Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/5/23: Trump Mocks Overuse Of 'Woke', DeSantis And Trump Avoid Debates, Big Donors Back DeSantis, Jack Endorses RFK Jr, SCOTUS Crushes Workers, YouTube Changes Election Disinfo Policy, Twitter Notes, Jamie Dimon 2024, Ukraine War Profiteers

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump mocking the overuse of the word 'woke' as DeSantis claps back, both GOP frontrunners potentially dodging the debate stage, Wall Street donors backing DeSantis, Jack from Twitter endorsing RFK Jr, SCOTUS crushing workers in a brutal new ruling, YouTube changing their disinformation policy, the flaws of Twitter Community Notes, Wall Street pushing for Jamie Dimon to run for President, and Ukraine war profiteers with Ben Freeman.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Read Ben Freeman Here: https://quincyinst.org/author/bfreeman/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. What up, y'all? This your main man, Memphis Bleak, right here. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. Whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn, learn from it.

Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today.

What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of 2024 news to get into this morning. We've got a war over wokeness in the Republican primary that nobody sort of expected between Trump and DeSantis. We'll tell you about that. We've also got the debate over the debates, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. And RFK Jr. gets a big and very prominent endorsement. YouTube is actually changing their misinformation policy with regard to election misinformation. We also have a big decision from the Supreme Court that could hurt workers and their right to strike. So we'll break down all of those details for you. In addition, I know this is going to be huge news for our viewing audience. Chuck Todd out at Meet

the Press. Kristen Welker is going to be the host of that long running Sunday show. So we'll tell you about that and what the plans are there. I was excited about a guest on just how much military industrial complex money is going to all of the analysts that you're hearing on the Ukraine war. You perhaps won't be surprised, but still important to dig into all of those details. But before we get to that, Sagar, why are we not in our normal studio? Yes, we're not in our normal studio because it doesn't exist anymore. We are currently at home.

The studio is being ripped apart, renovated, being completely reborn into a brand new iteration of which I think everyone will be very excited. It's the very last week you all have to hear us talk about how nice it is. You can judge it for all of yourselves. I want to say thank you to all the premium members who are making it possible, who are signing up. And just to make it clear, we are

going to have a very, very special announcement. Our premium subscribers will have the first look at the set substantially before anybody else and it debuts next week. So if you want to see the set firsthand and if you really want to help pay for it because it was the biggest expense in the history of Breaking Points, it's BreakingPoints.com where you can help us out. Yes. So the old set has gone into a cocoon and it will emerge next week as a beautiful butterfly. That's right. That's exactly right. We still have got a great show though, for everybody. We're going to make sure that we have all of the normal content that you are used to. So let's start here with the woke war of words. President Trump actually kind of surprising people in the campaign whenever he came out

and attacked DeSantis, apparently for always using the term woke in his campaign. Here's what Trump had to say. It's gone sick. And I don't like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it's like just a term that use half the people can't even define it. They don't know what it is. Oh, a little bit of a Bethany Bandell moment there going for President Trump says half the people can't even define it. I don't like hearing it over and over again. It's interesting always to me because Trump always hones in on something which is someone's political vulnerability, but which other Republicans refuse to say.

That said, DeSantis also had his response. So, Crystal, we'll talk about the fulsome nature of this woke war of words after we hear it. Let's take a listen to what DeSantis said. Woke is an existential threat to our society. I mean, it's an attack on truth. It's a form of cultural Marxism, and it really subordinates merit and achievement to things like identity politics. You can't have a vibrant, free society if every institution is dominated by woke ideology. And to say it's not a big deal, that just shows, you know, you don't understand what a lot of these issues are right now. DeSantis, woke is an existential threat to the country. You shouldn't be running if you don't understand it. It shows a mismatched judgment. Trump saying woke, woke, woke. Nobody can

even define it. What did you make of all of this? I mean, it's interesting to me. I'm always a little bit leery of offering my assessment of exactly what the Republican base might think about this because I'm not a part of the Republican base. But it seems likely to me that this reflects a bit of the class split between the DeSantis and Trump base. So, you know, Trump is very much and always has been sort of attuned to what a working class GOP aligned or GOP interested or more like sort of working class independent base, what they might be feeling. DeSantis has already proven that he has much stronger support among the college educated portion of the Republican base. So I don't know. My instinct is that Trump kind of has his finger on the pulse of the way people

are starting to feel about this word which is so wildly overused which you know originally i think there was a usefulness to talking about a pushback to the you know political correctness and the cancel culture and the authoritarian tendencies of liberals and left liberals but now when you're talking about like the problem with the military is that it's woke. The problem with bank bailouts are that they're woke. The thing just loses all meaning and collapses into nothingness. And I think a lot of people in the country are probably attuned to that, including a lot of people in the Republican base who are like, this doesn't really connect to me and my life and the things that I'm actually concerned about in terms of putting food on the table. I'm of two minds. So on one hand, I actually saw a recent poll which said that the number one issue for Republican voters is going after what they see as, and they didn't use the

term woke in the poll, but they basically just said cultural left tendencies specifically by corporations and through the broader culture. So that's one thing. But at the same time, Trump, I think one of his geniuses, what you're identifying is you're right, which is that the most activist part of the Republican base, whenever it comes to wokeness, corporations and all of that, it really is more of a highly educated, more of a conservative who went to college, which, again, it's not actually very typical for not only the median voter in the United States, but even for the person who is in the GOP primary. So they might identify and see it as something else. And I think it gets to what Trump's attack on DeSantis is, where he's always trying to go after him for saying that he's empty, that he's a lightweight, and that is where it is connecting. I genuinely don't know how it will land, because at the same time, like we said, his word almost drummed into the political consciousness at this point of

every American class status or not. And I do think it is also interesting from a different angle, which is whenever you think about Trump and his political genius, what he's able to connect to, he does not necessarily go after wokeness. He always goes after discrete issues. And actually, that's kind of what we always try to do here. We very rarely use the term woke. I may use it every once in a while, but more than often are not like affirmative action. We're not describing that as woke. We're just like affirmative action is bad. And then like, we'll go through the exact discrete nature. If you want to talk about the military, I mean, whenever people say the military is woke, it's like, well, what are you objecting to? You're objecting to General Milley, you know, citing critical race theory before Congress and then diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

So once again, attack things that are discreet and trying to think of some all encompassing term that becomes meaningless because then you end up just in the situation that you described, Crystal, where bailing out SVB is woke. It could just be bad. You know, we could just say things are bad and you could talk about things from that nature. Right. But it's I mean, I've always felt this. I've articulated this on the show a number of times, like the use of wokeness to describe things that conservatives like Ron DeSantis don't like. We saw this, you know, the first time we really got a sort of clear example of this is when Marco Rubio said, hey, you know what, I'm going to support the Amazon workers down in Bessemer, not because we need a general pushback against

corporate power, not because in general, I think workers should have a union so that they have some power within their workplace, but because of the discrete woke HR policies that happen to exist at Amazon. So it's a way to be very selective about your critique of corporate power without actually really challenging corporate power or the structures that enables it. So it's been very convenient, but it also speaks to DeSantis in his launch, even putting the tech glitches aside and all of that stuff, the language that he has adopted and that he uses in his media appearances that he even uses in a stump speech is so online and so inaccessible. It's the polar opposite of the way that Trump speaks. I remember when he first ran in 2016, there were all these analyses that were supposed

to be damning to Trump about how he speaks at like a third grade or a fourth grade level or whatever. But actually, he's an effective communicator, maybe an unconventional communicator, but a very effective communicator because he boils things down. He makes them simple and he uses language that is very accessible to absolutely everyone. DeSantis is on the polar end of that spectrum. So, you know, it's not like Trump and DeSantis are really different from a policy level on the basket of issues you may consider woke. In fact, I think that very same day, Trump was also talking about the woke military or whatever, but their communication styles are obviously wildly different. The issue set that they choose to spend the most of their time on where that are sort

of directly a clear passion projects are also very different. We noted, Sagar, that in Trump's announcement speech, if he mentioned transgender issues at all, it was, you know, it was very scarce. Abortion wasn't there at all. So the set of issues that Trump leans into and clearly has an actual like interest in passion for very different from the set of issues that Ron DeSantis has used to become a national figure within the conservative party. Smart. I completely agree. They're also sparring on the vaccine. This was a fascinating one, actually, to watch because Trump has been hearing some pushback from even people who are attending his rallies on the vaccine. And it's leading to a war of words about who supported the vaccine, but then didn't support the vaccine and then was pro-mandate and then

re-litigating also whether the Trump lockdown strategy was his fault or Fauci's fault. And this has actually become a major core contention between DeSantis and between Trump, specifically their records on COVID. Let's go and put this up there on the screen because this kind of gets to it and why I think it is going to be difficult for him overall. A, there was no bump currently for DeSantis from the 2024 launch as Trump continues to climb, even though DeSantis, as I have noted here, has continued his attacks on Trump, specifically on the vaccine. He has, and I have noted here, has continued his attacks on Trump, specifically on the vaccine, he has, and I've given him credit here for it, has very taken up an aggressive

posture where he's calling out Trump by name, responding to the attacks and trying to make himself become the formidable and only challenger to Trump, willing to actually rhetorically spar with him. But on the vaccine itself, this shows you a little bit about why it's going to be so difficult for him. You know, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen, guys, from CNN. This is from Andrew Kaczynski, where he shows, you know, Ron DeSantis actually praised Anthony Fauci for COVID response in spring of 2020 for, quote, really doing a good job. Now, I'm not saying this is a hit piece on DeSantis. There's

no question that he obviously departed from that. What I am saying and trying to show people here is that trying to relitigate a moment in time three years ago is going to be very difficult and dicey, especially because all Trump has to say, Crystal, is he praised my response at the time. He departed from it a little bit later on, but also he was kissing my ass in these endorsement videos, defending me on television. There really was no split between the two until basically after Trump had gone ahead and left the White House.

