Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/9/22: Jan 6th Hearings, Uvalde Survivors, Gun Debate, Kavanaugh Scare, DC Corruption, WaPo Drama, CNN Purge, & More!

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the January 6th hearings, Uvalde survivors, Kavanaugh murder attempt, DC think tank corruption, WaPo drama continues, CNN coverage shakeup, Biden's solar industry gift, & the Chesa Boudin recall election! 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/Ross Barkan: https://rossbarkan.substack.com/ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/chesa-boudin-recall-is-the-beginning-of-a-backlash.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big things happening today. The big start of the January 6th hearings. Democrats and their allies on the Republican side of the aisle have created a big multimedia presentation. So we will preview all of that, what it means, how it's all going to unfold. So you know what to watch for this evening. We also have some updates in that shooting, mass shooting down in Uvalde. We will tell you about that. And also Matthew McConaughey's big trip to Capitol Hill gave really what was an incredibly moving speech. So we have a bit of that for you as well. Also a threat on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A man was apprehended who had guns and directly said, I want to murder a Supreme Court justice. Some crazy stuff. Yes. So all of

those very, very troubling. Comes on the heels of actually a Wisconsin judge who was just shot and murdered in his home, too. So very, very troubling developments, needless to say. We also have a perfect swamp story for you that sort of tells you everything about how influence really works in this town. The head of Brookings Institution, this General John Allen, who was very influential in the Obama administration, very important in terms of the Afghanistan strategy there. He is now under investigation by the FBI for his dealings with Qatar. There is a lot to this story, including this straw donor who's already been indicted and found guilty for funneling contributions. This is completely bipartisan story and a big, big deal here in town. But also, again, just very revealing of how this town actually works. We also have to

give you the very latest in the complete meltdown happening over at The Washington Post. It is literally insane. I can't look away, Crystal. Nor should you, honestly. Yeah, the drama that I went into has only gotten 10 times worse and has become even more hypocritical. And it tells us a lot about how modern media works today. I think people are going to enjoy that. I think it says a lot, not just about modern media, about the modern left, about how these things are so destructive, about just how people are assholes to each other for no really good reason. There's a lot to say about this one. We also have Ross Barkin on to talk about the primary results.

Some disturbing results for people who are in the camp of being progressive criminal justice reformers, in particular, Chase Abudin, who was the prosecutor in San Francisco, was recalled by an overwhelming margin. Sixty some percent. Ross has been following the race closely. The statistics in terms of San Francisco crime, what Chase was doing. So we want to get into all of that with crime, what Chase was doing. So we want to get into all of that with him and what it says sort of from a broader perspective. But we do want to start with those big January 6 hearings tonight, 8 p.m. Before I get to the first element, I was

just reading this morning Politico Playbook has a little bit of in-depth detail about what exactly you can expect in this first hearing. This is, of course, the culmination of, I think it was a 10-month investigation. The co-chairs here are Benny Thompson, Democrat from Mississippi, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney are from Wyoming. What they say in Politico Playbook this morning is, drawing on months of interviews and thousands of documents, committee has thus far kept most of its findings close to the vest. So we expect a lot of new information and some of the most terrifying video from that day that hasn't been shown to the public yet. They really want

to sort of make the case that this was not just a sort of sporadic convulsion of violence, that this was premeditated, that it was coordinated and Donald Trump was really at the center of it. They also say committee aides are staying coy on the actual structure of the hearings, but told reporters there would be a multimedia component, much like the impeachment hearings in January. So we're going to get into some of the politics of this in just a moment. But, you know, Sagar, I feel like Democrats have this repeated instinct where when the things that they're very upset about, and I think there are good reasons to be upset as a nation about what happened on January 6th, but when they don't

land the way they want them to with the public, when, for example, the public has other concerns as right now, very concerned about the economy, very concerned about inflation, concerned about gun violence, concerned about a whole range of things. They are also concerned, I'm sure, about the future of our democracy and what happened on January 6th, but it's nowhere close to the top issue. So Democrats have this instinct of saying, well, we just haven't presented it in the right way. So go ahead and put this element up on the screen. This is from Vanity Fair. They actually brought in this veteran network executive named James Goldston, former president of ABC News, to pull together this multimedia presentation. You can see the headline here from Vanity Fair is, quote,

people must pay attention. People must watch. The January 6th committee is trying to make the most of its primetime TV slot. You know, they push networks to cover this live. I think almost all of them are doing that, save for Fox News, for obvious reasons. We are expecting, I guess, a Trump aide confirmed that the former President Trump will give some kind of a counter response here as well. Unclear whether it'll be a statement, a video, preview this thing and kind of hype it up to get people to really expect that this is going to be very revelatory and contain new information. We have Jamie Raskin, who is on the committee, kind of teasing this this week, saying, go ahead and put this quote up from him. Yes, the committee has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity. The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little bit out of control is absurd. You don't almost knock over the U.S. government by

accident. So we're going to lay on all the evidence we've found. House Resolution 503 charges us with defining what happened on January 6th, explaining the causes of what happened, and then ultimately laying out recommendations that would allow us to fortify ourselves against coups and insurrections moving forward. So again, I think that there's an attempt here to let's package it in a different way. Let's bring in this TV executive. Maybe this time it will land in a different way with the American people where it won't be just one of a list of issues, but it will be the primary issue. There isn't a lot of indication that they have some new bombshell revelations. I think everybody who lived through that day knows the general contours of what

happened and has already sort of taken that in and processed that in whatever way they are going to process it. But, you know, I think the other way you have to see this is through the lens of media apparatus that also has never had better, had ratings that were positive again since January 6th. So they also want to kind of recapture the magic of that day. Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a lot to say about this. Now, first and foremost is it's been 10 months since this committee was even founded. It's been more than a year since January 6th. I think we have a lot of bigger problems than January 6th. But this reminds me exactly of impeachment 1.0 and 2.0.

I remember specifically Nancy Pelosi talking in, I believe it was impeachment 2.0, whenever it was about Ukraine. They said, well, you know, the people of America don't understand how bad this was. So when we put him on trial, then they'll understand. And guess what? There has never been, and I really mean this, go back and look at Gallup party identification, higher identification with the Republican Party in the United States than the exact time period, January of 2020, whenever impeachment was going down. So what do you, I'm sorry, that was impeachment 1.0 about Ukraine. So what does that tell us?

Which is that we've seen this movie before. How many times did I hear it about Russiagate and Comey? They said, well, when you guys hear James Comey testify before the committee, or when you hear Robert Mueller testify, you're going to see. People need to understand what the Mueller report really said. We all know what it said. Everybody does. They have much bigger problems. It's like, how many times are they going to continue to try and do this? I find the primetimization of this, honestly, just so facetious because what really got to me is that – here's the other thing, too. If you are one of these Russiagate Democrats, January 6th people, who wants to see Trump out of office or impeached or whatever, criminally charged, you're being misled because they specifically have asked them, Jamie Raskin and others on the committee multiple times, are you going to find Trump criminally liable? They said, that's not what we were charged with doing. It's like, no, no, no.

But that's the spirit of what you guys have been trying to do. They tried to impeach him and it didn't work. It's like, what is the point of this entire thing? Well, and here's the thing I think too, right in the wake of January 6th, when the images and the emotion and everything that people felt of that day was really raw. That was the time for, and it's not, Democrats, I think, did everything that

they could more or less do. I mean, they moved forward with impeachment. You know, people saw that day. They were horrified by all of it. Like this was not this was not a good day in American history. So Democrats move forward with impeachment. If you're Republicans who wanted to sort of excise this wing of the party, who wanted to move in a different direction than Donald Trump, that was your time. Yeah. And, you know, there was maybe an opening. And we might remember covering at the time Mitch McConnell kind of flirting with it, putting out trial balloons of maybe we're going to maybe we're going to actually, you know, move in the direction of joining the Democrats for this impeachment, barring Trump from running for office again. Maybe we're going to actually sanction the members who were complicit in, you know, trying to overturn the election results, whether that was a far-fetched outcome or not,

which I think is pretty debatable. But ultimately, they took the temperature, and McConnell is a creature of power and nothing else. This is not about morals or principles or anything else with him. Took the temperature of the base of the party and decided it was too hard to act in that moment. And so now, you know, that they didn't pursue that path, whether it would have been successful or not on the Republican side, they decided to just kind of, there were a few that voted with the Democrats, but otherwise they just sort of decided, let's keep our heads down and keep going in this direction and keep playing this game that we're ultimately playing. And so now the only recourse that is left is an electoral recourse. I mean, the only recourse

that is left is, you know, really prove that you have, if you're on the Democratic side, that you have a better vision for the country, that you're going to deliver, you know, deliver calm, deliver material for people, materially for people, and push the country in a better direction. I mean, at this point, I think that's really the only answer to January 6th is offering the American people a vision that they can buy into that gets people moving in the same direction again, that doesn't just seek to tear and divide people apart. And I'm not saying that, you know, January 6th necessarily is about dividing people apart because I think the overwhelming number of Americans were really horrified about what happened on that day. But, you know, if Democrats think that this time with this multimedia presentation, with this new piece of information or this new interview with Savanka or whoever it is that we're going to release tonight, that this is going to change the way that Americans are thinking about the

midterms or thinking about the Republican Party or thinking about us, you know, I just I think that that's probably pretty fanciful. Yeah. Look, gas is five dollars a gallon. Focus. Sorry. It's four four dollars and ninety seven cents. It'll hit either sometime today or sometime tomorrow. That's the problem. Food is too expensive. Solve that. Hold a hearing on it. I honestly why can't we have primetime hearings with the CEOs of the oil companies and primetime hearings with the CEOs of the meat packing industry. That actually might get people going. People might tune into that and be like, oh, you know, I'm kind of interested in what exactly is happening here. But this is what, look, politics and Washington especially is all about what you choose to focus your time on. And

this is what they have decided to try and make a key part of their case. And I don't think it's going to work. I think the holding it in primetime, obviously, look, fine. I mean, also, here's the other thing on the video side of this. What have we not seen at that point from the day? I mean, the New York Times did a whole mashup on this, like right afterwards. People have done, well, you can't watch it on YouTube anymore. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. I think it's nuts.

But look, all the raw footage is out there. There's also raw footage, you know, that people have been looking into to try and piece together, like, what exactly happened with some of the police informants. And nobody talks about that one. My point is that there isn't hundreds of hours of raw footage at this point. If you want to go watch it, you can. I'm sure there's super cuts of it all over the Internet. They're probably ten times better than whatever some idiot TV producer has. I mean, we all lived it. Yeah, exactly. I watched it live on television. We all lived it, you can. I'm sure there's super cuts of it all over the internet. They're probably 10 times better than whatever some idiot TV producer has. We all lived it. Yeah, exactly. I watched it live on television. We all lived it in real time. And I have no doubt they have

something, you know, I think one of the things that they're going to show is, and we'll get to the Proud Boys in a moment, but there was a documentarian who was actually following them on that day. So I think there's some footage from that that hasn't been released. I'm sure there is some new stuff that people have not seen, but I also think that people really understood it very clearly on the day what ultimately happened. And we have learned some new details about how there were people in Trump's orbits

who had deluded themselves into making these plans and these separate slates of electors. And again, I think it's an open question of how close any of this came to ultimately succeeding. But and I've read through the affidavits at this point and the indictments at this point of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who have now both been charged with seditious conspiracy. And we'll talk about that in just a moment. And, you know, it's clear they deluded themselves into thinking that if they sort of showed up at the Capitol, that the American people would be behind them in this effort to overturn the election results. And that would be the spark of this revolution.

