Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/28/21: Biden's Infrastructure Deal, Tragedy in Florida, More UFO Info, Julian Assange Case, John McAfee's Death, Woke Military, Socialism in America, and More!

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

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going to bring you the very latest on that. There is a new UFO report, a saga in particular, but also I'll weigh in a little bit with what the TLDR is there. Some major developments in the Julian Assange case that are not being reported at all in U.S. media. The supposed suicide of John McAfee, both of our breaking points. But we wanted to start with some major developments from Joe Biden on that bipartisan infrastructure deal. So to start with, I'm going to get in a minute to more of the substance of the deal. There's some major problems with it. First of all, as we've been warning about, it's a major private sector giveaway.

One of the pay-fors is what's called asset recycling, which means selling off the infrastructure you already have in order to fund new infrastructure, something that has been a failure when it's been tried in other places before, like Australia. But Biden made a gigantic mess for himself with some comments that he made. One of the concerns from progressives is that you get this bipartisan infrastructure deal and then you never bother with any of the other pieces of the Biden agenda. So he came out and said, what, essentially everybody knows that he wants the bipartisan deal, but he also wants to do this reconciliation package that would require just Democratic votes. He's a little too direct in saying that. We can throw this tweet up on the screen.

A little too direct in tying those two things together. So Republicans feigned this whole outrage cycle as if they didn't know that after the bipartisan infrastructure deal, he also wanted to push forward with a reconciliation package. That's always been the idea from the beginning. Lindsey Graham was sort of chief among the freaking out. We can throw the next tweet there up on the screen saying that he felt that this was extortion and, you know, amounted to like a veto threat that if the bipartisan infrastructure deal didn't come to Biden's desk along with the reconciliation package that he ultimately wouldn't sign it. This led to Biden then, quote unquote, clarifying his statement,

essentially walking it back. It's the latest development there, Biden walking it back. We can throw the next tweet from Jake Sherman up on the screen of exactly what he said there. He says, on Thursday, I reached a historic agreement with a bipartisan group of senators on a $1.2 trillion plan to transform our physical infrastructure. The plan would make the largest investment in infrastructure in history, the biggest investment in rail since the creation of Amtrak, and the largest investment in transit ever. But he goes on to say the statement, understandably, his statement tying together the infrastructure package and the reconciliation package, he says it understandably upset some Republicans who do not see the two plans as linked. They are hoping to defeat my

family's plan and do not want their support for the infrastructure plan to be seen as aiding passage of the family's plan. My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent. So essentially, Biden creates a whole unnecessary mess. Republicans feign a whole outrage cycle. And Biden ultimately, like, immediately caves. No, no, no, no, no. This has nothing to do with the other, which it's also telling that he's so responsive to Republican concerns on all of this and so not responsive to progressive concerns on all of this. I just had a brain aneurysm trying to understand all of that.

What are you doing? Sorry. Okay. And here's the thing. If we can barely understand, if people in Washington and senators don't understand it, how are other people supposed, they're going to be like, what's going on with the infrastructure bill? Oh, it's not going to pass? Here's the thing.

If you're going to go bipartisan, then actually go bipartisan. Which is, I mean, I'm not a huge champion of bipartisanship or whatever. But he was like, okay, so he strikes this bipartisan deal with all these crazy pay-fors, which we can talk a little bit about, come that time. But what happens? Okay, so we have this deal. But then he comes out and he's like, well, but I'm also, you know, he basically says he's going to veto the bill if it's not paired with reconciliation bill. So then people like Lindsey Graham and all

these other people who want gas taxes more than they want anything else in the world are like, oh, well, no, then we're backing out. And so then the people are like, wait, so are we going to have a bill or two bills? Or when does that schedule? How does that happen? Then we go and the Biden reverses that, even though, as Jake Sherman pointed out, the White House kept saying he's not going to do it. He's not going to backtrack. He's not going to backtrack. Oh, then he comes out and he backtracks. So is the deal still on? I think this entire thing is, frankly, fake. I thought it was fake whenever it was announced. I think it's fake now, which is that I don't think two of these bills are going to pass. I think maybe one will pass, the bipartisan bill. Even that one, Lindsey Graham, some other Republican, very likely to come out.

This was another good point that I heard from somebody, which is that, okay, they've got 55 votes, right? That's not 60. They can still filibuster if they want to. So if you are Ron John or one of these deficit Republicans, many, and you get enough, you can still filibuster the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That may actually not even pass. And so nobody seems to have a plan these deficit Republicans, many, and you get enough, you can still filibuster the bipartisan infrastructure bill that may actually not even pass. And so nobody seems to have a plan currently to get from 55 to 60, even more so. I think it just goes to show how ridiculous this entire exercise is, which is that Biden going for this bipartisan plan, but also saying, yeah, but we're going to have this not bipartisan Democratic plan

in the reconciliation bill. Why can't it all just be in reconciliation? Here's the thing. Once again, and I'm not even saying I like all this stuff in this plan, but I believe in power and I believe that political parties should use it whenever they're governing. And guess what? Like Obamacare turnover and the TCJA, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that all passed through reconciliation. Because whenever you want something to get and Jobs Act, that all passed through reconciliation. Because whenever you want something to get really done fast, that's what you do. And this entire thing is basically turned into Biden's Obamacare 2.0. It reminds me exactly of that time. Whenever Rahm and Obama were having all these meetings with all these Republicans and all this, and they would come out and be like, we've got this new plan. Oh, and then would just like fall apart in three weeks time. And eventually what happens? It passes

purely Democratic votes on what, Christmas day or whatever. I think that's very likely to be what the exact scenario is here. This is a perfect example of DC brain and thinking that people care more about the ins and outs of the process than what actually gets done. So Biden in particular, I mean, this is like over the course of his career, he's obsessed with this like bipartisan consensus. And so he's wasted all of this time going after the Mitt Romneys and Lindsey Grahams of the world only to see the support for, you know, even this limited infrastructure plan, very tenuous with just, you know, one sort of offhand comment. It almost blew the whole thing up. Now, I will say that the Republicans seemed mollified by his complete and utter capitulation that happened over the

weekend on these comments. So they seem to be back on board with all of this. But he's really compromised the extent of what he can actually get done here. So on the infrastructure package itself, first of all, it's a lot less than what he proposed. It's a lot less than even what like a Joe Manchin proposed. Remember a while back, Manchin was saying, hey, $4 trillion infrastructure plan, I'm all in. This is the top line is $974 billion, but it's actually only $579 billion of new authorized funding. The pay-fors, some of them are fine. There's like an increasing in IRS enforcement, which is something that I support and needs to happen. But it also includes rolling back unemployment benefits. It also includes,

as I was saying, asset recycling, which is something that Trump proposed, by the way, and that liberals were very exercised about when it was Trump proposing it. But now that it's the bipartisan Biden compromise, suddenly we don't hear as many complaints from liberals about selling off our infrastructure to fund new infrastructure. And so, yeah, he's delayed. He's made it super complicated so that it's not easy to understand what's passing and who supports what part of it. They really believe that somehow having like Republicans sign on to some piece of this deal is going to be a great political talking point for them. And I just don't think that's the case. I think people care

much more about what actually happens versus the process of, you know, this very complicated process and how things ultimately get done. And I do just want to say, like, Republicans on this whole outrage cycle, it's really silly. Everybody knew that these two things were tied together. We've been talking about it here. Everybody in the news has been talking about the idea that progressives only want to go along with this piece if they know that there's going to be the other part pushed through reconciliation. You had Congressman Don Beyer actually pointed this out. Senator Roy Blunt was making this case exactly on Fox News Sunday. We can throw that tweet up on the screen.

