Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Breaking Points FIRST SHOW: Dems Screwed In 2022? Facebook's Trump Ban And NYC's Crazy Mayoral Race ft Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

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which is available in the show notes. We love you guys. Enjoy the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. Welcome to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sager. We have an amazing show for everybody today. I miss saying that, Crystal. I know. Indeed we do.

Guys, super excited. Welcome to Breaking Points. Can't tell you how hard we've been working to get all of this together, how excited we are. I actually feel like a little nervous this morning. So you have to forgive us for all of that. Just to give you a little bit of a sort of rundown, a tour of how we're going to be doing the show,

you can see we've got this new graphic along the side that kind of gives you a guide post to the type of stories that we're going to be covering today. So we've got a little intro for you this morning. We're going to look at a Dem autopsy and some warning signs for them, Trump's Facebook ban, the New York City mayoral race, Saugers, breaking points, new name for our monologues, my breaking points. We've got the one and only Glenn Greenwald on. He's going to address some of the attempts to smear him and also talk about the media. So, you know, you don't want to miss that. What are we doing here, Sagar? What is sort of the ethos of the show? What are we doing here? Why am I on this beautiful new set with this beautiful, really well-designed desk? What are we doing here? You're so obsessed with the desk. I love this desk. I always will.

Listen, what we're trying to do here, we said this in our mission statement. We said this whenever we announced, which is that we truly believe in making everybody really hate each other less and hate the corrupt ruling class more. And I don't think there's ever been a more politically charged time in America. Yes, January 6th and all that happened. That was like the high watermark, if you will. But the scars of all of that are with us. And the Biden presidency is now as sclerotic as I think both of you and I predicted. And there's just this empty rot, which we're constantly fighting over and asking questions about what comes next. And nobody who

works in politics or in the media seems to know. These people are all reporting on January 6th commissions as if that's going to solve everything. We need to be focused on what's actually breaking apart in this country. And I think that that is the core ethos of this show. We want to tell people what the media is not going to tell them. We want to take them behind the scenes about how elite corruption works and really just connect it to the lived experience of your day-to-day life. People know they're being lied to. They know that the system is rigged. They do not know and have the ability to articulate why.

And I really see that as the overall mission of what we're trying to do here. You know, we want to take the pieces of Rising that you all really responded to and that we thought were really important. And honestly, over the course of Rising, it went through a few different evolutions and iterations. It had different focuses at different times, but one through line was those sort of breaking points that underlie

all of what's happening, whether it's in our political system, whether it's in housing, whether it's in the rise of sort of conspiracy theories, all of these things are happening underneath the surface, and you know that that's going on, and yet no one is speaking to them in the media. And it's wild, you know, we say this thing about hate each other less and hate the elites more, and as you were just saying it right now,

it's sort of mind-blowing that that's the exact opposite of what most media does. And politics, that's all politics is about. Most media is literally about making us hate each other and love the elites. That's the message that's being pushed time and time again. So when you see these metrics that show trust in the media declining and declining and declining,

it's because people sense that and they really resist it. It doesn't reflect what they're seeing in their daily life. So we wanna to bring, you know, the other thing that you all always told us you really responded to on Rising was the high level of production. I want to say thank you to everybody who's already subscribed as a premium member. $10 a month, you get the whole thing uncut in your inbox, the full entire show. An hour early. Yeah. We also, though, if that's out of your reach, like, guys, really don't worry about it.

The clips are going to be up on YouTube. The audio is going to be free with breaks anywhere that you get normal podcasts. By the way, that was one of the top comments we would always get on Rising. That's right. Where's the podcast? Why can't we listen to this as audio? Now you're going to be able to get that. And look, we really want to look forward.

We have our reasons for leaving the Hill. So now you're going to be able to get that. And look, we really want to look forward. We have our reasons for leaving the Hill. But the bottom line is this is more true to our values. We believed in you guys. We thought that this was important to you and that you would give us the support necessary to continue the production values and the type of product that we want to put out into the world that you all have told us has been very impactful. And you've really, really showed up for us as we sort of like stepped into the breach. So guys, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. And we're so excited to be able to do this show without any sort of like corporate anything. It's just totally reliant on you all. I couldn't be more excited. And I'm blown away. I mean, this is a final message to the suits, which is that we don't need you, which is that we have, if enough people believe in your product, you can make something happen. And because of all the premium subscribers, we are going to be able to do this. And more importantly, we are going to be able to continually improve. So we heard your feedback, which was that

the audio wasn't at the level where you guys want. So because of you guys, we were able to hire an audio person who is here on the set who's going to be helping. And if you have any more feedback, I'll send it over to him, and I'll be like, what's going on here, man? I'm just kidding. Look, really what it is is that over the next several months, as we get the feel of the show and all of that, we are going to make continuous improvements,

and that's all that we're trying to do here. We did not expect to be able to do this at the level of what we are at right now. And the ability of us, I think, to try and actually have a chance now to fulfill our mission, I am just absolutely blown away. Also, can we address the elephant in the room? Well, I was just gonna say exactly that. A lot of people, there's a lot of consternation online

about this one. We did switch sides. And what it really comes from is a deep meditation on we want to get out of this partisan left-right mindset, which, no, just kidding. We just literally sat in these seats when we got on the set to start with. And now we're, because we've done rehearsals in these seats, we're sort of attached to them. So you guys are all going to have to relax and get used to mommy and daddy being on different sides of the table i promise it's gonna be okay the emotional connection some of you have to my seat place unbelievable yeah i

also i also loved um in the videos we released last week they noted our my i still had like the goo from the hill there's a metaphor to that yeah but uh now we got nice new breaking point stickers and i should mention we have lovely breaking point smugs, which are both union-made and made in America. And we'll give you guys details about where you can get those. And all of the products that, you know, any merchandise we do, we're really committed to also sharing and reflecting our values. So union-made and American-made.

Everything we ever produce will be union-made and made in America. Our solemn pledge to all of you. But I think that it is time to get to some of the news. So Democrats warning. Let's go ahead and do that. We'll cue the directors there in the control room. What are we looking at, Crystal? Okay, so there's a new big autopsy out about the Democratic Party and how they fared in 2020. And it's sort of a weird thing because Democrats won the White House. They won the Senate. They maintained control of the House.

But it's still seen as like they wildly underperformed expectations. Which they did. So a number of groups got together and went through to say like, okay, here's what went wrong and here are the warning signs for the future. Let's throw this New York Times tear sheet up there on the screen. And basically, first of all, you need to know that one of the groups that was most involved with this was Third Way. Centrist think tank. They hate the left. They take every opportunity that they can to trash the left. So keep in mind when you're reading the details here

that there's like an ideological agenda behind it. And keeping with that, some of what they say is useful and some of it is clearly very ideologically motivated. So here were their sort of top findings. Number one, voters of color are persuasion voters who need to be convinced. And this to me was maybe like the biggest takeaway is that Democrats were assuming that minority voters were just automatically in their camp and all they needed to do was worry about turning them out. So there was no persuasion pitch. There was no effort to actually go into these communities and be like, here's why you should vote for Joe Biden. Here's why you should vote for the Democratic Party. They just took these voters for granted.

That's the bottom line, which does reflect what Chuck Roach has been telling us forever about the total underinvestment in Latino communities. And what they also came up with was that, no brainer, Democrats lacked an economic pitch that was effective. They didn't lean in. They leaned too much into just like Trump is bad messaging, which everybody can judge for themselves and could experience and witness for themselves, whether however they felt about Donald Trump. And so the fact that there wasn't a coherent economic message meant that Republicans were effective at portraying Democrats as like the party of lockdown, that they just want to keep you in your house forever

and keep the schools closed and keep your masks on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The part where they, it's funny because most of the report is very data-driven, and they've got all these charts, and here's the turnout percentage and all of this. And then the part where they, where they, it's funny because most of the report is very data driven and they've got all these charts and here's the turnout percentage and all of this. And then the part where they're like, oh, it was all the left's fault. It's all anecdotal. It's like, you know, we asked Abigail Spanberger and she said, it's the left's fault. Right. I also would say though, and we've talked about this before, there's no ability to distinguish between the sort of like economic

left policies and the cultural left. And look, I'm from a values perspective, I'm totally aligned with both the economic and cultural left. But if you just look at the polling and look what lands, there's no doubt that the economic policies are more popular. And also if your whole beef is like they lacked a coherent economic message, well, literally the only part of the party that has a coherent economic message is the left. Yes. So that part seemed to be very, very thin, but it's interesting.

