Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/15/22: Railway Battle, Abortion Ban, Inflation Numbers, Midterm Polls, Mississippi Corruption, College Rankings, & More!

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover the potential railway worker strike, Lindsey Graham's proposed national abortion ban, inflation numbers, midterms polling, nutrition facts, Mississippi corruption, corrupt college ranks, & Counterpoints with Ryan & Emily.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/Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/podcasts/deconstructed/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Big news breaking just this morning. It looks like there is a tentative deal to at least temporarily prevent a rail strike or full rail lockout. So we've got some details there and we'll talk to you about everything that is going on there as well. Also, Senator Lindsey Graham throwing the Republican caucus into some disarray, some further disarray by going forward with a 15-week abortion

ban at the federal level that conflicts with some of their messaging. So we've got all the political dynamics and the minor meltdown going on over there for you as well. Also, we have some really actually very disturbing news regarding inflation, which is that the Fed may use these latest inflation numbers to justify a full percentage point hike. But the reason I'm chuckling is also because we have on the same day that, you know, the bad inflation numbers come out and the market tanks and whatever binds out their leg. Things are great. It is one of the most hilarious split screens you'll ever see. Yeah, it didn't work out well for him there. We also have some new midterm numbers, both in the Pennsylvania race, also nationally.

And we have to share with you this video that was shared by the LA Unified School District, which is, I think, the largest school district in the country. One of the largest. I'm pretty sure. Certainly one of the largest. Anyway, they used this lady who was a representative of the company that makes Oreos and all kinds of other junk food crap to use social justice language to try to claim that, oh, all food is equal and eating a cookie is just as good as eating broccoli.

It's so evil. Honestly, there's no other word for it. It is straight up evil. Got those details for you. Sagar is looking into the case of Columbia University fudging their statistics so that they can get a better ranking. I am looking into maybe the craziest story I have ever dug into, which is this massive welfare fraud scandal that involves Brett Favre getting millions of dollars from the state of Mississippi. Again, from the welfare fund intended for poor people. Brett Favre is getting millions of dollars to build a volleyball stadium for his daughter. It's nuts. We also have Ryan Grim and

Emily Jashinsky here. CounterPoints launches tomorrow. They're going to give us a little bit of preview. Very excited about that. And with regards to that, we have a little discount for you. That's right. Okay, 10% off on the annual discount to celebrate that launch and to continue funding our expansion. For all of you who have signed up already, thank you all so, so much. We deeply appreciate it. As we said, look, we know the economy is tough. We're covering inflation here as well. So it means the world.

Many other sources of revenue are, let's just say, unpredictable up and down as to whether YouTube decides how you're doing or not based completely upon a whim. The only people we can ever count on is you. And to that end, as we've said, we're doing another show. Let's put this up there on the screen. Chicago, today is the very last day for pre-sale for premium members. So as we've promised, all premium members always get the pre-sale at least a couple of days in order to buy the best seats in Chicago. It's selling quite well. So if you want to go ahead and buy your tickets, if you're going to be in the area, as we said, this is going to be the flagship Midwest show. So if you are in the area, I highly recommend that you go ahead and buy tickets to this because the odds are we are probably not coming to any other cities in your

vicinity. No offense to all of you. We absolutely would love to, but as I've said, the economics on these things are difficult to figure out. So go ahead and buy your tickets. Otherwise, tickets will go on sale tomorrow to the general public, and we'll have a link in the description on all of our videos going forward. But that's enough administrative. Let's get to the show. Indeed. So as I said before, it looks like we at least have a tentative deal that may, for the short term, maybe not permanently, we'll see, avert a rail strike or a rail lockout. So we've been covering this for a while. Let's give you a little bit of the backstory, and then I'll tell you what we know about the deal. Go ahead and put this first part up on the screen. So negotiations have been ongoing for close to three years at this

point. Railroad workers have been really screwed during the pandemic and post-pandemic because these railroad companies are making record-breaking profits. But they laid off a significant chunk of their workforce, and they're forcing their current workers to really shoulder the burden. What that has meant is that they've had these incredibly onerous schedules, and they don't have things like the ability to just take a day to go to the doctor when they have routine medical appointments. They don't have sick time off. And unlike, you know, a lot of regular jobs, they don't get weekends. So when they're saying we don't get time off, they mean like literally no days off. Incredibly, incredibly onerous schedule. So the railroad labor relations is governed by specific law.

So they couldn't just strike. There's a whole process they have to go through. One key part of that process happened a couple months ago. President Biden intervened with this presidential board. They put together a set of recommendations that was supposed to be a kind of metal ground, but it completely punted on that key issue of time off. So it had some decent wage provisions in it, but on those key sort of quality of life

issues that workers were really stressed out over, it had nothing to say. So that deal basically sided with the bosses, the workers themselves overwhelmingly opposed to it. In fact, there's a number of different unions that represent these workers throughout the industry. So some of the union bosses had said, you know, we're okay with the presidential board recommendations. When the members went to vote, they said, no, no, no, no, we're not. So you had the bulk of workers still saying, we are not satisfied with this deal. And it was really coming down to the wire. The deadline was this Friday. So this was really imminent coming up this week where they either had to strike a deal or then the rail workers would be able to either go on a strike or the carriers could lock them out of their jobs. And there were some signs the carriers were moving towards that.

They already started to slow down certain things, long distance routes, etc. into some of the details of what the purported deal is or tentative deal here is that there is a provision that also allows Congress to intervene to prevent a work stoppage by basically cramming down a contract on both the workers and on the railroad companies. Now, the expectation was that if Congress intervenes, they would probably just pick up that recommendations from the presidential board, which again, basically sided with the bosses and did nothing regarding the workers' key demands and needs. Republicans made a big push yesterday to try to get that proposal through and force, you know, this bad deal upon workers who would then be bound by it legally. President Biden has been personally involved and his labor secretary, Marty Walsh, has been

really leading conversations and talks between union leaders and between the railroad companies to try to strike some sort of a deal. And in fact, this morning, reporting is that there has been a breakthrough. Now, as I said, we know very little about what this tentative deal is. And there's a lot of reasons to be cautious about this and to avoid, you know, premature celebration. Because ultimately, even though this is a deal between the bosses and the union leadership, the rank and file workers are going to have a say. Yes. And they were over, like 80% overwhelmingly opposed to the previous recommendations. So, this would have to be significantly better than what President Biden's board came up with before for them to agree to

that. But at the very least, there's a 60-day, what they call cooling off period, in which they sort of go through the deal, sell it to their members, and the members get to decide whether they're going to ratify this agreement or not. If they don't, then we're kind of back to the drawing board and facing down a similar deadline. Let me tell you what Jeff Stein, who has some reporting from behind the scenes about some of the details here, he says, people familiar tell me the deal does give rail workers ability to take days off for medical care without being subject to punishment. That was a key demand of the unions. He also says that President Biden was personally animated by the need to get this done. Further reporting says workers will receive voluntary assigned days off and single additional paid day off. They previously did not receive sick days.

Let that sink in. And the agreement provides members with the ability to take unpaid days to go to their routine medical appointments for medical care without being subject to attendance policy. So that's what we know at this point. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the coverage coverage of this pissed me off because it seemed as if they were being unreasonable. And I think a lot of people are blackpilled because of the way the teachers unions acted during COVID. Listen, these put these things completely separate as like in crazy teachers unions, uh, being COVID crazy is not the same as guys who were actually

getting fired and disciplined for getting COVID. They had COVID and they were like, I literally either got fired from my job or faced discipline. Same with getting the flu in other cases. I mean, these are not unreasonable expectations. If you don't get a single day off, how is your body supposed to recover? And then whenever you get pretty sick, especially if you have COVID and you need to be out for a couple of days, you actually face a penalty for reporting that when it's not like you want to get your other coworkers sick, like regardless of whether you're going to die or not. It's just very unpleasant to be sick. The other point that I was hearing was, by the way, don't we all remember that crazy rail crash that happened a couple of years ago in which the rail driver was accelerating too often

and apparently was tired on the job and it killed a couple people. Like, do you want somebody who is underslept, no day off, and sick behind the wheel of a passenger or even freight? I mean, I just looked it up. 28% of freight in this country moves by rail. And a tremendous amount of that is not just cargo, like retail goods. A lot of it is like iron ore, steel, gas. I mean, it's a key thing to keep our economy and all that. We're about to get into some of that. But yeah, the demands of these guys was really being overlooked, I think, in a lot of the media coverage. And also the Republicans handled themselves disgracefully in this way, because they were acting as if they were being unreasonable, again, citing teachers unions. I'm like, it's not, not every, obviously not every union is the same but look at the my always

thing is look at the specifics i'm like i think they were acting crazy the teachers unions in this case i'm like i look at this guys are getting sick behind multi-ton freight like that's crazy yeah this is good for no one i mean the thing that I just kept coming back to is because before they struck this tentative deal, the freight carriers were engaging in basically economic warfare, throwing their weight around, trying to. They really their position was they wanted Congress to intervene because they knew if Congress would intervene. And this is what Republicans were pushing yesterday, that they would end up with the deal from the presidential board. Those recommendations, which completely screwed workers, again, did not address their key concerns at all. And we covered it at the time. And by the way, I think it's really important to take a look around at which outlets were actually covering this.

We're covering it accurately. We're covering it before, you know, the last two seconds, and that weren't just talking to, like, whatever is called the Rail Carriers Association or whatever that represents the bosses, but actually had the voices of the workers. I mean, we had Maximilian Alvarez on here this week. He was talking to some of the workers. He's obviously with the Real News. You have the labor outlets, labor notes. In these times, Jacobin had been on top of this story. The mainstream press, they were asleep at the wheel. I mean, they didn't even notice that this was going on until literally two days ago. And then the coverage was so slanted.

