Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/11/23: Interviews At Trump Rally w/ John Russell, Zoom AI Face Scanning, WeWork Bankruptcy, Spencer Snyder On Rightwing Divorce Law

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

This week we discuss a Trump rally with John Russell from More Perfect Union where his interviews found Trump fans hyper focused on economic issues, Zoom's terms of service now require you to allow AI to scan your face and voice, WeWork nears bankruptcy in a total business collapse, and Spencer Snyder explains the consequences of rightwing divorce laws in the US.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Reporter for More Perfect Union recently went to a Pennsylvania Trump rally. And instead of trying to find like the craziest people he possibly could at the rally, he actually tried to have a conversation with people and see if they might be able to find some common ground on something. Here's a little bit of how that went. Why Trump instead of Bernie Sanders? What I look at is more progressives like the Bernie Sanders faction, stuff like that. We actually see a lot of the same problems. I would vote for a Bernie Sanders before I'd vote for like a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

Things are more expensive. I think people are more scared. Our money doesn't have no value. And that's why people, that's why we're having problems. This whole inflation thing, it's been building and building for multi-decades. And it's getting close now. You work at McDonald's, right?

I do. Do you feel like you're getting everything out of work that you're putting into it? I believe I should get paid more. All I am doing is I'm working my ass off to get my money. I'm a hard worker, and I feel like I deserve more. I worked down in West Virginia. Yes.

On the rigs for Evil Big Red, Halliburton. Oh, my God. Halliburton, we were two weeks on, one week off, so you never got to go home. We were the lowest paid of all the workers out there. I only made $13.50 when I got hired on. For Halliburton. For Halliburton, yep.

Probably wouldn't even have an Iraq war if it wouldn't have been for the Halliburton Cheney and stuff we were expendable. That's all it was Halliburton big red. They called it You're just part of the machine and the machine can be replaced. Can you really trust a billionaire? Help me understand why that's a thing. Yeah, so with billionaires, I would say honestly, no you can't I'll say with Trump when he debated Hillary Clinton in 2016, she said all these things about the tax laws, all this, and Trump said, where have you been for 30 years? You know, you haven't done anything about it. And then he said, I know you're not going to do it because all your donors who fund your campaign benefit from the same tax breaks and tax laws I do.

So whether it's left or right, these people, they're not really going to change the tax laws from the donors that are funding their campaign. We lost our we lost our republic decades ago. We're living in an oligarchy. And that reporter, John Russell, who not only does work for More Perfect Union, but also has his own sub stack at the Haller, joins us now. Great to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. Morning, everybody. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, of course. So just talk to us a little bit about your approach here. How did you like was this the general consensus from the people that you talked to? Or was this like kind of cherry picking the things that overlapped with some of your, you know, worldview? Look, I poured drinks in the Rust Belt where I live. I'm above it right now forever.

And, you know, the county I worked in voted for Trump by 71%. So when, you know, the bartender is like me, a white guy with a mullet, people kind of assume that you're on the same page. But when they find out I'm a card-carrying labor leftist, I make no bones about that. There's always shock that sometimes we are on the same page. This was the hunch that I brought up to that Trump rally. I wanted to have organizing conversations. What would it be, you know, if we're going to have mass movements and really address a lot of our problems, it's going to require not half of the working class, but everybody in it. So I wanted to see what would it be like if you had those organizing

conversations with people in line at the Trump rally. We, you know, featured the best parts that came out of there. There's a lot of crazy things in there too, but people are complicated. And if we're going to meet them where they are, you have to wade through that to get down to that class solidarity and see what's possible when you can when you can get people into the same boat. this one guy at a Trump rally said something crazy and it goes viral. Obviously, you took a different tactic here. What are some of the shared assumptions that you found whenever you were talking with some people at the rally? Well, everybody, if you step back and think about it, we live in unbelievable times. And we're all reacting to that in our own different ways. So the shared things were a sense of disbelief. Pick your issue. I mean, Elon Musk recently lost $200 billion, right? And somehow was still the second richest man on earth. You heard somebody who was working for Halliburton right there.