A while back, Roy Blunt was saying, my advice to the White House has been take the bipartisan win, do this in a more traditional infrastructure way. And then if you want to force the rest of the package on Republicans in the Congress in the country, you can certainly do that. So them feigning shock and outrage, I can't believe that he's then going to go forward with reconciliation was all a bit of a show as well. So the bottom line is this. We seem like the Republicans have come back on board after Biden's complete capitulation. It seems like this limited infrastructure deal is moving forward. And it also seems like the people who took the biggest hit on this are progressives who really wanted that sort of pledge that the reconciliation package is going to come next. And now it's really unclear whether those pieces are going to ultimately come together, what Joe Manchin is going to support and all of that. Now, he says he does say that he will support then after the bipartisan thing, some sort of reconciliation package.

But the details of what he's willing to support, he's already come out and said, like, oh, the price tag has to be really limited and we're definitely not going to deficit spend, et cetera, et cetera. So he's already trimming the sails on what he would be willing to support through reconciliation. And we already know the White House has no willingness whatsoever to put pressure on that guy. From what I can see, Crystal, I think that the best that's going to come out of that reconciliation package is an extension. Unclear how long for for the child tax credit. I think that's basically it. And the reason why is because the child tax credit, if not extended, would actually expire during the midterm elections, like sometime around October. So that would be bad for if you're a Democrat. Imagine getting a check, or I mean Republicans too. Imagine getting a monthly check for like $720 for your two kids, two little kids. And then in

the middle of the election, like right when people start to pay attention, boom, it just vanishes. So in my opinion, frankly, from the whole American families thing, that's probably the only thing that's going to go through. Maybe a slightly higher base tax whenever it comes to the corporate tax rate. That's what I saw that Manchin, I think he supports something like a 28%. 25%, he said. 25%. Okay. So he supports 25%. Also, possibly a step up in the basis on capital gains. That, as far as I understand, those three things are very likely to be the three major pillars or whatever that does pass through a reconciliation bill. There's one other thing I want to say about this, which is that Joe Biden, throughout his history, long history here in Washington, was known as a lot of things, but a competent and effective manager is not one of them. In a lot of ways, this whole incident and the confusing nature of it, the mess of it, the unnecessary delay, the immediately stepping on it and pissing

off both progressives and Republicans and just making a hash of it out of the gates. That's kind of a return to par for Joe. He's actually doing very well. This is exactly what he's been his entire career. So the original, the question was at the beginning of this administration, those first couple of months that were handled relatively competently, vaccine rollout went pretty smoothly, relief package. I mean, it took a while, but they got to it. Was that like setting a new tone for him and for this administration, or was that an outlier? And I think we see now that that early phase of relative success was a total outlier. It's not consistent with the way that he has been able to manage things throughout his career.

It would appear that, you know, a lot of the vaccine rollout stuff, frankly, is handled by the state. Some of that was sort of like in place before he came in. But I want to give them credit. They did a very good job there. We're doing very well as a country in terms of the vaccine uptake and how many people have been able to get vaccinated against coronavirus. The relief package was also already essentially put it together before he ever even was inaugurated. So those and had broad consensus around it already. So it didn't require political skill and it also didn't really require much managerial skill. This messiness that we're

seeing with the infrastructure package, I think is much more par for the course of who Joe Biden is and what this administration is going to look like from here on out. And again, this is just like based on his career, based on his reputation in Washington, there are positive things that people like about Joe Biden in terms of his personal character and the way that he relates to people in this town. But he is not known as like managerial excellence. And I think that is beginning to show here now. While you were talking, it actually occurred to me, which is that the basics of a rescue package and vaccine rollout are what a baseline president is supposed to do. And we were, I guess we were

all impressed because Trump was just completely incompetent for like the entire year of the pandemic. So Biden came on, did these easy layups. We actually said this at the time, but we were like, he's going to have very high approval rating because literally all he has to do is the most basic task of the United States government. This is actually the hard part. This is where being president is actually really hard. You actually have to be a pretty good politician. You have to make sure that you can try and get a deal done. You can actually push something through. As we said, from a political perspective, what he did from the Republican and progressive side here was foolish. Like he actually screwed himself both ways. Now, maybe it'll work. Like I

said, there's a long way to go till those votes happen and they can sprint all they want, but Washington moves real slow. And you might've noticed the August recess is coming up and these people hate to work. And they also hate to pass stuff before the August recess, which is really big. So they don't have to deal with it whenever they go home for political consequences. They would much rather come back to Washington and vote on it because then they don't have, remember those angry tea party, all those like angry constituent meetings? They do not want that. I was running for Congress then.

I remember them very well. I feel for you. I remember watching Arlen Specter, RIP, I think literally, who was getting screamed at in Pennsylvania. I was like, man, this is bad. I was like, this is real bad. So anyway, they do not want any sort of repeat of all of that. And I do think that Biden is running into basically the gridlock that in a way, look, he invented this. And like, I keep coming back to this. This is kind of what he was elected to do. He didn't really fool anybody. Like he told everyone,

he's like, nothing's going to finally change. I'm going to get the vaccines out. I'm going to pass the rescue package. And that's pretty much it. Basically hit the reset, not even a reset button. He's basically hit the button where he's like back to kind of normal and kind of normal really doesn't work. That's basically where we're at right now in DC. Yeah, indeed. We've also been following closely this horrific apartment building collapsed down in Miami Saga. What's the latest there? This is really bad. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure that we consider the story as much as possible. It's one of the biggest stories in the country, in my opinion, and I don't really think the political media is paying nearly enough attention.

And so if you guys missed this, what actually happened here at the Champlain Towers in – well, it's not in Miami. It's actually nearby in South Florida. It was really horrific, and we have a video that was actually taken of the collapse that was taken from a balcony. So you can see the complete and total collapse there just in a matter of seconds filmed from a nearby balcony in Surfside, Florida. And you watch just how quickly the entire thing completely disintegrates. And of course, the question arises, how the hell does this happen? I mean, was this because Florida's like moving around? Is this like an ocean thing? Is this building code? And possibly it's all of the above. And I don't want to be glib and turn this political because there are like 150 people who are

unaccounted for. Sadly, I think we know what that means. And there are at least a couple of confirmed dead that we have so far. But what really struck my eye was this horrific story in the New York Times that this all seemed incredibly preventable. So let's put this up there. An engineer warned of a, quote, major structural damage at the Florida condo complex in 2018. Here's what he said. He said that the report helped shape plans for a multi-million dollar repair project. Two and a half years after the building managers were warned, they were only just beginning to try and ramp up. So it sounds like somebody did something real bad, but listen to this quote from the 2018 analysis by Frank Morabito is his name. Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion. But the problem was, is that even within this, the person did not see

that it could have imminent collapse, essentially. But he did say that any sort of maintenance had to be maintaining, quote, the structural integrity of the building and its 136 units. So overall, look, these people were warned. They waited two and a half years before they were even going to get started. And now almost 150 people are probably dead. And I really don't know what else to say. I mean, pair it up with that infrastructure thing. This is a perfect example of you may know something is broken. You may know it's really bad, but because the process just takes a long time and now people are dead. It's not a joke. I mean, you pointed this out to me, this Washington Post story. Let's put this up there about screaming. People were on their balconies screaming and crushed by debris. There were children in that building. There were old people in there, but there were two elderly

couple there. I read a profile of them yesterday who were killed inside or likely killed inside of that building. I just don't even know what to say. I mean, it is so horrible. There's a lot of state government, federal government, I mean, local regulatory things that need to be called into question here. And there's no indication currently that the state or the federal government or whatever did anything about it. I'm sorry, that they were responsible or whatever in any way. But at the end of the day, we need a lot of answers because this is a horrific disaster. There's just no other way to say it. We have to know what happened here. And right now, there's still a lot of questions. There's some significant theories of what exactly

went wrong. And a lot of it has to do with that report that you were referencing from an engineer about three years back. That engineer and the report that he put together cited cracks in particular in the parking garage area, problems with the ramp going into the parking garage, a lot of cracks in the columns in that garage area. And that appears to be, based on the video and expert analysis, that appears to be potentially where the collapse started. So there was a compromise in the structural integrity that started potentially in the pool area or the underground area. Again, this is all speculation at this point.

