I don't know. I don't know how you can go up against BlackRock, how you can go up against, you know, these private equity giants and more. It's just it's just such a troubling time. This is the foundation of who we are. And to see people out there just outright lobbying against it, it's just completely wrong. Well, and listen, again, if there was another system in place for people to be able to build wealth. Yeah, but there's not, right. But there's not, right? Then maybe we can talk about, oh, the market could be more efficient. Everyone buy Dogecoin. Also,

what kind of a weird value system is it where like, no, it's good for you to be thoroughly unrooted to any community or place. That's again, that like neoliberal mindset. Yeah. And we need to efficiently allocate you across the country. Whereas, you know, most actual human beings, they like having roots in a place and a community. In fact, that's part of what we're seeing is more professional managerial class people wanting to move to places that are less anonymous, little smaller cities with more space where it's more important, like who your neighbors are and there's more connection there. It's like the most basic human value, but completely invisible to these people who are just like crunching the numbers at the top levels of the

economy. That's right. America should not become a nation of renters. Yes, indeed. Bottom line. All right. So there's another story we've been following. I want to do this one really carefully. So January 6th. OK. Obviously, still a lot of very important to understand on the deep level how we got to a place where something like January 6th could even happen. Also important to know, like, what did the intelligence community know beforehand? What were the failures that led to this, you know, overrunning of the nation's capital? So there have been new questions raised by some on the right about what the FBI and our nation's intelligence agencies knew before and whether they, in fact, had informants within some of these groups, the three percenters and the other, the proud boys and the other, the oath keepers, these other militia groups. Okay. So let me just say that the reason I want to be really careful with this story is because it's sort of, first of all, it's, it's very controversial, but also it really plays into a lot of existing biases for

people. So on the right, there's this desire to sort of like dismiss January 6th. There've been a number of efforts to say basically like, oh, these weren't even Trump support. This was like Antifa, which is silly, not true. We know that's the case, okay? So that one kind of fell flat. There's been an attempt to sort of downplay how just what a horrific event it was.

We both are of the opinion that it was a horrific, unconscionable day. So we're not on board with that. And now coming from some of the same type of people is the suggestion that FBI informants were involved in helping to plot this attack on the Capitol. OK, the evidence is very thin at this point all around. There is no like there's nothing clear to say that the FBI was involved at all, even with placing informants in some of these groups and plenty on the right. And Tucker Carlson in particular, he's the one who did like a big monologue on this and was way more definitive about what actually exists in terms of evidence than is justified. So he basically all but said some of the unindicted co-conspirators for the rioters may have been, he said essentially, they likely were FBI informants. Well, that particular piece is just not true because you wouldn't be named as an unindicted co-conspirator if you're working for the

government. You're not conspiring as a criminal if you're working for the government. However, that doesn't eliminate all the questions about whether the FBI had informants with these groups and what they knew in advance. So that's sort of the right wing side of it. The reaction to that has been over the top on the liberal side to say like unhinged, ridiculous that the FBI, our good national intelligence, they would never infiltrate these groups and be involved in helping to plot these attacks, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there's also no evidence for that claim. And in fact, and this is Glenn Greenwald has a good piece. He's the only person in all of this who's been sort of like a really, I think, honest actor in terms of laying out what we know and what we don't know, it would actually be surprising if the FBI hadn't in some way infiltrated

some of these militia groups. And I would think liberals would agree that you would actually want the FBI monitoring the three percenters and the oath keepers and the Proud Boys, whose leader, by the way, is a known former FBI informant. Long time FBI informant. So let's just put that on the table, too. We also know, and this is one of the things that Glenn points out, too. We talked about this last week in that Michigan plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We know that the FBI had informants involved directly in that plot.

So we do know, and that was, I think, a three percenter group. So we do know that at least in that instance, they were very well read in and had people placed within that group helping actually to plot this kidnapping. And then, of course, law enforcement swoops in and scoops up the guys who were planning this horrific attack. So that's what we know, which is very little. And basically, why I wanted to cover this story is just to say, like, be really careful with this. There's no evidence that the FBI had direct foreknowledge or was directly involved in any way. There's also no evidence, and there's a lot of history saying that, you know, it's not crazy to think that that could have been the case. So I'm completely agnostic on the question of what actually happened. But I do think it's something that is worth pursuing and asking questions about, again, just because of what we know about how the FBI acts. Think about during the war on terror and something else that we covered, the way that they would essentially radicalize Muslim young men who may be less than

intelligent. This is coming from like their own parents and family members. They're like, he was impressionable. Right. Financially distressed. They would sort of prey on these vulnerable young men, effectively radicalize them, sort of talk them into a plot that they never would have had the ability to execute on their own and then use that to, number one, you know, do their job and get paid as FBI informants to enhance the careers of politicians who want to say, look at all these plots that we're disrupting. And the concern is that we're now going to apply those same, in my opinion, unconscionable tactics to this new push on domestic terrorism. Yeah, I'm glad the way that you set that up, because you're right. It is far

too much in order to say explicitly that this was directed. But look, it is kind of crazy that all these low-level protesters have been charged, as Glenn points out, with major felonies and held without bail, and many of the alleged, quote, plot leaders have thus far been shielded from charges. Maybe they'll get charged in the future. But as they pointed out, this is actually a long-time tactic of confidential informants. Like you said, not necessarily agents, but confidential informants. So does that mean that they were informants, as in they had contact with the FBI? Does that mean that they were explicitly directed by the FBI? All of that has yet to come out. So there's absolutely zero question around it. But I think that the money quote and what you said is true. It would be kind of crazy to think

that the FBI doesn't have informants in any of these groups. It would actually be counter to all of that. And that is where the media comes into play and just goes completely insane. And now we have a new form of TDS. It's Tucker Derangement Syndrome, which is that, okay, look, Tucker's job is to inflame. Like, that's what he does. And so he goes out there and he gives this monologue, and I guarantee you he knew exactly what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, what happens?

