Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #46: Third Party Candidates, Housing Market Warning, 'Disinfo' Czar, & Biden's Saudi Trip

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the 'disinformation' czar, Andrew Yang, Biden's Saudi trip, and the housing market!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/The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Andrew Yang, floating and interesting name for a potential president of the United States in 2024. Go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. This was in his podcast, which is called Forward. And he was talking to um comedian shane gillis remember gillis was the one who actually he was supposed to be on cnn on snl rather and he got canceled

because he had yeah i love like slurred some i don't even remember exactly what he said but andrew yang was one of the people that he had like racially slurred and then yang came out and was like don't make this guy lose yeah he was like i don't care so anyway they had this whole sit-down conversation i actually did listen to the whole thing yesterday. But the part that's making headlines here is Andrew Yang trying to draft Matthew McConaughey, one of your faves, Sager, for president, saying we need him to get us out of this mess. Let me read you the transcript of what he says here. His analysis of the Democratic and the Republican Party.

He says, you have the Democratic Party establishment who are like, hey, you've got to play by these rules. Like, we're going to act a certain way. We're buttoned up and we have a certain way of presenting. By the way, I ran for president in this, Kuriang said. Then you have the Republican Party under Trump that's become this anti-institutional, F everything, burn it down kind of energy. He continued, there's a Republican establishment within that that fought Trump and lost. Now everyone's going along with it. You know, there has to be a kind of this positive ex-institutional energy that comes up and ends up being a third force in American politics. He lays out his plan for his perfect ex-institutional candidate. I'm not really sure what that means. But anyway, my paragon example of this is someone like

Matthew McConaughey. Like, so McConaughey is from outside institutions, but he's not an asshole in the same way Donald Trump is. So I look at someone like that and think, God, like that's the kind of figure we need to get us out of this mess. Gillis chimes in and says, I can't believe that's where we're at. Imagine as a country 10 years ago, hopefully Matthew McConaughey can get us out of this mess. Yang goes on to say, so you can fill in figures for Matthew McConaughey. Mark Cuban's in this category. The Rock's in this category. Some would say Oprah Winfrey. and then it goes on from there. But what do you think of this,

since you've been a McConaughey, you've had your McConaughey flirtations in the past? Yeah, I like Matthew McConaughey. I just don't, look, I think that what happened with the gun thing actually shows that he can be politically effective if he wants, but also he doesn't have necessarily the best instincts because he effectively aligned himself with the Democratic Party, which I think is fine. I mean, because that's ultimately what he cared about and what he wanted to do. But Andrew's not wrong. But at the same time, I just look, a lot of the third party movement era and efforts that we would have right now just don't seem to be working. Right now really is just a time of like deep partisan political division. And from what

I've seen, you know, the guys who I've looked to, like The Rock, you know, is a good example. I pointed to, I thought he would be an excellent guy. I was like, oh, this guy's, you know, I mean, he denounces Rogan because of pressures from online wokes, you know, during the whole N-word thing. So it's like all of them ultimately just have pressures on them, which make them unable to actually rise above what they need to. Mark Cuban actually is not a bad example. It's somebody who actually probably could do it of anybody. It has a decent story.

But even then, challenging the existing political infrastructure is just so difficult that I'm not sure it would work. I think maybe in the future, maybe five, six years from now, when people are absolutely more disillusioned with the political system. The other part, it's not just the disillusionment. Like, there's plenty. I think the level of disillusionment is sufficient. It's just the actual structure of the system that's the problem. And so I think the efforts that Yang is pursuing on things like rank choice voting and trying to reform the electoral system so that there is a chance for third parties to have a real shot or at least have more

of an impact on American politics. I support that 100 percent. I think that would be an incredible improvement. I think the fact that we're facing down this election where it's like Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, two people that everyone's like, not this again, please, anything but this. And there's almost like no way out of it because of the way that our system is structured. I think dealing with that problem is actually really important. But we haven't dealt with that problem yet. And so at this point, the idea of any third-party candidate actually having a shot at being fully successful outside of the two major parties, it's just fanciful.

