Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/7/22: Biden Incompetence, Highland Park, Airline Dysfunction, Natural Gas Chaos, GOP Fringe, Oil Market Volatility, & More!

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Boris Johnson resigning, Biden administration's incompetence, Highland Park shooting revelations, airlines lying, Dem rigging against Green party, Steve Bannon vs Rogan, natural gas crisis, GOP crazies, & oil market volatility!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/Rory Johnston: https://www.commoditycontext.com/ Highland Park Fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/irina-and-kevin-mccarthy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. Extra amazing because Crystal's back. It's good to see you. Indeed. It's much better to be back in the studio. And I'm feeling fantastic, wonderful, all of those good things. But I do reserve the right to blame COVID brain fog for any stupid things that I say.

There we go. I like that. For here and on out. From here on out. All right. Lots to get to this morning. Some pretty stunning reports, leaks, quotes coming from anonymous sources and name sources about just what a catastrophe the Biden administration is. This is from Democratic insiders who were saying, you know, not only is he failing on a policy front, but on just like basic managerial competence, which is pretty devastating. So we'll give you all of those details. And there are many.

We also have new revelations about just how this psycho was able to get his guns, the past interactions that he'd had with law enforcement that certainly should have kept him from being able to obtain the weapons that he did, and yet here we are. So we'll tell you about that. Also some new drama with the airlines that you have to see to believe. I mean, they're basically just caught lying about what's going on and getting called out for it. A stunning story coming out of North Carolina,

someone we've talked to before, Matthew Ho, who is running as a Green Party candidate for Senate there. And the dirtiest tricks you can imagine being pulled by Democrats to keep him off the ballot, impersonating Green Party volunteers to try to bully voters into removing their names from petitions, blocking him in a partisan way, in a way that should be, frankly, illegal. So I'll break that down for you as well. And this one is pretty interesting. So Joe Rogan once again said something that he had told us before. As he said many times, not just us. Right. So the mainstream media noticed that he had been approached before by Donald Trump for an interview and had said no, and this is something he's talked about before. Well, Steve Bannon is apparently upset with Joe over him, you know, deciding not to do an interview with Donald Trump. So break that down for you. Also, the oil markets

right now, totally wild. Oil prices collapsing. Obviously, you are seeing it a little bit at the gas pump, but not too much. So what exactly is going on there? But we wanted to start with big breaking news as of early this morning. Happened just this morning. We were looking over it last night, didn't know what exactly the status was going to be. But Boris Johnson has officially resigned the office of prime minister in the United Kingdom. He was speaking to the British people this morning. Let's take a listen. And to you, the British public, I know that there will be many people who are relieved and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed. And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world.

But them's the breaks. Them's the breaks, Crystal. I'll tell you what, I always loved Boris. You know, policy aside, he was a character. He really was a one of a kind British figure. He will not going to see anybody like him in British politics again. Now, in terms of what this means, Boris has been in office for about three years after winning that pretty stunning election, which, you know, presaged what I thought could have been something interesting. But COVID really took him off the rails. All of these scandals kind of broke to the fore in the last 48 hours where there were some decisions to snap ones by his cabinet members. And it led to a mass resignation in the last 48 hours by many of his most high-ranking ministers.

All of them basically said they no longer had confidence in his ability to take the government. The biggest problem for Boris was he's just had scandal after scandal after scandal, which seemed very quaint here in the United States. I think the biggest one was that he was drinking and having parties during COVID in like May of 2020. By the way, after he was in the hospital, which is unconscionable, but he was having parties, high government officials. He was actually fined by the UK police after the investigation found that he did, in fact, break lockdown rules. That kind of was just the beginning. Then he recently appointed somebody who'd been accused of sexual assault or some sort of lewd, untoward behavior. But just in general, his standing within the Conservative Party has been in question now for some time. And the mass resignation, it does seem kind of planned.

You know, two people came and then the rest of them went out. And so from now, what's going to happen is currently the British government is on something called summer vacation. And in the annual party conference in the fall, there's a committee of the Conservative Party, which is going to vote and elect their new leader. And whoever that will be will become the prime minister of the UK because they do have, I believe they have two more years until there's another general election to be called there. But effectively, you know, he's resigned the office today. They'll vote whoever his leader will be. I assume it will be in the next coming weeks or months. And then that person will succeed Boris Johnson as the next leader in the interim.

And he sort of wants to hang on until the fall, until they figure out his replacement. But there are a lot of calls for him to be gone basically immediately. I think one of his former aides said that there would be, quote, carnage if he wasn't out of there right away. And, you know, just candidly, I don't follow this nearly as closely as some people do. But from reading into it, I mean, it seems like this is one of those instances where the cover-ups were worse than the crime. So it's not just that he had these COVID lockdown parties, which I did follow that scandal pretty closely because it had a lot of echoes with different

politicians here in the U.S. who were totally hypocrites, who were pro-lockdown. Of course, the U.K. was on pretty stringent lockdown at the time. And not only is he having these weekly parties, but then out and out lying about it multiple times. One of his aides was caught. They, the seriousness of allegations here. But it wasn't just that this individual was accused of sexual harassment. It was also that there appeared to have been previous allegations that had been covered up by Boris Johnson. You layer on top of that, there were a number of other scandals within the conservative party of other sexual harassment, other sexual assaults, some of them horrifying, some of them just like bizarre, like some dude who was watching porn on his phone and the House of Commons, like what? So all of this added up to a picture of someone who was not trustworthy, who was caught repeatedly lying to the public, covering up.

And so, you know, Boris Johnson, he initially had this very sort of like buffoonish persona, which I think has sort of stayed with him. And this portrait of a very undisciplined, untrustworthy character is what ultimately seems to have done him in. They had 52 of resignations this week alone. One dude who he had just appointed on like Tuesday by Thursday was submitting his resignation. So it became too much of a snowball effect for him to be able to withstand, even though as recently as yesterday, he was saying, I'm not going anywhere. In their system, it's very difficult. Whenever you know you might either lose a vote of no confidence or when you have no support amongst your party because you wouldn't be able to appoint anybody to your cabinet. So the cabinet there has a very interesting

history in the way that it works in terms of governance and the ability to balance your cabinet is not really the same as it works with ours. It kind of used to work that way in our system back in the 1800s before Abraham Lincoln was president. So anyway, it's an interesting system that they have. So that means that we will have a new PM. The conservative party gets to decide who that person will be. And then that person will most likely stand for a general election against the labor leader. I believe their name is Kerry Sturm. I can never say it correctly. Anyway, sorry, Brits. Anyway, we're tracking very closely. For our purposes and for the world, I actually do think this is a tremendously important development.

And here's the reason. Boris was probably the single most hawkish leader in Europe on Ukraine. So, of course, we covered the two stories here. Number one, whenever his meeting with Zelensky and others, he said, we're not interested in a peace agreement here at all. This was months ago, kind of in the middle of the fighting. And most recently, he took Emmanuel Macron over and said, hey, you need to stop this diplomacy and all this other stuff. So the Anglosphere, if they do have somebody who is not as hawkish as Boris Johnson, and Boris, really, he was much more of a student of Churchill, and he saw himself within that vein. And he very much was much more hawkish towards

Russia than any other leader within, not in the EU, but, you know, of his EU compatriots, I guess, who he was also meeting. And alongside Biden, they were pushing the most stringent policy against Russia. So whoever they appoint, it's going to be very, very important to see how they approach the Ukraine conflict. Are they going to have the same policy towards that and actually, you know, could push things in a different direction. So for our purposes, I think that's probably the biggest takeaway. Also, remember, we do a tremendous amount of trade with the UK. We have a bilateral trade agreement that's coming up, I believe, before Congress and others is being negotiated. So there's other interesting intersection areas

as well. Yeah, that occurred to me as well because the U.S. and the U.K. have really been a united front in taking a uniformly hawkish approach to Russia's war in Ukraine, making it clear that they want the war to continue rather than trying to negotiate any sort of peace. As you said, Boris Johnson being very aggressive in conveying that to the French leader and very publicly telling everybody that he conveyed that to the French leader, even as the French said, well, that's not quite how it went. So the posture of whoever comes next is going to be incredibly significant to us and to what happens with that war we're going for. Do I expect there's going to be a tremendous shift? No, not really. Because ultimately, I think, you know, U.S. is driving this train, whether they should be or not. The U.S. is overwhelmingly sending the most amount of aid and weapons. And even as Biden loves to use this rhetoric of like, oh, we're just doing what the Ukrainians want. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. is driving the policy here and U.K. is very likely to continue to back us up. Yeah, I completely agree. So look, it'll be interesting. We'll see what happens,

and we'll keep everybody updated. Who knows what's going to happen. All right, so let's come back closer to home here. Back to the US. Mr. Biden and his administration, which is also suffering from a lack of confidence. Some pretty extraordinary reporting coming out now of mainstream outlets. And before I show it to you, I really think that this comes at a moment when even normie liberals who are like, vote blue no matter who, and you got to back up the Democratic Party brand because the Republicans are so much worse, even they are seeing the failures of this administration. I really do

think it's tied to the overturning of Roe versus Wade and just how manifestly unprepared they were, how lackluster the response has been in spite of having many weeks of warning and ability to sort of get their ducks in a row and know what the response was. They've basically, you know, done sort of less than nothing. And we'll get to that in a minute. But I think that's the context through which this reporting makes some sense and why it's coming right now. So the CNN piece is quite astonishing. I'm going to read you a good bit of this, including the lead, which is, there's a lot going on here.