He was making $13 an hour for Halliburton. And this was, you know, there was a part of his interview that didn't make the cut. He said, we were pulling double digit millions, high double digit millions of natural gas out of the ground, and we're getting paid 13 bucks an hour. This is Elon Musk is losing 200 billion and being the world's second richest man. I mean, everybody, regardless of where you're coming from on the spectrum, knows that that's crazy, right? And we're all having different reactions about what to do about it. But a lot of the times the political landscape doesn't have a lot of alternatives to do something. So, John, at this point, a Trump presidency isn't like a theoretical possible

future. We lived through a Trump presidency. We know what the priorities were. They were class war. All right. But, you know, of the sort that we've had in this country for multiple generations at this point, his biggest accomplishment was this giant, you know, corporate tax cut, three cents of which went to the top earners in the country, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you still, based on your conversations with these individuals, but also based on your own analysis, how do you still hold on to this idea that he's going to be on the side of the working class when it just wasn't the case when he actually had the power of the presidency? There's so many things to think about here,

but we're really in the infant stages of trying to build working class solidarity. We haven't had the kind of movement that stick around and really work, not just on an election cycle basis, that building working class solidarity, but, you know, over the long term. Partly because, you know, the status quo doesn't want that to happen. If the left and the right of the working class were to ever unite on the themes that came up in these interviews, reigning in billionaire power, ending all these forever wars, if working class people got together on those things, we would have a lot to win. The ruling class would have a far way to fall. So those kind of movements have really been kept down. But, you know, you never really know what something's going to be like until you have it. So I think people are looking at Donald Trump and they're saying, well, you know, this guy who might go into a rally and do literally anything. I mean,

hump the American flag, right? That's just one example. But it's a sure sign to people that this billionaire is not like the others. They don't, he doesn't fit into polite society that's handed down, you know, 40 years of this painful stagnation that we all kind of feel. Now, is he going to go to bat for the working class? Is he going to show up on a picket line like some of the people hoped he would in our interviews? No, I don't think he's going to do that. But the big point to me is that the folks at his rally, they want him to show up on a picket line. They want him to support unions. You know, we can all have our bets whether or not that's going to happen. But the big thing to me is that there is an appetite for anti-establishment, labor left organizing among the people you would

least expect to have that opinion. Yeah. And there's been research from Jacobin in partnership with a think tank focused on working class politics. They've done a number of field studies testing different messaging, and they found exactly what you're saying here is that, listen, you're not going to convert hardcore Trump supporters overnight. But can you start to shift back some of the class realignment that has happened in the Trump era if you use economic populist messaging? Yes. On the other hand, you know, the issues that seem to be top of mind in a lot of ways among at least some significant portion of the Republican base are these cultural like lightning rod, you know, transgender issues as big right now. CRT was big a minute ago.

And so it seems like there's almost more interest or the voting behavior tracks more with the cultural issues than it is with the economic interest that, you know, we see the polls of the number who want to curb corporate power and want to lift the minimum wage, et cetera, et cetera. But that doesn't seem to be the what dictates the voting behavior. Yeah. what dictates the voting behavior? Yeah, my response to that is that it's not surprising because we live, we all live in this environment of engineered division. It's not to cheapen any of those issues. But do any of us really think that there's a good faith discussion, that the reason why critical race theory is in the headlines has anything to do's a good faith discussion, that the reason why critical race theory is in the headlines has anything to do with a good faith discussion about anything in terms of racial equality. I mean, this is here. This is splashed all across the headlines with the intent to divide

people, not to have a good faith conversation. That should be part of building race and class solidarity. What we hear is, you know, an old divide and conquer tactic. I mean, there's a small group, 1% of the people, the merchant class, the super rich, they want to run things. They don't have enough numbers to do that. So they have to divide the working class and add their 1% to the 50%. That hates the other 50%. I mean, really, it's simple to me, but I think we all have to remember that's what's happening and not take that for granted because it's having, you know, it's keeping us apart and it's just a false choice.

And we have to, if we're going to break ourselves out of that, realize who the division from all of these hot button issues that dominate the press, that suck all the air out of the room, that you could use to have a solidarity conversation. We have to realize who that division is serving. And people are smart. You know, my beef with all of the videos that go up to these Trump rallies is it's like, you know, oh, let's go stare at the zoo animals and let's pick out the craziest one so we can profit off of the clicks.

Now, if you have a conversation with people in line they can understand that they will say that back to you uh but we got to get our politics in order in a hurry to do something a little more than just react to uh these hot button things that are you know engineered and have been put for 40 years and financed with billions of dollars to generate the reactions that we see all the time in our politics. We've got to get beyond that and actually talk to people. That's really well said, John.

