Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Best of Week 5/15: Buffalo Shooting, NATO Expansion, UFO Hearings, Primary Results, & More!

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the Buffalo shooting, NATO expansion to Finland and Sweden, Netflix's fight against wokeness, Twitter turmoil with Elon Musk, UFO hearings, Jon Bernthal, primary results, ministry of truth, & more!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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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us out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of big stories breaking for you this morning. First of all, Finland and Sweden inching even closer to joining NATO. We will tell you what obstacles remain, what the potential fallout will be, and our thoughts on all of that. Also, Elon Musk sort of signaling maybe he's not 100% going forward with the Twitter deal. It could be a bargain. It could be a bargain. Anyway, we'll tell you about what's going on there.

New polling reveals exactly how abortion may impact the midterm election. So far, I would say that our analysis has been vindicated, that it may help Democrats on the margins, but is probably not going to be the game changer that they would need to avoid some pretty devastating losses this fall. We also have a very interesting memo coming out from Netflix, basically telling employees, if you don't like all the content that we are publishing,

you feel free to go get another job. Good. We have an analyst on, first time on the show, talking about the primaries that are unfolding tomorrow. Some big ones in particular in the state of Pennsylvania, but also in North Carolina. So we will get to all of that. But we wanted to start with what is just a horrific tragedy and act of pure evil coming out of Buffalo. Mass shooting over this weekend by a racist white supremacist. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen.

Buffalo supermarket shooting. What do we know so far? So they say on Saturday afternoon, a white 18-year-old wearing military gear and live streaming with a helmet camera opened fire Saturday afternoon at Topps Friendly Market. It's one of the only supermarkets in this neighborhood. It's a supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. Ultimately, 10 people were murdered by this man. Three more were wounded. 11 of those individuals were black.

Two were white. The gunman live-streamed the shooting to a small audience on Twitch for several minutes before the platform cut off his feed. According to police, the gunman began shooting in the parking lot, then moved inside the store. A heroic security guard, Aaron Salter, fired multiple shots trying to protect the innocent shoppers who were there. None of them, unfortunately, penetrated the gunman's armor. He also ultimately killed Salter and then stalked through the aisles shooting shoppers. He apparently published a manifesto online that, you know, is purportedly attributed to him where he takes credit for this mass violence. It is, I actually read a good bit of it, at least the ideological parts of it. And first of all, it's kind of exactly what you would expect. A bunch of

completely racist claptrop talking about the so-called great replacement theory that whites are being genocided by people who are quote-unquote replacers coming in from the outside. He lumps in black people as one of these replacers. Lots of pseudo, you know, fake race science about how black people are inferior and they're not intelligent and they're criminals. Bunch of racist, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And ultimately, it turns out, a lot of this was actually plagiarized, Sagar, from the Christchurch, New Zealand shooter that, you know, massacred Muslims in 2019. So dude couldn't even write his own racist manifesto. Horrific accounts from eyewitnesses there on the scene.

Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. You could hear where the gunshots were, how close they were coming. And it wasn't all the way to me yet. I don't know what made me get up. I just kept saying, you got to get up. You got to get up. I literally jumped up. Everything fell off.

I had keys on my elbow. They literally came off my wrist, hit the freezers. My shoes were off, and I just kept running. At this point, where is your daughter? She's in the front. Still in the front? Still in the front, crouched at register six, because I never looked behind me until I got all the way to the back.

I turned around. she wasn't there and I said where's my baby? Has anyone seen my baby? Where is she? I didn't know where she was. And then I just thought if she's gone I gotta get out of here. She's got babies. She's a newborn. And she has a three-year-old. So I still had to get out if I went back for her. If she was gone, I would be gone too. And they would have nobody. So I still ran. And ran out the back. I mean, there are few things more heinous than people, innocent, powerless people being targeted just for who they are. And I cannot begin to imagine the horror that was experienced by the people who were there in that supermarket

and who are now grieving the loss of loved ones and community members, fathers, daughters, sons. It is truly horrible. Yeah, no, I mean, there's no other way to describe it as act of pure evil. I think you put it really well. And so now the real question is, is like, who is this gentleman? I'm not going to say his name. I also, unfortunately, had to read the idiotic manifesto, which, you know, I read the Christchurch person. Turns out it was the same one in many of these respects. Look, if you spent any time on the dregs of the internet, none of this is all that

surprising to you. And this is just one of your classic, like, absolute losers within society trying to blame everybody else for their problems. And the question arises, though, and I think at a very serious level, is we have heard a lot about domestic terrorism here in the United States. It's been supposedly in a major priority of the Biden administration, of law enforcement, you know, over the last two years. Well, why did we not catch this person? And let's put this up there on the screen. Well, you know, as it almost always comes out with these things, it turns out that the alleged gunman had threatened a shooting at his high school as shortly as last year. And he was actually sent for a mental health evaluation that lasted a day and a half. Now, I think that we are going to learn quite a bit more about all of this, Crystal, because what

they said is that he had not only threatened this mass shooting, but that the police say the suspect had made threats to carry out this shooting as early as June. So less than one year ago, while he was in high school, near the time of his graduation. He was even taken into custody by state police and obviously sent to the hospital for evaluation. So then the question arises, how exactly did this person legally acquire a firearm if that is in fact the case? If it was illegally acquired, there's not a lot you can do about that. But it has very commonly been the case that many of these people with past mental health problems, which should immediately be flagged, you know, from the FBI, especially in the commission of a crime or this particular case, you know, being so serious as to be taken into custody. Well, what's happening here? And sadly,

you and I went through the record. This is an all too common occurrence with people who are either mass shooters or domestic terrorists. So we put together a mashup of just how many of these cases there appear to be. Let's start. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. What do we see? Sun Sentinel. How the FBI botched tips about the Parkland shooter. A lot of people remember that one. Dominated our politics very much in the same way that this one may. Well, one of the most undercover aspects of that,

not only the failure of Broward County Sheriff's Department, but the FBI had a very clear tip about the shooter in that case. Let's go to the next one that we have up there on the screen. FBI had closely scrutinized the Orlando shooter before dropping that investigation. Omar Mateen, the guy who shot up the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. Let's go to the next one that we have here. The FBI had a breakdown in its background check system, which allowed Dylann Roof to buy a gun. He, of course, was the white supremacist who went and shot up the Charleston church. Let's go to the next one that we have up there, which is that, and actually didn't even remember, you're the one who flagged this, Sung-Hyu Cho, who was the Virginia Tech shooter based on mental health law, should never have been able to acquire a firearm.

And yet was legally able to acquire multiple firearms, which he used at that time to commit one of the most deadly mass shootings in American history. Let's go to the next one, which we have up there. The Texans, I actually covered this significantly at the time. I don't know if you guys remember this, but an evangelical church in Texas was absolutely massacred by an absolute nut job. Well, it turned out that the Air Force, he had actually been put into prison for domestic violence and that a breakdown in reporting mechanisms for the FBI background check system, having been known to law enforcement, he also should have been barred from illegally owning a gun. And finally, what we have here is that the FBI

knew earlier of the Boston bombing suspects. By the way, this is not an exhaustive list. There are several others that we could have put there on.

That one, I had forgotten the details. Russia actually warned us about this. Yeah, they were like, these Zarnayev guys are problems. Because they had

traveled to Chechnya. They said they, you know, they're sort of in league with militants here. So Russia had actually warned us about them anyway. I forgot the details of that. But yeah, I mean, you look down this list and the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe, when it really counts, they seem to have dropped the ball over and over again, either directly at the law enforcement level or at the level of the background system, you know, checks that are supposed to be in place. They interviewed the guy who, you know, apparently sold this murderer his weapon, and he at least claims he did the background check. Nothing came up. Every time.

So, you know, I mean, and I don't think this man, you know, he seemed like he was telling the truth. And so, yeah, he had no reason not to sell this murderer a weapon that he ultimately used to massacre 10 people and injure three more. And this comes on the heels of, you know, just a year ago, him threatening a mass shooting at his high school. Like, this is completely insane. I know, and this is something, again, which, and look, this is where I have to go after some of the Republicans. You know, to his own credit, John Cornyn, after the evangelical shirt shooting, tried to pass the Fix NICS Act, which is the background check system,

which would have allowed, well, it actually, I mean, it's not funny, but it turned out that the U.S. military had not been reporting any of the domestic violence crimes that they were throwing people into jail for, meaning that literally, you know, millions of people could be acquiring firearms despite the fact that they're not supposed to. So if it was adjudicated, the military justice. Even though the FBI system says that if you're prosecuted for a crime that qualifies under being barred from acquiring a firearm, they had not just been reporting it basically to the national, I forget what it stands for, but the background check system. But there was all kinds of breakdowns in the background check system. This is something Cornyn pushed at the time to fix NICS Act. I don't believe that it

ever passed. Look, I mean, at its very basic level, I'm a proponent of firearms. What I look at it is that most of the people who are in the gun community are going to say that very clearly here, everybody starts calling for gun control. You can have your thoughts on that if you would like. At a basic level, I think we should be able to agree that the existing laws on the books for the background check system should be enforced. And to me, it seems like once again, a major breakdown in the investigative chain. And it's like you just said, so what exactly do these people do all day? I mean, I'm not going to say that you're going to have to have a perfect system because we have to balance civil liberties and all of that. But this was not even the case where you had some, you know,

quasi entrapment scheme and then it all fell apart or he was a known informant. It's like he threatened a school shooting, got taken into state police custody, had a mental health evaluation. Who's the person who cleared this person for a mental health evaluation? Why was there no follow-up whenever it came to this? He recently became an adult. Was there any sort of flag system here happening? How exactly does this person legally acquire these firearms, which appears to be, and the guy who ran it, you know, we have no reason to disbelieve him that he ran the background. I mean, he would be, any gun store person will tell you, like, if you sell somebody a gun and you did not, and they use it to murder somebody, you didn't go through the checks, like, you yourself are going to have some serious problems.