Brian Stelter and the Huffington Post and all these people absolutely freak out. Tucker Carlson of the far right wants to recast January 6th as a false flag by the deep state. You see CNN and many others come out, and they say the same thing. You see all of these people who are on CNN, actually, Glenn pulled this transcript, which is amazing. Chris Cuomo, when covering this, he goes, okay, let's talk about what is true and not true. Joining us now, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Oh, so we're going to ask the former spook guy who was in charge of some of this stuff in order to weigh in on whether there were spooks embedded in January 6th? This is actually more of a media point than it is around the actual allegation itself. Ask the allegation, I don't know. And listen, I'm staying tuned. Frankly, it would not shock me if any of this turned out to be true. But what I really think is ridiculous is how much, it's kind of like lab leak. If you float it, if you float it, it has to be disproven, even if there's a kernel

of truth. And to be fair, this is part of the problem. If Tucker and Revolver News are the only ones who are putting it out there, then it gives them the ammo to say this is a total right-wing conspiracy who wants to do it. Look, the world screams for the average, normal investigative reporter to go out there with some decent FBI sources and ask them. There are people at the Washington Post. These people were your little Russiagate stenographers for three years. You can't go out there and maybe ask the question. This is more of a media story, in my opinion, than anything else.

We could know tomorrow if the story was true or not. But the people who actually have the sources as to prove it true or false, they don't want to do so, which I also do think speaks volumes as to the allegation here. Well, I do think it's interesting. So first of all, just to give you an example of how Tucker went way too far and actually made it easy to have the liberal media freak out and be like, this is totally ridiculous. So he says, this is a quote from that monologue. Strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6th have not been charged. That's true. Look at the documents. The government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives. That part is completely false,

right? You wouldn't be called an unindicted co-conspirator if you were working for the government. That's not the way this works. So the fact that he goes so far on that piece with something that's easily knocked down led to these liberal outlets just saying the whole thing is bunk. It's like COVID in the bioweapon. It doesn't have to be a bioweapon to still come from a lab. Right. So the part that is a legitimate question is there are a lot of people who were allegedly sort of the ringleaders of planning and plotting and executing this riot that have not been charged. Meanwhile, a lot of the lower level people are being charged and hit

pretty hard in terms of the way that they're being charged. So you have to ask the question, OK, what's going on there? And then you also just have to look at history and know how the FBI operates and ask, you know, what did you guys know? And so if you can take the kind of right left liberal Trump supporter piece out of it, liberals are very interested in knowing what happened on January 6th. This is one of the major sort of like points of emphasis within the mainstream Democratic Party, within the mainstream media, right? The January 6th commission and wanting to get the bottom of what happened there. And certainly I think we could all say that part of getting to the bottom of that is knowing what

our intelligence agencies knew in advance and how they so utterly failed to prevent this from happening. Like that just seems like a really basic question because it could very well be, new in advance and how they so utterly failed to prevent this from happening? Like, that just seems like a really basic question because it could very well be, and this was some of what Ken Klippenstein suggested in terms of the just intelligence failure and failure to have the manpower there to be able to disrupt all of this, was that there was kind of like an ideological blind spot there. You had a lot of people who were more sympathetic to the right, more sympathetic towards Trump, and that kept them from effectively doing their jobs. We don't know that that's the case, but that's one potential implication that should certainly be explored and ties into this

whole question. So, you know, once again, you have a situation where it's a legitimate question. We don't have the answer to it. The media hasn't been focused on it, even though it's very much squarely in line with the type of questions that you would want to ask if you actually care about a real January 6th commission and really getting to the bottom of what happened on that day. That's a fantastic, that is a fantastic summary there because it's important to say like, oh, you want to find out what really happened? I'm totally down. That's what we were talking about on Rogan's podcast. I'm like, listen, if this was a real inquiry and we're really going to get down to it, great. But we all know that that's not actually the case. So unfortunately, that's where things are right now. We're going to keep on top of the story. I do actually think it's very, very important. Could reveal to us a

lot about the new war on terror and all of that. Hey guys. So remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here I am again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to crystalandsauger.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Let's talk now about the Texas energy grid. So you flagged this story. This is totally crazy. All right. Let's go ahead and put this up grid. So you flagged this story. This is totally

wild. All right. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen because it's just totally nuts, which is that the people woke up in Texas to find that their smart thermostats were raised remotely. So they did not know their thermostats were being accessed until it was 80 degrees inside of their homes. OK, so how does this happen? Well, it goes and it turns out his wife had received an alert on her phone. This is one man who said this happened. And the family said the thermostat had been chained remotely because of a three-hour energy-saving event. Now, many smart thermostats are enrolled in a program called Smart Savers Texas, which is operated by a company called Energy Hub.

Now, that agreement states that in exchange for entry into the sweepstakes, electric customers allow them to control their thermostats during periods of high energy demand. And Energy Hub's clients include TXU Energy, a bunch of other energy providers in Texas. Texas Power is kind of like a Wild West situation where you have a bunch of different people down. My parents were telling me about it. I'm like, this is insane. Like in terms of the amount of bartering you can basically do about which power company and stuff that you want. And it turns out that part of that is you can have your thermostat remotely screwed with. This is kind of dystopian. So on the one hand, like I get it. Obviously, we were recently down in Texas. It was very hot. It was like 110 degrees. Yeah, and everyone was like, hey, you know, we could have another power outage and all that.

