Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/16/21: CA Recall Results, Biden Covid Polling, FBI Nassar Coverup, Ex-CIA Agents Hack, Nicki Minaj, AOC's Dress, Milley's Misdeeds, Drug Price Battle, and More!

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

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Indeed, we do. So many interesting stories to get to this morning. Some new polls out regarding Biden's approval, also how people are feeling about those new vaccine mandates and requirements that he's put into place. Some stunning and horrific testimony from some of the women who were abused by Larry Nassar, specifically with regards. I mean, they were scathing about the FBI lying, burying this, allowing girls to continue to be victimized by this man. We'll bring you all the latest there. Also an interesting case, three former CIA intelligence officers who apparently were doing a lot of work for UAE that was not necessarily legal and looks like they were using their tradecraft to spy on Americans on behalf of the UAE. So we'll give you all the details there. Also, yes, we will bring you up to speed on Nicki Minaj's Cousin's Friends

Balls. Correct. Everything you need to know. There's like 5,000 new updates there. And layers, yeah. Give you, yeah, all kinds of layers, heroes, villains. It's all very complicated and very interesting. We'll bring you that. We've also got David Dayen on to break down exactly what's going on with that Medicare prescription drug pricing. You know, Democrats have long promised, this was a core campaign promise, that they were going to start negotiating with drug companies to lower prescription drug prices. It's supported by like literally 90 percent of Americans. And yet now you have a couple of, frankly, corporate assholes who are standing in the way and trying to block that proposal. So we're going to talk to David Dayen about what exactly is going on there. But we wanted to start this morning with the big results out of California, an utter

shellacking for the Republicans who were hoping to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. No other way to describe it. Let's go ahead and put the New York Times tear sheet up there on the screen. It shows the vote totals there with 63.9% coming in at no, yes coming in at 36%. As Crystal pointed out before the show, they oddly put no in red, so it seems like it's Republican, and then blue for yes. But the geography there does seem actually kind of interesting. Really what it is, is the mega populated areas not only came in to keep Gavin Newsom, but came in heavily. The rural areas part of the state, especially up there in Northern California, more deserty part, they all came in for the recall.

So if we dig down into the actual vote, also I should say that the 64% or around that of what Gavin Newsom ultimately was able to prevail within the recall is roughly equivalent by around two points to how he won election back in 2018 in the first place. So a stunning show out for the governor. But would be remiss if we didn't say that the composition of the people who voted within the recall shows again the accelerants of the trends that we saw in the 2020 election. So Nate Cohn over at the New York Times, they dug a little bit into the exit polling here. You can see that, which is that Newsom fared better amongst white college graduates than non-white voters in the state. And he isn't even faring better among Latino than non-Latino voters. So just to break

it down for you there, the education by race, white voters with a college degree came out at 70% within the recall. White voters with no degree came out 57% for the recall. Same thing whenever it's voters of color with a college degree, 63%. Voters of color, no degree, then it drops to 59. So it's a little bit different. And on race in particular, you can see there white, black, Latino, and Asian. Newsom won across the board. But actually the lowest percentage that he got was actually amongst white voters. So it's a very, very polarized country. It seems California, which is very much like the rest of the country, is just as polarized as we are. And Crystal, I mean Steve Kornacki also pointed out, let's put it up there, in terms of education polarization.

This is the most important one, in my opinion, because you can see 2018 compared to 2021, white college-educated voters came out at 59% for Newsom in 2018. In 2021, 68%. White non-college, he actually won that back in 2018. Today in 2021, 57%, like I said, voted for the recall. So the drop is actually precipitous amongst white non-college educated voters. And the Hispanic vote share dropped from 64% to 58%. That's what the governor is dealing with. It's the exact same story across the country. The semi-minor drop amongst Latinos basically mirrors the 7% to 8% bump the GOP got. And then the 10 point jump amongst white college voters. That's the story of the 2020 election and why Biden is president today. Yeah. I mean, it shows you, number one, why Biden is president today. It also

shows you that the influx of some Latino voters to the Republican Party to vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a one-off occurrence. Correct. So there always is a question because he's such a singular figure, whether this is just, you know, this particular election because he's on the ballot. You've consistently seen now that splitting of Latino voters. Look, still Gavin Newsom wins. He still won the majority. Still wins the group. And there's also, it's notable that there's less of an education divide among Latino voters than there are among white voters. But still, you see that sort of steady bleeding that I think Democrats should be very concerned about. They had long thought, you know, demographics are destiny. This is our new coalition. These are the people they just sort of assumed. And that's part of the problem is that there weren't ongoing efforts to actually understand this community, reach out to this community, form ties, communicate with this community in a way that's authentic and makes sense. So those problems continue to emerge for Democrats. But I mean, obviously, the big story

here is that Gavin Newsom, it wasn't even close. Yeah, it wasn't big. In a very unusual situation, he actually outperformed the polls, which normally Democrats recently have been underperforming, whatever the polls say. He did even better than what the polls said going in. There was obviously a late surge. His messaging of, listen, if you're worried about the pandemic and staying safe and you want to keep this like Trumpist maniac out of office, then you got to show up and vote, worked very, very well, especially as you point out with white college educated voters who are now the sort of primary base of the Democratic Party that they really cater to and really focus on. They have a lot of power within the party, regardless of what their numbers are and their numbers within the party continue to ultimately increase. There were also some interesting commentary from some California Republican consultants who were very upset at both Trump and Larry Elder basically at the end saying,

oh, this thing is rigged and suppressing voter turnout, which I think also helps to account for why you had this late surge for DUSA, because they also had not been pushing people to vote by mail in the same way that Democratic voters have been being pushed to vote by mail. So they were really counting on a big day of turnout. It just didn't happen. And it didn't happen. Why? In part, it's got to be because you got the president, leader of the party, and the guy that you're supposed to be electing saying the whole thing's rigged anyway, so why bother? It's so stupid and foolish, and it mirrors exactly what happened in Georgia. And look, this is the problem. Trump is both simultaneously the driver of turnout on the Democratic side. Why do you think these white college-educated voters came out so hard for

Gavin Newsom? Because every single ad, every single thing they talked about, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, all those photos, as you pointed out, that's the worst photo Larry Elder ever took in his life, is a photo of him with a thumbs up next to Trump. Who's in every ad. That's the problem, Larry, is that simultaneously the Republican base may love Trump, but if you juxtapose it onto the entire general electorate, especially in a state which is mega-democratic, and then you depress turnout on your own side, you have a state which is mega-democratic, and then you depress turnout

on your own side, you have a complete and total disaster. And that's exactly what happened. I predict this is what's going to happen in Virginia too, Crystal, because we've talked about Youngkin and all of that, but it just seems that Trump in particular is such an inspiring figure for Democrats to come out and vote. And you pointed a lot of this during the 2020 election, which is, this is all Dems have to do. They just have to be like, look, you want Trump to win and be like, oh God, no Trump. And that's enough. They will come out and they will vote, you know, for they'll crawl over glass in order to make sure they can put that mail in ballot. And at the same time, Trump is out there saying, well, the election was rigged. It's totally stolen. So why bother come out and vote? It's like you're basically giving an in-kind donation to the other side's

voters. It's one of the dumbest things you can do electorally. Yeah. I mean, this is pretty embarrassing ultimately for Republicans who really genuinely had a chance at this thing. And the beginning of August, the polls were tied. Obviously there's precedent not that long ago. A couple of things are definitely different. Number one, Gray Davis was less popular than Gavin Newsom, who never actually really dipped below 50% in terms of his approval rating. You didn't have a candidate like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's both well-known and well-liked and also a moderate who can appeal to a broader base in California. Instead, they lean into this guy who's, you know, fairly fringe character and wildly out of step with what the general population of California actually wants. Republicans really leaned into the sort of pandemic culture war messaging and I think