So we don't have any reason to deny that. I think it just goes to show, once again, that there are massive holes in the existing system that there already are. And I don't think there's a lot of discussion about that, unfortunately. Yeah, and instead, you know, they've spent a lot of time in things like during the whole war on terror era, sort of concocting and inventing plots to entrap Muslim men. We, of course, covered here the, and we can put this up on the screen, the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot that lots of FBI resources were expended to effectively like create this plot and then ultimately disrupt it. And this is, there's a

reason why these types of concocted plots are ultimately what they spend resources on because there's a lot of political benefit to having the big press conference and disrupting this scary plot, whereas the blocking and tackling of following up on these tips and making sure the background check system is working properly is a lot less sexy. And there are a lot fewer sort of political careers that are made out of that type of law enforcement work ultimately. You know, I do want to say, because there's a lot of conversation about the manifesto and what the inspiration for this guy was and how it fits into a broader sort of right-wing media and political ecosystem. And, you know, we both did look through this manifesto because I think it is important to understand what is the twisted, ugly, hateful thinking of someone like this that leads them to this place. There's no indication that he was mentally ill. There's every indication that

he was just radicalized by a hateful and vicious ideology. What he claims in this purported manifesto is that during COVID, he was bored. He spent a lot of time on Reddit, spent a lot of time on 4chan, ends up immersed in this, you know, complete garbage around, you know, this racial ideology, white supremacist ideology, and becomes convinced that there's this, you know, cabal of global Jews who are trying to replace the white race and that it's a white genocide and all of this. So standard issue, great replacement theory, nonsense, which has been used and cited not only by him, but Tree of Life Synagogue, down in El Paso, that shooter, and as we mentioned before, the Christchurch shooter. Now, there's been a lot of conversation about Republican politicians and Tucker Carlson in particular who have given sort of like whitewashed language like that ultimately. And what I just want to say is I don't think it's fair to draw a direct line

between, you know, what one killer does and political rhetoric used by anyone. I don't think it'd be fair to do that to the left. I don't think it's fair to do it here. I do think it's totally fair to inquire, as we do routinely on this show, what type of rhetoric is good and healthy for society and places blame in the correct places. And what type of rhetoric divides us and convinces us that ordinary, powerless people are the real enemy. And I don't think that there's any doubt that there has been, you know, routine sort of scapegoating rhetoric from Tucker, from politicians on the right. And whether or not that was any sort of fuel for this individual, there's actually no evidence that he took any direct inspiration from Tucker or from any of the individuals that are being cited right now. But I think it's totally fair game to ask the question about what type of rhetoric is ultimately good for society.

What are accurate reflections of what's actually going on in society? And I think that those questions can lead you to a deeper conversation about the roots of hatred and extremist violent ideology in America than just the cheap and easy answers, which would be we need more Internet censorship. Let's take down one particular cable news host. And that's not to say because media, you know, media does have an impact on society. And the rhetoric actually, you know, really is significant, really does matter. But it's too simple to just, you know, these trends are ultimately a reflection of sort of like deeper rot and deeper problems in American society. So politicians and media figures who cynically out of their own ambition like give a wink and a nod to that rhetoric, they're more a reflection of these undercurrents that are going on than they are some sort of leader or pioneer. They see what is fueling clicks, what's creating rage, what's creating emotion,

and they feed off of it. I think the deeper question that we need to ask ourselves is where that animus ultimately comes from, which is, you know, something that I'm going to be thinking a lot about and continuing to try to explore. Well, I'm glad that you said that because I think that there's a really disgusting parade on right now, which is all like, oh, this is all the fault of people who might be concerned about mass immigration. It's like, look, I look at this as a much more derivative of a sociological problem. And I think I and many of the people who would watch the show can see this in the broader context of what are some of the major stories that we've covered in the last week? Opioid deaths up 15%, alcohol use up 40%,

mass loneliness, friendship crisis. You have COVID, which caused massive social isolation. And I'm not saying that's a justification, but one of the things that you learn in social science is that when you have an overall trend, the major outliers that are a result of that trend are going to be really nasty. Like, you know, when you have millions of people using these types of drugs and fentanyl and heroin, then you're obviously going to have the tail end of that more people are going to be able to die. Same with social isolation. Same whenever it comes to loneliness and the lack of friendship and also with COVID. I mean, he even literally blames lockdowns here for the reason, now look, you know, we should not take this person out.

It's word. It's obviously. And one of the things that we learned in the Christchurch shooting is that there were intentional trollish things that were listed within the manifesto in order to try and spark a backlash. And there's some signs of that here as well. Exactly. Trying to blame like eco-terrorism. Anyway, my point is don't take it literally. Take it seriously. So the serious thing that we should take here is that this person murdered nearly a dozen people in cold blood and live streamed the thing

and apparently had zero remorse for this entire killing. What happened here? What is this a result of? Like you said, is it tied to broader political movements and to broader political rhetoric? Yeah, I think so. But is it also, as you said, the politicians are the downstream of the culture or do they shape it? And what I would say is that I think a lot of it is a downstream of major sociological dents in our actual civic life, which I don't think a lot of people want to fix. And I think the current backlash against this, if you want, I mean, I saw a Rolling Stone article, for example, which said that the shooter, he wasn't a lone wolf. He was a mainstream Republican. It's like, OK, so you think that the 70 something million people voted for Donald Trump all agree with murdering black people in a grocery store. Good luck with that, because you're actually going to make those people even more radical.

And what does that justify on the other side? Exactly. I abhor scapegoating rhetoric, period. Innocent, powerless people in this country, be they immigrants, refugees, Trump supporters, whoever they are, they know, the way that he, I mean, he engages routinely in the scapegoating rhetoric. And I think you can call that out and abhor it in and of itself and say that it is bad and it's divisive and it misplaces the blame in society and leads to an ugly division. Can you draw a direct line between this mass murderer or the Tree of Life mass murderer or the El Paso mass murderer and that rhetoric, I don't think it's fair to draw a direct line. Do I think it's fair to abhor that rhetoric and say this is ugly, that you shouldn't be giving a wink and a nod to

this stuff? Yeah, I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that ultimately. And the other thing that I would say is just like, you know, this idea that Latinos coming in across the border are just going to like automatically be Democrats is clearly false. Like, I mean, it sits very uncomfortably with the fact that Republicans are actually gaining a lot of ground with Latino voters. So maybe just try to appeal to voters, even as demographics continue to change, which, you know, unfortunately, as someone who's on the left, I think Republicans have been succeeding in against their best efforts. So anyway, I do think it's complex. But the other conversation that's already starting is this is another reason why we need more internet censorship. Oh, yeah. And that's the other one that, I mean, not only is that like a cheap and easy answer, but it ultimately is ultimately going to be counterproductive.

What you want to just push people further and further into the shadows, into the corners. You want to make their ideology even more like sort of sexy and rebellious. No. You know, I was even irritated that it was, it was hard to find this manifesto to read. And I don't agree with that because again, I think it was important for both of us to be able to actually read it, not just how the news media was characterizing it, but be able to judge it for ourselves and see what he's saying. And again, you should, you know, these are the words of like a killer and one of the most, you know, who perpetrated an absolutely evil act. So you have to take it for what it is. But I think it's more important to dig into these things and try to understand the roots of this and how you could come to such a vicious

and ugly place as he ultimately did. Yeah, you know, actually, I had a lot of frustration with this during the terrorism times. I used to read Al-Qaeda's Inspired magazine. I would read ISIS propaganda. I would read especially the stuff. I was really fascinated. I'm like, what is it with these Western Muslims in Europe? I'm like, how are they getting all these people to go over there? So I read it. I just read the forums, the magazine, the reporters of like, oh, brothers, this is what it's like in the caliphate. Now, you know, it actually helped me really understand. I'm like, wow, you know, this is part of a much broader problem in terms of displacement and culture. And like I was just talking about in terms of the tail end effect of when you're going to have,

you know, millions of people who are kind of quasi-rejected by the dominant culture. That's going to have some extreme effects on the worst side. And you see exactly how Al-Qaeda and ISIS and all that was exploiting that. I thought it was very important. Like I said, I watched, unfortunately, I watched the New Zealand Christchurch video. Again, I wanted to force myself because I'm like, okay, what is actually happening? And this is sickening. But it's important, I think, in order to engage with this stuff. I watched a lot of ISIS stuff as well when I was covering it. And, yeah, look, I mean, I would point to the same thing. But I would also say, look, you want to go down the road of saying that it's a legitimate point of view in this country to say that there are problems with mass immigration and that we should have controls on that.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think there's – and this is where it's, you know, where it becomes tricky because I think every single society is going to have some debate about what their immigration system looks like. Especially in the West, yeah. What are the limits? How do you determine it? I mean, these are totally reasonable grounds for policy debates, and we can come to different conclusions. Obviously, when you go down the path of making this argument that people are being brought in to replace other people and you make it this existential threat, and again, you're using this to scapegoat immigrants like they're the source of your problems, that's when you end up, you know, in an ugly place. So that's how I view all of this. One other thing that I think is interesting,

and I also think it's important to note, like, none of what we're saying here about the underlying factors denies any, like, blame and culpability of this clearly, you know, evil, horrific individual who was radicalized by an extremist and violent ideology. So I just want to make that completely clear. But, you know, some of the roots of the modern white power movement actually come out of the failures of the Vietnam War. And in fact, if you look throughout history, it's at the end of wars that you have a spike in violent white supremacist movements. Because ultimately, I mean, you think about in a war, soldiers are taught to basically dehumanize their enemy.

So if you've already sort of dehumanized one group of people and then you come out of Vietnam and on the right, there was a narrative about like the government failed us. If we had just been allowed to do our thing and hadn't had all these rules on terms of engagement, we could have won. And also the feeling that soldiers were spat upon and that their service wasn't honored when they came back. And you have a bunch of, you know, armed young men, trained young men who have now lost all of their purpose and meaning.

That can create fertile conditions for this type of militant extremist movement. And so, in fact, you saw coming out of the Vietnam War, this new resurgence in white power movements, also, of course, in reaction to like the cultural changes of the 1960s and all of that ultimately. So, you know, it's just when you think about these issues, there's a lot more going on than just what cable news hosts are saying or whether internet is censored or not. There's a lot more going on than just what cable news hosts are saying or whether internet is censored or not. There's a reason why America is such a violent society ultimately. And I do think part of it is, you know, violence is normalized through our endless wars that we repeatedly engage in as one particular factor, not to mention the loss of meaning as we've

shipped jobs overseas and we've made it very difficult for people to be able to have that family unit that is, you know, such a core source of, like, meaning and purpose for a lot of human beings here and around the world. So it's a complex conversation. I guess that's just what I'll say. So this is very important. Both Finland and Sweden moving much closer towards NATO membership. Sweden's ruling party, which is the Social Democratic Party, is paving the way for the Scandinavian country to submit a joint bid with Finland to join NATO. has 200-year history of military non-alignment on the European continent,

which goes back almost as far as Switzerland in terms of its reputation as a neutral country. And for a long time, they kind of pursued a strategy of strategic autonomy, specifically because they were caught between their cultural ties and business relationships with the West, but also their obviously geographical proximity towards Russia and their view as a place within a semi-traditional Russian sphere of influence, although obviously all these things have changed hands many, many times over the years. But you can't deny geographical approximation. Same, obviously, with Finland. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that Finland is also set to apply to NATO, like I said, with that joint application. And Finland also, frankly, may be the more provocative, I think, of the two, given the fact that Finland and Russia had actually fought a war before, you know, back in the 1940s.

