Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/30/22: GOP Midterm Chances, Abortion Politics, Ukraine War, Iraq Unrest, Student Debt, Psychiatric Drugs, & More!

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Trump effect on GOP midterm chances, abortion politics, GOP agenda, Ukraine war sanctions, Iraq's political unrest, student debt forgiveness, psychiatric drug usage, & Sam Bankman-Fried's political spending!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Tickets: https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E005CD6DBFF6D47 Freddy Brewster: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-08-12/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-political-donations Opening: [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Cable news is ripping us apart, dividing the nation, making it impossible to function as a society and to know what is true and what is false. The good news is that they're failing and they know it. That is why we're building something new. Be part of creating a new, better, healthier, and more trustworthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning, everybody.

Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. We have Crystal. Indeed we do. A lot of interesting political news breaking this morning. First of all, Republicans signaling increasing concerns about Trump being at the center of the midterm election. So we'll break all of that down for you. Also the new developments in terms of the Mar-a-Lago raid and what's going on with the judge, all of that stuff we have for you as well. We also have a number of Republican candidates very concerned about where

they stand on abortion. They said one thing during the primaries to make sure they secured the GOP nomination. Now that they're into the general election, they're deleting entire sections from their website, changing their tune, backpedaling, all of that as well. And at the same time, the House Republicans have kind of decided, you know, maybe we should run on an actual policy agenda. They brought out new Gingrich for an old consult on the whole contract with America. It's a little bit of a 90s throwback situation, so we'll break that down for you. We also have some big foreign policy news in terms of Ukraine is reportedly now launching that long-awaited counteroffensive. How is that going, and what does it mean for energy prices here, but in particular in Europe, where things are looking increasingly dire?

At the same time, massive, deadly protests breaking out in Iraq of some 20-plus years since we, of course, invaded that country. The government is in complete freefall. They've been unable to form a government since sometime last year. So we've got all of that for you as well, as well as a new guest on the show. Excited to talk to Freddie Brewster about the way that cryptocurrency billionaires are shaping our politics. Before we get to that, two things. First off, live show. Live show. Put it up there on the screen. Only a couple tickets left. As we said, we are in the currently final negotiation stages for the rest of the dates. So get ready, folks. This is the opening salvo. It's really exciting. It's kind of fun, Crystal, looking across the map and be like, hmm, should we go here? Should we go there?

So all of that is in development. Come and join us. But number two, Crystal, go ahead. Yes. So we are hiring. Yes. Producer James needs some help. He does. He certainly does. And the show is expanding as we've been sort of teasing for you guys. We're going to have a big announcement after Labor Day about an official expansion of Breaking Points. Along with that, we need someone to help us manage all of the content that we are putting out to help us, especially with the partner program and make sure that we're getting the best out of that. Someone who has, you know, editorial skills, news judgment. So remind me what the email address is. If you're interested, send us an email,

jobs at breakingpoints.com. As you guys know, I mean, we are a very lean and very small team. So really important that we're able to have someone else who is trained on all of the things that James does, because basically right now, if James gets sick, we're kind of screwed. Look, it's going to be a partnership management position. We need somebody with at least a couple years experience in general. You need to be familiar with social media, some sort of video production, production background, knowledge of how some of the backend systems work, like between YouTube, Spotify, and more. But in general, you're just going to have to have a know-how of what it means to work in the content business.

So that spans everything. And an understanding, probably the most important skill is like a deep understanding of our show. Yeah, exactly. Our values, what we're aiming to do here, and yeah, a willingness to sort of do whatever it takes because since we are such a small team, everybody pitches in with

every aspect from initial show conception and the editorial process to actually doing the behind-the-scenes work to get the show up every day to helping out with some of the help requests that we get through emails, people having trouble with their account, those sorts of managing, that part of it as well. But the big focus that we want this person to have is on helping us to manage the partner content, especially as we continue to expand in that direction. So one more time, what's the job? Jobs at BreakingPoints.com.

We'll put out an announcement on Twitter as well, but officially consider yourselves the first in form. We'll have a link down in the description. So send it in. I don't want to put anything official because I don't want, look, it could be somebody who's 21 and has been doing this on the side since they were like 15. It could be somebody who's like 45 and has also been working in TV for like 20 years. Whatever it is, all people will be considered the best woman person shall win. So there we go. Yes. It'll be fun. Indeed. And one other thing we should say about that is thank you to the premium subscribers for helping to make that expansion possible.

James thanks you very much as well because he's getting increasingly overloaded. We just keep putting more and more things on his plate and on the team that you don't see in the background on their plate as well. So thank you guys for making this expansion possible. It's going to make everything run more smoothly and help us to be able to optimize the content so the experience is as good as possible as it can be for everyone. Exactly right. So all the premium subscribers, the reason why we asked some of the monthlies to upgrade was specifically for this reason. Realize the cash, have the budget. We can make sure that we can hire the right person at the right price and also expand out content partnership as well. It costs a hell of a lot of money in order to do video production. So thank you all

so much. And if you can help us out, sign up. We're just giving you a very clear view. This is exactly what we use the money for. So thank you all so, so much. With that, though, let's get to the show. All right. So let's jump into some of the political news that we are focused on this morning. The first piece here is that as Republican fortunes have kind of soured for the midterms, there are starting to be a lot of angst about what exactly is going wrong for them. And look, I want to start this whole section by saying Republicans are still very likely to take the House, probably 50-50 in the Senate.

Maybe Democrats have a little bit of an edge in holding on to the Senate. It's still not a terrible landscape for Republicans. But we also have to say this is a landscape that looks a lot different than what they were anticipating just a few months ago. And it is a landscape that looks a lot different even from, you know, historical precedent and with the president's approval rating and the number of people who say the country's on the wrong track. The fact that there's any chance at all the Democrats could hold either the House or the Senate is a major change in the fortunes of Republicans.

So finger pointing is beginning. One of the places that people are starting to look is at the adverse impact Donald Trump himself is having on Republican fortunes for these midterms. And that's on a few fronts. Let's put this first tear sheet up on the screen. This is from the New York Times. They say Republican signal worries about Trump and the midterms. They point in particular to the fact that just very few Republicans even willing to go on the Sunday talk shows to defend former President Trump. Those who did indicated they would rather be talking about almost anything else. That marks a dramatic turn, even from when this raid, when the news of this raid first came out. I mean, we tracked here how instantly everybody was

on the talking points. Every single, like, potential challenger to Trump was out there saying exactly what he wanted them to say. Well, as this thing has worn on and more details have come out, they've gotten a lot quieter. They haven't really stepped away from their comments, but they've gotten a lot quieter in how they're approaching this whole thing. Couple quotes from within this piece of some of the Republicans who did go on the Sunday shows. You had Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, acknowledging that Mr. Trump, quote, should have turned the documents over, but then quickly pivoted to the timing of the search, quote, what I wonder about is why this could go on for almost two years and less than 100 days before the election. Suddenly, we're

talking about this rather than the economy or inflation or even the student loan program. Governor Chris Sununu sounding a similar note. He, of course, is a Republican of New Hampshire who actually took a pass on running for the Senate, which damaged their chances because he would be a strong contender in that state because he felt like they didn't really have an agenda that they were running on. They just wanted to be in opposition. Anyway, what he said is former President Trump has been out of office for going on two years now. You think this is a coincidence just happening a few months before the midterm elections. So very different approach from Republicans, many of whom are just saying, I'm just going to stay quiet for now and sort of see what shakes out. And those who are talking about it are basically trying to pivot immediately to inflation, the economy, basically anything else.

That's what I would do too. Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, Trump was the biggest motivating factor in the history of modern American politics for Democrats and Republicans. However, you don't want the Democrats motivated. Even to the extent that they are, it's because of Dobbs. But that still is not yet, from what we have seen, reached the 2018 level of fervor of people who just hated Trump. The more that you elevate him as a figure, the more likely you are to come out and make it about him. You want them to either stay home and possibly if you can have those swing voters come out, we want to talk about inflation,

you want to talk about gas, and you want to talk about Joe Biden, who is the most relevant figure in their lives. If you start to paper over all that stuff, well, it's going to be a hell of a lot more different election. Not to say Republicans can't win. It still would be, you know, I would say probably that's where your money should be. But now it all comes down to the extent of how exactly the turnout is going to be. And then furthermore, it matters the most in the swing states, places like Arizona and in Georgia, where Trump lost environment, those should have been absolute slam dunks. And even with Blake Masters and Herschel Walker, they should have not been cruising to election, but, you know, it should have been a fight. Now, if you make it a referendum on Trump, we already know, Crystal, how those two states think about Donald Trump. Yes. Very, very differently.

Well, and so here's what Republicans wanted. And we're very clear about this. I mean, Mitch McConnell, who I think is, you know, one of their smarter strategists, however you feel about him, was like, we're not running on anything except for Joe Biden is bad and inflation is bad and the economy is bad. That's it. And now they don't really have that option because it is no longer just a referendum on Joe Biden. You already saw in the CBS News battleground tracker that we were talking about yesterday, that you have more people motivated to vote in opposition to Trump than you do motivated to vote in opposition to Biden, even though Biden is obviously the guy in charge. So in some senses, that ship has already sailed. And the problems predate the FBI raid, which, of course, has put Trump back at the center of our politics and, you know, is sucking up tons of media attention. And now his truths are being covered relentlessly. We're

going to cover one of his truths ourselves in the show because it was quite noteworthy and very not helpful in terms of the Republicans. But it predates that even because he played so heavily in shaping the Republican nomination process that so many of these candidates are his candidates. It's hard to distance yourself from the guy when, you know, these are his handpicked slate of candidates by and large, which are running in all of these states. So that also made it difficult for them to sort of say, oh, let's not talk about that guy. Let's just focus on Biden. Kind of hard to do that at this point. I think it's going to be very hard to put that genie back in the bottle. I mean,

they are begging Trump to not announce his presidential run before the midterms, which he, I think, was kind of inclined to do because it is true that the raid has consolidated Republican support behind him, even as it has been a net negative for independents and, of course, a motivating factor for Democrats in terms of opposing him. But yeah, they are begging him to wait till after the midterms, telling him like, oh, if it doesn't go well for Republicans, then you'll be blamed and that'll be so much of a problem. But whether he announces before the midterms or not, and we'll get to this in a minute, it's already a major issue because he's become, again, the central dividing line in our politics, the center of

media coverage, and also is sucking up a bunch of the money that would otherwise potentially be going to Republican candidates. So just so you know, this analysis is coming from all kinds of corners. Ben Shapiro actually had a very interesting thread on exactly this topic that I want to take the time to read through so we can go through the whole analysis. So he says the Republicans are losing steam in the 2022 election. There are some reasons for this, the Democratic upswing in the wake of Dobbs being the most obvious. But there's something else going on here that represents a deeper problem for the Republican Party. The GOP is miscalibrating the very nature of the American political scene right now based on a myth. In fact, the entirety of American politics is based on dueling versions

of the same false mythology, the mythology of the emerging Democratic minority majority. So this is the ideal of like the coalition of the ascendant that you hear talked about a lot on the Democratic side. But he's saying, you know, Republicans really buy into this myth as well and see it as a direct threat to them. He says, Democrats have banked on this myth since 2012, believing it excuses their cultural and economic excesses. This is untrue and has led them into an electoral box canyon as many minorities turn away from their woke progressive overreach. Meanwhile, Republicans have also banked on this to the extent that they believe only a magical person, and even if it's like the little trademark, like Donald Trump, can defeat it. This means that when Trump is attacked,

Republicans immediately return to making him the centerpiece of the conversation, and this harms them electorally, as every poll is now showing. Two things can be true at once. First, the FBI raid on Trump looks like a political hit, but second, the more Republicans talk about Trump, the worse they do electorally. Americans vote against things, not for them. If Republicans want Americans to vote against Biden, they have to campaign against him, not against the FBI or the deep state or on whatever, whether Trump had the right to have boxes of classified documents in his closet.

