Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/1/22: Trump Investigation, Biden Messaging, Midterm Races, Life Expectancy, CA Policies, Big Pharma, & More!

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Krystal and Saagar examine the Trump investigation, Biden's agenda, midterm senate contests, Jackson Mississippi's water crisis, WaPo losing money, life expectancy dropping, California's progressive policies, & Biden's healthcare provisions!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 John Abramson: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/sickening-john-abramson?variant=39935390089250 Opening: [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big breaking news this morning. So we have some big developments in the Trump-Mar-a-Lago raid. There's actually a major hearing scheduled for today. So we'll give you all the context and backdrop of that. The government kind of dropping a bit of a bomb this week, taking a very aggressive stance. So a lot

to look at the tea leaves with that. We also have President Biden scheduled to give what he's billing as a major primetime address about restoring the soul of the nation, returning to some of the talking points of his presidential campaign. What does it mean? How does it fit into the context of the midterms? And we have some news with regards to the midterms in particular. We had previously sort of previewed for you this Alaska special election race. There's a lot of nuance and like strange dynamics there, including the fact that it was conducted by ranked choice voting. But Sarah Palin ended up being defeated by a Democrat in Alaska. And this is an at-large congressional seat. So this is a statewide election,

long time since a Democrat has won one of those. So we'll give you all of those details and what, if anything, it actually means. We also have new polling and new dynamics in the Pennsylvania and Georgia Senate races that we will bring you as well. Also wanted to update you on what is just a completely unconscionable situation unfolding in American city, Jackson, Mississippi, the capital of that state. The residents are without water for the indefinite future. Their water system has completely broken down. There is no end in sight. There is no money on the table to, like, fully fix the problems that they've been having for years and years. It's insane.

I mean, in America, a whole city, American city, without drinking water, that is safe. It's flint all over again. It really is. We've covered Jackson before, too. It's just, it's really, really sad to see this. It's so disturbing. It is so disturbing. And then we also have some news on the media front.

Washington Post apparently not doing too well in the post-Trump world, one of many media organizations that's kind of struggling to find their footing without the President, President Trump in the White House. We also have a return guest, John Abramson, who is an expert on big pharma, to talk about our healthcare system. But before we get to any of that very exciting news, we are adding a new show to the Breaking Points channel. It is called CounterPoints with great friends Ryan Grimm and Emily Jaschinski. Go ahead and put it up there. Boom! Look at that graphic. We love our graphics team over here at Breaking Points. Those are some good-looking people right there.

They are fantastic-looking people. It's going to be every Friday here. It's going to start on September 16th. It's going to be their own show, their own little modified version of the set, podcast feel. I think you guys are really, really going to enjoy it. As we said, we were going to announce this after Labor Day. However, somebody, I won't say where, leaked it to the press that this was going to announce this after Labor Day. However, somebody, I won't say where, leaked it to the press that this was going to happen. And so through our negotiations, Crystal, with this

reporter, we are announcing it here today because he's going to report it later. I mean, it's a little bit flattering. It is slightly flattering, I guess. There's not much interest in it. And, you know, obviously they've been hosting together over at The Hill, on Rising. They've been doing a Friday show together, which, you know, I think they've had a really great dynamic. And I like the combo of the two of them. Obviously, Ryan has great sort of like first, you know, reporting, breaking news that he is going to be able to platform for us all the time. Emily is a wonderful sort of commentator in general and cultural commentator and comes from the libertarian right. So they have, you know, it's a left-right dynamic, but a little bit of a different left-right dynamic than we have.

I think it'll fill in some gaps maybe that we have. And, you know, people have been asking for a Friday show. And, you know, we've been wanting to do it. And obviously it was all a question of scale and money and all of that. And so thanks to everybody who, you know, the premium subscribers, they enabled us to fund fully the thing, the graphics package, the studio, the staff, Emily, Ryan, and all of that. And so thanks to everybody who, you know, the premium subscribers, they enabled us to fund fully the thing, the graphics package, the studio, the staff, Emily, Ryan, and all of that. So I just want to say again,

like, thank you guys so much to enable this expansion. And I do think everybody's going to get a lot out of it. Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited to see what they do with it. You know, we really, really encourage them

to make it their own. Obviously, like Breaking Points was, we designed it custom to sort of play to our strengths and what we're comfortable with. They're interested in taking a little bit more of, like, having a little bit more of that sort of podcasty, laid-back feel, but it's going to be delivered to you just the same way that our show is delivered to you

on YouTube with the clips is one version. There's also the free audio version. Then, of course, for premium subscribers, you will get the entire uncut version in your inbox every Friday. Yeah. So, counterpoints. And what's the start date? Remind me.

September 16th. September 16th. It's actually the exact same day as our live show in Atlanta, which is sold out, just for the record. Just so everybody knows that. Thank you all very, very much. Yeah. I'm pumped. They're going to do a great job.

We've watched them. Obviously, you know, we both brought them in individually at Rising because we're like, hey, I think these people can kind of fill in for us. And they've made something their own. I think it's really cool. And yeah, I'm excited to see how it goes. In a certain sense, it's kind of getting the band back together because these were two of our always on the panel, always like stalwarts on election night coverage and all of that. So this has been part of our plans for expanding into the midterms and making sure we have sort of complete coverage. And also, as you said, Sagar, we'll get some different ideological diversity with the dynamics of the two of them. So super, super excited.

Cannot thank you guys enough for making it possible and making this happen. So let us know what you think about the show and let us know what you think about the expansion because at the same time, The Washington Post is scaling back. We'll get to that later. Yeah, they are scaling back. They're struggling. Not so much here.

Don't forget though, as we said, if you are interested in applying to become a partner manager, which will help Emily, Ryan, and all the other partners and the expanded universe that continues on from here on out, we've gotten a great number of applications.

Fantastic. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Jobs at BreakingPoints.com. As we said, need a little bit of production experience, but we'll consider people from many different backgrounds and all of that. So put that in there. And now you get some insight into why we're here right now, because this will be sort of the dedicated producer for that show in particular, but also to help us manage all of our partner content and make sure we're getting all of the syner also to help us manage all of our partner content and make sure we're getting all of the synergies that we possibly can out of our little universe that we're building here. So keep that in mind. And thank you to all of those who applied. It is

going to be a very difficult decision figuring out who it is because we have some wonderful applicants. Yeah. Some of you are too qualified. Oh man, this is insane. It's actually very flattering. So thank you all so much. Yeah, it's exciting. Exciting stuff. All right. So let's get to the news in the Trump-FBI-Mar-a-Lago-DOJ saga here. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. The government, as part of an official sort of legal filing this week, pushing back on the Trump team's efforts to secure a special master for this case. As part of that rather extensive filing, I'll get more into the details now, released this photo, which is quite explosive. It shows a lot of one secret and a bunch of top

secret documents, at least the sort of, you can see the cover sheets of them, strewn across the floor. This appears to be in Trump's office in Mar-a-Lago. Kelly O'Donnell says the DOJ filing submitted tonight includes a photo showing the obvious classification markings on documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. Also, LOL, in the corner of the photo is a bunch of Frame Time magazine covers. Classic Trump. I saw those in Trump's office. I saw those in the Oval Office, so some things have not changed. Yes, so classic Trump. Trump, of course, responding to this quite aggressively. In fact, his whole world seems to be very upset about this photo because it is quite damning to see all of these documents laid out that he had kept in his possession even after his lawyers had attested the fact that they had exhaustively searched for everything and turned everything over. Here was his initial reaction.

Go ahead and put this up on the screen. He says, terrible the way the FBI during the raid of Mar-a-Lago threw documents haphazardly all over the floor, perhaps pretending it was me that did it, and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see, thought they wanted them kept secret, lucky ID classified. A lot going on there. I mean, they've been really leaning into this argument saga or his side that, like, this was somehow meant to show that Trump just had these documents laid out on the floor,

but I didn't interpret the photo that way at all. I just interpreted it as, this is kind of standard procedure when you go in and do this kind of search, you document, you know, what evidence is found. So they took this photo and they include it. But yeah, they're like really up at arms at the idea that there's an insinuation that Trump's office is messy. I have no idea whether this is standard procedure or not. I do think it's probably a little bit staged, but listen, I mean, are they there or are they not there? Because I think that's probably all that materially matters in court.

The next truth was like, I had all these documents in a carton. Yes, I have that here. I can read that. It's exculpatory. You're admitting you had those documents. You just had them in a carton as if that makes it better. So late last night, here was the truth. Quote, there seems to be confusion as to the picture in quotes.

Don't know why that's in quotes, where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see as if that's what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong. They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big find for them. They dropped them. Not me. Very deceiving. And remember, we could have had no representative, including lawyers present during the raid. They dropped them, not me. Very deceiving. And remember, we could have had no representative, including lawyers present during the raid. They were told to wait outside.

So as some people have pointed out, Trump is so annoyed about the optics of the photo that he is actually ignoring the legal implications of acknowledging that he had these in his office, which again, I mean, I'm not saying it's appropriate or whatever for the DOJ to do this. I think it was clearly a photo meant to be leaked. Not even leaked to the press. It was just released publicly. Yeah. That being said, skeevy SBI tactics aside, it doesn't matter in a court of law.