And they basically say, look, Democrats could really be in trouble in 2022. I think the parsing of it is very important because you're right. Look, I think the cultural left is 100% to blame for both the current state of American politics in terms of the division and really in terms of the division and really in

terms of the democratic underperformance in 2020. And the only thing that saved them was really Trump and his complete and total idiocy. But if you want to see a picture of the future, my own home state of Texas, let's put this up there on the screen. McAllen, Texas, an 85% Hispanic town on the border. And when I say on the border, I mean literally on the border. That is what it is. Just elected a Republican mayor, which shows actually that the Republican gains in South Texas are going to stay despite the fact that Trump was on the ballot. So yes, Trump was on the ballot, the stimulus checks and all that, but something oceanic has happened down in South Texas. And I think that what it does show you is what we speak about all the time, which are there are Hispanic voters in South Texas who are like pro-Medicare for all, pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-PC, anti-establishment.

What party speaks to them? Not the national GOP, certainly not the National Democratic Party. But on a localized level, this is what the future of politics looks like. I'm not gonna say it's for the future of GOP. What it is is that they are recognizing that the national brands of both of the parties are totally out of step with these brand-new constituencies. Yeah. And I would say that the reason why the Republican Party, if anything, can be the mantle, why some of this is gonna be seen, at least in the emerging time, is they don't stand for anything.

So the people down there can make it stand for whatever they need to. Yeah, I don't know that I'm really buying that. In the future, the Democratic Party could too. I don't know. Well, I just, you know, having lived in Ohio and Kentucky and done work in West Virginia, local politics is dead. Everything is nationalized now. That's true.

And you really can't escape, like if the Democratic Party brand is trash, there's no escaping it. If the Republican Party brand is trash, there's no escaping it. If the Republican Party brand is trash, there's no escaping it. You're going to be tarred with stop the steal at every single level in the Republican Party. For the suburban voters, for sure. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, depending on where you live, but you're not going to be able to escape that. And for the Democratic Party, I mean, this is why they've lost all of rural America and why even candidates who, you know, had a long history in some of these seats and were really well known among the population. That's why they haven't been able to make up any ground there, even have these sort

of like outlier races anymore, because there's just this aura of contempt and condescension coming from the national party that you cannot escape, which is why, you know, all these, and this is what's really depressing, any sort of like individual candidate qualities are like, oh, what platform does this particular candidate run on? Or like, what, what's their bio and how do they relate or how do they have deep roots in the district? All of that stuff matters almost not at all. Right. Right. No, like you're, you know, and, and that's actually, and so that's the national brand is everything that matters. And so, you know, I think you have these two choices that are both like lackluster and anemic in very different ways. And I do want to say on the like, you know, blaming defund the

police for all democratic underperformance. I think that's very convenient for the democratic establishment. I'm not going to say that it didn't have any impact at all, but guess what? Joe Biden could have run on a platform, right? He could have run on like, hey, here's what I'm actually going to do for you economically. Here's the healthcare plan that I'm actually going to push for. He stopped even talking about the public option once he won the nomination. It's very easy for Spanberger and these other blue dogs or for the Biden team or whatever to be like, oh, it was all the fault of these activists saying defund the police, because that keeps them from having to do a single moment of soul searching about the fact that they did not offer an economic agenda that was coherent for people. And they continue to not

learn the lessons of 2016 that it's not enough to just lean into like, oh, Trump is bad. Well, yeah, and they're learning that the hard way. Look, I think defund the police is absolutely responsible for the state of Florida and for a lot of South Texas. That being said, it's not the only thing. And you're right, which is that whenever you, everything is very complicated. Coalitions are difficult, which is that why do millions of people come out and vote? Many of them can't even really tell you themselves, but like, oh, maybe I did it for this. Maybe I did it for that. At the end of the day, sometimes it's about a gut feeling. But I do think that it does lie with this. Neither candidate of 2020 proposed any transformative way in order to change your life. So what did

it come down to? Of course, the default was culture, right? If there was no argument around how you're going to remake American society, then of course, we're going to default to defund the police or immigration or anything else. That, yes, we can say those are the top issues in people's lives, but also things are downstream from each other. When Trump is out there saying what he run, his economic agenda in 2020 was I'm going to cut social security and pass another large tax cut.

That's literally what he said. Okay. Oh, awesome. And then Biden, I don't even know what the hell he was running on. I mean, Trump- Restore the soul of America. Restore the soul of America. Literally means nothing.

Which, again, doesn't actually mean anything. So in that particular case, it does, of course it makes sense to me, which is that you're going to have a default cultural election. So we have cultural doomerism right now in America, where everybody's like, the cultural war rules everything. And I've said it here many times. But it's because we have the absence of political parties speaking to the actual economic and societal problems

of the 21st century. Now, in the year 1932, you know what they didn't have to argue about? Culture. And it wasn't just because it was a homogenous society. It was about what is the government role in the Great Depression? We were owed that this time around

and we completely lost it. Some of these books behind here are exactly about what happened back then, and it makes me so sad to see the way that our politics works today. This is actually what my breaking points are about today. I'm going to have to get used to saying that. Radar is very ingrained in my brain, but this is what it's about because it's not just in the U.S. Across 21 different Western democracies that Thomas Piketty and some of his colleagues studied, you've had this, what they call a multi-party elite system. So on the right, you have the financial elites and on the left, you have the education elites, like people who have college

degree and higher degrees. And so that means you have every party dominated by various elites who continue to pursue their own class interests, which means that economics is essentially taken off the table. And what all the fights are over is culture. And that's very easy and it's very convenient for like, you know, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party establishment. They don't have to do anything other than say the right words and signal the right things. So that is the state of our politics. Does it have to be that way? No. Even today, there are exceptions. There are countries that are exceptions to that rule. But the more that you focus on just like this sort of like gauzy, meaningless rhetoric, rather than a concrete, actionable policy plan,

the more you're just going to have these fights over culture. And that is what we see. That's absolutely correct. One of the core themes I think we're going to track in the future is just how much the culture war is ripping us apart and to what end and why. And I really do blame the people at the top. I do not blame the voters whatsoever, and I never will. Hey, guys. So remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here I am again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to crystalandsauger.com, which you can click on in the show notes.

The other story that we wanted to talk about is this new Facebook decision. This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. in the show notes. The other story that we wanted to talk about is this new Facebook decision. This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Let's put it up there on the screen, which is that Facebook has decided that they're going to uphold Trump's ban, but he can maybe come back in 2023. I think this is just the most ludicrous thing. Either ban him or don't. I mean, at a certain point, this is all becoming ridiculous. They said it will look to experts to decide whether the risk to public safety has receded. Which experts? Are they the nutjobs who screwed up?

Yeah, I'm the expert, which is that let people generally say what they want. And look, you know, I don't think it's a secret. I'm a huge Trump fan, okay? And I think he probably did do a lot of damage on January 6th. All of that being said, this is a farce, which is that take Trump out of it and take a look at this from a pure power perspective. It is ludicrous to have a fake oversight board providing fake recommendations to a fake transparent company. Who's in charge here? It's Zuckerberg. He's the only one who makes the decision according to his own stock structure. What do I say all the time? Follow the money. He controls the company. He has a majority stake

whenever it comes to a majority shareholder power. So this one person is the person who's deciding whether the president is going to be here till 2021 or 2021 till 2023. And I think there's a really scary part is the Trump campaign or the former campaign, potential campaign, has even said they view the Facebook decision as their ability in order to run again. So look, I mean, I don't particularly want Trump to run again, but it's not my place. It's up to the American people. And it's certainly not up to Mark Zuckerberg. That is the hard thing to separate. It's above to the American people, and it's certainly not up to Mark Zuckerberg. That is the hard thing to separate. It's actually really nice that Trump is not on these platforms. Like, on a day-to-day basis, the fact that, and it has worked.

