Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #36: Progressive Wins, GOP Shift, Al Jazeera Journalist, Non Profit Corruption, Workplace Bullying, Ukraine Drones, & More!

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

Krystal, Saagar, and their collaborators talk about protest laws, Democratic primaries, UFOs, Jon Bernthal, Jen Psaki, Hillary show, GOP institutions, Goldman buying homes, Fetterman's playbook, Al Jazeera journalist, lethal drones to Ukraine, non profit corruption, workplace bullying & more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/James Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLiMax Alvarez: https://therealnews.com/Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/The Lever: https://www.levernews.com/Marshall Kosloff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3O3P7AsOC17INXR5L2APHQKyle Kulinski: https://www.youtube.com/c/SecularTalk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Great to see you, sir. Hey there. So you have some very timely reporting about the Republican response to the seeming granting of their every wish and desire, which is the imminent overturning of Roe versus Wade, a project that they have been dedicated to, you know, creating this outcome for like close to 50 years. But the reaction to it is very interesting. So you detail some of this. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. You say a McCarthy era law aimed at pro-choice protesters, conservatives and corporate media pundits want to use a red scare statute to arrest people demonstrating against the GOP's looming anti-abortion victory. So just set this up for us, David.

Sure. There's this controversy within the controversy. I mean, there's the leaked ruling and then there's a lot of the commentary about whether the leak was legal or who leaked. There's also the controversy about the protests against the ruling. And just to start out here, it's worth saying that it's a pretty pathetic state of affairs in media and in politics where the top line story is the reaction to the extremism rather than the extremism itself. But the reaction when it comes to protest, I think, is something, it tells us something. The reaction has been one saying that protesters shouldn't be allowed to protest near where Supreme Court justices live. Now, there's a lot of hypocrisy about this considering the fact that the Supreme Court itself effectively legalized protest near the homes

of people who work in women's health clinics. That was a 1990 ruling in the mid-1990s. Somehow we're supposed to forget about that. But there's now also a call by folks like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to resurrect a 60 or 70 year old law from literally the McCarthy era that was designed to outlaw protest outside and near the Supreme Court by alleged communists. And what Hawley wants to do is essentially use that law to, and he's calling for it, to arrest, detain, and jail protesters anywhere near the homes of Supreme Court justices. Now, let's be clear.

You can agree or disagree with the tactic of protesting near a judge's home in a legal, peaceful way. You can say, I don't think that's a good tactic. Maybe you say that is a good tactic. Wherever you come down on this, there's something deeper here, which is the attempt to criminalize basic protest dissent demonstrations. That's what's really at issue here in trying to resurrect this law. A law, by the way, pushed not only by sort of McCarthy era extremists, but also by segregationists. Well, and this isn't just happening at the federal level. I just saw this morning, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill today that makes

protesting outside of a person's home illegal. So, and he has been, you know, he has become kind of a leader in launching this type of legislation that other Republican state legislators then pick up. I think it also very much exposes the lie of the idea that the Republican Party is the quote-unquote free speech party. Totally. I mean, these are the same people who have been running around decrying so-called cancel culture and screaming freedom, who are now trying to quite literally criminalize protest in America. And again, I go back to this idea that you can say, I don't think it's a good tactic, or you can say, I think it's a great tactic. The debate over whether a kind of protest is effective is a different debate than whether

the protest should be allowed to happen. And we have a situation now where you literally have politicians trying to outlaw forms of protest. And obviously, there's the other hypocrisy here. I mean, we're still only a year and a half away from, since the January 6th insurrection, the violent takeover of the Capitol. And so the same party, in some cases, the same politicians, in Josh Hawley's case, the guy who raised his fist, kind of egged on that insurrection and that riot, the same politicians are now trying to outlaw a kind of protest. And I think what's clear is that they're trying to outlaw a kind of protest that they don't agree with. In other words, they don't agree with the message. And so they want freedom of speech for their message and not freedom of speech for other

messages. And that's not the way freedom of speech is supposed to work. And I just want to add one more thing here. The First Amendment of the Constitution, not like the 20th Amendment or the right, the very first amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrines a right to peaceably assemble. And that's what's really at stake here. Yeah. And I think we've also already seen in DeSantis' case specifically how these statutes are used very selectively. So he also passed a law that I think banned protest on any roadway

in Florida. And that was in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Lo and behold, when it was protesters against the Cuban government who were blocking a major roadway, suddenly, for some reason, the law did not apply. That is not free speech. That is free speech for me, but not for thee. And that's really the issue here. Look, free speech is not an easy thing to protect because it means protecting speech that you don't like. It means protecting speech that you don't agree with. The Supreme Court has issued rulings in the past of protecting freedom of speech that even uses violent rhetoric. Now, I'm not a fan of that. I don't think that's good for the discourse. I don't think that's good for the culture. But the point is, is that once you start encroaching in a real way on free speech, free political speech, okay, non-threatening speech

in the sense of non-imminent incitement of violence. And that's what we're talking about when it comes to pro-choice protesters. Okay. When you start encroaching on that, you start cutting away at, again, the first amendment. This is foundational. And what I worry about is that we are living in a time where we are losing touch with things that are difficult to protect, ideals that are difficult to protect, freedom of speech. I mean, here's the thing. When I see the Washington Post or media outlets

saying that they want restrictions on different kinds of protests, I mean, the press, the fourth estate operates under the same freedom of speech. And it kind of blows my mind. Do these folks really understand the laws under which they are protected and how encroaching on those laws threatens the ability of, for instance, even the press to do its job? Yeah. Also, obviously, the case with the silence

on the prosecution of Julian Assange. The last thing, David, that I wanted to ask you is, you know, what do you make of the fact that, OK, Republicans, the religious right have been building and working very studiously on this project for literally almost five decades. They now are on the verge of the cusp of victory. They're about to get the end result of something that they have been engaged in for a very long time. And they don't want to talk about it. They're upset about how it came out. They want to talk about the league. They don't want to talk about the protests.

They don't want to talk about this monumental political victory that they are on the cusp of achieving. What do you make of that? Well, I mean, I think they know they have victory in hand. I mean, they know that that draft ruling, if it becomes the law, is the victory they want. They don't have to talk about it. And they know talking about it

is probably not great politics for them heading into the midterm elections if you look at polls on the issue. So they already have the victory. And so what they're trying to do tactically, in my view, is focus more on the controversy surrounding the victory and to try to scandalize dissent. They're trying to scandalize the outrage about this. And so, and look, and they've got a willing and complicit partner, I think, in corporate media,

which I think has focused as much on the protests, as much on the leak, as on the substance itself. The question is whether the Democratic Party heading into the midterm elections can actually focus the public on the actual issue at hand, which is the ripping away of reproductive rights from 166 million women in the country. David, thank you so much for your reporting on this and so many other issues. It's great to see you. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me. The rise of some new candidates and the victory of J.D. Vance has a new discussion. Is the right going to change if they take power in the U.S. Senate and in Congress come 2022? To talk about this is Oren Kass. He's the executive director of American Compass. It's

good to see you, Oren. Welcome back to the show. Great to be here. All right. So we've got an interesting new piece here that was written in American Compass. Let's put this up there on the screen. Taking the right off of autopilot. It's something that your organization has been focused on now for quite some time. So, Oren, how do you kind of assess the chances of taking the right off of autopilot come November victory for the Republicans in the midterms, if that's what happens? Well, I think a huge question for the right of center is what's going to happen in our institutions. You know, there are all these huge, very well-funded think tanks, publications that drive a lot of the conversation, are listened to by a lot of elected representatives. And they have for 40 plus years now been focused exclusively on this sort of Reagan style agenda. It's kind of very libertarian on economic issues. And it just doesn't fit 2022. It might have been great for 1982, but it doesn't fit 2022.

And the question in my mind and saying this piece really speaks to is, can these institutions change? Can an organization that's been doing the same thing for so long, that takes hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from people thinking a certain way, that hires hundreds of people who have staked their careers on thinking a certain way, can they actually say, we actually have to think about things differently? And I think we're seeing some places where that is starting to happen. You know, Kevin Roberts coming in at the Heritage Foundation is a good example. But at a lot of places, we're not seeing that happen at all. And I think, you know, those institutions are going to become

probably irrelevant over time, and we're going to need new ones that carry things forward. Are they going to become irrelevant, though? Because it seems to me like there are two basic problems that make it structural issues that make it difficult for Republicans to adjust course with regards to economic orthodoxy in particular. Number one, what you pointed to, the source of money backing these think tanks and the institutional right. It's a sort of corporate libertarian ideology that has been ascendant in the Republican Party

and frankly in the Democratic Party as well for quite a while now. But then you also have this dynamic, and I think this is revealed from the J.D. Vance successful Senate campaign, which is that the base has been sort of – the base really responds to culture war incitement. So that was a lot of – even though J.D. talked a little bit in a different way on economic issues, when our reporter was on the ground asking voters what they cared about and what they were interested in, a lot of what they talked about was these sort of cultural touchstone issues. When our reporter was on the ground asking voters what they cared about, what they were interested in, a lot of what they talked about was these sort of cultural touchstone issues. So if there's money backing the standard issue economic orthodoxy, and then

you have a base that's responsive on cultural issues, it seems like there isn't a lot of incentive to change what you're doing in terms of economic orthodoxy? Well, I think those are definitely key obstacles. The things that give me hope, you know, are probably two in particular. One is, it's absolutely true that some of these more cultural issues, you know, which tend to be really hot button and politically salient, drive a lot of energy in the base of both parties, drive primary voters. At the same time, if we believe in the idea of a realignment, and especially for the right of center, if, you know, candidates like J.D. Vance are actually going to build the kind of popular support that could ultimately lead to a governing majority, that realignment

to a large extent comes down to finding working class voters who have typically been on the left of center, who probably agree with conservatives on some of these culture issues, but feel just completely left out or ignored on the economic side. The question is, how do you bring them in? And so that's a place where the economic message is incredibly important, essentially being able to pass a threshold on the economic issues with voters who probably agree with you on the cultural issues. And so I think that's where, you know, if you look at how sort of someone like J.D. balances his message, of course the cultural message is going to be hugely important in any political campaign. But the ultimate coalition, I think, is likely to be one that has that economic element as well.

And then I think the second piece of it is you see this incredible crossover happening now between the cultural and economic when it comes to big business and so-called woke capital and the way these corporations are behaving in a lot of cases. And you're seeing right-of-center elected politicians and voters really turn against corporate interests. And to some extent, I think those interests really sort of align quite strongly with the Democratic Party at this point. So, you know, you may have some institutions on the right-of-center. The American Enterprise Institute is probably the best example that first and foremost are oriented toward business interests. I mean, it's right there in the title, American Enterprise.

I think even like on the Disney example, I also think it's very telling because the objection to Disney isn't the one that the left has had for many years, which is that, you know, they're union busters. They pay their employees terribly. They treat their labor like crap. They make their, you know, oftentimes their merchandise has been made in like sweatshops. It's not that critique. It's we don't like their stance on a cultural issue. So again, it's not really a corporate critique. It's a cultural critique, which is why I feel like, why it seems very clear to me that the primary animating force is not a change in economic orthodoxy. I mean, Trump talked in a different way on economics and then his biggest

accomplishment was a tax cut for the rich. It's leaning into culture war issues that are easy to prosecute and don't require you to upset your donor base. Well, I think some of these culture issues are very much upsetting the donor base because they do at the end of the day come down to saying, you know what, we're not going to give a free pass to corporations. And this idea that the most important thing you can do for the country is whatever corporations want you to do just isn't true. And so I think you're absolutely right that some of these cultural issues arequoted what's good for general America is good for America and vice versa. It's just not true on a whole lot of fronts. It's not true on the cultural front. where you have both a sort of willingness to kowtow politically to China, but then also

obviously an enthusiasm for offshoring to China, both of which are bad for Americans. And so I think all of this sort of comes to a head in the same way, which is to say, you know, groups on the right of center that are willing to rethink orthodoxies and say, well, what does it actually mean to be conservative in 2022? And what's a policy agenda that's going to address America's problems? I think those groups and politicians are gonna be very successful.

I think those that have their Ronald Reagan playbook from 1982, and they're just sort of flipping through it to find the right tax cut and the right op-ed that explains how wonderful business is. I think those groups are becoming irrelevant on the right of center. I hope you're right, Oren. You're going to be one of those voices regardless, and we'll continue to highlight yours here on the show. Appreciate you joining us, ma'am.