thought that their anti-lockdown positioning was a lot more popular in California than it actually is. If you look at the exit polls, and this is my own tweet, we can throw up here on the screen, two-thirds of California voters said the state's pandemic restrictions were either just right or not strict enough. So Republicans thought they had a real winning issue with anti-lockdown. Meanwhile, down the stretch, Gavin Newsom is leaning into, hey, I'm the one who put vaccine mandates in place for teachers and for healthcare workers. And by the way, and I actually thought this was smart messaging, his message on that wasn't like, we're pro-lockdown. It was, if you don't have these precautions in place, we're going to have to close schools again. So Larry Elder is the guy that's going to lead to your

kids not being able to go to school again. And in California, and actually we're going to cover some polling later, in a lot of the country now, with Delta variant surging and people feeling a lot more uncertain, some basic pandemic precautions are really popular. So I think Republicans overlearned some of the lessons of 2020, where they saw this surge of Latino voters. They saw that the polling didn't really reflect how people were feeling about lockdowns and the economy and all of that and leaned hard in that direction when certainly in a place like California, but also I would say in a lot of the country, it doesn't land the way that they think it is. And the polling has moved in this regard as Delta has gotten worse. People have adjusted. And now, whereas earlier in the summer, they were feeling like, OK, let's get back to normal.

Let's take the masks off. Let's go back to school with like all the normal sort of modes of doing that. Now there's a lot more hesitancy, a lot more caution, a lot more fear about the virus itself. No, it's and this is important for a corollary for everybody to understand, which is we had to adjust the way we thought about lockdowns after the election. But this is the first election where we've had an arguably the most pro-lockdown state. And look, I mean, vote doesn't lie, right? Like that's what you always have to look is what did the actual number come out to be? And so, yeah, it's true. I certainly overestimated what I thought would be a largely popular, you know, not uprising necessarily, but, you know, 40% of the state or so that I thought

might be able to be mobilized at the same time, Democrats feel apathetic. Nobody really likes Gavin Newsom, the homeless problem, crime, etc. Look, the guy basically not just won. I mean, he won around the exact same level that came out in 2018 when the state was arguably a lot better off. So what does that mean? It means that some of this stuff is popular in California. Now, trying to extrapolate that across the country, we're about to get to that into the polling block. But I really, I'm scrambled because at the same time, definitely got burned on all the lockdown polling that came out before the 2020 election. At the same time, you know, we see, you know, Biden also throws a wrench in this, but the vaccine has also changed things in the way that people think about it. We should also, and I'd be remiss if we didn't just hammer this home. This is what Dem messaging is going to, I think this might

actually be the best chance they have in the midterms. Not in terms to win, but in terms to try and stave off is all they have to do is say Trump's name all day long. Check out what Gavin Newsom said when he declared victory. I said this many, many times on the campaign trail. We may have defeated Trump, but Trumpism is not dead in this country. The big lie, January 6th insurrection, all the voting suppression efforts that are happening all across this country. What's happening, the assault on fundamental rights, constitutionally protected rights of women and girls. It's a remarkable moment in our nation's history. Yeah.

You know, I just find it so irritating. All of these politicians who came up in the Obama era and mimic his speech patterns and his mannerisms and his all. He's like an obvious example of that. Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg is probably the worst example of that. Anyway, irritating. But, yeah, the question has always been, okay, did the Democratic base just go back to brunch? And it was looking like that in California. Well, they're here now.

In August, it was really looking like these people don't really care. They're kind of apathetic. They're, you know, kind of like whatever with regards to politics. They're not, they're a little tuned out. They're not watching cable news every hour of the day anymore, which is probably a better state overall. But when it came down to a choice of, all right, listen, you may not love me, but look at this guy and check out this picture of him with Trump. they showed up and they showed up in droves. And so, look, again, let me say, I think Democrats are pretty much screwed for the midterms because historically it's hard. They didn't know what they need to do with regards to redistricting reform.

So they have, you know, six, seven point disadvantage coming in. Biden, we're about to get to his approval rating. Not great. There's a lot of uncertainty, all these problems. So I think Democrats have a very, very, very steep hill to climb. But they should take some heart from this so that when the chips were down, they were able to freak out and terrify their base enough to get them to show up. Well, that's going to be their strategy come 2022. So let's go ahead and get to that, actually, because this is very important. And trying to obviously nail the mood of the country is very, very difficult. But I think one thing we can generally say is Joe Biden's approval rating is down. For what reason? It's actually difficult to tell. The cross-tabulations in this new Quinnipiac poll give us a little bit

of insight. Let's put this up there on the screen. Overall, Biden stands at 42.50, which is a disaster. It's a little bit higher than the 39% that we saw about a week ago. You can see that the dip is largely among the independent voters there. 34.52, 34% approval, 52% disapproval. That's exactly where you don't want to be going into the midterms. And also his white college numbers are very soft at 56-39. He needs to be in the 65-70% range there. The Latino voter as well at 38% approval, 47% disapproval. So he's soft in the group that he really needs to be big on. And he's also incredibly soft there amongst Latino voters, which generally need to win by about two-thirds, one-third, just to even replicate 2020, which wasn't a very good turnout. But let's get to the issue by issue,

because this is where it matters even more. Put the next one up there on the screen. Do you approve and disapprove of Biden's handling on the following issues? COVID, 48-49. Economy, 42, 52. Foreign policy, 34, 59. Climate change, 42, 45. And my favorite, being commander in chief, 40, 55. Can thank the news media for that one. Yeah, that one's the news media. But I would say COVID, that is the biggest problem that he has. Because for a long time, when he entered office, he was in the 65, 70% approval rating on COVID. And then obviously the vaccines came out. And then what happened? It was like, oh, you know, June, it's over. Delta has just destroyed him. But really what it does is that as the march of Delta continues and on and on and on, as he dips underneath on COVID, at the same time, having a 10 point deficit within the economy, that's his biggest problem. I mean, Trump showed you can overcome a nearly 60% disapproval rating on COVID if you had a high approval rating on the economy.

He was always above 50%. Dipping below both, I think, is a recipe for disaster for Biden. Well, and they foolishly just let a lot of supports expire, pandemic supports expire at the same time that Delta is resurgent. And there are some economic signs that are extraordinarily mixed at best. A couple of jobs numbers that were wildly missed. And just generally people kind of pulling back on consumer spending. And as I said, now there are fewer supports in place to keep them spending, keep them feeling like they can stay in their house, they can stay in their apartment, that things are going to be okay. Visibility in terms of what they're going to do on this reconciliation package and any further, you know, relief that is going to come, very, very unclear what's ultimately going to come out of that. So on the pandemic, they seem to understand

that the thing that matters most is just the reality of how Delta is. So I think they feel totally comfortable withstanding any blowback over new restrictions, new requirements, all of those sorts of things, as long as it actually works to get Delta under control. Because ultimately, what are people going to vote on? It's not so much going to be on this policy choice or that policy choice. It's going to be on how do I feel right now? How do I think things are actually going? Am I better off now than I was two years ago? Yeah. So I think they seem to understand that with regard to the pandemic. They don't seem to understand that right now with regard to the economy, where, yeah, people may scream and put up a fuss and, you know, cry to Larry

Kudlow on Fox Business or whatever if he spends more money and provides these supports. But if the economy is doing well, ultimately, that's the metric that really counts versus all these sort of inside the beltway policy choices and decisions. So he's in a very perilous, precarious place right now. I think it's kind of a tipping point where either things are going to start to get better and people are going to start to feel that optimism again, or things are going to kind of stay stagnant and people are going to feel really frustrated that we've been in this place for a long time. To my mind, they're not doing nearly enough on the economy to make sure that people are feeling that sense of optimism that would

drive them into the polls for the midterms. I completely agree with you. It's totally middling. You know, if you're a normal person, can you ask and answer the question, what the hell is going on with reconciliation? I can't even answer that. Or ask and answer the question, what is actually in the damn thing? Nobody knows. You've got Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, they were at the White House yesterday, they've got these deadlines, everybody's arguing over money, nobody's actually even telling you

what's really in the thing. I'm telling you this thing is Obamacare 2.0, it's a total disaster, it's dragging on forever, there's no way it's gonna pass. All eyes right now, by the way, Crystal, point to a government shutdown over the debt ceiling at the end of the month, so everybody watch for that, you heard it here first, I'm almost certain that the government is going to shut down, which almost

always drags the economy down with it because of services, all of that. That'll be the last thing we need, but it almost certainly will happen because of some idiotic maneuvers. And of course, McConnell and them want Biden to suffer, so they're not going to vote for it. Put that all together. Biden is betting on the vaccine mandate. And we've got some mixed views here. So let's put the Axios tear sheet up there on the screen in terms of the polling. So they say that 60% of voters are backing the Biden vaccine mandate. So what they mean by that, and it's important, Axios asked this question, support for federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate and testing. So whenever you mention the testing, the number is at 60%. So it's amongst Republicans, it's 69% oppose, 30% support.

