Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/14/22: Historic Inflation, Uvalde Footage, Ukraine Weapons, Bolton Coup Admission, Class Divides, Saudi Policy, & More!

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the new inflation numbers, unearthed Uvalde police footage, Ukraine war weapons concerns, John Bolton's coup admission, Ray Epps suspicions, Trump vs DeSantis debate, college divide shaping politics, & Biden's Middle East visit!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Trita Parsi: https://www.tritaparsi.com/ https://quincyinst.org/ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed we do. Many things to get to this morning. So we are now getting video out of Uvalde from within the school. And, I mean, it's just unimaginable what these guys did, what they didn't do. So we'll break down for you everything that we learned there. Also, some stunning numbers on inflation and new indications the Fed could actually lift rates up to a full percentage point. I mean, this is truly wild, truly insane. Former Ambassador John Bolton. Yes. Thank you for the comments. Saying the quiet part out loud about his involvement in coups. We also have a New York Times look into Ray Epps, who has been the center of some conjecture about exactly what

happened on January 6th and who was involved. We're also going to have Dr. Parsi here to talk through Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia. But we wanted to start actually with a few announcements before we jump into the show. Three announcements. Number one, live show. Do we have that graphic control room? Can we go? Yes, there it is.

Center Stage Theater, Atlanta, September 16th. We're coming 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. As we said, if you can help us sell out this venue, deeply helps out the show because we can show the rest of the industry and others that we can indeed sell tickets. We've actually already done a pretty good job, but I would really like to sell this one out in a so-called mid-market city just to show the world what Breaking Points can do nationwide. So if you're

in the area, we would really appreciate you joining and buying tickets. We're going to have links down in the description. What's number two? Ah, yes, premium subscribers. Thank you all so much. As we said, for planning and financial purposes, it's very helpful to us if there are monthly subscribers who are able to upgrade to the yearly subscription. We're offering a discount, a 20% discount on that for the existing monthly subscribers. There's going to be a link in your premium newsletter all at the top. For those who have already done so, it is so, so helpful to us, like you said, for financial planning purposes. As we move into the midterms, we have some bigger expenses that we want to be able to make sure that we have the cash for. So thank you. And then number three, we're going to be off next week. So Crystal, you're going on vacation. It's my

grandfather's 90th birthday. So I'm going to be on a plane to India. As I was telling you, I have to wear a mask the entire time. So that'll be fun. 20 hours of travel. Your passport experience was crazy too. My passport experience was insane. I'm not going to bore everybody with the details, but basically the state department is a total mess right now as a result. COVID. I had to go in person. Yeah, let me just tell this at the top.

It was horrific. And so I had to, thank God, I was able to get an in-person appointment where you get your passport the same day. And this lady showed up, and clearly she didn't speak English that well and she was a US citizen and she didn't make her appointment properly and her son is in the hospital in Ghana this is from what I could gather and they were like, ma'am, there's no appointments for the next

two weeks. She's like, I need to get on a plane to Ghana and people were like, oh my god, I'll give her my appointment but there's nothing you could do. They were like, no, you have to come, I'll give her my appointment. But there's nothing you could do. They were like, no. They were like, you have to come back. And she was, like, crying. It was horrible.

Imagine letting just some, like, bullshit bureaucratic rule get in the way. Well, she had travel. You know, there's only nine of these. Passport. Luckily, we live in D.C. There's only nine of these things in the whole country. So I think she had travel. Oh, my God.

I felt so bad for her. Jesus. So, anyway, the things you see in these agencies, nightmare. It got done, thankfully. So I can get my visa. But anyway, so those are the three announcements. And we do have, we've been banging a bunch of content. So you will see a little bit of us next week.

We also are going to have great partner content for you next week. So we will not be entirely dark, but we also will not be doing our full show. And we'll be back the week after. We'll be back the week after. Reset, recharge, all that good stuff. Yes, reset, recharge. I'm going to go eat some great food in India. Not in Europe.

Okay. All right. Let's start with inflation. All right. Let's start with the big, very bad inflation numbers. Let's put the headline up on the screen here from Heather Long at The Washington Post, who does a good job just tracking the numbers. She says, Justin, inflation is getting worse. Inflation rose 9.1% year over year in June. That is the highest since

1981, the year of my birth, and the highest so far in the pandemic period. Gas, rent, and food drove the increase. Gas accounted for about 50% of the increase. Inflation was up 1.3% just in the month of June alone. Let's go ahead and put some of the specifics here. This next tweet up on the screen about what categories we are seeing the highest inflation in. This again, Heather Long says inflation continues to hit hard. Groceries up 12% in the past year. That's the biggest annual increase since 1979. Chicken up 19% in the past year. That's the biggest increase ever. Gas up 60%, biggest since 1981. Electricity up 14%, biggest since 2006.

Rent, this is a really critical one, up 5.8%, biggest since 1986. A little bit more on rent. Put the next one up. Over the past three months, rents have risen at an annual rate of 8.2%. Owner's equivalent rent rising at 7.3% rate. That's especially worrying because rents don't tend to turn around quickly. And the part that is probably the most crucial point here, let's put this A4 up on the screen. Bottom line, wages are up 5.1% in the past year. That sounds pretty good. But costs are up 9.1%. That means you are getting a massive

pay cut. Gas prices have come down a little lately, she says, which will help. But food, rent, electricity are showing few signs of relief. We're going to get to the cope, the political cope from Biden and Pelosi in just a moment. But, you know, there continues to be hope that, oh, we're getting to the peak. Month after month after month, we hear these, oh, we're at the worst of the crisis is behind us. But what's really troubling here is that even if you strip out the most volatile pieces, which are like food and gas prices, what they call core inflation is still rising at a rapid pace. That would seem to indicate that we are not moving past the end

of this crisis. And listen, I think everyone should have a lot of humility about predicting exactly how and what happens here. But there is no sign at this point that, you know, the Fed's goal of reducing inflation is working. The Fed's goal of point that, you know, the Fed's goal of reducing inflation is working. The Fed's goal of hurting you is working, but the Fed's goal of reducing inflation through the actions that they're taking thus far, we're not seeing in the numbers. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any getting around it. And any of the structural issues that are affecting inflation are not being solved. So gas, I mean, you know, people are saying the administration we're about to get to is like championing the fact that gas is only $4.60 a gallon.

It's actually still near $5 here in D.C. Okay, yeah, I'm not going to say $0.30 a gallon reduction isn't a good thing, but that doesn't mean that it's still good. I mean, by the time before Russia invaded Ukraine, I think it was $3.50 a gallon. That was already high, and a lot of people were complaining. So around the twos is where people feel comfortable as a consumer. So, look, you're still over 100% on that. On food, I mean, the food price problem continues to skyrocket. Also, the fertilizer issues and natural gas and more that we've been talking about, none of that is going away. And not just right now, for years and years. Because

crop planning and others that people, farmers and others need to do in Europe and in the United States, all of those problems remain. On top of the supply chain issues, I mean, the port of Los Angeles continues to be a nightmare. It's not as bad as it was a year ago, but it's still not even close to 2019. And then you add on top of that the recessionary problems that we already have in the economy where people just don't want to spend as much money. So you have a reduction in demand, you have the supply chain problems, and then you have the gas issue on top of the geopolitical risk situation. All of that just means that it's just not going to go away anytime soon. In addition to

fuel oil is probably the highest part of all of inflation that people are seeing at home. As I've talked about here ad nauseum, the energy crisis that we're all experiencing is going to continue. And as the country gets colder into the winter, that's actually when I think we'll probably see some of the worst energy inflation. So gas may come down to four something a gallon just because of reduction in demand. But electricity prices are going to probably just replace and eat even more of people's income. So it's rough out there if you're a consumer. It absolutely is. I read the New York Times analysis of these inflation numbers and what they mean and what might happen in the future. And their quote unquote, like silver lining or

like hope of what might happen. They say there are some reasons that today's rapid price gains could abate based on the economy's fundamentals. For example, consumers might struggle to sustain their spending as prices jump. If they move in with roommates, stop taking vacations, or pull back on social activities to save money, supply could begin to catch up with demand, allowing price gains to decelerate. So they're hoping that people are hurting so badly that they're having to move in with roommates, cancel their social activities, cancel their vacations, stop driving. I mean, that is the economic policy of this administration. And this is what the Republicans are offering as well. They have no actual solutions

that would deal with the corporate price gouging, the supply chain issues, nothing that's going to get through Congress. The only thing that they can do is crush demand. And so that's what they're actually hoping for. I mean, how absolutely grim is that? They are hoping that the American consumer is so badly hit that they have to pull back on their car trips, their road trips, their vacation, their spending, their meals out, their, you know, moving in with roommates, all of these things. It really, that it's just incredibly ugly that this is what our policymakers have resorted to. Housing is the one I'm probably the most worried about because you already pointed out 8% on a national average. Okay, you know, that's national. But if we're talking metro areas, so there's actually a story that just broke this morning. Manhattan rent has broken $5,000 for the first time in New York City history.