I mean, the model is to come in from the outside and take over one of the mainstream parties. That's what we've seen work in the past. And in a way, the Reagan revolution was that in the Republican Party, where, you know, prior to that, Republicans had been more or less in acquiescence with major provisions of the New Deal. And then Reagan comes in. He takes over the party apparatus that had started with the Goldwater Revolution. He takes that and he completely transforms and takes over the party. You see that with Bill Clinton and the DLC in the Democratic Party in the 90s. You see it sort of with Trump and the Republican Party in recent years, even though he ends up really governing more like a traditional Reagan, you know, Republican

than he had sort of presented himself in the campaign in 2016. But, you know, I mean, I obviously have issues with all of these people that he floats. There are all these sort of like, you know, enlightened centrist types that it's not even really clear what they actually believe or stand for or would fight for, which means that you're going to be buffeted by the winds of, like, you know, this one says they're offended at that or that one says that you should be going in this direction. To me, it's really important you have candidates who are very clear on where they stand

and what they're going to fight for and what their program and agenda is. But, yeah. So, lab politics are hard. Reagan was an example, actually, of that because he had a legitimate ideological agenda and he was former governor of California. So, he was able to translate his showmanship with an actual governing in practice. He had a deep ideological philosophy, thought out philosophy. It's very interesting actually to kind of see it. So, I think if anybody was going to do it, they have to do it in the way that Reagan did. Or even Trump. I mean, to his credit,

Trump effectively believed the same thing for like 35 years for the care of his campaign. On trade and China, very consistent. Same thing. I mean, you could go back and watch a clip of him. I think he was on Oprah in like 1979. And he was saying the exact same thing. It was shocking, really, actually, to go ahead and watch. So it has to be somebody like that. It's a very unique set of skills that could get you there. Again, to be clear, I think McConaughey could do it if he wanted to, but he has to make different choices than the ones he's currently making. Fed raising interest rates. And we already have brought to you how just the small moves the Fed has made so far have had massive implications in terms of the cost of borrowing and the mortgage interest rates. And that has a huge effect on people's ability to ultimately purchase a home. We're now starting to see the data that in the housing market, I mean, there really is kind of

an imminent collapse coming. And we're seeing the early warning signs. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So home sale cancellations jumped in June as buyers backed away. 60,000 deals fell through, equal to 15% of homes that entered into contract. This is by far the highest number that we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic, when the entire economy collapsed and was shut down. And at that point, people said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I can't go through with this because I'm not sure I'm going to have a job. We are now back to approaching those levels in terms of home sale cancellation. So again, nearly eight, about 15% of homes that buyers, you know, are planning to buy, they enter into a contract, are being canceled

and they're backing away from and directly, directly tied to the actions that the Fed is taking here. The cancel rate, like you said, it hasn't been this high basically since 2020, like right after that. And it's continuing to rise at a precipitous rate. It's just going to continue to rise. And if it gets to the 20, 20, 25%, it's just going to make the housing market even more of a chaos. And something I've been trying to point to is when high-priced buyers are pushed out of the home market. Let's be honest, the home market is mostly for upper-middle-class people at this point, just given what the price is. Yeah, definitely. I mean, median housing price is half a million dollars. Exactly. It's sanity. So you have to be upper-middle-class just to be able to

get into it. Well, whenever the interest rates get it so that not even the upper class, and only basically the upper class can be the people who afford it, then the upper middle class are going to turn to the renting market. And they are going to rent luxury property and squeeze everybody down the value chain, which is going to increase the price of the rent. We're seeing this already in the housing markets across the country, which was a response to rising rates. So where the rates are, where they are right now, it's a total disaster because it pushes people into a place where they have to be able to choose between – I mean, I don't know why anyone would basically choose to have a 6% mortgage rate is what I was also looking at. And another thing that makes this more dangerous, I didn't realize this, when rates go up to like 6%, it no longer is necessarily to your benefit to take the fixed rate mortgage, which creates all, again, I'm not a mortgage expert, but there are all other kinds of like wonky adjustable rate type mortgages that you can go for where you might be able to pay less, at least in the long term.

But those are much more subject to market conditions. They're not as locked in and friendly to the consumer, more subject to financialization. So what I was reading is that by increasing their mortgage rate and going away from the low fixed rate mortgages that would be typical of the last 10, 15 years, or yeah, I guess last 10 years of low interest rates from the Fed, it changes the whole dynamics of all of U.S. housing. Interesting. Which is just not good. Yeah, it's just not good for people. Well, the adjustable rate mortgages were part of the story in terms of the housing collapse because, remember, they had the ballooning payments that consumers didn't understand what they were getting into at the beginning.

