Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/8/22: Senate Legislation, China Escalation, Weapons Shipments, NATO Expansion, Monkeypox, Media Fawning, & More!

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Krystal and Saagar report on Democrats legislation, China tensions rising, weapons flowing to Ukraine, gay marriage vote, Dick Cheney's ad for Liz, Monkeypox hypocrisy, & media fawning!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  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have a deal, folks. It has gone through the Senate. Kyrsten Sinema, after extracting her pound of flesh on behalf of the private equity industry, did sign on to the deal. It did pass through. It is actually expected to get through the House. So lo and behold, just when we thought that nothing was going to happen, there is something that's going through. So we'll break down the details. We'll tell you what Sinema stripped down, what she put in. There's also one piece on insulin prices specifically that the parliamentarian said, no, you can't do this. And Republicans ultimately blocked. So all those details we will bring to you. We also have some new moves from China. Retribution for Pelosi's big visit to Taiwan.

Was it worth it? We will talk to you about that. We also, OK, so this is very interesting. CBS News did this big report. They actually billed it as a documentary on the ground, tracking how few of the weapons that we shipped to Ukraine actually get to the front line. So we thought, oh, this is very interesting. We're like, wow, great story. We're going to cover it. We're going to show the clip.

Well, days after this was posted online, they pulled it down. They've got all these caveats. We've got to investigate more. We've got to edit it. So you have the very first sort of like really critical deep dive from the media into exactly what is happening with these weapons shipments. And they're basically bullied into pulling it down. Well, they were bullied specifically by the Ukrainian government. And so we're going to get into a lot of this. I've been looking over the details, you know, just even more so this morning. It's genuinely shocking.

It is a pretty shocking story. Also, some genuine suspense in Washington. Democrats are now taking the tack of passing through the House and the Senate some of these pieces, protecting these things to access to contraception, pieces regarding choice, and specifically on gay marriage. So the initial thought was that this was very, very unlikely to get through the Senate actually codifying gay marriage. Now it looks like there's a possibility. So we'll talk to you about where that stands, what the whip count is, who's for it, who's against it. We also have some liberal love for Dick Cheney that we need to talk to you about.

So we will get to all of those things. But let's start with, well, live show. Live show. Oh, see, I forgot actually this time. Look at that. Atlanta. We are coming September 16th, 730. Brain work to remember to plug it.

There we go. Thank you so much, Crystal. Recovering from some cross-country travel here, folks. So September 16th, 7.30 p.m. Atlanta, we are coming. We're going to have that live show. It's really exciting. As I said, go ahead and buy your tickets. We actually have a couple of mass ticket requests from a couple of patrons, so there really are not going to be all that many left after we go ahead and fulfill those. Grab the tickets while you still can. We're hoping to sell out the entire thing, maybe like a month or so ahead just to show everybody else, yes, we can indeed

sell out these venues so that we can book our tour. Negotiations are continuing right now. We're going to have a full list of tour for everybody as they come. So if you're in the area, we would deeply appreciate it. And we thank you all very much. September 16th, Atlanta, Georgia. See you guys there. Yes. All right. Let's get to the details of this deal that passed through the Senate over the weekend in a marathon session. Let's go ahead and put this first piece up on the screen. So it was a completely party line vote. Kamala Harris came in to be the tie-breaking vote, 51 to 50. Headline here from the New York Times, Senate passes climate and tax bill after marathon debate, despite all Republicans being opposed. The vote was a major victory for

President Biden and Democrats. The bill now goes to the House, where it is expected to pass by the end of the week. You will recall, just to tell a little bit of the story of how we ended up here, you'll recall there was initially, you know, a year ago, there were big negotiations around this Build Back Better bill. It included the climate piece. It included tax hikes on the rich and on corporations. It included a lot of social spending on child care, elder care, and education and the like. Okay, this is a massively pared back

version of that that has now been rebranded by Joe Manchin as the Inflation Reduction Act. That's what he's calling it because that makes him feel good about himself, basically. At the last minute, essentially the reporting indicates that Manchin didn't really like being the villain of the situation, especially in the elite press. So he comes back to Schumer and very quietly, totally behind closed doors with input from nobody and managing to keep it a total secret in Washington, Schumer and Manchin work out this deal. Basically, what it entails is there are some sort of giveaways to appease the fossil fuel industry and to appease Joe Manchin and his ties to the fossil fuel industry. But there's also significant spending that will push us in the direction of clean energy. It would at least give clean energy kind of a shot, is how Ryan Grimm is describing it. You also have some significant tax increases on corporations. The original deal had some reforms. They didn't really close the carried

interest loophole that's so beneficial to private equity, but there were some reforms to it that would constrain them maybe possibly a little bit. The big piece was a 15% what they call book tax on corporations over a billion dollars. So these are giant companies, and you're going to look at their financial statements, what they're telling their investors versus the bullshit numbers that they send into the IRS, to make sure they're at least paying something. So 15%, that actually raises significant revenue. You also have in there some additional money for the IRS,

so they could actually go after tax cheats, especially wealthy tax cheats. Right now, they don't really have the resources to do that. You have some closing or some continuation of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which were set to expire. That's also significant. You have something that Democrats have been after for a very long time, which is Medicare being able to negotiate on prescription drug prices. That should be a benefit to seniors who are on the Medicare program. And those are kind of the big pieces. So that was the original Manchin-Schumer deal. Kyrsten Sinema, though, she had to have her say. And of course, she had to go in there and make this thing worse and make sure she's taking care of specifically her private equity buddies, which seems to be her. It's not a joke.

Literally, there's only two things that she has stood on. First is the private equity initial nixing. And then during the vote itself, causing a hell of a lot of drama. And actually making things worse for every other industry except for private equity. Yes. Which is kind of amazing. So let's go ahead and put this Politico tweet up on the screen. So let me walk you through all the pieces that Kyrsten Sinema demanded. Some of

it is unobjectionable and some of it is highly objectionable. First thing, as I said, she removed the carried interest reform altogether. So they were only tinkering around the edges of this. Some of the theories were that they put this in specifically so that she could strip it out and claim a win. That is a major giveaway to the private equity industry. So Kyrsten Sinema goes ahead and makes sure she does that for them. Now, she had to replace that revenue. And actually, what she put in there instead was a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks, which would ultimately raise more revenue than the kind of bullshit carried interest loophole

reform thing that they were doing. So even though it's a grotesque giveaway to the private equity industry, that part I didn't have as much of an issue with on balance. Another thing she did that I didn't have an issue with is $5 billion in drought relief, which disproportionately benefits her state of Arizona. But fine, I mean, that's spending that is worthwhile that we need to be dealing with okay. Another thing that she claimed to be concerned about is now let's get into this 15% book tax. So there are two pieces here. Number one, she claimed that some manufacturing concerns

were saying, oh, this is gonna discourage us from investment. We need to be able to still take our depreciation for our investments in property, plant, and equipment. So they modified that so that it's not really 15% minimum tax. They can still take some additional depreciation and other credits beyond that to get that tax rate again below 15%. But the real doozy was yet another private equity industry giveaway that Sinema really delivered on. So I'm going to get into the details of this and try not to make it so that your eyes glaze over.

But effectively, those of you guys who know private equity companies, they buy a bunch of other businesses, oftentimes sort of like, you know, load them up with debt, strip them of their assets, sometimes sell them for parts. But they're holding a bunch of different companies. So the question was, OK, well, if all of these companies you own together is more than the billion dollar threshold for this 15 percent, well, this should apply to you. Oh, no, no. She wasn't going to have private equity subject to this 15 percent, which, again, is still very low tax. So at the last minute in the voting with the amendment, she partnered with a few other Democrats and all the Republicans to make sure that private equity would be unaffected by the 15 percent book. Yeah, it's completely outrageous, Crystal, because what this means is that firms like Apollo Global Management, which used to be headed by Leon Black, since resigned after his connections to Epstein, but just to give you an

idea of who some of these people are. A side note there. Just a little side note about who some of the biggest private equity people are in America. Disproportionately multi-billionaires. These people buy up these companies, leverage them up with debt offshore. They're some of the worst people in American finance, and they benefit from some of the biggest loopholes in the American tax code. Well, this was the first time that we were ever actually going to go after them. And one of the benefits of the way that the book tax was written was, what is the easy way is if they say we're going to tax everybody over a billion? What do they do? They spin off a bunch of subsidiary companies, and they have holdings that eventually totaled up past one billion. But according to the IRS and legalese, they could say that they report under a billion.

This actually was quite strict in the way that they were going to enforce said law. And it's one of the reasons why it would have raised so much money. What she effectively did is carve out the private equity industry from the 15% minimum tax. So what does this mean? It actually disincentivizes normal corporations, which are much easier to regulate, much easier to go ahead and to tax. And this actually is such a boon that it is very likely that we are going to see even more sales to the private equity industry because they have such a beneficial carve out now in a tax code boon to some of the worst people in the U.S. economy. So now not only are they going to pay less in income tax than you or I as small business owners, and maybe even more so than a lot of people who pay even just basic payroll taxes, but now they actually now have a specific benefit over the rest of the industry thanks to Kyrsten Sinema. It's one of the most insane tax caravans. It's totally un-indefensible. Raven, it is grotesque. I mean, it is just so brazen. This will save the private equity industry $35 billion over the next decade. This is a $4 trillion industry in the United States, and we're talking

about this small sliver of people who have, I mean, they just have completely bought Kirsten Simmons. And this is the thing is, you know, lobbying money well spent, I guess. Whatever they spent to get her on their side, it was certainly worth it in terms of their bank accounts and this grotesque giveaway that they ultimately won for her. It really is extraordinary. And let me tell you what she's saying, the bullshit spin on this and what John Thune, the Republican who offered up this grotesque amendment. He's a great friend of the industry. Yeah. And all the Republicans voted for a few of the Democrats and Kyrsten Sinema led the charge

here. So they're saying, oh, it could be read, this tax code, so that these small businesses themselves could be impacted by the 15% minimum book tax. And that's just not fair just because they happen to be owned by private equity. Well, every analyst that they spoke to said, no, that is not the way this works. Now, if that really is your concern, we could clarify that in the language, but that was not really their concern. What they wanted was a fig leaf of a justification to give this giant giveaway to private equity. Yeah, this thing came at the 11th hour. This actually came only hours before the vote. It scrambled the entire process. They had to find

a different way to go ahead and to pay for it. So she threw this in at the wrench because she was throwing it, completely holding the deal hostage. And this is so egregious. Even Joe Manchin spoke out. Yeah. Put it up there on the screen. He was like, I'm very disappointed that she took this out.