He just took his, like, crappy blog site thing down. Yeah, let's put this up. No one was going to it. No one was reading it. The media wasn't covering it. That was apparently his big thing, was the fact that it it wasn't what he was putting up on this blog site was not getting covered by the media. And so they gave up on that thing. So it has actually really worked to not have him on these platforms. But, yeah, I read the corporate speak memo that Facebook put out about their decision to ban him for at least two years.

And it was all like, oh, this shows that we're accountable. And this shows we're really listening to the board, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, one of the really basic things that they don't explain is what exactly did he say on your platform that justified this ban? That's right. Because the sense that I get is that this is much more about the totality of his actions than whether he actually violated their specific terms of service.

So, okay, if you're in the business now of judging the totality of a person and their actions in terms of whether they can have access to your platform, that's a whole other situation that you're putting yourself into. That's called democracy. That's democracy. Only America gets to decide the totality of the president's actions and whether they constitute something where he should be booted. And we did that. And here's the thing is like, I actually, if, if, and I, to be honest with you, I don't know what he said on Facebook to know whether this was the same

video posted to Twitter or he's like, we love you or whatever. I could actually be persuaded that a short-term ban could make sense if this sort of rule is being applied consistently to all political candidates, to all people, or I don't know if political candidates should have a separate category, to all world leaders, but it's very clearly not any sort of consistent standard or pattern. And none of those decision points are laid out. And then, I mean, the bottom line is always this, like no matter whether this

was the right or wrong decision, this ban or this length of time, et cetera, et cetera. The bottom line is that a single person should not have so much incredible control over our political system. And so, yeah, you've basically vested in Mark Zuckerberg the ability to determine which political candidates are going to be viable and which are not. And that is an outrageous state of affairs because Facebook, you know, we don't pay as much attention to it. Yeah. And it doesn't get as much elite media attention at all. Twitter is basically the only thing that exists for elite media and I fall into that trap as well.

I'm only looking at Twitter. I don't even know how to log on to Facebook anymore. But Facebook, the Trump team says, was the most critical social media network for their success. They invested tons in Facebook. They were pushing tons of messaging there. So this was absolutely critical. And the fact that you have one guy who can just say, like, no, and shut off that spigot is crazy. No, I think that's exactly what it is, which is that at the end of the day, the arbitrariness of this all is not acceptable in a democracy.

And actually, before he left, Ajit Pai actually proposed something or was working on something, which I thought was very important, which is that the Section 230 debate gets very complicated very quickly about who's liable etc But it would be an amendment and what it would do is it would force Transparency of moderation and what that means is that companies would have to publicly say Exactly when and where they're going to remove something or not as like as you said Yeah, Facebook should be required to point to the exact post time, date, and stamp. They have all that data. I think we all know that.

And say, this is the reason this post right here, why Trump is being taken off. This is what our terms of service said. These are other examples where he applied it in a similar way. I mean, remember Twitter and then their arbitrary ban of the Hunter Biden? That was insane. That was completely insane. You are not allowed to censor a private news organization. If they're libeling Hunter Biden,

Hunter is welcome to sue them. Oh, and guess what? He hasn't. You know why? Because every single one of those emails are true, and every single one of those stories are true. And what that means to me is that the arbitrary position of all of this moderation

is what has to be slayed more than anything. We have to create a situation. And this is totally reasonable, which is we're not nationalizing Google or Facebook. We're saying, hey, guys, if you're going to take stuff off, which I don't think anyone wants to live in a 100% unmoderated internet, right? That's like child porn and death threats and suicide and all that. We don't want to live in that world. We're just going to say, hey, you've got to publish your standards. You've got to come forward, and you've got to say to us, this is exactly when, where, how that we decide that we're going to take something off or we're going to put something on.

Okay. And this is, again, this is a democratic thing. We can make this and write this into law. This is what Congress is supposed to be. What we talked about earlier, which is that who is actually asking the questions of the 21st century? No one. Every time these goddamn tech companies get launched before Congress, what do we see? Some Republican who's like, hey, why does my iPhone email send to the, I kid you not. I saw this guy ask why his campaign emails go to the promotions folder on Gmail. He asked that to the

CEO of Google, the CEO of Google. And Sundar Pichai was like, I'll look into that for you. I'm like, what are you doing? You're literally destroying my brain. I'm dumber for having watched you. And then the same thing whenever Facebook, remember that embarrassing Facebook hearing? They were like, Mr. Zuckerberg, how do you make money? And he was like, ads, Senator. And then one of them asked him why something had been taken down. And Zuck goes, I believe you're referring to Twitter. So I'll leave that to my colleague, Mr. Dorsey. I'm just, it is pathetic the way that these people are unable, unable to grasp what's happening. I shouldn't say none. Very few are actually serious. And Republicans, for all their talk of big tech censorship, et cetera, et cetera,

they have no interest in actually curtailing the power, having real solutions to any of these problems. And, I mean, I think platforms as large and as significant as Facebook is to just the basic workings of our democracy at this point, I do think they should be regulated like public utilities. Like, this is beyond what we should have in the hands of one individual or a public- publicly traded company. This is really, really essential to just the basic functioning of our country and our democracy.

And so, yes, you can't have someone who has so much power over which candidate can and can't run and can and can't have a shot at success. Do you actually think that that's true, that whether he's back on Facebook is going to determine whether Trump is going to run? I actually do because they need it. I don't think people can truly understand the sheer amount of cash and how important it is. Also, ask any of your boomer relatives. Boomers love Facebook.

I don't really get it. They love they're getting the news from Facebook. They love sharing stuff on Facebook. They really enjoy, like, sharing stuff around, creating Facebook. This is a very boomer phenomenon. It's something I truly actually don't understand. But I know that they use it, and they use it a lot. And so that is the base.

I mean, that is where Trump, his true power is in. We also know. Yeah, go ahead. We also know that since he's been off these platforms, like, everything Trump has plummeted. That's right. I mean, the Google search traffic on him. The cable news segments. Right.

The number of mentions on Twitter. Yeah, the Google search traffic. That's the biggest indicator to search traffic went down to levels from before he even ran for president. And then, like I said before, the fact that he had to take his shitty blog post thing down because just no one was looking at it.

Remember, we looked at those numbers and all of his posts together had a few hundred thousand engagements, which is what we get in one segment. It really is like, it was a pathetic number of level of engagement. Media wasn't covering it, et cetera. So, yeah, I think if he remains banned on these platforms, it will be very difficult for him to be able to run.

Now, look, if he did run even without being on Facebook, would he win the GOP nomination? Yes. Yeah. And then are you really going to be in a position where the Republican nominee for president is banned from these different platforms? That seems completely insane. No, you can't have that. I mean, and look, like I said, I don't think Trump should be. I think Trump was a terrible president and overall will probably be remembered as largely a failure. However, that doesn't mean that it's up to me. It's up to the American people. And it's certainly not up to Mark Zuckerberg. I gave you my opinion.

I'm just sharing it. But I'm just one of 330 million. And I think that people need to be a lot more humble whenever it comes to actual questions fundamental to democracy. But at the same time, Crystal, we've got some developments in the NYC mayoral race. There's a lot going on. This race has basically become a total mess. New York City mayoral race coming to a close very shortly. And, all right, the latest thing, the polls are all over the map in terms of who is actually leading. So Andrew Yang for a long time was holding onto this lead. Now it looks like it's him, Eric Adams, Catherine Garcia got the New York Times endorsement.

And she shot up. That seems to be causing her to surge. And I have to think, I mean, New York City at this point, like a lot of it has been gentrified to the point that it's like, you know, a lot of affluent liberals who are very influential, who read the New York Times. So that endorsement carries a lot of weight. And then you have just a total sort of meltdown on the left in terms of picking a candidate, sticking with that candidate. Really pathetic. It really is a total mess. So the latest thing that you have is there was a second allegation of sexual harassment against Scott Stringer, who previously, it seems like a lot of progressives were kind of coalescing around Stringer as their candidate of choice.

Then this first sexual harassment allegation comes out, which Ryan Grimm did the digging into and found like there's a lot of holes in this person's story. But it was already a lot of the progressive groups had like run away from stringer and unendorsed him and all of this stuff The new allegation we can throw Ryan Grimm's tweet up here as well So the new allegation also has similar holes the New York Times reporting on it was such a mess So they had to change like their reporting on it and the way that they were Indicating his response and how he was responding. So, again, look, we don't know what happened. And this new allegation is from 30 years ago.

