Yeah, I use right. I agree with everything you said. Thank you for saying it out loud, Matt. I hope that you continue to speak out. I appreciate it.

Yeah. I didn't know that he was like, yeah, I said that. Yeah, yeah.

He was like, absolutely. I stand by it. And he was like, look, man, you caught me talking shit in a bar. If you think that's news, it is what it is. And then he got up and he walked out in terms of his interview with James O'Keefe. I have no doubt that he probably will have some problems in his workplace with some fake boycotts, but Matt, you are welcome on this show at any time in order to talk about what happened also to talk about some of the feds who were involved on January 6 and anything else that you want. So it's an open invitation. Yeah.

Absolutely. I would

love to interview you. I doubt he'll probably want to appear on that. I

do. I mean, the part I feel bad about is like, like I said, so many people talk shit about their work colleagues. I feel bad for the guy. I feel bad that that part came out both for him and for them, you know, you're saying something privately at a bar that probably didn't want to put them on blast in like such a public way, but

whatever. It's amusing in order to see it, but it is newsworthy, I think, in order to see what the thinking inside of these top institutions are. There you go. All right. So I go, what are you

looking at? Well, a constant

throughout our state of the union coverage from Kyle to Crystal to Marshall to myself was this Biden needs to connect the struggles of today from the war in Ukraine to high gas prices to high food prices to the aftermath of COVID to a national narrative, a struggle, give America a through line from a posture abroad to an ambitious plan at home. Instead, what we got was a fine recitation of the no American soldiers would deploy to Ukraine, but then a laundry list of democratic think tank wants with no vision whatsoever. It's a speech already in the dustbin of history. And the more I think about it, the more I think that Biden's response to this foreign and economic crisis here at home will define him in the eyes of history, perhaps even more than his lackluster and wanting response to the world. Biden did not invade, not did not invade Ukraine. He's being president sometimes though, means you get dealt a terrible hand. And the great ones rise to the occasion. They use and marshal the public towards a common goal. They give America a way out as long as it takes and as hard as it can be. And yet, as we already referenced just hours after the banning of Russian oil and force of the United States, this was Biden's response when he was asked about the trajectory of high gas prices. Going to go up.

Can't do much right now. Russia's responsible.

Nothing we can do. It's going to go up. Incredible. Nothing. Just nothing. First of all, if your plan all along was to ban Russian oil with no measurable weight increase supply, then you better damn well sure give American people an explanation as to why they are paying more at the pump beyond, well, it's Putin's fault. But second is this. A key part of inflation is managing expectations. Firms raise prices not just when corporate greed, but from what they expect to pay in the future. Thus, this answer is literally the worst thing you can possibly say. Nothing we can do means the US government is signaling they won't take any meaningful action. Which in turn is going to push the price up even higher. And guess what? That's exactly what happened. Immediately after Biden's comments, commodity traders in all sectors from food, gas and elsewhere, bet big on the price going up, which in turn of course affects future prices, which fuels a vicious cycle for all of us. Seriously, compare that to some of our past presidents. Remember FDR, the bank run and the first days of his presidency? His calming voice after taking office, asking his friends, the American people, stop taking money out of that bank, my friends. And if they would so kindly, maybe put it back in the bank. Explaining how and why it was necessary. Rescuing America out of the immediate crisis at the time, connecting it to the more ambitious prospects of the new deal for the American people. Where is that call for anything? For nuclear power and nuclear new deal. More tax credits for Americans. How about this? If Washington's going to raise all our gas prices to $5 or $6 a gallon, give stimulus checks to people. They better at least give us some release at the pump now. How about repealing for a time the federal gas tax and then cutting a deal with the states, replace their gas tax revenue if they appeal theirs as well? That alone could reduce price maybe 30, 40 cents a gallon across this entire country. These are all things I just came up with in my home desk. These are people who are charged with running the country. They give us nothing. Their message to the people is, well, it's all on Putin. You go ahead and suffer. Hope you make it. It's only in times of immense crisis that anything truly meaningful gets done in this country. Our history tells us that. And yet, we have a man here asleep at the wheel who's beginning to act with the obtuseness of Herbert Hoover in the middle of the night. Those of you who stuck with me during the Trump years know that my main critique of the Trump administration is that they were mostly useless, full of de-list idiots who were incapable of doing anything at all. And the few things that they did do were accomplished by people actively working against the agenda that the American people had voted for. In competence was the name of the game in the Trump years. And a central and a core part of the liberal elites pushed for Joe Biden was, well, at least the adults will be back in charge. That alone was a huge part of the cell. And yet, what have we learned? The adults in Washington may not be as garish or bureish as the Trump ones, but they are equally useless. Take Biden's plan to send fighters to Ukraine. It was an ill-considered and it was a dumb-ass idea given how brazen it is and potential for escalation. But okay, he wanted to get it done. So the US announces fighter jets that the Ukrainians know how to fly or on the way. The Ukrainians, obviously, were ecstatic about this. But then what happens? The Romanians and the Poles who actually had those planes, they came out saying, no, no, no, no. We're just going to send, we're not going to just send fighters directly to Ukraine. We need them ourselves. After some initial talks, then the Poles came up with this plan. Okay, we'll release the fighter jets, but we're not sending them to Ukraine. We're sending them to Ramstein Air Force Base. And then the US was like, well, no, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. Because then the jets would be coming directly from us into Russian-contested airspace. So then they put the kibash on the entire plan. Can't make it up. It's like a comedy and a dance of incompetence.