The carried interest, not even loophole, like a one-year extension of carried interest is they'll admit it. It's a heck of a run that they just can't justify. He's right. There is no justification for many of the rich carve-outs that we have in

our tax code, both from billionaire individuals to also the tax code. And I do think it is remarkable. And this, you know, look, I think there are some things in this bill which are really, really great. But there was a tweet this morning which effectively shows Democrats have now had two opportunities to repeal the Trump tax cuts of 2017. I will remind the audience the single most unpopular thing Donald Trump ever did in office, Charlottesville, January 6th, he never reached a lower point in his presidency than the day that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed as a giveaway to rich people, giveaway to the industry, accelerating stock buybacks, not putting us in the best position in whenever the coronavirus pandemic hit because, lo and behold,

everybody spent a bunch of money on stock buybacks. Nobody spent any money on actually manufacturing and investment. That remains codified into law. So we now have two successive Republican administrations, the Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts, which Democrats ran against and promised to repeal and did not do so. They had multiple opportunities, and it now remains the law of the land, and we all know the House going the way it's going to go, that means that they're here to stay forever. If Trump wins, then we're going to have even more tax cuts. It's done. And this is common, as you're pointing out, with the Bush tax cut.

There's a ratchet effect, which once you do the giveaway to the rich, they are never letting it go. They will do whatever they can. They will buy whoever they need to, to make sure that they lock in their little giveaway, their little loophole, the thing that makes it so that they pay so little in taxes compared to the percentage rate that you pay, that small business owners pay, that ordinary taxpayers pay. It really, really is grotesque. Couple other things to say here. So first of all, obviously this has to also pass to the House, where the big question mark was over the no salt, no dice caucus.

I saw this morning that they're saying they're going to back it. So they were not willing to be like the total villains of the situation. Even Josh Gottheimer had enough sense to be like, all right, fine, I'll back this thing. And Manchin had kind of drawn a red line about the SALT tax cap saying, we're not getting rid of this. So it would have been a problem if they tried to mess around with it. They've said they're on board. I haven't seen any progressives who were saying they're not going to vote for it. So it looks very likely that this is going to go through the House and ultimately end up on the president's desk. I'm going to talk in my monologue a little bit about, you know, the media coverage is

very, like, historic. Hedgehog. It's landmark. Yes. It's the first and it's the best week in his presidency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't want to downplay the deal because there are good things in it. Yeah, it's good. Yeah.

It's a good thing. I think we spent some time last week really going through the provisions, you know, what it means for you specifically. There's a lot that's actually very good in it for consumers in terms of that would both reduce our emissions, but also really, you know, be of direct benefit to you. If you're able to buy an electric vehicle, there's a big, you know, subsidy for a tax credit for that, for making your home more energy efficient, those sorts of things. Home solar.

Yeah. I'm not a fan of corporate solar, but home solar is good. Yeah, home solar installation, all those sorts of things. Home solar. I'm not a fan of corporate solar, but home solar is good. Yeah, home solar installation, all those sorts of things which are beneficial. You know, the 15% minimum book tax, even if Kyrsten Sinema gave this giveaway to private equity, it still is an improvement. It still is going to raise revenue. It still is going to make it so that you won't see ads often. Companies like Amazon paying 0% interest rate, which is a good thing.

Right. I'll just reiterate those, which is that effectively, there's been $80 billion for electric vehicle subsidies. And actually, one of the things I like the most about it is that for a while, GM and Tesla were actually penalized by the tax code because they had sold more than 200,000 vehicles. And originally, they capped it so that you no longer got an EV tax credit for buying those vehicles. But look, it's not about $200,000 or less. It should be a boon to the entire American electric vehicle market. And so that tax credit is going to come back under this. Part of the ones actually that could help the most people,

you may not even really feel it, but you will feel it at the installation level, is some money off for electric cooktops and also money off for electric panels and home insulation. These are little things which, of course, bleed into your air conditioning bills and more and make it a little bit better. So all of these are going to be written into the tax code. And on the margins, they're going to help your ability in order to reduce energy consumption. Now, obviously, we have a hell of a lot way to go. But it does – look, like I said, the fact that we got technology neutral into this, a lot of right-wingers are not talking about it because this bleeds into the bigger culture war.

I do kind of wish they hadn't called it the Inflation Reduction Act because it's like, guys, this has nothing to do with inflation. Like, just stop. I mean, look, it's fine. It's a climate bill. Honestly, look, I mean, calling it a clean energy bill is something worse than in the world. It's not like clean energy is unpopular. Yeah. I mean, this was Manchin.

You can put the squarely on Manchin. The naming of it, this is what he needed to make it called in order to be able to sell it. What about reducing the energy bill? He's been saying his whole thing is inflation and this is what he's focused on. Whatever. To the extent that over a number of years it will reduce your costs, I guess technically it will reduce inflation. Fine. Is it set to deal with inflation right now?

No. That's not really the main purpose of the bill. Okay. So anyway, there's some good provisions. We should celebrate them. I think that's a good thing. I'm annoyed specifically about the private equity. It really is gross.

I just can't imagine being a United States senator at the last hour and going and holding this whole thing hostage just so a specific billionaire industry can get such a massive tax carve out. Yeah. And look, you know, a lot of Republicans who voted for this, a lot of these guys talk a big game about, oh, we're going to go after BlackRock and Larry Fink and all that. It's like, yeah, well, you just voted to give the guy tax cut. So congratulations. He's actually a lot richer now, thanks to you. Because she couldn't have done it with just Democrats. Of course. They weren't on board. So, yeah, I mean and and the other thing about it is like i mean she got her drought relief thing for arizona at least you can look at that and be like

that's your state yeah like you're actually i mean even freaking josh gotheimer as gross as it is his salt cap thing that actually does impact his constituents very directly they're rich he's like i'm fighting yeah he's like i'm this is is my constituent, and this is what I'm standing for. But, like, the private equity industry is in New York and Connecticut. This isn't even in her. These are just the people that she's serving who aren't even her constituents who have bought her off. It is grotesque. The last thing I want to say on the overarching sweep of the bill, and then we'll get into this other piece on insulin, which is also very important, is obviously, even though the media is billing this as landmark, historic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it is a far cry from what the original conception of Build Back Better was. Oh, sure.

Especially on the social spending, but also just if you look at the climate portion. I mean, it's nowhere near the sweep, the scope, the amount of spending that they were contemplating to begin with. And of course, there's basically at this point, very little in here that's going to impact your health care costs, very little that's really going to get at the prescription drug pricing, especially after the parliamentarian made a couple of negative rulings regarding what they could do with regard to prescription drug pricing. Of course, pre-K child tax credit, elder care, housing, all that stuff ultimately left down. And Bernie Sanders, ultimately all the Democrats obviously voted for it, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten through. But he offered a number of amendments that I thought was kind of revealing because there were a few things.

I'm going to talk about this in my monologue, too, like the child tax credit that supposedly every single Democrat supports. And yet, for whatever reason, they're like, no, we can't. We can't possibly put it in this bill. It's like, well, then do you really support it? Because ultimately, look, I get it's a precarious balance and, you know, you're striking a deal here and whatever. But it's grotesque that Kyrsten Sinema can hold it hostage for her private equity giveaway. But when Bernie's like, hey, guys, we all support the child tax credit and this is really great for kids. Why don't we put this in?

Every single Democrat, every single senator except for Bernie votes against it. So I think it's important to keep into context what the original idea was, what the original conception was, and the much, much, much, much, much more narrow version that ultimately gets through while still saying, yes, it's a victory. Yes, it's a positive step forward. Even with the caveats, it's an improvement over the status quo. Definitely. Politically, do I think it will matter? Honestly, no. I mean, to the extent that it will have like a little bit of a boost, maybe to some Democrats, like, yeah, okay. I just think macroeconomically, inflation is a story. We'll probably cover

tomorrow. Poll out today just shows Joe Biden at 60% disapproval, which, you know, okay, look, you've had your good week, but when you're coming off something like that, listen, Jimmy Carter had a number of legislative wins too. It didn't actually matter. Yeah. Yeah. And the problem is that Democrats really need to shift the status quo of reality, not just, like, have a couple of good media cycles. Yes. You know, the problems are so far beyond just, like, oh, you have a messaging issue.

