Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/1/23: Trump Demolishes Rivals With Working Class, CNN Spins Damning Hunter Testimony, Elon Denies Starlink For Ukraine, Secret Chinese BioLab Raided In CA, Pentagon On UFO Whistleblowers, AI Harvesting Content, Gen Z Boys Conservatism

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss new polling showing Trump demolishing his rivals on every single issue, NYTimes saying Trump is in a stronger winning position than in 2016, Dems accidentally admit Biden lies on Hunter, CNN spins damning Hunter testimony, Elon denying Starlink internet services to Ukraine offensive, a secret Chinese Biolab raided in CA contains HIV and COVID, the Pentagon calling the UFO whistleblowers liars, Krystal looks into AI harvesting content sparking a revolt in the "fan fiction" community, and Saagar looks into Gen Z Boys data showing a boost in conservatism.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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Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here. And we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots to get to this morning. Polls, polls, polls. Some very interesting numbers coming out. New York Times on both the Democratic side and the Republican side. Who's up? Who's down? What does the race look like? We will dig into all of that. We also had some very interesting testimony here on Capitol Hill from a former Hunter Biden business associate who is, by the way, facing jail time and is really undermining

the story that Biden has been going with. We've got some media cope for you. We've got the whole thing with regards to Hunter Biden. Also, big developments in terms of Ukraine. You know, these drone strikes on Moscow are now becoming just an absolute regular occurrence. So we'll tell you about that, some of the things that are going on there. Wild story coming out of California. I honestly don't know what to make of it. There was an unlicensed medical testing lab that authorities were able to get into. They found all kinds of viruses and all kinds of human biological substances. Very disturbing, actually,

and some disturbing connections there as well. Sagar's got an update for us as well in terms of the UFO testimony that we saw recently and some pushback that we're getting. Some drama breaking out. Some major drama there, so we will break all of that down for you as well. But before we get to any of that,

thank you again to all of the premium subscribers. We've been really working hard to get some big guests in studio. And I know you guys have really been responding to those interviews. So thank you so much for your support. Yeah, that's right. So we've got more big guests that are coming down the pipeline. We've been working and using extensively a lot more resources. Thanks to everybody that's been able to sign up at BreakingPoints.com. You guys not only enable the ability to actually get these done, all the man hours that go into it, the after, the production, travel, et cetera, that makes that possible. So thank you all to those people. And of course, as a thank you, we always release those interviews first to our premium subscribers. So if you want the big names and you want them first, then that's

the reason to sign up, breakingpoints.com if you are able. But let's get to this big New York Times poll, Crystal, which is making big waves both on the Republican and on the Democratic side, really. Yeah, that's right. So let's start with what's going on with the Republicans. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So Trump with a massive lead in terms of this New York Times Sienna poll, which is considered kind of a gold standard. They spend a lot of money on these things and try to make them as accurate as possible. Not that they always really succeed there, but this comports with the trend that we have seen of Trump really pulling away from the field. So we have him at 54, so more than

majority. DeSantis at 17. And then everybody else is at either 3, 2, or 1%. You've got Pence, Scott, and Haley at 3%. Vivek and Chris Christie at 2%. So obviously doing the basic math here, even if you add up all of the Trump opponents together, you still do not match what Trump has. They did test the head to head Trump versus DeSantis and he was winning by a two to one margin. So even in the fantasy world where everybody drops out and everybody coalesces around Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump still with a massive, massive lead. Let me read you a little bit of the analysis here. They say that Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party as Republican

voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy, led by wide margins among men, women, younger, older voters, moderates, conservatives, those who went to college, those who didn't go to college, cities, suburbs, and rural areas. And you can also see that there were additional ominous signs, they say, for Mr. DeSantis, who performed weakest among some of the Republican Party's biggest and most influential constituencies. He earned 9 percent, DeSantis, 9 percent support among voters at least 65 years old, 13 percent of those without a college degree. So basically working class voters, only so great for DeSantis, Republicans who describe themselves as very conservative favored Trump by a 50 point margin, 65 to 15. And that's really where DeSantis has been trying to lean.

He's gotten to the right of Trump on a variety of issues, hoping that he could pick up these very conservative voters. It is not working out for him. No, it is certainly not working out at all. Our own Emily Jashinsky actually flagged a really interesting some takeaways, I think, from here. Let's go and put this next one up there on the screen. This one, as you can see here, is about one of the most important things that they actually poll test in Trump v. DeSantis. Strong leader, gets things done, able to beat Joe Biden, fun, likable, and moral. So interestingly enough, DeSantis is actually beating Trump on likable and moral. But whenever it comes to strong leader, Trump is crushing

DeSantis 69 to 22. In terms of get things done, it's 67 to 22. That's brutal for DeSantis because his entire case is I'm the guy who actually gets things done and not focused on the drama. But really, to me, the one that actually just brought it all home was the fun deficit, Crystal. Is Trump 54% fun? DeSantis 16% fun? That is actually the biggest delta between the two. And look, politics is a show. Trump, he captivated these people. He gave meaning to their lives. He gave them the jolt that they always wanted to see somebody who pisses the people off, that they hate more than anything on national television. And he gave them that gift four years, every single day, 365, every tweet that was ever sent.

DeSantis, in many ways, is almost undermining that ability because he wants to be the guy who gets things done. He doesn't want to focus on the drama. He doesn't want to do silly season. And something we've maintained here for a long time is that that's just a very wrong reading of the GOP electorate. The GOP electorate loves silly season. They actually love Trump. They think it's hilarious. And that comes through dramatically, really, throughout all of this because they don't think he's likable.

Nobody's ever thought he's likable. They don't think he's moral, but they think he's hilarious. They think he's funny. They think he's strong, and they think he can beat Joe Biden. I can't disagree with them. I can't disagree with them either. That's the thing. Can you really... Anyone who is honest, who is not a self-serious, it's not a self-serious

like cerebral, just like sitting there and be like, oh, the democracy and all that on an objective basis. He's good at what he does. He's a funny guy. He's charismatic and he's hilarious. It's horrific that he's such a terrible person, but that is the reality. And so if you've got two guys who share basically the same ideology and one of them is funny and the other one is sort of like grating and not that fun to listen to. Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't want to be too hard on DeSantis because I do think that he basically read the electorate wrong in every key way. I also don't think that there is really a way to go head to head against Trump and come

out on top just because of where the Republican base is right now. We'll get some more of those numbers in just a second. Another way, though, in which DeSantis misread the Republican electorate was on making wokeness the center end-all be-all of his campaign. Only 24 percent of Republican voters said they would be more likely to support the candidate focused on fighting, quote, woke issues. And they did a bunch of tests of like wokeness versus, you know, other messaging. And in every instance, the other messaging sort of more of a focus on law and order and border came out way on top over focusing on fighting back against wokeness. They asked questions about the

fight basically that DeSantis is engaged in with Disney and more people were on the side of, hey, you know, you shouldn't be using state power to go after private corporations. So and that was across demographic groups, across education groups. So I understand why he put that at the center, because he has a very difficult challenge trying to stitch together this coalition. And the one thing that does seem to be a glue across a very divided Republican electorate right now is concerns about quote unquote wokeness. But clearly it's not enough of a concern. It doesn't feel like it touches people's lives directly enough for this to be sufficient for them to move off of Trump. Let's go and put this next piece up on the screen that shows some of the

divide within the Republican Party along really class lines. So at the top, you see you've got MAGA base that's like 37%. Those are the people who are rock solid for Trump. You've got 37% of persuadable voters who they like Trump, but they could be maybe open to a different candidate. And then you've got 25% who are not open to Trump. Across those different categories, you have a very big class divide. So in the MAGA base, you have a much higher number who do not have a college degree. You have then on the open to Trump, you have a

much higher number who do have a college degree. It's a majority there that have a college degree. You have near a majority there among the not open to Trump who earn 100K or more. So very clear class divide in terms of which category these people sort themselves into. So on the number who oppose immigration reform, you see huge split between the MAGA base. It's 71 percent. No immigration reform among the higher end, you know, income and college education group that are not open to Trump. it's only 37%. You see a big divide on opposing aid to Ukraine, much more popular position among the working class MAGA base. This one was the most notable though, perhaps. Among the MAGA base, 80% say that