So we really don't know what happened back then. But in any case, the left is a band and stringer. Then it was like, oh, maybe Diane Morales, who positioned herself as the leftiest in the field. Right. And she's had a total implosion, too. Number one, her campaign staff, there were allegations of, like, a toxic work environment. They wanted to unionize, but it's really late in the campaign. And then they marched on her office, and it became this entire sort of, like, navel-gazing exercise.

It also then came out, oh, she's positioning herself as this sort of democratic socialist candidate, but her views are not left at all. At least they weren't until the minute that she thought it would be politically advantageous. Take a listen to this interview she gave where she laid out some of her views on things like charter schools and also on whether she voted for Andrew Cuomo or Cynthia Nixon. Take a listen. For Democratic voters that you're going to be trying to appeal to, can you give folks an early sense of sort of where you fall in this supposedly big tent party? Are there ways that you talk about what kind of Democrat you are? Should people know who you're supporting in the presidential race? You know, are there some markers you can give folks? Yeah.

You know, I've been asked that question a couple of times and I've been really resistant to the label, mostly because I don't check all the boxes in any one lane. I think, you know, people have tended to want to lump me in the sort of progressive or the Democratic socialist. But then we talk about schools and we talk about school choice. And then they go, oh, you know, maybe not. Right. Because I do. I am a strong believer in school choice. And that's definitely a much longer conversation that I'd love to be able to unpack.

But so I don't I don't fall neatly into any one category, I don't think. And I'm hoping that that's actually going to be pretty appealing to New Yorkers. Just quickly on that, do you have a favorite in the Democratic presidential primary? I am honestly going to vote for whoever the candidate is, the nominee is. And I haven't quite made up my mind yet. And were you a supporter of Governor Cuomo or Cynthia Nixon in 2018? That's a good question. I think I voted for Cuomo or Cynthia Nixon in 2018? That's a good question. I think I voted for Cuomo.

Okay, sheepishly. Oh, my God. Extraordinarily levels of cringe. Won't say, like, doesn't know who she's going to vote for in the Democratic primary. So this is a person who is positioning herself as like the lefty candidate. So she imploded. Total implosion. The latest effort to sort of coalesce behind a progressive candidate is Maya Wiley. AOC just endorsed her. We can throw that up on the screen. So that's Scott Stringer, you know, derailed by maybe possibly bogus sexual harassment or assault

allocations. Diane Morales collapses. Now they're trying to coalesce behind Maya Wiley, who, you know, she's a big Russiagator over on MSNBC. She's a huge Russiagator. That's who she is. Come on. How everybody knows her at this point, I think. So anyway, that's the latest choice. But it really is interesting, and Ross Barkan had a great piece on this and how politics became just like neoliberal through and through in New York City.

It was basically like, you know, New York City was a real innovator in these sort of like New Deal projects with rent stabilization and with these big housing developments for affordable. So all of that stuff. Then you have the New York City bankruptcy. That's right. Again, what he tried. In the 1970s, yeah. And after that, the focus in New York City becomes like, how do we make this an attractive

target for capital? And how do we make sure that we've got developers who want to come in here? And even de Blasio, who with some of his rhetoric tried to signal an end to that neoliberal era, that train is hard to slow down. It's too powerful. He had some surface level reforms and also was just sort of like ineffectual in terms of just like his level of competence and ability to get the job done. So he loses trust. And at this point, there's really no one in the field who's proposing anything significantly different from the neoliberal

era that, whether it's been a Republican or a Democratic mayor, has dominated in New York City. There may be some differences around the edges, but that's the direction that this race is going in. So, you know, Yang looking shakier. Eric Adams is more to the right than Yang is and has like active hostility and contempt for the left. He went and attacked AOC, which I thought was smart, actually. Well, he's just trying to distinguish himself that way. You have Maya Wiley who's sort of like, again, I mean, she worked in the de Blasio administration. Catherine Garcia, same thing, worked in the de Blasio. These are technocratic type of neoliberal managers and that's essentially what the choices

come down to. And you know, to the point that we were making earlier in the show about the cultural and the economic left, I mean, AOC and them endorsed Maya Wiley because of defund the police, not because of any other economic reason, which actually is very pathetic from that point of view, which is that there's no economic agenda. This is New York City. I mean, this is the greatest city in America, like a beacon of America that shines throughout the world. And like you said, that's a very astute point from Ross. I never thought about it that way, which is that the bankruptcy and Ford telling them to drop dead basically made it.

We're like, OK, we have to make New York the playground of the rich because that's the only way we're going to make this thing happen. Yeah, and it worked. I mean, what's the average home price of what's the average home price? We can go and ask some of these mayoral candidates. They don't know. I mean, in Manhattan, it's absolutely outrageous. And the Bloombergization of New York City, where they explicitly were just like,

look, we're going after the millionaires. That's going to be our entire tax base and screw everybody else. They said Manhattan, it should be a luxury good. I mean, and it is, and it's very expensive. And everybody, you basically import cheap labor from all around the rest of the boroughs and from the surrounding New York City area.

And everybody has to commute like nine hours in just to go work at Starbucks or something like that. I think that's a pathetic situation for the biggest, one of the biggest cities in America, a beacon of our country itself. And from that point of view, it is a very sad state of affairs. I will say I know the left is very down on Yang. If he wins, it still does change politics forever. I still truly believe that Yang is such a post, almost post-cultural figure who rises above like culture war in a way that I have not seen in politics in a very long time. It's also fascinating because he became famous by running for president. He wasn't famous before he ran for president. That hasn't happened in a long time.

I don't think it's just the left that's down on Yang, judging by the polls, by the way. He's lived quite a lot. And I really think it comes down to something simple, which is part of his magic that made him so compelling, is he just seemed like this normal guy who was trying to figure it out and super authentic and wore it all out there and would answer any question you want in the most direct way. Now he's teamed up with these Bloomberg consultants and you can tell in what he says that this is what he's been told to say in order to win. And so to me, on the one hand,

I see your point about the fact that he just, you know, became famous for running for president and he really circumvented the traditional media and went on all these independent media platforms, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, in that sense, but then if he wins, he did it by becoming basically a standard issue politician. And so it really muddles

whether this is any kind of a breakthrough point or not. I'll put it this way. It's not the endpoint, it's V1. It's like the version one of what I want to see, which is in the new style of why did he become famous in the first place? And I agree with you. Look, Andrew, by the way, if you ever watch this, you didn't become famous by being like a Bradley Tusk Bloomberg consultant. What you did was by showing his greatest moment on the campaign is when he said, we're all wearing makeup. This is theater in front

of millions of people. That resonated with everyone.. And so look how he is as an actual mayor and you know, how he is even now as a candidate, I actually do think it's beside the point because that is V1 in my opinion of what the future could look like. But you know, the, the sad thing is I'm afraid if he does win and at this point, I don't have a dog at the fight at this point. I don't know who I even want to win or who I would vote for if I was there, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the learning from this, unfortunately, would be if he did win, like, oh, he won by doing the normal politician stuff and pandering to these groups that he knew were key to being able to have success in the city.

I don't know if it's going to work out. The polls have been very dicey for him. It seems like Catherine Garcia is kind of surging. Eric Adams has been very aggressive. Who knows if Maya Wiley may have a last minute, like, you know, if there's a new coalescing around her. We really don't know, and these races can be very fluid up to the end. But, yeah, I sadly think that would be the takeaway, whether it's the right takeaway or not, that he played by the rules, got the political class consultants in, had the right poll-tested messaging, and that that was the key to success. So I'm not sure that the takeaway would be what we wanted to.

We'll see. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices because here I am again asking you to become a premium member at crystalandsauger.com so you don't have to hear these pleas. And as annoying as I know this is, it's not a Viagra commercial like you're going to see on cable news. So go ahead and count your lucky stars. As you're about to notice, the free show does not include the discussion after each of our monologues, which is one of our premium benefits. Help us beat the corporate media today. Get access to the full show. Take care, guys.

