Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - EMERGENCY POD: Sinema Goes Independent, Twitter Files 2.0

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Bringing you all a podcast with some important breaking news segments from today including the latest Twitter Files scandal and Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema defecting from the party!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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. All right, guys, some big breaking news this morning, a big Washington bombshell. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, formerly Democrat of Arizona, has decided that she is going to register as a political independent. So, of course, this has thrown everybody into a giant tizzy trying to figure out what her plan is, what this means for Washington. And it's particularly noteworthy because Democrats just won an outright majority in the Senate with the victory in Georgia. So a bunch of questions still remain. Obviously, when she was a Democrat, it was 51-49. So the question is, will she caucus with the Democrats the way that, say,

Bernie Sanders does? What I've seen reported so far, Sagar, is that she is not planning on going to the caucus meetings, but she still wants to maintain her committee positions. So that would sort of indicate she wants to still caucus with the Democrats, which would still give them that majority edge. That matters for things like judicial nominations and significantly subpoena power, which is something that they've been floating that they might use to, like, call corporate CEOs on the carpet and things like that in this session. Right. So as I understand it, that kind of fits with the way Angus King operates in the Senate, technically independent, but does caucus with the Democrats. I do have her statement here that I can

read for everyone. Quote, in a natural extension of my service since I first elected to Congress, I have joined the growing number of Arizonans rejecting party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington, formerly registering as an Arizona independent. Over the past four years, I've worked proudly with other senators in both parties and forced consensus on successful laws. Becoming an independent won't change my work in the Senate. My service to Arizona remains the same. And she also reiterated that in her interview with Politico where she announced this, quote, I do not anticipate anything will change about Senate structure,

talking about the party politics. I intend to show up to work, do the same work I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the political strategy here. Will she run for re-election? I have many thoughts. I have many thoughts. Go ahead. Okay. So first of all, I want to disabuse anyone who might hear that statement and say, oh, well, what's wrong with being an independent? Isn't that great to not be beholden to partisan politics? Let me just say that Kyrsten Sinema has never, since she's been in the Senate,

served anyone except corporate donors. That's why she is incredibly unpopular with Democrats, incredibly unpopular with Republicans, and incredibly unpopular with independents. Just to give you a few key examples of this, you may remember she is one of the top recipients of money from the private equity industry, and she has carried water for them repeatedly, making sure that that carried interest loophole that is just a giant giveaway to that industry never gets closed. So just outright villain on that account, serving her corporate masters. And also in terms of lowering prescription drug prices, she has been a consistent ally of Big Pharma, who she also gets a ton of campaign cash from. So

let's just disabuse anyone of the notion that this is like, oh, she's an independent and she's just heterodox. No, no, no. This is all about Kyrsten Sinema making a cynical political maneuver. And I'll tell you, Sagar, and you tell me if you think this makes sense. What I think her calculus was here. She was very likely to lose in a Democratic primary. She was going to get her ass kicked, very likely by Ruben Gallego, who is a member of Congress. She's been polling pathetically with Democrats and with the party. So she was going to lose a Democratic primary. So instead, she's decided that she's going to force the party into this sort of tacitly support her bid,

thinking that, all right, well, having Kyrsten Sinema, I guess, even though she's a weak candidate and is a corporate tool, is better than allowing the Republican to get into office. So I think that was her play here. I think it's sort of a desperate maneuver. She didn't have a lot of great options because she is so unpopular across the board. But I think she thought she would threaten to blow up Democratic Party chances in the state of Arizona and hope they just back down and allow her sort of tacitly to be their nominee. As you said, there was Representative Ruben Gallego, who was already mounting a

potential primary challenge against her from the left. Then we also here have, I have her net favorability actually right in front of me. So all likely voters, we have 37% in Arizona with 54% unfavorable. For Democrats, it was 37% favorable, 57% unfavorable. Amongst independents, it was slightly better, 41% favorable, 51% unfavorable. Then Republicans, I've got 36% favorable, 54% unfavorable. So nobody particularly had like a great love for Kyrsten Sinema. Overall, she was underwater with every single demographic in the state of Arizona. And also, I do think that your analysis on the blackmail view, view really does seem to be key because the other answer for her and her camp will be, well, OK, do you want Carrie Lake to be the next senator from Arizona who very well may run for Senate now that she has still such a hold on Arizona GOP? That's right. That is precisely her calculation here. Now, I would say that given her weakness, I mean, you just gave the numbers, like no one likes this lady.