So, all right, let's talk a little bit about insulin. So let's put this piece up on the screen from Politico. So they say breaking as we flag might happen back in November of last year. Democrats just learned the Senate parliamentarian nixed their plan to penalize drug companies who hike prices faster than inflation outside of Medicare. So they're allowed to, and again, like they could just fire the parliamentarian and do what they want, but they have decided to be constrained by whatever this random person says. So what they've decided is Medicare, yes, you can negotiate drug prices, but they're not going to allow them when it comes to private companies and the costs that they are charging consumers, they can't do anything about that. So part of that is Democrats really wanted to put a cap on the amount that companies could

charge for insulin. And obviously, this is a critical piece, because if you just look at the numbers, Americans pay almost $100 for insulin when the rest of the OECD pays significantly less than $25. It takes like penny. It's such a small cost to manufacture insulin. And Bernie Sanders has made a big show of going across the border to Canada to purchase it. I mean, we are just getting price gouged to high heaven. And obviously, we have a lot of people in this country whose life depends on being able to get access to insulin who are diabetic. if they could get a few Republicans on board, 10 Republicans on board, so that they could actually overcome the 60-vote threshold and be able to get the insulin capture, which would be a massive beneficial step forward for so many people across the country. Well, that didn't work out. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen.

Senate Republicans block the insulin cap on the private market. 60-vote threshold, it fell 57 to 43. So you did have some Republicans who voted for it specifically just to give credit to the ones who did vote to impose this insulin cap. You've got Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Kennedy, Lisa Murkowski, and Dan Sullivan. Kind of an interesting and odd grouping there. Unusual coalition of folks who voted for this insulin cap. And it is worth pointing out, Sagar, two things. Number one, so many of these senators, I saw Joni Ernst in particular, who I think has close family members who are diabetic and dependent on insulin, who under the Trump administration, they were talking,

oh, we got to get insulin costs, or we got to do this, we got to do that. Then when they have the opportunity to, of course, they vote no. And the other thing that's worth pointing out is that, you know, it's disproportionately red states who have the largest number of diabetic sufferers who, you know, would really benefit from this bill. You can go ahead and put this last piece up on the screen that has the rates here. The highest rate of diabetes is West Virginia, then Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas. Many of those places, their senators just voted against this. So again, silly. The Democrats are letting the parliamentarian dictate the rules here, but they've decided to go down this path and ultimately did, I think, something that was

at least politically intelligent. The right moral stance would be just to do it and get a new parliamentarian. But from a political perspective, you know, getting people on the record and showing where everybody stands on these issues, I think is a tactic we've seen increasingly from Democrats, and I think it's a pretty wise one. Well, especially insulin. Also, just don't forget, given that so many Republicans voted for it, that means a lot of Democrats did not vote to make sure that it actually got across the line, which is kind of insane that they didn't allow it to do so.

I just think it's – look, this is a good opportunity in order to highlight this. 10% of the U.S. population, 9.8 specifically, of adults over 18 have a diagnosed case of diabetes. And a lot more people, we don't have the exact numbers, are at risk of diabetes. So this is a killer. I mean, this is a sign of the obesity crisis. Diabetes is a lifelong problem. It reflects a lot of problems we have downstream of our diet and more. I hope it's a wake-up call for some people in order to take care of their health. But at the very least, at this point, we're in it now. And from this point forward, the obesity rate and the, you know, the morbidly obesity rate only continues to go higher. The correlation between the two is just extraordinary. We have children now getting diagnosed with type two diabetes. So listen is,

you know, we have to attack the health crisis. We also have to cure sick people or at least give people the ability in order to pay for that. I mean, if you're a child, you're like 12 years old, you have type two diabetes, like you're signing up for what possibly a 70 year lifespan. We're going to need this medication. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars that you're going to have to spend here. And it's, it's, it's ridiculous that only Medicare, which is, yes, it's great that Medicare gets a price cap. What about everybody else? Not all of us have Medicare. You know, I'm 30 years old. Like there's a lot of people like me for 35 years until you ever get to hit that. So what if you get diagnosed with diabetes in your mid-40s, which is increasingly happening to a lot of people, specifically obese people?

They're on the hook for years and years. It's just terrible. And, you know, the red state thing, it's a classic situation, right, which is screwing over your own constituents. But unfortunately, a lot of people are just not going to cover the bill. We've spent almost 30 minutes now this morning, Crystal. It takes a while to be like, yeah, your tax code works, private equity, you get carved out. Here's why it matters. Same with the exact vote on insulin. It all just gets bundled up and people don't really spend a lot of time. So that's why I think that we spent as much time on it this morning. I

think it's important for people to understand this. Yeah, I do too. I do as well. And it is a sad state of affairs. I mean, let's just be really clear. Americans are getting price gouged on insulin. The amount of markup is absolutely grotesque. It is more than four times what any other country, OECD country in the world, is paying for insulin. You see at the bottom, the U.S., almost $100. Every other, that line at the beginning, that's $25. Every other OECD country, price of insulin per unit, all of them are below $25. And many of them are significantly below $25, more at like the $10 mark.

And we're paying freaking $100 per unit. Like, it truly is grotesque. It is not expensive to manufacture. One thing I want us to talk about on another day is what Gavin Newsom in California is doing, which is very interesting, is saying, hey, we're going to, as the state of California, we're going to manufacture our own insulin so that we're not subject to that, which I think is a very interesting direction, something that the left is looking at pushing for more and more in addition to like Medicare for all. Why don't we also have direct, you know, public manufacturing of some of these generic drugs to compete with the,

and to try to, try to wring out some of this massive price gouging from the pharmaceutical industry. So really this doesn't make any sense. Okay. Let's go ahead and talk about foreign affairs. There's a lot of stuff that happened in the last couple of days. Let's start with China. So the fallout from the Pelosi trip continues. We brought you guys the news that on Thursday, the military exercises by China, not around Taiwan, by shooting missiles into the water there in a pretty provocative move.

In addition, missiles falling into the Japanese exclusive economic zone, causing a lot of consternation in Asia on the military front. But some of the fallout on the military side between the U.S. and China is especially troubling. Let's go ahead and put this on the screen. So beyond testing in the Taiwan defense zone, Beijing has now both sanctioned Nancy Pelosi, which that doesn't seem to matter as much, but more so is cutting off all talks between the U.S. military and the Chinese military. Now, one of the most important lessons that we learned from the Cold War was to have that ability in order to speak directly, not only leader to leader, but to have military to military discussion at all times. In the military business, it's called deconfliction. So what we would have is to avoid any military air collisions and just military notification, we would say,

hey, just so you know, we will be having an exercise in X region, just so you're aware, your air force and more. If they choose to come around us at that time, that's on you, but it minimizes the chances of some sort of accidental confrontation. And so I mentioned this in our last show, but this only underscores why I think this is so important. Let's go ahead and put this next one up there on the screen, which is that because of this trip, China is actually now expanding its military drills, both in the airspace, in the Taiwan defense zone, in the maritime version, in the missile tests, obviously. At the very same time that they go ahead and cut off our military communications, which again are now reportedly at the highest level. Go to the third one, please. That the top of the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, tried to call the People's Liberation Army and was rebuffed, Crystal.

His answer is call. Multiple calls were ignored at all levels of the chain of command by the People's Liberation Army while this was happening. I just want to remind everyone, this all happened right before 9-11. It was called the Hainan Island Incident. I mentioned it a little bit in the last show, got overshadowed by 9-11. Basically, we had an E, I forget exactly what it was, a US reconnaissance aircraft that was flying. I think it was in the South China Sea. And a Chinese aircraft, and he came, and he was being very aggressive. Anyway, by the way, the facts are very disputed about China, but I'm just telling you the U.S. side.

So the Chinese aircraft basically collides with this. It gets sawed in half. The pilot dies. The aircraft is very badly damaged. It's forced to land on Hainan Island, which is a Chinese military island. So they land there, and now all of a sudden we're in the middle of a full-fledged diplomatic crisis. We have like 20 guys, pilots and more, who are sitting in China who are basically blaming us. They say it's our fault for both spying on them and then for colliding with this aircraft.

They said it was our fault, not their pilot's fault. We required a full-fledged diplomatic crisis by the Bush administration, where actually we had to come to some sort of fake declaration, where the soldiers were put on camera and had to sign a statement declaring that it was their fault, just to get them the hell out of there. And once we eventually did, they were like, no, actually, we didn't do anything. Anyway, that was 2001. That was a very different China. That was at a unipolar moment of the United States. And they still were very aggressive and held our guys hostage, quasi hostage for a little while. Well, what has come out of that since the lesson is we need to have communication with the PLA to make sure that we don't have any of these midair collisions, midship collisions, any sort of aggressive

behavior in the China seas, because these types of things can escalate to a much bigger military confrontation and diplomatic crisis. Think about Francis Gary Peters in the Soviet Union. We want to avoid these types of situations. Look at Brittany Greiner right now. We want to avoid this stuff at all costs. And so for them to cut off military communication with us over this visit, it's dangerous. And look, there's no, I'm not a China appeaser. I think anybody who's watched me for years would know that. I have no problem, quote unquote, standing up to them. My problem with the Pelosi trip, as we repeated over and over again, there was no strategy behind it. She just want her to go specifically for this reason. The Biden administration didn't want her to go. President Biden ultimately didn't feel like he had what it took in order to basically just say, no, you can't go. And then she goes over there for no discernible reason and has now ignited not only a diplomatic crisis with China, but now having military ramifications. I mean, who knows when they're going to pick up the phone again? These are important. Another thing that we didn't actually cut here, but we had to cancel one of our nuclear missile tests in order to just say, like, hey, don't worry about it.

It's all good. You know, we had a scheduled Minuteman 2 nuclear missile test that was going to take place out in California. And part of the reason that it was canceled was because the Pentagon chief literally can't get in touch with the PLA to try and tell them, hey, it's got nothing to do with you. So they just went ahead and canceled the test. So we have all kinds of downstream ramifications now that have happened as a result of this trip. And the only question is like, OK, was it worth it? Like what exactly was accomplished by this trip? What did you gain? Congratulations. Like you showed that we're strong. Like it's so silly. It is really just it was an absolutely reckless and foolish move on her part. And the fact that it was so broadly supported by both parties also tells you a lot about where the foreign policy consensus in the United States Congress is.

