Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Good morning, everybody, Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, ris soul?
Indeed, we do lots of drama to get to you this morning. First of all, developments with regard to the debt sealing. We will tell you what is likely to happen there as best as we can possibly figure as we are coming down to the wire. We also have some big developments with regard to Jeffrey Epstein and one of the banks that was happy to have his business for years and years after he'd already been convicted of being a sex criminal, So we will talk about that as well.
And also no Jobski caught in Noo, my man, No, I don't even know.
What to say.
The book might have to go, Chris, So I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure we could keep that behind.
This not a good look. Let's just say that.
Also, some really dire numbers with regards to the housing market, and some overall economic news, and actually some news about just how Americans are doing, like at the core of their being that we need to talk through as well. Wholme, Meghan and Harry situation in Manhattan that I just it's like literally the South Park epite.
I I've been upset the moment it came out. I said, this is fake, calling them the Duke and Duchess of small At. I'll make you make You can make up your mind for yourself whether you think they're lying or not.
I don't think my view is all that.
I think it's pretty clear what happened at this point, so we'll give you all those details. Also, there are some rumors about what Fox News is going to do now that they have Pushtucker Carlson out, how they're going to reconfigure their prime time lineup. Also excited to have a political reporter in the show that we haven't had before. Shelby Talcachi is tracking closely run DeSantis versus Donald Trump. So we want to get her report from the campaign trail as well.
Old friend of mine, she actually took my job White House correspondent. Oh that's right, A call her before me and now she works over at sea for she's doing a very good job.
That's outlet the GOP primary, that's right.
And by all accounts, I mean, she's allowed to do what she needs to and she's she's doing a really good job of just like beat to beat about DeSantis and Trump and all that, and so I'm excited to talk to her a little bit about that. So before we get to that, though, we just want to say thank you to everybody who watched the RFK interview.
I know that so many of you enjoyed it.
I guess my only regret about it is that we didn't have enough time with the man. He unfortunately had to go, But we talked to him about it afterwards, Crystal, and he wants to come back, and we've even discussed doing a town hall event or something of some kind that you can try and organize. So by all accounts, you know, we're happy with how that went, and we want to make sure that we continue to do more of these.
Oh, one hundred percent. Yes, really enjoyed the exchange with him. I think we try to cover as much ground as we could the time that he had available. Obviously, he's extraordinarily busy here in DC, so you know, grateful to him for his time, Grateful to you guys for watching engaging with it, and also those of you who signed up as premium subs, super super appreciate that as we are getting very close to having the new set to reveal.
Yeah, we really do appreciate all of you, and you know, we're going to have more of these interviews. We're going to in the works right now scheduling Maryanne to come. We're gonna grill her as well, and I think that's something we're committed to. We're gonna grill every single one
of them whenever they have here. And I do think in the future we're going to push for a little bit more time in terms of this because, like you know, I really don't like whenever people have to go and all that, but we'll get to that.
These are busy folks. Yes, so totally understand. And like I said, I think we got a lot of ground covered with him in the time that we had available. Absolutely, super grateful for him for taking the.
Time, and thanks for everybody who signed up. And if you want to continue support our ability to.
Do that town hall events, new sets, all of that.
It's very expensive, so we appreciate you breakingpoints dot com to become a premium describer today.
All right, let's get to the very latest with regard to the debt sealing. Just as backdrop here again, guys, we have this really weird and incredibly stupid system where Congress votes to spend money and then weirdly, they have this separate vote about whether or not they're actually going to borrow enough to pay those bills down the line. Republicans in particular have decided to use this as a point of leverage try to get through things that they
otherwise could not get passed through the Congress. And so now we are coming to a head here. By some accounts, June first is kind of the drop dead date we are going to go through in a moment if we do breach the debt ceiling. What does the potential fallout? I mean, the big takeaway is nobody really knows, but it looks like it would be really really bad, And obviously it is now May eighteenth, So we are inching
very close to that deadline. Joe Biden's original consistent stance had been not going to negotiate it clean debt ceiling that I'll accept, not going to negotiate with the hostage takers. Well, now he has gone back on what was previously a very clear position. He is in fact negotiating with the stage takers, although he's trying to parse and pretend like he's not. Here's how he is framing things and what he is saying.
We're going to come together because there's no alternative to do the right thing for the country. We have to move on. And to be clear, this negotiation is about the outlines of what the budget will look like, not about whether or not we're going to infect para debts. The leaders are all agreed we will not default. Every leader has said that.
Well, so all have agreed we will not default.
I don't know we'll see it.
I don't know that, yeah exactly.
And then you can see how he's trying to parse. He or trying to say, oh, we're not really negotiating on the debt ceiling. We're talking about the budget. This is all just word games. They are negotiating on the debt ceiling, something that you know, I'll talk a little bit more about in a moment. I think is a dramatic mistake because what does this mean? Even putting aside whether you think the GOP demands are good or bad or indifferent or whatever. The minute you give into this,
people guess what. Every time this vote comes up, the whole global economy is gonna be held hostage again by you know, whoever wants to gain an edge and get something through that they could not get through the legislative process.
Yeah, I mean, I think people need This is also why, though I will say Chris, I was actually very frustrated several months ago because I'm like, listen, you're gonna negotiate. There's no question about it, Like there is no getting around this, But where.
Is getting around it? Like there are other options. There are multiple other workarounds. There is a fourteenth Amendment workaround what Constitution says like the debt shall.
Not be questioned.
You could pursue that, you could mint the coin. There's another alternative where you can issue premium bonds.
So there are other workarounds.
Otherwise, God, we're just going to go back to this same dynamic year after year after year, every time there's a Democratic president and Republicans have one or the other House recires.
I meant within the framework that the Biden jugs Joe Biden, Yes, Rich, I will say, okay, look on the fourteenth Amendment. So I've done a decent amount of research now and I'm not even saying that these aren't feasible. Same with mint the coin, A lot of it actually does come down
to whether the market would accept it. So I guess we could talk a little bit about that in terms of what a breach would look, but you could technically mint the coin, and even if the Federal Reserve were to accept the coin, and we let that actually is not a given, there's actually no guarantee that the markets would look at that as a genuine debt ceiling left.
So part of the problem is, you know, so much of our feelings around debt are feelings, and they are backed not necessarily by the technical raising of the debt ceiling, but by everybody just kind of walking around and just being like, yeah, the full faith in credit of the United States, it's good, We're cool with it. When that starts to come into question, even with the fourteenth Amendment, the debt ceiling, the premium bonds. As you said, that uncertainty,
you're still looking likely looking at a crash. I mean, it's just one of those where it's a very complicated situation. So I also don't want to take responsibility away from the Republicans because I think we should all be honest about what they are asking for. And they have decided that they want to cut spending and return spending levels to six months ago.
When you put it that way, okay, it sounds reasonable.
But one of the ways that they want to cut spending almost entirely is they don't want to touch the military budget at all. They don't want to touch any DoD spending or Ukraine spending. They don't want to touch entitlement programs. Well, you just took off the two vast portions of the entire federal expenditure. So what is left, Well, what's left are effectively, you know, you have food stamp programs. They've talked about welfare, They've talked about rescinding some of
the IRS money. I mean, I personally have a problem with some of that, but they do have want to rescind some of the money taken within the Inflation Reduction Act, some of which has already been spent, some future tax credits. And my other problem with it is they also don't want to raise any taxes. There are actually ten different tax loopholes that have could easily be closed.
We've talked about each.
One of them on the show Ad nauseum, the private equity loophole, the carried interest sloop hole, step up basis loophole.
There are several other corporate loopholes.
None of these would ever touch anybody who is including people at this desk, because it has nothing to do with small business or middle clad. This is all corporate or extremely high net worth individuals, which could raise billions of dollars, and they've taken that off the tables. I want to be very I want to lay out exactly what the conversation.
Here I mean.
In a sense, like I said, I don't really care what their demands are because I think the whole thing is economic terrorism, and so even if what they were saying was totally reasonable, as a matter of principle, I don't think you should negotiate. But the details matter for another reason, which is that it really shows how disingenuous they are about actually caring about the debt. First of all, there is no sign in the markets that we have
any sort of looming debt issue. Up until very recently when the Fed started hiking rates, interest rates have been incredibly low. The market has been very stable in terms of treasury bonds. Like, there's no indication out there that we have this looming debt crisis we have to deal with. That's number one. Number two, if you were genuinely concerned about the debt, guess what you would put on the table the freaking Trump tax cuts for the top one percent.
You could keep whatever little pit pitdling, you know, pennies they gave to like the middle class and the working class line, keep that in there. Roll back the ones that dramatically benefited Corporate America that they used to engage in all their stock buybacks, that added massively to our dad, that put a gigantic hole in our budget. Like, if you actually cared about these things, that would be on the table. And of course they're not interested in that.
They're not interested in a tax conversation whatsoever, because this is an ideological project, and it's a specifically an ideological project to appease one part of the Republican caucus that you know, extracted their pound of flesh from Kevin McCarthy in order to for him to get his speakership. Let's go and put this next piece from Axios up on the screen that has some of these details. So they're talking about how McCarthy called Biden's bluff as you were
pointing out sober Biden being a you know, weakned institutionalist. Unfortunately, the writing was kind of on the wall that ultimately he would cave and he would negotiate. That's exactly what is happening now. They say efforts to peel off vulnerable House Republicans failed. None openly opposed mccarthy'strivelege of tying spending cuts to a debt ceiling hike. House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole told Axios their negotiating now, and they weren't doing it before.
So again he caved.
Now the cope here from the Biden side, and this is the politics that come into this. They say, if Biden conceded to direct one on one negotiations, McCarthy is prepared to give ground as well. He's open to a deal that lifts the debt ceiling until twenty twenty five beyond the next election.