All right, Sagar, what are your breaking points? Wow, I love that. The reason I am sitting at this beautiful desk today is because of the Iraq war. All my politics start there. The outrage that I felt at watching American soldiers die for a despicable lie, it still sticks with me to this day. And of course, those who ordered our sons into battle for nothing are most responsible. And those who carried the lie on their behalf when their job was to do the opposite, they bear a lot of the blame too. I never thought I would

actually live to see another screw-up as bad as the Iraq WMD, but I was wrong. And that has become increasingly evident in the last several weeks, as the evidence mounts that coronavirus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, a hypothesis which has been denigrated, debunked, dismissed, cast aside, all but written off by our corporate press for over a year based upon a single premise. They just hated Trump. Hating Trump is not good enough of a reason to cover up a true investigation into the worst pandemic in a century. And as more information enters the public domain, the worse the media looks. It's like September 2004 all over again. The truth is slowly dripping out. And instead of acknowledging their mistake and coming clean with

the American people, the cover-up only continues. That is the current state of the situation, with the latest release of Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails. Now, many Republicans and others have made a lot of the emails regarding Fauci's own lies around masks and the pandemic guidance. That's a whole other monologue in itself. But in my opinion, the original question remains the most pressing. Did coronavirus leak from the Wuhan lab?

While we do not have the full picture, the initial one emerging from Fauci's emails are stunning. Fauci's emails show on January 31st, 2020, after COVID's genome was decoded, he received an email from the virus had, quote, unusual features. And that, quote, one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features potentially look engineered. Oh, really? The email continues. He and his team, quote, all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. You know what something inconsistent with evolutionary theory means? It means man-made.

Now, the especially stunning part is that the author of that email in January of 2020 was himself the ringleader of a statement in March of 2020, which declared unequivocally, quote, we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. What changed? Well, politics did. The exact opposite of what science is supposed to be concerned with. It was in February of 2020 that Senator Tom Cotton first appeared on the Fox News channel and posited that coronavirus may have come from the Wuhan lab. Now it spawned a million takes and debunkings from the mainstream media. And the theory was quickly recited by President Trump and Secretary Pompeo as well. The culture war is the best thing that ever happened to Dr. Fauci and these scientists. Why?

Because they all had an institutional interest in making sure that the potential truth never came to light, that coronavirus was a result of gain-of-function research, a type of research they all spent their lives championing and directing millions of dollars towards in service of allegedly trying to stop a pandemic. The gravy train dries up if the lab leak hypothesis is true. So they were happy to be media darlings of the last year in service of standing up against Trump to cover up what could actually be the truth. Now, the email is particularly damning because it reveals not only did the top scientists involved in declaring coronavirus natural origin definitely disregard their own findings, but it shows that Fauci was not being clear with the American people.

In this May 2020 interview with National Geographic, he states, quote, If you look at the evolution in virus and bats and what's out there, the scientific evidence is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated. Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species. Oh, really?

The evidence strongly leans that way, huh? Well, not according to information he was directly aware of four months before that interview. And worse, the emails also reveal that in April of 2020, Dr. Peter Daszak, the person whose nonprofit funneled money from Fauci to the Wuhan lab, emailed Fauci saying, quote, I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19. Just a reminder, DASAC is the only American attached to the World Health Organization team who concluded that the lab leak theory was not true. When it was asked why, this was his literal response to 60 Minutes. Let's take a listen.

Do you audit the lab? And they said, annually. Did you audit it after the outbreak? Yes. Was anything found? No. Do you test your staff? Yes. No one was- But you're just taking their word for it. Well, what else can we do? There's a limit to what you can do, and we went right up to that limit. The more information that comes to light, the more we begin to see the makings of an immense conspiracy of public health establishment seemingly caught in a gigantic mistake in the media assisting them with a cover-up because they hate Trump and more than a year's long gaslighting of the American people about one of the worst crises in modern memory.

Now, in a normal country, what I just told you would be on the nightly news, but this is how NBC is covering it. You can't even make these things up. After a year of lies, the media cannot admit the truth because it shows just how badly they screwed this up. And luckily, we're here to tell you what they won't. Thank you for tuning in to our very first Breaking Points monologue. It's just the first of many. And I think, Crystal... It's me again, guys. We hope that you're loving the show. If you have any questions, you know where you can ask them. Go to crystalandsauger.com, become a premium member,

and then you'll get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anything. The link is in the show notes. What's absolutely stunning about all of this is that in the emails, it directly contradicts the scientists themselves two months later, and it shows that Fauci was basically lying whenever he said that the evidence strongly points to something else. The evidence he was pointing to was the letter put out by the guy who emailed him in January of 2020 that this does not look of evolutionary theory. I also love the term. I mean, here's the thing. What happened in January

2020? It wasn't a culture war. What happened by March of 2020? It was a culture war. I know what changed. It wasn't science. And amazingly around all of this is you begin to see clearly how ideology mixes with their moneyed interest, which is what they need to protect gain of function research. And they rode this gravy chain for a year. They probably thought they were going to get away with it too. And here's the funniest part. Biden winning may have been the worst thing that ever happened to them because it allowed us all to at least have an honest conversation and let people stop losing their minds around whether this lab leak hypothesis is true or not. I really reserved judgment on Fauci for a very long time. I think we both did. We gave him a lot of benefit. We gave him a lot of benefit. Even after the mask thing, we're like, alright, it's one screw up, alright, you know, like he seems like he's acting in every, he's really

trying to act in everybody's best interest, very tough position, etc. But when you had at the beginning, him lying about masks, then it comes out that he's like changing the numbers on herd immunity based on, and he admitted this openly, based on what he thought the public could handle at that moment. It's like, it's not your job to be a politician or to be a spin master to decipher

what the mood of the American public is. It's your job to tell the truth. And then in this, I see a very similar dynamic where he's playing games with what he thinks the public should hear or wants to hear. It's also interesting what you point out about the way that these like shiny objects of the culture war can be used to hide the truth. So the minute that you've got this narrative that the lab leak hypothesis is like the Trumpy conspiracy theory and you layer on top of that this baseless insinuate like allegation that it's somehow racist and more racist by the way than the like oh Chinese people eat bats and other weird stuff the minute you have those two things together you have a sort of like airtight ability to keep the truth of or at least the

allegation or at least a real upfront investigation. You have an ability to keep that under wraps. That's why this whole episode is so revealing. Obviously, at the surface level, we need to know what happened as best we can. We may never know exactly because at this point, so much time has elapsed. But if you want to prevent a pandemic, important to know how this last one started. But it's just such a commentary on the way sectarian divisions cloud our ability to see sort of basic facts clearly. The way that Trump made all of that so much worse, which is partly his fault and partly the fault of the people whose brains he broke and who intentionally also used the fact that he was so awful and like actively intentionally weaponized that to cover for themselves and to escape any accountability themselves and then you have

this media story to where you know in the theory in the over the course of just a couple months this theory goes from like Discredited debunk, fact-checked, all this stuff to like, oh, maybe there's more here than we thought. The New York Times said debunked as of just a few months ago. Yeah. Two months ago that they were calling it debunked in a headline. I do think that that is so incredibly significant. What else do we cover here? That the lead COVID reporter for the New York Times says that the lab leak theory itself has a racist origin. Yeah, okay. And all of this comes down to a simple fact. Did it come from the lab or not? It's a basic question. As I've said before, too, the Chinese are liars. I expect them to lie. You know what I don't expect?

I don't expect our government to be complicit in funding gain-of-function research, which could have led to this large pandemic outbreak. That's something that we can control. And I love this too. What are we arguing about right now? All of American politics cleaves along the line of January 6th commission or not. You know what actually bears investigation? Did this virus leak from a lab?

