Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/23/24: Trump On Joe Rogan, Walz Slams Elon, Shock Senate Poll, Cuba Blackout & MORE!

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Trump going on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Walz slams Elon Musk on campaign trail, shock Nebraska poll could decide Senate control, McDonald's E Coli outbreak, Cuba blackout as US sanctions cripple the country, IDF battalion year of destruction.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chastain.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Emily, how you doing? Good. Sorry to disappoint everyone. We do not have a bro show today. No bro show. That's all right. That's all good. We can still.

Yeah. There we go. Sagar did a great job holding down the CounterPoints for it last week, so we are ready to dive into these last... I meant to switch seats because he sat here and I sat there and I liked it so much better, but I forgot. I forget that you like the other side. Well, maybe someday you can colonize Sagar's seat. Well, Sagar did a great job holding down the fort, but we are within two weeks of the election, so we have quite a big show. Donald Trump is campaigning everywhere. Barack Obama campaigned

with Eminem on behalf of Kamala Harris last night. A lot of people saying that he rapped the first verse of Lose Yourself. It didn't really, he wasn't really rapping. It was a poetry slam. It was a poetry slam, right. But I felt like sort of, I had been like, what's the, remember when you used to get Rickrolled? I felt like I had been Rickrolled by people saying Obama was rapping Eminem. I read the Trump war rumor, whoever tweeted it, all the Republicans were like, I have no idea what that even was. You know what that was. Come on. Yeah, everyone knew what that was. You know what it was trying to do. So the campaign trail is chaotic as usual right now. So we're going to dive into some highlights from Trump's last 24 hours. Basically, we're going to talk about how the announcement,

huge announcement, he's going to do Joe Rogan's podcast. We're also then going to turn to the Kamala Harris campaign. We're going to talk about Elon Musk. We're going to bring all kinds of updates from the world of big money, basically, the role that it's playing in this election. Then, Ryan, we're heading over to Nebraska. Yes, we've got an exclusive poll from the Nebraska Senate race, which we'll tease it for you now, shows Dan Osborne, who we had on the show about a month ago, up by two points over the Republican incumbent. This race could flip control of the Senate. Actually, I would say that Nebraska is the Senate race that will decide control of the Senate, assuming Democrats lose Montana. We already know that they're going to lose West Virginia.

Joe Manchin, God rest his soul, no longer with us. Well, it could also be an AOC style vibe shift for the Senate. So, you know, where the seat is scooped up by not a Democrat, but an independent candidate. Right, an industrial mechanic, union leader, veteran, who led a strike and got fired for it. Guest on the show. Potentially now could be a senator. We'll see. Yeah. All right. So we will dive into that. I really hate to say this, but we have updates from McDonald's, which is suffering in the stock market and in the stomachs, apparently, of people around the country. So far, one person has died, an elderly person who died from E. coli-infected quarter pounders. Yeah, the stock price plummeted.

Dozens of people sickened. Gross, disgusting. Disgusting. Sagar wanted us to talk about it, so here we are. And we'll also do an update from Cuba. Ryan was able to get a fantastic on-the-ground report that we're really excited to play for everybody. The blackouts in Cuba are just unbelievable. Yeah, Cuba went through its most serious blackout in its history post-revolution.

Ed Augustine, reporter for Dropsite, is on the ground in Havana and will update us on that. Yeah, and we're going to finish with another Dropsite report, actually, on the IDF. Fantastic report that Dropsite published. Yes, incredible report that looks into, that basically maps out an entire Israeli combat battalion, the 749 Battalion, tracing their entire path of destruction through Gaza, starting shortly after October 7th, up until today, exclusively relying on their own social media posts. So you'll want to stick around for that one. So let's start with Donald Trump's last 24 hours or so on the campaign trail. He sat for an interview with Saudi State TV

and talked about what he thinks has become of the hostages, Middle East policy. Let's roll just a clip of that. You said you have to release these hostages before I reach the White House. So do you think what can be done? Well, I would have said they have to release these hostages before I reach the White House. So do you think what can be done? Well, I would have said they have to release them immediately. I think if I said it, they would have done it. I think the hostages would have been back home.

But I think even early on, I think a lot of those hostages were dead. I think they were dead. I mean, it's a very sad thing. It's not even believable when you think about it. But I think pretty early on, there were a lot that were gone. And, you know, just God rest their souls to live that way and to, you know, spend. And these were largely young people that were having a good time at a festival. Life was a bowl of cherries, right? And they're dead. It's a very sad thing. But,

you know, it's interesting. I don't know what's going to happen when they find out there are fewer than they thought. And it could be by a staggering number. What about the destruction and the death of civilians? Do you think that's tolerable price that Israel is doing in Gaza and in Lebanon now? Oh, the destruction is terrible. The whole thing is terrible. Again, it should have never happened. If October 7th wouldn't happen, which it wouldn't have, because Iran funds it, and Iran had no money. They had no money. They had absolutely no money. And I would have made a deal with them, and they wouldn't have done October 7th. But because they have no respect for Biden, they did it. So, Ryan, this continues Donald Trump's campaign trail pitch, essentially, that Ukraine and the war in Gaza never would have happened if he was president. And this is

genuinely the way that he's handling these massive foreign policy discussions. And honestly, I think it's one of those moments from Trump where it's like so absurd that it's almost brilliant because you can't really rebut it. What are you supposed to say? I have a time machine and actually I can play out this counterfactual. plays out, at least on the micro level, not necessarily macro, but on a micro level in various conflicts based on how world leaders personally interact with other world leaders. So I don't think it's as ridiculous as a lot of the media is making it out to be, but it is his, I mean, for any voter, they would actually like to know more specifics. And I think recently so. Like what are you going to do?

Some sort of basic questions. Yeah. But you could, as a voter, you could even grant him for the sake of discussion. Okay, let's say that that's true. Yeah. He's just going to negotiate. Like now what? Right. Okay. You weren't president. So it did happen. Now here's where we are. Right. So now what are you going to do? Right. His point on the hostages is very Trumpian and is also, there's some truth to it. It's devastating for a lot of those families to hear and kind of heartless because he doesn't have any specific information and he's not telling them anything specific. He's basically just telling them you should have less hope than you do have.

But on the other hand, we do know that so many of the hostages who we thought were alive in Gaza actually died on October 7th. That is a fact. And that hasn't gotten talked about much. It's just a very Trumpian, callous way to kind of inject himself into that, into that question. Um, you know, he recently said, uh, that he, that BB is holding, that Biden is holding Netanyahu back and that in fact he should do the opposite. And you have this remarkable situation, we're going to talk about this in a bit,

where he's now winning Arab American voters. Right. While also saying that Biden has been too tough on Netanyahu. Yet he's smart enough that he's framing the race as around the Cheneys and that he's the peace candidate. Right. But he's not disciplined enough to stick to that because he's not.

Right. But the Harris campaign is playing right into his hands. Right. And the Harris campaign. But he's not disciplined enough to stick to that because he's not. Right. But the Harris campaign is playing right into his hands. Yes. Absolutely. Again, like this is, Donald Trump is absurd in many different ways, but this is not, I mean, I think this is actually one of those moments where Trump is kind of outside the paradigm, like the uniparty paradigm that absolutely chains other candidates to unpopular positions. And I'm not saying that it's like morally a pillar of like political moral genius, but it's actually politically pretty smart. Like he's slippery. Although there's never a place where the uniparty was supportive of the Cheneys. Like the Cheneys were either popular among the Republicans. That is really true. Or popular among the Democrats. That is really true. Or popular among the Democrats.

That is really true. They never had bipartisan support at the same time. That's a great point. Although they have bipartisan support right now, just not with the people. Right. I mean, they've got, what, Bill Kristol or whatever. Yeah. Well, and he may actually say he's formally a Democrat right now.

But the entire reason that they're rolling out the Cheneys on the campaign trail is, he says he's a feminist, by the way. Bill Kristol. Dick Cheney or Bill Kristol. I don't think Dick Cheney could ever bring himself to do it. But it's because the Harris campaign thinks it'll win swing voters, which is sort of funny in and of itself. Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of that, actually, this was, we were just about to get to this thought of Frank Luntz, sort of famed DC pollster, talking about how the Trump campaign could use Nikki Haley. Let's roll Frank Luntz here. Trump has said that Nikki Haley. Let's roll Frank Lenz here.

