Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/10/23: Biden Defends Cluster Bombs To Ukraine, Biden Says Ukraine Not Ready For NATO, DeSantis Low Polling, Slowing Growth Jobs Market, Twitter Threatens Lawsuit With Zuckerberg, Colleges Nuke Merit, AOC Endorses Biden, Will Jawando Runs For Senate

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden shipping Cluster Bombs to Ukraine, up to 100 CIA personnel in Ukraine, Biden saying Ukraine isn't ready for NATO, DeSantis pressed on FOX News about declining poll numbers, the words GOP candidates use to stand out, Jobs report shows slowing growth, Elon threatens to sue Zuckerberg in Twitter-Threads fight, Saagar dons Indian Clothes for 1 Million sub Dare, Saagar looks into colleges nuking merit to preserve racial admissions, Krystal looks into AOC bending the knee to Biden by endorsing him early, and Dem candidate for Maryland Senate Will Jawando joins the show to discuss his campaign.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. First and foremost, Sagar is back. I'm back. And a married man. Congratulations.

Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. Wedding ceremony number one done. Everybody was very happy. The grandparents, it was a great success. That's beautiful. I hear the airlines,

not such a great success, but you got there. You managed. I have a lot of beef with Pete Buttigieg right now. It's actually quite literally the FAA's fault. Oh, for real?

I didn't even know that. I'm thinking about doing a little monologue on it to give everybody an update. But thank you. Lots of good wishes from you guys, from all the audience. So really, really appreciate everybody. And do stay tuned, though. I do have a promise and something to fulfill. I think everybody's going to want to watch my monologue after we hit one million subscribers today.

A little outfit change is going to be happening. Man of his words. So definitely stay tuned for that. Also in the show, we got a lot of big news we need to cover. So Biden is greenlining cluster bombs. That is over the objections of a lot of people, including some of our top allies. We'll get into that. We also have Fox News potentially turning on DeSantis. We'll show you a bit of that and some interesting. This is actually really fascinating. There's an analysis of the top words that all of the different GOP contenders are using. It says a lot about that race and where things are. We've got new jobs numbers not looking all that great.

And we have an upping of the ante in the whole Elon versus Zuck situation. Also excited to get Zagor to weigh in on threads and his view of whether that is going to be the Twitter killer that has been promised. But we wanted to go ahead and start with the very latest out of Ukraine. Yeah, there's a lot going on in Ukraine, obviously. Since I left, I've been monitoring the news. Don't you worry. The biggest one right now, President Biden is actually currently in the United Kingdom meeting with King Charles as we speak on his way to the NATO summit.

At that NATO summit, there's going to be a lot of discussion around membership, which we'll get to. But the initial action that has been made before that summit was to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions. This was a big decision by the White House as these are obviously considered a war crime or have been and have been criticized by the United States previously and was an indication about what the Ukrainian military wants and is requesting at this time. Here's what President Biden had to say. We're in a situation where Ukraine continues to be brutally attacked across the board by munitions, by these cluster munitions that have dud rates that are very, very low,

I mean, very high, that are dangerous to civilians, number one. Number two, the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition. The ammunition, they call them 155 millimeter weapons. This is a war relating to munitions. And they're running out of that ammunition, and we're low on it. So there's a very key point that President Biden just made there, Crystal. Number one, the Ukrainians are running low on ammunition, despite the $100 billion or so the United States provided them. But number two, to me, is actually might be one of the most important one. We're running low on it, aka,

we have provided them now with so much critical ammunition that the United States military is now so low on its stocks that we have to provide banned munitions to the Ukrainian military, which they have already used previously and actually were criticized by the New York Times and by some other human rights groups for doing so previously in this war. This is a massive, massive sea change in the way that we are considering the amount of munitions that we provided to Ukraine. Previously, the line was, oh, guys, it's all surplus stocks, not stuff we were going to use. Anyway, then they did that fake devaluing of the equipment so they could provide even more. And despite the fake accounting gimmick, which is basically illegal, then the $100 billion or so of all these munitions, we are now running solo,

and they are also running solo, given their expenditures both in the counter-extensive, but also in Bachmann, that they have now been begging for cluster munitions. There's also something that President Biden said there, which is a straight up lie. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. John Ismay, an excellent military reporter over at the New York Times. What does he note? The cluster munitions that the United States

will provide to Ukraine is the 155 millimeter M864 projectile, which is loaded with 72 DPICM grenades that are identical to those used from the earlier M483 round. The dud rate on these submunitions has been observed at 14% in real world conditions. Now, the Pentagon, in their statement justifying providing these weapons to Ukraine, Crystal, repeatedly said that the dud rate was some 2.35% or less, which is, quote, far better than the actual rate for common cluster munitions. So the Pentagon is straight up lying here. They're saying that the dud rate on these,

which is what makes them so deadly to civilians, is much lower than the actual dud rate observed in real world conditions, part of why we have been so reluctant to provide these weapons to Ukraine so much in the first place. And I should also note about hypocrisy. One of the consistent lines from the Obama administration throughout the slaughter of Aleppo in the Syrian civil war was that the Russians were using clustering munitions on civilian areas. Well, here's the issue, as we also criticize the Russians here for. All of Ukraine is a battlefield with civilians populated throughout it. So if the Ukrainians by definition are going to be using that, even on their own soil, they're putting many of their civilians at risk by using a known munition banned, you know,

by over 100 countries, considered a war crime by international organizations and often criticized even by the United States military itself. I mean, this is something which really removes much of the, quote, moral high ground, as moral as the cause for Ukraine is, from America's stance in this war. Yeah, I mean, let's be really clear. This is an immoral act. It is truly an atrocity. I want people to understand in layman's terms what these things are. They're basically bombs that scatter a bunch of little grenades all around. And so when we're talking about the dud rate, the problem and why these have been banned by 100 countries that have signed on to the treaty, we are not a party to

that treaty, neither is Russia, neither is Ukraine, but why so many countries and why even so many of our allies, including the UK, who have been extremely hawkish, are criticizing this move is because some percentage of those grenades do not detonate. That means that they are laying around in areas where frequently it's children that go and find them and they blow up and they kill them. There's varying numbers about what percent of civilians are killed by cluster bombs. New York Times cites a study that says it's 50% of the casualties from these bombs are civilians. There are other estimates that civilians represent up to 97% of cluster munition casualties. Again, disproportionately children are usually the ones that find these things laying around.

So it is an immoral act and is clearly an act of desperation. Even the New York Times, I was telling you before we started this morning, is reporting in very act and is clearly an act of desperation. Even the New York Times, I was telling you before we started this morning, is reporting in very careful and couched words that the Ukrainian counteroffensive isn't going well. They haven't gained much ground. They've gained something like 60 square kilometers, which pales in comparison to what they've been able to accomplish in the past. They really haven't been able to break through the Russian lines. You've got the Ukrainians running out of munitions. You've got us apparently running low. And so this is a desperate, immoral act that the Biden administration is perpetrating here. UK has criticized this action. Spain has criticized this action.

Many of our allies have criticized this action. And, you know, there have been some words of dissent from the progressives who should be clearly, unambiguously opposed to sending cluster bombs, which, again, considered a war crime by much of the world. But so far, we've heard very little. We did hear from Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has been a clarion voice in many instances against endless wars. She was one of the world. But so far, we've heard very little. We did hear from Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has been a clarion voice in many instances against endless wars. She was one of the lone voices to stand against the Iraq war vote authorization vote. Let's take a listen to a little bit of what she had to say. Cluster bombs should never be used. That's crossing a line. Once you see what takes place, we know what takes place in terms of cluster bombs

being very dangerous to civilians. They don't always immediately explode. Children can step on them. That's a line we should not cross. So when Putin started using cluster bombs, the Biden White House said that that would potentially be a war crime. Do you think that, therefore, the U.S. government, the Biden administration will potentially be engaging in war crimes if this goes forward? What I think is that we are would risk losing our moral leadership. Because when you look at the fact that over 120 countries have signed the convention on clustered munitions saying they should never be used, they should never be used. So she won't go so far as to call it a potential war crime,

even though she should go that far. But that's a key question from Jake Tapper. Hey, when it was Russia using these things, y'all didn't have any qualms about calling it out for what it is. Now, the Biden administration, out of desperation and because Ukraine apparently always eventually gets what they want, they're going down the same path. But for some reason, when we do it, it's okay. Yeah. I mean, and just to reiterate your point, this is not something that you do as a sign of strength, both from America's point of view and how destroyed our defense industrial base is, that we literally don't have enough munitions, apparently for ourselves, not only to provide a regional war in Eastern Europe, but also for how the Ukrainians are doing. Let's go and put

this up there on the screen. This is from Sky News over at the UK. Here's what they say, quote, US cluster bombs deal is a clear signal the war is not going well for Ukraine. This is from Mark Stone. America risks losing the moral high ground by supplying Ukraine with a weapon banned by much of the world. So why are they supplying it? And as exactly you pointed to, Crystal, even the New York Times noting this in a very, very stark terms, Ukraine claims to have retaken 60 square miles. By comparison, the last great push in the fall reclaimed 5,000 square miles. Quote, they are probably weeks behind where it was hoped to be at this time. That is directly from the mouth of some of the most pro-Ukraine forces that exist in the

U.S. media. Even Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, says, quote, it has been very hard going. Defense has consistently been a straightforward proposition than offense in this war, frankly, on both sides, fulfilling the World War I edict around when you lack air supremacy, combined air tactics and all that, well, defense is always gonna be a much stronger position. And whenever you're attacking, you're gonna lose a lot of men.

And unfortunately, that's what's been happening to the Ukrainians. The cluster munitions and the bombs themselves are effectively showing you the same struggles that the World War I armies had, which is they also ran out of ammunition weeks into the war that they thought would last for forever. It ended up having massive expenditures. The United States and all those other countries that were fighting in World War I, fortunately for them, had actual industrial bases that they could spin up. America is not a country at war.

We're not going to total war footing, and neither are any of the allies. Ukraine, of course, has zero industrial base. Actually, to speak of, they're 100% reliant. So what do you do then? Whenever you're running low and your allies and all of them, despite their extraordinary generosity, are depleting themselves so much that they also can't spend even more money or go even more forward, you have to start reaching for desperate actions. And the cluster munitions, the reason that they are reaching for them is not only how deadly they are, but Crystal, we have a massive supply and stock of them. So it's one of the only other things that we still remain and have not tapped on Ukraine's behalf.

So I think we can answer a couple of things. Number one, this is not going well for Ukraine, period, no matter what, given what they're asking for. It doesn't mean, though, that they can't still continue to do well. But number two is, in terms of the question, is this weakening the United States and its defense readiness? There's now zero question about this. There has always been a big debate about whether this was actually cannibalizing resources that we would use. It's out of the president's mouth now. Obviously, stockpiles are running low. You can't deny that. Now, there's some high-minded like, well, but we're fighting Russia, so it's worth every penny of it. I'm like, yeah, but what if something breaks out tomorrow in the South China Sea? What are we going to be doing?