$5,000 for the average rent in the city. That's so insane. On Manhattan Island. Okay, yeah, you can live in Brooklyn. Is it going to be that much better in Queens and elsewhere? That stuff bleeds out because what happens is, of course, the ultra-rich are not affected by this. And even the upper middle class broadly can afford it. I'm talking about this in my monologue.

Only 17% of white college-educated voters say that the economy or inflation is their top issue in 2022. The fact is they can just absorb it. But everybody else has to deal with it. And so the trickle-down effect of squeezing upper-class and upper-middle-class people out of the housing market is just going to balloon the rent market even more, which is just going to force even more working-class people, even middle-class people, honestly, out into the real dregs of housing. So people are going to have to drive more, which means they're going to spend more gas, live in subpar conditions, 30-, 35-year-olds living with roommates. I mean, this is not the way the country was designed to work.

But effectively, that's the policy right now of the Federal Reserve is to push things in that direction. story about how many people are pulling out of their contracts when they're buying a home. They put the house under contract and then 15 percent are now walking away and say, ah, we can't do this anymore because of inflation, because of, you know, the way the prices have escalated and specifically because of the way that mortgage rates have dramatically spiked. I mean, a huge historic spike in mortgage rates, which again, that's the intent. But the place, so you're not seeing the results of the Fed policy in terms of inflation coming down, but you are seeing the Fed policy in terms of regular consumers, Americans being hurt and, you know, increasingly struggling to be able to sort of move forward with their lives and

especially things like being able to get into a house, which, as you said, that has a trickle-down effect in terms of, okay, if that person's not buying a house, then they're in the rental market. Then someone who was already in the rental market who was sort of struggling to hang on there gets pushed down into homelessness. It's a really, really bad downward spiral. So let's talk about what the politicians are saying about all of this. President Biden, let's go ahead and put a five up on the screen. He says the CPI data is out of date because gas prices have fallen. Let me read this statement. He says, well, today's headline inflation reading is unacceptably high.

It is also out of date. Energy alone comprise nearly half of the monthly increase in inflation. Today's data does not reflect the full impact of nearly 30 days of decreases in gas prices that have reduced the price of the pump by about 40 cents since mid-June. Those savings are providing important breathing room for American families and other commodities like wheat have fallen sharply since this report. It is a good thing that gas prices are going down, there's no doubt about it. But as I was saying before, you know, if you look past the gas and food prices at, you know, core inflation, you still see these huge spikes. So, you know, in terms of really making a case that we're at the peak of the crisis and things are going to start to abate, that maybe that could be the case. But there isn't particularly evidence for that in this report.

It's also just so stupid. You're not supposed to celebrate $4.60 a gallon. I mean, we were sounding the alarm here on this show when gas was like $4.30 a gallon. And just keep in mind what's happening on the West Coast of this country. California is still $5.99 a gallon on average, which means in the city, it's over $6 a gallon. Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, and Illinois all still have $5 a gallon. The national price, yeah, it's at $4.60. Here in the Northeast, it's well over $4.50 a gallon as well. So the only people who are actually seeing cheaper gas are the people who live near refineries in the South, like Texas is at about $4.13. But I don't think you should celebrate the fact that gas, the cheapest gas in the people who live near refineries in the South, like Texas is at about $4.13. But I

don't think you should celebrate the fact that gas, the cheapest gas in the country is like $4.11 in the state of Georgia, where they've had to slash the gas tax and do all sorts of financial chicanery even to get there. This is not a victory. And yet at the same time, Nancy Pelosi, let's put this up there on the screen. She says, I think we're peaking. I think we're going to be going down from here. Now, people pointed out Biden in December, so seven months ago, said that inflation had likely peaked. Also, I learned from personal experience, you shouldn't be getting into the prognostication game and you should just sit back and let it all work out. Just be like, what's going on here? Because all we can really understand is that inflation is out of control for a multitude and a variety of reasons, far longer lasting than anybody expected. And you should have a deep amount of humility if you're a policymaker. Let's throw that up there. The Biden comment specifically, I think it's the peak of the cry. That was in December of 2021, back way before we hit 40-year highs

on inflation. If anything, inflation has actually gotten worse in the last seven months. So when you consider the cope and the prognostication from these people, the issue I have too is that they're just constantly trying to gaslight the American people. Like Biden is trying to go out there and say, well, gas prices have come down every day for the last 30 days. Yeah, you're right, from $5 a gallon nationally to $4.60. So $0.40 a gallon to a still unmanageable price, that's not a victory. They're always trying to play games with the charts and by saying, gaslighting people, this is the strongest labor market since World War II, the strongest economy. Listen, as you pointed out in the wage thing, wages are up five, inflation is up nine. So that means people got a 4% cut. A year, you know, if you compare it to 2019, people got even a larger of a cut. So what does that mean? Things are way too expensive. You know, I was looking, people

are paying like $8 for a dozen of eggs in some places in the country. That's crazy. I mean, eggs is one of the highest, chicken as well. I was even seeing, and this is really gross and dystopian, there are YouTube channels of like this old grandma called Depression Cooking, which is seeing a skyrocket number of views. I love that. Because people are buying whole chickens to learn how to like roast chicken stock, make their own taco. Anything to cut costs at home, specifically moms, you know, or people are going out and buying like Costco rotisserie chickens and learning how to, you know, make a whole week's worth of meals out of those things. You know, look, being frugal is fine, but it's more pointing to that's the economic reality. People are pointing to, people are looking at

YouTube channels to try and save $5 here, $4 here, or whatever per day, just because the price is so much higher. People's grocery bill is up over 100% in some cases. Yeah, I guess, you know, the other thing that really irritates me, not just irritates, it really enrages me about the Biden response is his defenders, you know, would say, oh, well, back in December when he said he thought this was the peak, this before Russia invaded Ukraine. And so, you know, this is out of our hands. What could we do? Completely ignoring the fact that we are playing a very active role in that crisis, that our posture and approach of keeping that war going indefinitely is creating massive inflationary pressures,

not only for our own people, but around the globe. And this is part of, you know, we covered the crisis in Sri Lanka, which has a myriad of causes, but one of them is skyrocketing food and fuel prices that are leading people to absolute desperation. And so inflation is high around the world. There are a lot of reasons for that. But part of it is our response to the Russia's war in Ukraine and in particular the Russian oil ban. So to pretend like, oh, there's nothing we can do. We're just going to sit back and hope that things get better from here and hope the Fed, you know, does their best to crush the consumers so that ultimately supply and demand can meet up again. Hope is not a strategy. And also, that's the worst possible way and the

most painful way that you could deal with inflation is by just depending on the Fed. And that's a great transition to the next piece here, which is that, listen, the Fed initially, when they started hiking rates, was like, OK, maybe a quarter of a point up, maybe half a point. Oh, that's a lot. Oh, maybe 0.75 of a 0.75 basis points. Now, according to Bloomberg, the Fed could weigh a historic 100 basis point hike, that's a full percentage point, after inflation scorcher. They say futures show one in three chance of a supersized July move. 75 basis points now also in play for Fed's September meeting. Let me read you a little bit of this just to hear their analysis. They have quotes here from economists who say, after what happened in June,

I do not rule anything out. This is the chief economist at Amherst, Pierpont, Securities, whatever that is. I had been thinking that the Fed would decelerate to a 50 basis point per meeting pace beginning in September. But if the next two monthly inflation numbers look like May's and June's, all bets are off. So you now have analysts saying they could go as high as a full percentage point hike. This is an insane escalation because the only thing worse than inflation is inflation that continues plus a recession. Plus, not only are you getting your wages cut effectively by inflation, but oh, now you're actually out of a job. I mean, there are ways that this situation could get much, much, much worse. And that seems very much to be the

direction that we are risking right now. Yeah, Citibank came out with an assessment this morning. They say, quote, we now see 100 basis policy policy rate increase at this month's FOMC meeting as the most likely outcome. So people at the market preparing for a 100% or 100 basis point hike. I mean, even if it's 75 basis points, 0.75%, that's a lot. I mean, I was looking right now, the average mortgage rate right now in the United States at a 30-year fix is 6.36%. That's the largest increase in the mortgage rate in a short period of time in modern American history. So, okay, we're not living yet in the 1970s, but it's beginning to rhyme a lot with the 1970s. Yes, it is.

And everything bleeds into consumer spending. This means that businesses on a macro level cannot borrow cash at a cheap rate in order to invest in their workforce and in capital expenditure. So they're going to cut all investments, cut their workforce in order to protect the stock price, especially as consumer demand goes down. Also, on a micro level, try getting a car loan right now. Try getting a house loan right now. Try getting any basic loan outside of the credit card system. And you are looking at a very, very high rate, which is going to constrain your behavior. So it bleeds all the way down and increases the likelihood of unemployment.