Trump has said that Nikki Haley, once his nemesis in the primaries, could join him on the trail. She's done a robocall for him. She's recorded robocalls on his behalf. But if the Trump campaign deploys her, what kind of voters could that help with, and where do you think that they'll use her? It will help with younger women because Trump is doing so well among older men. It'll help in these swing states. And Nikki Haley brings interest, brings attention among

independents, among swing voters. There aren't many left, but what is left, they will listen to her. And it'll be a surprise because she has been so challenging of him, so negative towards him up to now. It's a very smart strategy, but in the end, it's not going to be the surrogates. It's going to be what they say and how they say it in the last 48 hours that will determine these final votes. The key for Haley is absolutely turnout, 18 to 29 women. The key for Donald Trump is absolutely union votes, young African-American men, and Latinos. It's too close to call right now. Who does better with those groups is the one who gets elected. One part of that, Ryan, I'm curious what you make of is him saying that the key for Nikki

Haley would be 18 to 29-year-old women. I would think it would actually be an older demographic of women, slightly older, women in their 30s and 40s with kids who want a softer face on Trumpism to reassure them. I would assume he would agree with that, that wherever she can make inroads with women or swing voters in general, or people persuadable in general, that she would go for that. This is a problem of the Democrats' own making, though, in some ways. They elevated Nikki Haley as this reasonable centrist. Yes, that's so true. Who should be listened to when it comes to her take on Donald Trump because they liked what she was saying about Donald Trump when she was running against him. Lo and behold, you better be careful

who you elevate if you don't think that they're actually in your camp. And so it's like, so now there will be this candidate, there's this candidate out there who CNN and MSNBC and all the kind of suburban Democrats have said is a credible voice when it comes to Trump going out and saying Trump is actually good. Right. That's such a good point. Whoops. No, that's a great point. And this idea that, you know, what Frank Lentz was saying there is like this race is way too close to call. So to your point, Ryan, any slice that you can appeal to easily enough, like you get any surrogate

and you put them wherever you can because it's just a game easily enough. Like you get any surrogate and you put them wherever you can because it's just a game of numbers. Like you're just trying to tip the scale in one direction. And even if it's, you know, basically what I'm saying, we don't think Nikki Haley or I don't think Nikki Haley has like some broad demographic appeal in the United States. But there probably is a slim enough demographic of people who are in the middle of the Venn diagram where they take the mainstream media seriously and are sort of interested in Donald Trump. Yeah, right, exactly. It's not a huge group.

And Democrats created her as a reasonable critic. And the reason I say it's a foreseeable error is that she is a complete maniac. Like, her politics. Cheney-esque. Her politics are Cheney-esque and in many ways more insane than Trump's. Like, she has never met a country that she doesn't think we should be at war with or should be our proxy doing war for us. Like, there are no other countries in the world. Utterly maniacal when it comes to foreign policy and militarism. And Democrats were willing to either,

let's be generous to them and say they're willing to overlook it because she was critical of Trump during a primary. I mean, I think they like it. It's the same people who are elevating Dick Cheney. I'm being generous. Yeah. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, speaking of sort of breaking out of the uniparty paradigm, Donald Trump agreed to go on Joe Rogan's show. Big news yesterday. He's going to sit down for an interview with Joe Rogan on Friday. I'm hoping the episode will air on Friday. That'll be a fascinating watch. There's your weekend plans right there. There it is. Can't wait.

But Trump said, which podcast was it on? He said like a month ago that he would think about doing Joe Rogan's show. He's Lex Friedman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. It was Lex Friedman. And it was part of this longer conversation that he was having with Lex Friedman about why it's important. I'm not going to ask him. He hasn't asked me. I'm not going to ask him. Right, right. Exactly. Why it's important to do new media, which is an argument that he's made a couple of times since, which is also pretty interesting. But he said basically, like, I don't know Joe Rogan. I don't, you know, I've walked out into the ring with him. People think

that makes us friends. But he was kind of cold towards Joe Rogan when he was having that conversation with Lex Friedman. And here he is. He's agreed to do the podcast. Really speaks to the power of Joe Rogan. And another, credit where it's due, smart move on behalf of the Trump campaign because, I mean, this is a massive audience and Trump is Trump. Trump doesn't have bad interviews. Trump only has Trump interviews. Like there is no good or bad. It is just Trump. Yeah. And if we didn't already, we can put A3 up on the screen. In some ways, Trump had to swallow some ego herehmm it wasn't just that Trump had

Decided not to go on Joe Rogan's show Joe Rogan for many years Has been saying publicly that he was completely uninterested in having Trump on and that Trump is a buffoon Yep, who he refused to vote for? so Trump knows that and It is a testament to Rogan's power that when he finally agreed, okay, fine, I will have Trump on, that Trump agreed. Because Trump hates nothing more than people who make fun of him, belittle him, insult him, don't look up to him, don't respect him. So for Trump to say,

all right, despite him saying all that, I am still going to appear on his podcast shows, you know, how important his campaign and he understands Rogan's kind of gettable voting base to be. And that's what Democrats have just, or elite Democrats have just not understand about Rogan's demographic, that some of them are locked in right-wingers, some. Yeah. But most of them, I would argue, are very much gettable. And they're open to hearing an argument. This is the thing that professional Washington struggles to understand is the sort of what they would view as confusing and incoherent political views of the average American. And it's not incoherent at all.

It's just like the average American isn't a fixed ideological creature like most of professional Washington is. And that's what I think Joe Rogan understands. It's interesting because Rogan basically seemed to be very exhausted by the pressures of interviewing candidates because people would, when you're talking to Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, people would put Rogan in one box or the other, and then they would start talking about him in the context of journalism and treating him like he's purporting to be some type of Walter Cronkite figure, which he's not. But he's also apparently reportedly in talks with the Harris camp. So if Kamala Harris did Joe Rogan, that would be an incredible disaster, because Joe Rogan has sort of like picked up the mantle from Howard Stern and is actually more Howard Stern-esque than Howard Stern himself. As we talked about Kamala Harris's very, very warm and friendly conversation with

Howard Stern recently. I think for Harris, you know, Trump can mix it up. Think that'd be a disaster? Why? She's so bad in unscripted situations. But maybe a three hour, like she's, she's bad in a one minute unscripted situation. You think it might be different? But in a three-hour unscripted situation, more of herself would come out. Possible. I mean, when she did that on Breakfast Club, she got caught lying about smoking weed and listening to, what, Snoop Dogg or something. Yes, she said she used to smoke weed while listening to Gin and Juice or something. And it was years before Gin and Juice ever came out. Right, but she won't.

The reason I think she could do better is that I don't think she'll feel a need to pander to Rogan. Whereas Breakfast Club, she's in full-on pander mode. I feel like she would want to pander on Rogan. No, I think because she's so kind of inculcated with the democratic idea that this person is an adversary, that she would go into it a little bit adversarial. Try to be charming, but understanding it to be an adversarial situation. Interesting. And so then wouldn't be pandering. Who knows how she would try to pander to Rogan. It'd be funny to think about it.

Yeah. Maybe she'd try out some comedy, some stand-up riffs. That'd be fun. I see what you're saying. And I think there's a non-zero chance it's right. But I think the chance is also small. Because what people don't understand, she's not dumb. No.

She comes across as dumb sometimes because she doesn't believe anything, and yet she's running for president. Imagine how hard that would be. Put yourself in her shoes. Yes, put yourself in her shoes. She's trying to tell you what she believes about things but doesn't actually believe them. That's a hard act. Pour one out for her. She's been doing it for decades.

So have some sympathy for that. But she is the daughter of two brilliant people. You can look up her parents. Extraordinarily talented people. Her sister, extraordinarily talented civil rights activist. And she herself, very smart person. The role she's in makes it difficult for her. So if you let her go for three hours, maybe she actually loosens up a little bit. But the problem is- Possible.

The questions are still about what do you believe about things? And if she does believe things, she doesn't have enough confidence in them to say them. Like she's, what she says is what her advisors are saying is the thing that's going to get her elected. So she still could get tripped up by that. But Rogan isn't going to talk policy for three hours. Yeah, I mean. He would just talk about her upbringing, probably ask her lots of stories about Berkeley. Yeah. Well, you and I both know the type of politician that is always in sort of acting mode and struggles to kind of get out of it.

And a lot of politicians don't. Like Obama, Trump is a different animal entirely. But there are some politicians who— Obama's in it for so long, it is him. Yeah. But there are some politicians who actually can unbutton the jacket, sit down, have a beer, and they'll say more interesting things. But there are also those politicians that literally cannot get out of politician mode. It's impossible. And she strikes me as one of those. Just because you play the act for so long,

you keep up the act for so long, you forget who you actually are, kind of. That's my armchair psychology. She could do what Elon Musk did on Joe Rogan, just smoke a little joint. So speaking of Elon, that appears to be what a lot of his canvassers are doing. Seamless transition, Ryan. People don't, that's it right there. That's the art of transition. And so an audit, according to The Guardian, if you can put up A4 here, of the America PAC canvassers finds that one in four of them are stoned and skipping. Okay, I'm kidding about that part. That's your theory. It's not a bad theory.