Good to see you, Oren. Thank you. Good to see you, too. So White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has officially stepped down from her post. Karine Jean-Pierre is now moved into that slot. But on her last day, Jen Psaki had some comments about what her experience in the hothouse of D.C. has been like. Let's take a listen. People always ask me, and I'm sure you guys get asked this too, about whether Washington is rotten. You know, whether everybody is corrupt here and, you know, nothing good happens and we

all just argue with each other. And I, having done this job, believe the absolute opposite is true because I have worked with and engaged with all of these incredible people across the administration and this amazing team, many of whom are here that I get to work with every day. And as I said about Karine last week, these people are already the stars of the team, but they're going to be shining stars in the future, and I'll miss them a lot. Okay. So she does not believe Washington is Krupp Saga. No.

She's made me believe the opposite. There's also someone who says that the West Wing is what inspired her to get back into politics. I mean, look, I generally like to take people at their word. I guess that's been your experience. As an outside observer, I would say it's been the opposite of my experience in order to see that that's the case. Also, from my many friends who remain in the press corps, they are not exactly singing the

West Wing tune as to how exactly she ran it. So I actually think, remember when we interviewed Jon Stewart and he was like, I told my staff, you cannot have friends. Because when you meet a person on an individual basis, they can be, this kind of happened to Bernie and Joe Biden, they can be nice people. They can be personally kind to you. They can show generosity to you. And so I can understand why when you're in that situation and you're surrounded by people who have been personally nice to you, it's hard to separate that like human to human relationship from the overall things that they're doing and also like the system that they're operating within. And so, yeah, it's not about individually, like, did Joe Biden call you on your birthday? It's who do you take money from? Where does this ideology come from? What's it doing to people? What's the impact on the country? So that's why, you know, it's some

of the most challenging situations are where you know someone personally and you see them doing something that is wrong or bad or corrupt. It can be uncomfortable to reckon with that. Someone had a great reply. They go, well, why are you taking a job at MSNBC if you think that's true? I mean, if it really is the opposite of corrupt and you have great work to do and you're having the time of your life and you're changing the whole country, then why are you going to go work at Cable News? Let's be honest, because you're going to make a lot more money. And because lying for a living, and I'm not saying that they don't all do this, lying for a living and being a propagandist for a failing administration is not a fun job. That's the honest bit. So in a way, her spinning all this narrative is the opposite of really what's happening in her actual life. If it really was the most fulfilling job of all time,

she would stay. I mean, I've gone back and I've read the people at the time when government is really worrying, you have to kick them kicking and screaming out of government. Like the New Deal guy, they stayed in for years, eight, nine years. Same under LBJ or JFK. I mean, those people would have crawled over glass. They never would have left the president in the lurch if they really felt like they were accomplishing something. But here and in past administrations, the Trump administration being one, the Bush administration, high turnover amongst press secretaries. When stuff gets tough, people really always leave the job because they know how full of it that they really are. A lot of people who are staffers in the White House, I mean, first of all, it's a brutal job just in terms of the hours and what it does to your

personal life. So I can certainly understand why as a mother, she wouldn't want to stay there forever. But a lot of people take these jobs not because of what they want to do or a vision they particularly believe in, but because they want the resume item that, you know, parlays into a cable news hosting gig. Corporate gig. Or, you know, or a corporate gig like Jay Carney. And so a lot of times it's used more as a launching pad than actually the place where you're going to stay and try to impact the country in a positive way or further a vision that you ultimately believe. I think that would be different from the New Deal era when you had a lot of true believers who really thought this is the direction the country needs to be in. Or the new frontier. Actually, Reagan is another example. Man, Reagan, their staff, their people stayed along for a long time. So if you study, like when people really feel like they're really doing good work and all that, they stay.

They don't act like this. So there you go. So on top of Meghan Markle getting her show canceled, another one has bitten the dust. And the Obamas. Let's not forget about them. That's right, the Obamas as well. What do we got here? Hulu is passing on Hillary Clinton's series Rodham.

Clara Danes and Dakota Fanning were to star as 20th Century TV is shopping the project around. All of this is based upon the 2020 New York Times bestseller, which imagined an alternative universe in which Hillary Rodham met and dated Bill Clinton, but never married him. Instead, in the life Clinton really led, she goes on to thrive as a Northwestern University professor and launches an eventual presidential run. Real world events such as rape accusations against Bill Clinton and Donald Trump play out in the novel, but in vastly altered ways. Well, I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that she would not even be in politics without Bill Clinton. That's not a sexist thing to say. I just think that she's a terrible politician. So sorry about that, Hillary. Also, I do got to say, I mean, in terms

of all these series, the one benefit and the downturn in the stock price is that a lot of the chaff is just getting completely cut out. The Obamas not getting their Spotify deal re-upped. The Meghan Markle animated racial series getting canceled by Netflix. Tear shed in that moment. Hillary Rodham not getting picked up. Because here's the thing. All this content, it sucks. That's the part that we also know. It's not actually good. And a lot of it was just vanity stuff in order to buy off politicians like the Buttigieg documentary on Amazon. I'm sure it did real big numbers over there. It's obvious why it's happening. He had a podcast

too, remember that? Oh yeah, he had a podcast. I don't think that. Well, now he's at Treasuries. Yeah. Not Treasury, Transportation. Transportation. Far less important than Treasury. I want to know who read this book. Yeah, I want to know too. Was it real? Well, unfortunately, I know people who read the book. Really? Yeah, it was a big bestseller. The PMC ladies, they love this show. I mean, sorry, they love this book. Let's be honest. I was Well, unfortunately, I know people who read the book. Really? Yeah, it was a big bestseller. The PMC ladies, they love this show.

I mean, sorry, they love this book, let's be honest. I was looking, though, at the, there was a new Democratic primary poll that came out that included her in the mix, and she wasn't faring too well. It was interesting. It was like, Biden was number one. Here we go. Biden, 33. Bernie, still number two, 17.

Kamala, below Bernie, at 12. Warren at nine. Buttigieg at eight. AOC at six. And Clinton at six. So just another indication that America is not ready for Hillary. No, well, and we never were, unfortunately. So even that book, it's all cope, folks.

Let's be honest. It's good that we never have to see this on Hulu. Very excited to introduce our next guest. It's Jon Bernthal. He's the host of a new podcast. You know, it's funny, Jon. Sometimes I find out that celebrities watch this show. Usually I'm like, yeah, whatever.

But I was like, holy shit. I'm like, that's Jon Bernthal. Anyway, I know you've got a new podcast out the real ones i actually took a listen to your episode on russia which is part of the reason i actually wanted to talk to you uh you actually have some interesting things to say so welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about your podcast uh thanks so much man i i am i'm uh i'm an enormous fan uh and um i'm'm so deeply appreciative of what you guys are doing. And I think, you know, in an age right now where it's just so hard to get sort of unfiltered and real and honest and, you know, just sort of fair information delivered by folks that, that, you know, really,

I, I, I just, I really feel like I trust you guys and I love getting my news from you guys. I love your opinions and the discourse that you have on the show. So I'm really grateful. Look, I think for, for my show, similarly, look, I, I have no place. I have no place sort of in, you know, exploring the key issues of the day. I wear makeup and say lines for a living. And I think the last thing we need, sort of what you alluded to, is another celebrity kind of spouting off and pontificating on the major issues of the day. our job is really to tell stories. That being said, I've been so enormously frustrated with just the discourse in this country right now. And, you know, not just in the media, but kind of all over. And I think, unfortunately, so much of, you know, what we're listening, what we're watching is sort of this agenda based, you know, sort of flag waving this, this bombast and this rhetoric and people just sort of trying to get people to join their side. And, you know, for me, I can't really imagine anything less American. I think that, you know, to be patriotic and to be strong is really about

compromise. It's really about being secure enough in your positions to open up yourself to people that think differently than you, people that were raised differently than you, people of different backgrounds from you, political backgrounds, racial backgrounds, sexual orientations. It's what makes this country really wonderful. And look, I've been enormously blessed in my life, where I grew up and how I grew up, and with what I do for a living that I've gotten to learn from and meet all these wonderful folks that I've become enormously close with. So the folks that I have on my show are Special Forces soldiers, they're police officers, they're surgeons, they're teachers, they're coaches, firefighters,

they're nurses. I really believe that when you focus on folks that really, you know, walk the walk, don't just talk about it, there's a certain kind of empathy there. There's a certain understanding. I think they're too busy and have had too much time, you know, really with boots on the grounds of these issues to join a side. And they understand that, you know, we're all human beings and we all want what's best for our kids. We all want our families to prosper and to make this world as good as possible. And I'm enormously, enormously grateful for the folks that come on my show. And I believe in them.

And as much as I sort of want less of me out there, not more, this show really has nothing to do with me. It's about the great folks that I bring on. Well, it actually really comes through in your interviews. Like I said, I mean, I think personally, I think most celebrity podcasts are terrible. But I was listening to this, and I'm like, this guy actually asks good questions.

He's letting his guests speak. He's making sure he's elevating somebody legitimately interesting. And I guess it's fit. I mean, like I'm saying, to be honest, I've always found a deep fascination with some of the characters. You have a real rawness in some of the people that you play. We were speaking before we went on the air about We Own the City, which is David Simon's, I would guess, kind of a sequel-ish to The Wire in which you play a Baltimore police officer. I'm not going to give away too much. But, I mean, can you maybe talk about some of the themes that we have here on our show, on your show,

in playing multifaceted characters which are both villainous, but you're also doing something in a social commentary, which is very deep and outside of the way that most of the media and popular culture likes to talk about these things. Yeah, look, I think that's right. I think, look, who better to kind of explore these issues that have really gripped the soul of the country right now, these issues of race and policing? Who better to do that than David Simon and George Pelicanos? They come to the work with a journalistic integrity. They're trying to tell

the truth. There's no agenda. There's no flag waving. And I knew with these guys, there would be a certain level of access in the city of Baltimore because of what they've done before. It's hard. You know, the way that I really like to work again is to kind of dive in and to get to know the real folks. That's sort of my sword to try to tell the story as authentically and truthfully as I can. And I knew with David Simon because of, for lack of a better word, their street cred with The Wire, when you're going into the Baltimore Police Department and you're saying, hey, we're trying to tell a story about sort of one of the most corrupt and vile episodes of your department. Um, you know, it's going to be hard to get them to kind of open up

their hearts and minds and open up the doors to you. You know, for that show, I, I did three months of ride-alongs every day in every district of the city. I went on drug raids with the Baltimore SWAT team. And I'm so grateful to those guys. And what I found by this approach of kind of digging into the wound of race and policing, trying to tell the story authentically and without an agenda, I found that they really appreciated it. And look, I mean, I think there's no words for, you know, how vile and reprehensible and how awful, you know, police brutality and police corruption and the effect that that has on victims, whether it's Fourth Amendment violation victims, folks that have been wrongfully imprisoned, folks that have been beaten, folks that have been killed. There's no words for that. There's also another subset of victims that I never knew about.

And I think it's very little focus. And that's the good and righteous and courageous people that take the peacemakers code, the peacemakers oath and that go and police our cities. Good cops suffer at the hands of bad cops. and there's no other profession. I think that, you know, the acts of the vile acts of, you know, the worst of them really just, you know, changes both the career paths and just the livelihoods and the way in which people police. And, you know, it's part of the thing that I'm trying to do on my podcast as well is I think the answers to policing will lie in the people that have community minded, great police that have been there forever. And, um, you know, I'm really grateful that I got sort of a front row ticket to that. And I got to make some really good friends along the way. That's great, man. I mean, it really comes through in your acting

and your show. And I really think you're, uh, you're really having a renaissance these days. And I can attest to the audience, he is one of the real ones. He's one of the good ones, not one of the ones we make fun of often on the show. So, John, thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciated both your podcast and talking to you, getting to get to know you a little bit more. And I look forward to a lot more of your work. So thank you. Me too, man. Keep up the good work. I really appreciate you guys. Absolutely. Take care.