There's a reason Democrats are eager to keep Trump at the center of the conversation. Half of independents say Trump is a major factor in their vote. They are breaking four to one for Democrats. Republicans should not play that game. If they do, they're cruising for a bruising. And then this last piece here, he says, Democrats, we don't want to talk about Biden, the economy, our perversion of the education system or Afghanistan. Let's talk about Trump. Republicans, great idea. Let's talk about Trump.

But why are Republicans losing momentum? A mystery wrapped in an enigma. So there you go. What do you think of that, Sagar? I think he's absolutely spot on and it's correct. I do want to say it is definitely Ben Shapiro. Most of the Daily Wire crew have already made it known that they're all in on Ron DeSantis. So I think it's, to be fair, you know, their ideology, they never really were like Trumpists in 2016. He was a Ted Cruz guy originally, right? He's more of a, they call it true cons, like true conservative. These are guys like traditionally of the conservative movement, align more with like the WSJ editorial page, but you know,

better at content, frankly. More comfortable with Tea Party than with MAGA. Absolutely. I mean, that's the environment in which they came up in. So they never particularly liked Trump. And to the extent of they, Trump did anything populist, like they were not fans of it, right? So to them, an environment in which it's all culture war all the time, and then Republicans are much more slipping back into 2010 era economic dogma, that's a very good environment for them. That's ideologically kind of where they fit. And that's the natural preference of the state of politics. But he is not incorrect, which is that the current, even true con, critique of the economy of inflation was landing. Why? Because inflation is very high. I mean, you know, it's

very difficult in order to tell people about supply chains when government spending is a much easier and convenient explanation that has been baked into the way that a lot of people look at politics. So that was definitely landing. And more than that, what Shapiro does correctly into it is that in the last 30 years, especially the last 10 years in American politics, people do vote against. That's simply what it is. A vote for Trump in 2016 was a vote against the status quo, against Hillary Clinton. This is lesser evil politics. It always has been. A vote for Joe Biden, frankly, was basically the same thing. You know, more than two-thirds of the people supported Joe Biden said that it was a vote not for Biden but against Donald Trump specifically.

And even those who are voting against Trump are voting against the tides of cultural leftism. So he's not wrong, which is that Republicans really were at this ascendant position, let's say, three months ago because inflation was very high. They were critiquing this central part of American life, which was going wrong. It was a leaderless, rudderless phenomenon, which actually makes it better because you can't have a flashpoint on one person like Trump or Ron DeSantis. The flashpoint itself was Joe Biden, who kind of became the Brandon figure of which all of our problems get coalesced around. But when you put him up against somebody else who is similarly unpopular, then it just throws a major mix into things. And Ben is not wrong, I think, that by elevating Trump, you do dramatically, not minimize, but you make it 50-50 when it should be 75-25 on the Senate. You make a 20-point, 20-house gain seat, what should be a 45 or a 50. And so I think that his analysis is pretty spot on from a political point of view, even though I understand why it's very convenient for his ideology. It's also convenient because, obviously, he's very, very pro-life. So downplaying, like,

the importance of the Dobbs decision is also ideologically convenient for him. And, like, we really can't downplay how important that is. There's just no denying that was the turning point. But is it the only factor? No. I mean, we've continued to see sort of Democratic gains even post-Dobbs. Now that we're a little while out from Dobbs, we continue to see Democrats solidifying their positions in the polls, you know, improving on the generic ballot. We certainly see Biden's approval rating going up, which is a really important predictor of how Democrats are ultimately going to perform. And part of that, I think, is Biden getting a little bit of momentum

back, having some legislative wins, seeming like he's, you know, kind of got his mojo and dark brain and rising and all that stuff. And part of it, I do think is Trump is very unhelpful to them. As much as he is like motivating for the base and they love him, they already were ready to go to vote Republican in the midterms. And so it reminds me of when Emmanuel Macron in France won reelection and he had like a 36% or something approval rating and Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff, tweeted that out and said, oh, that's interesting. How did that work out? That's basically their plan is, listen, you may not be in love with us, but look at who the alternative is. And Republicans are sort of going out of their way to remind American voters who the alternative is. And Republicans are sort of going out of their way to remind American voters who the alternative is and what this, you know, sort of reinserting that dividing

line, which is not great for them in the midterms and led them to massive midterm defeat back in 2018. Again, doesn't mean it's going to look the same this time, but there's no doubt that their fortunes are flagging the other part of this, which I referenced earlier, but worth breaking some of the numbers down is Trump, because the Republican Party is all about him, he sucks up not only all of the attention and gets his nominees pushed through, but he also sucks up so much of the money. Go ahead and put this piece up on the screen here, the numbers. Trump's Save America pact raised over $103 million between the insurrection to July of this year. That's nine figures.

His MAGA pact has piled on an additional $16 million, and those numbers were reported before the August raid of Mar-a-Lago. Trump's team claims they've been getting $1 million per day in donations after that raid. Put together, the former president's political action committees have sucked up somewhere in the neighborhood of $125 million of Republican donor money. And so now, as they head down the stretch, and a lot of their candidates are right now down in the polls in key swing states, they do not have the money to be able to compete in the way that they should have been. Now, listen, do I think that Republican billionaires are probably going to ride to the rescue? Yes. But this makes it a lot more difficult. And it also, the drying up of the grassroots online fundraising in particular is a problem for these candidates because then they're just really reliant on, you know, you see Blake Masters like basically begging

Mitch McConnell to come in and save him, which McConnell has basically said, screw you at this point. But yeah, they're basically dependent on like Mitch McConnell or the Republican elites to kind of ride to their rescue and come in with multimillion dollar ad buys. Yeah, I think it's going to be a huge problem. I mean, this has always been the issue with Trump, which is he sucks up all the money. And actually, this is why you'll remember this. Remember during the 2020 campaign, the RNC and the Trump campaign had like a mutual finance agreement in which their cash was shared. And the reason why is the RNC and the Trump campaign had like a mutual finance agreement in which their cash was shared. And the reason why is the RNC needed access to Trump's fundraising dollars. He is the

single fundraising behemoth. He raises money like nobody else. He's raising a million dollars a day after the FBI raid and no other candidate can come close. The other issue is, is that he doesn't spend money on behalf of people unless their name ends with Trump. Yeah. There was that story recently about how he donated a bunch of this money to the, what, the... Yeah, to the National Archives. Portrait Museum or something. Portrait Gallery, that's right.

Yeah, to create portraits of him and Melania. Like, that's part of what this money is going towards. Well, yeah. Hopefully they can do a better job than the Obama portrait. I freaking hate that. It has nothing to do with Obama. I just genuinely hate that portrait. Check out the portrait gallery if you're ever here in Washington, D.C.

Beautiful building. But again, the issue continues to be that Trump's interests are not aligned with the national GOP. And that's been the case for some time. It is in Donald Trump's interest to solidify total control of the Republican Party. If I was him, I would have announced last week, whatever the day after the FBI raid, I've got every single one of my supposed opposition candidates, Pompeo, DeSantis, all these other people towing the line. Everybody's like, this is an outrage. Nuke them. Just come out and be like, that's it. You're all behind me. I'm coming forward. I'm running against the corrupt deep state and against Joe Biden. That's good for him. It would ramp up fundraising dollars, but it makes it less about the national, cultural, electoral, economic tides

that Republicans were cruising in on just by simply being opposed to whatever the status quo is. And so by making it less amiable and making it much more about Trump and MAGA, it's just going to be difficult for the Republican Party going forward. And this is just going to remain the case. I mean, you know, in a way, what happened in Georgia was good for Trump. Trump can continue to say the election was rigged, stolen, all this stuff, but Republicans lose seats in the Senate. So it's like, well, which one is better, right? For Trump's purposes, probably the fact that there were Democrats in control of the Senate. For the Republicans, well, it was kind of a catastrophe and basically it allowed Joe Biden to pass all these pieces of legislation. And I just think that dual track

will remain the case until the day Donald Trump dies, whether he is running for re-election or not. He is the single most important figure in the Republican Party. It certainly looks that way. And again, we've mentioned before, his truths are getting covered a lot more. I think he said this morning he was retweeting a QAnon drop. That's what they're called. It's great. That's the parlance. Q drop. Great, great stuff from our former president. But this got a lot of attention. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So he said, so now it comes down conclusively that the FBI buried the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. All caps.

Knowing that if they didn't, Trump would have easily won the 2020 presidential election. Okay. This is massive fraud and election interference at a level never seen before in our country. Remedy. Ready for this one? Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 election irreparably compromised and have a new election immediately. What do you think about that one, Sagar? See, I always think it's important.

Again, you know, I'm just going to call out once again, Josh Hawley, many of my other friends here in Washington who kind of play footsie with, they play footsie with Stop the Steal. They're like, you don't understand. Like, he's not saying the election was rigged. He's not saying the election was stolen. This is specifically about mail-in balloting or the lack of voter ID. Or media bias, big tech bias. Or Zuck Bucks, as in like Zuckerberg, you know, algorithmically. Which, what did we cover yesterday? We said it was outrageous.