And really, I mean, that's the goal. You saw Larry Summers came out yesterday. We talked about this. He's one of these people very much of this view. He said we need at least 6% unemployment right now. I mean, that's almost double the unemployment rate. That's hundreds of millions of people who are going to be unemployed if that becomes the case. He said we need 10% for a year. Yeah, for a year. Or 6% for like three years.

Right. This is actually psychopathic. The backdrop of all of this, too, is, you know, labor has this historic sort of momentum behind it in terms of the grassroots organizing that's going on. You've had huge skyrocket in the number of union elections. And you've had I'm sure you've heard all of this like whining of the capital class of like, oh, we can't get workers in the labor market. There's not enough people to work and we're having to give them raises. And it's so terrible. They would actually love a higher unemployment rate because that imposes a sort of discipline on workers, makes it less likely that they're going to file for union elections, puts them in a position where they just have to take whatever scraps they're ultimately given. So there's an incentive here from the capital class, too, to discipline labor and hike the unemployment rate above and beyond just, oh, we want to get inflation under control. So that's part of an important context here as well.

And unfortunately, I mean, history bears out that if we go into a recession, if we have unemployment continue to spike, which the last jobs report continues to be very strong, we continue to create a lot of jobs. They're just, you know, wages are getting cut by the cost at every single turn. But, you know, history shows that if you do have unemployment rates spike, you're going to have many fewer union elections. You're going to have workers in a much more difficult and precarious position. So, again, as bad as things are now, they can get worse. They can get a lot worse if we continue to have inflation because we're not dealing with the underlying issues and we're in a recession. That is an utter disaster and catastrophe. Yeah, look, the inflation is not going to be stopped by a cut in demand because only about maybe a third of it-ish is demand influence. So that means two-third of it

is going to be supply. We really could be living in... Also, the other thing is that let. So that means two-third of it is going to be supply. We really could be living in... Also, the other thing is that let's say that the Fed is the only option. Well, then you actually have to basically do what Paul Volcker did in the 1970s and raise interest rates to like 25% and actually induce a massive recession with a crash consumer demand. Jerome Powell says he doesn't want to do that. So then you would have this weird world where interest rates are like 8%, 9%, not actually high enough to induce a full scale recession, but also not going to deal with any of the underlying problems. And we will just skate through this thing for years and years and years. I really do think this is going to define

possibly the next five years to the next decade. We had a decade of easy money, and now we're probably going to have a decade of some, I think, hard times. Now, you know, there's an argument for that from a libertarian perspective, like the best companies come out of a bootstrap. Okay, yeah, maybe. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of suffering along the way. Well, we know coming out of the last recession, what really happened is you had a massive spike in inequality. Ultimately, the response to the recession contributed to that. You had a majority of middle-class jobs

that were lost during the recession. Coming out of the recession, the majority of the jobs that created were low-paid, low-wage jobs. So this hasn't worked out well for working-class people. Again, the people who have money, recession's an opportunity for them. This is the same thing we saw last time as well. They went out, they snatched up lots of single family

homes and apartment complexes. They bought all kinds of distressed assets so that when things turned around, they were in a position to massively, massively profit. So, you know, they always win no matter the situation. And again, they would be happy to see labor disciplined a little bit and able and so that they can once again just call all the shots and have workers have absolutely no say in their workplace. The last thing I want to say about the Fed policy, because I think it's important to keep the global context in this again, is what happened in Sri Lanka this week. What's continuing to unfold in Sri Lanka is an important reminder of this, as we hike rates here at home, that effectively increases the cost of dollar denominated debt around the world. So all of these developing world nations that borrowed heavily during the coronavirus crisis to be able to take care of their people while their economies were

shut down, they're in a very precarious position now. And not only are they dealing with the knockout effects of the war and the massive inflation increases and all of these other disruptions that are going on around the globe, but then also their debt is becoming much more expensive to service. So they are getting squeezed in a lot of ways. That's why you've seen a huge spike in the amount of distressed sovereign debt around the globe. You already see a sort of flight of investors from developing world bonds. That can also create a kind of domino effect of instability and chaos around the world that, of course, doesn't just stay in those countries. 40th order effects, they always exist. All right. Let's talk about Ubald. This is just, I haven't been able to really stop thinking about

this one. I know. We know the details, of course. We've known them now for a while. The cops stood out there, did nothing, the broad contours. But luckily, some hero somewhere leaked the video, the full video of the officers and their engagement in Uvalde in the classroom. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Major props to the Austin American-Statesman. They got the video. They did an excellent job doing the analysis. They edited it. I mean, one of the most haunting lines is they say that they edited out the screams of the children from the video so that none of us would have to hear it.

And what they point to is just a level of screwery inside which is difficult to comprehend. You can actually see the gunman come in. You see a child actually peek his head around the corner, and you can immediately hear the gunshots. That's apparently where the screams were edited out. Then within a couple of minutes, you see three officers come in, come close to the door, get engaged. But immediately, the moment they have fire, they all run back. From that moment forward for another 77 minutes, nobody goes inside. And we are talking about dozens of guys who are gathered within this room. Just milling around, fist bumping. On their phones, literally on their phones. Getting hand sanitizer. Fist bumping,

getting hand sanitizer. It's difficult to describe how aimless so much of this looks. We have a video mashup here. Just look if you know if this is a sensitive thing or whatever, I recommend that you don't watch it. But for those who can stomach it, let's take a listen. I'm going to put it up. Stand there. So the reason that that matters is you can see clearly, I mean, 10 minutes, 11 minutes, there were gunshots that were still being fired while these guys were standing out there. If you continue to watch, I mean, again, it's a 77-minute-long video, but if you continue to watch, what you see is you got guys milling around.

At the 56-minute mark, they're like, we're going in, but they don't go in. Everybody's, quote, looking for the keys even though the door wasn't locked. And also even, you know, why didn't nobody ask for the keys earlier? A colossal cluster. You know, the hand sanitizer thing we referenced. Just put this up there on the screen. I mean, just look at this guy. I mean, he's got a helmet on.

You know, he's got his vest on. He's getting hand sanitizer. People were fist bumping. People were checking their phones. People are text messaging, making phone calls. You can say, which they have, and blamed Pete Arredondo, who was the chief of police, who made the call not to go in. But you guys were all out there. And ultimately, it was the Border Patrol guys at the end who were so disturbed that they even went in. Although, to be fair, you know, you can see that they were standing out there for a

little while, too. They were milling around there for a fucking hour, too. Yeah, so look, it's not, there's some heroes, I don't know who they are. I think the biggest one is probably the guy whose wife was, I think he was killed and called him and was texting him from the room.

He tried to go in. They literally held him back, stopped him. You can actually see some of that in the video, too. So I don't know. That image with the guy and the hands,

it just really sticks with me. It's at the 57 minute mark, too. I mean, they're all just so casual like there's nothing going on like this is no big deal just hanging around hanging around in their tough guy little outfits like they're badasses when they're too fucking cowards too cowardly to go in and rescue these kids i mean they heard they didn't have the kids' screams edited out in real time. They heard that. They heard that gunfire in those classrooms where there are children and teachers,

and they do nothing for so long. You know, one of the other things that really stood out to me is, remember we were told, oh, they engaged the gunman, but they were wounded. So they had to fall back. Oh, were they?

Really? Show me. Where's that? Where does that happen? I know. I mean, that was a total lie and bullshit. And I knew that from the beginning because they wouldn't give us any details about, like, who was injured, how they were doing, were they in the hospital? Nothing.

None of those police officers ended up going to the hospital because none of them were injured. That was a total lie and part of their cover-up as an excuse for why they did not ultimately go in. And to your point, you know, they all have wanted to scapegoat this one dude who definitely deserves a lot of blame, no doubt about it. But you had on the scene there that you see visibly in this video, you have the Uvalde Police Department, the regular police department. You have the Uvalde County Sheriff's Department. You have the Texas Department of Public Safety. You have Texas Rangers. You have U.S. Border Patrol.

And you have U.S. Marshal Service. Show me in the video where they're having to restrain these people from going in. No, they're not trying to go in. They're not like, oh, my God, we want to go in and this guy just won't let us. No, they're all doing the same thing, which is absolutely nothing. So listen, as you said, we knew a lot of these details already, not because this is the story they told us, but it became blatantly obvious that they had just kind of hung around and hoped someone else would come in and do the hard work and do the scary

thing that they didn't want to do. But to actually see the video and all these guys and how casual they are as kids are bleeding out on the floor, you can't unsee it. You can't unsee it. I mean, and the people who are the families here, they're so upset. That teacher who we played a video of him before, he just talks. He says he'll never forgive these cops. I mean, he was sitting there. And I want to address another thing. People were like, well, there weren't a lot of shots afterwards.