America is in danger of failing. Among the more affluent, not open to Trump group, it is only 37% who say America's in danger of failing. I mean, I guess it makes sense when you yourself are doing pretty well, you probably feel pretty good about the direction that the country is heading in. You don't feel an existential risk. Whereas if you are in that non-college educated, more working class base, it makes sense that you would see things quite a bit more dimly than the rest. Yeah, that's right. Let's put the next part up on there on the screen because they have a very important sliding graphic here, which shows you that the MAGA base is already 37%. Then amongst the so-called persuadables, 17% of those people actually lean towards Trump. So now

you just got to an outright 50%. And then amongst the rest, there are 12% others. And then really only a very slight crossover between persuadable and not open to Trump. So we've always said it, it's very difficult to try and cobble these things together. I've never really believed that the coalition really existed for Ron DeSantis, just given the way that people feel about Trump. And this is just a good confirmation of that, I think, in many ways. And the class divide, at this point, I almost think it's important just to stop talking about even DeSantis, many of these other people, and just look at the base as it exists and why I think that they still look in favor of Trump. I mean, consider the Ukraine question. 64% of the MAGA base opposes aid to Ukraine.

58% of these persuadable voters also oppose aid to Ukraine. 26% don't, and they're not open to Trump. The GOP lawmakers who are vastly represented in Congress and in the Senate, whose side are they on? They're on the side of the affluent. They're on the side of the small. And these people who are not open to Trump, these are old time Republicans. These are Mitt Romney, small business owners, the multi-millionaires, the guys in Florida on a nice boat in the Trump boat parade, but they don't do it because they love Trump. They really just do it to flex the boat. When they're looking for a tax cut. Yeah, these guys have been Republicans for

decades. It's like those are the people that you need to really persuade or really should be working on behalf of if you think about it in terms of coalitions, this shows me again, that like there it's Trump, it's Marjorie, it's Matt Gaetz. I can name on the other hand, like maybe JD Vance at some times like Josh Hawley, a few others, like that's basically it in terms of their coalition that's in Congress. So no wonder that they feel so connected to Trump because he is really the only even spokesperson in rhetoric for so many of the things that they even come to care about. Although to be honest with you, looking at these numbers, what really comes across is it's more about the vibes than a specific policy issue because even they polled, okay, so what do you think about Ukraine, aid to Ukraine? And even among people who are like, I support it and I support Ukraine and I want to be there,

you know, indefinitely, they still support Donald Trump, right? I mean, on all of these, among people who think that social security shouldn't be cut and among people who think it should be cut, they all support Trump. So I think to me, much more at the core is the fun graphic of how people feel. He's a strong leader and I have a good time when I'm listening to him. That's what I'm really in it for. And, you know, I mean, this is not to like cast aspersions on the electorate, but part of how DeSantis misread the Republican base is by thinking like, oh, if I go down the issue list and I like check off the boxes and I get to Trump's right and I find the right position on all of these things and get the right

answer, then people are going to come into my camp. It hasn't worked out that way. In fact, the more that he has, you know, leaned into his policy oriented message, the more people have moved on to Donald Trump. So I really, you know, I think what you're saying is important in the fact that there is a failure of democracy in terms of representation in Washington, the issues that are pushed by either major party in Washington, what the actual policy outcomes are. I think that is incredibly important and essential, but I don't actually think that's driving what the support is in the Republican primary. There is a quote in here, though, that I think more gets to the point. This is really just so people know why people are overwhelmingly backing Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Let's put this up on the screen. This is from David Green, 69 year old

retail manager in Somersworth, New Hampshire. He says of Trump and why he supports him, quote, he might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife's underpants and you can't be a man anymore. You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump's my guy. He proved it on a national level. Much more vibes that, because I mean, DeSantis has leaned into whatever like issues this man is gesturing at. He's very much leaned into those policy issues, but Trump makes the more strong man kind of case. I love this guy because he just says it out loud. He's right, by the way, in terms of how people view things, that's it. That's what it takes

away. That's why, I mean, look, I led with fun whenever I said it explained everything. There are a few other things that I do think, you know, tangentially apply, but fun, they appear strong, pissing the people off who I hate the most. That's pretty much always been it. So anyway, you can take that away. I don't know, this man may have his own issues that he's working through. Your top issue is women's, men wearing women's underpants. Anyways, let's move on to the Biden side of the aisle because we just this morning got the New York Times Sienna poll on the Democratic side. And it is also very interesting. Let's put this up on the screen. So Biden has somewhat improved his position among Democrats, although a majority are still like, we'd rather have someone

other than Biden. But here is the here's some of the analysis from The New York Times. They say warning signs abound for the president, despite his improved standing and a friendlier national environment. Mr. Biden remains broadly unpopular among a voting public that is pessimistic about the country's future, and his approval rating is a mere 39 percent. Perhaps most worryingly for Democrats, the poll found Mr. Biden in a neck-and-neck race with former President Donald Trump, who held a commanding lead among likely Republican primary voters, as we were just discussing. Even as he faces two criminal indictments and more potential charges on the horizon, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were tied at 43% apiece in a hypothetical rematch in 2024, according to the poll. Now, in terms of primary support

within this poll, Biden had the backing of 64% of Democratic primary voters who were intending on participating in the party's primaries. 13% were behind RFK Jr. and 10% chose Marianne Williamson. So even though you still have, and they've got some good quotes here, I'll read to you, voters who are on the Democratic side, they're not enthusiastic about Biden. They feel like they have no real choice. I think that the relentless message from the party leadership and from corporate media aligned with the Democratic Party that, listen, guys, Biden is effectively the only candidate in the race and we're just going to ignore these other two. I think that's worked. You've got a couple of quotes here that I want to share with you. One individual who said about

Trump and Biden, I'm sorry, but both of them to me are too old. Biden to me seems less mentally capable age wise, but Trump is just evil. He's done horrible things. That is the case that the Democratic Party is hoping is going to resonate with the American public. Like, listen, you may not be in love as political progressive, not aligned with the party, who said Mr. Biden's tax policy had been skewed to favor the wealthy while the middle class paid more than its fair share. Quote, we're kind of smushed in the middle. We're taking the brunt of the taxes for everybody. She did say she'd vote for Biden again, but added she wouldn't do so with much gusto. It's basically like I don't have another

choice because I don't feel comfortable not voting, she said. Yeah, I mean, on the Democratic side, it's pathetic whenever you're only getting two-thirds or whatever people to support you. So let's just leave that aside. The big headline to me was the Trump. I mean, the actual head-to-head one versus him. I mean, he is actually tied in this poll, Crystal, at 43% apiece in a rematch in 2024. That's a terrible position to be in as an incumbent president, especially two years out. We really have not yet heard the full critique of Donald Trump in an actual media circus environment of a full 2024 campaign. He theoretically should be stronger right now than he ever has been. The counter to that could be, oh, well, Biden hasn't

yet made his case to the American people. I mean, my counter would be, you're the president. You get to make your case every day. Also, you are getting older every day, which is part of the problem as to why people are very skeptical of you. I mean, this really does confirm a couple of things. Trump is still dramatically electable. As much as people want to count him out, this New York Times poll, I saw CNN story yesterday kind of preparing the liberals just being like, guys, Trump could actually win. And it's true. I mean, I've always said this. When you are the nominee of a major party, you can win the presidency. But then with Trump, he's always underestimated. Yes, I understand 2022 didn't go well. It's true. 2018 didn't go well

either, but he won the freaking presidency. You can't deny it. He only lost 44,500 votes. And I just checked the 2020 poll that came out October, 2020. See a New York times. Sienna is actually a poll historically biased against Trump in terms of his favor. They had Biden up 51 to 42 in the last poll of October 2020. So if they have him tied, Trump, Biden, I'm giving Trump plus four. Historically, that's what it usually has come down to. Didn't seem to work in 2022. But to me, that was because Trump himself wasn't on the ballot. This man, he's like a magician. I don't know what exactly it is, but in terms of getting people actually to the polls to come out to vote, he seems singularly enabled to do that as a politician.