Does it constitute like literal, you know, changing the election? I mean, I don't know, maybe in a legal sense, but if you want to make it illegal, then pass a bill. Oh, wait, Republicans have been the ones who are blocking anything going after big tech on the FCC. Interesting how that works. Anyway, the point that I'm making is that he believes it. And whenever you play footsie with this stuff, you have to just buy it all in. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and all of them, they are willing to just be like, yeah, the election was straight up rigged. It was straight up stolen. No, my particular election, there was nothing going on with Georgia voter fraud at Marjorie Taylor Greene's district.

But, you know, on the national level, absolutely. Right. That's what happened. And you point to specifics and they're like, oh, they use the word audit a lot, right? They're like, oh, did you watch the audit? Did you watch this edited YouTube video? By the way, just so everybody knows, the 2000 and Mules book by Dinesh D'Souza just was issued a full recall from Barnes & Noble and everybody else just yesterday. The news came out. I wonder if maybe some of the claims in there were opening them up

to legal liability. By the way, that doesn't come from Barnes & Noble. That came directly from the publisher, which is like a right-wing outfit. So the publisher was like, ah, we got some trouble here. It wasn't like liberal Barnes & Noble or whatever. The wokesters of Barnes & Noble or whatever. Thank you for heading that off because I didn't even consider that the low IQ response. That would be what people would assume. Listen, this is what he believes.

He believes the election was stolen. He believes it should be overturned. He believes he should be immediately reinstated as president like a dictator. He's saying he should declare the rightful winner. And you'll recall also that everybody attacked Mo Brooks because Mo Brooks said that he would not commit to overturning immediately the election. And that's what Trump accused him of, quote, going woke for. So I just think it's important that we understand at a very visceral level what riding with Trump throughout all of this means. Yes. It doesn't mean voter ballots. He

doesn't talk. It doesn't mean Pennsylvania election law. He doesn't even care about the Georgia voting law. He doesn't care about voter ID, even if there are merits to any of these laws or policies. He only cares if you are willing to say that the election was straight up illegitimate and should be reversed overnight. And going down every rabbit hole. Today he's talking about, you know, Facebook and the FBI or whatever, but that is, he will go down any rabbit hole of conspiracy to justify that he is the rightful president. I mean, you see this too, and this goes back to our sort of general, in general view that the Ron DeSantis taking, you know, being able to defeat Trump in a primary is foolish wish casting by D.C. types. He's doing the same thing in Florida.

He had this voter fraud. He made a big deal. Like, oh, we've arrested these 20 people, et cetera, et cetera. Well, who were they? They were in Florida. They passed a ballot initiative saying that convicted felons should have their voting rights restored. Like, the voters wanted that. They backed it.

Republicans came in and put all these provisions on it. You got to pay these fines and court fees, which are very hard to figure out. What turned out, a lot of these people, they had actually been told that their rights had been restored. They had had a voter registration card sent to them that they filled out and turned in and thought that they were genuinely able. This was not some conspiracy to like rig the election with 20 people for Donald Trump. Not that he needed the help in Florida anyway. He won just fine on his own. But again, this is their attempt to sort of like dabble in some legitimate version of this. And guess what?

When you get on a stage with Donald Trump and you're up against him head to head, do you think that's going to be sufficient? No. It's not. It's not even close to where they want you to go. And you see this with the type of candidates who got nominated in places like Arizona, who are willing to just flat out go all the way in with every conspiracy, 2,000 mules and say, well, I wouldn't have certified the election if I was the governor at the time. That's where you have to be. And if you're not there, then you're going to end up like, you know, being painted as like Liz Cheney, basically. Yeah, you've gone woke. Yes, you've gone woke, as Mo Brooks did by just basically saying like, let's stop talking about

this. Okay, there's one more legal piece of this that we wanted to bring you. So yesterday, we talked to you about the fact that the Trump legal team, with regards to the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, had been asking for what's called a special master. Now, what is a special master? Usually, sort of independent expert who's brought in to evaluate materials that are seized in a raid like this to see if any of them are subject to attorney-client privilege to filter those out before they go to the investigatory team. So, in this case, and these have been used with Michael Cohen,

there was a special master, Rudy Giuliani in one of his things, there was a special master, so this is not unusual. What is different about the Trump team request for a special master is, number one, they aren't really focused on attorney-client privilege. What they're focused on is so-called executive privilege, that they have a legal theory believing that Trump can assert over some of these documents as a former president, even though this is a very contested sort of ground in terms of legal theory. So their request for a special master is a little bit different. Anyway, this judge, who happened to have been appointed by Trump, looked like she was going in the direction she was due to preliminary order order saying, I think I'm going to side with the Trump team on this, and I think I'm

going to appoint a special master. That hearing, where we'll get the official decision, I believe, is today. One of the things that we posited yesterday is, you know, they got these documents a while ago, so the investigatory team has probably already gone through everything. We're talking about this was weeks ago that this happened. And sure enough, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This tweet says Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents already have been examined by the filter team at the Justice Department. That's what the government is telling the judge. Officials say the attorney-client privilege review was completed even before the judge's weekend ruling suggesting a special master might be

appointed. So the basic idea here is the government is saying, y'all, we already went through these documents. It's kind of too late. You may want to appoint this person and filter out these documents or those documents, but you're too late. We've already done this. And even in her preliminary order over the weekend, she didn't tell the government, stop going through the documents. She just said, I might rule in favor of this on the Trump side. So that's ultimately where we are. Now, one thing to point out here is, again, the government is saying,

we filtered these out for attorney-client privilege, and what the Trump team is concerned about is executive privilege. So you sort of have them talking past each other, but the fact remains that it looks like the sort of special master conversation is a little bit moot at this point. It's a bit moot. However, what they say is that the appointment of the master itself would actually slow the pace of the current litigation, which apparently the game plan is to run out the clock on congressional

oversight and that by instituting this kind of gum up the works either ahead of the midterm elections or even they want to muddy the water yeah it's a muddy the water sinks we talked about this with bradley moss yesterday and all the current reporting into cases which is the trump team is really just scrambling around they're trying to find a legal defense that would actually work in court and as we said you know inserting political pressure slowing down things and making it as hot as possible for as long and kind of turning it back into a Mueller or Russiagate type level event, which just drags on and on and becomes like a national scandal. Kind of like the Hillary emails. I mean, how long did that last? That was over a year. It was a long time having lived through that

one. Way too long that we all learned about, you know, servers in the basement and acid. I could still recite every chain of event on those things. Anyway. I acid washed my brain after that happened. I should acid wash my brain. I already did that for Benghazi. At least that has been washed out so far. Expunged. The point is, is that by gumming up the works, pointing and pushing things in a further direction and dragging on the legal process, it increases the likelihood that he might be able to, quote unquote, wriggle his way out of this one. I still personally think that's probably going to happen somehow, some way, where the way things will ultimately end up with the DOJ.

But I do think it is still, you know, it's probably still a quote unquote victory for the Trump team, because if you can delay things by a couple of months, that's a couple of months more of maneuver time, which we saw work to his benefit in the Mueller investigation and further. And it also just throws this like complicated legal issue of executive privilege into the conversation, something else for people to sort of like debate and where the Trump people feel like they have at least somewhat of a leg to stand on. Now, it's a bit of a distraction from the core issues here of why he had these documents, why he refused to give them back, the level of classification, how sensitive they are. All of those things are really the core issue and potential obstruction, which is the thing that Bradley was talking about yesterday, which he found to be very significant in what we learned from the affidavit. But it, again, allows them to sort of confuse the conversation

and get into these complicated legal discussions about executive privilege. And, you know, and it also sort of brings Biden into this thing by saying, like, oh, he's blocking our ability to assert executive privilege, which has been the other strategy that they've been attempting, is to somehow, you know, bring Biden into this in order to paint it as just a political hit job coming directly from Joe Biden. So that's the latest of where those things stand. All right. Another specific issue that we've been taking a look at and that is proving to be very problematic for Republicans is their positions on abortion. Now, the pro-life, the like very extreme pro-life part of the GOP coalition is not a majority of the voters, but they're

very influential. And so a lot of Republican candidates in their primaries took very extreme and really unequivocal positions on abortion. Perfect case in point is Blake Masters. He is the Republican nominee in Arizona for Senate. And he has been caught now changing his website to really moderate his views on the issue of abortion, as, you know, Dobbs has made this issue really central and has become a big problem for Republicans in places like Arizona. So let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So this tweet says, new Blake Masters campaign scrubbed the abortion section of his policy page. It's the latest sign of how abortion rights are shifting the political landscape. They've got screenshots here of the before and after. Just to give you a taste of some of the

changes that were made, which were, you know, really clear and quite dramatic. Federal, in the original version, he advocates for a federal personhood law that would basically ban abortion altogether from, you know, the minute that there's a heartbeat. So this is a very extreme law that he's saying he wants passed at the federal level. Very clear, non-equivocal in the primary. Now it says, well, I want to ban late-term abortions. So on much more solid political ground there. Now, that doesn't directly contradict the idea that you also would want a federal personhood bill, but that's a very different thing to focus on. And another thing he just outright took down

is he used to say that he would have a litmus test on all judges. They had to understand that Roe and Casey were wrongfully decided. That has been taken down. You know, this is a guy who he called abortion genocide. He was really, really out there in terms of the type of inflammatory language he would use on this issue. And that has all now been dramatically moderated in terms of his website. Well, stripping it off of his website in a way is just such a stupid move because you only draw even more attention to it. And now the Kelly campaign is actually just smacking him over the head even more. They're like, look, he realizes that it's so bad that we're going to continue attacking him. And Blake is trying to change the message with his new ad.

Just take a listen on how he's trying to spin it. Most people support common sense regulation around abortion. But Mark Kelly votes for the most extreme abortion laws in the world. We're talking no limits up until birth. Think about how crazy that is. That's more extreme than Western Europe. It's way more extreme than what Arizonans want. Look, I support a ban on very late-term and partial birth abortion. And most Americans agree with that. That would just put us on par with other civilized nations.