Amongst Democrats, 16% oppose, Democrat, 84%. But independent number, pretty critical there, 37%, 62% for support. However, whenever you ask it as a mandate question, and actually, this is where I think it's all going to be about branding. Let's put this next one up there on the screen from Quinnipiac. Well, whenever you drop the testing provision, then it's 40% approve, 51% disapprove. So I think, Crystal, that given your nuanced position on this, and we may disagree a little bit, but it's fine, is whenever you drop the testing from the discourse, and you, I think the Republicans are going to have a good time on this, because as they can frame it purely as a

vaccine mandate, then there is disapproval. Or at least, at the very least, it's complete 50-50, my opinion, based upon, look, structural realities in the House and all that, is that 50-50 means like 55-45 for Republicans just because of the weight, you know, in terms of the House of Representatives and especially in the Senate. Whereas if you include the testing, that is going to be the hardest part. But I'm curious, how does Biden thread that needle? Because he both needs to reassure the Democrats who are super pro actual mandate, but then he also needs to reassure the Democrats who are super pro actual mandate, but then he also needs to reassure the people who don't want to get the vaccine. They're like,

no, no, no, you're not going to get fired, right? Like you can still have a test. That's going to be a very difficult game for him to play. I think the messaging matters less than the reality. I think this is one of these situations where if the cases drop, if the hospitalizations drop, if you have more people actually getting vaccinated and it's having an impact in the parts of the country that are real hotspots right now, I think that reality, this is an instance where the reality trumps the messaging because it is truly going to be about what people are experiencing in their daily lives. I mean, all of us, I don't live in a particular like COVID hotspot area, but we're all dealing as parents with kids getting sent home to quarantine because they've been exposed to a positive test case at school. And it's just it's all very disruptive.

It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's all very disruptive. Everybody was hoping you'd be able to go back to school this year. Maybe even the kids wouldn't have to wear the mask in the school this year, and that everything would go smoothly. So if we're getting into the midterms, and we do feel like we've really turned this corner this time, and you've got a larger percentage of the population vaccinated, you're not having these hotspots and these surges and all the ICU beds full and all of that, I think that's going to matter a lot more

than the messaging right now in this particular political moment. Look, I think Democrats feel pretty confident about the choices that they've made here. Most of the polling seems to indicate that a majority of the public is with them. I also think that there's something to, you know, Republicans were all in on this culture war fight anyway. And Biden, we talked about how Biden was kind of in the worst of both worlds because he wasn't really leaning into the Democratic position, but he also obviously't really leaning into the Democratic position. But he also obviously wasn't like with the Republican position. Now he's kind of leaned into the fight and given people something to side with.

And I think that is part of the story in California, too, is you had these clear lines. You can't, unfortunately, you can't opt out of these things. You've got to stake out a position and give people a reason to rally to you. So I think that if nothing else, making these clear calls with regards to more aggressively trying to get people vaccinated is going to cut through a little bit of the apathy with the Democratic base that was a problem. And one thing I noted on this, so part of what that Axios-Ipsos poll that had 60% of voters backing the Biden mandates, part of what they found is that there's extreme intensity on the issue. So the numbers of very strong approval and the numbers of very strong disapproval are pretty high. The people are in

the middle like, it's okay, I'm not sure, sure, no, whatever. Those numbers are relatively small. People are very animated on this issue. And Democrats need their voters to be animated on these issues to actually show up. 100%. And for anybody who's complaining, I would just point to you to one Donald Trump, who actually invented this strategy in terms of cleaving the public apart and making sure that you fight and feel incredibly polarizing on one way or the other. It's actually a very good electoral strategy. And so that is something where I get so annoyed whenever I hear a lot of, you know, Republicans more be like, Biden is just talking down, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, you guys invented this. You know, you literally,

Trump literally rode this wave to the White House. And how did it work out, everybody? We all hate each other more. Everybody, you know, doesn't want to listen. People feel intensely polarized. And look, we try to approach it with as much nuance here as possible, but we're just giving you the exact electoral ramifications. And I think you're 100% right, which is if you turn this into a moral crusade, which it is for a lot of people, especially around the people I live around, they will come out to vote because they'll be like, absolutely. I mean, they love telling people what to do. And then it's on the other side. People love telling people, don't tell me what

to do. And Trump leaned into this more than any politician. So from a pure electoral ramification standpoint, it's correct that if Biden gives these people, you know, they feel like they're moral crusaders. That's a real good way to get people out to vote. They feel like they've got something to fight and something to defend. Exactly. It goes back to Newsom, what his ads were. Listen, I put these requirements in place for teachers and healthcare workers, and they're going to take it all away. So he was able to lean into that in a way that's very effective. You can see Terry McAuliffe doing the same thing in Virginia and Joe Biden clearly leaning into a similar strategy. Again, I think Democrats are at a tremendous disadvantage for the midterms.

But I do think that this is a much better political strategy that will help them to mitigate their worst potential losses. Is it good for the country? You can have apathy. I mean, look, I actually do think I support these requirements. And I don't think that he has gone too far in terms of like shaming people or having contempt for them. I generally think he's pretty good about that as far as Democrats go. However, the big thing that they were worried about is Democrats being apathetic. And I think that this gives them some juice.

And ultimately, again, I come back to what is going to matter is the actual reality. More than the political messaging and the consultant speak and what the ads say. If people actually feel like we're moving in the right direction and these people over here are going to take us backwards, that's going to be a much better place for Democrats to stand in. I think that's probably right. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to BreakingPoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes.

All right. We've got a very important story we want to keep everybody updated on around Larry Nassar, the FBI. There was a hearing yesterday on Capitol Hill where some of the star gymnasts actually came and gave some testimony in terms of not only their abuse by Larry Nassar whenever he was the doctor for USA Gymnastics, but in terms of their dealings with the FBI, how they spoke out exactly on the abuse that they were suffering and that they were turned away by the FBI. And Larry Nassar continued to molest dozens, hundreds of young girls, even when law enforcement was aware of the issue. So let's go ahead and take a listen to Michaela Maroney. Most of you are probably aware I was molested by the U.S. gymnastics national team and Olympic

team doctor Larry Nassar. And in actuality, he turned out to be more of a pedophile than he was a doctor. What I'm trying to bring to your attention today is something incredibly disturbing and illegal. After telling my entire story of abuse to the FBI in the summer of 2015, not only did the FBI not report my abuse, but when they eventually documented my report 17 months later, they made entirely false claims about what I said. After reading the Office of Inspector General's OIG report, I was shocked and deeply disappointed at this narrative they chose to fabricate. They chose to lie about what I said and protect a serial child molester rather than protect not only me but countless others. This was very clear cookie cutter pedophilia and abuse and this is important because I told the FBI all of this and they chose to falsify my report and to not only minimize my abuse but silence me yet again. I thought given the

severity of this situation, they would act quickly for the sake of protecting other girls. But instead, it took them 14 months to report anything when Larry Nassar, in my opinion, should have been in jail that day. The FBI, USOC, and USAG sat idly by as dozens of girls and women continued to be molested by Larry Nassar. According to the OIG report, about 14 months after I disclosed my abuse to the FBI, nearly a year and a half later, the FBI agent who interviewed me in 2015 decided to write down my statement, a statement that the OIG report determined to be materially false. Let's be honest, by not taking immediate action from my report, they allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year. And this inaction directly allowed Nassar's abuse to continue. What is the point of reporting abuse if our own FBI agents are going to take it upon themselves to bury that report in a drawer?