And I think this does just speak to some of the crazy stuff that's beginning to happen as our infrastructure grid is just like rotting away. And Texas Monthly, I guess it's a magazine, which I really respect. Go ahead and put this up there. They wrote a fantastic piece that I read a couple of days ago. I wanted to share it with you, which is what is wrong with the Texas grid. And it's basically about our electric system cannot deliver power when we need it the most. And I think that this is the most important thing, which is that if you go and you read into exactly how this happened, the problem is, is that the electric grid is decrepit and worse, that it is particularly malfunctioning at the times when you need it the most, whenever it's very cold and when it's very hot. Now, this isn't necessarily crazy, because that's when, of course,

when grids get stressed. But what they point to is that the lawmakers are not doing anything right now in order to address all of the holes that led to blackouts during the, what was it, the deep freeze? Yeah. And now during the heat wave, which is going to lead to these really dystopian situations like what we see with the thermostat. That just freaked me the hell out. Yeah. The idea of waking up and being like, why is it so hot inside of my house? Somebody remotely changing the temperature in your house is really weird. And a lot of people are connected, I'm actually connected to one of those like smart thermost And a lot of people are connected. I'm actually connected to one of those like smart stats as well at my house, which I'm now very

troubled by. But yeah, obviously we all remember what happened over the winter. People died. Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot. People died because of the failure of the electrical grid. And at the time, a lot of the conversation focused on like, oh, it needs to be winterized and oh, it's because they shifted to too much renewable energy and there's not enough sun. That was ridiculous and not true at all. And so what this Texas Monthly piece really reveals is it's a little complicated because electrical systems are a little complicated, but basically the villain is libertarianism. Basically the villain is this is one of those situations where the quote unquote free market created a massive market failure where you're not incentivized to create any excess capacity so that when you have, you know, unusual events like a deep freeze in Texas, a place that doesn't normally get that cold. Or you would think in Texas they might be

ready for 110 degree weather, but that's also an unusually extreme event. So when you have those events, basically you're not prepared because there aren't any incentives built into that system to build excess capacity. Why? Because look, if you're just like looking at the straight profit margin. Oh, it's cheaper for sure. And you're not thinking about the human cost. If you're just doing the cost benefit analysis and like human beings dying during the winter or potentially dying during the summer when it gets too hot, isn't like a cost to you and your business, then you're better off not building excess capacity, which would normally just sit there unused and not be as profitable. So that's really, and Texas Monthly, again, does a really great job breaking this down. That's

really the problem here is that you don't have any government effort to make sure there is the excess capacity to deal with these extreme weather events. And what do we know? As the climate warms and climate change gets further along into its end stages here, we're going to have more and more extreme climate shifts. I think this is also a story about culture war, though, because after that horrific event in the winter where people died and there was so much national focus, horrible, right? You would have thought that they would do something, and they didn't. They didn't do anything. They're not planning on doing anything. And it seems to me that probably one of the reasons is because our politics collapses down to these like flashpoint cultural issues. So you can get away with just like weighing in on those and culturally signaling to the base and leave something that is just like a glaring failure, completely unresolved, so that now here we are just a few months later facing a very similar and potentially catastrophic situation once again. The incentive in the GOP in Texas is to tweet something about the Green New Deal while our constituents are freezing to death.

And then whenever it comes time to actually fixing the problem, you don't do a damn thing about it. Oh, and now the electric grid is down again. Oh, and here's the worst part. The voters will not punish you because they also hate AOC and they hate liberals. So it's one of these win, win, win situations. Everybody is actually, in a way, they're getting exactly what they want. And that's actually what really makes me really sad about this, which is this is my home state. And look, there were at least something to be said about some limited deregulation and power in the 1980s. But what we've seen in Texas is like the full-blown Enron-like end state, where this is what we have, which is that we now have it so that we have just-in-time power delivery. This actually relates very strongly to my radar, where I'm talking about a national

shortage crisis and the same efficiency standards which screwed us as a country, they're now coming for us whenever it comes to power. Such a great point. Such a great point. Okay, another thing we were looking at, and this is really interesting too. Crystal loves this one. Yeah, I do. MSNBC workers, kudos to them, are looking to form a union. Very cool. And we can throw this article up on screen. The part of it that's funny though is that, of course, you know, Progressive Network, MSNBC, they're engaging in the same corporate speak. And it may be a little aggressive to call it union-busting tactics, but essentially they wouldn't just go ahead and recognize the union. They're forcing a vote, which gives them the opportunity to engage in all of those union-busting tactics that we're so familiar with. And it's just funny how so often it is the case that any corporation that's espousing all these progressive values and we're so woke and we're so liberal and we're so out there and we're leaning forward and all this stuff. When it comes to labor rights, suddenly they sound exactly like Koch Industries. So it's very corporate speak

memo that was put out by Rashida Jones, who's the network's new president. She says, I respect our employees right to decide whether they want to be represented by a union. And I believe our employees should be able to make such an important decision through a standard election process. Again, that's corporate speak for saying like, we're going to make you vote on it and we're going to make sure we have some time to try to dissuade you. The Writers Guild was very disappointed. They wrote MSNBC needs to follow its own progressive principles and honor the decision made by its editorial employees to unionize. So obviously they are not impressed with MSNBC's progressive values here. And I just think it's really interesting the way that the mask comes off

anytime workers' rights are involved. Well, you want to see how wokeism pairs very well with anti-union tactics? So on Thursday, MSNBC Senior Vice President of News, Dan Arnell, spoke with staff and said that contract negotiations could go on years, repeatedly citing examples of where a contract negotiation went on as like 17 years and nearly 20 years. He argued that union dues and fees could discourage low salary, entry-level employees from joining MSNBC, and also suggested the fees would discourage non-white candidates from taking jobs at MSNBC because there's a $500 initiation fee. So he's basically trying to use identity politics to discourage unionization

at his place. And this whole like the contract, I mean, isn't that right out there, all out in the open. This is the senior vice president of noose at MSBC, who is telling his employees this stuff. And so it just pairs very well, Crystal. You can use your woke identity politics in order to do whatever the hell you want in this country if you're part of the boss class. That's amazing. So we'll see where this goes. I know Chris Hayes tweeted out something favorable. I'm hoping that, I know Ben Smith had his eye on this. I'm hoping that reporters kind of keep their eye on the type of tactics that they use to try to dissuade employees from forming a union. That's a very interesting technique there. But, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see the full playbook roll down like they did at Amazon.

