Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/24/25: Venezuela Regime Change, Trump 2028 Run, VA Delegate On Dem Future & MORE!

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Saagar, Krystal, Ryan, Griffin, and Mac discuss an exclusive BP report on Trump's push for Venezuelan regime change, Bannon says Trump will be President in 2028, VA delegate Sam Rasoul joins on the future of the Democratic Party.Sam Rasoul: https://www.sam4va.com/Mac: https://www.youtube.com/@GoodPoliticGuy   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everyone. Happy Friday. We've got a full-packed BP crew here. We got Crystal. We got Ryan. We got Saga. And we've got, I can't tell who that is.

Is it a young Republican, Mac? What's going on here? Republican. Representing the youth here. Yes. That's right. Gen Z in the house. Gen Z youth right.

That's right. We're not ready for Gen Alpha. So we got Gen Z here today. And we got a bunch of stories. We've got Trump talking about more Venezuela strikes. We've got a bunch of other stories. Eric Adams has endorsed Cuomo in the New York mayor race and a bunch of other fun stuff. But first, we're going to go to Ryan and Sager, who've been doing some gumshoe reporting, some

reporting exclusively released here first. Saga, Ryan, why don't you take it away? Yeah, Ryan and I've been working on this for a couple of days. Teased it yesterday. So I'm going to go ahead. It hasn't actually even been published. So this is exclusive literally to our entire breaking points. Audience, I'll just read a little bit from what I wrote at the top.

And then I'm going to throw off to Ryan, who, by the way, Ryan did the bulk of the actual reporting. So I do want to shout it out to him. I was just simply the phone. Sager released it back up, got back. on the journalistic field. I love it. I appreciate every opportunity you give me for a byline. So it is good to get the dusty fingers off, all right? So U.S. intelligence has assessed that none of the fentanyl that is trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration.

a senior U.S. official directly tells me. The official noted that many of the boats targeted for strikes by the administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach U.S. waters dramatically undercutting claims by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeseth. Quote, despite the intelligence on Venezuela's lack of association with fentanyl, the Trump administration has made Venezuela and government drug trafficking be Casas Belli in its drive to overthrow the government of Nicholas Maduro. Toward that end, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has redirected millions of dollars in money, previously allocated under USAID, towards pro-democracy measures in Venezuela and the surrounding countries a thinly veiled effort to prep the region for war.

Two sources familiar with the discussions tell me that a long proponent of regime change, Marco Rubio, is the driving force behind the aggressive military posture towards the Maduro regime. Toward that end, Rubio, who is in charge of the remnants of USAID, has redirected some money. previously allocated for pro-democracy measures in Venezuela in a themely veiled effort, as we said earlier. And so I'm going to kick it now to Ryan, who actually did all of the reporting along with his colleagues over a drop site, to actually expose what some of those efforts actually look like at a contract level. Yeah. And so we tried to go around Congress seeing what had been noticed when it comes to, you know, money being moved from USAID over to INL or other State Department bucket. It's Jack Paulson, my colleague, dug through a bunch of kind of federal records and found some interesting buckets of money being moved around. Maybe the most interesting, we've got a $4.8 million contract that was moved for a, quote, Columbia Virtual Shooting Range. It's a contract with an Arizona-based company called Virtra.

So funding a shooting range in Columbia, meanwhile, $1.73 million, foreign minimum. military sail through the U.S. Coast Guard of a bunch of 21-foot boats to a Colombian entity. And so we got a tip that what we needed to do is like look at the Colombia, look at Venezuela and the bordering countries, particularly Colombia and Guyana, where these kind of anti-Modoro Venezuelan factions set up shop. If you remember, there was attempted 2020 coup that was funded largely through USAID and other state department. money, which they comically referred to as the Bay of Piglets, because it was such a, it was such a catastrophe, it couldn't even rise to the Bay of Pigs. It wasn't even a mature pig. Wasn't even a mature pig.