They had legal, legitimate evidence of child abuse and did nothing. If they're not going to protect me, I want to know who are they trying to protect. What's even more upsetting to me is that we know that these FBI agents have committed an obvious crime. They falsified my statement, and that is illegal in itself. Yet no recourse has been taken against them. God, it just makes your blood boil.

Scathing. I mean, Scathing. Yeah, I mean, props to her speaking out that way. I mean, Simone Biles had a very similar story. Let's take a listen to what she said. I don't want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse. To be clear... Sorry. Take your time.

To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse. Wow, that is hard to watch. I mean, what they're describing here is just failure after failure after failure. Not only does the FBI sit on these allegations, do nothing, multiple credible allegations, they just sit on them. Then, according to Michaela Maroney, they lie. Falsified her statement. Lie and falsify her statement about what she actually told them about the abuse that she suffered. And of course, the worst part of all of it is that by their inaction, they allowed this man to continue

to go and victimize young girls and carry out his horrific abuse for another day, month, year. I mean, it just is so unconscionable. And you look at the FBI and you're like, what are you people doing anyway? What are you doing? Like, you couldn't prevent January 6th. Framing those guys for going after the governor in Michigan? There was never any holding to account of the many war on terror plots that they invented. So that they, you know, actively radicalizing people and providing them support so that they can then ride in and pretend like they're the heroes, disrupting plots that they themselves created. Now they seem to be applying those tactics domestically, inventing maybe a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.

We know there were more FBI informants working on that. Than actual defendants. Than there were actual defendants. And by the way, their lead dude just had to, just was fired by the FBI for domestic violence. So great group they've got going there. Like what the hell is going on with the FBI? This is unconscionable. Well, and what did we just learn? It took until yesterday, let's put this up there on the screen, for the FBI agent who failed to pursue those tips to even be fired. It took until yesterday.

We've known about this for five years. in the Indianapolis office, who voluntarily retired, made false statements to the Justice Department because he was one of the people involved in covering up this case. And what did we learn, Crystal? That he was angling for a job after he retired with USA Olympic and Paralympic Committee and discussed it with Steve Penny, who is the president of USA Gymnastics. So what does that mean? Not only did he leave the FBI with no disciplinary action whatsoever, while he was there and covering up this sexual predator abusing these young girls, he was trying to go work for USA Gymnastics and the US, or sorry, for the US Olympic Committee. And by not doing all of this, while Larry Nassar was at Michigan State University, that he was abusing both people there

and the gymnasts at Team USA. So all of it together, the only people who've really been punished were the girls themselves who were molested. I forget her name. She was taken off of the team for initially even reporting all of this to Larry Nassar. Is that Ali Reisman? I forgot her name. There was a whole documentary on Athlete A, I think it is, on Netflix, and I recommend everybody go and watch it. But really what it is is that you put all of this together, and everybody in the system protected him. The USA Gymnastics, they didn't want it to be a scandal. Steve Penny repeatedly made false statements to the parents of the people who reported the crime and then retaliated against the family who had the real courage in order to go

and speak out. And then these poor girls are at the Olympics, they're winning gold, and then they're getting molested while they're there. Simone Biles and Michaela Maroney, I mean, these were household name heroes here in the United States. And at the same time, they're going through these, like, horrific personal traumas. And then at the end of the day, she, Michaela Maroney in particular, I mean, was really struggling at the time. And she told the FBI before her own mom because he was so ashamed Of what was going on and then this guy betrays her trust Completely and lets it all go. I mean, there's just the fact firing is nothing

Okay, and then this other guy WJ Abbott these people belong in jail I mean, there's no other way to describe it and Christopher Wrayray, FBI director, he's like, oh, I'm heart sick. We had to take some disciplinary action. I mean, I'm going to save the expletives, but screw you. If that's all we got, screw you. You have no public confidence. Also, right now our city is crawling with feds because September 18th is coming, and there's some like January 6th

thing and they put the fencing back up in the Capitol and, you know, I see little unmarked cars rolling around. So the dump trucks coming in this morning. It's like, good guys, this is what you're focused on while you're letting literal serial predators off of the, off the hook. They were very busy framing Muslims at the time. so Zagre couldn't be bothered to look into actual ongoing crimes. I don't know, if you're these girls, how you ever trust anyone again. I don't know. Because they were failed by every single adult along the way who viewed them as vessels for their own ambition versus human beings who were trusted to their care. You know, as you said, USA Gymnastics, they didn't want a scandal.

This was working out very well for them. The girls were performing. They were getting gold. They were bringing lots of prestige upon them. That's what they cared about. This creep at the FBI, more interested in his potential job prospects after he leaves the agency than doing the job that he's supposed to do in protecting these girls and bringing this man to justice. It's just, it really is horrific. And then you

think about Nasser himself. I mean, this is what is just so horrific to contemplate at all. You know, he starts with these girls when they're so young, starts building this trust and manipulating them and telling them, oh, this is just part of the medical treatment. And everyone around you is forcing you to go to this man and telling you how great he is. And, you know, and a lot of the parents, I'm sure they didn't, they didn't know, had no idea what was going on. So, yeah, I mean, how do you ever trust a single person again when in every single instance, time after time after time over years, they looked out for their own interest and just everything that you said or all your concerns, your safety, your well-being was secondary, tertiary, not even on the radar for these people.

Yeah, wow. At least they got to speak out. We'll continue to bring you guys updates whenever we can. Got another deep state story for you here. This one about the CIA. This is actually, there's a lot to this story. Let's go ahead and throw this New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. So ex-U.S. intelligence officers admit to hacking

crimes in work for the Emiratis. The lead is three former American intelligence officers hired by the UAE to carry out sophisticated cyber operations admitted to hacking crimes and to violating U.S. export laws that restrict the transfer of military technology to foreign governments. That's according to court documents that were just made public. Those three men, Mark Baer, Riot Adams, and Daniel Garicki, they admitted violating U.S. laws as part of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement. If the men comply with that agreement, the Justice Department will drop the criminal prosecution. They will also pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and they will also never be able to receive a U.S. government security clearance again. So here's the backstory with all of this. And bear with me

for a moment because I went deep on this story because there's a lot going on here. The CIA has been warning that there's a real problem with their former officers who, you know, understand all of our deepest tools of spycraft and hacking and all of this in this global cybersecurity world are now getting hired by other countries for hundreds and thousands of dollars to go and apply their tradecraft that they learned the CIA, sometimes against now our own people. So these former intelligence officers are selling themselves to the higher bidder, highest bidder, to go and do nefarious work for whatever government is willing to pay them the highest price. The way that this particular thing went down is initially these dudes, they were part of a company called CyberPoint that was doing what it looks like to be

at least legal, if not entirely legitimate work for the UAE. UAE kept pushing them to go further and engage in illegal hacking activities, including some allegedly targeting American citizens themselves. So since they were with CyberPoint, and CyberPoint was like legitimate and registered with the U.S. government, etc., they were unwilling to do everything the Emiratis wanted. So the Emiratis started this other company called Dark Matter, got a bunch of the employees from CyberPoint to go over to Dark Matter, and Dark Matter starts doing all kinds of crazy stuff. So one of the things that they did, and I don't know if you guys remember this story. Remember the story about how baby monitors could be turned into spying devices?