This is like the, you know, deluded, fanciful, like LARPing that these dudes were doing. And I don't want to downplay that this like a dangerous situation, but ultimately in their mind, they'd completely deluded themselves. The American people clearly were not behind them. I mean, that's that's the bottom line of why this all became a complete failure. If your goal is to overturn the election results is because people, even Republicans at the time, now Republicans have come up with all sort of post after the fact rationalizations. They were horrified by what happened. They did not have your back ultimately. Even Trump, after much persuasion and, you know, a million people calling him saying you have to tell these people leave, ultimately told them to go home and to be peaceful. So the American people did not have their back. They understood

on that day what it meant, what happened. They have sort of made their political judgments around that. And I think that at this point, the parties that can focus most on delivering a better country and delivering for people and making their lives better tends to be the party that's doing best. I mean, this is the big Achilles heel for Trump as well, as he's so obsessed with the stop the steal nonsense. That's the one thing that could keep him and his wing of the party from coming back to power. And people like Doug Mastriano is now the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania who's obsessed with this stuff. Like that's a very winnable race. And his obsession makes it much

less likely that people that people are going to ultimately vote for him and put him in that office because they are very concerned about their day to day life. And that's what they want politicians ultimately focused on. So that's right. All right. So I mentioned the Proud Boys. There is a new indictment of a number of Proud Boys, including their former chairman, Enrique Tarrio. So it's Enrique Tarrio, former chairman, four other members of the far-right group were indicted on Monday for seditious conspiracy for their roles in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. Let's go ahead and put this first element up there on the screen. This is one of the most serious criminal charges to be brought in the Justice Department's sprawling investigation of the assault, they say.

They say this came in an amended indictment that was unsealed in federal district court in Washington. The men had already been charged in an earlier indictment filed in March with conspiring to obstruct the certification of the 2020 presidential election. So this is a superseding indictment. This marks the second time that a group has been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6th attack. In January, Stuart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was arrested and charged along with 10 others with the same crime. The charge of seditious conspiracy, they say, can be difficult to prove, carries particular legal weight as well as political overtones. And it requires prosecutors to show

that at least two people agreed to use force to overthrow government authority or delay the execution of a U.S. law that carries maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. I read through this indictment. Maybe the government has additional facts and information than what was in this indictment. Someone will leave that possibility open. It's very hard when you read these things to determine, to sort out what is just like self-aggrandizing LARPing and what is actual like, you know, actionable plans to execute some insurrection and overthrow of the government. So it is sort of similar to the Oath Keepers indictment that I also read. There's a lot of social media chatter about this is 1776 and storming the Winter Palace and all this kind of rhetoric, right? So they're very, you know,

they see themselves in this light or they want to pump themselves up as being this, you know, these revolutionary patriots. Again, the American people had very different feelings about what they were actually trying to do that day. Enrique Tarrio was not in D.C. that day because he had I don't know if you guys remember this. He had been arrested for burning, stealing and burning a Black Lives Matter flag. So he was banned from the city. But what the government argues is he was like sort of directing events from afar. Part of why the government was able to put this indictment together, I think, was because this documentarian was following them on this day. So they have all kinds of video and insight into their actions on that day.

Documented at this point, they were some of the first, you know, rioters to breach the Capitol. Some of them, you know, directlyers to breach the Capitol, some of them, you know, directly violent, assaulting people, breaking through metal barricades, those sorts of things. So that is ultimately what the indictment says. I have no idea. And I don't honestly think that anybody really knows how likely it is that they end up getting a conviction on this one or the Oath Keepers one. But, you know, it's clear from reading this that both of these groups, they sort of like, you know, they were high on their own supply. They were wanting to pump themselves up like they were these key players in history. They kept saying,

you know, telling themselves like we did it and we're, you know, we changed history today and all of this sort of stuff. So, like I said, hard to sort out how much is like social media LARPing and how much of it is like real serious tactical planning with a chance of success in actually doing something. Maybe it doesn't matter whether it has a chance of success. The seriousness of the intent, I guess, is what matters. I don't know. I mean, I do think, do think it does matter. Maybe I just looked at it in a different light because I'm from Texas and I grew up with, you know, a lot, frankly, rednecks, let's be honest here, who always had like Confederate buckle bags and Confederate buckles. And we're always talking about like, oh, we'll rise again. Texas always has the right to go independent. And everybody was like, yeah, whatever, man. You know,

it's like one of those things that people just post on Facebook. Don't try to live in Virginia now. Everybody's got a don't tread on me flag. It's fine. I mean, it's one of those things where, yeah, it's definitely it's LARPing almost in an identitarian perspective. Yeah. Look, I'm not saying that they didn't riot, but I just want to come back to this. Seditious conspiracy is an extraordinary charge of which the last time it was prosecuted by the Justice Department, they lost humiliatingly against the Huatri Militia, which was a Christian nationalist militia in Michigan. Honestly, the circumstances of that are very similar. They had an undercover FBI agent who was like the best man of one of the ringleaders who was in charge and he infiltrated the group. And they had to try and prove that they were literally this Christian militia was trying to overthrow the government. And they relied entirely on circumstantial evidence,

very much in the same way that we have here. And this is not just me saying this. There's actual lefty kind of legal analysts who have pointed out the problems with charging seditious conspiracy, they all got off, all 10 members. And the FBI actually had to return their guns, their AR-15s to them, all of their seized property. So that's the last time in the United States of America that a seditious conspiracy charge was filed against a far-right Christian nationalist militia. I'm not saying these are good guys or that they were up to anything good, but the point is that you have an extraordinary burden of proof on the U.S. government in order to try and prove this because it also carries an extraordinary sentence.

And it should be that way. So let me give you a few of the details here from news reports also, the way this was written up. So they say that while the Oath Keepers, the other group that was charged with seditious conspiracy, they were the ones that after January 6th, they went and celebrated at like a Denny's or an IHOP or something like that. I can't remember exactly. As one does in the middle of a revolution. Right, exactly. Everybody celebrates their revolution at Denny's.

The Oath Keepers had been planning for an armed response to Trump's loss for some time. The Proud Boys appear to have been mobilized around January 6th, only after Trump tweeted that there would be a, quote, wild protest in D.C. on that day. According to the government's indictment, Tarrio and other Proud Boys formed a new chapter of the organization, sort of an elite Proud Boys unit, I guess, on December 20th called the Ministry of Self-Defense. The focus, Tarrio said, is, quote, national rally planning. So Trump's tweet about a wild protest was December 19th. They start this group on December 20th. So, you know, the government is trying to indicate, like, Trump really inspired these guys to pull together this sort of, like, militant armed group and to execute this planning for January 6th. Shortly thereafter, they say someone sent Tarrio a nine-page plan titled, quote, 1776 Returns. It included plans for occupying a number of buildings in Washington.

In a video chat December 30th, Tarrio told members of the MOSD that what would happen on January 6th would be, quote, completely different than the group's past demonstrations and wouldn't simply be a, quote, night march and flexing. So this is some of the evidence the government is laying out to say this wasn't just, you know, Proud Boys, obviously, they're sort of notorious for being mayhem, mischief, showing up at rallies and getting into scuffles and, you know, sort of having like an inclination or an acceptance of violence in their ranks, that there was planning involved, that they actually had these documents that that lay down a plan to occupy buildings. They have messages between them, you know, plotting out what they're going to do on the day.

And so that is the case ultimately that they are laying out. Yeah. And look, I mean, I think that they have a pretty good case for what, like for illegal entry, mischief, you know, maybe even conspiracy to that effect. But again, I just want to emphasize seditious conspiracy is an extraordinary charge that's being brought. And I honestly do think it's political. I think it's being brought by the Department of Justice in order to try and mollify and satisfy kind of these bloodthirsty Dems who are like, what are we going to do to try and make sure that these people are held accountable? And look, I think it exposes a lot of the ways that they think about criminal justice and kind of how it should be used against people that they look at as they're fine or they're the real criminals and then our side who does anything similarly. It's like, no, that's not how the law works, nor should it. It should be equal application of the law.

And let's throw this final one up there on the screen, because I also think that this just goes to show you the Justice Department here is bringing a contempt case against Peter Navarro for not complying with the request of the January 6th committee. Now, is Peter Navarro technically in violation of the law? Yeah. But how many times have we seen contempt charges moved from Congress to the Justice Department and they refuse to actually prosecute it? I mean, it actually doesn't happen all that often for the Justice Department to specifically carry out the contempt charge because a lot of people, and I hate to say this, a lot of people actually are in contempt of Congress. A lot of people don't simply just comply. But the Justice Department, Merrick Garland's

Justice Department, is making them the enforcers on the January 6th committee. I'm not saying that they shouldn't comply. It's a legal charge they're supposed to. But the application of law, again, shows you what the priority actually is. Yeah, I don't know. On this one, I think this dude should be held in contempt because, I mean, you can't have a congressional body, whether you're like super into the January 6th committee or not, that has the power to compel people to testify and people can just say, screw you, I'm not going to. I don't disagree with you at all. Nothing happens. I think the charge against him is completely fine. I just wish that everybody who was held in contempt of Congress actually got

prosecuted. That's that's fine. Just because it's not you know, I mean, it should be consistently applied, but you can't just say like, oh, we're just not going to get like you can just go to Congress and when they, you know, ask you to testify or not. So I think if you're going to have a government and have a state, you have to be able to enforce rules like this. So I have no problem with Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon or, you know, if Mark Meadows, who also didn't comply with their request and others being held in contempt, I have no problem with that. Charge them. That's completely fine. I'm more saying I know that there is not an equal application of the law because I've seen several contempt charges not get brought against other people. And I just think, look, I mean, the thing

that it feeds into is the witch hunt narrative that a lot of people who look at this and say, look, you see these January 6 people who are still where they're still in prison, like a Washington, D.C. jail. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are like always talking about this. And I mean, look, it is unjust. But you also see the seditious conspiracy charges that millions of dollars the Justice Department has spent on this and no real investigation. now, millions of dollars spent by Congress, primetime. I just think it feeds into that narrative. And I do think it delegitimizes actually some of the power of Congress in the eyes of the people.

Now, look, I mean, you know, it's got an 8% approval rating. I believe in the equal application of law, absolutely. Yeah, of course. And, I mean, this is not people's top day-to-day priority, but overwhelmingly the American people were horrified by this day. And, you know, the idea that people who were involved should be appropriately held to account and the existing laws applied to them. I have zero problem with that whatsoever. And I do think it's a fake narrative that's been spun about like, you know,

that there's there is a contingent on the right that just wants everybody to be left off the hook and paints them as like they were just tourists taking selfies and no big deal. No, I mean, the application of the law here is actually important. You can't just have it where, you know, if you don't like what the congressional body is doing, you can just say, screw you, I'm not going to show up. And I also don't want to downplay, even as some of these people were buffoonish, and some of their plots completely ridiculous and had no chance of working, they were serious about wanting to do this, wanting to overthrow the government. And I do think that that's something we should take seriously.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, and that is why I actually look at people like John Eastman and some of those people who were legitimately, legally trying to do this. I'm like, those are the people you really should be going after. And Eastman, that's a weird one because this is not some, I mean, he obviously is a crank. Right. But he came from this, like, you know, sort of intellectual. Legitimate lawyer. Background, legitimate lawyer, all this stuff.

And he was very involved in trying to come up with some like high minded stop this deal. Use exploiting some ambiguities in constitutional language to try to make this thing a reality. And so, I mean, it is troubling to learn that there were people who were sort of engaged in this plotting behind the scenes, again, whether or not it was realistic for it ultimately to be pulled off. So the last piece about this, let's go ahead and put this New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. The New York Times take here is that January 6th hearings give Democrats a chance to recast midterm message with the majority at stake. Democrats plan to use the six high profile hearings to refocus voters attention on Republicans role in the attack. I mean, spoiler alert, that's not going to happen. People have already people have processed January 6th. However, they're going to process

January 6th. What November is going to be about is how people are feeling about their own bank accounts, the direction of the country right now under Joe Biden. Inflation is the number one issue. You know, we have seen issues like gun violence and abortion become more significant in terms of people's directions. But ultimately, it's not complicated to understand what this election is going to be about. People feel very negative about the economy. They expect there to be a recession. They're getting pay cuts every month and every week because of inflation. And that's what they're ultimately going to vote on.