This is somewhere where there's long been kind of a cat and a mouse game between the two. People remember, you know, the 1939 Winter War between Russia and Finland. And in Finland in particular, we saw this in the polling data, most of their population did not want to join NATO before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were like, listen, we don't want any of this. We see the Russians. They're crazy. We don't necessarily want to see any sort of thing like this. I think strategic autonomy in our massive welfare state, that's good with us.

Well, what's really happened here is that, and this again, you know, this is exactly what I predicted. The day of the Russian invasion, I was like, what Putin has done is he has united Western Europe in a way it has not been united since the threat of the Cold War. And he somehow pushed neutral populations like Finland and Sweden, who did not want to join NATO. They're like, all right, we got to get into NATO. So I think that, you know, in terms of a strategic backlash against Russia, which the entire purpose that they say that they were expanding into or going and invading Ukraine was, oh, well, we have had NATO push up against our border, which is true. You know, this is something where it's becoming a Western client state. We have to go in and have a military operation to present, prevent this. Well, now you've invited these own democratic populations in order to try and join

NATO. Now that's one side of the conversation. I think the other side of the conversation that we should also focus on is we also have a choice. There are 37 member countries in NATO. Do we want to extend the United States nuclear umbrella to Finland and Sweden? And this is going to be probably the most controversial part of this, and I know there are a lot of people going to be upset by this, but I think we should have a very serious discussion as to whether the U.S. nuclear umbrella should be extended to Helsinki and Stockholm. We should really have a conversation around this. Does it mean that we should be willing to go to the brink and possibly pass the brink of nuclear war in order to protect these far-flung

borders, which are not even in Western Europe, but all the way to the edge and bordering along Russia? We already have that in the case of the Baltic states, in the case of Poland. Obviously, in 2008, we invited Georgia and Ukraine in order to join NATO. That didn't end up materializing, but that was a key moment within this. And now with the expeditious nature that this is moving, this is a conversation that we need to have in real time that we did not have in the 1990s and the 2000s when we extended NATO membership to the Baltic states, despite the fact that there were a lot of voices at the time who warned against doing so. And just to show you how bipartisan this is, go and put this up there on the screen, which is that Republican leader Mitch McConnell just visited, he visited Kiev,

and he met with Zelensky, where he told him that he had the support for Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Now, why does that matter? NATO is a treaty, which means that you need two thirds of the US Senate in order to ratify the new NATO treaty to allow these new countries in to NATO. Now, obviously, I think a lot of the Democrats are basically on record as saying they might do so, but a lot of the Republicans, it has a relatively open question. There are people like Rand Paul and others, and we'll get to this in a bit, who had objected the Ukraine bill, but he's saying that the majority of his caucus supports this, makes this his de facto conclusion, that this is absolutely going to happen. However, there's also a geopolitical part to this, which is also kind of interesting,

and there's a lot of reasons as to why this might be happening. Let's put this up there on the screen. People forget, you know, Turkey is in NATO. It's under a dictatorship by Recep Erdogan. And Erdogan actually, despite previously telling the Finns and the Swedes that he was kind of okay with them joining, he's now gone ahead and said that he may be against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. He did not say specifically that he would issue an actual objection because he would probably be the only country in order to deny doing so. But this is also a country which is in NATO, which has done military trade with Russia.

I think they have like an S-300 missile system that they bought from the Russians, and they have their own crazy relationship with the Russians, given what's happening in Syria. His objections against Sweden and Finland classically have to do with the Kurds and the PKK. So it's, you know, for domestic political reasons, he might be trying to force a chit from those two countries in order to allow them in. But also just shows you that if there is any opposition to this, it ain't happening here in America. I think that's a tragedy. We supply the vast majority of the arms within NATO. Recently, Europe, just so people know, only appropriated the EU 500 million euros to go to Ukraine.

How much did we just approve? 40 billion. So that's 80 times what the Europeans are sending over to Ukraine. You might want to ask that question. I mean, we don't live in Europe. Last time I checked, it's a much bigger of a threat to their security than it is to us. I don't really know why we're footing the bill for the entire security of the continent. So I think this just masks a, look, I have complete sympathy for the Finns and the Swedes. If I were them, I would want to do the same thing. But we got to look out for what's good for us. And I don't think this is necessarily the best decision. Yeah. I mean, listen, this would about double,

roughly double the land border that Russia shares with NATO, because Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia. This is an extraordinarily significant decision in terms of overall geopolitics and in terms of the United States specifically. And it is being presented by the media as a fait accompli. Like you have no say. Like it's a done deal. And also it's being done very casually.

Like this is no big thing. When, listen, ultimately, as we've said a million times, Russia and Putin specifically, not the Russian people, but Putin and his Kremlin cronies specifically, are responsible for the unjustified invasion of Ukraine. It is wrong. It is wrong. It is bad. It was also completely predictable by our decision to expand NATO. Another thing that happened with almost no public debate. And this is why we have to push back on this anti-populist, pro-elitist way of doing governance, where they just present to you something like this as it's

a done deal and don't worry your pretty little head about it. And we know what's going on here and we know what we're going to do. And, you know, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are both on board. So let's go ahead. Are you ready to extend Article 5 protection to two more nations? Are you? And the fact that it's not, that question isn't even raised so that people can be informed by the news media is extremely, extremely disturbing. And it's a pattern not just with NATO expansion, which we can now see has been incredibly consequential in terms of global security, right? But, I mean, you see it with regard to Fed policy. You see it with regard to almost everything, where it's just, trust the experts. We got this.

Don't dig into the details. We're going to present it as a done deal, as if there's no even room or space for public debate on the matter. And I think that is completely insane. Yeah, you know, I never thought I'd be this guy, but I have been increasingly appreciative of the vision of the founders and what the things that they saw at that time was that we do not want to get entangled in a lot of these foreign alliances, that if we are to do so,

given the destabilizing nature of American interference and quasi-alliances with the West and how that really shaped their worldview, it's actually crazy how little has changed, which is that the reason why they put that two-thirds majority in the Senate is they said this has to be ratified by a supermajority, two-thirds of the people's representatives inside the United States Senate, which should advise and consent. And we should also remember this. We have a long period in our history of rejecting international agreements, which our presidents and which the ruling elite at the time

thought were great ideas like the League of Nations and Lodge's 14 points. There were real robots. I mean, Woodrow Wilson, people forget this, went on a stump tour of this entire country on the back of a railroad, on the caboose, stopping in town to town, preaching why we need the League of Nations. And then Henry Cabot Lodge and the Republicans went after it and they had a huge debate. I mean, something we would barely recognize over an actual policy matter. And I am calling for the same thing on this one, because being just slept walk into alliances of which you and I and our children may have to all one day pay the price for is not something that we should do so half-heartedly. Well, because the elites, it won't be their kids who are fighting and dying these wars. That's definitely true.

I mean, that's what you have to keep in mind is are you willing or are you willing, ready to send your sons and daughters over to fight and die in these potential wars for, you know, Finland and Sweden? I mean, that's the core of the question here. Well, let me give the opposite. And so I had a big argument with Marshall over this. I think somebody should give the pro view, which is that it is likely inevitable that any war where Russia invaded Finland or Sweden is going to draw the United States in. And I think that's probably accurate, given the current state, especially what would have happened in Ukraine, and especially if our NATO partners like the UK and France and all of them were to get involved. And I kind of do think they would probably go to war if that

were to happen, that the United States would then be dragged into this war, regardless because of the current alliance system. So we might as well extend the deterrent factor to Article 5, to Stockholm, and to Helsinki. Not a terrible argument. I'll tell you why I disagree with it, which is that I would rather us get pulled in, kicking and screaming into a war for Helsinki and Stockholm than to have no choice. I want every single senator and congressman to vote. I want to send American troops to fight and die for the capital of Helsinki and Stockholm. And if they vote, so be it. I'll even sign up. I guarantee you that. If we go to war over those things and the people's representatives think, I would be happily in order to stand in that

because that's something that I believe in. That being said, this is not that vote. And this vote does not carry the consequence that it should of the height of there are Russian missiles raining down on Helsinki. Now, you can argue then that it's America's job in order to defend those two capitals. And I accept that. I think that's a fine, legitimate point of view. But I would much rather every single people's representative vote to send us all to fight and to die over there than to just have it just get backdoored Article 5. There's two things there. Number one is the point you're making, which I think is really important, which it's very different. A vote that's in the abstract where we come to their defense. OK, yeah, sure. Right. Versus no, no, right now. Are you willing to go and fight and die? different a vote that's in the abstract with the we come to their defense okay yeah sure right

versus no no right now are you willing to go and fight and die i think those are two very different questions that land very differently with the american people so agree with you on that point i would also question the idea that it really serves as a deterrent versus as an irritant and an escalating factor. Because, I mean, the expansion of NATO thus far has not served as a deterrent to Russian aggression. In fact, it has exacerbated and made that aggression predictable and much more likely, again, not taking agency away from Russia and the bad things that Putin is doing. So I would dispute the idea that this would really serve as an effective deterrent versus being yet another escalatory step. And in fact, you know, what the Russian foreign minister has said is that they would have to take

some sort of retaliatory action. And that it would be a grave mistake. And that it would be a grave mistake. And I think that we should take their words very seriously and consider what those consequences are as well. Just because they're a military joke right now in Ukraine does not mean that they have an immense amount of force in order to bring to bear. And of course, they remain a nuclear-armed power. I mean, look, I don't know how many times I have to say it.

They have been beaten, or they have been looked beaten and downtrodden and all of this many, many, many, many times in their history. And they always come back in order to remind us that Russia really should not be underestimated. So, look, I think, you know, we'll try to give you more of the all side of the debate. We're going to have somebody on tomorrow to talk about this in a bigger, grand strategic context. Because I do think that the no matter what, even if you do support it, these Finns and the Swedes, if you join, you better pay up because I don't want to see those people, you know, say, you know,

they have the biggest welfare state on the planet, which is fine, but why should we subsidize it? By supplying you all these arms and military equipment and all, we're backstopping the entire security of the European continent by 80 times more than they are. And they are rich countries. They have their own GDPs in national society. So no matter what happens here, these people better be willing to pay because it is not fair to our tax payers, to our citizens, in order to backstop so much of their country. This is an important story, an interesting one in terms of the culture and how this is all working out. Let's put this up there on the screen.

Netflix basically issued a memo to its entire staff where, in a very polite way, they say... It's not actually that polite. It's basically, if you disagree with what we are putting out, you can leave. So here's what they say. As employees, we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful.