And so, and you also have this conflict playing out between ExxonMobil and Guyana, which, and these like Guiana entities that keep threatening to move on, move on Venezuela. And so what you've got is the ground being prepped for all sorts of kind of mischief and sabotage and troublemaking while President Trump is now, you know, talking about bombing. All of this, we're told, is being really driven by, you know, Marco Rubio, who throughout the beginning of the Trump administration was trying to make the case for regime change in Venezuela using kind of old school, you know, South Florida arguments like human rights abuses. these communists out of our hemisphere. We got this, the election was stolen. We can't,

we can't allow, you know, we can't allow stolen election here in our hemisphere. And Trump, I'd say unsurprisingly, was not moved by any of those arguments. Trump, in the very beginning of his term,

was trying, and I think it was the Washington Post report this, to actually make good on his promise to attack Mexican drug cartels. But the lawyers and, and also the, a lot of diplomats are like, I'm sorry,

like this is geopolitically untenable. at this point. You cannot just start bombing inside Mexico. And Rubio's like, aha, guess what? There's cartels in Venezuela. And the cartel leader, his name is Nicholas Maduro. And here's this, here's this, like, indictment from 2020, where he was involved in cocaine trafficking. And that scratched Trump's itch.

And so that's how he persuaded Trump to kind of start backing regime change in Venezuela through this shoehorn of the drug trafficking. Meanwhile, it's all become about fentanyl because cocaine, people don't think cocaine really causes hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States. It can destroy people's lives. It's not the thing that's ripping apart an entire generation of young people. That's fentanyl. And so just out of nowhere, they started saying fend as well as producing fentanyl. And, you know, as we learned through our reporting saga, you could talk about this. American intelligence assesses that little to none, as you mentioned at the top, little to none of the.

Fentany, if any, is coming out of Venezuela. It's being mass produced in Venezuela. But did you guys ask the important question of what Israeli intelligence says since we like to rely on that instead of our own intelligence? I think even they are not. I'm just reminded of when Tulsi Gabbard went, you know, and testified to Congress and said, we see no indications that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon. And they decided to just pretend that didn't happen, lie to the American people and be like, but they Israelis say something different. I think even the Israelis are not dumb enough to claim this one. And I think one of the key pieces that Ryan and I kind of put together, first of all, the USAID money stuff is very interesting in and of itself.

Perhaps the most interesting kind of tip that we got was about shaping the area around and what Ryan and his colleagues were able to hammer down was that the battle space, if you will, of Guyana and of Colombia are the jump-off points where previous regime change efforts have sprung from on Venezuela. And I think kind of secondary to what Ryan is talking about is the internal logic of the Trump administration. And one of the really interesting things that has happened is that Trump has somehow been convinced, at least as of this moment. Everybody remember, he can change his mind at any time. As he did, remember the six-day timeline I laid out on Ukraine is that we went from demanding a peace deal to sanctions and long-range missiles in the span of literally five to six days. So, of course, all of this is just current to what Ryan and I understand as of right now. But one of the key is about the oil and the minerals, the vast amount of resources that Venezuela has. Keep in mind, Nicholas Maduro offered everything. This is according to Donald Trump, and it's also according to the sources that Ryan and I were able to speak to. He was saying, I will give you oil. I'm happily to invite, you know, U.S. oil companies down here. And in fact, you know, he currently is shipping a significant amount of oil to China, some half a million barrels per day, actually, just last month. And that is just scratching the surface of the Venezuelan oil capacity. Now, Trump is

obviously salivating at that. He wants to get oil prices down here in the U.S. He wants to make sure the U.S. oil industry is booming. Rubio has very cleverly convinced the president that actually the best way to get access to this oil resources is through regime change itself. And so that is why this is now kind of a central question inside the administration. And it's one which obviously, I mean, just, you know, our own editorial, Ryan and I are like, that doesn't make any sense, collapsing a regime to extract resources when the current regime is like, take whatever you want. They're like, anything not nailed down to the floor, take it. You can have it. We're like, we're happy to sell it to you. Yeah, we'll pry it up for you. You know, if you want it. It's a tremendous risk. And there's a couple of other areas that I think are really worth kind of delving into how this happened. And I'm not taking away Trump's agency, but just to just to explain some of the internal. dynamics. One of the most interesting things that Ryan and I kind of delved into is the Florida cabal. And I think that's something that's really important to this story is that you have the White House Chief of Staff from Florida. You have the Secretary of State from Florida. You have

Senator Rick Scott, who's a very high-level person on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Attorney General is from Florida. One of the White House Senior Communications Aids is from Florida. The president himself is now a Florida resident. So he is surrounded in an ideological kind of cabal, which is genuinely unique to the situation at any time. And one of the things I think is hard to explain for anybody who's not familiar with that South Florida dynamic is the ideological fervor that they treat the overthrow of the Maduro regime. You have a lot of rich Venezuelan expats. You also have a lot of Cubans, others ideologically motivated actors against socialism. So this Florida picture is really key to the entire story. And it does show you how