And there it is.
I mean, that's the real trump card that the Republicans have, is they can hold out to him like, we'll make these economic problems for you go away. All you have to do is like throw poor people under the bus, basically, and we'll make this go away until after the next election so that we don't have some sort of global financial catastrophe that is going to hurt you in your re elect bid.
And so that's what this comes down to.
And he actually spoke a little bitbout on CNBC yesterday. Let's take a listen.
So first of all, there is not going to be a tax discussion in this debt seiling. The President admitted debt yesterday at the beginning, less curve what we were spending, less than we spent last year, go back five months. Let's put in things that make us grow, right, permitting reform, cut the red tape if you like, renewable energy, be able to get the permit to do it, build the roads, but also the other energy we talked about. Let's help people get jobs again, let's be less dependent upon China.
I think that's reasonable.
And sensible, but I didn't think it was reasonable that I had to wait one hundred and four days till they finally admit they'd come into the room and negotiate.
I actually do agree with them on permitting reform, but on the rest of it, that's always the issue, which is it sounds reasonable and then you start looking at what's actually being cut. That's why I wanted to lay it out for people. You know, listen, if you do care about the debt, and there are reasons that you you know, maybe should or maybe shouldn't, and there it's a multifaceted conversation. But if you would then some there are many other things that should be on the table.
As he said, he doesn't want to have a tax conversation. And you know, most Republicans are not against raising taxes on corporations or on closing tax loopholes for the financial industry.
Regular Republican we're talking about actual Republican vote elected. Well, there's a dreams of polling on this, Like Republicans don't want to touch entitlements, and they don't have any problem with raising taxes on corporations and specifically on wealthy tax loopholes that only benefit financial billionaires.
There are many.
I mean, this is almost where it's like just turn it into a culture war thing and be like George.
Sorrows and all other people, let's tax them. I'd be like, okay, let's go.
Yeah, yeah, that's actually these esg terrorists, which kind of true should pay taxes.
Okay, you know, let's let's go. There's a lot of different ways.
So this is always why I just find the conversation very difficult. And you know, look in terms of the dead ceiling and all that, as you said, I mean, just I think I come back to this. I think hardcore Republicans are going to be with them no matter what. They like a fighter. They like somebody who's going to fight.
The question remains, are people really like when they hear and understand, let's say your four oh one K drops by twenty five percent, and they're like, wait, we're doing this for for for work reform, work requirements in the food stamp program, regardless of how you feel or not about that, Like do you feel enough about that to have your retirement portfolio go down by twenty.
Five the entire global economy or.
You know, this is another one.
So let's say that the last time twenty eleven we didn't even go over the debt ceiling, we still had our debt downgraded, that had significant ramifications for pension funds and for t bills, and a lot of it was erase the problems for that by very very low interest rates and the zero interst rate economy. Well, we don't live in that environment anymore, so this actually could only
further propel us into a recession. Now cynically, though, I mean, this is kind of exactly what you want if you are a Republican, like if you are politically and cynically, at the end of the day, Crystal, I do believe that in the short term, while it would not be good for the Republican Party and they may suffer some cost overall, that in the net, having a worse off economy is going to be worse off for Joe Bidens whenever he becomes present.
Absolutely psychopathic way for them to look at this, I agree with you. That's not named to you, that's not to them. I mean, that is psychopathic for them to look at it that way. But I think you're right, that is the gamble that they're taking because they're playing with people's lives here, and so in terms of the mechanics of how this is going to work, there's been a lot of happy talk in DC this week about oh,
they're going to come to a deal. Maybe, maybe, but there's still a long way to go before that actually comes together, because you have Democrats who are pissed off, Progressives who are pissed off with this up on the
screen from Jeff Stein. You've got a number of Senate Democrats in particular, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others, who just sent a letter urging Biden to prep that Fourteenth Amendment solution again, the fourteenth Amendment saying that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned. Because keep in mind here, what is basically happening is Congress is sending the president to conflicting
sets of instructions. One set of instruction says, spend this money, and the other says, don't do what you need to do to be able to spend this money. So the basic constitutional argument here is you've got the fourteenth Amendment, which says the debt shall not be questioned, take it to the courts and let the Supreme Court make the call as to whether they want to be the ones
that crash the economy. And even though the Court, you know, very partisan institution, but it's not clear that you would have all of the conservatives like committed to the potential chaos that could be unleashed by taking that perspective.
So progressives are pissed.
You increasingly getting strong words from them about their upset about what the White House is putting on the table, the work requirements, the fact that Biden's been opener work requirements on any of this stuff, the fact that he caved and is negotiating. You're getting an increasing upset there.
So that's the Democratic side in some ways, though even more seriously on the Republican side, there were some pretty stringent demands made from the furthest right part of the caucus, and it's not at all clear that whatever do you Biden and McCarthy would make would be acceptable to the
Republican entirety of the Republican Caucus. So there's still even though there was a lot of happy talk in Washington this week about oh, we think they're getting close and we think there may be a deal, I'm still skeptical that that is really going to ultimately come together, because
it's not just up. If it was just Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, Almos said John Bayner, my god, PTSD, If it was just Joe Bien Kevin McCarthy, Yes, I think they could probably come up with something that both of them would be comfortable with because they're both basically institutionalists, they're both basically quote unquote moderates. But when you add in all these other factors, it makes it a lot more complicated to actually get to the finish line here.
So I think, you know.
All of the sort of solutions, the workarounds, all those things are in sense still on the table, even as I have a little confidence that Joe Biden really has the spine to pursue any of them.
Yeah.
My thing is, I am increasingly believe that we are going to default, at least in some name only, and that only after that where we see some sort of deal.
This part of what I was talking about.
So I think June one, the likelihood of having a deal between McCarthy and Biden which is acceptable to Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House just seems like zero and remember this also McCarthy has what twenty something votes or whatever to play with. Well, it's not like they have all that many votes on the Democratic
side to actually get this through. There are many Republicans who may not even vote to advance the debt ceiling deal out of Congress, out of the Senate for a cloture. So you have to put that, you know, in the Senate and think about where that comes from. But then you have the House of Representatives. Then there's a flipping where there's also a clean debt ceiling which is on the floor for the House of Representatives, and they the Democrats, only need five Republicans to sign on for them.
So I actually think there.
Could be a likelihood that we get to June one and people are like the markets crash, that's the only let's be honest, you know, until Wall Street gets mad, that's they don't care.
They don't care.
So the Marcus crash, the hedge fund managers and everybody, and the banks.
All blow up the phones.
And it's certainly possible, given to discharge petition and more, that they were able to get a clean debt ceiling through because five moderate ish Republicans are like you know what, I don't want to deal with this. Let's kick it down the road for a month or something like that. Then it would go to the Senate. But then there's no guarantee that the Senate of the Republicans would vote for that. So I'm looking at this on both sides,
and I just see tremendous amounts of uncertainty. Is it possible, I don't know, but I don't think that the impetus for forcing negotiating power right now is there enough. There has to be a crash of some kind for people to get serious. I don't say this, but you know, I don't want there to be a brass but I really don't believe that they will genuinely do anything both sides right. There's no way that Elizabeth Warren and John Fetterman and all these people are going to vote for
work requirements unless there's a massive crash. There's also no way that a lot of these spending people who are like I want to cut the Department of Education. I'm not going to vote for anything until that goes through. There's no way they're going to vote until unless we have a large crash either.
I mean, there's a few Republicans in the House who are like, I'm not voting for a debt ceiling increase.
At all, right, exactly, So it just just to show you, like the polarity of the views here.
So just to type this part of the conversation before we get to all right, what could happen theoretically if we do breach the debt ceiling, especially for some kind of extended period of time. The basic paths that are available right now is they are able to strike some kind of a deal that is acceptable to enough Republicans and enough Democrats in the House and the Senate in
order for it to actually get through. That is one potential outcome, and I think we've laid out how dicey a prospect that is, there's what you were referring to, Sager, this idea of a discharge petition, which is there is a sort of ourcane legislative procedure that if you have a majority of members of the House sign on to it, you can bring something onto the floor without from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
So that's where you're talking about.
If you could get five Republicans to join with all the Democrats on a clean debt ceiling increase through a discharge petition. That is another potential alternative. As you're laying out, in some ways, the bigger barrier there is the Senate, because you have to get sixty votes in the Senate still for that thing to go through. So that's the discharge petition, and then you have this raft of workarounds.
I think the fourteenth Amendment one is the one that seems to be considered most most sort of seriously within the White House, even though they have expressed to Jefstin and others that they're very skeptical of that as well, and they're nervous about what it would mean. There are other work errounds that are sort of gimmicky, like the mint, the coin and other directions they could go there. So we'll put that all in the basket of different workarounds.
And at this point, you know, I can make a case against each one of those very clearly, and it's hard for me to make an affirmative case for any one of them because they all have major risk challenges and political you know, uncertainty.
So that's kind of where we stand with things.
No, I think you're right. I think we should just tell people like, what's going to happen, what's possible?
Yeah, yeah, those are all the scenarios. Okay, So let's talk about if they are unable to come to a deal and the Biden administration doesn't employ one of these workarounds, and we do, in fact breach the debt ceiling, what.
Is this going to look like?
And the truth of the matter is nobody really knows, because even though we technically breached it before, you know, there was a resolution quickly enough that we didn't get to some of the most dire scenarios. Although even in that scenario those back in twenty eleven, we lost trillions of dollars in household wealth just from that brief breach of the debt ceiling. So it shows you there could be tremendous consequences. Here go and put this up on
the screen from the Washington Post. The headline here is seven doomsday scenarios if the US crashes through the debt ceiling. This was written up by Jeff Stein.
Just at the top.