We spoke about that landmark UFO hearing. And joining us now, UFO expert, journalist in his own right, is Jeremy Korbel. He's also a great documentarian and a friend. Jeremy, welcome back to the show. It's good to see you, my friend. Really good to see you, Sagar. Okay, Jeremy, so you have been through the new footage from the UFO hearing. Now let's dissect everything that we have. First, describe to us exactly what we learned that is new from the hearing hearing. Now let's dissect everything that we have. First, describe to us

exactly what we learned that is new from the hearing so far. Right. Okay. So everybody needs to understand that this is just the beginning. This is a benchmark. This is a moment in history that we haven't had in over 50 years. They brought two people forward, top brass of our military. And to be honest with you, you know, they've jumped into this recently, too. Now they are in a position to know. But remember, the UFO programs are often protected by special access program protection. This is why Senator Reid was trying to get SAP status for the true UFO program that was called OSAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program. So they don't know everything,

but they're going to go into a closed congressional briefing. I do, you know, where they can talk about classified information. I do know, though, for sure, that this is just the start. There are other people that are going to be testifying on record. So what we saw was we saw some new footage of a UFO that shoots by a fighter plane. But the thing is, is one piece of evidence is nothing. They're just bringing the public up to date with what's going on. They had problems when they were trying to slow down and like click it to show to people. It's really funny. They need

a tech person. But ultimately, they asked good questions good questions they said have we ever fired on a ufo do we have exploitation programs using a different word um and of course look there were lies obfuscation you know and some things they just don't know but what that's what we expected but the big thing here and representative carson talked about this was that that, you know, and he pushed the witnesses. The idea is to reduce stigma. So people like me are unnecessary. The only reason they mentioned me in the hearing is because I'm getting footage from our military that should have gone up the chain of command without people having to leak it to me. So I hope they fix this broken chain so that we can really get to the bottom of this UFO mystery.

I think that's the most important takeaway from me as well, which is just really making the normalization in the military culture in order for it to bubble up so that we don't have to keep seeing leaked audio. I talked to a guy. Here's what he said. You know, but, you know, whispers and all of this. I hear probably a fraction of it, but still hear some of it from people as well. Jeremy, talk to us about those lies and obfuscations, because this is important.

In terms of claims around past videos, what were some of the lies and the obfuscations that they told us? Right. So one of the things is they really focused on what looks like the green triangular by angle of observation footage that was shot off the coast of 2019 off the USS Russell. And I obtained and released that. They were playing that like the whole time. And it was really interesting because this was contained within their own classified documents.

And I, inside of it was able to get out as unclassified. And then the videos were, I obtained and released the videos. Now they were talking about how it looks like a triangle and that's because of the camera and how it put together. They were inches away from saying the lie that it was like just an effect of optics. But what was really interesting, because he really danced around the words about it, was that he was saying that it looks and appears triangular, but what he didn't say is that all of the classified briefings, because there are other optic systems rather than just

being shot through the night vision, these were non-aerodynamic. They were indeed described in all classified briefings as pyramid in shape. So they were just dancing around a few issues, but that's okay. We're going to crack it open and make sure I have more to release. That's great. And you always hold their feet to the fire. Any other information just for the layman person out there? They're interested. You and I are really excited and all this, but somebody is out there. What are their main takeaways from this hearing, other than the fact that there will be more transparency, like with this video or any confirmations around the report that maybe they could take away from this? Well, yeah, I think the biggest thing you

can take away from this is that Congress is actually doing its job and it is holding the intelligence communities and the individuals in position to either be aware or they should be aware. I mean, these are the people supposed to be studying this of what programs do we have to exploit these technologies, to study it, to manage what they call signal management. You know, what is our defense capability when something is in our restricted airspace? The takeaway is that now the public's voice has been heard and they are having their feet held to the fire. And this is a great first step.

It is a first step, but it is a great first step. So what people can expect now is just a resounding response of enthusiasm from the public. And this is what's going to push this topic forward. There is so much to learn about the UFO phenomenon, the mystery of UFOs. We know maybe 1% of what UFOs represent to humanity, but we already got more information today than we had yesterday. And every day, human knowledge is increasing on this issue. And UFOs have been with us since the beginning of recorded human history that we are aware of. So it's an exciting time. And you know, I love this topic. And you know, I love it too, man. You're the one who got me into it. So I really appreciate you joining us. I'm going to keep listening to you. We'll stay in contact in terms of some of the new

information. And I do want to thank you on behalf of everybody in the community community because I don't think that any of this would be happening without your work. Thank you much for joining us, sir. Appreciate it very much. I want to thank you, and I want to thank UFO Twitter and everybody that really pushed for this. So I appreciate it, brother, and I'll talk to you soon. Shout out to all of them. Absolutely. Hey, guys, Kyle Kalinske is letting us post some of the clips from his channel

that we think you guys will really love in the Breaking Points community on our channel. Yep, let's get to it. All right, so we got this article in the New York Post, Goldman Sachs backed firms by entire Florida community for $45 million. So this is where we're at. You know, Wall Street firms are just like, I should buy that town. And then they do. So they say, there's no end in sight for Wall Street's Sunbelt Sojourn. A pair of Goldman Sachs-backed ventures gobbled up an entire rental home community in Florida last month for a cool $45 million. Fundrise Interval Fund and Growth E-Rete 7 picked up 87 single-family properties in Brevard County as part of an ongoing southern spending spree. Fundrise previously snatched up a 120 unit development in Pensacola and has been pouring money into other rental developments in states like South Carolina and Mississippi. With rents continuing to soar and demographic shifts ongoing, real estate experts said Wall Street's southern appetite will only intensify.

Ken Johnson, professor of real estate at Florida Atlantic University, said firms are following population trends and investing in previously disregarded regions of the country. You are seeing more and more of this, Johnson told The Post. The attraction of Florida is the same as places like Texas and Tennessee and North Carolina. These are places people are moving to and where we can expect to see future increases in population. Florida, he said, has undergone fundamental shift in recent years, morphing from a second home and a hospitality-centered economy to a year-round place of business. There is a reorganization of Florida's economy taking place, he said. Some critics have correlated Wall Street's embrace of single-family and rental homes with unprecedented price increases over the past several years. Anecdotes abound about aspiring homebuyers having their bids avalanched by corporate

competitors with deep pockets. That's exactly what's happening around the country. Florida has seen rent spike by more than 30% overall, while other Sunbelt states have seen similar hikes. But Johnson argued that corporate purchases remain a drop in the bucket of overall home transactions throughout the country. He asserted that even large-scale corporate purchases in concentrated areas do not confer enough market power to dictate rental prices. I don't buy that for a second. Other analysts contend that increasing mortgage rates will now spur even higher rents with would-be homebuyers opting for the sidelines. Yeah, see, this has been a problem recently. Anecdotes abound about aspiring homebuyers having their bids avalanched by corporate competitors with deep pockets. We've talked about this in regards to BlackRock too.

BlackRock is going around the country and buying up entire blocks or entire towns. So what happens is these corporations swoop in, they buy a house or houses or an entire development. And then oftentimes what they do is they'll jack up the rent and rent it back to people. And I mean, this, it's ugly. It's what started after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and great recession. So in 2008 or leading up to 2008 in the crash, what happened was you had basically a totally unregulated market where instead of having a mortgage that was reliable and steady, 30-year fixed rate or whatever they call it,

what they would do is have these ballooning rate mortgages. So somebody who doesn't make enough money to buy a big house would go and buy a big house. And it would be like, no money down. At first you pay 3%, but then eventually the interest rate would balloon. And so as soon as the payments would get up to 8%, 12%, 16%, they would default on it, and they wouldn't be able, the house would be foreclosed on. And so we basically had a total house of cards. We had, at the same time that that was going on, you had these bundles of these mortgages that would be sold off from company to company. And they were basically playing hot potato with toxic assets, just waiting for the bubble to burst. And that's ultimately what happened.

And so we had the subprime mortgage crisis, the Great Recession. We had so many people, millions of people, get foreclosed on and lose their homes. And what needed to happen was to reintroduce regulation, make it so that ballooning rate mortgages are illegal. You need it to bring back Glass-Steagall so that you have a separation between commercial banking and investment banking. So in other words, when you go to your local bank and put your money in there, they're not doing casino capitalist bets with that, which are going to go belly up eventually. And in the wake of that, so the new trick that happened in the wake of that is Wall Street said, all right, well, the problem was we were selling these houses to people who shouldn't really be buying the houses.

And we were really scamming them because we would just turn a profit and sell the bad mortgage to genuinely need a house and can buy a house, but will pay above the market rate and will get the house at Goldman Sachs or BlackRock or whatever. And then, so we deny them housing, and then we can rent the same house back to them and jack up the rent. The economy is a total house of cards, man. The total house of cards. And this is why FTR famously railed against the money changers. What is going on with these giant financial corporations other than they're just money changers? What value are they providing to the economy? They're not providing value. They're pushing numbers around on a screen. And they're denying people a chance at a home and pushing them out of the market and then jacking up their rents. So, I mean, it's just, it's a joke. It's a joke.

I don't know why this is allowed. It shouldn't be allowed. It should be regulated out of existence. But of course, there's no accountability for Wall Street. There never has been. There never has been. How many Wall Street bankers who committed fraud as part of their business model went to prison after 2008? I'll leave that one up to you guys to put in the comments section. So they're back on their bullshit, man. They're back on their bullshit. And this is a symptom of late stage capitalism in a decaying society. Hey guys, our friend Marshall Kosloff, he's going to be conducting interviews with experts and newsmakers for us here on the Breaking Points channel. We're really excited. Yep, here it is. Hey, Breaking Points, this is Marshall. I am joined by Charlotte Alter.

She is a senior correspondent at Time, and we are talking about John Fetterman, the Democrats' nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania. He's a really interesting character who could say a bunch of things about Democratic strategy moving forward. We're also going to hit a bit about millennials and Gen Zs in politics, lots of great things here. So Charlotte, you've got some great pieces and Twitter threads on this. So let's start by introducing John Fetterman. Who is he and why does he seem to mean something bigger than just a typical Senate seat run? Thanks, Marshall. Yeah. I mean, John Fetterman is somebody who has been really present in Pennsylvania politics for a while now, but I think a former steel town that's really been down in the dumps since steel workers, since the steel industry and steel jobs left the area. And he is somebody who

has kind of, he's a real classic, like Pennsylvania guy. Nobody is ever going to out Pennsylvania, John Fetterman. He's six foot nine. He doesn't really like wearing a suit. He normally wears a sweatshirt and shorts everywhere he goes, which political observers like me are like, mind blown. Oh my God. But voters are really, voters seem to love it. I went to one of his events. I followed him around for a couple of days, a little bit before the primary. And I went to one of his events at a steel workers union. And I counted, there were maybe like 30 people in the room. And I counted five guys there who had both his exact same outfit and his exact same haircut. So it's like he's clearly resonating with people.

And you could tell because he won the primary by 30 points against Conor Lamb, who was the sort of the who is a congress of Pennsylvania congressman who was really endorsed by like most establishment Democrats. Joe Biden, you know, he'd always had a sort of like Beau Biden vibe. And Conor Lamb really was kind of seen by a lot of Washington types as the type of like clean cut young up and comer who could win in Pennsylvania. And actually, John Fetterman has really carved out a new and pretty strong path for Democrats there. You know, it's interesting because there's two questions to the can he win in Pennsylvania thing. There's the can he win the Democratic primary, or can he win the general election? So I think if you're a Democrat, looking at the, let's say, probable bloodbath in the fall, if you're a DC type, you'd say, well, Conor Lamb is a great fit for that midterm. So how are people thinking about

now that Fetterman's the nominee, how he's going to play in the general? So one thing that I think people get wrong about John Fetterman, because there is this line of attack on him, people think that John Fetterman is like a Bernie Sanders progressive. And he's not. He did endorse Bernie Sanders in the 2016 campaign. But then he went on to campaign for Hillary Clinton. and he was not affiliated in the 2020 campaign, but he did campaign a lot for Joe Biden and the general. He's a get it done Democrat. You know, I asked him a lot of really pointed questions specifically about. Specifically about Bernie Sanders is sort of like the progressive politics that he's often accused of. I said, you know,

Medicare for all, yes or no. He's like, you know, what is smart about him, I think, is that he's really working hard to not specifically align himself with one wing of the party, mostly because he knows that the voters don't really give a shit about that. So, for example, when I asked him about Medicare for all, if he had been a true Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders style progressive, he would have been like, yes, Medicare for all or bust. Like we have to have Medicare for all. Health care is a human right. All of the all of the, you know, arguments that you've heard in support of this position. Instead, he's like, we need more health care. Any bill that comes through the Senate that would expand health care access in Pennsylvania, I will vote for. If that's a Medicare expansion, I'll vote for it.

If it's Medicare for all, I'll vote for it. If it's Medicare for all who want it, I'll vote for it. If it's some kind of, you know, way to expand Obamacare, and it would be good for, you know, expanding healthcare access in Pennsylvania, I'll vote for it. So that I think people read that as a very kind of sane and practical way to look at this issue that actually Democrats spent six months arguing about. You know, a Green New Deal. He's not for it. And that's interesting because, you know, these people who are trying to attack him as if he is some kind of like progressive activist, he's actually only on, there are only a couple issues on which he's pretty closely aligned with progressives on policy. And it's often the issues that Pennsylvania voters are especially enthusiastic about, like a $15 minimum wage, like strong support for unions, like getting rid of the filibuster to protect voting rights, things like that.