It's one of the rarest things you'll ever see in politics. So I have that CNN piece from Harry Enten, who's like their data guy. Analysis of the polls and the headline that he has here is the chance of Trump winning another term is very real. And one of the things he says that I think people really need to internalize, Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a non-incumbent to win the Republican nomination, but he is in a better position to win the general election than at any point

during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle. Keep in mind with Donald Trump in 2016, he was almost always pulling behind Hillary. With Biden in 2020, it looked like it was going to be a blowout if you were just looking at the polls. He has very rarely been looking at polls where he was actually in the poll itself tied with his Democratic opponent. So now listen, he's facing a number of other charges. He's going to be going to trial before this election. He could be facing prison time. That's a very real possibility. And I have to think that that is not going to be an easy thing for him to be able to overcome. So there are a lot of wild cards out there. But I think people need to take very seriously the fact that Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak Democratic nominee

for all the people out there who are really concerned about electability. You know, and if, if God forbid, in my opinion, Donald Trump gets reelected, they need to take a really, really critical lens to the Democratic Party and the fact that they shut this process out. They did not allow voters to have a choice. They said, you have to be stuck with this man that an overwhelming majority of Americans are like, this guy's just too old. Yeah. I look, I mean, it's been obvious from day one, they're playing with fire. You know, if they believe that Trump is an existentialist, which they say all the time, who knows if it's whether they believe it or not. Well, if you lose, it's your fault. 100% it's on you. And more and more that I'm reading, Crystal,

while stop the steal is a problem, while the criminal cases are a problem, everyone can recite the litany of problems. He's a strong politician, man. It comes through like anytime we see like a very serious look at his real support against Biden, specifically in the swing states and all that, I always come away with the same thought of this man, he's getting awful close to the Oval Office right now, especially when you peg it to how the media and all these other people are painting his chances. And so look, be a fool and count him out if you want to. I would not advise it. The one thing I'll put on the other side of that equation for Joe Biden is, you know, the economy does seem to be improving. Inflation does seem to be going down. Although, you know, if you ask American

voters, they still not feeling it really in terms of an improved economy. The mood is very, very negative. But, you know, my instinct is that the charges and the criminal jeopardy for Trump well it doesn't matter in a Republican primary could be damaging to him in a general election but on the other hand I mean it's not like people don't know what he did on January 6th it's not like people don't know that he's facing these charges etc so listen it's a jump ball right now. I think that's all we can say. And to me, yes, it speaks to the strength of Trump as a politician. But for me, Trump's success and very near success in 2020

has always been a deep reflection of how weak the Democratic Party is and how little they live up to their promises and actually deliver for people. So I think it's pathetic that they should be in this position going into this election season. Let's move on to another piece on the Democratic side, which is continued questions and maybe answers about Hunter Biden, his business dealings, and critically, because this is the part that really, really matters, the involvement of his father, the president of the United States, Joe Biden. So yesterday,

one of Hunter's former business partners, Devin Archer, who was involved in the whole Burisma situation, he was on Capitol Hill to testify. And what he said directly undercut what Joe Biden's line has always been about his lack of involvement in Hunter Biden's business. He said he never even talked to Hunter about his business dealings. Well, Devin Archer has a different story. He says Hunter would quite often, many times, put Joe on speakerphone with his business associates to try to basically sell the Biden brand and leverage his famous, powerful last name into his own business dealings. Democratic Representative Dan Goldman was asked about this after the hearings. Let's take a listen to how he spun those revelations. It was clear that it was part of the daily conversations

that Hunter Biden had with his father. And it was and and sounded like most of the time uh now president biden didn't even know who the people he was at dinner he was just asked to say hello uh and he would you know talk about the way he described it several times they asked over and over and over he described what the weather was how was, what's going on on your end. The witness was very, very consistent that none of those conversations ever had to do with any business dealings or transactions. They were purely what he called casual conversations. Oh, OK. Incredible.

Incredible. Incredible. And we are expected to believe in his telling of events that the president of the United States is so naive that he doesn't know what's going on in these conversations. And they expect the American people to be so naive to buy this version of events. And they also expect us to completely erase our memories of Biden saying that none of this ever happened. He said he never spoke to him once on the phone. And this guy's like, oh, they were just talking about the weather. You just said they talked for how many times? The story significantly shifted. Completely changed the goalposts. Put this up there on the screen also from Fox News. Devin Archer actually, whenever he was present in front of the committee, unfortunately,

was actually behind closed doors. So I really would like to see the transcript of that hearing. I am calling on them to, quote, release the transcript. And look, I've always said this too with Archer. He's an unsavory character in his own right. He's facing jail time. But he was there at the center of all of these deals. And one of the reasons I feel like I'm growing nuts, Crystal,

is I've been covering this for almost five years. I actually looked through my notes. I did a monologue on Rising September 24th, 2020, which detailed every single one of the allegations that Devin Archer made behind the closed door at this hearing about the Russian billionaire who transferred money there. Actually, the source material was the 2020 GOP Oversight Committee report, which detailed all of this and which Joe Biden then denied on September, I believe it was 25th, somewhere around then, at the very first presidential debate. This has been out in the open for years. I mean, I actually, so I also went back and checked. I did an interview with Peter Schweitzer, who wrote the book on Hunter Biden on on March 14th, 2019, over at Rising.

And every single detail about BHG partners, Devin Archer, China, Ukraine and Burisma is listed in that interview. So it's like this has all been present in the public sphere before Joe Biden was even a declared candidate, let alone the president. So it's like, how are we still litigating this and never have gotten to the actual bottom of it until now, August 1st, 2023? That's the absurd part to me rather than the facts. I mean, Archer saying, I put the guy on the phone, like I put the guy, of course, he obviously did. Archer testifying that Burisma hired Hunter for the quote Biden brand and everyone's like, oh, what a shocking. Is it shocking? We need Devin Archer to testify to that? Why does the guy get $83,000 a month? It's not shocking to anybody. We knew consistently that Biden had met at the very least have been

testified to by eyewitnesses with business partners. So it's like, to me, this is only confirmation of facts that we have known for years at this point. So it's just, it's really repulsive to me to see Goldman and all of them not admit the very basic truth. I mean, there's only one honest interpretation of this. Biden lied straight up on the debate stage, on the campaign trail as president of the United United States, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre both told lies about Hunter's business dealings from the podium. End of story, period. If we are to believe this testimony, not only this testimony, multiple other corroborating

reports, the text message that has come out. It's like all of this. It's just, it's absurd that they can still try and stick to their original. I mean, it was always very plain on its face that the most charitable interpretation of Hunter's business dealings is that he was using the Biden. I mean, there was never any other possible explanation. Right. Remember how he was like on the Amtrak board? Of course.

