Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/1/25: Gov Shuts Down, Portland Invasion, Hegseth Slams Fat Generals. Venezuela Coup & MORE!

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Bernie rips Trump as gov shuts down, Portland invasion, Hegseth slams fat generals, Israel bribes influencers, Trump betrays farmers, Rubio plots Venezuela regime change.   Joe Vaclavik: https://www.youtube.com/@GrainMarketsandOtherStuff/videos    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist.

Hi Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight.

And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. and a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.

This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. All right, good morning, and welcome to breaking points. We have a government shutdown. That's right. Welcome to the government. government shutdown. With our colleagues over to ditch this Irish news outlet, we've been tracking U.S. and global weapons shipments to Israel. And so now with the government shut down, those could be in serious jeopardy, right? Hmm. I mean, essential. I'm joking. Essential services

are in. I'm joking. Those will remain. Weapons will continue to flow. Yes. Until morale improves. Yes. Yes, they will. So midnight, 1201, government shut down. So this will be, This is our first one since, what, 2018, 2019, when Trump wanted some border wall money. Back when he wasn't just moving, actually, and then he lost that, and then just took the money anyway. And since then, he's been like, oh, I can just do whatever I want. That is really the big distinction between other shutdowns and this one. So we'll get to that and break down all of the details. We actually have Democrat Jeff Merckley joining the show to give the Democrats' perspective on the shutdown.

Then we have Representative Ben Klein of Virginia, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, coming in to give the Republican perspective on the shutdown. So we will have all of our bases covered as we discuss. Rainward, I think is actually going to be a pretty long haul. Yeah, I think so, too. Because, yes, and we can talk about this more when we get to it. But, yeah, I don't think either side really has much incentive to get moving. Over at the Pentagon, Donald Trump and Pete Hagseth spent many millions of dollars flying in

a bunch of fat generals, as Pete Hegseth put it, and ordered them to do physical therapy. Fat for now. And not be such wimps. Yep. Be better war fighters. Classic mid-level officer just cranky about is everything. Just yelling at a bunch of generals.

Meanwhile, they're ramping up hostilities with Venezuela, with Iran. Big new New York Times report on the intentions in Venezuela. Venezuela, and also we had a little bit of movement on the Iran situation yesterday, so we're going to dig into the details of that. Ryan, the flotilla, there's some interesting developments there. The most interesting development is that there were not really major developments overnight. They were expecting to get intercepted. They're at a place about, maybe they're at about 80 nautical miles at this point from Gaza, by which point all previous flotillas have been raided. They have not yet been.

We're in regular touch with Alice Coulson, drop-site reporter who's on that flotilla. We'll also have updates about the state of the Palestinian response to the Trump Netanyahu offer yesterday. Excellent. And finally, we will be joined by our new friends at the Grain Markets Podcast. Grain Markets Podcast, love them. Yeah, this soybean fight, you have to hear about. It's challenging the right in a lot of different ways. The Argentinian bailout is pitting, as Matt Stoller puts.

It's two of Trump's key constituencies, hedge funds and soybean farmers against one another. So important fight, obviously, for the American economy, but also for the politics of what's happening in the conservative movement. Yes, indeed. All right, let's get to the government shutdown. This happened at 1201. Predictably, the impasse was reached any efforts to seriously come to an agreement yesterday, especially after the Monday talks fell apart. those efforts were obviously doomed last night. There's sort of some theater happening, but there's a little hope right now, I would say, for immediate resolution.

On the political side, a shutdown, Ryan, we were talking about this just as we introduced the show, it's probably good for the grassroots of both parties, and that's probably why we think this is going to be kind of a long-haul shutdown. Yeah, so from the Democratic side, they have demanded, so during the pandemic, there was an expansion of Obamacare subsidy benefits. So 20 million people who are on the exchanges started seeing their eye-popping monthly costs for their premiums in Obamacare

go down to something quite reasonable. And that was actually when Ezra Klein and other people were selling Obamacare at the beginning and people like me were saying, this is terrible, this sucks, like this should be much better, they would say, get it in place and then continue to improve it. Because if you have genuinely fully subsidized,

almost fully subsized health care through these exchanges, and you get fired, you get laid off, and you can then move into those exchanges, that's genuinely night and day compared to the barbaric system that we had for most of my life,

which was if you got fired, and let's say you have cancer, like you're S-O-L. You cannot get new insurance, because now you have this pre-existing condition, and so the insurers don't have to take you, and if you can get anything, it's ungodly expensive. Obamacare changed that.

So, no, you cannot discriminate against people for having pre-existing conditions, but it's going to be kind of expensive. And it's called the Affordable Care Act, but it's not really affordable. The Affordable, I quote, there. But then during the pandemic, they changed that and made it genuinely affordable.

Like, we have a relatively humane system in place at this point. Republicans took that out in the big beautiful bill to pay for more coal subsidies, tax breaks for corporations and the rich. And so that expires at the end of this year. Democrats looked around, decided what do we want to demand in order to go along with this government staying open? And they settled on these health care subsidies. Now, Republicans, why do they feel like this is in their interests. So because this is what Democrats have chosen to focus on health care, and we're going to bring Marjorie Taylor Green, a post from her into this in just one moment.

I'm going to read from the Wall Street Journal that summarizes the Republican perspective. They say, quote, Democrats are trying to reverse all health policy changes enacted by the GOP's tax law, including provisions that limited federal funding for immigrant health care. Democrats are seeking more than a trillion altogether in health care funds, including for the ACA subsidies and Medicaid over 10 years, are unauthorized immigrant. eligible for ACA subsidies and Medicaid. The journal goes on to say, migrants in the country illegally aren't eligible to enroll in the ACA marketplace,

which you probably have heard Democrats pointing out in the last few days. They say the GOP's new tax law, the journal, signed by Trump in July, revoked eligibility from, quote, lawfully present immigrants. So that would include refugees. And what truly were millions of asylum seekers who came into the country under the Biden administration are backlogged in the system.

So that would also include some visa holders, according to the journal, Democrats' proposal would restore their eligibility. So for Republicans, they feel like that's a gift, and it's probably telling, Ryan, that Republicans latched onto that rather than 10 years ago, the battle of the decade was Obamacare itself. Right. Republicans aren't even fighting over the Obamacare extension. I mean, fiscal hawks obviously are, but they're overwhelmingly focusing on the eligibility

for the, quote, lawfully president, immigrants. Right, well, which they refer to in their talking points as illegal immigrants. Which is actually a distinction with a huge difference. And this has been, I think, a problem with a lot of the Republican arguments on the Biden immigration wave. These are, in many cases, not people who are in the country illegally. They may be people who entered the country illegally

and then claimed asylum, which means that you're allowed to claim asylum. It ends up, you know, you might cross. through a wall and then go to cross through a wall, cross through a barrier of the border, and go to Border Patrol right away and make this asylum claim. But the problem, and this is a tangent, but it's useful in this case, is that what the Biden administration did was massively expand, from a conservative perspective, massively expand the legal pathways. This was the entire argument.

So yes, in many cases, in most cases, as we discuss these subsidies, these are for people who are here legally, you just don't think they should be here legally. Right, exactly, yeah. To boil down the right-wing argument, correct me if I'm being unfair here, but they would say, Democrats would say, but they're not here illegally.

And Republicans would say, yeah, but they should be illegal. Which is, again, which is a massive distinction because the Biden administration, and this actually, in a sort of normal debate setting, would be helpful to the Republican argument because the Biden administration didn't go through Congress, expanded the pathways through just executive, the executive branch, basically. And that's what their argument was for the four years of the Biden administration.

That's what Republicans were saying was wrong. So these are people who are technically here legally in probably almost all cases if they're taking the insurance here. And I would love to hear Trump try to say that somebody disrespected Congress. Hasn't been collaborative enough in the governing approach. Speaking of Congress and speaking of Donald Trump, we have some sound from lawmakers just yesterday. Let's go ahead and roll 8-2.

They are shutting it down. We're not shutting it down. We don't want it to shut down because we have the greatest period of time ever. I told you, we have $17 trillion being invested. So the last person that wants to shut down is us now. With that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them,

and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know, you all know Russell, though he's become very popular recently, because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn't do any other way. So they're taking a risk by having a shutdown because because of the shutdown, we can do things medically and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people.

We don't want to do that, but we don't want fraud, waste, and abuse. We're rolling the greatest hits on our social media. just saying that the point about giving people who are here illegally health care is not exactly what is in their proposal. No, it is 100% what their proposal. It's immigrants who have legal status and you're just disagreeing on who's eligible. I looked at it actually because I was curious about your argument yesterday. You should study the CBO's analysis that they just put out a few weeks ago. Yeah, I saw that about the 1.2 million people. You're basically arguing about who has who has legal status, people who are seeking refugee or seeking asylum. No, I'm making sure that we are making sure

in our provisions that we sign in a law have ensured that health care benefits go only to eligible U.S. citizens. Chuck Schumer's proposal. Federal law was not being enforced. That's the whole point. We had to fine-tune that so that we could strengthen the health care program. That's what we did. A response to Republicans, like House Speaker Mike Johnson and others who say,

the subsidies don't expire until the end of December. We have time to negotiate on those, and we could find some common ground. Well, for a start, common ground, really. They have had months. And for the first time in modern history, they have not sat down. What has always happened is a majority. You know, he talks about how 13 occasions they worked with the Democrats. It's true because the Democrats in that case sat down with them.

So what you need is a bipartisan solution. But these guys have said, it's my way or the highway. This is the way it's going to be. And that is kind of what Trumpism is about. That's that authoritarian tendency that we're seeing in America right now. So are you telling me you're willing to vote no every time Leader Thither raises up? I am not going to allow. Let me be clear.

All right? You can quote me on this. You can quote me on as we say in Vermont to the California. come home. I will not let tens of thousands of fellow Americans die because they're thrown off of health care. I love to say you could quote me on this while you're on camera, but Ryan, that Bernie energy is exactly what Hakeem Jeffries lacks. Yeah, he also got on the line. He said, as we say in Vermont until the cows come home. As we say everywhere. We'll give him that because Vermont has a lot of cows. Sure. But come on, like everybody says as the cows,

he can't claim that. But like I said, especially, exemption from Vermont. They got an awful lot of cows, so fine. We'll let me have that. Separately, if you'd have told me 10 years ago, I'd be looking at the government getting shut down by Donald Trump with RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz standing behind him. Yep. Like, what is, where did we go wrong? What happened? You would think you were tripping. What is going on here? Yes. Dr. Oz chuckling about Russ Vote in the back there. So that's the key point, though. The substance here is Russ Vote is the mastermind of Project 2025. He is

one of them. A key thought leader. Absolutely, yeah. When it comes, he was the OMB director under Trump 1. He dulled his hatchet just by slashing through everything he possibly could, learned a lot of lessons,

spent the next four years sharpening that thing. And now he's back there and he knows what he's doing. And he believes, and we could get into the laws or whatever, what's the point? Because that's besides the point in a political era where power is everything, he believes that in a government shutdown, he can destroy the government much faster. Yeah, I have an article pulled up actually from, you mentioned the sharpening of the hatchet. This is from Eric Tietzel, who's the executive director of the Center for Renewing America, very much like Movement Conservative.