I mean, there is a standard playbook for how to keep employees, how to keep workers from forming a union. And they may feel a little constrained to be a little more subtle than, say, Amazon was. But I bet we're going to see a lot of the same tactics. I think you're right. And speaking of rich people who genuflect. Speaking of Amazon. Speaking of Amazon and all of that, this is my favorite. OK, we have to keep you guys updated on this story. We'll keep this relatively quick. But it's very, very important. So let's put this up there on the screen. So we told you about how that there was this Bezos bailout effort for a $10 billion contract for Blue Origin that was stuck into the Endless Frontier Act by the senator from Washington

at the behest of Jeff Bezos because he was very upset this company did not get a contract. Well, the House of Representatives, Republicans, and Democrats teaming up, one of the few right-left coalitions coming together, have come together and said, hell no, Mr. Bezos, you are not getting your little bailout there for Blue Origin. This was always a very important example because it showed how Bezos was able to use the power of Amazon in order to fund his company, Blue Origin, this was always a very important example because it showed how Bezos was able to use the power of Amazon in order to fund his company, Blue Origin. And look, he can do whatever he wants with his personal money. But then using his leverage over the senator from Washington, getting her to put in a $10 billion appropriation, a lunar landing probe, which was almost certainly

going to Blue Origin under the rules of the way the contract negotiation was going. And it really, I think, made us all upset because NASA had actually been asking for similar levels of funding towards their program. And she, as the head of the committee, was never amenable to actually providing the actual funding that NASA needed. But when Mr. Bezos comes knocking for Blue Origin, because it's basically a vanity thing where he's like, well, I want us to get a big, you know, Elon can't get all of the space glory. Then Congress, the entire U.S. Senate snaps too. Only I think Bernie was one of the few people in order to speak out against it. Luckily, House Democrats and Republicans have come together and have said, nope, that's not happening at all. And so now at least a senator from Washington can go to Bezos and be like, I tried.

I tried. And she'll still get her nice big donation. I want to give special credit to Pramila Jayapal, who represents a Seattle district that has tons of Amazon employees in it. And also, I'm sure, you know, got calls from Bezos or his lobbyists or whatever. Jake Harney. And she just flat out said, look, if Jeff calls from Bezos or his lobbyists or whatever. And she just flat out said, look, if Jeff Bezos wants to explore space, that's great. But I don't think he needs federal dollars. So and she said that he, Blue Argent, did not need a handout, which is just like, I mean, this is the most obvious comment ever. But especially when you're in that sphere of influence in that region of the country, I think it's impressive that you put your foot down. and she didn't just do it quietly, made sure to come out and be like, hell no to all of this.

It is very it's actually very revealing about how it is that over decades we've stripped the ability of the federal government to create to create things on their own. Right. The capacity to build infrastructure. I mean, during the New Deal, it wasn't like, we're going to hire out to private content. The federal government built it. We built it ourselves, and now we just take for granted that we can't possibly do that, right? This is NASA, and space exploration is another perfect example. There was actually a big push in the 90s in particular. This was a big Clinton thing to outsource a lot of federal government capacity to the private sector. There's always this assumption that the private sector will be more efficient.

They'll do a better job. That maybe sometimes pans out, but oftentimes it doesn't. We see that with private prisons, too. The numbers on that are horrific in terms of the treatment, certainly, but even in terms of things like recidivism and the ratings of those facilities, they're total failure. We see it in terms of health care. Medicare, much more efficient in terms of dollars spent for actual care than private health insurance plans. So there's no reason to actually believe

that these external space exploration companies, whether it's Elon's or Jeff Bezos or whatever other billionaire wants to get in the game, will actually do a better job than NASA. But they have the lobbyists to go to Marie Cantwell or whoever and get the money and build the capacity. Meanwhile, like NASA doesn't have a lobbyist to go and like throw their weight around and make campaign contributions to say,

hey, we should be able to keep this capacity within the federal government. You know what's even worse, Crystal, which is that the head of NASA, who is Bill Nelson, who is the failed, defeated senator from Florida and who was given his nice plum little push because he was an astronaut, as he would tell you a million times. Well, he was supportive of the Senate measure, saying it would, quote, set us on a path to execute many landings on the moon in this decade. What? Yeah. And you know why? Because he's a former senator from Florida and he got kicked out on his ass by Rick Scott. And he's a part of the political machine who was appointed there by Biden. And guarantee you that the man has had dealings with Bezos and with Amazon and all of this.

And when you have the head of NASA themselves advocating for programs in order to benefit private space companies and not NASA itself, I think that tells you a lot about how the government works. That's actually really wild. And it's because they all want to keep the options. He's a politician. He's not a NASA guy. I mean, look, like I said, despite the fact

that he's always talking about how he's an astronaut. Yeah. Didn't he, like, not do that much either? Okay, he, like, went to space for a couple of days. He's, like, he's an astronaut. Look, respect. He's technically an astronaut, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is very, very

revealing because he wants to keep his options open for, hey, you know, Jay Carney got a plum gig over there at Amazon. Maybe that's going to be my future as well if I play nice. He can go work at Blue Origin as a consultant and he can make hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rest of his life. Yeah, or be on the board or whatever. Yeah, that really says it all. Yeah. Wow.