So they say, actress Deborah Messing was fed up. The former Will and Grace star was among dozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with the White House aides last Monday to discuss the overturning of Roe versus Wade. The mood was fatalistic, according to people on the call, which was also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together. Messing said she had gotten Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn't even seem to be a point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening. That afternoon, what did they get? They just got a follow-up email with some basic talking points and suggestions of Biden's speech clips to share on TikTok. So they use that as the

lead to lay out this article of just how disenchanted regular Democrats and people within Congress and within the White House are becoming with the Biden administration. They say top Democrats complain the president isn't acting with or perhaps even capable of the urgency the moment demands. Rudderless, aimless, and hopeless is how one member of Congress described the White House. Two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, several within the West Wing, so in the White House themselves Two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, several within the West Wing, so in the White House themselves, tell CNN they feel this goes deeper than questions of ideology and posture. Instead, they say it gets to questions of basic management.

They go on to detail some of the specific frustrations with the lack of response and lack of ability to respond to the overturning of Roe versus Wade. But put this next piece up. The Washington Post kind of had a follow-up piece to this. Their headline is Democratic Criticisms of Biden Get Louder and Broader. The part that they really emphasize here, Sagar, is that piece about how there is a lack of managerial competence, that it's not just the ideology, but it's the questions of basic management. Because as we've been saying here for quite some time, you know, Biden's central promise wasn't you're going to get the policy of your dreams and desires.

It wasn't that he's going to be this transformational figure. It was the adults are going to be back in charge and we're going to have basic competence operating at the White House again. And so when you see even that is completely falling apart and predictably, by the way, if you followed what this man's career has been like in Washington and what his management style has been, now that this is being openly acknowledged in the papers, you know, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times has had similar stories to this. This is a dire moment for this president. This is not good for the president. He's had a kind of a leak-proof White House, so to speak. A lot of his people weren't coming out against him. But even his own staff is pretty disgusted with his managing and handling of all this. And I think it's bigger than Biden. I don't think it's just Biden. I think it's the entire

Democratic leadership. I was reading a really interesting story actually in Vox this morning, which is that there are a lot of staffers at the level who've been working on abortion now for a decade. And they're like, okay, look, we don't have the votes on Roe versus Wade. You know what we do have? We've got votes on rape and incest exceptions. Or we could put Republicans in a very tough spot, 90, 10 votes on many of these things, and we're not taking any of them. And they point to the fact that if you look in the past, they voted on pre-existing conditions before. They voted on, you know, carve out pieces of their broader legislation because they understood that they could codify that. And Republicans are shocked that they're not trying to put their bosses

in any of these positions. Why is the president not doing that? So executive orders is another one. What really struck me was just the sheer lack of competence where they didn't have a statement or action ready to go on the day the decision came because they believed their White House counsel who assured them. He's like, hey, don't worry, the decision's not coming today. First of all, how would he even know? Second, you know, you should probably just plan just in case every single day. We certainly were, you know, the entire time. Didn't know if it was going to come. Had to prepare it just in case. You know, we knew what to look for, etc. You and I were expecting the decision on that day. I mean, that's why you were ready to go and do a segment and get it out in the world. So, like, how is it that we know more

than the White House knows about how this is going to unfold? I knew there was a 50% chance. I was like, oh, well, I think it'll probably drop later. There were only a few days remaining. It had to be one of like the next few days. It was not rocket science. Listen, you know, it just shows you, they quote somebody saying it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall. And just over and over again, you're seeing a lot of people in the administration who are just really disgusted. Because abortion, it just, that's, you know, the normie lib. Obviously, that's what they're going to care about. But gas is a good one the number one thing that Americans care about,

it's 33% is inflation, 20-something percent is the economy, which is code for inflation. And I think number three is like food prices, which is also inflation. So we're talking here about 60-some percent of people are like, hey, I care about inflation. I want you to talk about inflation. I want you to do something about inflation, inflation, inflation, inflation. Where is the price? What is he doing all day? It just seems completely feckless. He's either abroad, unable to articulate any sort of vision, both for the world and for us here at home. And he's floundering. I mean, I don't think we can overstate just how badly he's doing. And this all is going to culminate in the 2024 election. He's about to get shellacked, probably, and you're doing a midterm on this in the 2024 election. He's about to get shellacked, you know, probably, probably,

and you're doing a midterm on this in the midterms. But regardless, it's going to not be a good showing. He has to come out swinging. The presidents in the past who've been able to win, despite that, Obama and Clinton really mounted a full force campaign in the last two years of their first terms in order to try and get reelected. I don't see a lot of that happening here with this pattern. Look, there's no doubt for voters. Number one issue is economy, economy, economy. There's just no doubt about that. But I do think the abortion issue is really key for this sort of like Normie Dems and liberal press turning on Biden, because this is the issue that they have offered as like, this is the reason why you vote for Democrats to protect women's right to choose. Like this has

been bedrock of Democratic politics for at least the past decade. And so, you know, first of all, when this happened, there was an instant realization of, when the leak came out even, there was this instant realization of, wait a second, Republicans were not quiet about what their goals were here. You knew this was where we were going. You've had opportunities in the past where you had majorities and supermajorities to codify this, to prevent this exact eventuality, and for some reason you didn't do it. And then even, okay, so the leak comes out, and then they've got seven weeks to figure out, all right, this is coming. We see it. You know, we've got time to prepare.

We can work with the pro-choice groups, figure out what our response is going to be, figure out some legislation we can put, how to divide the GOP caucus, which is like the most obvious no-brainer of all time. And instead, they're caught completely flat-footed to the point that, yeah, the person who's like the point person on responding was like out getting coffee when the decision came down. No response really prepared. Still, here we are, however many days and weeks later, and they still haven't really figured out what it is they're going to do. We had some conference call with governors and, oh, we're going to come up, you know, listen to them and get their ideas. And then we're going to come back to you. Still haven't seen any of those sort of action items come out of that meeting. So I think the fact that on this issue that has been really central to the Democratic message and ideology, that they have so clearly failed to meet the moment. I do think it's been sort of

eye-opening for a lot of normie Democrats and the liberal press and has given them permission to take the gloves off and criticize in a way that they normally don't. I think the main thing is, and you're going to be the major expert is, is to see Democratic politicians begin to turn against him at the state level is very, very significant. And that's what's happening. Yeah. So this is an extraordinary story, too. So in addition to their failed response, we also learned that literally on the day that Roe was being overturned, Biden was cutting a deal with Senator Mitch McConnell to install an anti-choice federal judge, which of course federal judgeships are for life. So this is a big deal and it's in the state of Kentucky. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen here. So Democratic governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, after coming

under pressure from the media to release these emails about this individual's last name's Meredith, who's being nominated for this federal judgeship, he actually released the private emails that went back and forth between his office and the White House explaining that this dude, Chad Meredith, was going to be put up for this appointment. This is really, you know, no, I actually, I know Andy Beshe. I met him, talked to him many number of times when I lived in Kentucky. It's a very small world for Democratic politics. First of all, regular Kentucky Democrats, party loyalists are furious about this. John Yarmuth, who's the only Democratic congressman who represents Louisville, he's actually retiring this year.

He has been outspoken about how outraged he is. The few people that I reached out to, you know, on the ground there who are, again, like Democratic Party stalwarts, they cannot believe it, how outrageous this is, especially coming at this point in time. And Chad Meredith is like, you know, he's like sort of a well-known political operative. He was in the Matt Bevin administration. So he's a very partisan guy, somebody who's well-known to the politicos in the state. But to have Andy Beshear, who again is—his dad was governor, Democratic governor as well, total party loyalist, normal mainstream Democratic dude—to have him release these confidential emails from the White House, that's also a pretty extraordinary move. Yeah, and I think what they were pointing to is that the press in Kentucky was like, are you sure that the White House said that they were going to do this? And he's like,

yeah, I am sure. Here's the plan. And he literally released his own emails with the president. Think about how extraordinary that is. A normie Democratic governor, you know, in a red state. So I guess he has some incentive to buck the administration, but very much been kind of a friend of the Bidens. And then to just release the email like that, I just think it's stunning. I mean, to see, I can't even think of a parallel where there's such a lock on party loyalty for state governors like that to just turn against Biden. And I think it's a growing trend. You know, Gavin Newsom clearly is also smelling blood and he's trying to position himself as the anti Ron DeSantis 2024 pick. I don't think that's going to happen. But the fact that he feels, you know, he's like, hey, you know what, Biden's a disaster. I won recall election. Maybe I should be the one who can just feel how terrible Biden is and how know how unpopular he is in their states. They don't feel like they need to fall in line. And, you know, I think their constituents will probably reward them for that. That's the biggest problem for Biden.