But the Center for Renewing America is where Russ was before going back into the White House. And Eric writes, until this year, conservatives have opposed CRs. They wanted to use the annual appropriations process to cut spending and eliminate woke, wasteful, and weaponized federal programs, eliminate annual deficit spending, and reduce the national debt, then goes on to say, however, President Trump and his director of OMB, Russ Vote, came into office in January 2025 with a plan to revive lawful authorities of the president in spending that had long lay dormant, namely the powers of impoundment and rescission. And if you've been watching this show for the last several months, you know that we've covered their claiming of the impoundment and rescission powers. Impoundment. Disagreement on impoundment goes back to Nixon. The Russ vote and

the Trump administration have an ideological belief that is obviously also convenient for the sake of power, but it is an ideological belief that is powers that should lie in the hands of the executive. And so Eric goes on to say, in short, these powers allow the president to decline to spend money that Congress has appropriated, sending it back to the Treasury. This means that conservatives in Congress no longer bear the sole weight of cutting spending. The president can do it too. Suddenly a CR that merely keeps funding flat from previous years is both a cut in real terms with inflation and nominally and an opportunity for the president to make additional cuts. And let me read one more line. Eric says, that's juicy, but here's work gets even better.

If there is a government shutdown due to a lapsing congressional authorization, the president and his team led by Russ Boat must decide how to prioritize whatever federal revenues are received. So Eric compares that to like a family managing their household budget and says the president decides whether to pay the credit card bill or cut the cable, only the options are keeping national parks open or funding research for transgender hormone therapy in mice. But that's on the table right now, and as are potentially mass layoffs, which is where Democrats were genuinely fearful of what would happen with a shutdown, Ryan. At the same time, though, that in their corner politically, they're being asked to blank check

the Trump administration. Right. Yeah. Democrats are in a tough spot because they're, well, because they're mostly out of power, their base wants them to fight. They're sick of the sternly worded letters. They don't have a lot of power. And they don't have any. I think if Democrats had charisma and a message that they were regularly delivering on television and on social media, Democrats would then forgive them for doing. nothing in Washington. Because we're like, look, okay, they're inspiring, they have a message, they're rallying the country against what's being done. They're not remotely doing that. We've got Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Embarrassing, Democrats are embarrassed by their leadership.

Yeah. So then they're like, well, then do something. Like, shut the government down. So you've got indivisible and these other grassroots organizations that are pressuring Democrats, show us you have some spine. But absent a message and any charismatic leadership, it's just kind of like just do something in order to just do something. And then meanwhile, Republicans, I feel like, actually want a government shutdown so that Russ vote can do this thing that he wants to do, further savage the government. And I think Democrats in Washington are like, well, long term strategically, this is a bad idea because it's going to lead to a lot of people getting fired and the government getting destroyed.

But we kind of have to do it because our base wants us to do something. Because our base hates us. Yeah. And they're not wrong because this is like, Hakeem Jeffries versus Bernie Sanders is like the stark contrast there tells you what you need to know. All I know is what I've been told. And that to have truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a son.

small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn,

or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I, uh, pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother

tried to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look to people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hakeem Jeffries, I don't know, Ryan, I'm curious what you make of this.

I just think his Schumer or Schumer, and he's sort of a creature of Washington, but Hakeem Jeffries tries really hard to seem like something else. He tries really hard to feel like he's a grassroots populist almost in his presentation of leadership talking points. But it really seems to me like it falls flat. Maybe we can roll this Trump meme. You may have caught, this is A4, we can't play the music, but you can, see this on your screen. Trump tweeted out, again, another meme on Hakeem Jeffries, another joke

on Hakeem Jeffries. Yeah, this is a V-O. We can play it while I'm talking here. So Trump posted this again. It's a clip of Hakeem Jeffries on MSNBC talking about how Trump putting the sombrero and mustache and mariachi garb on Hakeem Jeffries is racist. As he's saying that, Trump posts a video that puts the sombrero and mustache and has Trump playing mariachi music in the background. And Ryan, I know it's... Is that racist?

I mean... It's insensitive. I don't know. Akeem Jeffries is not Mexican. No, he's not Mexican. And it wasn't like... It's childish. It's juvenile. I was just going to say, yeah.

I know that this is Donald Trump's boomer meaming. But that tells you something about how pathetic Hakeem Jeffries is. it is an interesting contest between two parties who are in different worlds and trump seems to believe that the world that he's creating and then occupying is the one where power is going to reside in a in a country and in a world in which people are fed up with the old system whereas heim jeffreys is just clinging to some type of bygone values and he even referenced and I might even have been in that interview

all of a sudden they're in this Oval Office reading a bunch of like MAGA 2028 hats show up on the coffee table and the White House takes pictures and puts them out and Jeffrey says that he said to J.D. Vance you okay with this? And he says that J.D. Vance said no comment.

Which is Jeffrey's like reaching back for some type of comedy and civility. Right. Right. And implying then to the audience that J.D. Vance secretly pines for that as well. Right. And probably does. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. But like, Hakeem Jeffrey's wasting any breath calling a meme from Trump racist during this shutdown fight when they have the political gift of talking about health care is insane to me. And it's just so indicative of where their heads are at. Like, he should be... It's just, I sympathize with him because, man, Trump was a lunatic.

He's like, what he's supposed to do? So say that. I mean, right? It's like Trump, let's say, pulls up to the meeting in a clown car and you're not supposed to point out that he and J.D. Vance and all these other clowns are stumbling out of a clown car. Like, it's hard. I get why you should stay focused on the health care, but it's like, he's in a clown car. Does everybody else see this? You just don't have to call the clown car racist because then it becomes an entire.

Entirely, like, he should know this media ecosystem, and he should know that voters, like, many of his own voters are sick of these invocations of racism when they feel like their material world is crumbling in front of them. Healthcare prices are about to go up and are going up, actually. So I just think it's crazy for him to waste a breath on it. And on the other side of that, Marjorie Taylor Green, let's put up A3, has some criticism for her own party. This is, she posted this yesterday. The fifth squad member. The fifth squad member, Americans are getting crushed by health insurance with monthly payments of $1,700, $1,000 and over $2,000 per month. Instead of a revolving door of foreign government leaders to the White House, I'd like to see health insurance CEOs in there getting chewed out on live television.

Health insurance is out of control. So that was, again, posted the day before the government shut down the day after Netanyahu was at the White House. And Ryan, she's cooking. She is. If I had unlimited amount of time, my next book, I think, would just have to be about MTG. She's what a fascinating arc she's taken. And she is correct. Monthly payments of $500, $700,000 per month when the subsidies go away are going to be a bloody nose to a middle class

that is already suffering under the weight of everything going up. groceries are up like 50% or something year over year it's insane like and people know like wait how much am i paying for just two bags of groceries and and then and then at the same time this the insult to the injury of your coffee is four dollars extra because of tariffs because trump is trying to encourage a domestic coffee production industry where are we going to plant coke where we How are we going to get coffee in the United States? No, seriously. How are we going to do that?

Yep. Greenhouses? Mm-hmm. And I think it's got to be drier than that. So I don't know. Like, what, like, why are we, just because he doesn't understand things? Like, you have to pay more at the grocery store. And then, right, who rolls in and out for the fourth time,

Nanyan, who rolls in and out of the Oval Office. So MTG is like, how about we bring in the insurance CEOs? And now, yeah, good. Crack down. Go MTG. And to answer her rhetorical question of why not, it's because they're all big donors. The same goes for Democrats, by the way. And the reason part of what we're dealing with Affordable Care Act-wise is that the bill was this hulking mess that had all kinds of, it was in some ways this compromise between, and in some ways, ran an understandable compromise between industry. he were covering this at the time between industry and the sort of idealism of Obama about bringing

health care prices down, but they compromise with industry in a lot of different ways. And that's not completely, what we're dealing with now is not completely downstream from that. But for Marjorie Taylor Green, I think to be jumping in and criticizing Republicans for health care for, I mean, an obvious blind spot, Republicans for a decade campaigned on health care did nothing about it and now never even talk about it. unless it's in reference to what they say are quote illegal immigrants, which are just covered. But it's just a massive blind spot that is maybe one of the biggest holes and sources of anxiety in the average Americans' daily budget, and they've got nothing.

Yeah, and just briefly want to keep people updated on the fight over electricity bills. We could put up A5, new research from Bloomberg here showing that, as you suspect, like your intuition is correct in areas where there have been data centers built electricity costs as much as 267 percent more than it did five years ago that's a near quadrupling like that's insane and it's only going it's only getting worse as they continue to build these and as both parties are you know supportive of these big tech sweetheart deals that basically require rate payers, you know, consumers to subsidize the production of these AI and these data centers. And do not ask Rock about that. Because then

you're just, you think it's free every time you ask him, if this is true, you're paying. Stop. Yeah, thanks to everybody for their other questions. Although, I don't always. Sagar roasted us for yesterday. Yeah, I don't want to encourage it. Like, the whole carbon footprint was a neoliberal, like, ridiculous attempt to make something that is system-wide, a personal responsibility question. The same thing with recycling, which is fake, which is almost entirely fake. So I don't want to, like, shame people for using AI or grok or whatever as if you have some,

like, GROC footprint. Yes. And that if you use less grok, that your electric bill will go down because it's a systematic problem. As if you have any agency. But also stop with this group other than voting in order to. You should just stop because it's like an insult to all of our intelligence. Just to wrap a blow on everything, we've alluded to a bit why this is probably in both parties' political interests, even if it's not in the American people's interest to have a shutdown government.

But for both parties coming to an impasse on this, they just don't have many incentives. Democrats are reportedly hopeful right now that actually Donald Trump is the one who will come to the table on the ACA subsidies or the ACA expansion because he's someone who wants to be able to say, I gave you your health care cheaper. I gave you your health care. I fixed the problem with your health care. Now you can thank me for the health care because of the shutdown aversion or ending the shutdown. I, Donald Trump, ended the shutdown. So I think we can expect this to go on for a long time. They're probably correct that that's their best bet at this point because Donald Trump. Trump can basically tell congressional Republicans what to do and they'll follow him, no question about it. But if they let it go on for a few days at least, they'll already start experimenting with some of these long-term cuts that they want to do. And finally, Ryan, this is a point that we haven't talked about, but it's what most of the media coverage is focused on.

I'm thankful that this isn't what most of our coverage is focused on because it's kind of a secondary story. But in prior shutdowns, there's just this finger point. game that gets played in the media. Everyone's see in it as a Republicans' fault, as a Democrats' fault. And when we were reading the op-ed earlier about Russ vote, saying, well, previously Republicans have opposed these CRs and have opposed, you know, all the way that we're funding the government. Well, there are arguments that you can, there's always a partisan argument for who actually shut down the government. Republicans can

say, well, Democrats wouldn't come to the table. And Democrats can say, well, Republicans are the ones who won't give us the votes. This time it's the Democrats who will not give Republicans the vote and Rand Paul. They need seven because Rand Paul is out. So I'm curious if we'll be able to look back on the media coverage at this one as an instructive example as to who gets the blame when they're not giving the votes. We'll see. And these are called process arguments. Yes. And the public does not care about process. And parties in general also do not care about process. They invent concerns about process to justify whatever they're substantial or political demand is. So nobody should really waste much time thinking about that. Last thing on this, we have a little scoop. Attorney General

Pam Bondi just before 5 o'clock last night sent out a memo to the Department of Justice, which we obtained, and which one of the attorneys there sent to me flagging it as a flagrant, what they call a hatch act violation, which was a law that is still on the books, but does not actually get enforced anymore, which says that the federal government, you know, cannot be used for partisan political purposes. That's illegal. Yesterday, if you went to HUD.gov during the day, it gave you a giant banner that said, sorry that you're coming here, but radical Democrats have ruined the world. It's still there. It's still up right now. Go to HUD.com. So that the memo she sent out, Attorney General Bondi, unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this.

CR in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands. If congressional Democrats maintain their current posture and refuse to pass a clean CR to keep the government funded before 12 AM on October 1st, federal appropriated funding will lapse. The department has contingency plans in place, et cetera. This is the kind of thing that would have been a five-alarm scandal, even just 10 years ago. Now, the full politicization of the federal government has taken hold, as it's just, weaved into this otherwise bureaucratic sounding memo sent to thousands of lawyers. Yeah. Like they...