It's impossible to predict. And then second, or sorry, third, really whenever it comes to the moral strategy that we've been using on this, the Russians, and more importantly, I just returned from India and I was telling you, there is a very different view of this conflict in the rest of the world. And now the Indians, the Brazilians, the Chinese, all these other people were like, yeah, you guys sent them over cluster munitions. I'm like, and now if China wants to send deadly weapons to Russia, what are we going to say? You know, what are we supposed to say? They haven't even provided them anything. They're very willing to do so. News came out that President Xi spoke with Putin and said, hey, just don't use a nuke. All right. Like, don't go. But, you know, I mean, as long as Putin and Xi maintain good relations and let's say things start to look on the up and up for the Russian military, not outside the realm of possibility.

And then when we criticize Beijing, what are they going to throw right back in our face? I mean, listen, let's tell the other side of it, which is that it's not like things have been going well for Russia lately either. With their whole Prokosian mutiny, whatever the hell happened there, which, you know, we were just reading again, reporting this morning, that apparently even after the attempted weird, pathetic coup thing, then Prigozhin had a meeting with Putin for three hours. No one's seen him since any of this happened. He was supposed to go to Belarus. Apparently there's reports that he's still in Russia. Last understanding was that he was in St. Petersburg. So they got their own issues. Let's be clear about that. But Sagar, I think your point is a really important one, which is, listen, they just have to hold their line.

And that's a lot easier to do than it is to push forward and break through those lines and be on the offense. They also have very clearly learned a lot from their early failures. They are better organized. They have better, you know, better strategy and tactics in, and it's being executed more effectively. So to me, all of this just underscores why it is so imperative that this war be brought to a close as soon as possible, that the parties are able to get to the negotiating table, that the U.S. do everything in our power, and we have a lot, in order to force some sort of negotiations and ultimately negotiated settlement. Because, you know, the war of attrition that we've been warning about and so many military analysts have been warning about is effectively upon us. And, you know, Russia does have a large

industrial base. They are on war footing. We are not. We are running low. And now we are resorting to the desperate tactics. You know, it's funny because, Sagar, we talked so much about Russia resorting to these desperate tactics. And they have in many instances and the type of, you know, dirty and horrific things that they would pull out of their bag of tricks when they're backed into a corner. And now here we are actually the ones sending cluster bombs into this fight out of our own desperation. So it is it is a grotesque outcome here from the Biden administration and is clearly, clearly indefensible. Well, the problem too for Ukraine is, you know, the people you're killing as a result of these, not just Russian soldiers. I mean, many of these people are your own civilians, your own citizens, you know, ostensibly who you're

refighting. Ukrainian kids. Ukrainian children who you're fighting to take over. And, you know, I don't want to downplay either what the long legacy of these things. I've been to Cambodia. I've seen a lot of people who got their legs blown off by just wandering around in fields. In fact, in many areas that I visited in Cambodia, they're like, do not step off this road. Or like, you literally could die. And that was in the 2000s, decades after the conflict. So the long-lasting legacy of these is a total disaster and is really

one where this is going to devastate this part of Ukraine now for a long time, even more so than it already is and really muddies the waters and makes it more complicated. Just reiterating the call to try and end this thing as soon as humanly possible. Let's go to the next part here. A very interesting look by Newsweek and a great reporter, William Arkin, into the CIA and their actions inside of Ukraine. Let's go and put this up there on screen. The top line is that the CIA currently has about 100 personnel inside of Ukraine. Now, that might sound like a lot, but actually the crux of the article, Crystal, is, quote, the agency is as uncertain about Vladimir Zelensky's thinking and intentions as it is about Putin's. As the Russian leader faces his biggest challenge in the aftermath

of the failed mutiny, the agency is straining to understand what the two sides will do, because President Biden has determined that the United States will not undertake any actions that might threaten Russia itself or the survival of the Russian state. And what they point to specifically is, of course, it will be difficult for the CIA to figure out what Putin is going to do. But despite the fact that we have already learned via the, what were the discord papers? Is that we're calling them now? I think so, yeah. From the discord papers that we were able to report to at least some of you here, our intelligence agencies are spying on Zelensky literally by tapping his phone and others.

And I think that Zelensky and his people are very aware of that and are taking several measures to make sure that the United States is obfuscated from some of their plans. Lots of reports previously, consternation from the Pentagon, Ukrainians hiding some of their plans about the counteroffensive, only briefing the military whenever they want something with their handout being like, please, please give me more, give me more, give me more. And then beside that, though, hiding key details. And the U.S., the CIA and others are actually faced with a problem where they are trying right now to get as much information out of Ukraine as possible and are having to resort to having to spy on them to a pretty historic degree for a so-called ally in this conflict. There's also a lot of indication in this report from Newsweek that, you know, our intelligence agency knew pretty much right away what was going on with the Nord Stream pipeline. I mean,

this is honestly, it's really humiliating because number one, the fact that we don't know what the hell our supposed ally who we're sending so much material to that we don't even know what they're up to, that they don't read us in on their plans. I frankly can't blame them because we haven't apparently brought pressure to bear to get them to be upfront about those things. And because of some of the leaks that have come out, I can kind of understand their position on that. But it's humiliating for us. And we are supposed to have this kind of like agreement with them that, all right, we'll give you all this stuff, but you're not going to attack Russians on Russian soil. You're not going to engage in these sort of, you know, sabotage and going, you know, after going after Russian citizens on Russian soil. You're not going to do those sorts of things. And they've done it repeatedly. And we've just

kind of accepted it. I mean, we've just taken it. So of course, they've been emboldened to the point that they would send drones to strike the literal Kremlin in some sort of, you know, half-hearted assassination, Putin assassination attempt. So I underscore something that we've seen indications of from the beginning, which is in some ways, because we have such a long history of spying on Russia, we're able to get more inside of what they're thinking and what they're planning and what their posture is than with the Ukrainians, who obviously are the ones on our side. So it's a pretty wild state of affairs, honestly. I encourage people to go through and read this. Willie Markin is a very stand-up journalist. I've followed him for quite a long time. And one of the important things, again, that actually comes through is both the level to which the Ukrainian military relies on the United States

and the level to which they hide as much as possible. And then also, finally, how much our government lies to us consistently about this. I mean, with Nord Stream, there has not been a single indication yet from the obvious fact that they are almost, almost, very likely, certainly, the people who blew up the pipeline. After calling it a terrible act of sabotage, we're gonna get to the bottom of it. We're like, well, maybe we shouldn't get to the bottom of it.

Certainly, what comes through, really what comes through, though, is that we are running ops for them to a ridiculous and historic degree, from the surveillance, from human intelligence against the rest, providing them with a location of Russian generals so they could kill them and all of us and flirting real close right up there to the line of direct combatant status. And at the very same time, though, we're being kept in the dark about what they actually want to do. And so obviously this is going to be very frustrating, I think, for a lot of people behind the scenes inside of the Pentagon and others. But because of the ideological capture that has happened within the elite, you are unable to issue any real criticism of the Ukrainians. And that's something that I think has shined through from private conversations, things that I have heard, and also just bubbled up through the military.

You know, every time we're like, hey, maybe you should reserve some of this ammo in Bakhmut because you're gonna lose anyway and you gotta get this counter-offensive. And they're like, no, he knows what he's doing. And it's like, yeah, but it's our weapons. You know, maybe we're the ones you should listen a little bit

to what we tell you to do, the greatest military in the world. And they're like, no, we know what we're doing. Now you're running low on ammo, we gotta tap our cluster munitions. Consistently also, in terms of their plans and other things, they really only tell us something whenever they want something from us.

And in some way, I don't blame them. If somebody was so stupid, they're willing to basically write me a blank check. Why keep them in the dark? But in any ways, it's actually more of an indictment, I think, of our leadership and our approach that's going on with this conflict.

And also, don't underestimate this. We don't know nearly as, you know, there's like an idea about the CIA and the intelligence community. They're all seeing, all knowing, and all these people. They've gotten some things right. They got a lot of things wrong, you know, on this conflict. And this shows you why they get a lot of things wrong. Yeah. And the other piece of this is the way that they use the CIA to get around the Biden administration's commitment that there will be no boots on the ground. Meanwhile, there's, you know, something like 100 CIA personnel on the ground. Apparently that doesn't count. They don't wear boots, apparently. But yeah, I mean, there's an open acknowledgement from Polish officials, which again, they've been the most hawkish in

all of this, that the U.S. really doesn't understand the Ukrainian state and the, quote, reckless factions that exist there, says one Polish official anonymously. You also had a U.S. defense intelligence official saying, I hesitate to say the CIA has failed, but they said sabotage attacks and cross-border fighting created a whole new complication and continuing Ukrainian sabotage, quote, could have disastrous consequences. So, you know, this is completely out of hand. We don't know what they're plotting. We know very well that they were behind these various attacks that they, you know, immediately lie about and deny and that our own military establishment lies to the American people about and pretends that it's maybe it's Russia, it's Russia, or maybe we'll never know, or maybe it's better if we don't get to

the bottom of it. So it's pretty stark to see the way that this war is actually being carried out and just how directly involved the CIA is on the ground and how much they have really failed in their job of understanding what the Ukrainians are planning, let alone what the Russians are planning. Absolutely. Well said. Let's move on to the next part here around NATO. As I mentioned, the NATO summit's going to be happening in Vilnius. News just broke this morning, Crystal, President Zelensky will actually be visiting the NATO summit, where he will ask specifically for NATO membership as soon as possible. President Biden has also talked about this request from the Ukrainians, but also from pressure from other NATO allies around whether Ukraine should be admitted into NATO as soon as possible, including at the summit. Here's what he had to say.

Should it get membership in NATO? I don't think it's ready for membership in NATO, but here's the deal. I spent, as you know, a great deal of time trying to hold NATO together, because I believe Putin has had an overwhelming objective from the time he launched 185,000 troops into Ukraine, and that was to break NATO. He was confident, in my view, and many of the intelligence community, he was confident he could break NATO. So holding NATO together is really critical.

I don't think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war. For example, if you did that, then, you know, and I mean what I say, we're determined to commit every inch of territory that is NATO territory. It's a commitment that we've all made no matter what. If the war is going on, then we're all in the war. Well, I guess at least he's got enough together to compute that basic fact. Yeah. Glad to hear it. Unfortunately, our so-called allies over in Lithuania

and the Baltic states don't seem to understand this. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The Lithuanian leader who's hosting the NATO summit says, quote, give Ukraine a quick path to join NATO. Poland and several other Baltic countries have been strongly pushing forward to beg NATO to offer Ukraine official membership status as soon as possible. And of course, you know, look, we are not going to sit here and validate entirely Vladimir Putin's

justification for invading Ukraine. Okay. It's ridiculous. Obviously, why now? Oh, you know, we offered Ukrainian membership into NATO in 2008, never officially did it. So all miracle, all of a sudden in 2022, it became a crisis. All right. Let's put that aside as obviously a farce. Now though, it would also be a farce to say it had nothing to do with it. And that NATO expansion in the Baltic region clearly aggravated and created tensions in a situation such that the Russians felt on the back foot and validated longstanding Russian paranoia about NATO and Western incursion into their spheres of influence. Both of these two things can be true at the same time. And NATO

membership for Ukraine obviously is a non-starter for not only Russian leadership, military leadership now at this point, also for many people inside of Russia who very much would feel validated at actually fighting a war on these grounds. It's clearly something, in my opinion, which should be taken off the table for all time. There's no reason to ever consider it. That doesn't also, though, mean you can't provide security guarantees to Ukraine outside of that. Look at our relationship with Taiwan. They don't have a ironclad guarantee, but they've got a pretty good one. Look at South Korea. Look at Japan.