You guys must really like listening to our voices because here I am again asking you to become a premium member at crystalandsauger.com. So you don't have to hear these pleas. And as annoying as I know this is, it's not a Viagra commercial like you're going to see on cable news. So go ahead and count your lucky stars. As you're about to notice, the free show does not include the discussion after each of our monologues, which is one of our premium benefits. Help us beat the corporate media today, get access to the full show. Take care, guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, it is an absolutely crazy time right now in America today. On the one hand, we have this old caretaker president who seems barely there. Bizarrely, actually seems to meet the moment. Things are calm. People are going

outside. People are pronouncing summer of whatever pronoun that you want type of summer. Normalcy seems just on the horizon. But beneath the surface, there's some really weird stuff in this country that's going on right now. And it spells warning signs for the future of us. And more importantly, it shows how much of a mistake America made by refusing to fix any of its major problems during the pandemic. Now, one of Crystal and my major goals in going independent was the ability to cover stories which may not get the most clicks, but which are still vitally important to the daily lives of Americans today. Right now, while the media is talking about whether Biden shook hands with Putin or the latest developments on the January 6th commission, every day Americans

are going without, well, pretty much everything. I'm sure some of you may have noticed, we are in the midst of a great reopening of America, but we also have a national shortage crisis. Not just a shortage crisis of a particular good, but a shortage crisis of everything. Here's a short list of some of the things that we have national shortages in. Semiconductors, new cars, used cars, rental cars, plastics, palm oil, truckers, Uber drivers, houses, lumber, toilet paper, diapers, furniture, chicken, bacon, hot dogs, cheese, coffee, olive oil, chlorine, corn, which is somehow possible in America, oxygen for medical purposes, and labor. Now, luckily, they solved the most important shortage

of all, which was Chick-fil-A sauce. But this leads to a question that I had when I found out about all this. What the hell is going on? What's going on, my friends, is we're being revealed for the clown country, which we are. At the beginning of this pandemic, we all found out that we don't even produce vital medical supplies in our own country, And we actually make all of it in China. Given China's our geopolitical rival, that seems bad. And since we live in a clown country, we spent the entire last 16 months arguing over whether masks work or Dr. Seuss or whether Biden can say the Pledge of Allegiance instead of, you know, how do we exactly function normally? And now that Biden is president, a lot of the country has gone back to sleep. We're seeing the consequences of all of this in real time. America is unable to deliver

the most basic consumer goods to its populace. In the case of a chlorine shortage, it could literally lead to the state of Oregon running out of clean drinking water. People cannot buy cars. New moms are spending a fortune on diapers, even if they can get them. And if you're like me and you've been through a drive-thru lately, you're going to find out quickly we have a national shortage of chicken, which is one of the most cheaply consumed meats in the U.S. All of this comes down to the basic fact that we make almost nothing we need on a daily basis to survive or thrive. Right here in the US, we are dependent on Asia to deliver it to us. And that delivery system is built in the last two decades and it's falling apart. Shipping in particular is a great example of how precarious

that we've lived our lives. Almost all of logistics in the US in the last two decades has relied on something called just-in-time delivery. As in, right as you're about to run out, you get a new delivery. That way, you don't have to waste precious space storing your stuff. You just have a continuous supply. Now look, it's a lot more efficient. The problem is, if something goes wrong, you're screwed, which is where we're at right now. Efficiency is great for cost, but it's terrible for resiliency. This is what happened in the shipping industry, where price wars in shipping led companies to keep building larger and larger and larger megaships. It reduces marginal costs, and they have it so they can only profitably sail

whenever you're 100% full. But then global shipping ground to a halt in the early months of the pandemic. Nothing was moving on the seas. Once that happened, the whole system went haywire. To make matters worse, for all of Trump's talk about correcting trade imbalances between the US and China and being more resilient as a country, he miserably failed while he was president. In fact, FreightWave's data shows that import volume from China via ocean shipping is up, listen to this, 54% year over year. Yes, more than 50%. While export volume to China, as in from the US to China, it's up 4%. So we're importing 50% more goods than we were before the pandemic from China and exporting only 4% more. We have somehow become even more reliant on the Chinese to deliver our goods for us as a result of this pandemic. Here's the real rub. All of this

was preventable. We sacrifice our national vitality at the hands of short-term profits. If you can't buy a car or a PS5 right now, it's because of a shortage in semiconductors. Now, some companies are waking up to the fact maybe we shouldn't have let our domestic manufacturing capacity go abroad. So Intel, one of them, has announced it's going to spend $20 billion to create a new plant in Arizona. Great, right? But guess what? That's $6 billion less than Intel spent in 2018 and 2019 on buying back its own stock to juice its stock price. As the New York Times writes, quote, in the decade leading up to the pandemic, American companies spent more than