And it's not just that they've ghosted our defense secretary and are not communicating directly military to military. They also have said they are going to stop cooperating in eight different key areas, some of them that supposedly Nancy Pelosi cares a lot about, including climate change. So a few of those are not only defense, but narcotics control, transnational crime, and climate change. So listen, the other power in these scenarios always has moves that they can make as well. And I also think it's very illustrative of the way that the U.S. sort of approaches foreign policy in general, because, yeah, ultimately, like China is very responsible for how they decide to respond and the fact that they're deciding to go, you know, over the top with these war games of the sort that we haven't seen since the 90s and that they're deciding to sort of sanction Taiwan in these specific ways.

They also decided to directly sanction Nancy Pelosi. I'm not going to cry about that one. But and to, you know, decide not to cooperate in these eight key areas. Of course, they ultimately are the ones that made the decision. But we can't act like we're blameless here. Like, this wasn't a predictable outcome from her deciding to go when they were very clear in saying, this is not acceptable to us. Like, this is a red line. This is screwing up what you've said you're committed to over decades and decades and decades. We don't like it, and we did it anyway. So one thing that I have become very concerned about in thinking about this, and there's actually a great interview with Lyle Goldstein, who's the director of Asia Engagement and Defense Priorities that's in Jacobin Magazine right now, is I really don't know that – well, I do know.

The media is not doing a good job of laying out just how risky this ultimately is and what a precarious moment we're in right now, locked in this proxy war with Russia. So we're already thumbing our nose at one great power in terms of Russia and directly saying we want to defeat them on the battlefield and continuing to send billions of dollars in weapons shipments, adding countries to NATO, all of those things. So we're already doing that. And now we're basically picking a fight and sort of provoking another great power that is, you know, has way more at stake in Taiwan and cares way more about Taiwan than we ever will. What I like about what you're saying, too, is, you know, that both the hawks and the doves agree. They're like, this is a lot more dangerous. You know, we've had Bridge Colby on the show. He's a mega hawk on Taiwan. And what will he tell you? He's actually

very against a lot of our Ukraine intervention, specifically for this reason. He's like, look, I am only concerned about what's happening in the Asia Pacific. I do not believe that our military is ready for it. The doves will tell you the same thing. There is like a horseshoe theory going on where everybody, I think, can at least agree. I mean, this is really my orientation, which is that I think that focusing all of our problems on the old world while we basically ignore 50% of the world GDP out in the middle of Asia, when I see the cutoff of communication between us and China, I've spoken about it with Russia, it's not even close to the same level of stakes. And that's why I just, the media does a terrible job of communicating what the closure of the Taiwan Strait would mean, what closure of the Straits of Malacca would mean, what the fall of

Taiwan would mean for the United States. Like, these are astronomical. Like, you think it's bad to pay $1.50 more per gas a gallon? Like, imagine not being able to buy any consumer electronics. Imagine having no more cars. Like, imagine literally, I mean, also, Russia is, you know, you call it a great power. I mean, it's one-tenth probably the military and economic strength of the Chinese. But, like, we're literally just casually risking nuclear confrontation with two countries, significant countries right now. That's insane. I mean, you just look at the fact that you're like, what in the world are you thinking doing this? And yes, Pelosi maybe decided to do this on her own, but it is a major failure and a huge humiliation, honestly, for Biden

if he didn't want her to go and he couldn't bother to get on the phone with her and say, do what he needed to do and say what he needed to say to get her to not go. This has completely scrambled their policy. To your point about the Cold War, listen, I have a million complaints about the way that we operated during the Cold War, but there was a strategy. There was thought. There was a visceral understanding among the public and among our leaders of what the stakes were, what the risks were. There was intentional communication. There were intentional, ultimately, agreements that were come to try to avert the worst of the worst potential disasters. Now, I just feel like we're just sort of bumbling around this thing casually. You know, I feel like going to Taiwan. Let me do that. It's the end of my career. Let me go there. There seems to be no intentional strategy or real understanding of what the stakes and what the risks are. And that scares the hell out of me.

It should scare you. It's actually, you know, Marshall and I are very divergent often. And we were talking about this recently on The Realignment. And he was like, you know, even, you know, from a more hawkish perspective, the biggest problem that we have both, you know, shared with the trip is around exactly what's happening here with the lack of strategy. And Pelosi's just ad hoc going. Think about the days of the Soviet Union. Would Tip O'Neill ever defy Ronald Reagan and just go to the Soviet? Never. It would never happen. Because what happened is that 1948 onward, George Kennan writes NSC 68, laying out the

strategy of containment. This becomes the guiding foreign policy of the United States up until 1991. Everybody had their varying degrees on containment. Obviously Vietnam was a disaster. Then, you know, you had like detente, then you had rollback, all of these different things, but they were within the same framework. We have no framework of prioritization, which actually leads us very well into our next segment. Talk about Russia, where we have the similar bleed over effects.

Why don't we go ahead and get to this, the weapons segment? Yeah. This is a fascinating media story, policy story. The fact that it's actually not a bigger scandal really just tells you a lot exactly about how the U.S. media, who they respond to, and what criticism they have. So a couple of days ago, CBS News committed an act of journalism. They both went to Ukraine and researched, hey, these hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons that are flowing into Ukraine, tens of billions of it from the United States alone, how's that

going in Ukraine? Is it actually going to the front line where these weapons are needed? And here's what they found. Now, keep in mind, this video is no longer available on the CBS News website. And we had to go to kind of great lengths in order to just get a clip of it. But we think it's important because remember now they have since taken it down and say, after criticism from the Ukrainian government, that they need to do, quote, more research. Let's take a listen to the original segment that they aired. In the past two months, we've moved weapons and equipment to Ukraine at record speed. Drones, grenade launchers, machine guns.

We're seeing this incredible, historic flow of weapons coming into Ukraine. Do we have any sense as to where they're going? We don't know. There is really no information as to where they're going at all. You know, all this stuff goes to the border, and then kind of like something happens, it kind of like 30% maybe reaches its destination. 30%?

Are you concerned about weapons getting in the wrong hands? I don't care at all whether that happens. What sort of a unit do you command? Well, I can't say. Can't say? Okay. You know, there are like power lords, oligarchs, political players. One of the biggest targets are convoys like this transporting weapons. Europeans had come to believe that that project of integration had effectively meant the banishment of armed force. All of a sudden, not far from the borders of the EU, was the most significant war since World War II.

Interesting, right? I sure as hell am very interested. Yeah. Well, CBS News since, though, let's put this up there on the screen, has now added an editor's note to their story. Here's what they say, quote, this article has been updated to reflect changes since the CBS Reports documentary was filmed. The documentary is being updated. James Oman says that the delivery has significantly improved since filming with CBS in late April. The government of Ukraine notes that the U.S. Defense Attaché Brigadier General arrived in Kiev in August 2022 for arms control and manufacturing or monitoring. So what they point to is that they

basically had significant pushback from the U.S. military and from the Ukrainian government at the airing of this story, so much so that they've gone ahead and deleted that segment. Now, here's the thing. Why did it need to be deleted at all? Whenever they say perhaps it would create a false impression. Listen, if the fact that only 30% of the weapons were getting there in April, that's a good story too. Even if they have improved, there's no indication that they have, by the way. I mean, you'll recall when the massive aid package passed through, Rand Paul said, hey, guys, how about we add an amendment onto this so we have an inspector general to keep track of what's going on here? And that gets voted down in massive bipartisan fashion. So there is no actual indication that arms delivery has improved.

In fact, if anything, there's the opposite. We talked about how the Europeans are raising red flags about these weapons getting onto the black market. But even if it has improved, the fact that it was going so poorly back in April, I mean, those weapons

are all out there now. So that is still an incredibly important story. When I was prepping for this segment yesterday, I went to actually watch the documentary because I was like, oh, this

is really interesting. I want to make sure I have all the facts. I want to see what they say and have the full context, not just this clip. And when I clicked on it, it just went to, like, this page not found. It's crazy. I was like, and the fact that I hadn't seen any commentary online about it either about, like, oh, I can't believe they pulled this thing. I was like,

what the hell is going on here? So that's when we started digging. And sure enough, it the hell is going on here? So that's when we started digging. And sure enough, it looks like the Ukrainian government and the military freaked out and bullied them into pulling the whole damn thing. Now, listen, it is pretty common in media when you have a story that's provocative or contentious or disputed or whatever. Yeah, you add in maybe an editor's note.

Maybe you put, you know, after the fact, we got comment. Here's what they say. Here's their side of the story. But to pull the whole thing entirely is quite extraordinary and definitely not something that they routinely do when it's as long as the narrative fits like the sort sort of liberal view of the world, it doesn't matter if it's blatantly wrong, they'll leave that shit up. Of course. Listen, like I said, it's a good story, even if it's outdated. Just say, all right.

This was the state of play in April. This was the state of play in April. By the way, that's actually very interesting to me, because early April is when some of the craziest fighting was happening. Remember, that was Kiev, that was the Russian military, the pincer movement, the fallback, all the way down back to the Donbass. And that's when we were rushing shipments in like nobody, like literally we've never seen before in history.

The most decisive moments in the military campaign, we're going to be studying that for decades in terms of what exactly happened. So, hey, if only 30% of the weapons were making it to the front line at that time, that's actually quite interesting. So they note that this analyst, Jonas Oman, who is a Lithuanian military expert, the founder and CEO of an organization that was meeting with supplying frontline units, has now since estimated or re-estimated what exactly that is. But just so you know, he won't give you a number. So in April, he said 30% to 40%. Today, he says the situation has, quote, significantly improved.