Obviously, I don't understand how they can possibly think this recast the midterm message. You know, frankly, they'd be better off going with COVID and nobody cares about COVID anymore. So this is even lower on the rankings. I just think it's incredible. Like it's impeachment all over again. Why they are unable to just reckon with what's really happening in terms of what voters care about. You know, Joe Biden just today hit the lowest ever in the history of his presidency, lower than Donald Trump's approval rating, some 31%. And not just that, he's got a 56% disapproval. That's 20-some percent approval amongst

independents. What's the number one reason that people are upset? Inflation. What's the number two reason people are upset? Also inflation. Number three is probably healthcare, which also has to do with inflation because that continues to go up. Number four is like housing. So does that have to do with any of this? And the media obsession. Anytime, you know, I had to stop. I had to turn off phone notifications for these media companies. They'll be like, so-and-so was just served with a, I'm like, I don't care.

I literally don't care. And I know from doing this show that other people don't care. A lot more people that don't watch the mainstream media, which is the vast majority of people in this country who would either tune them out or tune in to something else, care about something far differently, which is why when we do stories about the trailer park going up, that's the stuff that really affects people's lives. And they have no seeming connection, media especially. Throw this one up there. I love this, from Yamiche Alcindor over at NBC News, Democrats need to, quote, make people care. This is what they always say about the January 6th hearings, more than gas prices or maybe formula. Yeah, you should care more about the January 6th

committee and about a seditious conspiracy charge against some cranks in the Proud Boys, more than whether you can feed your child or drive to work. I mean, this is the height of the way that they see the world and why what they feel like is most important continues to just be a massive disconnect from everybody else. Yeah. I mean, there's just no denying that. And I think she's not wrong in that if Democrats could pull off the magic trick of making January 6th the number one issue, that would be a much better landscape for them for the midterms. But that is clearly not going to happen at this point. And I also think it's important to remember that part of why they keep grasping for something like let's just talk about January 6th again is because to focus on the issues that people are telling pollsters are

their number one issues day to day would require actually doing work, would require actually, you know, challenging their corporate donors, would require actually, you know, having some political imagination, having some political courage, having some plan and vision for the future. And they you know, that's why they continue to fall on these to fall back on these types of issues rather than the material issues, because it's easier to put together a multimedia presentation reminding you how terrible January 6th was than it is ultimately to sort of challenge corporate power and get inflation under control, deal with gas prices, chart a new future for the country. So I think that's why they continue to fall back on these types of things. Absolutely. Okay, let's go talk about Uvalde. So we always want to stay on top of what's going on with that. Uvalde CISD Chief of Police Pete Arredondo, the person who made the call to make sure that police officers and law enforcement who were gathered in the hallway did not even go into the classroom. So let's go ahead and put this up there

on the screen. Oh, very interesting. The school police chief was a no-show at the Uvalde City Council meeting. So just again, to explain this for people who may not remember, Pete Arredondo was also elected recently to the city council in Uvalde. And he was actually sworn in after the shooting while he was in disgrace. And they actually stopped that swearing in ceremony from being public. Since then, he's been in complete hiding. He, by accounts and early leaks from the investigation, was not being cooperative with the FBI and with the Texas Department of Public Safety whenever they're asking him for information. He has been confronted by CNN. He says, I'm not going to say anything. He continues to try and live life in the shadows. He's closing off the city council. Imagine that, a government building, a people's

building that they're like, no, no public allowed. He's actively working to throw reporters off of the sidewalks. He's hoping that all of us just lose interest in this case, but we need to hold this man accountable. And now he's a no-show at the city council meeting that he was just elected to do. So it seems that he's very bad at doing two of his jobs that he shouldn't even have. Yeah. I mean, it's not only that. It seems like that all the sort of officials around him are protecting him. Yeah, they are. I mean, we know they're literally protecting him in terms of they brought in law enforcement to protect law enforcement. You know, the sort of protection that those kids could have used very much while they were being massacred by a madman. They also, you know, they lied to reporters about a board meeting being closed to the public when

in reality it wasn't to try to keep reporters from showing up. They actually closed the doors to City Hall and locked them so that you couldn't have any media access. You know, they seem to have been, there seems to have been a lot of complicity in this guy's vanishing act. So that is a very important part of what is going on here ultimately. And the school board had a chance at their meeting to actually remove him from his post. Yeah, and they didn't do it. They declined to do it. Right. So, you know, at the same time, certainly the anger and emotion on the ground in Uvalde is not going away any time soon when lives have been taken, lives have been ruined, families have been destroyed. And the very latest, incredibly hard

to watch emotional testimony came from a teacher who was wounded in this attack. He was in a fourth grade teacher. He was in room 111. His name is Arnolfo Reyes. And he had 11 kids in his classroom. Every one of those 11 kids shot and killed. Arnolfo himself was gravely wounded and is continuing to go through, you know, he's alive. Thank God for that. But he's continuing to go through surgeries. It's going to be a long physical recovery process for him. And I don't know the emotional, mental recovery process. I don't know if it's even possible to overcome what he's experienced. Here's a little bit of what he had to say about the response on that day. Did you feel abandoned in that moment by police, by the people who are supposed to protect you? Absolutely. After everything,

I get more angry because you have a bulletproof vest. I had nothing. I had nothing. You're supposed to protect and serve. There is no excuse for their actions, and I will never forgive them. I will never forgive them. I know that I will not let these children and my coworkers die in vain. I will not. I will go anywhere to the end of the world to not let my students die of pain. They didn't deserve this. Nobody in this world deserves this kind of pain. And what he wants specifically is to raise the age of assault, the ability to purchase assault weapons, something that actually was passed in

the House but has no chance at this point in the Senate. But his experience on that day, he talks about how he could hear law enforcement in the hallway and then he could hear them saying, please, you know, please come out and talk to us. We promise there won't be any harm done to you. And then they go away and nothing for, you know, something like an hour and 20 minutes. And he, it's heartbreaking because he, he says, you know, I did everything I could do. I told the kids to, um, he told the kids to go under a table and to pretend that they were asleep because that's, they had gone through training for active shooters. I mean, this wasn't a school district that was unprepared. Of course it ends up that

they were completely unprepared, but he did what the training had told him to do, to have these kids hide under a table and pretend like they were asleep. And he said, you know, in the end, they were just like sitting ducks and every single one of them killed. He also wanted to make sure to tell the parents that the other teachers who were in the joining classroom who were both murdered, that they also bravely did everything they could for those kids. But, you know, they're completely defenseless and the people who were supposed to be there to help them did nothing. Yeah. And, you know, props to him for speaking out that way. And, you know, whatever he wants to say politically, I think that's completely fine. And that's something I get annoyed by is people who attack, you know, victims in this case for pushing policy. Look, am I annoyed by David Hogg and all those people? Yeah. But don't attack kids who went through a traumatic

experience. It's a free country. People can say what they want. Matthew McConaughey, he's a native of Uvalde, Texas, actually visited the White House, gave a very emotional speech, went quite viral, actually, in which he had an interesting nuanced take. I don't agree with many of the policy positions that he put forward, but I don't think that you can not help but listen to the man. And he framed it in a way, this is what I appreciated the most, Crystal, as I grew up in Uvalde, it's where I learned how to use a gun. I believe in responsible gun ownership. He made it clear, he's like, I don't believe in taking people's guns away. I want to try and find some sort of middle ground solution. And he also talked about family values. He talked about strengthening, you know, mental health resources and more.

There really was something for everybody. Why don't we go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that that we have here. We need safer schools. We need to restrain sensationalized media coverage. We need to restore our family values. We need to restore our American values. And we need responsible gun ownership. Responsible gun ownership. We need background checks. We need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21. We need a waiting period for those rifles.

We need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them. These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations to our nation, states, communities, schools, and homes. Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals. I think he frames that better than any Democrat thus far. I haven't seen any. President Biden's out there talking about an AR-15 banning 9mm ammunition. High caliber. Yeah, high caliber, not yet, which also means nothing about guns. And I think that he is McConaughey here from my experience growing up in a family where Second Amendment was very important to my father and growing up in a community that is rural and has high rates of gun ownership, I think he channels what a lot of responsible gun

owners feel. Because, you know, if you are someone who this is part of your culture and this is what you have grown up with and you have been schooled since day one of the proper way to handle a gun and to store a gun and to keep people safe. And then you see some kid being able on their 18th birthday, I don't want to call him a kid, he was a man, but on his 18th birthday, being able to go and buy two AR-15s, having no training, having no idea what he's doing. Yeah, you look at that and you're like, this is a disgrace. It shouldn't be that anyone can just casually acquire these guns with no limits, no checks, no responsible training whatsoever. And so he framed this as this is not a setback for the Second Amendment. This is a step forward for the Second Amendment and to make sure that we don't have just, you know,

a culture of sort of abusing the Second Amendment, but actually respecting these powerful weapons. So the other part of the speech, it's very emotional to listen to. Yeah, because he should watch the whole thing. You should watch the whole thing. It's worth it because he spends a lot of time talking about the families that he and his wife met when they went to Uvalde, you know, who their kids, their dreams for the future that have been cut short. The, you know, one of the teachers, I don't know if you guys follow this. I don't think we talked about it on the show. One of the teachers who was shot and killed, her husband died of a heart attack. I know. The next day they leave behind four kids. You know,

they had been working hard to get their house painted. They wanted a food truck when they retired. They were planning all these things for the future and all of that, all of that is gone. So listening to the humanity of these children and these lives that have been lost is not easy to do, but I really do recommend that you listen to the entirety of his speech. And I said this before, Sagar, you know, I have specific position and ideas about what I think would be beneficial in terms of gun control. I do think lifting the age to 21 makes sense. I think red flag laws make sense. I think safe, you know, gun storage makes sense. And, you know, there are some other, I don't have any problem with like banning high capacity

magazines and things like that. But at this point, I think it's so important for the country that we could just do something so that there's a sense that we can act. I mean, tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, and we have these spikes in attention, the emotions are really raw, and then it sort of dissipates and goes away and literally nothing happens. I mean, it just really reinforces this sense that you are in a failed, declining state where even things that have 80 percent, 90 percent bipartisan support, there's just no chance. There is no responsiveness to the public will.

And it's extraordinarily depressing from that perspective as well. Yeah, I get where you're coming from. But I mean, I think my issue is that people were like Matthew McConaughey and seemed legitimate and didn't seem like they were going to encroach, you know, much, much further. I think a lot of people like me would be like, OK, you know, maybe we can talk. But I mean, you have the president talking about banning 9 million ammunition in AR-15s. And then the vice president, you know, Beto, is like, I'm going to come and seize your AR-15s. What did you think of what passed in the House last night? Oh, I mean, look, 18 to 21, I think it's maybe fine. I just am extraordinarily,

especially on red flags, I mean, I just do not trust the capacity of the Justice Department and of these states in order to administer this fairly. And I think that responding in a mass tragedy event like we did post 9-11 to give up an immense amount of civil liberties was a traumatic and terrible mistake that had long-term ramifications. And my fear is that we're looking exactly in that. If it was just 18 to 21, and again, I haven't heard, I talked to a lot of people in the gun community, I haven't heard a great argument against it. That being said, it does open a slippery slope. So on that one thing alone, on the merits, I think, okay, maybe I'd be willing to talk.

But red flag is the one I'm just absolutely not going to give you. Well, and I don't think the red flag is what was included. I'm looking at the details of what was passed last night in the House, which, again, I think has no chance of the Senate at this point. But it doesn't actually include the red flag laws. The big piece of it was lifting the age 18 to 21 for assault weapons. And I just don't buy the slippery slope argument here because it's so hard. I mean, not even these things, which are incredibly moderate and supported by like a majority of Republicans, 80, 70 to 80 percent of Americans are probably not going to get through.

So I just I don't conceive of a world in which, OK, well, and then that leads to they're going to take all your guns. That's totally counter to what we've actually experienced over the last several decades, which is a slippery slope in the other direction of, you know, states increasingly loosening any sort of gun regulations, including that's the direction Texas certainly has been headed in many other states besides. Like that seems to be the direction of the slippery slope versus any kind of increasing sort of licensing or age restrictions or limits whatsoever. Yeah, I know. I hear what you're saying.