Democrats need to buck up, get behind a candidate that actually has real widespread appeal, you know, believe in their ability to beat a total charlatan like Carrie Lake, who just lost in the state and is not going to be any stronger next time around, is likely to be much weaker than she was this time around, and actually try to beat Kyrsten Sinema and get a better representative there. I think that is the Democratic Party's best bet. Do they have, like, the whatever to do that? Who knows? But, you know, for Kyrsten Sinema, it's a win-win because either she slides through and gets reelected through her like blackmail scheme here effectively, or she blows up the Democratic Party chances and can go then get a cushy job, you know, in the corporate sector, which is what she's clearly been positioning

herself for for a long time, because there was another direction she could have gone in. She could have been a better senator. She could have, you know, broken from her corporate masters. And then she might have actually had a shot at winning a Democratic primary. But she didn't want to cut off that ability for herself to be able to cash in after her time of service. So for her, like I said, it's a win-win. She either gets back in the Senate. I think that's very unlikely just given how incredibly unpopular she is, or she gets to go and make a bunch of money in the private sector where, you know, clearly she's been sort of, that's where her true loyalty has been. So the idea that she's any kind of an independent thinker is ridiculous.

She doesn't serve you. She doesn't serve either of these parties, although both of these parties tend to serve their corporate masters as well. She has always served private equity industry, big pharma, whoever will fill her campaign coffers with the most donations. That record is incredibly clear. Yeah. And she was actually asked in this interview with Politico, will you entertain a second run? She says, quote, it is fair to say I am not talking about it right now. I keep my eye focused on what I'm doing and registering as an independent is, I believe, right for my state. It's right for me. I think it's right for the country, and that politics and elections will come later.

So, I mean, famously, apparently she doesn't like being a senator very much. It's possible, Crystal, that she just goes independent for the last two years of her term, and then she just cashes out and leaves, possibly the preference for everybody. But I do see some forward calculus in this as to how exactly she would run and try and force her hand and make sure that she doesn't face some sort of brutal primary and still is able to basically get what she wants in further Senate negotiations. Don't forget, the Senate being held by Democrats means that she's going to have not as much power as in 50-50, but still quite a bit of power, especially if her and Joe Manchin are teamed up together.

You know, one thing I saw people float is like, well, why didn't she, if she's just worried about the sort of electoral calculus here, why doesn't she run as a Republican? And the answer from the numbers you laid out is really clear. Like, they don't want her either. And so given her, right, so she wasn't going to win a Republican primary either. She can't win a Democratic primary so long as she continues to be, you know, a stooge of private equity, a stooge of big pharma. So this was kind of her last ditch ploy. Now, maybe it's true. Maybe she doesn't even care about being in the Senate anymore and she just wants to go and serve her corporate masters, in which case, you know, she's lined herself well up to do that as well.

So I just want to make sure people understand, you know, they're not all independents are created equal. It is great to be, you know, outside of the sort of partisan, narrow thinking. It is great to actually serve the people instead of your sort of partisan team. But that is not who Kirsten Sinema is. That is not who she's been. That is not who she's going to be. And it's an extraordinary arc for someone who started as a Green Party candidate, like on the hard left, as an anti-war activist, someone who, when she came into the Senate, you'll remember this saga,

all kinds of puff pieces about how extraordinary it was to have a queer woman in the Senate, how her style, there were all kinds of glowing profiles of how fabulous her outfits were and how she was breaking the mold. Well, it turns out she's actually a very old and very known mold in terms of the Senate, and that is just serving the donor class. So pretty consistent, actually, with things you see every day there. Yeah, I think that's very well said there, Crystal. All right, we'll leave the folks wanting more.

Thanks. Shout out to the premium members that we met in New York, Boston and elsewhere. We had a great, great time and we will see you guys later. Hello, everybody. Coming to you live from my home office. Forgive the beard. Just came off of a tour on the road with Crystal. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to join me for this segment.

So I thought I would just do a quick reaction video to the second installment of the Twitter Files. Gonna do my best here. So let's start with the files themselves, just released by Barry Weiss and her team over at the Free Press and the Big Takeaway. Well, it turns out shadow banning on Twitter was not only completely real, but that real software was actually built by the Twitter executives to implement it. Let's go through it. Furthermore, not only was the software built, it was actually controlled by the highest levels of the company, including the CEO Vijay Agade, Yoel Roth, and their entire team over

at the quote, trust and safety. Okay, let's actually go through some of the specific examples that was released by Barry Weiss. First and foremost was Dr. J. Bhattacharya. This one actually might be the most significant one to me because it isn't even about politics. It was about COVID lockdowns. Well, Twitter actually secretly placed him on a, quote, trends blacklist, which prevented his tweets from trending. The next example was Dan Bongino, the right-wing talk host. He was actually placed on something called a, quote, search blacklist. There was Charlie Kirk. He was on a list called, quote, do not amplify. Let's remember in 2018 that they

specifically said, quote, we do not shadow ban, quote, we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology. Now, the way that they're getting around this is I went ahead and I pulled the reaction from the former Twitter head of product, Kayvon Beckpor. He says, quote, wow, did you even read our blog post? We never denied de-amplifying things. In fact, we made clear that we do rank. We defined exactly what we meant by shadow banning and made clear we didn't do that. You are characterizing de-amplification as equating to shadow banning, which is a lazy interpretation or deliberately misleading. This is kind of like when Dr. Fauci tried to say that he did not fund gain-of-function research by redefining exactly what is commonly understood as gain-of-function