You know, they've got quotes from a few economists saying Mark Zandi, a chief economist at Moody's, says it would be a lethal combination, you can see how this thing could really metastasize and take down the entire financial system, which would ultimately take out the economy. I've seen many other economists say this could be way worse than the two thousand and eight financial crash if allowed to fester
firs sufficient period of time. So going through the seven scenarios here, I mean number one, the first thing that would probably happen as stocks would crash, and you have estimates that stock prices could fall by roughly one fifth, that's from Moody's analytics. You would have stocks plummeting on
the expectation of a wider economic downturn. Interest rates would rise, investors would pull funds out of the market to preserve their access to short term cash, and that piece, I think is pretty clear that you would have a rather instantaneous stock crash. And you know, we did see sager previously in the when there was the coronavirus crash, which was so brief that people like apparently forgot that it
even happened. And by people, I mean like elites who weren't paying that close of attention because it galvanized forces in Washington actually act. So it is possible if you had stocks fall off a cliff, then maybe people will get their act together at that point and get something done.
Yeah.
I mean, looking at all of these stocks crashing is obviously going to force that couldn't be everything. The sudden recession. Federal workers in limbo, I don't think. I'm not saying they don't matter, but I am saying I don't think a lot of people are going to care. Well.
I don't want to just write that one off, because you are talking about US military personnel, We're talking about air traffic controllers, we're talking about food safety inspectors. Federal Garment is the largest employer in the whole country. True, so that's not enoughing to wave off. And of course when you have the largest employer in the whole country basically, like you know, not paying their workers, then that obviously feeds into much broader economic issues.
With regard to the instant.
Recess, the one that really hit me was the Social Security so who said that it's possible that we could reach a point where sixty million people who get monthly Social Security payments would not be getting some of their payments. In addition to federal reimbursement for Medicare. I was like, that is one which actually would really change things. Now, some Republicans have said that the government actually can continue to make these payments, but some budget experts are skeptical
of the Treasury Department will have the ability. The other thing is cynically, if the Republicans are like, no, you can, and the treasury departments are like, no, we can, it's like, well, who has the authority to pay the Treasury Department? Right, so they may do it just to try and force the hand of somebody. Let's all be honest, like nobody really knows how and what to do. Because what happens is the Treasury Department will still have incoming revenues. All
of us will continue to pay taxes business owners. You know, we have to pay on a quarterly basis or whatever, so we'll pay our quarterly tax estimate. Well, they can use that money coming in because it's non congressionally appropriated. So then they though have to go and decide what to spend it on. But that itself comes to a constitutional question of like you shouldn't be making decisions about what to spend and whatnot.
So it's yeah, it is complicated.
Right, And also you know, think about this choice that they would be making. Are you going to pay the holders over like the seniors who which is social Security? Of course that's what Wall Street wants one hundred percent. And you know, to make the other side of this, there are Republicans who say, oh, we've gone through we prioritize how we'd make the payments, so you know, it
wouldn't be as dire as what you're laying out. But again, this is all completely uncharted territory, and so there's a lot of skepticism that, however, it's like billions of payments have to go on from the federal government that do you really trust the federal government to be able to accurately like prioritize those in a way that everybody is going to find acceptable. Very likely they would privilege Wall
Street over like veterans, seniors, et cetera. So so yeah, I think that's a really important one, and this could be a global catastrophe. Why Because more than half of the world's foreign currency reserves are held in US dollars. Treasury bonds are used as collateral routinely because they're considered to be like the safest possible financial instrument. Sometimes they're considered like safer than cash. This backstops as collateral transactions,
major corporate transactions all around the globe. And that's why, again it's so hard to predict. Okay, when that stops being so certain and becomes instantly.
This risky asset, what does that do?
What does it mean in terms of our status is still being the world's reserve currency. You already have countries that are trying to move in another direction from that, so huge and very frightening question marks about what that would all look like. I always remember, you know what happened in the UK when you had that mini budget disastrously released by Liz Trust and it had all of these follow on, catastrophic, instant economic impacts that nobody really
saw coming. Because the global financial system is so intertwined and so complex that even the most intelligent and well versed economist can't lay out what all of the follow on effects are. So that's what makes this so frightening. You of course would have the dollar drop. You would have us barrowingst sore, which is the opposite of what you want if you're worried about the debt. That means the debt becomes even more expensive, and we're even in
a deeper hole. So that's why this is not something to play around with. You know, this is not a game and it's not something to be casual about. There are potentially very dire and very serious consequences here, and they're playing with fire.
So let's go put the next one on there because it's important, actually, which is they say the consequences from Bloomberg of the debts healing are already here. And what they say is that this is even JP Morgan CEO Jamie Diamond, the consequences could be catastrophic. One person that they quote, the former chief of staff at the Treasury Department, said, people get the joke that's going on in Washington. It's
the strongest economy in the world, the most powerfulmation. If it's not going to pay its debts when due, you've got to be kidding. And then what they point to is that this could cause global financial panic, as you said, Crystal, and that's why when you're messing with something which seems so ironclad in the global financial system, you really just have no idea what's going to happen. They point to
the fifty trillion dollars capital markets, debt and equity. Any hiccups in repo markets that could take those markets off course have hundreds of billions of dollars in implications, even a couple of percent, you know, both ways, and the overnight lending through the banks and financial markets as primary collateral. He says, there could be a huge contraction of credit and capital markets liquidity that greases the skids of all of those markets, as well as a huge liquidity call.
What's more, corporations with triple A ratings cannot be rated more safe than the country that they are hosted in, meaning that corporations themselves could face mandatory downgrades and higher borrowing costs. That's what I referenced earlier in our show whenever we had a debt a downgrade in the way that we were. You know, all of these things have automatic kick ins for pensions and for higher borrowing costs.
And if we have higher borrowing costs across not only as a government, but for our individual corporations, that bleeds into what they're able to do, what they're able to borrow money for. So yeah, it's just a real mess all around.
I think that's the only way you could possibly sum it up, and let me just say again, look, I think Biden has made a catastrophic error here by a goring to negotiate, because I think the consequences of this are so dire, and I do want to be clear on like the fourteenth Amendment work around or whatever. No one is saying that would be painless. It would be you know, there would be economic consequences to that as well, because tagar are what you're pointing to the uncertainty of
how this will work out within the legal system. And was this you know, debt really going to be honored in the way that our other debt. That is all really true, But we cannot keep having these hostage situations year after year after year. We have got to find a way to take this thing off the table because this is a potential catastrophic disaster for people in this country and people around the world in the making, and we need to not repeat the errors of the past,
is what I would say. So we will see how this all works out. If it does work out, okay.
Let's go to the next one here, This one all Gnome Chomski and just the Jeffrey Epstein story. It never really does die, does it? So let's go ahead and put this one up on the screen.
This is.
It's you know, it's hard to say for somebody who is certainly respected the book that we have literally on the shelf, which I've always thought was very important, foundational to understanding manufacturing consent and media incentives and all that by the intellectual Nom Chomsky linguist somebody, you know, I still do respect, I guess somewhat intellectual leads respected scholarship.
I can respect a scholarship that said. We now have proof from the Wall Street Journal that Jeffrey Epstein moved two hundred and seventy thousand dollars for Nom Chomsky and paid an addition one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
an academic named Leon Botstein. So what the journal says is that this transfer between accounts for Noam Chomsky the two academics have all been confirmed, both by Chomsky as well as financial wreckers that the Wall Street Journal has been able to get their hands on, says that Chomsky met with Epstein, not just the one time that we
had previously said, but actually on multiple occasions. Now Chomsky says that they quote met occasionally to discuss political and academic topics, and in response to those questions, Actually what they say is that previously one of the payoffs Fisiness to Botstein was one hundred and fifty grand because Epstein had donated a sum to bar that year as more than a one million dollar donation. A spokesperson then said that they did receive this like weird pass through donation
through Leon Botstein. Not exactly sure what's going on there, you know, with Chomsky, he doesn't really have a particularly good explanation. He says he received a March twenty eighteen transfer of two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from an Epstein account. He says, quote, it was restricted to a rearrangement of my own funds and did not involve one penny from Epstein. He explained he had asked him for help quote with a technical matter that involved the disbursement
of common funds related to his first marriage. He says, my wife died fifteen years ago. We paid no attention to financial issues. We asked Epstein for advice. The simplest way would be a transfer funds from one account in my name to another by way of his office. Chomsky said he did not hire Epstein. It was just quick and a simple transfer of funds.
Look, I mean maybe, uh.
You know, his initial response to the question Crystal was remember whenever they would deal that he'd met. First response is none of your business or anyone. Second is I knew him and we met occasionally. So is it possible that it's an innocent explanation?
Maybe?
But I mean, ever, it boggles the mind to think of a true scenario where you need a quarter of a million dollar bridge loan from Jeffrey Epstein, Like there, we have a legitimate financial system, and we have ways to rectify those problems. Why would it make sense for you to transfer money from one account to another guy's account, who then transfers money to you. If you do need to transfer money to yourself, why don't you just wire
money to yourself or you know what I mean? Like there, I'm just like, it's like, there are many ways to give money to yourself, very few of them involve me sending it to you to send it to me. And you know, if we're have a closer relationship, hopefully than Jeffrey Epstein and Nomchovsky. So anyway, I think it's a little bit odd it just.
It lines up with so many of these things that come out where it's you know, Epstein is doing financial transactions for people that you're like, why was this person in the middle of this?
Why were they involved?
He clearly made himself in the business of like solving whatever little issue, whatever little problem that people with power or money had, and so somehow I don't understand how or why it makes sense to put himself in the middle of this just transfer of funds between accounts. I mean, we do lots of fun transfers here at breaking points. Yes, number once have we been like, let's get this weird pedophile to help us with the transaction, Like let's send it to him and then send.