If you find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you. And that went out to all of its staff. Also, with the basic acknowledgement that a lot of the people who led these internal revolts around the Dave Chappelle special have already been fired. And I think it's actually

an important demarcation line in some of these culture war fights, which is that at the end of the day, the vast majority of the people who work at these companies do not care either way. Are they liberal? Yeah, probably.

Did they really object to the Dave Chappelle? Maybe. But did they perceive it as personally harmful to their ability in order to conduct their jobs? No. This actually happened at Disney when this whole Florida speaking out against this, which has led to a massive decline in their popularity. You know, right now they only have 53% approval, which is nuts considering it's probably one of the most beloved brands in modern American history. Then you also look at Apple, which forced out my friend Antonio Garcia Martinez based upon some things that he wrote in his book a decade ago,

of which Apple was aware of. And a tiny, small percentage of Apple staffers who, you know, called him a misogynist. They fired him. And now they fired all the people who went and organized that petition. And like I said, it's always been a tiny little percentage of these companies which have held them majority hostage. And I think a lot of people, I think maybe also this has to do with the declining stock price. I'm curious for your view, which is they don't have time to screw around with this stuff anymore. They can't indulge people's feelings. They're like, listen, we got to produce whatever we need to produce in order to up the stock. Because they're getting hammered.

They're bleeding subscribers. They're canceling all these shows. Megan Markle shows are canceled. Yeah, they're considering an ad-driven model instead of a subscription-driven model, yeah, which does kind of suck. I mean, listen, I support the sentiment. What I would say, you know, my own personal ideological view is I believe in democracy in the workplace as well. And so I think to your point, if you had, you know, workers with more of a say in the runnings of these companies, you would have a sort of internal process for handling these disputes and handling these grievances. And so it wouldn't have to come down as just like a fiat from on high from some like CEO dictator. And that really struck me when another part of the memo, the newsletter reminded laborers that the company does not intend to treat them like family members, but rather like lionhearted sportsmen on an award-winning athletic dream team,

one on which any player can easily be benched or booted. So basically just kind of typical like using corporate spin to say, we can fire you at any time for any reason, which unfortunately is the landscape in America. I think that's fair. And I totally, obviously, you know, I'm on the side of worker rights. I know, yeah, I know. But I do think there is something to ending this family dynamic for a lot of people at these major tech companies. Well, this can be kind of abusive as well.

Yeah, because they're like, you're our family. We eat dinner together. And by that, you better be at this office in order to have dinner at 8 o'clock. That can also be very manipulative because then it's like, and you see this in the union busting rhetoric that they'll use. You'll have a manager come in and be like, oh, how could you do this to me? I thought we were, like, family. Like, how I treated you. They'll use this sort of, like, guilt and emotional manipulation to have you work ridiculous hours or do things that make no sense whatsoever. So, yeah, in general, I just, you know, I support workplace democracy

and workers have to stay in the workplaces. And to your point, I think if that happened, these very small fringe viewpoints could be heard, which they, you know, fine for them to be heard, addressed and dealt with. And I think it would be more clear that actually the majority of workers don't feel the way that they do, you know,

but there should be a process for that. That's all I'll say. Yeah, I think that's right. Some dizzying comments here on Elon Musk in terms of breaking news this morning. Here's what we can report, which is that Elon says that he will only proceed with his $44 billion takeover of Twitter if Twitter can prove that less than 5% of its users are bots. So we explained a little bit of this yesterday. And let's put this up there on the screen. There was a big spat between Elon and Parag Agarwal. Parag put out a multi-post thread about determining spam, bots, and explaining his own proprietary methodology to determine that 5% or so of the people on Twitter are actually bots.

Now, Elon replied to this with a literal poop emoji in terms of shitposting and replied to this, which I think is the crux of the matter. So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter. Now, here's why it matters. Elon has very high revenue targets that he has to hit per promised things to his investors, who have now promised him tens of billions of dollars in his potential takeover of the company. And now we're in the closing due diligence phase where they're going through the books, and Elon is like, okay, let's see if there actually is 5% or whatever of the users that are bots. Now, you can also couple that with the fact that Tesla stock is down some 20-so percent in the last month, I believe. That Tesla stock is the predominance

of Elon's wealth and also what he was borrowing against whenever it came to the money that he was going to use in order to finance this entire deal. Also, all of his other investors are also venture capitalists and rich people who also rely on a complex margin lending system in order to access a lot of this capital. Now, here's the other thing. Elon gave an interview yesterday to the All In podcast. Let's put this up there on the screen. Now, here's what he was talking about. He says, the more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow.

Could it be done at a lower price? Maybe. He continues, I was relying on public filings. So the reason that this matters is that he is saying, and essentially accusing Twitter publicly of lying to him about the number of bots that are on the platform. And lying to the SEC. And lying to the SEC, lying to investors, lying to the world, which, I mean, I believe that.

I certainly believe that that's possible. Here's the thing about these fake statistics. Parag's thread was creating this complex methodology, and it just conveniently arrives around 5%. I'm like, listen, you know, the way and how you define a bot, you know, in terms of the posting schedule, et cetera, I'm sure can inflate it whichever way you want. Well, he also was trying to, because Elon had said, I'm going to do, we're going to take a hundred random accounts and we're going to test it to see if they're bots and you guys should do the same. And so the other thing Parag was trying

to do is say, oh, you can't do it with just publicly available data. You got to have what we have on the back end, because you may see an account that looks like it's like a first name and a string of numbers, and it looks like, and they've got weird tweets, and it looks like a bot. But when we look on the back end, there's good reason to believe that it's actually a real person. Right. So look, I have no idea. All right. The point is, is that, is this about bots or is this about negotiation? Obviously, it's not bots. I'm willing to bet that a lot of this is about negotiation. Let's put this up there on the screen for my friend Alex Cantruas.

He says, the Musk negotiation playbook. Make offer, agree to deal, wait for market softness, devalue the asset via public disparagement, pay half. And guess what? It's working. Twitter stock is significantly down in the process. And just looking at the transcript of the All In podcast, it's very interesting because Elon says, I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of fake or spam accounts on Twitter. Twitter is refusing to tell us. So this just seems like a strange thing.

Jason Calacanis asked him specifically, they say, Elon, that life is a negotiation. So at a different price, it might be totally viable deal, correct? Elon, it is not out of the question, but the more questions I ask, the more my concerns are growing. At the end of the day, it has to be fixable within a reasonable time frame without revenues collapsing along the way and all of that stuff. I really need to see how these things are being calculated. It can't be some deep mystery that is more complex than the human soul. I think we can apply the scientific method and try to figure out what's really going on. So I think that in the context of the market crash, it makes a hell of a lot of sense in order to use whatever leverage that you can in order to close this deal at a much lower price.

Elon not only has less capital available to him compared to how much he was worth just a month ago, but Twitter stock is also down significantly as well. And here's the other thing. What are these people going to do? Now, I said yesterday about the breakup fee. There's some interesting analysis. Stoller actually sent me a message this morning, which is that Musk, it's not his only problem. He actually has to pay that only if the financing falls through or if regulators block the deal. But if he voluntarily walks away, he is actually theoretically on the hook for all $44 billion and can be sued in a Delaware Chancery Court. That was the same analysis given...

Well, probably not, though, if he can credibly argue that they were... Lying to him. That they lied in their public filings that he was basing his decision-making on, right? Right. Here's the thing. Look, we're not lawyers.

We have no idea. And I bet you can contest this case all the way to the bank for billions and billions of dollars on both sides in legal. Yeah. So my guess would be that this is some sort of negotiating contract. Ben Thompson also had a newsletter out this morning from Stratechery. He says the contract gives Twitter the right to force Elon to close the deal and to put up $27.5 billion of equity that he personally committed as long as his debt financing is available. So it does seem that Twitter has some leverage on their side. I would put this in the terms of the Musk playbook in terms of publicly leveraging his

immense popularity brand and megaphone in order to, you know, hammer the stock price and try and negotiate on the outside in order to bring the price down, maybe by a couple billion dollars, or maybe even more significantly than that, especially if he can prove some sort of lie in the SEC filings, which would then make them legally viable and bring that all the way down. All of this is really just a long way of saying that there's complicated stuff going on. And one thing to look past is this that producer James found, let's put this up there on the screen, which is that a longtime Elon Musk backer says that the Twitter deal will close at a lower price. That has impressive eyebrows. Exactly. Yeah, it really does. So this is Tim Draper. He's an early investor in both Tesla

and SpaceX. And he co-founded a venture capital firm that's actually sinking $100 million into the bid. Here's what he said when he was asked about whether the Twitter deal will close at a lower price. He says, I think so. I think he's going to get a better deal because he found out whatever, two-thirds of users are bots or something. So this is somebody who is committing equity to the deal. We don't necessarily know how much he has. But at the very least, he's somebody who has his own money on the line, who's backing Elon's venture here, and all of this should be reviewed within that context. I got to say, this is probably the most exciting corporate takeover story that we've seen since the 80s in terms of all of the jockeying that's going on publicly. It's very dramatic. I mean, I don't think it's right that you should be able to—and he's done this in the past, like manipulate markets with his statements, especially intentionally.

I mean, this is what he's been accused of and actually had like a consent decree with the SEC about before. So it is a pattern of behavior that I think is sort of gross. I mean, he did this even with the initial announcement where he didn't, where we learned that he was a 5% stakeholder or whatever it was. 5%, yeah. Yeah, and he didn't file that disclosure with the SEC and was able to profit off of that delay and failure to file in time with his public comments, again, benefiting him. Listen, I have no idea what this dude's intent is. I definitely don't take him at his word. There's no way that the real problem here is the percent of bots on the platform. And you know this because he's not even planning on using advertising revenue as the primary source of revenue moving forward. His plan, which many analysts have said is not feasible and is unrealistic, is to get way

more users on the platform and then charge a subscription fee for a certain percent of those users, which, you know, that piece of it to me is not a bad direction to go in whatsoever. I think it would be a lot better if our social media networks, especially the ones critical to free speech, were more dependent on treating you as the customer versus these, you know, advertisers and the sort of incentives that comes with just generating eyeballs for advertisers. So I don't mind that direction. But it just shows you that, you know that his business plan is not particularly dependent on whether he can jack up the price with advertisers or not. So ultimately, this is

either a head fake to push a better negotiating position, try to get a better deal now that Twitter's stock is way down and now that his net value is way less. Or it could be also, ultimately, if he can prove that they have way more bots on the network than they were claiming, it could be an excuse to totally walk away from the thing and say, you know what, this is not feasible ultimately. I really have no idea. I have no idea either. I do think that Twitter might be lying here though. I mean just in terms – not – okay, when I say lying, misrepresenting. I think that their methodology just seems so fake to me.