Although I'm sure a lot of them are stoned and hitting the doors. Some of them appear to be stoned and not hitting the doors. So of the people that they audited in, what, Nevada and Arizona, up to a quarter of them were found to be suspicious. It's what in the Army they call pencil whipping. Like, instead of actually doing the task that you've been instructed to do, you just pull out your pencil and your clipboard and you check off the box that you did it. In this case, I'm sure checking a box on a tablet, which as you can imagine is a very tempting thing for somebody underpaid who doesn't do DGAF. Well, yeah. And of course, the little tablet can tell.

It has GPS. Yeah, if you just hit them all at the end of your shift. Well, so the Guardian audited data from a group called Blitz Canvassing that is part of the AmericaPak operation. AmericaPak was founded by Elon Musk, and it sounds like they contracted out to this group Blitz Canvassing. And the Guardian shows leaked data shows that 24% of the door knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under its internal, quote, unusual survey logs, which is a metric used to determine fake donors. They use just one example where they say it showed

a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at Aguayo's on the trail restaurant half a mile away from the doors he was supposedly hitting in Globe, Arizona. Another canvasser was recorded marking voters as, quote, not home, two blocks away from that apartment. So this is actually kind of technical, and I don't know all the details of how often this pretty, and again, it's pretty technical and specific canvassing software. I don't know the details of how often this stuff ends up being off the mark. GPS that is being routed into software like this, it's possible that this is something campaigns deal with all the time.

What is pretty telling though, Ryan, is that someone leaked this to The Guardian from presumably it would have to be inside America Pack or from the canvassing group, which tells you that there's a lot of internal upset, likely, over whether or not they're doing a good job. And this was a huge problem for Donald Trump with outsourcing his youth operation to Turning Point USA's PAC back in 2020. There was a ton of hand-wringing in the press by a lot of anonymous sources, some on the record afterwards, saying

that that was basically a disaster and that it didn't go very well. And so now it seems as though there's potentially more tension over at America PAC, which we were just talking about why it's important to even go for these, like, slim demographics of people who might be persuaded by Nikki Haley. Knocking on the doors is pretty important in a place like Nevada and Arizona. That's like the most basic thing that you have to do right. Yeah. You know, who knows if Elon Musk's canvassers are doing this more than the typical canvasser? You would guess probably. But who knows? And we'll see. But it funny, and we can all have a good laugh. Now, less funny is this lever report.

This is a fun one. And this has been kicking around for a while. We can put up this last element of the A Block here, a story from David Sirota's The Lever, about this provision that's been in law for 35 years. I've been thinking about this as Elon Musk has talked about taking an official government position. There is a law on the books that is designed as a good government law, which says, and you can imagine how this is kind of a fair way to approach things. Say, look, you're super rich. You own a bunch of stocks. You are invited by the people through their elected president to serve the public. And as a result, you're now required to divest from some of your holdings so you don't have criminal conflicts of interest. The divestment might cost you an enormous amount in capital gains taxes immediately and could practically bankrupt you depending on how the

financial situation unfolds. And so therefore, we're going to allow you to defer all of those capital gains taxes. We're going to otherwise kind of give you a unique tax break that is not available to anybody else in the tax code or in finance as a thank you for your government service. And so if Elon Musk gets that tax break, it could end up being worth billions of dollars. Now, I don't think Elon Musk is doing all this for that tax break. That would be crazy. However, it is billions of dollars that we're talking about. And I do think that Elon Musk is doing this for lots of reasons, many of which involve maintaining his position as the richest and most powerful person in the world. I mean, it's fascinating how people on the right are glossing over the truly insane amount of government subsidies that he's hoovered, more and more oversight of how some of those, like, massively valuable subsidies that boost his products in the marketplace will be delivered into the future.

Now, obviously, there are regulations, like we were just talking about, that change, you know, what you can actually reap when you're in the position. So I doubt, you know, I think he has a million different ways to get great tax breaks, to be honest. But it is, I mean, Sirota's right, this is significant. The whole question is significant because it raises the broader question of what on earth he would do. Because legally, he would be required to divest from, say, SpaceX. Yeah. Or anything that's getting major. It makes no sense.

Starlink, anything, Tesla, anything that's getting major government contracts. Which is everything he does. And of course, he's not going to do that. And if he did do that, the tax break wouldn't be worth that much because the stock price collapse from him no longer being the CEO of those operations would probably kind of outweigh the tax benefit that he would get from it. So therefore, he probably ends up keeping them because who's going to tell him not to? Donald Trump? No. Right. That's a good point. Donald Trump's attorney general? No way. So he probably ends up unloading things that he had been holding on to, and now he can get this tax break, but aren't consequential to his $250 billion kind of enterprise.

It's sort of inconceivable how it would work financially to put him in government. I mean, it's almost impossible to figure out what that would look like and how it would be done ethically, even if you're doing it in the most charitable possible way. Ethically, yeah. People in the 70s conceptualizing this would blow their minds. We have a piece that we published Sunday over at Dropsite that Emily actually gave us a right-wing sensitivity read for about Elon Musk. And he had just recently incorporated United States of America, Inc. He calls his pack America Pack. And it's a look at what on earth

Elon Musk might be up to. It's a good read. I think it's really important. I wish there were more people on the right who were doing similar reporting. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids,

promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of Elon, but actually move over to the Harris campaign. Because Tim Walz went after Elon Musk at a rally. So let's roll this clip of Tim Walz going after Elon.

Elon's on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things. You know it. Think about it. Think about that. That guy is literally the richest man in the world, spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election. Now look, they're saying the quiet parts out loud now. to help Donald Trump buy an election. Now look, they're saying the quiet parts out loud now because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of

government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs. That's a hell of a buy. He could spend billions to make more than $10 billion on the back end. So in other words, Donald Trump,

in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. There's something not just nuts, but cruel about a billionaire using people's livelihood

as a political prop. His agenda lets big corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very workers that he was cosplaying as. Okay, so that was Tim Walz at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin. Ryan, I'm curious what you make, actually, of Democrats turning Elon Musk into a negative or trying to turn Elon Musk into a negative from a kind of populist line against the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign sees Musk largely as an asset, which is fascinating. Again, in this broader conversation about what actually is populism on the right and what populism is on the left, this is a billionaire who's very close. He's a

billionaire defense contractor, very close to all of these foreign leaders, very much tethered or very much entangled with the US government, campaigning on behalf of Donald Trump, who, you know, it just is so different than, at least Donald Trump purports to be so different than the kind of Uniparty or the Beltway or the Swamp. And yet Elon Musk has been kind of entangled in the Swamp for a very long time. Democrats are sending out Dick Cheney, or I'm sorry, Liz Cheney, saying nice things about Dick Cheney and then going after Elon Musk. Elon Musk does have the biography of somebody who people hate, a billionaire defense contractor living off the government dole

while preaching libertarian free market values. However, you have to acknowledge that Elon Musk is a unique figure. Like he doesn't, that's the beginning of the description of Elon Musk, but it's not the end of it. And up until fairly recently, his overall popularity among Democrats, Independents,

and Republicans was through the roof. People really loved him. In fact, liberals were the ones who were buying all of his solar panels and his Teslas. But as he has become this right-wing partisan figure, his numbers, particularly among Democrats, have plummeted. And he's now under 50%.

They'll do polls that say, do you have a positive or negative view of Elon Musk? And he's now under 50%. He used to be way above it. In a polarized world where you are a partisan warrior, that's just necessarily going to be the case. And so I think Walls is certainly, you know, he's preaching to an audience there that is already primed to hate him just because he's so strongly supportive of Donald Trump. I don't necessarily think – I think Elon Musk is trying to buy the election lands hard because he's spending – he already put $75 million into America PAC. That's a billionaire trying to buy the election. The thing where he's doing a goofy lottery where he pays people who sign his petition 100 bucks or $47. A million dollars. And then a million dollars a day to one random person. Right. I think that lands less hard even though it's crime.

I'm telling you, if George Soros did that in Pennsylvania. The reactions on the right would be through the roof. Oh, you very quite literally, specifically, explicitly cannot do that. It's against the of the country right now. It's much closer to saying, that guy is literally the richest man in the world, spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election. That's the Walz quote. I think most Americans would, more Americans would sympathize with that. It doesn't mean they would dislike Elon Musk. I just think that's a smart case to make, whether you're making the case against the billionaires that are backing the Harris campaign or the billionaires backing the Trump campaign. It's kind of the mood. Right, yeah, exactly.

Speaking of billionaires with huge egos who may or may not be helpful to the candidate that they're ostensibly trying to support. Yeah. Mark Cuban running around the country undermining Kamala Harris with voters. He thinks he's doing a great job. To lift her up with Wall Street. There's an argument this is very effective. I mean, effective for his tax rate or something. Well, but effective also for convincing. She used to win New York. Convincing his peers. Well, yeah. Convincing his peers that it's okay to donate to her. But who gives a rip if she has a billion dollars?