Okay. So then I was going to ask, what is he actually kind of more progressive on? You answered that then. Given what you said, though, why did he endorse Bernie in 2016? I think that he sensed, and he's right, that Bernie was the populist candidate and he's a populist guy. So I think the thing, you know what? And I've been talking with Fetterman now since 2018, really. Like I first got to know him shortly after Trump was elected. And he was one of the first he was one of the only people who saw that Trump was going to win Pennsylvania. I mean, the Clinton people were like, how much are we going to win by? Is it going to be five points or 18 points? And Fadiman was like, no, no, no, this is. And so, um, I think that he, uh, you know, just to be total honesty,

I never actually, um, you know, had a deep, long conversation with him about his thought process in 2016 when he made that endorsement. But I do know that he is definitely not a purist in the way that some people who have been in the Bernie camp since 2016 are kind of purists about the Vermont senator's policy. In general, he's not a policy guy. And that is, I think, one of the reasons that he's been so successful in go into these counties and you start talking to people, people don't come up to him and say, I only want Medicare for all and I don't want any other health care option. People don't come up to him and say, green new deal or bust. People come up to him and say, instead, we need more health care. We need better paying jobs. And so he understands that a lot of these kind of questions of purity on policy proposals are a kind of Washington invention that ordinary voters, particularly in Pennsylvania, don't care that much about. I'm glad you did all the substantive policy parts, because I do think we need to get to the shorts and the sweatshirt. Yeah. Because as you said in your recent piece in Time about him, he hates talking about this. He's not here, obviously, so we'll get into it for a second.

You had a tweet that I think speaks to this, which is you basically said, you know, I think a lot of politicians are going to start putting away their suits and ties. So this question really relates to authenticity and how politicians think they should perform, because I think this speaks to Fetterman's skill set. The question that I think a lot of people are thinking of right now isn't, like you said, policy planks. It's trustworthiness. Is this a person who's likable? That specific dynamic. So how effective and widespread do you think we're going to see the, you know, let's just transition to sweatpants and shorts take? So I think the reason that this works for Betterman is because this is what he has a look that has been his look forever. If you look back at pictures of him when he was mayor of Braddock, it's the same exact look. I mean, he's very distinctive looking. He's extremely tall.

He's extremely big. He's got a bald head. He's got a beard and he's usually wearing, you know, if it's not a sweatshirt, it's like a short sleeve button down or a t-shirt or like it's, it's not, um, he's very rarely in a suit. Right. So I think if you took somebody who is out there wearing a suit all the time and said, you know, just start showing up in sweatpants, then it would look kind of slobby or like inauthentic or kind of fake. And I think that that's the reason that he has been so successful is that it's not like, oh, everyone can start wearing shorts and then they'll win statewide in Pennsylvania. That's not the takeaway. The takeaway is, you know, if you are somebody who has, you know, who is authentically connecting with people in your community, if you are somebody who has, you know, who is authentically connecting with people in your community, if you keep dressing that way, that authenticity will, like, you're, in some ways,

I think a lot of people read his refusal to start wearing a suit regularly as evidence that he is still connected with the people who first elected him. And I think in particular, you know, there's, I'll always remember, we had lunch in 2018 at Netroots Nation, which is this like very progressive conference of progressive activists. And that was, you know, shortly after Trump was elected, just ahead of the 2018 midterms. And at that point, the Democratic Party was basically like, we don't need white working class voters. They're too racist. White working class voters voted for Trump. You know, we can get by without them. If we just turbocharge Black turnout and turbocharge youth turnout and really get all the women in the suburbs, we'll be able to win these elections. And so like, who needs those people? And John Fetterman was like, sure, maybe, but why would you want to find out? You know? And, and I'll

never, and he, and his point, which I think is a really good one, which more Democrats should pay attention to, is he knows that he and the Democrats are never going to win, are never going to win white working class voters in Pennsylvania. They're never going to get 60 percent of white working class voters in Pennsylvania. They're not going to get 51 percent of white working class voters in Pennsylvania. But if they can get 20% or 30% instead of 10 or 15%, that's the difference between winning and losing in a state like Pennsylvania. So his, I think in some ways, the fact that he is this person with a level of authenticity that can reach some of the voters that feel like the Democratic Party isn't even trying to talk to them. His strategy and his hope is that that is going to help lift him over the top statewide in November. I think the last question speaks to your broader

work, totally unrelated to Fetterman, especially because of age. You wrote a book a few years back that I really enjoyed. Sagar and I did a realignment episode about it, and it's called The Ones We've Been Waiting For, Millennials, Young People, and Politics. Yeah, right there in the back. Weird time for, I think the book was very optimistic. And I feel as if every year since the book came out, you've been a little less optimistic. And I think Madison Cawthorn losing a few nights ago, I think Elise Stefanik, who's in no danger of losing, regardless of how you, to our bipartisan audience here, regardless of how you think about her, her rhetoric, those bits, she's not going to transcend anything. She is a hyper-partisan person for good or for ill. And a lot of the promise of, I think, the interviews you had with her back in 2020, were to this idea of, I'm this millennial, I have these ambitions, but they're going to be transcendent. So can you just give us like the epitaph, like the latest, the latest Charlotte update on whether we should be optimistic about younger people making a difference in the system? Yeah. I'm really glad that you mentioned Elise Stefanik because she's somebody, you know,

here's the thing. What is always a risk that you run when you write a book about people who are at the beginning of their careers, like I did, is that things change. You know, there's a reason that most people write like biographies once the person's kind of like retired. And my book isn't a biography, by the way, it's sort of like a snapshot in time. But what's interesting is when the book first came out, Stefanik was very, you know, in all of my interviews with her for the book, she was very light, she was very, she was kind of held up as an example of a young Republican who was, you know, very conservative, but also working to try to find some kind of bipartisan way forward on some of the issues that millennials really care about, like immigration, like climate change and college affordability. And literally,

in the span of time in between when the book came out and then when the paperback came out she morphed herself into an ultra maga type republican and she really lashed herself to donald trump so there's really a whole chapter in the book about how earlier in her career she was kind of like tiptoeing around trump and not really embracing him, but also not really denouncing him and just sort of trying to like twirl on the tightrope a little bit. And so the paperback is updated, significantly updated to reflect a lot of the way she's changed. But the thing to remember, I think, you know, particularly about Stefanik is that she's incredibly smart. She's incredibly ambitious and she's a Republican in New York state. So that means, why does that matter? It means that she's not going to be in the Senate from

New York and she's not going to be governor of New York because it's just such a deep blue state. I mean, it would be very, very difficult, a big long shot for a Republican to win statewide in a state this blue. So she knows that her ladder upwards in American politics is through the House of Representatives. And so it seems obvious to me as an observer and somebody who watches her closely and talks to a lot of people who are and have been close to her is that the calculation she made is that in order to advance within the Republican Party circa 2020, 2021, 2022, you have to be a Trump Republican. And listen, that bet paid off. She is now the highest

ranking Republican woman in America. She is the highest ranking millennial in Congress. She's got a straight, you know, if she is in congressional leadership, she, I think it would be a mistake to bet against her as the first Republican woman speaker of the House. So I just think for her, the bet paid off. I also think, you know, you asked about optimism. I am. One of the things that I find interesting is that almost all of the people in my book are still active in politics right now. So I had kind of expected that some of them would have fallen off or lost reelection. I mean, Max Rose lost reelection, but he's running again, so he might be back in Congress. But I do think that there, I am still optimistic in the long run. I think we've got a pretty thorny couple of years ahead, particularly when it comes to democracy. But if you were to, if I was, if somebody were to ask me to bet whether American

democracy would still exist in its current form 15 years from now, I would say yes. It's kind of depressing that that's even a question though. Yeah. And I think the note just to end on is I think the takeaway from once again, Cawthorn and Stefanik, regardless of what you think about their actual politics and you insert AOC here too, electing young people is not just going to in itself address that problem. Cause they just see a lot of this rhetoric, especially with the people who watch shows like breaking points to say like,

man, like the problem in our politics is that Nancy Pelosi is old. Chuck Schumer is old. Biden's old. Trump's old. There's lots of older people here. And so far track record wise, electing younger people,

if there's a tipping point, it's nowhere near there. So I think it's just important to be clear eyed about those structural problems that you really get into in the book and comes through in your writing. Yeah, no, I think you're completely right. And one thing I always feel that I have to clarify is the argument of my book is not that young people will save us. The argument of the book is that this generational shift, which is coming partly because your listeners are right, that our existing government is so, so old, that this coming generational shift is going to usher in a new type of political paradigm. And I'm not necessarily, I'm not necessarily saying

that's good. You know, more Madison Cawthorns in Congress is not good. So I think that there are some issues, some areas in which it could be good. I think, you know, for example, climate, utter climate denialism is probably going to like be on its way out when this new generation takes over. But I also think that Trumpism has so thoroughly infiltrated our politics, particularly on the right, that I think Trumpism is a stronger force than generational change. And both things are happening at the same time. So they kind of like play off each other. And certainly in 2018, they did play off each other a lot. And I think too, in 2020. But I'm still, you know, 2022 and 2024, I am still, you know, it's still unfolding. And I think that people who come through with really strong predictions about what's going to happen. I mean, listen, obviously Republicans are favored to win, to win the midterms this year. I'm not denying that. But

I also think there's a lot that we don't know about how these elections are going to play out, particularly, you know, Trump's had a kind of spotty track record with his endorsements, which I think is a surprise to a lot of people. So, yeah, I just think we have to wait and see. Very well said. Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us on Breaking Points. Thank you so much for having me, Marshall. Great to talk with you. Welcome back to Breaking Points. This is another special edition of Breaking Points The Intercept. We hope to do these weekly. I'm joined here by my colleagues now, Sarah Sirota and Ken Klippenstein. Welcome to you both here. Thanks for having us.

Good to be with you all. They each have important stories this week that I want to get into. Let's start with Ken. So, Ken, this week you scooped that there was a letter that was circulating among House Democrats. Maybe it's become Senate Democrats as well at this point, maybe a few Republicans. But the letter was directed to what, both the State Department and the FBI? Yes. Calling on the United States to launch an independent investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,

who is the Palestinian-American journalist who was killed recently in Jenin during an IDF raid. So what's the status of that letter? And where does it fit into the U.S.-Israel-Palestinian politics? How new is something like this? Well, this is really an extraordinary step and an important one, a necessary one by the Biden administration to take because it's basically saying we don't think that the Israeli investigation is going to be in any sense impartial or fair. And not just that, it's a politically and legally important step to take because Shireen Abdu-Akbar, she was a U.S. citizen. And that highlights how out of control the Israeli forces are when they do that. I mean, you know, a human being is a human being. It doesn't matter what nationality it is. But legally,

this means that the Biden administration has certain responsibilities that it has to attend to. So not only are they having an FBI investigation, they're having a State Department review of if any laws were broken when what witnesses say happened was Israeli forces fired on her and killed her. And so the letter was initially circulated by Andre Carson, who's one of the few Muslim members of Congress, and Representative Correa. Who's on it now? Like, has it been snowballing? Because I saw that some local reporters out in, say, the Bay Area were saying, were like

updating in real time. Okay, now Barbara Lee is on board. But not just limited to progressives. It seemed like a number, like there was a snowball effect going on. Yeah, that's what's interesting about it. When I was talking to sources in Congress about this, they were surprised at the prominence of some of the individuals who were not, you know, by any stretch of the imagination, squad members or progressives. And the fact that they signed onto this is an indication of how serious of a breach, not just of US-Israeli relations,

but just basic humanitarian norms, I think, that something like this was. When you talk to folks in the region, people in the Middle East, you mentioned this reporter, this was not a marginal reporter. This was the equivalent of, I don't know, some person that anyone would recognize from a cable news show or something. This is the Ken Klippenstein of Palestine. So, you know, and I think that there's a lot of—

No, but seriously, more than 20 years of experience in the field in Palestine, somebody who was really an icon of journalism over there, which Ken will be. I'm on my way there, yeah. But yes. Give me time. Yeah, just a tremendous reporter who most people who have watched Al Jazeera in English or are interested in that know immediately who they're talking about when you think about Shireen. But yeah, go ahead, sorry. Yeah, the prominence of this person who was killed and the fact that, you know, the

U.S. now is asserting or, you know, in this letter is asking the FBI and the State Department to, you know, assert some kind of response that is going to send a message to Israel that this is unacceptable. So my understanding is that it's garnered a lot more signatures than the two co-leads that I initially reported on. You mentioned this a moment ago, a Bay news outlet KQED reported that they'd gotten, I think, two or three more reps. And my understanding is that there are a bunch more, and they're going to keep circulating this, trying to gather as many signatures as they can

before they end up sending it. But I think it's going to be a very awkward, from the perspective of the Biden administration, ask, because this is something that is very clearly has broad support, I think, in, in, in at least among Democrats in Congress, and to see what the administration is going to do to a government that, you know, historically they have been very differential to. And so I think there's actually, there's good reason for the, for people to be skeptical of whether this investigation will be independent. I don't her. Sarah, if you remember, right after she was killed, the IDF and some of the Israeli government leaders put out a video showing a Palestinian gunman firing down an alleyway, saying like, it looks like Palestinians may have accidentally killed her. They had to roll that back when there was analysis done of it showing that actually, so they were shooting down an alley.