But again, you know, the caution is always, yeah, not today, but it could come sometime in the future. So, I mean, I see you have in front of you, like, in the details of the bill. Don't you just have to judge the legislation on its merits today? What's on the table today? Firearm storage is a good example. It's like, okay, great. I completely agree everybody should have firearm storage. But how are you going to enforce that?

Does it mean a police officer is going to come in my house and fine me for not having a gun in the right place? It's like, well, now we have Fourth Amendment problems. I mean, is the ATF, when we have, for example, private sales. Do you really oppose safe firearm storage at home? I think face firearm service should absolutely be encouraged, but I don't know. I mean, this is something that has like 90% approval rating. Sure, but what about enforcement? I mean, do you want a cop to be able to come into your house and check how your gun is stored? No, I absolutely don't want that. What I want is that if there is a child who gets a hold of a weapon, which was improperly stored in a home and ultimately kills themselves or someone else,

that there's some legal ability to hold someone responsible for their total negligence and allowing that situation to unfold. I actually do believe there is a negligence standard whenever somebody uses, a child doesn't, whenever you improperly store your weapon. I've seen cases where that- It depends on the state. It's state by state because not all states have these rules. Right. But I'll give you another one. Private gun sales being passed to or as another. That actually requires a universal registry of firearms. And so when you have a universal registry, that actually was the precursor in Australia for going and making sure that you could buy back everybody's guns.

3D printing is another one. Look, I mean, I know I might sound radical here, but part of the problem with all of these things is that when you put heavy amounts of enforcement, you give the ATF and other people more knowledge, you have more data. So would you do anything? Well, I mean, on the current one, I honestly just don't think that there is any. So you think we just have to accept this is how it is. There's going to be school shootings. We're going to have mass violence. There's not, you know, the suicide rate. I mean, that's that's terrible. Honestly, the mass shooter events are the hardest ones to disrupt. What I think you could have more of an impact on is domestic violence and suicide, where just having easy, immediate access to a firearm, no waiting period, you know, no safe storage, the sort of accidents that all too often kill our children.

Those are the sorts of things that I think you could more easily have somewhat of an impact on, but you just don't think it's worth it. It's not about worth it. It's about what's the cost. I mean, look, like I said, I keep going back to 9-11. I mean, 9-11 was a horrific tragedy, terrible event. 3,000 people were killed. Was it worth 20 years later giving up an immense amount of civil liberties?

I have no idea what this country is going to look like in 20 years from now. I'm honestly not optimistic about it. The Patriot Act and safe gun storage and universal background checks are not remotely equivalent. Having lived in Washington, D.C. over the last couple of years and seeing the literal breakdown of society and then also seeing that a lot of people are okay with it has made me so pessimistic and frankly more of a gun radical than I've ever been in my entire life. I literally do not trust the state to save me in any unsafe situation. That's literally where I'm at. So you are now a full-on libertarian on everything. I'm not libertarian on everything. I mean, but that's what it sounds like because the problem is- On like individual safety, I want people to be able to empower themselves because if you look

around, if you live where we live, like I don't see how you can trust these people whatsoever. So what would you – so you would respond to this with nothing? I mean, in the current situation, I would say we have a terrible situation where it comes to both mental health and a lack of trust, and that would be my number one focus. But, like, I don't think there is a one-shot – look, I wish it was a legislative issue, but I just don't see it. Like, I've said it before obviously look there are a lot of deeper issues here mental 100 medicare for all everyone should have access to mental health truth no doubt about it okay by the way the republicans who are like let's talk about mental health they are very opposed to that they deny the dollars and that's

ridiculous in texas but just on the numbers, you cannot deny that when you look at it, we are massive outliers in terms of the number of guns and we are massive outliers in terms of the amount of gun violence. I mean, the two things are linked. Like there's just, you know, the idea of, oh, we just need more guns, more good guys with guns. That's silly. That's a fantasy. I think the case that you can make is the one that you're trying to make here, which is like I would rather accept the violence and have the freedom than to try to do anything even on the margins to curb the amount of violence. Is that your position? ordinary amount of cost. And that also living in Europe or anywhere else where you don't actually have a lot of rights sounds far more terrible to me than, yes, accepting that we live in a country with 400 million already guns that exist. And that will mean probably a higher amount of violence and

of crazy events. Look, Europe is quite safe. This is what I would call a safetyist mindset. It's the same thing that led to lockdowns, COVID. It's like safetyism is an immense amount of cost in your personal autonomy. Sure, but what's being contemplated here isn't taking away every gun. It's, hey, maybe you shouldn't, as a stupid 18-year-old with no training, be able to go out on your birthday and buy an AR-15. Maybe we should wait until 21 because we know a disproportionate number of the murders that happen with these weapons happen between 18 and 21. Hey, maybe we should have some regulations in place to make sure people hey, you know, a weapon for you doesn't sound like a great idea. This is not like this is not some overreaching, insane, like we're going to round up all your guns. You can't do anything. And it's an infringement on your way of life. In fact,

I think as Matthew McConaughey put it very well, like a majority, a vast majority of responsible gun owners who take these weapons seriously support making responsible ownership part of the culture and part of the regulatory culture. Now, I hear what you're saying, but I mean, look, Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane in 2002 with a bomb on his foot. And now all of us have to take our shoes off unless you literally pay the government for TSA-free. Yeah, but this is not that. This is gun violence every single day. Nope, everybody in O2- That's one instance versus, like, we know we have a violent society.

So it's not like a red herring, like, this is just theater. This is all being framed in terms of mass shootings. Like, and look, I appreciate it, Lisa, you're talking about suicide because that's what it is. But listen, I mean, are we really supposed- So even the 18 to 21 thing, as I understand it, that might be the case in terms of the mass shootings and the school shootings. But that is not necessarily the case whenever it comes to suicide deaths. It is.

I don't know about suicide, but in terms of homicide. Homicide, again. It's disproportionately 18 to 21-year-olds. So, okay, you know, waiting. And we're not even talking about all weapons. We're talking about assault weapons. Wait until you're 21 years old. But how do we know that in the 18 to 21 case, even in homicide, that this is something that these aren't being illegally procured guns? I mean, isn't that the case? And especially within

gang violence and in urban, I mean, look, you're in DC. Sure, that's why you crack down on straw purchases. Again, none of this is going to be a magic fix, but I don't believe that that means you should just say we can't do anything. Because I do think it's instructive. This dude waited until his 18th birthday until he could buy it legally. Yeah, sure. I mean, but, you know, Columbine happened when the assault weapons ban happened through straw purchase because they got some weird friend of theirs in order to go and to buy the gun. You know, I forget what his name was. Yeah, it's never—of course, it's not going to solve every single instance.

There's no question about it. We're talking about can we reduce the numbers on the margins, not just of mass shootings, but of all gun violence. And I think there are some steps we could take. And, you know, the American people overwhelmingly agrees. And I find it very depressing that Congress is completely unresponsive to what the overwhelming public will on this is. I mean, I don't even disagree necessarily with the statement. I just I'm trying to present to you, listen, the last couple of years have changed a lot of things for me. I didn't think that we would ever live in this country that we are, and it has made it so that I'm extraordinarily skeptical. Especially whenever it's D.C., Virginia, or these types of extraordinarily blue states where if I were to live in them, I would want to give people as much power as possible in order to try and protect themselves should the time ever come. As depressing as it sounds. Okay.

All right. We'll leave it there because we've had this debate a lot. All right. Let's talk about Kavanaugh. I just fundamentally disagree that the answer is just to give up on government being able to do anything good. I don't put it that way. I would say, okay, let's try – I mean it's a meme, but let's talk about root causes. Let's restore trust in society.

There's a lot of different things. Yeah, but there's also harm prevention in the meantime. But harm prevention, think again, harm reduction. These are all great intentions, awesome intentions. But we know, as we saw in the COVID regime, that whenever you give a little bit of power, that it can encroach tremendously on your day-to-day life and that the safety is mindset. There are little kids in New York.

I just saw two days ago walking down the street here, little preschoolers with masks strapped to their face because of school policy. New York City, Eric Adams is still for it. My point is, is that as you saw in those cases, the safety is mindset exactly, which led to mass universal mass mandates. Honestly, I even supported at the time two years ago. I was like, oh, this stuff gets pretty out of control quickly. Washington, D.C. was one of the last places in the country to lift an outdoor mass mandate. I mean, look, these things have real costs. And when you give people that power, especially in the current environment.

The fear mongering around that was this is never going away. Well, it has. I mean... Well, it hasn't gone away. It's more that we kind of accepted it, which we probably should have accepted a long time ago. Almost everywhere in the country,

there are no mask mandates. Schools were open until, you know, summer vacation and all of that. So I also thought that there was a lot of overreach there. But the maximalist argument that, like, now that they have the power, it's never going to go away

and we're going to be stuck wearing masks forever in all places, et cetera, et cetera etc that didn't come true we'll see everybody's saying monkey pox is airborne new lockdowns around every corner are we in lockdown no we're not so listen again i think there are big problems with government overreach especially in terms of fbi law enforcement overreach, especially in terms of surveillance, patriarchy, all of that is certainly true. But I don't think the answer to that is to say government can't do anything to make our lives better and our communities safer. Because then you just like, that's just giving up.

I mean, it's just a very nihilistic view to say like, everybody's on their own and you can't, the problem isn't let's make a more accountable government that's more responsive, as in this case, responsive to the public will. It's like, let's just not have a government at all. I'm just not sure how possible that is in the current environment. Okay, let's go ahead and move on and talk about Kavanaugh here. Let's put this up there on the screen. So an armed man was arrested yesterday near Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home and was actually charged with attempted murder. The details of this are really chilling. So this man, he was 26 years old. He's from California. He was carrying a gun, a Glock 17, knife, pepper

spray. He was upset about the leaked draft opinion on Roe versus Wade. This is according to an FBI filing prosecutors who were against him. So man's name is Nicholas John Roski. He was from Simi Valley, California. And the details of this crystal are a little bit weird. So federal agents apparently spotted Mr. Roski at 1 0 5 AM dressed in black clothing and carrying a backpack and a suitcase as he got out of a taxi in front of justice Kavanaugh's house. After seeing agents in front of the house, Roski walked away. And then, and this is what is especially strange, he called Montgomery County Emergency Communications to say, I have suicidal thoughts,

I have a gun in my suitcase, and I want to kill Justice Kavanaugh. So it's not like he was walking down the street and they stopped this guy and they were like, hey, what do you have in that suitcase? He actually called, I mean, look, he sounds like a grade A loser slash freak. Lunatic. Yeah, lunatic. And there's also a question here about these guns because, you know, Maryland, where he was apprehended, actually has different gun laws and the rest of the gun, they have capacity magazine restrictions. He actually had a Glock 17, which was on him as long as two mags. So then here's the question. Did he fly with the Glock? I mean, it's legal to fly with a gun in this country, but did he fly into Dulles or into

one of the areas around here with the gun on him? And also, did he stop at a gun store in order to procure ammunition? He also had pepper spray, which I know that you can't fly with, as well as a knife. I'm not sure exactly what the laws are around that. Anyway, the preparation as to exactly what was going on here sounds strange. And the FBI isn't giving us much of a timeline. They basically say that he got out of the plane and then came to Justice Kavanaugh's house. So I also have a question of, did he fly with the pepper spray and the knife? From California. As to what we were just talking about with TSA? By the way, TSA fails almost every other safety exam that they're ever put in front of. Most people don't know that.

Anyway, it does show you, though, that there is obviously feelings are hot. There's sparked a lot of debate around being able to protest outside justices' homes. But, I mean, that's not connected to this. I will say there was a group. I think it's called like Ruth Sent Us, which is especially ironic considering that Ginsburg is the reason that any of this is happening. But Ruth Sent Us apparently published the homes with a map of all the conservative justices where there have been protests. That's how this gentleman found out the address of Justice Kavanaugh. So that's obviously going to be part of the discourse. But I personally

found the media angle on this just mystifying because what do we talk our entire A-block about? They're trying to connect January 6th, broader, seditious thing, to the actions of a bunch of, you know, a thousand or so whatever absolute lunatics on the day of January 6th. They've made it clear. It's like, oh, if you were supporting this even rhetorically, then you are directly responsible tied to the violence. But look at how this CNN reporter reacts the moment that the facts start to become clear. She actually even tries to blame the GOP. Let's take a listen. Very little detail at this point, Kate, other than to say it's this man is he's an adult man from California. We don't yet know what the nature of the threat was. We don't know what language the threat was or what kind of weapon this man might have had if he had one at all, because the information at this point is just so thin.