There are no definitive answers, but this is based on expert analysis that triggered the collapse of that middle section. And then once that piece collapsed, then that far section also collapsed and everything just completely pancaked down. And just to give you a sense of how significant this is, this appears to be the most deadly accidental building collapse in American history. Wow. So we've never seen anything like, you know, potentially up to 160 people killed in this type of accidental building collapse.

Now, in fairness to the condo board, they had these repairs, significant $12 million repairs planned that was just about to get underway. And what they're saying and telling the press is like, look, we thought that we had time to do this the right way. We didn't know based on the report. We knew there were problems, but we didn't know there was an imminent danger of collapse. So we took our time, yeah, putting the plans together and I guess getting the funding together to begin starting this project. A couple of other things that have come out is that this building in particular had been sinking something like a millimeter a year. That's right. Of course, this is Surfside near Miami. The Miami area has been significantly impacted by climate change. They're having a lot more flooding,

a lot of issues, coastline being claimed. So there's questions too about whether climate change could have affected the structural integrity here. There's questions about whether a sinkhole could have opened up somewhere deep underneath this building that caused some of the columns to lose support and grounding in the earth. So we don't have all the answers about what happened here. But at the same time, just down the beach, there's another identical building, you know, built at the same time, by the same construction firm, identical plans, all that stuff.

And of course, those residents are going like, well, shit. They're like, well, can we just live here? Should we? Is everything good here? I mean, should we stay here? And so it's a very scary situation. And then there's, of course, the bigger questions, too, about how many buildings in this area that are subject to similar climate change forces, similar erosion, similar potential sinkhole. Like how many other buildings are at risk that have absolutely no idea? So these are all incredibly significant questions to answer. And I do think that, you know, when I saw this happen, in addition to just

how absolutely horrific and heart-wrenching it is, I mean, one minute you're sleeping in your bed, the next minute it's over, right? And the family members and the loved ones who are desperate for answers and how long the search efforts are going on and recovery efforts are going on at this point where you still only have, you have nine confirmed dead and about 150 still unaccounted for. And of course, hope very, very dim at this point for any of those people. But as you were saying, you know, last week we talked about there's a pedestrian bridge on right on here outside of D.C. that just collapsed onto the onto the interstate, onto 295. I was talking about that bridge in Memphis that they had to have an emergency shutdown of because there was a gigantic crack that the inspectors first missed. And then they come in and find it and are like, oh, shit, they were worried about exactly something like this happening with this bridge.

So, yeah, it just seems like we're letting so much of our infrastructure and essential facilities of life crumble before us and not taking the actions that are necessary to deal with it. So, again, a lot of questions here, a lot of heartbreak here, and something that we really need to get to the bottom of because it has major implications for especially that entire region and the structural integrity of a lot of the buildings there. No, that's right. And this is really, you know, there's also interesting, the area specifically was analyzed with space-based radar back in the 1990s. And they found that there was some sinking indicated, but only in the area of the Surfside building. And actually in 2015,

a resident had sued the condo complex saying that water was seeping into her walls. And so, again, possibly that's an area. I think there's a lot of questions that need to be asked about the structural integrity. Go ahead. One other thing I wanted to note here is New York Times has an article this morning about the sort of theories of what might have happened. And there was significant construction happening in the next door building as well. And apparently someone from the condo board had reached out to the city and said, we're worried about the integrity of our building because this construction next door is so intense. Oh, it's rattling it, right. And it's rattling it. So that's another potential factor

here. And likely, the case is that maybe some or all of these factors played in because, again, this is extraordinarily rare throughout history. This would be the deadliest accidental building collapse in American history. So for that to happen in this dramatic and horrifying of a fashion, you have to have a cascading chain of events, of things that went wrong. So you've got a building potentially that's deteriorating. You've got climate change further eroding. You may have a sinkhole and then you have the precipitating event of this construction. That could be the chain of events that led to this collapse.

That's right. Look, we're going to stay on the story. Unfortunately, I'm sure there's a lot of bad information to come out. Only thoughts with the people who lost some people in that building are awaiting results because that is just a horrific, horrific thing that you have to deal with. So really sorry for all of you. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are 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 breakingpoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. I guess I don't even know how to do an abrupt shift from this one. We also have some new developments on UFOs. So let's go ahead and throw this up there on the screen. It's a new report that was actually released from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I put my TLDR up there. I do think that's the most significant one, which the US government just admitted. In 18 known instances, UFOs demonstrated advanced technology and that they have zero information to indicate that it's human. Now, here's the thing, though.

There were a lot of people who were very underwhelmed by this report, so I'll just give people the top line. There were 143 unexplained sightings since 2004. There's no evidence of extraterrestrial life or a technological breakthrough by a foreign adversary, though there is no evidence that either is also ruled out. There is 18, that's what I put up there on the screen, included potentially advanced technology that the United States cannot understand, and 11, 11 were near misses with government aircraft. Now, in terms of the response to this report, there was a lot of speculation. There was a lot of anticipation. And I understand, at the end of the day, this thing is only like nine pages. And really what it comes down to is that the government was like, we need more data. We need to go out and search our databases. We need to make sure that we analyze these things,

or we need to make sure that we do a comprehensive sensory review. I would say the biggest takeaway from this is what I put up there, which is, yes, there's 143 instances of known sightings since 2004, which cannot be explained. But the most significant to me were the section where they talked about advanced technology, 18 known instances in which the government observed on their radar screen a movement which cannot be explained naturally, indicative of some sort of technological breakthrough. And look, at least according to them, there's no indication that there's a foreign adversary that was doing this. And I just want to quickly go over that one. So for this to be true, that China and Russia have this technology, not only would they have had to make the greatest breakthrough in human flight in modern history,

they would also be using their super secret breakthrough over U.S. soil, over U.S. military aircraft. Repeatedly. Repeatedly to 143 times. So you're going to have me believe that a foreign adversary creates this awesome, awesome new technology, which if we got it would completely change the game. And then they're going to use their technology over US airspace repeatedly and over US military aircraft once in order to test it, maybe 143 times. I just don't think so. It sounds preposterous. And I'm not denigrating the Russians or the Chinese. I'm just saying this, which is that any sort of

breakthrough like that, there's some sort of scientific indicator. The atomic bomb was theoretically possible 15 years before it happened. The SR-71, everybody knew it could happen. The sound barrier, everything. There's no explanation for any of this. There is zero scientific explanation for craft that move in There is zero scientific explanation for craft that move in ways that were observed on radar. And that's exactly why the government is at least coming out and admitting it. So I guess I agree with the conclusions of the report. We need a lot more data. We need a lot more information. But it was very underwhelming, Crystal. There were no videos or no photos, any of that stuff. That being said, maybe that those

things, those videos, photos, and everything now exist in the intelligence community because somebody had to compile all this data. And maybe that will get leaked to a journalist like Jeremy Corbell or George Knapp or somebody else there. So that is my hope, is that we can get something more out of this. Overall, mixed reviews on this. So just so people understand, they examined 144 of these sightings. Right. And they found one that they had an explanation for. It's also noteworthy that because one thing that the skeptics were saying is they threw in this line that said essentially, well, this could be like radar error. This could be some sort of, you know, a visual processing error, some issue with the technology that's portraying something that isn't really there, isn't behaving in the way that it's being perceived as behaving. But a number of these

reports, hold on, I have the number here. A number of these reports, actually 80 of them, involved observation with multiple sensors. In other words, some combination of eyewitness testimony, radar returns, infrared indications, or other electro-optical sources. And then, as you mentioned, there were 18 that involved movement patterns or flight characteristics that are beyond anything that we know to be possible. So you have a significant number of these where it's not like you're relying on just one data source for the sighting. You actually have multiple confirming data sources for the sighting. So it makes that idea that, oh, this is just like a radar malfunction, that makes it not impossible, but makes it a little bit less likely.