And so that is why I've always believed that DeSantis' best line is the one he actually used recently. He said, you know, they were asking about how do you pronounce my name? Is it DeSantis or DeSantis? He said, the way that you just say it is winner. I'm the winner. I'm the one who has actually won recently in this race. It's a forward looking and it's a more positive one that not only primary voters could connect

to, but people across the country could connect to. But then you run into the Gordian knot of Trump, who Republicans don't believe actually lost at all. They do think he is a winner. Maybe DeSantis is just a bigger winner. So, yeah, look, it's funny. It's a hard situation. It's funny to me. You like that line that DeSantis is not DeSantis or DeSantis. It's a winner. I thought it was really terrible. Oh, I thought it was so cringy but anyway again I'm not the audience for it so um listen on the COVID stuff I think DeSantis really thought this was going to be his in and his avenue of attack on Trump he thought this would be the way that he could separate himself and you know it was a year ago,

a major energizing issue for the Republican base. And I think he's having trouble letting that go, even though people have moved on. Like, it's just not the energizing issue for anyone that it was at one time. So, yeah, they can go back and forth this war of words. Honestly, it's I think it's kind of like wasted time for both of them at this point. I think the other thing is, you know, Trump just gets away with stuff that other politicians can't get away with. So if another politician had kept Anthony Fauci on, that might be devastating for them. Somehow Trump just gets away with these things. So personally, I don't think that this is going to be, you know, the winning issue that Ron DeSantis wants it to be also because Trump is able as he, this is what he's so good at. He muddies the waters, you know, he'll be, he'll be using the video of DeSantis praising him over and over again and kissing his butt.

That's one way to muddy the waters. Another way is to point out these areas where, you know, DeSantis agreed with like the COVID conventional wisdom of the time. So I think ultimately this issue is probably a wash for both of them and, you know, not the ground that the GOP primary is gonna be fought on. Trump also, you know, displayed his, you know, skill, I guess, in this. He's like, look, I never supported the mandates, but I created the vaccine and it was great.

And, you know, actually correctly noting that over 75% of Americans did actually receive at least one dose of the vaccine. Well, I actually want to say before we yeah. Yeah. So on that, you know, the other as you're pointing to the big argument in favor of Ron DeSantis that his donors really point to and respond to is that he's electable. He's more electable than Trump. And, you know, he may be in the right place with regard to vaccines and sort of like hinting at vaccine skepticism or anti-vaxxism within the Republican primary. It's not a popular position to be in for a general election. As you're pointing out, overwhelming majority of Americans got a vaccine and overwhelming majority

of them were happy with that decision and feel like the vaccines did something, you know, it wasn't everything that was promised, but help reduce the risk that they would be severely ill or hospitalized or dead from covid. So this is another issue where I feel like, you know, Trump can get away with the more moderate position in the primary. And it actually gives him a stronger case that he's the more electable candidate in the fall and a stronger reality that he may be a more electable candidate in the fall. Well, here's what he had to say. Judge for yourself. Everybody wanted a vaccine at that time. And I was able to do something that nobody else could have done, getting it done very, very rapidly. But I never was for mandates. I was I thought the mandates were terrible. And and, you know, there's a big portion of the country that thinks that was a great thing. You understand that.

Not a lot of the people in this room, but there's a big, but there is a big portion. Well, he's explaining it. And, you know, I've always actually thought that, especially even amongst Republican voters, people 65 plus were overwhelmingly likely to get the vaccine. So, you know, it's one of those where I genuinely don't know. I personally am not inclined to believe, based upon all the polling that currently exists, that COVID is going to be the number one issue in the primary. People are always generally forward-looking whenever it does come to elections. And especially whenever it

comes to switching candidates, they always want to see a contrast about the future. Yes, of course, the future is determined by what people have done in the past. But that's why I continue to think that DeSantis is best option is leaning into being a winner. The economic boom of Florida, the net in migration, turning America into all of that. Now, whether it was cringy on the winner line or not, I mean, I think what I'm baking in is I just don't think he's all that politically talented as a speaker. And Trump is Trump is compelling. And, you know, and this is one of those it factor things of which we can go back and forth all the time. And the country, you know, goes back and forth between whether they want somebody like Obama, the ultimate eloquent speaker, and then somebody like George W. Bush, you could barely string a sentence together. So it's one of those.

I just never know what mood the overall electorate is in. Do they want somebody who's kind of whiny, not all that politically talented, but, you know, can speak cogently in a sentence? Or do they want to see the show whenever it comes to Trump? I mean, Bush famously even had the like relatability, like even though he's this totally unrelatable plutocrat, you know, born into a political dynasty family, he had that you want to drink a beer with him vibe. Like that was always the famous thing about him that people responded to Biden for, you know,

all of his agedness and feebleness at that point. I mean, he has a little bit of that as well, where people felt like, oh, this is somebody that I sort of relate to. And, you know, he was always good at sharing empathy with people when they were going through very difficult times. I think the part of the problem for him is he's lost a little bit of that. Now people are seeing less of that in him, but that's kind of the core of his appeal. So, yeah, I don't know that DeSantis has either the like, you know, the eloquence of Obama or Bill Clinton either, or the really compelling speaking style of like a Trump or a George W. Bush, who was also to sort of boil things down and make them relatable. I also just to go back for a minute to the piece we put up

about how he didn't get a poll bump from his launch. It's kind of devastating. I mean, he really needed that, you know, like it's a big problem. And whether that's kind of devastating i mean he really needed that you know like it's a big problem and whether that's because of the tech glitches or the content of the launch or the way the media whatever uh it's a huge missed opportunity for him even nikki haley got a bump from her launch and you know did a very conventional rollout sometimes there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and you know maybe it doesn't matter because a lot of times those initial launch bumps fade anyway. But that was really the moment when he needed to prove like, OK, now that I'm in the race, things are going to be different.

And he wasn't able to pull that off. And I think it shows some weaknesses in terms of the type of judgment that he makes and the part of the GOP base that he's super responsive to that's not necessarily reflective of of the GOP base that he's super responsive to, that's not necessarily reflective of the larger GOP base. So there are some, to me, some real warning signs in the fact that that launch went so poorly that he didn't get any kind of benefit from the polls and from having all of the media, you know, there's not going to be that many times for Ron DeSantis when all of the media is focused on him, just given the show that Trump

creates and the looming indictments and all of that stuff. So when you have those moments, you really can't afford to squander him and them. And he definitely did. Yeah. Let's go to the next one because this is important. It kind of gets to that about the energy around DeSantis. Let's go and put this up there on the screen, which actually shows that the DeSantis campaign through the new disclosures had 40,000 donors in the month of May. So that means that the campaign relied very heavily on big donors for its $8.2 million one-day haul. They had an average donation of $200 plus, which is colossal. As he says, for comparison, Bernie Sanders had a $26 average per donation whenever it comes to day one. That figure, just for people who understand, again, $200 is much, much more than the typical grassroots support.

This is actually something that we used to see a lot in our early analysis of the Democratic primary whenever it came to candidates like Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren, people who had connections or better ones to big donors. And what it matters and why is that whenever it comes to Trump, Trump has always been a absolute fundraising juggernaut. And he actually would often match Bernie Sanders whenever it comes to his math in 2020 for the ability to drive small-dollar, grassroots fundraising from a massive email list of people who just love him and are always willing to hit that button. And look, for DeSantis, I guess, to defend him just a little bit, it's not like they tried to hide it.