This is a huge thing. That was Dark matter, okay? These guys were doing things like that to spy on perceived enemies and adversaries of the UAE. So that's dark matter, but they're far from the only firm that's engaged in this type of nefarious activity. In fact, the biggest sort of most notorious one at this point

is this group called NSO that we told you about before. It's an Israeli-based firm. They're the ones that developed this Pegasus spyware that can literally take over your phone and without you even clicking on anything, so you don't even have to get like a phishing email or a weird text or whatever, they can just take over your phone and get access to everything that you have, everything you're doing there, including your encrypted apps. And they're selling it to the Mexican government. They're selling it to some of the Gulf states. All these actors that claim, oh, we're just going to use it in legitimate ways to combat crime, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, they were using it to target journalists, to target activists, to track, in Saudi's instance, the people who were around surrounding Jamal Khashoggi.

Thousands of people, heads of state, prime ministers, all of these people being tracked by this Pegasus app. And so all American, Israeli, and other top intelligence officers around the world being recruited into these incredibly nefarious and oftentimes illegal lines of work. So this is just a glimpse into one small instance of what was going on here. Yeah. And what did we just talk about with Larry Nassar? We have the FBI agent who wants a job for the U.S. Olympics Committee. Here's the thing. We have a huge problem with these guys. You know, when I lived in Qatar, I saw this stuff everywhere, even whenever I was a teenager, because it's like the Qatari royal family would hire all of these like ex-British SAS and Delta

Force guys in order to protect them. Their pilots were all former like special forces, US military pilots. That's just the protection side. And look, I have less of a problem with that, but even then, but then I would hear all these stories about guys out in the middle of the, uh, about in the middle of, um, forgetting the geography for a second, but wherever the Somali pirates are, they would have these like floating mercenary ships, right? Where in the middle of, uh, in the middle of the ocean, because that's where like, you know, certain laws don't apply and they can use whatever firepower they want. It was total craziness. And then more and more,

the biggest worst kept secret in Washington is how many of the richest people in this city are on the take from the Qataris, from the UAE. There are these restaurants which you can't even afford to walk into. And it's all fake. It's a fugazi because it's all these expense accounts

being dropped by the Qatari, the Emiratis. They all pay these PR people. They have lawyers. They have these ex-CIA agents. And if you screw with them, I guarantee you are both under surveillance. I'm serious. Even covering this story, they will hack your phone, your emails. They do it to each other. That's the best part. A Q Qatari ambassador the Emiratis their ambassadors emails were all leaked like to Wikileaks

or whatever it was clearly by the Qataris and it was like the Qataris will go and you know their stuff will get hacked and so they're all

and all of it the people who are playing this game are hired guns who worked for us who we trained some of these guys aren't just CIA

some of them are NSA they worked on some of the top hacking protocols. They can go out and sell that on the private markets for millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands, contracts, their skill set. I mean, this is supposed to be classified. We have a massive problem with this all across the world. And the authoritarian regimes in the Gulf, because they have all this money, they'll pay top dollar for you to do all of this stuff. And they don't care if it's against US citizens, nothing. Nope. I mean, to further their monarchy. Think about that. That's what this is all about. The lower your morals are in this town, the more money you will make. You can

make so much money. I mean, it really is a direct correlation. The richer you are here, the worse shit you've been willing to do. I mean, that's just, that's what it is. I remember when we were covering the Haitian, by the way, there's all kinds of new developments about who killed the Haitian president. Yeah. Now the new prime minister ends up, it looks like he was involved. That had just been appointed. Classic.

Yeah. I don't know. I think it's all with regards to drug money. It's regards to money, for sure, all of these things are. But there were stories about how, you know, people were showing up with this political vacuum that was created, throwing lots of cash at lobbyists here to take their side in the dispute so that they would be the chosen one by the U.S. government to lead the country next. And so if you're and and what these lobbyists are like, some of them are willing to do it. Some of them weren't willing to do it.

You have no idea who might be implicated in this plot. Ultimately, like, is my client, were they involved in murder? Were they involved in a coup? I don't know. How much are you willing to pay me? And that, you know, and that'll tell you whether I'm willing to forgive and forget or not. The more you're willing to abandon any sort of principle of moral patriotism, any of that loyalty, the more money that you're ultimately going to make. And so this is one little window into this. And this, this hacking is incredibly troubling, not just for a like, they've betrayed

the country thing, but we're talking about, they can gain access to anyone's phone. Apple just released a new update to try to combat, yeah, to try to fight back against Pegasus so that they can't just take over your phone whenever they want. All they need is your phone number in order to do that. There's zero doubt, though, that they'll figure out a way around this fix as well. They'll always be one step ahead of the, you know, Apple or whoever or Samsung or whoever else coming up afterwards trying to protect your security ultimately. I mean, I think Apple's the only one who really particularly cares about your security at all anyway. As imperfect as they are as well. But, you know, when you have a country that's based around money and where your whole message is like, if you're rich, then you're good. And that sort of money and wealth and profit is the end all be all, then people find it very easy to abandon any sort of morality or compass that they might have once

had. So it's a pretty fascinating look at how these things actually operate and what the deep state goes on to do after they've, quote unquote, served our country. There you go. All right. Somewhat less serious story here. There is no way to segue to this story. So it all started a few days ago with Nicki Minaj tweeting that her cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine because his friend got it and became impotent. His testicles became swollen.

His friend was weeks away from getting married. Now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it and make sure you're comfortable with your decision, not bullied. Yes. Okay, so Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend allegedly has swollen balls because of the vaccine. Now, obviously, this is ridiculous.

Also, you were just telling me they don't even use the same vaccines they use like the Chinese version. Yes, that's right. This is actually an important corollary. They don't have Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. They use Sinopharm. So even if any of this is true, and it seems pretty clear that Mr. Minaj's cousin's friend has been cheating on his cousin's friend's fiance, She probably broke up with him because he was cheating on her and he clearly got an STD. He was definitely screwing around. Gets an STD.

He's like, it was totally the vaccine. Genius move. She obviously didn't buy it because she broke up with him. Okay, so let me just say something about human nature, which I think is relevant and a potentially deeper point here

before we get into even more of the silliness that ultimately unfolded. People are very swayed. This is human nature. People are very swayed by anecdotes. They're very swayed by like what they've experienced in their life. And so, you know, I think that it's important to realize,

to try to recognize that we all have this bias in favor of our anecdotes. We knew someone who this happened to, ergo, it must be true across the board. Of course, we have our own personal anecdotes, right? I was around you a lot when you were sick, and I didn't get sick, and we both had the vaccine, and we had no side effects. So those are our anecdotes. But the best thing to do is to look at the overall data and to not listen so much to Nicki Minaj or anyone else telling you about their cousin's friend's swollen balls.

However, let's take for a moment seriously the claim that a vaccine side effect is swollen balls making you impotent. I can't believe this actually happened. The health minister of Trinidad and Tobago came out and gave a press conference. They did a whole investigation to find the swollen balls in question and came up empty-handed. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. One of the reasons we could not respond yesterday in real time to Ms. Minaj is that we had to check and make sure that what she was claiming was either true or false. We did, and unfortunately, we wasted so much time yesterday running down this false claim. It is, as far as we know, at this point in time, there has been no such reported either side effect or adverse event. And

what was sad about this is that it wasted our time yesterday trying to track down, because we take all these claims seriously, whether it's on social media or mainstream media. As we stand now, there is absolutely no reported such side effect or adverse event of testicular swelling in Trinidad or I dare say, Dr. Hines, anywhere else. None that we know of anywhere else in the world. So there you have it, guys. No swollen balls. Yeah. Even if there were, they're using a different vaccine, okay?