The court of law is, did you have it in your office after your lawyer said that you would return them? Because that seems to be the case. Whether or not they were on the floor or in a carton, it doesn't really legally make a difference. But yeah, it's very clear that he was upset and the people around him upset by the optics of this because, you know, pictures do speak very loudly. And so when you just see it all laid out there, I think it is fairly, you know, it definitely sends a statement. And there's zero doubt that the government intended with this filing, which was quite, I would say, aggressive in its language and much less muted than some of their previous filings have been, they clearly intended to speak to the American

people, not just, you know, argue a narrow legal point over whether or not there should be a special master in this case. So that's extremely noteworthy. And I want to get into some of the specifics here. But before I do that, I am becoming more convinced that they are actually going to indict Trump. Because, I mean, what really sort of, from a laywoman's perspective, what really sort of tipped me in that direction is how aggressive this filing was, how much they intended to really kind of lay on a public case here and rebut some of the talking points that have come out of the Trump side. That made me feel like, oh, you know, this is not, this was

not just an effort of like, ah, we got to get these documents back and this was the only way we could do it. It does feel more and more like they are truly building a case towards especially obstruction because that's, and that's part of what has increasingly come out. That's part of what is revealed in this latest filing is, you know, they, there was a messaging coming out of the Trump team that like, oh, we were working with, we were cooperating, we invited them in, Trump greeted them, we said, go and find whatever you want to find. Well, the government very, you know, pointedly sort of rebuts that saying that they were, you know, not greeted as heroes or liberators. That was kind of

indicated by Trump. They were barred from certain areas of as heroes or liberators. That was kind of indicated by Trump. They were barred from certain areas of the building, including that storage room, according to the government. Again, in contradiction to what Trump said. And then it's now been reported that his lawyer, I think her name is Christina Bob, is that her name, is the one who signed that attestation saying that we looked everywhere. We did an exhaustive, diligent search, this was everything we could come up with. Well, then the government in just a few hours was able to come up with far more documents than had originally been turned over as responsive to the government's subpoena. I agree with you, Crystal. Let's go to the next one up there on the screen. I mean, as you said, I encourage you guys to go and read this whole thing for yourself, but the aggression

in the special master case and the laying out consistently, they're basically revealing that the lawyer had signed that attestation, then saying that they found those specific documents in the office. I mean, I guess the only way that Trump could possibly find his way out of this is if he could say that his lawyer lied, not necessarily on his behalf, but that would require her to fall on her sword. Right. But when he makes comments acknowledging, like, I had these documents in my cartons, makes it harder to just pin the blame on the lawyer. And given the reporting that we currently have, whether it's true or not, but nobody involved has denied it, that Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch was telling Trump,

no, you can hang on to these things, that would show a willful knowledge of, I am hanging on to these as I instruct my counsel to say otherwise to the Department of Justice. Now, you can put just prosecution and all that aside. I'm just telling you that the people that I follow, even on the right, who I trusted a lot through Russiagate, Andrew McCarthy specifically, who, you know, if you're a Republican, he was on Fox News all the time. He was very against Russia. He wrote a whole book about it. He wrote an entire book about it, about how it was not just. He is now saying he thinks Trump will be indicted.

Again, whether you think he should be or not, on the way the Department of Justice is behaving, on the facts of the case as we know them now, given the photos, given the attestation, given the filings, it's going to be a tough way to see Trump wriggle his way out of this one. Yeah. Will it still happen? Possible. Possibly. Possible. I don't know. And it's possible, you know. They may never charge him. It's possible the DOJ, you know, just decides like, ah, this is too hot. I mean, that's, honestly, that's, it's pretty clear at this point, that's what the Trump team is mostly betting on.

They're not really betting on any sort of legal strategy because they've been all over the map. They really initially sort of bet the house on this declassification strategy of like, oh, president can declassify anything. So, you know, these documents, I of course declassified all of them, so nothing to see here. Doesn't really matter. And so when that legs were cut out from under that defense, they've really struggled to come up with something that is going to make sense from a legal perspective. You can even see in the response to this photograph that Trump tries on a couple of different defenses here. I mean, at first there was sort of an insinuation of like,

ah, maybe the FBI planted these documents here. We don't know where these documents came from. And then in the very next truth, he acknowledges, no, I had these documents, but they were neatly in cartons instead of splayed across the floor. So they're struggling in terms of a legal strategy. What the effort is today to secure the special master, which we've kind of gone into in detail with you, they're arguing that a special master is required to sort through which documents are subject to executive privilege based on his status as former president. Very murky legal ground there because a lot of people say, okay, well, you're not president anymore. So the person who gets to decide that is the current incumbent administration, but that's what they're trying to argue today. But, you know, as we pointed out before, the government is saying, hey, we already went through all these documents. We had our own filter team go through for attorney-client privilege, something different.

Those documents have already been pulled out. We've already reviewed everything that we have here, so this is kind of irrelevant. The whole strategy, as far as I can tell from a legal perspective on the Trump team, is just to try to slow things down, try to muddy the water, try to throw up as many sort of procedural hurdles as they can. But in terms of a comprehensive legal case, it's not clear to me what direction they're going in. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but just reading the analysis, reading the filings, trying to, you know, evaluate this as best I can, it seems pretty clear the real strategy they're

leaning into is more of a political one to basically say, and this is what Trump, you know, back-channeled to Merrick Garland, like, hey, things are pretty hot. You wouldn't want them to get out of control. Lindsey Graham going on television saying there's going to be riots in the street. So sort of pushing on that button, saying, like, you don't want to go here because it could be really divisive. It could be really dangerous. It could be really explosive in terms of our national politics. And trying to scare, you know, people who are sort of like naturally risk averse, Merrick Garland and other bureaucrats and the DOJs are naturally risk averse people into holding their fire, even though, you know, at this point, it's incredibly clear if this was

anyone other than Trump, they would already be indicted. Yeah. And let's put the final element there up on the screen. DOJ saying, or likely based on Bloomberg reporting to wait past midterms to reveal any Trump charges. Theoretically, they could actually file charges under seal before the election and then unseal it ahead of time. But given the election policy on not to make any cases ahead of a major election, even if Trump is not necessarily on the ballot, that's not something that they are likely to do. So there you go. This was another item that pushed me in the direction of they are going to indict him, because the fact that they're leaking this to the press of like, well, an indictment's not

coming right now, rather than if they really wanted to tamp things down and, you know, indicate like, oh, this is really just about getting these documents back. We're not planning on charging the former president. I feel like that would be getting leaked to these reporters. And the New York Times had a version of this as well. They said something like the DOJ isn't close to charging Trump, also indicating like this will come further down the road. But, you know, it doesn't have any indication they're not going to do it. Just, like, don't expect it right away, basically. At this point, we're all Harry Potter in the tea leaves class. We're all just like, what's going on?

This did push me more in the direction of they're serious about this. I think they're serious. And I even put the DOJ aside, and I look at the, quote, unquote, outside analysts like McCarthy. And, like, when McCarthy says he's going to get indicted, I'm like, wow, that's that, that, that personally was like the most significant one for me. Because people like Brad who you had on the show, like Brad has always been that way. Yeah, he's a resistance guy.

I mean, that's, that is his framework, which we try to be upfront about, even as he is an expert in the specific area. Totally. And, but it's like when I see the skeptics either go silent or start attacking the DOJ over the photo, and then I see the ones who I really trust and I've always thought intellectually honest be, say, or Judge Knapp, you know, we'll talk about that too, who was on Fox, got fired from Fox. I forget exactly why he pissed Trump off. But anyway, I've always liked and trusted Judge Knapp as well. When those two

say an indictment is coming, again, some of the biggest Russiagate Mueller skeptics that existed. Yeah. I listen. And Judge Napolitano is opposed to Trump being indicted, but he's just looking at the case and that's been laid out and what the government is saying and the way they're approaching this. And he was quite clear that he believes that he will be indicted. I'll tell you another thing, just again, as a lay person that seems to me to argue in that direction is Trump's lawyers are now in pretty significant legal jeopardy. And so if you end up with a situation like I feel like it'd be difficult to indict the lawyers, but then let him off the hook. People who don't have any sort of claim of like, you know, presidential protection or we should treat them differently who were pretty clearly possibly in violation of the law here with regards to testing that, oh, yeah, of course we did this exhaustive search and turned up everything we could. I don't know. That to me also makes it more difficult for the government to kind of come up with a case for not charging him given what has come out and what they've laid out at this point. Agreed. So to your point, Sagar, it's becoming more difficult for even Fox News to really fully defend Trump.

Now, he still has his full defenders on Fox News and One America and Newsmax, let's be clear. But there are a few voices who are saying, you know, this is kind of hard to really explain in a way, in an innocent way. Doocy being one of them on Fox and Friends. Let's take a listen. Well, here's the thing. When you look at those documents, can we go back and look at those documents on the floor? Keep in mind, according to the filing, the agents found three classified documents in Donald Trump's desks. What were they doing in the desk? And when

you look at these particular things right here, at least five yellow folders mark top secret and another secret SCI. That stands for sensitive compartmentalized information. These are the biggest secrets in the world. If you know, we've heard that Donald Trump's lawyers went through all the stuff. But how could you go and look at that and not think, you know what, that's probably something I should turn back over. What'd you make of that? I mean, is it deniable? Like what is it? Hard to argue. Can you argue with that? Like, not really. I mean, beyond that, and I think, again, I look at what are the most, I think that there are a class of people out there

who are actually very, very adept at defending Trump really in any way possible. And they always will gravitate to what I would say is like the respectable version. I have not seen that materialize on this case. I'm not saying it can't. Possibly, maybe they'll come up with something. I haven't seen it in court yet. And to the best of my knowledge, Trump and his defenders are going with what Dan Bongino is basically going with and either insinuating that the documents themselves are fake or that it was egregious to just spread them on the office. So let's give people a preview of what that looks like.

Yeah, I love the pictures are showing there, too. Top secret covers, top secret covers are covers. And you're assuming, by the way, taking the I get is a lot of it's blacked out, redacted. I'm not, I'm not stupid, but here's the point here. You know, I dealt with a lot of classified material in the secret service too, like motorcade routes. And in Brian, I've got news for you. After the motorcade route is run and a hundred thousand people saw the motorcade route, it's not classified anymore. I'm not telling you those documents aren't classified because I'm not a leftist media loser who jumps to conclusions. I'm simply telling you those documents aren't classified because I'm not a leftist media loser who jumps to conclusions. I'm simply telling you jumping to the conclusion and assuming the FBI's story and the DOJ that it is classified is equally dumb.

You know, he's basically saying, I don't know if it's classified or not. And his point is not incorrect. At the end of the day, and you actually said this in terms of the affidavit, you know, this is all the DOJ's and FBI's case. That's not how you prosecute in America. In America, the defense also gets to have their day in court. Now, the defense has not put a very forthcoming defense in the court of public opinion. They may come up with something in the court,

but at this point, what Dan is going with, which is basically like, well, I don't trust the FBI. Look, I don't trust the FBI either. Would they outright lie about whether these documents are classified or not? I don't know. I mean, it would be very risky, right, in order to do so because I think they would probably get exposed in a trial. The other thing is that Trump hasn't really denied that they had material that at least was at one point highly classified. I mean, even with regard to this photo, he was like, I had all those documents in cartons.