She's going to finish the campaign with money in the bank. Well, let's take a listen to this CNBC sot. We'll play this. This is B3. I said, why are you letting Mark Cuban be out here, being the face of this? Why aren't you saying it yourself when it is something that matters to so many people?

Because they don't want to alienate other voters. That's the big issue. Of course, the big thing out there. And when I said this matters to so many people, someone told me't want to alienate other voters. That's the big issue. That's, of course, the big thing out there. And when I said this matters to so many people, someone told me yesterday, they would tell you you're crazy if you said that to the campaign that this matters. The defense is that this isn't something they think is really going to be a moving issue in the last two weeks of the campaign. So they don't want to touch it.

They don't want to alienate. They don't want to alienate the base, but they also don't want to alienate their big donors. And that's the issue they run into. Exactly. And I guess with two weeks left, they'd rather just let Cuban talk about it, even when Trump's going on the attack. They say, we don't want to make it more of a thing by having Harris herself come out and say it. But I agree with you, especially reporting on this campaign, trying to get concrete details out of them has been really difficult.

So the substance of the dispute here is that the Harris campaign had said it supported some type of a wealth tax on billionaires. Mark Cuban went out and said, don't worry about that. She's not actually going to do that. Trust me. He publicly said that. Yeah. And he's not just a friend of hers. He's not just a guy. He's what they call in campaign world, an official surrogate. In other words, what he says can be tied to the campaign. Well, his media appearances are presumably being, if you're a surrogate, that means presumably your media appearances are being coordinated by the campaign. Right. The difference is that he's a billionaire. Yeah.

And so he does what he wants. Right. And that's the problem with having a billionaire surrogate. Right. Right and that's the problem with having a billionaire surrogate right and so but he has also said When asked about Lena Kahn and Gary Gensler whether or not Kamala Harris, you know It was you know supports what they've been up to he has said she has told me to go out and say That she does not support He calls it regulation by litigation, which is also otherwise known as law enforcement

Was known as when these companies break the law You you take them to court or you charge them criminally. And he's out there saying that she doesn't support that. He's been part of the campaign to get rid of Lena Kahn and is a surrogate on the campaign, out there undermining her. Right. And I mean, he's very transparent, at least about his thought processes on X, not dissimilar to Trump. It must be a billionaire thing. And truly, I think it is a billionaire thing, right? When you have that much power, you feel comfortable, like, inviting people into your thought process because you're super confident.

Your ego is pretty rock solid, so it doesn't strike you as something that could be damaging to the campaign because you're Mark F. in Cuban or you're Donald Trump. Like it just doesn't strike you as something that could be a vulnerability. A top Biden economic advisor, Brian Deese, who all of, you know, these top advisors have hung around and are advising Kamala Harris. It was reported recently that he is a supporter of Lena Kahn, Gary Gensler, this kind of network, Rohit Chopra, this network of kind of populist financial regulators. Right. And that was read on Wall Street as, oh, wait, maybe we're actually being strung along here. Mm-hmm.

And that the anchor's point was the right one, that she actually doesn't have the political will to get rid of Lena Kahn. But there's no reason for her to alienate all of her donors at this moment. On the other hand, maybe she does have the will to do it. So Jamie Dimon is also, this was just the last 24 hours, the New York Times has reported basically that Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates are quietly lending their support to Kamala Harris. I think Jamie Dimon- And Gates is a bunch of money too. Yeah. And Jamie Dimon's been a little bit less quiet about it. He's actually said he would consider a role in the administration. So another kind of Musk-esque type person thinking about,

hey, maybe I could be treasury secretary. Axios says he would likely, he says he'd consider a role in her administration, quote, likely treasury secretary, treasury secretary, which yes, you can easily. I mean, Trump brought in like half of Goldman Sachs. It's a very Clintonian vision. And we're going to find out if Biden's four years of really breaking from neoliberalism when it came to their economic policy was just an aberration. Yeah. Or if and that Kamala is going to try to take them right back under the Clintonian glide path. But it is very disturbing from a left-wing perspective to see people like Jamie Dimon or Liz Cheney or Dick Cheney seeing the Kamala Harris campaign and saying, oh, that looks nice. I'm going to join that.

Right. And it signals that they think they have sort of influence, significant influence. Which they do. Speaking of which, while Tim Walz is talking about the world's richest man going in on the Trump campaign, I just want to pull up this article from The Washington Examiner. Gabe Kaminsky, who we've talked to before. He's a great young reporter. on the Trump campaign. I just want to pull up this article from the Washington Examiner, Gabe Kaminsky, who we've talked to before. He's a great young reporter. He wrote a story called Meet Kamala Harris's Influential Mega Donors, outlining Reid Hoffman's influence, Michael Bloomberg's influence, people like Dustin Moskowitz. You can go down George and Alex Soros, James and Catherine Murdoch. It's a really interesting story. Jeffrey Katzenberg, of course, because the sad read of Tim Waltz going after Elon Musk, that sort of populist vein,

is that neither party, and our viewers and listeners obviously know this, has any claim to be against big money in politics. There's just literally no truth to that. The Harris campaign has been open arms to these folks. Yeah. And then finally, to cap off both of these segments, just utterly hilarious, delightful Donald Trump clip at his rally yesterday, talking about Arabs and Muslims. And watch, as you're watching this clip, I think, tell me if you agree afterwards, you notice something that he's, there's a message that he's being told is going to work and he's,

and he's talked to, he had, he's had calls with a bunch of Arab American, uh, mayors who have joined his campaign or endorsing him. So he's heard directly from them. He knows the messages, uh, that work, uh, with, with them and with the audience, which is, you know, that, you know, Biden and Harris are killing their family members in Lebanon and in Palestine. And they're a complete failure when it comes to their militarism. So he understands that that's the message and that he, if he presents himself as the candidate of peace, who's going to put an end to this, that works for him. What he really wants to say is that Liz Cheney is an adult and a moron. And so as you watch this clip, there's this gravitational pull of what Trump wants to say

that keeps pulling him back into trashing Liz Cheney for being a moron. Why would Muslims support Lyon Kamala Harris when she embraces Muslim-hating and very dumb person Liz Cheney, a dumb person who, by the way, lost for Congress in the biggest margin in the history of politics. She lost by almost 40 points. The reason she has that honor is that most people, most people wouldn't have stayed in. A congressperson that's in that position normally retires before the election, which would have been a good idea for her to do. But Liz Cheney is a total loser. But her father brought years of war and death to the Middle East. He killed many Arabs, many, many Arabs and Muslims. And now Lion Kamala has embraced Liz Cheney. She embraced her. And why would a Muslim or why would an Arab want to vote for somebody that has Liz

Cheney as her hero? Liz Cheney is a failed, totally failed politician. Again, she set the worst record. I think it's a terrible mistake that she's made. I think it's a great insult to Muslims all over the world. And I think that she's going to do very bad in Michigan. I really do. I think she's going to do very badly. To do that was a bad thing. And I was very surprised to see it. Ryan, I actually want to put some numbers on this

because Matt Karp revealed some results from the Center for Working Class Politics that are somewhat relevant here. He said, we surveyed, this was yesterday, 1,000 Pennsylvania registered voters and found that calling Trump a threat to democracy is Kamala Harris's least effective message with all voters, but also especially with working class voters. And it's that tension, it's the balance between needing to appeal to as many possible demographics while also not suppressing the vote or turning off

voters in the other slices of the pie that you need in order to put the math together for the electoral college. So if by using Liz Cheney and hammering this democracy, democracy, democracy message over and over again, which gets picked up by NBC and all these places that people actually watch, nightly news, whatever, are you turning off voters that you might otherwise have? I don't know. I mean, that's a pretty difficult question for the Harris campaign. Well, it's certainly turning off Arab American voters. New poll out has Trump up 45, 43 with Arab Americans, which replicates an earlier poll from the Arab American Institute, which found him up 42, 41 among Arab Americans.

You don't have to have that long of a memory to remember what Dick Cheney did, what the Bush administration did to the Mideast. And if you understand and remember that, and you are viewing what's happening now with Gaza and with Lebanon and soon with Iran, through that prism, it just makes you that much less sympathetic to the administration's position and that much more certain that they actually hate you and are okay with you and your family being slaughtered and cut to pieces. We have one more thought. This was Kamala Harris on Hallie Jackson's show, NBC News, yesterday. Let's roll this one. It's going to be B2. We are sitting here two weeks away from election night. Last election, the former president came

out on election night and declared victory before all the votes were counted. What is your plan if he does that again in two weeks? Well, let me say this. We've got two weeks to go. And I'm very much grounded in the present in terms of the task at hand. And we will deal with election night and the days after as they come. And we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that as well. So you have teams ready to go? Is that what you're saying? Are you thinking about that as a possibility?