It is a job of Congress. They have subpoena authority over the intelligence community. Now we have all these news stories. Oh, the intelligence community believes so-and-so was sick. Yeah, maybe. I want to see the evidence. I mean, I don't trust these people as far as we can throw them. The only thing that the 9-11 commission was actually good for was declassifying a lot of the initial cables around some of the screw-ups between the FBI, the CIA, and the lack of coordination. I want to see the raw intelligence report from the people who determined this sickness came in November 2019 for the Wuhan staffers. I want to see all of the stuff that is out there. It is of immense public import that we get this out there to not only to

America, to the globe. If gain of function research just led to trillions of dollars shutdown of the global economy, everybody deserves to know. The other thing that was interesting, the Fauci email, it's a little bit like of a side tangent from the focus of the lab leak focus. But there were all these reporters who were like emailing him like, tell me the truth about Trump stifling you tell me the truth about how you're being muzzled yeah which is i mean you can just see like they wanted to write that story they're begging and they're just quote begging for the and he's repeatedly like no no i don't feel like that and no i appreciate your concern etc etc the other thing that maybe more than anything struck me about these emails is just how cozy a lot of the journalists who had a long-time relationship with him.

Like Donald McNeil. Like Donald McNeil. Yeah. They had this very cozy relationship with him where they're emailing him in what feels like a very personal way as more friends than as, you know, reporter and subject of said reporting. And so you can see how some of these failings of Fauci throughout the pandemic, they just get overlooked by the press. They don't dig into it. They don't ask hard questions about it. There's never any critical coverage because this is their buddy. And that's, Fauci's not unique in that way. No, this is how all elite networks of power work.

Literally, like this is standard operating procedure, where the more that you have these chummy relationships in this town with people in power and authority, the higher you rise in these elite legacy media organizations. And I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense, because that means you've got all these sources, you may be able to get scoops and stories that other people can't get. But it comes with a massive price of basically you have to treat these people with kid gloves and be their best friend if you want to get those stories.

And that means that when it is the people in power who are doing the bad things, the critical coverage doesn't come. Why? Because you want to preserve your network. You want to preserve your relationship. You want to preserve your access. So I also thought the emails, maybe more than anything, I thought that was kind of like the most fascinating point. I think you're absolutely right. I call it down payments on the future, which is that what you do is what these elites do is they build up credibility in relationships with reporters so that when the big one comes, coronavirus, that it all pays off for everybody. The reporters have your phone number and they know they can trust you. And so you can spin them whichever they want. And that down payment could have cost America a lot in the last year or so. Yeah. And you're right. That's

what Donald McNeil admitted to. He admitted that outright. In some ways, I respect him. I actually appreciate that he said, here was my thinking and why I dismissed this theory out of hand, because I trusted Dr. Fauci, because I'd worked with him and I thought he'd always been a good actor, etc., etc. And so you multiply that by a thousand, and that's exactly what's going on behind the scenes at all of these organizations. Absolutely. Okay, Crystal, what are your breaking points? Well, an Amazon delivery driver just won the million-dollar vaccine lottery in Ohio. So as you may recall, that state is offering five $1 million prizes to adults who get vaccinated

with winners who are selected randomly in a lottery. Here's what that delivery driver, whose name is Jonathan Carlisle, said he would do with the money. You just won a million dollars. How the hell do you feel? It's overwhelming. Here's what that delivery driver, whose name is Jonathan Carlisle, said he would do with the money. You just won a million dollars. How the hell do you feel? It's overwhelming. I don't know what to do. I'm just still dreaming.

I know I got all the bills to pay, so it's the first thing that's going to happen. Jonathan goes on to say that he might also use the money to help him get a house, that he knows that he's going to have to keep working and that he isn't anyway set for life, but it would provide what he described as a good bedrock. It's a sort of version of the American dream, the chance to be a winner, to change your life, to obtain all the trappings of American affluence. It's just that at this point, it takes literally winning a million dollar lottery to be able to achieve that American dream. Just think about that. Jonathan Carlyle works a brutally difficult job

for literally the most successful company on the planet, founded by the richest man on the planet, and without winning the lottery, he can't stay current on his bills, let alone dream of buying a house for him and his girlfriend. So what happened? Why is grinding, ever-escalating inequality, the norm in America? Why are we stuck in the neoliberal hell cycle when we could be doing so much more for people?

At least some of the solutions to give everyone a life of basic dignity are well-known and well available, yet nothing ever seems to fundamentally change. Where is the class conflict that should be central to a wildly unequal moment such as this? Well, a new paper from renowned leftist economist Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin, and Clara Martinez-Toldenano offers some important insights into the forces that may be preventing significant structural change beyond, of course, the obvious failings of the American political class. The paper is titled Brahman Left vs. Merchant Right,

Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948 through 2020. And it explores a persistent trend in 21 different countries where educated elites have been moving towards the left of center parties and financial elites have remained in the right of center parties. So that means that both sides of the political spectrum are ruled by a different set of elites. So while working class people remain atomized, split across the political spectrum, elites continue to defend their economic class interests, focusing political conflict around culture and identity issues rather than on issues of economic fairness and redistribution.

As they put it in fancy academic language in that paper, quote, a key result from this literature is that political support for redistribution should be inversely proportional to the strength of other political cleavages cross-cutting class divides. The divergence of the effects of income and education on the vote documented in this paper to strongly correlated measures of inequality could in this context contribute to explaining why the rise of economic disparities in the past decades has not been met by greater redistribution or renewed class conflicts. In other words, the data compiled from 21 different Western democracies shows that culture wars kill economic populism. It says that the places where sectarian strife are the worst and where identity and culture are at the center of political debate are also the places where inequality is highest and life is the most brutal for the working class. At least can feel comfortable in either

party here because they will see their economic interests protected either way. Politics collapses down to in-group signaling and cultural posturing rather than policy. Things like this start to count as politics. Just take a look at this. It's a totally content-free BS gesture just to signal to a Republican base in Ohio that this candidate will fearlessly own the libs. Or you could consider the liberal equivalent of Mandel's nonsense there. Hat tip, by the way, to Thomas Frank for pointing this one out. Behold this sign, which declares in this house, we believe black lives matter,

women's rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything. It's a sign you can buy from the modern day sweatshop of Amazon for the low, low price of $7.99. You can find this sign and ones very similar to it in the yards of rich liberals all across the city. And look, I agree with all of these vague sentiments, but you can't help but notice

that not one of them includes a concrete, actionable policy demand, and none have anything to do with economics. There's no healthcare, no living wage, certainly no union rights. Love is love and kindness is everything are very nice values that require only things from Nancy Pelosi that she is willing to offer, such as kneeling in kente cloth. In Piketty's paper, he and his co-authors note, there are two actual exceptions to the trend of educational elites moving into the left-of-center party, and those exceptions are Ireland and Portugal.

It's important to note how those two countries have bucked the trend. In those nations, new left-wing parties found success after the 2008 financial crisis, and they managed to keep class-based concerns front and center rather than cultural or sectarian divides. At the other end of the spectrum is the U.S., where not only have education elites moved left, but nearly alone among Western democracies, financial elites have also begun consolidating in the Democratic Party. So deep are our intentionally stoked sectarian divisions, so class loyal are the Democrats, and so just completely insane are the Republicans, that elites of all stripes have flocked freely to

the Democratic Party without doubting for a single moment that their class interests are going to be protected. Instead, we have political skirmishes over the battleground of a January 6th commission or personal mask wearing choices as just a few examples. At its core, though, this paper really questions the feasibility of the American dream. The American dream that says anyone from anywhere can make it here. The one that says you don't have to win a damn lottery to pay your bills, buy a house, and lay down that stable bedrock of a middle class life. But also the American dream that says we can make a functional and just nation out of an idea rather than a singular ethnic identity. Are we doomed to watch cynical elites leverage our human differences for fun and profit while serving as a grand distraction from any sort of redistribution?

Will we just endlessly repeat the cycle of letting the news media convince us that the greatest threat to our existence is not a rigged and corrupted system, but our neighbors, who happen to have different political or cultural beliefs? Now, I reject the cynicism that says that this outcome of sectarian strife and skyrocketing corrupted system, but our neighbors who happen to have different political or cultural beliefs. Now, I reject the cynicism that says that this outcome of sectarian strife and skyrocketing inequality is inevitable. But it is certainly good to know what we are up against here, the barriers that are in our way. And those barriers look a lot like the Democratic Party convincing us that Joe Biden not being Donald Trump is enough. It looks a lot like Republicans pretending they're anti-corporate because they tweet something about woke HR departments. And all of us accepting these

gestures and symbols as meaningful change when they are anything but. And Sagar, the paper is not that long and it's actually incredibly important because for the first time they compile data about where elites have shifted in these parties. And it's not just the U.S. and it's not just a like last five years phenomenon. This has been happening over decades and decades. And then they tie it together to, okay, well, the countries that are outliers and have resisted this trend and have been able to maintain some sort of class politics, what is different about those countries? And what they find is that they've had lefty parties that have centered class consciousness and class politics. And that is what has sort of rebuffed the trend.