They didn't mention in a lot of these pieces, they didn't mention at all what the workers' demands were. They didn't have the workers' voices in their pieces at all. And so the impression you come away with could very easily be like, oh my God, they're just willing to risk the economy so carelessly, when in fact, they've been engaged in negotiations for years and their demands are so incredibly basic and reasonable. And then you look at these companies that are making record-breaking profits. BNSF, owned by Warren Buffett. And you're willing to shut down the entire economy because you don't want to give your workers a freaking paid, like unpaid sick day. That's not, they're not even asking for paid sick, unpaid sick day.

Days that they could go and go to doctor's appointments. Like you're willing to shut down the economy just to keep your workers nose to the grindstone and make sure they are completely just crushed under this onerous work burden. Again, as you are making record-breaking profits, completely grotesque behavior. There is a tweet thread that laid out some of this context that I think is important to remember even as we have this tentative deal. Go ahead and put this tweet thread up on the screen. This is Jeff Shirky I'm going to go with. As the possible rail strike lockout gains more national attention, some important context. Number one, tweet thread up on the screen. This is Jeff Shirky, I'm going to go with. As the possible rail strike lockout gains more national attention, some important context. Number one, bargaining

started in January 2020. Workers have been waiting nearly three years for a new contract. Class one railroads have slashed their workforce by 29% in the past six years while making record profits. So again, they cut their workforce and they're forcing the workers to shoulder all the burden. Presidential emergency board that we've been referring to was supposed to propose a fair settlement to avert a strike. It ignored key bargaining issues. You have the unions that reach tentative agreements based on those recommendations. Two, once they put it to the membership, actually rejected those agreements. That's what I mentioned before. And the last thing he says here is the Railway Labor Act is designed

to prevent strikes. So the fact that it has gotten this far shows you how truly, truly pissed off the workers are. The next piece, this is now a That put more pressure ultimately here on the White House. Let's go ahead to the next piece. Again, this is what I was referring to with regards to the Republican senators. They sought to advance legislation at 4 p.m. yesterday to avert looming rail strike by forcing an acmen of presidential board recommendations if the unions and carriers can't meet Friday deadline. That was blocked by Democrats led by Bernie Sanders. Jonah Fuhrman has been essential. Guys, make sure you follow Jonah for labor reporting. He says he feels like people are not appreciating. Warren Buffett and his friends are shutting down the supply chain to force Congress to mandate 125,000 railroad workers to go to work with no weekends or sick leave. They're not just thinking about doing it. They've already started doing it. This is the lockout that

I was referring to. Norfolk Southern has already announced planned embargoes on intermodal and automotive cargo, even though it's supposed to be a cooling off period. And the potential economic impacts were extraordinarily real. Jeff Stein saying emerging impacts, Amtrak cancels long distance trips, ammonia, fertilizer, ag products pulled from trains, price of ethanol, other products sores, grain shipments could stop tomorrow if rail shuts down our entire agricultural system shuts down. White House has been in emergency meetings all week trying to, this is the next piece, trying to figure out any sort of workaround in case there was a lockout or a strike, working with other

modes of transportation, including shippers, truckers, and air freight to see how they can step in and keep goods moving if rail workers go on strike at the end of this week. But, you know, this is a real education, I think, for some folks about exactly what the concerns were, exactly how unreasonable the companies have ultimately been. Newsmax had a worker named David Manning on to talk to him. I mean, they sort of started their framing as like, oh my God, you can't shut down the economy. He educates them in the segment about exactly what their concerns are. And these Newsmax hosts are kind of shocked about how unfair the treatment is. Let's take a listen to that. David, we did reach out to the Association of American Railroads and they say that workers get sick days and paid time off.

But what I want to talk to you about is what does this mean for Americans if you do go on strike? Well, whoever told you we get sick days is manipulating the data. We get paid time off that we earned the previous year before. Before the new policy came about, we were allowed to take five days off and two weekend days off a month. Now we could take virtually one day unpaid off a month. And then the only other time we could take off is our paid time that we had to earn the previous year. Yeah, that does seem ridiculous. They would never let airline pilots do that. Is that issue number one for members of the union? 100% is number one.

And if we go on strike, yes, it could hurt the economy. It could be bad for society, but we don't want to do that. None of us want to do that. And I know Amtrak's already suspended. We're not asking for the world here. We're asking for a few days off a month to spend with our family instead of living on a train. We spend 240 to 260 hours a month sitting on these trains or sitting at the hotel rooms away from our families. When I leave my house to go to work, I'm gone for at least two to two and a half to three days.

I didn't realize that, David. And then I come home and I'm only allowed to be home for 10 hours. And then I can be called to go right back to be gone for three days. You have a family? Yes. Kids? My kid is 17 years old. Wow.

I mean, that one host actually makes a good point. They would never let airline pilots fly. That was what I was saying about freight. I'm like, you know. This is kind of important. Listen, I mean, we all learn, you know, when we have those two pilots. Well, maybe one. I don't know about the other one.

But for MH370, still a lot of questions about that one. I mean, the guy, you know, literally crashed a plane in the side of a mountain because he went crazy. So we should probably do everything in our power in order to make sure that never happens again. Yeah. And this is probably a key part of it. No, I think it's completely insane. And again, the Newsmax thing illustrates my point, which is that when you try and look at it in the aggregate, you're like, what are these guys doing? They're going to crash the economy.

It's just like the railway strike of 1946. No, it's not the same in any way. The dude laid it out perfectly. He's like, listen, I'm not gone for three days. I come home for 10 hours. I can't take time off whenever I get sick. And the time off that we accrue is based upon the previous year of work, which means if you start your job right now, and this belies, which is that this is very important to the entire economy. So you should pay people. Well, that's obviously, I mean, commiserate to your value, you should get paid.

And the problem right now is that the Union Pacific and the railway companies are making money hand over fist. In fact, I pulled the economic data before this. Crystal, they're spending billions of dollars buying back their own stock. Yes, they are. Dividends, paying out massive dividends for their shareholders. In fact, Union Pacific, for example, with a dramatically lower workforce, is making 85% more profit than it did in the year 2000. So consider that. They're making 85% more profit with a lower workforce and paying out even more to their shareholders and to their dividends and buying back their own stock.

So take even a couple percent of that and you can afford what this deal is. Just to show you how unreasonable they really are being. Completely, completely unreasonable. And most of the complaints here, obviously everybody would like to get a raise. And I think if memory serves correctly, they haven't gotten any sort of a raise in years, which is ridiculous again, given the profits that these freight carriers have been raking in, especially during the pandemic and post-pandemic. But it also shows you that a lot of the key concerns sometimes aren't actually about wages. They're about, can I live a life outside of my job? Can I just handle the basics of being able to go to the doctor or go to my kid's soccer game

or whatever it is, actually see my family and have a family? That's really what this ultimately came down to. So again, we have some sort of a tentative deal. It's between the railroad bosses and the union leadership. They have to take that now to the membership, to the rank and file workers and see whether it is sufficient. We have very limited details about what exactly is in this deal. You know, I mean, it is a very, Jeff Stein was tweeting about the difference between how President Biden has approached this sort of like seminal defining labor moment versus how Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers back in the 80s. I think that's correct, but it also

remains to be seen how good this deal actually is for workers or how much it falls on the side of the bosses. We just don't have that information yet to really make a judgment over how President Biden performed, who's going to ultimately benefit for this, and whether a strike has been actually averted or just pushed off for another six days. Yeah, important context there. Look, I mean, the deal came out at 520 this morning. It's only been a couple of hours whenever we and I are filming this. We don't know. You know, we haven't even seen any worker reactions. Some people are still getting up.

So we'll see what the overall thing seems to be. And yeah, I think we'll have coverage. And if we can, we'll do something. Emergency depends in order to react to whatever happens. Yeah, to the specifics of the deal. Okay, let's get to Senator Lindsey Graham here, who really surprised everybody by pushing forward with a 15-week abortion ban at the federal level. Now, we'll get into some of the politics of this, but part of why this caught people by surprise is, first of all, Mitch McConnell and Senate leadership was not behind it at all. Second of all, a lot of the Republican messaging around abortion has been like, we just think it should be left to the states. And Democrats have been saying, these guys are going to try to ban abortion at the federal level. No, no, no, don't be ridiculous. We think this is going to be done at the state. So Lindsey