That's true. They're using Sinopharm, which you shouldn't take because it's actually just not that effective. That's the other thing. So Nicki Minaj's tweet and anecdote here, profoundly unhelpful and silly. But then it just devolves from here, okay? So then you've got MSNBC, like, aggressively trashing her,

Joy Reid leading the charge. I'm not going to read this whole tweet from Nikki and the various slurs that she threw out against Joy Ann, but suffice it to say she brings up the fact

that, you know, Joy had her old homophobic blog post that she claimed it was hacked and, you know, time-traveling hackers went back, et cetera, et cetera. Also, and this is interesting, Joy had previously tweeted, which I didn't actually know, during the Trump administration, she said, Will anyone, anyone at all ever fully trust the CDC again?

And who on God's earth would trust a vaccine approved by the FDA? How do we get a vaccine distributed after this broken Trumpist nonsense has infected everything, even if Biden wins? Which, look, I think there is something to the idea that you can't just expect all the trust to be healed and everything to be, whatever your reason for mistrusting the government, those things don't just instantly go away. So it's worth having some compassion for people who are nervous, who are uncertain, who are taking their time. Okay. Yeah. So at the same time that MSNBC is doing segments trashing Nicki, of course, Fox News suddenly loves Nicki Minaj. She's amazing.

She's a hero for putting out her weird, wrong, swollen balls tweet. Tucker Carlson does all kinds of segments about it. I think he has Candace Owens on to talk about it, of course. So Nikki tweets out one of the Tucker segments and just has like a bullseye on it, basically saying like he's totally right. And so because, again, we live in like the worst of all times, of course, someone had to chime in. Oh, well, here's this as well. News media also pretended that the reason she didn't want to want to go to the Met Gala is because their vaccine requirement. In reality, she says it's because she didn't want to want to go to the Met Gala is because their vaccine requirement. In reality, she says it's because she didn't want to travel because of her young child. So she feels that they were really twisting that. OK, so we'll throw that one into the mix.

OK, so then we get back to Tucker. She's saying he got it right on this piece. Somebody had to weigh in and be like, he's a white nationalist and that someone happened to be his son piker to which she replies um that you know basically don't tell me that i can't even associate with someone from a particular political party quote people aren't human anymore if you're black and a democrat tells you to shove marbles up your ass you simply have to if another party tells you to look out for that bus stand there and get hit um and there's a whole back and forth. Now I'm pro-Nikki.

What's going on? I know. What's happening? I'm like coming full circle now. I'm like, well, you're kind of right about that part. That's a good point. And then there's another one more layer that I'll, well, there's two more layers, I promise.

We're almost to the end of the updates. The next layer is Nikki says, and I think we have this tweet, that she's been invited to the White House. The White House has invited me, and I think it's a step in the right direction. Yes, I'm going. I'll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I'll ask questions on behalf of the people who have been made fun of for simply being human.

Hashtag ballgate day three. Then the White House responds that actually they didn't invite her to come. They did offer her a phone call. Personally, I think it would be a good idea if they did invite her and she could talk to Dr. Fauci, do something on camera. She's an influential person. One of the reluctant populations has been young black people. She might have some influence there. So I actually think it would be a good idea if they did invite her.

And then the last piece I will lay on the plate for you is she says she's in quote Twitter jail. Don't know exactly what that means. Twitter says all these tweets, by the way, are still up there, which I think if a common person tweeted some of this stuff, I'm not sure it would have remained intact. But all these tweets are still up there. But she says she's in Twitter jail. Twitter denies that there's anything going on with her account. And now I believe you are fully up to date on Nicki Minaj and the case of the swollen balls. There you go. That's it. You heard it all here. Trinidad says it's not true. She tweeted out her thing. Now it becomes political controversy here. The problem is then the worst people on earth turn against Nicki. So

now I'm pro-Nicki. Then the White House says, well, she's not really invited. We invited her for a phone call with the doctor. I, like you said, I actually would support it. And now, um, she says that she is off Twitter and she will never use the platform again. Whether that's true or not, we'll see. If she does that, she'll be a happier person. And like you said, a Twitter spokesman says Twitter did not take any enforcement action on this account. So who the hell knows what's going on? Which is interesting in and of itself. Because, again, I think if it was a regular person, we just did the segment on Facebook and how they've been exposed now as having a two-tier system of – explicitly a two-tier system of justice with their enforcement actions.

It seems like maybe Twitter is doing a similar – they call it whitelisting or it's a cross-check program at Facebook. But it seems like special treatment here as well. But, yeah, I mean, it all starts with a really stupid and profoundly unhelpful anecdote. And then everybody gets into their equally stupid partisan corners. And it just ends up being embarrassing and showcasing the worst of Democratic Party hacks and Republican Party hacks all the way around. And so you sort of come full circle in the end to being like, well, she doesn't have a point about how stupid these partisan brainwarners ultimately are. Like I said, invited the White House. I think it's great. She can talk to doctors. She should

talk about it wherever. I think it's a good idea. If she wants to go on Tucker and talk about it, fine, whatever. I think it's all generally a good thing, and that inserting our culture war BS into this is dumb. Like you said, the Trinidadian health minister says it's all good. Maybe he's the Dr. Fauci of Trinidad. I don't know. Yeah, but they don't even use our Maxine. The real point is they all use Sinopharm, which is not the same

thing. So there we go. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Saga in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Krystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, dear viewer, I hope you will forgive me, and I hope I can forgive myself because I've decided to present a hot take on AOC's Met Gala dress. I just can't keep my mouth shut even when it is thoroughly advisable. So here it is, the good, the bad, and the ugly of AOC's tax-the-rich Met Gala dress. So let's start with the ugly here.

That dress was ugly. Let me take a nothing special 90s wedding dress, stick some bright red letters across the backside. Honestly, what woman wants to have bloodstained red across their ass on a white dress? I will spare you the details, but my mind instantly flashed back to some very traumatic time of the month moments in high school. You also brought up Sagar. It looks very much like the Chick-fil-A eat more chicken situation. However, I will say AOC was even born. So while Carolyn's gaudy lace gold, purple, and green dress with a giant sash or cape or something was totally hideous, it was also completely politically irrelevant. So you hobnobbed with elites, you embarrassed

yourself, and you didn't even get a news cycle out of it. Well done here. On a rather more serious note, also ugly were the images of the servant class, masked up and anonymous and all black, catering to the political and cultural elite, who mostly went without masks, judging from the pictures. Glenn Greenwald and others rightly pointed this out. One group is intentionally invisible, vague, indistinct, intended to be unnoticed servants to the people who actually matter. The other, they're expressive, they're visible, they're photographed, they're memorialized. In fact, it's kind of the perfect metaphor for the class divide in America writ large. First of all, it is now commonly the

practice in places without indoor masking requirements that the shopping classes, they can roam freely, they can make whatever pandemic protection choices suit them, while service workers are required to fully mask up for their very long shifts. Not so much for their own safety, but to make sure that the clients are comfortable. It all reminds me of an incredible scene from The White Lotus, where hotel manager Armand instructs his new trainee on how to behave and how to treat their wealthy guests by being as generic as possible. He says, The goal is to create for the guests an overall impression of vagueness

that can be very satisfying, where they get everything they want, but they don't even know what they want or what day it is. The goal is to disappear behind our masks as pleasant, interchangeable helpers. It's tropical kabuki. All right, on to the good and the bad of the dress itself. So there's two possibilities here. Possibility number one, AOC put on a performative display of righteousness, cosplaying class politics for a wealthy cultural elite who are all too comfortable with her and her toothless approach to politics. Possibility number two, AOC weaponized her access

to elite circles, forced an uncomfortable message in their faces, and successfully sparked a national conversation on a live issue, which is of course being debated right this very second. So, if it's option number one, it would be AOC at her absolute worst, a full embrace of the most biting critiques of her politics as totally establishment-friendly with some more radical and pro-working-class rhetorical flourishes. Someone who's lost her way from the new member of Congress who sparked the wrath of Pelosi on day one by protesting with activists outside of her office. A former rogue who's been thoroughly tamed, doing a younger and cooler version of Carolyn Maloney's impotent calls

for an ERA. Now, if it's option number two, it's actually AOC at her best. She's a backbench congresswoman, but she's young and she's pretty and she commands a social media army. And Lord, does that woman know how to drive a news cycle when she wants to. In order to do so, you got to be controversial. You got to make some segment of the population totally lose their minds. Mission accomplished. She forced our feckless news media to talk about taxing the rich instead of getting us into new wars or whatever they're onto today. Not only that, but culture, like it or not, is king. She transformed progressive taxation into a culture war topic that could be comfortably debated at the metaphorical water cooler, and that is no easy feat. Not as we're saying here that the very reason AOC is invited into these spaces is because she hasn't been much of an establishment or elite threat in recent months.