But he's not giving us— What are we talking about? We're talking about 45% now? We're talking about 50%? What are we talking about here? Even if 25. I mean, 25 is kind of insane. Like, we're one-fourth of all these weapons just going.

And also, I love how they're like, the government of Ukraine now notes that the U.S. defense attache has arrived in Kiev in August 2022 for arms control and monitoring. I'm like, so? Okay. Is he doing anything? So he arrived. Okay. It's August 8th.

So that means he wasn't there until a week ago. So then what was going on in July and June and all these other billions of dollars of shipments? And lo and behold, let's go and throw this up there. Of course, we are now readying an additional $1 billion that is headed over to Ukraine, one of the largest so far. It's munitions for long-range how much pushback you're going to get in the current environment. But at the end of the day, I mean, they went ahead and folded. And I think it's crazy because as you said,

I mean, there's no outrage around this at all. This is a legitimate act of journalism, which the government and our military and their military pushed back so hard that they have deleted, basically like disappeared the entire thing. I wonder if these news outlets pulled their, like, Ghost of Kiev stories that turned out to be total propaganda. Great point.

Did the Ukrainian—and also remember, I mean, listen, it is very difficult to cover a war when, you know, you're kind of dependent on what the government's involved or telling you. In fact, we are more dependent for and understand the Ukrainian side on the Ukrainian government than we are on the Russian side, because with the Russian side, we have intelligence assets. We have a well-developed program to figure out what is the discrepancy between what they're saying and what the reality is, you know, and put your deep state spin on that or whatever. On the Ukrainian side, we didn't have any of those assets developed, so we're more dependent on just whatever the Ukrainian, like, official line is.

And the Times, the Post, whatever, they report this stuff often as if it is outright fact. That goes unchallenged. But the minute there's a narrative that, you know, challenges whether the Ukrainians are, whether this is, how this is all going, whether Ukrainians are as the government, as perfect and noble as they're sort of presented in the press and Zelensky the hero and all that stuff, then they come in and they completely, completely freak out. It is incredibly revealing. Well, it's very upsetting. We're going to continue to try and track this. But look, at the end of the day, the story was spot on in terms of we don't know what the hell is going on over there. And, you know, listen, I can say that the Ukrainian cause is far more just. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have some accountability. They would be nowhere. Their government would be gone and their country would be dead. We're literally without us. So don't we get some sort of a say about what happens with our weapons? And let's say this.

If it was the first time that something like this had happened, you could be forgiven, right? It's 1986. The Soviet Union is fighting. And you're like, hey, these guys, these Afghans, they're good guys. They're just fighting the Soviets, anti-communism. We say, hey, all right, we're going to shoot. And then, oh, these Stinger missiles end up in the hands of some bad dudes and end up being used in the Civil War and the Taliban, and we lose all this military equipment.

And it's 1990. And we're like, all right, you know what? We're going to learn our lesson. That happened before I was born. And we keep doing it, the same thing, over and over again. Afghanistan, then Syria. I mean, Iraq, obviously. You can't even forget that one. Afghanistan, Iraq, then Libya, then Syria, then now this. It's like, when will we ever learn our lesson? As the Rand Paul thing, one inspector, do you know how much we have learned

from the special inspector general of Afghan reconstruction? That guy, John Sopko, he's a hero. I mean, the amount of corruption in America, the U S and Afghan side that he exposed for decades. If you read those, you knew it, Kabul was going to fall. That's why it didn't surprise me at all. Uh, whenever it happened, the, um, Soviet Afghan lesson is also instructive because part of the reason that we threw in with the groups that we did was because they were the most, they were the sort of most ruthless. So that made them the most effective in terms of our cause. We also trusted the Pakistanis to tell us who we should be funneling weapons to. But, you know, I'm also interested in the part of the documentary that they tease there where they've got the guy saying he's not going to tell you what type of unit he's in charge of you know I want to

know more about that guy I want to know more about what's going on there and who exactly these weapons are going to but um it's it's pretty extraordinary that this got pulled and there was nary a peep about it and this was a massive expenditure of resources from CBS News to put reporters on the ground and get all this footage. Very dangerous. I mean, journalists, I'm sure, put their lives at risk in order to get this footage. You could see it, literally. It was in the line of fire. Anytime you have, you know, journalists on the ground in a war zone, this is not just, you know, you're there on your own figuring it out. No, there's a whole team around you and fixers that are involved. It was a very elaborate, costly, dangerous process to gather this footage, and now it's disappeared. And I wonder, do you think they're going to update it and put it back up again now?

I don't know. I bet it's just dead forever. I do think they're going to have to update it just because, well, now that we'll have done a segment on it, I'm just going to assume some others will possibly bring it. Probably going to pick up on it. Yeah. But, yeah, look, it is certainly revealing. Yes. Okay. Let's go to the next part of this, which is NATO. We didn't have space in our Thursday show, but we did want to make sure we updated everybody on the vote. The Senate did go ahead and vote on adding Sweden and Finland

into NATO, 95 to 1. One senator was opposed, Senator Josh Hawley, who had written about that in the National Interest previously. Senator Rand Paul voted present. So this is an interesting, revealing little vote here around actually everything. So I'll go ahead and shred everybody who's involved. First of all, we actually did know. I mean, look, it's like I say, cars on the table, but I'll try and do my best to present both sides of the argument. I was against adding Sweden and Finland to NATO specifically because I think that NATO expansion played a significant role in shaping modern Russia to the point where they did invade Ukraine. Russians have agency.

It's not 100 percent our fault. Please don't interpret anything that I'm saying. That being said, as our China segment, actions have consequences. Understanding the history of Russia, the Russian state, exactly how they felt post-collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Putinism, and why exactly it's popular is interesting. No? You should try and understand the other guy and the other side's argument. It's not just interesting, it's essential. Well, yeah. Great powers, their red lines, what are they? We should know that and we should understand.

Yeah, you could say, like, I think that's indefensible, but you should just be like, I understand that this is a red line for them. Okay, so let's understand that. Then with Sweden and Finland, they historically did not want to join NATO. Both have been invaded by the Soviet Union and Russian Empire many times in the past. However, the invasion of Ukraine said that they pushed them over the edge. They wanted to go ahead and to join. So this, as we noted, I think we were owed a real debate. And by the way, we did not actually get one. We had great debates in this country in the past in terms of foreign entanglements, all the way back to John Quincy Adams, the invention of the Monroe Doctrine,

we shall not go abroad, or there's George Washington, we shall not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. There's always been a long history and debate over how exactly we engage specifically with the European powers, been embroiled with them since the 1700s. And with NATO, it harkened back to some of the original ones like Wilson and his 14 points in the Treaty of Versailles. I mean, there was just a massive campaign in this country after we lost 200,000 troops, supposedly for peace in our time in Europe and more of our peace forever, the war to end all wars and the Enlightenment, you know, bringing on this new age. And ultimately, it was defeated.

And that was really the harbinger of a lot of isolationism, of a change on the European continent, of, you know, many of the points that Lodge raised actually were quite salient and did end up coming true. But my point is, is that we got the debate. Here, we didn't get the debate at all. And I got to say also with Rand Paul, and also Mike Lee, supposedly a libertarian isolationist, Rand, if you're against it, vote against it, man.

Like don't vote. Voting present is such a lame move. I'm just going to say it's so lame. It's one of those things where take a stand, man. If you're willing to take a stand on arms control, fine. Hawley, I personally, I would say to his credit, did vote against the bill. He gave a little bit of his rationale on the floor. Let's take a listen. Some say we can't beat China by retreat credit, did vote against the bill. He gave a little bit of his rationale on the floor. Let's take a listen. Some say we can't beat China by retreating from the rest of the world.

But I'm not arguing for retreat and I'm not arguing for isolation. What I am arguing for is an end to the globalist foreign policy that has led our nation from one disaster to another for decades now. What I am arguing for is the return to a classic nationalist approach to American foreign policy, the one that made this country great. A foreign policy that is grounded in our nation's interests and in the reality of the world as it is, not as we wish it was or not as we once hoped it would be. I don't disagree with a word of that. That being said, there was an objection actually from Senator Cotton, who himself is a hawk, but actually did point out some hypocrisy on Hawley's part. As I said, I'm going to be fair to all sides.

He says, quote, It would be strange indeed for any senator who voted to allow Montenegro or North Macedonia into NATO to then turn around and deny membership to Finland and Sweden. I would love to hear the defense of such a curious vote. And actually, as Cotton points out, Montenegro and North Macedonia are far less strong additions to the NATO alliance in terms of their military capability, their strategic importance to the United States, you know, why they should be in the alliance at all. Personally, I would say all four shouldn't be in the alliance.

But I think that's a good point. So anyway. Well, and listen, if Hawley came out and said, you know, actually, I shouldn't have taken that vote. And here's what I've learned from Russia's invasion. Here's why I look at the world differently than, you know, listen, people can change and they can learn and they can evolve. And he didn't.

I actually read his op-ed and his speech and he did not mention it. And he didn't address it. So I think that's a fair point from Cotton. You know what, I'm – so Hawley is presenting the sort of like right-wing China hawk view of why this is a bad move. So my view and Hawley's view of the world are not the same. What I'm sad to see missing from this debate is the left-wing case against this, which is, as you said, I mean, listen, what we have been engaged in very casually in terms of NATO expansion with little debate and little thought did play a role in exacerbating the Russian paranoia that leads to them invading Ukraine. That doesn't take agency away from Putin. But it does say we need to understand how our adversaries are viewing our actions and then, you know, take that into consideration when we are moving forward with our own foreign policy.