That's an extra bold. Yeah. Yeah. What does she care? Anyway. Well, let's go ahead, Ryan, and bring in Representative Ben Klein of Virginia, who will be followed by Senator Jeff Merkley. You brought him Klein.

He's a Freedom Caucus. Right. Freedom Caucus. He'll tell us what the right flank of the house is thinking. Well, and that's especially interesting giving the Marjorie Taylor Green. She's not in the Freedom Caucus anymore. She's still roughly Freedom Caucus. She's not booted out for being too-based. Yes, and she criticizes them a lot now.

But to have a kind of populist perspective on a health care fight is always, I think, useful, especially since it's been such a blind spot for Republicans. So we're going to talk to Representative Klein in Virginia, and then we're going to bring in Senator Jeff Merkley, who can, I think, give us some insight into how prominent Democrats are thinking about this. Yeah, and Merckley first elected in 2008 represents Oregon. And so we'll ask him about the federal war that Trump declared on Oregon yesterday as well. Plus, he and Chris Van Hollen were actually, they tried to go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites pretty recently.

So we can ask Murkley about that too. And just before we toss to them, just the real world consequences of a shutdown, it's many of four million federal employees. I'm reading, yes, those. We're reading for MBC right now. But people have been through it now. They sort of know what to expect. So that includes some service members, could go without a paycheck. That actually includes some of the National Guard people who were deployed to places like Washington, D.C., potentially to Chicago or Memphis, hundreds of thousands, including airport security officers, air traffic controllers, and certain members of the military will be deemed essential workers and told to come to work anyways.

So if in a flight, you don't have to worry too much, except last time when there was a shutdown, you just get a lot more callouts of TSA people who are calling in sick because they don't know whether they're going to get paid if this lasts particularly. long national parks could close and the swastonian could it's staying up until monday so far but and like apparently like in the bureau of labor statistics for instance apparently about roughly one person is deemed essential which means if this goes on for a long time the already somewhat unreliable uh data that we're getting out of the bLS will become that much more unreliable because you don't have to because you need the workers to be collecting the data on a daily basis otherwise you are flying blind in the economy. So stuff like that, too.

We'll see. And then broke this morning, that BLS nominee, EJ and Tony's nomination has been withdrawn. Right, there you go. They'll find some other bozo. All right. Let's get to it.

All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls, came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.

A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her.

Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal. system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways,

disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to heavyweight on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're joined now by Congressman Ben Klein, Republican representing Virginia's 6th District.

Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. Good to be with you. Okay, so you are a member of the Freedom Caucus, and somebody who, you know, used to be pretty close with Freedom Caucus world, does Russ vote. And I'm curious, Congressman, if you could talk to us a little bit about how this shutdown, how Republicans are looking at the possibilities of the shutdown, empowering from their perspective, the Russ vote and Donald Trump effort. to actually make significant cuts while the government is shut down to go on impoundment, recisions, and potentially even layoffs of federal workers. Is that a significant part of the plan that people could expect to see in the coming days? Well, the administration has its priorities.

Our priorities in the House and in the Senate with Republicans are to get the government back on track. We passed regular order continuing resolutions to keep the government running. We've done our job. The Senate is trying to, I mean, the Democrats are trying to attach extraneous provisions. But we will hopefully be back up and running. And, you know, in the meantime, if the administration is going to pursue their priorities of streamlining government, then, you know, then I think that's something Republicans are generally in favor of.

We hope that they are targeted and that they are in areas where we need streamlining. But, you know, I think that Russ vote has done a fantastic job as OMB director. And I think we look for him to make decisions that are going to help improve, improve efficiency and reduce bureaucracy. And so the big beautiful bill, which Democrats are kind of making this shutdown fight about, included significant tax cuts, tilted towards the wealthy. And to pay for some of that, there were significant cuts to Medicaid and then to Obamacare subsidies, which Democrats say, and I think there's actually a lot of data to back this up, is going to be really brutal for hospitals in particular in rural America. Are you seeing any pressure from your constituents who were concerned about hospital closures? Well, my district voted for President Trump, voted for the Trump agenda, voted for Republican control in the House and in the Senate.

So, you know, what we are doing is delivering on the agenda that the voters voted for. And so when we passed the big, beautiful bill, we passed included language that would eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid by putting in place common sense work requirements, by streamlining SNAP benefits to make sure that there's not duplication, that there's not people who shouldn't be on food stamps, getting food stamps. All of that is the Democrats are seeking to roll back the election of last November and say it didn't really happen. Our agenda is the agenda that people voted for and want. So we want more bureaucracy, more waste, fraud, and abuse, and more excess spending on pet projects like health care funding in California for

illegal immigrants. I was just going to ask, so if Democrats dropped, and that seems right now to be a big if, if Democrats dropped, they're part of these negotiations that would apply to the, quote, like, lawfully present immigrants, which could include people who came over and claimed asylum, even if they crossed illegally and then claimed asylum, if they dropped that part of this, do you think there would be a pathway to an agreement to reopening the government if they just got rid of, would Republicans come to the table if they just got rid of the tax care, the health care, I'm sorry, subsidies for people who are not U.S. citizens? You know, that's not the only

problem with the Democrats' demands. It is one of the most egregious. But the health insurance subsidies, let's remember, Obamacare broke the health insurance marketplace so that all the health insurance policies are now out of reach for low income and middle income earners. And so to actually afford these Obamacare policies, Democrats have put in place subsidies and want to keep the money trained going to the insurance companies. Republicans don't think we should be subsidizing insurance companies with $40 billion, $40 billion, excuse me, to in additional money to pad their balance sheets. So we need to put more. competition in the marketplace, put more low-cost health insurance options for working families.

That's how we're going to address the problems that started long, long ago. And putting it into a continuing resolution just is malpractice on the part of the Democrats. We can talk about ways to reform health care once we get the government back up and running, but we have to do that first. So, Ryan, if you don't mind, I just wanted to read this post from Congressman, your colleague, Marjorie Taylor Green, who said, Yesterday on Twitter, Americans are getting crashed by health insurance with monthly payments of $1,500, $1,000 per month instead of a revolving door of foreign government leaders to the White House, probably referring to Benjamin Netanyahu there, I'd like to see health insurance

CEOs in there getting chewed out on live television, health insurance is out of control. And I thought that post was really interesting because it reflects the sentiment that I could hear maybe people in your district or just average Trump voters who might see their premiums spike saying, yes, we all agree that we should fix the health care system, but you're asking me to wait for a massive political project that might or might not ever happen because of the state of Congress. So doesn't that, I mean, how would you address somebody who says, I'm being raked over the coals every month.

I can't afford this. This is out of control. Please just do something. I can't wait for Republicans to undo ACA with some, like, grand solution in the future. Yeah, Republicans agree, which is why we oppose what the Democrats want to attach to the CR, which is such a rollback that millionaires and billionaires are going to qualify for these subsidies that they currently receive. That's outrageous. And as to the health care locations, the hospitals and other health care facilities, those are going to be benefiting from the $50 billion that is in the Big Beautiful Bill that goes to rural health care. And that's something the Democrats want repealed. They want all of big, beautiful bill repealed, including $50 billion for rural health care, including putting back in place, tax subsidies extended for millionaires and billionaires. It doesn't make any sense. It shows the

lack of focus on the Democrats part. We have three Democrats, two Democrats and an independent who voted with Republicans last night for the continuing resolution for a clean CR. So it's clear that the they're breaking, and we just need to keep the pressure on, and hopefully they'll come around and vote for a clean CR, and then we can talk about how to resolve the spending for the next fiscal year. Let's talk about that $50 billion number, though. So Republicans in the big, beautiful bill, cut about a trillion dollars from Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, the ACA, Obama Care.

High-cutting waste fraud and abuse, exactly. Right. So let's, because we have a wasteful, we have a wasteful system, and a lot of it goes to health insurance executives, a lot of private equity executives who own a lot of our, you know, providers. Let's say that even half, let's say half of that trillion dollars is just siphoned off by profiteers. I don't think it's, I don't think it's 500 billion, but let's just say, let's just say it is. Probably closer to, let's say 200 billion. Let's say, so that means $500 billion is being stripped out of the health care system, money that's not going to go now to

providers and community health care systems. I was looking at up. Lee County Community Hospital is in your district is saying that it might close. So you've got a conservatively, you have a $500 billion gaping hole blown in the health care industry by this bill. And Republicans, because they understood the political risks of that, came back in with a $50 billion kind of backstop. So I hope for your constituents' sake that Lee County Community Hospital does manage to win the fight in the snake pit to get that money from that $50 billion pot. But don't the numbers just not add up there? Like if you're taking $500 to a trillion out, but only putting $50 billion back in,

aren't we going to see some significant bankruptcies among hospitals and providers? Well, Lee County's not in my district, but we do have a lot of rural hospitals in my district. And what they are saying is that, yes, that because we expanded Medicaid to cover working adults, that putting in place work requirements is going to put the responsibility on them to actually qualify for Medicaid and stay qualified for Medicaid. And then the increased reporting requirements is going to, again, put it on them and on the hospitals to make sure that only those who are qualified are going to receive Medicaid. So these common sense measures are going to make sure that more money is

available for rural hospitals. And then you add on the $50 billion that's going to flow back only to rural hospitals. You know, rural hospitals really only use about 5% of Medicaid funding and for them to actually get this directed money without the big hospitals and the big competition for those funds, since it's just going to rural hospitals, you're going to see them benefit directly, and hopefully our constituents in rural areas will too. Last question for me, Congressman, is just how far are House Republicans willing to push this? And maybe you haven't said into the Senate side and President Trump as well, but consensus here in Washington is that this is a shutdown will probably, I mean, it may even challenge

the record long shutdown from President Trump's first administration because of what the incentives look like for both parties here. And I tend to even, as rarely as I agree with the Washington consensus, that does feel right to me this time. So what's your take? I mean, how far are House Republicans willing to hold out if Democrats don't add their votes to the, to the, in the Senate side? If Democrats weren't in existence in the Senate, we would have a continuing resolution. It would be business, you know, continuing in the federal government. Because Democrats are refusing to provide those seven votes, that's why we have a shutdown. So it's on them to come back to the table.

Three have come back. We need four more. I anticipate that by the time we get back to Washington next week after the Jewish holiday and after the weekend, we are going to be ready and the Democrats will probably be ready to get this thing resolved and open the government back up again. I've, Emily and I were talking earlier in the program about how it's interesting that Republicans now, when they're opposing these Obamacare subsidies, have done it in the context of whether or not the money, the subsidies are going to illegal, illegal immigrants, rather than kind of challenging the subsidies ideologically, as they did for many years. Does that, I know, Freedom Caucus is pretty still squarely against those types of subsidies, but are you noticing? an ideological shift among Republicans that they're in a populist sense more open to these government subsidies and that's why they're looking for this angle of, well, they might accidentally benefit

illegal immigrants. So that's why we're against them. But for American citizens, we're okay with it. No, I think for multiple reasons, you see Republicans explaining to the American people why these subsidies distort the marketplace and are wrong for health care. and there may be a temporary solution for folks right now, but long term, the money that is being asked for will go directly into the pockets of insurance executives that will keep premiums high and they won't provide any kind of relief for working families. We have to long term solve the problem that Obamacare broke when it destroyed our health insurance system. But short term, we do have to address high health insurance costs, but we have to do it without making

sure that millionaires and billionaires benefit from these subsidies. And the Democrats, that's what they want. And that's what they're holding the government hostage to get an extension of these subsidies to every income earner, including illegal immigrants, and taking away $50 billion for rural health care. It doesn't make any sense. And I'm hoping that Democrats come to their senses and reopen the government soon. Congressman Klein, thank you so much for joining us here on Breaking Points this morning. We appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know quick. killed her, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her. or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.

