Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/6/22: Uvalde Police Threats, Ukraine War, Saudi Oil, PA Senate, CNN Coverage, Amazon Agenda, Top Gun, Lorenz Smears, & More!

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Uvalde police coverup, Ukraine war developments, oil diplomacy with Saudis, PA Sen general election, CNN coverage shift, Amazon weaponizing woke, Top Gun vibe shift, and Taylor Lorenz smearing creators covering the Depp-Heard trial!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Legal Bytes: https://www.youtube.com/c/LegalBytesMedia  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big developments this morning. You would think that we at this point would basically know what happened in Uvalde.

But we don't. More revelations of more lies coming out. We will update you on all of that. Also, some fairly significant developments with regards to Ukraine. Putin issuing a warning about those long-range missiles that we are planning to send over there. We'll give you those details as well. making some big moves to try to plug that Russian-sized hole in the oil market, both with regards to Venezuela and also Saudi Arabia. We also have big developments in the Pennsylvania Senate race on both sides of that equation. McCormick went ahead and conceded, so we do have a Republican nominee now, Dr. Oz. On the other side, John Fetterman. There are increasing questions about the status of his health and how he has handled that whole situation.

We also have some insight into CNN, including some bombshell reporting from one and only Sagar and Teddy. I'll reveal that later. Hashtag personal news about CNN. Don't worry, he's not going there or anything like that. It is interesting, imagine. Big DeMellis Sagar is leaving Breaking Points, going to CNN. No, that's not what's happening. We also have on a woman who's a lawyer and a YouTuber.

She goes by LegalBytes on YouTube. And she found herself in the middle of this crazy Taylor Lorenz story. Taylor lied about her in a column, basically smearing YouTubers who covered the Depp Herd trial. Crazy. So excited to talk to her as well. But we wanted to start with the very latest out of Uvalde. Stunning revelations from that mom you guys probably remember. She was the one who shows up at the school.

Yes. She wants to go in. The cops outside handcuff her. Okay. Handcuff a mom. She then sort of talks her way out of that. They agree to take the cuffs off. She managed to get around them, jump the fence, go into the school, get her two kids. And now for the first time, she is speaking to the press. Let's take a listen to what she has to say. Arrest you because you're being very uncooperative. I said, well, you're going to have to arrest me because I'm going in there. And I'm telling you right now, I don't see none of y'all in there. Y'all are standing with snipers and y'all are far away. If y'all don't go in there, I'm going in there. He immediately put me in cuffs. She says after Uvalde police officers told marshals to uncuff Gomez, she ran towards the school. As soon as they uncuffed me, I jumped that first gate fence. And once I jumped it, I went to my son's class and I knocked towards the school. As soon as they uncovers me, I jumped that first gate fence. And once I jumped it, I went to my son's class and then knocked on the door. And I remember the teacher saying, I'm like, hey, they're already they're already bulge cutting the fence to get

me. She's like, you think we have time to get out? I said, you have time. I'm going to run for my other son. Once she was assured her son was OK, Gomez ran to get her other child, encountering more officers who tried to stop her. So I start yelling and I'm being a cooperative and I'm like, well, y'all aren't doing, what are y'all doing? Y'all need to be in here. Give me your vest. Somebody give me a vest, something. And if anything, they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there. And like I told one of the officers, I don't need you to protect me. Get away from me. I don't need your protection. If anything, I need you to go in there with me to go protect my kids. And if anything,

they were being more aggressive on us. They were more pertain on keeping us back than getting into that school. So she also reveals that she, you know, wandered those hallways getting both of her kids. She says she didn't see police officers in the hallway. So even this story about, oh, we were there and there were 19 of us, that's in serious doubt at this point. That's number one. Number two, this woman is clearly amazing. She is incredibly courageous, obviously, you know, even just to speak to the press at this point, because put this next piece up on the screen, they threatened her with an obstruction

of justice charge. She is on probation from some charge from a decade ago. And they told her, the police, that if she keeps talking to the media, they will hit her with an obstruction of justice charge and potential violation of her probation. Yeah, do it. Go ahead and violate her. See how it's going to work out for you. I mean, it's just unbelievable. They couldn't do anything when it came to taking out this mass murderer who was killing their children. But they'll handcuff a mom and threaten to hit her with charges?

Disgusting. And by the way, one other note on this mom. Those of you who are watching can see in the background she's kind of like in a field there and there's equipment moving around. She's actually a farm worker. She had come straight from work to her kids for the sort of end of the year school ceremony. She said she originally didn't want to take a picture with them because she was all dirty and dusty from the field, but they insisted she has this photo of her with her kids that morning. And then she'd gone back to work when she heard this was all happening and, you know, sped back to the school. But it's just unbelievable how they seem to have literally lied about every single thing that happened on that day. Yeah. And the cover up here is just unbelievable. Whenever you consider not only they threatened her, they're in full-fledged hiding. Let's put

this up there on the screen. You know, reporters down in Texas are continuing to try and get interviews with that guy, Pete Arredondo, who was the Uvalde CISD police chief who made the call not to go in. And now City Hall is locking its doors during business hours, declining to provide any public records to all reporters. And Uvalde CISD falsely had said that the first school board meeting since the incident was going to be closed to the public. So what they continue to do is try to make it so that it is impossible to hold these people to account. And remember, this guy, Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde CISD police chief, he also was recently sworn in as a member of the city council. He is refusing to speak to the press. He know, he was confronted by CNN

outside of his house and he just said, look, I don't have anything to say. In terms of his communication, Crystal, with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI, they say he's been uncooperative or they said we've had some communication, which to me reads like, yeah, he's talking through his lawyer. I mean, he's in hiding and he he's even—apparently, Uvalde PD has called in other cops in the area to protect them. So they want protection, protection that they weren't willing to give to these children. And I think that what shines through out of all of this is that the Uvalde—people of Uvalde are furious. Not just the mom, but quoted in almost every story are people who are nearby or who are residents of the town. And they say straight up, these people are cowards.

They call them absolute cowards. They think that this guy, Pete Arredondo, needs to go. He's trying to wait this out. He wants you all to forget that this ever happened and to try and get absorbed into a meta conversation about gun control. And we're going to talk about that, you know, later on in this block. But let's stay focused still on the incident. Yeah, there's a lot that's come out, too, about how there was a lot of public mistrust of this police force even before this incident. There are people quoted who said, you know, basically you call with some sort of disturbance.

You want help. They're they're not reliable in terms of showing up. So there was already mistrust here. And, you know, obviously, Arredondo has a lot to answer for, but I don't think he's the only one to blame here, which is why the city officials are helping to basically complete his vanishing act. I mean, that's the way that they phrase it in this article. The council had previously scheduled public ceremony Tuesday, instead swore him in in secret for his latest role on the city council, locking city hall doors during business hours, declining to provide any public records to reporters. The chief of the city police force, so a different dude, a guy named Daniel board meeting since the incident would be closed to the public at the special meeting Friday. An agenda item allowed the board to terminate Arradondo. The board declined to do so. So are the most, the largest number of questions for this guy, Arradondo, who's in total hiding?

Yes. Are there many more questions to go around for everybody who stood by? I mean, we still are not getting a straight answer here about what unfolded on this day, who is culpable, who made the decisions, and what this all looked like. Because it also, another question that's been raised is why he maintained control of the situation as like, the top dog in charge of the response when the local police force responds and they had more experience dealing with these sort of mass shooting incidents? Why didn't they take command? So still a lot of questions here.

We also have another eyewitness account to add another piece to the puzzle of what actually happened since we clearly cannot get a single straight answer for anyone who was supposedly in charge. Go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. This is from a man who works as a funeral attendant at that funeral parlor that is across the street from the school. He says he encountered the gunman and tried to go after the shooter, but he was held back again by police. The account he tells is really chilling here. He saw the murderer crash his truck in that ditch. He goes over, you know, saying, hey, man, are you okay? And the guy looks at him with what he describes as this sort of chilling look in his eyes. But at that point, he just thinks, oh, he's dazed, he just wrecked his truck.

So he's still, you know, saying, hey, are you all right? What's going on? And then he sees him reach in his truck, get the AR-15 and turn around. And that's when Cody Bersagno is the name of this funeral attendant, tries to run, he slips and falls.

His coworker is there. He says to him, like, he's got a gun. He takes off running. So they both managed to get away while the killer is firing at them, misses luckily all of those shots. So he goes back into the funeral parlor, calls his wife, says, bring me my gun. She gets there with the gun at about the same time that the police are arriving and responding. He tries to go in that the police are arriving and responding. He tries to go in and the police hold him back and say, you can't, you can't, you can't. Now, listen, if you're the police and you're there and you're actually responding, I understand why you're not going to let a civilian interfere and you doing your job and getting done what needs to be done.

But, of course, they were not doing that. And the incredibly incredibly incredibly sad end of this is brisania now is he's digging the graves for these children who were murdered and he says he feels guilty and this is his quote i feel guilty man because i couldn't stop him he was shooting at the windows and i didn't have my gun on me so again i mean something that actually actually Kyle said to me, which I think is the truest thing about this whole situation is if you had had just random civilians off the street responding to this incident, you would have had a better response than from these supposedly trained professionals who were just complete cowards. This is the perfect evidence that you have the guy here. And his immediate thought is, oh, we need to go. He calls his wife. He's like, bring me my gun. We need to go in. He's ready to go in. He's ready to volunteer his life in order to save children. As again, you would hope that any police officer

on the scene would do and not even hope. It is written in their training. It is written explicitly. If you are the first person, you are going to confront the gunman. If this makes you uncomfortable, choose another line of work. It may require you having you to sacrifice your life. That is why we have a social contract where you get all this military gear and all this money and these great benefits and societies like, you know, thanks and all that. There's supposed to be like a two-way deal here. And I just think all these people, Every person, the incident commander, Uvalde PD. Because here's the thing too. Uvalde PD and city council at this point, you know, we saw the Uvalde PD trying to throw those journalists off of the sidewalk. They're all engaged in cover-up.

Exactly. It's a complete cover-up. These people need to be, I don't know how exactly the system would work. But with the state can obviously move in and just be like, all right, like, you know, you've all the PD, like, disbanded. How do any of these people still have their jobs? How are they not all under investigation right now? I mean, at this board meeting that they don't remove Aradon, I mean, he completely failed at the task. Like, you had one job, and you completely failed.

And that they just, you know, they do this board meeting, and they try to make sure no press can be there, and they keep them on. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. There really is just, I don't know. It's a cover-up of immense proportion. We're going to continue covering it.