I don't doubt that at all. But I also don't think that's a real answer. Oh, I don't think it's a real answer either. I'm also not going to shed a tear for any of these investors on either side of the other. So anyway, we'll keep you guys updated. We spoke about that landmark UFO hearing, and joining us now, UFO expert journalist in his own right is Jeremy Korbel. He's also a great documentarian and a friend.

Jeremy, welcome back to the show. It's good to see you, my friend. Really good to see you, Sagar. Okay, Jeremy, so you have been through the new footage from the UFO hearing. Now, let's dissect everything that we have. First, describe to us exactly what we learned that is new from the hearing so far. Right. Okay, so everybody needs to understand that this is just the beginning. This is a benchmark. This is a moment in history that we haven't had in over 50 years. They brought two people forward, top brass of our military.

And to be honest with you, you know, they've jumped into this recently, too. Now they are in a position to know. But remember, the UFO programs are often protected by special access program protection. This is why Senator Reid was trying to get SAP status for the true UFO program that was called OSAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program. So they don't know everything, but they're going to go into a closed congressional briefing.

I do, you know, where they can talk about classified information. I do know, though, for sure that this is just the start. There are other people that are going to be testifying on record. So what we saw was we saw some new footage of a UFO that shoots by a fighter plane. But the thing is, is one piece of evidence is nothing. They're just bringing the public up to date with what's going on. They had problems when they were trying to slow down and like click it to show to people it's really funny. They need a tech person. But ultimately, they asked good questions. They said, have we ever fired on a UFO? Do we have exploitation programs using a different word? And of course, look, there were lies, obfuscation, and some things

they just don't know. But that's what we expected. But the big thing here, and Representative Carson talked about this, was that, and he pushed the witnesses. The idea is to reduce stigma. So people like me are unnecessary. The only reason they mentioned me in the hearing is because I'm getting footage from our military that should have gone up the chain of command without people having to leak it to me. So I hope they fix this broken chain so that we can really get to the bottom of this UFO mystery. I think that's the most important takeaway from me as well, which is just really making the normalization in the military culture in order for it to bubble up so that we don't have to keep seeing leaked audio. I talked to a guy. Here's what he said. Oh, but whispers and all of this, I hear probably a fraction of it, but still hear some of it from people as well. Jeremy, talk to us about those

lies and obfuscations because this is important. In terms of claims around past videos, what were some of the lies and the obfuscations that they told us? Right. So one of the things is they really focused on what looks like the green, triangular by angle of observation footage that was shot off the coast of 2019 off of the USS Russell. And I obtained and released that. They were playing that like the whole time. And it was really interesting because this was contained within their own classified documents. And I, inside of it was able to get out as unclassified. And then the videos were, I obtained and released the videos. Now they were talking about how it looks like a triangle and that's because of the camera and how it put together. They were inches away from saying the lie that it was like just an effect of optics. But what was really interesting

because he really danced around the words about it was that he was saying that it looks and appears triangular, but what he didn't say is that in all of the classified briefings, because there are other optic systems rather than just being shot through the night vision, these were non-aerodynamic. They were indeed described in all classified briefings as pyramid in shape. So they were just

dancing around a few issues, but that's okay. We're going to crack it open and make sure I have more to release. That's great. And you always hold their feet to the fire. Any other information just for the layman person out there? They're interested. You and I are really excited and all this, but somebody is out there. What are their main takeaways from this hearing other than the fact that there will be more transparency, like with this video or any confirmations around the report that maybe they could take away from this? Well, yeah, I think the biggest thing you can take away from this is that Congress is actually doing its job and it is holding the intelligence communities and the individuals in position to either be aware or they should be

aware. I mean, these are the people supposed to be studying this of what programs do we have to exploit these technologies, to study it, to manage what they call signal management. You know, what is our defense capability when something is in our restricted airspace? The takeaway is that now the public's voice has been heard, and they are having their feet held to the fire. And this is a great first step. It is a first step, but it is a great first step. So what people can expect now is just a resounding response of enthusiasm from the public. And this is what's going to push this topic forward.

There is so much to learn about the UFO phenomenon, the mystery of UFOs. We know maybe 1% of what UFOs represent to humanity, but we already got more information today than we had yesterday. And every day, human knowledge is increasing on this issue. And UFOs have been with us since the beginning of recorded human history that we are aware of. So it's an exciting time, man. You know I love this topic. And you know I love it too, man. You're the one who got me into it. So I really appreciate you joining us. I'm going to keep listening to you.

We'll stay in contact in terms of some of the new information. And I do want to thank you on behalf of everybody in the community because I don't think that any of this would be happening without your work. Thank you much for joining us, sir. Appreciate it very much. I want to thank you, and I want to thank UFO Twitter and everybody that really pushed for this. So I appreciate it, brother, and I'll talk to you soon.

Shout out to all of them. Absolutely. Very excited to introduce our next guest. It's Jon Bernthal. He's the host of a new podcast. You know, it's funny, Jon. Sometimes I find out that celebrities watch this show. Usually I'm like, yeah, whatever.

But I was like, holy shit. I'm like, that's Jon Bernthal. Anyway, I know you've got a new podcast out, The Real Ones. I actually took a listen to your episode on Russia, which is part of the reason I actually wanted to talk to you. You actually have some interesting things to say. So welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about your podcast. Thanks so much, man. I am.

I'm an enormous fan and I'm so deeply appreciative of what you guys are doing. And I think, you know, in an age right now where it's just so hard to get sort of unfiltered and real and honest and, you know, just sort of fair information delivered by folks that, you know, really, I just I, I, I just, I really feel like I trust you guys and I love getting my news from you guys. I love your, your opinions and the discourse that you have on the show. So I'm really grateful. Look, I think for, for my show,

similarly, look, I, I have no place, I have no place sort of in, you know, exploring the key issues of the day. I wear makeup and say lines for a living. And I think the last thing we need sort of what you alluded to is another celebrity kind of spouting off and pontificating on the major issues of the day. You know, our job is to tell stories. That being said, I've been so enormously frustrated with just the discourse in this country right now. And, you know, not just in the media, but kind of all over. And I think, unfortunately, so much of, you know, what we're listening, what we're watching is sort of this agenda based, you know, sort of flag waving this, this bombast and this rhetoric and people just sort of trying to get people to join

their side. And, you know, for me, I can't really imagine anything less American. I think that, you know, to be patriotic and to be strong is really about compromise. It's really about being secure enough in your positions to open up yourself to people that think differently than you, people that were raised differently than you, people of different backgrounds from you, political backgrounds, racial backgrounds, sexual orientations. It's what makes this country really wonderful. And look, I've been enormously blessed in my life, where I grew up and how I grew up, and with what I do for a living that I've gotten to learn from and meet all these wonderful folks that I've become enormously close with. So the folks that I have on my show are special

forces soldiers, they're police officers, they're surgeons, they're teachers, they're coaches, firefighters, they're nurses. I really believe that when you focus on folks that really, you know, walk the walk, don't just talk about it. There's a certain kind of empathy there. There's a certain understanding. I think they're too busy and have had too much time, you know, really with boots on the grounds of these issues to join a side. And they understand that, you know, we're all human beings and we all want what's best join a side. And they understand that, you know, we're all human beings and we all want what's best for our kids. And we all want our families to prosper

and to make this world as good as possible. And I'm enormously, enormously grateful for the folks that come on my show and I believe in them. And as much as I sort of want less of me out there, not more, this show really has nothing to do with me. It's about the great folks that I bring on.

Well, it actually really comes through in your interviews. Like I said, I mean, I think personally, I think most celebrity podcasts are terrible. But I was listening to this. I'm like, this guy actually asks good questions. He's letting his guests speak. He's making sure he's elevating somebody legitimately interesting. And I guess it's fit. I mean, like I'm saying, to be honest, I've always found a deep fascination

with some of the characters. You have a real rawness in some of the people that you play. We were speaking before we went on the air about We Own the City, which is David Simon's, I would guess, kind of a sequel-ish to The Wire in which you play a Baltimore police officer. I'm not gonna give away too much, but I mean, can you maybe talk about

some of the themes that we have here on our show, on your show, in playing multifaceted characters which are both villainous, but you're also doing something in a social commentary, which is very deep and outside of the way that most of the media and popular culture likes to talk about these things. Yeah, look, I think that's right. I think, look, who better to kind of explore these issues that

have really gripped the soul of the country right now, these issues of race and policing. Who better to do that than David Simon and George Pelicanos? They come to the work with a journalistic integrity. They're trying to tell the truth. There's no agenda. There's no flag waving. And I knew with these guys there would be a certain level of access in the city of Baltimore because of what they've done before. It's hard.

The way that I really like to work, again, is to kind of dive in and to get to know the real folks. That's sort of my sword to try to tell the story as authentically and truthfully as I can. And I knew with David Simon because of, for lack of a better word, their street cred with The Wire. When you're going into the Baltimore Police Department and you're saying, hey, we're trying to tell a story about sort of one of the most corrupt and vile episodes of your department, you know, it's going to be hard to get them to kind of open up their hearts and minds and open up the doors to you. You know, for that show, I did three months of ride-alongs every day in every district of the city. I went on drug raids with the Baltimore SWAT team. And I'm so grateful to those guys. And what I found by this approach of kind of digging into the wound of race and policing, trying to tell the story

authentically and without an agenda, I found that they really appreciated it. And look, I mean, I think there's no words for, you know, how vile and reprehensible and how awful, you know, police brutality and police corruption and the effect that that has on victims, whether it's Fourth Amendment violation victims, folks that have been wrongfully imprisoned, folks that have been beaten, folks that have been killed. There's no words for that. There's also another subset of victims that I never knew about. And I think it's very little focus. And that's the good and righteous and courageous people that take the, you know, peacemakers code, the peacemakers oath, and that go and police our cities. Good cops suffer at the hands of bad cops. And there's no

other profession. I think that, you know, the acts of the vile acts of, you know, the worst of them really just, you know, changes both the career paths and just the livelihoods and the way in which people police. And, you know, it's part of the thing that I'm trying to do on my podcast as well is I think the only answer there is to weed out and single out the ones that are there for the wrong reasons and they're there for corruption or have horrible, horrible issues that manifest itself in violence on the street. But let's also celebrate the great police. And I think the answers to policing will lie in the people that have community-minded great police that have been there forever. And, you know, I'm really grateful that I got sort of a front row ticket to that. I got to make some really good friends along the way. That's great, man. I mean, it really comes through in your acting, in your show. And I really think you're really having a

renaissance these days. And I can attest to the audience, he is one of the real ones. He's one of the good ones, not one of the ones we make fun of often on the show. So John, thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciated both your podcast and talking to you, getting to get to know you a little bit more. And I look forward to a lot more of your work. So thank you. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We have many, many very interesting election results to dig through, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. On both sides, there are races that still are not called that are going to recount. We will bring you all of that.