Rubio has a lot of allies on his side. There are tertiary to also that. Crystal is something you mentioned about Stephen Miller is that if the United States is engaged in a, quote, war with Trend de Aragua and with Venezuelan, the Venezuelan regime, it actually legally bolsters the argument, the legal argument for the Alien Enemies Act and for some of the other deportations of the Trump administration is currently doing. So that's a small part of the story. But it is important from a domestic point of view because what it belies is that there's not enough voices in the White House saying, hey, if we're worried about illegal immigration, the worst possible thing we could do is collapse a regime, which is shaky at best, which governs millions of people, which could flood the region, flood the United States, flood, you know, all of Central America and cause a mass refugee crisis. De-stabilize a bunch of countries and then, of course, the fallout from ours as well. And just a quick note on the political dynamics as well, because I've been banging my head against the wall about why Democrats aren't saying much of it. I mean, very few. Rocana, Mark Pocan, a couple of them. But by and large, they're pretty quiet. And I actually talked to Rocana about this yesterday. Kyle and I did. And first of all, he revealed some news that the Progressive Caucus has an official policy not to take position for their members to not talk about power. Palestine, Israel Palestine. That's an aside. But he used that as a way of exposing how on a lot of foreign policy issues, even quote unquote progressives have this very old school neocon cold war formed ideology. And so now even though Florida is long gone for Democrats, like not competitive outside of some individual congressional districts, they still, the part of the reason why you don't hear them loudly opposing this is because many of them don't really oppose it. And we saw that first, you know, certainly in the first Trump

administration with the whole one Guaido, you know, a coup attempt. And many Democrats were fully supportive, many if not, most, if not practically all. Yeah. And not to mention, everybody remember who got the Nobel Prize this year, right? It was a Venezuelan opposition figure who, you know, it doesn't take a genius to say is very supported, I'll say at the least by the West. And so the political dynamics of this are very dangerous. We are moving. Griffin, can you go ahead and queue up Donald Trump laying out the logic for land strikes in Venezuela? This is the next part of the military campaign, which we may see. Go ahead and play it. And briefed them on the operations.

No, we will go, I see. You will go. And it will go. And it will go. We don't see any loss and go. I don't see any loss and going, no reason not to. You know, they'll always complain. Oh, we should have gone. So we're going to definitely, I'd like to just say, let's go. We're going to tell them what we're going to do. And I think they're going to probably like it. except for the radical left lunatics. And, Mr. President, if you are declaring war against these cartels and Congress is likely to approve of that process, why not just ask for a declaration of war? Well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay, we're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be like dead.

Okay. Like dead. Great question from a friend of the show. Philip Wegman, what he underscored there was a couple of things. Number one is about the military strikes that not asking Congress. A second part, which was very important actually to the discussion, is we really had two options. Trump was actually asked alive whether B-1 bombers were present off the coast of Venezuela. He denied that despite flight radar actually showing these, you know, very capable, highly sophisticated U.S. aircraft that were some 50 miles off

the Venezuelan coastline. And actually, that was later confirmed via Pentagon sources that it was a legitimate operation. This comes after we also had the B-52 bombers, which very recently were off the coast of Venezuela that took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, not to mention the large naval buildup that we have in the Caribbean. Third thing that we have to remember is that the Southcom Admiral, the Admiral who was in charge of these operations recently departed his post. Now, I've been trying to chase some of that down, and I don't have it all fully nailed down. But it does appear, at least from a little bit of what we know, is that he was subjecting both to the legality and the scope of some of the operations that were happening. And I think everyone should be banging their head against the wall because I don't, and I said this yesterday, where is MAGA on this?

There's a New York Times article. I do want to give credit, which just came out yesterday. some MAGA allies, friends of mine, people like Kurt Mills, and apparently Laura Lumer as well, I guess we're glad to have you, Laura, are speaking out, or at least a little bit behind the scenes. But, you know, there is no large scale awareness in the way that there was on Iran, which was legitimately did check some of the regime change efforts that were happening originally by the Israelis and from the Trump administration. They at least felt that they were politically precarious. This time, much of MAGA is buying this fentanyl line, hook line, and sinker, I think because they're desperate to, like, see some war against the drug cartels, but they're not asking for basic evidence. Right now, it really is just Rand Paul, who is standing up and speaking out about this. And, of course, he's being heavily penalized by the White House. Everybody remember, if you're Lindsey Graham and you agitate for regime change across the world, Donald Trump

will do his very first fundraiser of the 2026 campaign with you at a golf course. tournament. That's not an exaggeration. He also only punished one senator recently in an invitation to the White House. That was Senator Rand Paul for speaking out against the Venezuela operation. This is now central to how Trump views himself as part of the Republican Party. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit. So you can push your gameplay beyond performance with Intel Core Ultra processors for the next era of gaming.