People bled out in that classroom. You don't know how many people died. If you'd gone in there and you neutralized this guy within 10 minutes, maybe you could have saved some lives. But, you know, a lot of people bled out. That's your blood loss. And anybody who's worked in the military, a first responder will tell you the first minutes are critical. So you let somebody just sit there and bleed out for over an hour, you're guaranteeing death. At the very least, you can give some people, at least some people, a fighting chance. And again, that's just something that they are not, they won't even acknowledge.

And what pisses me off even more, this mayor, this guy has a serious problem. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen because he's been playing cover-up from the very beginning. He went out and actually castigated the Austin American statesman as, quote, chicken and unprofessional for releasing the video footage before the families were able to see it first. Yeah, well, why didn't you show it to him? You know, it's been over a month. And they've been asking for it from the very beginning. And this guy is very upset because Uvalde police has been getting the blame. And actually, on this part, I will agree with him. It's not like the Texas Department of Public Safety doesn't have things to cover up, too. And yeah, you're right. Screw all of you. That's really what it comes down to. I was also reading

about how there was a, quote, heated debate where Governor Abbott and others had wanted to release a video but didn't do anything about it. Now, look, maybe his office leaked it and they didn't want it. I don't know who leaked it. That being said, I think the governor and them should still be much more forward. And I don't think it should come out this way. It shouldn't have to be leaked to the Austin American-Statesman. The governor and the attorney general should come out and be like, hey, here's a video. Anybody in that video who has shown a dereliction of duty is hereby laid off, fired by

the state of Texas. At the least. Yeah. The least. Yes. Not, you know, and you think about it, given the way our laws are structured, it's not, none of them are ever going to face any criminal penalty for what they did here, given the Supreme Court and ruling that police don't actually have a duty to protect you. But also, you know, none of them are really open to civil liability either. I personally think they should be. I think this guy, Arredondo, should be sued to high hell for what he did. Again, because at least you can tie back the decision making to him. But there are a lot of individual actors who made terrible, terrible, terrible decisions that day. I mean, at least we have the video. At least we can all see it.

I think it's really disgusting that the mayor tried to, like, use the residents of, like, oh, how dare you release this. They wanted it. Of course. A resident shot back because he said, oh, these journalists are chicken and unprofessional for releasing the footage. And they said a resident shot back asking him if he thought the cops were chickens. How about that? So the residents, I'm sure, feel that this has been a service that has done that gives the public and gives them some at least answers about what actually happened. So to hide behind this, I mean, it's just total bullshit. It really has been a cover up at all levels. And by the way,

there is still a lot of information that has not come out because they are blocking the release of the body cam footage, any and all documents relevant to that day. At every level from the county to the state, they are standing in the way of that information ultimately being released to the public. And at this point, I mean, the very least, given the colossal, what should be criminal, failures that happened here, the very least they can do is provide these families with the truth of what unfolded on that day.

And people who are relatives of the victims reacted, and they're disgusted. They're horrified. And, like, you know, this is the main thing. It's not just the Evaldi police. There were feds there, Border Patrol. Texas Rangers, U.S. Marshals.

U.S. Marshals. All of them should be dragged before. I mean, look, can't somebody in Congress step up too? You have subpoena power. Yeah, that's true. Drag their asses before Congress.

Make them, you know, make them testify or let them plead the fifth if they want to. But let people see it because the video, I think, make them testify or let them plead the fifth if they want to. But let people see it because the video, I think, should just be the starting point. I mean, I'm not naive and I think most of these guys will keep their jobs, which is honestly the most disgusting part of this entire thing. All right, let's talk about Ukraine. Let's go ahead and put this up there

on the screen. This is something that we've been warning about from the very beginning and finally beginning to come true. The European Union and NATO governments are now sounding alarm over arms smuggling from Ukraine into Europe as governments fret over billions of weapons sent to Kyiv are ending up after they cross the border. And I think this is a very important piece because it's something that we really were trying to warn about from the beginning, which is that what you can see is that the billions of dollars in weapons that we're sending to Ukraine, now, of course, we're sending them to the Ukrainian military, but the Ukrainian military is not just a whole organization. We found this out the hard way in the Afghan military. There are many different composite parts. Sometimes there's not good people who are

in there, and sometimes they're willing to accept cash from really shady people and just sell them elsewhere and then come back to the U.S. and say, hey, by the have been distributed without records since then. And there is no currently real register of any of these weapons the moment that they end up in Ukraine. So the way that the kind of possession process works is NATO and the US, we take the weapons there, we scan them, we have good records, obviously, and we hand them over. Well, the moment that they get on a truck in Ukraine and go wherever the hell they're supposed to go, nobody knows. And from that point, we have seen this happen in Libya. We saw it happen in Syria. We saw it happen in Afghanistan. We saw how Libyan and Syrian weapons had to die out all across all sorts of crazy conflicts. I mean, don't forget, this stuff can bleed back, you know, even when Syria, for example, remember those Paris attacks? I mean, a lot of that was organized

in ISIS territory, in Syria, the training, the planning. So a vacuum of power with an influx of weapons has never worked out for modern Western policy, except this one is actually on the European continent. So you could see very sophisticated weapons and weapon systems ending up in the hands of all sorts of crazy people with cash. You know, there's Chechen separatists. There's, you know, we've got the Dagestanis, you know, who are also in Russia. There's no shortage of separatist groups in Western Europe and militias elsewhere. And all these people would love to get their hands on some brand new weapons from the United States or from NATO. And that's exactly what they're warning about in this piece.

Yeah. They say, they quote a Western official who says, all these weapons land in Southern Poland, get shipped to the border, and then are just divided up into vehicles to cross, trucks, vans, sometimes private cars. And from that moment on, we go blank on their location and we have no idea where they go, where they are used, or even if they stay in the country. You'll recall that the last massive authorization of spending that passed through Congress, I think it was Rand Paul who said, hey, let's have some accountability along with this. How about we track, actually track and, you know, make sure we're keeping account of where these weapons go and who they end up with, et cetera. Got voted down. They said no.

And that's exactly the problem when you have just a total blank check is, you know, they can sell off some of these weapons. They can go into the black market. They can make some cash and they can just come back to their American patrons and say, oh, we use those. We need more. And maybe Sosolinski. He wouldn't even their American patrons and say, oh, we use those. We need more. And maybe it's not Zelensky. He wouldn't even know about it. No, I'm not putting this. That's what I'm saying.

Ukraine was not a well-run country. Let's not have any illusions about Ukraine being some really super efficient and non-corrupt nation before any of this happened. It was not. I mean, it ranks very poorly on measures of corruption. So there are a lot of holes in the system through which anything can slip. We literally just saw this whole story play out in Afghanistan. I mean, I've told some stories here before about how the Afghan military kept requisitioning all this gas and the military commanders like,

how are they using all this gas for the Humvees? They were like, oh, they didn't use them at all. They never even drove the Humvees. They sold the gas at a profit. They just took it from us and then sold it off. Take that and multiply by $700 billion. Well, now we've got $40 billion so far of what we've shipped over to Ukraine, or at the very least it's been appropriated. And just yesterday it was like $1.7 billion in additional aid that's heading over there. I'm not saying that some of the weapons that we're giving them aren't making an effect. Throw this next one up there on the screen. They've been using these new anti-aircraft

systems against air defense systems in Russian territory, which have actually been very helpful. There's been a lot of jokes and memes in the military community about how the Russians, for some odd reason, store their ammunition and others in very concentrated places, which obviously make them easier in order to hit by the Ukrainians with US-supplied technology. But it also does highlight, hey, what if one of these things gets into the wrong hands? That could be a very serious problem. And we saw the exact play out of this in the 1990s, whenever Ukraine specifically was a major shipping ground for all sorts of black market weapons all across the world.

Nobody knows where the hell all of this stuff is going to end up in the future. And that exactly highlights the issue. And at the same time, our producer James has been highlighting this and pointing to it. Let's put this up there, which is that there is still a major problem right now in terms of grain exports. Remember that Ukraine was one of the world's largest shippers of grain. It's always been known as kind of one of the bread baskets of Europe. And there's been ongoing plans right now to try and get some of this damn grain out of the Black Sea in order to alleviate some of the issues with global hunger. But that still has not been hammered out. It's not completely finalized with a deal. And it just highlights that there are major spillover Ukraine and learn from, it's not ancient history. It just happened.

We ran this whole experiment multiple times in the 2010s. And then before that in the 1980s. It's happened over and over again. And we never learn our lesson. And people call you a propagandist or whatever if you point it out. It's like, listen, we have broader interests outside of just Ukraine. But that itself is a foreign mindset to a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, listen, of course, the worst suffering is being committed on Ukrainian soil.