Mark Kelly? The only countries that support his no-limits, extreme abortion policies are China and North Korea. I'm Blake Masters, and I approve this message. TIE fighter incoming. The problem for Masters is that most of the Republican pro, let me give you this example. If I had come out 60 months ago and said, you know, Roe versus Wade, I don't know. I support European style abortion law, which is 15 weeks, pretty much universal. There's no way they would have called me pro-life. That's not what being pro-life means. Being pro-life means you're opposed in all circumstances, which is like,

listen, I actually, by the way, do support European style abortion law. 70 some percent of the American people does as well. That's like, I think it's like 76, which is a 15 week ban. Okay, fine. You know, whatever. That seems pretty reasonable. And yet, though, they have to now defend every extreme case of the 10-year-old and others instead of being defenders of a much more popular status quo. And again, all American politics is which side seems like they're the most extreme. For a while in abortion politics, again, for a while, I would say like three years, it was a lot of the cultural left figures were coalescing around late-term abortion, and I was proud of an abortion, abandoning safe, legal, and rare. Caitlin Flanagan wrote a whole good piece about this in 2019 about the death of safe, legal, and rare and how it was possibly one of the best political slogans and policy kind of campaigns of all time for a very complicated human issue. Well, now though,

it seems that the Democrats, by just trying to defend a Roe status quo, are on the side of more of a safe, legal, and rare rather than the most extreme. And then the Republicans are the ones who have to defend all this other stuff. And when he came out and said, not only, quote, I'm 100% pro-life, but after the reversal of Roe versus Wade and Dobbs, what he said is that he's like, I think I would go further than that, basically intimating that he would support a complete ban and even the personhood legislation. Now he opens himself up to the point where he has to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm a defender of the European status quo. First of all, that's a complete flip-flop. And once again, having known, I know a lot of people who are pro-life, they would not call

you pro-life if you actually support that position. They would say, yeah, it's better on balance, but it's not a quote unquote pro-life position. So they're in a real, they got, I mean, it's a problem of their own making. Yeah. Well, and I mean, there's a lot to say about this. First of all, all of these people are trying to be like, they took me out of context. It's like you literally had on your website that you want a federal personhood law, which is effectively a national ban on abortion. How is that taking you out of context? They're not lying about you. They're just literally saying what your position was in the primary and repeating some of the things that you yourself said. So that's number one. Number two, I mean, it's very revealing that they felt the need to go up with very limited campaign funds that they have, by the way, especially since the Senate leadership fund is hanging him out to dry, to go up with this ad trying to push back because they very clearly see this as a real problem for them and a real issue and trying to reframe the debate.

Because, yeah, this was firmer ground for Republicans back when the question was about late-term abortion and how does that all work out. That's very difficult ground for Democrats. But I think it's really important to understand why the debate has shifted so dramatically. Because under the Roe regime, when Roe was still in place, you could still ban late-term abortions. The whole question was around fetal viability. And so now, inherently, if you support the Dobbs decision, you support Ro very provocative, incendiary language and very, very extreme positions. You know, a good sort of test case of whether it's going to work for Blake Masters and other candidates to try to now moderate their positions is the special election that we just had in New York, where a lot of the conversation was around abortion. The Republican

who was running there, Molinaro, he actually was more of a moderate on abortion and did not have this kind of extreme language in terms of his past and in terms of his history. Didn't matter. Didn't matter because the whole party now has been, you know, painted with this brush of extremism. And so this ended up being a big problem for him in that race. There's a couple other little tidbits here that are kind of interesting. So first of all, Master's team is leaking to the press that he himself edits his own website. So it's not like this was some...

It's honestly worse. You should just blame a staffer. Exactly. So it's not like it was some consultant who just came in and did this and tried to massage it. Apparently his staff, and this also tells you his staff must hate him, his staff leaked to the press that he you like his staff must hate him. His staff leaked to the press that he himself changes the language, which is funny. And then the other piece that's also revealing is, um, put this next one up on the screen. This is another dude who, yes, another Republican. Yeah. There's another Republican congressional candidate who removed his entire

value section of his campaign website because it had his anti-abortion positions on it, which is hilarious. But put the next one up on the screen. So Masters apparently has excluded his campaign website from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. So his campaign is explicitly instructing web crawlers and robots to skip the site altogether. So they're trying not to get caught on that one. And then the other thing, there are a bunch of candidates who are in the same boat. There's the dude who deleted his whole value section. There's this other dude who's running in Iowa who said all abortion should be illegal. Now he's published an op-ed saying like, yeah, actually I support exceptions. You've got a Minnesota

Republican gubernatorial nominee who was asked about abortion during his primary. He said he would try to ban abortion as governor. Now he's saying he supports various exceptions. So a lot of backtracking, a lot of trying to like moderate the position, scrub the websites, all of those things. And this all comes at a time when things are not going particularly well for Masters from the sort of monetary standpoint we covered before, how he was basically begging Mitch McConnell, who he was very critical of during the primary and said he wasn't going to vote for him for leadership, to come in with his Senate leadership fund money and rescue him. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. McConnell's like, yeah, not so much. The Senate Republicans' primary super PAC is canceling nearly $10 million in Arizona and

Alaska ad reservations. So in Alaska, they feel confident Murkowski's in good position. So that's why they're pulling the money there. In Arizona, apparently they've decided that they've got a better shot in taking Georgia and or Nevada than they do of taking Arizona. So they are kind of hanging Blake Masters down to dry. And to be honest with you, they're kind of direct about it in this piece. Senate Leadership Fund President Stephen Law told them, we're leaving the door wide open in Arizona, but we want to move additional resources to other offensive opportunities that have become increasingly competitive, as well as an unexpected expense in Ohio where they're having to shore up J.D. Vance with tens of millions of dollars in order to overcome a tougher than expected challenge from Tim Ryan. Yeah, I mean, I'm reading this

and also even looking at the polls. So remember, Trafalgar, one of the most Republican pollsters that is out there. Here's how they rate Arizona. This just came out last night. Mark Kelly at 48 and Blake Masters at 44. That doesn't mean it's a completely runaway campaign by Mark Kelly. Blake Masters certainly has a shot, but this is where some of his trifling with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Leadership Fund is a real problem. This brings me back to something that I was talking about yesterday, which is that because Trump is sucking up so much money, it actually means that the NRSC, which has been chronically financially mismanaged, and Rick Scott clearly is a complete moron while he's vacationing on his super yacht and has blown over $100 million, it means that you need the Senate Leadership Fund more than ever because

they're one of the only large organizations with massive amounts of cash that can come in and buy ads. Now, to be clear, they are still going to buy some ads on his behalf come October. But just noteworthy, you know, Masters was not included in, there was a confab that McConnell recently just did. He did a fundraising thing and Dr. Oz was there. Even Herschel Walker was there. Blake Masters was not there. So he was like, I picked the candidates who I think I can win. Once again, there are all sorts of subtle, if you speak McConnell, he's basically twisting the knife in his chest. Oh, definitely. And making it known.

It's like, hey, you come at the king, you best not miss. And with Masters, look, it's a major unforced error. Honestly, he should have just kept it on his website and taken the hit. Like, at that point, you said what you said. There ain't much else you can do about it. Apparently, he also removed the ad for... Or the section of his campaign website where he said that the election was stolen. Yes, correct.

He also removed that portion of his website. He did that infamous ad whenever he was trying to get Trump's endorsement. He's like, I think Trump won. But even if you didn't, you have to admit the media, you know, whatever. And coming back to the kind of high IQ, stop the steal that I've discussed before. So, look, he shot himself in the foot big time. And, you know, who could have seen this coming? Coming out against contraception at the Supreme Court level could have had electoral consequences on a statewide campaign.

And the funniest thing to me about all of this is that now that he's just campaigning against late-term abortion crystal he's essentially turned himself into john mccain who think about it the senator from arizona mccain got hammered in 2008 for not being 100 pro-life and he's like well i'm against late-term abortions like well now you have become you have become mccain it is no longer crenshaw it is you are watching in his footsteps he also i mean he also has the issue of he's one who's flirted with privatizing Social Security, and there are a lot of old people in Arizona. Yeah, which they are smacking him across. I'm glad you brought that up because I forgot about that. He actually still stands by that, which is insane.

As much as the abortion stuff is a problem for him, like in Arizona, this is an issue. Right, exactly. This is also a very big issue that he is dramatically on the wrong side of it. I do want to point out, like, Mark Kelly, whatever you think of him, you know, he's more of a sort of centrist, corporatist figure than my ideology. But he's got a good profile in the state. He's a solid candidate and isn't, like, particularly polarizing or divisive. He's a hero.

He's married to Gabby Giffords. Yeah. And so they can, they are able, since his bio is well-established in the state, they're able to focus most of their resources on making the case against Blake Masters. And that appears to be a big problem for Blake. Absolutely. Okay. One other piece to this, which again, is just a sign of the times and how, why so many of these Republicans are backtracking is, of course, we covered that Kansas ballot initiative, which very surprisingly went strongly in the pro-choice direction. Well, there are a number of other states that also have abortion related ballot initiatives set to be on the ballot this November, Michigan being one of them. And

let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. We just got some polling on how this is expected to go, and it looks like it is going to be a landslide. This is from Daniel Nishanian, who, great editor-in-chief of Bolts Magazine, really useful website that I highly recommend. So he says, a huge poll lead for abortion rights in Michigan, 67% plan to support the ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution versus just 24% who are against. This would effectively sideline the state's pre-Roe abortion ban that looms large in the state. He goes on to say 70% of independents and 81% of voters under the age of 34 are saying yes in the poll. So, you know, Michigan, obviously the quintessential swing state at this point. There are some key races on the ballot, including Governor Gretchen

Whitmer, who, you know, Republicans had previously been very hopeful that they'd been able to defeat. Having this abortion ballot initiative on the ballot, first of all, I think helps to drive out turnout on the Democratic side, but also just, again, a sign of how out of step Republicans are, even with there's, I mean, if you're, when you're getting 67%, you're talking about you've got a sizable chunk of Republicans who are planning to vote yes on this initiative. Well, and look, we'll see what the final vote tally is, but we'll just a reminder, which is that one of the people that we showed you before was specifically a Michigan Republican. And listen, I mean, Michigan is a state which Donald Trump won in 2016, I want

to say by what, 10,000 votes? And he didn't lose it by all that much in 2020. So what happened, folks? Well, it's just kind of like minimum wage in Florida. When you decouple this away from the traditional party lines, it turns out there's a hell of a lot of crossover appeal. And as I have said, literally ad nauseum, at least one third of the people who voted for Donald Trump were themselves pro-choice. And if you put it in this stark language and you make it kind of an up or down thing and remove it from party politics, then you're going to find out that even in quote unquote swing states, like actual 50-50, the margin is somewhere like two thirds to almost 75%. Again, we will see what the actual

vote total is. But given what happened in Kansas, which is what, R plus 15, I want to say, what does that indicate? From what I read, if you extrapolate the Kansas results in terms of what it means on the electoral results for the whole country, it would mean 40 out of 50 states in the nation would side with the Kansas view of the law, as in making it so that you cannot have an outright ban. As to what the eventual time frame was, six, you know, heartbeat bill at six weeks, 15 weeks, whatever, that always, of course, remains to be seen. But if that's the case, that is not exactly what a lot of the pro-life people said what America was going to look like. And it turns out that a lot of Republicans actually don't even agree with them in terms of the outright ban.