It back to us, just take it out.
I don't know, we send it to the person we own money to right.
There, you put on a wire like it's not really that already you can do it online these days. So that yes, And at the same time, there's some additional news about some of the banks and their relationships with Epstein. So he was originally a JP Morgan Chase customer for many years, and they're in trouble over that, and they're facing discovery over their relationship. Jamie Diamond's been subpoena and all these sorts of things.
So that happened.
Then after JP Morgan, Chase was like, all right, I think we'd better be done with this dude.
Then Deutsche Bank picks up where.
They left off, and they had this relationship with Epstein for years after he was already convicted. So there's really no excuse, and they've been in a lot of hot water for ignoring what were like really obviously suspicious transactions that were going on. So put this next piece up on the screen. We now have Deutsche Bank paying seventy
five million dollars to victims of Jeffrey Epstein. This is a proposed court settlement closes, they say, another chapter in the German bank's relationship with the disgraced financier, which began in twenty thirteen and continued up until.
Late twenty eighteen. So this was to.
Settle a potential class action lawsuit charging that this financial institution facilitated his sex trafficking ring. According to lawyers who sued the bank on behalf of alleged victims, you had a woman who was listed anonymously as Jane Doe in court papers who filed this suit last year in New York, and this was on behalf of herself and other accusers of Epstein. So you know, they want to make this
go away. And I would say for a gigantic financial global financial institution like Deutsche Bank, seventy five million dollars to them, it's nothing.
Yes, you're right, And Deutsche Bank has long had problems and links to Jeffrey Epstein. They were one of the originals that were cited by the New York Financial Department for some of the activities that they had taken on behalf of them. And what was revealed actually in the Deutsche Bank complaint and the complaint by them by from the New York Financial Services Department is basically that they knew that he was involved in sketchy transactions, They knew
he was a sex offender. They never kicked him off of their client list. Despite the fact that they knew all of what was going on, they continued to pursue
him for business transactions. And really some of the most troubling was that they were facilitating transactions which would be illegal in any or not or which would be flagged to federal authorities by any other client So, for example, Christal, if you or I were to go to our bank and we were to ask this question, how much money can we withdraw without alerting the feds?
They're supposed to alert the feds.
He asked that question, and then after they told him the answer, he would take out basically up until one dollar in cash. For all of that, his assistants would say that it was for tips. They also were wiring all kinds of crazy amounts of money to Eastern Europe for potential sex trafficking, you know, potential like sex trafficking purposes.
There was some financial behavior where's no normal person would ever, ever, ever, ever get away with, and that they knew was sketchy because they were flagging it internally and continue to do business with them.
Yeah, that's that's exactly right. And so you know, they didn't want any sort of discovery with regard to this. They didn't want any of their dirty laundry to be aired publicly. And so, like I said, I think seventy five million dollars is them getting off really easy here.
Oh it's easy as hell, because I mean, somebody who even knows they might have made more than that just in the fees that they had from banking with him. I mean they certainly paid a fine there, but even reputationally, as you said, like to expose the level of safeguards that they didn't have in place while this was happening, which these banks all supposedly do have.
Again, you know, for you and.
Me, for somebody who has let's say somebody fell on hard times and declared bankruptcy or something, it's like, well, then the bank has all these regulations about how they can and can't do posinis. But if you are literally convicted sex offender and you have a proven track record of moving money around for trafficking purposes, apparently that's all good as long as you bring in enough money.
I mean, that's all take to be a client for one of these people.
It's so dirty, It really is so dirty. I mean this is this unrelated to Epstein, but Wells Fargo, which has been yeah, really bad actor. And they claim they had that whole fake account scandal. I don't know if you guys remember that, but it was just they were opening up accounts and people's names that they never asked for.
They were creating fake accounts just routinely as part of their culture and they just had an issue where their shareholders are accusing them of lying about that they had things under control and that they had cleaned up their act et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, these are so many of these institutions, if not all of them, are just so incredibly dirty.
Yeah, dirty as hell.
All right, As we said, we had some big and very disturbing news about the housing market. How Americans are feeling about the housing market right now, let's put this up on the screen from Gallop. You now have views of the US housing market reaching new depths, a new low in the US say it is a good time to buy a house. Leaves us up on the screen for a little bit, just so people can take in
the trend here. You know, back in nineteen eighty you had about fifty percent of people who said a little bit more than fifty percent, a majority saying Okay, it's a good time to buy a house. That continues to go up until right about the time that you have the financial crash, it dips down to about fifty percent. Then after the financial crash around twenty ten, things pick back up, and now you've been on a basically consistent decline over the past decade, reaching.
A new loan.
Now where only twenty one percent of Americans feel like it's a decent time to go out and buy a house, seventy eight percent say it is a bad time to buy a house now. It will be no surprise the viewers of this program. Why that is you have the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates that has had a dramatic impact on mortgage interest rates that is made already unaffordable housing even more wildly unaffordable. Now as home prices have
just started to fall around the country. You've got a median of four hundred and thirty six thousand dollars is the median home price in twenty twenty three, and you do have fewer Americans expecting home values in their area to rise in the coming year. So it's not that prices are like continuing to skyrocket, but because of mortgage rates, it's so wildly unaffordable.
And of course, housing prices have.
Been going up and up and up and up even before we started this whole conversation about inflation. Inflation within housing, healthcare, and education has been out.
Of control four years.
So this basic building block of middle class stability has become out of reach for most people who are you know, even college educated professionals who are earning decent salaries, if they live in a major metro area, they're screwed. If they don't have a cash handout for mommy and daddy to put down you know, major cash upfront, they're screwed. And they've only become more screwed from the mortgage interest rates.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think that the mortgage interest is the biggest problem in terms of affordability, because you know what people do is they're saving up, they look at their down payment, they think, okay, great, I can make this happen, and then they go and they play with one of those tools and they're like, wait, so two years ago, definitely I could have made that happen, but now I
can't because the interest payments are sky high. And then even if you can afford the interest, here like do I really want to be paying more than half my paying or do I really want to be paying so many thousands of dollars per year to the bank. And sure, you know it's tax deductible and all of that, but you know, why would you spend you know, why throw away a dollar so that you can save twenty five
cents or whatever whenever it comes to your taxes. And that's always one of the like stupidest ways that people can think about it. The other one, as appointed to here, is that when you have a decrease in the housing market, and in views of the housing market, yeah, it restricts the further supply of housing because home builders and new homes of.
Which we are desperately in need of. We really do need a lot of new housing.
And that is a whole other conversation about how you balance neighborhood hoods and all that other stuff, which I'm sympathetic to, you know, to some respect. But the question is like, at the very least the ones that are getting built need to continue. Many home builders are simply dropping their projects or putting them on pause because they a cannot afford the building materials and b they do not feel that they will be able to sell at their current rate. Or and we have this right here,
let's put this up there on the screen. The housing market is now so unaffordable. Builders say, quote, they have no choice but to build smaller homes. Now, again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because in some cases, we kind of do need more starter home invatory because some people, you know, not everybody has to buy a four thousand square foot house. I'm not really sure where this came from,
but let's put that aside. The idea, though, is that by building smaller, one of the things that they're finding is that it's going to just deeply cut into their profit margin, which would only mean that they will continue to build less and less, or they may just not they may abandoned the project altogether. So there's just like all within the chain of custody. I guess of all this is it's just a really bad outlook. We'll have less housing and then we'll only have even more expensive payments.
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the problems too is people who already own a home who might have been interested in moving, which would open up their house to be sold and you know, some new buyer to be able to come in. They don't want to move because they have really low mortgage interest rate. They don't want to have to take out a new mortgage that's going to
have a much higher interest rate. It makes no sense because they're not going to be able to afford even the house that they already have given the way that mortgage interest rates have gone up. Now they have come down a little bit from their peak, but is still significantly higher than where it was before. And as you're referring to soccer, in terms of the builders, it's kind of a worst of all worlds for them because on the one hand, inflation has made materials very expensive for
them in terms of building. On the other hand, even though the Fed has been hiking rates, you know, it hasn't combated that inflation in terms of their materials and their expenses, but it has jacked up also their borrowing costs.
So that's an issue for them as well.
One of the things things that frankly, we weren't about very early in the Federal Reserve program of hiking interest rates because it has constrained supply of housing and it has made the housing situation even that much more difficult. So you have low housing stock, you don't have enough homes, you certainly don't have enough affordable homes. You have decades of prices going up and up and up, making housing
unaffordable to start with. Then you layer on top of that the mortgage interest that is just absolutely killing people, and that's how you come to this place where so few Americans feel that it is a decent time to buy a house, record low feeling like it's a decent time to buy a house. And you know, we talk a lot about the housing market here, and the reason we do is because it is so central to building
basic wealth and prosperity. I mean, that is the real divide increasingly in America is between asset owners and particular homeowners and people who do not own assets and do not own wealth. And as Sober you cover in your monologue the other day, those problems are only going to get worse as boomers hand down their inheritances to their you know.
Lucky children.
There's going to be a growing divide between those who can ever dream of getting onto the you know, home ownership ladder versus those who are going to be Listen, if you love renting and that's your thing. I'm not like there's no judgment here whatsoever, But a lot of people want to have a home, have that stability, be able to build well through it. And it is increasingly impossible for people to be able to do that last
piece with regard to housing. You know, just to show you how much the mortgage rates here matter put this up on the screen from Politico. They had a piece a little while ago that said how the Fed's rate hikes helped drive up mortgage payments. You can see the average monthly mortgage payment for a typical US home has grown fifty percent since January thirty one, twenty twenty two. So basically, in a year, the average monthly mortgage payment has gone up by fifty percent. Just let I mean,
let that soak in. And so that's why people who already have a home and have a lower mortgage interust rate, they're definitely not interested in selling if they can at all avoid it. They want to stay put until things come back down. If you're trying to get in to the market, this has made it so that what you're able to obtain is going to be so much less than what it was before, and in some cases, in many cases, it's just going to be completely off the table altogether.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think that's why that graphic is just so poignant about the fifty percent increase over two years, and really sad part is you probably just won't ever go back. I saw a graphic going around that if you were able to get a less than two percent or two point five percent interest rate on your mortgage. It may be the single best trade that you'll ever make in your entire life. Wow, just through you know, fortuitous circumstances. For those who did it, God bless you.