Like I

said, I'm against this stupid-ass plan from the beginning. But they can't even execute it properly. These bumbling amorphous response will be the political death of Joe Biden. High gas prices, high food prices. A deal with it attitude from the White House, on top of a hot war in Eastern Europe, when it all over the response from the administration, projects a tremendous amount of uncertainty into the global system and into the global economy. He has given us nothing to hope for. No confidence in his actions. America is a nation-adrift. And it will likely be for the foreseeable future, given that the next person to take that office is probably the only man as incoherent and as incompetent as Joe Biden is. So, good luck to everybody out there. It's going to be a long eight years. I don't know, Crystal. I mean, you just think about it. That fighter jet thing is a perfect example, right? You can't even do that. And

if you want to hear my reaction to Sogres monologue, I'm the premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, we've been tracking this. There's a massive stereo that's sweeping the country right now, a nasty anti-Russian xenophobia primed by decades of Cold War propaganda, years of Russia-caped mania, and then whipped into a little frenzy by the media. It's freedom fries with a side of potential nuclear war. And history tells us that the voices we should look for in such times are those who are willing to urge the most unpopular thing in the entire world. That would be restraint. They must scorned, derided, and reviled, often end up looking wise and prescient once the madness of the time has passed. And make no mistake, we are in a time of madness. Russian restaurants, even some owned by Ukrainians, are being boycotted, flooded with nasty reviews, bombarded with phone calls, calling them Nazis, and in the worst cases, vandalized. On Tuesday, I showed you thousands of protesters marching in Chicago, demanding we close the skies. That's a reference, of course, to enacting a no-fly zone, which would almost certainly lead us to World War III. A new protest at the Guggenheim pushed the same message with a different tactic. Artists gathered on every floor to send airplanes out onto the floor of the famed museum. But the most troubling mania is happening among the people with power. In Washington, we have rushed into a wholesale economic war on Russia with consequences almost no one has stopped to contemplate. Our tools of economic warfare are indiscriminate, they are brutal, and they are unprecedented. It's already easy to forget how quickly our actions and thinking have escalated. Just a few weeks ago, kicking Russia off of the Swift Bank communication system, that was considered the most extreme potential response to their actions. Now, swift to small potatoes. We've given Russia the full global economic death penalty, including swift removal, the first in history sanctions against a G20 central bank, and now a ban on Russian oil and energy products. Russia, of course, considers these actions to be an act of war and are warning of the price that we will pay from their response. The economic consequences will reverberate around the globe. Oil and wheat prices will continue to climb, and if there is one thing that I know, it's that skyrocketing energy and food prices do not often lead to more global peace and stability. At the same time, it is impossible to wrap your head around just how quickly we have flooded Ukraine with American-made weapons. During the Cold War, there was actually this kind of Kabuki theater diplomacy requiring that we at least had some plausible deniability about the flow of our arms into the arsenals of anti-communists. We no longer have any reluctance about being completely brazen here. The New York Times reports that we are rushing our most effective weaponry into the country with record-breaking speed in an effort of such scale as being compared to the Berlin airlift. 17,000 anti-tank weapons in six days. 360 roughly million dollars worth of weapons delivered in five days. By comparison, a much smaller package announced back in August that took months to get on the ground. The US and our NATO allies have been messing around with the idea of getting fighter jets the Ukrainian saga was just talking about that. Thank God that latest hair-brain scheme failed to accomplish what they wanted here. Someone was sensible enough to realize that the minute a NATO pilot, let alone an American pilot, flies a jet into Ukraine we have officially entered World War III. It is worth recalling again that arming the Ukrainians against Russian aggression was highly controversial and not so long ago. When Russia invaded Crimea, President Obama resisted the immense pressure to arm Ukrainians, reportedly posing the following questions to his aides. Okay, what happens if we send an equipment? Do we have to send in trainers? What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin then escalates? He also reportedly worried that, quote, arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow. Listen, those questions all seem pretty valid, but few have the courage to actually race them publicly today. We should all also be extremely uncomfortable with how many people are now throwing around the example of our arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, as if that whole thing turned out well for us. But

remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980, and although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisors to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn't end well for the Russians. There were other unintended consequences, as we know, but the fact is that a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Obviously, the similarities are not ones that you should bank on because the terrain, the development in urban areas, et cetera, is so different. But I think that is the model that people are now looking toward, and if there can be sufficient armaments that get in, and they should be able to get in along some of...

Oh, really? Some unintended consequences? Why don't you elaborate a little bit on that hill? And to be honest, military aid is just the beginning. We're also providing aid, which is not being talked about by politicians, or really debated at all. Did you know that a cadre of American lobbyists are influenced pedaling and giving PR help to Zelensky and the Ukrainian government right now? That means giving favorable stories plays pushing his interests among their powerful friends, using all of their dark arts to skillfully manipulate the American public. Now, again, there is a lot to admire about Zelensky personally, but his interests are not the same as ours, and he, remember, is aggressively calling for the most hawkish possible response. Did you know that we may be leading an active cyber counter-offensive to fight back against Russian attacks on Ukrainian networks and have almost certainly collaborated to harden those networks in advance? Did you know that we are using our own satellite images and electronic intercepts in military communications to help send warnings and guide Ukrainian military decision-making? And those are just the elements of support that have been publicly reported. Lord only knows what secret programs have been launched with zero awareness and zero debate, but potentially catastrophic consequences. In terms of elected officials, we haven't seen a whole lot of courage. All of these actions have been overwhelmingly supported on a bipartisan basis with barely even pausing to say, maybe we should talk about this. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has actually been one of those very lonely voices. On arming the Ukrainian, she tweeted, quote, The consequences of flooding Ukraine with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons likely not limited to just military specific equipment, but also including small arms and ammo, are unpredictable and likely disastrous, especially when they are given to paramilitary groups without accountability. She was also prepared to be the sole lone vote against a Russian oil ban, Biden has since decided to institute that oil ban without the help of Congress. But here's what Congresswoman Omar had to say on the matter, she said. Whether it is politically or morally, we have to think about what this means a year from now. What this means two years, three years from now. I think ultimately, this is not going to end well for the actual people of Russia and it's not going to end well for the people of Europe as well. For these comments, which just urge humanity and restraint, Congresswoman Omar has been called every nasty name you can imagine in the book. On Twitter, she was sent pictures of dead Ukrainian children with the implication that their deaths were somehow on her hands. She was, of course, accused of being a Russian puppet, and she was even smeared as being an anti-white racist. These sort of attacks, though, they might be familiar to Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She was the sole member of Congress to vote against giving George W. Bush the blank check for war that he wanted and that ultimately led us to decades of disaster and moral atrocities. Congresswoman Lee received so many death threats at the time for her stance that she was assigned a personal security detail. She was called a traitor who hated America. People sent her letters proclaiming their desire that she had been among the dead in the Twin Towers. Take a look at this. Even a supposedly respectable Wall Street Journal said she was, quote, a long practicing supporter of America's enemies. But, of course, now with distance from the madness and frenzy of the time, she was 100% correct, vindicated. Congresswoman Lee herself pointed at the time to the example of two other courageous senators who had been the only votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which, of course, authorized LBJ to, quote, take all necessary measures in Vietnam. You might also think of the example in recent times set by Russ Feingold. He was the only U.S. senator to vote against the Patriot Act during that frenzy. Lone voices despise at the time whose wisdom we would have done really well to heed. So as we lurched into more and more extreme actions, casually embracing measures which were previously unthinkable just weeks ago, please listen to those people like Congresswoman Omar who are trying desperately to stand outside of the mania and hold on in your mind to the wise words of Barbara Lee. She said, let's step back for a moment. Let's just pause just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. And listen, doesn't mean that when you have the unpopular opinion, you're always correct. But we have seen repeated- And if