They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight.

People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know True Crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism.

We could give you a whole brand new thing. where you're, like, super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eyes. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, to talk about the democratic posture when it comes to the shutdown.

and also update us on his recent trip over to the Gaza attempt to visit the Ghazi Humanitarian Foundation. Senator Merkley, thanks so much for joining us. Good to be with you. So when it came to the Democratic decision-making on how to confront Republicans

on this shutdown, how was it that party leaders wound up settling on kind of health care subsidies as the thing that you were going to make this fight about? Well, if you compare March 15th, and as Shakespeare said, beware the eyes of March, and now here we are a number of months later, what has happened in the intervening period? Well, the big factor was passing what we refer to as the big, ugly betrayal bill, that what did it do?

The bob. It savaged Americans' health care. And that factor is coming due here in the coming months, because in November, people will be signing up for health care again, and they'll be discovering double-digit increases. In many cases, they'll be paying twice what they paid the previous year. And in some cases, families in Oregon will be paying $8,000 to $25,000 more, and they simply won't be able to afford it. You go without health insurance. You don't go to the doctor. Health conditions get worse.

When you do go, you go to the most expensive version, the emergency room. When you can't pay the bill because you don't have insurance, then the revenues decrease for our clinics and our hospitals, many of which are already on the edge. And so Republicans are shutting down the government in order to cut health care. And why did they do this to fund tax breaks for billionaires? Wow. I mean, this is a families lose, billionaires win direction. And health care touches every family in America. Are Democrats willing to come to the table on the key issue that Republicans have been talking about, which is health care for non-citizens?

It's for people who are lawfully present. Republicans are saying illegal immigrants. The truth of that is it's people who are like lawfully present may have claimed asylum in the big wave of migration that we saw over the last few years. So if Democrats are willing to, I'm curious, are Democrats willing to come to the table and drop health care that would cover non-citizens for the sake of getting the government back open for, U.S. citizens? Listen, the Republicans are engaged in a big lie because no one who is here undocumented is eligible for Medicaid. No one who is here undocumented is eligible for Medicare. And so that big lie is an effort to distract from what they did, which was to savagely cut health care for working Americans and struggling Americans across the spectrum. This bill that they passed was rolling out the red carpet for billionaires

and rolling out the red tape for struggling families who are trying to get on their feet. And so the vision that is different here is that we want to make America work for everyone to be able to succeed. And I must say the reason we call this often their bill an ugly betrayal is because President Trump campaigned on helping families. But then when you saw in the rotunda, he's being sworn in, and I'm about 20 feet away from him, the second row back. And who's standing behind him, not champions for health care or housing or education or good paying jobs or investment in infrastructure or equality of opportunity or making our planet healthier? None of that. No, no, it's billionaires. Day one of his administration was dedicated to making billionaires even wealthier and doing so at the expense of everyone else. It wasn't just cutting health care. It was cutting child nutrition.

And it was creating $30 trillion in additional debt over 30 years. Why to fund tax breaks for billionaires? So certainly when you get in the room, there's going to be a lot of discussions over details. But that's the key is Republicans said, we are. not even going to talk to you. The president, when he was non-president, back in 2013, said the president has a responsibility to bring everyone together. If there is a shutdown, it's on the president's head. So this is Trump's Republican shutdown. But he wasn't willing, now he's president, he wasn't willing to meet with our team until essentially we're, you know, we're approaching midnight, if you will. And he instructed the Speaker of the House. You don't

talk to Democrats either. And the majority leader in the Senate, Senate didn't talk to Democrats. In other words, it was like, okay, well, let's talk about this because we are not going to just say that this horrific assault on families in America is okay. We're not going to say it's okay. We are not going to support that. Come talk to us, and they were unwilling to do so. So in a moment, we're going to be talking about Trump and Pete Hegsteth appearing at the Pentagon yesterday. And while there, Trump talked about how, you know, he wants the military to start using American cities as training grounds, and he has said that he's going to send, or is sending the military into Portland. As a senator from Oregon, what have you seen

so far? And how do you respond to Trump's proposition here? Yeah, a week ago Thursday, he announced he was going to, quote, do a number on Portland. He said, I'm going to have the Secretary of War deploy the troops, and I'm going to authorize them to use full force, we're going to do a number on Portland. So we held a press conference, and I called it the don't take the bait press conference. And we had all the local leaders, the mayor, our congressional delegation, the local city council members, don't take the bait. What the president is up to is he wants to create riots in Portland. And so by sending an influx of federalized troops, while he's hoping there will be conflict, and then conflict justifies more authoritarian power. So understanding this,

our reaction has to be, don't take the big. And so this is the message we're giving to people, yes, protest, but don't protest by getting engaged directly with any of these officers. Now, it turns out that some things have developed and that instead of sending a whole bunch of different forces from different organizations the way he did in 2000. Right now, what a, uh, 2020, what he's planning to do now, uh, is to federalize, uh, 200 of our Oregon National Guard send in leadership. So it basically decapitates the leadership that's in Oregon and sends in separate leadership. They're going to go through a couple days of training. And there is a hearing this Friday for a stay. Uh, and why, why is that stay being?

considered because the power that the president's using, the authority he's using is called Title Tim. And it says the president can send in troops when there is an invasion or a rebellion. And this is very important because our founders were terrified of a standing army. They had seen dictators create an authoritarian state by using the power of an army. So they didn't want a standing Army. They didn't trust it. And then 150 years ago, we had a general agreement that troops, and it's called POSIC-Komatatus law, that troops would never be used inside our cities, this exception being invasion or rebellion. So I'm hoping that we'll hear from the district judge an injunction saying there's nothing that qualifies as an invasion or a rebellion. I went past the ICE headquarters,

which is what Trump has focused on a couple times this last week. And I saw three women standing out with signs that had flowers on them. And are you kidding me? That's a rebellion. That's called an American protest. That's called freedom of speech. That's called freedom of assembly. That's as American as apple pie.

There have been a few conflicts, kind of like the equivalent of a bar five over the last couple months, but well within the ability of a local pleased to tackle. Nothing that would constitute a rebellion. Think about a rebellion. What's a rebellion? Like the Civil War, that's a rebellion. Shea's rebellion. That's the founding of our republic. That was a rebellion where you had a mob seeking to tackle the local armory and grab guns. But so what we feel what Trump is doing is very much out of the authoritarian playbook, extremely dangerous. And then he followed up, as you mentioned, by talking to the generals yesterday morning.

And he says, you know, first of all, it's a loyalty test. You all don't like what I'm doing. Leave the room. but you will be, you'll probably lose your rank. Okay, so loyalty to the Constitution is the oath they took, but Trump wants loyalty to the president. It's very dangerous. They said a group of you are probably going to be in charge of this strategy of sending troops to cities and making it a training ground.

A training ground for what? For how troops are deployed across America. Folks have been coming to my town halls and saying, and I've done 36 of them this year, saying, we are really worried that the president is going to create some emergency power. It's going to say as emergency power. It's going to postpone elections. People are going to basically protest against that, and it's going to send in the troops. Is this what he's planning? Is this train so that troops will be prepared to go into cities?

Once you go across this threshold and you do it repeatedly, it becomes easier and easier to repeat the precedent. I think this is an extraordinarily dangerous moment for us with an authoritarian president who's violating the Constitution, left and right, and now talking about developing a habit of putting the military into our cities. If we take Trump out of the picture for a moment, what do you think needs to happen in Portland? I'm curious about that. You can correct me.

I mean, there have been obvious, as you just mentioned, instances of political violence in Portland, more than less than, I should say, social bar fights, for example, but bar fights maybe with some political animus behind them. So what has to happen in Portland? And I ask that as somebody who doesn't like the expansion of government power, particularly in law enforcement, particularly domestically. But is it possible that there's like this giant opening for Trump to seize on disorder in Portland as Democrats have let political violence fester in some cases in the city?

There's been very little violence in Portland. If you walked through Portland, you would just go, this is a city. on the rebound. Of the 65 largest cities in America, it had the biggest decrease in murder rates year over year, that 20 percent. In fact, it was cut in half. It had one of the largest 20 percent decrease in violent crimes. You see the city has been rebuilding from COVID, rebuilding from the 2020 conflicts with Trump and his first administration. Things that have been closed down are starting to open back up. We see the impact of, of course, homelessness and drug use,

and those impacts are less visible. Now, as programs have ramped up to provide alternatives and assistance, Portland's been on the rebound. You would not recognize it as looking anything like what Trump is described. And if you have a few people who want to create disturbances, and they've been coming late at night and throwing some stones, has been a very small number, that's where the local police arrest them. And that's a local police function.

You throw a stone out of a federal building, you put off a fireworks, save at a local building, even if it's not an ice building, any building. That's a local police response. So there's nothing here that comes close to justify federalization of the National Guard or sending in troops of any kind. We don't have much time left, but I did want to just get. get your quick perspective on your trip over toward the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's sites over there. One of the few American non-mercenaries was able to get close. How close were you

able to get? And what was your interaction with GHF officials? What was your takeaway? You and Senator Chris Van Hollen had made a trip there. And the trip was much broader than it is trying to get into Gaza, though that was a goal. We were turning. down by the Israeli authorities. We then arranged to participate in a Jordanian overflight where they drop humanitarian aid. The Israelis canceled the flight. I mean, we were in Jordan with the C-130 cargo planes all getting ready to take off and Israel canceled the flights. They didn't apparently want an American observing Gaza from the air. But then we were able to go to the border at Rafa Gate, where we'd also been in January of 2024. But this time, we were able to go through

the transition area between Egypt and Gaza because the gate shut down. And at the far end, we were able to climb an outside fire escape to the roof of a three-story building, stand on the ledge, and look out over Gaza and just see, or over Gaza, but over the city of Rafa, and just see everything reduced to rubble. It's one thing to see the satellite photos. It's another thing to stand there and just see it that every building blown up. This was, it was, it was stunning because it was just such visible evidence of the strategy, a twofold strategy of ethnic cleansing. The first strategy was destroy all the homes, not just that they're empty and the city's been emptied out and their shell holes or got, no, everything blown up so you can't return.

And the second strategy of deprivation, deprivation of food and clean water and medicine. And now we have a famine for the most vulnerable populations inside of Gaza. We have horrendous impact on children. Can you imagine two years of bombs falling? Your family members dying. You've moved five or six or sometimes ten times. No place is safe. No school can be held. Malnutrition rolls into famine. And it's just it's the international workers say worst hellhole in the world as a result of this strategy. Designed to drive people out. of Gaza. That was very powerful. We met with so many groups. We met with the families of the hostages. We met with soldiers who had served in Gaza. We met with international workers who had

been inside. We met with World Food Program workers who had been inside. We learned about all the strategies to block the regular delivery of food that are constantly being used to extend this famine. The same values that made me a passionate support. reporter for Israel are the same values that say what the Netanyahu government is doing is horrifically wrong. It's a violation of international law. It's a violation of every humanitarian or religious creed. It is just horrific and America's complicit because of our close relationship and we haven't used that close relationship to say hell no to the strategy of ethnic cleansing. And for people who don't know, Rafa is a city that dates back.

back to the second, at least the second millennium, BC, you know, Alexander the Great was there, continuously occupied basically for something like 4,000 years. What was it like to see this one of the most ancient cities on the planet, just reduced to non-existence? You know, you couldn't recognize anything because it's all just rubble. So you see no signs of, you couldn't make out, if you will, oh, where it was something that was ancient, significant. It's all just rubble.