We have tons of allies all across the world, which we have security partnerships and such that don't still limit and constrict you to the sole language of Article 5, where an attack on one is an attack on all, effectively guarantees a nuclear exchange between the great powers. So they are trying to get the best security guarantee they can. I guess I can't blame Ukraine. If I've been invaded, clearly something I would want at the same time. But on our perspective and really for the rest of the world, this should be one of those where the great power should have enough sense to say, look, we can give security guarantees when this conflict is in during some sort of negotiated peace, but NATO membership is not going to happen. And Biden refuses to rule that out,

Crystal, including in that interview. I want to defend Biden, though, because I know that he was under a lot of pressure to provide some sort of timeline to Ukrainian NATO membership, and not just from the Lithuanians and the Baltic states, but quite a number of NATO members were really putting a lot of pressure on him. And he was quite clear here that it is an absolute non-starter while the war is going on, which I appreciate hearing. And I also want to say, you know, there could be some sort of tactical advantage in keeping the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership on the table for future negotiations. Because if you've already said, no, no, they're never going to be in, well, that's obviously something that Russia wants. So that's obviously something that Russia wants. So that's something that you could potentially give them in a future negotiation.

So while I agree with you, it's insane to imagine putting, you know, allowing Ukraine into NATO. We never should have held that out ever in the first place. And it certainly exacerbated and helped to contribute to the crisis that we face today. I don't hate the fact that they left it out there on the table because I think it could be a point of leverage and negotiation in some theoretical in the future negotiated settlement. I think that's fair. Yeah, I mean, they're negotiating out in the public. We're simply here, you know, talking about it. However, we should take a little bit of attention to the United States Senate where any ascension of Ukraine into NATO would have to pass, given the makeup of our Senate. I actually have no doubt that it would pass, which is terrifying. However, there have been some

actually sane voices in that chamber we want to give credit to. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Senator Rand Paul responding to Lindsey Graham, who says that he's working with Republican and Democrats to pass a resolution urging the admission of Ukraine into NATO. Rand Paul says, quote, absolutely not. This is exactly wrong as usual and could very well lead to us with a war with Russia, something no one should want. Lindsey Graham claiming Ukrainian NATO membership is the best way to prevent future wars and promote peace and create security guarantees that make aggressor nations think twice before starting wars. I believe this is an overwhelming majority of senators support this proposition. He's probably right about that.

Probably, unfortunately, he's right about them. Senator J.D. Vance also weighing in yesterday. Let's go ahead and put this up there, please, on the screen. Quote, he says, why letting Ukraine into NATO, especially now, is a massive mistake. Neoconservatives want to sign us up for a war with Russia when we don't make enough artillery shells for someone else to use. I am so sick of the bipartisan absence of wisdom on this war, making only two senators now so far who are willing to vote against this. And yet, despite all of that, Zelensky, he won't drop it. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. He says Ukraine is not only going to prep for NATO membership and beg for it,

but also EU membership after the war. Remember and recall that EU membership and that being all the table is what led to a lot of consternation inside of Ukraine previously during the so-called color revolutions and all of that, which initially led to some of the civil war, breakaway regions,

and also Russian incursion into Crimea. So all of this is a very complicated geopolitical picture, but of which we have to pay the utmost attention to because any indication, declaration, text offering Ukraine-NATO membership would be a sea change event in this conflict. It would almost certainly ramp up whatever was going on then. But grand strategically, that would change almost everything.

And many NATO members have already, even Turkey, who is blocking Swedish membership, said yesterday, I believe, Erdogan said Ukraine deserves membership. I was surprised by that, right? Yeah, he's an odd one, Erdogan. Just remember, he doesn't actually care about, you know, apparently anything except himself. Like, even his Swedish objection is about, like, PKK Kurdish terrorists. Right. Yeah, but the Hungarians also are blocking, currently at least, blocking Swedish membership inside of NATO.

I'm not exactly sure what their beef is on the subject. So it's not like that others wouldn't be able to explain about it. But of course, the US is the most important voice in this conflict. It also harkens back to some drama that was happening while I was off around who the next NATO leader should be. They ended up extending the current member's term because the West wanted to nominate somebody who was less, I guess, hawkish on the Ukraine conflict. And then the Baltics were like, no, we have to have somebody who will only support ascension of Ukraine into NATO. So there's still a lot of fractures, I think, inside of this alliance. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, we're the big dog in this whole situation. I did like this. I had to

chuckle at this from Zelensky. In an interview with Martha Raddatz, he was asked about potential NATO membership. He says, by the way, as Sagar was saying, like they're preparing for EU membership. All right, that's happening. He said, quote, I assume that Ukraine will be a valued NATO countries partner with actually the strongest armed forces in Europe. They have the strongest armed forces in Europe now, given what we and our allies have provided them. So that's the way that he is framing things. So he is still very much pushing for this, although he wasn't aggressive about pushing it now.

Currently, during the war, it was more sort of accepting the Biden administration framing of after the war, we're going to push for NATO membership. I also wanted to update you, Sagar, on something you missed while you were away, which is that Lindsey Graham's Trump went down to South Carolina. Did you see this? Yes, I saw he got booed, yeah. And Lindsey Graham was introducing him. And I saw the headline, you know,

you see these things that are like so-and-so booed and you listen to it and there's like two people that are booing and you're like, all right, that was underwhelming. I mean, this was bad. It went on and on. He was trying to talk. It was, you know, just continued and continued.

And then Trump sort of like poked fun at him as well. So he's not the most beloved figure in the GOP right now, which I support. I support that as well. Always put your trust in the people. All right. Speaking of the Republican Party, we've got some updates on the Republican primary. So as we told you before, Fox News had overtly, like clearly, gone all in for Ron DeSantis. Murdoch had had lunch with him and Casey DeSantis before even the last election was over and said, we're going to be behind you. Looks like they may be having a little bit of buyer's remorse. You had Will Kane really pressing DeSantis, saying, you know, what's going on here? Your poll numbers are trash, effectively. And you also have Maria Bartiromo with a very tough line of questioning as well.

Let's take a listen. Here's this weekend's headline from the Politico playbook. Failure to launch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' campaign to topple Donald Trump has stalled. We are way behind, says a top DeSantis PAC official sounding the alarm. What happened? Maria, these are narratives. The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that's very, very clear. Why?

Because they know I'll beat Biden. You know, my reelection in Florida, we had the greatest victory that any Republican governor or candidate in the history of the state had. And yet a few months before the election, I had media saying that somehow my reelection campaign was stalling, that we weren't doing anything. And so we're doing what it takes to win. It's not a national

primary. That's not how these things are going. It's really on the ground in those key states. You got to have the organization. You got to have do that. So that's what we focused on. I enjoy, Sagar, how he says the media doesn't want him to win when he's literally on the largest cable news network that very much does want him to win. Not only that. I mean, given his media attention, it's just not true. Considering if he is polling at the same level as RFK Jr., ask yourself which one gets more actual media attention. He is treated way more seriously than Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. And yet, you know, he can. I mean, look, no doubt the media doesn't like him, but that's

they don't like many Republicans. But you think they love Trump? Yeah, exactly. They love Trump either. So I think it's a bit of a ridiculous comparison. You know, one interesting thing that you found is just a real analysis showing pretty holistically that things are not going well for Ron DeSantis. Go and put this up there on the screen, the decline of DeSantis, showing basically a total net drop from 38%

in the GOP primary to 23%. And also, whenever you look at his net favorability ratings, he was actually slightly above. Now it's gone negative. The most important, though, is his margin head-to-head versus Trump, 1.3 points in February, now minus 24.1. Arguably, Crystal, that is the most important number that is there, which shows his margin of the head-to-head number drop, showing that he is not viewed credibly as an actual alternative to Trump amongst people who he would have to split away from the former president. Just showing you how strong Trump remains in this primary. I think those favorability numbers are a real problem for him too. I mean, this is a key part of his pitch is like, I'm Trump without the drama.

People like me more. I'll be more electable. When you're getting significantly underwater on your favorability ratings, that also makes it a lot harder to come back. And it really cuts against the core of the argument they were making just before he got into the race, which is, OK, yeah, sure, Trump is up in the polls. But once I get in, people see what I'm all about, then I'm going to be able to rise. They're going to like what they have to see. It's exactly the opposite. Since he's gotten in the race, people have soured on him the more that they have seen him, frankly, and the more that he has come under additional attacks, not only from Trump, but from the other Republicans who are too afraid to go after Trump, but not too afraid to go after DeSantis. And then the other piece of this is, you know, even in the head-to-head matchup. So if you

imagine a situation where everybody else drops down, all the money and all the everybody coalesces around him, sort of like a Biden situation back last time in the Democratic primary. Even in that situation, he has fallen off significantly in terms of his head to head chances against Trump. You know, another thing that we talked about while you were away, Sagar, is this weird ad that his war room tweeted out that I'm sure you saw where it was like bragging about like the most anti-trans governor, blah, blah, blah. And it's really clear that he has decided, it's almost for him too, we talked about this with the cluster bombs, but for him too, it's kind of an act of desperation. Like he has to go super hard right, has to really lean into

what are some of the least popular in terms of a general election audience positions. And we talked early on about how he had a very different, a very difficult path to walk because he needed to combine the people who are in the Republican Party who are actively anti-Trump because they're more moderate with the people who like Trump, but maybe they'd be open to considering an alternative. So he has had to really pick this kind of like hard right conservative lane. And I think it makes it difficult for him to be able to put together the coalition he needs. And I think it also undermines that pitch of I know how to win. I'm the electable guy.