That was correct. It was happening around the same time. But at the other end of the alley were IDF forces who were also shooting back. But then from IDF, there was a direct line to where Akhle was. There's been Bellingcat, who is, you know, a lot of people just associate with, you know, having a pro-Western bias. But a lot of their work actually does cut against the other grain. They have sophisticated analysts. They came out and said, no, our forensic analysis of this suggests that it could only really have been the IDF. And so then at the funeral, you have Israeli police, you know, beating the mourners to the point where they almost completely dropped her casket. And so

from that perspective, you're like, how on earth could anybody trust this government then to do an impartial investigation into its culpability here? Right. And the Israeli government, you know, tried to argue that, well, the police, you know, targeted the mourners because they were respecting the family's wishes to have the funeral proceeded in a certain way. And obviously that's been met with quite a bit of skepticism. So, yeah. That's not how the family did not want it to unfold how it did. Yeah. I think anybody could watch the video and have a little skepticism about that argument. So, yeah, I think your point is completely made that a lot of people would have reason to question if the Israeli government could execute a truly unbiased investigation.

What was incredible, too, is if you look at just the Israeli government's response to when the police beat the protesters. Initially, they were asking the police, why are you doing this? At first, their claim was, well, they were waving around Palestinian flags and chanting nationalist mantras. And that was their stated reason for this. That's incredible. And it just, to any sort of audience watching that, I mean, it goes a long way towards explaining why there is this skepticism that exists towards what nature of the investigation is going to be. And then not just that, but the video they released, they actually selectively edited

video to make it look like someone was throwing rocks at the police and the idea being that this just provoked the police response. I can't remember who was able to find this out, but what it showed was that the video was sort of, I think it was sped up and omitted a part that made it look like a guy who was just waving his arms in frustration at how horrifying this scene was. They made it look like he was sort of charging at someone

or throwing something, and it wasn't the case at all. And so just again and again, these indications that there's not a good faith mindset on the part of the Israeli government when it comes to any sort of look into what happened here. And the effort to defend that is now bleeding into, and I want to talk about your story in a second, is now bleeding into Democratic primaries. Just on Tuesday, you had AIPAC combined with DMFI, Democratic Majority for Israel, using mostly Republican donor money to intervene in a bunch of different primaries, including two in North Carolina and one in Western Pennsylvania. They spent $3 million

against Summerlee in Pennsylvania, several million against Erica Smith and Nita Alam. With Nita Alam and Erica Smith, it was enough to get their opponents over the top. In Western Pennsylvania, they were able to take a 25-point gap and close it to triple digits right now. And Steve Irwin is suggesting that he's going to go for a recount. They were able to bring it that close, but we're still not able to get it over the top. They're now saying that what that says is that there's no support among the American people for the left's anti-Israel politics.

Now, the left argues that it's actually AIPAC that is long-term anti-Israel because the way that they are pushing them in such a hardline direction is leading them into this cul-de-sac of international isolation that is going to be detrimental long-term. But setting that aside, the ads were not about Israel in either North Carolina or Pennsylvania. It wasn't as if there was a public debate in Pittsburgh over a candidate who was pro-Israel and one who was anti-Israel and voters chose X, Y, or Z. What kind of ads they run instead? Yeah, I mean, this consistently, you know, is something that we've been seeing where the kinds of ads that they're running have really, there's no indication that there's anything about Israel

and politics. So it just goes to show that, you know, this sort of, as you were saying, repeatedly, we see like these bad faith attempts to involve themselves in American politics that, you know, are not actually about their long-term interests and don't necessarily help their long-term interests from what it appears that they are. But instead using sort of these right-wing donors to marginalize progressives often. And, you know, I think AIPAC or DMFI came out and said when Summer Lee emerged as the victor by just a slight majority, that that was an indicator that, you know, her brand of progressive politics is not popular in the Democratic Party, which, well, she emerged victorious. So I don't really see how that argument makes sense. That's how you know when there's this organic upswell

of support for Israel, when they have to dump millions into this and that none of the ads overtly mention the, you know, policy with respect to Israel. It's just risible on its face, I feel like. And so I also want to take a little time to talk about your story this week. So Sarah's beat for several years now has basically been the military-industrial complex. And so you have a fascinating piece that calls back to the debates that the White House press corps was having with the White House early in the early in the invasion saying where are the planes why are we not getting you know these fighter jets why are we not getting these planes okay we can't give them their planes give them the migs and we'll give the planes to Polish and the Polish could give the migs to the Ukrainian why aren't we setting up

no-fly zones why are we setting up no-fly zones? Why aren't we setting up no-fly zones? Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have made so clear that what they believe they need the most is more warplanes and fighter jets. So why is the U.S. believe they know better what Ukraine needs than what Ukrainian officials are saying they need the most? It sounds like, you know, we're pretty dug in on our position when it comes to the no-fly zone, when it comes to the MiGs, despite this growing call, bipartisan call in Congress to shift a little bit. To put it bluntly, is Zelensky wasting his time tomorrow asking for these things? President Zelensky is going to be speaking to Congress tomorrow. He's been pushing for fighter jets, a no-fly zone.

You're going to hear some of those same requests tomorrow as well. Has the administration's thinking shifted on that at all? They're not really calling for a no-fly zone. They're a NATO member. They share a border with Russia. How do we view their calls for a no-fly zone? And on President Zelensky's address tomorrow, of course, he is expected to ask for more assistance. As my colleague noted, a lot of the U.S. positions on that haven't changed, as you just said, when it comes to the no-fly zone. But on the aircraft specifically, the Pentagon said last week that Secretary Austin

said they do not support the transfer of additional fighter aircraft at this time. Is that still the United States' position? Would a strike in Poland on supplies or anything, really, automatically be met with a military forceful response, which would be a conversation amongst allies about how to respond? There are reports that a Russian drone met with a military forceful response, which would be a conversation amongst allies about how to respond.

There are reports that a Russian drone made its way into Polish airspace before going back to Ukraine and being shot down. Does a drone into Poland count? Former ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Ivanovich, has been quite outspoken recently. And she said, you need to mitigate mitigate risk but it's also true that not taking greater action comes with a risk as well because Putin is a bully and he only understands strength. Is the president showing enough strength against Putin? If Putin were to use chemical weapons would it change the president's thinking

when it comes to these MiGs taking the no-fly zone off the table but at least on this issue? If you prepare can you give us any more details about what that threat means of severe consequences? The president obviously made the same threat last week. Is that purely economic consequences, or would there potentially be a military cut? The answer from the White House was constantly, we don't want American forces and Russian forces in direct combat because that could lead to nuclear war. That feels like a pretty uncontroversial statement. You even had Marco Rubio coming out and endorsing this. Marco Rubio.

No flies. And that line is somewhat being held. But so you have a piece this week about a push by the military industrial complex with the support of some elements of our political structure to say, okay, we can't do planes, we can't do fighter jets, we can't do MIGs. What about these things that are basically fighter jets, but they're unmanned? Right. So what are these Reaper drones? Right. So Reaper drones, I mean, from the perspective of the military industrial complex and the people that are very much in favor of sending fighter jets, they effectively can function very similarly. They can do mass surveillance. They can carry very intense air-to-ground weapons.

And so if we can't get manned fighter jets to Ukraine, maybe we can try to get unmanned fighter jets. How big are these things? Yeah. I mean, they're much bigger than the switchblade drones, the handheld backpack drones that we've sent, these kamikaze drones that have gained quite a bit of fame for being sent to Ukraine. I mean, this is a complete— We're talking big missiles and like the whole thing. Oh, yeah. Hellfire. sent to Ukraine. I mean, this is a complete... We're talking big missiles and like the whole thing.

They carry Hellfire missiles, which the U.S. has notoriously used, carried by MQ-9 Reapers to target or indiscriminately target people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and they've been found to harm civilians. And now there's this effort to get them to Ukraine. And this would be a significant step up in the kinds of weapons that the U.S. has already sent and could be very provocative from the perspective of the Russians and potentially lead to that escalation

that the Biden administration has been trying to avoid. And so there's no American pilot in the cockpit. It's an unmanned drone, obviously. But who would man these or woman these? Yeah. So the idea that's been put forth is that Ukrainian pilots could pilot these drones. Like be trained to remotely? Yes. Is that realistic? So, you know, in the U.S., Air Force pilots have to have at least a year of training before they can fly Reapers. But General Atomics has said, well, we can expedite the training. They're the ones who make the Reapers.

Look how motivated the Ukrainian forces have proved to be so far in the war. We can train them on a much faster timeline. So lazy Americans, you need a year, but a motivated Ukrainian pilot. Sure. How long do they say? Weeks? I'm not sure that there's been a specific timeline, but I was speaking with a general atomic spokesman who said, well, before the State Department moves forward and approves this while we're still in the negotiation phase, we could start training Ukrainian pilots now, which would be fairly unprecedented also for the way that these kinds of deals move forward. So, you know, there's certainly this effort. We've seen the press, you know, kind of beckon the administration.

Are you going to move forward and do this. We've seen several think tankers that are backed by General Atomics, the maker of the Reaper, argue in the media that the U.S. should be sending MQ-9s. We had Adam Kinzinger and a few other Democrat lawmakers send letter to the Secretary of Defense asking, well, what kind of timeline could we train the Ukrainian pilots on? Then the business side here is fascinating because, as you describe in your story, this company is bit on the rocks, which to me is pathetic. Like, how are you a weapons maker in the United States and you're not turning a profit? Like, come on.

And the clowns from War Dogs managed to get themselves rich. So this is their prized baby. How much is one of these things? You said $300 million or something? Oh, well, so one individual aircraft can go for about $30, at least $30 million. $30 million.

But then there's also all of the maintenance and operational support and all of the structure that goes with it Which adds exponentially on to it when you're at a Toyota dealer Actually work so these are Incredibly expensive which just goes to show that if we if the US were to approve a sale or a leasing agreement with the Ukrainians, I mean, the U.S. government would basically have to be involved in funding this. So, yeah, so General Atomics has had frustration over the years because the U.S. has a very strict export policy about who—

We're not letting just anybody buy these. We're not just letting anyone buy MQ-9 Reapers. I mean, essentially up until the Trump administration, it was understood only NATO allies could have these because they're dangerous weapons. They can carry very sophisticated, very dangerous missiles and be used in mass surveillance. And so during the Trump administration, as part of its effort to broaden U.S. arms sales abroad, they eased this export policy. Who started getting them? So the UAE was approved, which is... Sure, they'll act responsibly. Which is obviously a very big step up. Taiwan, which is a big step up.

And so, you know, General Atomics very much is in favor of continuing to allow more and more countries to access. Naturally. Naturally, you know. More customers. Sure. So, you know, they see Lockheed Martin making a ton of money selling their fighter jets to all different countries abroad. Why shouldn't they have the ability? Right. And so there's this big fight going on on the Hill and in the administration, this big lobbying effort to ease export policy to allow these exports to occur.

So this question about whether this effort to allow the Ukrainians to have access to the MQ-9s is occurring within this broader effort to ease export policy. Which feels inevitable. The idea that you're going to create these massively expensive weapon systems and then you're going to restrict who you're going to sell them to. Obviously you should, but there's just so much pressure to push against that. And Ken, how does this fit into

the reporting that you've done on the arms sales and Middle East politics. Yeah, so my reporting, I focus on what's called the ISR. It stands for, it's like the reconnaissance. Intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. Yeah, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. It's this fleet of aircraft from the AWACS to all sorts of different things they use to, it's pretty amazing what their capabilities are.

They can peer deep inside of Ukraine from outside of the border. The idea being that, you know, we're not going to go in Ukraine to avoid becoming labeled a belligerent, but we're going to work from outside of it and then pass intelligence onto the Ukrainians that they're able to gather. And so these, it's a sort of presence that Biden has had since not even day one, since before day one, they've been operating at the border, collecting intelligence, passing things. One way they were accurately able to say, hey, there's 125,000 Russian troops on the border here. They weren't guessing. Exactly. And if you look at the earnings calls for some of these corporations like Lockheed, this is an area of focus for them that they identified as a growth sector going forward.