Graham, though, is calculating that a 15-week abortion ban is a lot more popular than some of the more extreme positions, even more extreme than that positions that they've been taking. So he decides to move forward with this bill. He announces this as a press conference. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. I think we should have a law at the federal level that would say after 15 weeks, no abortion on demand except in cases of rape, incest to save the life of the mother. And that should be where America is at. So that's how he is presenting the bill. He also has another moment there that Democrats were gleefully clipping out and sharing where he's

basically like, if we get control of the House and the Senate, you can bet we're moving forward with legislation like this, which again, Democrats see as very beneficial for them. Washington Post has some reporting on the Republican response, which was kind of all over the board. Their headline is Republicans in muddle on abortion as ban proposed by Graham exposes rifts. They start off kind of, you know, laying out the context here. They say in a memo to GOP campaigns released this week, the Republican National Committee laid out what it called a winning message on abortion, pressed Democrats on where they stand on the procedure later in pregnancy, so late-term abortions, seek, quote, common ground on exceptions

to bans, and keep the focus on crime in the economy. So in other words, try to pivot off of this whole abortion thing and focus on crime in the economy because that's stronger ground for us. Then Senator Lindsey Graham introduced legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy, overshadowing new inflation numbers and undermining what many GOP strategists see as their best message for the fall. Leave it to the states to give you a... One Republican strategist quoted as saying it's an absolute disaster when he was informed that Blake Masters, Arizona Senate nominee, had already signed on to it. His response was oy vey. McConnell declined to commit to bringing it to the floor. His top deputy, Senator John Thune, said he'd, quote, like to

see the federal government get out of the abortion business. Now, there were Republicans who were quoted in this article, too, who were like, I don't think it's a problem. I think it's actually fine. But there's clearly a divide here in Senate leadership. Definitely not on board, which is interesting. I mean, I don't know, Crystal. I still am confused as to why everybody thinks this is a terrible idea. I mean, 15 weeks is actually, I wouldn't say like overwhelmingly popular, but the last poll I saw, 48%, at least the majority of people support a 15-week ban. It deals with all of the horrific exceptions. I mean, if you look, I think every country in Europe save three bans abortion or doesn't allow abortion after 15 weeks. I mean, it's quite a, I mean, reasonable position. I think my annoyance with it is that amongst the

pro-lifers, they would never have called you pro-life if you supported a 15 week ban. They'd be like, what do you, some sort of European style squish? And we're like, I guess, you know, in this one particular case, I do align with the Europeans. I mean, from my perspective, I don't understand why they're freaking out unless it means that what they really wanted was to do a much more restrictive ban and that this would force their hand to go past what they want. And as I understand it, a part of the reason why they're annoyed with him is because there's a lot of deep red states, which were, I mean, South Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and others that wanted to go, not even six. I mean, they wanted to like outright ban everything with

no exception. So they're upset about it with him from that perspective. But overall, I mean, frankly, 15 weeks would be, I mean, a pretty decent compromise in my opinion. I mean, 15 weeks is still underwater nationally. So it's not like a popular position. It's more popular than like the- But it's not like Roe's. Sorry, it's not like three. When you test the question of three months, which was Roe, like the Roe policy, that's not overwhelmingly popular either, right?

It's like Roe, the Roe, the defense was, we like the status quo, not like we're supportive of the policy. It's like, we don't really want to revisit this. Yes. Whereas when you ask people to choose, 15 is like a pretty good middle ground. 15 is, I mean, the polling has it still underwater,

but closer to 50-50 than certainly the more extreme things that they've been pushing for at the state level. The reason why this is a problem, in my opinion, for them to politically, and I don't want to overstate it because I don't think that this is a significant change or whatever. But I think the reason that you have a lot of Republican strategists like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? Is because when you look at the numbers in these states of who's registering to vote, the more directly voters feel like their

vote is going to matter on abortion, the more women you have registering, the more young people you have registering. And it's a really clear trend. So if you look in a state like New York, you haven't had this massive surge of women voters, this massive surge of young voters, because they feel like abortion is relatively safe in their state. Which is true, it is. So, well, but then when you have this, then you're like, no, it's not. And so what Graham has done here is he's effectively put abortion on the ballot in every single state in the country. That's a problem for them. And then the other big picture issue is just like, they don't want to talk about this. It's clearly, we've seen Republicans are still in a position to do

decently in the midterms, probably win the House. 50-50 on the Senate is my assessment at this point. They were in position before Roe was overturned to completely romp and dominate in the House. Historic margins definitely pick up the Senate. So this issue of abortion has been the key. It's not the only thing, but the key reason why their fortunes have fallen so dramatically. So the fact that Lindsey Graham, instead of like, you know, doing some of the stuff DeSantis is doing, like flying immigrants to Martha's Vineyard and like those sorts of things are very solid ground for Republicans. They feel like that's a place where they'd like to stay in crime, immigration, continuing to talk about the economy. The president just got some bad news on inflation. And instead it's like, oh, so we're going to just

talk more about abortion and have another political cycle about this and effectively put the issue on the ballot in every single state so that's why i think there's a lot of like this was a really really terrible i think when you put it that way you take so i'm you know too much of a nerd because i'm like looking at the specifics but i mean in general like you just don't want to talk about abortion period and look i mean they're not wrong too it's very unpopular but a lot of these people will want to do and as you said when people vote on abortion we're going to talk about this in the Pennsylvania block. But whenever you see people who are registering to vote and voting on abortion, overwhelmingly breaking for Democrats.

So at that point, they don't care about 15 weeks or anything. They're pissed off about the repeal of Roe, period. And they're not looking at anything that Lindsay B.M.S. is saying. And here's the other thing is, number one, midterms are about energizing your base and turnout. And this is an issue that is energizing the Democratic base like no other. There's just no doubt about that. So I think that's really important. And then I do have to say on their whole, like, we want to be just like Europe thing.

It's like, OK, well, then why don't we give us the affordable child care, the public health care, the single payer. Like on this one thing, they want to be like Europe. Okay. Well, I just think it's the idea that it's extreme to ban abortion after 15 weeks just seems nuts to me. I mean, it seems like perfectly reasonable, like in all. Well, but here's the other thing, Sagar, is like, again, they've been trying to lean into this whole messaging of like, we don't want to do anything in the federal. We just want to leave it to the states, local, localism, like let them decide. Everyone knows exactly what you said. Pro-lifers are not satisfied with 15 weeks. This is not their position. This is the starting point that they

think they can get the public to swallow right now. And people aren't stupid. They know this is the opening bid. And that in actuality, because people who are pro-life and like, you know, adamantly and like genuinely so, they see abortion as literal murder. They're not going to be cool with infanticide up to 15 weeks. That's the way they view it. Everybody, like, that's very, I think, obvious and apparent. So people feel like, oh, you are in the business of trying to ban abortion completely nationwide. And that's why I think this is a problem.

There was an interesting moment. I mentioned Blake Masters before. Let's kind of put this next piece up on the screen. So Masters actually came out immediately and was like, yeah, I signed on to this. Of course, he said I would support Graham's bill. At the same time, his campaign spokesman had retweeted a message that, this is from the Washington Post, appeared to channel some GOP groans over Graham's announcement. The retweet was just, why, why, why, why, why? He later deleted that retweet. But clearly, you know, he and his candidate

not exactly on the same page as to what the political impact here might be. Yeah, that one's pretty funny. I agree. I mean, it's interesting to see the freak out. I mean, with Masters in general,

he just doesn't want to talk about abortion at all. He put out that one ad and he's like, all right, let's move on. Let's never talk about it ever again. Yeah, deleted his whole previous section from his website. Yeah, no problem. I mean, he's the guy who put on his website, federal personhood

bill, like all this stuff, went hard in the paint when absolutely nobody asked him to do so, you know, whenever he wanted to. And then he had to reverse course because he's getting hammered with, you know, $20 million in ads on abortion. So on that, you know, I don't have a particular amount of sympathy because it's genuinely a self-inflicted wound. So yeah, look, I think that your overall analysis is correct, which is that if you're talking about abortion, period, no matter what the specifics are, and you're Republican, you're probably just going to lose, given who your allies are on that. Well, and it's not just pro-choice people like me who see it that way. Charlie Kirk, who is very pro-life, also thinks just from a political perspective that this was a

very bad move on Lindsey Graham's part. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. Why is Lindsey Graham 25 days out from ballots going out, galloping in and saying we need a federal abortion ban? Really, where have you been, Lindsey Graham? That feels like election interference. And I say this as someone who is so pro-life, I would love a total abortion ban. 15 weeks is not enough, but I'm also not dumb. 25 days out from ballots going out, the Democrats are applauding. Thank you, Lindsey Graham, for making this issue about abortion. I mean, I think his political analysis there is pretty correct. Like this is the last issue that Republicans really want to be talking about right

now. And so that's why there's, I mean, McConnell, however you feel about him, fairly savvy political operator. And the fact that he's like, no, we're not moving forward with this, I think tells you a lot. Oh, absolutely. Well, that's another interesting thing on McConnell itself, which is that how are you letting all this stuff happen in your caucus, man? I mean, you really are losing control. Lindsey didn't consult anybody. He just came out and did it. Freelancing.

Which is interesting. I wonder what his calculus on it. I think he probably sees it the way he's like, look, we just need to settle this. He's like, I'm sick of all these attacks. Lindsey's always been kind of a, quote know, to these people. So he's like, let's just force everybody's hand and let's unite the entire Republican party. But part of the issue is, as Kirk is saying, it's like, you know, listen to what Kirk actually wants, which is that so is there any real uniting these people? Well, same thing. I mean, Blake Masters had said, I think

he was one of the ones that said abortion is genocide. And so it's like, we know you're not going to be satisfied for 15 weeks. So that's, people see through where the initial stance is and where they would ultimately want to go here. I mean, it is kind of revealing though, too, that you, he acknowledges, like, the American public is not with us on this issue. So we kind of need to hide the ball in advance of the election on what we actually want to do, which I think is revealing as well. I don't know what Graham's calculation was. I mean, look, you have people who have a genuine ideological commitment, and I understand that. And it could just be coming literally from that. I mean, Mike Pence said something like this issue is more important than any sort of short-term

political gain, basically acknowledging like, yeah, this might be bad for us in the fall, but I think that there's a higher priority here. So maybe it does come from that genuine place versus any sort of political calculus. But ultimately, I don't think it's going to be helpful to their chances. Yeah, I think you're correct. Okay, let's move on to inflation. This was an absolutely surreal moment. President Biden, on the South Lawn of the White House, holds a multi-thousand people party. Every group who's ever existed in democratic politics is there. He's uniting everyone for the success of the

Inflation Reduction Act. It's on Tuesday afternoon. At the very same moment that the president is talking about how the Inflation Reduction Act is going to reduce inflation. It comes out after the CPI came in hotter than was expected. And as the Dow is dropping over a thousand points, it really is one of the most surreal moments that you'll ever see. For those who are just listening, just keep in mind, while you're listening to this, there is a Dow ticker in the bottom right corner of the screen, which just continues to show market activity as Biden talks. Let's take a listen. This couldn't have happened without every single one of you. And that's the literal sense of the Senate. Every single one was required because the other team

didn't want to play. And all our distinguished guests, CEOs, advocates, activists, thank you for joining us. What a great day. Exactly four weeks ago today, I signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. So it's just right. Classic Biden. He's got the aviators on. He seems to think that when he puts those aviators on, he becomes 35 years old again. It's not quite how it works. But so he puts the glasses on. The Dow is dropping 12, 1300 points there. Well, smart, smart programming there from Fox News too. I mean, they didn't miss the chance to- I think they actually had it up all day. To their credit, they actually did have that up and Biden just happened to say at the same time, like, would you pull it off? No.