It's a problem for them at the governor's race level. A huge problem. Because, you know, Gretchen Whitmer, she actually her approval rating was not that bad, but she obviously came under a lot of fire and really became quite a sort of lightning rod figure during the COVID pandemic for having relatively stringent COVID policies. They nominated, the Republicans nominated the supposedly more moderate figure in Tudor Dixon, who's like a sort of conservative media personality. She was picked by Mike Pence. Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos came in heavy for. The DeVoses are big political players in that state. They're sort of the political players in that state. Trump eventually, because it looked like she was going to win, he eventually decides to endorse as well. So, but she has, you know, continued to reiterate very extreme positions on abortion.

She usually recently got asked about like a child victim of incest and rape and wouldn't back down from the idea that yes, this child should be forced to have the baby. So if you don't think that that's going to show up in some ads here, if it hasn't already, then you are sadly mistaken. And just having this initiative on the ballot will help to center that issue and make it a really important part of this election come the fall. Yeah, absolutely. That's where those things stand. Let's talk about the GOP. So as you said, Mitch McConnell is doing something he didn't want to do, which is talk about what they may do if they were to take power. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that McConnell is now saying that a U.S.

recession is likely and that he's vowing that the GOP will curb Biden's spending. So what he's saying is he's basically framing things as Democratic spending is responsible for inflation and now pitching the GOP as a check on Biden if they are to win the House and the Senate. Now, the reason that I think that this is important, Crystal, is that for some reason, he actually felt the need to have to come forward and give a little bit more detail. Now, we already knew that this is what it was going to be, but it does show to me that just simply saying, but inflation does not seem to be hitting enough. And I think there's complicated reasons for that. Number one is that inflation in the mind of most Americans is just inextricably tied to gas prices. And even though gas right now is way too expensive and is $3.85

a gallon nationally, $5.20 still at the state level in California, which means 5.50 or so in Los Angeles County and other places in the state. It does mean that people saw it come down in the relative immediate term. And like it or not, the president gets blamed for gas prices going up. He also gets credit whenever you blame him when they go down. Biden's seeing a little bit of a boost from that. At the same time, look, core inflation is still very high. Inflation is still like 8%, which is insane. Food prices and all that, the astronomical increases beginning to plateau off a little bit. So Biden is almost getting a benefit from, yeah, it's definitely worse than it was in 2019, but it's not as bad as it, it's not increasing at the same rate as it was three months ago,

which I personally would not run on. But when it's the centerpiece of everything, now the Republicans are going to stick into a bit more of having to criticize and give a little bit more specifics. So here is specifically what McConnell said. He said, no more mass spending bills. But here is something interesting. He said, quote, I would be open to more modest bipartisan bills, noting laws that he had recently supported, legislation on postal reform, infrastructure, school safety, mental health, etc. So I do think it is interesting that he is not committing to a total,

even though that roughly translates to like a basic blockade, that is still, he's not pitching it as a complete and total like dead stop in the Senate. In the same way, we should recall how Mitch McConnell talked about Barack Obama the day after Obama gets elected, something like that. It's an apocryphal story that Obama always tells. He's like, McConnell would always come out and say, our number one goal is to make sure I don't get reelected, which he did say that. That is basically the goal from the Senate. Didn't work out, did it? And they committed. They're like, no, we're not only not going to work with you, we're going to try and tank your presidency

and make America such chaos that we win the election, which did work in 2010, to their credit. So the point is, though, that they feel the need to color in the lines a bit more. As the national environment changes, Joe Biden hits a one-year approval high. And if trends continue, he's exactly on the same upswing, headed right into

November, which is exactly where you want to be. Frankly, through no real action of his own, except for some machinations by Chuck Schumer and by Joe Manchin. I guess let's put that aside. At the same time, the House GOP also feeling the screws. Let's put this up there. This actually is even more important because this is probably the place where you're most likely to actually see a Republican win. They are now plotting their quote-unquote policy agenda for 2022 and recently had a confab with Newt Gingrich, who obviously famously created the Contract for America plan. Now, the interesting thing, here's what they say. Republicans are expected to focus their new platform on education policy, tapping into parental discontent, countering the rise of China with new economic measures, quote, oversight of the Biden administration. And they are also looking at invoking other traditional GOP goals, such as

cutting taxes, restricting immigration, criticizing Silicon Valley, and repealing environmental rules. Now look, at a national level, if the president is a Democrat, no matter anything you do is not going to become policy. So then it all just becomes kind of shaping operations or signaling for what would happen if Trump were to get reelected. These shaping operations you should pay attention to because a lot of them were used to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 and also were used, you know, if John McCain hadn't put his thumb down, like Obamacare also would have been repealed, essentially with a law that was developed under Paul Ryan. So

that's why we should pay attention. However, what I'm really getting here from this, though, is that McCarthy is in a real bind. Originally, they were pointing and trying to do things more populist, like they had talked about the stock ban. They haven't talked about that in quite a long time. And in fact, you have John Fetterman now running ads against that, but it kind of disappeared from the lexicon of McCarthy. The other issue that McCarthy has is he basically probably cannot commit to any even effort at government spending or action, even on big tech, because he's got the Freedom Caucus who are inside and are likely to have a tremendous amount of power. They could make

his life a living hell, and they could even deny him the speakership crystal. So there's a lot of machinations happening at the top level as Biden's poll numbers start to take off. I laughed so hard reading this, like, 94 throwback agenda. They literally say that they want to, okay, let me read this part of it because this was really hilarious to me. Gingrich said, he's hopeful the GOP will incorporate a balanced budget amendment, long-stack conservative policy goal that would require numerous cuts to federal spending programs. When you're talking about a balanced budget amendment, first of all, this is a, this is total 100% throwback to the 90s. This is Paul Ryan era austerity politics. Remember when he put out these like theoretical budgets and just slashed literally every spending program, including Social Security, including Medicare, including Medicaid, absolutely everything.

Because, of course, they're not willing to touch the defense spending. So this just means like massive slash and burn of every single social program. So that's number one. Number two, yeah, they say they're going to challenge big tech. Okay, you actually have an opportunity to do that now because there are Democrats who will side with you and you're not doing it.

In fact, you're oppositional to all of it. And as Matt Stoller has been pointing out, I think Stoller has been very fair in trying to find any sort of populist Republican that will do anything on challenging corporate power. You know, that ship in terms of the sort of economic

realignment on the right has really sailed. Like he points to the provision that Sinema got through in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is just a giant direct giveaway to the private equity industry. Yeah, Sinema voted for it. So did literally every Republican. So the idea that they're going to challenge big tech with antitrust and other measures, LOL, no way. The other things they put in here are so like online that it's hilarious to me. They want to change congressional rules by repealing mask mandates, removing magnetic scanners from the floor of the house and abolishing voting by proxy, because I'm sure those are the issues that are center to your family and your household budget. They're also going to resist Biden's tax hikes

on corporations. So again, how's that for the populist side of this? You know, they want to, McCarthy is also, they point to, he released this parental bill of rights, which kind of had more juice back in the fall when the sort of COVID and the lockdown conversation was— See, that's—it was just so dated to me. I'm like, it's not 2021. Right. It's just not the central concern. Exactly.

I'm not saying it isn't a concern. And even the thing that he released, I mean, it really wasn't—it was literally just like virtue signaling on the issue. It didn't actually change—wouldn't actually change anything. Well, that's the other thing. You know, it's not like the feds have all that much influence on state and local government. That's all we do. How did we all find that out with masks? Which is like, yeah, if crazy jurisdictions want to do crazy stuff, well, there's actually not a hell of a lot you can do about it.

So to me, it just reads as very dated. It reads as a 2021 document. And it tries to extrapolate Glenn Youngkin's victory onto the rest of the country. The Youngkin victory was a specific moment in time. November of 2021. Very different. There's vaccination campaign, critical race theory, all that other stuff was at the fore. Inflation was on the massive spike.

Afghanistan had just happened. It's just a completely different national environment. I mean, now we're almost, what, 10 months or so removed from that. And the country's changed. The Ukraine war, obviously, you know, at the height of inflation was really bad for Biden. And now when things start to go down, people kind of, you know, it's still on the front page of The New York Times. It's not like people care all that much anymore. And you see the gas price go down.

You see the plateau happen with inflation. And overall, it's a challenging thing because they just don't know what to do. And as we already discussed in the Trump block, they also have this Trump behemoth shadowing them at the same time. It's a tough spot for them. I'm not saying I feel all that bad though. All right, let's move on. Let's talk about Ukraine. So important news out of Ukraine on a couple of fronts. Number one is the actual front line. So let's start with that. Now, Ukraine, and let's put this on the screen, is claiming that breakthroughs have been made against the Russian forces in their southern offensive and officially have launched what they say is the southern offensive to retake the strategic city of Kherson, which was occupied

by the Russian forces earlier in the war. Kherson has now become a flashpoint and a symbol of the Ukrainian military for wanting to retake it. It has major strategic importance, both to the Russians and to the Ukrainians. And it's access to more strategic areas where Ukraine should be able or wants to be able to continue to export goods, have supply lines and more, and also would be a front line if they were to ever continue to move on to Crimea. It's in the very southernmost part of the country. So anyway, this is going to be a major flashpoint going forward. In terms of the actual operations and more, I have not been able to find a lot of information about the actual strategic success in what is happening. Now, the way that Ukraine is saying is that this is the beginning of the offensive. However, the way that the Western press is interpreting what's actually happening on the ground, Crystal, and again, look, we're not in Ukraine.