Although I guess you can't really leave. But for those who like.
Your house, you'll be there forever.
Yeah, exactly. I hope you like it because you're not leaving.
But you know, for those who didn't get who did missed out on that, just as a matter of circumstance, it's still not fair.
So we got to fix it something.
Yeah, but I'm kind of kicking myself because I started the process of refinancing my mortgage at the time when it was like Atith Lewis, and then I like dropped the ball and didn't get my shit together and then the rates started going up.
I have a friend who's got a one point out Crystal one point nine.
Wow. Wow, man, you you lucked out, so good for him.
Yes, indeed, there's another piece that you know. It tracks with the dire views of the housing market. It tracks with you know, people's just sense of hopelessness. It tracks with the fallout from the pandemic. God put this up on the screen. I mean, this is in some ways one of the worst metrics of how the country is doing that I've seen in a long time. US depression
rates have reached a new high. So people who have been diagnosed with depression, who have ever had depression, who are currently being treated for depression, both of those metrics have reached an all time high, so twenty nine percent. That's a nearly ten percentage point hike since twenty fifteen. So we're not talking about a long time ago, but we've had a ten point hike in the percentage of Americans who currently have or are being treated for depression.
That's at seventeen point eight percent. That's up about seven points over that period, highest recorded by Gallop since they started measuring depression. You have higher rates among women, so over one third of women thirty six point seven percent now report having been diagnosed at some point in their lifetime. That's compared to twenty point four percent of men. Their rate has also risen at nearly twice the rate of
men since twenty seventeen. You've got young people who also have seen significant increases, So those aged eighteen to twenty nine, they're at thirty four percent. Those who are aged thirty to forty four, they're at thirty five percent, and their depression diagnosis rates have been among the ones that have spiked the most. Now in some of this is, you know,
for example, the difference between men and women. I wonder how much of that is there's actually different differing rates of depression between men and women, and how much of it is women feel more comfortable admitting this and seeking help, And because you have the image of like, you know, masculinity and the strong, silent type of whatever, if there's more of a stigma there around seeking help and admitting you've been diagnosed or admitting you've struggled with depression, I
genuinely don't know. I'm just putting that out there for people to consider. But the other thing they point to here is not going to be surprised, which is that you know, COVID nineteen and the social isolation and lockdowns and the fact that people were just at their home alone or with just their close nuclear family that has really exacerbated what was already a crisis in terms of depression. It's also contributed to significant substance abuse. So, and you know,
mental health in this country. Mental health care in this country is really poorly lacking, so that contributes to this picture as well.
Yeah, so I actually think I'm most concerned about the percent change because the percent change has gone up by eight point four percent in the last eight years. For men, it's gone up by five point seven. For women, it's gone up by ten point five. For those who are eighteen to twenty nine, it's gone up by thirteen point nine, thirty to thirty four, twelve point six, forty five to sixty four, or five point seven sixty five. On older
it's only gone up by two percent. So the net increase specifically amongst people between eighteen to twenty nine and thirty to forty four just comes from a general sense of malaise and also your inability to think that you can get out of your current circumstances. And I think that is probably the toughest single thing, and it's also explains a lot of our social ills. It's why people are angry so much, a lot of violence right now. It's just people are pissed. They're like they're popping off
for literally no reason. Ask anybody who works in law enforcement. Also, the amount of rage road rage incidents is sky high.
I actually witnessed two or three today.
Wow, well, you know what you just want to You'll be like, I want to be in the brain of somebody who thinks it's okay. I do not want to be in that brain. No, I'm just want to be like a horrible place to explain it to me. Explain to me why you're more important than five hundred other people who are in line. Well, what's happening inside of you? It's like how were you raised to get to this point? And then also you know what happened on this particular day.
Everybody has bad days.
It's okay, but we're having a lot more bad days on average than good days.
And then that's the question of like why how does this all happen? And I think, you know.
It's COVID lockdowns. It just accelerated it, Like it's not the answer. I was also looking at, you know, not only the team depression rate, it's also it's been on the rise now for quite a long time, and I think I have to go back to the phone analysis a lot of it as you see a huge spike in depression between eighteen to forty four year olds.
That happened right around twenty eleven.
And the reason why twenty eleven or twenty twelve is a pretty good benchmark is because that is when mass availability of smartphones, not just when the iPhone came out, but whenever I am massive iPhone four. It really was a jump off for a lot of people. The move from the BlackBerry to the smartphone, and also the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and all of these other apps kind of right hits that on. Now. You know, can you live
without them? No, wouldn't literally it wouldn't be here without them. So you know, it's complicated, but it's very complicated. It's complicated that said, I mean, we got to find some sort of balance and I you know here and we see it a lot from people. People feel very not optimistic about starting a family, about even getting in a relationship.
Everything's kind of been gamified, smartphoneified. And again, you know, you can't go back from where we are right now, but I think acknowledging it at the very least is important.
Yeah.
Also, you know, it should open up a lot of discussion Gristle about SSRIs. We have covered all those stories about whether SSRIs even work, you know, relative to all of the downsides, how exercise itself seems to have the exact same level of upside without any of the risk. I'm totally open now having watched Michael Pollin's documentary and book about the use of potential you know, psychedelics in.
A clinical setting.
But more importantly, it's like we have to pursue all options with a vigorous I think, and yeah, with a vigorous attitude.
I do want to point out to that, you know, some of the trends that we track here are really unique to the US. This one is actually not. This is actually pretty consistent with global rates of depression and anxiety, which I think also would fit with the idea that you know, the smartphone has been a major contributor, because obviously that's not a US specific phenomenon, so it's it's very multifaceted. I also agree with you that COVID was
an accelerant of trends that were already existing. And you know, I think this is a major crisis just in terms of oftentimes the only way that the US, the US government, media pundits know how to track well being in the US is like by money or the unemployment rate, or you know, or the stock market, which is a particularly
poor indicator of how the country is doing. But to me, core issues like you know, whether people feel like they'll ever be able to buy a house, how they're feeling about themselves day to day, how much of a struggle it is for them to get through their day. You know, the levels of depression, anxiety, self reported loneliness. Loneliness can
be really devastating, and it's under discussed as well. These are the sort of core metrics that I think really make up a healthy society and unfortunately we're failing on a lot of them.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of those where at the very least people need to take it seriously.
Yeah, and that's the most important thing.
Speaking of mental illness and things that are you know, really out of whacking that turn for a while, people who have been maybe displaying narcissistic behavior now for years. There was a fascinating incident that happened yesterday, So we began the day. There was a statement that was put out by the Duke and Duchess, the Duke and Duchess Harry and Megan that we may call them here in the United States. Let's put this up there on the screen.
They put out a statement, they say, last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and missus Raglan that's the mother in law, were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi. This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD officers. While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never
come at the cost of anyone's safety. Disseminations of these images, given the way in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all involved.
Hmm.
Okay, so we have a couple of questions here immediately about this. Obviously, you know we can we should have some empathy for Prince Harry. His mother literally died in an incident where well, maybe we're racing away from paparazzi. Okay, so at least that's the official narrative. Maybe that's what he believes. So if so, maybe he's going to be sensitive about that. All right, so let's break some of it down. So first and foremost, what are we all asking about?
Two hours?
Yeah, two hour near catastrophic car chase in the middle of down mid Town Manhattan. That's pretty interesting for anybody who's ever lived there, who's ever spent any time there.
You guys, Now, Midtown is like Times Square.
Yeah, Times Square, So we're this place has bump bumper traffic like twenty four to seven, especially at the time that they were leaving, So that's kind of crazy. How do you have a near catastrophic car chase? Then they say that it had near collisions with other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers. So immediately, of course, okay, well, you know, maybe this happened. Let's talk to the NYPD. So here's what they had to say. Let's put this
up there on the screen. Here's what they say. On Wednesday evening May sixteen, the NYPD assisted the private security team protecting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. They were numerous photographers that made their transport challenging. The Duke and Duchess arrived at their destination and there were no reported collisions. Summons says injuries, arrest in regard. Oh so no collisions, no summons says, no injuries, no arrests in regard, no
officers were put at risk as were originally claimed. So already we have some questions here about the two hour thing. Now the NYPD basically says that's actually not what happened at all. Then Mayor Eric Adams, who presumably also had been read in a little bit on the incident, he poured cold water on the entire thing.
Let's take a listen to what he said.
I would find it hard to believe that there was a two hour high speed chase. That would be I find out hard to believe. But we will find out the exact duration of it. But if it's a ten minutes, a ten minute chase is extremely dangerous in New York City.
Ten minute chase is extremely dangerously right And unfortunately though for them and their version of events, it doesn't even look like even that ten minute chase happened.
Let's put this up there.
On the screen because the taxi driver that they got into a taxi he says, I don't.
Think I would call it a chase.
He says, I never felt like I was in danger, they were quiet, they seem scared.
But it's New York. It's safe.
By the way, whenever he says that, what he's actually saying is it's midtown Manhattan, that it's safe. And look, I think that that is very obviously true. Now, furthermore, there's actually been even more reporting since we put these together, Crystal, And in fact, according to police sources who are countering this claim, not only was there no car chase all of that, but they say that this entire episode lasted only twenty minutes and did not involve the amount of
paparazzi that they claim. In fact, the cops who escorted Harry and Megan out of the event and to their home or wherever they were staying, they say they.