You know, there's no doubt about it. The Ukrainians are the ones who are suffering the most in this whole situation. But there is a lot of suffering around the globe that is knock on effects from this crisis, from this war in the rising food costs, in the fact that a lot of places that really depend on Russia for fertilizer because of the banking sanctions effectively can't get it. So that means you not only have higher food prices, but you have a drop in crop productivity so that, you know, countries are unable to feed themselves. They're having to try to import more grain, more, you, more basic staples of their people's diet, unable to do it, under stress from all kinds of different directions. And so you're seeing a truly historic amount of hunger and people who are struggling with famine and food insecurity. You have nations that are on edge and in crisis. I mean, the bread riots have already started in all kinds

of places around the globe. As I was alluding to before, you also have nations that are being pushed closer to the brink of default on their sovereign debt. Sri Lanka already, obviously, that has happened. Pakistan is another nation that has really been pushed to the edge. So this war is causing a lot of chaos around the globe. Now, listen, no one here is saying that it would be easy to end, that the U.S. could snap their fingers and it could be all over. That is not the case. But our posture, our strategy has not been to even try to push for negotiations in some sort of a settlement, which is going to be very politically difficult for Zelensky. There's no doubt about it because it seems that the bulk of the Ukrainian people believe they can win, believe that they don't have to cede any kind of territory. We should be putting pressure on our allies to try to bring this thing to the close rather than what

we've been doing, which is putting pressure on the Ukrainians to keep this thing going, because this is a disaster for the entire globe. And it is first and foremost, a disaster for the Ukrainian people. Having a war, an endless war on their soil is going to devastate this country for years and years to come. Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, you know, it's going to take a long time, even if we decided to pursue peace. And we all watched what happened with Syria. Syria dragged on for years and years. And the longer it went, the more weapons that were flowing per capita into that place. And go ask, you know, people who who live in Syria how that worked out for them. So Syria becoming a playground of the great powers is probably the worst thing that happened to the actual Syrians themselves. And I'm sure a lot of them would have preferred at least something in 2012 or 2013 as opposed to the bloodshed that eventually came 2015 onward.

All right. Shall we check in with our friend John Bolton? Yeah, let's do it. Former National Security Advisor under Donald Trump, also former UN Ambassador under President George W. Bush. So he's served in all sorts of Republican administrations. And he was recently on CNN with Jake Tapper, and they were talking about whether Trump was really competent enough to plan and execute a coup. John Bolton had some interesting insight on this. Let's take a listen. With all due respect, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.

I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, not here, but, you know, other places, it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he did. I'm sorry. Come again? I mean, not that any of us are surprised that John Bolton has been involved in planning coups, but usually they try to keep that quiet. Here he is just brazenly saying the quiet part out loud, just openly admitting to it casually, like this is a perfectly fine and acceptable thing to cop to. It was completely nuts. And the reaction we'll get is really funny from the neocons who still support Bolton.

Yes. But it was one of those just absolute quiet part out louds. Maybe he was trying to be funny, but I don't think so. I think that there is some truth. He's got a long career, Assistant Secretary of State, and obviously he hasn't made his views private on this. And Jake Tapper actually continued to press him on this. Let's listen to that.

When we were talking about what is capable, what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups. I'm not going to get into the specifics, but- Successful coups? I wrote about Venezuela in the book, and it turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president. And they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable. But I think there's another- I feel like there's other stuff you're not telling me, though.

I think I'm sure there is. Well, so that's actually interesting. Having lived through some of that, when I was covering the White House, they refused to say that it was a coup. Right. I don't know if you remember that. And now here he is. And now he's like, yeah, I was involved in that coup, that Venezuelan coup. Because there were people who were like, well, hold on a second here.

You're recognizing some guy who is like the parliamentary leader, is the leader of Venezuela. Like what right do you have to do that whenever clearly he doesn't have any position where he has any hope of actually becoming the president. It became a whole thing. I mean that guy visited Washington. He was given like diplomatic recognition. Juan Guaido. It was totally by parts. Remember, there was standing ovation for him and all of that. The Maduro government, by the way, didn't go anywhere. And now we need their oil. I don't know if people have checked that out. So it was, anyway, I remember covering it at the time and people were asking, like, hey, is this a U.S. coup d'etat? They're like, absolutely not. You know, we're representing the diplomatic or the democratic will of the Venezuelan.

I'm not going to claim Maduro is democratically elected. Or Juan Guaido, okay? Like, the whole country is a complete mess. The whole point is that when you start trying to meddle in other countries like this specifically, it's really weird. Yeah. And that is, to have him just say it out loud in that way and also just fully acknowledge is just, it's really weird um yeah and that is to have him just say it out loud in that way and also just fully acknowledge is just it's crazy right because the mythology i think in america now is like well we during the cold of course you know out of our we didn't really want to we're

kind of forced our hand we had to do these coups it wasn't great to serve american interests read capitalist interests. But, you know, that that passes all behind us. And here's John Bolton outright being like, yeah, coups, Venezuela. Remember, just a couple of years ago, we were involved in that, which, again, at the time, there's no way they would have admitted to the fact that they were basically trying. I mean, not basically. They were literally trying to foment a coup in the country now in the modern era. And here's John Bolton just admitting it on television. The response was equally revealing, though. Let's go ahead and put up.

First of all, this is from put up D3 here. This is from someone who's a Bronco Marsetic, who I think is a good and smart observer. He says, I hope my American followers can understand how extreme and abnormal this is. I don't know any other country where a former official can just openly say this and then the journalist interviewing him simply nods along as if it's completely unremarkable. I mean, at least Tapper has a brain and is capable of, like, listening and then following up. But he kind of chuckled like this was some sort of a joke, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, of course we do coups.

Yeah, there is no other nation on Earth that would just outright admit to this casually, like this is no big deal, and then everyone just goes on as usual, and I'm sure John Bolton would be back in a cable news green room next week. Super weird. Yeah, and I also love, yeah, the January 6th thing,

oh, that, you know, you gotta have hearings and all this. this they're like oh yeah you know he was talking about coup it's like well hold on a second because that was not bipartisan well it was but in practice but congress never voted on that you know people are supposed to have some sort of democratic input nobody wants to have a hearing apparently it's just amazing to me which coup planners are you know pushed out and which are allowed i have a little bit to say on that in my monologue as well. But yeah, I mean, that is the great irony of this whole set piece is Bolton has been brought on to, you know, disparage for good reason, Trump and his insanity with regards to January 6th. And yet he is admitting to committing the very same crime just overseas. Since it was overseas, I guess we're able to chuckle about it and it's no big deal.

And he'll be perfectly fine in the cocktail circuit here in Washington, although some of his friends are a little bit peeved at him. First, we have Ken Klippenstein just saying, hey, wouldn't it be nice if Congress looked into that whole John Bolton orchestrating coups thing? Yeah, that would be useful, wouldn't it? Maybe once we get past the January 6 hearings, maybe we might look at other coups that our government officials have been attempting to perpetrate. But then you have, let's put this next one up on the screen. Lindsey Graham noted neocon. His reaction, quite telling. He says he was surprised by John Bolton admitting to coups. Quote, it was odd. It was like, be more specific. I've always liked John. I agree with him on foreign

policy, but was just kind of an offhand comment that rattled the system. So note here, it's not the coups that are the problem. He outright says, I agree with him on foreign policy. I think, you know, that's great work that he's doing. Just why did you, why'd you have to say anything about it? You're rattling the system by being actually honest about the horrific deeds that you're committing overseas. That's the problem here. And we also had John Cipher, who's like a former CIA op, go and put this on the screen. He said he's full of shit. He never planned a coup. Throw the next one up there. What else did he say? He says, I see a lot of misinformed people using this to push an agenda. My point is that Bolton's comment is dangerous because it says the false people, the American

people, senior officials sit in the White House and choreograph coups. That's nonsense. Well, you know, given the fact that he was a national security advisor, we should at least take it seriously. And then the all time. He literally is talking specifically about Venezuela. Right. And there are, I'm sure others as well. But this happened in recent years. So to pretend like this didn't happen is actually the nonsense. Right. And then the final one, which was hilarious, David from

The bright red light indicates the camera and microphone are on. Former national security advisors should measure their words and avoid cynical jokes that give aid and comfort to those who do not wish this country well. What a hilarious joke.

Ken Klippenstein says, how do you know it was a joke, David? Yeah, that's a great question. So anyway, I think that we should all be asking a little bit more questions about John Bolton. Yeah. And stop allowing him on television to just be, all he's good for is bashing Trump. But it's like, you know, there's a lot of other stuff you can ask too, as just haphazardly admitted, which is kind of hilarious.

Right, yeah. I mean, I would love to see him pushed a little more, you know, in detail on these things. That would be worthwhile having John Bolton on for that conversation, but that doesn't seem to be the direction they typically want to go in. Yeah. I just love how the neocon reaction wasn't, you know, horror at the things that our country does overseas, but that he would say it, that he would say it out loud, that he would brazenly admit to it publicly. That was the real issue. And so they have to pretend like, oh, of course, he's just kidding that old John. What a jokester. Clearly in the context, I mean,

he's not making a joke there. And then again, goes on to give some specifics about what he means. So in what way is this a joke? Exactly. January 6th committee hearings are happening. One of the undercover elements of all of this is what exactly was the role of police informants, FBI and others in the actual riot at the Capitol? Now, we are no way saying that they are the ones who are fully responsible for it. Obviously, Trump is the one who started Stop the Steal and that. But we do know that there were informants that were there, and there's been a longstanding question as to what the level of involvement was, how much did they know? If they did know and they had so many informants, why did it happen in the first place? These are all fantastic questions. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist in order to ask these.