So he's not, he originally was like, well, maybe these weren't even, maybe the FBI brought these here. Who knew who's to say? And yeah, I don't trust the FBI either. But he basically admitted that, yeah, I had these documents. I just had them in cartons, not on the floor, because he's so triggered by the idea that, like, they made his office messy or something, that he feels like that's a good place. They just don't have a lot to hang their hat on right now, basically. slow things down, muddy the waters, throw out these procedural objections like asking for the special master that's happening in the hearing today. It also is giving the government an opportunity to do things like, you know, put in this, this filing would not have happened if it

were not for the Trump team's efforts to secure a special master. So that created an opening for the government to drop this photo, lay on a very aggressive case, to push back on the talking points that we've been hearing from the Trump people about classification, about how they were, you know, greeted with open arms and they were working very cooperatively and all these things. So they, in a certain way, seem to have sort of shot themselves in the foot by opening the door to let the government put in this filing. So we'll see what happens in the court hearing today, whether the judge had indicated that she was likely to side with the Trump team and appoint a special master, even though potentially it's irrelevant at this point since the government has already gone

through all of these documents. We'll see whether she's convinced by the government's case against doing that. And they basically made the case that, number one, you know, the fact that that would slow down their ability to kind of go through the review of whether national security was compromised by the fact that these documents have been hanging out at Mar-a-Lago with people potentially around who aren't, who shouldn't be seeing that information. So it would slow down that review. And then they also take issue with the idea that Trump even has standing to assert executive privilege and the fact that he is not in the White House currently. So we'll see if she's swayed by those arguments. But ultimately, from a political perspective, it's a different story. From a legal perspective, it seems like

the Trump team is struggling to come up with a coherent, innocent narrative of what's going on. I think you're right, Crystal. And to the political point, there's still a lot going on there right now, too, with Joe Biden. I mean, this is one of the best things that's frankly happened to the Biden campaign in quite some time. Let's start with this. President Biden is very, very happy to not talk about inflation, to not talk about gas, to not talk about the economy, to not talk about the Federal Reserve. All this man has ever wanted to do, and all, frankly, was ever good at, was talking about Donald Trump. And he is returning to his political roots in the latest midterm campaign rally.

Let's take a listen. You're on the side of a mob, on the side of the police. You can't be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection. You can't be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6th patriots. You can't do it. What are we teaching our children? It's just that simple. And now it's sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI threatening the life of law enforcement agents and their families for simply carrying out the law and doing their job.

Look, I want to say this as clear as I can. There's no place in this country, no place for endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place. None, never, period. I'm opposed to defunding the police. I'm also opposed to defunding the FBI. I'm also opposed to defunding the FBI. Best thing that ever happened to Joe Biden, Crystal. And he's running with it all day long.

Let's put this up there. Return to the very beginning of the campaign. President Biden traveling to Pennsylvania today and to give a primetime speech on what the White House is calling a battle for the soul of the nation. Where have I heard that one before? Democracy in peril.

The 2020. It worked last time. Listen, it did work. This is why. Can you blame the man? It's not like he's been all that good at governing. So what do you return to? The greatest hits.

This is what Trump always did whenever he was in the fight for his election. This is exactly what Joe Biden is doing. And the greatest thing that has ever happened to Joe Biden is the supremacy of Donald Trump on the chyron of every news channel in this country, on the top of every newspaper. Because what does it remind you of? Trump. And this, the more we talk about Trump, the better it is for Biden. Two thirds of the people voted for Biden did not vote for him. Affirmatively, they voted against Trump. The more that Biden can turn this as a cast against Donald Trump. Now with the Jan 6 stuff, I generally, I mean, we have a slightly different view. I don't really think it had any real impact, but to the extent that it matters and you pair it then with

the FBI investigation, then again, it just elevates it even more up to the top. And we start talking about things 18, 20 months ago, then what transpired, by the way, in the middle of those 20 months? You know, it's fascinating view of politics because you have these meta political trends, which mattered so much in November with Glenn Youngkin, school closure, inflation, all of that. But the moment Trump comes to the fore, it's just the most insane thing to me is how this man and his personality can dwarf life expectancy, school closures. I mean, the data came out this morning. We have a two-decade reversal on school children learning.

Is that going to be talked about by some of these Republicans on the campaign trail? No. They're going to be talking about Trump. It's like the more that that's all that we're talking about, even Fox, frankly, the more that that is really at the center of mind, the less it's good for Republicans. There's no other way to say it. Well, and also, I mean, schools have been open this year. So we've also, like, COVID as an issue is just not the center of gravity that it was, either for the right or for the left. Very true.

And so, you know, we sort of moved past that cultural moment, which was very beneficial to Glenn Youngkin. I mean, there was there's a new Wall Street Journal poll out this morning that has Democrats gaining and edging out Republicans on the generic ballot, has Biden's approval rating up a bit. And, you know, I think it reflects a lot of things. I think you've got the fact that, yes, Trump is back in the news and reminding everybody why they were anxious to get rid of him in the first place and being the polarizing asshole that he always is and chaos generator that that's what he does. So there's that reminder, which is not helpful to Republicans who wanted to make this a referendum on Biden. So that's one. Number two, I mean, very obviously the Dobbs decision. That really was the game changing moment in this election. All the trends shifted. The vibe shift starts with the Dobbs decision

overturning Roe versus Wade. That gives Democrats something to just hammer the hell out of Republicans on and paint them as extremists. And that ties into their defenses of Trump and January 6th and all of those things all sort of adds up to this view of the Republican Party of like, these people are really out there. And I may not be happy 100% with what's going on. I may feel like the country's on the wrong track, but I don't know about letting these people back in charge either. So that was another piece. And then the other thing is, look, Democrats have delivered on a few things lately. You know, they actually got a few things through. They got the PACT Act, which delivered for veterans, toxic bird pit victims, which has been

long overdue. And they finally got that done. I think that's really significant. The CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and now student loan debt relief, which I think has really changed Joe Biden's fortunes with young people, but also was very important and very popular among African Americans, of course, a key Democratic-based constituency as well. So when you add the focus on Trump on top of all of that, yeah, it has made it so that, and I'm always careful to not overstate the case, it has made it so that Democrats have a shot. Whereas before, there was no shot. They were losing the Senate. They were getting wiped out in the House. Republicans were staring down potentially

historic margins. Democrats in Biden plus 10 districts were out in the House. Republicans were staring down potentially historic margins. Democrats in Biden plus 10 districts were shaking in their boots. Now I just saw more ratings changes come out this morning, shifting more House districts towards Democrats. They've outperformed, and we'll get to this a little bit more in the midterm section, they've outperformed in every single special election. They've outperformed Biden's margin in these districts in every single special election post-Dubbs. So, yeah, I'm not surprised that Biden, who I don't know what, like, drug cocktail mixture they've given him, but he's like a different guy these past couple weeks. He's definitely got a little bit more of something that he was lacking before. Kind of a smart move that they're leaning into this moment.

He's doing the primetime speech. Apparently, there was a memo that was put together by Jen O'Malley Dillon, who is a deputy White House chief of staff in Anita Dunn, a top communications advisor. And they're sort of leaning into this playbook. Biden is expected to trumpet legislative victories that, quote, beat the special interests, smart framing there, and attack the extremism embraced by Mr. Trump and his allies, both strategies emphasized in the memo. So really leaning into, you know, the vibe shift and trying to make the most of it that they possibly can. At the same time, some moves that maybe indicate Biden is, I personally am of the view Biden is running for president again. There are other people who don't agree with that, especially since you add a number of Democrats,

Carolyn Maloney up in New York being like, it's my understanding that he's not running again. So question marks there. But I personally think, especially with his gains in approval ratings, Democrats are going to prop him up, you know, if they possibly, possibly can, because they've also got a Kamala Harris problem of, you know, if he doesn't run, she's the obvious successor. It'd be hard to put her to the side given her sort of trailblazing historic status. So he did file an update, I guess, to his Biden for president committee. Let's go ahead and

put this up on the screen. Initially, reporters really seized on this of like, oh my God, this is it. He's filed for president. The Fox News headline says Biden FEC filing, not a reelection announcement. An official says they were updating the treasurer on this filing is my understanding of what was happening here. But, you know, obviously he will be in a much, much stronger position to run for reelection if they're able to maintain this momentum. And it shows you that for Republicans, I mean, this is the double edged sword with Trump. His people really love him. He still is very much in the poll position to get the Republican nomination actually stronger than he's ever been in his post-presidency. He's never been stronger than right now to win the nomination. And he's never been weaker to win the White House back than he is right now.

That's the problem for them. It will be the problem, as I say, until the day he dies. So, look, we'll see. If I'm Joe Biden—by the way, I personally can't until the day he dies. So, look, we'll see if I'm Joe Biden. By the way, I personally can't stand this whole everything on the dividing line of Trump, but I have to be honest with people. Horrible for politics. We have to be honest with people that this is the stuff that frankly matters. Joe Biden has had a terrible record.

Last couple of months have been decent for him. I mean, look, I should give credit where credit is due. He did pass the CHIPS Act. They have been using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to reduce the price of oil, which is something I advocated for very strongly, and I think it took them far too long in order to do so. They passed the PACT Act. They had the Inflation Reduction Act.

They also had student loan forgiveness. I don't personally agree with the policy, but we'll see how it politically shapes out. So these are things. I think people have had enough. I think people get it. What I would say is action always beats inaction. That's right.

Because inaction, as we know, we had an entire eight-month period where inaction was the status quo and the Republicans were cleaning up. So they have given themselves a shot. They've definitely shot themselves in the foot with Dobbs, but that's really out of control.

The current Republicans, it's been a multi-decade project and we're just living in a whole new world. I think that's a big part of it. Yeah. And you mentioned gas prices going down. That should not be overlooked in the fact that, you know, things are feeling a little bit better for Democrats right now. That's probably as key a thing as any of them. So, and this is, let's go ahead and jump into the midterms segment here. So, kind of pretty big surprising news we got out of Alaska last night, which is that a Democrat won their at-large congressional seat, defeating Sarah Palin, the one and only hockey mom herself. The pit bull.