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headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lily Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong.

Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And Lindsey Graham is floating making Venezuela a 51st state. So I don't think is what Maga thought they were voting for, but now they're ready to go along with it, apparently. Can we just go back to that Trump stop? Because that was fucking insane. Like, when I saw the quote of what he said, I thought it was some like sort of shitpost summarizing, speculatively, what he really meant.

And then I listened to it and I was like, oh, he actually said, like, we'll kill them. They'll be dead. Like, he actually said that. And when he's talking, I really, really, really want people to take this in, okay? When he's talking about the ability to randomly murder people that this administration claims our drug cartel members, we already know they've lied about some of it. We already know, as you guys reported, that they know that none of what they're doing has anything to do with fentanyl. Okay. So we know that they lie routinely about all of this. They are claiming the ability to assassinate anyone that they want to with no due process and not quote unquote just in Venezuela or Columbia or some, you know, in the Caribbean or in the Pacific. We're talking about here. And that's why the Stephen Miller Connect is also very important and why I'm sure he loves this, right? Because they they are claiming extraordinary powers for themselves.

To do the sort of things that previously in the war on terror, you know, we're only done in foreign lands, to do them here on our soil and for us to have no recourse and for them to not have to provide a shred of evidence that these people are who they say they are. By the way, even if they are drug traffickers, they shouldn't have, we have a court system, we have a judicial system, we have a justice system in order to try them and evaluate the evidence and for them to be held accountable. So this to me is a red alert. It is a red alert domestically. It is a red alert in terms of regime change wars. It is a red alert in terms of authoritarianism. Like we are so far off the rails that I can scarcely rot my head around it. Griffin, if you don't mind, could you pull up Pete Hegseth talking about this?

Sure. I just want to pick up on this. Hegsaith, I want everybody to listen to the language that he uses very carefully about ISIS and al-Qaeda. That's the one that you can look for, Griffin, because this kind of. kind of gets to the extrajudicial assassination previously that we saw the legal justification under the Obama and the Bush administrations where they're allowed to actually extrajudicially execute and assassinate anybody who was deemed a quote terrorist. Do you have it in front of you, Griffin? Can we play it? Yeah, coming up right now. Okay, cool. Yeah, so again, just setting it up

and kind of bolster that point around how this is now coming here to the Western Hemisphere. Let's Take a listen. Tell, as was mentioned, these are designated terrorist organizations, foreign terrorist organizations. Our generation spent the better part of two decades hunting al-Qaeda, hunting ISIS. Well, as the president said, this is the ISIS, this is the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere. They intimidate, they terrorize, they extort, they poison the American people. The president's right. Every boat we strike is 25,000 Americans whose lives are saved because of the drugs that were headed in our direction. So our message to these foreign terrorist organizations is we will treat you like we have treated al-Qaeda. We will find you, we will map your networks, we will hunt you

down, and we will kill you. And you've seen that evidence in the maritime domain, whether it's in the Caribbean or in the Pacific with the last two strikes. We know exactly who these people are. We know what networks they work with, what foreign terrorist organizations they're a part of. We know where they're going, where they originated from, what they're carrying. He knows who they are except for, I think, there were people they had to release recently, right? Well, so that's a, you know, that is an important part of the story, and it kind of undercuts the same logic. If you struck a boat of terrorists and two of them survived, why would you return them to their home country, free of any charge? Wouldn't you bring them here to the United States to face trial or, right?

So this is part of the thing, which, you know, and this is where my media kind of critique comes in, like that story about the release and about those captured prison, it was nowhere. I mean, it was like, you know, bottom of the fold, A4 or whatever, New York Times, like barely anybody was really talking about this because I don't think that they're putting the pieces together. And look, Ryan and I are not the first people to hear this about what's happening in town. And I do want to give credit. There are other kind of national security reporters who have reported much of the same types of dynamic, but it is not being taken seriously to the level that I think it should be. During Iran, as I said, there was a full on, there was a genuine discourse in the country around this. This is just happening, and they're saying it out loud, but nobody seems to like want to believe that this is actually going to happen. I'm at a point where, unless we get some sort of Zelensky style reverse, which again, very possible, this is going to