But, Kate, this this certainly contributes to this overall threat landscape we've been talking a lot about. The major concern here with this abortion ruling from federal officials, and they've been sounding the alarm on this for about a month, is that Supreme Court justices will certainly be, you know, potentially targeted by violent extremists who are angered over this pending ruling that is poised to strike down Roe v. Wade. This is an extremely passionate issue. There are emotions on both sides. Federal officials have made clear over and over they believe the risk truly comes from both sides of this abortion debate. So here's what's weird, which is, and by the way, it's not untrue, actually,

that there are, obviously, I mean, abortion claims have been bombed before, like people have been killed. So I'm not even saying that that isn't a real point. She said it's not even clear if the man had a weapon on him at all, even though that was immediately clear. So what information- The comment on CNN literally says, it's not even clear if the man had a weapon on him at all, even though that was immediately clear. So what information—

The guy on CNN literally says, found with a weapon. Found with a weapon. It's not clear. It's like, well, where are you getting your info before you go on live television? She seems very uncomfortable in explaining what's going on. Just say the facts. Why is it difficult, Crystal? You even—you and Sarota did a whole segment about not being

able to protest outside people's homes. Whatever. You know, I honestly don't even particularly care. But my point is that you can hold that position and say, yeah, some lunatic tried or wanted to kill Justice Kavanaugh. And, you know, the circumstances of it show this is a grade-A freak. Who's like, I'm having, you know, who buys a gun

and goes outside the house and then calls 911? So, like, look, you know, even people are like, this is a bona fide assassination attempt. Yeah, in spirit. He's also, you know, he called 911. On himself. On himself because he's freaking out. Yeah. And chickened out apparently.

I, you know, that's a good outcome, great outcome. Right. That it didn't get violent. So anyway, I think that the media coverage on this, I was telling you before, front page of The New York Times didn't even have this story on there in the immediate aftermath. You all – everybody knows if Sotomayor – someone even sneezed at Justice Sotomayor, it would be, oh my god, political assassination. You have to deal with the facts as they actually exist. Exactly. You know, what this made me think about was it did remind me that there was that judge in Wisconsin, a retired Wisconsin judge that was

just murdered by a gunman who then killed himself, who had a list of names, the government officials included, you know, the governor of Wisconsin, the governor of Michigan, and other people within the judiciary, the reason I bring it up is, you know, it's a really bad sign in a society when you have judges being threatened or judges being murdered, when you have, you know, increasing political violence and instability. And so I really just sort of look at these events as part of that sign and trend of a complete unraveling of American society. And I think there's, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that. I think it's obviously in part that, you know, it's the Taibbi thesis, I think, is incredibly compelling that after we sort of, you know, we get out of the Cold War and so we don't have this external, you know, unifying quote unquote enemy of the Soviet Union.

Then you've got the war on terror and let's get those bad guys. And in order to generate ratings, the idea was after that, okay, well, we'll turn people on each other. And, you know, so I see this as just another sign of a society that is in decline and in decay. And it's very uncertain what the future ultimately is. And it's going to take some dramatic changes to get us back on track, which is, I think, something that a lot of people really sense out there in the public. I mean, I think that a lot of the angst right now is economic. But I think if you look at that 70% plus who say America's on the wrong track, I think that's an all-encompassing feeling of like, this is not going well. This whole project we're engaged in right now is really

not going well. And ultimately, you know, we're dependent on the whims of like our most fringe and most deranged extremist among us for our sort of safety and future of society. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you look at this too. I look at it as a total breakdown. You know, you have judges being killed. It's not the first time, unfortunately, in the last couple of months that you've seen that. There's been a spike reported. I do actually think there's some bill on the floor, which again, it's being partisan partisan for I think it shouldn't be to increase security for the Supreme Court. I actually think we should obviously do that, especially they're going to be dealing with more controversial cases. Look, I just think that you look at it in the context.

I don't know why the media can't just cover it fairly. We all know if this was on the other side and that guy ever watched a single second of tucker it would be like tucker carlson linkedin you know we're not up here being like what was his media diet you know who did he like i'm sure this person who was clearly deranged in you know enjoyed and imbibed a lot of liberal media okay fine are we gonna say the liberal media. Okay, fine. Are we going to say the liberal media is responsible for attacks or assassinations? No, because people have individual autonomy. And clearly, this guy's a lunatic. And lunatics exist in our society. It's a good thing that he called 911. I find the treatment of the story almost as important as the story itself. Although, I think there has been violent attempts or like

threats before Justice Scalia. Anyway, I know that there's been attacks or threats against justices. But look, if they're going to be deciding cases on, you know, Roe was not the only case. It was a gun case actually before the Supreme Court. There's a bunch. And this is something we'll be covering in the coming days. There's a lot of significant issues that they're going to be weighing in on. I mean, coming any time now, basically, during the month of June. Right. OK. Let's go ahead and move on.

Temperature not going down. OK. This story, very important for what it reveals about the swamp and how all of this works. Go ahead and put this first piece up on the screen. So the FBI has seized the electronic data of a retired four-star general who authorities say made false statements and withheld incriminating documents, so he was lying and covering up, about his role in an illegal foreign lobbying campaign on behalf of the wealthy Persian Gulf nation, Qatar. New federal court filings obtained Tuesday that were sort of, I think, accidentally released actually outlined a potential criminal case against former Marine General John Allen, who led US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, did a bang up job there, great job,

before being tapped in 2017 to lead the influential Brookings Institution think tank. Side note, one of Brookings' longtime top donors, the nation of Qatar. Ah, interesting. Okay, I did go deep on this. I will spare you all of the ins and outs, but let me just give you a brief sketch

of what the government is saying went down here. There are three individuals who are really involved. One of them is General John Allen. The other is a former ambassador to the UAE in Pakistan named Richard Olson. And the third is someone they describe as a, quote, prolific political donor who's now serving a 12-year prison sentence on corruption charges related to those donations, some of which were fraudulent. He would donate that it was really on behalf of some foreign individual who wasn't supposed to be donating in our political elections. Or sometimes he would invent names to funnel donations through.

There was all kinds of shady dealings going on here. At the highest level, this man's name is Ahmaud Zubairi. And if you look into the details of what happened with Zubairi and Olson and John Allen here, basically, they were all colluding again. Allegedly, I'm sure their lawyers say this didn't happen, et cetera, et cetera. They were all colluding to come up with a way that they could represent Qatari's interests within the Trump administration. I want to say that this, though, story is completely bipartisan. This shady Zuberi character who's now serving a 12-year prison sentence, he's got pictures with Hillary Clinton. He got meetings with Joe Biden. You know, this is a complete political mercenary who is a hired gun for the shadiest characters around the world to try to peddle

influence here in Washington. And also, by the way, sometimes with success. There's a quote here. Go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. This is about the U.S. ambassador, Olson. Part of what happened here, this is the guy who was ambassador to UAE in Pakistan. He was in trouble with the FBI, and he was basically like, how come you're focused on me? And what about John Allen, who I had, like, I was in cahoots with this guy, and you're not looking at him at all. So that's part of how the FBI ends up at General John Allen's doorstep. Olson was being paid 20K a month by this sketchy political donor dude serving the 12 year prison sentences. And he also, the sketchy donor dude, agreed to pay Allen an undisclosed fee for his efforts.

According to prosecutors, in Olson's plea deal. But Allen's spokesman says the general was actually never paid. They say in mid-June, Allen met with Olson and Zuberi at a Washington hotel to explain, quote, how he would conduct the lobbying and PR campaign. According to prosecutors, a few days later, they flew to Qatar at Zubairi, the sketchy political donor's expense, to meet with Qatari's ruling emir, other government officials, where the pair explained they were not representing the U.S. government, but noted they had connections with U.S. government officials that placed them in a position to help Qatar. Allen advised the Qataris on what steps to take, including signing a pending deal to purchase F-15 fighter jets and using a major military

base in Qatar as leverage to exert influence over U.S. government officials. And what do you know? Just four days later, Qatar signed a deal to purchase those jets per Allen's advice. The last piece I want to lay out for you here, and the reporting from the AP has been really strong. Great job. Yeah, great job tracking all of this down. Go ahead and put this last piece up on the screen. So this one, the headline is, Mercenary Donor Sold Access for Millions in Foreign Money. Prosecutors describe Zuberi as a, quote,

mercenary political donor who gave to anyone, often using illegal straw donor cutouts he thought could help him. Pay to play, he explained to clients, was just how America works. He also said, we get requests for meetings from all scumbag of the world, warlords, kings, queens, presidents for life, military dictators, clan chiefs, tribal chiefs, and et cetera. And he says, everyone wants to come to Washington to meet people. So again, shady character, did not do a good job even hiding his illegal criminal behavior. No problem gaining access to the highest level officials on both parties. Yeah, absolutely. Go and put this next one up there on the screen. Ken Vogel makes a

great point. DC think tanks always downplay suggestions that they're part of influence campaigns. But now the FBI says that the literal president of Brookings tried to hide his role in an illegal foreign lobbying campaign for Qatar. Look, they've got him dead to rights. He emailed the national security advisor of the United States who he knew and served in the military with while he was, I guess, maybe getting paid by these people to say you should have a more friendly tone to Qatar how much more pay to play does it get yeah people and then this is even better they have the three of them or at least alan and uh olsen conspiring of like oh what can we say that we were really doing let's say alan was setting up a foreign military advisory panel for qatar and that's what he was really there for so and they have them hiding documents and making up these stories that they

go ahead and push to the feds. So yeah, it's damning. And Brookings, by the way, has already suspended this dude. He got the Weigel treatment. Yes, he got the Weigel treatment. They already put him on leave. Presumably unpaid, although not a hundred percent sure about that. Oh, I'm sure he's getting paid. But you know, here's the thing. People know this. I lived in Qatar. I went to high, my last year's high school were there. Brookings has had a presence in Qatar for a long time, and just pay off all the major institutions in the West, have them come here and intellectualize our society, which if you know anything about them, that's an interesting thing to do over there. But that's what they've been trying to do with Brookings and others. Now, the problem was, is that when they got into all that snafu,

people forget about this. They were cut off by the UAE and the Saudis. It was like a whole thing. Then they used their buy-offs and institutional connections to lobby heavily the Trump administration and others, not to just side with the UAE and to try and play a broker role. They called in all their favors with Rex Tillerson. He was the Secretary of State at the time. And this was all unfolding during that time. Exactly. This was all happening during that time. This is a big problem for Qatar because, remember, Qatar is a tiny little peninsula. There's nothing going on there, and they're connected to the Saudis. They're one land border they just got cut off of, so they've got to fly in all this stuff over here. So apparently my mom had gone over there, and she was saying the grocery store, like everything was from Turkey and Iran all of a sudden.

Yeah, because the food, the normal food, all that stuff got, anyway, it was a huge problem for the economy in Qatar. Now, what happened then is that they started calling in all the favors of all these billions that they've been paying off all of these Westerners. And this is exactly the issue with having all of this intertwined connection with these foreign governments. I mean, when you have these foreign governments donating all this money and spreading it around town, nobody does it for free. There's always a cost, always. And that's something that so many people here have tried to deny. I'm not going to say it's always pay for play, but it never hurts, right, to give oftentimes in Washington and the sort of, you know, the games they play to be able to do it.

And you see issues that have huge public support and get no movement in Congress whatsoever. And then you wonder why you have the societal breakdowns, not to excuse like the criminals and the lunatics that would, you know, cause mass violence or political violence. But then you wonder why you have the societal breakdown of people who are like, you know, using these fringe and violent means to try to make their political. It's all a sign of a society in complete breakdown when this is the real way to get influence and power across both political parties, that is a devastating state of affairs. And, you know, these think tanks, like, they have this very sort of, like, high and mighty type of image, especially in this town.