Were home twenty minutes after leaving the event.
This entire thing appears to be, based on the full availability of the evidence as it currently exists, does not appear to have happened in the way that they said, Crystal, And we can say that from the taxi drivers on record, from the NYPD, from the mayor, from the police sources that have all put this out, a.
Lack of video, the lack of video, this is Mintown, Manhattan. There's people with cell phone cameras everywhere.
The video arps do anything.
Come out from people who showed the paparazzi around the car out of red light by the way, doing anything wrong? Then a cop car was coming, except the cop car wasn't escorting them. He just came through and he turned right. He didn't go in the same direction. So even their
version of events on that one is total BS. So look, I mean, looking at all of this, it is very clear that this did not happen that the way that they said it did, based upon their recollections and all the stuff that is in the public domain at this moment. And it's just a further part of the we want Privacy tour.
Yes, I don't know how many of you watched the South Park episode. Yeah, Harry and Meghan that they were suing them over right, the whole.
Well, they could, they considered it. They considered it.
Oh they didn't.
There's a thing.
They're in America, Sorry, Harry and Meghan. You're not in your BS country where you can just sue people for no reason and may impossibly win.
In America, we have much better laws.
So in the South Park episode, the whole central core of the plot is that Harry and Meghan are going on people who look like Harry yea bear some resemblance to them, are going on a worldwide privacy tour where they go and they decide they're going to move to South Park to like get their privacy, and they're out like picketing, like we just want to be left alone, and everyone's like, we're trying to leave you alone, like
please leave us alone. And this is almost literally like it is literally the South Park episode, Like you, okay, there were some paparazzi. I don't think anyone is going to be shocked by that. Paparazzi can be aggressive. I don't think anybody, including yourselves, are going to be shocked by that either. But by wildly overstating this, it's like, yeah, we are trying to leave you alone, but you just keep putting yourself at our faces.
Do I want to cover Harry and Meghan?
No, not really, but like this is just too absurd to not talk about. In the direct contradiction from the police, from the mayor, from like everybody who had anything to the taxi driver, for anybody who had anything to do with it.
It's the reason I feel compelled to debunk this and to talk about this is because I know that this will just be regurgitated by the page sixes and all of these other people. In fact, the funniest thing is in Britain they think that Harry and Meghan are a joke and they are reviled. The only people who believe her and anything that she says are idiots in America.
Who are like, oh my god, it's a real life princess.
And that's the issue is like we are the suckers, our media are the life.
How much of that sentiment still exists in this way? I'm genuinely asking, because I have my sense is that everybody is like, please go away.
That's words, you're around the normal people. There are a lot of girls out there who love Megan. They think that she told the truth in her OPRAH interview, even though there's not a lot of evidence to say that she told the truth in her OPRAH interview. I mean, and look, you can hate the royal family if you want to, that's fine, but like that doesn't mean you have to believe a complete narcissist. And like that's it's very clear what her game has been too normal folks
like us, but not everybody feels that way. And the point is is that, you know, looking at the way that her claims were reported, immediately was as truth. They were like, oh my gosh, this is terrible, catastrophic all that not one ounce of skepticism, except again from the Brits and you know, Megan Kelly, people like me and a few others who are like, yeah, I don't think so, man, this whole thing doesn't really add up.
I don't want to a smirch page six, which I think does some phoenomenal report.
Right, you're right, I'm sorry I did not go after that.
They're only doing what they're told, I guess just you know, technically their entire job.
But yeah, we may trade in gossip, that's what they do. But you would think that there would be a moment of like, two are car chase in midtown men? Yeah?
Exactly.
That's my thing is, how do you say with a straight face, but you had a car chase in midtown Manhattan for two hours. Most of that time you'd be sitting in traffic, and all of the evidence that came out from it is people sitting in traffic So there you go. All right, let's talk about Fox News and let's put this up there on the screen. This is big news being reported by Matt Drudge over at the
Drudge Report. Fox News is currently denying it, but Drudge Report says that Sean Hannity appears to be ready to replace Tucker Carlson in a major shakeup.
Now here's what he says from Drudge.
He says, world exclusive, Fox News sets a new schedule. So Drudge is claiming that the new primetime gigs will both go to Sean Hannity, to Jesse Waters, and to Greg Guttfeld to stack the primetime lineup. Seven PM currently is where they might move him too, because Guttfeld is currently on at eleven PM and also on the five
PM show called The Five. The reason why that this is a big deal is not only would they say that Hannity, their current higher rated host, is just going to slot in and take over Tucker Carlson's timeslot, It's that it would also involve a drop of Laura Ingram. Now, again, as I said, let's put this up there. Fox is
denying that any of this is the case. They say no decision has been made on a new primetime lineup, and there are multiple scenarios under consideration, not really a full scale de Nile, because all Drudge is saying is a major shakeup is happening, and the main thing that he is reporting is that Sean Hannity is going to the eight pm hour. It's certainly possible that it doesn't happen, you know, I guess it's possible it doesn't. Drudge though,
generally pretty good whenever it comes to internal news. I guess you could say of the Fox News channel because he was very tight and has a lot of sources there.
He actually used to work there. You know.
Now at some point the real question is, uh, you know, will lor Ingram get the boot? And then second, this only only codifies so much of what I've talked about here is there. If they're not even gonna try and replace Tucker, they're just going to slot in Sean Hannity yea, and move in there, that's an admission of failure.
It's a huge admission.
It's such it's very consistent, Yeah, with MSNBC's approach to not even trying to replace Rachel Mack, really putting in Alex Wagner, who's just like a you know, sort of standard issue news host. It's consistent with CNN just moving Caitlyn Collins to primetime. I mean, does anyone really expect she's Maybe they're deluding themselves and I'm thinking she's going to be some good luck star, but you know, to me, she's just another sort of like standard issue news hosts
like many of the other ones. So it is consistent with a pattern of effectively managed to climb that is quite evident at every one of these networks. We have a non denial denial about the Laura Ingram thing as well that we can report. So a network spokesperson said, this is kind of funny. Reports based on various tweets by left wing activists are wildly inaccurate.
Since when did Drudge become a left wing activist?
Okay, Laura Ingram, the top rated woman in cable news, is now and will continue to be a prominent host and integral part of the Fox News lineup. Doesn't say she's going to remain in primetime though, does it? Yeah? No, So, I mean it is interesting what is being omitted, and you can bet very intentionally so from these little statements that they're putting.
Out yeah, yeah.
I mean that's actually the big takeaway for me is like, oh wow, so clearly something is going on over there. I mean, I just think, look, if you're going to slot in Hannity, that is the biggest admission of fail. Whenever O'Reilly left the network, Hannity stayed in his nine PM slot and they tried out a bunch of different stuff. I forget exactly what the drama was because, like Megan Kelly was leaving, so they replaced her, and then Tucker
was moved APM hour. Eventually that's where he found his success. But they're only keeping existing talent. They're not even hiring anybody new. Tucker was actually brought in new to the network, at least to the primetime here to.
Primetime before that, he had been hosting I think weekend.
I was gonna say, he's only on weekend Fox and Friends. Just completely not the same thing at all. So look, I mean, what you could say around all of this is that what you can say is that this has managed decline at its absolute finest. And I don't think anybody could say that Sean Hannby is in any way in the same caliber. I mean, he is just like You can accuse Tucker of many things, but with Hannity,
he is just like copy cut like cookie cutter. Whatever Republican talking point of day is, Yeah, it's.
Like a wind up doll, like freedom and low taxes is just it's very predictable. That's what I would say, is he's very predictable. He's always going to be on the side of like whatever is the Republican thing of the day, He's going to be on the talking points like it just is. You know, it is what it is. So you're not going to break a lot of ground there. Obviously, he's had a lot of success at the network for
a lot of years. I think he's been there the whole like the whole time since the launch of the network.
I don't know if he was there at the very beginning, but he's.
Been there a long time, and you know, he's held down a stable core of audience. But as we've discussed before, there were only a couple people in cable news who really were a magnet to draw viewers in, and then much of the cable news game is trying to hold
on to whatever you get in terms of audience. That carries over from the last host so you know, Rachel Baddow was a tent pole at AMSNBC, and Tucker was a tent pole over at Fox News, and you know, they clearly don't have anyone to replace him with in terms of that sort of like tent pole draw. What do you make of the Laura if we're taking this Laura rumor at face value, which frankly, the Fox News statement just to me almost like confirms that she's being
moved down in prime time. She was also caught up in some of the Dominion revelations. You know, I can't remember specifically that, but I know there were texts or messages between her producers and some people who were involved with Stop the Steal. You know, do you think that that could be related to why she's being moved down in prime time?
As possible.
It's certainly possible that she's that's one of the reasons that she got moved out of primetime. It's also you know, her ratings, not me, may not be the best. They also could I mean, look what they may want to try and develop talent, Like they've given her several years there and she hasn't made it into some Gangbusters thing.
You know, it's also hard to work with.
I mean, ten pm is not a great time to be on television, and you know, in general, she's hard to work with.
Yeah, I was going to say, I know, behind the scenes, she's not be loved.
That's what the people say. Yeah, allegedly according to a rumor mill.
So you know, it could be. It's probably just a combination of factors. The real thing is, if you move gut Failed into primetime, you were taking effectively was one of your biggest stars in the network and somebody who's found success in the eleven pm hour, and you're just going to bet on him to try and do that, to bring some comedy or something new, you know, for that Waters, I mean, listen, Waters, I think he's very
much in the same league Hannity and all that. But all of these people, this has just managed to climb, you know, at its very least. It definitely would be bad for Laura Ingram though, if that's what happened.