And it's clear that Republican voters at least just don't really buy that. So for me, I just think that he is pursuing a Ted Cruz strategy. The true conservative. Yeah. The person who is real. And unfortunately, you know, look, he is number two. And that's what Ted was. But if he wanted to be number one, you have to be able to combine some of that with at least a crossover of what's going on. The problem for DeSantis is I think he is actually leaning far

too much into policy. I don't even disagree with him that on policy, he's obviously correct on many of his critiques versus Trump, especially in terms of implementation. But let's all be real. How many people actually vote on policy? Almost nobody, really. I mean, people say they do, but when you look at what they say they like about Trump, they're like, he's a fighter. He stands up for us. He drives people I like crazy. That's actually, or hate crazy. That's probably the number one reason. The issue I really believe for DeSantis is that he is both fighting this online campaign, which I really read that ad is, because there's a lot of energy around the ad that he put out, right? In terms of he were to spend some time kind of on right-wing Twitter, especially younger people. Many of them are

working on the DeSantis campaign. But if you were to go and you were to ask the aggregate GOP primary voter, the typical one, this is a non-college educated white man who probably hasn't gone to college. And you ask him, what are you most concerned about? He'd be like, I hate the media. I hate Joe Biden. The economy sucks. And maybe one or two things about the border, right? That's going to be your top four. Well, you got to be focusing directly in on that. And that's really what Trump excels at more than anyone. Even also, I think Trump has taken a smart lane while I was gone. I know he called out DeSantis again for being like, what does woke even mean? Because he's calling them out for overusing the term and kind of

trying to undercut their core critique really of US society of Biden and others by saying, I'm the guy who fights, I think, on all fronts. So in general, Trump is running a very savvy campaign right now against DeSantis. In that analysis that we put up a moment ago, they cite an April poll from Fox that found only 1% of voters list wokeness or transgender issues as the most important issue facing the country. And, you know, I think there were a lot of part of DeSantis' success in Florida was maybe a bit misread. I think it had a lot to do with his COVID policies. I think it had a lot to do with, you know, going against school closures. And

same with Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, where, you know, that was the core of his appeal, that he was opposed to these school closures, which were really, you know, really a problem for a lot of parents, a lot of families, and the results of which have clearly been devastating. That was misread as an enthusiastic backing of some of his other cultural positions, which he has since really leaned into as that COVID policy and like the COVID era has receded. And we saw in the 2022 midterms that didn't really work out for Republicans. And I think we see even within a Republican primary, it is not top of mind, not to mention, as you were pointing out, Sagar, it is sort of adorable to imagine that voters are really going down like a checklist issue by issue to see where they align with each candidate.

That's not how it works. So anyway, some challenges there for Mr. DeSantis as even Fox News is like, dude, what's going on with your campaign? We put ourselves out there for you and what is going on? It's undeniable. You read a poll, look at it. And look, I don't want to take away. He still could do well. Remember, Ted Cruz did win Iowa. He win Iowa. So it's possible he could win Iowa, but he's got to pull off the double whammy. He's got to win Iowa and he's got to win New Hampshire. Iowa would be huge in the feather, but if he can beat Trump in the OG state where Trump first won, that would be everything. But for him right now, I'm not seeing a path towards that at all. So Washington Post did a really interesting analysis of the

language that the Republican candidates are using on the trail, like the top words that they use that we wanted to go through, because I think it's really fascinating. I think it's also kind of revealing about the way that these different candidates are approaching the race. So let's go and put the first one up on the screen. You've got Donald Trump here. Number one, they point out, great. And they highlight some of the ones that are like different from the other countries. It's not necessarily the number one word that they use, but it's the ones that are kind of unique to him. So great Biden, radical and border. Sagar, you were pointing out how border is very animating among the Republican base.

Let's go and put DeSantis up. DeSantis leans hard into his time as Florida governor. The other things that you have here are COVID, kids, parents, Fauci, woke and ESG. And what I take away there is, I mean, first of all, like really leaning hard into what he's doing policy wise in Florida, which we just discussed may not land all that much. Still talking about COVID and Fauci, something that has really fallen off even among Republicans as a key issue. And then the rest are on the cultural agenda. ESG, which I guarantee if you pull a majority of the Republican base, probably has no idea what you're talking about. Woke, which Trump is going after as well. And then kids, which fits into that piece. Let's put Mike Pence up on the screen. Pence running hard for that evangelical right base. His words include God, life. He has been probably the

candidate who has most staked down a hard right abortion, anti-abortion position. Trump, actually, surprisingly, is probably the most vocal in terms of talking about the former president, kind of because he can't avoid doing it, and Constitution. So, you know, some throwback language there. Nikki Haley, let's put her up on the screen. She's got some that I think really reflect how she leans into her bio. You've got the word proud, strong, love, and together. And kind of similar, Tim Scott put this up on the screen. Again, some of the words leaning into his bio talks about his mom a lot, apparently, God and faith. So also making a play for that evangelical right base. What did you think of some of this language saga? What did you take from it? I thought that the most important ones for DeSantis were terms that many Americans

don't know. What is ESG? I mean, look, I hate ESG. I will critique it here all day long. I know there's a lot of discussion online about it, but I'm not an idiot. And I don't think if I was running for president, I would never talk about ESG. Never. Because I know that the vast majority of what we talked about previously, like voters don't have checklists. They're like, is the gas price low? Do I like the guy? Is my wife going to give me crap if I vote for this guy? You know, like, what am I talking about with my neighbors? Man, this stuff drives me crazy.

Like, that's basically, that's most of the amount of thought that most people put into actually all this. And, you know, look, he's running the same strategy for the nation that he ran in Florida. Not a terrible play, but he's not focusing on the right elements. He has to focus more on the economic message about population inflows and about the booming economy. That is what turning America into Florida. He's talking too much right now about parents, Fauci, ESG.

It's like the ultimate validator is you left your state to come live here. Let's make America just like that. That's a TV positive. That's kind of almost like a Reagan-esque type message from 1980. And unfortunately, I think he's learned many of the worst lessons from validation on the internet. You know, Trumps are so basic,

and that's also one of those genius things as a politician. Everything he says is like at a second grade reading level. He's got radical, border, great, and Biden. Easy. What do you identify with Trump? He always exaggerates. Everything is going to be great. Whenever it's the border, okay, he's against Biden's position on the border.

Radical, he talks about the radical left. His opponent, Joe Biden. That's exactly the right play. You know, with Mike Pence, it's almost like a meme out of a Mark Levin, you know, type show talking about the Constitution. Life and God. Nikki Haley, the fake Reagan-esque vibes that I was talking about, like together and strong and love.

I'm a fighter, and I'm surprised kicking didn't make the list. Tim Scott, you can't help but be endeared to the man that he says mom and God and faith. That's great. That said, there's a lot of people, I think, in the GOP primary who love their mom and who love God and who love faith. I mean, that's great. That said, you know, that's, there's a lot of people, I think in the GOP primary who love their mom and who love God and they love faith. So it's not like it's a very unique position that you're taking overall. Uh, I just thought that the sheer simplicity of Trump and what he's saying is exactly why I think he's leading so well in this primary. I mean, it's really simple. Trump was just a really good politician. You know, I mean, it's really simple. Trump is just a really good politician. You know, I mean, you listen to him on the stump and even like I can't stand the guy and I can't help but be chuckling at some of what he's saying.

He does all of these like comedic bits and he's just a really good politician and the Republican base really likes him. And so it's you know, it's a tough thing to figure out how to how to crack that net. I did want to put the last one I want to put up here is Chris Christie, guys. It was the next one in the list after Tim Scott. There we go. This is kind of interesting to me. So he talks a lot, apparently, about how leaders of both major parties are making Americans smaller with divisive messages. And his some of his top words smaller, small, and big. So, I mean, he says at every pivotal moment in history, there was a choice between small and big, and America has succeeded because we always picked big. I would say out of all these candidates,

Chris Christie, just in terms of political talent, is probably the second most talented, just like raw political skill is Trump. I do think in some of this just simple, straightforward language, you see why he is a very effective communicator. And Chris Christie is not going to be the Republican nominee. You know, he's really takes a stake down a position as like the anti-Trump candidate and wants to go in there and knock Trump down a peg. But I do think you see why he was able to get elected in New Jersey, why he was such a darling of the right for so long and why he is that, you know, he is a very effective communicator. And he actually has jumped up in the polls a bit more than I expect. I mean, he's still in single digits, so I don't want to like overplay it here,

but he has leapfrogged a number of these other candidates who also get a lot of attention. I think it's a testament to the way that he speaks. Chris Christie is always a great communicator, but I think he was elected in the blue state for a reason. He's not a hard right politician and the GOP primary is a hard right game. He missed his moment in 2012 whenever people were looking for that alternative with Obama. And then more broadly, I think that what you see in this is that as you're prosecuting a case against the most popular Republican since Ronald Reagan, sorry, you're not going to be the Republican nominee. You're going to be great on television. I wish

you the best of luck. Yeah, we would really like to interview, actually, we'd like to interview any of these people here. So guys, all of you. We put requests out. We're working on it. We're trying to get him here on the show. But I mean, the point, though, with Christy is, it's like you're just not going to win a GOP primary. You are going to win television.

And I think, actually, I would like to see him just be more honest on TV and kind of his unvarnished thoughts. I really would like that from many of these people. But unfortunately for a lot of them, they always think that they can have it both ways. And it's just like, guys, that's just not how it works. Just not how you win an actual election. Do you think that he, this is one where I'm like, do you think he deludes himself into thinking he can win? Yes, I do. You think he's got that level of ego? Many, you can't listen. You know, I always think about this for these people. They give up everything, their anonymity, their families. They miss some of the most important things and events in their parents' and children's lives

so they can attend some fundraiser for, like, Women Against Whatever. You know? It's like to succeed in the business, you have to have it hardwired that this is everything. And you have to have, in many respects, for all success, you have to have a delusional faith in oneself. So it's paid off many times before. He genuinely thought he could win last time. I know that for a fact.

I attended, actually, an event where he really was going for it, even when he was very, very low in the polls back in 2016. So, yeah, I think he believes it. I think all of these guys believe it, at least in some way. Otherwise, why would you sacrifice so much of what you have? I don't know. I think some of these guys know that they've got next to no chance, but it's just like a savvy media career play at this point. Like there's not that much to lose. There's a lot to gain. You know, just being in the conversation and keeping your relevance is worth a lot.

So listen, I don't know which bucket Chris Christie falls in particular, but he also could be one that just feels like, all right, even if I don't win, like I'm going to say things that other people aren't going to say. So people need to hear that message. And that could be, that could be part of what he's doing. Let's talk about, you talk about what we can parse in terms of where the economy is. We got a big jobs report on Friday. Numbers were a bit disappointing. Let's put this up on the screen.