Yeah. I mean, they're smart at what they're doing. And so Biden also puts out this incredibly foolish statement at the exact same time. Let's put this up there from the White House in reaction. It says, today's data shows more progress in bringing global inflation down in the US economy. Overall, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months. That is welcome news. Gas is down an average of $1.30 a gallon. It will take more time and resolve to bring inflation down, which is why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act to lower the cost of healthcare, prescription drug, and energy, my economic plan, blah, blah, blah. So again, he's trying to seize on the success of the Inflation Reduction Act as we saw it. Look, the core inflation number did go

up by 0.1%, and the reason why was specifically food and shelter. And when those two things are going up, the Inflation Reduction Act, by the way, has zero impact on food prices and on shelter costs, right? So the two things. And I think another thing we should underscore is inflation went up despite the fact that gas prices went down by 10% in a month, which means those had to be so high in those commiserate categories that the overall number is still there. So the pressure remains on families. His point is not technically incorrect, right? Which is that year over year inflation went from 8.4 to 8.3. So year over year, it dropped by 0.1%, but it's still up 8.3%. It's a really tough one. I always think it's

so foolish when presidents try to sell a picture of the economy to the American people. Yeah, which is just fake. And I don't think it lands. I don't think it's persuasive. I don't think it's smart for them politically. You know, he could have used this moment to point to, look, gas prices are coming down. That's great. It's not nearly enough. And we still have these other problems that my administration is planning to address through

X, Y, and Z measures. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That's going to help in these key areas. But to try to say, but this shows we're making progress, it's like, nah, it doesn't really do that. And clearly, the markets were in free fall, largely because of what they expect now the Fed is going to do, which is to continue with a very aggressive direction in terms of rate hikes, which now, and we'll get to this in a minute, some analysts are saying they may not just do 75 basis points. They may do a full 100 basis points. So that's why the market is in freefall. But yeah, this report was a bad report.

We covered it as breaking news here because it was higher than what the expectation was. The expectation was like, okay, it's going to tick down a little bit and we're going to be headed in generally the right direction. And instead it's like, no, actually ticked up a little bit and we're still headed in the wrong direction. And to not have some of that reality seep in and have this just total celebratory, congratulatory tone in the remarks is off. What's annoying too is that Americans don't feel, Americans are still very concerned about inflation. However, remember what we covered a couple of days ago. Because the inflation is so highly tied with people's minds and gas, they still actually feel better about

the economy than they did three months ago. Correct. So inflation can quote cool because it is technically cooling, right? 8.4 to 8.3, not year over year jumps of like 7.5 to 8.5, but it can still be bad. Like it's all just about trying to fit the vibe. The vibe is, is that people aren't feeling as bad as they were four months ago when gas or three months ago when gas was $5 a gallon. Yeah. That doesn't mean they're like super happy about it. Yeah. They also don't feel like mission accomplished. Yeah. And it's like trying to declare the mission accomplished moment is just really foolish. And so to have the split screen like that, I do think is a tremendous political viability in the future.

And so let's get to the Fed point. Let's put this up there, which is that the Fed is considering that 100 point basis point rate hike, the biggest hike since the 1980s, specifically in reaction both to this inflation report and to just from the overwhelming pressure that comes from Wall Street and from elsewhere. And the funny thing is, is that even Wall Street, and this is part of the reason why the S&P 500 and others, even though their overwhelming consensus is around that the Fed is going to do this, they are still reacting in a negative manner every single time that the inflation report gets worse because

they know that's only going to put even more pressure from the quote-unquote consensus on the Federal Reserve to increase the rate hike. And that only means that recession is just more and more and more and more likely. And I think that that is just the scariest part of all of this is what we talk about here. I mean, look, are zero interest rates perfect for the economy? Probably not. I mean, it's probably not a good thing that all these fake companies and all these other things, but to have such a precipitous rise so quickly, I don't think we can really describe what it's like to live in that environment. I mean, major fortune 500 companies have to cut benefits and have to cut workers. Yes, they will always cut worker pay before they

have to cut share price or stockholder dividend. Eventually, that will happen too. And so you're just going to see an overall, like a trickle-down recession without any of the trickle-up benefits supposedly on the way back up. And that's what they always promise, this quote-unquote soft landing. I just don't think that's remotely possible. When you're moving at this level of speed, these things take months to manifest in mortgage, housing, and all of that. So I think we're going to see this for at least a year, maybe 18 months plus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and what they point to here is a few things. So the odds of a 100 basis point, which just means a full point hike, jumped more than 20% after we got that report. Hopes of a Fed pivot, they said,

were firmly dashed, as if they hadn't been already. You've got Nomura economists changed their forecast for the Fed's September meeting from a 75 to 100 basis points, writing that a more aggressive path of interest rate hikes will be needed to combat increasingly entrenched inflation. Frickin' Larry Summers is out here tweeting that if he was a Fed official, he would pick 100 basis points move to reinforce credibility. Reinforce credibility, whatever that means. This is the same man who said that we need to get the unemployment rate to 10% in order to get this under control. Just so you know. I mean, Jerome Powell is out there directly saying, we need to get wages down. There's going to be a little bit of pain. They're not hiding it. And again, I think if anything, the fact that you have inflation numbers continuing to be bad shows you what they're doing so far. I mean, there may be a huge lag, but it's also not

getting at some of the core reasons we have inflation to start with. I mean, the shelter cost is the perfect example. And I know we've gone over this a few times, but I just think it's really important to underscore. One of the big reasons that housing costs keep going up is because we haven't been building enough homes. Hiking interest rates makes it so that builders are less likely to build more homes. So not only you're not dealing with the problem, you're actually exacerbating the problem in that particular instance. So I think it's a really, really bad situation. I think it's a very dangerous situation because you just don't know. These are blunt instruments and you just don't know what

kind of a massive effect they can have on the economy because there is a lag between when those rates are hiked and when the pain actually hits. The last time that rates were hiked at this level of 100 basis points in the 80s, it drove the U.S. into a deep recession. We reported on, I guess it was Tuesday, about that research from an economist with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who said, hey guys, we got to be careful with this because we could have a very similar circumstance to what happened coming out of the Spanish flu where, yeah, we had these supply chain shocks and all these issues,

and we have this aggressive interest rate hiking that could cause a severe recession. So there's a lot of reasons why the Fed should be very cautious here. And instead, it looks like they're moving in a more and a more aggressive posture. Absolutely. Look, it can be bad. We'll underscore that housing point, and we're going to continue to watch it. But it looks like the prediction of, quote, some pain looks very much like it's going to be an understatement. Indeed. Let's talk about the midterms. This is some really interesting new polling. And from the beginning, let's say

the crystalline saga caveat that all polls, especially the polls that we're seeing right now, look about as wrong as they were in 2020. So keep that at the very top of your mind when we talk about the latest polling that's coming out from CVS. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. On a national level, I love these midterm vote, very important issues, specifically with Pennsylvania likely voters. Economy, 80%. Inflation, 77%. Essentially the same. Crime, 65%. That crime number is exactly why Dr. Oz is talking only about inflation and crime. That's one of the things he's been hitting Fetterman over with. This one I found interesting. I'm curious what you think.

Election issues. So what's fun to me is that means something to very different people. You're talking to a Republican, you're talking about stop the steal. You're talking to a Democrat, you're talking about also stop the steal, but you want to like throw people in jail who are pro stop the steal. So that one, I don't think it's really salient beyond like a base motivator, but then guns and abortion are also very high up there as well. Now, this is an important thing. Oz is leading in that poll of likely voters of 57 to 43 with Fetterman on the economy. And again, this is why I kept saying whenever he attacks Fetterman, um, on any ground that isn't Joe Biden and the economy, I just, I think it's foolish. I mean, I think this is the absolute centerpiece of their campaign.

The issue though, for, uh, for the issue though, for Dr. Oz is let's put this up. Next one up there on the screen in terms of who Pennsylvanians say they believe when they talk about politics, really believe Fetterman, 57%. Oz, 29%. Think voters want to hear, 43% Fetterman, 71% Oz. So the attack on Oz here is he's a phony. They don't believe that he means what he says whenever he's talking. And there's a couple of other things that they point to. And this one, obviously, I think it's going to matter a lot. Has Oz been in Pennsylvania long enough to understand the issues? 33% yes.

67% no. Does Oz have the right, or do they have the right experience? John Fetterman, 56%. Yes. 24% for Oz. How do they handle themselves? John Fetterman, 56%. Yes. 24% for Oz. How do they handle themselves personally? Fetterman is at 50-50. Oz is at 36-64, with 64% dislike. And then, quote, main reason for vote choice. By the way, I love this. This is my favorite. Because for all of the talk of issues, do I like the guy or not? Here is with Fetterman.