It's difficult to say. They say Ukraine steps up strikes in the south. So they are casting the Ukrainian government, the beginning of more strikes on the south, as the beginning of the offensive. That certainly would be. However, we also need to see the movement of actual troops on the ground and the movement of the front line. Now, so here's what they say. The Ukrainian military is pounding targets across southern Ukraine as they seek to disrupt Russian supply lines, degrade Russia's combat capabilities, and isolate Russian forces. Part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad and a coordinated counteroffensive. In other words, we have not yet actually seen the movement

of mass forces and the employment of all of these troops in the South. We are simply beginning to see rockets being fired, the use of, you know, also the Ukrainians are using some decoy missiles and other things in order to try and fool the Russian forces. But, and here's the caveat, Russia has now had months to reinforce those lines of defense in the South, making any Ukrainian advance there going to be very tough and very bloody. The reason that we all have to pay a massive amount of attention to this is we have all shipped a hell of a lot of weapons to Ukraine for this purpose, not just to be defensive, but to give them some sort of offensive capability. So what is the actual fighting capability of the Ukrainian force

when they are offensively taking on the military of a great power nation with tremendous more economic and military might resources than they have? To be fair, it's not like Russia has employed the full force of its military or anything like that in this war. So we'll see. But the beginnings of this operation could mount a real decisive point in the war, which is that if the Ukrainians are outright defeated or if they are unable to have any sort of successful offensive, it's just going to be like, all right, well, what are we doing here? What is the point of all these weapons that we're giving you? Sure, it's great that you have a defensive front line that your Russians can't move forward, but if you can't retake anything, then it's time to negotiate, right? You know, like that's where things... That's what you would certainly think.

That's what you would think. Again, we don't know. There's a lot of propaganda being cast by the Ukrainians. They're trying to cast this into this big, grand movement. We should believe it when we actually start to see troops roll on the ground. As for now, it just seems to be a set level of strikes, even though they are claiming breakthroughs and all this other stuff that is going on. And Zelensky, obviously, under a lot of pressure to start this counteroffensive. And so, yeah, the way that I saw this described previously in the New York Times, which, again, it's like, it's important to see the New York Times view because that's like the official U.S. government view. Like that's how they're trying to shape the- It's like center left lib massaging. Yeah. Well, and with a lot of direct sort of like sourcing from the Biden administration and exactly

the portrait of this that they want to paint. But they talked about how this was intended to sort of shape the battlefield to try to prepare them for this counteroffensive. But Zelensky is under a lot of international pressure and a lot of domestic pressure to begin this counteroffensive because, remember, they also have to contend with the changing seasons. It's going to start to get cold there soon. It's going to start to get really muddy there very soon. And that makes it very, very difficult to launch the kind of counteroffensive that they ultimately want to be able to, you know, push Russian troops back and show that they have the ability to retake this territory. Because Zelensky continues to say very directly, their goal is not just to retake the territory from before this particular invasion, but they want to retake Crimea. They want to retake the

areas in the eastern part of Ukraine that had already been sort of de facto, you know, Russian controlled before this new Russian invasion. So we're going to see very quickly whether that is a pipe dream or whether that has any grounding in reality with the incredible support that we've given them. In the history of warfare in this region, this has been always the most critical part of time. So from Operation Odessa with the Nazis to Napoleon and their invasion. Every time, it's really interesting, actually. You go and you read the accounts of the soldiers. I'm getting some of this from Dan Carlin, but he talks about how the first snowfall in October is always like the death knell. That the soldiers realize they're like, this is it. The snow is coming.

And it's like October 15th or so is when the first snowfall is always recorded. And from there, it just becomes exponential as it gets cold. Sometimes the cold is advantageous. It's not as muddy. The roads ice over, but it's brutal, right, in order to actually conduct military operations in. So decisive campaigns are always aimed both by Hitler, by Napoleon, anybody who's fought in this region, as right now. So things need to begin the month of September when the weather is temperate, especially it's not as hot in order to fight in. This will cease probably some of the most decisive times in the war.

And if we don't see that, that also tells us a hell of a lot of what's happening. Yes, then you're in for this grinding winter where there's unlikely to be many gains made on either side. And, you know, does anyone then start to look for an exit ramp? Do we start to push for an exit ramp? The last thing I want to say here is something that we haven't really focused on here too much, but I think it's really important to note that the Biden administration has actually assigned a general to oversee this, you know, what they call our military aid to Ukraine, but really is in effect a U.S. proxy war against Russia. And that just shows you that even though, you know, yes, this is still on the front page of the New York Times, but

a lot of the cable news media has moved on. They are not doing anything like the intensive coverage of this conflict that they were in the early days. You know, the American people are understandably focused on a lot of other issues here at home and abroad as well. This continues to be, you know, an exceptionally volatile conflict. We continue to have sort of these little incremental escalations, and it continues to be a major, major sort of military focus that is occupying large pieces of our defense infrastructure at great cost. So that's why we continue to really try to focus on it and not take our eye off of it because this thing could escalate or turn at any moment and is already reshaping global politics in ways that have incredibly direct implications for you

and for our European friends. Let's tug on that string a little bit. Let's go to this next part and put it up there on the screen. This is complete insanity and is not being grappled with here in the West. Our gas prices may be going down. We are staring down the barrel of a full-fledged catastrophe on the European continent. European power prices futures are up 1,000% since last year and have broken 1,000 euros for the very first time, smashing records every single day. And literally, Crystal, as you and I are doing this show, Gazprom came out and said they had notified Germany that they would be further reducing

natural gas stockpiles to Germany ahead of the winter. The reason this matters is, you may not know this, but the Europeans do not have air conditioning. It usually doesn't get very hot over there. They use most of their consumer and electric power in the winter because it gets cold, and they especially need it for German manufacturing and for everybody else. Now, the reason why is that they run almost the entirety of that on natural gas and specifically natural gas, which is supplied by Russia, some 60% pre-war period in Germany. To have European power prices spike so high effectively means a recession. There is just not like even what we're flirting with, like a full-fledged Eurozone crisis, to have the biggest power in Europe, the fourth largest economy in the world,

waylaid by energy prices. Furthermore, France, even though through some idiocy really of their own, and there's a lot to discuss on this, the French prime minister came out yesterday and said, listen, if they cut us off, we're probably going to have to go to word rationing. And she's like, if you don't need power we're probably going to have to go to word rationing. And she's like, if you don't need power, turn it off. Do not use it. So they are already moving to voluntary consumer reduction ahead of a full-fledged shutdown. And the interesting thing behind that

is France actually has a tremendous amount of nuclear power. Part of the problem is apparently they've not been taking very good care of their plants. And so some of these plants had to shut down for maintenance purposes and more. And so they've been using more natural gas than they usually do. It was a bit precarious and they haven't been updating their stock because of the green movement

in their nuclear power plants. And that has now led to a crunch there. So again, we're talking here about France, the second largest economy on the European continent, a member of the G7, a supposed US ally, especially in terms of our trade, this could cripple the European economies. So you would say, well, yeah, it's worth it if Russia is being crippled even further. You could make that argument. There's just one problem. Let's throw this up there, which is that Russian corporate profits in the last quarter went up 25% as sanctions, quote, hit muted economy.

Net income gains despite economic contraction and inflation. Now, even more so, I was reading even more this morning, Crystal, which is that Russia has continued to print record amounts of profit off of oil. So we talked previously about that 100 billion euros that they had made. Now, this last month or so, they only made 90 billion. Of that 90 billion, 70 billion is coming from oil. Now, the way that they're making a profit on this just shows you the difficulty in trying to, quote unquote, ban or sanction commodity markets. Oil basically is kind of the same, regardless of chemical makeup, from all over the world. So what are the Russians doing? Now, this is from the Wall Street Journal I'm reading.

They have taken their oil, shipped it to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is buying it at a discount to the global market price. Saudi Arabia is then burning the cheap oil to power their economy and then taking all of their oil and selling it to us at the highest market price. Furthermore, here is what else they're doing. This is on top of India and China. They're buying them. The Russians are also sending a ton of oil via Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. There are now all sorts of sketchy facilities in the UAE where if you drop

it off there in the morning, it's Russian. When you sell it, it's something else, even though the sulfur content means it's from Russia. Furthermore, they're taking like Iranian and Venezuelan oil and they're doing like blends and then selling it to yours truly here in the United States and to the rest of the world at a market price. So the arbitrage opportunities for traders in New Delhi, in Beijing, in Sharjah, and in Riyadh are tremendous. Without fail, these people are making untold billions of dollars on top of our sanctions. And who is paying the price? Currently, Russian more people to enter the military. Military spending is fine. Their war machine grinds on. Our consumers are paying the price. And since we live in a democracy and it's a little bit different the way that our country is structured, our government is

also suffering the totaling effects of an unstable country wracked by inflation on top of a European continent, which is, it's difficult to describe, but like genuinely almost 10 times more vulnerable than we are to the effects of this sanctions policy. So the quote unquote United West, because it is unable to actually cut off the Russians from the global financial system, and especially the Russians from the oil markets, is suffering to a tremendous degree. And the Russian war machine, of which we were meant to inflict pain on, is doing just fine. Yes. And that's a big problem. But because we went so all in on our economic warfare against Russia, well, that gave them the green light to use their

own tools that they have in their toolkit to inflict a lot of pain and, you know, do their side of the economic warfare, which they have been toying with. I mean, why wouldn't they? Exactly. I mean, by us taking that step, and this is what we always weren't. Like, these things, when you exact these, when you impose these sanctions, when you take these actions and send in all of this military aid as well, they have an ability to respond. And so they took this as a green light to, hey, we're going to toy with the natural gas supply to Europe. And they have done that. And that's part of why you see these massive price increases.

It's also going back to why Zelensky is feeling so much pressure right now, because he's not a fool. He knows that you're going to have a lot of waning sentiment in Europe as they see the tremendous cost that is exacted on their lives and the crisis that they're being pushed into by, you know, Russia's invasion and by the Western response to Russia's invasion. So he has got to be concerned that sort of public sentiment to continue in the direction that we've been continuing is very likely to become a lot tougher this winter as Europeans in particular really suffer with these high gas prices that they are just full stop unable to afford. So that's part of why the landscape is increasingly difficult from the Ukrainian side and why, you know, we need to have more serious conversations about like, what next? What does this look like? Are we just going to

continue to ship package after package, regardless of how Ukrainians perform in the battlefield, regardless of whether their maximal claims are realistic, regardless of what it means in terms of like Europeans' lives, regardless of what it means in terms of famine in the Horn of Africa and these other places that have been suffering as well. These are the conversations that we really need to be having about what comes next. Yeah, the overall, so I talked about Germany is up 1,000. All of Europe is up 700% in terms of gas over the last year, and it's up double just from the end of July. The closer that we get to winter, the Russians are turning off the spigot. They're reducing and dwindling the supply, and this has massive economic ramifications for Europe.