Yeah, that's right. And I, we covered this before. Let me just say, I wouldn't read too much into this one because there are some very unique dynamics. The number one unique dynamic being that they used rank choice voting. Sarah Palin, and this is a special election,

they're actually going to all be on the ballot again in November. Sarah Palin got the most votes in the initial round of balloting, but she is an extremely divisive figure. So Mary Peltola, who is the Democrat, and we can go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen here, the Democrat to feed Sarah Palin in Alaska's special house election. Mary Peltola, who actually seems to be very good friends with Sarah Palin, and is it Nick Begich, who was the other more moderate Republican? They all seem to be very friendly. The campaign didn't seem to be, like, really ugly at all, which I also think is a testament to the different dynamics and incentives of ranked choice voting.

She sneaks in there because she got the second highest number of votes in the initial round balloting. And then you take the third candidate out, who was this more moderate Republican, and you then look at who picked his voters. Who did they pick second? A lot of them just didn't vote. A lot of them just picked him, and then they fell off. That was it. They weren't going through the rest of these candidates. A bulk of them picked Sarah Palin, but a significant minority picked Mary Peltola. So she ends up then with the edge and beating Sarah Palin with the ranked choice voting system. Now, again, I think the unique dynamics here are

ranked choice voting, number one, and number two, Sarah Palin being Sarah Palin. Very unusual that in a congressional seat you have this kind of well-known, like nationally, internationally known and very divisive figure. But, you know, it does track with the trend of Democrats outperforming in these special elections. It also tracks with the trend of sort of a broader electorate rejecting Sarah Palin was definitely the more Trumpy candidate in the mix. So it does track with that as well. The last thing I'll say about this of why, you know, temper your enthusiasm if you're the type to be inclined to be enthusiastic about this is this term lasts like three months and they have to do this all again in November. So they're going to rerun for the full term at that point. It looks like things are sort of falling into place very similarly this time around. It's the same folks who will be in the runoff on the ballot next time

around. So we'll see how that plays out. But pretty interesting. It's a first time in a long time a statewide seat has gone to a Democrat in Alaska. 1972, apparently. That's a lot. Wow. 1972. So I didn't know it was that long. 50 years. Yes, a lot to say about this. Very interesting. I think the most important one, though, is that ranked choice voting has now kind of been awoken to many people in Alaska. Personally,

I think there will be tremendous pressure on Nick Begich to either drop out of the race next time around or affirmatively tell his people to put her second. And that will probably put her over the edge. But I mean, listen, I'm a fan of ranked choice voting specifically for this reason, which is that it generally moves against the more extreme candidate. Yes, you can have a Trump-style candidate who's got 30% of the electorate locked down, but that doesn't mean that 66% of people should be subject to that person's

extremism and then people give only two choices, and then people actually get somebody who aligns a little bit more with them, if not perfectly. I mean, the best argument for ranked choice voting, in my opinion, is just very straightforward, that you can just vote for, you get more choices, it opens up the door for potential third-party runs, and voters can actually just vote for who they prefer without having to worry about, do all this calculus of like, oh, are they going to be a spoiler? And am I throwing the election of this person or that person? It just gives voters a chance to actually rank. OK, I like this one first. And then if not that one, then, OK, we'll go to this one and we'll go to that one.

And it could really open the door to having more than just the two parties to choose from. Exactly. That's, in my opinion, the best argument. It makes parties more local because then, as we always say, a Democrat in Alaska is not the same as a Democrat in, I don't know, New York City, right? Yeah. But then what happens then is that things become super and hyper-national. Well, now you could have somebody who votes green and then they're not a Democrat. They don't want to be a Democrat. They're more aligned with the Democrat than they are green, but they can put green first, then Democrat second. They can

vote for who they want. Or you could have a libertarian candidate who actually you may think would align with the GOP, but maybe they're socially liberal. So they have their libertarian candidate, but then they vote Democrat for the second person. They may have more culturally Republican one. Maybe they care more about economics, and then they vote Democrat for the second person. They may have more culturally Republican one. Maybe they care more about economics and then they vote culture second. So this gives more autonomy to the actual voter in the general amount of preferences. That being said, I have no doubt Republicans are going to come whole hog against ranked choice voting. They're already saying that the election was rigged and that this is a way in order to attack them. I mean, to be fair, like if you're a MAGA Republican, ranked choice voting is not good for you.

It's not good for you. Yeah, it's not good for you because it's a minority position. You have a very strong, hard base of support in the Republican Party and not with the rest of the general public. So, yeah, it's not good for you, but it is good for democracy and for having more choices. And the other thing that was interesting, this race was, at least as I could tell, so civil, like so friendly. Peltola was saying lovely things about Sarah Palin, how she likes her and she respects her and they're friends

and she hopes to work together. So that is the other part of this, is in ranked choice voting, you have to appeal not just to your hardcore base of supporters, but you've got to convince the other people's supporters that they should rank you second. So you don't want to piss all those people off. So it does just really change the incentives

in how this all plays out. Of course, Andrew Yang and the Ford Party, they've made ranked choice voting, you know, a key part of what they are pushing across the country. That part of what they're doing, I fully, fully support. And it really would change some of the dynamics. Alaska is not the only place that has ranked choice voting at this point. But, you know, it definitely would shift the electoral landscape and make some other things possible that currently are impossible within the two-party system.

Correct. Okay, let's get to a couple of these Senate races. So some significant developments in Pennsylvania as John Fetterman continues to struggle to recover from his stroke with issues, I think with speech in particular, but also he says auditory issues. He has decided not to participate in a scheduled debate. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is from Jonathan Tamari, a reporter that we used to have on Rising all the time. He's a great reporter. Fantastic Pennsylvania local reporter.

He says, Fetterman confirms he won't attend KDK's proposed debate, accusing Oz of mocking his stroke. He says, quote, this is from Fetterman, as I recover from this stroke and improve my auditory processing and speech, I look forward to continuing to meet with the people of Pennsylvania. They'll always know where I stand. Oz team has taken the gloves off on this stuff and are being extremely, I'll just say, aggressive in how they are framing all of it. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So I'll read this whole thing. The Dr. Oz campaign released the following list of concessions it's willing to make. If John Fetterman will agree to debate in one week, Dr. Oz's campaign released the following list of concessions it's willing to make. If John Fetterman will agree to debate in one week, Dr. Oz promises not to intentionally hurt John's feelings at any point.

We'll allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff in real time. At any point, John Fetterman can raise his hand and say bathroom break. If the topic of his pardoned murderers comes up, we'll allow extra time for him to explain that second-degree murder is not as bad as first-degree murder. We'll pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby. And here's a quote. The first debate at KDKA is set for one week from today, but there's been no response from lying liberal Fetterman.

I mean, if I had to defend releasing convicted murderers and not paying my taxes, I'd be pretty worried, too. I guess John Fetterman is afraid of debating Dr. Oz. What did you think of this, Sagar? Yeah, I don't know. It's odd. I have no idea if it'll work or not. I've spoken with some people who are privy to some polls that I'm not privy to, but you never know whether you're being spun or not. They claim that it is working, that internally they see some doubt amongst Pennsylvania voters about his stroke and that

they want to remind people of it as much as possible. I could see it going of two ways. On the one hand, Fetterman cannot claim that you have problems. In his statement, he says, I have problems with auditory processing, but that will not affect my job as a senator. Come on, dude. That is just, stop. There is no chance that one of the most important jobs in the United States is not going to be affected by your health problems. Now, politically, as to whether that matters or not, it's two things. One, which is that with Biden, the attack on age sometimes worked, sometimes it backfired. Yeah. With Fetterman. Here's the thing. I'm just going to say this kindly. People in Pennsylvania, especially the older folks, probably not the healthiest population.

So they actually will find some kinship with John that he has suffered through a major health event. And he actually recently had a rally, a Democratic rally, and he was like, how many of you guys have suffered a health event? You know, the entire room basically raised their hand, which is sad. Sad. I'm not saying it's a good thing. Yeah. This is America. Listen, we have a terrible healthcare system. That's my entire monologue is about today, about life expectancy, specifically amongst older people, fat people, etc. So, everybody was like,

I would, and he was like, can you imagine a doctor attacking you over your head? And everyone was like, oh, boo. Now these are people at a Fetterman rally. You know, you would want to believe that type of politics works. My bigger problem with all this is this seems generally indistinguishable to me from generic Republican positioning nationally. Yes. And that's not why I believe Dr. Oz would be a good candidate in the first place.

And I took a look to see who wrote that statement. And lo and behold, Brittany Yannick, who's the current communications director for Dr. Oz, what was her previous job, Crystal? She worked at the Republican National Committee nine months ago as a comms director for state. This is a pure through and through GOP standard politician. She worked at the RNC. Before that, she was deputy director of communications for the White House under the Trump administration. And before that, she was just some generic replacement level comms director on Capitol Hill in the House of Representatives. So I know these people. They don't have an original brain in their heads.

The lying liberal thing and all of that very much just tracks with generic GOP positioning. If I were Oz, and again why I thought he would be very effective, is Oz was somebody who had a deep emotional connection with people on TV that was born of a positive message. And now people do vote negatively, but there's a way to be positive about the negatives, about bringing ourselves out of something terrible and casting Fetterman as a part of that horrificness. So how it lands, I don't know. I generally have no idea.