So essentially, I mean, the report is like, we don't know. We have no evidence that it's our classified program. We have no evidence that it's an adversary like China or Russia. We have no evidence that it's extraterrestrial. So here's the sightings that we've had. Here's one that we figured out what it was. Here's 143 others. Some of them, these objects are doing stuff that we don't think is really possible. We have no idea how they're doing it. And let's study it ultimately some more. So yeah, I guess, I don't know if, I didn't find it underwhelming. I found it, I guess it was what I expected because I didn't think that they were going to come out and be like, we got it, you know,

we figured it out. Just want some videos. The other thing that's worth pointing out here is while these sightings dated back to 2004, so over the course of 15 years, most of them were actually from the past two years. The reason is because the Navy put that program in place so that there was a standard reporting mechanism so that more of this data is starting to be collected, which is also a positive indication that maybe we're going to get more data, more sightings, more ability to figure out what the hell is going on here. Because right now, none of the explanations are plausible. Like, none of it is actually plausible. There's

no good explanation for any of this. So it's just a gigantic shoulder shrug and like, meh, we'll keep looking into it, I guess. It makes me sad. People like, they do the shrug, they're like, oh, I mean, this is, look, potentially one of the greatest stories in humankind. And all I would say is this, which is that we need some more curiosity. The ability and the inclination of so many people, even smart people, to just dismiss a lot of this stuff is very troubling. They're like, ah, come on, you know, whatever. If they actually had it, what about camera resolution? I think these are ludicrous because, once again, your iPhone camera is not going to capture something moving several miles away in a heat signature in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night, okay? Of course it's going to be grainy. It's a miracle that we even have a photo of it at all or a video of it at all. And so what I would say is that regarding all of this, it seems clear to me that, and I want to be fair, one thesis is that it's secret government technology. Now the government says we've

concluded it's not secret technology. I mean, you can't trust them. Right. It's possible that the people who did this report who were relatively high level people do have access to classified info. Maybe it's an even higher level of classification that they have no idea about. That's one potential theory. That's one potential. Like I said, the foreign adversary one is there. I will say that if you're one of those people relying on the weather balloons, that this report specifically at least dismissed the weather balloon theory in some instances. So if you're out there and you're pumping that, I'm very sorry to tell you. The only plausible explanation that I've heard that could account for the multiple sensors is that this supposedly occurred after some sort of software update on the radar from Lockheed Martin or one of the,

I haven't gone too far down this rabbit hole. That being said, what, you're not going to fix the software from 2004 to 2021? 17 years of broken software? Give me a break, okay? So every single potential explanation to me doesn't carry water. Now, that doesn't mean there's any evidence for extraterrestrial either. There's no evidence for anything. I just think it's one of the great unexplained mysteries about what exactly is happening. And because it's so hard to pin down, people just don't. It's just like, we talk about this all the time, like the Miami thing. There's no Trump angle.

There's no Biden angle. There's no Republican angle. It just is. But it's a great mystery. It's a good story. It's something that requires a lot more investigation. And yet, I mean, I guess I'm doing my radar on this, so I'm guilty of this too. What are we arguing about? Woke military? You know, critical theory? You know? And look, I think it's bad. That's what my whole radar is about. That being said, this is a way bigger story than that. And so,

at least we cover both. Most people don't even care. And I think that that's a big problem for political media today. At the same time, there's a quite potentially significant development in the case against Julian Assange that the U.S. government has brought. And just for a little bit of background so that we can understand the significance of this development, because essentially a key witness of the government is recanting and admitting that he lied. This guy's a known criminal who lied about his involvement with Assange and that Assange coached him on how to hack into certain government documents. But to provide the background here before we get to the specifics of what the development is, remember under the Obama administration, they really wanted to go after Assange too. And the reason that they didn't is they couldn't get over what they called the New York Times problem.

How do we criminalize Julian Assange as a publisher without potentially criminalizing papers, well-established newspapers like the New York Times, who do reporting from whistleblowers on classified government documents. And they essentially threw up their hands and said, we can't figure out a legal distinction between Julian Assange and the New York Times and other major newspapers, so we're going to decline to prosecute. We're going to decline to indict him. Trump administration came in, and William Barr in particular, they decided they were going to decline to prosecute, we're going to decline to indict him. Trump administration came in, and William Barr in particular, they decided they were going to go after Julian Assange. And the way that they did it, it's this kind of like end around of the New York Times problem, saying like, we're not prosecuting him or going after him for what he published.

We're going to go after him for helping Chelsea Manning hack into government service. That's what we're going to pin our whole case onto. So they have to prove that he was complicit in actually doing the hacking into the government systems to procure the documents and videos that he was able to obtain. By the way, the case here, extraordinarily flimsy for reasons that I'm not going to get all the way into, but, and also it's very problematic as Glenn Greenwald often points out. Oftentimes, if you're a journalist working with a source, you're helping them figure out how to cover their tracks and those sorts of activities. So this would potentially criminalize,

again, normal journalistic activities that all sorts of investigative reporters engage in. So to bolster the idea that Assange wasn't just publishing documents but was actually involved in breaking into government files, they pulled in some additional supporting information from his involvement with the Icelandic government. And in particular, this guy, Thordarson is his last name. It's a very Icelandic name that I'm sure- Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson. Thordarson. Sorry, Icelanders. Came to the FBI. Thordarson was apparently in trouble for stealing funds from WikiLeaks. The walls were kind of closing in on him. So he goes to the FBI and is like,

I've got the goods on Julian Assange. Let me talk. Well, this guy has now recanted his version of events and admitted that basically he was making this all up. And again, known criminal, known thief, known extorter, not a good guy to start with. And now he's come back and said like, well, actually, I wasn't telling the truth about this piece and my interactions with Julian Assange. So undercutting the government's case against Assange. And what is in part also really noteworthy here is this seems like a significant development in the case. And only the Icelandic press has reported on this. Nobody has. This is in stunned media. It's nowhere to be found.

And I think we have the tear sheet that we can throw up there on the screen. So this is the WikiLeaks tweet of the stunned article written about how this key witness has now admitted to lying in the indictment. And there's also a lot of details in here, too, about how desperate the U.S. government was to really essentially entrap Assange, especially in his dealings in Iceland and some of the things that he exposed ultimately there, aggressively going after him, aggressively trying to find someone who would turn on him, who would spill the goods, who would implicate him in a crime beyond just publishing documents. So there's two layers here. First of all, significant development in the case on its face, but also complete silence from the U.S.