Road trains. He liked the train. Like, OK, yeah, that's what that's what gets you on that board. It was always really obvious. And I'll never forget when we asked Congressman Ted Lieu about these dealings. And he's like, yeah, people sit on boards and they earn salaries as if that's totally fine. Now, listen, that may not be illegal, although I do think some of his potential unregistered lobbying for foreign governments is something that deserves a lot of scrutiny and may be illegal. But, you know, unfortunately, leveraging your political connections and parlaying them into lucrative financial positions may not be illegal. Number one. Number two, I'd like to see Republicans apply some of the same scrutiny to their own activities and deal with those of Donald Trump. But Biden has really caught himself here and backed himself into a corner by stating so unequivocally that he never even spoke to Hunter about those. And it's just that part. It's gone. Like, it's very clear that that's a lie at this point.

You got this other piece. There was Devin Archer apparently, you know, reportedly testified that Biden had met with this Russian oligarch who was also involved in potential business deals. And there were questions about why this particular Russian oligarch did not end up getting sanctioned. Karine Jean-Pierre refused to answer a question about this from the podium. Let's take a listen to that. Regarding Russia's sanctions, I'm wondering if you could share the reason why President Biden hasn't sanctioned the Russian billionaires, Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina. How is he handling the conflict of interest they're giving his son? Was it business associated, these two people? And can you confirm that as sitting vice president, he dined with Baturina in Georgetown? I'm just not speaking to anything that's related to his son

from here. If you want to ask a question about Hunter Biden specifically, I would refer you to his family. So just continuing to Stonewall here, Sagar. Just complete BS. Once again, I literally have the notes right here in front of me, as I wrote at that time. A payment included a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Batarina, the richest woman in all of Russia, conveniently the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, business associations with individuals who are linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army of China. It's all been in the public record. Everyone knows this. And it's like, Stephen, a friend of the show, a great reporter, at least has the cojones to ask about this and to get them on the record.

But it's like the the level of obviousness of which what was testified here, that the Biden brand was being stocked by Burisma, of course, that Biden had been on the phone now with Hunter Biden associates. And the thing is about Dan Goldman is now Goldman is dropping the only defense that the White House ever had. I never talked to him about business, which was ridiculous and a farce on its face, but never had any real credible testimony. Archer has been saying this. Tony Bobulinski came forward in what, I mean, it was October, I believe, of 2020 and said, yeah, what are you talking about? I met with Joe Biden. I literally, all of this, all of the core allegation, the facts, everything has been here now for years. And, you know, still the media is either downplaying it or, I mean, really what shocked me with Goldman is like, I'm like, wait, he just admitted it.

Like he said, he admitted the quiet part out loud. Like he says Biden talked to him on the phone. And it's like you said, Crystal, even if they were just talking about the weather, which I don't believe, let's say that they were. When you are able to dial somebody up in a meeting to flex your relationship with them and put them on the phone with business partners, that's worth a lot of money. If he's trying to close a deal and he says, yeah, I've got juice. And they're like, yeah, what kind of juice you got? And he goes, I can get my dad on the phone anytime I want. And you're sitting in a cafe in China or you're sitting in a cafe in Italy, which both of these happen, just so you're aware. And he dials his dad up in the middle of the night or whatever.

And his dad probably answers because he's terrified. His son's probably going on a crack binge again. But you're doing that to flex the fact that you have such a deep relationship with the guy. That's still corruption, you know, regardless. And Biden, you know, you said he's not stupid. He's been in the game for a long time. He knew exactly what Hunter was doing when this was all going down. Yeah, I think there's no, it's hard to come up with another plausible explanation here. So we've got some interesting media coverage of Devin Archer's testimony and what this all means for Joe Biden. Let's take a listen to how they are portraying the facts. So Goldman's sort of explaining that Archer qualified the topics of discussion on these phone calls as niceties that Biden sometimes didn't even know who was on the other line with his son Hunter. And, you know, sources in the room telling CNN now that Archer did not point the finger directly at any sort of a connection between Joe Biden and his son's foreign business dealings.

And rather, you know, said that he was, that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of said access. Horace? Really a stunning development, Zach, when you consider that Republicans were selling this as a breakthrough that would link Hunter's business dealings with his father. Instead, business was apparently never discussed, according to Devin Archer. Zach Cohen, thanks so much for the reporting. Right. That's the takeaway. Right. So we're either, we're either supposed to believe that the president of the United States is such

a fool that he had no idea what was going on with these many phone calls with Hunter's business associates or they're wildly, you know, he lied and they are still wildly misrepresenting what really happened here. I mean, listen, have Republicans put their finger on like Joe Biden directly financially benefiting from Hunter's business? No, they haven't. They have not gotten any, you know, smoking gun evidence with regard to that. But do they have pretty clear evidence that Joe Biden has lied to the American people about how all this went down and, you know, the at least verbal involvement of him with his son's business dealings. Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is where the semantics of it just become absurd to me.

If my I have a little sister, if my little sister was trading off my name in the way that James Biden was trading off of his and used one hundred thousand dollars slush fund to buy herself a laptop through a deal with the Chinese Communist Party, and not just buy herself a laptop, but for all of my nieces and nephews and possibly even in conjunction, by the way, with one of my children, yeah, I think I did financially benefit from that. I mean, by any common understanding of family corruption, they obviously benefited from it. So did Biden's actual bank account get any money? I don't know. I mean, I actually still think it's possible. But

I think we even said this at the time, Crystal, it's almost very like third world in the way that this entire thing went down. The way that it works in a developing world is sometimes you pay somebody off directly. But usually it's like, ah, you pay my uncle, you pay my cousin. The cousin will facilitate. It's like in Narcos, Mexico, whenever the defense minister of Mexico, he's like, you don't deal with me, you deal with my nephew. The nephew is the one who is like the bank transfer guy between the cartels and the government. I mean, with modern money laundering and FBI stings and all of that, even in the rest of the world, briefcases full of cash and all that stuff doesn't happen. But it is still obvious in any familial network ties that if you are going to mansions paid

for with corrupt cash, you benefited from that. We understand that whenever it comes to private jets, but why don't we understand it whenever your quality of life and all the people around you is directly affected by this corruption? Then to me, and again, in any common public understanding of that, I understand not legally, then you clearly did financially benefit from these transactions. Republicans, you know, they're doing this for political reasons. They clearly don't like really care about corruption on its face. They don't say shit about Donald Trump. All of that can be true. And it can also be true that the conduct here from the president of the United States is a problem. And it's something that the mainstream press should be digging into

rather than trying to give excuses and spin this testimony yesterday, which was really bad for the president and did reveal lies that he's told the American people, try to spin this as a loss for Republicans. And also, why just, you know, why are you why play into their game where they want this just to be about like scoring points against President Biden in this like partisan battle? Why play their game? Why not just actually look at the facts when it pertains to Trump, when it pertains to Biden? I mean, that's certainly

what we try to do here. Obviously, yeah. And for all of the what ifs, you can search breaking points, Jared Kushner Saudi, if you're interested. Hey, listen, yesterday we were talking about Trump bilking his supporters for $65 million in legal fees. You are welcome to search Steve Mnuchin Trump Saudi, Jared Kushner, Saudi. All of America First Policies Institute billionaires. We could go into it forever. And that's the way that it should be. Okay, let's go to the next part here. Some interesting developments going on in Ukraine.

Obviously, Crystal alluded to this, but there have been multiple drone strikes now by the Ukrainians on the city of Moscow, kind of just becoming a routine development. I guess all us all just hope that they continue to just strike buildings and if they don't kill the wrong guy, and that way launches us all into a massive conflict. But there was a piece of news buried actually within a New York Times expose, not even expose per se, more like a profile of Elon Musk and of Starlink, which revealed not only the Ukrainian reliance on Starlink, but also Elon's personal intervention here into the conflict, which does say a lot about our society. So let's go and put this up there on the screen.