Yeah, I tend to agree with you. And putting the morality of attacking someone who's just suffered this horrific health event, I mean, look, it's politics. People are going to use whatever they can use to try to, I think it's fair game. If the guy can't hear properly, that's a problem. Yeah. I mean, that's fine. Make that case. But you know, they're just from a political perspective, I think they are going about this in a very ham-handed way that just feels mean-spirited and makes John a more sympathetic character, then there's a way to do these

and it's not having it come directly from the candidates. It's probably more innuendo and super-pass stuff. Right, so like, okay, so again, putting my sleazy political operative hat on, the way you do it, you leak stuff to the press, you get your allies, you get your attack dogs who are outside of the campaign, So you have plausible deniability. And if you're Dr. Oz, you wear your like Mr. Rogers, America's doctor. Gosh, I'm just concerned for his health. You know, bless his

heart. That's the way that, that's who you are. That's the character you're supposed to be playing. I personally think because the attacks feel so sort of like edge, like they have a hard edge and they're sort of like mean spirited in their approach. It more plays into this idea that Dr. Oz is just kind of this like rich out of touch asshole versus the impression that, you know, a lot of TV viewers over a lot of years had of him. So it feeds more into that narrative the Fetterman campaign has been pushing about who this guy is and what he's all about versus really, you know, causing questions for voters about Fetterman's health. That's my read on the situation that it's not that I don't think the health issues could find some purchase and traction if done

in the right way. It's got to be done a little bit delicately, though, and they have not done it delicately at all. And you see that this is actually uncomfortable for Oz himself. He got asked on a local radio interview whether it's appropriate for his campaign to make fun of Federman's stroke, and he said, the campaign's been saying lots of things. My position is I can only speak to what I'm saying. That's your campaign.

Bro, it's your freaking campaign. Come on. Like, own up to it. Yeah, own it. Or go in a different direction. Like, again, the sleazy, the way you do this effectively is you leak stuff to the press. You, you know, get clips of him that look really bad and you send them to people who are your allies. You get them spread around.

You get the Fox News machine working so that you have plausible deniability and you can remain above the fray. It's not a good look to look like you're just like being mean about somebody who clearly struggled through a significant health event. I'm also a little bit skeptical about how much these health attacks really work because ultimately people care more about like, how do I feel about this person? What's their ideology? Then, I mean, the Biden age questions didn't, that didn't hurt him. John McCain, there were, I guess, you know, I think that did hurt. Do you think so? I don't think that was, I don't think that was the problem for him. I think Sarah Palin was more of the issue for him. So I don't know. I'm a little skeptical of, think of Bernie Sanders. Heart attack and then he comes

back and he was never stronger than, you know, in the primary. I think we should be honest here. Like, Fetterman, look, there are a lot of clips out there, and it's not looking so good. I mean, the guy can't debate because he literally can't speak. Like, that's a big... Well, let me say this, and go ahead and put this next poll up on the screen from Emerson.

So Emerson has Fetterman up four over Oz, 5% undecided, much closer poll than some of the other ones we've been seeing. Recently, I think this is much closer to where this race actually is versus, you know, we saw these polls that were pretty skeptical of it. They were like, Fetterman up 13. It's Pennsylvania. I just don't buy that. It's going to be a close election. And in my opinion, if Oz is able to make a comeback here, which is very possible, very possible, this is still, in my view, a toss-up state, I think it's going to be more about national mood, inflation, gas prices, feeling the country's on the wrong track than, you know, these attempts, which to me feel a little bit desperate about Fetterman's health.

I don't know. I have no idea. As for Fetterman, I think it probably has less to do with Oz and can the man speak by the end of the campaign. I mean, for real. Like, honestly, if I were him, I may take a little bit more of a health break and just try and be as good as possible.

Most people don't pay attention, really, until three weeks before Election Day. So he's got a little bit of time. Apparently he's going to the Hamptons this weekend to go raise some money. Good for him. You know, he's getting himself out bit of time. Apparently he's going to the Hamptons this weekend to go raise some money. Good for him. You know, he's getting himself out there. He did not appear or will not be appearing with Joe Biden scheduling conflicts.

He says, and I always love that. I'm just like, come on. He's unpopular. Just say you don't want to appear next to him. So that's, but Josh Shapiro is, which I also find kind of interesting. Yeah. I don't really know why he would choose to do so, but Fetterman wouldn't. Maybe it's a different poll.

I have no idea how it's going. Yeah. So it's interesting. Nonetheless, yeah. I don't really know why he would choose to do so, but Fetterman wouldn't. Maybe it's a different poll. I have no idea how it's going. So it's interesting. Nonetheless, yeah, I don't know. Personally, I mean, I wouldn't do it. I think it's a very risky strategy. Could it be effective? The people who claim they're in the know say it is. They could be spinning me. I have no idea. Again, I think there's a way it could be done that might be more effective. This, I feel like they're just making him into a more sympathetic figure. And as much as I would like the, like, they won't debate me attacks, I would like it if those attacks worked. I think those attacks should work. I think we should have a requirement constitutionally that candidates have to debate and have to take questions from the press and so that they really have to sort of prove themselves and put

themselves out there. But I don't think it really works. And that actually gets us to our next. Yes. Which is the shoe was on the other foot of down in Georgia, Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock. Warnock, of course, the incumbent Democrat trying to hold on to his seat from a challenge from Herschel Walker. Walker has struggled at times to answer questions very effectively or make himself very clear about what his positions are, what he believes in all of these things. In this race, it's Walker who is trying to avoid having any debates. Here's the latest polling there, which shows it as tight as it could possibly be.

Now, this is from Trafalgar, which is a more right-leaning pollster. They, you know, in some of the states in 2020, they were fairly close. In some, they did overstate the Trump support. But, you know, I take seriously what their polls say. And they've got Walker up by a point on Warnock with 3% undecided. So, again, I think this race is as close as it possibly could be. And, you know, again, Walker sort of struggling to communicate what his views are and how he sees the world and has had some real stumbles and gaffes. The latest one being he got asked actually about his mental fitness and whether he was up to the job. And this was part of his response. Let's take a listen. Personal Walker is still standing. My bike is not bent so anyone can ride my bike like he seemed to

have Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden riding his bike because he seemed to be voting for whatever they say. One thing about me, I represent the people of Georgia. That's the reason I got into this race. I had nothing to do with trying to be a politician because I'm not. So that's what's going on there. Yeah, I mean, listen, I feel the same way I kind of do about Fetterman. It seems skeevy, but look, it's well known that these guys are subject to a hell of a lot of brain injury and that over the lifetime that causes erratic behavior, memory loss, slowness whenever you talk, and a general feeling of like, hey, what's wrong with that guy?

Don't have to say that isn't the case with many people who are in fighters, many people who have been in football over the years, boxers, et cetera. So it seems to be the case. If I were Walker, I wouldn't debate. I mean, after all this stuff, he's got barely a chance in hell. Okay, that's not fair. Let's say he's got a 35, 40% chance. I mean, what would I do? I would just bet like hell on the national environment, try not to open my mouth, get Trump to stump for me and bring out as many Republicans as possible, and then pray like hell that you win on election day. I mean, he's not a particularly good candidate. This is just what you hope for. This is just, that's just reality. I mean, Oz and Walker are kind of the two

emblems of Republican candidate quality issues. But that being said, I mean, he's still got a chance, very good chance. I would put Georgia at a true toss-up. I think Walker actually has a better chance to win in Georgia than Oz has to win in Pennsylvania based on the polling that we've seen so far. And it's not just this Trafalgar poll. There's another poll that just came out that had it basically the same of the two of them really neck and neck within a point or two points of one another. So I do think this is one that's just going to come down to national environment, how people are feeling right then and there. And, you know, I would like it if Canada equality mattered more in these races and, you know, if policy mattered more and all of those sorts of things. But I do

think you're going to see a real national referendum kind of a dynamic. And, you know, I think also highlighting some of these polls shows you, even though we talked a lot today about how there has been a vibe shift, that Democrats have a shot now where they didn't have a shot. But, I mean, even for control of the Senate, which is seen as Democrats are more likely to keep control of the Senate than they are to hold control of the House. This thing is perched on a knife's edge. It could truly go either way. You could have Democrats make gains. You could have them picking up the seat in Pennsylvania, holding what they have, picking up even potentially the seat in Wisconsin. You could have Republicans, you know, not just getting control but being able to surpass that and make significant gains. So it really is as close as it could be. And, you know, now we're going into Labor Day weekend. This is sort of like the

official start of the hot campaign season. This is also when pollsters start to shift from their registered voter models to their likely voter models. Those usually favor Republicans more. So we'll see how that changes the dynamics. But you can see here, none of these races have been put away by any of the candidates involved. Absolutely correct. All right, let's talk about Jackson, Mississippi. This is just a horrible situation. So Jackson, Mississippi, of course, the capital of that state, home to hundreds of thousands of people, is without water. They had significant flooding of the Pearl River, which runs through the city, overwhelmed their water treatment facilities. And this is a system that has been

struggling for years and years. They actually had a winter storm last year that also crippled the system and left their residents without safe drinking water. Now they're in a situation where, you know, at times, not only is the water not safe to drink and you have to boil it, by the way, they've been on a boil alert for a month. This didn't just happen now. And this isn't the first time either. Right, exactly. So not only is that water not safe to drink, at times they just have not had water to the point that, you know, they had to close the university that's based there. They've had to close the schools and they were concerned about literally not having water to fight fires. So state of emergency has been declared.

Governor of that state, Tate Reeves, had this to say about the situation. The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the state's lead on distributing drinking water and non-drinking water to residents of the city of Jackson. So that's from the governor. Now, the mayor of this city, and I think it's worth saying that this is a majority black and highly impoverished city, and the mayor is a self-described socialist. So there's been some tension between the mayor and the Republican government over the years, no doubt about it. And so, you know, for example, at that press conference right there with Tate Reeves, the mayor was not invited to be part of that press conference, which I think is just like petty and mean spirited personally. And also, this has been a problem for the city for years and years, and the state has not given them the

funds to be able to deal with it, which I think is absolutely unconscionable. So here's what the mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, I think is how you say his name. Here's what he had to say about the situation. What our focus is, is a focus on a coalition that works together, a coalition that is arm in arm, making sure that we work towards the residents of Jackson and making certain that we can conclude these challenges. We need an overall, an overhaul of our water treatment facility. In all actuality, a new water treatment facility would be in order because the water treatment facility we have has never functioned optimally and has had challenges from the moment that it was created. So here's where we are. Let's go ahead and put this

Mississippi Today article up on the screen. So as I mentioned before, this water treatment plant has only been operating in partial capacity for a while. For more than a month, the city's been under a state health department-issued boil water notice. It boggles my mind that an American city can go a month on a boil notice and it doesn't even make the national news. That is an unconscionable failure to start with. Add to that the fact that, yes, everyone knew that this problem was going to reoccur. This is not the first infrastructure issue that they've had. It's not the first water issue that they've had. As I mentioned before, they had that winter storm just last year.