Of course. This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo a free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked. Some were killed. This is a serious matter. The American people are at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision. I do think what most people are rooting for is that whoever wins, wins convincingly. I know. That's the note. Like, if people could vote just for that. Right. Not even for a candidate, but just for, like convincingly. I know. If people could vote just for that. Right. Not even for a candidate,

but just for clarity. Somebody please win this in a comfortable enough fashion. Yeah. Even though Biden won by, what, 7 million votes? Yeah, we knew. It was razor thin in three states that decided the outcome. We knew what was likely to happen by midnight on election day, but we just didn't have certainty really until, I don't know, five plus days after. Well, the other problem, if you remember election night, it was like 3 a.m. when the Wisconsin votes finally came in, which you knew was going to happen. Like, if you were following it, that was not surprising. But if you weren't following it, you're like, wait a minute, 3 a.m., they get all the votes.

And oh my God, lost. Sounds like fraud. Yeah, it felt like a car crash that you were watching in slow motion play out. So yeah, let's, I guess, hope for more clarity on election night. But I don't think that we are going to get it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm JR Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty.

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the most important races to watch is the Nebraska Senate competition between Deb Fisher and Dan Osborne. Dan Osborne was a guest on this show really before anybody was paying attention to him, except for, of course, Ryan Grimm, who had his thumb firmly on the pulse of Nebraskan politics. Ryan, you have a new report out in Dropsite, and some of it is exclusive that we're going to share right here. Yeah, we could add this in post. The story that went up on Dropsite news this morning, a new poll has Dan Osborne up. Was it 48-46, I believe? So this is at least the third recent poll that has found Dan Osborne, the kind of populist

independent in Nebraska, up over Deb Fischer. A previous one had found him all the way at 50%. So over the last several weeks, things have definitely been pushing in his direction. So here's why this race matters so much. Democrats ended up with Osborne running as an independent and gaining a lot of steam as an independent and refusing their endorsement. They ended up not even nominating a candidate. They said, forget it. We're sick of getting wiped out by 20 points every time anyway. So let's just see what happens with Osborne. Deb Fischer completely slept on

this race. She has woken up over the last couple of weeks as the polls have shown her behind him. The NRSC completely slept on this race. That's the National Republican Centrally Committee. They looked at the race and they said the math just isn't possible for anybody other than a Republican to win this race. That was their view. Trump plus 20, right? It was a Trump plus 20 state. But Osborne has a biography that a campaign consultant would dream of. He started working in the Omaha Kellogg's plant as an industrial mechanic in 2004.

And then in 2021, when Kellogg tried to shut the plant down and tried to cut their pay, he led a strike that kind of captivated the state's attention. And they won that strike and got a strong contract, such a strong contract that they later maneuvered to get rid of him. His best revenge, running for Senate then. Also served in the Navy, the National Guard. So doesn't have a college degree. Just supported his family with a union job, which was the kind of 20th century American dream.

He also is, like many in Nebraska, personally, culturally conservative, but politically more libertarian. Right. He told us he was personally pro-life, but that he wouldn't overturn Roe. We can roll some of that here. From our interview last time that he joined us on the program, we can play this here. If there was a bill that came to the Senate floor that would codify Roe v. Wade, Would you vote to support that? And how big an issue are abortion rights in the Nebraska Senate race? It's a fairly conservative state, but then again, abortion rights triumphed in nearby Kansas.

Correct. It did. And it is also a ballot initiative in Nebraska, as is the legalization of medical cannabis is going to be on the ballot as well. And, you know, I always divert back to the Constitution of the United States and the founding fathers and how they envision the country. And they envision the federal government take care of the big stuff, the economy, the border, foreign affairs, things like that. And I don't think the United States government should be meddling in our personal affairs, whether that's at the doctor's office or our bedrooms.

I truly believe that. And so, you know, would I codify Roe v. Wade? You know, that boils down to also the federal government should be taking care of our individual liberties, right? The Second Amendment, things like that. And so I believe that does fall under the category of an individual liberty. Look, in my own personal life, I'm 100% pro-life.

I would never advocate for anyone that I know or love to have that procedure. But I also know that I'm a male and I don't have a womb, and I would never advocate for women to have that choice. And I know pregnancy is a very difficult thing, and that it does need to be available for women who need that procedure because it could be life-threatening. So you can tell that he's not a professional politician from all of them, right? Which is in some ways endearing.

I might disagree with what he said in the answer, but I think a lot of people— I actually think Donald Trump— That's probably what he actually thinks, which is a shocking thing for a politician. I think Donald Trump would watch that and think he's a fairly competitive candidate. Oh, yeah. If Trump read his bio. If Trump has a heart of hearts and he sat down with Deb Fischer and sat down with Dan Osborne, there's no question who he's endorsing there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he doesn't have a heart of hearts. He's the leader of the Republican Party. So he cut an ad for Deb Fischer from his private plane where he's saying, Dan Osborne is a Democrat in disguise. Vote for Deb Fischer. And that's the message that Republicans are hoping is going to break through. Right.

Don't you think it will? I mean, so there's something to what we're hearing from people inside GOP circles, which is that this race is in a, you know, he might be doing well, he might come close. But at the end of the day, Nebraska is a Trump plus 20 state. So you described this before we went to air, there's a gravity there. There's a momentum for Republicans that is hard for literally anybody to overcome. So I think there's something to that for sure. Osborne, though, is not coded in a way for, you know, the average voter that's going to make him really easily pinned to the far left. And even the kind of squishy center Democratic Party that doesn't have a great brand in Nebraska.

I mean, he's coded in a way that you would think the guy's a Republican. You'd think he was kind of MAGA. So I think there's something to it. I think it's powerful. But basically, we reached out to the NRSC for comment. Don't have a comment from them. One thing I heard from a Republican strategist about the race is their sense is that Osborne is tapped out and has hit a ceiling. And so it's two weeks before election day, and that's absolutely something that happens. Someone gets a surge of momentum,

a bunch of money pours into the race. They start polling very well. In fact, you could argue this happened with Kamala Harris and peaks too early. So it's not impossible. That's what happened. But these polls, I mean, where you have, so his internal, as you reported at Dropsite, has him up by two points. This is the recent poll from Deb Fisher. This was from October 12th to 15th.

It has her up by seven points. It has Osborne at 44%. But his poll from October 9th to 12th had him at 50%, as you mentioned, and had Fischer at the reverse, down at 44%. So that's plus six for him. There was an independent center. They sponsored a poll that was at the end of September that had Osborne up five. Yeah. So it wasn't a poll from either of the campaign. It had him 47 to 42. Although they have, you know, it's the Independence Center. You just tell from the name that they have an interest in an independent doing well. Yes, of course. Which we do too, because it's, we'd love to see this duopoly

broken by a populist union mechanic who pushes the Democratic Party aside and then beats a corporate-backed Republican in Nebraska. But you're right. I think if the election were today, he's the favorite. But it's not today. Now, mail-in voting is happening, which is good for him. There'll be two weeks of millions of dollars spent calling him a Democrat. Yeah. Being a Democrat in Nebraska hurts. The poll shows right now that Donald Trump is winning 94% of Republican voters and Deb Fisher is winning 80% of Republican voters.

That 14-point gap is Osborne's path to victory. Yeah. That 14% of Republicans who are going to vote Trump-Osborne puts Osborne in the Senate. She is going to try to, she's going to spend every penny she has to close that gap. So if by election day, 94, 96% of Republicans vote for Trump and 89% vote for Deb Fischer, then Deb Fischer wins. If she can close that gap, there's so many Republicans in Nebraska that if she can close that just a little bit, she wins. So for him to keep the jaws of that gap open require him to fight against this polarization and this gravitational pull towards party preference over people's actual respect and support for him. Yeah, interesting. And to your point, now that Republicans, you even get the sense when

poking around on this, that they've finally realized that they have a situation on their hands because control of the Senate is so tight. Don Osborne is obviously at this point, he's obviously proven himself to be a serious candidate. So, and it's unpredictable. So there's going to be so much money pouring into Nebraska from McConnell and McConnell's allies. Deb Fischer is super close with the Pentagon, those types of wings. So there's plenty of money going around to support Deb Fischer. The problem for her is that there's only so much money you can spend in Nebraska because you have basically the Omaha TV market and people only watch so much TV. There's only so many evening news programs because you want

to advertise on sports and news. That's where you want to put your ads because those are the things that people watch live. If you put your ads on anything else, for the most part, people are going to skip over the ads. And expect it to be that Dan Osborne, the line is going to be, he's a wolf in sheep's clothing because he hasn't really given an answer. I think this is fair from a conservative perspective. He hasn't really given a clear answer. We asked him this about whether he would caucus with the Democrats or Republicans or just not caucus. Because like Bernie Sanders, if you would be an independent in the Senate, it's a huge question who you caucus with because it will likely give voters an indication of which party you're going to side with, especially on the important questions.