Elon apparently is personally intervening in the war and vetoing access to its services for Ukrainian military to facilitate operations that he personally does not approve of. So as an example that they give here, they say that Mr. Musk expressed fears that Ukraine would use Starlink not just to defend itself, but also to conduct offensive operations to regain territory seized by Russia, which would cause significant military casualties. And this was actually personally intervened then by the Biden administration to call him. Let's go to the next one that actually shows you. Starlink access since then has, quote, fluctuated depending on the

movements of the war in Russia as Russia won territory and Ukraine fought to take it back. As battle lines shifted, Musk has used a process called geofencing to restrict where Starlink is available on the front line. SpaceX uses this location data by its service to enforce then geofencing limits. This has caused problems when Ukrainian troops tried retaking cities like Kherson in the Russian-controlled areas in the fall. They needed internet access to communicate. Members of the armed forces messaged Mr. Musk requests to restore service in areas where the army was advancing. So it's funny because there are several elements to this. On the one hand, you could be like, oh, this is capricious. On the other, Starlink is being

provided for free to the Ukrainian military, and they call it the backbone of their military operations. So if they want some terms of dictation or whatever with what's going on, then you should pay for it. That's number one. Two, you are welcome in many cases to go get some ISR, which is intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance of your own. If you could afford it, you can't because the U.S. is the one who's paying all of your bills. So I've seen Elon take a tremendous amount of criticism for this, Crystal. But if he does personally own the company and he's providing them a service for free, then in my mind, it's like, well, OK, well, then why shouldn't his opinion matter? Like if you're paying for it, then that's one thing. You know, we can have a

negotiation here. And still, obviously, he can do what he wants, but they're not even paying for it. They're literally getting it for free. And then, you know, the U.S. military and apparently Ukrainian military are so wholly reliant in a single point of failure, which is a private company in the whims of the guy who changed freaking Twitter to X. It's like, well, what are you surprised by? At this point in the conflict, why are you invested in something else? So that's a whole other conversation. I think it's a big meta problem that is worth discussing. It is a big meta problem. And I really would like people to try to put aside how they specifically feel about Elon Musk and how they specifically feel about what the right or wrong policy is with regard to Ukraine. We should not be outsourcing key state

functions to any one person, period. Because when, you know, when he gave access to Ukraine, to Starlink, like he celebrated, but then you didn't realize that you were then giving him a say in what your foreign policy as the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet, what your foreign policy is. I mean, you're basically like putting that in his hands.

That's insane. That is malpractice. Yeah, that's your fault. So we should not be outsourcing key government state functions of statecraft and warcraft to one person, whether you like him or hate him or feel indifferent about him or think he makes good decisions, bad decisions or whatever. So the part of this piece that actually really struck home for me is they quoted this tweet from Elon from back in April, where he says, quote, between Tesla, Starlink and Twitter, I may have more real time global global economic data in one head than anyone ever. That may be true. I think he's right. And I really want us to take in the fact that this one individual, again, however you feel about him, and I certainly made my feelings and,

you know, analysis of his business decisions clear, but however you feel about him, he is deeply integral to at least three really key industries in our society. Tesla, I mean, the move towards EV vehicles, this is a central component of the Biden administration policy, a central push in terms of people who care about climate change. And he has huge market share there. Starlink, I think this is case in point of why he's got a huge number of satellites. The number in here, what is it? He's got like more than half of the satellites that are orbiting our earth are Elon Musk satellites. That seems like it's pretty significant. And Twitter, and now that he or X, whatever, you know, he has bought and now controls a key part of our communications infrastructure and something that is, you know, bedrock to our

democracy and our town square, et cetera, et cetera. So this one individual has so much power in so many sectors. I'm not sure people have really wrapped their head around it. Yeah. And then just don't be surprised then whenever that individual flexes that power based upon their whims, especially when you're not paying for it. It's like, that's the one that especially graded me. It's like, like you said, he was celebrated whenever he gave it to him for free. And then they didn't realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Meanwhile, obviously the war in Ukraine continues to become brutal. The Russians are really showing us all who they are.

Let's put this up there on the screen. Just a barbaric attack yesterday. There was a missile strike actually on Zelensky's hometown, which killed six civilians, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother. It's always important just to remember that this level of barbarism happens on a daily basis. Then, of course, Ukraine is retaliating. And then, of course, that singular missile strike was done, Crystal, because Zelensky went on Twitter and issued effectively battle plans for retaking Crimea. We're in a vicious cycle. And this was meant to be a personal rebuke against President Zelensky as well. Let's also not forget this. Let's put this

up there on the screen. The Kremlin actually just yesterday threatened the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for the drone strike on Moscow skyscrapers. They warned, quote, there is no other way out after attacks on the business district that closed Russian airspace and left one injured. Closing Russian airspace, by the way, is no joke. You know, I've just recently been taking flights to India back and forth. The disruption over that airspace is one of the most critical areas for specifically European flights to East Asia and also the long-haul flights that come from the East coast of the United States that usually fly over this. It's not only has caused multiple cancellations, but the uncertainty and all of that. I mean, we all know the Malay, I forget, what was it? Malaysian flight four. I forget that got shot down over Ukraine. Not, I mean, not that long ago. It was almost like,

I think it was like about a decade ago because some Russian separatists thought that it was, I forget exactly what they thought it was, but the point being, you know, hundreds of civilians were killed. So it's creating a tremendous amount of uncertainty in this entire conflict. We've got little kids getting killed in apartment buildings, you know, in terms of retaliation. And then we've got, you know, drone strikes on the freaking business district in downtown Moscow. I mean, that's what I said at the beginning of this entire discussion, which is it only takes one guy to get killed and things change completely. They don't know who they're going to hit. They could hit somebody who's like

the cousin of whatever, some person who's very special up in there and the whole conflict could change completely overnight. So anyway, it's always just a reminder that there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty and risk and trauma and all that that actually comes to a real war. It's not just a video game that people are playing on Twitter. I mean, it's literally a live fire exercise.

And so it appears that the Ukrainians have been trying to target these sort of symbolic targets, ministries. You've had little in the way of casualties in terms of these attacks directly on Moscow right now. I mean, their intent is to terrorize the citizenry. I think that's really the intent.

You can see some of the videos that people post and, you know, them screaming in terror as they see drone strikes on their city. And it's understandable when you consider the horror that the Russians have inflicted on Ukrainian civilians. You know, so I'm not saying that these are like on the same level, but there's a lot going on in Russia domestically right now with moves being made by their legislative bodies to try to, you know, potentially have martial law, to try to potentially have another round of recruitment.

And if Ukrainians, if Zelensky thinks that these drone strikes on Moscow are going to force the Kremlin to the table and make the Russian population really reject this war, I think that's very foolish. I don't think that that's likely to be the outcome. So ultimately, you're just playing with fire here and risking a broader conflagration. And maybe that is the real point for the Ukrainians.

Yeah, well, that's smart. And look, who knows? We'll continue to keep everybody updated. Let's go to the next part. This is a wild story, one that we actually spent hours kind of trying to dig into this. You went down this rabbit hole. I was just like, what the hell is going on? Is this as insane as it appears on the surface?