Yeah, well, that's very true. That is very true. I think I saw a headline. Tim Ryan, who's running for Senate in Ohio, was like not going to appear with Biden in his state. I mean, these are the sort of things that have, that hasn't happened really up till now. Because even though Biden has not been a popular president for, you know, the last year, he hasn't had this sort of like radioactive quality to him where rural or moderate or swing state Dems feel like, I got to keep my distance. That's changing and it's changing pretty quickly. Another sign of decline in the White House is one of his top aides who was there with him throughout the campaign, Kate Bedingfield, who's White House communications director. She is going to be leaving the White House later this

month. I think we have this that we can put up on the screen. The tweet here says, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, a trusted Biden aide since his time as Obama's vice president, will be departing the White House later this month per White House officials. Now, of course, they'll say, oh, she's just, she's really tired or family or whatever excuse they're going to make. But when you start seeing high level people like this who've been there for years saying, I'm done, that's a sign of a real problem. It's something we tracked with Kamala Harris's office, of course, closely as well. And going back to that initial CNN piece that we were looking at,

they actually have a quote in there. They say, several officials say Biden's tendency to berate advisors when he's displeased with how a situation is being handled or when events go off poorly has trickled down the ranks in the West Wing, leaving several mid-level aides feeling blamed for failings despite lacking any real ability to influence the building's decision making, that has contributed to some of the recent staff departures, according to people familiar. So Biden's management style, as I've discussed before, is he is kind of a micromanager, but he's also incapable of making a decision. And you see that now playing out in his inability to just move forward on some things and ideas that have been floating in the ether now for months and months. Classic example of this is

the student loan debt thing. How many weeks ago did we hear, oh, he's thinking about doing it, maybe it's going to be $10,000, maybe it's going to be means tested, it's coming anytime, he's going to make a decision anytime. Here we are, still no decision on something he could have literally done on day one on his own. Doesn't need Congress, doesn't need Manchin, parliamentarian, none of that. So his, even though, like you said, of course, you know, not every problem is because of him, but a lot of it does come back to his management style, his inability to make decisions, his inability to delegate, and the fact that that really hangs up the White House response on literally everything.

And then we're seeing from quotes from within the room that his response to this frustration that is caused by his own failings is then to yell at and berate his advisors. Yeah, that's right. I mean, when you put it that way and you just really consider how much these people are turning against him, that we're seeing at the state level and more, I just think that it just shows you that he's in real trouble. He's exactly in Jimmy Carter territory. It's exactly at these times when Ted Kennedy and others decided to run and run against him. It's also at this time when Reagan and his advisers, this is quaint, but at the time they're like, could a 60-something-year-old person really get elected? He seems so old. And Reagan was like, nah, man, I could beat this guy.

And he was pointing to Jimmy Carter. So, yeah, I kind of wish for the days where 68 seemed too old to be president, but that's where we are. So he finds himself in the exact same political conditions, and that just causes a tremendous amount of chaos in the country. And, you know, it's bad for the country to have somebody that lacks so little confidence in their own party and in the people at the highest level of the office. I mean, it's bad for the country when we have so many crises that need to be dealt with and he's unable to, you know, galvanize any sort of response to any of it. So, yeah, it's a sad state of affairs. And then the last piece of this is you were alluding to the fact that, you know, not only do you have Andy Beshear bucking him in the state of Kentucky, you've got Gavin Newsom kind of testing the waters out in California.

Very bold when you have an incumbent president. And clearly he feels he's not going to pay any price for pretty actively floating his own 2024 considerations, even as Biden has been totally clear, I'm running again. The other person who's starting to get attention is Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who's, you know, billionaire dude. No one would expect him to be the sort of like Democratic savior. And it's a sign of how low the bar is, honestly, that there's such he's having such a moment because it's like all he hasn't done anything extraordinary. It's just he campaigned such a moment. Because it's like, all he, he hasn't done anything extraordinary. It's just he campaigned on a few things and then like actually did them. And people are like, oh my God, this dude is incredible. So put this Washington Post piece

up on the screen, which talks about exactly this dynamic. They say, as some Democrats grow impatient with Biden, alternative voices emerge. And they lay out this contrast with J.B. Pritzker. So when Biden heard about the Highland Park killings that we're going to talk about next, all he said at this Independence Day barbecue was he got up and sort of like mumbled in his typical way. You all heard what happened today. Things will get better still, but not without more hard work together. That's it. OK. He then later got up and gave a little bit more fulsome remarks. But in contrast to that, J.B. Pritzker is the governor of the state where this all happened, you know, immediately came out with a much more sort of clear and forceful response. Again, it's not like Pritzker's

response was anything mind blowing. It just showed like a little bit of energy and a little bit of emotion in response to what is an obviously gut wrenching, horrific tragedy. Let's take a listen to what Pritzker had to say. If you're angry today, I'm here to tell you, be angry. I'm furious. I'm furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence. I'm furious that their loved ones are forever broken by what took place today. I'm furious that children and their families have been traumatized. I'm furious that this is happening in communities all across Illinois and America.

I'm furious because it does not have to be this way. And yet we as a nation, well, we continue to allow this to happen. While we celebrate the 4th of July just once a year, mass shootings have become our weekly, yes, weekly American tradition. And I think what Pritzker shows to sentence, you were telling me and I was like, that's it. That's why people like this guy. And I think that, right. It is a sign of how people are just desperate for it. He at least has his finger on the pulse of how the Democratic base is kind of feeling. So channeling that emotion. But I actually think that that is noteworthy that, you know, it's not even that he called for specific policies and had this whole agenda like, OK, here's what we're going to do X, Y and Z. It was just that he had a forceful response that was clear in the moment that included emotion that a lot of people were feeling. People aren't asking for Biden to be a magician or a rocket scientist or any of that. They just

want to feel like he's at least engaged and at least trying. And you're really getting none of that. Oh, yeah. I mean, I can't even... Like I said, I watched it and I was like, really, that's it? But look, when the bar is this low, I guess I get it.

It reminds me of the Cuomo love, you know, during the middle of the pandemic where literally all he did was seem semi-competent even though he was killing old people with his nursing home policies and then bailing them out with some nursing home liability shield. But people thought, hey, at least he can speak. So Pritzker did do one thing that's—

What is it? You're going to kind of appreciate this. So he cut the gas tax and also, I think, the grocery tax in the state. Oh, good. And he mandated that gas stations and grocery stores put up a sign telling people that they are benefiting from this tax cut. I love that. Yeah. I support that.

This is someone who understands politics. It's like when Trump signed the stimulus checks. I was like, hey, that's a good idea. Oh, my God. A Democrat who actually, like, understands politics. So, anyway, that's the Pritzker flirtation. And then the last thing, we just have a couple of poll numbers to show you

that is the backdrop for all of this. Monmouth poll that just came out, put this up on the screen. We've got right direction for the country, 10%. Wrong track, 88%. That's as close to unanimous as you can possibly get. Biden's job approval rating, put the next piece up, now sinking to a new low in this particular poll, 36 percent approval rating, 58 percent disapproved. Look at that curve. It's insane.

It's bad. And I mean, the thing for him is obviously the Republicans united in opposition to him, he's lost, you know, overwhelming majority of independents. But he also has among self-identified Democrats, especially young ones who also are completely disenchanted. Now, those aren't people who are going to vote for Republicans, but are they going to show up in the midterms? You know, this is a pretty devastating state of affairs the current president's facing. Total disaster. And the right track, wrong track, which is the one that I would focus on the most, at 88% wrong track, 10% right direction, that just shows you that they're in serious issue with the feeling of chaos. And that's what I was getting to about gas and inflation. Everything is chaotic. We're talking about the airlines. Airlines are not functioning properly. It's like, is anything in American life working at all? And the answer is pretty much no. I mean, beyond what is things are expensive, you are seeing the businesses are in a very strange position because many of them at the same time have to pay very much for workers, which I think that's a good thing. But also,

from an inflation perspective, the smallest ones are getting hammered. Also, we're seeing reductions in consumer spending. We could very likely be in a recession. GDP is contracting. But again, we talked about this on Tuesday. I was like, look, pull away from the technical stuff. Everything is just too expensive. Everything is chaotic. And that's why the wrong track number is going to be where it is. I think it's a huge, huge problem for the Democrats. But at the same time, you know, the generic ballot polling within this only showed the Democrats down by 2%. So it's not necessarily that people will say they'll automatically vote for Republicans. There's still a 2% margin. Again, you know, Kristol Zaga rule probably had like five because they generally

underestimate Republican support in all of these polls basically since 2016. So I don't know where things actually stand. YouGov's polling moved eight points on generic ballot towards Democrats in one week. So this is what the subject of my monologue, like the only thing that could possibly save Democrats from complete disaster is the Republicans who are doing their damnedest to prove to people that they are completely unfit to govern and that their views are like wildly outside of the mainstream and that they've like lost all touch with reality. So that's the only thing that the Democrats have going for them is that the alternative is, you know, bizarre and absurd. But, you know, I think back to Biden and the sense in the country right now, you have this sense of just

sort of permanent decline that is set in, coupled with Biden's mission to defeat any sort of political imagination that you might have. Yes. So, you know, his response to everything is we can't do that because of X, because of Y, that's not possible. It's, you know, there's basically nothing we can do about anything. That's his whole political ideology seems to be centered around the idea of like, well, there's not really anything we can do about any of this. So when you couple that hopelessness with a situation that seems to be deteriorating in basic ways all the time, yeah, you're going to end up with 90% of the country saying we're

on the wrong track. Yeah, I think that's correct. Okay, let's talk about Highland Park. Some really stunning stuff that came out around this shooting. As we alluded and mentioned to in our last show, Shooter was known to law enforcement. The extent to which he was known to law enforcement is legitimately stunning. The police now coming and saying that they had two separate interactions with this individual, both of which probably should have resulted in him never being able to purchase a firearm. And we'll get to the exact specifics of that. But just listen to how big of a screw up that this actually was.