But what really struck me was to recognize that six months earlier, a million people were in that city. And just as in Gaza City, a few months ago, a million people were in Gaza City, and now Gaza City is being raised and blown up in the same fashion. If this proceeds, you will find that you have two million people crowded into a small area on the very southwest corner of Gaza, which is Gaza is already a very small place. And where are they going to go? Well, the goal is to make life so miserable that they will self-deport.

American government's called it voluntary departure. There's nothing voluntary when you're being starved to death and indiscriminately bombed. So this is not all that's going wrong. You have on the West Bank another strategy, which is that green light has been given for settlers to engage in massive harassment of Palestinian villages, cutting the villagers off from their olive orchards, cutting them off from their vineyards, cutting them off from their springs or their wells, proceeding to run livestock right up into and too and often through these villages, and then assaulting the villagers. and then assaulting the villagers when they leave the village itself to check on their lands or so forth. And that also is to drive everyone out of area sea, basically, a de facto takeover of the West Bank.

That is wrong as well. Well, we, in 1947 vision was two nations for the two people. The world supported and endorsed and made happen the Israeli nation, but we never solidified a Palestinian state. This is why I introduced a resolution, the first of its kind, saying to the President of the United States, we should be recognizing a Palestinian state. The failure to do so has been a festering wound that's contributed to the cycle of violence in the Middle East. And I was pleased that, and I know the senators joined me, so 10 senators did something that hasn't been done before, and that is to speak up and say, we've made a mistake, whether it was through Camp David and Oslo,

in all times since we never actually recognize the legitimacy of a Palestinian state. And it's time to make that happen. I do want to say that in the peace plan, the president just put forward, there's a lot of elements that are the best step I've seen this administration make towards a fast, hopefully a fast ceasefire and the start of something new and better. We need a ceasefire. We need a massive influx humanitarian. We need to return of all the hostages.

is we need to break this ethnic cleansing strategy. It's better for Israel to break that strategy. It's better for the Palestinians. But let's build on a ceasefire to create a prosperous, peaceful future rather than have this haunting cycle of violence infect the decades to come. And we'll talk more about that plan later in the program up next. We'll be talking about Trump and Pete Hexat, at the Pentagon. Now, Senator Jeff Merkley, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

A pleasure to be with you, Ryan and Emily. Take care. Thank you. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling.

I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, And I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hi there. This is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke.

And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look to people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to heavyweight on the I-heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, last week you may have been worried, as even some people, from home that I grew up with were texting me

if I had any idea about what this mysterious meeting, this gathering of generals at the Pentagon was all about. You may have been concerned that we were going to war, Secretary of War, as we're now calling it. I think Ryan, that moniker is more accurate anyway. Left news consumers and military leaders fairly uncomfortable after he abruptly announced that they were planning this massive meeting of generals

from around the world, flew everybody in here to DC, where we headed into war, was it this grand PR exercise? You guessed it. We talked about on last Friday show what it could be. I speculated if it was war, maybe it was in our own hemisphere. We'll get to that in just a moment, actually, towards the end of the show, what we could be seeing in our own hemisphere. But it was...

My source at the time, remember, he said, this is just a giant Trump. He was like, yes. Stupid exercise. He nailed it. He did nail it. And my life is filled with regrets, of course. but one of them is that I had multiple sources over the last seven months telling me

Hegseth keeps saying he wants to change this to the Department of War. Oh my gosh, you ignored it. And I was like, that's too stupid to report. I'm not saying I don't believe you, but make me look like a moron. Float that. He's talking about that.

No, certainly, yeah, actually did it. It did it. You did it. So War Secretary of Haxeth, you're going to want to see some of these clips because what Haxeth did basically was gather everyone for a pep talk that doubled as him making different points about like DEI stuff and also rules of war.

We're going to get into that in just a moment as well. And also a photo op for the military to, you know, sort of like the parade that happened in the summer, look on the global stage and nationally like it's putting its best foot forward, which I won't deny is, I actually think that's important. but this was something else. Let's go ahead and roll our first clip here. Very much value the impact of female troops. Our female officers and NCOs are the absolute best in the world. But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral. If women

can make it excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result. So be it. This also means grooming standards. No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We're going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards. Because it's like the broken windows theory of policing.

It's like when you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes. So you have to address the small stuff. This is on duty in the field and in the rear. If you want a beard, you can join special forces. If not, then chafe. We don't have a military full of Nordic pagans. But unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call BS and enforce standards or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards.

Both are unacceptable. And that's why today at my direction, the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos. It all starts with physical fitness and appearance. If the Secretary of War can do regular hard PT, so can every member of our joint force. Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.

It's a bad look. Every member of the joint force at every rank is required to take a PT test twice a year. I mean, he also said, Ryan, more seriously, quote, we unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don't want to fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.

Hexeth has been a supporter of people who have been accused of violating laws related to war crimes. He was a big advocate for Eddie Gallagher. Right, not accused. He was openly an advocate. Yeah, war criminal, a convicted war criminal who all of his comrades called a complete sociopath who stabbing and shooting people like innocent civilians. And so like if your bar is Eddie Gallagher, then you are lifting and removing what so many people take. take pride in when it comes to the U.S. military, which is a, a, this, this idea that do you actually do protect civilian lives.

What did you think of this line? And that's what separates the U.S. military. Obviously, I'm my criticism of the U.S. military, but like that, that is a sacred belief that people have, and he's saying, forget that. So he said, quote, the new compass heading is clear. Out with the Karelli's, the McKenzie's, and the Millies, and in with the Stocksdale's, the Schwartzcoffs and the Patton's. Did you get to catch that one?

Yeah, and Patton, you know, famously got in trouble for like, you know, slapping a private, I think in Italy, right, during that campaign. Yeah, so, yes, he's, I was, when he was talking, I was like, wait a minute, is he coming after the special forces here? Because the guys with the tattoos and the beards are in the special forces. And then he carves them out. Right. Like, what are we doing here?

Well, he says you can go to Special Forces if you want your beard. So Donald Trump also joined the gathering as well. Let's go ahead and roll B2. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we're going into Chicago version. That's a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid. I thought it would be met with fury on the left. But they're sort of giving up. I must be honest with you. They've had it. They've had it with Trump.

I really thought that we were going to have to sort of fight it through. There's been no fight. There's been no fight. Don't laugh. Don't laugh. You're not allowed to do that. You know, I just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank. There goes your future. And I'm not a fan of some of the ships you do. I'm a very aesthetic person. and I don't like some of the ships you're doing aesthetically. They say, oh, it's stealth. They say, that's not so an ugly ship.

It's not necessary in order to say your stealth. What you're missing is Ryan Lucey. This guy, unbelievable. Take a look at this picture. Let's put this all of it up on the screen. This is B3. Doug Mills in New York Times snapped a picture of military leaders after Trump's speech looking.

Ashen, stone-faced, any other descriptions come to mine, Ryan. You know, questioning their life choices. Nonplussed. Yes. You know, it was, at least we're not going to war. It was not a war meeting. It was not. We probably are still going to war.

Right. But we didn't announce some type of major World War III operation yesterday. So that's the silver lining, I guess. But yeah, Trump, like, talking about we're going to make major. American cities training grounds for the American military. Like, that's just an incredible place for us to be as a country. Like, if you said that that was what Trump was planning to do, a year ago, you would be accused of inciting violence against Republicans for blaspheming their good patriotic name. And here he is, no, that's actually what we're going to do.

Let's put B4 up on the screen. This is about a report in the Daily Mail. This is the Daily Beal. This is a Daily Beast covering the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail report is suggesting that Pete Hegesith, according to leaks, has been especially paranoid after Charlie Kirk's death, which is completely understandable, I think, but that he and his wife are, at least seeming to be sort of even deeper entrenched mentality. And, you know, it's a tabloid story. I think worth keeping in mind. You know, we've seen the rebranding as Department of War, which I think happened actually right before Charlie Kirk died, maybe the day that Charlie Kirk died, if not a couple of days before. But also this new, or this high-profile meeting and tensions in Venezuela are heating

up. So, you know, the leaks aren't good either. The leaks are going to fuel that sense of paranoia. If this makes it into the Daily Mail in a meta-sense, that's going to make the Secretary of War, Ryan, even more paranoid. Yeah. And so Pentagon Insiders tell of explosive tantrum. and erratic behavior, quote, crawling out of his skin. What the Daily Mail, and people were saying, like, oh, it sounds like he's on the sauce again. That's not how I read it. I read it as, this is a dry drunk, you know,

who is going through basically untreated withdrawal. Like, if you are a serious alcoholic and you just go cold turkey, this type of crawling out of your skin, behavior can be a thing. Somebody was saying that he was seen drinking a bud light at a football game or something, but I don't know, maybe that doesn't even count. I don't know. I mean, I think honestly, like put all of everything that's been reported about Pete Hegseth,

which I'm pretty skeptical. I've met Pete Hegseth a couple of times. I don't necessarily think that he has a drinking problem right now, but put all of that aside because, you know, I'm sure there are people who have different stories, whatever, but I mean, I guess a lot of them were from the past. Either way, all this is to say, what happened to Charlie Kirk, we covered it at the time, the ramifications, we're not even talking about a Charlie Kirk-related story here, but the ramifications on the right are going to be significant in ways that aren't always obvious. And some of that might be just

stoking, intense paranoia about personal security in ways that can push people in dangerous directions, I think, Ryan, I mean, because when you're paranoid, a lot of paranoia becomes irrational. It can start in a rational place. I think it's rational for public figures right now to be paranoid after the cold-blooded assassination of somebody. So yes, but that can have consequences just on a personal psychological level. So I don't know if that's what's going on. But this meeting, I guess I'm just grateful, was not some major war announcement, and that's a low bar, perhaps. And we'll get to that later in the show. Yes, that might not be announced. It might just happen. It sure as hell won't be voted on. No, it won't. If you thought that Congress needed to

take us to war, boy. You've been proven wrong. Right, let's go ahead and get to the flotilla. So we had planned to make this segment about the potential interception of the Samud flotilla that is heading to Gaza that was expected to come overnight because the flotilla has now entered the nautical mileage space at which each flotilla before them has been intercepted by Israeli Navy. But still smooth sailing, fascinating. Literally smooth sailing. Well, I think rough seas, but otherwise smooth sailing headed towards the Gaza shores. So we will keep you updated as that unfolds, but instead let's talk about what else we were going to talk about in this segment, which is updates on the Trump Netanyahu take it or leave at offer that he made to the

Palestinians. But also incredible developments when it comes to the kind of propaganda side. So recently you had Netanyahu meeting with a bunch of influencers, and he said that Like the way that we're going to respond to the problems that Israel's image is facing worldwide is we're going to have our influencers go out there and make the case on TikTok. And he also said the most important thing to do is to purchase TikTok. Like that was his word. And Larry Ellison, a close ally of Israel through Oracle is indeed doing that. But incredible discovery, it's in Afara filing by Quincy Institute research.

Nick Cleveland-Stout and put this C1 up on the screen. New document reveals the Israeli government paying a cohort of 14 to 18 social media influencers between $6,100 and $7,300 per post. The show is now fully in support of Israel, our coverage will only be supportive of Israel, $7,000 a post every time we post about it. So if we do, let's say, if we do a 15-minute segment that's slobbering about Israel, then we cut it up into like 15 different clips. We'd be so rich.

Can we cash 7,000 each? We're leaving a lot of money on the table. That is big money. That is a lot of money. So we don't yet know the identities of these 14 to 18 on social media. We can guess. We can certainly get a fun game. It's a game show.