One of the individuals has come under scrutiny is a guy named Ray Epps. He was a protester who was there. The reason why is because there's video that has been come out and edited together, which shows him repeatedly on the night of January 5th and then on the morning of January 6th, saying, we need to go into the Capitol. We need to go into the Capitol. And fellow protesters were so suspicious of him that they are actually chanting the word Fed at him. So let's take a listen to this video just so you guys get an idea of who this person is. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol.

What? No! No! Peaceful in. Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed! Tomorrow, I don't even like to say it because I'll be arrested. Well, let's not say it. We need, we need to go. I'll say it not say it. We need to go. I'll say it. All right. We need to go in. Shut the fuck up, Boomer. To the Capitol.

Face Fed posting? We need to go into the Capitol. I didn't see that coming. Okay. The president is not speaking. We are going to the Capitol where our problems are. It's that direction. We spread the word. All right. No, David, one more thing. Yeah, so can we go up there? No? When we go in? Are we

going to get arrested if we go up there? Yeah. You don't need to get shot. Can you arrest us all? Now, it's been a while since January 6th, and Mr. App's actually basically been missing for a long time. Well, the New York Times somehow found him at a quote-unquote secret location and interviewed him. So let's put this up there on the screen. Now, this is very interesting because they portray a sympathetic figure of Ray Epps. He had to sell his business. I'm sure that people have been trying to, and I don't condone any harassment of this guy, any of this stuff. But what's fascinating to me are a couple of things, Crystal. Number one, Epps acknowledges, actually, that he contacted the FBI, quote, minutes after discovering that agents wanted to talk to him. At no point in this entire article

and interview did the FBI ever ask him, hey, so did you ever have any affiliation in any way with the FBI whatsoever? They also acknowledge in the article that Ray Epps has not been charged by the FBI despite admitting to breaching the barriers of the Capitol. Now, he says, and there is no video evidence to claim that he ever entered the building. He claims now, though, a very different tone. Now, Ray Epps says he may sue Dominion or he may like join lawsuits against Stop the Steal people. He now says disinformation is like a scourge. He's reciting quite a few kind of liberal talking points that would be very amenable to CNN and to elsewhere. And seems to have completely abandoned his entire MAGA outlook to the point where he was encouraging people to breach it.

Maybe it's genuine. I don't know. But it's very odd. There were two things that stood out to me about the article is, first of all, have there been any other sympathetic portrayals of anyone who was at the Capitol? That's a fantastic point. Yeah, yeah, that's an excellent point. Maybe, but I haven't seen them. And this is a very sympathetic portrayal.

And I am always in favor of, you know, people are complex. They make mistakes. They feel one way one day. Another day they get hyped up. They say stupid shit. They do stupid shit. Like, I am in favor of foregrounding the complexity of human beings, so I don't have an issue with that. But I do think it's interesting

that this is the one character that they decide to take that approach to and have, you know, this very sympathetic portrayal and really kind of whitewash the extent of his involvement. Because as you just show in that video, the way they portray in this article, if you just read this, he may have said to one person the night before, like, oh, we should go into the Capitol, but that's it. Not over and over and over and over and over again to the point that the people around him are like,

this seems like a setup, are you a fed? Yes. He also talks about how he has regrets. This is the quote from the piece. Epps also said he regretted sending a text to his nephew well after the violence had already erupted, in which he discussed how he helped to orchestrate the movements of people who were leaving Mr. Trump's speech near the White House by pointing them in the direction of the Capitol. So again, that's very different than the

rest of the portrayal of him in this piece, which is very like, oh, he just happened to be there. And actually they say, oh, he was trying to prevent protesters from engaging with law enforcement. And they they paint him out as like, you know, a sort of like attempted hero of the situation is is the portrayal that, you know, that they go with here. So I thought that was very, I thought it was noteworthy, I guess, just that this is the individual that they decide to give the really favorable portrayal to. It also pissed me off that they say the baseless idea that the FBI was behind the attack on the Capitol. Now, look, maybe Tucker said that. Never heard that here. Or you never heard that from a lot of people, Glenn Greenwald and others, who are asking what the hell happened on the day. It's not a baseless idea to say the fact that there were police informants who were there on January 6th.

We literally know that from court filings. We know it from New York Times. They did the reporting. Are they conspiracy mongers now who are saying this is a false flag? They are the outlet that first acknowledged that there were people in contact with the FBI who were there inside the Capitol. So again, I have no idea who this man is, what he thought he was doing in that day, what he really was doing on that day or any of that. But I think the total lack of curiosity about that piece and the attempt to strawman and dismiss anyone who

would say, hey, you know, it would have been great if this was all disrupted and prevented, which is what the FBI is supposed to be involved with. So if there was connectivity with some of these participants on the ground, which it would be strange, it would be unusual if there wasn't, because we know they've infiltrated groups like the Oath Keepers, then why weren't you able to see this coming? Why weren't you able to disrupt it? I think those are extremely legitimate questions that you're basically not allowed to ask or your conspiracy.

And here, let me ask you this. Why is a QAnon, by the way, I have no sympathy for the QAnon shaman. He looks like a total loser. But why does a QAnon shaman get 41 months in prison and prosecuted by the FBI? And then the guy who on the night of January 5th and all throughout January 6th is repeatedly asking people and admittedly sending text messages about orchestrating people. Why has he never been charged by the FBI? They even acknowledge in the piece the FBI has never stated why they decided not to prosecute him. There is clearly you could go after someone. Look at the number of people that have been prosecuted on this. And again, I have no sympathy for many of these people.

They broke the law. Fine. You should be prosecuted on this. And again, I have no sympathy for many of these people. They broke the law. Fine. You should be prosecuted to the full extent of it. But when you point, then it should be equal application. And that's the issue. Sure, I'm glad, you know, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, all of that. Although I do think they're going to have a very, very hard time proving the sedition case against the Oath Keepers in the way that just based on U.S. case law and all of that. And they probably have been better off just focusing on pure just conspiracy to riot or whatever. On Epps, I mean, he's never once set foot in the jail time.

And he also says that he contacted the FBI, quote, minutes within this is happening. And none of us are even claiming that this guy even works for the FBI. Maybe he was an informant. Who knows what the level of involvement exactly was. This was one of the pieces that was always a little eyebrow raising is he had appeared on an FBI list of people they were looking for in connection with January 6th. And he was up there one day and then the next day he's taken off. His explanation for it in this piece is, oh, it's because the minute that I heard this, I contacted the FBI. Hard to say why that would lead them to being like, you know, like immediately. So why that I heard this, I contacted the FBI. Hard to say why that

would lead them to being like, you know, like immediately. So why would they just prosecute? Right. Or did you enter a plea agreement? No, because we would know that. So the explanation that's given here is that because he didn't breach the Capitol, according to him, and again, there is in video evidence, but according to him, he didn't actually breach the Capitol. There were a lot of people who technically trespassed and breached the barricades who weren't charged. That's what they ultimately say. So that's what we know. And this is a little coda to the Ray Epps story.

Still a lot of questions here. I still have a hell of a lot of questions. I think the Times did a terrible job. I think they should have just asked him straight up, were you ever a FED? Did you ever work with Feds? Did you ever work in any capacity? There's no yes or no answers in any of this. Look, if the answer is no, great. Get confirmation from the FBI. We can all move on. I mean,