April of 2019, an individual contacted Highland Park Police Department a week after learning of Mr. Cremo attempting suicide. This was a delayed report, so Highland Park still responded to the residents a week later, spoke with Cremo, spoke with Cremo's parents, and the matter was being handled by mental health professionals at that time. There was no law enforcement action to be taken. It was a mental health issue handled by those professionals. The second occurred in September of 2019. A family member reported that Cremo said he was going to kill everyone and Cremo had a collection of knives. The police responded to his residence. The police removed 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword from Cremo's home. At that time,

there was no probable cause to arrest. There were no complaints that were signed by any of the victims. The Highland Park Police Department, however, did immediately notify the Illinois State Police of the incident. So this guy tried to commit suicide in August 2019. September 2019 says he wants to, quote, kill everyone. Now, here is where there is some real blame, not just on the police, who, by the way, there is a red flag law on the books in Illinois. He very much would have covered for this. This is where this guy's father is. There should be some serious action taken against him.

Let's put this up there on the screen. Because immediately following that, here's what we learned, which is that the clear and present danger report made by the police was made in response to threats directed at the family. But the report indicates that when police went to the home and asked the individual if he felt like harming himself, he responded no. And additionally, here's the key. The father claimed the knives were his,

and they were being stored in his closet for safekeeping, as in his son's closet. So based on that information, they returned the knives to the father later that afternoon. So whoever this father is, he basically made it so that some of the Red Flog Law provisions could not kick into place whenever they could have been used and the police could have taken more action against this guy.

And that basically resulted in them not only returning the knife, a sword apparently, come out of this guy's bedroom, once again, complete freak. Because, you know, that's what parents do all the time. They store their own knives in their children's closets. That's a normal thing parents do. I know. I mean, and look, if you're the cops, like, what are you supposed to do? It's not like you can prove that the guy is lying.

It's very clear that he probably was lying. But based on that information, the father very clearly was covering up for his son. And this guy apparently was pretty well known in the community. And now it has resulted in six people who are dead, including two parents of a young infant, a two year old child who's now been orphaned. This is horrific. There's a GoFundMe. We'll put the link in the description. But the point is, is that this was a screw up up and down the chain. August 2019, the fact that he tried to commit suicide and the fact that the mental health professionals didn't flag him under the red flag law. And then second, whenever somebody reported and was concerned enough to say that he was going to, quote, kill everyone. And again, you know, the police did not take the action that at least it seems in retrospect they should have.

In some cases, their hands are tied because his father is, well, you know, like I said, I hope at the very least he faces some wrongful death suits and others by the family members who are involved here. Just a disaster all the way up and down the chain. Because it's not just that dad covers for him. You know, son says, I'm going to kill everybody. Police are called to the house. Find all of these knives and weapons in his closet. Dad covers. Oh,, those are actually mine. Blatantly lying, obviously.

But then when it comes time for this maniac to buy the guns that he ultimately uses to mass murder these poor innocent people at this parade, guess who backs him up on that and sponsors him for that? Because I think in Illinois, you have to, if you're under 21, you have to have somebody who's older to sort of sponsor your application. Dad is the one who shows up and makes it so that this maniac can buy these guns. Little parenting tip. If your kid has tried to commit suicide and has said he wants to kill everyone, don't help them get a gun. I mean, this is just, this is absolute insanity. And, you know, the red flag law, too, part is really sad because clearly the provisions were in place that if dad or someone else in the family said, you know what, this, my child is having emotional issues, there are danger to themselves or others, then instead of going and sponsoring his application to get the gun, you actually put a block in place so that

he can't easily obtain that weapon. And then maybe ultimately, that's the difference between this mass shooting and death unfolding and not. It really is just, this person was like the most obvious mass shooter in history. And he's facilitated in obtaining the weapons that he uses to commit this carnage. Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, like I said, again, there's going to be some serious questions that remain to be asked around this dad, around the cops, what they knew, who also is this mental health professional, you know, who did not flag this under the Illinois system? Because suicide and committing that should have fallen within the provisions. I think it just goes to show you that even with all these laws on the books, there's still tremendous amounts of screw-ups.

None of it is foolproof. None of it's foolproof. And if people like this dad are going to be terrible citizens who are now responsible, at least in part, for six people who are lying dead on a sidewalk after attending a Fourth of July parade, I don't know. It just shows you it's just a further sign of societal decline, even the fact that this freak exists in the first place. There was a report that the dad had told someone that his son had, quote, emotional issues. Again, even if you, because listen, I can sort of wrap my head around as a parent, you can't imagine that your kid would be capable of this. But even if you're just concerned for his own safety, he had tried to commit suicide. You're going to help him get a gun? Yeah, the most common way to commit suicide is a gun.

Exactly. I mean, insane details continuing to come out here. So we'll continue to follow it. Okay, let's go and talk about the airlines. So this is a very important story, and very interesting as well. So there's an ongoing war, as we've talked about, between the airlines who are blaming the FAA, and then

the FAA who is saying the airlines are completely full of it, and all of this is obviously resulting in these massive flight cancellations. So, let's go ahead, actually let's put C2 up there first, please, control room, because here's what's happening, which is that United Airlines came out and put out a statement saying that they actually, what has happened is that they're blaming the FAA for not having enough staffing resources. They said that travel woes are continued to expect. They told their staff they're going to have more summer problems

because air traffic controllers can't handle the amount of flights and that that issue is causing flight disruption. However, they got fact-checked almost immediately in real time. So let's throw this up there. C1, please. Where the FAA basically smacked them down hard. Here's what they said. The department and the FAA appreciate airlines taking steps to improve informants,

but clearly more needs to be done to reduce cancellations. It is unfortunate to see United Airlines conflate weather-related air traffic control measures with air traffic control staffing, which would deceptively imply that a majority of those situations are the result of FAA staffing. The reality is that multiple overlapping factors have affected the system, including airline staffing, weather, high volume, and the air traffic control capacity, but the majority of delays and cancellations are not because of staffing at the FAA. On July 3rd and 4th, there were no FAA staffing-related days at all nationwide, yet airlines canceled 1,100 flights in those two days, a quarter of which were United Airlines flights.

We will continue to meet our responsibility to hold airlines accountable, et cetera, et cetera. So they got fact-checked and smacked in real time by the FAA. And it just shows you there's a high level, basically a proxy war playing out. United and American and all the other major carriers, they don't want the wrath that comes from consumers when they're canceling thousands and thousands of flights per day. It's total chaos right now in airports. Also, like I was talking about earlier, bag check. Nothing is working properly in these places. And they have been trying to blame the FAA now for days.

It's good to see actually the FAA actually come out and be like, no, that's actually completely not true. Because United is trying to tell both its stockholders and its staff it's not their fault. When, look, it's very clear here they have staffing problems that they are a result of their own making from forced retirements that they took COVID money in order to push people out. And also they are booking the money on flights that they basically know they can't fulfill. And so from a cancellation and legal perspective, it's chaos. And of course, outside of whoever this FAA guy is who put out the statement, I don't see anything else from the Biden administration doing anything about it. Indeed. Pete, what's going on, Pete?

What's going on, Pete? Yeah, because on top of all of that, the cancellations and I mean, they really they needed to pare back their summer schedule. They don't have the staff to fly all of the flights that they put out to the public as available to book. That's the crux of the problem through their own choices after we bailed them out. That's the real major issue here is they need to pare back their schedule and they were unwilling to do it because they're worried about their bottom line profit margins. But then to add insult to injury, when people are getting canceled and they're entitled to an actual cash refund, the airlines have also been caught trying to coerce people into taking miles instead of the cash that they're entitled to, basically trying to snow them, which was the subject of Pete's little travel agent tip, like, here's how you calculate your miles. So in terms of Pete and what he could do, we've covered here before, Senator Sanders put out a very specific proposal of fines that they could levy on the airlines

when they cancel and delay passengers that would have some bite and discourage them from continuing to operate in what is really an unconscionable manner. Pete has now responded to that proposal. He says, quote, he hasn't seen all the math come back on Senator Sanders' proposal to fine airlines for canceling and delaying flights that they knew could not be staffed. So he's still dodging and deflecting. You'll recall about a month ago, he gathered all the airline CEOs together and said, you better cut it out. And if July 4th weekend isn't good, there's going to be, you know, we're going to look at this again and we're going to see how it goes. Well, the stats came back. It was a disaster. And still he's, you know, doing basically nothing.