Because as Sarah said earlier, not just are you deploying these things, but you need to maintain them, which can be very expensive. The maintenance contracts are often the bigger source of revenue than even the initial sale. Exactly. And that's something I didn't realize

until investigating this kind of thing, just how much money is involved in these things on a sustained basis, not even just a one-off thing. And if you look at Northern Virginia and the suburbs of Maryland, like you see where that money has stayed. Like you can just map kind of housing prices and the development out there.

Great reporting, both of you, Sarah Sirota, Kenneth Klippenstein. And for everybody watching, thanks for watching Breaking Points. And also I think this is funded, I think you can ask Sagar, he knows all the details, by the people who donate to you know contribute to breaking points uh so thank you for doing that if you if you want to support our journalism you can go to theintercept.com

and it won't be hard to find how to donate there we badger people relentlessly on the site I think the actual site is theintercept.com slash give. As soon as you go to our site, we're like, please help us. We were funded years ago, 2014 by a billionaire, but he's not around forever. And you don't necessarily want to always be funded by a billionaire. Yeah. And so, because it takes away your, your ability to be independent and independent media is extremely important. So thank you guys again for joining us, and thank you guys for watching. Hey guys, we're excited to partner with upcoming YouTuber James Lee of 5149. He's going to explain culture, politics,

anything else that needs explaining, and we're really excited about it. Yep, here is his latest effort. Let's get to it. Hey there, my name's James Lee. Welcome to another segment of 5149 on breaking points. Now, I am sure that many of you at this point who are well in tune with politics are aware of the recent controversial revelations surrounding the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the umbrella fundraising organization for the BLM movement. Black Lives Matter under more scrutiny over how it's spending donors money as a new report claims Black Lives Matter leaders use six million dollars in donations to buy a massive,

beautiful California mansion. Yes, Steve, living like the rich and famous. You know, Steve, I'll be very honest with you. Ninety million. They basically use black Americans for profit. Steve, ever since the George Floyd death, Black Lives Matter has profited from the George Floyd death. What have they done for the black community? Where are the community centers? Where is the improvement in education? They use this money for personal gain. I think for many conservatives, this news served to vindicate their belief that BLM has always been a deeply flawed, corrupt movement. But the truth, I think, is much more complicated than that. As documented by journalist Sean Campbell in his expose about the BLM Global Network Foundation's shady financial dealings in New York Magazine.

BLM has become a sort of catch-all term for the current civil rights movement, and the BLM Global Network Foundation has been the most visible organization in the broader BLM movement, with the organization shown to be marketing, branding, and fundraising experts. But their actual on-the-ground contributions have been I think much more limited and we don't really know for sure how they are spending their money. Now I think the rise and fall of this organization, the BLM Global Network Foundation, is noteworthy not just because of its attachment to the largest protest movement in American history, but also because it reveals a broader set of issues plaguing the nonprofit sector and its relationship with activism,

with social and economic progress. And that's what I want to dive into today, which is the dark side of charities and nonprofits, with the goal that we'll all come away with a better understanding of how nonprofits can be used for questionable aims and what scrutiny you should apply to them when you read about nonprofits in the news or consider donating to one of these groups. Well, Dana, every year you file a tax return, right? Well, for a nonprofit like BLM, that's IRS Form 990. It's basic. It's a bare minimum that states require when you raise public money. So listen to what founder and BLM's longtime executive director said Friday about the 990 and this controversy about how the charity has spent its money.

I actually did not know what 990s were before all of this happened. The accountant handled that like I don't know what that is. It is such a trip now to hear the word, the term 990s. I'm like, it's like triggering. Not a great look. This being triggered by a disclosure form that all nonprofits must fill out. I mean, she was, after all, the head of a multi-million dollar foundation. But in my view, rather than it being an indictment on the BLM movement itself, as I think the right-wing media like to portray it, and it's certainly not an accident that outlets like Fox News chooses to cover a story like this from mostly a culture war perspective intended to sow further division in this country, we also shouldn't ignore the broader issue, which is the perpetuation of a legal and regulatory

environment in which an organization like the BLM Global Network Foundation could thrive despite repeated instances of financial impropriety and the refusal of most of the mainstream media to apply a level of scrutiny that an organization of this size should most certainly warrant. The fact is, nonprofits are some of the nation's largest, most powerful organizations. Hospitals, foundations, universities, and churches. In the U.S., there are over 1.5 million nonprofit organizations generating over 2.6 trillion dollars in annual revenue. And although most like to cloak themselves under this aura of charity or altruism, they, like any other organization or institution,

are susceptible to corruption, waste, and abuse. But unfortunately, generally speaking, there is a lack of scrutiny in the nonprofit sector, all the way from the approval process to the regulatory and enforcement environment. Stanford professor Robert Reich in his paper, Anything Goes, Approval of Nonprofit Status by the IRS, dissected the ethics of present-day philanthropy and charity and found the IRS approval process for 501c3 public charities, which is the official legal classification of what we typically refer to as nonprofits, extremely easy. Referencing the chart you see on your screen, Reich found that the IRS approves more than 50,000 applications for 501c3 status every year and rejects only a very, very small number of applicants. Quote, obtaining recognition by the IRS as a public charity is an

embarrassingly easy thing to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that when it comes to oversight of the application process to become a public charity, nearly anything goes. So getting approved as a nonprofit in the U.S. is effectively a rubber stamp. And once a charity is set up through the IRS, it is ultimately up to each state's attorney general's office to prosecute misconduct. And like pretty much every other government agency in the United States, attorney general's offices are oftentimes resource constrained and have limited oversight and enforcement capabilities, with only the most obvious and egregious cases ever being brought to court. For example, it took the California State Attorney General's Office over two years of BLM Global Network Foundation not filing financial disclosures,

the absolute bare minimum for a nonprofit, for them to serve a delinquency notice. There's also just very little media effort dedicated to watching the nonprofit sector, and if they are, it's done to serve partisan interests. Just one example, but the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Trump Foundation, basically had a beat devoted to investigating Trump's financial mismanagement and potential misdeeds from the time of his first presidential campaign through the remainder of his presidency. The problem I see, though, with sort of this activist or activist mindset masquerading around as journalism is that there will undoubtedly be asymmetric focus on certain organizations

based on certain politically driven motivations. And so otherwise good reporting on high profile nonprofits are oftentimes just shrouded in political theater. Headlines like BLM's Patrice Cullors slams racist report on organization buying $6 million SoCal mansion. You know, right-wing organizations will have no issues amplifying the misdeeds of BLM while glossing over the Trump organization's fraudulent practices, while the more liberal news outlets will do the exact opposite. And I think this problem will only get worse as news outlets become increasingly more aligned with certain ideologies or rely on the donations and ownership of the billionaire class. This I'll get into more later. But in the cases of BLM and Trump, there was a certain political will to

put resources behind exposing them. But I wonder, and maybe we should all kind of wonder, what about the cases of nonprofit misconduct where there isn't political will, or it would be wholly inconvenient to a certain powerful organization or individual to investigate. How much misconduct actually exists in the nonprofit sector? The truth is, we don't really know. Based on a research paper documenting fraud and corruption in U.S. nonprofit entities, quote, Empirical research on fraud in the for-profit sector is well-developed, aided by the availability of centrally compiled U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission data.

In comparison, research on nonprofit fraud has been limited by a lack of readily available centrally compiled data, leading researchers to rely on survey data or to undertake exploratory studies that identified fraud cases during a specific period. The reality is that while nonprofits often receive less scrutiny from the government, the media, and the general public, the sector as a whole is actually filled with many potential avenues for misconduct and ripe with perverse incentives that encourage unsavory behaviors. This, to me, is a huge blind spot in most discussions about nonprofits. There's this idea of the non-profit industrial complex popularized by a book called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. This idea that because the non-profit industry is so lucrative, like we discussed before, over 2.6 trillion dollars in annual revenue,

there will undoubtedly be, as one scholar defined it, quote, a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance To put it in simpler terms, the nonprofit sector can and will be used by wealthy, powerful interests to surveil and even co-opt nascent social movements that threaten their wealth and power. So the nonprofit industrial complex does not exist to create fundamental change, but rather exists to protect its own status and that of its patrons, which makes it possible for the ruling class to not only contain a revolution, but to shut it down altogether.

For example, in the case of Black Lives Matter, despite huge amounts of grassroots support and engagement, nearly every corporation in America was able to co-opt the BLM slogan without most of them enacting any kind of fundamental changes to their business practices, even in cases where said corporations employed an exploited, disproportionately black and brown workforce. I'm looking at you, Amazon. When BLM first published their website back in 2015, the co-founders described themselves as, quote, trained Marxists. But by 2021, they were doing Zoom events sponsored by global capitalist boot brand UGG.

So looking at the story of the BLM Global Network Foundation, it's hard not to assume some significant character flaws of its leaders, but it's also not hard to imagine that all the money and attention from corporate interests did have some effect on their tactics as well. Philosopher Mary Harrington wrote recently in Unheard Magazine, quote, people in glass houses are famously advised not to throw stones. And as the progressive worldview has become more monolithically elite in class terms, it's also lost its antagonism to big business. leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement look very different from the champagne-sipping activist leaders of the modern BLM-era civil rights movement, right? Just something I read recently, Justin Hansford, a Howard University professor, joked that

having an organization called the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation would be akin to having a group in the 1960s call themselves Civil Rights Inc. Essentially, everything today has been corporatized. The activist movements used to be so much more skeptical of the nonprofit sector because of its obvious ties to money and power, but that distress has seemed to all but disappear. Quote, another example is Planned Parenthood's Action Fund, which reinforces and perpetuates the idea

that the solution to large-scale political problems is donating to an organization that then hires a lobbyist, as opposed to, say, building a mass movement capable of occupying Congress or otherwise disrupting business as usual until its demands are met. We seem to have adopted a kind of leave-it-up-to-experts mentality. usual until its demands are met. We seem to have adopted a kind of leave it up to experts

mentality. There's a nonprofit today for basically every cause, BLM, Planned Parenthood, or the many Ukraine relief funds that have recently popped up. And for the most part, we just kind of assume that they all know what they're doing and have the best interests of those they claim to serve in mind. So for most socially conscious folks who want to feel like they are contributing positively to society but are also busy living their own lives, the logical conclusion is to just give money to a non-profit and let them handle it. But the question is, can the interests of the non-profit industrial complex with its ties to mega foundations funded by corporations and the ultra wealthy actually align to the interests of the people who they claim to serve? altruistic or humanitarian reasons? Or do these foundations serve ulterior purposes such as protecting the reputations and projecting the power of the people who run them? And perhaps

no other foundation raises this question more than that of the world's largest charitable foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation. The world is on the brink of a great scientific achievement. A COVID-19 vaccine will likely be ready by early next year. In fact, we'll probably have more than one vaccine ready. These vaccines will allow us to save millions of lives. They'll also have another enormous benefit. They'll allow us to develop a plan for the world to globally eliminate COVID-19. That was Bill Gates from September of 2020 speaking at an event hosted by the WHO called Accelerating the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

But my question and the question we should all be asking, is how did Bill Gates, how did a billionaire in Seattle gain so much power over global public health? In an article titled with the exact same question, Slate reporter Mary Harris interviewed journalist Tim Schwab, who explains, all in all, the Gates Foundation spent $1.8 billion on global public health in 2020 alone. But that meant there were few checks or balances on what Gates-funded groups were up to. If you look across global health, they're funding everybody. Nobody is more than one degree removed from the Gates Foundation. So it's really difficult to avoid the foundation's money.

And that's also the case for journalists. If you're a journalist writing about global health, you might end up getting a fellowship or grant to do reporting that's funded by the Gates Foundation. So it's really hard to overstate how much influence that gives the foundation. I think the Gates Foundation has undoubtedly fundamentally altered the image of Bill Gates, right? In the past, viewed as a kind of a monopolistic robber baron when he began building his riches at Microsoft, Gates is now seen today as this magnanimous humanitarian by a lot of folks because he has bought that image through massive investments funneled through his foundation. But I think to no one's surprise,

consistently, the Gates Foundation has advocated for this kind of top-down, arguably neocolonial interventionist policies where the so-called experts from the developed world go into the developing world to once again, quote-unquote, solve their problems. Schwab continues, quote, the Gates Foundation is a very top-down technocratic enterprise where Bill Gates sees himself as this really smart guy with these innovative ideas and technology. And he surrounds himself with this elite cadre of highly educated experts. And it's his view that from this person, Seattle, they can devise solutions to fix all the problems of the global poor. And that's a very different approach than going out into a poor nation or a

poor community and talking to people and asking them what they need and what they want. I've talked about the power of capital in my previous breaking point segment, and I think it's very applicable here. This idea that in modern America, capital and the interest of capital have risen above the American nation and political authority is unable to check the power of capital. Through the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has successfully inserted himself at the top of this kind of complex philanthropic empire that allows him to have a major impact on policymaking regarding numerous pressing global issues, all while getting significant tax breaks from the U.S. government. You know, Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world.