I think on a week ago, Brianna Wu announced that she'd be going to TikTok to start doing pro-Israel content. I don't know if she's getting paid or not. but interesting. Guess the pro-Israel influencers. It's like... Interesting timing. Amazing. $7,000 per post.

And so we've seen some of the... I don't know if it's... These are the influencers getting paid, but we've seen... You know, you see a lot of posts that have started to circulate. I'm curious for your take on this. I think that they are... Now, they have endless amounts of money. And also, as DropSight reported, citing Hot RETs, actually, that Israel just approved another $40 million boost to their global propaganda budget.

This is on top of a $150 million increase over what they had already been doing. $24 million of that is for, quote, global influence campaigns. And $16 million is to finance international delegations visiting Israel. So these are the, whether it's lawmakers or influencers, they fund your trip, flights from New York to Tel Aviv, nice hotels, good, you know, free food and drinks, travel, like your entire trip is paid for. They send, you know, good-looking IDF soldiers around with you. It's like the solstic. Access type of soldier. Yeah, exactly. Yes. BMI is appropriate that Hegseth would be. No beards.

Not ashamed. No beards. No beardos. And try to give them a good time. And then they go back and they have warm feelings and they have and they meet people who dangle future opportunities. This is much more direct. Like here's $7,000 to say something nice about us on TikTok. And then they have the problem of, oh, but nobody wants to hear that.

So then they then they take over. TikTok and juice the algorithm so that you have to hear it. Like, it's just going to show up in your 4-U page. Well, that's an important point. Yeah. So this is something that Nick Cleveland Stout reports over at Quincy, which is, I actually think getting underreported. This is coming from Brad Parscale also. Former Trump campaign manager, right? Right. And part of this is also about, I'm trying to find the exact part where Nick mentions this, but part of it is also about gaming chat GPT and AI search engine. It's like specifically in what Nick reports on.

He has a new, this is what it is. So he did a follow-up. And it outlines the Brad Parscale of it all. And Brad Parscale is also, this is coming to Salem Media Group. Did you catch this part of it? So Clock Tower, I think that's Parscale's group. will integrate its pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media Network properties, a conservative Christian media group that boasts a vast radio network

and produces high-profile shows such as Hugh Hewitt, Larry Alder, Wright View with Laura Trump, in April the conservative media network announced Donald Trump Jr. and Laura Trump as significant stakeholders in the new company. Salem Media Network did not respond to a question clarifying whether it would be compensated by Clock Tower for promoting messages on behalf of Israel or how these messages would be integrated.

That is American media. Right. That is actually some conservative news outlets that could be then infiltrated by paid paid propaganda. There's a difference. And that's not a distinction without a difference. Propaganda is propaganda. Yes. When people are actually getting paid by a foreign government to do propaganda in a sensible news outlets, that's a completely different ballgame. Yeah, so follow the money here. So, well, I guess the money starts in the United States. So it is American taxpayer money.

But so then we subsidize Israel. Israel uses the money then to send to Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, who then gives it to Lara Trump and other people, presumably, in order to foist Israeli propaganda into these media properties because ChatGPT is trained to believe that these media properties have some level of reliability and substance to them. ChatGPT is probably told, don't just scrape things from government propaganda websites and then believe it to be the case. Like, yeah, it's more reliable to trust news sources rather than direct propaganda. So you pay to have the propaganda then smothered into the news properties, these right-wing news properties. And then chat GPT absorbs it into its code. And then when you ask

chat GPT, you know, is Israel good? Chat-GPT responds based on the raw material that it's produced. from these news shows, which then also can, then they have Wikipedia armies that then try to edit Wikipedia articles sourcing to these news shows that they have fought internally inside Wikipedia to get labeled as credible news sources, and then you tilt Wikipedia, and then Wikipedia becomes raw material for chat GPT and other AI as well, because within a few years, everyone's understanding of reality will be shaped by whatever these AIs tell them is the reality. So there's this massive arms race to shape what that reality is going to look like. And by the way, this happened right after Nick mentions this. We probably mentioned this on

the show, but the SKDK, Knickerbocker campaign to run a bot farm for the Israeli narratives on social media. Which is related to that stagloor group thing that we reported on. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. So this is coming, lest you think it is just conservative media that's being infiltrated Democrats are taking money to infiltrate social media with these narratives as well. Which is man.

And it can't happen a moment too soon for Israel because let's take a look at the trash that they're currently putting out. Put up C2. So Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday put out this post saying

exposed official Hamas documents, and that's when everybody is like, oh my God, official Hamas documents, yeah, sure. Found in the Gaza Strip, now revealed for the first time, turns out they tried to reveal these exact same documents in June, and they think we all forgot about it, prove Hamas's direct involvement in the funding and execution of the Samud flotilla to Gaza. Huge news, if true, you then poke a little bit further into it, and turns out none of this is remotely true. But they write Hamas documents that were discovered in the Gaza Strip and are being revealed for the first time again, not true, show a direct link between the flotel leaders and the Hamas terrorist organization. The way they try to put this

together, they say the Palestinian conference for Palestinians abroad was established in 2018 in functions as Hamas's representative body abroad, operating de facto as Hamas embassies. The organization operates under the pretense of civilian cover and is responsible on behalf of for mobilizing actions against Israel. Then it says, first official Hamas document was found in the Godstrip, a letter from 2021 signed by head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Ismail Hanea, directly and explicitly calling on the PCPA chairman for unity. So let's pretend, and I posted this on Twitter and said,

this should be a critical thinking test for, like, students in a class on propaganda. So let's pretend for a second that all of this, everything that there's, saying within the four corners of this is true. Huge gigantic if, but let's just pretend. Let's say they have a letter from Hania, who they assassinated in Tehran in his bedroom, that is calling on the PCPA chairman for unity in 2021. So put on your critical thinking hat. If Hania has to ask the PCPA for unity, does Hamas run the PCPA? Think that one through. If they're not happy with whatever the PCPA is doing. Why are they out there asking for unity? Separately, this is 2021. Was this Samud Flotilla class organized in 2021?

Anyway. If you're just listening to this, you're missing Ryan's facial expression. So anyway, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in desperate need of help. So this, this $40 million boost, it couldn't come a moment too. soon, and good Lord, these 14 to 18 TikTokers are going to have their work cut out for them. Can you imagine being fed this stuff? I'd be like, all right, for $7,000, make a post about how this is true. And let's imagine for a second that you have critical thinking skills and you read this and you're like, oh, my God, like, this is what you're going with.

And I haven't even mentioned yet that they put up some documents, they put up some photos with Greta and then circle the guy in red. The guy in red is George Galloway, who's a British citizen and former, yeah, and former member of parliament, who, in Israel's defense, is pretty, like, Hezbo and Hamas sympathetic. Like, he will, like, he look up any interviews with him. He's fun to watch very, like, articulate and passionate defender of armed resistance to colonialism all over the globe. But he's not the guy they're saying he is.

Right. Getting it wrong. You're getting it wrong here. And also, it's George Galloway. So what's your point? You found Greta in a picture with George Galloway. This is your evidence. And again, like I said, this is pretending that all of this is actually authentic and true, which is a gigantic if. Why it's serious is that this is the kinds of things they do before they take violent action against. in this instance, the flotilla, to try to say, like, actually, the flotilla is Hamas.

Right. And that's why we had to blow it out of the water. Let's hope that this is not the case. Priming the pump, yeah. So anyway, a quick update as well on the savage attacks on Palestinians inside Gaza, if you thought that they were going to abate while the final discussions around the take or leave it offer from Trump and that Yahoo are being considered, you would be wrong.

We put up this next element up on the screen. There was another double-tap strike, this one in Gaza City's Al-Zay-2 neighborhood, where they hit a school and then waited until paramedics and the civil defense, whose job it is to get people out of the rubble, showed up at the site and then hit it again. If you want more details on what's been going on the last 48 hours, I would just suggest you sign up for DropSight Daily. There's our new morning newsletter, which really goes into detail what's going on there. And then when it comes to the negotiations, two pieces of two pieces of news there. We have, you can put up C4.

Trump was asked how much time does Hamas get? And he said three or four days. Al Jazeera now reporting that officials from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey met in Doha on Tuesday with the Hamas negotiating delegation to go over the 20-point ceasefire plan. Hamas said it will study it with, quote, with great responsibility, which is, you know, that's not an outright rejection. And I do think they're under enormous pressure to say yes to this. And we put up C5, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is kind of the second largest resistance faction in the coalition, initially came out with a pretty blunt, not rejection, but condemnation of it. I think nobody wants to say that this is going to be good because if it does go into place,

Palestinians will be living with the consequences of it for years to come and they don't want their to say to endorse it. but that's different than trying to find a way to accept it. And so a P.I.J spokesperson is out, again, kind of condemning it, but also saying that, you know, they want Palestinian unity and they want the Palestinian authority to agree to it. This is a kind of hold hands and jump type of statement. So you can read it here, but they're very critical of it. And they're trying to get the Arab countries. They say if Arabs have a real role, they must pressure Trump to adopt their statement because the 21-point plan that the Arab leaders agreed to became a 20-point significantly edited plan after he met with Netanyahu.

They're saying, can we at least go back to that initial one? I doubt they'll be able to do that. So they'll have a couple days before they respond. But I've asked a whole bunch of different Palestinians and Gaza what they're. What their take is on this, and to a person, they say, like, we just want this to end. Like, it doesn't, this terrible deal, but we just want this to end under any circumstances, under any condition. People are just, people are starving to death and living in tents if they're lucky. Right.

Like, it's actually pretty hard to get a tent, let alone food and water and access to medical care. So people just want this to stop. And so I think you're, so I think the Hamas will come back. with some type of yes with some tweaks. Right, with some tweaks. And we'll see if Netanyahu uses the attempt to get some tweaks to then just restart the war. It's all, yeah.

And it's very possible, obviously, as you guys have reported, that it was a giant pretext because Donald Trump and Netanyahu, I was there, I was at the press conference, made a point of emphasizing. We could do this the easy way or the hard way, and that Netanyahu will be able to, as they said, Israel will be able to take care of the rest itself.

So not an unfair reading of the agreement they were done. So meanwhile, let's get to the soypocalypse hitting American farmers. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved. until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards.

So check out the Stuff You Should Know True Crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like,

okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to heavyweight on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So last week, the Treasury Department had announced a 20, billion dollar bailout of the chainsaw wielding Argentinian libertarian president, Javier

Millet, which actually turned out to be a backdoor bailout of American hedge funds and China. Meanwhile, it is driving soybean farmers in the United States absolutely mad. Let's roll J.D. Shulton, a lawmaker from Iowa talking about the effect of this trade war on soybean farmers. in Iowa. Trump's illegal terrorists have single-handedly destroyed the U.S. soybean market. As of yesterday, the price of soybeans is about $9.34 here in Iowa. The cost of production is anywhere from $11 to $11.50. So per bushel of soybeans, it's about a $2 loss. And when you add the fact that it's about 50 bushels and an acre of soybeans here, you can do the math to see how bad things are. Historically, 60% of Iowa soybeans have gone to China.

With Trump's trade wars from his first administration, the U.S. has become an unreliable supplier. So instead of these soybeans go into China, it's soybeans from South America, like places like Brazil and Argentina. That leads to more grains going to be left in the bin, which means to oversupply, which means to lower prices. So here's what we need to do. We need to demand trade, not aid. Farmers don't want to bailout. They want markets. The second thing we need to do is push for competition, both on the market side and especially on the input side with some.

seed and fertilizer costs. All right, so that's J.D. Shulton, Iowa Democratic lawmakers, who's actually a former minor league pitcher. Really? Yeah. And he's a big antitrust guy. But you don't have to take it from the populist left. Chuck Grassley, if you want to call him a populist, I don't know.