And then their payment jumps and escalates to a point where immediately they can't afford it and they're being pushed down essentially because they were tricked into signing on to something that was well outside of what their actual means were. I mean, this is what we're seeing. Like, I think it's really important that you understand this is the goal of our policymakers is to make it impossible for you to buy a house, to, you know, tank the housing market with follow on effects, as you're pointing out in the rental market as well. This is their goal because they are unable because of political gridlock and lack of political imagination to deal with the supply side issues that are fueling inflation. So the only thing they can do is take a hammer to the American consumer. And the housing market is the area that is most sensitive, typically, to these Fed rate increases. The other thing that you pointed to before, which is a part of this picture, Americans have never paid higher interest rates to finance car purchases. So also in terms

of being able to afford a vehicle, to be able to get to and from work, consumers are already being hit really, really hard. And we are just at the beginning of what the Fed is ultimately planning to do. So, you know, it's a real warning sign that this early on, you're seeing these kind of dire numbers in terms of home sale cancellations, people who thought they were going to be able to, you know, to purchase a home, maybe for the first time, you know, maybe be able to move somewhere that was better for them and for their family. And they're having to say, I just can't do it right now because of these rates. Yeah. I mean, it could delay it for 10 years. Who knows whenever these things are going to come back?

And then you're going to be, what, like 45, maybe 50, and you're not even going to own a house? It's not good. Not good. Nina Jankowicz is the person who just simply will not disappear from American politics. She's the gift that keeps on giving, isn't she? The gift that keeps on giving, at least to us. She's been recently appeared on the Brian Stelter program over at CNN to deny that she

ever herself spread disinformation while she was the head of the Disinformation Governance Board. Let's take a listen. I, you know, did not post disinformation. The folks that are honing in on tweets that I sent in 2016 when I had fewer than a thousand Twitter followers that, you know, I was just sharing information about a presidential election as it was happening, as millions of other Americans were doing, using their right to freedom of speech. That wasn't disinformation, right? It was just sharing news. Other people honed in on tweets that were, they completely stripped of context. The one that the conservatives loved to really amplify was a tweet that they claimed that made me seem like I was calling the Hunter

Biden laptop disinformation when, in fact, I was just live tweeting a debate, you know, saying the exact words that then-candidate Biden and President Trump were saying during a debate. Totally stripped of context. So you still think you were the right hire? And people didn't want to look further into the context. So you still think you were the right hire? Absolutely, I was the right hire. Also, that's not true what she was saying. I mean, she was live tweeting it and also trying to add the context

About how the laptop Which she was calling disinformation You mean she's spreading a little bit of Disinformation there about what she was doing We can go on forever at the number of things That this lady said which were straight up false She was promoting the Hunter Biden conspiracy That it was some Russian plant

I mean she was even an election Truther 2016 With. I mean, she was even an election truther 2016 with Hillary. I mean, on COVID was spreading all kinds of insanity. She literally tweeted, please lock us down in like March of 2020. So listen, it's very clear that she was not the right person of any authority to be the arbiter or not. I also think it was a ludicrous interview because he didn't even push back. He didn't ask her about any of the specifics. He just let her be like, yeah, I was the right person.

No, I didn't spread any untruths or misinformation. What is that? Also, why don't you, here's the other thing. His show is called Reliable Sources. So you're talking to a former government official who is trying to decide what's true and what's not and was actively pushing meetings

with social media companies like Twitter, including the person who actually censored the Hunter Biden laptop story over Twitter. Why don't you ask her about it? That's open source information that's available right now. I don't know why they are incapable of doing this. Even some of his colleagues at CNN were uncomfortable with and asked hard questions, remember, about Dana Bash was asking difficult questions of the dhs secretary about what exactly this board is and what exactly this board does which

you know i mean as cringe as nina jankowitz is that's really the bigger problem is that it would not be better it would not be a good outcome if they put a less cringe person as the head of this board this board just should not. That's really the bottom line here, ultimately. Now, in a way, they kind of did us a favor by picking someone who was so clearly not a neutral actor who had, you know, herself spread incredibly questionable and outright false information because it made it much easier for people to be able to sort of go on the offense and say, this idea is ludicrous and this is really not something that the government should be doing whatsoever. And we literally never got a straight answer about what this board was meant to do. They would, on one hand, be like, stop worrying.