And the governor still has not laid out any sort of long-term fix for these issues. So he's saying, okay, we're going to truck in the water. We're going to bring in the National Guard, we're going to get it back online as soon as we can. But in terms of actually fixing the system, still no word. And, you know, some of the questions have been asked here because Mississippi did, Sagar, get a bunch of money from the Infrastructure Act. So what the hell is going on with that? Apparently the city, after that snowstorm in 2021, asked for $47 million to try to get ahead of this crisis, and they were given $3 million. And the reality is the infrastructure bill dedicated $238 million for water infrastructure and only $75 million in this type of funding for the entire state for the year of 2022, the mayor says that it will probably take a billion dollars to fix, to actually fully fix this entire water system. Now, anytime you have a round number like that, you have to assume this is, you know, kind of a back of envelope calculation, but nowhere near

adequate funds have been devoted to this. And then think about, you know, how many billions of dollars did we just send casually to Ukraine? And we've got citizens of an American city who cannot drink the water or flush their toilets. Yeah, it's horrific. Unconscionable. You know, you and I did a, I just checked, March 5th, 2021, it's a crystalline saga. Media ignores Jackson, Mississippi missing water for two weeks. So it's not like people didn't know. We knew. I've been talking about that. I mean, you know, I'm not going to say I've been following the story day in and day out, but the moment I saw it, I was like, oh, I't know. We knew. I've been talking about that. I mean, I'm not going to say I've been following the story day in and day out, but the moment I saw it, I was like, oh, I remember Jackson.

We did a whole story about how they haven't had water before. And this is the same thing. So it's like Flint all over again, right? Flint didn't just happen. It was a multi-year process, a lot of corruption. Nobody ended up going to jail for basically criminality, what, all the way up and down the chain. Oh, yeah. In terms of obstruction, corruption.

Jordan Sheridan has been following closely. Yes, it's completely insane. Jackson, same thing. Won't be surprised. Unfortunately, if this takes years, there'll be embezzlement once the funds actually do reach it. It's literally the capital. Apparently that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, it's just very, very sad.

Ask yourself if this happened in a wealthy area how fast it would be fast. Yeah, and I think that that is always the perfect critique that I'm absolutely willing to go for, which is that, look, from these people have been forgotten. It's been a downwardly mobile area for decades. I remember that whenever we were doing this about how the population continues to shrink, so they have low tax base, which means that they can't fund anything and the city or the state doesn't want to give them anything. And so it just continues to go down, down, down, and down. And no capital of any American state should look like this. But capital aside, no city should look like this. No town, no city, no state.

There's no area. It's indefensible. President Biden, to his credit, has said that he's pledged to fix it. How much actually the feds can do in this case, I don't know. It's not like Obama did a hell of a lot for Flint. Don't get me started on that. He went there and covered for the corrupt administration is what he did. It's not like Obama did a hell of a lot for Flint. Don't get me started on that. Going there and – I mean he went there and covered for the corrupt administration is what he did.

I mean drinking the water and, oh, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Hopefully we can muster a better response this time around, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I mean this is really – it's another sign of who matters and who doesn't in our society. It's another sign of sort of national decline that we had allowed this kind of situation to unfold, totally preventable, totally predictable for our citizens. It's just an absolute, like we should be ashamed as a nation. We should be utterly ashamed as a nation. Absolutely. Okay. Let's move on here. Media story. This one is really, really interesting. So let's go ahead and put it up there on the screen,

which is that it has now been revealed the Washington Post is now not profitable for the first time in years. There's probably the New York Times tear sheet up there on the screen. By the way, what I found funny, Crystal, and the Post people were very upset about this, is the Times not only published this story,

they also did a push notification to everybody's phone just as a little bit of a screw you to their main competitor. They made sure to note in this piece too that, by the way, the New York Times subscriptions have continued to expand. That's very true. And let's actually go into the numbers because this is fascinating. So the Washington Post is losing money in 2022 after years of profitability. The Post has now fewer than 3 million paying digital subscribers than it had hailed internally near the end of 2020. And the Post fell to roughly $70 million in revenue for the first half of the year, 15% lower already than the first half of 2021. All of this is ascribed to what? No more Trump, no more good for business. And the truth is, is that the news media, the news media business in terms of politics,

has been suffering now for two years, accepting us truly over here, of which I'm actually incredibly proud of. The reason why is that all of these companies have effectively had to turn to non-news sources to make money. And the Post thought that people cared so much about Trump, specifically these liberal resistance types, that they would continue to pay for actual information whenever he was gone off of the page. All of the democracy dies in darkness branding and all of that did not save them whenever Trump ultimately disappeared, at least for a while, off of the American political

scene. And he's back, so maybe that'll rescue them. Maybe it will. But that ain't something that you should be betting your entire business model on. What really comes through in this article is a couple of things. Number one, you guys will remember Felicia Somnese's gate, which is that the Post, for some reason, just seems to have a very tough time

asking its employees to do something and them complying. So they have a policy where they want their people to come into the office three days a week. But apparently, huge swaths of their reporters are like, no, I don't want to do that. I support that. I mean, sure, you can support it if you want, but I think it's crazy that the boss is so afraid

of firing or even reprimanding these individuals, he won't do it in written form and wants it called because he doesn't want it to get leaked. But also, that's not really the problem for the post oh totally people aren't in the office enough i mean that's part of the issue like that comes through in this thing is like this dude is focused on all the wrong things he's measuring like how many meetings they're having and stuff as if that's the problem uh with the washington right now. Also, where's Jeff Bezos' brilliant business acumen? What's going on here? Why isn't he intervening to come up with a better business model for these people?

That's actually a great question. Yeah, I mean, because this is under his watch that has gone from being highly profitable to not. So they weren't profitable whenever he bought it, and it became profitable. His whole idea was that we will create a back-end system of which we can license other papers. I think it's made some money. I don't think it's made a hell of a lot of money. I think it makes more money than whenever he bought it. It had been losing money for a long time.

But, yeah, it's true. I mean, at the end of the day, what they point to is, like, Bezos basically lost interest. He's like, yeah, whatever. And, you know, every once in a while, he used to apparently log on for a weekly meeting. He doesn't do that anymore. He's hanging out in Saint-Tropez. You know, who amongst us isn't doing that? So Bezos lost interest in his vanity project. Dismantling bridges to get a super yacht.

Owned it for nine years. Yeah, he's retired from Amazon. He's been hanging out with his girlfriend and taking Instagram photos. So that's what his priority seems to be. He no longer really cares about the reputational laundering. And he apparently has made it known that he's not very happy. Now, what that means is that they are looking to fire a hell of a lot of people at the Washington Post, which is certainly something in the 2022 age, just considering the boom that these people experience. And I think Josh Barrow had a really interesting write-up. Let's put this up there on the screen. He says, digital revenue dies in drunkenness. Really what he points to is that the Post, at the end of the day, refused to pivot to lifestyle type content,

which floats these quote unquote news organizations in the downtimes. And he points to the New York Times buying Wordle. The New York Times, people don't know this, they make more money off of their subscription for cooking, for crosswords and games than for news. The crossword and the cooking section floats the reporters, not the other way around. It's a lifestyle brand. Now, that's a problem politically and socially, personally, I think, you know, with everybody thinks having a time subscription like makes you a better person. I listen to the daily. I'm so informed everybody thinks having a Time subscription, like, makes you a better person. I listen to The Daily. I'm so informed. But from a business perspective, great idea, right?

Add on NYT. People are obsessed with that New York Times cookbook. I mean, I think it's fine. I don't really get why. Those podcasts have been very successful, too. Podcasts have been a boom. They've got documentary deals, I think, with FX. That's right.

But they're very entrepreneurial is what I'll say. They understand that they're a lifestyle brand. They're willing to lean completely into it. They know that their wordle-paying subscribers are people who would never even read a Maggie Haberman piece at the time. And they don't care because they'll take your money either way. Also, they make it very difficult to cancel, which I think is hilarious. You have to call. Oh, really? Yeah. They won't just let you cancel your membership. So they have all kinds of way of locking people in and upselling folks as well. But the Post thought that people would pay for only political news. Well, unfortunately for them,

only political news, that's really just not that much of a differentiated product at this day and age. If the Post wanted any success, their democracy dies in the darkness stuff would have had to pivot exactly like the Times did to gaming, to crosswords, to cookbooks, to podcasts. They haven't been able to do any of that. Yeah. Well, and that's what Barrow points to is like, you know, I thought it was a no-brainer for the Post to buy Wordle. Yeah. And then New York Times swoops in and does it. So it's sort of basic business sense, like putting the politics of it aside, you got to diversify. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. And they clearly did. They thought that the resistance surge in news subscriptions was indefinite, that it would just grow and grow and

grow, that it was all that they needed to bet on. And as cable news is finding as well, that's just simply not the case. Now, all that being said, as I mentioned before, Trump's kind of back at the center of everything. So never know. May work out for them still. I probably will, which makes me sad because I don't want Bezos to win. But I will enjoy watching. What I enjoy here is the sanctimony in which these people think of folks like us and, frankly, anybody who's not in the establishment media is unbelievable. And to see them and be able to point to the next time I ever run into them when they're trying to lecture me is like, yeah, how's your business doing? You know,

at the end of the day, it's about what people want and people don't want you. And I think that's a very profound statement. So anytime the market actually does align and show these people that, you know, becoming ideological is actually not good for business, even for the times. I mean, the fact that you have to float your news organization on cookbooks, that's kind of embarrassing. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but that's not how it was envisioned. I would edit that a bit. I don't think the problem is becoming ideological. I think the problem is becoming blinded by partisanship. That's great. That's a good idea. Values, principles, being honest about those things and what's going on with regards to that. I don't think that's an issue. I think the issue is that so much of their coverage just focused on this one individual. And, you know,

as much as like the cult of personality around Trump is like disturbing and authoritarian and reminds you of North Korea, the opposite of that was equally pernicious and gets back to what we were saying about Trump as the dividing line in our society is a very bad thing. And it made a lot of reporters buy a lot of stories, buy a lot of lies, propagate a lot of lies that ultimately destroyed their credibility. And then once that guy is less central to our politics, well, guess what? You remember their Mueller book, their book that they sold all across the country, the Mueller report, illustrated. Yeah, the graphic novel. I should buy that for the show.