Also, Madison Cawthorn is part of that. He did lose his seat. We'll tell you. He's out. It was ultimately pretty close, but he did lose. We'll tell you. He's out. It was ultimately pretty close, but he did lose. We'll tell you about all of that. Also, the Ministry of Truth board. It's folding.

Yeah, that didn't take long. The Biden administration, I guess to their credit, was like, you know, let's just press pause on this one. real story here is the way that the media read taylor lorenz is covering this which i have to tell you the article that she wrote about this is literally one of the worst journalistic products i have ever read in my entire life it is psycho truly insane so break that down for you also um biden administration making some big moves with regards to baby formula he is now at last um invoking the defense production act they also have a plan to fly in baby formula. He is now at last invoking the Defense Production Act. They also have a plan to fly in baby formula from Europe. Obviously, those shortages have been devastating for moms and babies and families. Just a terrible thing that people have been going through. So we will bring

you those details. We also are excited to bring geopolitical strategist Peter Zaihan onto the show. He can talk Ukraine and Russia. He can talk China. He can talk the world going forward. He's got a new book out called The End of the World is Just the Beginning, which is not exactly a hopeful read, but maybe an important one nonetheless. But we wanted to start this morning with the big primary results. And Sabra, let's go ahead and start with the Republican side of things. Yeah, we were hoping that we would be able to give you full results, but unfortunately, the count continues in Pennsylvania. Let's put this up there on the screen. David McCormick and Mehmet Oz continue to be locked in the race for the GOP Senate nomination.

Now, in terms of where the things stand literally right now, honestly, it is almost certainly going to a recount because it is within the 0.5 percentage. Now, the McCormick team and the Oz team are both saying that they have this thing in the bag. Dr. Oz appeared on Sean Hannity. He said that he's almost certain that he's going to pull it out. But, you know, the top strategist who works for the top strategist who actually works for David McCormick just came out this morning. And here's what he had to say. At the end of last night, Dave was down 2,700 votes. Today, out of the 10K of the 33 absentee ballots that were counted, we continue to average a plus 10% victory. We have closed the gap by 1,500 votes. Dave is now only down by 1,200 votes with an estimated 20,000 GOP

absentee ballots left to count. Dave is almost certainly going to win. That guy works for Dave McCormick. So here's the thing. That's a spin on both of them. At the same time, in terms of the outstanding ballots, we don't actually know where a lot of those outstanding ballots come from. Jeff Rowe is not wrong that the outstanding ballots have been going plus 10, but the late arriving absentee ballots, which are most of these seem to be ones which break a little bit better for Dr. Oz. I think that the actual result of this is you are not going to know who won this race for like a week. Because it's so within the margin of error. You know, I'm talking about, you know, Dr. Oz is 31.3%.

David McCormick is 31.1%. This is one where recount theoretically actually could change the results. And, you know, there's going to be all kinds of legal battles. Both these guys have a ton of money in the bank. So we are just simply not going to know what happened in this race, Crystal. Yeah. So right now, the differential is about 1,200 ballots that Oz is up on McCormick. And I watched Steve Kornacki's analysis this morning. And the dude is a savant when it comes to all of these election ballot counting stuff. And so basically what he said is there is some outstanding Election Day vote, both in one of McCormick's strongholds over in Allegheny County, Pittsburgh area, and in one of Oz's strongholds over towards Philadelphia.

So that sort of seems like it will more or less cancel itself out. The big question is, according to Kornacki, there's probably about 15,000 absentee mail-in ballots left to count. And that's the real question mark because what Kornacki was saying was that those have been coming in more like 7% in favor of McCormick, not the 10% that his dude is saying. See, there we go. Anyway, I mean, it really genuinely could go either way. Very likely that this thing comes down to a few hundred ballots. It is just that close. So it really is pretty remarkable.

It's also interesting that the Trump-backed candidates sort of consistently have done better on Election Day in-person voting versus the mail-in vote. So it continues to be a holdover from his whole mail-in balloting and fraud and all of that. Yeah, that's also a fun one, which is that the McCormick and all these other guys who think that the election was stolen are like, well, when all the mail-in ballots are counted, we're sure that we'll win. It's like, well, that's how Biden won Pennsylvania, morons. But hey, whatever. I'm not the first guy to make the point. I know it's a boomer lib one, but it actually is pretty interesting. Sometimes they're correct.

Sometimes the Boomer Libs have a point. Okay, let's go ahead and put this next one up on the screen. This is pretty funny. Trump is urging Dr. Oz to declare victory, speaking there as the neck and neck vote continues. And in terms of how exactly Trump candidates fared, I think this is a pretty important one. Let's go put the next one up there, guys. So here's where things stand right now. So J.D. Vance, obviously he won. By the way, J.D. was actually asked yesterday. He thinks Dr. Oz is still going to pull it out. You know,

we'll see how that works out. He wants to just tow the Trump line, too. I guess that's fair. So look, everybody's got an agenda. I'm just telling you, you know, this is such a nail biter. We truly have no idea. Gilbert, he won at 29 percent. Herbster, 30 percent. He actually lost. Madison Cawthorn, he was the loss and he was an incumbent. Hines, he won at 32 percent. Obviously, Dr. Oz, we don't yet know. McGeechan, he's down, who had only 25 percent. Sorry, 25 percent. And she actually lost. But then Mastriano obviously did win. So that we're going to cover fully in our next block. I do think it is. Put a hit in that one. Yeah. I think the major takeaway from the Senate race is that Kathy Barnett, for all of the hype, didn't even come close to winning this thing, Crystal. So a lot of that really was driven by a single poll. A lot of it was cope. I also think that Kathy Barnett probably did cost Oz the nomination if he did lose, just because a lot of people who are MAGA couldn't really bring themselves to vote for Oz and that McCormick is really slipping in as a result out of that. I'm not, you know, no criticism. I'm just saying that's almost certainly how he kept that lane of the Pat Toomey pro-business type Republican. Well, it also was the case that in the final

stretch, rather than them going hard on McCormick. They actually switched and trained their fire on Kathy Barnett because she seemed to have the momentum was rising quickly in the polls. I mean, she's still finished. She's finished in the 20, it was like 21% or something like that, which was still much higher than where she had been in the polls. So I don't think they were wrong that she was surging. But yeah, by focusing and training their fire on her rather than staying focused on McCormick,

they let him kind of sneak in here. And also you can see, I mean, he must have had a pretty effective organization to have banked all of these mail-in ballots early on before the final stretch of the campaign. So it is interesting. I mean, Sagar, we were talking a little bit about, by the way, I think the fact that Trump is saying, hey, Oz, you should go ahead and declare victory. And he said something like before they find the mail-in ballots and, you know, make you lose or whatever. To me, that's almost maybe the best indicator we have that they actually do think McCormick may pull this thing out in the end. Who knows? Maybe he doesn't know anything more than we do. And he's just sort of getting ahead of this thing in case it goes south. But that to me was maybe the best indicator that actually the hedge fund ghoul McCormick may end up on top.

And then we were talking. I'm interested in your thoughts, Sagar. Which one of these candidates, Oz or McCormick, is stronger ultimately in the fall? Because you hear a lot of sort of mainstream pundits theorizing because they had the example of Glenn Youngkin. McCormick is kind of a similar model of financial ghoul who's able to signal to the MAGA base but not go all the way in on the election conspiracies that potentially that's a path to victory in the fall. But I personally think Oz, just because he is such a well-known and famous figure,

especially among just regular people, I think he could have a lot of crossover appeal and be very difficult to defeat in the fall. That's a very conventional take. You know, I completely agree with you, which is that there seems to be like a lunacy here in Washington, which is that the boring hedge fund guy

is going to be run better in the state of Pennsylvania. I mean, here's the thing. David McCormick worked for Ray Dalio and ran the hedge funds with pioneered shipping jobs over to China and knows how to make that Pennsylvania. And we'll be running against a guy from steel country, Pennsylvania. You tell me whether that guy's going to do better or is the guy who is one of the most famous people in America who also has massive crossover appeal, especially with the suburban

women in the mainline Pennsylvania area, which are has massive crossover appeal, especially with the suburban women in the mainline Pennsylvania area, which are disproportionately Democratic now. You tell me. You know, we were also talking about this during the primary. Oz did not beclown himself. He'd had no major Kathy Barnett type interview. Yeah, obviously he sucked up to Trump. But I mean, who didn't? At the end of the day, he is actually an extraordinarily good communicator. You know, his major issues were like COVID, talking about inflation, all of the stuff that he stuck to. Very centrist, high level of appeal. Now, look, personally, I think both McCormick or Oz is going to beat Fetterman simply because of the national environment.

All politics is national. Candidate quality matters, but relatively on the margins. And I don't think that margin can be overcome. But I do think that Dr. Oz is a safer bet. And I think ultimately what sunk him in this primary is really the demands of the MAGA base in order to have higher standards than they have for Donald Trump. That's the part I don't understand. They're like, Oz used to be pro-choice. So is Trump.

Oz is pro-gay. So is Trump. Oz used to be a liberal andice, so is Trump. Oz is pro-gay, so is Trump. Oz used to be a liberal and hang out with Barack Obama. Trump literally donated to Hillary Clinton and was friends with the Clintons. At their wedding. At the wedding. I mean, this is what drives me insane. I don't understand. I'm like, look, from a purely strategic perspective, do you want a legitimate A-list celebrity, one of the most famous people in America? Or do you want David McCormick, who obviously was also liberal in the Goldman Sachs-like sense and is now fake inventing himself as some Harley riding?

Which nobody ever buys. Both of these guys are rich carpetbaggers. Actually, Oz is worth $400 million, and he's probably the poorer man in that race. Yeah, almost definitely. You know, you make a good point about the Pennsylvania electorate versus the Virginia electorate. Virginia is, the electoral map of Virginia is completely dominated by Northern Virginia.

So Fairfax, Loudoun County, Prince William County, this is all, this is like the whole ballgame in terms of Virginia politics at this point. So, yeah, for those people, Glenn Youngkin apparently was a good fit and a good candidate. Pennsylvania has a very different electorate. It is much more of a blue collar state at this point. And, you know, I agree with you that, listen, it's still Democrats have really tall hill to climb. And so you would still say probably advantage Republicans in the fall.