research. So look, is this a huge bombshell report? I mean, I think we all knew that it was real, although to see the screenshots that were released by Barry Weiss where they specifically include tags that are like, do not amplify, do not search blacklist and others. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of shocking to me personally. Other things, which is unfortunately, actually, and I wonder what exactly went into the process on here. I've been talking a little bit about this with the Breaking Points team. All of the examples that were included right now either are right wing or they code right wing. I think it's important that Barry and other people with access to the Twitter files actually release some examples of non-political content or left-wing

political content or other ideologies so that we can understand that this is a mass societal problem at the whims of a team, a small team. That was another thing that came out from the Barry Weiss Twitter files. There was a special group actually inside of Twitter that was known as the Strategic Response Team Global Escalation Team, or SRTGET. What are these people in the military with these acronyms? All right. Anyway, they had an even more important one called Site Integrity Policy Policy Escalation Support, known as SIPPES. And that secret group was Vijayagade Yoel Roth, who you'll famously remember, left Twitter under Elon and is now defending even the Hunter Biden laptop censoring. He's

defending taking down the Babylon B account. He is about as NPC as it gets for the Silicon Valley set and the former CEO, Parag Agarwal and Jack Dorsey. I do honestly think this does make both Agarwal and Vijay Agade and even Dorsey. I hate to say it. I think Dorsey has said some decent things in the past, but let's be honest here. He said, quote, unequivocally, we do not shadow ban. He said that in a reply to a tweet in 2018, and that's just simply not true. So either he lied or he had no idea what was going on. At the end of the day, what is shown here is a systematic campaign to blacklist, to deamplify, to shadow ban, as you may well known colloquially. And I think that that is the major takeaway here. If you guys want to read more, Barry appears to have access to the Twitter files and to Slack messages. She's at thefp.com. And she says that Matt Taibbi will be releasing the next installment. That's all I've got for you guys right now. Stay tuned. Shout out to our premium members. By the way, it was really fun meeting so many of you in New York and in Boston. And

Crystal and I will hopefully have a reaction video to Christian Cinema and all of that in a little bit. Stay tuned and thank you for joining this reaction video. Hello, everybody. We just wanted to do a quick thank you to all of you for bearing with us as Crystal and I were in New York and Boston. We had an amazing time at those shows. We met a lot of amazing premium subscribers. And I do have to say, Ryan and Emily did a fantastic job of holding down the fort. It's a very cool expansion of the Breaking Points universe. Yeah, it's so nice to be able to lean on them to allow us to go and travel and see some of you all in person, which we really did enjoy. I mean, it's always like preparing for

these and actually doing the travel and everything. It feels like a real lift. But then once you do it, it's so rewarding to see all of you in person. So huge thanks to everybody who came out. I had a blast with Colin Marshall there. We did like a, we made it kind of like a year end show. So we did some superlatives. We gave out some awards in different categories we made up. And I think we'll post some of that for you guys all to be able to see. But yeah, we'll be back in the studio, you know, full regular show and schedule and all of that stuff next week, which we are excited about too.

It'd be nice to be back in the regular routine. That's right. Yeah. We'll be back in the studio. Uh, in the meantime, premiums, you guys will get access to the full routine. That's right. Yeah, we'll be back in the studio. In the meantime, premiums, you guys will get access to the full show of what we recorded. We'll put that out to you

sometime in the next couple of days. We'll release some of the clips in the future. Again, shout out to the premiums who enable us to literally have shows going on while we're on the road. That is what you guys help expand. It's very, very helpful. And we have a little teaser promo reel

for what it was like in New York and Boston. Let's get to it. What's up, New York? We got a good crowd tonight. I can feel it. The idea that there can be people, so many of you, who are in this room of different race, different age, background, socioeconomic status, job. You could be working class. You could be upper class. It could be anyone who can resonate with the idea that things are not right. The system is not working for you. And so this is always a reminder whenever we do these to see and to meet so many of you is the idea that actually this is always a reminder whenever we do these to see and to meet so many of you is the idea that actually this does this is real and when it's real it's not about us

I don't really think it ever should be hello Boston! You guys are fired up tonight. I love it. That is a testament to something, that these people spent the last 25 years of our lives working against, trying to split us up to make it so that this entire thing is impossible. And we consider it the great privilege of our life to have an audience like all of you to show up for us in this way. So with that, guys, 2023, I think it's going to be a great year. Thanks to you all and what we're all building together. So thank you guys. We love you all so much.

And we'll see you from the Breaking Point studio on Monday. Thank you. This is an iHeart Podcast.