I mean, utter complete, like 100 percent silence from the U.S. media on this development in the case. All the while, you know, these same people are out there like, press freedom, and we believe in the free press, and this is so important. Maybe the most important thing happening in the world right now for press freedom, and they have zip to say on it. People should go and read this entire thing. It's pretty wild. I mean, you have the lead key witness in this case against Asajj admitting on the record to Icelandic media that he lied, revealing chat logs showing that he lied, showing specifically that what he alleged is not true. And look, this is a sketchy guy in the first place. He has multiple convictions for sexual abuse of minors and apparently for wire fraud. And actually said, according to, I don't know

who this guy is, but told on the record to this outlet, they continued his crime spree while he was working with the Department of Justice and with the FBI, receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. So not only did he commit crimes, he said he was continuing to commit them while he was working with the FBI. Yeah, now he's got a free pass. He's got immunity from prosecution. Which is, I understand, that actually is supposed to avoid any sort of immunity deal. I think the whole thing is supposed to avoid any sort of immunity deal. I think the whole thing is very indicative, like you were saying,

around how most of the people who talk about press freedom are totally full of it. It's actually mostly a partisan thing. When they say press freedom, what they really mean is CNN, not even Fox, CNN and MSNBC freedom. And if Fox is talking about it,

it's the same thing. They mean it for themselves and not necessarily for everybody else. And this is how you fall through the cracks if you don't find yourself. And Julian is a perfect example of the culture war problem, which he was a hero of the left, then he became a hero of the right. And there's enough people on left and right to hate him. And so what happens? You have bipartisan administrations, which are willing to go after and go after you and actually prosecute you till the ends of the earth. I think the New York Times problem is a significant one. And I mean, does that mean we could be prosecuted? I mean, I've asked people to

signal me before, you know, whenever I was trying to get classified information, technically under that, you know, under that standard, I could be prosecuted for a break. I mean, sure. I mean, I was doing my job. I was a journalist, you know, I was trying to get somebody in the Pentagon to leak me classified information. This is what people do every single day. You can't criminalize that. And I have not yet been convinced that there's any way whatsoever in order to do this type of prosecution without setting a standard, without going after or making the precedent set. Because the precedent is the most important thing.

We're going to talk about this tomorrow fully, but the Biden administration just bombed Syria, who the Trump administration also bombed, who the Obama administration also bombed. And remember when that happened, it was kind of crazy. People were like, wait, you just bombed a sovereign country. That's insane. I mean, Assad is the president of Syria. You don't have to like Assad, but he's the president. And so he doesn't want you to bomb him. And so that means it's an act of war. And so that means Congress is supposed to get involved and nobody did anything. And then you have three successive presidencies which have done it. So if you do this once, just once, that's all you need. Then you can go and spy. Go ask all the Washington Post, New York Times journalists who had wire

taps placed on them. This actually recently came out. The New York Times had a gag order on them for two years while they were fighting in court. And the Trump administration, the DOJ, was explicitly trying to hack, not hack, maintain and subpoena their emails. I'm not for that. But who set the precedent for that? Obama, when they went after James Rosen. So this is how it happens, people. You do it after the perversion who is your enemy, then another person comes into government, they're going to do it after theirs. And then next thing you know, everybody's cool with it because then they have a hand in the game. We can't allow that to happen anymore. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And you're correct

that the reason why the US media is by and large completely silent on all of this and why, you know, they let Tony Blinken and Kamala Harris with a straight face go out there and be like, press freedom when they're continuing these exact same prosecutions is because of Julian Assange's involvement in the 2016 election and their perception that he was in the tank for Donald Trump and, of course, released emails that were ultimately damaging to Hillary Clinton. So they've put on this partisan lens that allows them to just completely ignore the implications that this case has for them and their entire industry in an extraordinarily significant way. You know, the latest in terms of Julian is he is being held in the UK. The U.S. is trying to

extradite him. The Biden administration is continuing to try to extradite him. The judge in that case, basically, you know, the initial ruling was that she was concerned on humanitarian grounds for what it would be like for Julian in the U.S. prison system, which is, of course, notoriously, like, horrific treatment of those who are held in prison. So it was not on the merits of whether or not he deserved to be extradited, whether there was anything to this government prosecution indictment prison. So it was not on the merits of whether or not he deserved to be extradited, whether there was anything to this government prosecution indictment whatsoever. So that's where things stand right now. Again, this seems like a very significant development in the case, and it is quite astonishing that we hear nothing from the U.S. media on it. By the way,

I think on Crystal Kyle and Friends this week, we're going to be talking to his brother and his father who are in town in D.C. trying to raise awareness on the case. So we'll be able to get full update from them on what's going on. But just wanted to make sure you guys know what is being kept from you by the U.S. media in terms of just how flimsy this indictment and this prosecution is and what the massive ramifications potentially are for U.S. publishers and publishers around the world writ large. Yeah, no, absolutely. And look, speaking of prisons, sketchy things happening, there's a lot of crazy transitions here. You've got the hard turns in this show today. It's a very hard turn. I don't really know how to do this one. Look, a lot of you have contacted us about John McAfee. I don't really know a lot about what's going on here, so we'll be very, very clear. John McAfee

was found dead in Spain, where he was being held on charges of extradition from the United States regarding cryptocurrency and wire fraud and a bunch of other alleged financial crimes. He had said in the past that if he had been found dead or suicided, that he had been killed. That's what he said. Some people say he may have delusions of grandeur and all that. Crystal, I know you just watched a documentary on him. We could talk about that. But here's the thing. His wife recently, I believe, had to see his body and confirm it. She recently spoke to some cameras. Let's take a listen to what she had to say. John McAfee was not suicidal. I spoke with him a few hours before he was found dead. We spoke about the court's decision to extradite him to the U.S. It did not come as a surprise to either of us.

We were prepared for that decision and had a plan of action already in place to appeal that decision. I blame the U.S. authorities for this tragedy. Because of these politically motivated charges against him, my husband is now dead. So that was McAfee's wife speaking there in Spain. Now, McAfee himself had actually given an interview back in July 27th, 2019, where he said that any suicide that you saw would be fake, and that he described a, quote quote dead man switch in order to ensure the release of sensitive documents and a massive database upon his death which to be clear has not yet materialized so here's what he had to say take a listen to this

if i commit suicide which is highly unlikely i like my life i love my wife i love my wife. I love my circumstances. I'm a happy motherfucker. If I do choose to commit suicide, you must know it was not suicide. Or if I disappear for more than a specific period of time without contacting specific people, then that data will be released. The fact that I'm not releasing it is the only reason I'm still free. Okay, Crystal. So this is everything that we know. His wife, Janice McAfee, speaking to the camera, said that it didn't happen, that she spoke to him that day. Now look, maybe she knows something else. She's covering up, etc. McAfee himself seems to have made it very clear that if he ever did commit suicide, that it was some sort of plot against him. That being said, maybe he was just sort of plot against him that being said maybe he was just kind of crazy we actually interviewed him once on rising he was totally nuts um in terms of yeah one time yeah it was crazy i remember you was there yeah uh i i think you were there we were talking to him about bitcoin i believe this is a long time ago i

need to go finally forgot about that yeah i gotta go find the clip yeah remember he was like on his phone and he couldn't connect. That was immediate. I was like, man, I interviewed this guy. I'm like, that's nuts. Whoa. But that was a couple years ago. Completely forgot about that.

Yeah, actually, I think it might have been around the time he was doing that. Maybe he was on a media tour. I don't know what he was doing. I remember he contacted me once because he wanted to give me a Bitcoin credit card. Because he knew I was into Bitcoin. And he was like, hey, I got this whole thing. And I was like, dude, I want nothing to do with you. I'm like, you know, what's going on here?