Like, oh, we're just intellectuals here, like, coming up with policy ideas and trying to, you know, help. They're incredibly enmeshed in the political world and provide the sort of backbone and thinking behind a lot of legislation that ultimately gets done. Congress basically outsources a lot of their work to these think tanks. And it's, I mean, this is, again, completely bipartisan and non-ideological. All of these think tanks are in bed with disgusting people and countries and all the rest. Oh, yeah, Neera Tanden in the UAE.

You remember that? Yes, that's exactly right. So, you know, this is the real – this cast of characters is far from the only one that is engaged in this. And, you know, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, that wrote this up that said basically, like, you know, if this dude, this Zubari character is now in prison for 12 years, if he'd been a little bit savvier and just played a little bit more on the side of like what you can, is legally permissible, he could have done all that he was doing in basically a legal way and it would have been perfectly fine and it's totally standard operating procedure here in this town. Oh, 100%. And just so people know, John Allen was one of those people who lied to the American people about the progress of Americans under the Obama administration while he was commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

He lied to all of our faces. Then he endorsed Hillary. I'll never forget this. He endorsed Hillary on the 2016 DNC. He's like, I'm a general, and Hillary's going to keep us safe. Then he became the Brookings head. This is as swamp as it possibly gets. Clearly still enmeshed in the military bureaucracy.

He was rewarded for his lies and failures in Afghanistan with the Brookings post. And now, finally, some several odd years later, he's actually being held to account for— Yeah, maybe. We'll see. I'd love to see him go down. He is actually being held to account for. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. We'll see. I'd love to see him go down. He is as swampy as it gets. Selling on his country. Best for last, Washington Post. My God, I've not been able to look away. And look, the details of this sound juvenile. And that's the whole point, that the people who work in the most elite media institutions here in Washington are legitimately crazy people. So let's go ahead and put this up there. Now, I'll remind you all that Felicia

Samnez is a reporter over there. She screenshotted a tweet that her colleague Dave Weigel had retweeted, not tweeted, retweeted, which said, every girl is bi, you just have to figure out if it's polar or sexual. Okay, whatever. She says, it's fantastic to work at a news outlet where this is allowed. She publicly starts flaming him on Twitter and calling for him to be held accountable. She starts attacking others who say that she's acting unprofessionally. This leads to a letter sent out by the Washington Post executive editor that we just showed you by Sally Busby. She sent a stern memo to the staff saying newsroom values are against racist or sexist behavior.

And we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online. Seems like you do. Yeah, but you do because you suspended one guy who retweeted a stupid joke. You didn't suspend the lunatic who's been flaming her colleagues and causing the meltdown of her entire paper and staff on Twitter. And by the way, after the release of that memo, Crystal, she has continued to publicly attack her colleagues on staff. And the behavior of her colleagues, who clearly also think that she is a lunatic but can't say so, is so cowardly. Let's put this up there. Glenn pointed it out. It's so weird and

creepy. All of them, these people who work at the Washington Post, started tweeting some version of, I know the Washington Post is a remarkably collaborative newsroom filled with journalists who may stumble at times, myself included, but are always working together. I am proud to work here. And I'm talking about dozens of people at work at the post started tweeting this. And the reason that they were doing so was to try and subtweet or push back against Felicia, but they didn't have the courage crystal to just say, no, what you're doing here is ridiculous. And you are not behaving in a way that I like, but because they're so captured by like the therapeutic woke industrial complex in the workplace. They just don't have that.

She's also. In themselves. Unhinged. Yeah. And you know will go completely nuclear. She would go right after you. There was one, we may have this, but go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. Yes, exactly.

Her own colleagues begging her to stop. So this woman, Lisa Rain, just replies to her and says, please stop. Right. So, I mean, this is not over the top, right? This is just like, please stop. And of course, she immediately goes nuclear on this lady. And, you know, to them. So they're also fearful because they're basically dealing with a terrorist here.

It was totally unafraid of just bombing anyone and everything in sight the moment they displease her. And yeah, it's completely insane. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's insane. And it's way too, I mean, you see this shit on the left all the time where you can have, it just takes a few people who are willing to go completely nuts over this stuff and because there's too much fear of calling them out and saying you're being ridiculous and you're just being an asshole. Like put political values aside. You're just being a total dick right now.

People are too afraid to do that. And so these people gain the upper hand and they end up controlling the organization. They do control it. Look at this. You guys remember Breonna Muir, the person who was mistakenly referred to months ago as Breonna Taylor, and she complained about

how it makes it very hard for her to do her job when somebody misspelled her name three months ago. She says, does our social media company policy not apply to Lisa Rain for telling Felicia Somnes

to stop on Twitter? In all honesty, her comment doesn't really sound collegial to me. She's blasting this out to the entire newsroom. Her comment was about as collegial as it gets in this circumstance, in my opinion. Yeah. She even said, please.

Please stop. You know, and then there's another one. This one is my personal favorite. This guy who works over there, he's 22 years old. Let's put this up there on the screen. Holden Foreman, he's a software engineer and works for The Washington Post. He says that he scrolled through more than 4,800 likes and he identified four Washington Post reporters who were in agreement with the sentiments of the woman who said, please stop. And then he identified that they were all white men. So he says, well, why is it

exactly that these white men are the ones who are liking this tweet? Do they agree with the policy of harassment? And look, just to give you guys an idea of who these people are, and I'm not picking on this dude. I'm just giving you the facts. He, you know, he's 22. He just graduated from Stanford. He works at The Washington Post. Pronouns and bio, of course.

This is an op-ed that he wrote back in 2021 while he was working there, so not that long ago, where he said that the Stanford dining hall system did not work with his disordered eating. I have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with disordered eating, but the crux of his complaint, Crystal, was that he has an undiagnosed disorder where he feels uncomfortable eating the amount of food that he should have on his plate while he's at a buffet. And thus, he wants the university to actually determine and place the amount of food that he needs on his plate without him having to make the choice of putting the amount of food that he needs on his plate. And it's also not diagnosed.

And that's what he, so he wants the university to effectively ration food at the buffet at Stanford. So I'm just giving you people a mindset into who these people are that are just being allowed to flagrantly violate their company's policies. Now, look, you know, you can believe whatever you want. If you want to hold that position, I think that's freaking crazy, but whatever. The point is that he's publicly blasting his colleagues and effectively calling them both racist and sexist, some of the worst things you can call somebody in the PMC workplace, and making it completely untenable to work there

in a civil way. And none of these people have been fired. Brianna still has her job. This guy Holden still has his job. And look, I don't think people should lose their job over trivial reasons. I actually agree that when Felicia Samnez was suspended for tweeting about how Kobe Bryant was a rapist, even though I obviously don't think that that was the time to do it, I think that was messed up. I think people should be able to mostly tweet what they want whenever it comes to their opinions within reason.

Oh, and you know who supported her is Dave Weigel in that, by the way. I know he did. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Here's the thing, guys. This is so bad for the entire culture of work – if you care about workers' rights as I do. Like the fact that you have this person out here being insane and smearing people publicly with a large and powerful platform, and this goes completely unchecked, that's terrible. And the bottom line is, as you were saying, Sagar, the reason this is allowed to persist is because people are so afraid of getting on the wrong side of a woke cultural issue.

Yes, that's right. They live in terror of that. Yeah. And so you allow the most unhinged person to control the atmosphere of your workplace. I mean, the HR department at Washington Post just did the bidding of Felicia Samnez, the most unhinged person.

Go to her Twitter timeline. Yeah. I mean, it is relentless. relentless oh she calls me scum by the way just so people i mean yeah i don't even understand how this lady has time to post all that she posts i'm serious like you know touch grass for real for real so you allow that person to control what you're doing over at Washington Post HR, that is cowardice. It's just cowardice because they don't want to be the one who's getting flamed by her and called sexist or whatever she's going to ultimately throw at you. So that's ultimately what it comes down to is it got to stop being so terrified of getting on the wrong side of being called not woke enough or whatever because whether it's at a media organization, whether it's at a company, whether it's a political project, more often than not – and we have seen so many examples of this on the left.

That whole story Ryan Grimm did of the Montgomery County City Council or something like that. I mean, it just takes one person who is willing to blow the whole project up because of their own feelings or their own posture and their own virtue signaling, their own branding effort, and everybody around them being too cowardly to call them out to destroy everything good. I do think that this is just like a CIA, this whole like cult is a CIA PSYOP to destroy the left. I really am convinced of this. I went ahead, I put this out there. I've decided I'm actually pro-Felicia at this point because what I realized is that she's just taking all of the cowardice language in the workplace to its logical conclusion. She's like, you said, believe all women, support all women at any cost. And, oh, we stand up to sexism, all this. She's like, you said, believe all women, support all women at any cost. And, and, oh, we stand up to sexism, all this. She's just playing it out and showing you that when you don't have clear hierarchy and real decisions, which aren't based in trying to make people feel good all the time, this is the stuff that proliferates. I think it's nuts. Just look, we have policies.

You violated the policy. You're fired. It's simple. And look, as long as it's not used in a punitive way where she's speaking out against something what I would consider, and I think most people would consider real, then it's fine. She's suing her own bosses and lost, by the way, asking for $2 million. You think that doesn't play some part in this? I think it's crazy that also all the people at The Post who are too afraid, like the fact that they thought it was some win that their editor had to be like, we are reiterating the policy. You don't need to reiterate. The policy is the policy. Actually implement the policy.

Implement the policy. Yeah. She's still employed, by the way. And Weigel, for retweeting that stupid joke. Which he immediately deleted and apologized for. The guy's going without a paycheck for a month. Ask yourself, could you go a whole month without pay how many people in this country i'm not saying a sob story yeah it's like

probably upper middle class journals i don't think anybody should have to go through that for something like this and he's personally kind of after us that's what we're trying to tell you we don't care felicia retweeted a tweet calling me absolute scum. You know what? Unlike her, I'm like, you've incited violence against me. I don't care. I have a show here. I can talk to you all about it. Son of immigrants. That's my point.

I'm not going to. How could you, Felicia? Enough. I don't want to pull all this stuff. It's fine. It's all in the game. You know, it's like the wire quote. But it's just one of those things where.

The cowardice. The cowardice. And these people are very powerful. Because you're going to have unhinged people. Any organization. It happens. You have a large organization. You're going to have someone who's unhinged.

That's right. It's okay. It's okay. Okay. Are you going to let that person run your organization? No. Because that's what's happening right now. I mean, she literally is like dictating the decisions of Washington Post HR as of today.

And the best they can do is like, we're going to reiterate an amendment. No, if you have a policy, enforce your policy and make it safe for the rest of your workforce to actually like exist and not live in fear of their own shadow and being like, you know, shamed and bullied online constantly. Absolutely right. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, Sarah Fisher over at Axios has a pretty big scoop about the new post-Zucker direction of CNN. According to her reporting, new CNN boss Chris Licht is scrutinizing talent for partisanship and leaving open the possibility of a purge if hosts like Jim Acosta and Brian Stilter cannot rein it in. Sarah writes, quote, Licht wants to give personalities that may appear polarizing a chance to prove they are willing to uphold the network's values so that

they do not tarnish CNN's journalism brand. For on-air talent, that includes engaging in respectful interviews that don't feel like PR stunts. For producers and bookers, that includes making programming decisions that are focused on nuance and not noise. This is the first we've heard directly that Host might be on the chopping block, but we have been hearing a lot of similar noises about getting back to straight journalism and dialing back the outrage machine since the new regime of bosses came in under the discovery merger and after Jeff Zucker's ouster. Heavyweight investor John Malone, for example, had this to say to CNBC last year. I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started

with and, you know, actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing. And we just reported on Monday that Chris Licht has created a new style guide that mandates the breaking news banner only be used when, you know, there's actually breaking news. According to that report, quote, CNN's ubiquitous breaking news banner is gone, now reserved for instances of truly urgent events. Snarky on-screen captions like angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session, for instance, are discouraged. 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. That all sounds pretty good, right?