A lot of people are trying to move on from this story. Pete Arradondo wants us to move on from this story. It's just not going to happen. Yeah. It's an egregious crime. At the same time, the national conversation about new gun safety measures continues to unfold. So President Biden originally had kind of punted the whole thing to Congress, said, you know, they wouldn't even put a representative on the Sunday shows to advocate for what the White House's position was. He says, I can't dictate anything. I'm going to leave Congress to figure this out. Okay, so that was the beginning of last week. The end of last week, he did decide to give a

significant speech address and lay out what his wish list is in terms of new gun control measures. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. We need to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. And if we can't ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. Strengthen background checks, enact safe storage law and red flag laws. Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability, address the mental health crisis, deepening the trauma of gun violence and as a consequence of that violence. Okay, we have a tweet that also lays down basically what he's saying there. He says, go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. We need to ban assault weapons, and if we can't, this is from Biden.

Then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. Ban high-capacity magazines. Strengthen background checks. Enact safe storage laws and red flag laws. Repeal gun manufacturers' immunity from liability. But once again, the White House— Okay, so now he's come out and laid out his position, which includes banning assault weapons or at least raising the age from 18 to 21. Doesn't seem like Congress and Senator Chris Murphy is totally on the same page with him.

Like there seems to be a lack of coordination between, you know, Biden and the lead Democrat who is supposedly negotiating these measures. Let's listen to what Senator Chris Murphy had to say about what is likely to come out of those bipartisan negotiations. We're going to take some common sense steps that do not compromise Second Amendment rights. We are likely going to pair it with some significant mental health spending, which will make a difference as well. And I think everything Senator Cornyn has said is consistent with the negotiations we're having. Listen, we're not going to do everything I want. We are not going to put a piece of legislation on the table that's going to ban assault weapons, or we're not going to pass comprehensive background checks. But right now, people in this country want us to make progress. They just don't want the status

quo to continue for another 30 years. So what do you make of all that, Sagar? Yeah, I mean, look, it's just as classic Biden, worst of all worlds, right? It's like, well, we're going to ban assault weapons. Obviously, gun people are like, well, he wants to literally take our guns away. And then also he doesn't have the political will to do so if he wanted to. It's so weak, right? He immediately cucks himself. Exactly. And he's like, well, and if we can't, then we should do it. So hold on a second. So your true intention is you do want to take away guns, but you can't.

So you're going to do something else. And now even your lead ally in the Senate is like, yeah, well, that's just not going to happen. So what was the point of staking out the maximalist position in public? Both him and the vice president are now on record saying the policy of the administration is if we could, we would ban assault weapons. But they're also not working to try and do that in the Senate. It's like, what is happening here? It really does remind me, shades of Obama in this, of like pre-negotiating with yourself. If you think the right policy is to ban assault weapons, and by the way, somewhere around 65% of the public agrees with you, stake out that position as you're opening your bid. And maybe in your mind,

you're thinking the compromise position is let's just increase the age requirements so that you have to be 21 years old, which has extremely high support. It has something like 80% of the public supports that. So you start with the maximalist negotiation position, and then you have a compromise in mind that you're willing to go to. But instead, he starts with this, like, the vice president, he and the congressional negotiators on a different page is negotiating with himself in public. It ends up looking, you know, extremely weak and very confusing. I mean, in terms of the politics of all of this, everything he lays out here is very popular. Even, like you said, the most maximalist position assault weapons ban is like 65% support in that morning consult poll. Banning high capacity

magazines, 70% support. Background checks are near 90% support, which is weird to me that Chris Murphy's like, we're not going to get background checks. That seems like the easiest part of all of it. That was odd, actually. Okay. And then red flag law is something else that Biden brings up. That has like 85% support that passed even in Florida, which at this point is like a red state. And it is, so, you know, on the one hand, you have the public behind these measures.

On the other hand, you know, we've been to this movie before and we know how it ends. Ultimately, you go through these negotiations, it gets dragged out, dragged out, dragged out. The sort of attention and raw emotion from the incident, in this case, the mass shootings in Buffalo and in Uvalde sort of dies down. And then Republicans are able to effectively walk away from the table. And we all know Democrats aren't willing to get rid of the filibuster, actually do what it takes to get this through on their own. So I remain highly skeptical that anything actually comes of this. But we do have to say, you know, in the wake of these mass shootings, gun violence has really spiked in terms of public attention and concern as a top issue for the midterms. Go ahead and put this last piece up on the screen.

So a new ABC episodes poll shows gun violence soaring to third most important issue. That's behind, let's see, we've got inflation number one, the economy number two, then gun violence, then abortion, then gas prices, then immigration. So gun violence was not up at the top of that list before these mass shootings. Unfortunately for Biden, he continues to have very low approval rating on every one of these issues. The only one that he in this list has majority approval is on COVID-19, which has totally slid out of the public consciousness in terms of a sort of political priority right now. So that's the lay of the land. Yeah, and I also wonder, gun violence. I mean, they always say gun violence.

I mean, how much of that is crime and how much of that is mass shootings? So, like, how much of that is people saying, I'm concerned about crime? Right, I was wondering. You know what I mean? Like, it's difficult to actually parse because, you know, the whole nation is talking about, about, uh, you've all the aid about mass shootings. I mean, you know, we also have these crazy, just like crime sprees, like here in DC, it was just looking at this violent, the last four days, there've been 18 people struck by gunfire, two fatally in 14 different separate shootings. And another person

died in a stabbing. Our city is like 600,000 people. Same in Philly. I mean, you know, they're describing it as a mass shooting. It looks like a run-of-the-mill, just like another incident of crime. And so, you have crime on the same time being conflated, I think, with mass shootings all leading to that number. So I don't really know how exactly you could parse it. I'm just looking again at the Biden approval numbers at least. They have crime and gun violence broken out as two separate things. Yeah, that's odd too. I'm just thinking about whenever somebody's answering a poll. Which does seem like a strange thing to, I mean, those two things are not really that different.

That's a good point. Yeah. So anyway, look, in terms of these things, I generally think it's more of a flash in the pan. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a good thing, even though I'm against basically any of these proposed gun restrictions. And the reason that I look at it that way is you can actually see the public interest graphs on Uvalde have dramatically gone down in the last couple of days. We know exactly what the makeup of the Senate on this is going to be. I think the best you could probably hope for is some sort of expanded background check system, which would expand to private sales of guns. And even, I don't see any realm in which national red flag law is going to pass with some 10-odd Republicans that would be able to support that. And currently,

there's negotiations happening. The Fix NICS Act that I talked about in the past is a good example of something that might go. But because this weapon was purchased legally, it's really just going to be a referendum on like, okay, do you agree with being able to buy an assault weapon or not? And for almost, I think every Republican on record, bearing like four, they do support the ability to buy it whenever you're 18 years old. Or if they don't personally support it at 18 years old, they say they should leave it up to the states because some states have different state-by-state regulations. So that's just what the political reality is in terms of what's going to pass. So, you know, I don't have a maximalist position on gun control to start with, but I do think it would be good for the country if we could pass something. something because it's just so depressing that you have this level of support behind some basic,

really not controversial changes, even among the Republican base, support for things like lifting the assault weapons ban to the assault weapons age to 21 years old, banning high capacity magazines, universal background checks, like support not only among Democrats, not only among independents, but also among Republicans. And so even though I have no expectation that what we would pass would be any kind of quick fix or, you know, overwhelmingly shift the amount of violence in the country, just that sense that we can actually respond, there can be this mass tragedy that moves the public and shocks and horrifies us, and that we can at least try to do something about it, I think would be a positive thing. So again, do I have a lot of hope that

anything is going to come out of this? No, because ultimately Congress typically is not responsive to the public. I mean, that's just reality. And you have a very well-organized and, you know, not as well-financed as they used to be, but still very well-financed gun lobby and NRA interest group, which still holds a lot of sway in Republican primaries. And so the odds are definitely stacked against you on all of this. But yeah, it would be a positive, I think, step for the country if we could just feel like at least we can act and do something when we are shocked and horrified by something as terrible as this was. I think the reason it won't happen is that if you look at the preview, I would do that monologue on history about gun control. It's just about the ability for people to agree on what the problem is. And I don't think a lot of people just agree on what the

problem is right now. I mean, that's fundamentally right. So the original 1934 Firearms Act, 1935, maybe, that was a response to mafia violence. Everyone was like, all right, these mafiosos are killing each other with automatic guns, and this is crazy. We need to stop this. Number two was, we had all these high-profile assassinations of MLK and RFK, JFK. Everyone was like, okay, I think we need to calm things down. And it was a major level of trust. And then similarly, in the 90s, people, there was just a general feeling of, I don't know, we won the Cold War. It was like America's back, the Gulf War, obviously, like Clinton was president, there was, the economy was booming. People said, okay, I think I trust the government enough in this situation to ban assault weapons. Like that is just, you know, we don't agree on any of the problems anymore. Like a complete fraying and lack of social trust,

which is very similar to the inactive periods of government in the 1870s, the 1880s, and 1890s, all the way up until until the Teddy Roosevelt era. Unfortunately, I really just think that's where we're at right now. I also think that the tactic of just delaying and waiting things out is so successful now. Oh, yeah. It works. We actually should cut and put in a future show so you guys could see, but people were sharing around this graph of attention after these mass shooting events online. Yeah, it's like this.

And with each successive one, basically the attention span is shorter. So with Uvalde, you had this huge spike in interest, you know, as we watched this horror unfold and the lies and, you know, all of that. And it just completely falls off a cliff at a much faster pace than even previous mass shooting events if you think back to Charleston or something like that. And Sandy Hook dominated our politics for months. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And so, I mean, Columbine, I don't know that that was on there,

but, I mean, that completely shifted the way people thought about schools and safety and guns for a generation. But, you know, now because the news cycle moves on so damn quickly and the next thing is coming at you before you know it, the strategy of just, you know, John Cornyn or whoever saying, yeah, let's look into it and we're open to it And let's have these long negotiations. And ultimately, by the time that the deal falls apart, people have moved on to something else. And so I think that that tactic is far, far too effective these days. That's right. Okay, big developments in Ukraine. Guys, go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen. So Russia has actually hit Kiev again now. This had been a

while since they had shelled Kiev with missiles. And you have Putin issuing a warning to the West on those long range missiles that we are planning to send to them. So let me read you a little bit of this. This is a report from the Associated Press. They say Russia took aim Sunday at Western military supplies for Ukraine, launching airstrikes on Kyiv that it claimed destroyed tanks donated from abroad. As Putin warned that any Western deliveries of longer range rocket systems would prompt Moscow to hit, quote, objects that we haven't yet struck. Let me read you the quote specifically from Putin. He says, all this fuss around additional deliveries of weapons, in my opinion, has only one goal, to drag out the armed conflict as much as possible. He insisted such supplies were unlikely to change the military situation for Ukraine's government,

which he said was merely making up for losses of similar rockets. If Kiev gets longer range rockets, he added, Moscow will, quote, draw appropriate conclusions and use our means of destruction, which we have plenty of, in order to strike at those objects that we have not yet struck. So you put these two things together, Sagar, and this is a very scary warning about some of the escalatory, you know, military aid that the Biden administration is planning to send, not only are you striking Kiev and demonstrating, hey, we can still do this, we can still go there if we want, but warning that there's a lot more to come if we do go forward with these longer range missiles. Yeah, I mean, they've made it clear now. Well, first of all, they made it

clear on the longer range missiles that were able to strike Russia. And actually this morning they came out with another statement talking about that, specifically saying exactly. They're like, if any of these missiles are used to strike Russia, we will then be forced to go after the centers of decision making. And we know that those centers of decision making are not in Ukraine. And I also think it's appropriate for people to remember, we're not the only person, people who are sending stuff to this conflict. Now we happen to be sending the overwhelming amount of materiel over there, but the UK is sending similar type of missile and weapon systems, Germany, the Baltic States, we are in the NATO alliance. So just because Russia may not attack the United States or may decide that to go after a particular type of weapon system that is used there, here's my other question. The United States secured a promise, again, in what form? Writing? I hope so.