Like, this is no big deal. This board is barely a thing. Like, it barely is going to do anything. And on the other hand, they'd be like, this is an attack on our ability to deal with misinformation and this is so super important that you let us have our truth board here at the DHS. So anyway, it's interesting all around. I wonder how long Brian Stelter is going to continue to have his show. I would love—listen, I would love to see that.

A lot of rumors that he might be on the shopping blog as part of the new regime at CNN. So we'll see. Totally. Absolutely. All right. More for y'all later. Hey, everyone. This is Ken Klippenstein, investigative reporter with The Intercept. I'm doing Breaking Points Intercept Edition. Joined with me here is Jonathan Geyer, senior foreign policy writer for Vox. Thanks for having me, Ken.

Good to talk to you. We'll be talking to you about a story that he had about Saudi Arabia, in which I think the title very succinctly captures what exactly is going on here, which is Biden distanced himself from Saudi Arabia until gas prices got bad. And so I think one of the most important parts of this story is how you are able to get at the tension between what Biden said was going to be a human rights centered foreign policy and a foreign policy for the middle class. That is one in which he holds the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he's called, accountable for his role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post journalist, and the fact that gas prices are soaring and that that's something that's hurting his political approval rating. So could you explain that a little bit? Yeah, so I would say there are kind of two bumper stickers of Biden's foreign policy. One is, as you say, centering human rights.

Obviously, he called Saudi Arabia pariah on the campaign trail. There seemed to be real hope from human rights defenders that there would be a different US policy towards Saudi Arabia. But you have the other bumper sticker, which is a foreign policy for the middle class. And I think as inflation is soaring, as the economy is in a tight spot right now, that really means dealing with gas prices. And Saudi Arabia, big energy producer. Now, the experts I spoke to think the changes, as you probably know well, will be pretty

marginal in terms of more gas on the market and lower prices. But I think the president wants to look like he's doing everything he can possibly do in the lead up to the midterms. But this means these two bumper stickers are kind of in a collision. And it looks really awkward. Very awkward. And for example, Biden actually penned an op-ed in the Washington Post, which again, that was the paper that Jamal Khashoggi wrote for, in which he just addresses the public and says, why I'm going to Saudi Arabia? Because recall during the presidential primary, he vowed to make Saudi Arabia and MBS a quote pariah and that's language that there doesn't leave

much room for interpretation you know that's pretty plain spoken language and now he's you know abrogating that because of I just wish that I mean if you read that op-ed that the president wrote it's kind of interesting itself I searched for the word oil you know which as your piece suggests, is clearly a big factor in what's going on here. That word appears one time in the entire op-ed. On the other hand— Well, it seems like the trip started being about oil, right? And now it's kind of about security.

It's about all these other things. Well, that's what's interesting. You search that piece that he wrote, the word Israel comes up like a dozen times. Exactly. And I think that to some extent he's sort of hiding behind this, oh, you know, we're going to have this normalization. You like the Israelis, right guys? So don't worry about, you know, what I said about making Saudi Arabia a pariah, because I've got this other thing that you care about that we're doing. And so, I mean, I think that's sort of going to be the messaging going forward. I think there's an open question as to, as you say, whether the middle class is going to be

getting anything out of that. Well, come on. Jamal Khashoggi was a Virginia resident who was writing for the local paper of Washington, D.C. I mean, maybe a foreign policy for the middle class would address the heinous assassination and dismemberment of one of our own, a columnist, a journalist. And I spoke with a human rights defender from Saudi Arabia this morning. And what she told me is, this is a police state. There's all these superficial changes that MBS, the Saudi Crown Prince has put forward. You have movie theaters. You have some women driving. You have concerts. There has been an opening up on some level culturally, but there's been a huge backsliding on his own promises. There's been capital punishment of minors in Saudi Arabia. There's, you know, continued to be a crackdown on free speech.