The U.S. is the worst of all the countries in that it's not just the education elites, but it's also the financial elites who have started to coalesce into the Democratic Party. And then weirdly, though, you still have the Republican Party, like, doing the bidding of the elites who are fleeing them like the plagues. It's an amazing situation. The Republicans are professional opposition. They're like a permanent rentier class who will use the cultural grievances of a portion of the population and sell that as arbitrage to the financial and basically oil elite in order to stand up for their interests in our politics. They've still got the oil elite. Oh, yeah. My home state.

They love me down there. You know, it's fascinating to see it because what I'm realizing is America won, guys. This is what the American empire looks. We've exported our values to the entire Western world and ruined all. This is the final triumph of the Marshall Plan, which is that what we've done is that our empire across the Western world has inculcated these total Westernization, globalization of the interconnected culture. And our politics have become exactly the same

in France, in Germany, across the European union. I mean, they literally connected themselves. And then here at home, Portugal and Ireland being the rarest of exceptions, they have very distinct populations, religiosities and other, it's a very, very unique situation. But if you take which companies which are more pan-ethnic, which are more, you know, less homogenous and such, larger, more integral to the global economy, especially like America, this is what happens. And I think it's stunning to see how our, both of our party systems have become flocked towards these elites.

And it's not an accident, which is that it's the greatest thing that ever happened to them, the ability to own both, because it does essentially ensure that nothing will happen. And as long as nothing happens, the status quo continues. And I don't think that people appreciate how much that is actually worth to the American ruling class. People say all the time, like, oh, well, you know, why would people donate to someone because nothing's happening in Congress? Well, first of all, some stuff does happen.

You don't hear about it. It's usually tax breaks and extensions on the defense budget, stuff like that. But status quo is great. I mean, look at the tax rate, right? Like, look at the way that people move money around. But status quo is great. I mean, look at the tax rate, right? Like, look at the way that people move money around. Look at the estate tax. And then what happened with the corporate tax rate? It's all at a historic low. Keeping things exactly where they are is an in-kind donation to the billionaire class. Yeah. Well, it really solves a puzzle that is something we've

been, I think, asking ourselves for a while now, which is when you have this state of affairs of a country that is very wealthy in the U.S. and, you know, you just look over the past year at the trillions of dollars that billionaires have accumulated. 70 billion for Bezos alone. We can go through all of the statistics. It's going to be the worst year ever for opioid deaths. It's going to be the worst year ever for suicides. You know, you have, and that's a little unique to the pandemic, but these are trends that have been mounting and mounting and mounting over years to the point that certain demographics are seeing their life expectancy decline, right? So you have

this endemic misery. You have this mass inequality. You have just blatant exploitation in corporate workplaces across the country. And yet you don't have a massive public uprising or any responsiveness whatsoever, certainly from the political system. Because you do see occasional players. You saw the teachers strike, right? You saw certainly the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer triggered by George Floyd's murder. But there was a lot of just like upset and grievance over all kinds of conditions going on there, too. But you don't see the political system responding in any way at all. Why? How can they get away with that? Like, how do they keep getting elected? I was just reading this bogus article from NBC News that was like, Joe Biden abandons the public option and the left is OK with that. It's like, OK, just because AOC is maybe not like maybe it doesn't mean that people in general are OK with this.

And yet, is he going to pay a price? No. Why? Because all he had to do was not be Donald Trump. That was it. The minute he's inaugurated and he exists and is alive and is not Donald Trump for the hardcore, for the Democratic base, for about half the country, really, that was sufficient. That was all he had to do. And the Republicans have their own equivalent. And you know what the sad part was was this took A lot of reckoning for me. I never realized how important it was for Republican base how important it was for just Trump to be Trump all they needed was for him to exist and piss off Elite liberals that sign by the way is literally my entire neighborhood

Yeah, I'm so sick of looking at it and the thing is and usually it's next to some sign Which is like say no to to high rise apartment buildings. Don't let them build any more real estate next to my million dollar house. Can't have any affordable housing. Yeah, can't have, it's always hilarious. And I could go into the hypocrisy of elite liberals all day. Really what it is, is that so many people, Max Alvarez said this on Rising, which was they put, Trump gave them cultural power. I've told this story before, driving through rural Nevada right before the 2020 election. And there was this giant sign in the middle of nowhere, like I literally, like nowhere, hour from anywhere, and this huge sign. And it just said, Trump, fuck your feelings. And that was it. And it actually hit home for me. I'm like,

for him, this man, woman, whomever they were, they truly felt nobody listened to me until Trump came. And it's not like he has to do anything. He just has to merely exist in the White House and say, screw you. That was his way. And I understand that. That was a very powerful force. 75 million people who finally, they're just like, no, enough. Hollywood, media, everything's just bombarding. Your daily life is full of indignities from the boss class and more, but they don't have to do anything. And that's the worst part, isn't it? He doesn't have to do anything. He cut the corporate tax rate. Not only that, even as the people that hated him, you know, made these public displays of meltdowns and whatever that were very satisfying to watch for all of us, right?

And by the way, the flag down the street for me, it says Trump 2020 make liberals cry again. Exactly. Same thing. But the sad truth is that he actually made those people that you hate more powerful than they've ever been before and richer than they've ever been before. And like you said, didn't have to do anything. All he had to do was like tweet some nonsense that made people mad. And that was the total content of his promise and what he offered and fulfilled for his base. That was all that they needed to feel like, well, this is, this is the guy, this is the one that I'm with. I wrote in a review of Thomas Frank's book that the charlatanism in the Trump administration is the single greatest gift to the oligarchy in modern

American memory. And I think it will remain with us as long as he's alive and probably for 20 years to come. All right. We wanted to review the state of the media writ large with a great friend of us, a new friend of Breaking Points, I would say, the one and only Glenn Greenwald. He's, of course, co-founding editor of The Intercept. He has a fantastic sub stack that you're probably already subscribed to, but if you're not, you should do that. He's also author of a new book called Securing Democracy, Pulitzer Prize winner, blah, blah, blah.

Great to see you, Glenn. Good to see you, Glenn. Great to be with you guys. Congratulations on the success of the new launch. I'm super happy for you and super happy to participate. Well, it's awesome. And as usual, you have like an idyllic background, which makes us jealous of where we currently are.

Actually, this is the first day that I'm not jealous. I knew you guys had spent a lot of time on your background. We're all proud of it. So I just wanted to make you feel a little less proud of what you had accomplished. Take us down a notch. That's what he does. And that's what you do. He doesn't just do it for us, though. He does it for the entire media. So we have to start with this one, Glenn. You flagged this. I just thought it was incredible. CNN's Brian Stelter yesterday on his show, Precious Time with the American press secretary.

This is what he chose to ask her. Let's take a listen. Jen, thanks for coming on Reliable Sources. My pleasure. Busy summer ahead, infrastructure, election reform. What does the press get wrong when covering Biden's agenda? When you watch the news, when you read the news, what do you think we get wrong? Well, look, I think some of our muscles have atrophied a little bit over the last few years, and there isn't a lot of memory, a recent memory or longer memory, on how long it takes to get legislation forward. I don't even know where to begin with that one, Glenn.