They literally had a big donor conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami after they launched. That was the very first thing that they did. They were clearly lining this up for months before. Part of the pitch on why he's maybe the only one to do it is he's got all these billionaires who are backing him, Ken Griffin, many others, the more college educated base of the Republican Party, the people who like DeSantis. Why not lean on that? You know, take the money if it's going to be there. These people are much disproportionately high income. But the reason why that you should be,

at the very least, a little bit concerned about this, if you are part of the DeSantis team, is getting people jazzed with their dollars is the ultimate sign that they will come out, they will vote for you, they will do everything possible for you. And as we've seen in the Scott Walker campaign, the Jeb Bush campaign, and so many of these other campaigns having a lot of money, it only works to a very, very small degree. Yeah. I mean, then again, Joe Biden had like zero grassroots support. There you go. Right.

He became the Democratic nominee. So it's important to keep the counter in mind. In general, I agree with your analysis, though. It was actually Obama who first had this insight that even if you can get someone to contribute like a dollar or two dollars, they become personally invested in your campaign. They're more likely then to volunteer. They're more likely then to engage online. They're more likely to show up and vote. So there's a strength that comes from that.

It indicates the level of, you know, Ron DeSantis has very high favorability in the Republican Party. I'm not saying people don't like him. I think people do like him. But there's a difference between, yeah, I like this guy. And like, I will walk across broken glass for this man. And Donald Trump has that from his hardcore supporters, like they will be there to show up and vote. They will click the box to send another ten dollars his way. The other issue for everybody in the Republican Party is the fact that Trump has used and abused his fundraising list. The amount of, you know, like asks that they make of that list, just constant email bombardment of send me more, send me more, send me more,

has created a real donor fatigue for the entire Republican Party that everybody sort of suffers from. And behind the scenes, a lot of Republicans apparently complain about. So that's another piece. And then the last part, reason why this is significant is because if you are dependent for financial support on a millionaire or billionaire class, then you have to be sensitive to their concerns. And you have to, you know, moderate what you're saying on Ukraine, as one example, if that's an issue where they're uncomfortable. And there are quite a number of issues where the sort of elite donor class of the Republican Party may be at odds with the broader GOP base. And so it makes it a little bit politically trickier for you to navigate if you got to

keep those people happy who don't reflect the wants and desires of the working class part of the Republican base that DeSantis has so far really struggled to win over. And I have the numbers in front of me, which is to prove the point. The average donation for the fourth quarter of the Trump campaign was thirty four dollars. So compare that to the two hundred. I mean, this is what people just don't get. And, you know, previously, comparatively, in the two weeks after Trump was charged, his campaign received 312,000 donations in two weeks with an average donation of 49 bucks. This is a fundraising juggernaut of which people are deep, always have underestimated. And it is a good proxy for voting.

I mean, once again, literally from January to March, he received half a million donations. I mean, that is, again, very on par with Obama and with Sanders. These are very rare, very, very rare political phenomena for people to be able to do that, which is why the vast majority of them pursue the DeSantis model and they go to or the Biden model really and go to big donors. As you just said, though, it's not like it can't work. It can work. So we should say that it can't you know that it can't. But it is a strength. It is a major strength. Yeah. The more I think about this match between DeSantis and Trump, the more that it feels there's some some echoes of Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, for sure. I mean, on paper, they support a lot of the same things Bernie and Warren do. Right. But their

approach and the base of their support in the way they communicate about those policies is just it's just totally different. And so, you know, the their support where their money came from and their ability to succeed ultimately in the process also ends up being totally different. And so, you know, the, their support where their money came from and their ability to succeed ultimately in the process also ends up being totally different. And so, you know, I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but I do see a lot of similarities there in the way that this is unfolding. I think that the best analysis is the difference between them is the, like wine track beer track distinction. And that certainly is reflected in these fundraising numbers. Certainly. Absolutely right. Let's go ahead to 2024. Some big news about the debates, about who's going to get allowed to debate and so much more. So let's go ahead and start putting these up on the screen, guys,

because we're going to go ahead and show people. First of all, whenever it comes to DeSantis, his team does not want NBC or CNN to co-host the debate. Trump, however, is wary of Fox and of Murdoch's perceived turn to DeSantis. I wouldn't even call it perceived. I would say it's absolutely correct. Then you've got CNN and NBC who are salivating to host the GOTV debate. But the deadlock is making uncertainty over whether any of it will literally happen at all. Now, as Alex Thompson here notes, Trump's campaign believes his opponents actually need the primary debates more than he does, obviously, because he's behind them in the polls. If Trump doesn't show up, what does DeSantis

do? Neither have committed currently to the first debate in August. And if they don't show up, what do the others do? This is a very important thing. And I will just say, once again, while I want Trump to show up for the debates, because I believe that people should debate, and I believe also it'd be fun to cover here on Breaking Points. Selfishly, yes. Yes, just purely selfishly. If I were him, there's no way in hell I would show up for these debates. No way. Because it makes them all just seem like squabbling children who are going after his scraps. When you're the king, why put yourself in a position where somebody can come after you? It denigrates them to a lower status by just saying, you're not

even worth my time. I don't have to do this. Now for DeSantis, this is very, very tricky. Do you show up to the debate where you become the center for attacks? Chris Christie needs to take out DeSantis if he wants to become number two. Vivek Ramaswamy's got to take out DeSantis. Nikki Haley has got to take out DeSantis. That's why they're mostly all concentrating their fire on one another. What does DeSantis do? I think if Trump doesn't show up to the debate, DeSantis shouldn't either, because it's again a sign of strength of, nope, I'm the number two. You idiots can all squabble on stage if you want. For example, Nikki Haley held a CNN town hall. Nobody cares. Nobody cares because she's

a low rated candidate. It's not a media event. He would basically turn. Remember the when was it in 2016, the Republican primary debates where they had two debates, the lower polls and then the higher polls? Yeah, the kids table. And where Bobby Jindal and all of them, nobody cared. Nobody watched it at all. It was irrelevant from a perspective. He needs to turn, if Trump does not show up, that's what DeSantis should do. He should turn the GOP primary debates into a spectacle. Now, I once again want to say, I do think everybody should debate. I think it's important for a democracy, but unfortunately, there is no requirement to do so. Yeah, I think we should have a law, constitutional amendment, whatever needs to happen to make this

required because American people deserve to hear from the candidates, especially the candidates who want to be freaking president of the United States. It's absolutely an absurdity. I disagree on the DeSantis calculus here. So first of all, let me say that if I was the DeSantis team, I would be doing whatever I could bending to whatever desires Trump has to try to persuade him to debate, because I think you need that. I think you need to be on stage with him to have a shot. OK, so if Trump is like, I would rather it's NBC, you may not like NBC or CNN or MSNBC or whatever. But if that's where he feels more comfortable, he's got the upper hand. He's got all the leverage. So I would bend to his wishes, even knowing that it is still unlikely that he is probably going to show up in debate.

So that's number one. Number two, DeSantis has got to take a lot of risks here, you know, so is it risky for him to step on that debate stage with everybody else? Probably like guns blazing directly for him since he's the one that happens to be there and they're all trying to position themselves to be the Trump alternative and they're all basically too afraid to go directly after Donald Trump. Yeah, that's a that's a huge risk, especially for a guy who, you know, frankly, doesn't do all that well in unscripted situations. So, yes, it's a risk. Do I think it's a risk he needs to take? I do. And it's at least a chance for him to, again, grab the media attention that he so desperately needs when Trump is typically sucking up all of the oxygen in the room. So I see it a little bit differently. I don't think DeSantis can afford to sit out those sorts of opportunities to get in front of cameras and try to persuade people that he is up to the task and that they should supplant the guy that they already really like, Donald

Trump, who was already president of the United States once with a newcomer that they like, but aren't as sure or as passionate about. Yeah. You know, look, maybe you're right. I truly don't know. Let's talk about the rules and some of that, too. Let's go to the next part here, guys, because the rules are actually pretty important. This gets to some of the pitches that we are inside the NBC pitch. They say that they're making sure that they'll be seen as fair and, you know, talking. And DeSantis campaign is is upset about the way NBC has previously covered them,

CNN as well, inside of their pitch. They say that CNN can reach more conservatives than Fox, as well as independent voters, which is a joke because it's absolutely not true. Let's go to the next part here, guys, just so we can show everybody. What we can see here is that DeSantis actually is making a case that he does not believe that corporate media should even be involved in the RNC process at all because, quote, their whole goal is to make the Republican candidates as ridiculous as possible. So the last remaining contenders kind of are ABC News, CBS News, and PBS. Let's get a little bit to the rules here because this is important. Let's go to

the next one that we can show you. To qualify for the current debates, according to the RNC, candidates must poll at least 1% in three national polls or 1% in two national polls, 1% in one early state polls from two separate carve-out states, aka like Iowa and New Hampshire, and then a minimum of 40,000 unique donors with at least 200 unique donors in 20-plus states, and pledged to not participate in non-RNC debates and support the eventual nominee. So interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, the polling at 1% and all of that, that's not difficult. There's a lot of candidates.