The idea that he's giving away all of his money is just not true. In fact, he's getting richer and richer every year. So should this really be considered charity? I think my point is that there should be more scrutiny of the nonprofit sector from all angles. The government needs to do more to ensure effective oversight and enforcement. The media should do more to dedicate more resources into investigating the nonprofit sector beyond just the whims of dredging up fodder for political theater or for partisan interests.

And I think we can do more to follow the money when it comes to the nonprofit sector. Who is leading these groups? What might be their ulterior motives? How is my donation money being spent? But perhaps more important, it may behoove us to examine and think about why activism in America today is mostly mediated through the nonprofit industrial complex and how the proliferation of nonprofits and activism has likely shifted and conflated America's values and beliefs when it comes to what we imagine good activism to be. That is all from me this time. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion

about the dark side of the nonprofit industrial complex. If you'd like to know more about this topic and many others, please check out my channel, 5149 with James Lee on YouTube, where I release weekly videos about topics relating to the intersection of business, politics, and society. The link will be in the description below. And of course, subscribe to Breaking Points. Thank you so much for your time today. Hi, I'm Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People. And this is the art of class war on breaking points. Today, we're going to do something a little different from the last two segments that we published here on breaking points.

But I assure you the subject matter is no less important. I want to give everyone a heads up right at the top that we will be touching on issues and stories today that deal with different forms of abuse, discrimination, harassment, and even suicide. And I want to encourage every viewer and listener to please use the links we've included in the description for this video if you or someone you know is experiencing the kind of distress or is involved in the kind of attacks that we'll be talking about today. And even if you yourself have managed to avoid experiencing these things firsthand, I would also encourage you to check out those links as well, because chances are you know someone who has not been as fortunate,

but you can still do something to help. Because what we are talking about today has been described repeatedly by specialists, labor leaders, and workers' rights advocates as an epidemic, even if we don't treat it as such. We're talking today about workplace bullying. First, we need to define our terms. We're going to return to the term bullying itself by the end of this segment, but for now I am asking you to try as hard as you can to set aside whatever prejudices or preconceptions you have about this word. And we all have them. Obviously, we tend to associate the term bullying with the schoolyard,

not because that's the only place that bullying happens, mind you, but because that's where many of us first encounter, engage in, or have to fight off bullying ourselves. But bullying does not magically disappear when you graduate from school, and it has never, ever been a problem that only afflicts school-aged kids and young adults. Anywhere there is a real or perceived imbalance of power that can be leveraged by one or more people over another, the potential for bullying exists. And that very much includes the workplace. Now there is no one rigidly defined and unanimously accepted definition of workplace bullying and

part of that has to do with the ways that bullying is circumstantially and legally differentiated from other forms of targeted harassment. In fact, while there are some stronger and broader laws in particular states, there is currently no federal standard defining, let alone outlawing, workplace bullying if the case does not involve harassment or discrimination of a member of a protected status group based on their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. Protections against such targeted harassment or discrimination are obviously important, but the sad fact is they do not protect the vast majority of victims of workplace bullying,

including members of those protected status groups who are being bullied at work but can't prove that they're being singled out because of their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. So clearly, we need to expand our understanding of what a hostile work environment looks like and what protections working people need and deserve. Again, we don't have a unanimously accepted and used definition of workplace bullying, but there are many common features in the various definitions. In the introduction to her book, Surviving Bullies, Queen Bees, and Psychopaths in the Workplace, Patricia G. Barnes writes, fired, or forced to quit. Bullying is an intentional abuse of power, usually by a boss, sometimes by a group of mobbing co-workers. End quote.

Now, another often cited definition comes from the Workplace Bullying Institute, which is one of the sources that we link to in the show notes. Founded 25 years ago by Drs. Ruth and Gary Namy, the Workplace Bullying Institute is an invaluable resource that everyone should know and support. When it comes to workplace bullying, as noted on their website, the Institute remains, quote, the only U.S. organization that aids individuals, educates the public and professionals, conducts national scientific surveys and research, provides training for unions and systemic solutions like the Healthy Workplace System

for organizations and employers, and advocates for legislation like the Healthy Workplace Bill." On their website, the Workplace Bullying Institute defines workplace bullying as, quote, repeated, harmful mistreatment of an employee by one or more employees. It is abusive conduct that takes the form of verbal abuse, physical and nonverbal behaviors End quote. Now, if you're like me, then you might hear a definition like this and think, well, that can't be right. Because that describes shit that I've seen or experienced or even participated in at most of the jobs that I've had. Okay, then that means we have two paths that we can choose to take here.

Either, as we are so often encouraged to do, we can accept this as simply the way things are. That this is the best we can do and these types of issues are just a fact of working life. That it's not actually that bad and that people need to just get over it, get tough, and move on. Or if this definition of workplace bullying describes circumstances that most of us have witnessed or experienced in different jobs that we've had, then we can sit down together and acknowledge that we've got a really big problem on our hands. And that is certainly the conclusion to draw from a landmark 2021 survey, which was commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute and conducted by Zogby Analytics. The survey of 1,215 adult Americans, including a subset of 787 employed Americans, was calibrated to be demographically representative of the U.S. population writ large

in terms of factors like race, gender, age, and region. The results show what the Workplace Bullying Institute describes as an epidemic that can no longer be denied, with 49% of adult Americans being affected in some way by workplace bullying, which includes those who have experienced it, those who have witnessed it, and those who have instigated it. According to the survey, 30% of adult Americans say they are currently being bullied or have experienced bullying at work. And that number jumps up to 39% for the currently employed Americans who were surveyed. 34% of the adult population say they are unaware that workplace bullying is an issue. 23% say they are aware but have no experience with it.

For employed Americans, though, 61% are affected by workplace bullying. And 73% are aware of the problem. That's not a small, insignificant problem. That's a lot of the working population. And the results also show that instances of bullying have actually increased in recent years with the expansion of remote work. Even back in 2003, an article for the British Medical Journal or BMJ by Brian R. McAvoy and John Murtaugh describes workplace bullying as, quote, a silent epidemic. As they write, quote, a deadly combination of economic rationalism, increasing competition, downsizing, and the current fashion for tough, dynamic, macho management styles have created a culture Now, what's especially and heartbreakingly telling

about the silent part of this epidemic is that on one side, it's an enforced silence because victims are bullied into keeping their mouths shut out of fear of more retaliation for speaking out. On the other side, this epidemic has been quietly boiling people alive in their own microcosmic hells because of the cultural stigma that pushes us to think that we are somehow weak or less worthy for bringing it up. That people will see us differently or think less of us. That we should not complain and just deal with it.

For so many people, for so many years, even to this day, that stigma has made us collectively unwilling to acknowledge workplace bullying when it's happening to others or ourselves, even when it's happening all around us. And yet, for being such a prevalent problem, it wasn't really until the early 90s that we developed a popularly accepted language for discussing the scourge of workplace bullying. While it was by no means the first or only study to address the subject, Andrea Adams's 1992 book Bullying at, certainly became one of the most canonical. And the response to the testimonies and descriptions of workplace bullying in Adams's book was enormous for the time.

In the days before social media, which has, you know, made our mass reactions to stuff way more instantaneous and visible. Many readers saw and heard in those testimonies not some distant clinical condition or depictions of exceptional horrors that they could never imagine happening to or near them. Instead, what they saw was as brutal and shocking as it was unnervingly familiar. Many saw, perhaps for the first time, that they were not alone in experiencing or witnessing what others were describing in Adams's book. And they saw it in human terms, through the stories of regular people like them. And those stories made their own pains and fears and resentments more real, less contained to their own heads, more connected to the struggle of others. And their once quiet individual pain got louder as part of a collective chorus demanding recognition of the problem, followed by real solutions.

And we still have a long way to go to make real progress there. That's what I hope to do with the remaining time that we have. I want to show you the human stakes here. Or rather, I don't want to suggest we don't already know what and who is at stake here. But I think it's safe to say that we slip into this state of resignation where we get comfortable with putting it out of sight as much as possible.

And that's understandable. It hurts to look at this stuff. But the problem is getting worse, and we can't ignore it. We can't ignore the fact that increasingly more of us are getting viciously ground down and abused in toxic and unsafe work environments. But here's the thing, this is a fixable problem. If we don't look away from the rampant pain inflicted by workplace bullying, if we stop judging and start looking out for one another, if we have each other's bullying, if we stop judging and start looking out for one another,

if we have each other's backs, if we raise our voices and fight for change together, we can fix this. If you are able, I want to ask you to join me in looking head-on at this problem and the disastrous and even deadly impacts it can have for victims. One of the first things to understand is that bullying can happen anywhere to anyone, even in professional sports leagues with the toughest guys in the world. Take the high-profile case from a few years ago of professional offensive lineman Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin when they were both playing for the NFL's Miami Dolphins. The sports world was shocked when an investigative report released by the NFL showed that Martin was subjected to a pattern of harassment on the team at the hands of Incognito and fellow linemen John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, including racial slurs, horrifically graphic sexual threats and taunts about Martin's mother and sister, and incessant hazing that went well

beyond the standard locker room joshing. While Martin was the primary target, the report also detailed routine bullying of another player and even an assistant trainer with the team. Now, in our culture, professional athletes like Incognito and Martin really exist and appear to us as so superhumanly different that they almost become less human to us. We see them as invincible, both physically and mentally. No matter how much heckling online or in person gets hurled their way as they brutalize their bodies for our entertainment week in, week out. But like many of us, they too can suffer from emotional and physical distress from a pattern of workplace harassment, just like Jonathan Martin did in Miami. Martin left the team in October of 2013

and checked into a psychiatric facility. He officially retired from the NFL in 2015 and made headlines in the following years for social media posts that showed he was still dealing with severe ailments to his mental health. In a 2021 interview with New York Times, Martin said that therapy and medication have helped control his depression, anxiety, and mood swings, but that he had made the decision to donate his brain to CTE research in the future to determine if head trauma contributed to the mental health struggles that he has lived with. Martin's case was shocking for many, but the fact that it got so much media attention forced a lot of us to recognize

that there was perhaps a lot that we didn't know about the problem of workplace bullying, what it can look like, the people it can affect, and how severe those effects can be. Sadly, most instances of workplace bullying don't get that kind of attention. And that has certainly been the case, and that has certainly been true in the case of Vivian Barrett. Vivian Barrett began working as a library technician in the Albin O'Koon Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2009. It was a good job, and Vivian was rightly proud of herself to have it. As her parents, Beth and Jack Sweeney, told reporters for UMBC's student newspaper, The Retriever, quote, as Vivian found the library and a place to work, she got excited

about that. Finding the library was really healthy for her and good for her, end quote. A student at UMBC told reporters that Barrett was, quote, the first trans woman with a career that I ever met, end quote. And they expressed that they really wanted to get to know her better. Unfortunately, tragically, they were not able to do that. Everything changed in the fall of 2015 when the library hired a circulation manager by the name of Paula Langley, who became Barrett's supervisor. According to a trove of formal grievance filings, co-worker testimonies, complaints filed with the university by Vivian, and posts on her social media, all of which were reviewed by the editorial team of the student newspaper, who deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their reporting,

Barrett's situation at work deteriorated quickly after her new manager came on. As Morgan Casey, Grace Reeb, and Isabel Taylor write, quote, Throughout the following year, Barrett expressed feeling discriminated against by Langley. Multiple former staff members report that Langley called Barrett by her dead name, the name of a transgender person, the name a transgender person is assigned at birth, but no longer uses after they transition, over the intercom at the library and regularly misgendered her in day-to-day activities. Quote, Langley didn't like the fact that Vivian transitioned.