Yeah, I'm just looking at what her involvement was and the like what came out in the Dominion thing. Apparently she and Tucker had been privately discussing Sidney Powell. Tucker called her a nut and said a bunch of other stuff, and then like that very the very next day where Laura is agreeing that basically Sidney Powell is an unhinched lunatic.
And then the very next day she's saying she believed the election was rife with problems and potential frauds, So very different what she was saying behind the scenes beside what she was presenting to her viewing audience. So was that a factor? You know, who knows who knows what's going Only time will tell, right, Yeah, I may never.
Know, Crystal, What do you take a look at?
Wow, mass surveillance is class warfare. That is the major takeaway from a new Washington Post report about how facial recognition and surveillance cameras are being used to strip the rights and the dignity from poor residents of public housing projects.
So here's that report. The headline is Eyes on the Poor Cameras, Facial recognition watch over public Housing, and it tracks how public housing projects are increasingly using surveillance tech to track every little movement of residents, weaponizing the technology to evict residents over really minor infractions. According to Post, this is happening in small, rural communities and major metro
areas alike. Just take a look at this graphic. It shows the number of cameras installed per resident in public housing projects from New York City to Rolette, North Dakota. Some of these places have more cameras per person than the Louver and the and many casinos, which are famous, of course, for sophisticated player surveillance. There is no tracking of how many residents have been evicted based on these monitoring systems, but evidence suggests that the number is significant
and rising. So first of all, overall, evictions have skyrocketed in public housing post pandemic. Princeton's Eviction Lab tracks a portion of these public housing projects. They found that evictions in the ten States and thirty four cities that they monitor have doubled since the end of the pandemic era moratoriums, rising to five thousand, five hundred seventy six in twenty twenty two. That was a faster rate of increase than
evictions from other housing units across the country. What's more, interviews with advocates suggest that these newly installed high tech camera systems have been crucial in trying to push people out. The Post spoke with numerous residents who had been tracked, harassed, and kicked out for violating rules about guests, or about smoking too close to the building, or even for removing
a cart from the laundry room. They interviewed one single mom, Tanya Akabu, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who is trying to balance childcare with her day job. She's a bus driver and she's also going to night school training to be
a lab technician. From the sound of things, she was trying to do everything right, trying to educate herself so she could get a higher paying job to better support herself and her kiddos, but given the expense of childcare in this country, she had to rely on her ex husband to help care for her kids while she was at work and while she was at school. The building accused him of actually living at the apartment, violating their rules, and they used the surveillance tech to make their case.
The housing authority actually used software to place a digital marker next to a Kabu's front door and told the system to retrieve every moment when motion was detected near the marker. Documents in interviews show going from the post here when her property manager suspected that a Kabu's ax was leaving through the back door. She set up a portable camera in the backyard pointed directly at that door.
It's according to housing authority officials and a review of the surveillance video obtained and verified by the Post, it got to the point where it was like harassment. A Kabu thirty three said, they really made my life hell. She says she presented evidence to the building that her ex was not in fact living there, that he had another different residence, but they didn't believe her and she
still was evicted. Now, another sixty eight year old woman was evicted when cameras caught her smoking too close to the building and allegedly getting into disputes with the other residents. After being forced down in public housing, she landed on her sister's couch, desperately searching for some other stable living situation.
Just once she thought that she had caught a break with another building accepting her rental application, she's back to square one after they talked to the public housing management and decided they did not want her in their building after all. It shows you how a single eviction can really derail an entire life. So what is behind the rise of this level of surveillance. Now in part, the installation is reaction to entirely justified concerns about crime, violence,
and theft. Residents and management alike. They want these complexes to be safe and calm, of course, not dens of drug use or gang infighting. A pandemic crime surge is hit poor neighborhoods such as these particularly hard and public housing projects don't have the resources to do much of anything other than apply a clumsy surveillance band aid to a gaping national social problem.
The problem goes back further too.
In nineteen eighty nine, at the height of the crack epidemic, federal legislators passed one hundred million dollars in funding to provide a wide range of social services, drug rehab, and enhance security to public housing. That funding was stripped under the Bush administration and replaced with a much smaller grant of just ten million dollars to install security features things
like cameras, doors, carbon monoxide detectors, and the like. So Unfortunately, while it's pretty clear the cameras have been intrusive to residents and have turned their entire lives into police state nightmare, there is no real evidence that they've been successful in combating crime that residents would want them to. In rural Scott County, Virginia, their algorithm base surveillance system has only turned up a single match for an individual who is
banned from the complex. And these bandlifts list our in and of themselves actually controversial since people can end up on them without ever having been charged with or convicted of a crime. The person this system match too, had been accused of domestic violence, the charges were never filed. In this story, we kind of see the perfect storm of societal ills that were gropped with all across the country. You've got a mistrust of and contempt for the poor that justifies dehumanizing treatment.
You've got a post pandemic.
Crime spike that has disproportionately victimized the poor. You've got a response to that crime spike that lacks resources and will to deal with root causes and instead just further emiserates the poor.
A tech search that is.
Increasingly penetrating even the most intimate of spaces for everyone, and looming over all of it, a housing affordability crisis that squeezes everyone except the wealthy, and constantly threatens the working poor with outright homelessness. People don't need Big Brother watching them. They need healthcare, a living wage, childcare, and perhaps above all, decent affordable housing. All the cameras in the world are not going to fix what ails us. And that's the Rubsager is a lot of these rests.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot Com.
All right, Saga, what are you looking at?
Well, it's time to check in with the cable ratings. Yes, I know it can seem gratuitous my honest answer. Maybe you're right, but sometimes I can not help myself. And the more that we remind everyone just how pathetic and badly they are doing, the better. One of the big predictions we've made here here after Tucker Carlston's departure from Fox News comes true is that this time it really
is different. Fox would have a very difficult time recovering their primetime lineup and has given the median age of their viewers it is now mid seventies, they just don't have that much time to get it right. Already, that prediction is bearing fruit MSNBC, for the first time in years, is now consistently beating Fox in primetime across the board, and MSNBC averaged one point eight million viewers between eight
to eleven. Fox averaged one point seven million, CNN average four hundred and eighty five thousand, Newsmax four hundred and twenty thousand. Now, of course, at least on their face, MSNBC and Fox numbers sound impressive, and CNN, though, is in another league of pathetic. But once again, consider the number of viewers that they have in their key demographic. Even here, MSNBC may beat Fox, but they're still only getting one hundred and eighty eight thousand viewers below the
age of fifty four. Fox is only able to get one hundred and seventy four thousand, CNN one point seventeen, News Max forty four terrestrial and old TV. Cable TV is truly the last home of the boomer. I recently was told by an insider, and I swear I am not making this up, is that one reason Fox News is not too worried about losing its overall audience is because their audience is so old they quote have difficulty
physically handling the remote and changing the check. I swear that's a true story, directly told to me by someone with knowledge.
That is a direct quote.
But even with the last holdout of Boomers over our mass culture, here too, there are signs of big trouble. CNN has lost out to Newsmax and its overall number of viewers in primetime on Friday night, and they were only able to pull some three hundred and thirty five thousand viewers on average throughout the eight eight to eleven PM hour. Ten PM, Chris Wallace was actually able to pull in only two hundred and sixty three This put Anderson Cooper's show also behind Eric Bowling over on Newsmax.
Consider how crazy all of this is when you think about these people's salaries. Cooper is supposedly a household name, a literal Vanderbilt. Surely he should be able to get some people to watch show, yet year after year to do so and still command some twelve million dollars per year. Chris Wallace, same thing, supposedly a household name, famous dad. Huge coup for CNN, plus after leaving Fox News is making millions at CNN to do the lowest rated show
on cable TV and get beaten by Newsmax. None of it really makes any sense at all, and it's why I can't stop talking about it, because the absurdity of it all eventually has to catch up to reality. So many people inside the system are so captured by it they will pretend to be surprised when it all crumbles down. At the same time, Over in sports media, though, something very interesting indeed is happening. Sports media is important to watch because many of the trends that end up happening
in political media start over there. Pat McAfee, the sports jruggernaut, in a shocking move, is going to air his show on ESPN.
But here's the deal.
He's walking away from one hundred and twenty million dollar deal with FanDuel for sponsorship of his current show. Instead, he will be now airing all three hours of his show on ESPN ESPN Plus. But what's surprising here not the dollars, it's the terms of his contract. All reporting indicates all McAfee had to really give up was the ability to say the F word during his show. His show will remain streaming live for free on YouTube. He will maintain editorial control. His deal is more like a
licensing agreement than a full blown acquisition. Think about what it means. Pat McAfee is so valuable now to ESPN and to Disney they are willing to pay him upwards of ten million dollars a year, probably more, just to have his stuff on their program while you can continue to watch it for free on YouTube. No network deal in history has ever been more friendly to somebody on the Internet.
Now.
The only caveat I'm going to give is if Pat thinks he's getting away just so easy as to stop saying the F word, probably has another thing coming.
Just out.
Yesterday, for example, a news broke that ESPN had dropped a documentary about the Chinese American tennis star Michael Chang, who won the nineteen eighty nine French Open as a young man and was inspired by the Tanaman Square masaker.
And guess why they dropped it.
I'm just sure it has editorial had nothing to do with Disney's parent company's relationship to the Chinese Communist Party. But the broader point that I am making is that a network acquiring a streamer and letting him continue to stream where he continued to own his IP is crazy.
That's how desperate that they.
Are just to squeeze even a few more people watching their dwindling channels. Now rest assured, that is not going to happen over here, nor do we want it to. It is only just a big sign of how things are going in the opposite direction from the arrogance and the confidence which the mainstream media consider their role in our society. And it's very fitting since Tucker's departure, the only person who's been able to pull real numbers on
MSNBC Rachel Maddow. She only works one day a week on MSNBC, yet she still continues to petter her nonsense.