From the Ukrainians saying, we won't use your weapons to strike Russia. Well, did they get a similar promise to every single NATO country? Because we're all going to war if they strike a single one of those NATO countries. Let's all be very clear about what exactly will happen here and what that escalation chain looks like. So this just shows you both from our tangling of alliances on top of what I think is a very indiscriminate view of just pumping as many weapons types as possible into Ukraine with no consideration for what the future then is going to look like is very irresponsible. At the same time, we actually have some kind of surprising comments now from President Biden about what a negotiated settlement may look like between Ukraine and Putin. Let's take a listen to what he said. From the beginning, I've said, and I've been, not everyone's agreed with me, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. It's their territory.

I'm not going to tell them what they should and shouldn't do. But it appears to me that at some point along the line, there's going to have to be a negotiated settlement here. What that entails, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows at the time. But in the meantime, we're going to continue to put the Ukrainians in a position where they can defend themselves. So there you go. He talked about their possible ceding of territory and a negotiated solution. To my knowledge, it's the first time there that ever the president has ever said anything like that. Yeah. At the same time, you found this President Macron. Let's throw this up there on the screen. This is another interesting one. He says that Russia must not be humiliated despite Putin's historic mistake. So obviously the word there, humiliation, talking about creating Russia as a permanent pariah state and also pushing a negotiated settlement crystal, which comes after he and the German chancellor have been pushing Putin on a phone call in order to make some sort of – in order to enact a ceasefire and pursue diplomatic means.

It seems that perhaps, hopefully, some of this is now breaking into President Biden, who is now saying, I've always thought a negotiated solution might be the end of this. So on the one hand, we're sending him all these missiles, and Russia is now using five X-22 cruise missiles in order to strike Kyiv. Bad. Very bad. Some of these churches were destroyed, survived World War II and have now been left. It's horrible. And then they're saying, oh, we're going to continue striking these weapon systems on the other. You now have three NATO heads of state.

Boris Johnson's in his own problems right now, which will leave to another day. He's facing a vote of no confidence. Vote of no confidence. Don't know yet if it's going to pass or not. The news just broke this morning here, Washington time. But in terms of France, Germany, and the United States, three out of the four most powerful heads of state in NATO now pushing negotiated settlement, I do think that is a sea change in terms of possible opening for a policy. At least in terms of the rhetoric. I mean, it certainly seems like the actions and the rhetoric do not line up. So based on the actions, which not just in terms of

longer range missiles, we're talking about longer range drones also potentially being shipped over. We had confirmation of the story we brought you last week about we are conducting offensive cyber attacks at this point, something that has gotten very little attention and is incredibly, incredibly significant. You have that, but also the level of, you know, economic war that we have waged on Russia. It's hard to look at that and say, you know, that we aren't doing everything to make sure that Russia is ultimately humiliated. I mean, what Macron said is we must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops, we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means. I'm convinced that it is France's role to be a mediating power. So that is ultimately his

position. But certainly, although I appreciate the improvement in words from Biden in acknowledging that the best way out of this is through a negotiated settlement and that, yes, although it's not ideal, that negotiated settlement may require some ceding of territory on the Ukrainian behalf. I appreciate that rhetorical shift versus when he was out there saying Putin cannot remain in power. But again, the actions and the words don't ultimately match up. And it kind of goes back to the op-ed that he published last week that we talked about, which, I mean, it was kind of confusing even within the text of that op-ed. All over the place, yeah.

And I think what this reflects is that you clearly have warring factions within the administration. One side that really believes the only end game is Putin out of power and pushing that end, which is unlikely to happen. And even if it does, you may not like what you get after Putin. And another side that says, hey, we got to figure out how to get to negotiated settlement and how to ultimately get to peace. Which side of that divide Biden is on, I think is really hard to say because we have had signs of all over the place with him. Yeah, look, he's old.

I don't know another way to say it. The man is old. We don't know how much of he's actually in charge. And to the extent that he changes his mind or what seems to me to be the pattern is that he leaves most of it up to his advisors. They push the craziest, most war hawk positions, and he shoots down maybe 30 percent of that. That's his basic role. And when we look here, his personal inclination appears to be towards negotiated settlement.

Even before the invasion, he was like, yeah, I think he'll just do, you know, we termed the just the tip invasion at the time. That obviously didn't end up being the case because Putin is a moron. That's true. But on the other hand, then he ad-libs these things about Putin can't remain in power. So, I mean, yeah, on the one hand, I tend to take Biden like when he ad-libs and goes off script as that being more representative of his real feelings. But I feel like he's gone in both directions with that. This is the problem. We have a complete strategic incoherence towards Russia, towards Ukraine, and towards even understanding what the hell we're supposed to do after this. And a friend of the show, Ross Douthat, he wrote a great column on this. Let's pull this up there on the screen,

which is, you know, we can't be Ukraine hawks forever, which is that, look, and I think there is a basic acknowledgement here that the people at the start of this conflict who were like, we need to arm Ukraine and Ukraine actually can fight, as opposed to people who said that we shouldn't do anything, they were correct that the Ukrainians had the ability and did now demonstrate the battlefield capacity with US arms and Western materiel in order to push the Russians back towards the Donbass. And now that is where this major fight is going to occur. That being said, now that that has happened, what is our policy towards Ukraine? And it just cannot be, as Ross writes, just cutting endless amounts of checks to Ukraine and hoping for their defensive capacity while making sure that the Europeans themselves don't have any real buy-in to this conflict.

I mean, I've shown you guys that graph. We are outspending the European Union eight to one in terms of this conflict. The security of the United States is not 800% more threatened than the security of Germany or the security of the UK or the Baltic States. And yet, in terms of absolute dollar amounts,

it's completely crazy. The Germans refused to even put in their constitution that they are constitutionally required to spend 2%. I saw somebody say, well, it's not in the U.S. constitution either. You think it's a problem for us to spend 2%? Listen, okay. If we dial it back to 2%, that would be amazing. I'm just saying. Do you think we have a demonstrated capacity of not paying our fair share up to 2%?

We're paying 3.6 right now. The point that I'm making is that, and what Ross is making here, is that we don't have a strategic end goal in sight beyond cut endless amounts of checks to Ukraine, backstop all of European security. And the longer this thing goes on, the more likely that we get drawn into a conflict. I see so many people, victory laps and all that. It's been 100 days, people. 100 days is nothing. That's like declaring victory 100 days post-Libya. You're like, oh, listen, you know, we took out Gaddafi. There's been an explosion of freedom in Libya. People are, you know, just dancing in the streets. Yeah. Call me three years from now. I mean, this is also a hundred days into the Syrian civil war. You could

have made a case. You're like, Hey, the free Syrian army, these moderate rebels, they got a chance. Assad's on the back foot. Russia's not in the conflict. Russia didn't enter the Syrian civil war until the fourth year. All right. Think about that. Assad was dead almost certainly before Russia entered in. Now look at how that ended up. You have to assume that your policy can survive lots of different factors. Here's the other one. Donald Trump, all of this is very leader dependent. Right now, this entire thing is hanging on a knife's edge, which is we're taking very, very hawkish actions, but Biden is pushing back against anything that could possibly be regime change. If Biden drops dead,

I'm absolutely convinced we're walking into a war because of Kamala Harris. She would have given those longer missiles to Ukraine. Everybody knows it. God only knows what Trump would do. Trump? Maybe he'd be better. Maybe he'd be catastrophe.

Afghanistan proves to us that Trump, while he talked a big game, always folded to the generals, always folded to these John Bolton types. And for every time he would try. You could see him go a no-fly zone. Yeah, exactly. You could see all kinds of things. So anyway, I'm absolutely convinced we are absolutely in a disaster situation absent Joe.

I never thought I'd be like, listen, I'm praying for Joe Biden's heart every night. His 80-year-old heart. I'm like, please. Because the alternatives are actually worse. The alternatives. It's a problem. As bad as it is, the alternatives are actually worse. And I also don't want to lose sight of, obviously, the most devastation is with the Ukrainian people who are suffering massively.

But this war and the Western response to the war is having massive impacts around the globe. I mean, Horn of Africa is in a massive food crisis made worse by the war. There are other factors there as well, including the climate crisis. They've suffered through some of the worst droughts that they've ever had. So they're in extremely, extremely dire shape there. You know, with the ban of Russian oil, and we're about to talk about the oil situation here in a moment, I mean, this is basically imposing austerity in particular on Europeans. Oh, I mean, not just them, but Americans. Yeah. Yeah. But they're the

ones who are most dependent on Russian oil. They will see the largest shocks in terms of prices on their soil. So this war is not without costs and consequences all around the globe, which is why, you know, I'm glad to hear Biden at least talk about a negotiated settlement, which we have barely heard him do whatsoever. I'm glad to hear him acknowledge the reality that such a negotiated settlement would likely require Ukrainian ceding territory. I have yet to see actions that back up those words. So that's what we'll be waiting for. I hope to see it. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to come. And I think we've gotten ourselves in a deep hole and this thing is going to be going on for grinding for years. That is the most likely outcome.