happen as of right now. So, Saga, I'm curious. How much of this do you think if internally they know that fentanyl isn't coming from Venezuela, so that's sort of a BS pretext for all of this? If behind the scenes, Maduro is basically

offering them minerals, oil, offering to cut relations with U.S. adversaries, whatever else the case may be, if that can't really be the logic in terms of going after the resources, like what is the split on this being about the resources and regime change versus just being sort of like a pure ideological project that guys like Marco Rubio have wanted to do for years and years and years. And so they're just hell bent on doing it regardless of what else is on the

table. Yeah, great question. Stephen Miller is definitely, or sorry, Marco Rubio is in that ladder camp, right? He is the ideological. He's been trying to do this since the day he came in. Now, the rest of them are kind of, you know, a little bit all over the place. And I will say, you know, Pam Bondi, Susie Wiles, all these other Floridians, they're more ideologically more aligned with Marco Rubio. Trump was firmly, firmly in the resource camp. That's all he particularly cared about. He's also, he's the person he hates drugs, like any mention of drugs. Rubio can hang his hat on the 2020 indictment around Maduro to convince Trump he's a drug trafficker. Well, you would think, though, with somebody like Trump, like, you know, I'm the dealmaker. You know, I can make deals with anybody. You

would think he would lean in that direction, right? Of Maduro's making me a great offer, whatever. That's what we were hoping. So is Marco Rubio just that influential or? Yeah, well, I mean, this is part of the, Ryan, you can talk to this. People are not, like, he's the most powerful man in national security since Henry Kissinger. Like, it has almost no American parallel in modern history. It's really interesting.

We thought when Rubio was put in that job that he would be a marginal figure. and boxed out and that Trump would get rid of him by the time his daughter was ready to run for Florida Senate. Instead, he has played the palace intrigue game quite effectively. We report in this story that there's effectively what people internally call a gang of five that run foreign policy, which is entirely unusual because there's an entire national security and foreign policy apparatus that has been set up over decades. And Trump is basically you know, reorganized it. And so this, this gang of five is

Susie Wiles, the chief of staff. And these are the people, these are the five people that run foreign policy. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff. Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff. Then Whitkoff, Marco Rubio. And who is the, who's even the fifth person?

Those are the, Oh, and J.D. Vance, yeah, which is also, like, unusual, but not necessarily surprising, but that's not, certainly Kamala Harris wasn't in any, you know, if there would have been a gang of five at Biden, she wouldn't have been in it. So those five on the outs are basically everybody else, kind of fighting, fighting their way in. And so then it just becomes this real game of intrigue inside the administration for who can talk to Trump last and what arguments they can make. And also,

the Florida Hawks believe that if they can topple Venezuela, that Cuba follows. Yeah. Like the reverse domino theory that they've been working on since the 70s. Yeah. And just to explain a little bit more on the National Security Council thing, one of the reasons why you really want an independent national security advisor is their job is to kind of be an advocate for the president to get as many different viewpoints as possible. Now, it's been corrupted, obviously, many times in the past. But theoretically, the job of the National Security Advisor is to convene something called the Principles Committee, where you take options from the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, and then you say, okay, we need a hawkish option, we need a medium option, we need a ladder option. The thing is, is that Rubio, as an ideological actor and the

Secretary of State, kind of had two different prongs at his disposal, he can control the information that's even getting to the president's desk, and he gets to put the information in there, right? And so there's been a bit of a breakdown in how the normal process is supposed to work, which explains so much of Trump's movement in this direction. And there's just a variety of, like, political convenience inside the admin at the same time. And so that's why I genuinely think this is much closer to happening than Iran. And we got very close on Iran. Well, because who's on the other side?

Right. That's what I'm saying. I mean, in Iran, you had warring factions. And here you've got a, like, alliance. I mean, the innovation of making it about, you know, some supposed war on drugs, like literal war on drugs, not the other type that we've been having for decades. that seems to have brought all of the factions together and also, by the way, seems to have sold by and large the grassroots MAGA base, especially in the absence of an opposition party to make the case and, you know, press the case in the media that this is absolute insanity on every level. I mean, I find the connect between the domestic crackdown and the powers there and the, you know, continued like war on terror style expansion of the military. military industrial complex and the regime change wars, like all of those pieces together, I find to be

absolutely terrifying. And you're right. I'm pulling my hair out that we, you know, that that isn't the national conversation. It's not coming from Democrats. You know, there isn't a loud maga faction that's opposing any of this. The decision to make this like somehow about drugs, even though it's preposterous, seems to have really worked to get everybody on board. It's very, it's very important to just, you know, last thing before I have to jump as Mr. Dad Daycare is that that is the central part and kind of the political genius is it's just drugs. And I don't know why people don't question this stuff. Because even aside from Ryan and I's report, which is current, but before that, guys, I mean, from the day one, Crystal, you remember this. I was like, hey, look at DEA statistics.