The fact that there was so little debate in the media, on the floor, that there was so little dissent. It really is deeply troubling. I do think it is part of this broader trend of anti-populist sentiment, meaning that we don't trust the people to be handed this information and to really understand the risks and the benefits and the trade-offs because they are many and it is a complex debate. We don't have the media apparatus in place to really help educate the citizenry about what the costs and the trade-offs are. And so we as a handful of elites are just going to decide on something that is incredibly, incredibly consequential and significant. And, you know, in the off chance that we are called through Article 5 to defend these countries is going to have a very direct impact on the

American people. So that's a part of this that I find really, really the most troubling is that this was just presented from the beginning. We covered, you know, the media coverage of this from the beginning was that this was a fait accompli. It was a done deal. There's no need to even talk about it. It was celebrated. It was cheerleaded. There was never any sort of critical look at, okay, but what might the cost be?

What might the tradeoffs be? What might the risks be? How might our adversaries view this as well? Yeah, and that's all I'm saying. And also, I mean, as Holly correctly knows, you know, Finland and Sweden do not even hit 2% of their GDP spending on national defense. So one has committed to do so. The other one promises that they will, but they're not enshrining that into their constitution anytime soon. And I'm just saying, if we're going to nuke a country on your behalf, maybe just step up just a little bit, given that you actually share a border with them. And Glenn Greenwald also points out specifically

what you're saying. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Bernie does not even pretend anymore to have anything resembling a left-wing foreign policy or minimal divergence from the neocon driven democratic foreign policy dogma. Opposing NATO expansion was long a mainstream liberal view. Now only Hawley and Paul will get near it, which is, yeah, I mean, I think he's right. The fact that he did vote for this and, you know, this is what you would expect from him is at least give a justification. But Crystal, I looked, I have not seen a single justification on his part for casting this vote. It is a major departure from a traditional left-wing foreign policy of which he would have espoused even during Russiagate, even in the insanity of Russiagate when he was buying into some of it.

He would at least put, I remember he put in some arms control language into various deals, you know, regarding military cooperation and more. All of that seems to be gone at this current moment. I mean, I think it's too far to say that, like, he doesn't have any semblance of a left-wing foreign policy at this point. You know, he's been a critic on certainly Israel policy in a way that's been uncomfortable, spoken out on Yemen and Saudi Arabia. So to just say the whole thing is just gone, I don't think it's fair. But on this, I mean, there's no doubt on this issue that there was nobody, there wasn't a single voice on the left articulating any of what we're saying here. I just think it's a disservice to the country that we didn't have that view presented, that we don't

have any representatives on the left who were willing to carry that view, and that there also has been so precious little consideration of the massive arms shipments that we've continued to send to Ukraine without an inspector general, with a lot of questions about where the weapons are going, with a lot of questions about what the strategy ultimately is and where it's going to lead. I remember early on, remember Ilhan Omar said something to the effect of like, hey, we should just like slow down and maybe have a debate about this. And she was vilified. I mean, just trashed by absolutely everyone for daring to say, let's slow down a little bit and think about what we're doing. So I guess they very effectively cowed them. Yeah. I'm just going to tie in for those

who are watching this as clips. In our previous clip, we talked about how the U.S. had a strategy in the Cold War. And the reason why that mattered is it was bipartisan. And it wasn't the type of bipartisanship we have today where it was foisted upon and governed as elite. It was actually sold to the American people. So one of the histories of the Marshall Plan and of the post-Cold War strategy is the government and the Truman administration went on a massive public information campaign to say, we know you just spent your sons and daughters to Europe. 400,000 of us are dead. Here's why. Here is how we're going to use your billions,

your money, in order to rebuild Europe, why we think it is better for the United States and for peace in our world. And the public said, all right, I support you. Yeah, we're on board. On 1949, only 17% of the American public was against the Marshall Plan. Do you see such a case being made today on Taiwan, on China? Listen, I mean, I can make a case here, but we're not talking to the entire U.S. popular. I wish we were. But the government and the president have that capability, and yet they don't do so. So even to my friends who are in the neoliberal establishment or may support such a thing, fine, but you need to make a case to people. Otherwise, you actually, you do great harm and risk to the alliance should an attack come. And then there actually is a debate at that time. And if you don't defend somebody on that, then it does actually call into question. It's like London, Berlin, you know? I mean, that's why just willy-nilly doing these things without consideration

for what the democratic, small d democratic fallout will be if you have and do make a mistake. Given that you have no trust, we live in a zero trust society. Our elites have never had less credibility. I actually encourage people, there's a book called The Wise Men, Six Friends in the World They Made. It was written by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson. It points exactly to what I'm talking about, about the architecture, both not only at the elite level, but how the public was engaged in the post-Cold War order. And people believed in it. And there was a debate. And there was, I mean, remember, there was all this

controversy over China and more. And then George Marshall made the case to the American people. And anyway, I mean, we had hearings and they were televised and hundreds of millions of Americans would watch them and they weren't familiar with them. And that age is just gone. Yeah. I mean, you even think pre-Cold War with FDR and fireside chats during the New Deal and also in the buildup to the World War II, because post-World War I, there was huge isolationist sentiment in the United States that had to be overcome in order to go and fight World War II along with our allies. And so he really took this level of sort of measure of respect to the American

people of inviting them in and really walking them, here's what I'm thinking and here's what we're doing. Here's what our needs are. Here's what I need you to do. So that it wasn't, you know, this voice from on high, this is what we're doing and everybody better get on board and there's no other option here. It really was meant to be a sort of ongoing conversation with the American people about what the needs were and where we were going to bring them along and directly make the case. Don't see that anymore. Yeah, absolutely. Not at all.

And do not fool yourself. These are immensely, immensely consequential decisions which are being made casually and with no input from the American people. Yeah, that's right. All right. We wanted to get to – this is actually very interesting. So obviously in the wake of Roe being overturned, one of the things that came out of that is Justice Tomlinson, in his concurrence, wrote that, hey, you know what? Some of these other decisions that we're accepting as like, oh, this is precedent, they should also be overturned. He specifically name-checked the gay marriage decision, and he also name-checked the right

to contraception decision. And so Democrats eventually, after they spent a few weeks sort of spinning their wheels and not doing much of anything and not really having a plan, have decided, hey, maybe some of these rights that they put on the table, maybe we shouldn't fumble the ball this time the way that we did with Roe. Maybe this time we actually should try to codify them, and at the very least, we'll put Republicans on the spot and show how dissonant they are, how much distance there is between their position and where the American people are. So gay marriage in particular has been a big question mark. The bill to codify gay marriage at the federal level passed through the

House with some Republican support. I think it was about maybe a quarter of the caucus that voted for it, which I guess you could look at it as like, oh, that's a lot of Republicans. Or you could look at it as like, that's kind of pathetic that only a quarter of the caucus ultimately voted for gay marriage. But anyway, that's where that is. Big question mark whether or not this thing can get through the Senate. Of course, it requires 60 votes. That means you need 10 Republicans on board, which is, you know, a significant number. Right now, you're at about five Republicans who have publicly said, yeah, we would go ahead and support it. So anyway, Senator Graham, who, you know, would be among those who would be voting for codifying gay marriage, was pressed on his views

on the issue and got very uncomfortable with the line of questioning. Let's take a listen to what he said. Gay marriage, at least that is what Rob Portman wants. He's trying to get enough votes to codify same-sex marriage because Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that it might be in jeopardy. You said two weeks ago that the state-by-state approach is the best way to go. So I just want to be clear about your position. Are you saying that the 2015 Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage the law of the land nationally should be overturned? No, I am saying that I don't think it's going to be overturned.

Nor should it be? Well, you know, that'd be up to the court. The reasoning, I think, could be attacked, but the point I'm trying to make is I've been consistent. I think states should decide the issue of marriage and states should decide the issue of abortion. I have respect for South Carolina. South Carolina voters here, I trust to define marriage and to deal with the issue of abortion, not nine people on the court. That's my view. How far down should I mean, how how wide should that go? How many more issues should we're talking about? Loving versus Virginia that allowed interracial marriage that that shouldn't be touched. No. Here's the point. We're talking about things that are not happening because you don't want to talk about inflation. You don't

want to talk about crime. This is all politics, my friends. Instead of trying to solve problems like understated people having guns, we're talking about constitutional decisions that that are still in effect. But if you're going to ask me. To have the federal government take over defining marriage, I'm going to say no. Wow. Getting a little bit dicey. Yeah. I mean, there's a few things to note there. I mean, first of all, when she goes down the path of, okay, interracial marriage, will that be left to the states? He doesn't have an answer. He has to dodge and just say, we should really just be talking about inflation. This was also one of the critiques levied to Justice Thomas when he wrote that concurrence, which is interesting that you don't.

If you extend his logic, it also would apply to Loving v. Virginia in a very similar way, and that was conveniently left off the table because, of course, at this point, it would be, you know, for most of America, would really be abhorrent to say, oh, we should let the states decide whether interracial marriage is allowed. But what I actually found even more curious about that is that he kept going after the court and we're like, we're not talking about the court, dude. We're talking about the Senate where you're actually a member and you represent South Carolina. Exactly. It's like, so what are you going to do on behalf of South Carolina? And he has nothing meaningful to say there. But also, if you think that the South Carolina state would vote in order to codify gay marriage, then as the senator from South Carolina, why wouldn't you just vote for it then?