I think it was a legitimate question from the get-go. So, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as we discussed, resistance hero John Bolton stunned everyone by just coming right out, saying the whole quiet part out loud, admitting in an interview, bragging even to Jake Tapper on CNN about his vast experience planning coups. With all due respect, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup. I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, not here, but, you know, other places, it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he did. Wow. Bolton there, who served in not only the Trump administration, but also the supposedly respectable Bush administration,

broke an unspoken rule of Washington decorum. This whole exchange got me thinking about which crimes and outrages are considered acceptable, even noble sometimes in Washington, and which are considered monstrous, out of bounds. Bolton is a perfect case in point here. Now, we all know that our government relatively routinely, especially during the Cold War, but still today, foments, supports, and outright plots and directs coups. We busy ourselves subverting democracy wherever we please to install regimes that our elites believe will better support American interests, read capital's interest. Now, we're all supposed to know this, but just not say anything

about it. Notorious neocon, as we covered earlier, David Frum, was deeply aggrieved by Bolton's loose lips tweeting, former U.S. National Security Advisor should measure their words and avoid cynical jokes that give aid and comfort to those who do not wish this country well. You might note that the problem for Frum was not the coups. It was Bolton's breach of Washington decorum in talking about the coups so casually and so publicly. And it's not only overseas coups that can be tolerated or even celebrated if handled with the proper D.C. etiquette. Just think about 2000. Instead of ruffians in Viking hats waving Confederate flags,

you had Harvard lawyers partnering with politicians clearly branded with the imprimatur of the establishment. George W. Bush and his brother, who was governor of Florida, and their team of highly paid, highly educated, respectable lawyers, they executed a highbrow coup in coordination with the conservative partisans on the Supreme Court. So instead of Rudy Giuliani, you had Ted Olson, former Reagan assistant attorney general. And not only did Washington accept this coup, the fact that Al Gore bowed out quickly with barely a protest is lauded to this day as a triumph of democracy, when in fact, of course, it was the polar opposite, an outright shredding of the people's will far more effective than what happened in 2020. But we were uniformly assured that the institutions held in our

democracy prevailed. George W. Bush, he maintained his decorum, most important of all the D.C. rules. Not once did we hear of smeared ketchup on the White House walls during his tenure. So he was allowed to serve two terms after stealing the election, leading our nation to the most grievous foreign policy mistakes of a generation, teeing up the housing collapse, and greenlighting mass surveillance against our own people and mass human rights abuses against others. But we were allowed the illusion that our country was more or less functioning. The lie that this coup was actually the glory of democracy in action saved us from having to actually face the rotten core of the American project today. Was our ignorance actually bliss? Now, I know the liberal instinct is to paint Trump as a singular evil who came out of nowhere to defile the pure and innocent grand old party.

But of course, the truth is, he just painted all of the pre-existing failures of our nation, especially its political elite, in garish colors, robbing us of our ability to maintain that blissful ignorance. D.C. was never mad about the corruption, the assault on democracy, the grifting, the lies, the contempt for governance. They were always most upset that he did not follow the Washington rules when engaging in all of those behaviors. I mean, Washington has long operated on an elaborate scheme of institutionalized corruption, a favor there, a campaign contribution here, a board seat for a kid or relative or post-public service gig. Trump literally expected people to pony up cash at his properties that would go directly in his pocket in order to get in his good graces. It was all up front.

All political fundraising, of course, is shady, manipulative, playing on emotions, promising results they know they will never achieve. Trump literally raised millions for a fund to fight election fraud that did not even exist. Now, in the neoliberal era, presidential administrations are incompetently managed by unserious people, stacked with some of the wrongest people on the entire planet. Neoliberals don't really believe in government, so it kind of makes sense. And the collective brilliance of the experts they employ has led us into disastrous wars, criminal trade deals, and financial collapses. But these experts, they were pedigreed. And so we were assured we were actually in good hands and we were just too dumb and uneducated to really understand what was going on here. Trump, on the other hand,

he went ahead and put Rick Perry in a role as energy secretary that was previously held by a nuclear physicist, Rick Perry. The third agency of government, I would do away with the education, the, uh, commerce. And let's see. I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops. The agency he forgot, that was literally the very agency that he was ultimately put in charge of. Now, the rejection of this brazen bad behavior and preference for decorous bad behavior is driving the Ron DeSantis chatter right now. That's why DeSantis' support is overwhelmingly college-educated versus the more downscale base overwhelmingly sticking with Trump. DeSantis has done enough in the Trump era to hug the former president, be a little Trumpy,

but he's a version of Trumpism that GOP elites think that they could potentially live with. He's being pitched as a sort of highbrow Trump. He won't call Stormy Daniels horseface. He won't watch with delight as rioters proclaim their desire to murder his vice president. He won't put Rick Perry in charge of the energy department. If Ron DeSantis does a coup, it will be the George W. Bush-style coup. He's walked out respectability on Stop the Steal, refusing to say whether or not he thinks the 2020 election was stolen, but not going all the way down the conspiracy rabbit hole. And another trembling display of contempt for democracy also overrode the will of Florida residents who voted to

reinstate voting rights for felons. Now, elite DeSantis backers are not opposed to coups per se. They just want it to be done in the Washington way, so they don't have to answer so many uncomfortable questions about it or be embarrassed by the unwashed masses who show up to execute it. They aren't opposed to corruption per se. They just want it executed through the accepted channels of kickbacks and campaign contributions. Maybe with DeSantis, they posit, we could recloak the ugliness of Washington in enough Washington respectability that we could go back to pretending that the country is more or less functional. The decorum slathered like a cheap coat of paint over underlying rot that continues to fester, masking it enough for Liz Cheney and

Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney to feel comfortable once again. And who knows? Maybe that useful fiction would be enough to keep our country from going off the deep end. After all, nations and institutions are built more on faith, collective storytelling, and shared delusions than they are really on anything tangible. Or maybe now that Trump has taken our every failing and put it on vibrant and repulsive display, maybe we can't really unsee it. Now, Trump was always hailed as a truth teller by his fans, which was a little bit perplexing given that he just makes up shit all the time

whenever he wants to. But when it came to Washington, as John Bolton did in that extraordinary moment with Jake Tapper, Trump always said the quiet part out loud. And maybe that is what his people meant. I mean, if your only choices are a John Bolton who keeps quiet about his coups or one that proudly broadcasts them to the world, which is actually better? Does it really matter in the end?

Trump took all of the accepted criminal, immoral, repulsive, authoritarian behavior of Washington elites, and he turned it up to 11, didn't he? And if the Republican base wanted the highbrow version of Trump, well, it could have picked Chris Christie or Ted Cruz long ago. John Bolton really got me thinking here, Sagar, about accepted coups. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, if there's a central theme to how I see the world, it's basically that class and the growing divide explains everything about the direction of the United States since the 1990s. The problem with class, though, is it's really hard to pin down. What does class mean?

Is it income? Is it ancestral wealth? Is it immigrant status? Is it racial? The answer is kind of all of the above. But as I've reiterated here many, many times, increasingly the best determinant of class is probably whether you have a four-year college degree or not. Now, before you explode, let me explain. I'm not saying people with a four-year college degree can't be poor, but instead that the four-year college degree is

more of a proxy for how you see the world. If you went to college, you were way more likely to hold liberal views on race, to not be religious, to be sympathetic to the elite narrative in this country. And increasingly, that basically means you're a Democrat. That is why I controversially will say that if you're a plumber making 100K a year, but you didn't go to college, you're culturally working class. While if you're a Columbia film student who is broke, you're still in the upper class. This new orientation of the world was very hammered home in the 2020 election results. Contrary to the way that the media speaks, Trump increased his vote share amongst every single demographic group in America except for white men, specifically white college-educated men.

White college-educated men and women were the major swing and enthusiastic voters behind Joe Biden's victory and the Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm elections. And I'll state another controversial fact. 2020 was the most racially depolarized election of our lifetime, with record numbers of Hispanic voters voting Republican and even Black men crossing over. How does one explain that? If you only care about race, you really can't without resorting to disgusting tropes about how people of color want to present as white. It's easier to understand to what extent race matters. It's more about whether you were an elite member of your racial group and you went to college or not.

The college degree unites the worldview of half the country and non-college worldview the other. This was hammered home even further in the New York Times poll that we spent some time on our last show. It shows this starkly. For the first time in a national survey, Democrats have a larger share of support amongst white college graduates than amongst non-white voters. And guess what? Those white college graduates who have all the energy of the party, well, they care far more likely about guns, abortion, and quote, democracy. Those are their top issues in 2022. In fact, amongst the white college-educated group, only 17% of those voters said that the economy or inflation ranked at the top of their issues that they're going to vote on in 2022. For non-college

educated voters, the data flips. Republican-leaning voters in 2020 care about one thing, one thing only, the economy and inflation. It's fueling the rise of non-white voters into the Republican category, with Latinos especially. In fact, Latinos in the New York Times poll were the most likely to say inflation and economy were all that mattered to them. This lines up squarely with non-college whites who are supporting Republicans by a 60-point margin. Just to hammer my point home again, if you take race out of the equation and just look at the electorate, by college or not, 56% of college-educated voters outright support Democrats, 33% Republican, 12% undecided. For non-college, 33% Democrat, 45% Republican, 22% undecided. Now, once you understand the college divide, everything all starts to make a lot more sense. If you went to college,

you hear Latinx, and while it is cringe, you have exposure to the critical theory that most colleges teach, you kind of get it. If you didn't, you think, what are these people smoking? Same with much of the pregnant people discourse that the current left is idolizing. When you went to college, the foundation of those ideas are imprinted and you're familiar. If you didn't, you can barely believe that these freaks are real people who actually speak this way. Now, like I said, I know there's a lot here that will piss some people off. Some college-educated voters who are broke will be upset. The truth is, though, the way you see the world is a better determinant today of class than pretty much anything else we have. This holds two primary warnings for both parties.