Oh, that's a great idea. They need some money. Maybe we'll buy it for them. We'll help them out. That's a great idea. You're so charitable. Okay. All right, sorry, what are you looking at?

Well, the most stark metric that exists in a civilized society is this. Are we living or are we dying? It sounds trite, but it became a given in the Western society after the Second World War that life expectancy would just simply rise over time with technological progress. More technology, more pills, more medical breakthroughs, longer life, right? Well, for a while, that mostly did hold throughout the boom years of the U.S. economy. But a darker story started to take hold in the mid-2000s, as the heart of America began to slowly erode. It took a decade for the consequences of Iraq, the financial crisis, globalization, and the slow-rolling opioid crisis to finally manifest in data.

The very first hints at what was happening showed up in 2015, when for the first time in many years, life expectancy in the United States declined, just slightly, 78.9 years to 78.8. Yes, it was a blip, but it was a flashing red light to people who read just a little bit further, and they realized that the age-adjusted death rate in the U.S. also had increased from 724 deaths per 100,000 to 733 in 2015. That year is when everything started to accelerate. Most people didn't even take notice in 2015, and it continued with business as usual. But then in 2016, in the middle of the 2016 election,

where the opioid crisis became a flashpoint in the data, it shocked the entire world. Life expectancy in the United States officially declined 78.9 years to 78.8 in the course of one year. The worst part was that the deaths especially rose amongst those aged less than 65. Cause of death was up across the board. Alzheimer's, respiratory disease, kidney disease, diabetes, opioid-related deaths, and sadly, suicide. From that point forward, same headline every single year. Life expectancy declines again and again. One of the most realizations was the prolonged trend of life expectancy decline was the worst the United States had seen since 1918 and World War I.

That was when we had the Spanish flu, and that was in 2017. That was the first year where data from the drug overdoses rose so starkly, and they counted amongst the main causes of death for people under the age of 65, on top of systemic health effects I already mentioned. Now, the reason I'm taking you through this history is because it's important to set the table before COVID hits. Before it happened, we were already not just sick, but deeply sick, the sickest as a nation in 100 years. And then came a disease that disproportionately killed the unhealthiest amongst us, the fattest, the old, the sick. We then responded to that disease with policies that exacerbated

other causes of death, skyrocketing opioids during lockdown, as well as massive increase in alcohol and drug abuse and obesity. The butcher's bill is now in full view, and the results are heartbreaking. U.S. life expectancy between 2020 and 2021 dropped by three full years in the United States, the largest two-year sustained drop in over a century. Now, of course, the pandemic was a big part of the drop, and that's what the media is focusing on. But when you dig deeper into the data, you see an acceleration of the multifaceted picture. The pandemic disproportionately killed the old and the sick. That was a given. The acceleration, though, of terrible health

conditions and substance abuse is just as big, if not a bigger story. The major non-pandemic related causes of death include heart disease, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, accidental death, drug overdose. Consider all of those. Every single one has been accelerating in Western society over the last two decades. Heart disease afflicts the obese. Liver disease and cirrhosis, major sign of alcohol abuse. Accidental death and drug overdose, of course, driven by fentanyl. Crisis all across the country. In fact, for young people, amongst whom the decline is accelerating, the cause is even more stark. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for people in the prime age of their lives, from 18 to 45. Previously, it was thought to be simply accidental deaths, like car accidents.

The reason it's important to understand this slow-lowering catastrophe is to reject any media framing of this phenomenon. It's not the pandemic. The trends were already here. The pandemic wiped out the most vulnerable amongst us. But there are a hell of a lot of people who might have survived COVID but are on their way to a coffin a lot earlier than they should be. This will be the central fight for our civilization in the next 20 years. pointing to the fact that life expectancy also dipped in 1993 because of the AIDS crisis. The facts, though, of course, show that life expectancy was well declining ahead of COVID. If it had to bet, I would say 2022 will only continue to bear this story out, as will 23, 24, and years and years to come. Societies that find themselves in this predicament rarely come out well. Already, the data shows over the last several years, it is those at the lowest socioeconomic end of the spectrum, uneducated men specifically,

who are dying at a much faster rate, while the life expectancy in the top 5% of American income not only increasing, but is almost 90 years old. Just think about that. The gap in sheer life lived between the richest and the poorest. Inequality isn't just about money. Just think about that. The gap in sheer life lived between the richest and the poorest. Inequality isn't just about money. It's about our very lives. Now, as venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan points out, the Soviet Union also saw a precipitous drop in life expectancy right before its demise, when life expectancy for men in the Soviet Union fell from a high of 65 years in 1987 to 57 years in 1994. In fact, further analyses of Russian life expectancy shows that in the years leading up to the Soviet collapse, for the last few decades, life expectancy was creeping down. Life expectancy is one of those figures which

does not care about your theories or individual proclivities. If it's up, things are good. If it's down, things are bad. But to move forward, the hardest part is we have to not only acknowledge it's bad, but then dig really, really deep to fix it. Trends like these are so big, they actually feel like a Goliath. The reality is, though, you can turn it around. 76 years is not great for life expectancy, but it's still pretty damn high. Drug overdose accelerated have over a decade. That means, though, if you do it well and you go for it, maybe you can reduce them over a decade.

Obesity, too, is one that, yes, of course, it's here to stay, no question. But if you throw everything at the wall and you nip it in the bud, especially for the generation of children, then 30 or 40 years from now, we can reap the rewards. If we don't, decline is our destiny. But it is not inevitable. It is a choice. And I hope that we reject that choice.

That's really what comes through. We're sick. It's deeply sick. I mean, to have a three... 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, back in Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address, he famously declared that the era of big government was over.

Well, not exactly correct, given that at least the defense spending part of the government certainly continuously balloons. His words marked the official death of the already decaying New Deal era. and his words affirmed that the new bipartisan era would be marked by privatization, deregulation, stripping the government of capacity, ceding governance to market wisdom, and imbuing in Americans a belief that the government was ultimately incapable of making their lives better. For Clinton and other ambitious climbers of his era, the future was neoliberalism, and they prospered politically on a personal level by placing their bets on deference to business and to the markets. Well, today, another ambitious climber has designs on the presidency and his finger in the wind. After surviving a recall, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, is placing some big policy bets in that state, hoping to use his achievements to launch a national campaign. And so far, although his ambitions are still limited very much by his fealty to the donor class, it is striking what a break the California

agenda is with the old Clinton ways. On climate, healthcare, possibly on labor, California is embracing a muscular role for government and carving out a larger share for labor. Altogether, it could put the Golden State front and center, charting a new left alternative to neoliberalism. And if it fails, well, a lot more people are probably going to move to Texas. So here's what's going on. First off, California might have seen this, is making big moves on electric vehicles. Governor Newsom recently signed a provision into law which would require 100% of new vehicle purchases to be carbon neutral by the year 2035. Now, in some senses, this was an easy one for the California governor,

even though it does sound quite bold, because the public was supportive and industry was also supportive. Automakers were already making aggressive moves towards EVs. The big three automakers here have been working aggressively to secure the necessary raw materials so they can phase in electrics and phase out gas-powered vehicles, with hopes that the former will be made more affordable at scale and with the supply chain kinks worked down.

Now, the new California law, it's going to phase in over time to that full carbon zero requirement. By 2026, 35% of cars have to be EV, and by 2030, that number rises to 68%. The car buying public there is actually well on their way. About 15% of new car sales in California this year in the first quarter have already been electric. I've got no doubt, given sky-high gas prices in the state, that those numbers are going to continue to soar. The state also has the most built-out network of car charging stations, so while that's still an issue, they're in a better position than any other

state in the nation. What's more, California has long set the national standard on car emissions. 15 states have already backed California's move, and about four more are looking to follow suit. When you put all these states together and the market power they command, California's new law may well make EVs the de facto law of the land. Now, there are a lot of big question marks on this policy, though. First of all, will this essentially amount to a tax on the middle class? Today, electric cars are significantly more expensive than gas-powered vehicles. The Inflation Reduction Act does include tax credits to try to make these vehicles more affordable, but more definitely needs to be done to make electric cars a reasonable purchase for far more people.

Second, automakers are facing a massive multi-hundred thousand backlog for these vehicles right now. I personally put a deposit down on EV nearly a year ago before the largest surge in purchases, and I am still waiting on delivery. Can they secure the raw materials and supply chains and workforce necessary to make mass-scale EV dreams a reality? Another big question there. Possibly, though, the biggest hurdle is California's straining power grid. Now, this was flagged to me by Sager. The state literally just put out a bulletin warning of potential blackouts and requesting EV owners not to charge their cars, if possible, due to a big West Coast heat wave. Seems like kind of an issue for their imagined electrified future and a stumbling block for plenty of other states as

well. So that is EVs, but that is really just the start. While California Democrats ultimately punted on universal health care, they are dabbling in public pharma in a way that is quite exciting and potentially quite meaningful. Now, as you likely know, millions of Americans depend on insulin, which, while cheap to produce, is insanely expensive for the American consumer. Americans pay, on average, $98.70 for one vial of insulin. That is ten times higher than the cost in every other country when you average them together. The next highest cost country is Chile, where they pay $21 per vial of insulin. That is 10 times higher than the cost in every other country when you average them together. The next highest cost country is Chile, where they pay $21 per vial. Still a comparative great deal compared to what our consumers are paying. It is an outrageous ripoff, and it's destroyed the lives of Americans, forced them to rack up debt, or skimp on dosages, literally risking their lives. California has announced a $100 million investment in directly producing

insulin to be sold at cost to California residents. Basically a public option for pharma. And frankly, the only downside I see here is implementation. Assuming they can pull it off, I can't imagine the plan will be anything but popular and very beneficial. The only question is whether big pharma finds a way to sabotage or snuff this direction out. As we have seen many times, they certainly have their ways. Such a policy at the federal level could be transformational, given the Fed's ability to use march-in rights to seize patents. Finally, though, the latest news out of California, to me, is the most thrilling.