So I think that's what they're going to hit him on over and over again. They are and they will. Just a far left guy who's trying to convince you he's MAGA. They're trying to tie him to Bernie, which would be interesting if that works and he still wins. Well, we'll keep following this race for sure. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable,

showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice.

These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now let's move over to McDonald's, which, you know, this is, it's sort of a funny story, but it's actually a really serious story as well, because as funny as it is that Donald Trump just made this trip to McDonald's, and then a couple of days later, there's an E. coli outbreak. So the memes have predictably been good. But 49 people in 10 states have been sickened by this. And an older person in Colorado actually died from this E. coli outbreak, which the CDC, if you go to their website, it's right there. It says, investigation start date, October 22nd, 2024, yesterday. And on their food safety alert, they say, this is a fast-moving outbreak investigation. Most sick people are reporting eating Quarter Pounder hamburgers from McDonald's,

and investigators are working quickly to confirm which food ingredient is contaminated. So looks like they have some reason. We can put D1 up on the screen. This is the New York Times breakdown of the story. Looks like they have some good reason to believe that it's specifically linked to the quarter pounder. But this is hitting people especially hard in the West. So Colorado, New York Times list Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. A lot of this, though, has been, speaking of Nebraska, a lot of this has come from Colorado and Nebraska.

So really awful situation. McDonald's obviously is taking these ingredients out to the best that they can. So we'll see what happens. The burger in that image looked really good, though, even despite the— No, since Trump went to McDonald's, I have really wanted McDonald's because it's just been, people have been posting so much about McDonald's. I really feel like we're at a point where McDonald's should just like give it up with the actual meat. Like we're at a place, the fake meat tastes the same as their fake meat that has meat in it.

So why? Just if you're actually now killing people, like one person, 10 people have been hospitalized, one died so far. It takes several days for this to work its way through your system until you wind up in the hospital or sickened. So there could be more cases of this. Hopefully this is the end of it. But the climate effects are profound for the amount of meat we consume. And if we can't do it safely, it doesn't really even taste that much different. Come on. Really, those chicken nuggets need to have chicken in them? Nobody believes that there's really that much chicken in those chicken nuggets anyway. So let's just go all the way fake. Well, the sad thing is there is chicken in the chicken nuggets, and the chickens are not very happy chickens.

No, those are unhappy chickens. Which is, I think there's something of a reckoning happening, just whether it's Maha and Maga having this unlikely marriage, where you get populist left and crunchy populist left coming together with the newly crunchy populist right. It's not a huge part of the country, but it's significant enough that I think there's a real momentum shift against some of our older food practices. It's also existential in the sense that you're blasting all these factory farmed animals full of antibiotics so that they can overcome the cruel and horrific conditions that they're in, which then, if you only care about humans, makes, you know, it's not good for

you to just be constantly ingesting antibiotics that already went through an animal. And it makes more, you know, antibiotic-resistant bacteria than the fact that we're talking about a bacterial infection here is not a coincidence. Their stock is plunging. There's some reason to believe, it looks like from the reporting, that this was linked to onions because there's some experts. So much for my no meat plan. Yeah, so much for your no meat plan. I mean, we'll see. But this is from NBC. They say McDonald's is working with public health officials. According to the CDC, the fast food chain has stopped using the slivered onions and quarter pound beef patties in several states. McDonald's said in a statement Tuesday that its initial findings from the investigation indicate that a subset of illnesses may be linked to

slivered onions used in the quarter pounder and sourced by a single supplier that serves three distribution centers, which would make sense given the pattern of the spread. Now, this is something that an expert echoed as well, that the onions are kind of notoriously difficult, which I didn't realize, but sort of notoriously difficult to control the E. coli and potentially people getting sick outbreaks of. So just a pro tip for everybody, maybe be worried about your onions. There you go. But Donald Trump actually is sort of infamous for loving McDonald's because it's so... Right. He believes that fast food restaurants,

and not incorrectly, fast food restaurants are so industrialized that their health standards and their cleanliness standards, they are held to the absolute highest standards because anything like this is so damaging to their business. They're under microscopes and they just have this rinse and repeat operation around the country that he goes to fast food restaurants because he trusts the cleanliness. There was this moment when he's scooping the fries the other day into the fried box, whatever. He turns to the camera and he goes, amazing, never touches the human hand. Yeah, which he loves. Yeah. But I mean, bad news. Yeah. Bad news. That's something. Well, stay safe out there, everyone. In all seriousness, this can be incredibly,

incredibly serious, especially to folks out West. So again, stay safe. Let's move on to Cuba, Ryan, where you have an exclusive report from a reporter on the ground, a drop site news reporter on the ground in Havana. Last Friday, the entire island of Cuba was plunged into darkness as a result of a power outage. You can put up E2 on the screen. It was the most significant power outage in the history of Cuba since the revolution. I put up E1 here. This is just an example of an absolutely extraordinary event, which didn't start of unravel itself to become fixed, to get the lights back on until yesterday. We're going to talk about why this is happening, where this is coming from. But over at Dropsite a couple of weeks ago, we published this really fascinating look at Biden's,

we'll call it a sanctions regime, but so much of what he's doing goes beyond sanctions to Cuba and the way that that is impacting the economy there. That piece was written by Ed Augustine, who is a journalist who was based in Havana. So we asked him yesterday to send us a little dispatch about what it has been like over the last five days in Havana, where this is coming from. Here's Ed Augustine. I'm reporting from South Havana, where finally, after four days of nationwide rolling power cuts, the lights are finally back on. I was here yesterday afternoon when the lights came back on and people were cheering,

and you can well imagine why. It doesn't take much to imagine how difficult life very quickly becomes without electricity. No lights at night, no air conditioning, no fans to keep the mosquitoes and tropical diseases that they carry away, but also problems with the water. Millions of people haven't had running water in Cuba for the last five days because the water pumps require electricity. Same story for gas. Cooking gas was losing pressure and was out in parts of Havana. Having said that, the feeling on the ground was a little bit more calm than one might have presumed. If this was to have happened in my own country, the UK, people would have completely plot and people were stressed here and worried but not as much as you might think cubans

are very resilient um or put it another way perhaps put up uh put up with far too much um but i was interviewing people yesterday and they said no it wasn't a big deal we're used to power cuts we've been through this for 60 years this was the biggest one in Havana that's ever happened. But people kind of shrug and many people even joke about it. That's a very Cuban thing. Right now in Havana, over 90% of the city has electricity, but it's a different story for the rest of the country. The National Grid is up, it is working, but there are still millions of people in this country, approximately 10 million people that don't have any electricity right now. The government clearly prioritizing for political reasons the capital. They don't have any electricity right now. The government clearly prioritises for political reasons the capital. They don't want any unrest as they would see it. Why is this

happening? Two main reasons. First and foremost, US economic warfare. Cuba has been sanctioned for longer than any other country in recorded history. And right now, the US Treasury Department sanctions some oil tankers that have previously docked in Cuba. And so that strongly dissuades other oil tankers from selling oil to Cuba, dealing with Cuba that drives up costs. So that's just one of hundreds of measures that the US currently has on Cuba, the aim of which is to provoke crises and desperation so that people rise up and overthrow government.

The other major reason, economic mismanagement, a failed planned, vertically planned economic model. There's complete consensus, or almost complete consensus in Cuba that the current economy is not working. And the Cuban government, despite having their own reform program, have failed to update the system over recent decades. But today in Havana, a sense of relief, the crisis isn't over. There's still massive problems in terms of being able to afford enough petrol, but relief compared to a couple of days ago. So he made a couple of interesting points there. And if you go back and read his piece, and we can put up E4 here, this is his piece that he wrote for Dropsite.

He talks a lot about the state sponsor of terrorism designation. And so Obama in 2015 basically normalized relations with Cuba and took them off the state sponsor of terror list. Trump, as a kind of a last act, kind of a little thank you to his friends down in South Florida, put them back on the list. And people expected that Biden would immediately revert to the Obama administration's policy. Say, okay, thanks, Trump, you lost. We're not doing this anymore. We've moved beyond this. Instead, the Biden administration came in and ramped things up and made them even tighter. And part of the reason that they were made tighter is that the American sanctions regime in general around the world has gotten broadly tougher.