It took me five minutes, right? It's not hard. Like, you can do a chat GPT or a Google search to go look at DEA analysis. I mean, by the way, you know, one of the sources I spoke to, it doesn't take a genius to say the absolute vast majority. And I'm saying 99% it's from Mexico with precursors from China. You don't even need to believe me. Go look at previous statements from these administration and previous administrations about fentanyl. Like fentanyl is a very specific substance, which has been obviously poisoning Americans. We have a long-standing understanding of the supply chain and where it comes from. Venezuela was not even tertiary to the conversation until these recent strikes. Remember they tried this earlier with Canada. Trump

said he was putting tariffs on Canada because fentanyl was coming through. Right. Yeah. Like, bro. You feel that whole. Yes. One last, one last side note on all of this I was reading yesterday, you know, one of the people that was randomly murdered in the Caribbean was a Trinidadian fisherman. And there's a big, a very disturbing article in New York Times about how in these areas of Trinidad, like random charred dead bodies are now washing up on the coast and the locals are like, what the fuck is happening? And yet even though every other Caribbean nation has said we oppose these, you know, random assassinations in the Caribbean, the prime minister of Trinidad has not and appears to be supportive. And it could be a very important military staging ground for, you know, the future operations in Venezuela. I'm glad you said that Trinidad, Tobago is actually one of the destinations for some of these boats who, look, some of these boats actually may be carrying drugs.

But one of the things that Ryan and I, and by the way, this actually backs up what Rand Paul and others have said about this, who are presumably read in, like, at least to a limited extent, as well, is that many of the drugs, if they're aboard the boats, there's not a lot of evidence they were coming here. They're more likely heading to Trinidad and Tobago, which could be a way station to Europe, because remember, cocaine is much more expensive in Europe. And in particular, the Holy Grail is Australia. So for a lot of these drug traffickers, the second part is, don't forget, there are a lot of American tourists who go to the Bahamas and who go all over the Caribbean who like to buy cocaine. And so in a lot of ways, actually, that's where probably some of these drugs actually are headed if they are drugs. But the one thing we can also say is that there is no current evidence that there's some mass fentanyl operation, you know, industrial breaking bad style vats of chemical, you know, engineers and others. cooking this stuff up. That does exist, but it's in a country called Mexico. And that is not what we are being told about right now. There's no regime change that's being mounted on that

ground. Yeah, I can, I can reach into my first book on this. Like, the trafficking from South America into the United States used to go through the Caribbean in like the 1980s. In the 70s. Yeah, 70s and 80s. And George H.W. Bush really cracked down on that. And he brought the hammer down in the Caribbean. Didn't have to, you know, launch air strikes from the air. But what it did is that that's when trafficking moved up through Mexico. So drugs that are coming from South America into the United States are coming through the Mexican U.S. border. Like that 99 percent, like the idea that you would put them in a boat, take them to the Caribbean, put them in another boat, and then take them to Florida. Like that's, why would you do that when you can just run it?

You know, you have these. We have NAFTA. We have millions of trucks a month that pass the U. border. It's just, yeah. And now we have a government shutdown. Like you think that these... Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead. On a human level, when you... Just when people keep saying, you know, on Twitter, you'll say, look, look at this boat. It probably did have drugs on it. Like, who do you think is piloting these ships? Let's say it is a drug. Let's say there is cocaine on this thing and it's taking it somewhere. Who do you think the cartels are putting on that?

They're senior readers. Random desperate people. Desperate people that they are many people who, they're forcing to do it. This is not a put something out on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. It's not the Kingpin. It's not El Tropo on there.

It's piloting the little dingy. Yeah, it's like you're doing this. Either we have some leverage over you or we're going to commit violence against you or your family if you don't do this. And if you do it, you get a hundred bucks or whatever. But these are just, these are highly disposable people.

Like, can you imagine if we just had people at the border and you can, could scan the drug mules, the women who like have to, you know, swallow, you know, the, the, the, the drugs and then, and we just like, if, if, if they happen to have drugs, you just snipered them right there. And then you'd have people on Twitter, but, well, I don't get them any ideas, Ryan. Please don't get them any ideas. Yeah, and it does look like that's what they're announced. I mean, that's what Trump is announcing that they have, that they want to do and that they have the power to do. Ryan's scenario, like, literally.