It is a pathetic state of affairs. So as much as I enjoy seeing the airlines sort of like fact-checked and called out like this, I would really prefer to see them actually held to account and somebody with some power do something to curb their behavior, which has just created total chaos for travelers this summer. Well, as a reminder, I mean, you know, Buttigieg does run the FAA. And I've said this, you know, look, call the airlines bluff, which is that get some air traffic control guys from the National Guard or whatever, put them in the put them in the towers and just say,

fine, OK, here's all the staffing that you need. I suspect from everything I've read so far, it does not seem that the airlines are telling the truth here on why exactly all of this is happening. And really what it is, is that the cancellations are becoming a nightmare for connecting travel, which is snarling things even further. Because Newark Airport, which apparently is the most delayed airport in the country, makes sense every time I've flown out of Newark. Like anywhere in the New York region. Yeah, New York is a nightmare. Anyway, so they have had to preemptively cancel flights. But part of the problem is whenever you cancel flights out of a hub, then you are going to

miss your connecting flights. And then also there's been chaos, not just here, but also abroad. Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, and Dublin were also seeing major delays and cancellations as a result of similar staffing-related problems. Because all of this stuff cascades globally. And you consider that, and there's just nobody who has their hand on the system trying to guide it in the right direction, which just leaves it basically up to the airlines who can rebook a flight,

cancel the flight if they need to. So, yeah, like you said, we've got the FAA. It's good that they're fact-checking them in real time, but they have limited authority beyond the executive branch to actually swoop in and do something about this. Fine, you know, if Sanders' proposal goes too far, do something. I mean, I don't know why you can't do a quarter of it. Maybe it would help. Like, there's no plan right now. Also, people are reporting major wait times at a lot

of these airports. Also, not just because of staffing issues, but obviously summer travel has bounced back. We're almost basically at pre-pandemic flight level. I have a flight later today, by the way. I'll report back to see how it goes. Now, what they're saying is that wait times are sky high. Also, in terms of the way that the airlines are running their boarding pass system and more, they're making people get paper boarding passes. In some cases, because they're refusing to assign seats, That's causing more wait times at counters where there's limited amounts. It's a real mess right now, I feel, for people who are traveling. Our friend Irami made a really good point to me that I want to share with you,

which is, he's like, you know how we look at other countries that have these systems of patronage where, you know, the brother, the cousin, the lackey, whatever, and it's like a sign of a totally corrupt, like failing government. These people are put into jobs that you know they have no business doing because no one actually is like,

cares about good governance. They just care about holding on to power and their access to money. Pete is like the same thing. Yes. Remember when he was being considered for what they floated, like, oh, you could have the office of management

and budget and he was like, nah, that's not high profile. I'm one he was the mayor of south bend indiana and he wasn't even a good mayor you know we talked about that on our show exactly the people in south bend were like this is a shit mayor you know we have potholes all over the problem we have police force issues like correct it's a tiny town look no disrespect but now here we are and it turns out that this position that he was given as the, you know, as the payment for dropping out of the Democratic primary at the time that Obama told him to, oh, it turns out this job actually matters, that it actually is important. And then it has

real responsibility. And then it has a direct impact on the quality of life in the country. And we've put this like, you know, McKinsey flunky who can't see beyond like who has no idea how to actually govern and do the job in charge. So, you know, it is the exact same type of thing where no one was under any illusion that Mayor Pete was qualified for this job. He got it purely as payback and patronage. Remember when Biden ran that ad during the primary making fun of Pete for like having no idea about any sort of infrastructure project, knocking him for like, oh, you put lights on the bridge. Way to go, Mayor Pete. And then that's the guy you put in charge. Yeah. Listen, it's pretty telling. Rough times out there.

Right now, we are seeing thousands of flights. 15% right now of summer flights are currently on track to be canceled. And 12% of departures, like I said, out of Newark alone are being cut. And Newark is one of the biggest hubs in the U.S. And on 4th of July weekend, there were 8.8 million passengers who were screened by TSA. I mean, that's a big part of the adult population in the U.S. was on a plane over the weekend and faced all sorts of these problems. So it's just like gas. It's going to touch many, many households. And when you're traveling with kids, oh, my God, it's such a nightmare,

these delays and the inflations. Total nightmare. All right, this is another really, I think, very important story, actually, about what is going on in the North Carolina Senate race. So there's a Green Party candidate. I can't remember if you and I interviewed him, but we interviewed Matthew Ho on Crystal Kyle and Friends. He had a great perspective as a veteran of the Afghanistan war on the deep levels of corruption and how the words from the leaders didn't even come close to matching the reality on the ground of what was happening there. So Matthew decides he wants to run for Senate as a Green Party candidate.

And he did everything right. You know, they had the infrastructure in place, gathers all of the signatures and more by thousands that they need to ultimately get on the ballot. So a couple things happened here, just blatant dirty tricks from the Democratic Party, which pretends to care so much about democracy and we have to save democracy, etc., etc., to get him kicked off the ballot. And so far it has worked. So the very first thing they did is they started, go ahead and put Matthew's tweet up on the screen here. He says, in recordings and eyewitness accounts provided to the Green Party and the media, Democratic Party operatives falsely claimed, so they lied, to be representing the Green Party and even the Board of Elections as they bombarded our petition signers with deceptive claims. So what happened here is once they file all of their petition signatures, then the Democratic Party goes and grabs them.

And probably what they did is they matched them to their own voter file information. And then they go through systematically and call and text all of these people to say, hey, do you want to remove your signature? Because, you know, this is really going to hurt the Democratic Party. We have to make sure that we stop the Republicans. So do you want to remove your signature? Now, this behavior is, I think, obnoxious. I think it's anti-democratic. It's something they did in Montana, too, and they were successful at it, actually. But it's not illegal.

But where they ultimately really crossed the line is they got caught because they called, I think, the head of the Green Party in the state. Yes. They got caught lying and saying, we're with the Green Party and we really are representing them and really have their best interest at heart. Don't you want to take your signature off the ballot? So they actually impersonated Green Party volunteers to try to get this done. Ultimately, they weren't very successful. They got a couple hundred people to be bullied and persuaded into removing their signatures from the petitions. So Green Party

still had way more signatures than they needed to get on the ballot. So put this next piece up on the screen. So what happens? Well, it comes down to almost the date when, you know, sort of by statute, you have to have the ballots locked into place and who's going to be on the ballots locked into place. And the Green Party needed 13,865 signatures. They initially submitted 22,500, way more than needed. Ultimately, almost 16,000 were officially verified by the County Board of Elections. But even though they had more than 2,000 verified signatures, more than was needed, on the state board of elections, which has three Democrats and two Republicans, all three of the Democrats voted in lockstep to deny the Green Party candidate ballot access. Did they offer any signs that there was like a reason that

they did this? No. They said, oh, there might be fraud. They didn't prove any fraud. They didn't show any. They didn't come close to showing thousands of signatures that were a problem. No. They said, there could be possibly fraud that we haven't uncovered, that we have no evidence for. So we're all going to vote in a lockstep partisan faction to kick the Green Party off the ballot. That's crazy. Totally crazy. Totally anti-small d, Democratic. Just outright saying, we don't want this candidate on the ballot. And so we're going to, in a lockstep partisan fashion, kick them off with no real justification. Now, my understanding

is that there are potential legal recourses from here because typically what makes sense is the assumption is that the signatures are valid. And then you have to prove if there's fraud, like we saw in Michigan, they proved that some certain percentage were fraudulent. And so people got kicked off the ballot justifiably. Here, they did not prove it. They came in with an assumption that these signatures are invalid, even though that is not the case. They never proved that it was the case. And when the lawyer for the Green Party tried to speak up and say, hey, you know, you can't do this, they actually muted him and wouldn't hear any more from him. It's insane. I mean, yeah, whenever you pointed this out and I was reading about the

so-called fraud, this really is like an actual stop the steal phenomena. And because it's in North Carolina, it's being completely, I mean, first of all, the media is not covering it, even though it's a totally nuts story, but what are they, what are they so afraid of? That's what I don't understand. First of all, look, you're in North Carolina, you're already fighting an uphill battle. Okay. But second, it's like, it's not like this is going to be such a competitive race. And then if you really want to beat him, then just beat him. I don't see why that they're so concerned and fighting so hard tooth and nail in order to keep this guy off the ballot to the point of impersonating people, calling signatories and more. It's

completely, you know, it really is dystopian almost in the way they're trying to keep it and rig the system here. I also think that it's crazy that they were able to rig the vote certification against him because the Democrats ran the election board. Right. And that way they were into lockstep machine all the way up to the top. I mean, this it does show you that as hard as it is, like as as hard as they will rig the internal Democratic primaries, it is even harder to get through as a third party candidate,, I mean, this state board of elections, it shows you how the whole system is designed for there just to be two parties that have a lock on the whole process. So when the three Democrats who control the board got together

and said, we don't really care whether the signatures are valid or not, we're going to block them. That was the final say. So it is out and out rigging. It is out and out fraud, impersonating Green Party volunteers, insinuating there's fraud, but not proving it. It is really an insane story. And it just shows you how they're pearl clutching about democracy, which is something I really actually care about. I would like to see the country be much more small d democratic. It's another example of how they're just full of it, because when it came down to it and they had their own ability to rig the system, they'll do it. It reminds me of, remember the Iowa caucuses when they wanted to throw out the vote or do a different

calculation for the caucuses that were coming in so strongly for Bernie Sanders. These overwhelming immigrant communities that were showing up and voting overwhelmingly for Bernie. They're like, we want to count those ones differently. Again, total hypocrites, total hypocrites out blatantly rigging the ballot in North Carolina because they're too afraid to actually appeal to voters and win in fair and square. It fits with the rigging that you were talking about with Joe Biden, too, in the broader Democratic primary. So this goes all the way up to the top, and it really is baked into them. I don't know what they're so afraid of. You can just beat people if you want to, but that seems too

difficult. Then you have to really actually appeal to people and do something. Okay, let's talk about this. This is fun. You guys might have seen the headline. Let's throw it up there on the screen. Joe Rogan said he's declined several times to have Trump on his podcast. I don't want to help him, said Rogan. Of course, the Times says who has spread COVID misinformation is popular with many Trump supporters. First of all, do you have any data to back that up? Because that is not necessarily true. And I love that they are able to just post that with no, you know, actual facts in order to belie that headline. Fine. But it does, here's what happened. Rogan did an interview with Lex Friedman. He said, yeah, I've declined to have him on the podcast multiple times because, quote, I don't want to help him. He said, I think he's chaotic. These are all things, if you listen to Rogan, he's probably said this a million times. As a reminder, he even has that new policy, which he set out. He goes, I don't want to interview politicians. He's like, I don't want to be seen helping anybody. And I think legitimately, you and I having interviewed him, talked to him, been on the

show twice, I don't think he, he doesn't enjoy being at the center of this maelstrom of politics. It's not something that he wants. So anyway, people project on him all sorts of things, which he isn't. The problem though, is that the Trump people are now very pissed off at him, with Steve Bannon now taking a shot. Let's throw this up there on the screen. Bannon tears into Joe Rogan and his, quote, low information voters for not wanting to platform Trump. So here's what Steve Bannon had to say. Quote, where is he about Spotify putting this guy's rap videos and making money off it? Why don't they notify the police? Why? What is Spotify executive saying? Talking about that Highland, the Highland Park shooter. The