Okay, let's move on here. This is a very important story around the oil markets, and there's been some major developments. So their White House policy here is all over the map. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The New York Times breaks a story exactly four days ago saying Joe Biden is going to Saudi Arabia. They are making plans. He's going to be meeting with MBS. Then Biden comes out and is like, actually, no, I'm not going to meet with, actually, no, I'm not going to Saudi Arabia yet. So officially now, Crystal, the White House position is he's going to Saudi Arabia, but later. He was going to go in June, but now he might go in July. So he's trying to save face because Biden obviously is trying to square this as, well, I'm not caving to MBS,

even though I said they were a pariah state, even though I said what happened about Jamal Khashoggi was bad. But basically, the Saudis have us over a barrel. I mean, let's all be honest. Over an oil barrel. Yeah, over an oil barrel, which is that they are the only ones, along with the Venezuelans, who have the immediate capacity to flip a switch and immediately begin pumping more oil. They refuse to do so because the administration is not supplying them with the, what they term, adequate security guarantee, even though we've sold them like $100 billion of weapons under the Biden administration. They want him to come over there and kiss MBS's ass. MBS, you know, and Saudi officials making very clear that their overtures

at the non-presidential level, not welcome. They need the American president to supplicate himself before Saudi Arabia and its king. And that is very likely appearing what is going to happen. Let's put this up there from the Financial Times, because this is just an excellent overview of the policy, which is that as candidate, President Biden vowed to treat the kingdom as a pariah amid the evidence that MBS and them were responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He declassified U.S. intelligence at the beginning of his administration. But now, it's very clear here. Because of the choices that we all made on oil in terms of banning Russian refined product and oil exports to the rest of the West, we are forced into a situation

where the leader of the free world, the President of the United States, has to go and supplicate himself before the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and beg him to pump more oil. And at this point, to be honest, Crystal, I don't think that it's even possible to save his ass in terms of the midterms or gas prices, because I've already pointed this out. Oil demand is already sky high, low inventory. At this point, even if the Saudis pump more, that will mean in the middle of the dog days of summer, the gas price may drop from like $6 to $5.45 a gallon or $5.15. Anybody going to give credit for Joe Biden dropping gas from $6 to $5.15? The time to try and solve this was at the beginning of the actual invasion. We had Ron Klain on the plane to Venezuela.

We'll get to that in terms of what exactly that policy looks like. Nothing ended up happening. The Saudis completely rebuffed us. They're in action. They released one time from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, did nothing. So they have no plan whatsoever in order to drop oil prices in the interim period. So now they're going to go over there. They're not only supplicate themselves,

the Saudis are asking for even more security guarantees. So almost certainly Biden's going to have to announce some Fugazi, you know, arms sale or whatever to the crown prince, stand there at the podium with MBS. And it's also just a great view into how all policy has trade-offs. We have all apparently decided, Europe and the Western world, that we're all going to pay $6 a gallon for gas for eternity in order to save the integrity of eastern Ukraine. I mean, look, a lot of people said, oh, yeah, support Ukraine. I'll pay a higher gas price.

Call me in five months. Call me in a year. We've also decided that Saudi Arabia's massive human rights atrocities are somehow not as great as Russia's. Exactly. Those are fine. Right. Just go, you know, look at what they've done in Yemen and tell me that it's not at least as horrific. What do you think they use the weapons we sell them for? Exactly.

In order to kill Yemenis. And there's actually a new report about just how incredibly complicit we are in what has been deemed the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the entire planet. The number of children who are starving and dying there. It is absolutely horrific. And yet somehow in our moral calculus, that we're going to be okay with, but Russian oil, we're not. I mean, there, and it's clear whenever Biden goes and does his, you know, ass kissing trip to MBS and tries to smooth the waters, the policy has already changed. And you can see that because there's been a shift in Riyadh here. OPEC did agree

to accelerate oil production to help replace output lost international sanctions. This is from that Financial Times piece. They also helped to extend a truce between Yemen's Saudi-backed government and Houthi rebels who are sort of aligned with Iran. They are looking for more defensive equipment, including Patriot anti-missile systems, new security guarantees, and assistance on a civilian nuclear program, all of which I have no doubt the Biden administration has already basically pledged to provide them. That's why there's been the shift in their policy. So again, look, ultimately there will be an AskKissing visit, whether it is now or later down the road. But the reversal in policy from saying, hey, we're going to make Saudi Arabia a

pariah state to my brother, my friend. Yeah. How can we help you? What can we do for you? That that's already that ship is sail. It's done. Yeah. The policy set the president's going now to Saudi Arabia. And let's put this next one up on the screen. Also, you know, apparently this is the best they could get. They say that oil from sanctioned Venezuela will now be allowed per U.S. sanctions to at least help Europe replace Russian crude as soon as next month. So the U.S. is going to be removing some of the international sanctions on Venezuelan oil and allow them to ship oil from Venezuela to Europe, given how much of the world's stock has been depleted. But here's the problem, as I talked about previously. Venezuela has got that type of oil called extra heavy crude. So it's a specific type of refinery that can actually handle that type of crude oil.

And there's just no way they'd be able to make up the difference. I'm not saying it isn't going to help. And look, I mean, it'll definitely bolster the Venezuelan regime and also some of the overall makeup. But this is my point, that strategic incoherence we were talking about in our previous block, everyone apparently is like, it's fine, we're going to ban all Russian oil for all time, which is 10 something percent of the entire world's oil. And also it's going to dramatically change the second largest or third largest market on earth and the way they get most of their oil,

which is Europe. And that changes and causes all kinds of supply problems here in the United States and now makes us more reliant on Saudi oil than ever before. So we've traded reliance from one despot to another. And apparently, this is a real trade-off. In the name of human rights, okay. In the name of human rights, in the name of democracy. You know, we're standing up for democracy by sucking up to— By partnering with Saudi. By partnering with the most barbarous regime on planet Earth. I mean, they still behead people in the streets over there.

And, you know, last time I checked, 15 of somebody's citizens crashed into the towers and into the Pentagon in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Don't talk about that one anymore, apparently. This is the point, which is that what we've now saddled ourselves into is our energy policy is complete insanity. We now have the current oil companies here in the United States basically being told by Wall Street, you're not allowed to drill. So that's not happening. Then the administration is also caught between a rock and a hard place because they don't

want to encourage drilling in the short term while not being able to offset the long term. Republicans are all in. They're like, no, no, no, we should drill entirely. And they don't want to also stop drilling in the long term. So our domestic political system is shot and our current energy production, done. We have no more refinery capacity. We have no more plants in order to build any more refineries. And so that

means we have to look abroad. And by looking abroad, that causes real choices. And now, if you thought or had any hope that an Iran deal was going to happen under this administration, if you think that's going to happen, where the Saudis have the ability to turn off the spigot and suffer, you know, and make us all suffer at $8, $9 or whatever a gallon, of course not. So this has major ramifications just on the optionality of the United States in the current market. And you might think that looking at all of this, there would be a lot of political will to say, let's shift from such dependence on fossil fuels so that in the medium to long term, we are never in this situation again.

But of course, that's not happening either. So not only are we in this situation again. But of course, that's not happening either. So not only are we in a terrible short term situation, but we're doing literally nothing to change the long term prospects so that we don't have these, you know, impossible no-win situations in the future. I mean, I appreciate what the administration is doing here with Venezuela, lifting some of the sanctions, allowing shipments of oil to Europe as soon as next month. Venezuela does have the largest oil deposits on the planet. But as you point out, there's the issue with refineries. There's the issue with just their oil production capability has declined over the years. So that's not going to be a complete fix. There also is a report the U.S. is expected to allow more oil to flow from Iran to Europe as well.

According to, you know, there was one well-positioned sort of industry insider who said that they expect that to happen as well. So that can help a little bit, too. But ultimately, none of those things will fill the gap in terms of the loss of the Russian supply. And at the same time, China's coming out of lockdowns, right? China's coming out of lockdown. By the way, that's not good for us. It's not good in terms of gas prices because then again, that was the one thing that remember there was oil prices had started to decline some. We thought, oh, maybe we'll catch a break here.

But that was largely because of a decrease in demand from China. Exactly right. Shanghai is now completely out of lockdown. Beijing is basically coming out of lockdown. Gas today, right now, $4.86 a gallon across the country. That's up from $4.27 just a month ago. So just consider, I mean, I'm going to do the immediate math in my head. That's something like 15% in a single month.

And it's just going to continue going higher and higher. It's the U.S. driving season. And look, $6 a gallon, very likely on average. I mean, California, I can't imagine. $6.34 a gallon, Crystal. And actually, if you think this isn't going to have midterm prospects, the New York Times has an article out this morning talking to working class Californians who are like,

hey, what's happening here? They're talking about not coming out to vote, period. They're like, look, I'm not a Republican. But screw you. How am I supposed to get to the polls? Because I'm paying $6.34 a gallon, as high as $7 a gallon in some places in the city of Los Angeles or in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, those types of areas. That's a destroyer in terms of the balance sheet for a lot of people. Okay, let's go ahead and move on here to the Pennsylvania Senate. Two pretty major developments here. Number one, first and foremost, we'll start with the Republicans,

which is that David McCormick has conceded, let's put this up there on the screen, to Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, which means that the hedge funder, David McCormick, Mr. MAGA, as he styled himself, will not be the GOP nominee, and that heart surgeon, heartthrob, as some people call him, Dr. Mehmet Oz, will be the GOP nominee for Senate there. It's actually very interesting here because they were in the middle of the recount. However, David McCormick came out and said this in a statement, quote, It is now clear to me with the recount largely complete that we have a nominee. And today I called Mehmet Oz to congratulate him on his victory.

So this means that the official nominees are set. It is going to be Dr. Oz versus John Fetterman. We'll get to John Fetterman and some of his own heart problems here in a second. But I do think it is worth just going a little bit and looking at the official count. in this primary out of 1.34 million votes that were counted in the May 17th primary. That's insane in terms of just how close things got here. And I'm curious, Crystal, for your view, I don't know how this is going to work in the general election, which is that because I think Republicans, it's very clear they didn't 100% trust Dr. Oz. His celebrity status wasn't enough in order to overcome the attacks on him as being some sort of closet liberal with all the same views that Donald Trump once held, very interestingly enough. But what happens is that now, given that GOP enthusiasm is so high, I don't think it's going to matter. The fact that he had difficulty, let's be honest here, winning the primary, I don't think it's still going to matter come election day against John Fetterman. I agree with you. I agree with you. I actually

think in this instance, which is certainly not always the case, Trump helped push forward the candidate who was more electable in the vote. Oh, absolutely. I think that Oz has a potential crossover appeal. I think, you know, the things that hampered him in the primary, some previously sort of like, you know, liberal flirtations and those sorts of views. I think that ultimately helps him in the general election. I think the thing that Trump said about like, he's popular in particular with the women or something like that. That's actually true. Could very much be the case. And, you know, Americans love celebrities. I know that the Fetterman team and Democrats will hit him with the fact,

you know, that he has been living in a mansion overlooking Manhattan. They'll call him a carpetbagger and all that stuff. But I think he's a very formidable opponent and not just for the Senate, frankly. I mean, if he makes it through this Senate race and the odds have to be in his favor, just given the landscape that Democrats are facing this year and how Pennsylvania is sort of the quintessential swing state at this point. I think if he makes it through, sky's the limit for him in terms of his political potential. So everyone thought we'll see how he handles himself on the trail. But you know that this is a man who knows how to play to the camera, knows how to answer a question.