Right. Look, this exposes a lot of the problems that they have. And it also does show you they're putting them in a very tough position on these votes. And actually, I mean, I think it is actually a very smart political move. It's interesting, too, because, you know, in terms of the politics, this is going to be a real tough one because it does look like a majority of Republicans are probably going to vote against it. However, there is a lobbying campaign on the inside. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Senator Tammy Baldwin, who herself is gay, is actually one of the people who is lobbying hard fellow Republicans in actually

to try and vote for the bill. The most surprising one really to me so far was Senator Ron Johnson, who is from Wisconsin, her home state colleague. But beyond that, publicly had said that he would, sorry, publicly has been very iffy on whether he was going to support this or not. He came out and said that he would vote for it. Now, he is citing his friendship with his colleague and all that. I think it has to do, he's up for reelection in a tough state. Absolutely. This is Wisconsin. This is not Alabama. You know, it's not an evangelical state. Yes, there's a Catholic population, but the Trump voters in those states are far more likely to be pro-choice even than the median GOP voter. Sorry, I said pro-choice. Well, actually pro-choice is not a terrible proxy for these types of things. But if you look at it, you know, especially in

that regard, Senator Johnson and outside of the, you know, the people like Susan Collins and Murkowski who are already on the record and kind of long been for this, they really do have the opportunity, Crystal, to get to the 10 votes. Right now they have Rob Portman of Ohio. I think his son is gay.

That was, I remember that being a thing. Yeah, he was, I think, the first one to say that he would sign on to this. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, but also Tom Tillis of North Carolina. That's also an interesting one. And remember this, Senator Tillis actually just won re-election. So it's not like he's doing this for political benefit. Or maybe he is.

Because, I mean, didn't Obama win North Carolina in 2008? Yeah. Yeah, it's a red state. It was close with Biden this time around, too. Yeah, exactly. It's not a 30-plus Republican state. Right. And I think that's the way to say it. So when these guys who are in these in these states where you're only winning by plus three, plus five, even up to plus seven, they're in a bit of a difficult spot. And it's actually going to be interesting. I mean, you know, Rubio came out and said that it was a stupid vote in order to be taken. But listen, I mean, it's not like Florida is, uh, it's not, it's like the reddest state in the world. I'm not saying that Republicans aren't winning right now. It's probably anywhere between R plus three and R plus five. But I would be fascinated actually to look at the polling in the state of Florida. I haven't seen anything by, uh,

Ron DeSantis who said anything about this either on the state level, which also is usually—I think he's very much at the forefront of these things, and he's a good, you know, like, tea-leave reader as to how these things are going to play, and he hasn't said a damn word. Good barometer. Yeah, I mean, it's a good thing to track. Some 70% of Americans at this point support gay marriage. Yes. So if you are opposed to this, you are very much out of step with where the American people are. And as you said, even if they managed to cobble together

10 Republicans to get this thing across the finish line, you still have the overwhelming bulk of the caucus voting against where the majority of the American people are. And this is one where, you know, at this point, most people have accepted. They know gay people, lots of gay people. They know

people who are married who are gay. They know, you know, this is part of their family, part of their friend circle, part of their community. And so to have this be such a difficult issue for the Republicans at this point is really very telling. So the senators who have said they're on board right now are Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Lisa Murkowski, Tom Tillis, and Ron Johnson. Tammy Baldwin, who, as you said, is kind of leading the outreach here to Republicans, has said that privately at least five other Republicans have given her assurances they will also support the bill when this is brought to the floor sometime after Labor Day. And we also actually just got the news this morning that Schumer is saying we're going to bring this to the floor in September. So it really is, there's some drama around this because a private assurance is very different than going on the record in the press with the media and saying I'm there. And there's also a question of, you know, and this gets into some of the Senate mechanics,

will they also be on board with the vote to bring it to the floor, to get it past cloture? Or would they just be on board with if it gets to the floor, then I guess I'll ultimately vote for it. It has clearly put Republicans in a very difficult spot. And the Rubio excuse is, to me, so silly and so transparent. Like, okay, let's say you really think this is a waste of time, even though you have a Supreme Court justice out there right now saying, actually, I think we should overturn this.

But it's not like you saying you're not going to vote for it is going to keep it from coming to the floor. So, all right, just don't focus on it. Cast your vote, say yes, and move on to focus on whatever the things are that you think you should focus on, not to mention the Senate wastes time on all kinds of dumb bullshit all the time.

I was going to say, so if Republicans control the floor, then I guess you could make a time argument. Yeah. But they don't. So it's like now you're just a senator who's in the minority. You're just, I mean, it's just very, you can tell it's Weasley. You can tell they're trying to dodge. Same thing with Lindsey Graham and that thought that we showed. He doesn't want to answer directly. He doesn't want to say directly what he thinks about it. He doesn't want to say directly, like, how this relates to other Supreme Court decisions, like interracial marriage. And we saw this after Row 2. The best argument they could come up with was, like, oh, we should leave it to the states to decide.

But then you had a lot of people giving up the game and also pushing for a federal ban on abortion, which is the opposite of leaving it to the states to decide. But then you had a lot of people giving up the game and also pushing for a federal ban on abortion, which is the opposite of leaving it to the states to decide. But then Kansas did, and then they shut their mouths. And then they're like, oh, maybe we shouldn't leave it to the states to decide. It's not like it wasn't predictable, but some of us tried to tell you. Indeed.

Okay, let's talk about our favorite. This has been just sticking in my craw all weekend. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Liz Cheney, her primary, is coming up. She's cast to lose in a historic degree, but she's going out with a bang in terms of being fettered by the national press. And this time the national press – look at the language they use. The one-minute ad landed with a bang on social media. Dick Cheney excoriates Trump in an ad for his daughter. Here's what he opens the ad. He goes and he casts it and says that is why Wyoming voters, of which he used to represent, should come out and vote for Dick Cheney. And this led to some of the worst and most cringe crazel that exists, both by MSNeney now. It's frying people's synapses. They don guys. Actually, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, no matter, by the way, no matter what

you think of Trump, literally no matter what, were obviously way worse from an authoritarian perspective. Well, how about just even on the metric because the pushback from the Lizzo, well, they didn't try to steal an election. No, they didn't try. They succeeded. They actually did it in 2000. They overthrew a country called Iraq,

which is really bad. How about that? I mean, when you think of our trajectory of national decline, you could place it with a few people, but there's a pretty strong case to be made for Bush, the tax cuts for the complete failure of that response, which really, I mean, was a moral, I mean, just devastating in terms of the lives lost and the families that were destroyed and the communities that were, I mean, it was horrific. And it also, I think, nationally really scarred us in terms of our own confidence about our government's ability to show up and perform in these situations. So, yeah, I can think of a few people who were a greater threat and actually created much, much worse harm, and that's not to whitewash the Trump era whatsoever and how horrible he was. But for this dude to come out and lecture, give me a break. To Willie Guy's point there about, like, oh, progressives are confused.

To the extent that they're confused, like you have your network to blame. Yeah, that's true. Because you all are the ones who elevated all these people and like as long as they were opposed to Trump, then now suddenly they're heroes and giving Nicole Wallace like, you know, primetime slots and all of that stuff. Like you all are the ones who created that confusion and didn't make it so that people could understand like Bush and Cheney and those, that crew were bad and actually helped pave the way directly to Trump. And yes, Trump is also bad. That is not a hard thing to understand. It did not have to break people's brains. You all did that. Congratulations. And also it's like, oh, this is a powerful message from a Republican.

I'm like, guys, if you cannot at this point in American politics, understand that Dick Cheney is not a mainstream Republican. Like what Republican, like what profession are you in? Like why are you lying to people? And when Liz Cheney loses by historic degree in the Wyoming primary, now they're saying that she's going to be running for like Wyoming. They're like this may be – Liz Cheney heads for a loss, but she's not done. It's like, OK, what's next? She says she's going to be a Republican. By the way, she also came out and said she wouldn't even support Rhonda Sanders. I'm like, okay, then

you're not a Republican. You're just a Democrat. By the way, that's fine. It's okay in order to switch parties in this country. Or just say, like, I'm not affiliated with the current mainstream. Instead, she has, like, mounting this quixotic, you know, thing in the media, which is all fake. It's like, why can't you just give it up? And then to have the press, just like they did with W. You remember W in his, what was in the funeral speech or whatever? And he was like, we see threats here at home. They're like, President Bush makes a historic, you know, historic denouncement of Donald Trump. And then what we covered on our show, you know, is whenever he slips up and he's like, to have another country unprovoked invade Iraq. He's like, I meant Ukraine. That is what is worth covering. It's like, I just feel

like I'm taking crazy pills. Well, the sign of how broken brains are is that Liz Cheney's approval rating is higher with Democrats than Republicans when she on every issue is right wing. I mean, she's almost consistently uniformly on the far right, voted with Trump, you know, however many percent. She's very reliable in terms of being a very conservative senator. And so the fact that Trump was interested in making the divide all about Trump, but also MSNBC and CNN and these other places played into that as well, where the only thing that mattered is where he stood on the issue of Trump. That's what helped to create this sort of brain disease where someone who is as far right as Liz Cheney could be loved more by Democrats and would be completely rejected by Republicans ultimately because they made it all about where do you stand on the figure of Donald Trump. So it is interesting. I wonder what her next play is.