Joe Weisenthal, who I've cited before, is basically saying this is a redux of the Eurozone crisis from 2012. What did we all learn then, people? Which is that given the amount of collateralized debt and all the other financial arrangements that we have with the continent and our banks and all that, crises like that don't just stay over there. It will impact us. And also, don't forget this, we produce a hell of a lot of the world's liquefied natural gas. They need it more than anybody else, and they are going to be driving that price up sky high, which means higher energy bills, not just in Berlin, but here and all over the United States. The last thing I want to say about this, going back to the Russian corporate profits jumped 25% as sanctions hit muted, that piece that we had up on the screen. It does say something, calls into question

some of the core tenets of the free market and the neoliberal mindset that Russia's been totally shut off from large sectors of the global economy, and quite a lot of their concerns are doing just fine. You had profits jumping 9.5 trillion rubles with the year-on-year increase outpacing the 17% rise in consumer prices over the period. So they're outpacing inflation, the manufacturing sector, which was especially hard hit by sanctions, cut off key imported components, still managed a 44% profit gain. Transportation and storage were up 168%. Profits in real estate and construction surged as did earnings in hotels and catering as Russians stayed home as international air service was limited. So just interesting to think about that, you know, the impact here in Russia was the polar opposite of what all our brightest economists told the American public was actually going to occur? Well, if the audience will indulge me, it validates an

economic theory of how I think the country should operate, which is that we've banked everything on globalization, financialization, and the service economy. But in a time of conflict, the only thing you can really count on is, quote unquote, autarkic economy, which means things that you produce for yourself. So what are the Russians teaching us? Commodities are everything. It's all about hard power. It's all about hard power. It's about internal and supply chains. It's about having a robust domestic state, which is capable of wearying and stopping attacks from the outside

and choking off all of the areas that you have vulnerable points, like Germany's Russian gas, like our own foreign gas prices. Which COVID showed us here as well, very similar lessons. Should have showed us. But anyway, autarky is good. Showed us. Yeah, autarky is good. The neolibs can attack you if they want.

All right, let's go ahead and move on. This is another important story. Usually it's the fun block. We wanted to maintain some of our focus on global affairs. So Iraq is currently undergoing a continuing, really slow-rolling domestic crisis. Some of you may remember the name Muqtada al-Sadr. Everybody in the U.S. knew his name in like 2006, but he's still there. Very much a prominent Shiite cleric in the Iraqi government, has his own political

party. They've been unable to form a major government there now for some time. And protests have erupted outside of parliament in the presidential palace now for months, but really culminated in the last week with a total curfew being imposed on the green zone and in Baghdad. Now we have some crazy footage. We're only going to show you guys a little bit of it, but just to give you an idea of how nuts things were. So that was inside the green zone. It was fighting between pro-Iran forces, the Sadarists. There's a coalitional fight. The Dutch embassy actually had to evacuate to the German embassy. There were false reports last night that the U.S. embassy itself was being evacuated. But there's still a

lot of questions about this. I mean, you know, it's not as stark as Afghanistan. Iraq was not a complete, like, you know, throwback to the Middle Ages in terms of it was a real, like, economy and society that existed as a polity for a little bit longer. And they had a more of a developed society. The issue, though, is that basically since the U.S., we came in, we left in 2011, everything collapsed and went terrible. ISIS comes, takes the city of Mosul. Our operations from that point forward were all military, and we're just supporting the Iraqi security forces to drive out ISIS. But on the political level, a lot of the machinations that

we did in the surge and more in order to try and balance different elements of the government, which is ultimately what erupted into outright sectarian genocide before all of that, is still and has been bubbling to the surface crystal, which is really why this is happening. So let's put this up there. The Iraqi protests really turned deadly, including in the green zone, the palace, the parliament, and more, after Sadr says that he is quitting politics. Now, he's done this before. This has always been kind of a threat. He is claiming this is his final retirement. The news broke this morning, Crystal, that he says, he's called off and told his people to stand down. But this is not the final end kind of of this saga. And it just shows you like these countries, you know,

you may not read about them anymore. But as we all found out in Afghanistan and more like things can flare up very, very hot. And then all this, all these questions about our role comes into question. I mean, I believe our embassy in Iraq is one of the single most embassies ever built. So if we have to abandon that one in the green zone, it will be a symbol of something. I really don't even know how to describe it. Yeah, well, we've got a lot of those symbols littered around the Middle East, I would say. I mean, you know, how is Syria doing? How's Libya doing? How's Afghanistan doing as we continue to deny their government their own money? And now how is Iraq doing?

As you point out, so Sadr's coalition was the winner of the elections last – secured the largest number of seats, but not enough to form a government. So they've been without a government for months and months now, and this all kind of comes to a head. He's – sheia cleric. He kind of is like against U.S. influence, but also against Iranian influence. His major rivals are these Iranian-backed militias. That's where a lot of the flashpoints and the tension and the fighting and violence is now. So he says in this very sort of dramatic flourish, like, you're free of me. I'm leaving.

And his followers, the analysis that I was listening to said, basically see this as a green light to then sort of like, you know, go riot and storm and all this stuff. And that's when you have this violence with 20 plus protesters dead, dozens more injured. And effectively, the idea is this was a political ploy to say basically like, look, when I'm not here keeping a lid on things, see what happens. So sort of making good on this type of a threat. But, yeah, I mean, listen, the fallout and the chaos that we created in their country and have, you know, largely just sort of left and turned the other cheek and only pay attention when something dramatic and shocking like this occurs. Yeah. So we hope things, you know, people will listen, but it's possible this could flare up into even more of a, even more of like a

conflagration over the weekend. We're going to see how the coalitions and all those other people on the ground. Yeah. Well, I'm sure they have the same economic stress that is going on around the globe. High prices, high food prices, you know, and a lot of strain there. And we know as we've tracked throughout history, I mean, this was a major contributor to the Arab Spring as well, and led to a lot of governments being toppled and overturned. So definitely something to keep an eye on. Yeah. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? So in their opposition to Biden's student debt relief program, some Republicans are really telling on themselves, accidentally revealing what a cramped and outdated definition they have of the working class and how they really feel about workers.

Take, for example, this tweet, which went mega-viral and not in a good way from Republican Congressman Jim Banks, who said, quote, Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military's greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments. As Chu replied, you're probably not supposed to say out loud that the country depends on poor, desperate people to feed the military-industrial complex. But the real winner in this category was one Senator Ted Cruz, who exposed a lot about his view of the world when he said this on his own podcast. There is a real risk.

If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can't get a job. Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand. Like, holy cow, 20 grand. That, you know, maybe you weren't going to vote in November and suddenly you just got 20 grand. And, you know, if you can, you know, get off the bong for a minute and head down to the voting station or just send in your mail-in ballot that the Democrats have helpfully sent you. It could drive up turnout, particularly among young people. What you see there is Ted Cruz displaying complete and utter contempt for workers, especially workers who don't happen to fit his narrow and selective definition of the working class. Now, he and other Republicans have kind of constructed an elaborate series

of deceptions to paint Biden's policy as directly oppositional to the working class. So let's start with a few facts first about who benefits from Biden's debt relief policy and who constitutes the modern working class. First, let's consider Ted Cruz's definition of the working class here, what it seems to be. Apparently, if you don't have a hard hat, you need not apply. Like most of the modern GOP, he's happy to co-opt the language of working class struggle when it's convenient, but shows absolute scorn for workers who don't meet his archaic image. In reality, service sector and pink-collar workers are a massive and rapidly growing part of the modern working class. The top three most common jobs in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor, are retail sales, home health aides, and fast food workers. If you claim to support the working class,

but your definition does not include those workers, you are a fraud. But the truth is, Republicans like Ted Cruz, they haven't been there for their stereotypical white guy in a hard hat worker either. Just ask the coal miners at Warrior Met Coal, who've been out on strike for well over a year now. Republicans were happy to posture

like they supported the coal miner in order to own Hillary Clinton, but not a damn one of them has supported these workers in their struggle. Not one. So the modern working class that Ted Cruz supposedly cares so much about includes his imaginary Starbucks barista who spent seven years in college. And by the way, baristas are not the only folks who might find themselves with a college degree fact gone to some college. And in case you were wondering, since there seems to be so much concern among Republicans about subsidizing gender studies and other, woke majors, degrees in ethnic and gender studies are exceptionally rare. Only 0.4% of all degrees conferred, as one person pointed out, that

literally rounds to zero. Now, some of the former students in the most dire circumstances right now are the ones who started college but were then unable to finish because the cost was so high. So they got the debt, but they did not get the degree. But plenty of those who did obtain a four-year degree graduated to find that the stable middle-class job supposedly at the end of the college rainbow was as mythical as a leprechaun. Somewhere around 40% of college degree holders are underemployed, working in jobs that do not require a four-year degree. In fact, as I've documented before, some of these college-educated workers have been at the forefront of the new labor movement. Amazon labor union leaders Chris

Smalls and Derek Palmer are both community college dropouts. Buffalo Starbucks United leader Jazz Brissack, she was literally a Rhodes Scholar and helped spark a labor movement that has now swept the nation. The fact that there are so many degree holders working at Starbucks exposes, in fact, that the college dream sold to them by political elites was a sham and was a fraud. The career trajectory has been especially cruel for those millennials who graduated into the Great Recession. But I suspect the Zoomers who graduated into the COVID pandemic have not exactly had a cakewalk either. Ted Cruz says these people wasted their time in college. And you know what? On that front,

he might just be correct. Because new research shows the college wage premium is actually collapsing, making the high cost of college much less of a sure thing in terms of the economic trade-offs. Of course, the fact that students got scammed is just more compelling evidence that they deserve a bit of help on the other side. So Cruz and other Republicans are able to frame their opposition to debt relief as populist by this series of well-constructed lies and deceptions. The lie that the working class is only dudes in hard hats, the lie that everyone in college is studying some kind of woke stuff, and the lie that their narrowly defined working class is free from student loan debt. None of these things are true. What's funny is Cruz actually

likely gets the political analysis correct here. He predicts the policy will motivate young voters and will increase STEM turnout. Sure enough, young voters are over the moon about this policy. According to the CBS News Battleground tracker, Biden's debt relief was backed by 75% of voters under 30. His approval rating among that same group, it has skyrocketed a full 10 points, going from 49% approval, so underwater, to 59% approval. For some of the beneficiaries, this is literally a life-changing moment. Elijah Watkins, a 28-year-old from Atlanta, had this to say, quote, this means I can begin taking greater steps within my adulthood for

purchases, like buying my first home, getting a new car, or investing back into my own business. Outside of Obamacare, this is the first time a president has directly influenced my day-to-day decision-making. who benefit, having your life directly materially changed is going to make you want to vote and may also create a bit of a lasting loyalty to the party that had your interests in mind. And perhaps the contempt showed by some Republicans who've suddenly decided to cast everyone who ever attended a single college class as a woke slacker gender studies major, that might just weigh on your vote as well. There's a few things here, Sagar. I think it tracks somewhat with the conversation. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, if there's anything positive that has come from COVID, at least for me, it's this. I do a lot more of my own research

for my own health, for public health, on pretty much any topic where I previously trusted the experts. With health specifically, what COVID opened my eyes to was that the public health authorities, the very top of the medical system and others, really are more concerned with a particular narrative than with ensuring the best health outcomes. It was a profound lesson, and it's a gut punt for anyone who ever trusted the system. And I suspect I'm not alone in that. COVID awoke millions more to the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, to the biases held by the medical profession, and to show how social stigmas and culture wars of today are stifling advice that can save your life. For me personally, an area of life I've become obsessed with is the way that we handle mental health broadly in the