I mean, you almost can't come up with a scenario that's too preposterous for these. people to, you know, to contemplate and put into action. So I know Ryan and Saga, I know both of you guys got to jump. Ryan, do you have time just really quick to break down this government shutdown news that you were taking a look at? Yeah. Sorry, guys. Yes, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Hi, Sager. It's your show. No, it's all of ours. It's all of ours. All right. I'll send pictures of P. All right. Yes. Yes. Please do. Bye, Sager. squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit, so you can

push your gameplay beyond performance with Intel Core Ultra processors for the next era of gaming. Upgrade to smooth high-quality streaming with Intel Wi-Fi 6E and maximize game performance with enhanced overclocking. Win the tech search. Power up at Lenovo.com. In the new podcast, Hell in Heaven, two young Americans move to the Costa Rican jungle to start over. But one will end up dead. The other tried for murder. Not once.

People went wild. Not twice. Stoned. But three times. John and Ann Bender are rich and attractive. And they're devoted to me. each other. They create a nature reserve and build a spectacular circular home high on the top of a hill. But little by little, their dream starts to crumble and our couple retreat from reality.

They lose it. They actually lose it. They sort of went nuts. Until one night, everything spins out of control. Listen to hell in heaven on the I-heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where you get your podcasts. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host.

Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen

and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with CalPen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Go ahead, Ryan. All right, yes. So yesterday, Jason Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,

was on Bloomberg TV. And I don't know if we have that mirror article that we can put up with it, we can get his exact quote. But basically what he said, is that there's a lot of talk in Republican circles now of the way he described it, extending the CR through December of 2026. And if you extend the CR, that's the continuing resolution, that's the budget as it was,

that means you keep the ACA subsidies in place through the midterms of 2026. To have the ways it means chairman saying this on Bloomberg TV is a real signal that Republicans are thinking to themselves maybe we just maybe we just like extend these subsidies because it's a political albatross around our necks to have the subsidies go away anyway going into the midterms like it's not to me it's always been strange that they've been stopping democrats from letting them save themselves and so i talked to a source in democratic senate leadership and and he said that yes that his, their sense is that Republicans believed that Democrats would cave quickly, that this would be a, and they've done, and they had reason to believe that. That's, that's been the pattern in the past. You shut it down for a couple of days. People get fired. It's chaos. You, you realize you're not going to win this. You bring everybody back. Republicans are realizing that Democrats are much more solidified in their, in their position at this. point. And so all of the different calculations that they've made have turned out to be wrong. And so the

sense that the sense among Democratic leaders is that they actually, that Republicans might actually cave. And so even if Democrats are wrong about that, the fact that they think that matters, because that will then strengthen their resolve to continue with the shutdown, thinking that if we just hold on a little bit longer, Republicans are going to give us what we want. And if they, and so that's, so it is, it is tilting, I feel like, in the direction of Republicans saying, you know what, why are we, why are we dying on this hill anyway? Like, do we want people's health insurance prices to double on our watch? Like what, like what, what do we cares? 32 trillion versus, you know, 32.3 trillion debt. Like, what's the difference to us when, you know, the midterms are coming up? Right. Midterms are coming up. And also, by the way, with like, our. and shutdown, you know, the holiday season is coming up. You're going to have people who rely on, you know, on SNAP benefits, not getting them starting in November. You know, the longer that

this thing drives on, the more real world impacts that you feel. Also one thing I wanted to mention that, so, you know, I live in this town that has a naval base, dog or naval base. And a lot of the workers there are not actually furloughed because it's a, quote, working capital organization. So they sort of sell their services, almost like an internal military industrial a complex, like they compete and they sell services to other branches of the government. And there's other entities like that within the federal government. A lot of them actually people don't realize. And they will be funded basically through the end of October. So then in the beginning of November, there's a whole other wave of federal government workers and services that will stop because a lot of

that working capital funded those projects will run out of funding at that point and they will be out of work as well. So, you know, I think they're looking at the polls, realizing both voters are blaming Republicans by and large for the shutdown. Watching Trump's approval rating is now like the lowest it's been. Democrats, approval rating actually is ticked up a bit because people see them fighting. They've managed to put health care at the center of the agenda, which is obviously much better issue for Democrats than it is for Republicans. And so, yeah, increasingly the logic looks like, all right, well, I guess, you know, maybe the least bad political option for Republicans is to extend these subsidies and also