The payrolls rose by 209,000 in June. That was less than expected, the headline from CNBC says, as job growth wobbles. The total, while still solid, they say, from a historical perspective, marked a considerable drop from May's downwardly revised total of 306,000. So May had been initially calculated as higher. They since revised it down to 306. And it was the slowest month for job creation since payrolls fell by 268,000 back in

December 2020. The unemployment rate, though, did decline by 0.1 percentage point. They also took a look at wage numbers. They said they were a little bit stronger than expected. Average hourly earnings increased by 0.4 percent for the month and 4.4 percent from a year ago. The average work week also increased a little bit. Another thing they take a look at here is the labor force participation rate. So what percent of people who could be in the workforce actually are in the workforce. That apparently held steady, still below its pre-COVID pandemic level. But for workers who are in what is considered their prime, to use some Don Lemon language here, between 25 and 54 years of age, that actually rose, so more workers participating in their prime years. And you have some indications here that,

you know, it's a little tepid, it's a little bit wobbly, and it also indicates that you probably wasn't poor enough of a report, though, to change what the Fed is planning, which is to continue hiking rates. Right. And you found this Fed is planning, which is to continue hiking rates. Right. And you found this really interesting piece, which is really unfortunate, but we've been predicting it for a long time. Let's put this up there on the screen, guys. The great resignation is over. Can worker power endure? And the furious pace of job switching has led to big gains for workers initially. But that pendulum right now is swinging back towards employers. This is really what we warned about, you warned about for the entire time, Crystal, which is that the more that the Federal Reserve puts downward pressure on the economy and increases the unemployment rate, that's going to give employers even more leverage in this economy where previously workers were able to leverage their labor and labor shortage that ensued post-COVID insanity in order to bargain for a higher wage. And the equilibrium that we ended up with is actually really bad

because while we did get some of these people raises, and I think that's fantastic, inflation so far outpaced the modest gains that overall cost of living remains worse, even with their higher wage, than where they are right now. And now we have actually kept our inflation from supply side problems, even though it's gone down, quote, modestly, and we've increased the overall unemployment rate, putting even more downward pressure on wages for the overall economy.

Yeah. So something actually kind of extraordinary and unique in our lifetimes happened over the past little while, which is because post-pandemic, you had a lot of people who didn't want to be on the front lines of the pandemic and wanted to get out of the service sector. They exited and tried to find different careers. And so you had this huge demand for service workers, and you actually had wages increasing quite a bit at the lowest end of the spectrum. And so for the lowest wage workers, they actually did get wage increases that more than kept up with inflation. And you had a significant chunk of the inequality that has been mounting over the past number of

decades. You actually had a decline because you also had rich people as markets were going down, taking a big haircut. Post-pandemic, of course, they got a huge, massive wealth transfer during the pandemic, so no one's going to cry for them. But that was a really extraordinary situation, and it held some promise of, OK, if the labor market can stay tight, maybe there are some real gains that can be made here among low-wage workers. And the warning signs here, both in terms of now we've got, you know, tepid jobs report, lower than expected. They downly revised last month. And you now have workers that are no longer behaving the way that they did previously when jobs really felt like they were plentiful and they really felt like

they could shop around. It's a real warning sign that, you know, some of those gains that were made for low wage workers, some of the power they were able to accrue in terms of increased activity in the labor movement, more strikes, all of those sorts of things, like some of that may be dying down, which, you know, would be would be really disappointing and really dire because there is so much rebalancing that needs to be done after, you know, like 50 years of everything going to the corporations, everything getting funneled to the top. Yeah, I think we're in a very stagnant period. So the big problem is that the biggest growing sector of our economy is facing effective recession technology. The rest of the economy isn't really.

Some manufacturing is coming back. Certain sectors, things are actually going well. We're actually investing a historic amount of manufacturing dollars as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, which I think is great. At the same time, we've got low wages. We've got high unemployment. We feel a lot of stagnation. People have a deep unsatisfaction with the state of the economy, all of that. We have housing mortgage prices at so high and yet zero drop in the overall housing market. And it's one of those where the cost of living feels more unattainable than ever before for the American dream.

Yeah, that's right. I think that's really the only way I can describe it. That's it. It's very odd. And odd in the worst way, I think, for the average consumer. And more and more, I just think, you know, I always think something has to break. But it really never does. You know, you put the mortgage rate at like 7%.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes. But I mean, at least with this, rate at like 7%. Sometimes it does. Sometimes. At least with this, I was like, man, there's no way. I mean, housing market's got to cool, right? Nope. Turns out we have so little supply of housing. People are still willing to eat 100% higher mortgage payments just to live in the house. Same with rent. I mean, rent is crazy high right now. People are still moving. It's one of those where credit card debt is at an all-time high. That's right. Foreclosures have gone up.

People getting kicked out of their apartments. Evictions have gone up. So I'm sure you've probably been watching Jeff Stein on Twitter has been fighting with people about all of these economists, Beltway-type economists, who are lecturing the American people about how they just don't really understand how great the economy actually is. And this is also the pitch that the Biden team is making. They're trying to sell Bidenomics. It's like, look at what great things we've done for your life. And meanwhile, you ask the American people how things are going, and they're like, it's really shitty. And we're really pessimistic. And actually, our financial position has eroded. And we are not remotely hopeful about the future.

And we think the country's on the wrong track. Good luck trying to sell an economy to the American people that they do not feel is going well for them. Huge disconnect between the language that's coming out of, you know, official Washington, especially on the Democratic side and from mainstream economists, and the way people actually experience the economy in their lives. And if I had to say, I think it's exactly what you're pointing to, Sagar, which is the ability to have a stable, middle-class, non-precarious life where you've got healthcare and you can send your kids to college and you can afford a house and afford a mortgage and have nothing fancy, just like a normal middle class life. It feels like you have to be a multimillionaire in order to pull it off.

People just feel like this is wildly unattainable and I'm never going to get there in my entire life. Very basic. And look, nobody has a right to European vacation. I'm not saying you have a right to. But it's nice. It's nice to to go uh guess what flight sky high i got friends who literally are doing very well in life we're looking at the bills that it would have made to go to europe this summer and they're like oh it's not gonna happen now yeah you know i'm gonna cry for these people but that said it's like if they can't afford a vacation to make it 200 grand

a year it's like what is the what even Disney World, what are you supposed to do? And also, you know, we've talked about this, but from what I've heard too, the prices at Disney World are sky high. Experiences effectively have been ruined if you're not really rich. It's like is there anything left in this country other than a national park to actually do something relatively low cost and for free? I will definitely come out in favor of vacations for all. I do think everyone has a right to, if they work hard and working full time, playing by the rules, to be able to take a little time off and go on a modest beach vacation or take their kids to Disney World or whatever. But we're far from that dream. Very, very far. All right. We want to give

you an update on this whole Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg situation, which is sort of degrading by the day. As you guys know, Zuck launched a Twitter competitor being billed as a potential Twitter killer called Threads, sort of attached to Instagram. If you've got an Instagram account, very easy to port it over, very seamless. Tech seems to be relatively good. There are some problems, though. Let's get to that in a moment. Well, Elon and Twitter are actually threatening to sue Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, over threads. Let's put this up on the screen. A lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in, quote, systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.

Twitter intends to strictly enforce its IP rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. what they what they allege happened here actually is that zuck hired a bunch of the people that elon had fired and then used them to develop metas uh the threads technology now mark zuckerberg denies that says that nobody who came from twitter was used in the development of the product whatever i actually think it would be kind of funny if they were i can't really blame like there would be a smart way why What's wrong with that? I mean, am I crazy? Like, if you fire somebody and then another person hires, look, maybe. I don't understand the exact, you know, intricacies of IP, theft, law, non-disclosure agreements, of which I'm sure these people are party to.

That said, if you literally sever somebody from your company and then you hire somebody for their expertise running said platform, I don't really see anything wrong with that. Seems like good old-fashioned competition to me. Yeah, seems fine to me. I mean, here's the other thing. They're threatening to sue. They haven't actually filed anything yet, which tells me maybe they don't feel like their legal position is that strong. I don't know. I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I do know that Mark Zuckerberg and his company have like ripped off other tech platforms, technology previously, not in that they

like actively stole trade secrets or whatever, but you know, they saw what Snapchat was doing. They incorporated it into stories. They see what TikTok is doing and they try to incorporate that as well. This is just like what happens in the tech world. There's not that much innovation. It's just everybody like copying whatever is the latest thing. So I have a feeling they are well-versed in what the limits of that are. I suspect that this probably doesn't have a lot of leg to stand on, but I'm not an expert here, so who knows? I don't know on the legal front.

We also have some developments on the fight between the two. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Zuckerberg copying Elon's one words concerning answers, replying trollishly to a thread on his new platform about whether threads itself was being throttled on the Twitter trending platform. Elon, meanwhile, saying, quote, Zuck is a cuck in response to a tweet there about Zuckerberg, alleged censorship, and all of that. I'm not exactly sure what he's going for there, Crystal. He's saying basically that Zuckerberg is like the king of censorship. So listen, overall, you know,

the childish antics aside, of which it's very possible, what, that we could see an actual cage match here happening? I think the cage match is off, but there was an update. Elon then replied to the Zuck is a cuck thing and said, I suggest a literal dick measuring contest. So that's the latest that's been floated that I can update you on.

I mean, I guess, you know what? They're just like us, you know, childish people, even whenever you have over 100 billion. But let's actually be serious here. I took some time, played a little bit with Threads, and I have some complicated feelings. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. First, in terms of the success,

Meta's Threads has over 70 million signups, which is actually even surprising Mark Zuckerberg, or at least that's what he said. Undeniably, having 70 million signups in just a couple of days is really good. Huge. In contrast, right now, Elon's Twitter has 237, 8 million users as of July of 2022, the last time that they had to go ahead and describe their

overall number. So if you're able to get a significant portion of that in just the first couple of days, that's a big deal. In terms of the functionality and all of that, I've sent two threads so far. Some thoughts. I'm not quite sure how much this will apply to everybody else. First of all, Crystal, I rarely tweet. And even when I do, it's usually so I can just post it on Instagram. So the ability to have a quote-unquote thread and just easily repost it onto my story or my feed, love that.

It's probably very specific to people with larger audiences like us. Something we're talking about with Griffin, our producer this morning. I am skeptical and curious to see whether people actually do want to use a Twitter alternative to follow just their friends. The reality is most people use their Twitter to follow bigger accounts, people like celebrities and others. But at the same time, people's Instagram consumption has changed. It's not just your friends.

It's also you follow bigger accounts, influencers, all those other people. But you do follow them on Instagram for a reason. You don't necessarily follow them on Twitter also for a reason. Twitter is a great place for aggregation of news, for discussion, for obviously what it's well known for. It's not really been Instagram's

thing. Can they replicate their ability to have a breaking news environment, to have high content that's valuable to a certain select group of users and get them addicted to their platform? I'm not yet sure that that's possible. But the overall functionality, I like it a lot. I actually do like, like I said, that cross-posting ability. But in terms of the complication for me, does Facebook really need more vertically integrated products? I was thinking, I was just in India, everyone's using WhatsApp. And the entire time I'm just like, man, I'm using a Facebook product here. I'm like, I don't know if this stuff is actually encrypted. Is it actually going to do well? Just a basic

communication. They even have WhatsApp payment in some places. Oh, interesting. India is obsessed with mobile payment. WhatsApp, Google Pay, all of this. And again, same thing. All I can think is, man, the domination here these big tech companies have over so much of the daily lives, your communication, your payments, all this. This is a Chinese-style system effectively in a private company, and that makes me uncomfortable. That's true. Chinese-style system effectively in a private company, and that makes me uncomfortable. So, you know, I don't really know who to root for here

because I do not want the Twitter killer to come from an already established social media platform. I do have to give Zuck credit. It's a good product. It's done well. Clearly there's an appetite. Vertical integration works for a reason whenever you're a monopoly, and I do think that he's got a good product here on his hand

that actually could work. Yeah, I mean, we have more choices of oligarchic, like baby men to these platforms we can pick from. So I don't ever think that there's anyone to really cheer for here. Put this last piece up on the screen, E4. So this guy that you see his tweet over on the side of the screen,

he, I think, is the head of Instagram or high up in Instagram. Yes, he think, is the head of Instagram or high up at Instagram. And so he basically is indicating like, we don't really want politics all that much on threads. He says, politics and hard news are important. I don't want to imply otherwise, but my take is from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity, let's be honest, or integrity risks that come along with them. There are more than enough amazing community, sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, et cetera, to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.