For people who haven't followed the life and times of John McAfee. So you probably know, I mean, he's McAfee antivirus, right? This becomes huge in the 90s. Really the first guy to sort of like figure out what this whole computer virus thing was. Wildly successful company that makes him extraordinarily rich. Made a lot of money. Okay. So after this, he gets bought out of that company.

He's got, you know, untold amounts of wealth. He's like sort of itinerant. He starts this yoga retreat. Then he suddenly shuts down the yoga retreat. Then he moves to Belize. And especially when he moves to Belize, things get really weird and also really violent. I mean, this guy probably, maybe, allegedly. Allegedly.

Killed at least one person who was his neighbor who had poison. He had these like vicious dogs and this huge 25 person fully armed security team down in Belize. He was extraordinarily paranoid about being kidnapped or harmed or housebroken into or extorted or whatever. So he's got these big guys, 25 of them, armed to the teeth, essentially like sort of takes over this town that he lives in in Belize, is given all kinds of gifts to the police department to make sure they're on his side. And part of his security entourage is these vicious dogs. His neighbor poisons the dogs. And I believe it was the very next day, the neighbor is murdered in his house. Now, in Belize, they don't have extensive forensics

testing. So even though they found, in fact, they have never actually solved a murder in Belize using forensics, at least at the time of the documentary that was done on McAfee called Gringo. So anyway, they found a fingernail. They found these other things. There's a guy who was in his security entourage who was implicated. The person who ran McAfee's household said that he had wired the guy who's the alleged assassin $5,000 from John that day. So there's pretty strong circumstantial evidence that he may have murdered this guy. So then he goes on the run.

By the way, there's also a lot in there about his sexual proclivities that I'll just allow you to explore for yourself as part of this whole thing. It's out there. So he then sort of goes on the run, ends up extradited back to the U.S., and they're unable to gather enough evidence to press charges of him. So then he starts to try to rebuild his reputation, very manipulative of the media, runs for the libertarian presidential nomination, loses to Gary Johnson, but goes on this whole media tour trying to rehab his image. And essentially what you get from watching this documentary is this is a guy, number one, classic narcissist, classic narcissist, total delusions of grandeur, totally committed to being this like big man, iconoclastic figure, world famous. This is what he's really all about and he loves to play the media he loves to create

these like grand illusions and images of himself as part of his whole like repeated pronouncement that if he ends up dead there's no way that it's suicide he even got a tattoo that said whacked and had like a dollar sign by it and whatever so So look, I have no idea what happened here. But does it seem crazy to me that he, in his final act to create this lasting legendary image of himself, plotted this whole storyline? That doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility to me whatsoever, given the personality that this guy had. And again, his number one commitment in life seemed to be to create this larger than life image and have people know his name and whether it was good, bad, or indifferent

that he would have this wild big man image. And so certainly possible that, and again, I actually almost think it's sort of convenient that he repeatedly was saying, just so you know, I would never kill myself. I'm going to get a tattoo. I'm so sure I would never kill myself. So that's another theory of what happened here.

I think that's a good corollary. People need to know he's kind of crazy. He's totally crazy. So I went back and found it. We interviewed him November 11, 2019 about Facebook's Libra currency. And I'll let you guys go look it up for yourself. There's a fun look on the two of our faces, which you guys can show on Google. We're like, what's going on here? I forget who exactly booked that. I think it was me. But all of this being

said, it has captured a lot of attention. A lot of people are very weary of kind of these high-profile suicides and more. But I think that your corollary there about he was clearly crazy, clearly had a little bit of delusions of grandeur and more, it's possible, right? And we should follow this continually. Also, look, he said there was going to be a dead man's switch. I don't see anything. It's been a couple of days since his suicide or alleged suicide happened. What does that mean? Dead man switch? He said that whenever he died, that there will be a release of all these sensitive documents of

caches and all this stuff, which fits, you know, what we're saying. And look, if it's true, like I'll look at them, you know, Hey, by the way, if you're out there, please send them. Um, but nothing of that sort yet has materialized. And so we're waiting for that. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. While I know this is annoying, instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Sagar in your daily lives.

Take care, guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at for your breaking points? I generally stay away from the culture war here on breaking points. Why? Because I generally believe most of it is used cynically by the ruling class as a distraction from what they are doing on a daily basis. You don't care about tax rates, income gaps, good jobs, and more when you're outraged over whether somebody refused to address somebody else on Twitter that you've never even met by the wrong pronoun, or if you're frantically checking Dr. Seuss' sales number on Amazon to own the libs. But for today, the reason I'm diving in is because this concerns an institution with massive power over American life, and is one of the rare instances

where a culture war has real and dire consequences not just for our citizens here at home, but for the millions of people across the world who at one point or another could have or have come into contact with the United States military. All of this starts off with General Mark Milley. He's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He's defending the teaching of critical race theory in the military. And it is important that we train and we understand, and I want to understand white rage, and I'm white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind

here, and I do want to analyze it. It's important that we understand that. Okay, there's a lot going on there. Before we start off, of course, I too would like to understand why people stormed the Capitol. There's just one problem. How is it that the general and all of these woke liberals think that white rage is the only cause? The explanation is actually pretty simple. Trump is a charlatan demagogue who made some stuff up.

Enough people believed him, so they were willing to storm the Capitol. Now if you want to really go down the rabbit hole, the question is this. Why did millions of people disregard good information otherwise from every major institution in American life and believe only a dude with a fake tan who all things considered was a mediocre to terrible president? That is a question actually worth delving into deeply. White rage may be part of the story, but I don't think it's a very big part of the story. You know what it is? The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan. The fact that we squandered the lives of our own citizens abroad with $6 trillion, not to mention the nearly 1 million Iraqis who died there. Not to mention the failure of the entire American general class while there.

And of course, there's more. How about the division of class lines in America? How about our total commitment to globalization and fake free trade? Mass immigration. I can go on and on. If the general really wants to understand, as this show does, then there's a lot that he could learn. But of course, he's not actually interested in that. It's a surprise that the people who are the most powerful in America are obsessed with

jargon and woke politics. All Milley has to do is say white rage, and he became a liberal hero, even more so after Tucker Carlson attacked him. Now look, personally, I wouldn't say what Tucker did, but I'll admit, I laughed. But what made me laugh more was this, the outrage by the liberal intelligentsia, which followed Tucker's comments calling Milley a stupid pig. Now Glenn Greenwald has always had the perfect eye, noting that American liberalism today looks like this in the mainstream. You have NBC news analyst, retired four-star general, Barry McCaffrey, calling for Tucker to be fired for disrespecting the head of the military. You have Jeet Heer of the nation blasting the GOP for not having insufficient reverence for

our troops. And you have Bill Kristol tweeting out his piece approvingly. That's right. The reaction to the comments have been completely unhinged. And you know what? That's dangerous. I can tell you that firsthand. I was disciplined by my teachers in the mid-2000s and generally despised by a lot of people

in my hometown of College Station, Texas, because I spoke out against the Iraq War. And I was told and dismissed for being disrespectful of the military when pointing out basic things like, hey, you know Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, right? That alone was considered disrespectful or treasonous. Civilian control of the U.S. military is actually the most bedrock and sacrosanct thing that we have in this country. And because of the culture war, we now have the most powerful people in the media allying themselves with the military, who have allied themselves with woke ideology, because they know it covers up any questions