Yeah, well, John, I've always appreciated your work, and I do recommend people go check out The Holler on Substack because you're from the area, you live in the area, you work at a dive bar. It's real for you. And so this image that comes from partisan media, whether it's, you know, MSNBC or Fox News of like, oh, my God, we're on the verge of civil war. I live in a conservative area as well where I grew up, born and raised. I used to live actually in the area where you live and were born and raised now.

And it never struck me as being accurate. It never struck me as like a reflection of the people that I know and interact with and friends with in my day to day life. So I appreciate you doing some work to highlight some of the areas where there's potential common ground and things that we could build from. It's always great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, man. Interesting little catch on a new line in Zoom's terms of service. Trust me, this is interesting.

I know it sounds like a very boring setup, but put this up on the screen. So they are now saying in their terms of service that you have to allow AI to train on all your data, audio, facial recognition, private conversations, unconditionally and irrevocably with no opt out. Let me just read you the specific lines here. So keep this up on the screen. They say, quote, you consent to Zoom's access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance and storage of service generated data. So that means when you're on Zoom and you're like doing your thing, they're collecting all of that for any purpose to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable law, and it's to be used for machine learning or artificial intelligence, including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models. This is something that I've been focused on a lot. I mean, this is a whole new world because the way that these new AI large language models work is they scoop up, the technical term is scrape, all of this data

that they feed into these models to train them on human language and information and research and creative, all of this stuff. And so there's a lot of questions about, well, are you just allowed to take whatever you want? Sarah Silverman and other comedians and writers are pushing back. They're actually suing these big tech companies to regain, you know, to get compensated at the very least, or set some sort of legal boundaries around what these companies are allowed to scoop up. But Zoom clearly working, you know, here in connection saying, listen, we are going to use anything that you do on our platform. We are allowed to use in whatever way we want. Yeah. This is totally crazy. I'm definitely going to uninstall Zoom or at least try to use it as little as possible. You know, you just never know though. It's like, is Apple going to do this? You

know, who's actually taking your data? This is just, thankfully this guy was able to catch it in the terms of service, but that's it. I mean, and this is part of the creepy thing. You're always being recorded now. You're always being recorded now. You're always like, I was with some friends, we're staying at an Airbnb and we were out on the porch and one of them was saying something about his job. He works in a sensitive job. And I was like, hey man, you shouldn't say that here. And he's like, what are you talking about? I said, look, these Airbnbs, these things are all wired with ring cameras. Sure enough, I look up, there's like one sitting right there. It's like, you know, you have to be kind of used to this world where there's like a privatized

surveillance regime literally everywhere. And then in the world of AI, they are using that even if the person who owns the camera is not using it. It lives on the ring server. What is Amazon going to do with that? Maybe they'll feed it into their algorithms to detect stuff. I mean, we're already at a point where they're talking about facial recognition and all that stuff for crime. We know that this happened during the January 6th investigation.

For example, you can read in the indictments, they literally sent images, the FBI did, to the facial recognition team and were able to ID people off of that. That's the government. I mean, they have all of our, you know, from licenses, from passport photos, all kinds of information that they're ready to tap with zero warrant or any of that. And that's, you know, in terms of how the government is and who's stopping them from contracting some of these firms and all these other entities to get more. So it's a creepy situation. Extremely. It also shows you how almost inherently exploitative these terms of service contracts are. I mean, you just, you know, you download Zoom. They say, like, check the box that you agree. Who is really reading through the 30 pages or whatever of fine print

of what exactly you're signing up for? And what choice do you have? If you're, you know, going to be a Breaking Points guest and we're like, here's your Zoom link, are you really going to be like, oh, I can't do this segment now because I don't agree with, you know, paragraph 32, subsection B, part seven of the terms of service. No one is doing that. So basically they set the rules and you have no choice if you're going to live in modern society, but to agree to them. And sometimes those rules are really