Highland Park shooter, of course. He goes, Spotify is an accessory before the fact, just like the parents are. And he goes, you got Joe Rogan over there, trash talking Trump. I don't give Trump any platform. No offense. He doesn't need your platform. He doesn't need your low information voters, continued Bannon. Okay, Trump deals with high information people. Your audience couldn't handle War Room, couldn't follow it. Start talking inverted yield curve, your eyes would cross. So, you know, don't trash talk and take money from Spotify as Spotify is part of the problem. So I'm just going to reveal a little bit of information here. It wasn't too long ago that I was contacted by somebody who works for Steve Bannon who wanted to get on the Joe Rogan

experience. I decline, I'm mostly 99.9% of the time. Somebody's like, Hey, can you connect me to Rogan? I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. And he was one of them. So just so you know, he didn't have it above him to try and get on the Joe Rogan experience. He was happy to talk to the low information. He was happy. And when he wanted to, to get on the Joe Rogan experience. He was happy to talk to the low information voters. Yes, he was happy when he wanted to, to get on the Joe Rogan experience whenever he had his people reach out to me in order to do that. But yeah, it's just like, first of all,

this idea is actually very anti-Bannonism, the idea of low information. It's like, dude, they're low information people, aka non-voters, aka non-politically activated ones, are the ones that you always said that you were for in the White House and are the reason that Donald Trump became president of the United States. Deeply insulting. You're actually talking about here people who are probably disproportionately more likely to vote than not. Clearly, they're listening to somebody who occasionally has newsy-ish type of information. And, you know, it just cuts against the entire idea that Trump or that the audience itself is somehow the problem and

reflected in Rogan when really they're just have they're there to have a good time. There's nothing wrong with that whenever they're doing so. So anyway, I thought it's so hypocritical by Bannon and deeply coping, given the fact that, like I said, I know he wanted to get on or at least the people around him wanted to get him on at some point. Listen, as we've discussed here before and I've discussed before, Joe Rogan, of course, is not a perfect person, no doubt about it. But I would take the information that is being spread on his show over, I mean, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, because there's actually a depth of conversation there

that is, you know, oftentimes, not always, oftentimes, you know, delves much more deeply into the issues we're facing than the surface level partisan bullshit that we get in cable news. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I think in terms of whether or not he should interview Trump, I actually, you know, maybe this is an un whether or not he should interview Trump, I actually, you know, maybe this is an unpopular opinion. I don't know. I actually would like to see him interview Trump. Obviously, it's his show.

He can do what he wants with it. But it would have to be the case, though, that Trump would submit himself to the full, like, three hours or whatever. And I don't think he would ever, ever agree to come in the studio and do the thing that a regular guest does. And so, yeah, if Trump is trying to have it like on his terms, a shorter interview, more controlled by him and his handlers, then absolutely he shouldn't do that. So I've interviewed Trump probably two hours in total across four different times. I don't see how it could work. And the problem is, is he's a steamroller, number one. He would not let Joe speak. He'd be like, excuse me,

excuse me, excuse me. And at a certain point, you know, he is, he was the president, at least when I was interviewing him. You know, you have to give some sort of deference and you can't be completely confrontational because then they're just going to cut it off completely. He just speaks in multi-paragraphs. It's very difficult to get in there. He's a real rambler. And I don't think that, I don't think Joe would get a lot out of it. And I don't think the audience would necessarily get a lot out of it either, because Trump is also a poser. Like he's never answering the question in a real fashion. He's always play acting. I feel like Joe's good at cutting through that kind of bullshit though, you know, especially if you have, if you give him

enough time now, you know, but I don't think Trump would submit himself to that kind of bullshit, though, you know, especially if you give him enough time. But I don't think Trump would submit himself to that. Exactly. And that's the thing. And, like, ultimately, look, obviously, if Joe doesn't want to do it, he doesn't want to do it. But, you know, the idea that if he had him on, it would automatically be helpful to Trump, I don't buy that at all. Because I think over the course of, you know, a lengthy interview, I think he could do a lot of things that would expose himself in a way that the mainstream press has never known how to handle Donald Trump. But I actually have more faith in Joe to do a better job with it than most of the interviewers who have tried to talk to Trump.

The worst case scenario is like the Nelk boys whenever they sat down with Trump. He spouted off for like an hour and a half on a bunch of election bullshit and they were like, yeah, Donnie, that's right. Donnie, you know, sitting there like drinking their stupid seltzer.

But even that, wasn't there a moment from that even that was kind of like revealing? I remember there was something from that that we covered. We covered the fact that he got taken down

by YouTube, which I thought was really dumb. I mean, I think it's fine for people to see the president as a moron if they want to, um, and spend time with these guys. Like I said, my big beef was that those guys were wearing shorts with the president, but whatever. They can do what they want. They have a very successful business over there, the Nelk gentlemen. I think that it's interesting, um, the perspective of, can you have a productive interview with Trump on these type of platform? I honestly, I just don't know if it would be possible given his steamrolling, given

how wedded he is to so much of this crap. And he does get angry and bristles whenever you do poke him or push him in the direction that I think Rogan would have to. Otherwise, he'd have to just sit back. And, you know, you know, that's a bad look, too. You don't want to get steamrolled. I don't think his instincts are incorrect at all to just say, you know what, like, I'm sick of this shit. I don't need any of this.

I don't need this shit. I mean, why doesn't he? I guess the way I see it, I totally understand where he's coming from, and I would probably make the same decision. But it's not clear to me that in terms of, like, what the public would benefit from, that it wouldn't be a benefit to have Rogan three hours with Trump. Sure. Again, I don't think that's possible. Like, I don't think that's a there's a universe where that is an actual possibility, because I don't think he would I don't think he would submit to that type of situation

where he really doesn't have control, where it can go as long as Joe wants it to go. And all of those sorts of things. His handlers aren't there and all of that. I don't think he would submit to that ultimately, because, you know, he's too fearful and too controlling of how that might ultimately go. But, you know, if that was a possibility in the universe, I do think actually the public could benefit from it and it would be more revealing than what you typically get in the mainstream. If they were all willing to do it, I would love to see it. Right.

If Biden would actually. And again, for real, like actually talk openly. It's just in my experience, these guys are so buttoned up. They're unable to open themselves up to any sort of critical inquiry. And they're just always full of shit. They're always lying. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a reason why we don't interview many people. Yeah, exactly.

Because they have all these bullshit restrictions. Just so people know. Oh, it can only go eight minutes from 9.42 until 10. And we want to see your questions in advance. Right, where's the questions in advance? And it's like, no, that's not happening here. And then they're like, well, on CNN they do. I'm like, I don't care.

They don't work at CNN. You know, it's just one of those things where they have a very set rules that they like to operate in, which is mostly cable, where they have all the power and they can control access and all that. And when you remove that, they don't really know what to do. And then they don't want to put themselves in that situation. You know, Ro Khanna, at least one of the only people who's willing to come on here, and I'll be like, hey, what do you think about this? What's actually happening? Ro, for whatever pulse he has, he is down to answer any question and engage on anything. I appreciate that about him. Very rare. Well, he understands the power of what you can get and who you can talk to when you come on the show. But for many of these people, they're

such boomers, they don't even really understand it. And just like I said, I've met hundreds of these people, politicians and more. I've met maybe three or four, I think, that could have a real free-flowing conversation because they're not genuine people. They're fake. Like to make it in this business, you have to be fake as possible. So everything ingrained in them from the day they ran for student body president or whatever has turned them off from being able to be a good guest.

Again, that's my opinion. Yeah, and to hold up that artifice for three hours is very hard. You know, if you get past the 10 minute talking points, the whole thing kind of falls apart. Exactly. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, it's time for another gas monologue here by Sagar.