about their own conduct. If you want the perfect example of this with regards to General Milley himself, he's the genius who blew up at Biden's national security team in the Situation Room when he said that, when they said they wanted to leave Afghanistan because he said America would be sacrificing women's rights in that country. Now, he literally did the Afghan girls meme, but in real life, and he was serious about it. If General Milley wants to sacrifice American lives to protect women's rights in Afghanistan, he is welcome to run for president on that platform. And I would personally relish in him, watching him welcome to run for president on that platform. And I would personally

relish in him, watching him fall flat on his face. Woke politics is a smokescreen that people like Milley and the Wall Street bankers with pride flags and BLM stickers used to cover up for the fact they're actually the ones behind the most destructive forces in American life today. And if you want, as I do, to understand what happened on January 6th, don't start with critical race theory. Start with General Milley. Start with the generals who lost us two wars in our lifetime. Start with bankers who are bankrolling and teaching a lot of this nonsense. Start with the think tank class who are happy to talk diversity in the military, as long as it doesn't mean having anybody around who thinks we should get out of Afghanistan. In other words, start with the place where power actually resides

in America. And Crystal, I thought it was important to do this. One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal, Kyle and Friends, where we do long form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. Anyway, Crystal, what are you taking a look at today? Well, one of the big questions we like to explore on this show is exactly what long-term shifts to our politics, our culture, our habits, and our communities will result from what we all lived through this last year, from the pandemic itself to our government's woefully inadequate response to what the whole experience exposed about our fake economy, self-serving media outlets, and the politicians who make it their entire job to protect the plutocrat class.

So as the pandemic winds down, at least here in this country, we're just starting to get little indications of what the long-term impacts will be, whether it's the insane housing market asset grab by permanent capital, whether it's working class Americans engaging in a low-key general strike of retail and restaurant work, or the affluent professional class refusing to go back to their cubicles. Well, we just got another little glimpse of how the pandemic has accelerated a shift in our attitudes about one of the bedrock assumptions that have ruled our politics over the past 60 years, let's say at least, that capitalism is good and socialism is evil, and that's all you need to know. Take a look at this poll here from Axios. So over the last two years, positive sentiments towards socialism jumped up while more people soured on capitalism.

Most of that shift happened among younger Americans, which makes some sense since this is a group that has been routinely screwed over by capitalism and also has had less Cold War propaganda drummed into them relentlessly throughout their lifetimes. So here are some of the relevant numbers. In 2019, 58% of Americans ages 18 to 34 reacted positively to the word capitalism. That's plunged to 49% today. Meanwhile, the numbers for socialism have improved significantly among certain demographic groups. 60% of Black Americans have a positive view of socialism. That number was only 53% just two years ago. 45% of American women have a

positive view of socialism as compared to just 41% in the last survey. And even 33%, a third of non-white Republicans have a positive view of socialism as compared to 27% two years ago. Did you catch that? Women and Black Americans are leading the charge in terms of favorable views of socialism, which is, of course, the polar opposite of the white brocialist stereotype we have all been fed. That, of course, is a caricature offered in bad faith by neoliberals looking to use weaponized identity attacks as a way to undermine redistributive policies. This poll also reveals that for Americans under 35, views of capitalism and socialism are essentially split. They're 50-50. Only two years ago, capitalism enjoyed a 20-point advantage in this same survey.

Among Gen Z, the numbers are even more stark. Capitalism is a full 12 points underwater at this point. Looking at all this data, you can't help but come to a few conclusions. First of all, the politics of younger Americans, they look a whole lot different than their parents. And second, no well-crafted messaging or popular politician could have possibly moved Americans nearly as effectively as what they experienced and witnessed with their own eyes this past year. What's interesting here, too, is that the shifts in views towards capitalism and socialism were determined much more by age than by partisanship. In other words, quite a few young Republicans soured on capitalism this past year as well. 56% of Republicans under 35 say

that the government should work to reduce the wealth gap, and the number of young Republicans with a positive view of capitalism, that dropped from 81% down to 66%. Now, while older Americans, they haven't moved nearly as much, they still overwhelmingly prefer that the government work to reduce inequality as opposed to focusing on deregulation. So, while they might be turned off by the socialist label, there's clearly a widely shared consensus around reforming the current version of American late-stage capitalism. So, it all makes a lot of sense, really. Think about what we've seen this past year. As shutdowns commenced and people lost their jobs, the stock market was automatically bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. Regular Americans, meanwhile, they

were left to hope that our corrupt political class would stop arguing over whether or not masks worked and actually get around to doing a damn thing to protect them. Industries, they got custom bailouts written by lobbyists, while most Americans were kicked to the rickety unemployment system. We have just learned that half of the 64.3 million Americans who sought unemployment insurance payments never got them because the system was so broken. We watched lawmakers get rich trading stocks that, oh, just happened to surge thanks to government pandemic programs. We saw the dual screen specter of bread lines for the many, even as the stock market reached new unprecedented heights. And perhaps most of all, we saw billionaires like Jeff Bezos and the rest of the American monopolists and financial royalists gain trillions of dollars in new wealth at the expense of workers, small business and the vitality of our communities. Now, as traumatized workers gingerly re-enter the workforce, politicians

were quick to force their hand by cutting those unemployment benefits while Biden's promises of a $15 minimum wage that could make that work worthwhile, those have completely disappeared. Now, you can certainly understand why quite a few Americans took a look at all of this and said, if this is capitalism, I want nothing to do with it. Frankly, the story of this past year is really the story of America over the past, let's say, 40 years, only set to triple speed. The corruption, the ever-consolidating wealth, the power of the few, the bailouts that protect the too-big-to-fail while treating workers like disposable pawns, the rigged system making a mockery of the idea that everyone's got a shot at success. It's just this time, rather than being like the frog put in a pot where the water is slowly increased at the boiling point,

Americans were just thrown right into that boiling water all at once. And they saw very, very clearly what was being done to them. So what will the consequences be? Well, it could be a new paradigm in politics with cross-partisan efforts to check monopolists, to lift wages, to reinvigorate the labor movement, and experiment even with worker ownership. Or, you know, we could just argue about Dr. Seuss and Potato Head instead, while plutocrats happily survey the landscape of sectarian conflict from their new pandemic-purchased yachts. And it kind of ties in with what you were saying. Joining us now, the one and only Matt Taibbi. Of course, you can find his writings over on

Substack, his journalistic stylings over on Substack great to see you matt good to see you matt great to see you both love the brick decor thank you sir thank you saga wants you to also come to the desk look at this desk i'll give you an opportunity to do that now it's a great desk yeah thank you thank you thank you um that's basically prerequisite for coming on the show. So you have a new relatively dangerous post up titled, Why Has Ivermectin Become a Dirty Word? Some of our audience will have followed. Ivermectin, there's a possibility that this is a very low-cost generic drug that could be effective in treating coronavirus.

Indications are mixed. There are some studies that say yes, some scientists that say yes, some others that say no, and it's become extraordinarily controversial. Can you just talk about what we know about ivermectin and why it has become so controversial to the point that YouTube in particular has been banning some of the content and some of the discussion around this potentially effective drug for treating coronavirus? So along with dozens of other potential cures, researchers began looking at all sorts of possibilities for treating COVID-19 last year. And one among the very many was an antiparasitic drug that's a wonder drug in many other respects,

this thing called ivermectin, which has been crucial in helping eliminate essentially diseases like river blindness. It's extremely effective against almost every form of sort of parasitic disease. And some people tried it in sort of small scale experiments involving COVID. There was an early study that showed that it had in vitro results in reducing the amount of virus, which meant essentially that it works in a test tube situation. Has absolutely no practical application, but it's like slightly promising. From that study, some doctors started prescribing it, you know, in of off-label to patients as a last resort in some cases, and some said they believed they saw results, and it started to get a little bit of buzz in the scientific community. And what happened was by fall of last year, there were a number of studies that were being undertaken, and there were a few people who were such

advocates for it that they started to say that this was definitely a cure or that it was potentially a miracle cure. And that's when YouTube started cracking down. In particular, they cracked down on a doctor named Pierre Corey, who testified before the Senate, and they actually took down Senate testimony when he used language. He called it a miracle treatment, which I think was was probably what initially triggered them. Right. And I think that surrounding all of this is this. Look, I don't like I said, I don't know a goddamn thing about ivermectin. Crystal and I are both fully vaccinated, modern it up. OK, just to be very clear here and have been also very emphasized here that I think people should go out and get vaccinated.