56% of his voters say, I like him. And that's why they're voting for him. For Oz voters, it's only 15. For the, oppose the other candidate, 24% for Fetterman, 54% Oz. And then he's my party's nominee, 20% Fetterman, 31% Oz. So for Fetterman voters, it's overwhelming, like an affirmative vote. Like, I like this guy. I'm with him.

For Oz voters, it's like, I don't like an affirmative vote. Like, I like this guy. I'm with him. For Oz voters, it's like, I don't like Fetterman. Or I don't like Biden. I don't like Democrats. Yeah. I mean, this is to oppose the other candidate, but yeah, you're probably right. It is more about like an opposition vote rather than an affirmative vote in favor of him. And this was also interesting, even though Fetterman is a current elected and Oz is the quote unquote outsider having never been in elected office before. It's actually Fetterman who was seen by more voters as representing change. I thought that was fascinating as well. You've got 58% saying that John Fetterman represents change and 42% saying that Dr. Oz

does, which again is kind of remarkable given not just that Fetterman's an elected office, but also that, you know, Democrats with party in power. So you would think that people would be like, oh, the Republican would be the one representing change. I think it shows that the Fetterman attacks on Oz have been very effective. I mean, they have defined him. These numbers reflect exactly the way that they wanted him defined. And so the overall lead here for Fetterman is 52-47, outside of the margin of error, but still relatively close race. I would say this is more in line with the numbers you would expect to see in Pennsylvania, pretty close race, but with Fetterman having a little bit of an edge, given that he's run a much, much more effective campaign. They also asked this

question, is Fetterman healthy enough to serve? And you had pretty, I mean, Fetterman's got to be happy with these numbers as well. You had 59% who said yes and 41% who said no. So clearly the vulnerability for Fetterman here is exactly what we've been saying. It's number one on the economy. The more that inflation is in the news, the more that Oz is talking about inflation and not in the context of crudite either, the more effective. And then the second beat is crime,

which they've been pushing more and more. Those are the places where Fetterman is the most vulnerable. And that's, I think, a microcosm of the entire national wins. Putting the specifics of these candidates and their campaigns aside. Bingo. I mean, if I was doing Oz, I'd be doing the same thing. Philadelphia

is a disaster right now. I'd be playing that all day long. Because the other thing is you maybe want to suppress vote in terms of the mainline suburban Philly people who all came out hard to vote for Joe Biden. If you can keep them at home or if you can maybe convince them to vote for Oz, not to vote for Fetterman, that's going to be a big win for you. Try and drive out as much of the Republicans as possible. Overall, same thing. I mean, the advice for Oz is the same for advice for every Republican candidate that is out there. It's just so annoying every time I see them get embroiled. It's like basic stuff. Just focus on the basics. John Fetterman has a vote for Joe Biden. Joe Biden is the reason we have high inflation. Whether it's true or not,

doesn't matter. What it comes down to is politics. And I think a lot of these guys, Blake Masters and Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker, they just seem to lack a very basic political sensibility

of being sticking to the message and just hammering it home every single day. Twitter is a distraction in every way. Even with Betterman, all of his trolls against Oz on Twitter is a distraction in every way. Yeah. Even with Betterman. All of his trolls against Oz on Twitter

is funny for people like us. What matters more, the billboards and the ads about how he's from New Jersey? Yeah. Clearly, I mean, it's landing in the state. Right, right.

That's what I'm saying. He takes that Twitter energy and then actualizes it in his real campaign. Yeah, correct. It's like, that's the key. I think the other thing, going back to the conversation

about Lindsey Graham and abortion and all of that, they asked, of those who say abortion is very important to their vote, who are they voting for? 70% for Fetterman. Yes. And 30% for Oz. Right.

So again, really clear numbers that the more that Roe versus Wade and abortion is in the news, like the better it is for Democrats. And they're clearly leaning into that messaging very heavily. They also had numbers on whether people are voting on national issues or local issues. 76% say they're voting on national issues every election. You know, the saying used to be all elections are local. No, all politics is now national. And so I think this shows you that there are opportunities for Oz here

in terms of the economy to continue to prosecute the case, to get out from the little bit of a deficit that he appears to be in. Although, again, I think you should take all of these polls with a grain of salt. But you can see why Fetterman has taken the approach that he has. And if I were to point to one of these numbers that I think is the most damaging for Oz, it's the first one you brought up about how people are like, I don't trust this guy. I feel like he's telling me what I just want to hear. Yeah, that's a huge problem for a politician that's a death knell sometimes. Yeah. Let's put the next one up there. This is about what happened in New Hampshire. Interesting last night. Actually, remember this woman?

She, Caroline Leavitt, used to work at the White House, whatever I was covering there. I remember her whenever she was just a junior press assistant. She's only 25 years old. She won her primary last night for the House of Representatives in the 1st Congressional District. I'm not entirely sure how competitive that seat actually is. It's very competitive. So this one, the Larry Sabato's crystal ball, they had it as a toss-up. After she got the nomination, they've moved it to lean down. Lean Dean, yeah. Because she was the more extreme of the candidates in the primary.

She's very MAGA. I mean, look, she just ran as MAGA. She got all the quote-unquote MAGA world endorsements. And her and the other winner in the Senate race really exemplify the quote-unquote MAGA sweep in the party. The reason I actually think that's important is that Trump didn't endorse in these races. a real test for the primary voters themselves. Trump aside, who are we picking? In both cases, the quote unquote MAGA person with the imprimatur of Trump, both on the Senate side and in the congressional district, both of them won their competitive primaries. Yeah, it's like they didn't even need the Trump endorsement. They just needed the MAGA aesthetic. Yeah, which they had. Well, it's interesting though, because in other primaries, there have been MAGA folks who have endorsed despite Trump's endorsement. In general, Trump's endorsement won. But always the question was, it's like, what matters the most? And it looks like in the absence of a Trump endorsement, as appearing more MAGA or not, mattered a lot in New Hampshire.

Now, why does New Hampshire matter? Presidential primary state. Trump, people forget, Trump won the New Hampshire primary by a blowout win. Remember, he lost the Iowa caucuses. I think he got third place. That was his first win on the scene in New Hampshire. Very much those white working class type voters, not same as some of the evangelicals and Catholics in Iowa. More, I would say, more of an emblem for the people who ultimately swung the 2016 election. So for that fact to be kind of the raucous GOP base,

for them to go very much with the MAGA candidates, that does matter. And it, again, seems to have affected electoral chances in terms of how the prognosticators are calling it.

Take that with whatever grain of salt that you will. Who the hell knows what's going to happen in the future. Sure, absolutely. I mean, there's another piece that's interesting here about the Senate race in particular, which is that this dude who, I don't know how you say his name, General Don Balduck.

Yeah, Balduck. He actually did not put a single ad of his own up on the airwaves, did not spend a penny in advertising himself on the airwaves, which is kind of incredible. But Democrats saw him as the weaker candidate. And so the Senate majority pack, Chuck Schumer's group, aired ads across the state calling his opponent, State Senate President Chuck Morse, the choice of Mitch McConnell's Washington establishment. They called him another sleazy politician, and they tied him to the lobbying industry and opioids. The opioid epidemic, of course, has been devastating in New Hampshire. So Democrats decided that, I mean, they're, again, playing with fire here. They decided this was the candidate they wanted to go up against, and they were successful in putting him over the top. Now, you know, I think Republican voters have agency.

Of course they do. Obviously, like, these are the type of candidates that they're selecting, so I'm not sure that the Democratic money ultimately was determinative here. But the big thing that Republicans in this state are concerned about is that now with this dude as the nominee, Mitch McConnell and the others who could put money into the state are going to say, nah, this is not a good use of resources. And so that's the real thing. Obviously, we've been covering how limited funds are for a lot of Republican Senate candidates right now. They're on a bed, beg Mitch McConnell or Peter Thiel or Donald Trump or whoever who has money in their packs to come in and sort of rescue their butts in these various races. So with money being tight, very likely that McConnell and co take a look now at this race, which already had

been trending more towards the Democrats and then the incumbent Maggie Hassan and say, this is not a good investment for us. We're instead going to put more money into Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Ohio, or somewhere else where we think we really have a shot to win. I'm still, look, you're playing with fire. What if these people win? What if this is a new Marjorie Taylor Greene or Madison Cawthorn or, you know Cawthorn? Or look, you never know. Some crazy shit could happen. Absolutely. And if somebody could win, and now you have this guy in the Senate. So you will pay the price, possibly, for that.

Might reap what they sow. Okay, let's move on. This is a hilarious thing that Crystal and I were both kind of obsessed with yesterday. Correct. So let me share, put the context. There is fat acceptance. TikTok is something I've become, unfortunately, very familiar with. It's a major social trend amongst the quote unquote teens. Now, I will say, if that's an organic movement, I think that's fine. I think it's abhorrent and terrible and unhealthy. But as long as it's organic, so be it. It's just another sociological thing that we all have to work out. There is,

however, been a recent trend of elite institutions trying to share this ideology. Now, this has now happened where the Los Angeles School Unified District shared a, quote, food neutrality video on its Instagram. Now, why does that matter? As you said previously, in the beginning of the show, Los Angeles, one of the largest school districts in the United States, you know, hundreds of thousands of children being educated, educated here. Nutritional guidelines in schools is a huge impact on overall child nutrition. Something I'm personally watching very closely, the Biden administration actually holding the very first white house conference on nutrition in like six years, happening at the White House in two weeks. Now, the reason that that matters is there's been a lot of debate about

nutritional guidelines by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Obviously, I think those guidelines are insane and ridiculous. And the question is, are they going to revise them or are they going to bow to some of this ideology? Are they going to move in a health direction or are they going to make it ideological? So this possibly could be a harbinger of things to come. Let me just say that some of the guidelines also for years and years have been impacted by the food industry. Yes, by the sugar and drug industry, the sugar and food industry, which culminates in this video and a perfect example of what I fear the most, which is what we see here in this video is a quote unquote food neutrality talk by these TikTokers that includes a nutritionist. Now the nutritionist in this video, we're going to play the full video for you, effectively says that caring about what you eat is bad and that there's no such thing

as good food and bad food. What the video neglects to say is that the nutritionist who goes by literal black nutritionist talks about quote unquote systems of oppression and all of this is a senior nutrition scientist at Mondelez International spun off from Kraft Foods and makes the foods like chips ahoy, Oreo cookies, sour patch kids, basically all sugary junk food and snacks. Delicious things, but not good for you. So with that knowledge, with that knowledge, now watch this video and see how much of an op that it is. I got us donuts. Those are so bad for you. Oh no. Are they moldy? I mean, are they poisoned?