But the 40,000 unique donors, including 200 donors across 20 different states, that's actually harder to do, especially the 40,000 uniques. It means you cannot brute force your way or kind of rich guy your way into this. 40,000 is just a lot of people, and it will definitely require some actual support for your candidacy across the country. The other thing is, and I don't think a lot of people notice this, having to pledge to support the eventual nominee is a huge inclusion into the new debate rules because Trump famously, at the very first debate of the RNC, when they asked him, will you support the eventual nominee, did not raise his hand because he said, well, maybe, maybe not. He still has never answered that question. There's no way also in my mind that he would even agree to that.

So the RNC might have just shot itself in the foot by making sure, Crystal, that Trump does not show up at all. Yeah, I think that's certainly impossible. Given that criteria, probably right now, possibly the only two that qualify based on the donor criteria are Trump and DeSantis. Maybe there's somebody, maybe a Nikki Haley or somebody else may qualify right now. But that really is the barrier is the donor numbers versus the polling numbers, because, you know, even some of the lesser known contenders are going to at least get one percent in enough polls to be able to make the debate stage. So I do think that that is the bigger issue. But yeah, I mean, Trump likes to keep his leverage. He's he is very unlikely to submit himself to that pledge. And, you know, it's not a crazy universe to imagine that if DeSantis did by some, you know, stroke of luck or fate or whatever, win the Republican nomination,

Trump would love to hang over their heads like, OK, I'll run third party then and we'll see how that goes. So, you know, which is a real problem for DeSantis's core electability pitch as well, because you're going to be a whole lot less electable if Trump is out there intentionally playing the role of the spoiler. So I do think that might be a bridge that he's not willing to cross. Yeah, I actually saw Larry Elder apparently spoke to a reporter about this. He said he was kind of criticizing the 40,000. He's like, oh, that's so difficult, all of that. And it gets to

some of the difficulty. DeSantis and Trump obviously are going to have no problem hitting the 40,000 unique donors and also people across. But smaller candidates who even have polled at 1% or 2%, people like Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson, and all of them, they may have a real donor issue. And actually, you're very likely to see them probably step up their online campaign efforts as these rules have now been announced. So let's all watch. August, it's really not that far away before we get to the very first debate.

I'm excited. Yeah, it's going to be fun. We're going to have our new set. We've got room for panelists. It's going to be awesome. I can't wait. All right, let's go to the next part. This is Jack Returns.

Jack Dorsey has returned to Twitter. He's even got a blue check. So there's something going on there. Oh, does he? Oh, that's funny. He certainly does. And one of the things he did something going on. Oh, does he? Oh, that's funny. I certainly does. And one of the things he did whenever he surfaced for the first time on Twitter in quite a long time. Let's go ahead and put this on the screen was tweet.

He can and he will to a YouTube video of RFK Jr. appearing on YouTube where it says Robert F. Kennedy argues he can and beat Trump. Somebody replied, are you endorsing or are you just predicting? And he said both. Okay. So whatever that means. So I guess that means he is certainly endorsing him since he did technically say that he would. He also tweeted out this video against Joe Biden shows you that this moment that Biden fell and he just said, open the Democratic primaries in the face. This isn't fair to anyone.

So clearly, you know, I did a video. Very fair point. I mean, obviously, he's right. You know, there's literally no question why the why there should be no Democratic debate. RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson, anybody else really who can qualify absolutely has the right and really the responsibility, I think, to challenge him and to ask him, like, why are you fit to remain in office? We're going to talk probably tomorrow, Crystal, about this new effort by Biden insiders to prove that he actually yeah, he's old, but he's not that old. He's he's a spry old chicken.

We we promise, you know, he gets up at nine and works till six. And I'm like, you mean like everybody else in the country? Okay. Not all that inspiring. This also comes on the heels, Crystal, of Elon announcing that Twitter will be hosting a space is actually later today with RFK Jr. moderated by Elon Musk. Let's put this up there.

Twitter Spaces says, heads up, we're doing maintenance on our infrastructure to help us handle bigger spaces. There may be some minor turbulence in the next day. Thanks for hanging with us. And Elon confirmed that the system is being upgraded and stress tested in advance of the RFK Jr. interview on Monday. So a big get for RFK Jr. interview on Monday. So a big get for RFK Jr.

He will be there at, I believe it's Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. So a little bit after this show will air for most of the general public. And we'll have a big analysis for everybody tomorrow on what happens. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Elon, after the DeSantis one, I think in some like feeble effort to pretend like he's not biased in this race was like, oh, of course, I'll do spaces with any presidential contender. Right. We'll see if that ends up being the case. I know that Marianne had replied like, hey, I do want to and don't think she's heard back yet. So we'll see if that actually, you know, invitation extends to everyone. But I think the more that RFK Jr. or Marianne are able to get high profile endorsements, high profile interviews where they're in the public consciousness.

I mean, this is the whole plan from the DNC is basically like, we're just going to pretend you don't exist. We're going to pretend you're not, quote unquote, serious or not, quote unquote, qualified. We're going to pretend like Biden has no real competition. And so, yes, you may be nervous about the fact that he can't walk across the stage and that he's in clear mental decline and that he only works from like 12 to four Monday through Thursday. You may be worried about him serving as president at 86 years old, but sorry, you just don't have another choice. And so the more that you have this kind of visibility for his challengers, the more difficult it becomes for them to sustain that narrative. And we saw this playbook a number of times in the Democratic primary last time around, where the very first phases were just going to pretend you don't exist. Even with Bernie, who had been, you know, so like so prominent and has came so close in 2016, if they hadn't rigged the primary, even with him, they tried to just

pretend he didn't exist at the beginning of the 2020 primary. And then you get to a certain critical mass. It's like, OK, well, we can't ignore you completely anymore. So now we're going to smear you. Now we're going to attack you like that's the next phase. And I think we're rapidly approaching that phase because it just becomes more and more difficult to deny that there are other alternatives, that people don't have to stick with Joe Biden, that there should be a competitive primary process. And so I actually love to see Jack, you know, clothes on fire talking about the sanctity of democracy and then are doing everything they can to short circuit the public having an actual Democratic choice within their own primary process. So, you know, I just saw an article this morning from I think it was ABC that was like, you know, so far, the Democratic primary has been successful at shutting down left wing critics who say there should be a debate. But the longer this goes on and the more the polls build for RFK Jr. in particular and Marianne as well, the more that that builds, the more difficult it's going to become for them to hold this position that they have right now. Yeah. As you said, let's go ahead and put B7 guys, please, up on the screen. You referenced the Marianne Williamson tweet that she replied. And she says, hi, Elon, you had offered a space

discussion to all presidential candidates who tried to get in touch. I would love to take you up on the offer. We'll see. Maybe RFK Jr. will bring it up there as well. And yeah, look, I actually, as bad as the DeSantis one went, I genuinely hope this one goes well because I think people like this deserve a forum and a chance to talk. And I want to see more of them. And, you know, if they can, maybe they should even publish it as a podcast.

I actually hope that there are no technical glitches. So then we can just clip out things that he says and we can talk about the editorial rather than, and so can other media outlets rather than, you know, focusing on all of that. So anyway, we'll see. Right. And I would still never recommend to any candidate that you launch on Twitter spaces, not only for the technical glitch reasons like it was poorly conceived of to begin with. It's the audio quality sounds like crap. It's a very impersonal kind of forum. It's just doesn't lend itself to the sort of like

staging that you would want to make your big first impression on the country. But as a forum to have a discussion and have, you know, high profile and get asked some tough questions and whatnot. Yeah, absolutely. Like I would recommend this to anyone, especially candidates who are being shut out completely of the mainstream press and who are they're trying to just completely invisibilize. If you've got an opportunity to grab some attention, you do it, even if there are risks inherent in that. But yeah, don't don't launch on Twitter spaces would probably be the advice here. Yeah, I agree with that one. OK, at the same time, we've got some other social media platform or I guess content platform news for you.