dystopian and disturbing as in this case. Yeah, totally. So anyway, raising awareness. Fascinating and crazy story going on with WeWork as if the saga can't still continue. Let's put this up there on the screen. WeWork is warning of bankruptcy after years of losses and warns that the cancellation rate of current clients makes it so that it may be unsustainable to continue the business. So in a new filing to the SEC, the company said it had posted, Crystal, a net loss of $700 million in the first six months of 2023, after recording $10.7 billion in net loss over the previous three years. Quote, our losses and negative cash flows from operating activities raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a growing concern. Yeah, you might call that a growing concern in business. The company reported it has 2.9 billion

in long-term debt as of June 30th. So this is just the latest casualty of the work-from-home crisis in commercial real estate. A lot of people, Crystal, actually thought that WeWork would survive As of June 30th. So this is just the latest casualty of the work from home crisis. Yeah. In commercial real estate. A lot of people, Crystal, actually thought that WeWork would survive work from home because they were like, oh, well, the flexible business model means that, you know, people only need a place like one or two times a week. They don't need to use it as much.

And there was a good argument for it, except reality is caught up and it turns out that people really aren't coming in at all or just like basically defaulting to like coffee shops and that this entire business may collapse completely, which is crazy considering the entire history of this company. I mean, this was such a hot company for a while. The CEO did a great job of creating this whole like hip image around it. You know, huge investments that came in. They quote an expert here who I think really sums it up, who says they were brilliant in creating an aura of being the next big thing, but they were never financially successful. So even at the height of the WeWork hype cycle,

they were not really making it. And so now in the pandemic, when, you know, workers were forced to work from home and then decided that, hey, I actually kind of like this at least hybrid remote work situation and you have massive office vacancy rates. You know, when people say like work from home, they don't mean work from WeWork. They have increasingly set up their own dedicated spaces in their houses or apartments

where they have an office set up, where they are comfortable and able to then manage some of their like personal life responsibilities more adequately. So, yeah, people aren't really interested in commuting into a WeWork in the same way they're not interested in commuting into their office. Exactly correct. And the other thing that's very interesting, I mean, if you look at the history of this company, I don't know why I was obsessed with WeWork for a while. There's a bunch of great books on WeWork.

There's like four or five out there. The Apple series, Jared Leto plays Adam Neumann. Anne Hathaway does an incredible job playing his wife, Gwyneth. Really? No, sorry, not Gwyneth Paltrow, Gwyneth Paltrow's cousin, who certainly makes it known throughout her life that she is a Paltrow. Interesting though, is that this company was basically the poster child of the zero interest rate phenomenon, where WeWork basically fooled its investors. Look, it's a good idea, let's be honest. But there's a lot of other companies

out there that do what they do, Industrious, Green whatever, Green Desk, I think that was one of their original names, et cetera. What they did is they fooled people into thinking they were a technology company by saying they were going to have proprietary whatever, linked up the startup movement. They were getting 40 times multiples, even though, I think it was Scott Galloway actually wrote at the time. He's like, this is just a commercial real estate company. He's like, why is this being valued as a startup? Because the upside of a startup actually exists in software. This is not a software multiple. This is just rent. And Adam Neumann convinced SoftBank to basically give it billions of dollars and effectively throw it away and buy a bunch of leases.

The only reason, Crystal, that this company had any value whatsoever even post-Newman crash was because he had spent such colossal sums of money going out and acquiring leases at all these buildings that when you write down the $40 billion or whatever valuation back to whatever the sane one was, they're like, yeah, maybe we can actually squeeze some value out of this thing. I believe they went public via SPAC for, I think, a fraction of what they originally wanted. But they still have so much debt on their books that the company still looks like it could fail. $700 million loss, even after all the write-offs, all the layoffs, and all the other nonsense. So it's a massive indictment of business and venture capital. Not even venture capital, just like banks. Everybody was willing to give this guy money. Masayoshi-san over at SoftBank, all of the foolishness that they were up to in the 2010s with WeWork and with Uber, both of which the Saudis were also invested in.

Yeah, look, reality eventually catches up. That's what we're finding out here. Uber even, by the way, in a lot of their filings, they're still burning through cash like nobody's business. It's like, when is this company going to turn a profit? Right. Whoever? And you pointed to the zero interest rate.

That's exactly what it is. Because when money is super cheap, then these funders are like, all right, well, let's just keep floating them. Let's keep funneling more cash into them. And they can keep servicing their interest payments on their debt, et cetera, et cetera. Now that interest rates have gone up quite a bit, you see a lot of these. I mean, this is not a tech company, as you pointed out. But it positioned itself as tech adjacent by creating this certain brand and this certain look in the space.