She's just edgy enough to be fashionable. They expect her to wear the dress. They don't actually expect her to do anything about it. Associating with AOC, it gives the cultural elite the feel-goods of the activists without requiring them to, say, view their anonymous mass servants as actual human beings, and without fear that anything will fundamentally change. And I might add, there's certainly nothing threatening about the inaccessible college grad student language that AOC routinely leans into, which seems tailor-made to persuade as few people as possible. So which is it? The unsatisfying truth for the moment is that we're about to find out. AOC and other progressives,

they've promised to use their leverage to demand an actually good reconciliation bill that would include climate, health care, a lot more, and yes, taxes on the rich. Are they actually going to do it? Well, I haven't seen any pushback on the rather disappointing tax proposal that came out of the House Ways and Means Committee. That proposal was described by the New York Times as leaving vast fortunes unscathed, preferring as it does to go after income rather than wealth. The wealthy are already well-versed in how to avoid the individual income tax rate. On the other hand, I have yet to see progressives more organized or more consistent than they have been this time around. They've actually done the work. They've secured a block. They're asserting their position consistently, and they deserve credit for that.

It's a tactic that is made a lot easier, though, by the fact that today, Nancy Pelosi is on their side. There's little doubt, though, that at some point, that temporary alliance of convenience is going to break down, and that is when we're really going to find out. When things get hot and Pelosi gets pissed, will AOC and her allies actually stand in the fire? Will they sacrifice next year's Met Gala tickets and the other many perks of elite access? In weeks, if not days, we will all know the answer and the true meaning of the dress um sagar i saw brianna say that the dress was basically like a rorschach test if you've already one more thing i promise just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with kyle kolinsky it's called crystal

kyle and friends where we do long-form interviews with people like gnome chomsky cornell west and glenn greenwald you can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, one of the problems that we have in this country right now is that the outrage machine is always turned up to 11. Joe Biden ordered some ice cream. Oh my God, Fox News alert. he's in decline. Trump walks down the stairs in a strange way for like two seconds. Oh lord, MSNBC alert, he's gonna die. There's a national health conspiracy. The problem with this media environment, other than it being incredibly dumb,

is it obscures and conditions people so they have no idea what is important or not. That, in my opinion, is the true crime of cable news, as it has conditioned millions to just simply tune out and say, ugh, what is it this time? I preface with that because the story we're about to actually cover should inspire some outrage, investigation, and the details of it just say so much about the Trump era, mass media, and worst of all, the people who are in charge of our decrepit institutions that left us behind a very long time ago. By now, I'm sure that you heard in Bob Woodward's latest book, he reveals a stunning charge that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the days after January 6th, called his counterpart in China to assure him

that Trump would not launch a surprise attack on that country. Not only that, Milley assured the Chinese general that if the United States were to attack China, that it would not be a surprise that he would call him directly, assuring him that there would be no attack. This in addition to General Milley calling elements within the military tried to assert control in the last days of the Trump presidency over the nuclear codes. Now look, the partisan reactions to this are easy. Democrats say, yeah, well, Trump was crazy. There was an insurrection, right? The general was just doing his job. Republicans are calling treason. Now let's take the partisan politics out of it for a moment and be dispassionate. General Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By law, he has no operational authority whatsoever. His job is simple, to advise the Commander-in-Chief

of military options and to coordinate those options to present to him from within the Pentagon. That's it. Nothing else. So in effect, when he picked up that phone, if he wasn't acting on orders, at best he was out of line, middling, he was violating the Logan Act, and at worst, he did commit an act of treason. But that's not really what I want to delve into. What I want to emphasize is this, that the general is one of those people who throughout the Trump administration,

along with the media and more, were the ones who would not shut up about norms. Trump was an assault on norms. We have to adhere to norms. Norms are so important. And yet, when the general himself steps outside of the chain of command to call his Chinese counterpart after January 6th, January 6th was bad, sure, but it's not a license to throw out the Constitution. If anything, the fact that the day ended in Biden's election certification is itself a constitutional victory. And yet, from that day forward, the very people who believed so much in norms use it as an excuse

to violate them. Norms only exist one way. When Trump stepped out of them, it was an outrage. But when the media and the establishment want to use January 6th as a pretext to declare a domestic war on terror, when they want to curtail civil liberties to a degree we haven't seen since 9-11, when unelected government officials break from their duties and begin violating the law, those are not violations of norms. No, no, no, no. To them, they break norms to protect norms. That's the biggest problem I have with General Milley's actions. It's just the latest in a string of these examples. And I can't help but look at it in exactly the same vein of a story we covered earlier. George W. Bush speaking at the memorial for the Flight 93 victims on the 20th anniversary of 9-11. Take a listen to that

if you want to make your blood boil, just in case you missed it. As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols,

they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. Malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together. I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I've seen. That speech was hailed by liberal commentators. Oh my God, George W. Bush

sees the light. January 6th, we're exactly the same as the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11. Or maybe, maybe, it's because of George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq, the screwing up of killing Osama bin Laden, the opening of tradeors of norms are those that architected a system in the first place that destroyed democratic trust in all of our institutions and it led to the election of Trump himself. The people responsible face no repercussions from any of this. And I'm sure a few senators will make noise, but let's be honest. Biden has already come out and said he has full confidence in Milley. The entire media will defend him as a brave warrior who stood up for democracy against evil Trump. When you start to dig a little further into the Milley situation, it actually becomes even more comical. January 6th wasn't the only reason that Milley was upset.

Right after Trump lost the election, Milley was alarmed because Trump signed an order to remove troops from Afghanistan by January 15. He was still the commander-in-chief. What did the general do? He defied it, he delayed it, and he waited so that he could try and work on the next president to stay forever. Thank God that didn't happen. Once again, that is a violation of norms. In our system, the duly elected commander-in-chief gives an order and the military needs to comply. But here, no way. Once again, it's fine. General Milley's allowed to violate norms

in order to defend them. And if there's one thing that I hope you take away from this, it's this, that what we really need in this country are some new norms. Because America is at its breaking point. Why else do you think they elected Donald Trump and then almost did it twice? The biggest problem that we had is that Trump was a buffoon, and he was more interested in giving a middle finger to norms than in actually creating new ones. In a just world, George W. Bush is gone forever, assigned to the dustbin of history. General Milley is fired, and we come up with some institutions and norms that actually have some democratic legitimacy in this country. Because until then, we're doomed to another cycle of partisan outrage and hate. And that's really just how I choose to see it, Crystal, instead of,

yeah, everybody's like, oh, treason, whatever. Yeah, maybe. You know, it's complicated. All right, so we've got the aforementioned David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect. Great to see you, David. Good to see you, David. Yeah, good to see you. So you've been in the weeds over this Medicare prescription drug negotiating situation with Democrats. And just to give people a context here, because I think this is really important. Democrats have been promising that they're going to make this very simple reform supported by like everyone in the entire country where Medicare can negotiate with prescription drug companies so that they can get better prices. And now that it's coming down to it, there are a handful of, frankly, corporate Democrats who have become flies in the ointment who are standing strongly against this incredibly popular, incredibly basic reform.

