Welcome to the newest edition of the Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar newsletter.  Get your live show tickets here: https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E005CD6DBFF6D47. Also, we are offering a discounted subscription upgrade for Breaking Points monthly premium subscribers. You can save 20% on the yearly subscription by paying $80 instead of the $100 annual payment. The deal will only last until the end of the month, so upgrade now: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/subscriber/user/subscription

Now to the contents of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt61pOVjsTA

Former President Donald Trump is in the Department of Justice’s crosshairs. They are investigating his conduct and conversations leading up to the January 6th Capitol riot based on phone records from top aides. Attorney General Merrick Garland labeled the investigation the most wide ranging in DOJ history. He plans on overseeing prosecutions of anyone criminally involved in interfering with the peaceful transfer of power. The investigation has moved far beyond the rioters themselves to everyone in Trump’s orbit. When asked about indicting Trump by Lester Holt, Garland did not rule out the possibility. He did not echo Holt’s concern about how going after Trump would further tear the country apart, especially if he is a Presidential candidate again. Garland intends on holding everyone accountable for Jan 6th in coordination with the House’s January 6th committee. It remains to be seen if the investigation lives up to its billing.

In his first DC speech since leaving office, former President Trump spoke to an audience of GOP insiders at the America First Police Institute. A little over an hour in, he teased a 2024 run and asserted his belief that the election was stolen. Right after, Trump threw his weight behind the plan conjured up by close allies to remake the federal bureaucracy in his image. As Jonathan Swan broke down in the Tuesday show, Trump’s allies will use an executive order to lessen civil service protections and place vetted personnel from trusted institutions into the government. None of the major media networks gave air time to Trump’s speech including Fox News. The entire speech was aired on Newsmax and other smaller conservative networks. Fox News instead chose to air a speech delivered by Mike Pence instead, deepening the rift between Murdoch owned media and Donald Trump.

The Senate has voted to pass bipartisan legislation geared towards boosting American competitiveness in producing semiconductors. Known as the CHIPS act, the bill received 64 votes in the Senate who sent it to the House for their vote. The legislation is a $280 billion dollar package for subsidies and R&D that will incentivize companies to build facilities and make products in America while directing more money towards specific research. It is considered vital to US national security to shore up semiconductor production because of their presence in vital electronics, information technology, healthcare devices, automobiles, and other parts of daily life. Most semiconductor chips are made abroad; primarily in Taiwan and China. The inability to produce them domestically has led to major supply chain issues throughout the economy. Several large companies such as Intel have announced plans to build new semiconductor manufacturing facilities premised on the legislation being passed. Of the funding in the bill, $52 billion will be used to get companies to make semiconductors in America. Most of those funds will be used for direct financial assistance to construct and expand facilities. Guardrails have been set up to ensure the funds are used for their intended purpose instead of stock buybacks, dividends, or other uses. Companies who are building and expanding facilities in China will not be granted subsidies. Republicans who voted against it expressed concerns about the guardrails being insufficient for companies who could benefit from the money without investing in America. Other corporate subsidy deals issued by states have shown the importance of enforcement mechanisms for industrial policy to succeed. An addition concern is the power given by the Commerce Department to decide which firms obtain the subsidy being funded by Congress.

The rest of the bill will go towards a wide variety of R&D funding for critical science and technology. Sen. Bernie Sanders joined Republicans by voting no to the bill. In a speech on the Senate floor, Sanders explained his displeasure with the subsidies for corporations and what he believes are misplaced priorities. If his view is held by progressive Democrats in the House, the CHIPS act could be jeopardized by unified Republican opposition and dissent within the Democratic party.

On energy policy, the Biden administration announced changes at the Department of Energy geared towards unlocking policy tools for energy security. The national security imperative and economic necessity of tampering inflation by lowering oil prices cannot be overstated. Now the Strategic Petroleum Reserve can be more easily mobilized and the liquidity of hedging instruments in oil markets can be improved.