He managed probably the trickiest waters were him navigating through the Republican primary. And he managed to pull it off without saying anything that was like too utterly ridiculous and, you know, just completely toxic for the general election. So, yeah, I think he's an extremely formidable opponent for the Democrats in the fall. So the day he announced, a lot of people made fun of me because I tweeted about how I was, quote, Oz-pilled and how a household named doctor challenging public health bureaucrats in a plain-spoken way tied to a positive vision to escape the current chaos is going to be politically formidable. And they said, oh, you're a joke. Listen, I watched Donald Trump. That changed my entire idea of what's possible in this country. Yeah. And I completely agree with you. That changed my entire idea of what's possible in this country. Yeah.

And I completely agree with you. I think Dr. Oz could easily be president. He could be the successor to Donald Trump. You know why? Because neither of them believe anything. And their ideological malleability is a strength. I've watched him, you know, navigate. Those Stop the Steal ones were very adroit in those interviews. He would be like, look, we need to beef up our election security, all of this. He would never come out right and say that the election was stolen in the same way that David McCormick was shameless enough to do it. Yeah, he play acts the whole gun thing. I've seen him too. Many of the most hot button of culture war issues, he always tries to find an actual middle ground. And given the fact that he comes from the Hollywood world and now he's a GOP nominee,

Trump had the exact same adroitness. I mean, I remember Trump being like, I'm the most pro-gay president of all time. He used to hang out with the gay pride flags, you know, LGBTQ squared for Trump. I remember that from 2016. The evangelicals didn't care. They supported him anyway. So Oz is exactly in the same way where you can split the difference. And I'm not saying, you know, if you care about those

things, it's not necessarily a good thing. But in terms of getting out the vote in a pivotal swing state, you're a massive household name celebrity doctor who can't really be accused of being a radical on anything. I think the most potent attacks I'm reading about Fetterman on him is that he's an out-of-touch Hollywood liberal, which, you know, not untrue. Yeah. Our producer James is telling us he has a commercial of Oz kissing his star in Hollywood.

His own Hollywood star. I don't think it's going to matter because people ran the same thing against Trump. Yeah. I mean, that is... So the question is, Trump had this ability to, like, even though he's this wealthy billionaire living in Manhattan, et cetera, he did have this ability to kind of feel out the pulse of your average American. Yes.

And because he, this is the benefit of being an outsider, never having served in public office before, you don't have any votes you have to answer for. You can be whatever you want to be for whatever audience at whatever point in time. And Oz, same thing. He has the ability to kind of shapeshift like that. And I think, you know, given his success in media, clearly has the talent to be able to pull that off. Now, does he have that same ability to kind of have his finger on the pulse the way that Trump did after, you know, living for years in a sort of Manhattan or Hollywood elite circles. But I will say, you know, daytime television is pretty finger on the pulse. I was going to say exactly. So if you're going to be in media in one area and still mean your connectivity to the sentiments of the average American, daytime TV is a pretty good

slot to be in. I completely agree with you. People, you know, consider it, which is that, you know, HBO, all that other stuff, that's for elites. Not that many people in this country actually watch it, as good as their stuff is. Massive HBO fan. Shout out to We Own This City and Euphoria. Now, that being said, though, the real people who understand the pulse are Judge Judy, The View, Dr. Oz, Oprah.

I mean, those are the people who really dialed into and created, you know, Judge Judy's worth like as much as Dr. Oz, like hundreds of millions of dollars. Oprah's a freaking billionaire. And she's the one, by the way, who made Dr. Oz. So my point is, is that they are very in touch in exactly the same way that Trump was in his ability to manipulate what I guess I would call is what lowbrow mass media. That's essentially like lowbrow mass media that appeals to the general public. And especially remember this, Oz is famous exactly amongst the demographic who votes. Yeah, look, none of our people are our age. We don't watch Dr. Oz. Boomers love Dr. Oz. A lot of those people came up on daytime TV and religiously watch it and have trusted him over the years.

I was looking back at his Q score, which is kind of his – anyway, it's a metric that advertisers and them look at for published consciousness. His Q score was sky high some 15-so-odd years ago. Yeah. By the way, I mean also worth noting, if he is elected, he will be the first Muslim senator. That's true. Breaking barriers. I was pointing out, breaking barriers. And the other thing about daytime television is that there's actually a high minority viewership as well. I mean, Trump, if he hadn't been so just like blatantly like nasty and xenophobic in his

first campaign in particular, had even more of a chance to improve his standing with African Americans. He was a rap icon. Yeah. So, I mean, he actually had the opportunity to do that and kind of screwed that up for himself. But I think Oz has potentially some of that crossover appeal as well. It's just going to be hard to paint him as someone who is like insane the way that say their Republican governor nominee in Pennsylvania, Mastriano, who's like at the fringe of and jumps on every conspiracy

and was there on January 6th and wants to ban abortions altogether. It's going to be hard for people to see Oz through that sort of a radical lens. Completely agree. So I, like I said, I, you know, there was some analysis that was like, oh, I think McCormick is the hedge fund, like out of touch hedge fund bro is a better candidate. I don't buy that whatsoever.

I think Oz is a much more formidable candidate. On the other side of the aisle, you know, I think Democrats did pick a very strong contender in John Fetterman, who you talk about like that everyman appeal. He has it in spades. He's one of the few top level Democrats who really has that sort of like just blue collar vibe. He was the mayor of a former steel town. He's six foot eight. You know, he's he's wears gym shorts everywhere and not as like a sort of like political theater. That's just literally who he is. But he's already facing very tough sledding because of the political landscape. Now he's facing an even more difficult challenge because of issues with regards to his health.

And let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So Democrats even very concerned about a lack of transparency around Fetterman's stroke. They're even reportedly looking at state ballot replacement law. They do go ahead and say we don't think that's going to be necessary, but they're checking it out just in case. They're trying to get answers about his hospitalization. And the quote here from a Pennsylvania official is, a lot of us Democratic Party types are very nervous about it. Now, one thing I will say, Sagar, is keep in mind those, quote unquote, Democratic Party types, they did not want John Fetterman.

They all were behind Conor Lamb. So do keep that in mind as you're reading this. Oh, yeah, they definitely want to get him the hell out of there. That being said, the story here is not good for John Fetterman. And I was telling you this, it's especially not good for him given that he is now running against a heart surgeon and appears to, I'm not going to say he covered up, but he was clearly extraordinarily negligent with his health. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that, you know, it's been several weeks now, 17 days for the Fetterman campaign to actually explain what the hell

happened in terms of his stroke. And what people are now pointing to is doctors immediately picked up on the fact that because Fetterman was fitted with a pacemaker and that he was fitted and treated in a particularly extreme way, his immediate explanation for his stroke just didn't make any sense. And now a cardiologist that was released a letter on Friday said that the defibrillator had been installed to treat a previously undisclosed cardiomyopathy, which was first diagnosed in 2017, that decreased the amount of blood that his heart could pump. So look, Fetterman is only 52 years old, but it's not necessarily out of character for somebody who's that long. Apparently when you're that big, could pump. So look, Fetterman is only 52 years old, but you know, it's not necessarily, uh,

out of character for somebody who's that low. Apparently when you're that big, like it can apparently cause some health problems, part of your body, arthritis, that type of thing. And just, you know, the sheer amount of size, like limbs and stuff that you're, uh, that your body has to cover. But what people are saying here and doctors and others is that he really nearly almost died, which he admits, I, he's saying that. I was going to say, he admits that now in this new statement is he literally said, I almost died and I didn't do what the doctor told me, quote, but I won't make that mistake again. And what he's trying to prop up is a statement by his doctor saying, well, if he wins, he'll be fine

if he's in the Senate. But like I said, I mean, he's literally running against the one guy who can explain in detail how bad his health condition is. I don't think that Oz will probably stoop to that level. That being said, they're probably going to attack him for being misleading and for trying to essentially cover up, especially in the immediate aftermath of the attack, just how bad it was. Because that's what you and I immediately pointed to. Yeah, because, so here's what doctors, why there were immediate sort of question marks for people who understand the heart.

They said pacemakers are sometimes used to treat patients with AFib, and that was what they were originally saying was going on here. That's an irregular heartbeat caused by the upper chambers of the heart. Devices that include defibrillators typically are not. And they have a quote here from a Harvard Medical School associate professor who says, you would never use a defibrillator to treat atrial fibrillation. The defibrillator is used to treat dangerous heart rhythms from the bottom ventricles. So when they saw like pacemaker and defibrillator, that doesn't match up with AFib, which is what they were originally saying was going on. It took 17 days for the campaign to explain in full what the actual, you know, what had actually happened here and what was going on with him. The Fetterman put out a letter. He says the stroke I suffered on May 13th did not come out of nowhere

like so many others and so many men in particular. I avoided going to the doctor, even though I knew I didn't feel well. As a result, I almost died. Frankly, I think that's a good, like just being blunt and straightforward like that. I actually think that was a good statement. It just should have come a lot earlier. A lot earlier. And the back story here, as you indicated, is he was having issues in 2017. He receives this diagnosis. He is supposed to be taking blood thinners.

Well, he didn't take the blood thinners, at least not for as long of a time as he was supposed to. He did hit the gym, eat better, lost something like 150 pounds. Yeah, that's what I'm reading here. And typical sort of like bro science thought, I'm good. Like I did the stuff. I lost weight. I'm doing better. I'm eating healthy now.

But he needed to also be on those blood thinners. And if he had, then this likely would not have happened. Look, there's also still, and you know, I like John Fetterman. I think he's a very good candidate. I think he's, you know, much more in line with what Democrats should be looking for. People who can actually relate to normal people, not these like Harvard educated lawyers who speak in their own language that no one can understand. But there are also questions about his recovery here. He still hasn't appeared in public. His appearances on video released by the campaign have shown him speaking only a few sentences at a time. They say his ability to have conversations

rapidly has not fully recovered, though he is improving and doctors still predict a full recovery. So listen, as long as he's able to make a full recovery and there aren't obvious, you know, visible signs here, I think the health issue is probably not what voters are going to make their decision based on. You know, if Bernie is any gauge after he had his heart attack, he actually went up in the polls. So I think voters could overcome that. The transparency issues are, you know, another question, which Bernie actually faced some of those questions as well. Probably the biggest challenge for John Fetterman is just running as a Democrat in this year. Running as a Democrat. And as you indicated, I mean, how long are you

going to take to get it? And by the way, I wish this guy the best. I hope he's up and walking like tomorrow, but it's going to take a long time. He just had major surgery. He literally almost died. The fact that he can't go out there on the stump. I mean, Pennsylvania is no joke. It's a big state. Yeah.

The campaign says he's out walking a few miles every day. That he's recovering well. But that sentence about his ability to have conversations rapidly is not fully recovered. It is concerning. It can keep you out of breath. I mean, just being out of breath. I mean, do you know how hard? Just doing this job is hard, speaking for two hours. We're not running for office.