David, just bring us up to speed of what exactly is going on here. Yeah, this has been part of the Democratic agenda since the so-called 6 for 06, 15 years ago. This was one of the signature things that Democrats said they were going to do when they won the House two times ago, right? So and it was a feature of almost all campaign ads in 2018 and 2020. So there are two committees that deal with this, the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee. The Ways and Means Committee actually passed

their version of this reform, which allows Medicare to negotiate the price of a certain group of drugs, high-cost drugs, with drug companies. And that not only Medicare patients get the benefit of that, but all of us do, because commercial insurance would be allowed to access those rates. In the Energy and Commerce Committee, three House Democrats, Scott Peters from the San Diego area, Kurt Schrader from Oregon, and Kathleen Rice from Long Island decided they're not going to agree to this bill. They rejected it. They put forward

their own version, which has a clever twist. It also negotiates price on Medicare, but only for drugs that are off patent. In other words, it preserves the patent monopoly, which allows drug companies without any competition to charge whatever they want for prescription drugs. And so you have this standoff, and it wasn't able to get out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Now, the House can put this into their final version of the bill in the Budget Committee. However, these three Democrats are making a stand saying we're not going to support a bill that has that in there. And of course, Pelosi doesn't have more than three votes to spare because of the nature of the majority. So it's a really difficult situation.

You have this reform that is more popular than probably any in this bill. Over 90% of the public supports negotiating prescription drug prices through Medicare. And as I said, they've been promising this for a decade plus. And it's now at real threat for not being in the bill. And that threatens the whole bill. Because this not only would save patients money, it would save taxpayers money, it would save the government money. And that money was earmarked to go into

spending in the bill, particularly for the health portions like extending Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision, and exchange subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, helping people who would qualify for Medicare if their states expanded it, things like that. So this really threatens the whole bill. It's important to recognize that. It threatens the whole Biden agenda. David, what is their rationale on blocking this? Is there any rationale whatsoever, like justification? What do they say? Money, money, money, right? Scott Peters has thousands and thousands of health prescription drug company workers in his district. There's a lot of life sciences in there. Kurt Schrader opposes the bill altogether. And Kathleen writes,

it's very curious because while Schrader and Peters have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from PACs, from pharmaceutical companies, Rice really hasn't. So I don't know if this is just a principled position for her that people should pay more for prescription drugs. But their nominal point they make is, well, this would stifle innovation. That's kind of the go-to industry talking point, that if you make the price of prescription drugs cheaper, then we won't be able to afford R&D and we won't make new drugs. This is ridiculous. The marketing budgets of prescription drug companies are larger than their R&D budgets.

They spend more on stock buybacks than they do on research and development. And the primary research and development arm for drug therapies in the United States is the federal government through the NIH and through academic research grants. So this is a ridiculous talking point, but it's the go-to for fans of the pharmaceutical industry who have a huge campaign contribution arm and a huge lobbying arm. Every new drug molecule invented over the past 10 years was publicly funded. None of them came from the drug companies and their vaunted R&D. They use their R&D to do things like, we're going to come up with a slightly different formulation of Viagra or whatever their main cash cows are. Not really these supposed life-saving, innovative drugs that they're supposed to be betting big on. That's not really what

they're doing with that R&D money. So it's always important to explain to people what's actually going on there with that talking point. You also observed a really interesting sort of behind-the-scenes dynamic of how Kathleen Rice, who you point out is now one of the major issues in terms of getting this basic reform done, how she even ended up on this relevant committee. Just break that all down for people. Right. At the end of 2020, committee assignments are doled out and AOC actually really wanted to be on the Energy and Commerce Committee. This is where climate change legislation is debated. It's where health care legislation is debated. And she got the support of Gerald Nadler, who's the head of the New York delegation. There was an open spot because Elliot Engel lost and he was a senior member of Energy

and Commerce. So there was going to be another New Yorker put on this committee. And AOC went out for it and looked like she had the support. And then at the last minute, Kathleen Rice made this play to get onto the committee and establishment Democrats voted her in by a wide margin in the steering committee, which is this committee that Nancy Pelosi controls to dole out committee assignments. This, the Democrats have a three vote majority on the Energy and Commerce Committee. If AOC was on that committee instead of Kathleen Rice, this would have passed out of committee. However, because there was, and it seemed like it was

almost a political payback because AOC supported primaries against incumbents. So because they were miffed about that, they put now Kathleen Rice on this committee. She votes against the key piece of their agenda. And this could force far more incumbents to lose in the 2022 midterms than AOC would ever have the wherewithal to do. So this is another example of establishment Democrats cutting off their nose despite their first. Well, and it's not the only, as you point out, it's not the only example of that. I mean, some of the people have been real issues here. People like Henry Cuellar, who the establishment also threw all in behind him in his primary. He narrowly wins over a Justice Democrat who's more progressive on the issues. And now he turns around

his issue for Pelosi. It's also really interesting what gets punished and what gets overlooked because Kathleen Rice was very visible and very vocal about voting against Pelosi herself for Speaker of the House a while back. But for some reason, if you attack from the right, it's forgive and forget. But if you attack from the left, then there's hell to pay and hell no, are you going to get on that committee that you want? I mean, it's just, it's very revealing here. And as you point out, ultimately now with Pelosi wanting to get this agenda through, it's becoming a real issue for her, some of these right-wing Democrats that she's propped up and supported. And you'd like to think that Pelosi or the House leadership would learn from this issue and realize that people

mean what they say, that when they're coming for your leadership, they could be a problem down the road. But I don't suspect that they will. I suspect that the establishment views going after other Democrats who aren't good on leadership issues as a bigger threat than going after leadership itself and actually trying to vote down these important agenda items. This should be a teachable moment, but I don't think it will be. And so, David, what do you think happens here? Do you think this actually gets through? Because, I mean, it really is pure insanity. If you can't trust the Democrats to get this thing through that they've been promising for decades, that polls at 90 percent, what can you trust them for ultimately? Well, the thing is, there was going to already be a fight

between the House and the Senate over this, over technical aspects. They were both going to use Medicare to negotiate the price, but it might be fewer drugs. It might be a different reference price that's more accommodating to drug companies. There was already going to be this fight. And now the Senate is really emboldened, right? Because the House can't even get their entire team on board. So you could see the Senate version of this prevail, which saves a lot less money and makes a lot less money available for the overall

bill. Maybe at that point, some of those House Democrats will say, okay, well, we got half of what we wanted. There's still a lot of momentum to get something done. But I keep saying there's a non-zero chance that this doesn't go forward. And, you know, we, along with the Daily Caller and the Intercept, did this whip count yesterday because, you know, there are two bills, right? There's the reconciliation bill that we're talking about, and there's the infrastructure bill that already passed the Senate. And House progressives want to keep those linked because they want to give moderates a reason to vote for the reconciliation bill. And they feel like if they vote the infrastructure bill in, then they're just going to abandon the reconciliation bill. So there are 17 Democrats, or I'm sorry,

16, because one of them after publication weaseled out, 16 Democrats who publicly agreed to vote against the infrastructure bill, which has to get a vote on September 27th as part of a deal that Josh Gottheimer made with Pelosi to get the rule through for the reconciliation process. They said they'd vote against the infrastructure bill if they don't have a good enough reconciliation bill. So there's a problem for the infrastructure bill from the left. There's a problem with the reconciliation bill from the right.

I don't think there's a scenario where one or the other passes. It's either both or neither. And there's really a non-trivial chance that it's going to be neither at this point. Wow. Well, thanks for the update, David. Really crazy. Like you said, it's pretty nuts that the largest purchaser of drugs is not allowed to negotiate the price and is the only people who are allowed to do so. I think only the 10% who don't support this reform, they must all work for Big Pharma. For the pharma industry. David, thank you. Thank you so much for your help on this issue. Thanks, David.

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And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war.

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