Right now, the state is rated by most ratings like as a toss up right now. But you do have to say Fetterman is probably the best candidate the Democrats could possibly put up. And we'll get more into him in a moment. But he does come from steel country. He was a mayor of a steel town. He still has that every minute. Anyone's statewide office. Shows up in his basketball shorts everywhere he goes and not as some fake McCormick like,

I'm the country guy now. This is genuinely, you can tell it's very legit in who he is and who he's always been. He's also very well known in the state and very well liked. So I do think Democrats have put up the most formidable candidate that they could in the state in a landscape that continues to be very difficult. If it's Oz that he's up against, I think that's almost impossible to overcome without some major issue from Oz.

If it's McCormick, I think he's got a shot. Yeah, I think it's certainly true. I think Fetterman has a shot regardless. When I like when I say probably I'm talking, you know, percentage wise, like 60 national percent or so. So that's generally where it's at. Let's throw this final one up there. The New York Times tear sheet, which is that the primaries really do show the limits and the depths of Trump's power over the GOP base. And I I would really put it this way. I've talked a lot about the concept of variance on the show, which is that the Trumpiness of the Republican Party means that in Trumpy states, a la Pennsylvania or Ohio, his endorsement is going to matter a lot. Also, his endorsement in a state like Georgia, which is not Trumpy, could also either have a negative effect or in the case of Brian Kemp, be very embarrassing, hence why he lost the state of Georgia in the

first place in the presidential election. So the Trump takeover of the Republican Party doesn't mean that he is powerful in the entire Republican Party, across the entire country. He's very, very, very powerful and influential in Trump country, but in places that are more on the margins, traditional Romney-style Republicans. Actually, the Deep South is a good example. Those places are going to have independent power centers and more—I wouldn't say forward-thinking, but just more independent-minded GOP voters than the people who really, really, really love Trump in the industrial Midwest or in a West Virginia, Appalachia-type place. So that's just the way to think about it, when and why the Trump endorsement matters. I think if Trump did not intervene in the Pennsylvania race, first of all, I don't think Oz would have had any chance. No chance.

Because there was clearly a lot of skepticism of him with the Republican base. And his unfavorable rating continued to be quite high among the Republican base throughout the primary. So I do think Trump put him in the fight whether he's able to prevail or not. Probably if Trump doesn't intervene, you could see a world where Kathy Barnett then is the one who's able to take the thing by storm. I think he really kind of killed her campaign in the final weeks by coming out and, you know, directly saying, because she was really relying

on being like, I am the Trump candidate. And she definitely had the credibility. And you can see the way that her partner in crime, Mastriano, you know, not only won, but easily won on the governor's side of the credibility. And you can see the way that her partner in crime, Mastriano, you know, not only won, but easily won on the governor's side of the map. And that really didn't owe to Trump because Trump didn't. Trump got in after Mastriano had already surged and the writing was already on the wall there. So I do think, listen, his endorsement is still extremely consequential. Georgia may be a special situation, especially because you have an incumbent there in Brian

Kemp, who apparently people more or less like, at least on the Republican side. So that makes it more difficult. They're not just evaluating what Trump says about this candidate. I think in these open seats where you have a variety of candidates that are somewhat unknown, I think that's where he has a huge, huge impact. Biden's endorsement apparently means literally nothing, literally nothing, and maybe like negative. Let's go ahead and put the big headlines here from the Democratic side. You've got Fetterman, who easily won from his hospital bed, won every single county in the state. He will be the Democrats' Senate nominee. And then you have Josh Shapiro on the gubernatorial side in Pennsylvania. That's going to be a very closely watched race. Now, both of these candidates have won statewide before. So I think that

matters. They're both relatively well-known by Pennsylvania voters and relatively popular. I actually didn't know much about Josh Shapiro. So I was talking to Sirota about him, who apparently has known him for a very long time. And he's more impressive than I expected. So he was the one you guys might remember when he was AG of the state. He did the big report digging into the abuses within the Catholic Church. Very difficult and very brave thing to do at the time. I remember that. It was a big deal. He went after, like, you know, people who were exploiting students

and, like, you know, charging them unfair amounts, and he was able to get a settlement there. He's gone after corporate America. So anyway, he's actually less of just a generic Dem and has a little bit stronger of a footprint in the state and more of his own identity than I ultimately expected. And he also has gotten crosswise with Larry Krasner,

who's the Philly DA, who's been very aggressive in terms of criminal justice reform. And Shapiro has been on the sort of more moderate side of that divide, which could also bode well for him in the state. So both of them ultimately easily win. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen of part of the reason why I do think Fetterman is a formidable candidate, even as I continue to say, like the wins are very much against Democrats in all of these races in all of these states. They describe here Fetterman's

plan to win Pennsylvania, taking his populist message to Trump country. And he says, they say in this article, Fetterman is as idiosyncratic in substance as he is in style. In his campaign, he has stressed bread and butter issues. He supports $15 minimum wage, is firmly pro-union, sells T-shirts in favor of legalizing marijuana, endorsed Bernie in his 2016 campaign, opposes COVID-19 mask mandates. He criticized Philly for briefly reimposing one last month and broke with Biden on immigration, saying the Trump era Title 42 policy should remain. So I didn't even know that. That's big. Yeah. So whatever you think of those policies, I think it's a very appealing package in terms of a swing state and how Pennsylvania is culturally positioned. And again, Fetterman has a lot of credibility in just, you know, how he came up, how he connects in steel country, his every man sort

of working class persona. So again, I think it's tough regardless of whether McCormick or Oz ends up as the Republican nominee, but I do think Democrats have put their best possible candidate in the race. I also have to say here, Sagar. Yeah. Conor Lamb, Congressman, about to be former Congressman, Conor Lamb, congressman, about to be former congressman, Conor Lamb. Former congressman almost. He is the vanquished candidate here. And to me, that is very sweet because this guy, he was held up by the Democratic establishment. He's like this blue dog, totally corporate type. He was held up as like, oh, this is the next big thing. He got every mainstream endorsement, not even only nationally, but in the state. I saw some tweet out the list of Conor Lamb's endorsements versus like the eight people

on the list of Fetterman's endorsements. And this guy didn't just lose. He got crushed like it was not close. And he lost to a man who was literally in a hospital bed. Yeah. Getting a pacemaker put in on the day of the election. So, you know, it was a big rebuke and not just in this one, but I'll go through a couple of others of the establishment sort of Joe Manchin wing of the Democratic Party. And in fact, voters told New York Times and other outlets that they saw Conor Lamb as, quote, just another Joe Manchin. And so the fact that you have Manchin as this completely villainized figure in the Democratic Party now has made it so that people

have a very visceral sense of what it means to be a centrist. And they're not impressed with it. And I think that's a theme that comes up a couple of times. So he got endorsed by Manchin. He was bragging about it. It turned out that was the thing that Democratic base voters wanted nothing to do with another Joe Manchin. That's very interesting, actually. It doesn't bode well for like a Kyrsten Sinema or any of that whenever election time comes in terms of the primary. Yeah, definitely. So I guess my real question, look, with Fetterman, who knows? I'm not saying the guy doesn't hold positions, but I've also said here,

he does not seem capable of opening his mouth without saying LGBTQ. And we'll see. I mean, look, he's going to get hammered. And whoever McCormick or these people, they have a lot of money, both him and Oz, they're going to blanket the state and try to paint him as another woke Democrat. Will it work? I mean, I don't think he does himself a lot of favors in terms of his primary campaign, especially in the latter times, because the guy was very clearly going to win. And if I was him, I would not have been going down that direction. I don't know. And this is also people I've spoken to who actually live in Pennsylvania. They all raise the same concern.

They're like, I don't know. He seems like he might be too culturally far left. So like I said, steel country, no question that's where his roots. But the more that he's gone statewide and more national appeal, he's become a lot more woke in his overall orientation. So this will be a big test also of populist economics versus a cultural message. I personally don't think it's going to work. And like I said, national environment. So this is the thing about Wokeness 2. If Biden were popular by 10 points, it wouldn't matter either in terms of the candidates. So he still could win.

I just think it goes national, then culture, and then we'll see exactly how it goes. But Biden overall is just going to be such a massive sink on everybody. But there are other Democratic candidates I know that you wanted to point to about who are also defeating the Democratic establishment. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd have to see more specifically what you're referring to in his language. I mean, even when we interviewed him, he always says LGBT. It's like you said it like three times in a 10-minute interview. Gay rights are popular, though. OK, fine. Also, remember, too, that is that on the ballot in Pennsylvania. But remember, too, that, of course, these rights are always on the ballot. I mean, it's a national election. Of course, you have an impact on those things. But let me also

say, too, that I think the cultural grounds have shifted to where there are going to be a lot more questions about abortion rights, where Fetterman is going to be much more in step with that one. He's a population than the Republican Party is at this point. And I think he's helped, too, by the fact that Republicans have nominated someone who was so fringe for the gubernatorial candidate. So we'll see how it all ultimately shakes out. But there was another race that was that was very closely watched that pitted Summer Lee, who is a sort of lefty Bernie Sanders-type state rep in the Pittsburgh area, against this union-busting lawyer, literally, on the other side who's relatively unknown. And this is for an open congressional seat. And originally, Summer had been up by double digits, like 25 points, somewhere in that range. And so multiple of these anti-Palestine, pro-Israel groups came into the race, dropped $3 million.

This is the most money that they spent in any race. And clearly shifted the dynamic and really closed the gap here. Ultimately, and the ironic thing here, too, is that it was like, so summer supports conditioning aid to Israel, which I also support by the way. Um, but they didn't run ads on that. They ran ads saying that she was like not a real Democrat and that she was going to try to undermine Joe Biden, all of these sorts of things, which is exactly the playbook that they had run successfully against Nina Turner in the past.

Of course, Nina had said that like half a bowl of shit comment, which didn't help her and help them to be able to make that case. So they spent millions on this race. And as of now, and this is one that's definitely going to recount because the margin is so narrow. Summer managed to eke this thing out by a few hundred votes. Like it is as close as it possibly could be. So she will be, you know, a new squad member. And I think she'll be very well known nationally, not just because she's going to be another addition to the squad. This is a blue district. It certainly will be the Democrat who, you know, ultimately wins in the fall,

but also because she definitely has a presence and a charisma. And I wanted to give you guys a little bit of a sense of that because I think you'll be hearing more from her in the future. This is a little bit of her victory speech on the night of the election. And I also thought it was interesting how she really carried a largely populist message as well, talking about the multiracial working class and a lot of bread and butter issues. Let's take a listen to that. We can't win on a quality education for every single child. They can't say that black women can't win. We show them today, we show them throughout this race that when we build coalitions, that when we cross all over the county, when we cross

and build a multiracial, multigenerational movement of people of all religions and all genders and all races, all ages, that when we come together, we can't be stopped. I want to say thank you to each and every one of you, no matter why you voted, every single vote counted in this race. And we will say that every vote matters. And when we show up, then we're going to knock one more door and every vote matters in this race. Matters in this race. Every single staffer matters in this race. And I just have such a gratitude

to you all. We got a lot of work to do. This was me. So looks like she ekes it down, like I said, going to a recount, but that was just one you'll be hearing more from her, no doubt. That was just one of a string of pretty significant victories for the left, though. I mean, you gotta count

Fetterman in that, dispatching with Conor Lamb. Conor Lamb's seat now is open. Open. And in the primary, Bernie Delegate also prevailed in his district. You also had, let's go ahead and put this next one up on the screen. Looks like, this isn't final yet,

because it's Oregon and it takes a long time for the mail-in ballots to come in, but it looks like Kurt Schrader, who was described as the Joe Manchin of the house, has lost to a progressive challenger, Jamie McLeod Skinner. This is a major upset. I mean, this is an incumbent Democrat who the establishment went all in for. Joe Biden endorses him. And it looks like he's getting waxed by Jamie McLeod Skinner, who, you know, ran with the grassroots backing and support.