Do actual journalism, tone down the sensationalism, ditch the team blue DNC cheerleaders. But there's reason to believe that the changes are unlikely to last. And there's even more reason to believe that CNN's new bosses do not actually have a vision for media that will serve a people's agenda, since all cable news is really about one thing, delivering for corporate advertisers. And that model will never be amenable to the media work that really needs to be done, and that is standing up to political, financial, and cultural power. So first, why am I skeptical that the changes will not last? Well, because I went through a very similar moment and a very similar purge at MSNBC. It was the dog days of the second Obama term. Ratings at MSNBC were total trash. And a new head of NBC News was brought in to sort out the future of MSNBC. It was the dog days of the second Obama term. Ratings at MSNBC were total trash. And a

new head of NBC News was brought in to sort out the future of MSNBC, and actually specifically, what to do with star anchor Brian Williams, who had been sidelined thanks to his revelations that he had lied repeatedly in a self-aggrandizing way. Ultimately, Andrew Lack, who was longtime friends with Brian Williams, decided the answer to their MSNBC low ratings problems and their multi-million dollar anchor on the sidelines problem was the same. Shift the network away from opinion and towards the supposedly down-the-middle journalists of NBC News. Now, this decision, as best I can tell, was driven by Lack's personal friendship with Brian Williams and by the fact that both sides' no-label centrism is popular in the wealthy Manhattan cocktail circuits that media execs like Lack, and by the way, the new guy at CNN, Chris Licht, like too frequent. So at MSNBC, this shift meant Chuck Todd getting a daily show. It meant Brian Williams being brought into MSNBC,

first for breaking news coverage and then for his own show. And people like Ed Schultz, Melissa Harris-Perry, and yours truly, getting axed. And one problem with this move towards trusted journalists is pretty obvious in its conception. In what world does a man who had just been caught repeatedly lying represent a turn towards grounded journalism? Get back to that in a moment. But the more immediate issue was that from a business perspective, the plan just didn't work all that well. Now, you'll be shocked to learn that Moore-Chuk-Todd was not, in fact, the network savior that media execs thought. Instead, what saved MSNBC, like CNN, was Trump.

And in the Trump era, the more opinionated the hosts, the more willing they were to go down the Russiagate rabbit hole, the higher the ratings. And so even though Lack and Co.'s personal preference was a milquetoast, corporate-centered, aligned centrism, the sort of fare that is still dishonest but in a way that's comfortable for corporate advertisers, the ratings of the most committed Russia gators could not be denied. And so, you ended up with a very similar formula at MSNBC as you ended up with at CNN. Opinionated anti-Trump coverage, but of the type that centered on lots of pearl-clutching over his personal affect, rather than focusing on his corruption or failed promises to the working class. That squared the circle of rating well with dem partisans,

but also being non-threatening to advertisers and to the Democratic elites, who had their own hands dirty with corruption and failed promises to the working class as well. So, as I'm watching Chris Licks go through exactly the same cycle as Andrew Lack before him, you can see where all this is heading. CNN ratings will remain low until Trump returns. And then CNN will find it irresistible to go back to the formula that was financially successful for both CNN and MSNBC in the previous Trump era. By the way, I have no problem with Trump outrage per se. There are a million ways that he is a true outrage, my problem is with an outrage that is either surface-level based on his boorishness, or that is based on lies like Russiagate, or that manages

to criticize him from the right for the few good things he actually does like negotiating with hostile regimes or imposing tariffs on China. And that gets to the bigger problem here. The issue with CNN isn't really about personalities, even people who are really annoying like Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta. And the problem is not the network being opinionated. The real problem is an entire cable news structure that will always, first and foremost, serve capital. Why? That's where the money is. And serve existing power, because exposing the powerful would mean exposing themselves and their friends and their advertisers. Cosmetic changes to any of these networks are completely meaningless.

The only reforms that would actually matter would be to upend the business model that these companies run on. That is clearly not happening. Or to change the social class that their talent and producers come from and represent. Also clearly not happening. Instead, you'll get some surface level shift

from one flavor of corporate shill to a different flavor of corporate shill and they'll scratch their heads and wonder why no one trusts them. So Sagar, even though you hear some things, you might say, oh, maybe, maybe it's gonna be... 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, I know we already did a big segment on this with David Dayen, but I feel really compelled to drill down into one of the worst things that President Biden has done as president so far. simultaneously declaring that companies who are very likely importing illegal Chinese-made solar panels designed to circumvent U.S. anti-dumping laws will not be subject to tariffs for at least the next two years. The executive order is extraordinary because it effectively is saying

that Biden knows the Commerce Department is investigating whether the entire U.S. solar supply chain is a Chinese dupe, and that even though he knows, and that they will probably almost certainly find out that they are, that the solar installers will not have to pay tariffs in the meantime. And because of a so-called natural emergency, which he simply has just decided is going on, he says, I'm just going to suspend those tariffs, even if the investigation finds that they are legally dumped products on these companies. He's trying to cover this up by saying, yeah, I'm going to

invoke the Defense Production Act to increase production of U.S. solar panels. But guess what? The entire reason that U.S. solar manufacturing asked the Commerce Department to investigate this, as is their right under U.S. law, is because they're being undercut by these Chinese trans shippers via Southeast Asia. The CCP is deliberately subsidizing the cost of these panels to destroy any foreign-read American competition. So even if you spur U.S. industry, nobody is going to buy it as long as the Chinese panels are cheaper. The Chinese are much smarter than us. They see clearly. The neoliberal establishment in this country is literally brain dead. They have themselves committed, as we see in California, New York, and others, to fake green energy targets no matter the

cost. They have decided, for idiotic ideological reasons, nuclear power is out of the question. So they only have two options, wind and solar. They're going all in on both, despite the fact that the solar panels manufactured in Asia produce filthy bribe products. They need dirty coal in order to make them, and slave labor is almost certainly involved somewhere in the supply chain. Their green targets are the only things they care about in this situation. And really think about the consequences. Biden is deliberately allowing major population states like California, New York, and others to move forward with Chinese-made solar panels at the expense of natural gas and nuclear power. I'm not saying natural gas is great, but guess what? We have a ton of it in our freaking

ground if anything goes south. The administration is signing us up for a future where we're nearly 100% dependent on China to manufacture the predominant future source of power to those grids. What could go wrong? Did we not just live through a pandemic and with high inflation right now as a result of horrific supply shocks, which are a direct result of globalization, the priority has to be the things that we have here within our borders, in our ground, or something that we can make without the rest of the world. There's only one clean power source that fits that criteria. You guessed it. It's called nuclear. Yet, when the Treasury Secretary of the United States presents her alternative for fossil fuels, what do you think that she says? Given the global nature of these markets, it's virtually impossible for us to insulate ourselves from shocks like the ones that are occurring in Russia that move global oil prices. And look, over the medium term, the critical thing is that we become more dependent on the wind and the sun that are not subject to geopolitical influences.

Every time. It's like a boomer mind disease that has swept this country and makes them think that low capacity, unreliable power sources, which we can't manufacture here, are somehow the future. It shows how fundamentally unserious these people are. And it also raises a really interesting question. Biden, when he wants to, can use executive power to spur energy production. He just did it in a massive gift to the China lobby. He was willing to issue an executive order that illegally circumvents U.S. law, specifically to bail out Chinese solar companies for ideological reasons related to power. So why will he not issue an executive order concerning anything else? As I laid out in a previous monologue, Biden has the ability to limit exports of U.S. crude to drop the price here at home. He has the ability under the

insane standard to suspend then the Jones Act for when it relates to oil in between U.S. ports. He has the ability to even use the SPR, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to circumvent Wall Street's block on new drilling. All of those things he does not even need Congress for. And yet, he does not do them. So in effect, here's what's he telling us. It's perfectly fine that we're all paying $5 a gallon

nationally on average. He won't lift a finger to help. But for the Chinese solar companies, yeah, he'll go to the mat for that one. One of the most important maxims of politics is that what you choose to spend your time on is what's actually important to you. And I know it sounds stupid, but really think about it. Politicians are always saying something along the lines of, this is my number one priority, or I'm taking a stand against Dexter. This is something I'm going to focus on in office. The only way that you know if it's real is if they actually do anything about it.

On this one, he's only acted in one area of energy production. And if anything, it makes us worse off. What I hate about this is how partisan brain worms are rotting this country. Yeah, Biden and the green people, they are legitimate idiots who are fine with the idea of high gas and Chinese solar, as long as it makes them feel better. But our whole country is suffering under the weight of bipartisan idiocy. Texas, my home state, not home of the Green New Deal, is seeing record power demand with high temperatures, flexing the grid in ways we've never seen before. Texas gets 47% of its power from natural gas, 20% from coal, 20% from wind, 10% nuclear, only 1% solar.

So if the Texas grid goes down this summer, it's not going to be obvious that it's the Green New Deal's fault. It's actually on fossil fuel promisers who said it would always give us everything we need. Look, even if the grid is intact over the summer, guess what? Natural gas is priced at the global market. It's sky high right now. People are going to get hosed to a degree they are not used to on their electrical bills. I end with that because it encompasses the issue. We legitimately have a serious problem and we need serious people to look at the actual choke points and not let ideology cloud their decisions.

Because when ideology takes over, it leads to two sides of the same twisted coin. California, where they're likely to face blackouts for being too green, and Texas, where they could have blackouts for not being green enough. Going down both roads, not going to save us. Only honesty will. And this administration, they're telling us plainly, they're both not honest, and honestly, they're not very smart. I think that's really what it gets to with me, Crystal, with these solar things. It drives me crazy. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Big primary results in California. Two races in particular that got a lot of national attention. The first one we want to start with is the recall of progressive prosecutor of San Francisco, Chase Abudin, and that vote was not particularly close in the end. 60% voted to recall him. Join us to break down what this means, both in terms of San Francisco, but more broadly for the movement of criminal justice reform, is Ross Barkin. He is a longtime friend of the show. He also, hold on, let me pull up all his titles. He's a writer for New York Magazine, columnist with Jacobin, also a contributor at The Nation, author of three books,

including The Night Burns Bright. Great to see you, Ross. Good to see you, man. Thank you for having me. Excited to be back. Yeah, our pleasure. So you have been following this race closely and you wrote an analysis. Let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. So you have been following this race closely and you wrote an analysis. Let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. And you headline it here. And this is, again, regarding Chesa Boudin, the progressive prosecutor in San Francisco being recalled. You title it The Backlash Has Begun. So for people who haven't been following this race, who don't know anything about Chesa. Tell us about him, his approach, what it means to be a progressive prosecutor, and why he became such a sort of lightning rod.

Sure. So Chesa Boudin is elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2019. He runs as a proud progressive very much in the mold of other progressive prosecutors around the country, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Wesley Bell in St. Louis. And immediately, his tenure is rocky. It coincides with the pandemic. It coincides with a rise in certain types of crime in San Francisco. You have seen a rise in homicides that have been rather small, but you have seen a surge in hate crimes against Asians. You've seen a rise in burglaries, car break-ins. And so there's been really a general sense of the quality of life in San Francisco has been declining, and there's a major homelessness problem there as well. So all of this fell on his shoulders. And also, since he was a reformist,

progressive prosecutor, he was not asking for cash bail. He was clashing with police. He was using diversion programs much more than other conventional DAs. So many felt he wasn't going hard enough on certain criminals like drug dealers. And so it was a confluence of various factors that led to him getting recalled. And there were conservatives who were very angry at him. There's the Asian community that was very angry at him. There were regular liberals, especially older voters, who were very angry with him, who felt that for a variety of reasons he was to blame for the state of San Francisco. So they got the signatures together. There was right wing money behind it. There was

a grassroots push behind it. And on Tuesday, he was overwhelmingly recalled. I think the split ended up being around 60-40. And now London Breed, who's the mayor, she will appoint his replacement as DA. And just for the viewers out there, San Francisco DA, it's a storied place. Kamala Harris was once the DA of San Francisco. So certainly it can be a launching pad for other things. Place to watch. Yeah, I think Gavin Newsom too, if I'm not mistaken. He's the mayor, yeah. Oh, sorry, he was the mayor. That's right. So, you know, the true trust of team. I am. I was the mayor too. There you go. Great, great history. I mean, I think it's really interesting, Ross.