How does one ask a question like that to the American press secretary? Well, first of all, I think it's important that any video that contains any clips from that interview have an adults only designation on it because it's really not appropriate or suitable for anyone under 18. And the amazing thing is, Sagar, that as bad as that opening question was, I mean, the opening question that he had was basically, Jen, tell us what we do wrong. How can we better serve you? What can we do better for you? It actually descended from there. It got more sycophantic. You know, he asked her, one of the most interesting parts was he asked her, you have, you know, a seven-year-old daughter, which is already kind of creepy that he knows

that that's up before front of his brain. He's like, I have a kindergarten nurse who he's trying to like establish this personal relationship with her. And he's like, do you worry about the world, the future of the world, given that the Republican party is so evil? And she was like uncomfortable with that question because it was just too adoring. And she actually went out of her way to say, I don't really see the world Democrat versus Republican like you, Brian Stelter, the pretend journalists do. So the White House press secretary was telling him that he was being too partisan and politicized in how he views the world. And I think what this really shows is over the last five years, CNN has transformed from an organization that used

to pretend to be neutral and that in some ways did try to be into one that has just completely given up the pretense to the point where you now have a CNN host who has seven or eight minutes with the spokesperson of nominally the world's most powerful politician and refuses to ask her a single difficult question about any of the things the government is or is not doing, but instead is just desperate to become her best friend in a way that's so obvious it's actually uncomfortable to watch. I mean, this has been great for ratings, right, Glenn? I mean, they're doing fabulously in the Biden era, aren't they? Well, that's the other thing is, you know, I think people have

forgotten that in 2014 and 2015, especially MSNBC, but also CNN, there were constant articles about how Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, wanted to fire basically everybody who was on the air except for Rachel Maddow, in part because the idea of turning MSNBC into a organ of the Democratic Party was starting to jeopardize the NBC News brand because so many NBC News journalists would appear on MSNBC and get contaminated by this overt partisan ethos that had been created there. But also, obviously more important to Phil Griffin, nobody was watching. Nobody was. I mean, the ratings were abysmal. They were all this close to getting fired. And the only person who came and saved them was Donald Trump. For four years, they induced enough mania and paranoia and psychosis in enough people to make their ratings sustainable. In fact, quite vibrant. But it was all based on this like artificial sugar high that a lot of media organs fed on, which was scaring people enough about

Trump to make them consume more news than they ordinarily would want to. And with him gone, it's like we've reverted back to 2015, where these people have nothing to offer. They all sound exactly alike. They're all upholding the same banal liberal orthodoxies. There's no independence. There's no dissidence. There's no deviation from or questioning of orthodoxy. And how do you make people pay attention to what you're doing if all you're doing is just uphold status, upholding status quo pieties? Nobody is interested. And their ratings of both MSNBC and CNN are shockingly collapsing. I mean, CNN in prime time can't even get close to a million viewers, a million overall viewers. 10% only of their audience is under 55. And even there among people under 55,

these prime time shows are getting like 100,000, 150,000 people watching like a mid-level YouTuber gets more than that. And the same obviously is happening with digital liberal outlets, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vice, Vulture, Vox, TM. They're all the same, and therefore they're all disappearing and everything's consolidating with the New York Times and the Washington Post, because if you don't offer anything unique, no one's going to pay attention. It's stunning to me that they continue to go along with the strategy though, Glenn, because I thought that they would at least try to innovate. But you saw Stelter. One of my favorite stories we covered here is he actually got higher ratings on his show when he was on vacation and they actually

dropped whenever he came back. And you're watching this happen all across the ecosystem. And yet the reporting and the overall fawning over the democratic politicians and more, it doesn't change. How can they continue to go on this road? Do they believe it? What are the structural incentives that we're not seeing? Yeah, so I think it's a few things. First of all, if you train your audience to expect that you're only going to tell them what they want to hear, what is affirming of their worldview, and never challenge or question them in any way. You're essentially now captive to or imprisoned by your own audience. I have a friend who, a former friend, who is the host of a prominent MSNBC show, and that person once told me that they don't get show-by-show ratings, they get segment-by-segment ratings. And they said, if we put somebody on who's critical of the Democratic Party, you can watch in real time the ratings collapse. People

just don't want to hear it. They switch channels. On top of that, they get attacked on social media, vilified by their own audience. Brian Stelter asked one question that he claims made liberals angry. And I actually believe him, which is he asked Jen Psaki, why doesn't President Biden have more news conferences? And he claims that all of the liberals who watch CNN were attacking him for even asking one like mildly, I wouldn't even call it challenging, but just like a question that implied that maybe Joe Biden is not perfect. And this is what they've trained their audience to do. So if you're a cable host or if you're a cable executive and you see your audience vanishing, the last thing you want to do is to take the few remaining old people in nursing homes who are still watching

and say things that might force even them to go away. It's a huge dilemma. It's like, do we stick to this failing strategy of feeding an ever shrinking audience the partisan tripe that they want to hear? Or do we change course knowing we're going to alienate the few people who are still watching in the hope of trying to get something different? The problem is, where is that something different going to come from? They are staffed with people who are now believers. I do believe, you asked me, Sagar, like, is this all cynical or is it true conviction? I believe that when you are in institutions long enough like this that subsume you in a certain political perspective, at some point you do start to actually believe that what you're saying is true because no human being wants to consciously believe that I'm saying something I don't really believe from material or careerist end.

So I think part of it is also true conviction, which makes it even harder to get out of. Also this mindset, and this is actually, so there's a big like Daily Beast hit piece out on you, very lengthy, it's kind of all over the map. But there's one part of it that I found very revealing and that fits into this conversation, which is they're essentially accusing you of providing ammunition for Fox News. And they don't dispute that any of the things that you were talking about are legitimate critiques

or that they got, MSNBC and CNN got certain stories wrong that you were pointing out and then Fox News latches onto it and uses it for their own ends. But there's this ethos of like, you can't criticize the Democrats because you're giving ammunition to the bad guys. So we just have to stay silent, even if it's a legitimate knock. We just have to keep quiet because people who have nefarious ends in mind may use that in their own sort of propaganda and as a talking point. And I kind of understand the instinct, but it's the path to hell because the minute that you just sort of like blind spot everything that's a failing of your team is the minute that no one trusts you anymore. And there is no sort of like baseline truth factor principle left.

So I found it really interesting that that was sort of like their main critique of you as how dare you say anything that's uncomfortable for the Democratic Party and that right-wing actors might like. Yeah, I always find media criticisms of me or other people to be most revealing because in identifying the things that they think are incriminating about you, they're implicitly saying what they think the role of a journalist ought to be. So exactly as you said, by criticizing me for saying things that might find a favorable audience on the right or among Fox News. They're essentially saying that a journalist should never report anything or say anything that in any way can undermine the Democratic Party or make the Republican Party stronger, even if what you're saying is true. And I really think this mentality has done more to corrupt modern journalism than any other. I think we see it most vividly in this incredible debacle that I know you guys have discussed before of how for an entire year, the liberal sectors of the U.S. media treated the question of COVID's origin as a settled question, that it clearly was zoonotic, jumping from animal to human, and that anyone who

raised the question of whether it might have escaped from a lab was a deranged conspiracy theorist to the point where they ought to be banned from social media, when in fact that certainty was never warranted or even close to it. And now everyone's recognizing that they're both plausible theories, neither of which has yet been proven. And the question is, why would that happen? And the answer is, because it was Trump who were the ones saying that maybe there was a lab leak. And so that mentality that you just described, which is never say anything that might help the Republican Party, led the media to endorse a view of the world that was totally false, namely that the question of COVID's origins had been resolved with finality,

that there was conclusive evidence in support of the zoonotic theory. It was the same thing with Russiagate. It doesn't matter if Russiagate is true or not. Saying that it's true helps the Democrats. Saying that it's not true or questioning whether it is helps the Republicans. And therefore, the role of a journalist is to make sure you do everything possible not to help Donald Trump. That's the reason also why they didn't want to report on the Hunter Biden archive. It didn't matter if it was authentic. It didn't matter if it was in the public interest. All that matters is that reporting on it would have helped the Democrats become weaker, and therefore the role of a journalist is to avoid anything that does that. And that absolutely is the prevailing mindset in most of these failing outlets. And it's not only making them fail because nobody trusts them, but it's also corrupting

the role of journalism in a democracy, which is not to serve one party or the other, but to unearth the truth. Absolutely right, Glenn. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being our very first Breaking Points guest. We couldn't think of anybody better. We appreciate it, man. Appreciate you, Glenn. Thank you. Yeah, I couldn't think of anybody better either. And I think you guys did a great job. You know, I'm a huge fan of both of you, so I'm wishing you huge luck. And I know you're not going to need it, but congratulations again.

That means a lot to us. Thank you, Glenn. Appreciate it. Okay. How should we end the show? Oh, shit. Let me retry this. Trisha, it's you.

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