$6 trillion to buy their own shares, adding the benefits were for investors and executives whose pay packages include hefty allocations of stock have come at the expense of whatever the company might have otherwise done with its money, investing to expand capacity or stockpiling parts. You know what the worst part is? Nobody's done a damn plan to fix any of this. Experts quoted in the New York Times all said that while this was a wake-up call to the precariousness of the global supply system, that short-term profit incentives built into the companies themselves will always triumph in the long run. To put that in plain English, our system is designed to incentivize companies to sacrifice everything at the altar of the short-term dollar, even if it means screwing the nation overall in a time of crisis. Even though that's already happened,

the same incentives remain if there's another pandemic or another crisis. So I have a better idea. Let's change the incentive. The market is a reflection of us and our priorities. It didn't have to be this way, and it wasn't always. It came about because of 30 years of terrible trade policy, bad tax policy, bad regulation. It's a crisis of our own making, and it was all a choice. The good news is that if it was a choice to get here, it's also a choice to get out. And my hope in doing this monologue is simply, they'll all just be more aware of the true price of everything around you and that you demand from your elected representatives that we do business a different

and a better way. Crystal, that's the really thing I wanted to come across. It's me again, guys. We hope that you're loving the show. If you have any questions, you know where you can ask them. Go to crystalandsagra.com, become a premium member, and then you'll get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anything. The link is in the show notes. Crystal, what are your breaking points today? Well, guys, I made the slightly insane decision to drive to Austin, Texas and back last week. you know, just a quick 24-hour drive from Virginia through Tennessee, Arkansas, and then into Texas. I am a sucker for a good road trip, and the scenery was truly gorgeous, especially through the Smoky Mountains, one of my favorite parts of the country. But

almost exactly halfway there, near Memphis, Tennessee, we started getting dire warnings from Waze that we were headed into catastrophe and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. So unbeknownst to me, the bridge that goes over the Mississippi River there on the main interstate, I-40, was completely closed, leaving the only other bridge over that river in Memphis at a total standstill. I joined thousands of other motorists snaking through side streets in West Memphis, waiting at least an hour to get through that gridlock snarl. Now, that was no easy problem to navigate around either. The next closest bridge was a full 70

miles south, so not really an option. As I sat idling in 90 degree temperatures, I was really impatient. That quickly turned into woe is me rage. What were they thinking closing this extremely important and extremely busy bridge? What the hell is going on here? Well, it turns out they literally had no choice. Why? In early May, an inspector found a gigantic crack in a supporting beam prompting an immediate emergency closure.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the repair on that six-lane bridge, over which an average of 40,000 vehicles pass every day, that repair is going to take through mid-July. It's costing millions of dollars in a city that serves as a major logistical hub and making daily life nearly unbearable there. Traffic is such a nightmare that the normally 10-minute drive from West Memphis to Memphis can now take upwards of three hours. Apparently, my hour-long wait was comparatively trivial. A trucker trying to get through said he moved only five miles in four hours on a recent day. So basically, we allowed a vital connector upon which millions of dollars of business and basic quality of life for hundreds of thousands of residents depend to become so dilapidated it required an immediate emergency closure. Of course, those stuck in the traffic

nightmare are far from the only ones suffering from our complete inability to do the basics of keeping our infrastructure up to date. So in the neighboring state of West Virginia, NBC News recently documented how residents are commonly denied drinkable water due to a combination of industrial pollution and aging water infrastructure. Cody Estep is the McDowell County Commissioner, born and raised on this mountain. Would you say people are worrying about water here on a daily basis? Yes, ma'am, I would. Yes. There's lots of people in this country that does not know what it is

that takes it for granted to go over to their spigot and turn that water on. You never miss the water till the well goes dry. Cody, if they invited you to Capitol Hill, what would you tell Congress about your situation here? I would have to just say politely, hey, look, what day can you all come down in southern MacDowell County? We need a tour bus to bring a whole bunch of you people down there. Just bring them in. And plan on staying now. The underlying causes of the water challenges here, fueled by economic decline, may be unique, but the struggle is not.

At least 2.2 million Americans live without basic access to safe drinking water and sanitation. I want you to think about this. McDowell County, once the crown jewel of coal country with a population of 100,000 people has been chewed up and spit out by over 100 years of exploitation, sucking all the natural resources out of that community and leaving the residents without even the very basics of clean drinking water. What does it say about a rich nation such as ours that we can't even get our act together to do the bare minimum of keeping our bridges safe and our water systems functional? Let's be honest. This is some failed state shit. Politicians in D.C. have been arguing about infrastructure for a decade now as our citizens struggle and suffer the consequences of their

gridlock. And let's assign blame here where it belongs, too. Top of that list is the Republicans who let the water get dirty and the bridges collapse and the roads become undriveable because they wanted to deny Obama a win. And then, just on a sheer incompetence, failed to do a damn thing during Trump's four years. Now they're dragging their feet again under Biden, cutting the funding and insisting that the hard-hit working class of America pay for infrastructure improvements through a gas tax. The Biden administration, they don't get off the hook here either, though. They're more concerned about whether they can get some useless Republicans to vote for their dumb bill because they think it will be a good talking point in the midterms than actually using the tools at their disposal to do what is required. Taken at the bird's eye view, though, the basic

failure may be the most visible sign of our decay and rot as a functional nation. Driving across the country, I saw grand New Deal project after project. We drove through the Great Smoky Mountains, preserved as one of the nation's most beautiful national parks. 12 million people every year visit and enjoy that park. The dams that were built by the TVA to harness electricity in rural communities, which have created incredible lakes enjoyed by tourists and bringing jobs to those areas. The interstate highway system that enables the tradition of the Great American Road Trip, which I enjoy so much. Today, it is almost unfathomable to imagine us creating such projects of beauty and utility

in service of the public good rather than in service of Amazon or Wall Street. We are stunned and amazed when the government even gets its act together to cut a one-time check. Longer-term planning, thinking, building, large-scale national projects like rural electrification or the railroads or the interstate highway system? Forget about it. We have lived off the vision of our forebears

for generations now, without even doing what's necessary to maintain the basics of their investment, let alone to build on it. I know that eyes glaze over every time we talk about infrastructure negotiations, but our failure to do the boring, let alone to do the spectacular, is leading to a slow motion collapse before our very eyes. The consequences of such a failure in aspiration, vision, and competence will be far more dire than an afternoon spent in traffic. Joining us now, the amazing columnist at The Washington Post, Josh Rogin himself. It's good to see you, Josh. Thanks for joining us, my friend.