Iowa Senator had one of his classic no punctuation random caps tweets where he says, farmers very upset about Argentina selling soybeans to China right after USA bailout, still zero USA soybeans sold to China. Meanwhile, China is still hitting USA with 20% retaliatory tariff, need China trade deal. Now, farmers need markets to boost farm economy. He still uses number two because he doesn't know that you can actually just tweet past the one, probably didn't know about the 140 character limit. So basically, what's going on is that as J.D. Shulton said there, China buys more than half of Iowa's soybeans every year. In In 2017 and 18, Trump started a trade war with China, and China retaliated by, at the time,

building relationships with a bunch of Brazilian soy farmers. What they also did is they started investing in Brazil because Brazil didn't have the infrastructure and the export technology and the on-site storage to really meet Chinese demand. And they don't have the economic base to do it on their own. So China was like, oh, the United States is going to play games. Well, why don't we invest in Brazil and make it so that they are a more stable partner? So now, Brazilian soybean production since 2018, when Trump first started his trade war with China, has almost doubled. So Brazil now can feed China a lot more effectively than they could nearly 10 years ago when Trump started this.

Argentina is the other big player. Which, by the way, that is a preview of what could potentially come 10 years after this current trade war on different issues, not even just soybean. Exactly, yes. We think that with this trade war, that we're positioning America for this renaissance, in fact, we're just encouraging other countries to figure out ways of existing without us. Which is, I mean, there are circumstances where that may be fine, but in this case... You're a soybean farmer. Your soybean farm. Right, exactly. And I think, granted, it speaks to the level of strategy that's actually at play,

as opposed to just like slapping crazy numbers out there or on different countries, slapping these numbers on there. But like there was obviously not a lot of thought about what was happening with Argentina and soybeans when the bailout happened. It was hedge fund guys are freaking out and we like Millay. It wasn't, oh, what are they going to turn around and do with soybeans in China?

And I think that's actually an important insight into the process. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in a moment, we'll be joined by Joe Voslovick from the grain markets and other. stuff podcast, which I love that. They describe themselves as the biggest grain market podcast in the world on the planet Earth. Love it. God, I love that. So they'll talk to us about what the effects have been on the grain market. But yes, the hedge funds, and Scott Besson, former hedge fund guy, are you ever a former hedge fund guy? It's like CIA. Exactly. American hedge funds,

when Millet was elected, were like, oh, this is great. We're going long on Argentina. Because Miele is going to do the thing we love. He's going to brutalize the unions and the poor and it's got the government spending. And as a result, foreign capital is going to flow into Argentina and the economy is going to grow. So they put all their chips in on Argentina doing great. Instead, what everybody else predicted is what happened. The economy further deteriorated and fell apart. And so now these hedge funds were looking at huge losses on their stupid bets. Turns out they were smart because they got the economics wrong, but they got the politics right. And Bessent is coming in and bailing out all of these hedge funds. Now, at the same

time that Argentina is getting this $20 billion bailout, they announce that they are cutting their export tariffs for soybeans, which slashes the cost of soybeans, and China instantly buys enormous amounts of Argentinian soybeans. But don't take it from me, because who will wants to believe me. So agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, Trump's ag secretary, texts Scott Bessent, and somebody named J.G. And we know this because a photographer, Jameson Greer, I think it's Jeffrey Goldberg. He is in the chats. He's still getting in the chats. Probably U.S.T.R. Probably Jameson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative. That would make a lot of sense. But making sense is not always what drives these things. So let's just pretend it's Jeffrey Goldberg. I actually

texted Jeffrey Goldberg yesterday. I was like, look, you're still in these chats. He did not respond, so maybe he is. So anyway, she texts Scott Bessent and J.G., which we assume is Greer. And so she writes, so this is Besson getting lit up in the meeting and letting somebody photograph. An Associated Press photographer got a snap on his phone. So the text says, I'm getting more intel. This is Brooke at Bessent and J.G. I'm getting more intel, but this is highly unfortunate. We bailed out Argentina yesterday, parentheses, Bessent. Bessent. So just to him. So that James and Greer doesn't catch any, or Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't catch any strays in this text message chain. And in return, the Argentines removed their export tariffs on grains, reducing their price, and sold a bunch of soybeans to China at a time when we would normally be selling to China. Soy prices dropping further because of it. This gives China more leverage on us. On a plane, but, Scott, I can call you when I land. Did nobody think about this?

It's a rhetorical question. No, clearly nobody thought. Because they don't care. The hedge fund guys were looking at losses. Yes. And Millet, and Besant said in his public statement when he made the bailout that the reason he was doing it is that Millet has an upcoming important election. Yes.

And he wants Millet to win the election because then that will bring more investment into Argentina. So he is out loud saying that the United States is using American taxpayer money to intervene in Argentina's election. Saying it out loud. And to undermine then American soybean farmers. We have a lot of different. I have a lot of questions for our guests about Matt Stoller's analysis of this and what the Trump administration is doing to help like maybe assuage concerns of farmers and people in the ag industry overall. But that is the text message is, such a great insight into the illusion of grand strategy. Yeah.

Right. And again, geopolitically. What'd you call it? Very unfortunate. Highly unfortunate. The geopolitically. We did it. It's not like a flood.

Right. Argentina is from the Trump administration's perspective, geopolitically, and a very important ally, when you have Venezuela, when you have Colombia, and what are perceived of, like, anti-American administrations,

especially like as we've covered before, the pink wave taking over some of those countries. They want to keep Argentina happy, obviously, because they want to have that, what would even call it, like a bastion of pro-American allieship in a big country in the middle of South America. So geopolitically, you see where they're coming from, like why they're doing what they're doing. But obviously they didn't even Argentina would take the bailout if the condition was soybean. Like if the condition was not, selling, was not undercutting Americans. You can't screw us. Yes, they would take the bail out. We didn't even think to ask them not to screw us, because we don't care. But also, can you imagine

if Democrats had this type of solidarity instead of viciousness towards South and Central America? If Biden had offered a $20 billion line of credit to, instead of sanctioning Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, you would not have had the migration. crisis. Like Biden drove the migration crisis with his policies towards Central America, Venezuela, and Cuba, which then helped bring Trump back to power. If they had done something like this, instead, people would still be in their homes and in their neighborhoods in Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua and elsewhere. Anyway, so let's bring in Joe from the grain market podcast and get some details on how this is playing out. Joining us now is Joe Vacklevick from the Grain Markets and Other Stuff podcast. Joe reached out yesterday saying he'd seen some of my coverage, I guess on TikTok or whatever, because I don't think we had covered it here yet, and offered to provide some of, you know, his expertise, because this is really your area. So, Joe, you know, thanks so much for being here.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I'm a big fan of the show. I've been watching Breaking Point since the very beginning. I love it, love it. So I don't know if you were able to see the beginning of the show, but you've seen, you know, my shtick on this already. Tell us, like, what is the effect of Trump's trade war generally so far on, and we'll start at that high level, on the American soybean market? If we want to do high level, I'd like to backtrack a little bit just to give you kind of an overview of what's going on.

The U.S. farm economy, as it relates to our big cash crops, corn and soybeans, and the farmers that grow those crops, we are in now what I would argue is the third year of a farm economy recession a lot of this goes back to COVID and the inflation that occurred in the post-COVID environment so we know that everything on the planet repriced in the years following COVID right we know that to be true the government number CPI would all indicate that that is true the very same thing has happened to farm inputs the things that farmers have to buy to grow their crops whether it's seed fertilizer machinery all of those things are up. Corn production costs jump 26% from 2021 to 2022.

So we're in the backdrop here of this big inflation event. A lot of that is just generalized inflation. A lot of it's because the government threw billions and billions of dollars at farmers during and following COVID. So you've got all that. And it's a low margin business, right, if you're a corn farmer. Historically, always a low margin business, highly cyclical. You go through years where you're break even to negative in terms of profit margins.

and then you go through a couple of boom years. We had a couple of boom years. 2021 and 2022 were really good. Remember, we've been through this trade thing, trade war thing before. And the last go around was rough. 18, 19, were rough. China signs the phase one trade deal in 2020. And they did, as a matter of fact, come in,

and they bought a whole bunch of U.S. corn and a whole bunch of U.S. soybeans in late 2020, into 21, and into 22. And everything that happened in 2022 is crazy. We had Russia, Ukraine, big commodity price blow up. And everything just fell. apart after that, mainly because we just, we had big production. We had good weather in the U.S., we had good weather in Brazil. And these markets, the commodity markets that we deal with, they're generally speaking, they're weather derivatives. If the weather's good, the prices go down.

If the weather's bad, the prices go up. So that's the backdrop. The trade war with China is icing on the cake here in terms of the farm economy and how bad it is and how much money farmers are going to lose. Last year, China accounted for 19% of all demand for soybeans grown in the United States. About 55% of it is our beans that we crush domestically. There's about 40-ish percent that's exports. And of that 40-ish percent, China's, you know, roughly half of it, basically. Pardon my math if it's not perfect. But China's a big soybean buyer or was. Now we're into a new marketing year. Farmers in the U.S. have begun soybean harvest. China has not bought a single bushel of U.S. soybeans for current marketing, your delivery. And therein lies the problem.

Now, talk to us about how significant what happened with Argentina in the last couple of days is for soybean. I mean, everyone on the surface looks at that and it's like, this is insane. This bailout is insane. What Argentina does is insane. But how significant is it from the perspective of soybean farmers? Optically, it's an absolute disaster for the Trump administration. It looks very, very, very bad. So the $20 billion in question, it hasn't happened yet.

And it's supposed to be a swap line, meaning that we're going to give Argentina $20 billion in dollars. They're going to give us $20 billion in pesos. We assume a whole bunch of currency risk, but we get political influence in Argentina, right? So as this was happening, these were all like simultaneous events. Argentina dropped its export tax on soybeans and corn. And China came in and bought a whole bunch of like 40 cargoes of soybeans out of Argentina during that tax holiday. It just, it looks very bad optically. fundamentally, you know, it's a couple million metric tons of business that in all likelihood

would have gone to the United States almost certainly this time of year. The time of year that we ship the most soybeans out of the United States is immediately post-harvest, like call it October 1st through maybe mid-January. And after that, the Brazilian crop comes online, China buys from them. So it's a very bad look optically, and it doesn't help in terms of dollars and cents either. Yeah, and you and I were talking briefly about this last night, and that really struck me. So it's because of the cycles of harvest, Brazil and the U.S., different hemispheres, so different harvest cycles. And so typically the fall, we'd be moving our soybeans to China.

So if China can make it through the fall into the winter when Brazil really fully comes online, they might be able to wait us out the whole time and buy nothing. Is that possible? Like, is there enough, are there enough soybeans in the world? for them to buy elsewhere through the fall? Yes, there are. What could happen, though, is China prefers to keep healthy stocks of soybeans on hand. They don't want to draw down their stocks.

Brazilian supplies this time of year kind of become exhausted. They're already through their big shipping window. China's bought a little bit from Argentina. This is a debate in the grain industry right now. Can China actually make it to the Brazilian harvest without any U.S. soybeans? And if so, what's the impact? are they going to draw down stocks? Are they going to risk drawing down stocks? We don't know. At this point, I think it's safe to say that if China does buy U.S. soybeans, it's going to be

in a reduced manner. You got to keep this in mind. China is avoiding U.S. soybeans as its way of fighting the trade war. China's imposing the tariffs on its own soybean buyers, right? So if China wants to waive the tariffs and say, we're going to buy U.S. soybeans, U.S. soybeans are cheap right now, just so we're clear. They're competitive. They can do it. They just don't want to because this is one of the few bullets that they have to fight the trade war with the U.S. Now, Matt Stoller wrote on Sunday, he says there's another set of announcements in which, quote, Trump sought to mollify as frustrated farmer base. Trump said he wants to use tariff revenue to bail out farmers.