So I read your piece. I know you talked a little bit to Chesa. But there seems to be quite a bit of cope on his part, which I'd love for you to get into. I mean, he tries to say like, oh, crime is down except for murder, which is up like 37% while he's over there. And I just got the general sense. And I, full disclosure, I literally know some of the people who funded this thing, David Sachs and others. I am not, you know, I am not uncolored by my own personal biases.

My own sister had to leave San Francisco because crime was so bad. So I can just go ahead and put all that on the table. What I got from him is that unlike Krasner and even, I forget the guy's name in LA, unlike them, Gascon, yeah, he did not seem to actually care in a public way about crime. And that seemed to be the real nail in his coffin. There were all those stories that came out of, he would meet with an Asian family and say he was promised he was going to do something about their murder. And then he would drop the charges. He would say that he wouldn't want to charge drug dealers because many of them were illegal immigrants and he would prefer that they don't get deported. These are all things that he said on record. So am I wrong in saying

that dispositionally and almost as a politician, he just seems far worse than Krasner and Gascon, even if they all may even have the same policy. No, I would agree with that. And in my long piece on Boudin, I noted that that he's not in any way, was not a natural politician. He was someone who did not come out of the typical political ranks of San Francisco, which is a place, as we said before, is kind of a remarkable launching pad for national politics, whether it's Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, you know, it is a place where talent is manufactured. He was not a natural politician. And at times he was tone deaf and he was not good at building alliances with communities.

He was not good at building alliances with the Democratic establishment, though he had endorsements. The reality was the Democratic establishment was not eager to defend him, particularly the mayor, London Breed, who did not support the recall, but also was not against the recall. And that was very key. So I would agree that unlike Krasner, Boudin was not an adept politician. I would also add the quirk of the recall makes it hard because he had no opponent. Krasner was able to defeat a primary opponent. Typically, that's what happens. It's a referendum on the person, but there's another person running. Gavin Newsom gets recalled. Here's Larry Elder. You can point to Elder and say, I'm better. Boudin had no one to point to.

I think that recall environment makes it very hard. But yes, he was not a natural politician and he's not a natural alliance builder. I think that was very clear. Ross, can you talk about the backlash in the Asian American community, specifically in the Chinese community against Boudin, because now that community, they were very instrumental in a couple of school board recalls that were also, you know, significant in San Francisco and, you know, a core part of the sort of grassroots backlash against Boudin, which I think was, you know, was very real. Where did that come from? And broadening out from San Francisco, what do you think that says about, I even hate saying the

word Asian American community because it's such a broad and diverse group of people. But what do you think it says about the Democratic Party and their relationship with this constituency? It's definitely a warning to the Democratic Party that it's a constituency that can't be taken for granted. You know, majority of Asian American voters, and yes, it's a very broad category, talking about Chinese voters, Korean voters, Thai voters, and so on, vote Democrat. But right now, I think any politician running in an area with an Asian community who is a Democrat cannot sit back and say these people are automatically in my column. You see it in New York City, too, at the mayoral race in 2021. The Republican candidate tied Eric Adams in the heavily Chinese and Korean neighborhood of Flushing in Queens, which was

usually never happens. The Democrat always wins, especially for mayor. So wherever you go, especially on the coasts, this is a big challenge for Democrats, particularly because crime is overall higher, not as high as it was historically. But it's not something you can say to the average voter who's maybe been mugged, who's been threatened in some way, knows someone who was killed. You can't go, well, it was worse in the 1990s. Many of them do not remember the 1990s. And so that doesn't mean anything to people. So I do think it's a big challenge for Democrats. It's a big challenge for the progressive wing as well as the moderate wing. And I do think Democrats have to recalibrate in some way

in how they talk about crime, how they talk about policing, progressives in particular. It's a very tricky subject, it's very challenging, and it varies by city too. The crime picture in San Francisco, for example, is not the crime picture in Baltimore, right? Homicides actually are not a big problem in San Francisco. For the size of its city, they're quite low

and they haven't risen by that much, but you've other types of crimes that have risen. So people do feel a sense of lack of safety, decline of quality of life. These things do matter. And I think they matter a lot in the immigrant Asian community, particularly the many people targeted for hate crimes. So I do think Democrats cannot take them

for granted and Republicans are making gains there and that could continue. There's a rule that says it would not continue. I think we should stick on this point. It's very important, which is that, you know, these people are not Republicans. Like, they just rejected any independent candidate. But as you're seeing in LA, a billionaire is very likely to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, built explicitly on the promise of cleaning up LA. Here now, Chesa Boudin gets, and it's not like a London breed is some Republican, but she framed herself here as a centrist. Why is it easier, seemingly to my eyes, that a London breed and an Eric Adams can acknowledge the reality of crime to extraordinarily political success, but Chesa, Krasner, Gascon, and all others, they just seem to have a real issue just acknowledging that people can look around and be like, I do not feel safe in this city. Why do they have such a problem validating that concept?

It just seems so insane to me. Yeah. Well, I would first push back a few points. Caruso is not a lock to be the next mayor of L.A. He'll be in a runoff with Karen Bass, and that's going to be quite contentious. And it wouldn't shock me if Bass won in November. There's been a lot of time for that race to sort itself out. Eric Adams is an interesting one. Extraordinary political success. I don't know. His approval

ratings are quite low right now, ironically, because of the crime issue. In a sense, centrists, I'd say Democrats and Republicans alike, have sort of, you know, this challenge where if you campaign on, let's say, a city being out of control on I will solve the crime issue. If then you're in power and you don't, voters can turn on you. So you're starting to see that happen with Eric Adams in New York. For London Breed in San Francisco, it's her problem now. And a lot of the issues that festered were not Chase Boudin's fault. They dated back a decade or more. Homelessness in particular, a huge, huge problem in San Francisco and L.A. So that is one problem that I would say even the center or the right has. If it does come

into power, voters are astute enough to go, well, you said you'd clean it up. Now go clean it up. And then crime maybe doesn't fall right away. But yeah, I think to answer your question, it can be tricky for progressives who run on these reform platforms who are saying we support rehabilitation versus locking people up in jail and are very wary of falling back on sort of the 1980s and 1990s paradigm. Now, do you overcorrect for that? I think you can because quality of life does matter. I think for socialists and leftist candidates too, I think it's a mistake to ignore

quality of life concerns in general. It does matter if your city is dirty. It does matter if it's not just a pleasant place to be if garbage is piling up in the streets, even putting aside crimes. So I do think the left shouldn't cede ground on those issues. I think there are intelligent and nuanced ways to talk about crime where police do have to do their job and solve crimes. And it also doesn't make sense to give someone a life sentence for, you know, a drug offense or something like that. So there's a lot of nuance there. But if crime is rising, it can be very hard to even

talk nuance because I think whenever crime is up, the right gets that advantage because their solutions sound much better and they seem like they'll happen much more quickly. Yeah, they're very here's what we're going to we're going to be tough on these people. We're going to clean it up. It's going to happen. But I think that Eric Adams' point is a good one that, I mean, he has done those things. I mean, he famously cleared out these homeless encampments and, you know, what was kind of brutal way, but the results haven't followed. And so people are turning on him as well. In San Francisco, it also seems to me that there's a, you know, obviously it's one of the most unequal places in the entire country. The only people who can afford to live there are basically like wealthy people and then people who are experiencing homelessness, right? I mean,

there's very little middle class left in the city. And so the type of progressivism that I think is embraced by some is, you know, doesn't want to compromise on anything like building a lot more affordable housing that might compromise, you know, their views of the Bay or infringe on their, you know, on their property or change their property values. And so I think that also creates a sort of limit because ultimately as a progressive prosecutor, you're not going to be able to solve all the ills of society or all the ills of your city. But you do have to be responsive in the areas where you can actually make a difference or at least validate people's legitimate concerns that like I want my kids to feel safe when we're walking down the street. The thing I think about Ross a lot is like the sewer socialists who are very popular because, you know, they had a broader ideology, socialist ideology, but what they focused on was actually delivering for people tangibly and materially and competently in their day-to-day lives. And sometimes I feel like on

the progressive side, there can be this sort of like ideological disconnect versus actually focusing on how do we improve people's lives today? Yeah, I would agree. I think for DSA candidates who win office, constituent services remains very important. And that is such a big element of this. The sewer socialists are a great model. Milwaukee was run by socialists for 50 or 60 years. You brought up San Francisco and the vanishing middle class. I wrote it in my first long New York magazine piece about this race. That can't be separated, I think, from the outcome of the Boudin recall. Larry Krasner won re-election fairly decisively in part because he ran up pretty big margins in the Black community of Philadelphia. Now, of course, Black voters are also concerned about crime and do care about quality of life

issues. But it's notable that San Francisco's black population is almost non-existent at this point. There really is this massive gulf where, yes, you have extremely wealthy people, you have some middle class people, and then you have a lot of very poor, basically homeless people, you have some middle class people, and then you have a lot of very poor, basically homeless people, not even really working class people anymore. So demographically, it's a city that's very different than some other cities, certainly like New York or Philadelphia, for example, where the electorate is a bit more complex. That, I think, class divide and also just the absence of a middle class can't be ignored. Now, a middle class could have voted to recall Boudin.

I'm not saying like a working class black population saves a tone deaf DA. What I'm saying is with the Krasner case, you did see an example of that happening. And also to your other point, yes, a district attorney can't solve a lot of problems. A DA can't even really control a crime rate, and there's no good evidence that that has ever been true. The police have to do their job. The police in San Francisco, from what I understand, I don't live there, I've studied it a little bit, are fairly inept.

The NYPD gets a lot of flack, but the NYPD is decent at solving crimes, at not discharging their weapons. The San Francisco PD seems to be on some sort of like de facto or almost strike where literally they don't really patrol and seem to do their job. So the DA cannot control that either. And the housing picture in California in general is broken. You know, studying it made me appreciate, I think, the East Coast approach a bit more because in New York, you can build. We do rezone things. You do have high rises.

San Francisco building is incredibly restricted. That's true in LA as well. And when you have decades of no housing construction effectively, you get these tent cities. And I don't think it's progressive to have tent cities. I think the issue is progressives support them because then they feel like

the people don't go anywhere else. But I do think there is a breaking point coming in California where a lot of people are saying we cannot have people on the streets like this and let's find a solution. So Caruso actually ran on building a lot more people are saying we cannot have people on the streets like this and let's find a solution so Caruso actually ran on building a lot more shelter beds so did Karen Bass there is going to have to be some change at some point in the California housing picture because it is profoundly broken that's the fault of Democrats it's the fault of moderate Democrats it's the fault of

progressive Democrats it's the fault of Republicans too remember It's the fault of progressive Democrats. It's the fault of Republicans, too. Remember, Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of the state. California has a Republican tradition. It's the fault of the entire political class. I think everyone should come in for a drubbing when it comes to the California homelessness and housing situation. It really has festered for now decades. And we're seeing this breaking point coming now in the 2020s. Yeah.

I appreciate your analysis very much, Ross. You know, as nuanced as I think we can get from the left. I encourage people to go and read your piece and read as much as they can about this, because I do think that this is part of a bigger thing

that's going to be happening across the country, as you even allude to in the piece. So thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Ross. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely the piece. So thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Ross. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely, man.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'm sorry the show is going to be late today. We had a bunch of interviews here. Our schedule went long. It is what it is. I hope you guys will love us and forgive us. We love you all very much. We didn't want to cut off our long gun debate.

We had to get it all the way in. We have to do it. I hope you enjoy that. We had to do it. It is what it is. It's okay. Please forgive us, everybody. We're really sorry, but we'll get it to you as soon as possible. So thank you all so much for supporting us. We really appreciate it to people who are just watching this as a clip and we will see you all next week. We've got great partner content for you all over the weekend. That's right. Love you guys. See you here next week. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

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