Could be a media play. She could also get a seat on the board of like Raytheon or whatever. She's got options. I just wish she would go away and the Cheneys. I mean, listen. Just leave. Look, I do think on the issue, like I dissent from the idea that it didn't take any courage to stake out the ground that she did with regards to impeachment and January 6th and Trump. I do think that that was courageous and clearly it had direct political costs. But the

idea that Liz Cheney is some sort of hero, that Dick Cheney is some sort of hero because they were right on this one particular thing, that does not erase the sins of everything else that they did, especially the sins of everything that Dick Cheney did. I think that's correctly said. That's right. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, everyone, the media and the public health establishment are at it again. So I feel compelled to revisit the topic of monkeypox, which on Friday was officially declared a public health emergency by the United States and the CDC, opening up billions of dollars of funding to combat the disease, and heightening the debate as cases spread, how do we contain it? Now, before I start, I think it's important to review the facts as they are. To be clear, once again, monkeypox is a smallpox variant emanating from Africa. It induces pretty severe illness in those that get it. From what we have seen so far in the

West, it is fatal in very rare cases, but it is unpleasant enough and viral enough, dangerous to those with worse comorbidities, that we should do everything in our power in order to contain it. All current evidence from the study after study in the West confirms the same transmission vector. The vast majority of monkeypox cases are occurring amongst men who have sex with other men. I say this with no judgment. It is simply a fact. This is mere fact and transmission vector has of course now ignited a massive debate amongst the public health establishment who find themselves so captured by woke ideology, they seem unable to actually just admit the truth and are igniting mass panic. They are also risking gay men's lives and beclowning themselves even more after COVID, which many did not even think is possible. Best on display is in

the debates happening right now amongst public health officials at the CDC and in major American communities that have large gay populations, where they are having a vicious debate whether to recommend to gay men to limit their number of sexual partners in the time being. Now, this is peculiar for a number of reasons. Number one is why should it be a debate literally at all? As we know, transmission overwhelmingly occurs between gay men. Transmission also appears to be concentrated in clusters traced back to group sex events. In such a case, the solution is clear, as they literally admit, quote, Public health authorities typically emphasize safer sex over abstinence to prevent the spread of diseases that happen through intimate contact.

Standard operating procedure, any disease that spreads through sex. You tell the public how it transmits, you issue guidance. If people want to heed that advice, that's on them. At least they have the information. But somehow, because monkeypox spreads amongst gay men, it's different, according to these folks.

According to the California state officials who are actually heading up monkeypox response, quote, if people want to have sex, they're going to have sex. He adds that he knows people will normally go to sex parties who will not. People will make their own decisions about their risk levels. Now this is interesting, is it not? This official is saying that with monkeypox, it's okay to admit that people will assess their own risk levels and make their own decisions.

The city of San Francisco, for example, declined to shut down a gay fetish festival in the city where they suspected group sex would occur. Instead, they disseminated information to attendees on how monkeypox spreads. To be clear, I support this messaging and this approach. I think people are free to put themselves at this risk if they want to, as long as they know what the risks are and the information. But, and this is the biggest but, compare this to COVID. The public health establishment asked all Americans to undertake overwhelming lifestyle interventions, pulling kids out of school, staying home, shutting down our economy. We refused to admit for a single second it was okay to let people assess their own risk levels

and instead demand that Americans wear masks for nearly a year, even after they got a vaccine. So consider how much you were asked to do to prevent the spread of COVID. But now, apparently, when a disease is overwhelmingly affected, a so-called marginalized group, then we all have to get very sensitive about language and have to be mindful of their advice. Consider this. At the height of the pandemic in June of 2020, the New York City Department of Health put out a guidance for its millions of residents to practice safer sex. That included wearing a mask, not kissing, and not engaging in any intimate relationships with people.

They literally had no problem advocating for both safe sex and abstinence in the case of a respiratory disease. They didn't even think twice about it. But this disease, which overwhelmingly spreads through sexual transmission, is not getting the same treatment. All anyone wants in this country is just to be treated equally. Gay men are adults. Like all adults, they deserve to be treated the same, without some ridiculous notion that by acknowledging basic facts around this disease, that it will somehow turn the entire U.S. population homophobic overnight. To see the contracts in real time is just stunning. It gives zero confidence that the public health establishment can ever, and I really mean ever, be trusted again in our current lifetime. Be watchful of how they are handling themselves as monkeypox continues to spread, because the more they set

the standard that different subgroups of the population are somehow treated with more sensitivity or care than other different standards, what we can tell other people to do and what not, the more they're going to shred credibility in the future. And I can be sure of this. The next time they tell us what to do, by default, it's just going to be no, or prove it to me, or I don't believe you. And that's just not a good place to be as a country. I just think it's incredibly hypocritical, Crystal, the way that they're handling it. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as we have been discussing in this show,

it looks like the Biden-led Dems are set to score a victory, finally bringing the worst parts of their caucus around to at least doing something to address the needs of the American people and the mounting toll of the climate crisis. But how big is that victory exactly? To hear the media tell it, this is monumental. It's landmark. It's historic. It's the best week ever. In a week, Biden went from left for dead to the most consequential president in a generation. So let's take a closer look at what exactly we're talking about here. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act will hike taxes on corporate America. It will improve the IRS's ability to hunt down wealthy tax cheats.

It will reduce carbon emissions through a basket of measures. It will maintain Affordable Care Act subsidies and, at long last, allow Medicare to negotiate some prescription drug prices. It will also use some of that increased revenue from tax hikes to reduce the deficit. Now, the overall impact, it's relatively modest. The biggest spend and impact is on climate, and here is how Ryan Grim breaks all of that down. He says, in a world in which this bill becomes law, the energy industry will still be tilted toward fossil fuels, but clean energy will be competing on a much more even playing field. The clean energy banks and the tax credits will bring in private investment that is many times the sticker price

of the public spending. In that world, there is a chance that technological progress will make clean energy cheap enough it drives dirty energy out of business. And there is also genuine hope that innovation around capturing and sequestering carbon and, say, turning it into rock underground can make a dent in atmospheric concentration levels. Putting public money behind these kinds of efforts at least gives humanity a shot. Listen, certainly having an outside shot is better than no chance at all, which is the reality of the status quo without this bill. But it can only really be celebrated as a big win in comparison to the nothing that it looked like Democrats were going to achieve through the reconciliation process. In effect, Manchin won and Sinema won. They demonstrated so thoroughly that they were happy to torch it all and burn it

all down to please their donors that everyone basically decided, what are you going to do? You got to give them precisely what they want. In other words, this was not a negotiation. It was a hostage situation. But it's never a fair fight when you actually care about doing something decent and the other side just literally does not. Remember, the original idea for this bill, back when it was billed back better, was much closer to being accurately called transformational. And it was still far from what was really, truly needed for the American people. It had a much more sweeping green energy plan. It also had major new social spending to support families, children, elders, and architect a new era of labor organizing. Bernie has done a good job throughout the short period of debate on the Inflation Reduction Act, reminding us all of

just how much has been lost and how inadequate the Biden agenda actually has proved to be. In particular, he was derided by his colleagues for pushing for provisions that every Democrat allegedly supports. Here they are in creepy, orchestrated unison, proudly proclaiming they will vote against things that they like in the name of Democratic Party unity. Then, when it came time to vote, Bernie had the audacity to offer some of these provisions as amendments, including expanding Medicare to cover vision and hearing, something that is wildly popular, also cutting subsidies to big oil, and extending the child tax credit. Now, take the child tax credit as just one example. This, again, is allegedly backed by every single Senate Democrat. Yet Bernie was sneered at on the floor by his supposedly progressive ally,

Senator Sherrod Brown, who urged his colleagues to stand united against doing the thing that, again, they all pretend to support. Madam President. Senator from Vermont. If I could ask my friend from Ohio, why would passage of this amendment or getting 48 votes on this amendment bring the overall bill down. Madam President, Senator Sanders, the arrangement in this is all 50 Democrats support this. We know every single Republican has voted against the child tax credit, not once last March, but twice. But we know that this is a fragile arrangement, and we've got to pass it as much as I want. Senator from Ohio, all time has expired. Come on, Bernie. So, you've got essential needs of the American people left on the cutting room floor because reasons.

It's also worth remembering that some portions of this bill could have been accomplished, and in more complete fashion, by Joe Biden himself acting alone. So, as we discussed earlier, Kyrsten Sinema, she extracted her pound of flesh before agreeing to this deal by fully protecting the Carrie Dindra's loophole that benefits some of the worst Wall Street ghouls on the planet. She is obviously terrible. But what do we say about a president who could completely close this loophole all on his own and just doesn't?

This analysis that's up on the screen now from 2016, this was under Obama, but this still holds true today. Biden could instruct his Treasury Secretary to close this loophole right now, something that would be good and also hugely popular among all but a very small set of very wealthy and very well-connected individuals. Instead of doing anything on carried interest, Sinema instead subbed in a provision for a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks. That is the disgusting practice corporations have become addicted to in recent years, where rather than invest in their workers

or innovation or product, they just buy their own stock in a kind of pyramid scheme that juices their stock prices, rewarding their wealthy execs, investors, and themselves. But you know what's better than a 1% excise tax? Returning to rules which were in place before the Reagan administration, which banned stock buybacks

altogether. Something, again, Biden could also do all on his own. And that's, of course, to say nothing of student debt, marijuana legalization, canceling the contracts of union busters, hundreds of other actions that he could use his executive power to accomplish. A similar story of gaslighting and failing to live up to the hype could be told about all of the other so-called landmark legislation reporters are now pointing to as evidence of Biden's transformational presidency. A guns bill, which is unlikely to significantly curb gun violence. An infrastructure bill, which still won't even fully update our infrastructure. An attempted industrial policy through the CHIPS Act,

which leaves workers to be exploited, and now a climate bill, which also contains a bunch of oil industry Easter eggs. They're all better than nothing, but they're also not even close to what they're being advertised as. You add them together in a tweet or on a cable news panel, it sounds pretty impressive. FDR, LBJ, Biden, they're basically the same, right guys?

But as I've long said, Democrats and Biden do not have a messaging problem. They have a reality problem. And this bill, along with the rest of the Biden accomplishments, leave far too much of our present reality intact. Yes, the bill's a net positive, but it is a long way from redemption for the listless Biden administration. And I'm sure you have seen these tweets. I've seen like hundreds of these tweets. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com.

Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We had a guest cancellation, unfortunately, but we will have somebody for the show on Tuesday. We really appreciate you guys sticking with us. It was a really fun show today. We got into a lot of policy, which is the area that we absolutely love the most.

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