Stoller says it's possible, but could require Democrats in Congress to go along. Trump is also bragging about new international trade deals, though China is conspicuously absent and he is trying to bring down interest rates which will help farmers. Also, another announcement was that the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, and antitrust chief Gail Slater announced they would be looking at the rising cost of crop inputs like seeds, chemicals, fertilizers, and machinery. So there's three different things there, really. What do you make of that kind of slate of potential Trump administration actions to try to mollify, as Stoller says, farmers?

There is almost certainly going to be some sort of farmer bailout. There was last time around. It was called MFP, the market facilitation program. And because of the trade war that occurred in 2018 and 2019, the previous Trump administration sent farmers tens of billions of dollars as its way of making up for the lost sales via the trade war. In all likelihood, they're going to do the same thing. Something's probably going to be announced here in the coming weeks. And to be clear about what this does and who likes it and who doesn't, a lot of farmers are not

a fan of this. To go back to what I mentioned earlier, these payments that go out directly to farmers have directly influenced the inflation factors that I talked about earlier, high fertilizer prices, high seed prices, high machinery prices. A lot of studies have shown that the vast majority of these direct farm payments don't really end up in the pockets of farmers. The farmers are essentially a mechanism by which these payments flow through back to the fertilizer companies and the seed dealers and the machinery companies and the banks.

Which are big corporations, right? Big corporations. And these are the corporations that lobby for the farm payments. It's not necessarily the farmers that are lobbying for the farm payments or the farm groups. It's the people who want their money back or want to continue to be paid or continue to make money. That's a huge, huge part of it that I don't think that the public understands is that so much of this money is just it's flow through money. The farmers and mechanism so that the big banks get their money back, the seed dealers, the fertilizer, they want their money back. They want to keep their stock prices high. That's a huge piece of this. Yeah, God forbid any of our companies suffer any penalty. So if China does successfully stiff-arm us, where else can the U.S. sell soybeans? Like who out there in the world is hungry enough for this amount of soybean harvest? Nobody. In terms of soybean importers, China is head and shoulders above any other global importer. That being said, we have had other global buyers step up and export sales to this point for this marketing year, which just began a month ago, to non-China destinations are elevated.

But they're just, I don't think there's a scenario in which non-China destinations make up the entirety of what China won't buy. Put it that way. Yeah, I can imagine Trump, you know, telling like Ghana, you want to, you know, you better buy up a bunch of our soybeans. Ghana's like, what I'm, yeah, nobody else has the appetite. I mean, China's just such a huge country. Yes. Yeah. What about India?

I mean, they got a lot of people. They want some soybeans? I don't think so. We may sell some corn or some ethanol to India. They're in the midst of a big ethanol push. I just, I don't know. I don't know exactly what the quantities are going to be. As with all these trade deals, you know,

I kind of go back to the phase one trade deal that was signed in 2020. It's like the trade deals are almost like ceremonial in some way, shape, or form. And really what happens is the trade deal gets signed. Does it mean anything when it's signed? I mean, publicly or optically, yeah, it does. But in terms of our markets are concerned, the market, the soybean market, soybean traders, the guys trading soybeans with big money, they're not going to care until we actually see the export sales.

In the case of the phase one trade deal, it was signed, I believe, on January 15th of 2020. It wasn't until six or seven months later that China came in and began to buy U.S. products aggressively. And they did, but it took a long time. So I think that with these trade deals, like we saw the one with Taiwan announced a week and a half ago. I mean, whatever. It's good press, but until they come in and start doing the business and we see an acceleration and the actual stuff that's being announced by USDA, which is now shut down, by the way. But that's what we need to see. All right. So anyway, if you're watching

this program and you need a few billion tons of soybeans, America's selling. We are. Joe Vaclivik with the grain markets and other stuff podcast. Really appreciate the insight here. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Rubio is reportedly in the process of a regime change effort against Nicholas Missouri in Venezuela. That's according to a long new report in the New York Times. The military, according to this Times report, as well as also readying operations on narco traffickers inside Venezuela.

So that's part of this big New York Times report. I'm going to read a quote from it here, the push by top aides to President Trump to remove Maduro as the leader of Venezuela has intensified in recent days with administration officials discussing a broad campaign that would escalate military pressure to try to force him out, U.S. officials say it's being led by Marco Rubio, who is also NSA, by the way, and that comes into play a little bit here, too. Rubio argues that Maduro is an illegitimate leader, who oversees the export of drugs the United States, which he says poses a, quote, imminent threat. But Mr. Rubio is shaping a more aggressive strategy using intel provided

by the CIA, the officials said, and the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 6,500 troops in the region. Another key part of this article, John Ratcliffe, so that's the head of the CIA, and Stephen Miller, obviously, the chief domestic policy advisor, close to Donald Trump, both support Mr. Rubio's approach. The officials added, again, according to the Times, the U.S. military has been planning potential military operations targeting drug trafficking suspects in Venezuela as a next phase, although the White House has not yet approved such as that current and former military officials say there was actually another story.

I think it was in the Washington Post, right, just a couple of days ago, about how there's disagreement between the Pentagon and the White House regarding whether it's appropriate to start writing a military operation in South America, and I think Mexico as well was part of the disagreements. Just finally from the Times, those operations would be aimed at interfering with drug production and trafficking in Venezuela, as well as tightening a vice around Mr. Maduro. Trump admin officials not yet confirmed whether there have been such exchanges in the White House did not provide comment on the matter. So this was a big New York Times piece, basically reporting out Ryan what we knew was happening

or what we all suspected was happening. There have been leaks to this effect, but this put it pretty clearly, I think, about what's happening inside. Yeah, I'm surprised he's not going for Cuba because the situation in Cuba, even though it doesn't get anywhere near the attention it should, is catastrophic.

You know, people losing significant amounts of weight, the outflow of, it's lost like a third of its population. over the last, like, five years or more. Crime is rising. Like, it feels like the embargo has, with the tightening sanctions, might actually finally do what it's been trying to do, which is topple the government and we'll get a failed state in its place.

So for Rubio, you know, who has wanted nothing more than to topple that government this entire life, it's interesting that he's doing kind of Venezuela first. Yeah. And it at least is pushing some Democrats to start to come out publicly against regime change in Venezuela. Representative Don Byer, he posted Donald Trump's quote, special military operation in Venezuela is a terrible idea. He's going from murdering people on boats without charges or due process to what sounds like regime change by military force. A president of peace doesn't start new, unwise, and unnecessary wars. This would be something that Democrats could follow Byers.

lead on and really push Trump on because, you know, outside of South Florida, nobody voted for this. And half the people in South Florida don't want this. It's like, it's basically just doing, just using the U.S. military to play act this counter-revolution that the South Florida Cuban population has wanted for 50 plus years. Well, I mean, we have reminders that are still downstream of the Cold War and our foreign policy every day about how easily these types of operations can go wrong. Iran being one of them, an ally of Venezuela, by the way, in Venezuela, clearly of interest to the United States. Venezuela's oil reserves are not unimportant to the United States' interest in Venezuela, of course.

And so these are incredibly kinetic situations, risky situations, explosive situations. And so if the U.S. right now is readying, which clearly I think it is, precision targeted strikes on narco traffickers in Venezuela. And by the way, I read the entire, I think it was SDNY indictment of Maduro the other day. And it's not insane. Like, there are actually some pretty credible connections between Maduro and Cartel of the Sons and of the last, I mean, I think it goes over like the last 10, 15 years. So some of it's going back pretty far. it's not insane that Maduro to say that Maduro as Rubio does it's not insane to say that Maduro may have had something to do with narco trafficking again he's the leader of

Venezuela all governments are involved with drug trafficking so Ryan wrote a book on this is your what's it called this your brain on drugs this is your country on drugs yes so anyway it's not an insane in insane indictment but as a predicate for military operations it's completely For military operations that are, let's just say, it would be a bit of a stretch to call Democratic because nobody's going to vote on this, of course. There's talk of actually using the AUMF earlier. It was one of the Venezuelan boat strikes where people were throwing out that maybe it was covered by the AUMF. Do you remember that?

Like the anti-terrorist AUMF after 9-11. So just the ways that this could go wrong, we have had, what, 50 plus years, to learn from. And especially as the Wright started re-exploring a lot of this during the Biden administration and the first Trump administration about how intelligence agencies are undergoing these regime change and propaganda operations

that then are anti-democratic and trickle into, as much as you may disagree with communism and see the dangers of communism and understand, you know, as a conservative, let's say that you share all of those perceptions as I do. this is crazy. Yeah. This is crazy.

If they were, if I were the lawyer for the Trump administration, the way I would tell them that you could use the AUMF is to say, because AUMF says, basically you can use force against like Al-Qaeda and people involved in 9-11. I would say, okay, here's how you make the argument. The CIA helped to create al-Qaeda. The CIA helped to create a lot of these drug trafficking operations.

Yeah. So, therefore, there's a connection between the CIA and 9-11 and drug trafficking, and the AMF allows violence against anybody involved in 9-11. And so, there you go. I was going to say that's insane, but that is not insane. What's insane is the actual case that you make, the fact that that's real. It's actually completely insane. It's all right up, it's legal, yeah, because it's all CIA operation.

Yeah. They all are, yeah. And well, John Ratcliffe is reportedly on board. Yeah. And then real quickly, the war with Iran keeps inching closer. Two interesting developments on that, we'll put up this next element. Trump administration reached a deal with Iran where they're sending a plain load of Iranian deportees. This is not the thing that's pushing us closer to war.

Just kind of fascinating that, like for the, and I don't quite understand it for, because the United States has always said, oh, we will give asylum. into these Iranian dissidents because Iran is terrible and is the evil mullahs and anybody who stands up to the evil mullahs is a friend of the United States. So what's going on here? Why are we like, actually, never mind. Go back to the evil mullahs. I genuinely don't know. Probably espionage charges. I don't think it's way too. Does this seem just like standard migration situation? I don't know. I mean, maybe that's, that's, That's happened with... We wouldn't send them back if they were spies.

We wouldn't maybe send all of them back, but yeah. Bizarre. But in another ominous development, this Amwage media reported yesterday that the... So the French, negotiations are ongoing around these kind of snapback sanctions and the nuclear deal. French apparently came to a deal with the Iranians that would involve Iran basically giving everything up when it comes to its nuclear program, again, in exchange for some sanctions relief. U.S. came in and basically vetoed that and told Iran, you know, stop enriching, you have to give us all of the enriched uranium. Because in the past, like, you would store it somewhere or you would give it to Russia or it wasn't like you wouldn't, you would give it to the United States.

You have to give us all of your enriched uranium. You have to stop your enrichment. And in exchange, we will give you a delay of like three months or six months or nine months of these snapback sanctions. So no sanctions relief, but just a delay of some further sanctions. And the Iranian government was like, wow, this is like insulting. It's so absurd. And so the sense among people watching this is like that this is just a pretext for more strikes coming pretty soon. Yes, and Iran, by the way, has a lot of oil property in Venezuela, and this goes back to what we're talking about earlier in the show with Argentina and soybeans just in the last block about why Bessett might be so interested in bailing out Argentina. Yeah, and if we wanted, if the U.S. government wanted prices to be lower for the American people, like there are ways you could do it by not doing needless wars, for instance, with Venezuela and Iran. But that getting prices down for the American people is not remotely a priority, apparently.

Well, that does it for us today. Ryan, big show, big news cycle. Shutdown news doesn't going anywhere. Crystal and Sager will be back here tomorrow and we'll see everyone on Friday. Indeed. All right. See you guys then. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways,

disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.

How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.