So, I mean, this is kind of telling as well. Like, they don't even really want politics on their platform because, and we've seen this before. I mean, we see this on YouTube where it's divisive, it's edgy, it's controversial. All of these questions about misinformation and extremism and people being radicalized and whatever, that almost exclusively falls into the domain of politics and hard news. So, also, Threads is 100% algorithmically driven, so like you follow who you follow, but then it's not like you can just get the stream of consciousness timeline

that you can get on Twitter. It's all formulated by an algorithm, so this would suggest that they're gonna sort of discourage and suppress political and hard news content. So, I mean, listen, this is the problem with leaving these platforms that are supposedly like the virtual town square and critical democracy and whatever. This is a problem with leaving them to the whims of the market and profit making decisions

because from a business perspective, I can't blame them. That is what would make sense from a business perspective. It saves you a lot of headaches. So I can see a world where Threads is successful. I think Threads will be successful. I mean, 70 million signups. Yeah, it's undeniable. Incorporated in with Instagram, you already have a big fan base on Instagram, a lot of people using it there. They've been successful at bringing over a bunch of big celebrities and public figures who are already on the platform and posting their threads, whatever. I think it's very possible you have Threads Succeed and you also have Twitter still out there as the locus for politics and hard news and that they are successful as well. I also think it's possible that you could continue to have a fragmenting of the user base where it does segregate more into ideological spaces, which, you know, on the one hand, I am not a fan of monopolies. On the other hand, the part of Twitter that has always been

interesting is having that give and take and engagement across the ideological spectrum. Some of that may be breaking down at this point. Yeah, look, business-wise, smart decision. Politics is a disaster. You know, I think I told you about this. I was talking with some YouTube guys, and they were asking us what our average revenue is. And I told them, they were like, what? They're like, for a channel your size, the amount of views that you drive, we are currently getting ad revenue, probably like 30 to 40% of what a channel our size as non-political would be making. And guess what? We know that. We know the politics sucks. That's why I have a direct subscription product. But these are platforms that all drive on advertising.

And so they made the, I think, correct move where they're like, we don't want to deal with this. They're like, let Elon deal with it because he already is trying to float all this advertising and have all these problems. Let him have deal with all the controversy over who to censor and all that. We'll be sitting over here. Talking about makeup. Talking about makeup. Basketball or whatever. Basketball, you know science

and whatever other health some days it really seems like a good life yeah it's a great life oh man i have friends who are not who are like you know big in all these other industries and i'm like i envy you man like you don't have to deal with the biggest controversy in health and fitness is whether to eat a carb or not and like at the end and it can get nasty but it's not even close to as nasty i was gonna say actually i feel like the health and fitness zone might be one of the more fraught. But I'm saying that's as fraught as it gets. You know, there's no life or death consequences here. Whereas, you know, should Ukraine be in NATO? Like you already know how many haters that we're going to be getting. And we deal with that on a daily basis. I've talked

with them previously. They're like, man, I can't believe how much crap you deal with. But listen, we like it. That's what we do, right? And so I just think that whenever you're trying to float this on advertising, it is always a smart decision to say, I don't want to deal with the political side of it. That said, you will always get drawn in because, you know, science. Oh, well, science has nothing to do with it,

except we have to censor RFK Jr.'s Instagram account. But then he's running for president. Now I guess we have to reinstate it. So you can't also delude yourself into thinking that you're not going to have to deal with it because you 100% are going to have to. So that's my overall impression. I like the product. I'm going to continue to use it. I probably won't use it for politics, but I do really like the way that images load on it. Not a surprise since it's so built into Instagram. Honestly, I've just taken a big step back from all of social media and my brain feels better.

So I don't really plan to change that, but we'll see. You know, something, I always get pulled back in. It's one point or another. I've gone through these phases before.

So far, I'm on threads, but I'm just lurking. Maybe I'll engage at some point. You're lurking? I'm lurking. I've currently got some jet lag tweets

about cats and then my own personal thing. So that's all I got going so far. Cat and dog Twitter is like actually, that's the best. Exactly. And you know, why not have even more images? All right. So this is the part of the show where normally I say, Sagar, what are you looking at?

But I actually think, Sagar, you have something for us to take a look at today. Whatever could you mean? What are you talking about? Is it this getup that I'm wearing? Is that it? Is it these sneakers? As I said, I was a man of my word. I thought we would have to go to the uptick. Can I see it from up top? I forgot about the sneaker part of the promise. From up top here. Can I see it from up here? Yeah, look at these. It pains me to wear Indian dress garb. I think it looks very nice, honestly. Thank you. So this is what I wore during my actual

Indian wedding ceremony. For those who are wondering, there is a more formal Indian garb, which I did also wear, but it was way too big to fit into a suitcase. It wouldn't have done it. It's called a shirwani, actually. So as you know, I have to do all my research.

So I'm like, all right, what is the origin of this dress? The shirwani. Okay. The shirwani itself comes from Persian court dress wear. Whoa. Which filtered down via the Mughal Empire, which then became adopted by the Maharajas as their like bejeweled, encrusted thing. And so actually, interestingly enough in India, there is no one agreement on what formal dress

wear is. There's the shirwani, there's something called Indo dress wear, and then there is the actual Kortha that I am wearing right now. So this is what I, as you can actually see, I've got turmeric and all this stuff left over from the actual ceremony. Oh, I see on your palms too. Well, this is actually, so nowadays they do, let's see if we can zoom in here.

A little bit, you can see it a little bit. You can see a little bit left. I thought it was only for women, but actually they said men do it now in India too, so I did it. I didn't know that. The embroidery on that is amazing, though. Yeah.

Oh, this one is very nice. I think this one is silk. So anyway, look. Wow. I said I would do it. If we hit a million subscribers, I honestly didn't think it was going to happen, and so here I am wearing it for my monologue.

I always believed in our audience that they would come through and force you to do this. I should have believed the other way. I should have promised something that was more feasible. So now, I think we're gonna do my monologue and everybody's gonna watch this and be like, what the hell is this guy wearing?

What is going on? So I guess watch this part first if you're interested. Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, of all the major events to miss, the one that I was most bummed about was affirmative action. Crystal and Emily held a fantastic panel discussion on the subject that I recommend everybody go and listen to.

And since that decision, a lot about our society has been revealed. So-called fake civil rights groups said that we would be set back by the decision. Many past injustices were righted by the policy. The racial-obsessed media parroted their claims, and the colleges themselves credited their past diversity statistics with the policy. But so much has now been written about the past, and what I want to do is focus on the future. What is higher education going to look like without affirmative action? Fortunately, if you've been watching our show for some time, you already know the answer. Higher education in the U.S. and their racial-obsessed bureaucrats are willing to nuke the standards for literally everyone and burn hundreds of years of academic

credibility, all in the name of preserving so-called racial diversity. The plan is simple. Any objective criteria that can be easily used to prove racial discrimination against whites and Asians will be sacrificed. Any criteria which will allow for preference against these groups will be emphasized, made to be the most important. People called me a conspiracy theorist when I laid out this plan long before the decision. Now that it's happened, it's out in the open. The New York Times immediately published the plan, titled, quote, With Supreme Court decision, college admissions could become more subjective. It was all laid out, third paragraph in, quote,

Officials at selective institutions predicted there would be less emphasis on standardized metrics like test scores, class rank, GPA, and more emphasis on personal qualities, told through recommendations and the application essay. Now again, why would this be the case? Because the case against Harvard relied almost entirely on objective metrics like SAT scores and others, which could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt Asian students in particular were straight up discriminated against in admissions. If you remove test scores as important and you lean more on personal essay where students of desired background can just write I am black or I am Hispanic over and over and over again for 500 words, it's easy. Once again,

I am not simply positing this. Already, the admissions department write in here locally, University of Maryland, saying, quote, right now, students write about their soccer practice. They write about their grandmother dying. But then she says they need to shift to talk, quote, about how race affected their lives. One neat trick that the admissions departments are already going for is simple. Make the college prompt about how diversity, equity, and inclusion is important to the applicant. The incoming president of Mount Holyoke University, for example, she imagines a future question will look like this. One of the core values of Mount Holyoke College is diversity of all kinds. Please tell us why you value it.

What will make you think to bring to the Mount Holyoke community in terms of diversity? Your belief in terms of diversity? Your belief in the creative diversity is all that will matter in the future. Whether you are good at math or science or English and can actually excel academically will cease to matter at all. So for the future, what do we do? Why should we even care? Let's start with the latter part of that question. About a decade ago, there was actually a big debate about the great awokening on college campuses, obsessions by students and professors, especially at elite

institutions with race and gender. The debate was, does this matter at all? Who cares if Yale or Harvard or any of these school kids are acting nuts? How does it impact any of us? The problem is, well, they grew up. And when they did, they populated the elite institutions across the country. Those kids who led race and gender cultural revolutions at college a decade ago, now they write for the New York Times, or they work at Netflix, or they're junior staffers at the Biden White House, or the marketing department at Bud Light or Target. They are the enforcers of the ideological regime,

and they will remain in power for decades. As you can already see now from the freak out over affirmative action, they will not go quietly into the good night. It will be a total war for control of institutions and for the future. And the war really will be a fight between masses and elites. The polling on affirmative action shows that the vast majority of people are against it. 50% of people outright disapprove. Only 30% approve. Most people are, the rest are unsure. And I actually think that's very underweighted. Because even in California, the most liberal state in the whole country, when affirmative action was put up for an actual vote,

it was rejected at a full 57% of the vote. And that happened in the exact same election where Biden beat Trump by 29 points. The people, and especially working class people, are very against affirmative action. For the elites, though, it is their religion, at least with the government that we have some Democrats say, though. But on the problem, for those on the side of the masses, is that many of the institutions we're talking about, they are not small d democratic. Harvard obviously has to comply with the law, which still takes decades to wrangle with, but they don't get voted for. Even public universities, somewhat more accountable,

don't face any close to the same level of pressure as actual government. And then what about private institutions, which are both elite by definition, but still important for the masses? Take this, for example, I've given before, like the American Bar Association. It controls the entire legal profession. It's literally private, though. You cannot vote for it. It's not accountable to any representative that we can vote for. Yet, it controls the entire profession of law.