Famously, YouTube has been very aggressive about taking down any content that suggests the 2020 election was stolen. Even sometimes when that content is trying to debunk those claims. Well, they have just announced that they are changing that policy. Let's go and put this up on the screen. This is actually a big deal. So they say, Scoop, YouTube reverses misinformation policy to allow U.S. election denialism in a reversal of its election integrity policy. YouTube will leave up content that says fraud errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections, the company confirmed. Why it matters, YouTube established the policy in December 2020 after enough states had certified the 2020 election results. In part of their comments here

from YouTube, they said, two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognize it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. Now, the way Axios presents this saga is very like, you know, they make it sound bad that this decision was changed, but people have to understand the reality of how this was enforced because even, you know, our old outlet, The Hill, they played some Trump clip where he's talking about a bunch of nonsense. They're not endorsing it. They're just trying to cover one of the most prominent people in political life. And their content is getting taken down and banned. And it's not just them. I mean, this happened. This also happened to Kyle, where he was trying to do a segment debunking some

of these claims and it gets hit and taken down. So the way that this policy was applied was horrendous and counterproductive. And also, you know, we have a commitment here to free speech and anti-censorship anyway. The way to go about these things is to debunk, to debate, to, you know, meet these like spurious claims with facts and truth, which is what we tried to do. We went through painstakingly all of the lawsuits that were filed and tried to explain to people, here's why there's no there there. That's the approach to this, not just blanket takedown. So, you know, selfishly, I'm very glad I'm very happy about it because we always had to be very nervous anytime. Like, for example, when we took Trump's launch speech for his campaign live, we were very concerned about whatever he says they could hit us with, even though it's not like

we're endorsing these claims. But if you don't come out and say, let me debunk claim by claim by claim. And even if you do that, they may still take it down. It's so ridiculous. Look, Crystal, you and I have said this directly to YouTube's face, you know, time and time again, I've been very outspoken about this policy and why I hate it,

which is that the idea that broadcasting what a person of public interest says is an endorsement is ridiculous. It's ludicrous on its face. When you're in the news, you play what people say and then you talk about it. You can say afterwards if you want to, whether this is wrong or not. But also, I even object to the idea that we are supposed to be compelled to fact check what we every single claim it is not we are allowed to program our show in any way that we want and also yeah look you can hate it you can hate it if there are right-wing youtubers out there who are doing videos about how the 2020 election was stolen but if you set

a policy about trying to ban that type of stuff there will come a time where soon maybe in the future you have questions about election mishaps or something going on in this country, and you try to do a video on it, and it is going to get taken down, or they can set a policy in which they adjudicate what is correct and what is not. At the end of the day, it is up to the legal system, and it is up to our actual viewers. I'm doing a whole monologue today, by the way, about this, about fact-checking community notes and Twitter. And it's so important for people to understand platforms have no business adjudicating truth, especially whenever it comes to small C civics issues like democracy, like voting, like elections. These are belong to the public. They belong to all of us. They are our elections. Our public officials set the rules and the things and the debates around them.

And if people lie about them, well, a that's on them. And why I hate this as well is what was the reason that all these Republicans lost in 2020 crystal or 2022 crystal? Stop this deal. People aren't stupid. A lot of people hate it. They hate it so much. It drives them completely insane. That was a literal Democratic check on something that people did not like. And obviously, Republicans did not make enough of a case that it was true enough. And in fact, made it such enough of a case to simply vote against them that many of them lost across this country. It is so important for people to understand that democracy itself is the single best check

against lies, against disinformation. And the idea that you need some overall thing to come on top and to tell you what's true and what's not for people like us to how to run our business, for people like us, how to run our content. I would never presume to do that to anybody. So anyway, I'm very glad to see this policy.

Yes. My advice to YouTube. My advice to YouTube is stay out of this game. Stay out. Fact checking. You know, even today, every once in a while. Now I said it. This video will have some stupid COVID warning.

For what? Link to Wikipedia. You know, it's like it's's like, how is that useful to anybody who is watching this? You know, it's one of those where the, the entire, it's a narcissism of these platforms to think that some stupid Wikipedia type label is going to in any way influence or change. Well, they, they don't actually think that they just want to cover their asses for advertisers. That's, that's all it is. They want to be able to say to advertisers like, oh, we put in a warning and here's the link and whatever so that they can feel comfy having their ads run, whatever.

That's what it's really all about. I do have a theory about why they changed the policy now, which is Trump just did his big CNN town hall where he spouted a bunch of election nonsense. And it just becomes really clear like, OK, so are you going to hit CNN because they didn't rebut every single claim in real time or whatever? Are you going to take their videos down? It just becomes really clear. Number one, they always have had a different policy about what corporate media can get away with and what independent media can get away with. And number two, I mean, the presidential cycle is underway. Are we not supposed to play Trump speeches or

take his comments live for fear that he may say something that is ludicrous and incorrect? That's just a preposterous standard that makes no sense ever, but especially makes no sense when you're in the middle of a presidential election season. So I sort of think that the CNN town hall may have been the breaking point where they realized like, all right, this policy doesn't really make sense. It's not really sustainable. Our hypocrisy and our like double standards here are being too blatantly exposed. So we got to we got to change course. We got to make a different decision. Listen, I absolutely hope so. It's a stupid policy for all these people. Stay out. Let the public look at the information, everything that is out there, and make up their own mind.

You have no, quote unquote, responsibility or even obligation to try and, quote unquote, fact check whatever is out there. That's not your job. It's the job of the people. And the sooner that people understand that, the better. It drives me absolutely crazy every time I see stuff like this. All right, we have a big Supreme Court decision that we wanted to break down for you all that could have huge ramifications about workers' ability to strike. Let's put this up on the screen, and then I'll tell you some of the backstory.

So this is from More Perfect Union. They say, breaking the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a concrete company that wanted to sue a union because a strike cost them money. The eight to one decision means the company Glacier Northwest Incorporated can sue the union over a strike where truck drivers left wet concrete in their trucks. So we covered the story previously, but just to remind everybody the backstory here, what happened is you had workers represented by a Teamsters local who were in the middle of negotiations with this company, Glacier Northwest, and those negotiations were not bearing fruit. The union was dissatisfied. The workers were dissatisfied. So they decide to go on strike.

This one does. This is the way that if you're in a union, that you leverage the power that you have as a worker and the fact that the company needs your labor in order to succeed. That's the way you leverage your power. So they walk off the job at a time that was after the, I think, warning truck drivers had already gone and they had wet cement in their trucks. Now, they actually tried to mitigate some of the economic harm to the company, which I would argue they're not necessarily required to do, but they sought to mitigate some of the economic harm by keeping the drums in the truck running so that that wet concrete wouldn't just instantly harden and damage the trucks. Yet because they were on strike, there still was some economic harm to the company

because they were unable to deliver that material. And so they lost money on the fact they were unable to deliver that material. And I think they just had to dispose of it ultimately. And they also argue that there was some risk there could have been damage to the trucks if it had been allowed to harden in the barrels. So Glacier said, all right, we're going to sue you, the union, because the workers went on strike and caused us economic harm. Well, a state court said, no, you can't do this because number one, this isn't really even our jurisdiction. This is, we're talking about federal laws here that are in play. The National Labor Relations Board, they're the ones that should investigate and should decide whether this was like egregious behavior on behalf of the union or not.

This went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And that's how you end up with this eight to one decision that now sends it back down and says, yes, you can actually sue this union over the damages from this strike. Now, let me say a couple of things. First of all, law clearly recognizes that if you are a worker engaged in a strike, you can't engage in violence, you can't engage in direct vandalism. Those sorts of things are out of bounds. And, you know, there can be suits in state courts. That's like very clear cut. But why this is so troubling and so damaging is now you're sending a message to all companies

and all corporations that if you're economically harmed at all by a strike, you may have an ability to sue the workers and sue the union. You can imagine what kind of a chilling effect that will have, too, on workers who are considering striking. Well, the whole point of a strike is to use your labor, I mean, to cause some economic harm that puts pressure on the employer to come to the negotiating table and bargain. So that's why this is such a potentially damaging decision. The one dissenting justice here was Katonji Brown Jackson. She argued the majority is inserting itself into an assessment of labor disputes that is lawfully the

purview of the National Labor Relations Board and that the court is overstepping their jurisdiction. That's basically what the state court had argued as well. She also argued that the court is putting the onus on workers and their union to avert any economic damage to Glacier, the company, when it was actually on the company to take steps to negotiate in good faith with the union and try to mitigate their own losses. But this next article from Reuters up on the screen, this gives you a sense of some of the arguments here that were made by the justices on either side of this issue. Their headline is U.S. Supreme Court hands defeat to organized labor in trucker strike case. So Amy Coney Barrett is the author of the majority ruling. She said the union's actions had not only destroyed the concrete, but had also, quote, posed a risk of foreseeable aggravated and imminent harm to

Glacier's trucks. That harm did not come to pass, but she's saying it could have come to pass. And she says because the union took affirmative steps to endanger Glacier's property rather than reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk, the National Labor Relations Act does not arguably protect its conduct. Again, that should be left to the National Labor Relations Board to adjudicate, but that's what they argued. And just to give you a little bit of a taste of the Katonji Brown Jackson dissent, she said, and I thought this was well put, workers are not indentured servants bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master. So that is the way that she was arguing the other side of this.