There is no free speech there. He jailed some of the women that were demonstrating for women's rights, women's driving. So there's huge contradictions, just a bundle of contradictions with all this kind of picture of him kind of modernizing the society, which, you know, there's something to that. I'm not saying there's nothing. But yeah, as you point out, there's all sorts of ways that he's backslidden. I just think that there's a lack of candor in this town for a variety of reasons. And from the president, I wish the president would just come out and talk about the, you about the economic consequences of this. The American people are adults. They can understand the situation we're in, in which not just our economy internally, but then the Russians are enjoying a bonanza

of profits in their war of aggression against the Ukrainians because they're working with Russia. These are the two biggest oil producers in OPEC, and keeping production low, which has the effect of driving prices up and financing this government that's doing this horrible invasion and undercutting the sanctions that we're putting on them to try to prevent them from proceeding with all of this. I mean, I'm very worried about the optics of this trip because, you know, President Biden is going to be shaking hands or in a meeting with MBS. Now, what message does that send? Who's the superpower here?

It's a major about face and climb down for Biden. And, you know, Biden has said for the past 18 months, I'm not going to meet with MBS. My technical counterpart is the king. So I'm just going to interact with MBS's father. Everyone knows MBS is effectively, you is effectively the COO of the country. He's running everything. But maybe this was a bad policy because now it's this incredible U-turn. Maybe it would have been better to deliver that intelligence report about Khashoggi's killing from the president to MBS in that first meeting 18 months ago and say, look, this has got to change.

We need some accountability here. The relationship has just totally gone off the rails. Saudi Arabia was always a conservative kingdom, but it was a consultative kingdom. The royal family had a role. It was governed by consensus. Now you have this guy who many, many experts have compared to Saddam Hussein, who's in his 30s. He could be running the country for another half century. And he started this brutal war in Yemen that is just probably, you know, the biggest human rights disaster in the world right now.

And thankfully, there is a ceasefire right now in Yemen. But, you know, that's small pittance for just total recklessness. Yeah, I want to go back to something you said. You talked about what message it's going to send, and that's really important. This is not just abstract human rights concerns. For example, a prominent Saudi dissident in Lebanon was killed recently. We don't know details about, you know, who was behind it or what happened, but, you know, you can guess. And then in addition to that, there was a case of a Saudi national in the United States being harassed for her and threatened for just, you know, voicing concerns about her government.

And so when you talk to the Saudi diaspora community, and particularly the Saudi dissident community, as I have for a lot of stories that I've done recently, they say that they have very concrete fears that this is telling MBS that he has a green light or maybe a yellow light to go ahead and continue to do some of those things because the president's going to normalize with you. What does he have to lose? If the primary sort of sanction that we placed on him, since we didn't put little economic sanctions or really suspend much in the way of weapons, was the president not meeting with him and dignifying, which I do think matters. If you're in a kingdom and you're jockeying for power, you want the legitimacy of the president of the most powerful country meeting with you.

That doesn't matter to him. If you withdraw that, remove that, what message is MBS going to take from that in terms of the transnational repression that he is engaged in that perhaps is most vividly captured by MBS's assassination, but takes the form of all kinds of bullying and, you know, just other dissidents have been killed. To give you another example, Saudi spies were working in Twitter, the Justice Department alleges, in passing information onto the Saudi regime about dissidents in the United States. So this is a very concrete threat to U.S. residents and continues to be. I don't think the Khashoggi thing is a historical artifact in any sense. Right. I mean, you start to see a lot of parallels between how President Trump dealt with Saudi Arabia and Biden. I mean, Biden's rhetoric has the word

human rights in it, but that doesn't mean human rights are at its center. I mean, you've done incredible reporting on Jared Kushner, Trump's brother-in-law, kind of really profiting off, you know, getting major billions off of his relationship with Saudi and through his investment fund that is, you know, that's a different kind of corruption. But I think what we're talking about here is a moral corruption, where you have a leader like MBS, who intelligence agencies determined killed a US resident. You know, is there going to be a meeting of President Biden with Arab journalists on this trip?

I would really like to see that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, we're going to leave it there. Once again, that's Jonathan Geyer. Where can people find your work? Vox.com. Thanks for having me, Ken.

Thank you for joining me. This is another edition of Breaking Points Intercept. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener. Right. And I maximize that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with a 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. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, Podcasts. in prison for two years. Through that process, learn. Learn from it. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid.

Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.