Thanks to a grassroots pressure campaign from the Fight for 15 movement, the California State Senate just passed a potentially landmark bill, which would institute a weak form of what's called sectoral bargaining for fast food workers. This is a baby step towards full-sale sectoral bargaining of the type in effect in several European countries and at scale could be a game changer, truly, for workers. So to give you the basics here, right now, as you know, workers face a massive uphill climb towards collective bargaining, and the effort must be undertaken shop by shop by

shop. That's what we've been tracking here so closely. Workers at Starbucks stores individually, REI stores, and one courageous Amazon warehouse painstakingly going up against corporate giants and unfair rules to win a union. But that's only just the start. Next, they typically have to fight even harder to win a contract, as companies are only just the start. Next, they typically have to fight even harder to win a contract, as companies are basically allowed to stonewall, throw up objections, fire people, and drag their feet indefinitely. Now, in sectoral bargaining, as is indicated in the name, the bargaining happens by sector rather than store by store by store. So, in the California example, workers across the entire fast food industry would benefit from the wage and working conditions set at the state level by a 10-member board with representatives from both workers and from industry.

They'd be permitted to set the wage floor as high as $22 an hour, and the sector standards would apply to all workers at fast food chains with at least 100 locations nationwide. Now, here's the caveats. First and foremost, Governor Newsom hasn't said that he's going to sign it. So we'll have to see on that one. On the one hand, union support nationally is literally at its highest level since 1965 with 71% favorability. That's incredible. On the other hand, from Newsom's perspective, the donor class, and especially the powerful fast food industry, is in a total meltdown over this bill. So we'll see whether he calculates that public support or donor support is more useful for his future political ambitions. So that's number one. Second, the bill was weakened in the Senate, which prohibited the board from negotiating on paid and sick leave, also struck

a provision that would have made parent companies responsible for the breaches of their franchisees. You want to talk about transformational, though, just imagine if fast food jobs were actually solid middle-class jobs. That would lift standards, of course, for those workers, but also for other workers as their employers were forced to compete as well. Now, it says a lot about the decline of neoliberalism that an ambitious political wind sniffer like Newsom is rejecting the Clintonian mantra that the era of big government is over, leaning into government intervention in key sectors of industry, rejecting in key ways the economic ideology that has dominated for the better part of 50 years.

The politicians, they haven't changed, but perhaps the wins have. And you see this too, we've talked about this some with the Biden administration, like Joe Biden is still the guy. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is Dr. John Abramson. He's been a guest on the show before, and he's got a great book. Let's put it up there on the screen. Sickening, How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How We Can Repair It. So, Dr. Abramson, really appreciate you joining us again. One of the things that I touched on in my monologue today was longevity data about how many deep underlying issues there are in American healthcare. Just as a doctor, as somebody who's studied this in the pharmaceutical angle as well, just expound on that for us. What does this longevity data and the decline in U.S. life expectancy so precipitously. Tell us about our population. What it tells us is that our health care is very fragile and that the COVID epidemic has stressed our health care. But the decrease

in longevity for Americans over the past couple of years is not entirely due to COVID at all. It's largely due to the weakness, not the greatness, of our healthcare system. Get into that a little bit. As you're looking at that data, obviously COVID took an enormous toll on the population, and that's, as you're indicating, part of what's reflected here. But these trends of lowering life expectancy predate the COVID pandemic. So at core, what are some of the other more sort of fundamental issues that you're seeing in this data? Right. So let me just go back and frame the problem. In 2019, before the pandemic ever started, Americans lived 3.3 years less than the

citizens in 18 other wealthy countries. 3.3 years less. By the end of 2021, we lived 5.3 years less. So the COVID pandemic has had a much greater negative effect on Americans' overall health than it has for citizens of the other countries. Yeah. And so, John, one of the reasons that we originally wanted to talk to you was, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act. There's been a lot talked about on the climate change piece, on the financial piece we've covered here. But there was a Medicare part to this as well, which was supposed to address pharmaceutical companies, bargaining, and more. Talk to us about whether any of the provisions in that bill are going to help the

problem or not. Well, let's talk about each of the provisions. The one that got the most press was the right for Medicare to negotiate drug prices. And that would be a real good idea. And it would be a good idea to negotiate drug prices when drugs come out and we find out how effective they really are compared to the previously available drugs. But the negotiation package in the Inflation Reduction Act is not going to get the job done. It allows for negotiation of 10 drugs initially, and then that goes up to 20 drugs, Medicare drugs that are the highest spend drugs. But the trick in this is that the drugs that are available for negotiation have to have been on the market for nine years for conventional drugs and 13 years for biological drugs and not have a generic version coming within the next two years.

So it means that very few drugs that are still on patent are going to be available for negotiation. In countries like France and Germany and Canada, they negotiate the price of drugs on the front end based on the effectiveness of the drugs. But we have no mechanism for determining the effectiveness of new drugs compared to other drugs. And we let drug companies charge whatever they want. In the other countries, they can't charge whatever they want. So we have this enormously high-priced brand name drug business in the United States. And this bill is just going to clip just a tiny bit off of the tail of that hyper-profitable business. And I mean, do you attribute that to the fact that it's, I mean, these companies are very large,

they're very profitable, money is very important in our system of politics. Is that why we end up with such a worse system and with these bare incremental, like tiny little changes that are sold as a big transformative package? Is that why we end up with such inadequate results? That's exactly right. I mean, it's clearly a demonstration of the power of the pharmaceutical industry. But one of the problems, one of the reasons why we end up with this is beyond

pharmaceutical lobbying and campaign contributions and all, is that it's so complicated that the people, ordinary people and doctors can't understand it. They can't understand that the United States is the only country that doesn't have health technology assessments. So docs don't know which new drugs are truly superior. And we're the only country that allows drug companies to charge whatever they want. So two thirdsthirds of the profits from the drug, global profits from the drug companies now come from the United States. And this system not only pulls money away from Americans either out of their pockets or through their tax dollars, but it allows the drug companies to promote drugs that are no more effective than older therapies as if they were.

So it's distracting our healthcare. And this is the biggest reason why American healthcare doesn't perform as well as the other wealthy countries. It's the knowledge that doctors have about the new drugs and their rightful place in therapy that's the problem. And this drug negotiation package, which pharma is squealing like a stuck pig about, that it's going to chill innovation and the pharma industry won't be able to function, it's just complete nonsense. It's nonsense. It doesn't, it's nonsense. This plan out of 1300 new drugs that will be approved over the next 30 years, this plan is going to decrease the number of new drugs by 15, 15 drugs. And only one out of four of those 15 drugs is actually superior. So there's not a chill on an ovation. It's a scare

tactic. Let me ask you about an idea that is being experimented with in California, which I actually talked about in my monologue a little bit, which is they said, all right, these drug companies want to price gouge consumers on insulin. Obviously, this is a critical, essential medicine for lots and lots of people. We're just going to invest $100 million in making our own insulin, creating sort of like a public option for this critical drug. We're going to sell it more or less at cost. If they want to compete with that, good to go. But we're going to make sure the citizens of our state have access at an affordable price to insulin, which costs very little to produce. But the numbers I saw,

on average, a vial of insulin in the U.S. costs like $98. The average in every other country around the world is like $8 a vial. What do you think of that sort of direction of direct federal government intervention into the market? Yeah, or state government intervention. Yeah. I think it's brilliant. Michigan is doing the same thing. So the insulin analogs, which can cost up to $300 a vial, can be made by nonprofits for $35 a vial. The key fact here that's being covered up by the Inflation Reduction Act is that limiting insulin co-pays to $35 is gonna be a good thing for insured folks who require insulin,

who don't have enough money to pay their co-pays. That's a good thing. But the bad thing is that as the California project comes online or the Michigan project comes online and makes $35 insulin, $35 analog insulin, what's going to happen is the drug companies, the brand name drugs are going to say, hey, don't let your doctor shift you down to an inferior generic product when you're doing well on the brand name insulin. Stay with us because it's only going to cost you a $35 copay.

So what's going to happen is that that $35 limit to the copay is going to largely neutralize the market benefits of California or Michigan selling insulin analogs at cost. And the real issue underlying this that nobody talks about, I've got a chapter on this in my book, is that 80% of the insulin that's used in the United States is used by people with type 2 diabetes. And there is no evidence that the insulin analogs that cost $300 a pile are superior than the first generation of bioengineered insulin, recombinant human insulin, which does cost $35, $25 a vial when it's bought efficiently.

And the docs have been convinced through the drug company marketing that they should be prescribing the insulin analogs to their patients with type 2 diabetes. 90% of patients with type 2 diabetes use the insulin analogs when there's no need for that. And I believe that this $35 copay is really a plan to continue to cover up that fact that the doctors have been misled to prescribe the expensive insulin when the far less expensive insulin would do just as well for their patients. Well, this is why we so appreciate your expertise. I'll remind people, if you haven't gone back and listened, Dr. Abramson's appearance on Joe Rogan is an absolute must-listen. You have such deep knowledge of the system, and we're going to keep coming back to you, sir. So thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Absolutely.

It's our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. As we said, we're going to announce it after, but preempted by the media, so be it. Apparently they care so much about breaking points. Ryan Grimm and Emily Jasinski. We have that graphic. Let's throw it back on the screen. Counterpoints, Friday, every Friday. Oh, beautiful. I love it. So nice. That's what it's going to look like. Every Friday, you guys are going to have a big, long, full show. We fully tell them, you guys do whatever you want. Your format, whatever stories you want to cover, that's how it is here at BreakingPoints.

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So look, we're just going to keep scaling things up. It's very, very expensive to do this. So if you mind signing up as a premium subscriber, if you have that ability, I know the economy is tough, but if you have that ability, if you believe in this mission, we deeply, deeply appreciate it. We can't thank you enough, and we want everybody to know that we won't be here for Labor Day, but we will be back. So happy Labor Day to all of those who celebrate, which should be all of us, especially to those in organized labor of who we stand with every day here on the show. That's it. What do you have to say, Crystal? Yeah, I just want to say it is a big deal for us to add a show.

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So yeah, we're really excited. We're really proud to be able to do this and we're so grateful that you have enabled it. So love you guys. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful weekend, hopefully a long weekend for you and we'll see you back here you guys. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful weekend, hopefully a long weekend for you, and we'll see you back here next week.

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