I also watched one of her ads, and I don't know much about the entirety of how she ran her campaign saga, but the ad that I watched went just eviscerated Schrader on his pharma ties. This is the dude, one of the key players in terms of killing the Medicare prescription drug pricing reforms. And she just hammered him for that in this ad. So again, a populist appeal that seems to have worked out in this primary. And it's so humiliating for Joe Biden that you wade into this race. He hasn't made many endorsements. You wade into this.

You endorse this guy who, by the way, has stabbed you and your agenda in the back. And you still have zero impact, ultimately, in the race. There's another interesting one. This one we should probably talk about more at another date because it's a whole layered conversation. But we had talked to Ryan Grim before about this crypto billionaire who is throwing his weight around to the tune of millions in a lot of congressional primaries, especially in particular on the Democratic side. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen. Well, his candidate, that he spent something like $13 million to back, lost, and it wasn't even close, to another progressive world-class candidate. 41 to 19%. I mean, it was brutal.

Like, they spent $13 million to try to push forward this sort of like crypto backed candidate. And this is also interesting. Not only did the crypto pack come in for this dude, but the House majority pack put a million plus into this race, which is an open primary. Like, what are you doing? Why are you getting involved in this race at all? Meanwhile, they didn't back Schrader, who was an incumbent who probably had a better chance of winning. So the crypto billionaire also goes down to defeat. There were a couple of lefty challenger candidates in North Carolina who also had those millions from the Israeli, Israel, pro-Israel PACs come in that did end up in defeat. But overall, I think when you look at this, it comes back to what I said earlier, which is that the Democratic base is really disgusted

with Joe Manchin. And when you can tie a centrist or corporatist candidate to Manchin, it is a really devastating blow to their electoral chances. And this has got to be a real rebuke of the Biden administration and the way that they have failed to really deliver on their key promises across the board. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, that Oregon district in particular, the one of Court Schrader, that is actually a little bit of a conservative district. So it's going to be a good test case of, you know, progressive rhetoric on whether they can win in a GOP area. I know some people from the area and they think that Kurt was basically the only guy who could win that. But at the same time, you know, like you said, Crystal, the Democratic base is just not happy here with Joe Biden.

So they're kind of in a real pickle where their own base is turning against them. But that they're not. Look, they have to nominate candidates then who can also win not only with the base, but with everybody else. So it really is. It's a tough situation for the Democratic establishment. You just hate to see it. Also, in the crypto community where there are these things called top signals, as in, like, that means we're officially at the top. I think Sam Bankman Freed having serious losses is a very big top signal for people. It's like, all right, it's peaked. We all need to get out of here. All right.

This is a very important story. So this is the DHS Secretary or the DHS Ministry of Truth. Now, there are two sides to this story. Both the fact and the headline is it's shutting down. So that's good news for all of us. What's the official name? The Misinformation Governance Board? Disinformation Governance Board, also known as the Ministry of Truth.

Here's what's interesting, though. Here's how The Washington Post reported it. Let's put this up there on the screen. Taylor Lorenz, of course, is the one who got the scoop. She says how the Biden administration let right wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts. A quote unquote pause of the DHS newly created board comes after its head. Nina Jankowicz was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond. As you said at the top of our show, what the hell is going on at The Washington Post?

The clear headline news of this is Biden administration, quote unquote, pausing, a.k.a. shutting down the disinformation governance board as a result of public outcry. Just say that. You can even characterize it as a bad faith right wing attack in your copy if you want to. Why is it? I don't support that. Look, I'm saying by the Washington Post standards. Yeah, I'm not saying I don't think it's my issue. That's my issue is just not even factually accurate. Yes, there was a lot of right wing criticism of her. There was also left wing criticism of this thing.

There was also civil libertarian and civil liberties groups that criticized this board. So to just say, oh, this is a right-wing smear campaign, that's not even accurate. Like, if you're just going by the facts and you're supposed to be reporting the news. I mean, a lot of people had concerns over this.

And, you know, I mean, at this day, you know, even saying free speech is apparently coded right-wing. But I'm saying even within their twisted framework, this is a terrible story. So the background of all of this, obviously, Nina Jankowicz, she worked at the Wilson board. I played that cringeworthy video of her singing Mary Poppins about disinformation and how it's quite atrocious. It's one of the worst, most cringeworthy videos I've ever seen. As I said, as a former theater kid, we need to see theater kids mugged by reality.

So she is somebody who needs to have that happen to her. That has happened, I think. And it finally has. So Nina, please quit the moaning Myrtle Band and Harry Potter fan fiction. Quit doing the Mary Poppins TikToks. Grow up a little bit. Now, exactly what happened here is that the Washington Post, though, is reporting that this is a result of the Biden administration folding to these, quote unquote, right wing attacks. And what I love is that they

actually quote a group within this crystal who characterizes this as a right wing attack, as the group itself, which funded the P-tape Steele dossier. So I'm like, you are literally quoting a group which funded and pushed official disinformation and quoting it and saying that this is a result of a right-wing attack against the so-called disinformation board. Just call this what it is. It's a censorship board. You want establishment, liberal point of views to dominate in the United States government and on technology platforms and to control the flow of information because you don't trust citizens to make up their minds. But they can't just come out right and say that. So they have to frame it as like, oh, we have all these concerns. And we've played all those videos before where she's like, it's actually liberals who are the ones who get censored. And it's like, no,

as we said, it's not liberals. It's leftists to the extent that anybody on the left gets censored whatsoever. And actually, it's mainly dissonant voices left and right who are always the ones who are being kept out of here. So I just think it shows you very clearly that the press is on the side of the disinformation governance board because they don't believe in parsing that. And they actually have an official point of view, as Taylor Lorenz does, that she wants to dominate on the internet. So there's a lot of troubling things that are happening with this. But God bless. I'm glad it's gone. There is so much to say on the Internet. So there's a lot of troubling things that are happening with this. But, you know, God bless. I'm glad it's gone.

There is so much to say about this article. First of all, she doesn't even mention the fact that one of the primary issues that people took with Nina Jankowicz is that she herself was a purveyor of significant misinformation, including buying into the whole like, oh, it's the Hunter laptop story is just like Russian disinformation. So that's number one. Number two, she goes to great lengths to try to convince the audience in this piece that these were coordinated attacks. And I think that language is very intentional because if it's a coordinated attack, like that sounds really nefarious. Then you start thinking about bot farms and, oh, this is some like, you know, this is some underhanded dirty trick to take down a good woman. When in reality, even what she tracks here is just there was a big account

that posted something critical of the board and of Jankowitz. It struck a nerve and people did what they do on Twitter and they talked about it. That's not a coordinated attack. That's just how Twitter works. And if you didn't expect that you would be mocked for your, like, you know, cringe Mary Poppins video, I don't know what world you're ultimately living in. You could also, there's the dishonesty of just framing this as coming from the right, which, listen, a lot of it came from the right, but it was not exclusively from the right. That also is very dishonest within this piece. And then the issue that I consistently have with Taylor Lorenz is, you know what?

If you want to write this as an opinion piece, fine. I don't agree with it. Yes. You're entitled to your perspective. This is framed as a news article. It is based in zero facts. It is so it is pure propaganda. And she tries to convince people that there was this coordinated plot which did not exist. So that is really, really disingenuous. And to the point of like the pieces that she leaves out, go ahead and put this New

York Post piece up on the screen, which, you know, New York Post was actually way more honest here in their portrayal. They say that Biden puts disinfo Mary Poppins on ice, which is funny. But they actually have the honesty to point out that, you know, among other things, she had the terrible idea of letting verified, so blue check Twitter users, edit other users' tweets. Terrible idea that we're getting from this quote unquote expert on misinformation. She repeatedly tried to spread doubt about New York Post reporting about Hunter Biden's notorious laptop, telling the AP in October that it should be viewed as a Trump campaign product. She also pushed the since debunked claim in 2016 that then presidential candidate Donald Trump had a tie to Kremlin-linked Alphabank, an allegation at the center of an ongoing trial of a Clinton campaign lawyer. So all of that is fair game. All of it is fair game. I'm not a big fan of digging up everybody's

old tweets and judging them for life. But when it's relevant to the job that you have been appointed to, yeah, that actually matters. Of course. The last thing I'll say about this that really irritated me about this entire conversation, not just Taylor Lorenz, but especially Taylor Lorenz, is she tries to have it both ways. She tries to say, I don't know what people were worried about. This board was no big deal. They don't have any real authority. And also, though, frame it as like this is some grave blow to the fight for truth. You can't have it both ways.

Either the board was no big deal and you don't know why people cared about it, or this is a big deal, it has significant power, and so it really matters whether it happens or not. You can't have it both ways. That's a very good, actually, I didn't think about it that way, but it's very important. So it's like it's either was a fake board that didn't matter or this is a big deal that she's been taken down.

And, you know, here's the other thing too. It's not like the Biden administration is all of that responsive to criticism. This obviously folded not because I think of just public outcry, but I think anybody on the merits could look at this woman, what she has said and say, yeah, this is just a bad fit. This is just not going to work out. You're not going to be a neutral actor. Exactly. We don't trust you to be a neutral actor. You can't be orbiting information for the United States government whenever you are such a clearly partisan actor. It's not just folding to politics, folding to attacks.

On the merits, it was a terrible idea to have it in the first place, and it was a terrible idea in order to hire her. So it folding is a victory, and I think that anybody in the press should not want a disinformation governance board, period. So the fact that they are using and defending it and that it's Taylor in particular that makes it somebody who's a proponent of it just shows you their actual ideology and their agenda. I want the government to be responsive to public criticism. Yeah, I wish. They rarely are. They actually were responsive to public criticism here. And that is a very good thing. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community.

I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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