So when the Bar Association decides to nuke the LSAT as part of admission to law school to make the legal profession more equitable, what are we supposed to do? What do you do when you need a lawyer? Medical school. I've talked about that before. Reducing MFSS on MCAT scores, GPAs in favor of racial admissions and essays. We have no say,

but when we get sick and you need a doctor, what do you do? Those are two small examples, but there are a myriad of elite institutions which govern all of our lives like this, which are equally racially obsessed and will be fundamentally altered in the future. And what does that future look like? I mean, I don't really have good news on that front. We will have, at a minimum, a generation, and more likely, probably nearly a century, of total chaos.

Because if you think that dying institutions just fade and go away easily and lose their power even when they suck, you're wrong. Take a look at cable news, for example. Or, for a longer timeline, look at the Ottoman Empire. You can be useless, corrupt, lacking any legitimacy that you once had. As long as your system, though, works well enough for those in power, it can hang on for a long,

long time. And they will fight even harder to maintain their grip on power. Now, for those of you who want a more meritorious and equal America, though, don't entirely despair. because the demise of affirmative action has heightened the contradictions. It has made explicit, which was once implicit, for all of us to see. In a relatively free society, that is actually powerful. Now, for now, you can still see the agenda,

and you can choose for yourself. Do you want to participate in it or not? And whether or not you choose to fight, I actually think it's important to choose to fight, and you can see this clearly, and I hope that all of you do too. So Crystal, my ridiculous garb aside, I know that you guys have- And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. disappointing but not a surprise, the supposed vanguard of the national elected left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, joined the Pod Save Bros in order to throw her backing behind Joe Biden. So president's only primary opponents are Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Haven't been any rumors about anyone else even thinking about jumping in. Will you be supporting Joe Biden for reelection? I believe given that feel, yes. I think he's done quite well, given the limitations that we have. I do think that there are ebbs and flows as there are in any presidency. You know, there are areas that I think were quite strong when he came right out of the gate

with the American Rescue Plan. And of course, the Inflation Reduction Act was a massive step in terms of our climate agenda. But, you know, there are also areas that I think could have gone better. We have major structural issues in this country. I think it starts with the United States Senate. And I think that until we have senators that are willing to stand up and stare the filibuster in the eye and stare a lot of structural issues about the Senate, the United States Senate will be what holds back this country from an enormous amount of progress. that short clip. First, AOC says, given that field of Marianne Williamson and Bobby Kennedy, she will back Biden. Apparently, AOC has bought into D.C.'s relentless spin that only candidates

officially certified as, quote unquote, serious by the powers that be are worthy of any consideration. Now, I don't have to point out to you the irony of this stance, given that AOC was once a bartender and organizer, thoroughly outside the circle of officially sanctioned candidates who ousted a powerful longtime incumbent to the shock and horror of the official Beltway crowd. How quickly she has gone from renegade outsider protesting in the Speaker's office to cowed insider. Not long ago, she said in different countries, she and Joe Biden would not even be in the same party. On the other hand, she and Marianne are probably theoretically aligned on like 90% of issues, but elite acceptability now trumps issues for AOC and the rest of the elected left.

Second, she says Joe Biden has done, quote, quite well, and then offers up the also officially sanctioned villain of the moment, the Senate and the filibuster to justify the many failings of the Biden administration. Apparently quite well in AOC's estimation includes accepting a loathsome debt deal, siding with capital over workers in a rail strike, abandoning efforts to lift the minimum wage, strengthen unions, widen healthcare access, and a long list of other campaign promises. She also accepts at face value the notion that Biden simply must accept the intransigence of senators like Sinema and Manchin and doesn't have tools of pressure and rewards that he could use at least to try to compel compliance. But really, to look at the personal failings of AOC, it's kind of too easy. It's too

obvious at this point. The writing of her fall from renegade to player in the game has been on the wall for quite some time now. And the truth of the matter is, she's really not special. The whole of the elected left has more or less fully fallen in line, scarcely raising a word of dissent, not even demanding on principle that Biden subject himself to debates. But it's not just the elected left. The whole project of leftism focused on a national level seems to have receded. Post-Bernie, the left, which had organized, found community, and created its own media in online spaces, really fractured. There was no clear big goal to keep everyone aligned. People were depressed. They were angry by the way the Bernie campaign ended, understandably so. And once Bernie's campaign was over,

the movement he started no longer had a real-world incarnation, and a pandemic locked all of us inside in front of our screens. That made what was left of that movement way too online, and thus extremely vulnerable to the shaping of the amorphous algorithms crafted by our tech oligarchs. Those algorithms, of course, reward drama, they reward conflict, they reward call-outs and destruction. So no one should be surprised that that is exactly what came to dominate the space. Now you might hope that people with principles would resist the dopamine fuel of clicks and fake outrage, but we are talking about fallible human beings here. From what I can tell, the whole era is pretty reminiscent of the retrenchment of the left in the 1970s, only this time supercharged with big tech poison. Founder of Jacobin Magazine, Bhaskar Sankara, recently made this observation on Twitter, which speaks to the national left recession.

Quote, Medicare for all has been seemingly erased as a core immediate demand of the socialist left. Obviously, it's not viable as legislation today, but it's barely brought up as a cause. Really, night and day to three to four years ago when it was at the core of Bernie's campaign. He goes on to opine that not only has Medicare for all gone largely dormant as a core demand, but there really is no core demand. Quote, I'm not sure there is a unifying national demand that compares to what it was. Lots of local activism around climate and tenants' rights and electoral activity, plus energy around labor solidarity. And you know what? That second part is actually really important because it's an antidote to the depression lefties may naturally feel upon watching a clip of AOC with the pod save bros going all in for Joe fricking Biden.

Because actually the desire for change and support for ideas like universal health care, housing and unions, it's higher than ever. Its expression has just shifted in a way that may ultimately be more durable and more powerful. Bernie bet that his political revolution would bring new voters out in droves, mobilize an electorate that typically stays home. And while, yes, he was screwed, and 2016 especially was rigged, it is also true that theory just didn't really pan out. And I think the reason it didn't pan out was at least in part because of lack of local organizations, and in particular, a robust labor movement that stitches communities organized around common political interests together out of atomized individuals. And that's exactly the area where there are actually some hopeful things happening today. In cities across the country, you do have tenants' rights movements

springing up to protect renters, and social housing has made a surprising legislative comeback. Unions are seeing record levels of public support as grassroots organizing pushes forward, and large established unions are also being remade with more militant and more responsive leadership. Even some regular old Democratic governors are actually doing some impressively based things. Wisconsin's Tony Evers just increased public school funding indefinitely for 400 years. Minnesota Democrats have grabbed control of the governor's mansion and the state legislature, and they are using it to do everything from making all school lunches free,

hiking taxes on corporations, and aggressively bolstering union rights. If New York congressional representative AOC isn't going to fight for Medicare for All, you could look to New York State Senator Jabari Brisport, who is doing the work to bring universal health care to his own state as a model for the nation. There's a hell of a lot more interesting things going on than what AOC has to say about Joe Biden to some Obama bros. And Sagar, not surprising, but I mean, it's just pathetic. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Speaking of people doing real things in the real world, a longtime great friend of the show, Will Giuando, is actually running for Senate in Maryland.

And he is going to join us in studio to tell us what he's up to. Excited to be joined now by a great longtime friend of the show, at-large city council member in Montgomery County, the one and only Will Giuando. Great to see you. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Good to see you, sir. So full disclosure, you are a friend of the show, personal friend and all that good stuff. But we still got some tough political questions for you, of course. So you've announced you're running for Senate. Congratulations. First and foremost. Thank you. And we did just get some

news in this race. This was pretty big. Put this up on the screen. So Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was seen as a pretty strong contender, if he jumped into this Senate primary, he has said he is not going to run for this open Senate seat. So Will, just talk us through your campaign. How are things going? Who are your opponents? What's your plan to win? Sure. Well, first to Congressman Raskin, my congressman, good friend. He's an important role in the House, and we've been talking about this. We need to take back the House so he can chair oversight and push back against a lot of the misinformation and craziness that's going on. I'm excited to run for the Senate because people need a champion.

They need a progressive champion in the Senate. When I go around Maryland and around the country, people are struggling. And my core message is you don't have to choose between you doing well and your neighbor doing well. I think that's what I really call the big lie. You know, not that Trump didn't win the election or that he won the election. That obviously is a lie. But this kind of, I think, prevalent idea that it's zero sum, like if you help the immigrant, you can't help someone who's been here for 200 years. So I think that is a real core part of our message at a time when people are really struggling. Right. You know, education costs, housing, they're concerned about safety, go down the list, the environment. And I think we're going to need bold, progressive solutions, especially in the Senate to get it done. And that's what I've

done. That's what I think is an interesting question. So Maryland's obviously, you know, Democratic state, Larry Hogan, I guess, notwithstanding, you're going to face a crowded primary. What is your plan? What distinguishes you from, you know, not even current opponents, potential opponents? Like, why do you think that you are willing to take up this mantle for this longstanding state and specifically a vanguard of the Democrats in the United States Senate? Absolutely. Well, look, I'm homegrown, born and raised in Maryland. I saw firsthand the good, the bad, the ugly. Dealt with disparities growing up. Lost a friend to gun violence. Got scholarships to college and

law school. Now serving in my second term in our largest county, 1.1 million of the 6 million in the state I already represent. Our diverse and largest county with four of the most diverse cities in the country in it. I've also worked in the Senate eight years. I worked for Sherrod Brown. I worked for Barack Obama. I was counsel on the HELP Committee. I worked for Nancy Pelosi, of course, in the White House with President Obama. So I bring, I think, a really needed mix of both federal experience, but also local experience. And, you know, I'm 40 years old. I'm a millennial. I'm a geriatric millennial. Yeah. You and me both. Yeah. John Ossoff and I would be the only two. Right.

At a time when we're 20, almost 23% of the population, the average age of the Senate is 76. We're dealing with aging parents, young kids, student loan debt. Go down the list. I think you need some people that actually are dealing with, as we confront AI and technology changes, it would be nice to have someone in there who knows what is dealing with those in real time. That's a fair point. So on the one hand, it's a benefit that you've worked in DC, that, you know, some of these players, you know, how the game works. There's also potential

challenge there being able to criticize, you know, that leadership when it is needed. So tell me a little bit about your view of the Biden administration. What do you see as sort of the high watermarks of achievement and what do you see as potentially, you know, failures or things that they've, missteps that they've done? Look, you know, I kind of remember when I used to come on years ago when President Biden was running. I was, even though when I took the, you know, the test of all the issues, I lined up with the progressive candidates. I always said I would support Biden and I think he's done a good job. Has he been perfect? Absolutely not. But America isn't perfect, right? You know, that's our story. We get some things right. We get some things wrong. We go

forward. We go backwards. I think the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act on the environment, the stimulus as a local elected official, the almost $300 million we got to put out and help with rental assistance. We launched a guaranteed income program in our state that I led that's helping 300 families with $800 a month right now. We stabilized rents during the pandemic. We gave money to after-school programs, et cetera. That money, we set up vaccine and food distribution. We needed that. So I think he put us on a good path. Do I agree with everything? Absolutely not. But I think he has started us in a good direction, and the other options on the other side are going to take us way back. So there's two theories of the case in the Democratic Party.