Are you allergic? No, I'm just saying you're judging my food choices based on a false standard of health again. Aren't you guilty. Diet culture, fat phobia, and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food and it shows up everywhere. For instance, harmful thought patterns like earning food through exercising or that dessert is the reward for the punishment of eating vegetables. Remember that you do not need to earn food. We are all incorrectly taught from a young age that our size and therefore the foods that we eat are markers of our self-worth. Moralizing food can lead to harmful relationships with food and assorted eating. Instead of focusing on good and bad choices, try to approach food with

neutrality in mind. The only foods that are bad for you are foods that contain allergens, poisons, and contaminants. Or food that is spoiled or is otherwise inedible. Eat without guilt, regardless of what society says. Eat without guilt, regardless of what society says. This is literally a corporate op in order to normalize eating junk food. Using social justice language to run a corporate op to be like, eat our Oreos. The crazy thing, Crystal, throw this next one up there on the screen, which is that part of her job description is, quote, innovation opportunities and driving the scientific evidence strategy to

promote brands and support the business. As in to use her, quote, black nutritionist label to try and normalize amongst this growing movement the idea that there's no such thing as good and bad food. And here's the thing. Yeah. Okay, so I think that people

should feel good about themselves. I don't think that if you are overweight or struggling in this department that you're a bad person. I think that part of, like, fat acceptance, body acceptance, I think that's such a positive thing. And also the fact that the like body standards now are different from even when I was in high school, like just being like skinny is not the only thing that is now seen as desirable. I think that is a wonderful, beautiful thing. I think it is flat out evil to do what this

lady is doing and lie to people about what is good for them and what's not. And this is like actually really old strategy. This is tobacco shit. So this is part of, this is actually part of why the federal health guidelines are bad because they bought into this notion that was pushed by, you know, the sugar and the soft drink industries, et cetera, that, oh, it's just calories in calorie time. It doesn't matter where the calories come from or what they are. It's all neutral. And so you don't have to worry about if it's sugar

versus if it's like, you know, a vegetable or something else that's going to be healthier for you. All you have to worry about is overall calories. So an Oreo can be just as good a part of your diet as something else ultimately is. So they're taking this very old strategy that they've employed with a lot of money backing it and a lot of fake research for years and decades. And they're now putting this like woke social justice label on it to try to make it sell in new era. And it is grotesque to see.

Yeah, it's really bad. And look, I mean, I've been, obviously people probably talk about it too much, my own health journey. For calories in, calories out, look, it can work for weight loss. You know, if you want to be able to incorporate an Oreo because you're going to literally lose your mind from eating a quote unquote whole diet, as long as you track every single thing, it's fine. Like it's not going to kill you. That being said, don't delude yourself that it has the same micronutrient profile as something else that you're going to eat. So focusing on that is actually probably the most important. I think people should eat however the hell they want to eat. Like I am not, I eat whatever the hell I want to eat. Like I just think that people should

have accurate information and be able to make good health choices so that they're empowered. And I also think we need to make it, obviously my like broader societal critique is we need to make it a lot easier and more affordable to make those good choices. But you're right that the school nutrition, it's a big thing. And it's funny because, yeah, there was- A huge amount of kids get their, like their like main meal from, so that's why the school lunch program is one of the most important programs in our country. So absolutely. And I think they just went back, during the pandemic, they made it free for everybody across the country, which I really, really supported. And now they've rolled that back. But yeah, like my kids, if they get the school breakfast, for example, oftentimes it's like a honey bun or some or like some or like a pop. possibly feed a child in the morning and sets you up for, this is why calories in, calories out is such a sort of like basic and wrong premise because what does that set you up? You get a

sugar spike, then you're going to crash. You're going to feel like shit for the whole day and you're not going to be set up to like have a good day of learning with that type of quote unquote fuel at the beginning of the day. So anyway, this is awful and bad. It needs to be called out. I'll say calories in, calories out is an important principle for weight loss because I see a lot of people out there eating lots of steaks being like, I'm just going to lose weight because I'm going on a carnivore. It's like, dude, well, if you're eating 3,000 calories of fat, like you're still going to get fat.

Now for health, it is not the same thing at all. So you got to put those two things apart. I think that, again, it's nuanced. It's difficult. Also, your genetics play a massive role into it. You know, I got my blood tested. I have, you know, like big problems, pre-diabetic. All my grandparents are diabetic.

Like I have Indians and South Asians in general are much more predisposed to that. The stuff that spikes my blood sugar, not going to be the same thing as spikes your blood sugar. So a lot of this is genetic. A lot of it is individual differences. A lot of it depends on my type, but you know, a lot of this stuff, what drives me crazy too, is about food and more. It's like, it's all based around a goal of you want to feel good and then you want to live a long time. And when you think about it that way, you take out immediate weight loss and immediate, all stuff, and put it on a

30, 40 year time horizon. Obviously eating a donut all the time is bad. This is where it's ludicrous. Now, as you said, look, you know, people shouldn't feel pressure or feel quote unquote bad about themselves. Yeah. I mean, like maybe you got some work to do or maybe if you don't care, that's fine. It's a free country. You can do what you want. I want to indulge in these foods and I don't really give a shit. But then you should know, like you're probably not going to live as long. You're probably not going to be able to pick up your grandkids whenever you're old. These are all things I really want to do

so I'm going to care about. You have to give people accurate info as to what they want and what they're actually choosing to do and not cover up reality. It's like that is when we start to get into dangerous territory. Accurate info without judgment or shame

shouldn't be a hard thing to accomplish. But there's so much money in this industry and that's how you end up with just like actually like evil insanity. And I'm really worried about that nutrition conference. I fear that they're going to cave to the drug industry again. There's a new nutrition study that's going viral right now specifically about these fake guidelines about how like cereal and Pop-Tarts are healthier for you than whole vegetables. Again, based on junk science funded by the food industry. And so if that science, which has been widely accepted by some people outside of the online sphere, if that gets accepted by the government and gets included on dietaryguidelines.gov, which they release every

five years, look, that determines school health guidelines. I mean, there's all downstream effects that this ends up having on a population-wide basis. So that's why we care about it. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? I can hardly believe the story that I'm about to tell you. So the TLDR is this. New text messages reveal how the former governor of Mississippi plotted to steal millions from the poor in order to build a fancy volleyball stadium for Brett Favre's daughter.

That is not an exaggeration. That is literally what is alleged to have happened. And it is backed up now by newly revealed text messages and court filings. And, to make matters worse, the current governor is trying to cover up the truth. What I am about to tell you is so outrageous, corrupt, and disgusting that I can scarcely wrap my head around it. It is the most perfect example of socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor that I have ever seen. So in the nation's poorest state, the welfare fund was plundered to give goodies to a rich NFL superstar, political elites, and their

cronies. Buckle your seatbelts, folks. First, though, we got to start way back in the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton decided to do what no Republican could have accomplished and to end welfare as we know it. He eliminated the previous welfare program in favor of something called TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Unlike the New Deal welfare program, TANF was what's called a block grant. States get a certain amount of funding and with some legal limitations can do with it whatever they want. And in southern states like Mississippi, frequently they did not actually want to give the money to the poor families who really needed it. Mississippi as a state is the most cruel to its struggling residents. In one year, according to a Jackson Free Press investigation, of the 12,000

Mississippi residents who applied for TANF, a mere 165 were actually awarded any benefits. Many residents who technically qualify for assistance have given up trying to actually obtain benefits because the process is so dehumanizing and the odds of success are so small. Essentially in Mississippi, a state with record child poverty, welfare does not exist. At least not for the poor, but someone was getting all that money. And a multi-year investigation has revealed the way that government officials and their cronies fed like pigs at the trough off of that money that was intended to go to help the poor. A single politically connected charter school operator, Nancy New, she is at the center of

this fraud. Now, New is a major GOP donor. She's given thousands to the current governor of the state of Mississippi, that is Tate Reeves. Reeves actually filmed a campaign spot at one of her charter schools. She was also close friends with the wife of the former governor, Phil Bryant. Bryant was governor of the state while welfare funds were being pilfered by the millions to benefit Nancy New, among others. So over the length of the scheme, Nancy New and her son, Zach,

netted more than $136 million in state funds. State auditors say that 77 million of those funds were actually misspent for illegal purposes, often to personally benefit themselves and their allies. They were two of the six individuals who have been indicted as part of the scheme and are personally accused of pocketing at least $4 million in state funds to fatten their own bank accounts. The vast majority of this cash came directly from welfare funds, again, intended for the state's poor residents. But Nancy New and her son are now cooperating with authorities as part

of a plea deal, and that is where Brett Favre comes into the picture. So Favre's daughter apparently plays volleyball at the University of Southern Mississippi. That's the same school where he played football. And daddy apparently wanted to buy his baby a fancy new stadium. Rather than pony up the bucks himself, something that given his extraordinary wealth he could surely do, he decided to collaborate with Nancy New to try to secure the millions necessary from the state and his personal friend, Governor Bryant. As with their other schemes, the News sought millions for Favre from the federal welfare funds that they had long treated as their personal slush fund. It wasn't just the stadium, though. Favre was personally paid $1.1 million to deliver speeches that he never actually delivered. He also benefited from millions in investments.