And the answer actually is yes. So let's put this up there. The first person to flag it to me was Kyle Bass, who put out this tweet. And we're going to go through some of the actual allegations in here. He says, quote, an illegal secret Chinese bioagent lab has been raided by the FBI, the CDC, and California Public Health Department in Fresno County, California. The CDC's division of select agents found infectious bacterial and viral agents at the site, which was listed as an empty building. Bioagents included malaria, rubella, and HIV. He continues, chlamydia, E. coli, numerous other types, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5. The lab had, quote, 900 genetically engineered mice designed to carry various COVID

strains living in inhumane conditions with another 175 that were actually found dead. Okay, so let's look at the actual details. And it appears actually that many of them do add up. So let's go to the NBC News report. So the NBC News report specifically did not put the, they did not ascribe the origin and the connections to the Chinese Communist Party in this, but they do actually confirm something key. One, this was an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, full of medical waste, and full of hazardous material. The Fresno County Public Health Department, quote, evaluated and assessed the activities of this unlicensed lab. And what they found is that with multiple state and federal agencies determined biological and chemical

contents that were actually on site, including coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes. So they actually confirmed some of the actual chemicals and the biological strains and many of the others that were present there on site. Then you have to go down a bit of a deeper rabbit hole here. And this was a fascinating view, actually, from public local news. This is why

we do still need local news, Crystal, because they have great investigations. Let's put this up there. They say, quote, I have never seen anything like this. Illegal medical lab discovered in Readly. This is from yourcentralvalley.com. What they point to is the city manager actually of the property says that she's never seen this in her 26-year career in the county of Fresno. We had 800 different types of chemicals and all of that, which were on site. But eventually, what comes through is that the tenant was a company called Prestige Biotech, and this has now since been confirmed, that was registered in Nevada, but was actually unlicensed for business in California. So the company's president is a

Chinese citizen who they were only able to speak with via emails, which were actually included in the court documents. And quote, other addresses provided as authorized agents for these empty offices were addresses in China that could not then be verified. Also, agents found thousands of package boxes, many with shipping labels from China, which were included in the court documents. So what was this lab doing in Fresno County, California? What's happening with this? And the craziest part, nobody knows. Who is this company? Who is this Chinese guy? How did they get a permit for all this stuff? Did it come through legally or illegally in customs? And then what were they studying in this? So this is one of the most bizarre, odd things that has happened. You know, there's obviously been a lot of skepticism and allegation and discussion around

Wuhan, but, you know, at least that one was a level, you know, it's the level four safety bio lab run by the Chinese government. This is some sketchy company in the middle of Fresno doing God knows what with who knows amount of unregulated chemicals. And the why question has still yet to be answered despite multiple people in California trying to get to the bottom of this. Yeah. From what I could read in the court documents. It's a wild story. And they, the authorities just sort of stumbled upon this. Yeah, exactly. A city inspector saw a garden hose that was like in a place, a garden hose

isn't supposed to be, which I didn't really know that they regulated where garden hoses could be, but apparently probably in industrial areas they do. They were like, you can't have that garden hose there. What else is going on? And then they go into this supposedly empty warehouse building and find all of this crazy stuff. In terms of what the owner of this company, Prestige Biotech, is saying, he told officials that Prestige Biotech, is saying. He told officials that Prestige Biotech moved assets that belonged to a defunct company called Universal Meditech Inc. to that warehouse from Fresno after that

other company went under. Prestige Biotech was a creditor to that other company and identified as its successor, according to court documents, officials were unable to get any California-based address for either company except for the previous Fresno location from which UMI had been evicted. So basically the story from the owner of this sketchy biotech company is that they had acquired this other defunct biotech company that these were the assets from that one and they just were sort of like storing them there randomly is basically the idea. But I mean, you think like live mice included in this? I don't know. It is a wild one. I have no idea what's going on with this, but it is really weird. Yeah. I mean, I think what has kind of come through is that clearly,

I mean, the thing is too, is that the pictures, like you could see, can we throw the first one up there just so people get an idea? I mean, this, I mean, I would have believed if they had told me that it was like a meth lab or some sort of drug lab, as you can see from, I mean, it's filthy, there's stuff everywhere. Clearly it's not clean.

Gloves hanging out there. Gloves just hanging out, you know, beakers and all this. I mean, it genuinely does look like it could, you know, come out of a drug den or out of a movie. And yet you find out that we're talking about, like, viral agents, infectious bacterial, filthy mice, inconditions. And then, you know, the why question is the one that just continues to abound from all of this. So, yeah, like you said, they stumbled across it somehow. What's really actually kind of terrifying to me is that none of this was flagged through customs because allegedly, we are supposed to have very stringent regulation on age,

chemical agents, viral agents, bacteria and all this stuff that comes into the United States. And it's especially supposed to be very high on China. Now, the problem is that China makes the vast majority of inputs for a lot of our drugs, but they do come in via a relatively regulated process. One of the reasons why that we're supposed to look very hard at the unregulated market is that Chinese fentanyl is probably responsible for the vast majority of opioid deaths here in the United States. And that's the reason why the drug cartels, they don't make those drugs here in America. They make it in Mexico where the export controls is much more corrupt effectively in order

to get it into the country. That's the whole point. So then my question is like, well, how the hell did they even get this? Well, but we don't necessarily know that it came from, that the materials came from China. Well, the shipping boxes came from China. So I mean, yeah, you're right. Maybe they shipped it to Mexico and they drove it across the border. I mean, we have no idea where this stuff was acquired from whatsoever. I mean, that could be, too, that it was shipped. We just don't know. And the thing to me that doesn't pass the sniff test about the story that this was, you know, they're basically just storing this stuff here after this other company went defunct or whatever.

When you look at those pictures, I mean, this isn't just like things in storage boxes. You've got a whole lab set up there. You got the gloves there. You've got things in beakers. You've got stuff that's on the table. I don't know. It doesn't look like you were just like, oh, let me put it in storage. And then, I don't know, dispose of it somehow, do something with it. It's a weird one. And also the, you know, creating front companies and all that in order to justify illegal export import. That's a time honored kind of Chinese tradition for, you know, I've read and done some dives into Chinese fentanyl business. It's almost exactly the same in terms of like, oh, you have a defunct company, a fake address in China. And whenever you're

trying to, you know, trace it back and be like, where did this come from? It's not a Chinese specific phenomenon. It's what sketchy businessmen do all around the world, including here in the good old U S of a. Fair enough. Maybe they probably stole it for, they probably stole the tactic from us. So, you know, don't, don't let anyone say that they didn't steal the best. Uh, let's go to the next part here. Crystal being very gracious in allowing me to give everyone an update, um, on the UFO phenomenon. So we updated everybody about the hearing, about what happened. Dave Grush came forward and made some extraordinary allegations. Crystal, one of the things that you asked me was, what do you think of all this? What are we to make

of all this? And what I said is, it's important to get this on the record and to create a binary. I think creating the binary is the most important thing. Is it true or is it not true? He's entered this under oath in the congressional record. We also have a previous director of the program, the AERO program, coming forward and saying there's no evidence of extraterrestrials, there's no evidence of any of these hidden craft retrievable sites, any of the stuff that Dave Grush has alleged before. Just to give people a flashback to that, that was Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who is directly at odds now with Grush's testimony.