There's one that people from Democratic states and who are like within the coalition should be able to push the president. The other is that they should go along with the president. Where would you fall into that? You know, drive down more into the specifics where you disagree. Yeah, sure, sure. So I think the answer is both. Like, you know, like it's like when LBJ told, you know, Martin Luther King, go make me do it. You have to be a friend and push. I mean, all my best friends push me. I don't want anyone in my group that's not going to tell me to be better. But you can also be supportive and be constructive in how you do it. For example, I think, you know, we should be supporting Ukraine,

right? And the devastation and loss. My father came to this country from Nigeria, fleeing a war-torn country, the Biafran Civil War, the first one of two televised wars and the Vietnam War and that. So I know what it is to deal with that. But I don't think we should be using cluster bombs, for example. And I don't think that's a safe policy for, you know, civilians and the like. So that's an example where I support the general policy of we should provide Ukraine with support. Russia is a bad actor. But how we do it matters. And I think that's an example, you know, I think on criminal justice reform, right?

You know, I was really heartened to hear the president talk in the State of the Union for almost five minutes about the talk and the need to pass the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act. But also he talked about how we have to support law enforcement. And what does that support mean? I've done a lot of work on those issues. I think that's an engagement. I think we've got to get them away from dealing with mental health and homelessness, focus police on violent crime, pay them more, have higher accountability. So I think there's examples of how you can support the president, but also push him on certain things. Interesting. Something else that we talked about in the show today was the president has actually

said, all right, Ukraine, you are not going to be in NATO while this war is going on, but he has held open the possibility of Ukraine ultimately entering NATO. Russia has said that was one of the provocations that led to their certainly illegal, unjustified invasion of Ukraine. You know, in the Senate, you'd be on the front lines of foreign policy. This would be something that you would potentially have to vote on. Where do you stand on potential NATO membership for Ukraine? Well, first let's get Sweden in. You know, obviously, they're going to they're dealing with some drama on that this week with Turkey and Hungary kind of objecting to that. Obviously, you got Finland in. I think that was a good addition. I am for a pathway for Ukraine into NATO. I don't think today is the day. But I think in general, expanding NATO, the idea of

like democratic pro-democracy states, for the most part, coming together to say we're going to protect each other is a good thing. They're not, I don't think they're in a state right now where they're ready for it. But I do think a pathway, which I think is consistent with what the president has said. So that, just to be clear, that means we would have, you know, they would have Article V protection. That means if there was another dispute, another war with Russia, we'd be obligating our sons and daughters to go and fight in that war. Is that something that you're comfortable with? Well, as I said, I mean, pathway, that's not today.

I think we have to, I am in support of supporting them now, as we are. I think Russia's a bad actor. They are trying to, as they have in other places, destabilize the region. They're trying to harm people. They're using misinformation in our elections. Go down the list of things that they're doing. I think we need to stand up against that. I think that's a democratic American principle,

that it harms other parts of the world and us if we don't. I take very seriously and would take very seriously in the Senate sending our young men and women overseas to fight for other countries. But that is the agreement of NATO. So if they are a member, we would have to do that if attacked. But I think that's why we need to really discuss what is there as this war goes on. Hopefully it comes to a conclusion. How are they going to proceed? What steps are they going to take? What is the stability in the region? Those are all factors into whether, when and how they would come into NATO. You just talked about cluster munitions. We're talking a little bit more about Ukraine. What is your view on more aid to Ukraine? So if you were voted into the United States Senate, would you your view on more aid to Ukraine? So if you were voted into

the United States Senate, would you vote for more military aid to Ukraine or do you desire a diplomatic solution? Again, I think I desire both. I mean, I think there is, you know, again, make me do it. The aid in a lot of ways, military, humanitarian, is helping put them in position for hopefully eventually a diplomatic solution. We cannot have endless war. But you have to, but you best negotiate from a position of strength. And I think people rightly question how are we spending money? What are we spending on? What type of weapons are we sending? I said, I'm not for the cluster munitions because of the civilian loss and just the long term effect of those, those kinds of weapons that just sit for years. And we've seen

that in Vietnam and other places. But I do think it's important to support them because they are at a key moment in time against a power that is in Russia that is trying to take us backwards and trying to be against democratic principles. When is enough? So if they fail in this counteroffensive, you get $50 billion more. How many times do they have to fail before we say it's time to come to the table? Unfortunately, there's no – I can't tell you today what that moment is. I think we have to evaluate the circumstances. That moment could come where, like we did in Afghanistan and other places way too late, that this isn't working.

We've got to do something different. I don't think we're there today, but I do think that the best negotiations in our history have come when they've come from a position of strength where people are saying it's in our mutual interest to have a negotiation. I think our aid is helping that to happen. But it cannot be an endless war. I also will say, back to my core message of my campaign, we can do that and we can invest here at home. It's not an either or, right? There's other things we can do. It's not we take our eye off the ball here for Americans that need help here. It's that this is connected to global democratic principles and freedom, and we need to do that too. Will, one thing we've always appreciated about speaking with you is a lot of domestic policy issues are not theoretical to you as a Montgomery County at large council member,

you are dealing with some of the trickiest issues from, you know, crime to housing and education. They're on the front lines. One thing that we've covered a lot here that I wanted to hear your thoughts on is the challenge of affordable housing. And this came across my radar. We'll go ahead and put this up on the screen. I saw Governor Moore just announced millions of dollars, 6.3 millions of dollars to support construction of more than 200 affordable housing units in the county that you represent. Can you tell us a little bit about what you think might make sense at a federal level to scale in terms of affordable housing based on what you've seen in your county? This is a massive problem. Number one thing I hear about, number one or two thing I hear about, you know, the cost of housing, health care, taking

away freedoms like bodily autonomy, the right to marry who you want, etc. But housing is always up there. In Montgomery County, we have 1.1 million residents, 40% of them rent. So it's over 400,000 people that are renting. Those are their homes. As you know, I've been a big proponent of rent stabilization as part of the mix. We passed it temporarily through bills that I authored during the pandemic. Now we have a permanent bill that passed out of committee two weeks ago. We're going to vote on it next week. That would cap rents at 6%, 3% plus inflation capped at 6%. It would be the lowest for a largest jurisdiction of our size in the country. I think that's part of the mix.

We need a massive federal investment in affordable housing to get these voucher waiting lists down. My dad lived in affordable housing with a HUD voucher. We have a 37,000-person waiting list in Montgomery County on this list waiting for a voucher. It's because there's been a dramatic underinvestment. We need to incentive. So we have to double or triple the amount of those vouchers. We need to incentivize, have more tax credit deals. Like I'm for, I want developers and housing providers to make a profit. I just want them to make a reasonable profit and build good public use housing that's mixed income. And so we need to get more tax credit deals on the table.

We need to incentivize states. The federal government has a good power of like saying here's some money if you do X to do stabilization because you can't have rampant, you know, raise. If you have 400,000 people renting in any year, their mortgage can go up a hundred, two, $300, $400. That's just not sustainable. And, and we need a renter's tax credit, just like we have a, a homeowner's tax credit. There's some of these ideas that are floating around, but I think it starts with a serious commitment. And then on homelessness, you know, one of the things I'm so proud of in Montgomery County, we eliminated veterans homelessness. We're on our way to eliminate it for children and families. That requires a housing first strategy. No matter

why you're homeless or experiencing homelessness, that we put you in housing first and then figure out all the other things. I think that's something we need to do across the country too. Let me ask you a specific one on housing. Something else that we've been tracking here is permanent capital coming in and buying up a lot of single family housing. Of course, especially right now with mortgage rates being so high, they can come in with all cash and it really makes it difficult for first time homebuyers. Is that something you would take a look at? Is that something you would ban? Or some people have floated the idea of you have to have, you have to give first preference to the individual

before you allow permanent capital to come in. We do it all the time. The local level is called a right of first refusal or ROFR. And I think that idea is a good one. If you look in some of these housing markets and metropolitan areas, ours included, there is so little available because of people that have bought things up either as investments to flip or these corporate entities, private equity entities coming in. So we need to, one, know what the universe is. We have to have transparency and sunlight on it. Two, I think we do need to look at opportunities and that would loop in like first-time home buyer credits, down payment assistant programs. Some of those things have phased out over time at the federal and local level. I think that we do need to make sure home ownership is on the rise. You

know, we saw with appraisals, these studies that's come out with appraisals, you know, for example, there's still a lot of inequity in fair housing where appraisals for African-American families and red line communities for the same house are 40, $50,000 less. So that's something we need to do as well. But yes, I do think looking at these corporate entities is a part of the solution for sure. Gotcha. Can I do a little couple of lightning round progressive priorities with you? Sure. All right. I'll be quick. Medicare for all, yes or no? We need to be on a path towards it.

What does that mean? That means- Co-sponsor the bill if you were elected to the Senate. Yeah, I think that's where we need to head. The price of cost of healthcare is insane. I talk to doctors all the time. They're getting out of- The OBGYN who delivered three of our four children is dropping the OB because of liability and because of the reimbursement rate. It's insane. And that's a, it's a black woman, maternal health for black women is a huge priority. The down cascading thing. It's crazy. I talked to an orthopedist who's having to fight with insurance companies every day to get the same amount that he got last year for the same surgery. It's the for-profit system is broken. So you need either dramatic regulation

or a public option to make them honest. But ultimately I do think a system where we cover everybody, it showed it at work. When we expanded Medicaid, it works. You know, you need to get people covered. Free college. Community college. We've done that in Maryland. I think that's the way we start. It's $5,000. It's effective. The smartest students, I'm chair of the education committee, are these young people. All of our students are smart. But these young people who do dual enrollment, they graduate. I just did a couple of their graduations from high school with their associates and with their high school degree. But even for those who don't do that,

you get a great bang for your buck. Again, it's less than $5,000 a year. We can afford to get people a good start. Not everyone needs a four-year liberal arts, especially with what's going on with our economy and the job, changing job market. But some sort of post-secondary training up to two years should be free. Various entities could be community college, could be career in tech, could be other things. We should absolutely do that. Green New Deal. Well, that's it. There's a lot in there. Yeah, that's fair. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Yeah. And so I would say I'm for a lot of the things in the Green New Deal. I wouldn't want to just right now say. Fair enough. And last one, last one on this, should President Joe Biden, who does have primary challenges, should he debate? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean,

I think at some point you're going to have to get to a point of like viability. You know, we get a little further down the line, but if like, you know, I mean, they're pulling higher than a lot of the Republicans, which is my point. But that could change. I think one debate might change that. Okay. But yeah, I don't think, I support President Biden, but I think democracy is about debate. If we can't have a free exchange of ideas,

if we're mad at people burning books and DeSantis and all that, we shouldn't be scared to have him stand up there and talk to people. I think that's entirely fair. Tell people where they can find you, Will. WillGiwando.com. There you go.

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