For the Democrats, while the college-educated rule the world, they are not the entire world. Only about 40% of Americans have a four-year college degree. Only 14% of Americans hold a graduate degree. The graduate degree people are way more represented in higher institutions of culture and are the ones driving the bus behind political correctness, gender, and race ideology. Many of the other forces behind cultural leftism today. That means the people at the highest income and class spectrum are setting the agenda for a party that still presumably wants to win and must win non-college

educated voters, to survive. For the Republicans, the warning is also obvious. Okay, you're probably going to win. So now what? Because if you have a bunch of people voting for you on economic grounds, if inflation goes sky high and you continue to trickle down economics and talking about the deficit, those same voters could abandon you pretty easily if things go south. Either govern and satisfy their concerns or get ready to lose again. The obvious point is neither of those things are going to happen. The freaks are in the driver's seat of the Democrats and they will be for years to come. The deficit hawks, similarly in the GOP power seat, they're there. We are doomed not necessarily to a permanent

realignment, but an ongoing yo-yo of American politics. So buckle up. I hope it works out. It's fascinating. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. So President Biden is on his big trip to the Middle East and to break down all of the things that are happening there and what we can expect and what it means for you. We have Dr. Trita Parsi, great friend of the show, and of course, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you, sir. Thank you so much for having me. So let's start with the basics. Where's the president going? And do you think that this trip is a smart move on his team's part?

Anywhere, any way you look at this, I just really have a hard time seeing why this trip makes any sense, except for perhaps some domestic political reasons. But even that, I think, is questionable. You take a look at the geopolitical imperatives that the White House has put forward, pushing down oil prices, etc. It's been quite clear for some time that the Saudis don't have the capacity to really push down oil prices in a way that would make a difference for the White House. In fact, if the president was really driven by oil concerns, gas prices, inflation, it would have been much better for him to just go back into the Iran nuclear deal. That would have freed up much, much more oil, including in the short term, that would have been valuable for the president.

If this is about creating peace in the region, then rest assured, the Abrams Accord, which just completely sweeps under the rug the Palestinian issue, in fact, is honest about it. It says that it doesn't try to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It tries to move beyond it. That's the language that they use. And rest assured, that is not going to help restore peace there. On the contrary, what it will do is to create a military alliance in the region. They call it a defense alliance, similar to NATO, between the Israelis, the Saudis, Emiratis against Iran. Here's the thing. There's nothing new about this.

This is yet another iteration of the United States seeking to organize the Middle East around the principle of containing and isolating Iran. That has been an utter failure, and it's been extremely costly. It has been a driver of conflict rather than a driver of peace. Don't take it from me. Take it from Rob Malley, who on the stage in Bahrain about a year

ago said that the isolation of Iran has been a driving force of instability in the region. Listen to what Tony Blinken himself said in New York Times in 2017, when Trump was moving down this direction. He said an anti-Shia coalition masquerading as a defense alliance will only bring about instability and more warfare in the region. Yet, this is the direction that the president has chosen to go. It makes very little sense to me. Right. And Dr. Parsi, what you're pointing to is it's not even necessarily working. You know, it's actually ratcheting some tension up in the region. I was already seeing President Biden, you know, said he was giving a deadline on the Iran nuclear deal.

He said he would use force if necessary to prevent the development of Iranian nuclear weapons. So it's not like the defensive alliance is keeping the U.S. out of this. I mean, what does this mean for the prospect of the administration continues to act as if a deal is still possible? What do you think in terms of the timeline? Well, let me first say the first thing you said, you're absolutely right. The idea that this would be some sort of a defense alliance that would help the United States leave the region, which is what the American public wants, seems to me extremely unlikely. There may be people, depending on and elsewhere, who think that by bringing in Israel into this and having the Israelis take over the American role of

essentially being a defense provider, security provider for some of these GCC states, that that would reduce America's responsibilities and obligations in the region i find that nevertheless extremely naive to think it will develop that way we can be quite clear that what the saudis the emiratis and the israelis are motivated by is that this will actually further entrap the united states in the middle east this is further bind the united states to their security in fact what what the Emiratis and the Saudis have asked for in return for some of these things that the U.S. wants from Saudi Arabia is that there is a signed defense pact between the United States and these countries that will bring

more U.S. troops to these countries. At a time when American people want to bring Americans home from the Middle East, it would be disastrous for the president of the United States not to sign a deal that would actually increase troop levels in the Middle East. Right. Well, it is remarkable. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah.

And when it comes to the Iran deal, the signaling from the White House at this point seems to be that they themselves have no interest in it any longer. Wow. And even if there were to be a deal, I think we can also then rest assured that that deal would not last very long. Set aside all of these other factors that Biden cannot give any assurances that the deal would last longer than his presidency. Set aside the fact that if the Republicans take the House and the Senate, they will probably actually undo the president's ability to waive sanctions, which is a necessary component of the

deal. But if we're at the same time, set aside those things, if we think that we can create an arms control agreement with Iranians that essentially prevents them from ever being able to go to a military nuclear weapons program, and on the other hand, we are arming and further increasing our troop levels on the other side of the Persian Gulf. And we think that that is actually going to be a lasting solution. I think that is just absolute insanity. If we want a nuclear deal with Iran, if we want to make sure that they completely forsake any path to a nuclear weapon, then we actually need to increase security, reduce tensions in the region, rather than cementing those tensions, exactly the way Tony Blinken himself said this

would do in 2017. Yeah, well, what's remarkable to me, and I am actually quite surprised by it, is how the Biden administration seems to have ended up essentially embracing the entire Trump foreign policy in the region. I mean, from they do it sort of reluctantly, like the current complaint about Israel's behavior, but they don't change any of the actual policy responses. You know, they kind of pretend like they want to get back the Iranian nuclear deal, but it sure doesn't seem like it in terms of their actions. And, you know, Biden, who said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia pariah nation when he was running for president. Now, here he is going to

Saudi Arabia, hat in hand, asking for them to be our besties again. So how did it end up that the Biden administration just basically followed the same footsteps as what the Trump administration did before them? I fear, unfortunately, that you are quite correct. And I think Peter Beinart put it best in his newsletter when he said that Trump would be quite proud of Biden's Middle East foreign policy right now. It is clearly a continuation of that policy rather than the continuation of what Obama tried to do, which was to open up an opportunity for greater diplomacy. Let me say one thing on this as well. The White House is behaving as if they had no choice, that realities on the oil market, geopolitical imperatives, Russia, Ukraine, all of these different things necessitated this move. And there was no other opportunity for the Biden administration to consider. view, quite false. Because in the midst of all of this, as a result of the U.S. earlier signaling that it's leaving the region, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rhetoric about turning

Saudi Arabia into a pariah, guess what happened? The region started to have its own diplomacy. The Iraqis have been hosting numerous rounds of talks between the Saudis and the Iranians, the Saudis and the Turks, the Emiratis and the Qataris. It's just been a flourishing of regional diplomacy. It's been climaxing in what the Iraqis call the Baghdad Dialogue, in which they've been bringing all of these countries together and try to resolve their tensions. And the difference between the Baghdad Dialogue and the Abrams Accord is profound. The Abrams Accord is organized against the country. The Baghdad dialogue is open

for everyone and is not organized against any country. It is not trying to create alliances and pacts and blocks in the Middle East. It's actually trying to resolve the tensions themselves. Moreover, it's a regional initiative. It's driven by the countries themselves. This is not yet another one of these Western ideas that is being imposed on the region. It's driven by the countries themselves. This is not yet another one of these Western ideas that is being imposed on the region. It's coming from the inside. Biden could have chosen to support that initiative, not necessarily take over it because that would have been counterproductive, but put some American weight behind it, endorse it, say this path towards greater diplomacy is actually a good thing. Instead, he chose to go down the path of

40 years of failed American policy in the Middle East, which will only bring greater American military presence and involvement and entrapment in the Middle East. Yeah, well, I think you always put it so well. We're so happy to get your analysis on the day of before Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia, and we deeply appreciate it as always. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Great to see you. See you later. Okay. Thank you guys so much for watching. We're going to miss you all next week. As we said, we have got great partner content. We have everybody banking stuff and we'll also have some stuff as well. We're going to miss you all a lot, but just a little bit of a reset and we'll come back to those who upgraded from monthly to yearly. We deeply appreciate it. And for all the

new premium subscribers, we appreciate it so much. We're going to hit the ground running come midterm election season. It's going to be fun. The road to nowhere. Brainstorming. Do you guys like the road to nowhere? I was also thinking we could do midterm madness. You know what the fun thing is? We can play around

with whatever we want because that's what it means. Oh, look at it. It's beautiful. Our crew's so good. They're on top of it, had it ready to go. Midterm madness isn't bad. I kind of like it. You know what? Why don't you guys send in emails? Send James an email. Tell him what your favorite is and maybe he'll tell us whatever the best one is. Sorry, James. You're in box. Prepare for

inundation, James. Love you guys. Thank you for everything you have done to support this show and we will see you guys in a little bit more than a week. That's right. Enjoy. See you soon. Over the years of making my true crime podcast,

Helen gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145.

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