All that being said, I don't understand how we can have so much hubris at this point, especially after the lab leak theory to say this is definitively true. This is definitively false to the point where we are willing to censor actual doctors talking about medical information. Now, I listened to the full Brett Weinstein, Pierre Corey, Joe Rogan podcast, and I came away from that thinking that a grave injustice has been done. And once again, I have no idea if ivermectin is useful or not against COVID. The discussion does seem to be something that is worth it, especially if it has been useful, at least according to them, to some people in India and some people in Mexico. I think from approaching it from the angle of you guys screwed up lab leak, are you so sure you want

to start censoring again? Seems to be the best defense against this, man. Yeah. And I think what's happened to this drug is that it's become sort of a fulcrum for a larger debate between populists and anti-populists, for lack of a better term. It's acquired the nickname of a populist treatment because all around the world, there are people who are self-medicating with ivermectin, especially in South America. In some cases, governments are actually giving this drug out or foundations are giving them out by the tens of thousands doses of this stuff. And the medical authorities see, I think, this issue as a proxy for a larger debate over how much control patients should have over their own

treatment. Should people be allowed to essentially treat themselves should they be allowed to order their doctors to give them a drug that's that's what this is all about and what what's frustrating about it is that I think when YouTube or Facebook cracks down on the speech surrounding this you know a topic like this it only fuels the resentment and mistrust of medical authorities and makes people even more likely to go out and self-medicate in a way that might not be productive. So that's what I think, that's what I've been focusing on with this story is, does any of this censorship really accomplish anything positive? Probably not. It's not logical in any way. But I also feel like because sometimes, you know, we I think we even made the case that Twitter bans and Facebook bans and YouTube bans, they don't even work.

Right. They just because they just they have a Streisand effect. They draw even more attention to the very thing that you want people to not talk about. But even if that wasn't the case, I still think, as Sager said, there should be a lot of skepticism of these really airtight, like, we know that this is debunked. We know that this is discredited. After the whole debacle of completely ruling out the lab leak theory, which now looks more plausible. We still don't know, but it's certainly a plausible potential explanation for how this pandemic started in the first place. So even if the bans were effective, because we've seen with Trump being banned, it's been pretty effective in decreasing interest in him and decreasing the spread of what he has to say. Even if it's effective, it's a very problematic thing to do, especially,

you know, these aren't scientists. They've gotten it wrong in the past. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is like, why this particular drug? Why did this one thing become such a flashpoint? And I think part of the context here, too, that people have been focused on is like big pharmaceutical companies, they don't have a way to make a lot of money off of this drug because it's a generic. So there's a potential financial incentive to shutting down any discussion of what's going on here. Yeah. So to answer the first question, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you both know in journalism, we don't know anything. I mean, we're not experts. And,

you know, at best, when a story like this breaks, or something like COVID breaks, we're scrambling, we're calling experts as quickly as we can to get, you know, some kind of explanation for what's going on. We don't have the means to determine what's absolutely true and what isn't. And, you know, by the same measure, neither does Facebook nor YouTube. I mean, they do not have the expertise to be telling us what is correct and what isn't correct. And so when they make decisions like this and they make mistakes like the lab leak thing, it only underscores the fact that truth is a moving target and you can't always hit it on the nose. Even if you have the best intentions, it looks bad to try to clamp down on this or that you could, because you can never be completely sure in this business, what's, what's true and what isn't. So that's bad in terms of the, why this drug in particular, I think

there's a couple of reasons. Number one, when Trump said he was on hydroxychloroquine, it gave, it gave kind of the odor of right wingness to any idea of using a repurposed cheap drug to combat COVID-19. And that's another thing that I think is very frustrating is in this polarized media landscape we have, in some topics, things just kind of become left or right, and they lose their identity as anything else after that. And ivermectin sort of acquired a reputation as something that Republican politicians were interested in and therefore i think it added to the to the degree to which it's been clamped down upon yeah and look like we said we don't know anything about the efficacy of this i don't know

anything about what dr weinstein is saying around a lot of different stuff i do know i think that in general debate is probably a good thing. And stifling it just seems to be incredibly Orwellian regarding all of this. So Matt, I am so thankful that we have people like you who actually write about this and say like, hey, what the hell is going on here? Because there needs to be some actual journalistic integrity investigation. It shouldn't just be a couple of people on YouTube talking about it. Let's have a real debate. You want to ban something? Because banning something means that you know for sure that you know something is not worth it. And if you can prove that, then that's great. But as far as I can tell, I have not seen any proof with that regard yet.

Yeah. And I think it makes everybody in the business look bad when you have bans like this. Again, we absolutely don't know what the answers are. And, you know, with with something like one of the things that's scariest to me is this idea of journalists being afraid to go near a topic. Yes. Because what ends up happening is you get this self-censorship situation where everybody kind of knows where the line generally is, but nobody knows exactly where it is. So what they'll do is they'll stay well short of it. And topics that are genuinely newsworthy,

people will pull back from and just simply won't talk about. And that's a serious problem. Yeah, I think you're right. Let's be honest. This is scary. We were nervous covering this with you today. There's no doubt about it um this is our livelihood but we have to do this you know we thought the topic was important enough again given

all of us saying we don't know whether ivermectin works or not listen to not recommending anything on both sides of the debate all of that don't just go out there and take ivermectin for the hell of it. And by the way, we think that the- And get vaccinated. Get vaccinated. Get vaccinated. We did. We feel great. Feeling good. Go get vaccinated. But this idea that you're talking about of the self-censorship, of the way that people are so nervous, of the just hubris of censorship and banning certain ideas and banning discussion on certain things from these social media companies when just within the last year, those, you know, over-the-top proclamations of

this is discredited, this is debunked, etc. have been shown to be completely hollow. I think that's the piece that was really important to talk about. Recommend everybody go and read your piece. It's very thoughtful, as always. Everybody go and subscribe to Matt on Subjack. Always great to have you, my friend. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. All right.

Take care. All right, everybody. Thank you. We really appreciate it. If you want to go ahead and support us for taking a risk and talking about ivermectin, please do so. It's actually, let me just say, this is actually literally the reason why we leaned into a subscription model versus just putting ourselves at the whims and mercy of YouTube. This is like perfect example of that because look, ultimately,

if they, you know, get rid of this video, if they suppress us in the algorithm, whatever, we know that you guys have our back and we're able to sustainably continue the business. So good actual case in point. This is exactly why we have things set up the way we do. We structured this thing exactly for this reason. And in exchange for supporting us, you get the full show one hour early delivered to your inbox. You can listen to it also as well,

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Now we have to put it together. So, yeah, that's going to be a fun little arts and crafts project, and you guys can see why I all failed art class in elementary school. Just kidding. It's a beautiful plaque that you guys are all going to see. Almost as nice as this guest. We really appreciate it. We're 100% powered by Supercast.

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