We're not barnstorming and screaming and all that into a mic. I don't know. I don't know. I can't imagine. Listen, my brain randomly breaks all the time, as you know, and I haven't had a stroke. I have no excuse. This is a tough job.

I'm not saying that, you know, like we're firefighters or whatever, but, you know, like I know what it means to speak for just a couple of hours. He's doing that times 10 per day over a period of months. That is incredibly, incredibly difficult on your cardiovascular system when you're already that strained. I mean, look, the number one lesson on this is don't ever let yourself get to 418 pounds. So take care of yourself, people, because, you know, even if you come down, it can still have major effects. Well, listen to the doctor. I mean, I do think, listen, because of the toll put on working class people's bodies in particular, these sorts of health struggles, very common and extremely, extremely relatable. But, yeah, I mean, I wish him the best. There's still

a lot of questions here. And I'm sure that the transparency issue is going to continue to dog him, especially since his whole persona and ethos is just like, tell it like it is. What you see is what you get. And so when you have this little cloud of, okay, well, why'd you wait 17 days to give us a straight story about what was going on here? Yeah, that's, that's, Republicans are definitely going to run with that. Yeah, that's well said. Okay, let's move on. The final one, CNN. This is a very interesting development. The new bosses at CNN clearly walk in and are like, what kind of shit show did we just purchase over here? Let's put this up there on the screen. Their new boss actually taking aim at something that drives me crazy in cable news, which is that the new boss says that CNN needs to abide by a new breaking news

standard and says that they are overusing the breaking news banner across its network and cable news writ large. He says, quote, we are truth tellers focused on informing, not alarming our viewers who have already seen far less of the breaking news banner across our programming. He says he agrees with complaints from both inside and outside the organization that the network uses the breaking news banner. It has become a fixture on every channel and the network and that its impact has become lost on the audience. We always joke about this. Whenever you're watching Fox News, they're like, they have the music and like, and they're like, it's a Fox News alert. It's 11 PM here on the East Coast. You're like, why is this a Fox News alert? Why? Same with, uh, so you know,

it's like breaking news, President Biden about to speak. Why is that breaking? What does that mean? Or it'll be breaking news, something that happened like three days ago. Right. We have breaking news here. Four days ago. What are you talking about? Cover further, we're further breaking coverage of the ongoing... Hold on a second because breaking and ongoing

don't have the same connotation. It has become something that is intrinsic to cable news. Roger Ailes' fault, actually, in terms of making sure that this all happened in the first place. Zucker did not pioneer this.

Zucker did not pioneer this, but he stuck to it. A lot of people did. CNN now, the first people to kind of step back. And, you know, the New York Times wrote it up in an interesting way, which is that the new bosses over at CNN are very, very aware of the problems that they have. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that this new guy, Chris Licht and the Discovery CEO are trying to undo many of the damages that Jeff Zucker put in, you know, beyond just the breaking news issues. They're pointing to the fact they had to deal with the Chris Cuomo cover-up. They

had to deal, obviously, with Zucker and his mistress and all that cover-up. They had to deal with the CNN Plus disaster and just shut it down completely in some of the first days of actually owning this thing. But more important, they had to shut down, you know, the snarky headlines, like the immediate fact checks and the print. They're like, they had to shut down, you know, the snarky headlines, like the immediate fact checks in the print. They're like, that stuff is over. They're like, we're done in terms of that. And then I somehow had a personal experience because I watched, I said in this, what they said is political shows are trying to book more conservative voices and producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far

right and the far left. And this made a lot of sense because on Sunday, I'm minding my own business and I get a text message from some producer over at CNN asking, would you be able to join our panel in New York City at 9 p.m.? And I was like, no. I was like, I don't do cable news unless there's a really good reason, given exactly what we do here. So you want me to waste my time and skip my own show to go up to New York to appear on your stupid-ass panel? Random CNN panel.

Yeah, random CNN panel with CNN's greatest analysts that they can pay over there for like a five-minute hit. And we were talking about this, where clearly a hit, by the way, is with lingo for appearance in television, for me to appear on your panel where they'll be like, you're a racist and a scumbag. Do you have a response?

And I'll be like, well, do I have some time? And they're like, no, we have to go to commercial. That's your response. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for joining us, Sagar. Really appreciate you taking the train to New York and all of this in order to make that happen. So as much as I personally would love to go on there and really tell them how it is, if I ever get the opportunity to do something like Brian Stelter's show or

something like that as one-on-one, I would absolutely do that just to call him out to his face. But something like this, it's like, they're clearly just scrambling to try and get somebody on there. So the TLDR is, I said no, obviously, so I could be here with you beautiful people here on this show. And look, I don't think it's going to work. And they really have

their work cut out for them. I can understand why they reached out to you because, I mean, you are kind of like a unicorn in that you have these right-of-center views

on certain issues, but you haven't just completely lost your mind and gone down some conspiracy rabbit hole. So, I can understand why they would want, plus they just see our numbers and they're like, we want some of that.

Yeah, we want some of that. Yeah, so I get why they reach out to you. I mean, I'll tell you like, spoiler alert, this is what's going to happen with CNN. Because this is exactly what happened with MSNBC when I was there and when I got canceled, ultimately. They brought in a new president. He looked around. Some of this has to do with what they think is

going to work from a revenue perspective. Some of it has to do with what they think will make them comfortable in their social circles. Oh, that's smart. And so new NBC News president comes in. He says, all this opinion stuff has to go. We're going to put in the NBC News, quote unquote, personalities. You might call them lack of personalities. And, you know, we're going to lean into our journalism and we're going to be down the middle and that's what we're going to do. So, you know, he puts in people like Kate Snow. He gives Chuck Todd his daily show.

Like all this stuff. Brilliant, amazing moves. So they go in this direction. And then what happens? Trump. Trump happens. And guess which shows performed the best? The ones that were willing to be the most opinionated and the most sort of deranged and outrageous. Those were the ones that got the best ratings. And so, you know, they were even thinking of getting rid of Lawrence O'Donnell, who's the 10 p.m. primetime slot. But they couldn't because his ratings were some of the best on the network. So ultimately, they, you know, that whole plan of we're going to be down the middle, we're going to use our journalists, et cetera, gets tossed out the window because ultimately what's sold in the Trump era was Trump derangement. And so they leaned into, you know, whoever,

whoever had that, whoever was doing that thing and satisfying the audience's desire for that. And it's going to be the same thing with CNN, because ultimately, look, their ratings are terrible right now. So right now it's easy for them to say, we're going to go back to this down the middle reporting. And they're imagining, oh, that'll open us up to a broader audience and we won't just have this niche. But there is no mass broad audience for news anymore. And you don't have, because of structural reasons and cable news, the ability to actually do something that would be good and like honest and that people would like and that is different and challenges corporate power in any way. Like there's just, they can't do that.

And so what's going to happen is we're going to get back into the presidential election season, which is going to happen sooner than any of you all think it is going to. Trump's going to be back in the scene. That's what's going to break. And they're going to go right back to where they were. That's what's going to happen. You're absolutely correct. The moment that Trump announces, by the way, there's actually some rumors that he might announce before the midterms.

He might announce before the midterms in order to preempt any efforts to try and replace him, in order to take a complete hold on the GOP field. It's going to be all Trump, all the time. They're going to go right back to what rates with their crazy resistance boomer audience. You know, just because those people turned out, they can't resist Trump. Something about Trump has rotted these people's brains where they will watch anything about how he's bad or whatever the next drama is with him and we will all be subjected to the same insanity

that we were over the last four years. I don't know if we can do it again, but we'll be here on Breaking Points. Indeed. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, we've all been there. You mean to send an email or text or DM to one person and it goes to the wrong person. Sometimes the results are humorous. Sometimes they're really embarrassing.

Sometimes they're catastrophic. And sometimes, as in the case of Amazon executives this week, your email forward screw-up leads to the public revelation of a disgusting and cynical plot to weaponize identity politics and racial justice to mask your own power-seeking agenda. Allow me to explain. So Amazon spokesperson Julia Lawless thought she was emailing an Amazon consultant about their media strategy, but she accidentally forwarded that chain to a Politico reporter. In it, Lawless implores that consultant to continue pressing the narrative that new legislation aimed at curbing Amazon's monopoly powers would somehow harm communities of color. Quote, Would it be possible for you all to push this with some of the newsletters, Politico Tech, Politico Health, etc., to underscore continued concern from a broad cross-section of groups, including communities of color. That email linked to a letter to

lawmakers from an Amazon-funded group called the National Minority Quality Forum. So to recap, Amazon sent cash to this group, which is supposedly devoted to reducing minority disparities in health care. That group then sends on a letter to Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar that conveniently toes Amazon's line on a bill that would curb Amazon's power. Amazon then uses that letter from the group they are funding to try to generate press coverage claiming the bill is racist in its impact, knowing that Democratic lawmakers might panic

if they feel like they are in danger of being on the wrong side of an identity issue. Their little email slip-up completely gave up the game. But unfortunately, Amazon's tactics here are actually identical to those that they have used routinely in the past and are, by the way, employed by virtually every large tech company in the space. Meta, Amazon, Uber, Google, all are happy to pervert racial justice to try to maintain their exploitation and their abuse. The legislation at issue here is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. It is a bipartisan bill introduced by Chuck Grassley on the Republican side and Amy Klobuchar on the Democratic side. It is co-sponsored by a half

dozen Democrats and an identical number of Republicans. It would prevent Amazon from rigging its marketplace to benefit its own products. And it is no wonder that Amazon is willing to go to the mat to try to prevent the spill's passage. Numerous investigations have revealed the shady tactics that Amazon uses to get customers to buy their products instead of those of third-party sellers on their own site. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Amazon violated their own policies and lied to Congress. The company routinely vacuored up info about which third-party products were performing well, and then they would create carbon copies of those products to sell under their own label. The Washington Post found that even as customers

were just about to purchase products from other companies, Amazon would then hit them with a suggestion to instead purchase their own Amazon-branded products. So, since Amazon controls the marketplace and sells products into that marketplace, they can copy successful products and then essentially force them on consumers, making it virtually impossible for independent sellers to compete. It is the polar opposite of a free and fair marketplace. It is the textbook definition of monopoly abuse. But since Amazon is such a massive behemoth, those independent sellers, they really have no choice but to accept the raw deal being given to them on that platform. As with every billionaire, Bezos hasn't become the richest man

on the planet by above-board competition. His real edge has been in figuring out how to rig the game. He is a world-class cheater. Bezos and the Amazon ghouls know that they cannot possibly justify this market rigging to the American people on its own merits. So instead, they lean on their paid network of charities. They use those charities to try to frame opposition to bills to rein in their abuses as somehow noble stands for racial justice. And this is far from the first time they have played this game. And again, Amazon is not alone. Uber launched multi-million dollar ad campaigns to try to persuade voters that their violations of labor law were really meant to serve Black and brown communities. Industry-backed consultants paid off a local NAACP head in order to endorse their efforts.