But I promise you all this time, it's not the gas that you're thinking of. We've talked a lot here on the show about the structural problems that belay the high gas prices right now. And while I have touched on other areas of energy like diesel and other markets, one market that we spent less time on but still tremendously important for all of our daily lives is natural gas. So it's difficult to state the impact that natural gas revolution has had on American life over the last two decades. It's a cheap and reliable source of power across the country. It's become a major global commodity and it has

underwritten the economic growth of much of the West, India, and China now for almost two decades. None of us paid that much attention until COVID, especially until the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And like those two things, we are now paying the price for globalization. Here in the U.S., natural gas makes up 40% of all power that we produced in 2021 alone. The key difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world is, though, that we make a ton of it. In Europe, they get 25% of their power from natural gas. The problem for them, though, is they're the largest importer in the world. And guess who provides the vast majority of that gas? Russia, who gives them approximately 40% of all gas they consumed just last year before the invasion. Part of the reason

for this is Russia is, of course, geographically close. The Russians have cheap gas, much cheaper than having to import it from faraway countries. Now, with the invasion of Ukraine, we've seen a commitment by the Europeans to cut themselves off not only from Russian oil, but to taper from Russian gas with the cancellation of the Nord Stream pipeline and more. The problem, though, is that they still need power, so they have to buy it from somewhere. And the shortage in natural gas markets and the disruption is not being felt by you at a consumer level in the same way. But the current craziness of the market may still and actually have even more of a destabilizing effect on all of us than high prices at the pump. The real crisis could actually just be beginning.

Natural gas is already up 700% over last year because of the demand increase in the Russian invasion. This has caused complete chaos in Europe, where energy prices are skyrocketing. And even here at home, where cooling bills and soon heating bills will be out of control expensive. The world may not be ready for a genuinely cataclysmic event, which is only a few days away. Exactly four days from right now, Russia is going to completely shut down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that carries natural gas to Europe. That shutdown is scheduled to last only 11 days.

But the Germans are now saying it may not ever get turned back on, as they have already cut natural gas flows to Germany by some 60%. The German ministers are describing it as, quote, economic warfare by Russia in retaliation for Western sanctions. Given the tremendous reliance by Germany, Italy, and other major European economies on gas, a total shutoff could spark a legitimate crisis.

Already, Germany has laid out a plan to ration natural gas and power, meaning literal rolling blackouts across the country, even if they do try to back up their grids with coal. Their union ministers are talking about the sheer collapse of German industry, which relies on Russian gas if a shutoff is extended. And the biggest problem remains infrastructure and globalization. Right now, natural gas prices in America are actually cheaper than the rest of the world. Yes, also because we make it here, but actually a worse reason. There was a fire at the Freeport in Texas where natural gas is liquefied and exported. That fire shut down the facility for a minimum of 90 days, meaning that if it can't be exported, then the supply is higher here at home. It was a temporary reprieve, which is not going to last. The moment the Freeport facility is back online, it's going to be booming business with European and Asian tankers who are

desperate for American natural gas. That is going to equalize prices with European and Asian tankers who are desperate for American natural gas. That is going to equalize prices here at home with global ones, meaning all of us will be paying a hell of a lot more. But the worst part is that none of this is even still going to work. The Europeans are surging natural gas facilities, but that's not going to backfill what the Russians have been providing them. A sheer lack of infrastructure on the continent means they are plainly screwed almost no matter what if the Russians cut them off. Furthermore, it's not like the West is the whole world. While yes, Germany is almost certainly going to ration, as is the rest of the continent, third world countries are plunging into complete chaos

already. Pakistan, whose entire grid is built on cheap LNG, is having rolling blackouts in the middle of the summer for up to 12 hours. Thailand is on the brink of fuel shortage because it can't afford expensive natural gas. And the rest of the world is turning to straight up coal to just power their grids because it's cheaper, more accessible than gas, and that is a disaster for CO2 output. In short, we are watching in real time an unraveling of the global economy. Germany is about to post a trade deficit for the first time since 1991, revealing that their economy and the Eurozone was fake all along. Their trade surplus with the world was underwritten by cheap Russian natural gas, which they use to manufacture goods and then export them at a profit to the rest

of the world. That's over. The decline of the biggest European continental power and the cornerstone of the euro currency hit its 20-year low just yesterday. I don't have to be a genius to figure out that when the German economy goes into recession suddenly, it's not usually good news for Europe or for the rest of the world. This time, the consequences could be dire as well, because the structural effect of a German recession effectively means an energy shortage for the entire world. And don't forget, just like with oil, high energy prices bleed into everything. They increase not only home bills, but increase the production price across the board for all goods worldwide, not just the ones here in the U.S. As far as solutions, you all know what I think. Build nuclear power plants across the board for all goods worldwide, not just the ones here in the US. As far as

solutions, you all know what I think. Build nuclear power plants across the globe. Do it now, but I know we're not going to. So instead, all of us are about to suffer big time. The 1970s are back, and we have got a Carter-like figure in the White House. A recession and the attendant chaos that comes with the decade is here to stay. They said in the 80s that the 70s were revenge for the 60s, and the 2020s then are the revenge for the hubris of the 2000s. The bad part is that we're the ones who have to pay the price this time. And I really couldn't get over it when I was looking at the rationing. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at?

Well, friends, the midterms are coming up fast and furious, and the outlook has ranged from bad to dire to outright cataclysmic for Democrats who are hoping to keep their hold on power. Obviously, inflation is still high. Almost everyone agrees the country is on the wrong track. Biden is unpopular, and the economy might already be in a recession. But a potential ray of light for the beleaguered Dems has appeared on the horizon. A small glimmer of hope for them, a life raft being offered from the most unexpected of places. Out of the darkness, the looniest fringe of the Republican Party is out doing their absolute best to rescue Democrats' midterm chances. What do I mean? Chances are you already know what I mean.

But here is a little taste anyway. So this is a viral mashup of the Arizona GOP's gubernatorial debate. Why not get high tech people that are going to be on the machines that are Republicans, a Democrat, Republican, get supervisors equal amount. That happens. We have parties looking over election results. That's right. They're doing it now. No, no. They're actually telling people that 200,000 minimum ballots were trafficked by mules. No. An honest election.

May I finish? Mamma mia. I don't believe this primary has been fair. I can tell you that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have launched the lawsuit. Our campaign is a movement. We're going to show up and vote in droves. They're going to have to cheat even harder in order to try to win this.

Your campaign's a psyop. Paula, please. First of all, put everything. I feel like this is a spoof, honestly. Go ahead. Finish what you were saying, please. Is this a spoof, Ted? No, it's not.

Are you sure? Yes, I am. Why can't we treat human life in the same way that we would treat alien life that we discovered on an alien planet? There's a reason we don't always invite Scott, because he's polling at 0%. No, 1%. And this is what happens when you... But the polls lie. Scott, please.

No, you can't respond to a closing statement. The only kind of drag I've ever dressed in is a business suit or construction work clothes. I've never aspired to be Elvis Presley All right, that's it. That's it. That's it That clip really had it all cringe election conspiracies weird white ethnic cringe things I genuinely don't even understand like the call to treat life as if it was alien life? What does that mean? Clearly, these people have lost their minds. Actually, the lady favorably citing the Grifter 2000 Mules movie, that's the one that is currently in the lead, according to latest polls.

But it'd be a mistake to consider this an isolated phenomenon. A confluence of events, from the Roe decision to the possibility of the Supreme Court rolling back even more rights to the renewed focus on 2020 election conspiracies thanks to January 6th hearings. All of this is really bringing out the unhinged freak in Republican candidates and Republican elected officials. From coast to coast in red states, blue states, and everywhere in between, Republicans are backing unhinged theories, pushing morally repugnant legislation, and generally behaving like maniacs. It may not be enough to rescue Dems in the midterms, but by golly, they are doing their damnedest. So up in Michigan, the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, she has linked abortion to child sacrifice. She's also said that demonic possession is real and can be contracted

through sex. Now, this woman rose to prominence by claiming to have witnessed election fraud and signing onto a pack of bogus election fraud claims, so she really just checks every box all the way around. You've got already elected officials gone wild ready for this new anything-goes Supreme Court era. In fact, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, he says he is prepared to enforce that state's sodomy laws, which ban same-sex intimacy, should SCOTUS give him the green light. Can anyone tell me how the state literally policing your bedroom and regulating which sex acts you're allowed to perform, how does that pull?

Now, Mr. Paxton has also said he wants to levy a fine of $100,000 on businesses each time that they help a woman cross state lines to obtain an abortion. Abortion, of course, is now illegal in Texas in all instances, nearly all instances, from the moment of fertilization. The only exception is for the life of the mother. And not content with leaving abortion extremism at the state level, of course, former Vice President Mike Pence immediately jumped out after Roe was overturned to declare his intention to fight for a nationwide, coast-to-coast abortion ban, an effort that quite a number of Republican members are actually already behind. Lawmakers are also now being asked about just how outlandishly cruel their views on abortion actually are, and some of the

answers are real doozies. The Speaker of the House in Mississippi, for example, believes that a 12-year-old raped by their father or uncle should be forced to bear that rapist's baby. Lest you think that is an outlandish example, which could never happen in the real world, the horror stories are already starting to trickle in of women and girls denied basic humanity and dignity. As one such example, a 10-year-old who was raped and impregnated was denied care in Ohio because she had been pregnant three days longer than that state's six-week abortion ban mandated. She fled to Indiana, where for now, doctors can still perform the procedure. But someone should update the Republican member of Congress running to represent my Virginia district on this story because she was a little shaky on her understanding of whether rape could actually result in a pregnancy. Guys, this is not going to stop. There will be more horror. There will be more candidates saying completely wild things on abortion and on elections, more legislators using their power to back ideas that are significantly less popular

than defund the police, and all politics is national. So it's going to be impossible for the Republicans trying to not go full crazy to wash themselves of the stench of all of the nutjobs. If Democrats hold on to the Senate, and there is actually a chance now that they could, this is going to be the reason. In general, yes, voters are absolutely frustrated and disgusted with the state of the country, frustrated with Biden. But that does not mean they are ready to vote for lunatics who believe thousands of mules stole the election, demonic possession by sex is real, and that 10-year-olds should be forced into childbirth. That could flip some suburban moderate swing voters, and it could convince some progressives who were just going to sit it out that they had better suck it up and vote D once again. Dems are probably doomed,

but the GOP is going all out, letting their freak flag fly to see if they can possibly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This is the only thing Democrats have going for them is that Republicans. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, Rory Johnson, he's an energy analyst and he's the writer over at Commodity Context on Substack. I hope you guys go ahead and subscribe. We'll have a link down there in the description. Welcome back to the show, Rory. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me back on. Of course, man. Okay, so there's wild swings going on in oil. First, it's down. Then people

are saying it could hit 65 a barrel. As you were telling me right before you came on, now the price has gone up. What is going on with oil, Rory? Why are there all these crazy swings? Is it Wall Street? Is it supply? Break it down for us. Yeah, so I think, you know, so just to put in context for people that don't follow the market on a regular basis, the last month has been pretty terrible for crude oil. It was as high on a WTI basis in early June. It's 120 bucks. Then it fell kind of a couple of different times. And then two days ago on Tuesday, it just completely collapsed, the third largest daily decline in the market's history.