Here's what he said a couple of months before to Congress. I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, Arrow has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. government's leadership of its findings. So, Crystal, after Dave Grush gave testimony at that hearing, which directly contradicted what he said, and which he said that Grush also said that he had brought forward these allegations to Kirkpatrick, a very odd letter began to circulate. It appears that Kirkpatrick circumvented the Pentagon's official

framework for releasing statements and released a statement of his own accord on his LinkedIn page. Weird. Responding, yeah, very odd. This does not happen in the government and does not happen in the Department of Defense, of which I used to cover. I've never seen anything like this in my entire career. So here's the letter that he put out. Again, he is saying, quote, they'd be there his personal observations and opinions and do not represent the DOD or the IC positions. IC being the intelligence community. Long letter here, effectively saying that he's very proud of intelligence community. Long letter here, effectively saying that he's very proud of his team. And he says, quote, I cannot let yesterday's hearing pass

without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Committee who chose to join Arrow, many not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks that this would entail. So he specifically in this letter calls Grush a liar. He says, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with Arrow. Furthermore, some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to Arrow, raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some congressional elements. So I'm going to zero in on that and kind of let all of the other stuff go, because the important thing that has come out from here is he is

claiming very matter-of-factly, not necessarily under oath, remember that, and also not through the official meeting, through the official process, so I don't really know what to make of it, but he effectively is saying, Dave Grush is lying, because Grush said at the hearing that he had provided materials, evidence, and all of that to the program, to the Arrow program that was reviewing the past record of UFO knowledge, files, and all that stuff, and that the reason he became a whistleblower is because it was not taken seriously and that it was buried. So we're basically in, we're in now an almost total like yes or no question. Like one of these people is lying and lied to Congress. What did you make of this part at the very end? He says

in this statement on his LinkedIn, also to be clear, none of the whistleblowers from yesterday's hearing ever worked for Arrow or was ever a representative to Arrow, contrary to statements made in testimony and in the media. So he's also, am I right, asserting that Grush is even lying about what positions he held? From what I read, there are some technicalities in terms of the way that Grush described his attachment to the program, not necessarily for the program. So they're using some sort of legalistic language here There's two ways to read it, you know, and again, this is not a vetted statement by the Pentagon That's not you know, it's not officially. This is just him something he put out on his LinkedIn page

But he's basically saying I don't know this guy. He never brought any of this stuff forward. He's a liar He never made any of it clear. He didn't even work for me. I mean each one of those is extraordinary in itself I mean He's effective he the only place where he's not giving himself out is saying that he was never shared those materials because now it's straight up, like did Grush lie or not? And listen, we really have no way of knowing. This is why it's so difficult actually to look at these two things because remember that the Grush report, I mean, it's not like he just came forward to the New York Times. He went through the internal whistleblower process in the Department of Defense, which the inspector general of the

intelligence community said that they found credible and urgent and bearing investigation. So it was vetted at the very least in some way, at least from what we're seeing. Much of what he said, even at the hearing, was said in an unclassified setting of which not has been cleared by the department, but of which has not been restricted from saying out in the open. He says that he provided all of these materials to Congress for investigation into the specific allegations about these programs and all of us. So, I mean, I'm, I'm like, even though I thought that this was an incredibly bizarre event, I'm happy that it happened because, and I, you know, it's probably sucks for Grush and many of these other people would be called a liar is because now, now we actually really have to find out because, you know, he, Kirkpatrick had given himself some outs in the past. He said, oh, we don't have any evidence. All this is a lot of different ways that you could

spin that, you know, whether he lied to Congress or not. But this one is such a direct and a personal statement saying he's a liar. And let's put this Daily Mail piece up on the screen because this included also quotes from very confused members of Congress who actually saw it. So, for example, Anna Paulina Luna, who is one of the Congresswomen who has been really at the side of Tim Burchett on all of this. Here's what she said. She said, it's crazy to me that they would try to discredit them. The fact that Kirkpatrick just tried to discredit also the other two witnesses that were legitimate pilots for the military that had the gimbal and the TikTok videos were confirmed by DOD is the exact reason why I think people don't trust Arrow. The evidence was brought forward by multiple veterans who had confirmed

the video footage of the Tic Tac and the gimbal of advanced technologies that does exist. The DOD even admitted it like, what are you talking about? That actually, you know, highlights what you said, you know, the very odd part at the end, whenever he's like, well, none of these three witnesses all worked for us. And it's like, well, let's put Grush aside. The other two never claimed to ever work for the program. They were just like, yeah, I flew planes and I had a UFO encounter. Yeah. So this was very much aimed at Grush. This was absolutely aimed at Grush. Which was why I thought it was bizarre that he also tried to kind of take umbrage at Fravor and at Graves' testimony, who, I mean, they didn't even really

say anything about Arrow. Anyway, the reason why I wanted to highlight it is just that clearly we are in a situation now where one of these individuals is telling the truth. And it's actually, frankly, should be easier now at this point to figure it out. And I implore these members of Congress, please find out and update us in a very, you know, speedy manner because enough, you know, public interest has been given now to the non-human biologics, to the, you know, all of the just incredible allegations made by Grush. But we have enough now to where, at the very least, like he said it under oath that he's provided materials to them. And we've also got some documents that are provided by George Knapp, which makes some really crazy allegations that were entered into the congressional record. It's like, look, investigate it and just tell if it's true or not true. I mean, it's going to be very difficult to get any kind of answers about

some of the extraordinary claims that were made in testimony. But some of the stuff that is laid out in this personal statement seems more provable. Exactly. Did he actually provide the material that he said he did or not? Like that seems like something we could potentially get to the bottom of. You know, what is the reality of who we work for and whether he technically worked for Arrow or not? And while those things don't provide us

conclusive evidence of, you know, what's going on with these craft, they do provide you with a little bit of information about the credibility of these various individuals. No, I think that's incredibly well said. That gives us, this gives us actually quite a lot more to work with. And bizarrely enough, I found it ignored by the media just because as a headline itself, it's like UFO whistleblower called liar by head of the Pentagon program. I mean, that's extraordinary to me. And then again, not done through the official DOD process. So that's the breakdown from the best of. I mean, that's extraordinary to me. And then, again, not done through the official DOD process.

So that's the breakdown, for the best, of what I've been able to gather on it. Covering this topic, you know, things always just seem, nothing, I guess, is ever done in the ordinary fashion. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Whatever you think of Barbenheimer, the explosion of cultural fascination with both films is basically a testament to our love affair with human creativity. For once, studios took a risk on a few things that were truly new and different,

and they were rewarded with massive audiences and a flood of national discourse that has briefly recreated a monocultural event, the likes of which I really thought we might never see again. Ironically, this moment of delight in human imagination comes at a time when the very essence of creativity is actually under threat. Big tech, in order to monopolize the new world of AI, is attempting to feed their models with the whole world of human ingenuity, scraping every bit of language, articulated vision, and novel innovation that they can get their hands on so that their machines might impersonate

a bastardized version of the human spark. These so-called large language models can't create anything new, but by harvesting our musings, our pictures, our conversations, our stories, companies are hoping that the bots can be trained to mimic us well enough that we will accept their AI-derived products. Basically, they're trying to eat our souls and then sell them back to us. But increasingly, artists and creatives are refusing to be food for bots that would replace them. Part of this resistance, of course, is located in Hollywood, where rules around AI use are at the center of the actors' and writers' strike. Studios want to be able to scan actors and use their likeness forever for whatever they want, obliterating the livelihoods of many actors, including extras. Studios also want to be able to use AI to write first drafts of new shows and

films, bringing writers in at the end just to polish those scripts at a lower pay rate. Both of these things, of course, are assaults on workers' pay, and that is really crucial. But they're also an assault on the very essence of human creativity. Instead of a human vision, bored of whatever collection of experiences brought that particular person to that particular moment, studios want to use AI to barf up a regurgitated amalgamation of the creativity that it has pilfered from humanity. A pure embodiment of this struggle is coming from an unexpected place, the world of fan fiction writers. Now, these authors delight in expanding the universes of their favorite shows, books, characters. They take inspiration from another human spark and let their own imaginations run wild. They create communities around these expanded visions.