Politico's Emily Bernthal previously reported that six different groups asserting that anti-monopoly efforts targeting tech companies would hurt communities of color had gotten cash from Amazon, Google, or Meta. In just one example, listen to this one. The Black Chamber of Commerce and the Latino Coalition signed onto a letter that was written by the Chamber of Progress claiming that antitrust legislation would hurt small businesses. So the Chamber of Progress is led by a Google executive and counts Google, Amazon, and Meta as members. And according to the report, quote, the Latino coalition lists Google as one of its corporate partners on its website, while the U.S. Black Chamber lists Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta as, quote, top-tier corporate donors. The latter group also helps lead Amazon's Black Business Accelerator initiative and helps Google promote its tools

for Black-owned businesses. Listen, if you want to know how Amazon actually feels about Black lives or any working-class lives, really, just look at how they treat their largely Black and brown warehouse workers, how they chew them up and spit them out intentionally, how they track every movement from picking items in the warehouse to the number of seconds it takes them to make it to the bathroom and back. Look at how they go to any lengths to bust their unions, firing worker organizers and retaliating against them. Look at how they smeared Chris Smalls as not smart or articulate before trying to use racial tropes to vilify him among his former colleagues. I hope lawmakers who are actually collaborating in a bipartisan way for something good for once will not be deterred by these nakedly cynical attacks. And I hope everyone sees through this

attempt to use woke language to maintain a status quo that has been devastating for all, and especially the disproportionately black and brown working class. Love the email screw-ups. 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? Well, to start off with, I saw Top Gun over the weekend. It was absolutely incredible. Legitimately one of the best movies that I've seen in the theater in nearly a decade. And it made such an impression, I thought I'd do a monologue here. Not about the plot or review or of those sorts, but perhaps what the movie itself tells us about

where we are in culture today and how that might matter for the country. Now, as I mentioned in our last show, I can't help but shake the feeling that we are in the middle of a major vibe shift in this country. And I think this movie and its success are a great signifier of that. First, and very heartening to me, is this. Top Gun could have been a cautionary tale about modern Hollywood. Most of us know the story at this point. The only way that Hollywood makes major money is China, since they have such a big population. The CCP only lets movies in that adhere to their cultural standards

and which don't show any pro-US messaging or anything that can be conceived of as anti-China, which in a way means that the CCP, effectively for nearly a decade, had a veto vote over one of America's greatest exports, its own culture. Now this resulted in consternation when early promos of the film were released in 2019, and many people, including myself, noted that the jacket on Tom Cruise's back was changed from the original movie to remove the Taiwanese flag. Now look, it's a small thing, but it was the perfect symbol of how Hollywood

was going out of their way to placate their Chinese masters. But here's the good news. Even their bootlicking doesn't work anymore. After going out of their way to try and court the Chinese and their investors, they still pulled out of the movie. China's Tencent Holdings, which is a massive media conglomerate,

which is also involved in the NBA drama, was originally supposed to co-finance this film. But the CCP forced them to drop their support of the film because they felt that it was too pro-US. Too pro-US, even though the enemy in the movie is faceless, and as it was in Top Gun 1, and no spoilers, but they even acknowledge that the faceless enemy has great technology. So that's how paranoid and nuts that they are over in China. Now, after ordering Tencent to drop financing, the government also does not like it whenever

they let Top Gun in theaters right now. So, something years ago which would have killed that movie. But here's the good news. It doesn't appear to have mattered at all. Tencent dropped their financing, the Taiwanese flag came back to the jacket, and the movie still broke massive records here in this country. In fact, Top Gun is just the latest in massive Hollywood blockbusters to hit it big, even though it was not allowed in China. It made $300 million worldwide on its opening and is going to easily make back its marketing production budget by the end of this week, making it a mega profitable blockbuster. This is just the latest movie to do so. Reports have surfaced over the last month that the reason the Chinese refused to allow the latest Spider-Man movie in the country was because it was too pro-US by featuring the Statue of Liberty. That movie, despite not

being released into China, made $2 billion. Its fellow Marvel release, Doctor Strange, was also banned from China, supposedly because, get this, of a single scene for a fleeting second where a newspaper kiosk featured in Chinese characters an anti-CCP newspaper headline. That was it. Disney still refused to cut the scene. Boom, they got the ax in China. Doctor Strange also went on to nearly net a billion dollars. The point is, is that all of this was basically unthinkable

not even five years ago. Hollywood has discovered you don't need China to make great movies and to make a lot of money. If the Chinese government wants to subject its population to Wolf Warrior 7, they can be our guest. It remains one of the dumbest pieces of film I've ever tried to watch. And look, they've got to give kids something to watch on day 197 of lockdown. But beyond the China angle, which I do think is tremendously important, there's also a metacultural one. There was not a single political point made in Top Gun 2.

And my god, was it refreshing. There was a faceless enemy. There was a team. Tom Cruise looked cool. It was a classic narrative arc. No pretenses. No politics. Nothing in any form throughout the entire thing. Per reporting around the film, that was actually meticulously followed by the production team,

who wanted it to be able to appeal to as many people as possible. Great. It's what people have been missing. As critic Lon Harris put it, quote, Top Gun Maverick is the least cynical Hollywood movie in maybe a decade. No winking, no nicotine construction, no arch attempts to outsmart the audience. Just a big, satisfying, heartwarming, well-made piece of mainstream entertainment. And I think that's actually a very important observation. For a long time, and I can't really pinpoint when, Hollywood has basically just been Marvel movies, Marvel knockoff movies, the occasional gem that is allowed to hit the silver screen, and then obviously a ton of streaming content, some of which was awesome, most of which is garbage. Watching

Top Gun in the theater as a tentpole movie, with no so-called controversy, shoehorn politics, it felt like a return to a bygone age, even for just a brief moment. Now, maybe I'm reading way too much into this, but I do believe that the instant success of the film and its near-universal love is something both to be celebrated and to really be thought about. To me, it just seems like the institutional insanity of the last decade or so is just breaking. The Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial, Biden, poll numbers being at record low, the mainstream media finally acknowledging corporate Pride Month campaigns are very cringe. All of that to me just seems connected, part of moving on from something. As Alison Davis wrote in New York Magazine in February 2022, a vibe shift is coming. A lot of

people made fun of that essay. I loved it, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Top Gun, I think, is part of that. Or maybe it's not, and I'm crazy. And even if I am, at least trust me on this. Go see this movie. It's awesome. So you gotta go see the movie, Crystal. Okay, I do have to see it. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, guys. So last week, we covered the conclusion of the Depp-Herd trial.

Yes. And as she does, Taylor Lorenzo, The Washington Post, had to put her take on what all of this meant. What she decided to focus on was the content creators who covered the trial and who got a lot of views and did very well because there was a lot of public interest in the trial. And it was not really covered extensively in the mainstream media. Taylor decided this was somehow really nefarious. Oh, okay. So not only does she do this in her column, but then she has to lie about having reached out to some of these content creators for comment and saying, well, they didn't respond. When in reality, she had just never bothered to reach out to them whatsoever.

In the end, the Washington Post has to issue this long, at first it was called a correction. Then it was so lengthy, they had to turn it into an editor's note about how, oh, we said we reached out, but we really didn't. And actually, we reached out to this one on social media, and they didn't get back to us. Okay, so all of that being said, we decided to have one of those content creators on to tell her side of the story here after being smeared and lied about by Taylor Lorenz in the Washington Post. Alita Majeka is a content creator on YouTube. Her channel is called Legal Bytes. She does legal analysis. Go ahead and put her channel up on the screen there. She does all sorts of legal analysis, including extensive coverage of the Depp Heard trial, and she joins us now. Great to meet you, Alita. Yeah, good to see you. Hi. So nice to meet you

guys. Yeah, of course. Listen, before we get into the Taylor stuff, I'd just love for you to set up, you know, your conception of your channel and what you're doing over there. Because one of the things that—there were a lot of things that sort of irritated me about the framing from Taylor. But one of the things that irritated me is she seemed to indicate that you would, like, completely switch your channel around to cover this trial. When in reality, I mean, your channel is focused on legal issues. So it seemed to me like it was a very natural fit that you would lean into something that had obviously a lot of public attention. So why don't you go ahead and set that up for us, Alita? Thank you. Yeah, I started the channel around two years ago. I'm a licensed attorney. I'm licensed in California and D.C. And the whole point of this channel is to explain the

law one bite at a time. That's always been the motto, if you will, of the channel. And that's what I do. I take current events, pop culture, et cetera, and I break down the law so that people can understand it in more digestible kind of bite-sized ways. Well, that's great. And I think that people need that. And the attack, Alita, on you by Taylor appeared to be that you were somehow grifting by focusing and covering this trial. So first of all, maybe just tell us how you decided to start covering the trial.

I mean, obviously there was a ton of public interest and you were filling a niche, something that we happen to do over here. I don't think that that's a crime either. But tell us about how you kind of came to the trial, decided to start covering it, and then we'll get into what the exact post said about you. Yeah, so this wasn't the first time that I've live-streamed a trial, at least, well, this is the first time on my channel, but the first one was the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, which was over on Rakeda Law's channel. He invited a bunch of us YouTube

lawyers onto his channel to basically do exactly the same thing, to live stream it from gavel to gavel, give our commentary, give our thoughts, the good, the bad, the ugly, and basically go from there. So I had that experience already. And when I came across this case, it was maybe about a month before the trial began. And I was very interested in not only just the underlying facts of the case were very interesting, but I also saw a community that was very, very skeptical and not trusting of the mainstream media because of its treatment of this case already for years. Years, people had been frustrated with the media's treatment of the case. So I figured this was a very interesting case to take a look at. I wanted to look at it myself,

not rely on the headlines because I had learned from the Rittenhouse trial, seeing for myself what the trial was like, and then seeing what the headlines were like coming out of that, and that there was a vast difference from what they saw versus what I saw. So I wanted to cover it from gavel to gavel on my channel with a bunch of other YouTube lawyers and other professionals, by the way. I had a nurse. I had two psychologists. I had a behavioral analyst.