Congrats on the new show. Set's looking great. Thank you. Thank you, sir. What do you think of the desk? Oh, yeah. Don't quiz him too much, all right? All right. This is very sensitive. For it.

Okay. You better be. All right, so Josh, you've been at the forefront of a lot of this lab leak reporting. Some of it has come to the fore recently. Dr. Anthony Fauci, let's put this up there on the screen, recently giving an interview, very much on the defensive, talking there about the more extreme that we get, the more obvious how political it is. Fauci has blood on his hands. Are you kidding me? This is also talking about himself in the third person whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives. Now you're telling

me he's Hitler. I think it's important that those of us, Josh, who are talking about the lab leak hypothesis and whether it be true and some of perhaps even Fauci's own mistakes say like, look, this isn't necessarily against Fauci. We're talking about the global health establishment. How do you think about Fauci in his role within the lab leak hypothesis and more culpability and all of that? Right. So as someone who's followed this for a long time, like you guys, you know, it's amazing to watch these various stages of the narrative. And, you know, what's happening now is that the people who are coming under heat for not being transparent about what was going on in these Wuhan labs and what the relationships were between American organizations and the Wuhan labs are now

getting very defensive. And we're seeing them get very upset about being asked a lot of uncomfortable questions about whether or not the research that they sponsored or research related to the research that they sponsored sparked the pandemic, which is what the lab leak hypothesis is. As Jon Stewart said, you know, it's science saving us from science. And sometimes you have these scientists who don't want their own work examined because it calls into question this very career that Anthony Fauci is so adamantly defending. But if you just listen to what he says, it's pretty shocking to hear himself, you know, first of all, referring himself in the third person, which is a little odd. But second of all, say that somehow he's above reproach, that he doesn't have to answer questions, that even criticizing him is somehow an attack on science itself, which is ridiculous and especially offensive, considering the fact that he's a public servant and he works for the taxpayers.

And of course, he is subject to oversight and scrutiny, especially when it seems like one of the labs that worked for him, that was funded by him, either directly or indirectly, may have sparked the pandemic that killed three million people. So, yeah, we're going to have to ask some questions. And it doesn't mean we're calling him Hitler. And I don't think Holocaust references are to be tossed around so casually. I think that's really problematic, actually. And so we just have to sort of realize what's going on here. It's the Fauci's of the world, not just Fauci, realizing that they're going to have to answer some really tough questions and now trying to get out of it any way that they can. But it's really troubling to watch. Right. His comments where he said, I'm paraphrasing the quote, but he said, attacks on me are an attack on science. I mean, to me,

that's just insane because what you and others who've been focused in a serious way on this from the beginning are actually trying to do is to bolster the science, just to ask the neutral question of how this pandemic started and then what are the policy implications that stem from that. And Josh, I'm wondering, what is your view of the origins of how the media got this wrong? Because there were people like you, there are a few others out there who took the question seriously, just again, looking at it in a neutral way without trying to say, without trying to use this as a way to like smear China or let Trump off the hook or any of that nonsense. But there were a lot who would totally dismiss it, who would say this is debunked, this is

a conspiracy theory, et cetera, et cetera. Like, what do you think is the origin of that view from the media? Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because, you know, this the way that the story got all screwed up is directly linked to what's going on now with these guys like Anthony Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, the head of the NIH. And what Francis Collins did last week was he gave an interview to the Washington Post, actually, where he tried to answer your question, but in doing so revealed a lot about how deceptive and misleading a lot of these scientists were.

First of all, we have to understand that all the scientists disagree, okay? So for anyone to say that science thinks this, or the scientists have a consensus of this, that person is misleading you. That's the person you have to look at skeptically, because it's obviously not true, because there are tons and tons of scientists who are publicly, now at least, saying that they believe that the lab leak theory is, in fact, what happened. Amongst them, Robert Redfield, a virologist who was the head of the CDC at the time, and many, many others. So when Anthony Fauci calls himself science, that's not only Orwellian, it's also just

wrong because science is not a monolith. But anyway, what Francis Collins said was that they had a secret teleconference call on February 1st, one day after the emails revealed that the scientists, even the ones close to Fauci, thought it could have come from the lab. And they had this secret teleconference, and they came to a consensus that the lab leak theory was crazy. And then a few weeks later, they had another meeting, and they said the lab leak theory was crazy. And according to Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, that should be enough. We should just sort of take that at face value. And of course, that's exactly what the media did. They heard from a small group of scientists

who happened to include the hero Anthony Fauci, who everyone believed must be the hero of the pandemic, therefore could never do anything wrong. And they just bought their line, hook, line, and sinker, and they ran with it. And because it was an anti-trump uh point that made it even sweeter for a lot of media people had a grudge and then there was a lot of group thinking source bias and confirmation bias and incompetence in the media which is like you know the thing that no one talks about is that like a lot of the reporters are just lazy you know i don't know what to tell you yes you know i just happen to be writing a book about this so i did a bunch more interviews that's why i thought i kind of got it right but the fact is that, you know, it was also fueled by these guys, Fauci and Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance and Kirsten Anderson, who deleted his Twitter feed after the emails came out.