Like, let's put in beanbag chairs and have an app for it and convince you it's a tech company. It kind of reminds me of a little bit of what's happening right now with the AI craze, where it's like every startup is like, let's find some way to position ourselves as AI related in order to get funding. So to be honest with you, I sort of thought that they already were headed to bankruptcy a long time ago. But it makes sense that COVID would be and the work from home,

remote work revolution would be the death knell for this company. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a sad end, to be honest. There are a lot of people who put their whole life savings in this company, worked at the company, believed in Adam Neumann, investors, all those. A lot of those people already went pretty bust. And now to go all the way to zero, that's a really ignominious end to the story. But anyway, like I said, I genuinely encourage people to watch that miniseries. It's very good. The acting in it is incredible. Have you guys ever been divorced? Have you been divorced? Have I been divorced? Excuse me, have either of you ever been divorced? It might be sensitive because you're together. Divorce. It's not just something that your parents constantly reassure you wasn't your fault,

even when you're not asking. It's also something that's political, i.e. divorce laws. Who can get divorced? Who can't get divorced? Well, wait, what do you mean, can't get divorced? Is it a thing to want a divorce but not be able to get one? And what does that sound like to you? Does that sound like a curtailing of freedom? The idea of not being able to leave a marriage? Because some people think there are too many divorces, that divorce

laws have gotten out of hand and we should go back to the old way. But what does that even mean? So there's something called no-fault divorce, as opposed to fault-based divorce. Do you know what no-fault divorce is? Yeah, it's like without a reason, right? No-fault divorce is what you file when you just want to dissolve your marriage and you're not trying to assign blame to anyone. No one committed any mortal sins against your marriage. I mean, maybe they did, but you just want to move on. So you file no-fault divorce and let it be

done. But for most of history, that has not been the case. Do you think one person should be allowed to leave no matter what the other person thinks? No, no, no. That's too free. It's too liberal. It's just too... Up until the 1800s in England, it was basically impossible to get divorced. The law was such that a woman was in a sense property of the man. And you can imagine how that might affect one's autonomy. So actually you had to get Parliament to approve divorces. Only about 10 were passed in Parliament each year and they were available only to the very wealthy because if you're rich you can do whatever you want and that's always been true. Now in the US divorce has always been left to the states and going into

the 19th century grounds for divorce were expanding. left to the states. And going into the 19th century, grounds for divorce were expanding. This worried some people. In 1847, the Missouri Supreme Court noted that, "'Too great a facility in obtaining divorces "'is exceedingly injurious to the good morals "'and happiness of domestic life.'" Now, to many of us, divorce is just something you do

when your first family finds out about your second family, and it's basically no big deal. But many people are still worried about the deleterious effects of divorce. Conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Tim Poole and Stephen Crowder have all essentially blamed no-fault divorce for family breakdown. Hi, this is the office of Congressman Adler. Hi, I'm a constituent. Basically, I'm calling divorce for family breakdown. One person in the Washington Examiner frames the fact that your spouse can divorce you Thank you so much. Of course. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye. One person in the Washington Examiner frames the fact that your spouse can divorce you unilaterally as a violation of your constitutional rights. The 14th Amendment mandates that no person be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.

But spouses sued for divorce have no right to their day in court. No weighing of evidence takes place. Only one spouse need allege, without proof or specificity, irreconcilable differences or that the marriage has irrevocably broken down. Or Steven Crowder saying, my then wife decided that she didn't want to be married anymore and in the state of Texas that is completely permitted. Now, the first no-fault divorce law was signed by Ronald Reagan in California in 1969. What was the last state?