They author stories primarily for the sheer joy of creativity, since copyright laws keep them from directly monetizing their work. And many were horrified to see their works scraped and ingested by AI. And the way these authors figured out their work had been fed to the machines is actually kind of interesting in and of itself. One of the bots exhibited detailed knowledge of something called the Omegaverse, which is apparently a specific sexual dynamic that only exists in the fan fiction world. That's all I really know about it. There was no way the bots could have known about the Omegaverse if they had not been trained on reams of fan fiction. Rather than accepting this unauthorized pilfering of their labors of love,

fan fiction writers staged a revolt. Some decided they would no longer post their stories publicly instead sending to private lists or taking other steps to keep their work private and walled off from the machines. They've also been pushing popular fan fiction sites to ban AI-generated content. A number also mounted a unique protest of small-scale sabotage. Authors banded together for a write-a-thon in which they attempted to produce as much garbage fanfic as they possibly could in an attempt to confuse the machines. I actually love the ingenuity of this approach. Creative community using creative mischief to mess with the bots.

It's quite beautiful, actually. More mainstream artists are also mounting resistance of their own using a legal system and demands for payment. Thousands of authors, including James Patterson, signed an open letter demanding permission and compensation for the use of their work. Comedian Sarah Silverman is among a growing number of creatives who have filed lawsuits against big tech companies for the unauthorized use of their work to train AI models. The news industry has also been fighting to get paid for use of their archives, and the AP has actually reached some sort of a deal with OpenAI to license their news content. Well, I can imagine the big boys, like the New York Times, let's say, cutting deals with AI companies. Who's going to look out for the product of smaller scale creators?

Because while you may not see yourself as a creator, to be human is to create, to tell stories, to share thoughts, to build, to find delight in sparks of inspiration. AI will never be able to actually do these things, but I think the attempt to vacuum up as much human creative content as possible from works of art to Facebook musing should be properly seen as an existential threat. The goal of these tech oligarchs is to make AI's regurgitated derivative products good enough that these products come to dominate the cultural landscape and certainly the marketplace, devaluing human creativity and squeezing it down into increasingly cramped corners of our society. Technology, which was supposed to bring the marvel of human creativity to global audiences, instead being used to quash human creativity's centrality to our own society.

It's not that the drive to create will be extinguished, of course not. But if you can't make a living from artistic expression, then the day job is certainly going to take precedence. If AI is creating our music and our movies because it's cheaper than paying real human beings, we're basically marking an endpoint for the advance of human creativity on a national or international scale. Because AI cannot create anything new, only recycle the old, leaving us in an endless cultural loop, living off the scraps of recombined Friends episodes and Star Wars spinoffs. Tech giants vacuuming up every human labor of love, flight of fancy, creative spark, and lots of driveling mundane meanderings besides, all to train AI models to serve their own profit-making purposes.

I mean, guys, what could go wrong here? In other words, you might have liked Barbie, but are you really going to like Barbie 5 brought to you by the bots? Perhaps better to reflect on Oppenheimer, where we track how humanity invents the tools of our own destruction. And Sagar, you know, it really got to me that the fanfic- And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? I worry a lot here on Breaking Points about polarization, red versus blue. It's the easiest forum to discuss, but in reality, the way that polarization really affects our lives is all the little ways

that we start to hate each other, from dating preferences to where you will live to the type of car that you will buy to which school that you will send your kids to. Polarization actually divides us in a more fundamental way than we often tend to realize. And I often said that polarization today is best understood by a single question.

Did you attend a four-year college degree or not? The answer to that question is probably the single best determinant of how you voted in 2020. If you did statistically, you're much more likely to vote Democrat. And if you didn't, statistically more likely to support Trump. Where there are important exceptions, and overall, it's as good as we got. But increasingly, another factor is actually beginning to emerge that could really hurt us. What gender are you? As you could actually see from those maps, if only women voted Democrats, would win by a huge margin. If only men voted, the same would happen for Republicans.

So once again, there are important exceptions to this rule. But the more true that it becomes, the bigger problems you are going to have. In fact, the more that I'm looking at emerging data, I'm realizing we've never actually been less racially polarized as a country, which is not a bad thing, but within races, we are actually polarizing amongst very different lines. Take Latino voters, for example. The two big predictors of whether a Latino voted for Trump in 2020 are, did you attend college or not? And are you a man or a woman? The same is true for white voters. Increasingly, we see signs of this trend even amongst black voters. Andrew Breitbart once famously said, politics is downstream of culture. In this divide, I think it's becoming even more

clear. What stunned me was not just that this is true for adults, but it appears true even for the emerging generation of teenagers who much has been talked and written about as the great liberal hope. If you're talking about just women, that might be true. But some new data unearthed by Daniel Devise at The Hill, buried within the Monitoring the Future survey from the University of Michigan, finds that the political identities of 12th grade boys differs starkly from the political identities of 12th grade girls. The Michigan survey finds, quote, 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal. Now, it's important that many people don't identify as anything. It's important to note that. Conservative standing

still only is approximately one quarter. Liberal is at 13%. But it's important designator whenever you put it up against women. For girls, it could actually be more different. As the survey finds, quote, the share of 12th grade girls who identify as liberal rose from 19% in 2012 to 30% in 2022. Only 12% of girls identified as conservative in last year's survey. So effectively, the polar opposite of what's going on with boys. What's interesting is not the divide, but how actually new the divide is. As they know, quote, as recently as late 2000s, liberal boys occasionally outnumbered conservatives, and back in the Carter era, both boys and girls were leaning towards liberal. As researcher Jean Twenge actually found in a new book published Generations, the difference

in attitudes between 12th graders has never been bigger than today. What's really interesting is that over a five-year period, girls became slightly more liberal, but it's boys in particular who became much more conservative. So this explains actually a lot about today, a lot of trends like the liver king and Andrew Tate phenomenons online, shit posting, Reddit culture as the overall culture becomes dramatically more hostile to traditional masculinity, especially during the Trump years. The new data on high schoolers in particular will have profound consequences for our society, culture, and our demographics as the years progress.

We're already seeing what happens when this is applied to college, for example. The more college is coded as left-wing and for women and gays, the more that boys are just going to drop out. That's something that I've covered here repeatedly. Boys who are fleeing college by the millions and this higher education soon will have a gender gap nearly equal to the electoral gap that we are seeing right now. It is really as if worlds are colliding. And to once again answer that question, why should you even care about gender gaps in politics or in education? Because it profoundly influences who dates who and thus who is going to reproduce,

or even if that's attainable. A college graduate, for example, on average, 43% less likely to date someone who is, quote, a Republican than the average American. It jumps up to 65% for the term, quote, is a Trump supporter. Dating and political polarization amongst gender lines creates a dramatic mismatch in the availability of mates, both genders, as they age up to the point where they desire a permanent partner. And while I support people's right to be single, of course, if they want to, the data tells us that people who are single longer and throughout their lives are less happy, less likely to report satisfaction in life, more likely to suffer from health problems, suffer worse overall lifetime earnings, and suffer on a myriad of other key quality of life metrics.

So what can we do about this? I honestly don't know. Richard Reeves has some great ideas in his book about how to stop gender imbalances in schools and higher education, but I think it goes way deeper than that. Culture is telling men that they're not wanted and they're responding accordingly by becoming both less desirable as mates and becoming more self-loathing and angry with the internet as a vehicle. Andrew Tate was a symptom of this disease. Liver King and many other scam artists to come and go since. Step one, at least, is acknowledging that we have a problem. It's okay to be a man, and it's also okay to care about men. So I'm curious

what you thought, Crystal, about that. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breaking Point. So anyway, enjoy the show. Thank you to all of our premium subscribers who have been signing up. And we're working on some big, big guests just to explain the current absence. So we'll see you guys later. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve We'll be right back. and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams,

I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, author of the most banned book in America. On my podcast, Fighting Words, I sit down with voices that spark resistance and inspire change. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not what you tell us what to do.

This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. Fighting Words is where courage meets conversation. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.