The news made to a medical technology company in which Favre was the lead outside investor. Governor Bryant helped out with that company too. During his time in office, he helped the Favre-connected company to clear regulatory hurdles and to find new investors. Once Bryant left office, guess what? He's given a fat package of stock in that company as gratitude for his help. How nice. Now, I should pause here to say Governor Bryant and Brett Favre both deny wrongdoing. Favre says he had no idea the money was coming from welfare funds. He has paid back the no-show speech money, though not the interest on the money, which he does also owe. Governor Bryant says he was not involved in the illegal company investments that the news are now facing charges of bribery,

racketeering, and embezzlement in connection with. He also says he was not closely involved in the volleyball stadium scheme. However, newly revealed text messages say otherwise. In a new court filing reported on by Mississippi Today, text messages between New, Favre, and Bryant show a deep level of coordination on the $5 million stadium project. Here is the lead of that story. They say, quote, text messages entered Monday into the state's ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former governor Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre's volleyball idea a reality. The texts show that the then governor even guided Favre on how to write a funding proposal so that it could be accepted by the Mississippi Department of Human Services.

Quote, Just left Brett Favre. Bryant texted nonprofit founder Nancy New in July of 2019. Can we help him with his project? We should meet soon to see how I can make sure we keep your projects on course. Additional texts show Bryant coaching Favre and New on how their fraudulent volleyball proposal might pass muster to receive welfare funds from the federal block grant, giving direction about the specific type of details they would need for it to be approved, as the federal government strictly prohibits welfare funds from being used for brick-and-mortar projects like, for example, a volleyball stadium.

In other texts, Favre is also seemingly concerned about the media finding out that he is getting paid out of these welfare funds. In one text, he writes to New, quote, if you were to pay me, is there any way the media can find out where it came from and how much? Well, it took a while, but the media did find out. And part of the reason it took so long is because of an apparent cover-up by the current governor of Mississippi, that would be Tate Reeves. There are signs that the current administration is attempting to protect the former governor and Favre. An attorney who was originally representing the state's welfare department in a civil suit to reclaim the stolen dollars was abruptly fired by current governor Tate Reeves after that attorney subpoenaed the former governor's communications, including text messages related to the volleyball project. That attorney believes that his firing was politically motivated, and lo and behold, that civil investigation has appeared to slow

since he was abruptly dismissed. Reeves has never been able to muster a direct answer about the real reason that he fired the attorney. What's more, even though the $5 million stadium expenditure was the single largest fraudulent expenditure, it has for some reason been omitted from the civil lawsuit seeking to reclaim some of the stolen dollars. Now, Reeves says his office used an objective process to determine which expenditures they would seek to claw back, but he has given no specifics about why Favre's volleyball stadium, greenlit by the former governor per these text messages, did not make the cut. Elites protecting their little club. Now, I might remind you that this is the same state and some of the same political players who have not been able to find sufficient funds to pay for residents of Jackson, the capital city, to have drinkable water.

So, millions for a volleyball stadium, salaries, investments in well-connected companies, and no-show speech contracts for a rich NFL star. And this is what is coming out of the faucets of their residents. It is sickening beyond words. These people, who have the nerve to rail against entitlements and welfare queens, all of that, they are the most disgusting grifters of all. Reverse Robin Hoods, robbing from the poor to pay the rich. And it just so happens that they are the rich. This story went so deep. It is my belief that the only reason... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sokka, what are you looking at? Well, I've been spending a lot of time over the last few weeks thinking about college, amid the student loan debt cancellation episode. Again, I'm happy people out there who got their 10K canceled are better off, but I'm reading very troubled that the corrupt college industry has not been dealt a blow that it rightfully deserves. On Monday, I highlighted the recent cases of insane woke bureaucrats at colleges doing their best to rip our society apart under false pretenses. Today, I want to go a level deeper to the outright

corruption that pervades the multi-billion dollar industry. Average tuition right now in the United States is $44,000 a year for a private university, $27,000 for an out-of-state student, $11,000 for in-state, meaning that at best, a four-year college degree at an in-state college will cost a total of $44,000. Tuition inflation is nearly 1,400% over the last 40 years. I've already exposed how government-backed student loans with no caveats contributed to this. So how do the colleges themselves justify it? Overwhelmingly, while pouring money

into student services and more, they have banked on the most simple thing they offer, prestige and certification. This is especially true at the Ivy League level. During the coronavirus pandemic, they still charge $65,000 a year to students to take classes on Zoom. When asked why they didn't drop tuition, the answer was simple. A quote-unquote college experience that they touted as so important was immaterial. What they were really charging for

was the degree you get and their name that you can use for the rest of your life. The simple truth is, is that if you have a Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, or any other Ivy League name on your resume, you're going to do a hell of a lot better in life than the average person. These collective institutions have a combined endowment larger than many small African nations and will do absolutely anything to protect their status, which brings us to the latest corruption, the US News and World Report rankings. If you spent any time in supposedly elite circles, especially amongst tiger parents, you will know this as an almost religious icon. It is the dream of high-achieving parents across this country to get their kids into a top 25 or

a top 10 school. The top 25 is determined mostly by the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. That ranking means everything to the parent, thus it means everything to the universities who know that the parents that they need to bilk hold it in high esteem along with the kids. The U.S. News & World Report list has been called into question several times in the years over its existence, but the latest scandal involving the Ivy League reveals how corrupt the entire process is. Columbia University, a mainstay of the Ivy League and for years claiming with a number two or three spot on the U.S. News & World Report list as one of the best colleges in the United States, recently dropped to a shocking 18th place. The saga began in March when a math professor who works at Columbia called into

question his own employer's statistics that it had submitted to U.S. News and World Report, saying he found discrepancies in the sources of data that Columbia submitted. It is worth looking exactly into the data the professor published, showing exaggerations on Columbia's part in several areas. First is class size. Columbia claimed 82% of its undergrad classes have under 20 students, and only 8.9% have 50 or more. Using open source data at the university, the professor found actually it's more like 60 to 67 percent of the classes under 20. And then in fact, the rate of class size over 50 was overstated and

worse actually growing year over year. He also skewed the notion that the faculty at Columbia were portrayed as far more educated and far more full time than they actually are in practice. But the true bullet to the head was funds used for instruction. Columbia's number two spot was in large part due to its funds used for instruction. Claiming by the university that the professor showed, the university said it was spending $3.1 billion, which works out to almost $100,000 per student. The professor found that Columbia was in fact using money it spends on patient care expenses in its inflated figures that when you look at the financial statements Columbia gives to the government, it's completely different by the tune of over a billion dollars.

The reason the professor did this was not just to skewer his institution, but to show why the entire ranking system is absurd, how universities game the system by doing exactly what Columbia did, inflating and skewing stats on what is counted to boost their ranking. As he notes in his conclusion, students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges. Rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, while universities' offer is far too complex to be projected in a single parameter. He adds,

This information is detailed and subtle. The vetting conducted by U.S. News is cursory enough to allow many inaccuracies to slip through. That is the point. Columbia just had a guy who was smart enough to point out how full of it that they were. This is more like a Lance Armstrong situation. Every single other competitor is just as dirty, if not more so, meaning the list itself is meaningless, corrupt, and not useful. The brand is so strong, though, and so few people will see this monologue or investigation, in all likelihood, they will just continue with business as usual. In fact, despite the corruption of the list being exposed,

the day the new one came out, schools on it blasted it out triumphantly. Of course, it will belie more tuition costs, more bloated spending, more loans, more highly paid fake administrators. The college industry remains one of the most corrupt to exist in the United States. Last year alone, the government estimates we spent more than half a trillion dollars on post-secondary institutions. It is immense and corrupt wealth transfer that capitalizes on the dreams of the young

and their parents who want them to get ahead. And the only way out is awareness. The more that we expose it, the more people will see and influence will decline. Until then, the corrupt rat race continues. That investigation is crazy. It's 21 pages. It's written as... And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, everybody. It is my pleasure to introduce you. Well, you already know who they are. They already know. But to have joining us now are great friends and new colleagues, Ryan Grimm and Emily Chyszynski, the co-hosts of CounterPoints, launching tomorrow. Welcome, guys. It's fun to be here.

Yeah. This is your set now, too. So we have a few modifications for you. That's right. Yeah, more or less right here. Well, that's true, and people will see the modifications tomorrow. So all the more reason to tune in.

Big reveal. Just a big reveal. Modification reveal. I didn't even have to plug that one. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. We've been hurriedly making new graphics. I love this particular graphic. This is going to be

the widescreen. This is what we're going to have in general. Emily, Ryan, I sent you guys your new monologue templates. I think they look amazing. We've got a nice

little bottom graphic. Everything's debuting tomorrow. Ryan's really got the smolder going on here in that shot. I think that might be the best photo I've ever seen. It's an honorable photograph

for real. It's Annie Leibovitz. Annie Leibovitz for Ryan. So tell us how you guys feel. We did a video like this whenever we launched here on the KKF set. I'll never forget it. It actually got a lot of views. So tell us how you guys feel to be here, what you're most excited about,

how exactly you want to change things up, keep things the same. What are you thinking? Well, Ryan likes to talk about his feelings, so I think this is... How do you feel, Ryan? I've got kids. I need more touch. So for better and for worse, in some ways for better,

some ways for worse, back at Rising, the production staff, and very grateful for it, did a ton of prep work for us. So sometimes we could just roll in and just do the show. Like, write a writer,

but otherwise just kind of, all right, what do we got next? What do we got next? What do we got next? And what I'm looking forward to is crafting the show. Like, write a radar, but otherwise just kind of, all right, what do we got next? What do we got next? What do we got next? And what I'm looking forward to is crafting the show ourselves. Yeah. So that we're going to be picking. And also, you know, there's so much content that Rising puts out that sometimes you're kind of reaching.