So we're in this extreme volatility moment. I think there's this open question is, what's causing it? And I think it's a couple of things, but primarily the market is, you know, volatile because the fundamentals, frankly, and our understanding and outlook for the fundamentals are very, very volatile. We're jumping between these kind of extremely, you know, oversupplied moments in the early, in early pandemic too. We've been in this chronic undersupply environment for

about the past 18 months or so. And inventories have come down at a record fast pace. So we're in a kind of a precarious environment overall. But that's, that's, you know, within the backdrop of this, you know, overall recessionary risk. And at the end of the day, well, oil is fundamentally a physical commodity that, you know, you and I put in our put in our planes and our and our kind of cars and everything else, you know, it is also a financial asset. And what we're seeing right now is a lot of different actors trying to express those views, those macro views through oil. And, you know, oil is getting kind of tossed around the process with along, you know, with the rest of the market.

Yeah. So speak to that a little bit more, because I think there's a layman's understanding out there that, you know, the price of a barrel of oil, it's the supply and the demand and where the two curves meet. That's what it is. But obviously, that doesn't make sense when you have these wild swings like the fundamentals can't shift minute to minute and the basics of supply and demand can't shift like that minute to minute. So how much of these swings have to do with financial speculation? Break that down for us a little bit. And also tell us whether, you know, whether you think that it's a healthy thing for the market of this commodity that we all really depend on, that it goes through these wild swings based on that speculation. OK, so I'm going to break this down into two different sections here,

because I think, you know, on the one hand, we're certainly seeing what I'm going to call a flush out of speculative positions. You know, crude doesn't move more than $10 a barrel a day without some kind of, you know, financial market positioning at play and people getting washed to those positions. So that's definitely, we have seen that, and particularly on the downsides, as people kind of, you know, they're holding a crude position, you know, futures contracts or options down the curve. And for whatever reason, you know,

prices come down too quickly, or there's this kind of broader recessionary macro fear, prices drop, and then people all bail en masse. So that is happening. But at the same time, what's really interesting and what's been occurring since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when prices have been extraordinarily volatile, we've been trapped in this extremely high volatility regime. less speculators in the market than we normally do. But what I think is, and you were saying, you know, fundamentals don't change that quickly. And I agree on a minute to minute basis. And, you know, Tuesday's price action was obviously crazy and obviously kind of some kind of speculative flush out. But I do think over the past, you know, three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have honestly been experiencing, you know, unprecedented changes day to day, headline to headline even in our expectations of fundamentals. So I do think to a degree that some of the volatility has been fundamentally justified.

Unfortunately, we go between Russia's going to lose 3 million barrels a day of supply, according to the EIA. And then later that day or later that week, China locks down 60% of its economy. So we're seeing, you know, normally, you know, I've been in the industry about a decade. Most of my time in the industry, we're talking about half a million barrels a day here, maybe a million barrels a day there. These are the kind of numbers we're talking about. This is kind of amplified by three or four fold, you know, now, and each kind of change in a headline can mean a huge change to, you know, your global supply demand balance. So I think we are in this extremely high volatility fundamental regime. But, you know, as we're seeing, even if there isn't that much speculation, those speculators

that do remain in the market can have, you know, weak hands in moments like this, when there are so many fears of recession, and people just dump their positions and kind of walk away. Particularly for many of these funds that are involved, it has actually been a relatively profitable trade. So they're taking money off the table. Okay. So Roy, in general, let's look forward. What are some of the things people should look to that are going to affect not just the price of oil, but the price at the pump? What are some major events? I know EIA, you guys are looking at supply issues. Are there any major announcements or other policy maneuvers that could affect the global price?

What do you think of that? Yeah, so I think, you know, breaking it again into two pieces. So we've had this crude oil crisis. We've also had this refining crisis. And we've talked about this a lot. And the idea is, you know, there aren't enough refineries anymore. COVID kind of spiked retirements in old refineries and delayed the coming online of new refineries. So the crack spread or the refinery margin that you're paying at, you know, at the pump is normally for a barrel of gas, you know, for a barrel of gasoline,

somewhere like $15, $20 a barrel. It's been trading over $60 a barrel. So the first thing we hope to see over the course of this year is a normalization of those crack spreads and refining margins as more refineries come online that had been delayed by COVID. So that's the first thing. I think that is mostly going to be a good positive story for consumers of the pump kind of over the coming six months. Even, you know, over the last two days, we've already seen crack spreads come in about 25% from their highs, which is a fantastic news, both for consumers and for the Federal Reserve, which has been watching pump prices much more than usual because of this fear of an unanchoring of, you know, an unmooring of inflation expectations. But I do fear that the crude oil crisis is going to become worse again over time. And the reason for that is that, you know, by the end of the summer, OPEC is going to

have returned all of the barrels it had planned to return. This is barrels that had still been held off the market from the initial early 2020 kind of emergency action that OPEC took to kind of save the oil market. So that's going to be coming to an end. The SPR, which has been, you know, been pumping between a million and a million and a half barrels a day, depending on how you count it, over the past month or two, and is expected to do that for the rest of the summer, that will also come to an end. So that's kind of the equivalent of, you know, a small or even medium-sized OPEC producer kind of falling out of the supply balance again. And then, you know, and

then all that together. And I think that, you know, we're still going to get demand that's going to continue to accelerate again, absent some kind of truly deleterious recession or worse. And that's, I think, going to be particularly pronounced in China, where, you know, most of this year, the beginning of the year, we actually have seen reasonably weak global supply demand balances because of these lockdown in China. And in China. And crude oil inventories globally have kind of stayed still for a couple months after falling at their fastest pace on record. My expectation is, as that demand normalizes from a rollback of these kind of curtailment policies, but also as some of that supply starts to fall off, I think the crude oil balances are going to start tightening again. I think that's where you're going to see the action

going forward as kind of refining kind of, you know, sorts itself out and kind of moves to the background. Got it. So bottom line, what do you think is going to happen with gas prices? In the near term, I think they're going to fall. And I think that's going to be a very, very positive thing going into driving season here. I think the recessionary fears are still high. Obviously, crude oil is much lower than it has been and crack spreads as well. So I do think that there is some kind of relief in, you know, over the next month or two for consumers at the pump. But then I think that things are going to, you know, take a turn for the worse again in the fall. And I think, you know, prices are going to begin rising again

until we get more, particularly U.S. supply growth. And I think that will be the main, that'll be the only real kind of organic thing that's going to be able to bring the prices, crude prices down in a reasonable manner. Got it. Gotcha. Well, we can always count on you to actually break it down for us.

As you know, I hit this guy up like every day, being like, what is going on? I appreciate you telling the audience as well. Like we said, commodity context, Substack, it'll be down there in the description, and we appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Like we said, commodity context, Substack. It'll be down there in the description, and we appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Of course, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We're really glad that Crystal is back. Reminder, we're coming on the live tour. We're supposed to do it at the top, but whatever. Put it up. Put the graphic on the screen.

We were too, you know, thinking about Boris Johnson. That's right. We were too busy thinking about Boris. September 16th, Atlanta. We're coming. Apparently, we sold a lot of tickets. Let's just sell this thing out completely so we can show the industry that that's what we do over here. We're negotiating already with different venues across the country. And so the tour will continue. But if you're in the Atlanta or greater Atlanta slash

Florida, et cetera, Northern Florida, Alabama, all of that, and you want to come see us, we would mean the world. We're going to have a great show for all of you guys. It's something that we're going to record. And we're really planning about us. We would mean the world. We're going to have a great show for all of you guys. It's something that we're going to record, and we're really planning different ways that we can make it really fun, engaging. I think it's going to be a good time. So let's sell this thing out, and then we'll take the tour across the country, and it'll be a lot of fun for us. I actually had a dream about this last night.

I had a dream about the show. But it was one of those stressful, almost like high school dreams where it was like we're about to do the show, and we weren't prepared, and it was like, oh, my god, what are we going to do? That's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. We don't do that. We'll be ready for you. Yes, we'll be very, very ready for you. Have a great weekend, guys. We're going to have good partner content and all that over the weekend

and we'll see you all later. This is an iHeart Podcast.