The Federal Trade Commission is going to block Facebook’s (now Meta) virtual reality acquisition on antitrust grounds. It is the first big action by FTC Chair Lina Khan against Big Tech and it came on the day of Meta’s earnings. Khan was appointed to the FTC to be a robust antitrust enforcer and so far she has lived up to the reputation. Her complaint looks at future competition in the tech space, named Mark Zuckerberg as a recipient, and it adds to other litigation by the FTC against Meta. It could be a major blow to Meta’s effort to build their virtual reality business centered around the Metaverse. In the FTC’s internal vote on the resolution, three Democrats voted for it and the two Republicans voted against. The vote demonstrates the gap between rhetoric and action from the GOP on big tech. Soon after, Meta’s earnings came out and the company had its first quarterly revenue decline since going public. Their revenue is sinking fast and the outlook is grim for the company’s future. Workers at the company fear job cuts amid economic challenges in the tech sector and beyond. The Meta executives are outlining revised performance expectations and the FTC’s action will only dampen the company’s outlook. Nonetheless, Meta is a billion dollar behemoth that will play a major role in the American economy.

West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is a crucial centrist swing vote in the Senate. Democrats have expressed their fury towards him for blocking Biden’s most ambitious proposals. Now, Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have come to a deal on climate, taxes, drug prices, and other policy aims in a bill titled “Inflation Reduction Act” within the budget reconciliation package. Notable tidbits from the deal include prescription drug price reform, a 15% global minimum corporate tax, and money for energy investments. Their energy policy will permit investments in renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels without discrimination based on the energy source. The tax policies will be aided by beefed up IRS enforcement and a closure of the carried interest loophole. These policies will lead to a deficit reduction because the tax revenue will outweigh the spending provisions according to the topline estimates. Its effects on inflation are much less clear despite the naming of the bill. Another uncertainty is how other swing Democrats will respond; Sen. Sinema (D-AZ) and moderates in the House were not informed of the deal before the announcement. The deal agreement came as a shock to Mitch McConnell who threatened to block the CHIPS act if ambitious legislation through reconciliation was still a possibility. Immediately after CHIPS got passed, they revived the reconciliation talks, meaning that McConnell got played by Schumer and Manchin. It is a rare move for McConnell to be outmaneuvered, and now he’s making sure the GOP House minority fights CHIPS as hard as they can.

Television host and liberal comedian Samantha Bee’s show Full Frontal has been canceled after seven seasons. The latest late night TV reshuffle, Bee’s program will no longer air on TBS as the network shifts its programming strategy. Her inflammatory, liberal feminist perspective made Bee a polarizing political figure to the extent people paid attention to her over the last few years. Samantha Bee was consistently the lowest rated of any late night TV shows after she rose to prominence on The Daily Show. When she got her own show, her act changed to be a crude, partisan feminist that lacked mainstream appeal. The headlines she made came from spouting profanities towards the Trump family and little else. Her decline reflects the fall of liberal political comedy and the girlboss feminist moment.

In Saagar’s monologue today, he takes aim at political correctness being prioritized over public health in responding to the Monkeypox outbreak. After the peak of covid, America is very tuned in to whether the next pandemic is just around the corner. Yet with Monkeypox, the political leadership and public health establishment is putting woke politics over science. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global public health emergency. The virus comes from the smallpox family with similar, more mild symptoms. The illness lasts a few weeks and a tiny amount has led to death. Woke politics comes in because it has spread almost entire by gay men having sex. Outside of Africa, 98% of recorded cases have been among homosexual men, and when traced back the transmission route is via sexual contact. Acknowledging these facts has become controversial because activists believe it is homophobic and targeting gay people for discrimination. But obfuscating the escalated risk of getting the disease if you are a homosexual male is insulting to individuals and the public as a whole because it denies them necessary information about the disease. Official sources and the media are refusing to directly inform the public because of fear of activist outrage. Take it from gay journalist Benjamin Ryan, who believes the CDC and media’s message about Monkeypox has been so misleading it amounts to misinformation. The overwhelming amount of data showing the transmission of Monkeypox is taking place through gay sex yet demographic data on the disease is not being collected by state and local departments. Most of the good data on Monkeypox comes from other countries who are more serious and less susceptible to woke politics. This concealment is homophobic and infantilizing towards gay men because they believe gay men cannot handle a simple truth or reduce their number of sexual partners. During covid, people’s lives were radically changed by public health guidelines for the sake of fighting the disease. Now, it is homophobic to advise gay men to make any lifestyle changes whatsoever. When an epidemiologist expressed his belief gay men should temporarily reduce their sexual partners, he was shutdown publicly by his own department. NYC authorities are more focused on the name of the disease creating a stigma. Gay advocacy organizations are only making things worse, encouraging reporters to lie about what is going on. Telling the truth is in everyone’s best interest, especially because there are known disease with more prevalence among certain types of people. Failure to do so can cost people’s lives and put all of us at risk.