Last thing to note here, Sagar, guess which side the administration took? Already know. They took the side of the company and said they should have the ability to sue. It should go back down to the state court and they should be able to adjudicate it there. So Mr. Most, you know, pro worker, pro union president in history, once again, stabbing workers in the back. This is bad for a variety of reasons, because what people don't understand is that even the standing, the ability to sue, for example, we would and every other media company on earth would cover things dramatically differently if we did not know that the bar was incredibly high in order to try

and sue people who are in the media whenever you're talking about public officials. You would basically have a British-type system, or in many of the other Western countries, where they can effectively file a complaint against you for anything, and the First Amendment and the level of legal protection does not apply to the media. What ends up happening? A fusion of the state and of the media. Now, we already kind of live in that system, but we have at least more free speech protections for people who want to use them should they try. The threat of legal action itself, ask anybody who is in business, the threat itself is chilling whenever it comes to speech. The same can be said here. Just as standing the ability to sue

will and can guide future strike actions, which are dramatically in favor of the company. So it's very obvious here who benefits from this change in the current way that we look at things. And it will have a bad effect, especially it's kicking people when they're down because they're trying to increase

the unemployment rate already and to try and limit whatever power the workers had in a tight labor market. So it really is, it's especially bad timing. Yeah, and it's disgraceful to see that, you know, the uniparty at work here that you have only one dissent from Kataji Brown-Jackson and kudos to her for, you know,

in a very well-argued dissent, I would say, and very strongly word her for, you know, in a very well argued dissent, I would say, and very strongly worded, but ultimately she's one person on the court. You know, there's a lot of talk about like the liberals and the conservatives on the court, but far too often the two sides tend to agree when it comes to bolstering capital and crushing labor as regular viewers of the show or, you know or regular people who exist in America know, the law is already overwhelmingly on the side of the bosses, especially when it comes to the right to organize and now the right to strike. So these little levers of power and leverage that working class people actually have, I don't think it's an accident that at a time when

you have this gigantic gulf between huge support for labor, huge support for workers, huge support for organized labor and unions in particular, but you have such low union density. I think that a lot of companies are seeing the movement at Starbucks, the movement at Amazon, at REI, at Chipotle, all these places across the country, and they're very nervous. So this gives the Supreme Court a chance to sort of check workers at a time when union support is super high, but you still have very low union density. So it's an attempt to try to keep them from gaining any sort of traction within the American economy.

I think it could be really devastating because, you know, every strike is going to cause some economic harm to the company. And now they've opened the door for no matter, let's say you're in a more perfect union. I actually did a great video on this, but that I recommend to people. So let's say you're a Starbucks worker and you go on strike, which a number of locations they have, let's say the milk spoils, let's say they lose some customers, whatever happens now, Starbucks, Howard Schultz and co can come out and sue the workers and sue the union because they dare to voice, you know, to, to exercise their right to strike, to demand better conditions, fair wages, whatever it is that they're after.

So I think it could be incredibly damaging, really devastating. And it's not surprising, but it's really sad to see the Biden administration and almost all of the liberal and all of the conservative justices team up to crush workers in this way. Yep. Absolutely agreed on that, Crystal. All right. Have some big media news for you you guys uh chuck todd moving on from meet the press uh of course that is the sunday show he also does meet the press daily does he still do that he does but it's online uh they took him oh it's online only it's on peacock where i'm sure that was already dozens of people are watching scores scores of people watching him over there on Peacock streaming. So he is moving on. He's out from Meet the Press. Kristen Welker, a longtime NBC News reporter and

journalist, will be replacing him there. Let's take a listen to how he announced it. Welcome back. I have a personal announcement. Well, today is not my final show. This is going to be my final summer here at Meet the Press. It's been an amazing, nearly decade-long run. I'm really proud of what this team and I have built over the last decade, and frankly, the last 15-plus years that I've been here at NBC. So, Sagar, are you okay? How are you handling this news? I know you're pretty bereft. Well, you know what's sad? Meet the Press was a great franchise though it was one of those things which it belonged to the monoculture era and we should have just left it there the idea so well said yeah that's so true at that time there were only three networks you know or sorry there were three yeah three big

networks three cable channels there was not a variety of ways for the public to get information from public officials the sunday show was the main format in order to interview these people to get, you know, Iraq war and all that stuff, get it out there. And Tim Russert was, he was okay. You know, my opinion, I don't think he was like the God that people think that he was. I actually think he was an effective interviewer though. He was, but he also let a lot of things slide during Iraq, which I don't think he should be forgiven for.

So anyway, I'll just, I'll let it, I'll just leave it and say, I think he was a little bit too cozy, but yeah, he was a decent interviewer. I think when he wanted to be, and we should have just left it there after he died. It was sad. Um, but from that point forward, the franchise tried to use the gravitas in an ever-changing way. It was basically 2006 onward. The internet comes and absolutely explodes. You have a variety of different ways that officials can get the word out. The Sunday show continues to diminish. And then now at this point, even putting in somebody new, it just doesn't have the same

power that it once did. I mean, the idea is, is that the Sunday show was this like prestige time slot in TV. And don't get me wrong, it still can and does compel big interviews every once in a while. But it's usually like legacy figures, people like George Stephanopoulos and others who will get those big scores. And it just doesn't matter in the way that it once did. So I think also that Chuck Todd and NBC also did damage to the brand by trying to turn it into a daily show, basically relegating it, you know, once again to cable, then the cancel it to move it to TV or to move it to online, which shows you just how unimportant it really is. And, you know, it like dies with a whip, with a, with a whisper, like,

you know, with a whimper really, um, it goes out, it should have died a long time ago. Well, I mean, and it will, it will continue on in a lessened form. You know, Kristen Welker, actually, like no problem with her on a personal level. She seems like a really nice lady. And I think people genuinely like seem to like her that her colleagues that work with her at NBC. This is also not, though, like a blockbuster marquee choice. And it, to me, is in line with the philosophy of managed decline that you have seen implemented at both at, you know, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, basically, where when

they're big stars depart, it's not like they're looking to make that new big deal and bring in something that's going to be game changing. They're just kind of bringing in someone who's safe, who can sustain. So, you know, the classic example is over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, their star for years and years, the quarterback of that whole lineup, the only person who really was able to sort of consistently bring in a ratings charge. She significantly diminishes her role. She's only on there once a week and they bring in Alex Wagner, who's just like, you know, she's a placeholder. She's safe. She's comfortable. She's not going to rock the boat. She can keep, you know, whatever audience is handed to her from, I think it's Chris Hayes who's at the 8 PM hours. She can kind of hold onto that audience more or less

and hand the ball off to whoever comes. They're not making, you know, they're not shooting for the moon anymore. And I think the choice of host here with, with Kristen Welker reflects that as well. This is not a household name. This is not huge star power. This isn't a marquee deal. It was sort of an afterthought in terms of how this was sold and how this was even mentioned. Your point about the relevance of the Sunday shows,

I think is also really well taken. And in some ways, I mean, part of this is not Chuck Todd's fault, right? It's like structural changes in the media ecosystem. But then the fact that you have this just like very standard establishment friendly, not particularly talented person who's at the helm, that doesn't help anything. One thing I will say, this is consistent with the block we just did, the conversation we just had about debates and how you actually need politicians

held more to account and willing to subject themselves more to interviews. Part of the problem too is that they're just less likely to the big politicians are less likely to sit for these interviews. So that makes it less relevant, which is a shame and a degradation of democracy. And then the other reason they're less relevant is there's just you know, there's not a lot of interest in holding their feet to the fire. So in a strange sense, what the Sunday shows were originally intended to do, I think we need more than ever in American politics, in American media. It's just that these shows are not really capable of serving the same function that perhaps they once did. Yeah, it's just one of those where the format was derivative of the time and they thought that it was because of them. And it wasn't, you know, it's like you said, like Chuck Todd, in some ways it's not his fault, but I mean,

it certainly doesn't help that he's one of the most boring individuals to ever be on television. But, you know, that kind of gets to what, in the old times, you could not even be all that good and you could still be, you know, commanding a massive and a large presence. But today that's just not how it's going to work. And people have options. DeSantis literally hasn't done a single corporate interview. You know, even Joe Biden actually was just reading is the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower not to do an interview with The New York Times. But he has done with Substack. He has done one with, you know, what was that guy's name? Brian something. I forget his

name. Oh, Brian Tyler Cohen, that guy. Brian Tyler Cohen has a Biden interview. I did this whenever I was actually, I'll be honest. This was my core pitch whenever I was in a White House correspondent. I went to the Trump White House and I said, hey, you guys say you hate the New York Times. You're always sucking up to them. I'm like, what about new media? What about people who are on the Internet? People like me. And they were like, yeah, that's a good point. You should do it. And so like that, it goes to when politicians have options, they're going to use them. They're going to play people against each other and they're going to get the voice out in any way that they need to and to reach the most amount of people. Some of that today does include linear TV, but a lot of it includes online. And