Yes. We remember it well. That was actually one of our big, you know, big reasons we wanted to make a similar move was that same thing. Because the model over there is just as much content as you possibly can. And I mean, we helped to create that model, frankly, because in the early days, we're like, we just got to get this thing going. You got to feed the algorithm. But at a certain point, yeah, you're doing a segment and you're like, I don't care about this topic. I don't think it's important for people to know about this topic. Like I'm just, you know, it's

not a good feeling to put things out in the world that you don't actually think are important. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Emily, what did you guys think about in terms of the sort of like overall ethos of the show, your approach to it, the structure of it? What was sort of the thought that went into it? Well, and that's another thing I like about this model is that it's not just we get to sort of put our fingerprints on what we're covering, but also how we cover it. So I like that we're going to be able to take a topic. For instance, I think we're going to talk about Ken Starr tomorrow in the news. He passed away this week. And we don't have to do an eight-minute segment. We can actually really say, what does this tell us about our politics? What does the arc of this man tell us about our politics? And spend a little bit more

time going into different things and in ways that we want to go into them, even if they aren't perfect news cycle fits, we can spend the time to give more context. Something I love about this format is a huge portion of the listenership is audio, and they're just going to listen to the entire thing. They don't have, they don't even necessarily care like, or know what the headline is or whatever. And so they may just stumble into that Ken Starr segment and be like, wow, that's really interesting. I'd never learned about Ken Starr before, which he is a fascinating figure in his own right. I'm kind of jealous that you guys get to cover that. So what are some other things that you got, like in terms of programming? So it's going to be

every Friday, obviously I'm assuming you'll just hit if there's some major, major news. But what you guys have been doing over at Rising has been kind of the same thing. Like taking a step back, looking at bigger stories. Like give some people a preview. You don't have to give everything, your whole rundown away. But what are you guys thinking? I think the format also allows you to go a little bit longer on the topics that really, really need it. Or if you're on a roll.

Right. Sometimes people would be like, If I'm winning and they're trying to shut it down. You know, our Ukraine invasion day, that was a 37-minute segment. And that's still one of the highest-rated segments that this show has ever done. So just to show you,

if it's big news, people will watch the hell out of it. And sometimes people would say, what do you mean you have to run? It's not cable. What are you talking about? Actually, you do you mean you have to run? Like, it's not cable. What are you talking about? Actually, you do. You have to wrap.

They don't understand the scheduling. Right, exactly. Guests and all that. Exactly. And so we have it set up here. And just the, yeah, the churn and burn of, we know we've got 10 more segments we've got to do today. So we've got to move on from this one because otherwise we're going to literally be here all day and the show will never get out. So I think that flexibility is really important.

I'm really excited to see you guys sort of put your spin on what the show looks like, what it feels like, what the vibe is. And, you know, the list of topics that you floated, looking at the potential stock band and things like that are actually things that we didn't get around to covering this week, too. I know. Yeah. Sometimes we now have the opposite problem of like there's more news in the week than we're able to get into the

three days that we do the show. So it'll be great to have you guys in there on Friday. You know, there's a lot of news that's breaking Thursdays and Fridays now in the news cycle. So it'll be really useful. Yeah. And I was joking about like winning an argument, but what I like about the show is that it's actually not an argument show. One of the reasons we called it kind of counterpoints is like, here's a point. Yes. Here's a counterpoint. All right.

And now we can move on to the next thing. We're not trying to actually win. And a lot of the times when I'm asking Emily a question, sometimes it's because I want to further the conversation. I know she has a good point to make and I'm trying to like tee that up. About half the time, I genuinely don't know the answer. And I'm like, curious. Like it's a real question. Yes.

Like an authentic, actual question. Yeah. Not like a debate bro vibe of like, I'm going to own you. Not trying to move you into a corner. And then, oh, you've said this thing. Now, by your logic. Logic chokehold. It's like, actually, you've said this thing. Now, by your logic. Logic chokehold. It's like, actually, we have two people here who are both thoughtful and have different opinions.

And like, let's work through that in real time. I mean, that's, I think, why we felt really comfortable bringing you guys onto the channel, which is something that we are kind of like nervous about. Initially. Well, not even about you. No, not about you guys in general, but the idea of it. I mean, number one, you guys have been an important part of helping to create Rising and make it what it was,

helping to create Breaking Points and making it what it was. Like you guys were original friends of the show on the election panels and all that stuff over at Rising. So we obviously have a great level of comfort with you, but we also felt like you really get that kind of core ethos of like,

you know, I think at our best, my ideal goal for the show is to be able to show that we can disagree and it's okay and it doesn't have to like break apart the union. And I do feel like, yeah, if I can't have like a hard disagreement with Sagar and be able to work through that, then what hope is there for the country at large? So that's kind of always been my best hope for this show and what I think you guys have really demonstrated a great ability to do in good faith as well over at Rising. And so we're excited to have you here. We're excited, too. And people are smart.

Like if you show people the same contrast that you want to get to, as Ryan's talking about, like I actually want to know what's different here and what's the same. Yeah. That's what I feel like all of us need. Like me as a viewer, it's the thing that I love about Breaking Points.

Like viewers don't need to be handheld. Like CNN tries to handhold people from point A to point B. And not let in any other differing view. Exactly. They're gatekeepers. But like we just have a conversation held like cnn tries to handhold people from point a to point b so you're not exactly what you think any other differing view exactly they're gatekeepers but like we just have a conversation and try to get to what the actual contrast is and then we can all think about what the road forward looks like it really comes through people it's the thing that people love the most about the show and and every time i meet them you know sometimes some of the things people say are like really

heavy where they're like you really improve my relationship with my dad, Crystal. I was like, Jesus, dude. I'm like, don't put that on me. Yeah, it's like we found a way to be able to talk about these things where we don't just hate each other. He's like, I'm more like Crystal. He's like, but you made me understand what my dad means, whatever he said. I was like, wow, that's true. That's a heavy responsibility.

And people are starting to get it. And actually, the corporation that bought Hill TV called Nextar, they actually have the right diagnosis. They think that cable news is completely broken and people don't trust it anymore. Their solution is wrong. The solution. It's Cuomo, you mean? They're coming forward. It's like, we're going to be the ones who are down the middle and fair.

That doesn't work. That doesn't scan to either side. Right. So their diagnosis is right. But I think the answer is give people options, like give people different viewpoints and then let them decide for themselves. I talk to a ton of people who watch CNN, Fox, and MSNBC because they want to get, because they don't trust any of them, but they think if they get enough of the different viewpoints, then they can decide for themselves. And here we're just kind of doing that all in

one place. It's good for people. Yeah here we're just kind of doing that all in one place. It's good for people. Right. Yeah, it's good for people to not be in ideological bubbles. Like, it's good. It's like sometimes I wish Sagar would just agree with me on everything. But I know ultimately there is no fun in that. And, I mean, I get a lot out of our exchange.

I get a lot out of preparing for our exchanges because I know I'm not going to just have somebody there who's going to amen me on everything and is actually going to challenge me. So I have to bring like the best argument that I possibly can. And it's caused me to like rethink some of the ways that I approach my, you know, my views, my values in the way that I want to, you know, live in this world and approach politics. So I think it's a beneficial thing. Obviously, we believe in it. We have seen you guys living a lot of the same values and are just excited to see what you are putting together and honored that you have decided to join. Thank you for choosing us, really. We're honored by it. I think we mean it when we say that it's an honor for us because what you guys have built here I think is so important.

I've covered it at the Federalist, how important this is. So it's truly an honor, and we're very excited. It's not us. Awesome. Truly is all about them. As we have said, we've got a 10% discount for the annual. 10% is off. 10% is off.

Let's throw the graphic up there one more time. Counterpoints for the annual membership. It helps fund this, other expansions, status coup, the reporting, to be able to send reporters to wherever anything is happening. By the way, you guys will benefit from that. You'll have live footage. If you ever want to dispatch Jordan or anywhere, or one of his cameramen,

we can help and we can send a reporter out onto the ground and have exclusive footage like we did at Jackson. This stuff costs a lot of money, guys. You know, the studio, the technical, the graphics, the reporting, all the other contributors. Max had that awesome railway segment. These things are things that you alone are funding. Can never rely on the YouTube and Spotify gods to just show up for us one day.

So thank you all so much. We've got that link in the description. And they will see you all tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. And it will be distributed. So their show will come out just like ours does. There's no extra price for whatever. You're a premium member.

You're going to get it just like you get Breaking Points. So it'll be in your inbox. I think at noon, right? Noon is the starting point. So for premiums, it will come out at noon. For everybody else, 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. So California people, don't worry. You'll still watch it in the morning.

I don't want to hear about it. Indeed. So good luck to our guys. We're very excited. Excellent. And then Crystal and I are going to meet Atlanta. So that'll be fun. And if we feel like it, maybe we'll put some clips out of it.

Stay tuned. We'll see how it goes. We'll see you guys later. get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I started a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but not your mommy.

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