you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Joining us now, a very special guest, Anna Kachyan of the Red Scare Podcasts. Anna, thank you so much for joining the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for

having me and thanks for pronouncing my last name correctly. Well, I interviewed you previously so I remember how to say it. That's

why it works out. I've had a little bit of experience. Anna, we were trying to brainstorm. We're like, who do we talk to about all of this Russian cancellation, the backlash? We've got the Guggenheim is throwing planes into the center calling for a new flight zone. Sorry to- You as an art person, I know in particular we're going to be pissed off about that. Let's put this on the screen. We've got the Russian backlash against these Russian restaurants and T-houses and all of this Yelp bombs are happening. Just give us a way to think about this. You're a Russian-American, a cultural critic yourself. What do you think this tells us about America?

Well, the first thing that you can always count on is that the most pathetic and depraved examples of activism across the board will always come from the art world. I saw the Guggenheim thing.

I saw

the Russian restaurants, they reported on this woman who is actually Ukrainian and she called her restaurant Russian from the get-go because she thought it would have more name recognition and that's really come to backfire. You see a lot, I live in New York and you see a lot of yellow and blue flags, people taking a stand. I'm really personally less interested in the specific examples of various corporate entities and activists getting in line with whatever the western governments are already doing. We've spent the last five or six years owning the Libs. We saw kind of slacktivism at its best with BLM and then with COVID. I'm sure that as we speak, there is some woman owned athleisure brand that is coming out with a blue and yellow pair of yoga pants named after Zelensky. But I feel like the joke is not funny anymore. It's less satisfying now to own the Libs. Anna, can

you just tell people you were born in Russia, correct? Can you give people a little bit of your backstory and then do you have family friends that you're talking to in Russia right now?

I was born in Moscow back when Russia was the Soviet Union and actually when we moved here as a family, we were sort of in limbo because we didn't have any kind of citizen status anywhere. I do my dad's entire family is in Moscow and I have been corresponding with my cousins. I think

that

among liberal, western, educated Russians, the attitude is almost unanimously anti-war and anti-Putin. I have no sense really what it is for the rest of the country. I'm assuming they're much more supportive. Putin has something like a 70% approval rating, which again I would take with a grain of salt. But I think overall, I'm sure the vibe is mixed. Yeah. And I think, you know, as I would just quote the Russians with attitude podcast, I think they said it best. And so I think that attitude, the kind of staunchly anti-Putin attitude, which I think in the West, most people agree with is the people that are mostly advocating it for it. It's a tautology. They're the most western leaning people in Russia are the most western leaning people in Russia. Do you have any sense of what is the

rough percentage that would fall into that western oriented, educated, more elite group in Russia that tends to be anti-Putin and is now anti-war?