Uh, the state that was Idaho. It's a good guess. It's actually New York. You know what year? Uh, New York. Uh, 79. 2010? No, no, that's not true. But there are still obstacles to getting divorced. I recently sat down with Naomi Kahn, co-director of University of Virginia Law's Family Law

Center, to get some clarification on this stuff. No fault in most states does not mean that you just drive down to the court, say to the clerk, I want a divorce, and you're divorced two minutes later. In some limited circumstances in some states, it can be much quicker. But in many states, if not most states, there needs to be some waiting period. There needs to be some separation, or there needs to be a finding of irreconcilable differences before a divorce can be issued. It depends on the state, but if you live in, say, some separation or there needs to be a finding of irreconcilable differences before a divorce can be issued. It depends on the state, but if you live in, say, Louisiana,

you and your spouse must have lived separate and apart for 365 days if you have children, 180 days if you don't. What about waiting periods for getting a divorce? You mean like you have to be separated for a year or something like that? I mean, ambivalent on that, I would say. If it's a mutual decision and there's no love lost, then there shouldn't be a wait list for it. A waiting period could, if anything, if it's a high conflict divorce, it could make the conflict become even more extreme. Think about where there's violence, think about where there's another relationship,

but it's very hard to do these studies. And so we don't really have great statistics on whether a waiting period would help. Waiting periods are especially a thing in covenant marriages. What is a covenant marriage? People in a covenant marriage who want a divorce must go through marriage counseling and be separated for at least 18 months if they have underage children. In other cases, including those involving spousal or child abuse, couples in covenant marriages have to be separated for at least a year before a divorce can be granted. If there's an abuse involved, I have a two daughters, one is married, out. O-U-T out, capital letters, out. So that's in Louisiana,

and covenant marriage is only in three states, and almost no one chooses that option. But some people love the idea. The Texas GOP recently added to its party platform, we urge the legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws to support covenant marriage and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.

It's not binding. Very few people opt into the covenant marriage, but three states do have that as an option. Stephen Crowder also lays out this scenario. If a woman cheats on you, she leaves. She takes half. Most states will divide something that they call either community property or marital property.

And that, generally speaking, will be the property that was acquired by either spouse through the efforts of either spouse during the course of the marriage. In some states, there's a presumption of equal division. In most states, there is not. It's equitable and equitable can mean that one spouse would get 70% of the assets and the other would get 30, but it's up to the court or since about 95 percent of divorce cases settle, it's up to the people or to their attorneys doing the negotiation. Who would actually be impacted by going back to a no-fault system?

There's been some evidence that the introduction of no-fault divorce has actually led to a reduction of female suicide. That's right. In states that introduced unilateral divorce, we find an 8 to 16 percent decline in female suicide, roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women, and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners. Domestic violence appears to have declined by somewhere between a quarter and a half between 1976 and 1985 in those states that reformed their divorce laws.

So despite this available data and the massive inconvenience getting divorced already is, there are a number of legislators who are pushing for this. The Nebraska GOP has affirmed its belief that no-fault divorce should only be accessible to couples without children. Louisiana is debating whether to recommend the elimination of no-fault divorce. Senator from Ohio J.D. Vance said these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they

were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear that's gonna make people happier in the long term and maybe it worked out for the moms and dads though I'm skeptical but it really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages now I've seen no data supporting the idea that making it harder for people to get divorced helps anyone and that maintaining some family unit, even though it's terribly acrimonious or maybe even violent, offers any benefit to the parents or the kids. What if only one person doesn't want to be in

that relationship anymore? You can't force that person to stay in the relationship they don't want anymore. You can try as much as you want, but if that's their decision, you have to mutually respect that person's decision. If they don't want to be with you anymore, you can't force them. Historically, stricter divorce laws haven't even done a great job of keeping people from getting divorced. In the 1850s, Indiana was known as a divorce mill because of its lax divorce laws, so they ended up dealing with what they called migratory divorce. And so the thing here is that most divorces are mutually agreed upon, so couples just figure out how to make it

happen. Couples often colluded to attain a divorce the state did not want them to have, and divorce became increasingly easy to obtain. Collusion was the norm. For example, in New York, you could only get a divorce on grounds of adultery. So an entire cottage industry had developed to fabricate evidence of adultery that could be used in divorce court. Okay, now, despite there certainly being people in power and even federally who seem unhappy with divorce laws as they stand, this is right now not

a top concern for lawmakers. This still seems pretty fringe, although you never know how things can change. And to my knowledge, no presidential candidate has mentioned this. But if they have, and I'm wrong, leave a comment down below. If you had any thoughts on this at all, leave a comment. If you didn't like my hair, leave a comment. Share, subscribe to Breaking Points so you don't miss videos like this. I also have a personal YouTube channel that will be linked below in the description. Thank you to Breaking Points. Thank you for watching. And I'll see you in the next one. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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