Nonetheless, though people love that nonsense.
She's basically the very last of her breed capable of doing that. Tucker and Rachel, in my opinion i've said before, probably the very last to play the game at this level, and even their numbers poultry compared to the ten years ago. As I've showed you all before, the total collapse of the cable news business now decade is all but assured, but it also will not stop a Feinstein level of delusion from remaining on here. The only question is about power and whether they wake up to how much the
world is changing every year and every day. I thought the McAfee deal is actually the most important.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagres's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints dot com.
Joining us now, old friend of mine, Shelby Talcotch. He's a political reporter over at Semaphore's rich.
To see you.
Nice to be here.
Okay, so Shelby, you've been all over the GOP primer or I guess the not technical primary yet but officially probably primary that's happening right now. We were just talking about news drawn DeSantis very likely set to launch his campaign either next week or sometime within that.
You wrote a new piece. Let's put it up there on the screen.
The real twenty twenty four campaign started in Iowa this weekend. Desant is giving us a little bit of a preview of what he's going to be doing. Tell us a little bit about what you learned what this primary is going to look like.
Yeah, I think it's been obvious that DeSantis is running for a long time, but this was the first speak and that I really noticed him kind of branch out of his Florida focused rhetoric, and so I'm sure you guys saw over the past few months when he was doing his book tour, it was very Florida focused. This time he started branching out and he started giving kind of indirect jobs over at at Trump he did the you know, handshaking and the flipping the burgers for the
for the press. He didn't give a press he didn't speak to the press, which was notable because Congressman Fiinstra's people were really pushing his team to do so, and they essentially, from my understanding, were telling his team, well, hey, this is this is how we do things every year, and this is you know, your your WoT to launch.
R presidential campaign. This is how things have to be.
But by and large, it was really the first indication I felt like that things are heating up.
He's about to announce, got it.
So how did he do?
In terms of the knock on him has been like, oh, he's not very personable, he's not very comfortable around people. He doesn't do like the glad handed handling a piece of politics very well. And there have been some indications of that. I mean, there was, you know, the one member of Congress that he met with and then directly
afterwards endorsed Donald Trump. You had stories coming out about, Hey, I sat next to this dude for years, we served on the same committee, and he didn't even learn my name. Do you see any evidence of that on the nascent campaign trail thus far.
Yeah, Listen, I think and I've talked to people close to him, and they acknowledge that it is not his bread and butter.
He prefers to be at home.
With his family, which I think is completely fine, but for presidential campaign you have to kind of branch out. So I'm seeing evidence that he is taking those criticisms and trying to apply them, but I'm also seeing evidence that it is not natural for him. You know, in Iowa, there was a clip of him as he was talking to prospective voters that went viral among the Trump team where he was like laughing really aggressively, and so, yeah, it's a little it's a little bit of awkwardness.
The egregious part to me was the guy who was like, I drove two hours to come you, and he was like thanks and just turned around. I was like, oh, dude, I didn't even sav was not it was part of the same clip, but that one.
I was like, that actually might be worse. Whenever you make people.
Feel that way, tell us about the actual infrastruction of the campaign.
Been covering now for quite some time.
One of the you know things that we saw was that Trump canceled this event and des Moines and Everyone's like, oh, you know, de Santa's going to go in on Iowa. He's going to try and make the early stage part of his strategy. How would you assess the strength of their relative campaigns. I guess, you know, at the starting line right now.
Well, I think it's early on.
He certainly had a really tough month last month, and the Trump team was really on point. And you know, when he came out to Washington, d C. They announced a whole slew of Florida enforcements right in his backyard. And I think it was a little bit difficult for him because he's been of the mindset. Desanta's has been of the mindset that we're going to keep everything really
locked down until we officially announced. I don't know if that's a missed up by his team, given you have Trump so aggressively for so long, kind of taking a beating on him.
But as for Iowa.
I actually think his team showed a lot of political savviness in you know, after they stayed on the ground first of all, in Iowa when there was a tornado watch, which I was in the state and it was a little bit rainy, but it was fine, fine. And then you know, they after the second event, they went and they posted up right in the backyard of where the Trump rally was supposed to be, and I thought that was that was really smart. And they were outside, you know, indicating,
you know, what a beautiful night. So, yeah, there is political savvy there. A lot of his team, his official campaign team is going to be comprised of people who have been around him for a long time. Now, how that ends up expanding, I don't know. I know that Deshantis has been historically very focused on you know, he's very insular. It's him, it's his wife, and those are the two main people. And he's going to have to expand that a lot and figure out kind of new
hires that he can trust. And I think that's going to be a really big test for him because he's never had to do that before.
Yeah, I agree, what is their theory of case of the case about how to or weather even to go directly at Trump, because this is one of the things we've been talking about here. There's there's really double stareing. I mean, Trump has been saying all kinds of crazy stuff about to say he like basically said he's a groom, or I mean like just unleashing a slew of attacks
against Ron DeSantis. DeSantis will make this little like sort of side job like I don't know anything about payments to porn stars, and people will freak out about it. So it's a very different standard he's held to. It may not be fair, but that's reality. Donald Trump gets away with a lot more than other politicians do and basically every sphere of his life and his political campaigns.
But at the same time, DeSantis, I think, is going to have to make some sort of cojin argument against Trump that would land with a Republican base in order to supplant him, as you know, the Republican nominee. So how are they thinking about how to navigate that challenge?
Yeah, So the big thing, and you noted it, it's not just Dysantis who's kind of sidestepping these attackskins Trump. It's virtually the entire twenty four.
Field and Nikki Haley's not kicking.
But there's like a legitimate I think there's a legitimate reason. Whether or not it should be a legitimate reason. It is when you go on the ground and talk to these voters, even the ones who don't want Trump to be president again also don't want to vote for someone who's directly attacking him.
They like, they like.
His record, They feel defensive because of the media, and so it's this like constant what line do can we cross without alienating the voter?
Price?
But I think, you know, I think Desantage is from people I've spoken to. His argument for the case against Trump is going to be look at my Florida record, and he's going to try to get to the right on Trump on almost every issue.
We've already seen it.
So tell us about that then, So you were on the ground with voters, the voters, the old people that actually matter, not any of our So what do you hear from them about people who are for DeSantis?
What are they saying? What do they look? Are they college educated? Are they normal?
Iowa voters like, who are these people? What do they want from the man? And why do they like him over Trump?
I think there's a mix.
It's certainly and I read an NBC article a few weeks ago that is one hundred percent accurate that even with Desanti's struggles the past month, he's still getting huge numbers of people to his events, like they're having to the Fiendstra event, I think was the most RSVPs that
they've ever had. The second event, the GOP County Dinner, they had to like extend invites like he's he's people are very interested in him, and I think it's a mix of people, but they like him because they're by and large they're tired of the drama, yes, from the Trump administration. And that's what I'm hearing consistently is they're like, we like Trump, he did a great job, but we're just tired of the drama. We want someone younger, like Ronda Santis in Florida has been like really tight with
his messaging. There's no you know, drama, there's no leaks, and they really like that. So really, the big thing, in my opinion from talking to voters is just they're tired of drama.
What about What do you think of the attempt to get to Trump's right on certain issues? I mean, the two that come to mind are abortion and entitlements, because on the one hand, those for the right positions may certainly land with a significant portion of the Republican base. On the other hand, they kind of undercut his other argument that he would be more electable than Donald Trump. I mean, we all see the way that the abortion issue has been devastating for Republican candidates who who have
taken extreme positions. We've certainly seen the way that you know, it's touching entitlements in any way is really off the table. And Ronda Santis talked about that certainly in the past, that he was open to cuts to social Security and medicare. So how are they looking at those challenges? How are voters seeing those And we've also had reports that some donors were upset by comments, especially on Ukraine and abortion.
Yeah, I think in terms of how voters are looking at it, they still view him as more electable than Trump.
Just because of the messiness.
They view him as being less messy, yes, and so for them, And whether that's accurate or not, I've heard from the you know, Democratic operatives who are texting me saying, oh Ron DeSantis said this about abortion, Like we're going to use this in the future, like this recent comment about hitting Trump over the abortion thing. They said, this
is going to be a talking point for us. So it is going to be a struggle, like how far right can you go before you lose some of those independent voters or some of those people who are maybe a little bit more moderate socially particularly.
Yeah, exactly, I mean that's the you know, the real problem I think that he has.
And it's kind of interesting.
I mean, whenever you okay, let's let's flip to the Trump side, you know, whenever you talk not surely the Trump campaign, the voters that you actually see on the ground that love Trump, why do they want to stick with him and not DeSantis? What do they say about DeSantis? I like the guy, but I love Trump? Like what does it look like?
The big message I hear is I like DeSantis, but it's not his turn? Yes, right, But but the thing with the Trump based when I go to Trump events, it's different than any other candidate that I that I.
This is hard to explain to people. Can you explain that because I've been to events like this.
Is it's like you go to a Disanta's event and there's kind of like normal voters who are looking into the fields. They're not necessarily committed to any one candidate. They're just you know, kind of you know, they like being courted. It's Iowa, okay, I'm sure. And then you go to these Trump events and these Trump valleys, and these are like it's like fans. Yeah, it's like a yes exactly, and so it's very different talking to them versus talking to voters at some of these other events.
Yes, yeah, well I always tried to handle that home to people. It literally is.
Like nothing else in politics, and I haven't seen it in a long time.
Shelby, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks you coming.
It was great talking to you. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Thanks for all of your support breakingpoints dot com if you're able otherwise, we will see you all next week.