And all these guys who came up with this consensus, which was a false consensus, which misled us. What was said on that? You said it was a conference call, a meeting. Like, what was so persuasive to them that they thought we're just going to dismiss this out of hand? Well, exactly. I mean, I think that's kind of the point is that there's nothing that could have persuaded them in that amount of time. One day after the emails show that they were thinking, oh, maybe the lab leak theory is a thing. The next day, the very next day, they had a meeting like, oh, no, we're pretty persuaded it's a natural origin so obviously they hadn't done their homework and you know

that's why the narrative that they created was so misleading because they must have known that they didn't what they that they couldn't have come to this conclusion so quickly but they were doing it for a reason because they were covering their own tushies and they were doing that because uh there it worked this 200 million dollar program program to dig up viruses all over the world, including in China, and bring them back to a bunch of labs, was now going to be under scrutiny. And if it turns out, and we don't know, right? You don't know, I don't know if this came from the lab or not. But if it turns out to be true, well, then their entire industry of virus collection and playing around with viruses, whether you call it gain-of-function or call it

whatever, because they don't like to call it gain of function because that means they would have to subject it to oversight which they didn't do you know but the fact is whatever you call it uh that whole industry would have to be necessarily re-examined probably you know reined in greatly and uh that's what they can't face that's what the the Anthony Fauci's and Peter Dez's of the world can't face is that their life's work may have been contributed, connected to the pandemic that's plaguing the world, not through intentionality,

not because they're bad people, but because, you know, science is not infallible and neither is Anthony Fauci. I'm so glad that you always put it that way, Josh, because again, we're talking about incentives and we're also talking about then what people have an incentive in order to make

sure that something is true or not. You have spotlighted the global VIROM project. I've been trying to bring a lot of attention to this. Throwing $1.2 billion at more gain-of-function research seems like the worst thing we could do when we have questions. Are there other serious efforts yet to rein it in? Is it still going forward? I just want to make sure we can update the audience. You know, we have to be clear that all of the plans currently in place to respond to the pandemic, if the lab leak hypothesis theory were to be true, would exacerbate and raise the risk of another pandemic greatly.

In other words, we're doing exactly the wrong things if the lab leak theory is true, because we're planning to dump another billion dollars into this, $1.2 billion actually, into this project of digging up dangerous viruses and bringing them back to labs, including Chinese labs, that have zero transparency and zero accountability, especially in a crisis, and we're going to continue funding them. And then if you look at what the Biden administration is doing, it's sort of like this Kabuki investigation where they have this 90-day intelligence community sprint, right? And I said to them, like, why are you sprinting? What's the sprint about? Why can't you just walk? Just take your time. You know what I mean? You don't have to finish it in 90 days. We have to figure out what happened to start this pandemic so we know

how to prevent the next pandemic and why limited but putting that aside you know what their other part of their plan is to encourage the who to press for access to china okay right and the reason that you laughed at that is because it doesn't pass the laugh test you know what i mean you can't think of that without being oh they must know that's complete bullshit right okay well if they know that's bullshit because the who is never going to be able to do that then why are they saying that oh Oh, they're bullshitting us. All right. So you have to realize that the Biden people are playing are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Like, we really want to get to the bottom of it and like, oh, well, we hope the WHO gets to the

bottom of it. You know, yes, it's a great point. And, you know, just one other question for you. Putting the pandemic aside, do we know of other documented instances where gain of function or as you put it, whatever you want to call it, this type of research has led to a virus escaping the lab? Because it seems to me that in some ways we may already have all the information that we need to know that we shouldn't be investing a billion dollars in going down this path further. Right. Well, here's what I would say. We in the SARS virus, which is like the one that, you know, the last one that the Chinese Communist Party covered up, but that one only killed eight thousand people instead of three million people that escaped from Chinese labs four times. OK, that's a coronavirus that escaped from Chinese lives four times killed nine people, which is less than the number that were killed by the rest of the SARS virus.

But still, you know, Fort Detrick, which is like the one that the Chinese communist party always points to. They're like, maybe it came from Fort Detrick. Well, they didn't actually have Corona.

They weren't doing that type of research, but they had a major leak, uh, in July, 2019. That's true. It's documented. And,

uh, it was shut down by a guy named Robert Redfield. He shut down the Fort Detrick Bioweapons Research Lab because they had a leak, right? They weren't following the protocols. So the point is these leaks happen all the time. They always happen. They're bound to happen. So the question is, you know, what are the odds that eventually another one of these very, very dangerous viruses that are the result of gain-of-function research are going to leak and the probability is 100% given enough time so all you have to think about is like okay if you're if you know that things are going to leak then how dangerous do we want to make these viruses and is it really a good idea just because this is like

what john stewart ended with it's just just because we can do something in science doesn't mean we have to do it and it doesn't mean we have to ignore the risks of it. And apparently we can't trust the heads of these institutions to say when, to say, OK, this is a risk that maybe is not worth taking. And maybe we shouldn't spend a billion dollars building even more dangerous viruses because it might spark a pandemic. And if these scientists can't be trusted to oversee themselves, much less the Chinese Communist Party, then someone else is going to have to do it, or we're going to be doing this every year. Well said, Josh. We really appreciate it. I hope everybody goes and checks out your book, Chaos Under Heaven. Absolutely loved it. I listened

to it on Audible. It was awesome. Thanks for joining us, my friend. Great to have you, Josh. Thank you. Thanks for everybody for watching. As always, a special shout out to have you, Josh. Thank you. Thanks for everybody for watching. As always, a special shout-out to Supercast, where you can become a premium member. Right now, it's right out there in the description. You get to watch the show completely uncut. You get to watch it an hour early. You get to listen to it uncut as well.

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at Breaking Points, we really appreciate and love you all. And we'll see you all tomorrow. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it.

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We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down, and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app,

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Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two

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