She didn't agree with that, said Perry Alexander, former AOK Library evening and weekend shift supervisor in a recent interview with The Retriever. Langley did everything in her power to clean out Barrett's position, he said. Beyond misgendering and deadnaming Barrett, former AOK library employees stated that Langley actively removed responsibilities from Barrett and would not promote her. Quote, towards the end of her career, Barrett and I had talks about how she believed Paula thought she was stupid and how she made her feel useless and talked about how she didn't respect

her being transgender, said Alexander in a 2019 personal statement. Having worked at the AOK library for 40 years before retiring in 2021, he knew the library and its staff well, including Barrett. In his 2019 statement, Alexander stated Barrett felt, quote, bullied and discriminated against by Paula and had expressed this to the library administration and campus officials, end quote. Vivian's cries for help were not heeded. She worked to build a discrimination case against Langley, all while desperately pushing to be transferred to the gallery department where she hoped she could find safe harbor. The transfer didn't happen. After hearing that she would not be able to transfer departments, Vivian posted a status update on her personal Facebook on October 12, 2016, which read in part, quote, I have to continue to suffer under a psychotic

manager who hates me for no apparent reason, but it's definitely not discrimination, according to the higher ups, end quote. Later that same night, Vivian posted another status update. It was a suicide note. She was found dead later that night. The university did eventually investigate complaints made by Barrett and other library employees who filed grievances against Langley, even hiring an outside law firm to objectively assess the alleged abuses. The conclusion of their assessment was, quote, that the supervisor had not engaged in intentional or malicious conduct toward Vivian, nor had she discriminated against Vivian based on her transgender identity, end quote. Students on campus and members of the Justice for Viv Coalition have questioned the accuracy of the university's commission investigation, and they have renewed calls for transparency and accountability. Bullying can take many forms, and again, I stress that it can happen anywhere, to anyone,

if the conditions are right. In a recent interview that I did at The Real News, for instance, I spoke with John Hogsett, an iron worker and one of a number of former employees at G&D Integrated who was laid off in a suspected act of retaliation by the company after workers voted to unionize. An infuriating story that was recently, thankfully, covered here at Breaking Points. In September of last year, John and a super majority of his coworkers at GND Integrated, which is a transportation, logistics, warehousing, and supply chain services company in central Illinois, marched on their boss together to demand recognition of their union. Their demands were not met.

Then, workers filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board and voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing with the Iron Workers Union in October. And as John details in our interview, given the dangerous and high-stakes nature of the work that he and his co-workers did at GND. Their main concern in fighting to unionize was workplace safety. Take a listen. Us guys, we stick together. We look out for each other. That's the strongest bunch of guys I've ever worked with.

And for something to, for like the safety issues that we had, it would be hell to have somebody die over that. And they wouldn't, they wouldn't even look at it. They wouldn't, they didn't care and that was the main thing for us going union and

I mean a lot of us when I worked at Caterpillar there was a lot of us too that stuck together but not not like the guys we had here and

that's that's the main thing for union right there, when people stick together like that. You can hear in John's voice and you can see in his eyes how much that shop floor brotherhood means to him and his co-workers. They looked out for each other. They stuck together. They trusted each other. They stuck together. They trusted each other. And they didn't want to see anyone get hurt and not be able to go home to their families. But management contemptuously waved away their concerns, and their rights for that matter.

Almost immediately after they made their desire for a union known, workers at GND Integrated reported retaliation from the company, including surveillance, interrogation, and threats of closing down the shop in response to the union drive, which is illegal. Since that time, workers and union representatives have filed a staggering number of unfair labor practice charges against the company. At the time of our interview, that number was around 150. And GND has so far denied any wrongdoing on its part. But here's the thing. Retaliation also took the form of what I would call bullying from management. Just listen to John here talk about the ways

that a certain manager would openly discipline workers by weaponizing personal information and throwing it out like chum to everyone else on the shop floor in an effort to isolate and alienate people from one another. I know because they told me when I had a little trouble sometime, I was drinking a lot and I missed a couple of days of work, whatever. But he was like, well, he ain't going to be able

to drink like that if he ain't working here. You know, it's just, he goes out there and, you know, sly ways of saying personal stuff to people. And then, just like with Evan and all them, about his medical stuff and all that. It's just sly ways of saying stuff about people's

personal stuff that nobody needs to know about. And then he's just, he's like a really vindictive type of guy. He's, if he, I don't know how to say it. If he's got a little thing for you, he'll start putting like little rumors out and stuff like that and then get

people talking and you know he'll say something like uh he told me this about you and then it gets you know a little fights going just stupid yeah there's no business stirring shit up yeah Yeah, no management should be like that. Iron worker organizer Vince DiDonato also told me that workers at GND tried to go to HR with their concerns. And when they did, they were told that what they said would be in confidence. Then, later that same day, the manager was out on the floor giving people shit for what they said to HR supposedly in confidence. Again, I'm saying this for myself. This may not be the word that John or many others would use, but I would call that bullying. And maybe that word just has taken on too much cultural baggage for us to use it, you know, to properly communicate the

seriousness of what we're talking about here. Because what we're ultimately talking about with these cases is abuse. And it's affecting a lot of us. We're talking about people, a lot of people, people like you and me, being abused at work every day, every shift, even for years without recourse. And, you know, that bullying can be done for many different reasons. But the methods are often very consistent. You or a group of people team up to make life hell for someone or some many people below you. You humiliate them. You coerce them. You corner them. You make them feel like they have nowhere to turn to.

You make others fear what will happen to them if they step in and say something. Maybe you just really don't like someone and you want to make them hurt. Maybe you want to make sure that they don't advance in their career instead of you. Or maybe you want to keep workers broken and pliable so that you can better exploit them. In the case of GND Integrated, we see how management abused workers on a daily basis to punish them for exercising their right to unionize and get a fair contract. And then, after months of torture, on Tuesday, March 1st, 2022, GND tapped everyone on the shoulder and laid off the vast majority of workers at the Morton, Illinois facility in a suspected act of retaliation.

The iron workers are continuing to fight to hold GND accountable, but things are moving slowly through the NLRB. Lastly, I want to tell you about a story that is very close to my heart. Back in September, for my podcast, Working People, in what was inarguably the hardest conversation that I've ever recorded, I interviewed the family of Evan Seyfried, a 20-year dedicated worker at an Ohio Kroger who, according to a lawsuit filed by the family, was bullied by store managers Shannon Frazee and Joseph Pig for months, eventually causing Evan to have a transient psychotic break and take his own life on March 9, 2021. Kroger has refused to say much at all publicly or to the Seyfried family about Evan's case

while the lawsuit is working slowly through the courts. And while that lawsuit is unfolding, we legally have to qualify these charges as alleged. All I will say in that regard is, if you are able to, listen to the whole interview with Evan's mom, Linda, his dad, Ken, and his brother, Eric. If you are able to, I beg you to listen to them. I can't go into all the horrific details of Evan's bullying that are laid out in the lawsuit, but here's a quick snapshot from Washington Post reporter Julian Mark. Quote, in a lawsuit filed in Hamilton County Court,

Evan Seyfried's family members allege his workplace, a Kroger grocery store in Milford, Ohio, is responsible for his suicide, a wrongful death that was the result of an alleged six-month harassment campaign by two of his co-workers. The lawsuit alleges the co-workers sabotaged Seyfried at work, had people stalk him outside of his home, and threatened to frame him for possessing child pornography. In October 2020, as the country remained in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Seyfried's life became, quote, a living hell at work, the lawsuit claims. One of the store's supervisors allegedly began harassing Seyfried for wearing a face mask at work and highlighted the difference in their political beliefs. Some of Seyfried's

co-workers allegedly began calling him Antifa, referring to a loosely knit group of far-left activists. The supervisor also allegedly made several unwanted sexual advances towards Seyfried, which he reported with zero recourse, the lawsuit says. Soon, according to the lawsuit, the supervisor's harassment turned into sabotage. The lawsuit alleges the supervisor would intentionally leave holes in Derry Department schedules, creating extra work for Seyfried. Then people began following Seyfried home from work, the lawsuit says. End quote.

Here's how Evan's father, Ken, described it to me on the podcast. Management's number one responsibility when it comes to their employee, above anything else else is to create a safe working environment. That's their number one responsibility in any organization. In this particular case here, not only did McMullen, the CEO, and his management team not create a safe working environment. They conspired with my son to create a hostile environment that was focused on terrorizing him. It was the exact opposite of what their responsibility as a management team in any company is. They create an environment that targeted him, and they terrorized him. I often refer to his store manager, Shannon Frazee, as a person that had a toolbox of terror. And I'm going to talk about that for a minute, because I want to make real clear with you that this is not a lawsuit based on conservative versus liberal or Republican versus Democrat.

This is a whistleblower lawsuit. The reason they terrorized my son and they wanted him out of the company is because he would not accept a hostile working environment. Every time they got hostile with them or a co-worker, he would throw up the red flag. He would go to the union. He would go to HR. He would go to line management. He would go outside the store if he could to get attention with the red flags. And they saw that as a problem all the way from the store manager to the district manager. They had a person throwing up too many red flags and they wanted him gone. So this is a whistleblower case. It has nothing to do with politics because in this community here, most of our supporters in this community are conservatives that voted for Donald Trump.

And they are in our camp. They are behind our cause. So it has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with Evan being a whistleblower. Evan tried to get help many times, but he was failed on every front by the people who were supposed to protect him. Kroger Regional Management failed him. Kroger HR failed him. His union steward failed him. And because of their failures, he is no longer here. And his family has a hole in it that can never be filled. Evan's story has not gotten the media attention it deserves. But what little attention it has received has often focused on the detail that his managers allegedly use politics to single him out, like calling Evan Antifa for

strictly masking during COVID. But his family has been very clear that this was not about politics. That was just a wedge that Evan's tormentors used to isolate and alienate him. And the fact that neighbors and co-workers and supporters from all sides of the political spectrum have come out to support the family and demand justice shows that we are fellow workers and neighbors and human beings first. We are members of political camps second. If we remember that, always, we can make sure that what happened to Evan never happens to anyone ever again. The Justice for Evan Coalition, a group of family, friends, and supporters around the country, has fought valiantly to make sure that Evan's name is not forgotten, that Kroger is held accountable for his death, and that workers everywhere get the protections

that they deserve. They have been fighting relentlessly to force Kroger executives to address Evan's case at next month's annual shareholders meeting, and they are asking people to do the same. The coalition and Evan's family directly attribute the conditions that led to Evan's death to Kroger's relentless pursuit of growth and profit under CEO Rodney McMullen, a man whose salary and stock options pay him reportedly $20 million a year. They say that the fact that the store sales increased under Evan's new manager meant that Kroger was unwilling to do anything about the distress that Evan and other workers experienced as demands for productivity just kept increasing. And Evan himself noted the changes in the company that he was so loyal to for so long.

And these things also led to Kroger not stepping in, according to the family, to address the complaints that Evan filed, complaints of harassment, or the complaints that he helped fellow co-workers file when they were being harassed. And I want to end on that final detail because it's important. Evan was a helper. He was kind. He loved his family deeply. And he was proud of his career. And he took care of others as best he could. Evan's family want others to know this about him.

And so do I. Because it's important to remember that every single person who experiences workplace bullying is or was a whole human being who is so much more than the needless and unjust pain that they endured. I want to end then by playing another clip from Ken Seyfried as he shares with the world what he wants us to know about his dear son. He was working at Kroger at the time. He wanted to move out, get his own apartment. So he was obviously old enough to do that. And he did it. And he survived the living on his own successfully to a point where in his years that he spent at Kroger, he was able to get his own home.

He financed it, got it approved, got it on his own, and took over homeownership. And he was very proud of that, that he was working for a company at that time for 10 years, was proud of that, was proud of being able to afford and have his own home. But what I would really like everybody to know about Evan is, particularly through this COVID period, he took care of mom and dad. He did everything for us. He did our shopping when we needed it. He visited us every week. He talked to his mom, if not every day. It seemed like every day for hours at a time. He talked to his dad a couple of times a week. He was there for us.

Eric used the perfect word for Evan. Evan was kind, but he was selfless. He put everything and everyone out of himself, particularly his parents and his brother. I couldn't think of a more giving, kind person that didn't have a harmful bone in his body. I don't think he's ever been in a fight in his life that deserve this kind of treatment that we're going to talk about later. It hurts. To Evan Seyfried and Vivian Barrett, wherever you are, to their families, to John Hogsett and his family, to Jonathan Martin and his family, and to everyone out there who is suffering or who has suffered at work, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve this. You don't deserve this.

We see you. We're with you. We love you. We won't forget you. And we will fight for you. Because we have to fight. We have no choice but to fight. We cannot and must not accept what is fundamentally unacceptable. Thank you for watching this segment with Breaking Points, and be sure to subscribe to my news outlet, The Real News, with links in the show description. See you soon for the next edition of The Art of Class War. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Helen gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7. Because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone breaking down lyrics,

amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music

changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.