Please don't ask me to talk about this. I have no clue. I'm sure that it's the minority, which is not to say that most Russians are pro-Putin or pro-war, necessarily. But I think that as we've seen in the West, these type of events have a unifying factor. I saw a lot of commentators on Twitter complaining about how everybody from political actors to corporations to individuals of the activist ilk who are falling for the most blatant syops and propaganda are very heavily kind of stumping, shilling for the war. To me, that was almost like a beautiful moment of national solidarity. For once, this torn and divided country is finally united. I'm assuming the situation would be similar in Russia. On the question of sanctions, for example, there's this idea that sanctions are imposed to pressure the oligarchs and the people to turn against food. But it's unclear whether that's going to have its intended effect.

That's actually what I wanted to get from you in terms of your understanding. Now we see McDonald's is out, Coca-Cola, et cetera. And as we've kept saying here, that's not because of the goodness of their heart. It's because they're required to by western sanctions. They literally can't wire money out of this. But what's your sense, Anna, of how is this going to impact life in Russia? It's easy for me to say like, oh, they're not going to have an iPhone, McDonald's. But I don't know what that means in the context of actual contemporary Russian life. Like how much of this is going to change their day to day, not just in Moscow, but in the, you know, in the rural areas.

Well, I mean, I think like I said, again, I'm less interested in the specific examples of sanctions and more in this kind of unprecedented reconfiguration of the global economic order, the global financial order. I think in the short run, it's going to be a very painful and arduous process. And it's unclear whether it'll be successful. I mean, the Putin certainly pulled the plug on western consensus. But it's really an open question as to whether he'll be able to pull off the rest. Yeah,

and Anna, what do you think over the long term? I mean, one of the things that we've seen in other countries is that these kind of indiscriminate sanctions can help to bolster a national movement, like rally people around the cause. Do you see any signs of that or think that that's a possibility here as well? Certainly,

again, I don't have a great kind of intuitive sense of what's going on in Russia outside of what the people I speak to tell me. And again, they're mostly like liberal and western leaning. And, you know, I can't do anything but be kind of like supportive and respect their opinion. But I can see a situation where the sanctions do kind of unite and galvanize Russians against the West even more. Because, you know, I forgot who said this, but nobody likes to be hated or targeted. And, you know, in the western establishment among the kind of elite and media and political class, Putin's invasion is seen overwhelmingly as like an unprecedented act of unprovoked aggression. I don't think that Russians see it that way. I don't think even resistance figures, opposition figures in Russia see it that way. For example, Navalny was open about the fact that NATO was a non-starter, you know, NATO at the doorstep of Russia.

Yeah, I mean, even I think Gorbachev has said it was I was outraged by it. There's always been a lot of co-peer in terms of which Russians we listen to and what they say, the opposition figures, and then the rest of the part that they don't say that people here don't want to be hurt. I think one of the points that you're making around the Russian-American backlash, nobody wants to be hated. I feel like these examples of the Guggenheim or of these conductors getting fired or some of these poor business owners here in DC, one of my favorite bars, Russia House has been vandalized, had to take down its Russian flag. I just think that, and I mean, I appreciate your perspective on this, that it's going to have a tremendous backlash both inside of Russia, but also how do Russian Americans supposed to deal with this? You know, in New York City, you know, when I was there, there are a lot of Russian Americans who are very proud of being Russian, even though they've probably lived there three, four generations.

Right, and I think what's interesting is that, you know, after BLM and Stop Asian Hate, we have these kind of like hashtag movements. There's a precedent. People really like to kind of glom on to these movements, and it's very clear that there's going to be a rise in rusaphobia. The thing with Russians is that you can't identify them as easily on the street, right? They can pass. So, I mean, I think that whatever is going on with rusaphobia in kind of the United States pales in comparison to what's going on in the Ukraine, I'm sure it's probably a fairly painful and demoralizing experience for expatriate Russians in the States, because most of them, again, I would gather, are probably, again, staunchly anti-poot in an anti-war.

Yeah, I think that's all well said. Anna, thank you so much for taking some time out to share your perspective with us. It's great to have you. It's great to meet you. Thanks, Anna. Wow, I like to read

scare in the description. Yeah, guys, go

subscribe to Red Scare if you're not already. All right, well, thank you guys. Thank you, Anna. Appreciate it

very much.