United States. And what I believe is a deeply troubling trend of prescribing medicine first in lieu of massive side effects while overlooking time-tested common sense. Perhaps no area of this debate concerns me more than overprescription of SSRIs, which tens of millions of Americans are on currently. I've covered here before how new meta-analyses shows definitively that the mechanism which SSRIs were thought to quote-unquote cure depression does not hold scientific scrutiny whatsoever. Again, to be clear, the study did show SSRIs are effective against depression, but it raises the question as to why billions of dollars of these drugs are sold yearly if we don't even know how they work. Furthermore, if the medical industry is going to prescribe a drug which the pathway is unknown, but the terrifying side effects are well known, then shouldn't we look at many other potential treatments for depression spanning psychedelic treatment in a clinical setting to simply major lifestyle interventions like changing

diet and more exercise? But of course, there is not nearly the same amount of cash in the latter and they are not discussed whatsoever. A deeper element to that discussion is starting to break through into the mainstream discourse. It's something that matters even more than overprescription. Altering the brain chemistry of an adult is one thing, but today we are learning the extent to which we are also pushing these same drugs and many other powerful ones on to children. A terrifying expose over the weekend revealed how one teenager suffering from depression at one point was prescribed 10 separate powerful psychiatric drugs. Worse, these drugs, in many cases, are not even approved under their so-called known methods of action for adolescents and are instead being pushed by the U.S. medical system regardless. The current numbers are stunning as you look

deeper. One in 12 children in the United States are on some form of psychiatric medication, including 1% of preschoolers, 13% of 12- to 17-year-olds. One of the most common uses of psychiatric drugs is treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, a recent pediatric journal study found that things rarely end there. 40% of the kids diagnosed and medicated for quote-unquote ADHD are on some form of other psychiatric drug. Furthermore, a growth rate in prescription of these drugs for children, including for depression, is skyrocketing. Pharmacy data currently indicates that the growth rate for approved depression medication for teenagers increased by 40% from 2015 to 2019, compared to the growth rate of 12

for adults. The crazy thing about this is that the huge portion of these psychiatric drugs given to children in tandem with each other in many cases is all occurring through off-label use, as in outside of FDA approval for a specific ailment they are suffering from. Now, the reason this matters is because we already barely know the long-term use of multiple psychiatric drugs used in tandem have on the adult brain. We have even less data to indicate how it affects the brains of developing kids. Now, I'm going to go out on unscientific limb and state something I don't think that should be that controversial. It is going to have some effect. To what extent? I don't know. My guess is screwing with the brain chemistry of someone who's going through puberty, probably bad. Again, the industry

is making untold amounts of money through these prescriptions, in many cases off desperate teenagers and parents who simply want their kids to be happy. They are paying hand over fist, in some cases getting the insurance company to do so with drugs that we barely understand on the most precious resource that we have, kids. This is where the culture war is now coming in. There is growing social pressure and norms that discourage doctors and medical professionals from dispensing obvious advice for fear of social backlash. First and foremost is weight. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that being overweight and specifically being obese will dramatically influence your mental health, especially given emerging research that indicates much of our

mental state is directly tied to our physical health. In adults, this research is well, well known, showing much higher risk of having depression in the course of your life bidirectionally if you're obese. Childhood obesity, though, is and has been skyrocketing now for some time, especially after the pandemic. Pre-2020 figures were bad. At the start of the pandemic, 15% of American kids between 2 and 19 were obese, 15 million kids with the rate at full 22% amongst teenagers. We still don't know the final figures, but after lockdowns, the current indication is that obesity increased for children across the board. Those suffering severe obesity in many cases saw double the weight gain. And yet, in our culture today,

it is somehow considered taboo, outside of the most tepid language, to state the obvious. Being fat is terrible for your physical and mental health as an adult, and it is especially terrible for kids. Yet, in my perusal of overall literature, which I have in front of me, exercise and diet do not even appear in the FAQs online at Harvard or at Yale for parents who are searching for remedies for their children who are suffering from depression. The social stigma around discussion of weight, of alternative treatments, of exercise, of lifestyle, of basically any area of inquiry outside of psychiatric drugs needs to end immediately. At the heart of all of this is profit and ideology.

Profit is propping up a corrupt industry that makes it easier to plug kids full of mind-altering drugs rather than pursue alternatives. And then ideology is sprung up in recent years that stigmatizes raising questions I am raising today. The ideology happens to protect profit. I'm not sure which one that we have to go after first. It's perhaps a full-fledged war on both. But it all starts with all of us, and with you. To your own research, don't critically accept a pill as the answer to all of our problems. Sometimes it might be, but perhaps many times it is not. And we shouldn't be so casual with our kids because one day they will grow up. And if you screw it up, we will pay that price for years to come. I think it's crazy.

And the more I think about it, Crystal, Johan Hari was a real hero charging into this. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. A 30-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire, Sam Beckman-Fried, has suddenly become sort of the center of political gravity, making a lot of moves here in D.C., playing in a lot of primaries across the country. And the LA Times had an interesting look at this. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. The headline here is, A Young Crypt's political agenda goes well beyond pandemic preparedness. That's the area that he claims to be really focused on with the money that he's spending and the candidates that he is endorsing. And the journalist behind that piece,

Freddie Brewster of the LA Times, joins us now. Freddie, welcome. Glad to have you. Good to see you, man. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, guys. Really appreciate it. Of course. So as I just said, Sam Bankman-Fried really been throwing his weight and his money around. Now, he says the candidates that he's backing, for example, there was one that prevailed, gosh, I'm blanking on his name, in a primary down in Florida recently, who was like a Bernie Sanders-backed candidate, but also got a bunch of money from Sam Bankman-Fried. He says he's just interested in backing candidates who are going to focus on pandemic preparedness. What did you find when you looked into this in terms of where his interests may ultimately lie? Yeah, so, you know, in the interviews I had with Sam, he said that, you know,

obviously his interest is in pandemic preparedness, but his on-hill activity is much different. He's testified in front of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, and those two committees oversee the regulations of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which part of Bankman Freed's lobbying efforts has been to try to get cryptocurrencies regulated by the CFTC rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is much better funded and much more aggressive in their enforcement actions. Yeah, that's what I was just going to ask.

Why would he, as someone who has made his fortune in crypto, why would he prefer it be regulated by the CFTC? Yeah, so the CFTC is only about a fifth of the size of the SEC. And the SEC is, like I said, much more aggressive in their enforcement actions that they bring against, you know, different securities actions, you know, fraud and such and such. So what I'm interested in is about the broader political agenda and specifically kind of glomming on to the Democratic Party, but also bipartisan. What do you see as the overall agenda and who's benefiting from some of the money that he's spending here? Because he's become a major political force in his own right. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And so, you know, he's pledged anywhere between $100 million and $1 billion, which puts him on par with George Soros and the Koch brothers. And if he spends $1 billion, that's putting him well past even those figures. And his spending, he's donated, like Sagar, like you said, mostly to Democrats, but also to some of the key moderates like Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Lita Murkowski. He's donated to Hakeem Jeffries and Pete Aguilar, the chair and vice chair of the Democratic caucus who oversees kind of what gets priority in the House. Gave a million dollars to the Senate Majority PAC, six million to the House Majority PAC. And one thing I found rather interesting is that he gave $105,000 to the Alabama Conservatives Fund, which that is a PAC that's backing, I'm blanking on her name, I think Katie Britt is her name. Yes, yes.

Yeah, the Senate Republican coming out of Alabama. And that PAC describes itself as a super PAC that supports, quote, candidates who will bring true Christian conservative Alabama values to Washington, such as defending the unborn, protecting our Second Amendment rights, restoring integrity in our elections, and fighting the socialists who want to change our country. So it definitely has some bipartisan spending. And that's Sam's personal spendings to Katie Britt and some of those other ones. So for Protect Our Future, they've really focused on house primaries and really focused on challengers rather than incumbents, although some key incumbents have gotten donations from Protect Our Future. I think Sam really came on board on everybody's radar back when it was like the House primary in Oregon where Protect Our Future,

the super PAC that has received $27 million from Sam Bankman Freed, they really backed this candidate called, his name's Carrick Flynn. And he was mounting a big challenge to somebody named Andrea Salinas. Salinas ended up winning out pretty easily, but they put $10 million into a primary run.

So how's it going? I mean, has he secured any sort of legislative goodies here in Washington? Does he have some sympathetic legislators now that he's working with? Yeah, definitely. So one of his like, you know, one of the committees that he testified in front of was the Senate Agriculture Committee and the chair and ranking member. So the chair is, uh, Senator Debbie Stabenow and the ranking member is John Boosman. And Stabenow and Boosman both received donations from Sam Bankman-Fried just weeks before he testified in front of them. Um, Bankman-Fried gave $26,000 to Debbie Stabenow

and some of her allied funding groups. And then John Boosman received $5,800 from Sam Bankman-Fried. And those two just recently, just back in like mid-August, if I remember right, they introduced a bill called the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022.

And that bill would seek to define cryptocurrencies as a commodity and truly bring its regulation under the CFTC rather than the SEC. In the bill, it says that some actions that would truly be regulated through the SEC will be regulated through the SEC. But by and large, the oversight would be under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Well, Freddie, thank you for breaking this all down for us. I really recommend people go read the full article because, I mean, look, it didn't take a genius to figure out that a crypto billionaire might have some of his own monetary interests at heart while he's donating these big sums of money. But you lay it out in a very systematic way and had access to him himself. So that makes a big difference too. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're really grateful.

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