you know, as long as that's the reality, these shows are just not going to survive. They'll be in a period of managed decline. Yeah. Politicians are use that new ecosystem to just seek out friendly interviews. Like if you're Joe Biden and you struggle to like formulate a complete sentence, which listen, I relate to sometimes personally, you're not you're not going to go and subject yourself to a tough interview. Now, I'm not saying Chuck Todd was going to give you that tough interview, but you're going to find someone who's really just going to be like, tell me how amazing you are and how did you accomplish so much with such terrible, you know, Republicans in Congress? And if you're Ron DeSantis, you're going to do the same on the other side. So it is that part of it,

even though the broader independent media ecosystem, obviously, like I celebrate, I think that's a very positive move forward. I think watching these old dinosaurs die is all to the better. But the fact that politicians use this new ecosystem to exempt themselves from any sort of challenging public scrutiny,

that's a real loss. Yeah, I think you are absolutely correct. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? So guys, we've got a potential new 2024 contender that Wall Street is clamoring for on the Democratic side. This is actually, like, you literally can't make this up. So you guys might recall, Sagar and I actually recently covered

this Wall Street Journal article talking about how sad they were to see a Trump Biden rematch, which looked relatable. All of us are not that excited about that. But the reason that they're upset about it is because they don't think these two men are friendly enough to Wall Street, which is just patently insane. barely even noticed at the time was them floating Jamie Dimon, CEO of, of course, Chase Bank, the biggest bank in the country, maybe the world, but certainly the country, as a potential presidential contender. Put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. So here was the quote. They say, Jamie Dimon, whose name has swirled as a potential candidate for years, recently got an earful from a fellow billionaire who wishes the JPMorgan Chase CEO would run according to people familiar with the matter. Interesting. I should have taken more

note of that when it came out, because usually these little nuggets buried in this type of report have a lot more meaning than is initially laid out. And next thing you know, Jamie Dimon himself is on Bloomberg, which is, of course, the television station of the ultra wealthy. And he gets asked specifically about whether he would consider running for president or another public office. And interestingly, he doesn't exactly rule it out. Now, Jamie, I know last week you talked a lot about succession or about your position that you're not talking about retirement right now. I do need to ask you, though, and your name has been bantied about for years about public office.

I mean, I don't think Wall Street's too pleased about a potential Trump versus Biden runoff next year. Is it any... Has that scenario ever crossed your mind, that you would run for public office or even accept a cabinet position? You know, obviously, it's crossed my mind because people mention things to you and stuff like that.

You know, I love my country, and maybe one day I'll serve my country in one capacity or another, but I love what I do. I think J.D. Morgan do a great job for helping Americans, helping countries around the world, and this is my job. This is what I'm going to do, and I'm quite happy doing it. I still have the energy to do it.

I mentioned, you know, that when you don't, I think people should give up the job. I've got a fabulous management team where I really enjoy working with. So I'm here. So, you know, there he says, I love my country. Maybe one day I'll serve my country. He says that he's thought about it. It's crossed his mind. OK, so he's sort of holding out the possibility here. But you also had a major Wall Street dude, hedge funder Bill Ackman. He took to Twitter. He posted a long thread begging Jamie Dimon to run for president. We'll put this up on the screen.

I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's honestly it's so embarrassing, but it's also really lengthy. So he says in part, Jamie Dimon is one of the world's most respected business leaders. Politically, he's a centrist. He's pro-business and pro-free enterprise, but also supportive of well-designed social programs and rational tax policies that can help the less fortunate. He's extremely smart, thoughtful, pragmatic, knows how to bring opposing parties together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He goes on to say that Jamie Dimon is the leader that we need right now. We need an exemplary business, financial and global leader to manage through what is likely to be a critically important decade for our country in determining our destiny. He goes on to say POTUS is extremely weak and in cognitive decline.

Can't really argue with that. 70 percent of Democrats don't want him to run. True. Biden's weakness sets up a large opening for a qualified outsider to run as a Democrat. I guess he doesn't consider the already candidates in the race to be qualified. And he says Jamie can beat Biden in the primary and Donald Trump in the general. But he needs to start now and build name recognition among the broad electorate. He will easily raise billions of dollars. I don't doubt that from Democrats and Republicans to fund his campaign.

And he knows how to build support. I also enjoyed this part of what he had to say because it's just like kind of a mask off moment. He says, Bill Ackman, JP Morgan stock will go up even more when Jamie becomes POTUS as he can do more for the bank and our economy as president than he can as chairman and CEO of JP Morgan. The bank will be in great shape since he has built a deep succession bench that is more than ready to step up. There is only one better job for Jamie than CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and that is president of the United States.

So he just comes out and says the quiet part out loud that this will be great for banks. It'll be great for JP Morgan Chase. Their stock will go up because Jamie would be able to do so much for them as president of the United States, as if Joe Biden and Donald Trump didn't already give the store away to Wall Street and corporate America overall. It's actually kind of ironic because Sagar and I had joked that Jamie Dimon is already sort of president of the United States or more powerful

than the president because of the amount of power that he holds within the banking sector and how critical that's been. We saw this in particular during the Silicon Valley bailout. There was all sorts of reporting about how instrumental Jamie Dimon was in formulating what the policy was. Apparently, originally, Biden had been kind of skeptical of doing any kind of bailout. And then Jamie Dimon and other figures like him got on the phone. Of course, Jamie Diamond also then was positioned to like suck up the profitable leftovers of the various banks that were collapsing at the time. So benefited him in the end in that way as well. But I always just think it's amazing the way that these people view the problems in America. They're not worried about like, oh, wealth inequality is too great. Or they're not worried about like, oh, we need to be able to get everybody health care or we need to check the military industrial complex. No,

they actually think the problem is that our presidents haven't been pro Wall Street enough, haven't given enough away to the titans of Wall Street and of corporate America, which is so wildly disconnected from the views of the American people. And they also, I think, genuinely delude themselves into believing that there is an appetite among the American people for this type of quote unquote leadership. But, you know, they could ask Michael Bloomberg. That was his theory of the case last time I was around as well. And you can ask Michael Bloomberg how well this worked out for him. So Sagar, it's just astonishing to me. Like it reminded me.

And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? As we discussed earlier in our show today, YouTube presumed for years that you were so stupid that you couldn't decide whether the 2020 election was stolen so that they decided to come in and fact check and take down videos. Now, it should always be up to you. If you think about where the standard even comes from, it's totally ridiculous. It traces back to the 2016 presidential election. Before that, the internet had no fact-checking on it,

nor should it have. We literally had decades on forums and other places where people spoke freely, they had debates, they argued, and the stakes were never seen as existential. It was only after the 2016 election of Donald Trump that a bunch of people, elites mostly, got together and decided that no normal person could ever in good conscience vote for Trump. They must have been tricked into it,

first by the Russians, then they blamed Facebook. Some crappily made Russian Facebook ads with a tiny budget compared to the rest of the entire campaign spending was somehow responsible for swinging 65 million votes. This led to the fact checking industrial complex. You had Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others partner with so-called news agencies to come together and to fact check posts that were seen on the platform. Once again, underlying this program was this idea. You are so dumb that you believe everything on the Internet and that you trust The Washington Post, The New York Times, PolitiFact, Snopes, any of these others to be able to arbiter the truth in a small d democracy where people make up their minds for themselves based upon the information that is presented to them. They actually undermine that with fact-checking. Fact-checking itself is broken and is wrong, as we all learned in the COVID misinformation debates, as we learned in Wuhan lab, as we learned when the Hunter Biden laptop story was taken down. Their judgment cannot be trusted at a major macro level. So now bring in Elon community notes.

This has been the new program that Twitter has decided to launch, where they say that they have solved fact checking with this program where you leave it up to the community. They say that this one is one where you can come in, apply to be a community notes fact checker. You will get voted by Twitter, vetted by them, and you will come through. And algorithmically, as well as with human judgment, you will decide whether posts itself need context or not, and then how you decide which context is placed there. Well, the downfalls of this are fully on display here. Let's put this up there on the screen.

When Chris Pavlovsky, he's the CEO of Rumble, noted, quote, community notes on Twitter is a really bad idea. It is a fancy word for fact-checking, which will eventually be gamed, hijacked, and or cause more harm than good. I've seen this story too often, and I won't let it happen on Rumble. Well, you know what's really crazy is that Chris's post here, which literally is an opinion, then had a community note actually added to it. And in it, the community note says, all Twitter accounts must meet eligibility criteria. Second, for a note to be shown on a tweet, it needs to be, quote, found helpful by people who have tended to disagree in past ratings.