So anybody who's on this state sponsor of terror list now is facing much sharper teeth around the world. And what happens, and the way that the sanctions work now is that it's much more difficult for the media, say, to pin it directly on Biden. In the past, you would, you know, the U.S. would directly sanction, you know, X, and the media could say, oh, look, you're sanctioning this. It's causing this harm. Therefore, we can talk about whether or not this is a policy that ought to be in place. By putting them on the state-sponsored terror list, what it does is it makes it basically impossible for them to use the banking system and to do business with anybody else off of

the island. And the US would say, well, that's not our problem. We don't actually specifically ban this particular provider of grain or oil from providing products to Cuba. We don't bar this particular bank from doing this. But the banks say because this designation is so opaque and the penalties are so severe that our lawyers say we should just not do business anywhere near Cuba. Forget it. It might actually be okay, but we're just not going to do it. And as Ed said, they also are specifically sanctioning some particular shipping companies, which is then keeping oil out of Cuba and driving up energy prices. I think the big picture story is that sanctions

are not, I'm not going to say they're categorically unjust and ineffective, but the long-term experiment shows that in many cases they're not effective. Now, I think what the U.S. would say to Cuba is, you know, the good faith actors in the U.S. would say that Cuba is not our problem until you reform your human rights situation. So I think that's the, again, like that's the good faith reading. But it's also the paper reading. Like we say that our policy is that we believe the Cuban regime should be ousted and that we are going to put sanctions into place until such time as that we drive the Cuban people into such desperation that they overthrow the government. So yeah, that is our position. Like you you don't like this? Stop being a communist.

Well, yes. I think that's true. I think also, though, what they would say is, this is the good faith reading. Obviously, it's not the reading of people who are just like old cold warriors who are trying to starve Cubans into regime change, which is, of course, still very much a mindset and mentality that exists in the Pentagon. But also, you know, reform so that you don't rely on all of these other countries for your electrical grid. Have some, even China, this is actually when Cuba has been looking to China, this was in a Financial Times report. A lot of people, I saw a lot of people like amused by this on Twitter. This is from Financial Times. They say, China publicly supports Cuba's right to choose its own path to economic development,

quote, in line with its national conditions. But privately, Chinese officials have long urged the Cuban leadership to shift from its vertically planned economy to something closer to the Chinese model, according to economists and diplomats briefed on the situation. Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership's unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform program despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo, the people said. And I agree. I think the glaring dysfunction of the status quo is pretty well put. So that is all to say, I don't think it's primarily the fault of US sanctions. I think Cuba working within the parameters that it has, I don't support the sanctions entirely, but I think

working within the parameters that exist, Cuba could do a better job servicing its people, keeping its people safe and prosperous and healthy. That said, I also don't think there's a great case that the sanctions are protecting the people of Cuba at this point. And Ed Augustine makes that, you know, he made that point at the end there, talking about how Cuba has talked about reforming its economy, the Cuban government, but has not done so. The politics of that are interesting. Because the Cuban government is always on its back foot because of these sanctions, they have no political capital with the public to do the kinds of reforms that would be difficult

in the first weeks of them, but long-term would lead to more economic growth. And that's not talking about going capitalist. That's talking about moving more toward a Chinese kind of, you know, socialism with market, you know, elements or whatever. That would lead to some disruption in the meantime. And so you would need a little bit more political capital to get that going. And they can't do it. The argument is the reason it's not happening is because the U.S.'s boot is on their neck, that they can't even move. My criticism for the Chinese would be, so then you step up. You're talking a big game about how you want to, you think they ought to reform. They can't reform because their economy is in complete shambles because of the United States.

You know, it's a rounding error for China to help them out. But China's just not going to do it, which cuts against this idea that we believe that China has some global hegemonic ambitions, which they don't because they're like, that's a U.S. problem. That's over by North America. We love that we come from the same father, but they're not going to lift a finger to help the Cuban government. I mean, I don't know.

I could see, not immediately, I agree with that, I don't know. I could see not immediately. I agree with that in the immediate future, but I could see long-term. This is a great argument, I think, against sanctions because what Cuba has been doing in light of the post-Trump sanction has been turning to Venezuela, turning to... Part of the reason this is happening is because Venezuela doesn't have the capacity to keep helping Cuba at the same level that it had been in the past. Because the sanctions on Venezuela and oil production has collapsed as a result. I think that's exactly right. If you lifted all the sanctions on Cuba, just let Cuba decide for itself, without the sanctions, what kind of government it wanted to operate, what kind of economy it wanted to operate, what kind of economy it

wanted to operate, they would open up their economy. And it would be a more market-oriented economy that the Cuban regime would try to keep like China. Well, I was going to say, I mean, when that happened under Obama, it was really, I mean, predictable where the money was going. And maybe, I mean, the experiment didn't get to play out in the long term, but it was becoming concentrated in the hands of elites. I mean, not by any, like if you compare them to the way that we concentrate money in the hands of the elites, then it's not even close. It's an interesting, I mean, I think it's a pretty interesting question of what would happen in the long term.

Because there are still... Yeah, exactly. And imagine that. Imagine letting Cuba just decide for itself. Well, yeah, instead of turning them into the arms of people, for example, who want to threaten semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan that we depend on. Potentially. I'm not saying they're actually going to do it, but that's obviously something that's being talked about in Beijing. So, no, I mean, China may be right about the problems with the Cuban system, but it's not an argument for China to colonize the Cuban system either. In the same way, it's not an argument for us to do it. But it feels anytime we have this bickering over Cuba, I mean, you just, again, go back to, we are not even a hundred years into the nuclear experiment. And the reason that Cuba is such a flashpoint here is because China could be Soviet-esque in putting weapons in Cuba, which makes it a huge threat

to the United States. Right, but they're just not that. Right. So the US, right. So that because of the possibility, you're constantly, constantly at loggerheads. It's actually ultimately an argument against nuclear weapons, but that's a different story. If people want a couple other details, one of the things we've done that's just completely malicious and vindictive is that we put into place a policy that says if you can come to the United States without having to get a visa, which is Europeans and there's like 37 countries or so where you can just come to the United States and vacation here, France or whatever. If you go to Cuba, then you now have to get a waiver to come to the United States for like the next 10 years. Why? Like there's no reason for us to do that other than

being vindictive. What are we afraid? They're going to fly to Cuba and get like cigars and then fly them back to France and then fly them over here and smoke them like on a balcony somewhere? Like, so what that did is it completely just dried up European tourism, which was one of the only things they had left. Cuban Americans here in the United States to sue like cruise lines saying that they were, that actually that ought to be our property. And so cruise ships stopped docking in Havana. So that disappeared. Like it's just this systematic, anything that Cuba had working for it, like we just went after. And then we're like, oh, look, see, we told you communism doesn't work. And then all the Cubans are flooding the southern border. Yes, absolutely. Hundreds of thousands, more than the Mariel Boatlift.

Yeah. Absolute, like anybody who can leave Cuba is leaving Cuba. And by way of South America. It's not like Mariel Boatlift. They're flying to Nicaragua and then they're taking a train up. Yeah. Absolutely. Speaking of humanitarian crises, Ryan, you have a wonderful new report up at Dropsite. Wonderful for how vivid and detailed it is, especially compared to so many reports that we see in the mainstream press out of Gaza about the destruction of Gaza, essentially. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating

stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's

political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day.

It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over at Dropsite News, we've published a unique new piece of investigative journalism by reporters Eunice Tarawi and Sammy Vanderlip. They were able to obtain reams of social media posts from soldiers and officers inside a single combat engineering battalion known as Battalion 749. The unit has been operating in Gaza on and off since shortly after October 7th and has left an unusually large amount of destruction in its wake. What makes this reporting unique is that by relying on the battalion's own social media posts, we can

trace their path through Gaza, identifying specific acts and linking them to specific actors by name. At one point, the battalion even put together a montage of their destruction and began it with a little homage to Disney. Now, we can play this here, but we're not actually going to play the clip because we're afraid we'll get a copyright takedown, which would be just extraordinarily ironic and a weird testimony to what you're able to do on the internet. But let me just say that doing this kind of investigative work is extremely resource intensive. And if you can help by becoming a Dropsite subscriber, either free or paid, and support Breaking Points while you're at it, go to breakingpoints.com. For that, go to dropsitenewNews.com. Counterpoint subscribers can get a discount 20% off at