After the monologue, Krystal and Saagar talk about the uncomfortable reality that needs to be acknowledged, and the behavioral changes the disease requires. It resembles the beginning phases of the pandemic where liberals tried to micromanage the emotions of the American people regardless of the facts. Fauci knowingly lied about masks instead of doing his job to collect data and protect people. Data about covid showed it had greater impacts on black communities, which was not stigmatized, in part because it was more about class. With this, somehow you cannot acknowledge its impact on a marginalized group, yet the vaccine is only eligible to men who have sex with other men. The gay community should know they are at higher risk, and lying about it is a disservice to them.

In her monologue today, Krystal brings her perspective to the reemergence of disgraced former CNN primetime anchor Chris Cuomo. He was interviewed by NewsNation about the work he did with Andrew Cuomo behind the scenes to cover up sexual abuse allegations and lying about it. NewsNation is a cable news company formerly known as Chicago network WGN that has been revamped in an attempt to fill the centrist news void on cable news. Chris Cuomo claims that he is committed to independent media and telling the truth against the wishes of the party duopoly. The gaslighting was most extreme when Cuomo indirectly defended his conduct at CNN to assist his brother and his belief in his own journalistic integrity. Cuomo believes the media treated him unfairly even though CNN brass covered for him as much as possible. He thinks benevolent actions to support his family were the cause of his career downfall in a stunning amount of self delusion.

Cuomo’s grand language about his role at the well funded but sparsely viewed NewsNation is another interesting aspect of the interview. Owned by Nexstar Media, the same company that owns The Hill, they have brought in longtime anchors who are cast offs from bigger media players. They receive a paltry 10,000 viewers in the key demographic, roughly equivalent to what Breaking Points receives in 15 minutes. A look at the NewsNation YouTube channel points to the lack of interest in the channel. Their Cuomo interview has received 60,000 views, much more than their average segment. Some of their content gets only a couple hundred views, and little engagement. Cuomo’s rhetoric about building something special and an independent force is strange considering his family’s deep power. His brother is even planning a political comeback in New York. The Cuomo family is a powerful political dynasty and Chris’s support for the system allowed him to gain prominence to begin with. A challenge to the system is unlikely to come from Chris Cuomo, whose new podcast has only featured guests that support the status quo. A doomed, well funded cable replica is his only career move left after falling from the heights of cable news. In the NewsNation interview, Cuomo hesitates to criticize the mainstream media showing how little he has shifted from the elite consensus. Low rated liberal news personalities constantly overestimate their significance when they start podcasts and enter other media ventures. Regurgitating the elite consensus in a boring way only brings an audience with powerful institutional players. America missed very little from Chris Cuomo’s media absence, and most won’t blink an eye when his new gig falls flat.

After the monologue, Krystal and Saagar talk about how Cuomo is a person who really needs to be on the air because of how he sees himself. The man believes he is really delivering a service to Americans. NewsNation needed the press, Cuomo needed a job, and they came together to make a bit of a splash. It ultimately is doomed to fail because the network and his show will not fill any media space that is not already occupied by elite careerists on cable and elsewhere.

Krystal and Saagar bring Status Coup journalist and Breaking Points collaborator Jordan Chariton back on the show to talk about his interviews with Americans across the country. He has been talking to workers, small business owners, and activists about the economic devastation they are facing. Take it from this Italian food market, a small business in Pittsburgh closing after 90 years of operating as a sign the economy is not doing well. Inflation is driving costs through the roof and supply chain issues are making essential goods unavailable. Big companies have been able to purchase goods first leaving the smaller stores out to dry. Higher overhead in terms of prices and shortages contributed to the business closing down and led people to relying more heavily on larger companies. Most Americans Jordan spoke with have been in a recession for a year or two at least while elites fight over trivial statistics. People are rationing medication and spending tons of money on gas. Young people are too concerned about costs to have children. Homeless has sharply increased and people are being pushed out of their communities because of gentrification. Costs are up everywhere, even rural America. Parents are having to scale back their kids’ extracurricular activities and people have had to cut back on their hobbies. Politicians are doing nothing for people from the President on down, illuminating how distant the corporate media coverage is from real life. Americans are being let down by elites and the economy is only getting worse.

Thank you for reading the latest Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar premium newsletter. Remember to buy your tickets and send us feedback. The next full show will be on Monday, and enjoy the extra content in the meantime!