And lastly, notes track metrics that alert the team of suspicious activity is detected. So in effect, what they did is they added context to Chris's opinion. This is way past even the line of fact checking. And it shows you that if you are able to and want to use the community notes platform, when you disagree, you can try and add something to somebody's post that they did not want there to be in the first place. This is a total massive overstep in this entire system. The pushback that I've heard so far is, oh, but this is up to the community and not from top down. Okay. Once again, just because community fact-checking may be better, at least in principle, than top-down fact-checking by the news organizations does

not mean that these platforms should be fact-checking at all. And in fact, that was really my position. And that's something that I put out there yesterday, which is that people said, hey, this is the best solution to a very complex problem. The solution is dropping the presumption that preventing quote unquote disinformation is the responsibility of a platform at all. One person's disinformation will always be another's truth in a democracy. And it was really on display there where Chris put out an opinion and then somehow had a ridiculous community note actually attached to it. If you want to defend the community notes platform or program, that's fine. You should reply to Chris's tweet with your opinion. If others find that useful, they can like that tweet. Or you can quote tweet what's happening with Chris's opinion

and add yours. And if more people like it, then that will be seen more. You should not be able to forcibly add context, you know, quote unquote, onto anybody's post that they never intended it to be there. It's actually a changing of the speech that they intended to put. Now, imagine also this in a more human context, because we can get bogged down in debates. Oh, the algorithm, some fake, non-transparent process in which these people are selected somehow means that we're supposed to just put all of our trust in Twitter. I've seen that fall apart so many times, but operationalize this to the real world. You're at a bar and you how many people have been in this scenario? You hear a couple of people having a discussion.

What they are saying is completely inaccurate, wrong and stupid. Would you really want a scenario where people are able to go in and to interject and say, actually, what you're saying needs context? Or do you think that those people should be able to say what they want? And then, you know, maybe if you're friends with them, you could come in and just say, hey, I heard you guys talking about this. You know, here's what I think is important, you know, to understand. And then people can shrug and say, oh, you know, that's kind of interesting. But the point is, is that people should have discrete opportunities to speak in this environment.

They should not be having things placed directly on top of theirs in a non-transparent process, which is supposedly up to the community. And I actually thought Michael Tracy also made a really good point here, which is that in the current program, when communities consist of self-selected users who join up because they're invested in a certain cause, like on Twitter, how many times have we said here before, Twitter is not representative of everybody. It is representative of a small, certain select base. Well, then even the amount of people who are engaged in the process is by definition not representative of every

constituency that might have a say about whether something needs context, needs truth or anything added to it. So, look, I'm not picking on Twitter or Elon or any of these. What I am saying is that all attempts at fact checking themselves are bad. You know, what we do here at Breaking Points is we don't, you know, lob on to somebody else's speech. We try to add context to help people think about things. And if people want to do videos about us and what we've gotten wrong, I think that's completely fine. But imagine a world where if enough people got together that they could interject something in the middle of one of our videos or on top of one of our videos simply because they thought that we weren't adding context to something. I object to fact checking in all forms that currently exist.

I think Chris over at Rumble got it exactly right. And just because you like this one a little bit more than you like the top down one doesn't mean that all of them aren't bad in the very principle itself. So that's where I'm at, Crystal. I'm getting very annoyed. There are a lot of people who are sending me things. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Our friends over at the Quincy Institute have a groundbreaking new report about just how much Pentagon money is going to fund opinions on the Ukraine war. Obviously, this is a vital debate. Let's go and put this report up on the screen. The headline here is

that defense contractor funded think tanks dominate the Ukraine debate. Some important details contained therein. And Ben Freeman, who is a research fellow at the Quincy Institute, joins us now to break down this report. Ben, great to have you. Good to see you, Ben. Thank you both. Great to be here. Yeah, of course. So give us some of the top lines here. What we did was I think we tried to investigate what was a hunch we all had, was that these defense contractor funded think tanks were dominating the Ukraine war debate. We see it on mainstream media. We see it in the New York Times, Washington Post. And what we decided to do was investigate whether this was true or not. And what we found out was

that overwhelmingly, yes, defense contractor funded think tanks have been dominating the debate. In fact, more than 85% of all think tank media mentions come from think tanks that are funded by the defense sector. So from this, what we determined was whenever most of your listeners are hearing somebody talk about the Ukraine war, if they're from a think tank, chances are it's a defense contractor funded think tank. And why is that important? What does that lead to, at least in terms of incentives, right? Because we've tried to look at this previously about the way that debate and all of that is formed. I mean, I have yet to see a single instance of somebody with a dissenting view actually featured in any of these mainstream media, either articles or on cable television, which probably matters even more.

Yeah, absolutely. It fundamentally biases the discussion. If the only voices you're hearing from are voices that are paid, at least in part, by the defense sector, then chances are the thrust of the debate that we're hearing, it's really not a debate at all. It's a bunch of different people operating in an echo chamber, and that echo chamber is being funded by the very businesses that profit from the Ukraine war and profit from a militarized foreign policy in general. Yeah. So let me read a little bit from what you have here. You say, first, of the 27 think tanks

whose donors could be identified, 21 of them received funding from the defense sector. That's 77%. You had a number of these think tanks where you still don't even know where they're getting their funding. So Lord knows where that money is coming from. And you point out that in articles related to U.S. military involvement in Ukraine, media outlets have cited think tanks with financial backing from the defense industry 85% of the time, that's seven times as often as think tanks that do not accept funding from Pentagon contractors. I personally don't have a lot of experience in the think tank world. Ben, can you help people understand what would be the shaping influences here? Would your average think tank analyst have

an understanding of where the money is coming from? Would there be directives coming with that money? How does this all operate? Yeah, when you work at a think tank, you are at least in to some extent, you are captive to the folks who are funding that organization. And if you want to test this theory as a think tanker, say stuff your funders disagree with and keep doing it and see how long that think tank keeps employing you. I assure you it will be a short-lived tenure for you. And we've seen this over and over and over again. Almost 10 years ago, the New York Times did a big exposition of think tank funding. And what those folks found was it was exactly this pattern.

If folks were saying things that were antithetical to the interests of their funders, those individuals were fired or their roles were reduced. And in repeated studies ever since, we've seen the same thing happen over and over and over again. So when you work at a think tank, you know who your funders are. And in case you don't, if you write something that is threatening to them, your higher ups will let you know who those funders are and tell you to stop saying those things that are offensive to them. Well, I think it's really important and it exposes, you know, something which people should be looking at. You know, the irony, too, is, like you said, The New York Times understands why this is a problem 10 years ago and then proceeds in the middle of Ukraine to go ahead and to cite every single one of these

people. I mean, when is the last time that you saw a real dissenting voice in The New York Times or even a dispassionate analysis, you know analysis in any of these articles, right, Ben? Right. That's exactly right. And in the report, we looked at over a thousand different articles. I mean, this took months to put together. And in all of those articles, we never saw any acknowledgement from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, that the folks that they were citing were from think tanks that were funded by the defense sector. In some cases, they're making comments suggesting the U.S. buy weapons, send weapons to Ukraine that are made by their funders. This is the most direct conflict of interest you can possibly get. And yet all of these outlets, they're not

disclosing that to their readers. And according to us, I think anybody would agree that's a disservice to the reader because they're only telling part of the story by not revealing the funders. Yeah, I want to underscore that because I think that's really important. Bad enough that so many of these analysts are coming from think tanks funded by the defense industry. Even worse is that New York Times, CNN, whoever is hosting this analysis, are not disclosing those very direct conflicts of interest. So if you're your average reader, your average viewer of cable news, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. You think these are just dispassionate experts who have nothing at stake in this fight, who are just

offering their honest opinion, when in reality, there's a lot more going on behind the scenes. I think to me, that's as damaging and as damning as anything in this report. Yeah, I completely agree, Crystal. And the other side of this that we see, too, is that from the think tank's point of view, they're publishing their own reports, articles and that sort of thing that directly benefit these funders, recommend U.S. foreign policy decisions, particularly in Ukraine, that would be a great financial benefit to these defense sector funders. And they're not disclosing it. So you read some of these articles, you read some of these briefs, whether it's from CSIS, Atlantic Council, Center for a New American Security, all these heavily defense contractor funded think tanks, and they're producing things that look a little better than propaganda for the defense sector. And they're not telling their readers about it.

Yep. Really, really well said. It's an important thing. It's why it matters to look at Washington and what exactly is coming out of it. And we appreciate you joining us, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much.

Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Thank you guys so much for watching, bearing with us as we're all from home. It's for a good reason. We promise we've got the awesome new set that everybody will be taking a look at. As a reminder, premium subscribers get the very, very first look. So take advantage of breakingpoints.com. You can become one of the first people to see it. We will be sending out instructions for our big special announcement to all of them by email. So premium members keep an eye on all of that. Otherwise, we will see you all tomorrow. Love y'all.

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