DropSiteNews.com slash counterpoints. Now, look, in mainstream Western media, the coverage of Israel's year of scorched earth destruction often touches on the victims and events happening in Gaza in the passive voice. Death and destruction befall Palestinians the way a city suffers from a hurricane or an earthquake. Though in those cases, actually, the media has little difficulty identifying the natural disaster as the cause of the destruction. When it comes to Gaza, it's even worse. Buildings mysteriously explode and people just die for no obvious reason. Rarely do we see the Israeli military identified as having carried out the act and never do we see individual members military identified as having carried out the act, and never do we see individual members of the military named and identified, their actions described in detail,

broken down by unit and task. In fact, doing so in Israel is illegal. The stated rationale for that censorship is operational security. But according to a report from Israel's Channel 13, the real aim is to dodge accountability for war crimes. If that's true, the soldiers themselves work against this cover-up on a daily basis, posting endless photos, videos, and montages from the homes and neighborhoods of Gaza they are raising. That's where this investigation begins. Munis and Sami have managed to find and archive all the Instagram stories and daily posts shared by the soldiers of Battalion 749. They've mapped out the structure of the unit

and identified the individual soldiers and officers involved, along with their various roles and operations. They have tracked the activities of each company in the battalion, including what they were doing when and where as the force shred its way through Gaza. The mission is nothing less than a systematic, concerted, and deliberate effort to erase the intellectual, cultural, and social future of the Palestinian people. Quote, our job is to flatten Gaza, the soldiers of the official D9 company of the battalion wrote on their Instagram page. They added accurately, quote, no one will stop us. You likely heard about some of the atrocities described in this article in real time. And if you follow our work here on

the Breaking Points channel, learn of the impact on the Palestinian population. But now you can see it from the perspective of those carrying out and reveling in them. The investigation is a thorough accounting of the acts committed by the 749 battalion, complete with the evidence they post themselves. These are not just isolated events, but represent a pattern that runs through the very heart of the Israeli military, a sadistic attitude toward the civilians of Gaza, whose futures they have been tasked with blowing up or flattening. Now, if sadistic sounds harsh, go read through the report and ask yourself if it's not, in the end, too soft of a description. From the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, you may recall Benjamin Netanyahu's ominous invocation of the biblical Amalekites. When Netanyahu made that remark, the notion was already in the air. On October 9th, Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore, deputy commander of Israel's 749 Combat Engineering Battalion,

posted on his personal Instagram account, quote, Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them and put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys, unquote. Now many of the unit's members liked the post and proceeded to put it into practice. 749 Battalion was among the first to enter the strip through the Netzerim corridor, the four mile long road separating Gaza City and Deir el-Bala that Israel occupied early in the war in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping them cement control of south Gaza

City, including the Netzerim corridor, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shujaya in Gaza City, the Burij refugee camp in central Gaza, and even Rafah. Currently, 749 Battalion is operating in north Gaza and Jabalia, where even following Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's killing in southern Gaza, Israel's campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation. There, 749 Battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, quote, we will leave them nothing, unquote. The images in this investigation come primarily from the battalion's private social media group, which Dropsite News gained access to, as well as the profiles and accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the group, we were able to clearly map out the unit's organizational structure, identify over 100 of its members, and document their activities in the Gaza trip in detail. Now, in December 2023, Company A of the 749 Battalion was tasked with rigging up the south

Gaza city campus of Al-Azhar University with explosives and detonating them, reducing Gaza's second largest university to rubble. First Master Sergeant David Zoldan, the operational officer of Company A of Israel's 749 Battalion, wrote in an Instagram post on December 20th, quote, On Shabbat, we loaded the mines and I signed off on the shipment with a modification due to the sanctity of Shabbat. A few days later, we assembled them and booby-trapped one of Gaza's symbols of the future, Al-Azhar University, in the northern part of the Strip, and blew it up, unquote. Zoldan, a reservist who normally works as a journalist at ICE, a local Israeli news outlet,

attached several photos and videos of the entire operation, quote, from the unloading stage to the massive explosion, unquote. In one of the videos, he cheers as the three buildings of the university campus are prepared to be blown up. Quote, this is the explosion before redemption, December 2023, he says. As the university is blown up, Zoldan tells his fellow soldiers, quote, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Did you see? You can hear it here. So, Odan did not provide a military justification for the explosion, and the Israeli military have not reported to have found anything in the university campus. 749 Battalion, he wrote after the explosion,

quote, is working day and night and performing holy work in the Gaza Strip, unquote. Other soldiers from the battalion made no effort to conceal their intentions, gleefully mocking the destruction of civilian and educational property. Maya Radazovitz, another soldier in the 749 Battalion, was among them.

She filmed the explosion of a Tsar University, captioning it, quote, Goodbye to higher education in Gaza, unquote, with an emoji of hands in the form of a heart. She's one of 27 soldiers that we have identified as being deployed to blow up Al-Azhar University, including Roy Wicks, who fights with an American flag patch on his sleeve and who helped plant explosives that led to the destruction of the institution. From there, Dropsite tracked the unit through the rest of its campaign through Gaza. Many of the social media accounts we used to obtain footage have since been deleted,

but you can read the full investigation from Yunus and Sami and see the rest of the videos over at DropSightNews.com. Now, in response to our request for comment, the IDF said this. In response to the barbaric attacks by Hamas, the IDF is working to dismantle the military and administrative capabilities of Hamas. In complete contrast to the deliberate attacks by Hamas on Israeli men, women, and children, the IDF operates according to international law and takes possible precautions to reduce harm to civilians. The IDF acts to address exceptional incidents that deviate from the orders and expected. The IDF acts to address exceptional incidents

that deviate from the orders and expected values of IDF soldiers. The IDF examines events of this kind, as well as reports of videos posted on social media and handles them with command and disciplinary measures. In cases involving a suspicion of a criminal offense arises that justifies opening an investigation. An investigation is opened by the Criminal Investigation Division. Upon its conclusion, the findings are transferred

to the Military Advocate General for review. It should be clarified that in some of the examined cases, it was concluded that the expression of or behavior of the soldiers in the video was inappropriate and it was handled accordingly. Now, Emily, they don't, they didn't tell us specifically which of the incidents were handled in that accordingly fashion. But I think what's important to understand is that the key when it comes, because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking are, where's the International Criminal Court and where's the International Court of Justice? You know, if we were a nonprofit news organization, with the help of some freelance reporters can put together this, certainly the ICC and ICJ can do it as well. So what's going on here? And you see

in that response from the IDF, part of the explanation, as long as there is a legal process in a state, in a government, to provide accountability to war criminals, then the ICC and ICJ don't have jurisdiction. That's the setup. So the deal basically is, okay, we're going to have these international courts, but if you have a sufficient domestic court that prosecutes people, then we're going to stay out. We're going to allow that to unfold. And so while Israel was going through that debate over the prison guards who were accused and then later charged of raping Palestinian detainees, that the internal debate was from defenders of the criminal charges. They said, look, we have to charge them. If we don't charge them, then the ICC and the ICJ come in. We have to have a process. Right. And their defenders were saying, screw it, we'll take them on.

That's why I think this case study is sort of a really sad but interesting window into the post and the invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is such a good example of how this is a case study on the incredible failures of global liberalism or post-war global liberalism where, like, I agree with one thing you said in here where you described this as a pattern. I mean, clearly, this is not fringe. This is not, you know, nutpicking. This is an obvious established pattern. And it's also not surprising that it's a pattern because this is how people react when their husbands and wives and brothers and sons and family members are killed and their countrymen are brutally slaughtered. This is, of course, how people react. It doesn't make it right. a liberal world order to help not allow retribution like this to happen on the scale,

on scale in international relations. And you're citing Old Testament verses about the Amalekites and all of that. I mean, this is just the way we decided not to do war after World War II. And Israel says that it holds itself to the highest standards. And it clearly holds itself to higher standards than places like, I mean, from Hamas, you see a lot of this happening out in the open. You hear a lot of this conversation happening out in the open. At least Israel purports to have some type of shame about it, but in a way that makes it worse, because they're the ones enforcing or being, or are a part of the liberal international order. And what this shows is that there really is no shame on the ground among the officers and the

soldiers and that we, we, we from outside this can have these debates or what is this a genocide? Is it not a genocide? The clear intent of the soldiers and the officers carrying out is genocidal like toward the cultural and social and political institutions of the Palestinian people. Like they're not talking about the militarily eradicating them. They're talking about just rooting them out. You're talking about ethnic cleansing. Root and branch, a complete and total ethnic cleansing. They're very clear about it.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's in a sense, it's one of those really difficult questions of how people who wield standards of international law, like the US, will wield these standards of international law in one way towards Putin and in another way towards Israel, are struggling to meet their own standards, and in some cases don't even care to meet their own standards. Yeah. So who do we have on the Friday show? We have Michael Knowles on the Friday show, which is going to be very interesting. We had Matt Walsh a couple of weeks ago. So we'll

do a couple of Daily Wire guys ahead of the election. But one thing I'll say about them is they're willing to chop it up. So I imagine we're going to chop it up with Michael because I can't think of two people with further differences or greater differences than you guys. Looking forward to it. Yeah, it'll be fun. We have a weekend segment, right, that's going to post as well. Yes, over at CounterPoints, we're rolling out the Palestine Laboratory. It's a four-part podcast series by Anthony Lowenstein based on his book by the same name. This is updated post-October 7th. We'll have a segment that we'll post on the weekend in an interview with Lowenstein about this podcast. And basically, the Palestine Laboratory is about how the Israeli military cyber industrial complex uses the Palestinian

people in the occupied territories as ways to experiment with new weapons and then markets its products as having been experimented on human beings and therefore more effective than the competitors. Well, I look forward to that. So everyone stay tuned. BreakingPoints.com for the full premium version of the show early with no ads. Make sure to subscribe there to support us as we head towards election day. But thanks everyone for tuning in. See you later. See you Friday. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober,

the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding.

If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chastin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.