I had a bunch of people on the channel to basically give their takes from a professional and personal perspective. And so that was what I decided that I wanted to do. I started covering it three weeks to a month before the trial began, long before it was ever clear that it was going to become like this global phenomenon that it became. Wow. Yeah. And you know what? Even if you had realized there was this need and then jumped on it once it already – that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. me and why this piece particularly stuck in my craw, so to speak, is because she makes this whole point about how YouTubers don't, you know, they don't have to abide by journalistic ethics and they're just, the whole point is like, oh, they're just chasing the money, as if the mainstream press doesn't have their own incentives and money-making ventures backing them. And also, ironically, in this piece that's in part about how YouTubers don't have journalistic ethics, Taylor Lorenz herself violates journalistic ethics by lying about whether or not she reached out for comment to you and another content creator. So talk to us through that part of the story from your perspective. So what happened was I saw that

she had published the article. And to be honest, I wasn't following her. I was vaguely familiar with her before this, but not really. Only just surrounding some sort of vague, I guess, controversies, you could say. But other than that, I really didn't know one thing about her beyond that. Didn't really have too many opinions about her, to be honest. But somebody had tagged me on Twitter and said, hey, you've got an article that's about you and it's not great. And this had already happened a couple of times. People have been talking about LawTube, so to speak, and other content creators in the

context of this trial. So I was like, okay, you know, more shade, whatever. But I took a look at it and I saw that she had, she said that she had reached out for comment. And I was like, I mean, I've gotten a lot of emails in the last couple of months. Like things have been pretty crazy, but let me double check my email just to see if she, like other journalists, reached out to me. I looked for her first name, her last name, Washington Post, I saw nothing.

There was nothing in my email indicating any kind of professional that was reaching out to me for comment. So I tweeted about it and I said, I don't think this is accurate, but you know, okay. And then I saw that the other content creator that was in the same paragraph as me, that umbrella guy, you know, he and I follow each other also because he's been one of the most active and most prominent in the Justice for Johnny Depp community for years. And so he said the same thing. So I was like, okay, so it's not just me. I'm not missing something. So then I get a direct message from her on Twitter saying,

hey, I'm so sorry. Here's my phone number. You can reach out to me. And I was like, okay, well, you referenced the information that you got about me from this Business Insider article. That article also mentioned that I'm living overseas. So it feels very disingenuous for you to give me your phone number for me to reach out to you if you know that I'm overseas, because obviously you have definitely read that article if you're referencing it.

So then I guess about 10 minutes later, she also see, well, I guess before that, one of the first corrections was, I guess, the stealth edit of removing that parenthetical saying that she had reached out to us. And then there was the correction, of course, that said, you know, we removed that parenthetical, there was an error, blah, blah, blah. And then there was another correction after that saying, well, we didn't reach out to that umbrella guy, but we did reach out to Alita Majeika for, you know, through Instagram when that was actually the last place where she tried to reach out to me after she had reached out on Twitter privately after I had already called her out. So we have, we have, um, your tweet guys, go ahead and put this up on the

screen. Um, that has this final editors known note. And you say, what? At Washington Post, I will say this again. I was not reached out to you by Taylor Runs for Comment until after my tweet below. She reached out to me by Instagram DM after she did on Twitter. Both DMs were sent to me after I called her out here. Please stop lying and take the L. And I'll just read the editor's note here so people can see how extensive this is. And I want to make sure that I have the timeline right here too, Alita. So first, they just, once you guys call them out, they just sort of stealth delete the we reached out to them for comment, which violates their own standards. They realize they violated their own standards and this is becoming a thing. Then they issue this correction, which then they make into an editor's note, which still is not correct.

What it says is the first published version of the story stated incorrectly that internet influencers Alina Mazeika and that umbrella guy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked via Instagram. And you say that's not true. After the story was published, the post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried that umbrella guy for the first time. During that process, the post removed the incorrect statement but didn't note its removal. That's a violation of our corrections policy. So this turned out to a complete mess. You know, I

mean, listen, why is it worth like sort of going into the details of the, you know, the life of the story and the various corrections that were issued. What do you think is the broader point here, Alita? Well, I mean, as you mentioned before, it is ironic that this whole point of this article was to say how mainstream media is no longer being turned to by the people because, you know, you have these influencers on TikTok and on YouTube who are suddenly pivoting their content to make a buck. They're clout chasing, they're just covering this because they want to increase their followers,

increase their subscribers, that kind of stuff. And the subtext seems to be that this is dangerous because misinformation is a big deal and who's there to fact check these dangerous influencers? When in reality, I'm just asking for fair reporting on this thing. And the truth of the matter is that when it comes to my followers, when it comes to me making any kind of a factual assertion to my followers and my subscribers, I have a community that is actually very well versed in the underlying facts.

So if I get something wrong, they call me out on it. So I would expect nothing less than of someone who is purporting to be someone who is a guardian of misinformation as well. Yeah, I mean, it sounds to me, I mean, look, I wasn't super into this trial, but if I was, I would have watched you. I don't know why I would have to turn into these tabloids or whatever. It sounds like you're doing a much better job than a lot of these people. And we didn't just want to talk about this. I was actually curious for your reaction to Amber Heard's attorney's first interview over on CNN. She blames social media for the verdict. Let's take a listen. We're going to get your reaction afterwards. Is there any way to see

this verdict in any other way than the jury simply did not believe Amber. You know, there's no question that influence was there. It's kind of strange because it was a mixed verdict as well, which suggested that they did believe at least some, and it seems we would call that messy more than inconsistent, I think, but possibly that. But I think really what happens here is it is kind of a throwback to an earlier time when it was automatic than when a woman said, I have been the victim of domestic violence. She's just not believed. Oh, Johnny, we know Johnny, he would never do that. And that's kind of what what we got here. Now, remember that we had another trial back in the UK, same issues, lots more evidence

came in on that one. And what Mr. Depp's team apparently learned from that is this time demonize Amber and suppress as much evidence as you can. Your reaction, Alita, what do you think? Well, if she's trying to point to social media and TikTok and YouTube as to blame for anything in this trial, I would simply point to Amber Heard's legal team because they were the ones that brought in all of the hashtags as evidence through their expert, through one of their data experts. And the jury arguably would not have known of the Amber Heard hashtag, the Justice for Johnny Depp hashtag, or any of the others, if it had not been for their questioning of their own direct examination of their own expert witness. So, you know, an argument can be made that it's very difficult, of course, for the jury to stay away from the public, to stay

away from the news, to stay away from social media on a case like this, because this case, of course, was everywhere, all around the world. But, you know, and we've had conversations on my channel also with me and other attorneys about just how much we trust jurors to follow the rules of a particular case. But call me naive, but I do think that at the very least, the majority of those jurors probably took those rules to heart and really did their best to stay away from the media coverage of this case while it was pending because they're giving up a month and a half to two months of their lives for this case. And they understand the high stakes

and the money and the life that is at stake between these two parties and the importance of the allegations involved. So typically, it's my opinion that a jury is going to pay attention to that and take that very seriously. Yeah. The other part of Taylor's article is she sort of insinuates that, you know, this decision was wrongly made or it was the wrong decision. And she uses, you know, your sort of monetary incentives to frame like, oh, they were coming in on this one side because that was where the money was. And there's kind of an insinuation in there that that may have influenced the outcome of the trial, as Amber Heard's attorney says there, more directly. But there's no even attempt to engage with any of the legal analysis. It's all just sort of a smearing of the motives and a raising of nefarious intent rather than actually dealing with the legal specifics of the case, which I am not a lawyer. I didn't follow this case at all. So I have no opinion whatsoever whether this was wrongly or rightly decided. I genuinely don't know and am agnostic. But I did want to ask you, Alita, because the case that was made on the other side

that I saw, you know, prominently among a lot of liberals, though not uniformly, was that this was a sort of blow for survivors of domestic abuse, that people were going to feel like they couldn't speak out when they, you know, suffered from abuse and that it would kind of chill the ability of women to come or anyone who suffers from sexual from physical violence in a relationship to be able to come forward. What did you make of that argument? Do you think there's any merit to that? Well, I think that there's there's always going to be a concern one way or another about that coming out of a trial like this. But I do think, I mean, well, number one, as far as the argument that all of these channels, including my own, are overwhelmingly pro-Johnny

Depp, I can't speak to other channels, but I can say that for my channel, the panel of lawyers that I had, the vast majority of them came into this trial knowing little to nothing about the underlying facts or the arguments in the case. And actually in the first couple of days, they said to me at the end of the trial day, they said on air, they were like, I don't think he's going to win because defamation cases are very difficult for any public figure to win. And this one, he has a huge, huge mountain to climb.

And I remember telling them, I knew a lot of the underlying facts because I had been spending the last month researching it. And I told them, I said, just wait, just wait and watch. And one by one, they all started to end up in Johnny Depp's camp just because of the facts that were laid out in front of them. And they all played devil's advocate because these are all practicing lawyers, licensed attorneys that are in the habit of poking and prodding both sides of a particular argument, especially when it comes to litigation or a trial. So as far as that is concerned, you know, I very much push against that. And I think that that is just another example of someone who has decided to write about my coverage of this trial without actually looking at the content that's on my channel. But as for the other aspects, you know,

the Justice for Johnny Depp community, what I have noticed is that there are a lot of domestic violence survivors, both male and female. And I think that what this message actually sends is that the male domestic violence survivors now have a chance of having their voices heard. Because, you know, statistically speaking, I think that it's true, women do make up a larger portion of domestic violence survivors from what I have heard and what I have seen. However, men still make up a certain portion of that. And men have a tendency to not be believed even more than women because of all kinds of stigma around gender, masculinity, femininity, all of those kinds of things. So I think that if anything, this sends more of a

signal that men have a fighting chance, possibly, maybe. And when it comes to Amber Heard, she is not a representative of domestic violence survivors. She is a representative of someone who is trying to defraud the experience of real legitimate domestic violence survivors, and she should be placed in a category all on her own. I think that's really interesting. So last thing, I know that you have a charity stream that you're doing for Children's Hospital. Why don't you shout that out before we let you go? Yeah, so on June 11th on my channel, I will be hosting, along with Rick Hogue of Hogue Law, another YouTube lawyer. So we will be hosting on my channel a charity stream for the Children's Hospital of

Los Angeles. That is one of the two charities that Amber Heard was supposed to donate her entire $7 million divorce settlement from Johnny Depp. Half of it was supposed to go to the ACLU, half of it to Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. So they were kind of wrong, you could say. Yeah. Exactly. They were sidestepped in this whole thing. So one of kind of, um, uh, you could say exactly they were, they were sidestepped in this whole thing. So, uh, one of the things that we wanted to do is to sort of give back for, for all of the, um, all of the, the, the love and appreciation that we've gotten from, from viewers and whatnot, um, is to sort of give back for this charity stream. So we'll be hosting it on June 11th and I I'm really looking forward to having a bunch of people show up. Great idea. Awesome. Well, it's great to talk to you. And by the way,

I watched some, not all of your content. And it seemed to me like you were really trying to evaluate the issues in a fair-minded kind of a way. People should go and look at your channel, Legal Bites, for themselves and judge what they think of your content. We encourage people to do that. Thank you so much, Alita, for taking the time. It's great to meet you. Thank you, Alita. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching.

We really appreciate it. Tomorrow's the official one-year anniversary, one year since we actually did a show and all that. I know a lot of one-year stuff. We've got some announcements that are coming tomorrow. Thank you all to everybody so much for the support. It just absolutely means the world. Link is down in the description, And we will see you all tomorrow.

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