save themselves the heartache of the vast majority of the majority of the last majority of. the subsidies go 77% I think go to red states go to like you know it's a disproportionate number of Republican voters too so why do we just why don't we just rip off this Band-Aid I mean it does make sense to me and we've got Marjorie Taylor Green to thank for all this don't we for breaking cracks in the walls here for Republicans on all this health care stuff do we think that created any pressure for Republicans I think it was more the the miscalculation about the track of Democrats and their and their willingness to take this to the so did they think the democrats would just fold under the oh they're giving they're giving you know health care to illegal immigrants or

whatever and Democrats would feel the pressure on immigration line or I think they would I think they thought they would fold over the pain to federal workers and the and the threats to like fire and riff a bunch of you know which is as you guys have pointed out before it's like they're already doing that. Like they were doing that. They're going to continue to try to rip apart the federal government to fire as many federal employees as they can. So, yes, when you operate in a completely lawless, reckless fashion, you take away the card of, you better hold me back. It's like, are I'm going to be crazy. Yeah. Where are we with mass layoffs? Like, the mass layoffs were the threat. Like, how deep into that are we? How many people have been getting laid off? I don't have the data on

that you know they're doing what they can um yeah but i think that they cut so deep into the bone previously that there's less room for the dough stuff seemed more brutal yeah interesting all right ryan well i know you got to jump too so we'll let you go and um mac and griffman and i can um i have a few more things i want to say on the shutdown you guys probably do as well ryan thank you have a good one all right see you later have a great weekend by ryan Right. But yeah, I actually, I mean, I was going to say, I think I also thought the Democrats would cave quickly because that is my experience with Democrats. And I think they remember there was that reporting at the beginning that Schumer was trying to look for some sort of an off ramp. You know, hey, can we pass like a short term CR or, you know, the other thing that I think Ryan and Sager had floated on the show they did together was like, let's just get to November 1st. And then we can say like, oh, it's too late for these Obamacare subsidies. So we. tried and the Republicans did in our way. Guess there's nothing we can do about it. May as well open up the government. I think that the leadership was very interested in pursuing some

weak need direction. In fact, I think leadership didn't want to do this shutdown at all. And they felt, they have felt the pressure from the Democratic base that's like, these are fascists. You cannot fund them. You cannot bend the knee. You will shut down the government. You will not capitulate. And there would be, this again is something I talked to Rocha on about. yesterday. Like, there would be a mass Democratic-based revolt if these people caved to the Trump administration. So I don't think

so, I mean, it's a rare instance where actually there was some like grassroots democratic, like small D democratic input here that I think has completely shaped this entire trajectory from the Democratic Party perspective. Yeah, I totally agree. It does, it feels like they got backed into a corner

into doing this. Yeah. And especially Because it's over something that's pushing the, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, Ezra Klein's been pushing the shutdown for a while, right? And he was kind of right in saying, like, if you do it, you got to have one really clear demand. It can't be a kaleidoscope of issues. And it seems like with the help of burning a few other people, they zeroed it on health care. And the Republicans just don't have a good answer for that.

Yeah. I mean, it's such a direct material thing to be like, everybody's, you know, premiums are going to double or everybody's, you know, health insurance is going to skyrocket in the next couple of months if we don't prevent these subsidies from going away. So, I mean, it's a pretty cut and dry issue, although, like, I think Crystal, you or maybe Ryan has made this point before where I wonder if there is any sort of broader reckoning within the Democratic Party in terms of Obamacare being a failure in general, the fact that it needs to rely on these kinds of subsidies

in order to function at sort of like a bare minimum level. Like, do you think there's any sort of lane there with the base or with, you know, some faction in the Democratic Party to like open the door to a conversation about broader structural change to health care in this kind of a moment?

Or is it just we're going to save the subsidies and then, you know, move on with that? I think with the base, absolutely. I mean, I think the base is there. Like that Graham Platner poll that we saw yesterday, I was like, oh, man. You know, everything that we, because, This is what we've been saying from the beginning of Trump 2.0 is that the like normie liberal democratic base has been kind of radicalized. You know, they're they're much more now where we have been. You know, they see the failures of the establishment. They're disgusted with leadership. And the end, you know, they're disgusted with people who can't call a genocide a genocide. And part of that package is, you know, more radical reform to health care, which by the way, has been the policy preference of the democratic base for years at this point. But they were always

persuaded by like, oh, Bernie's not electable. We just can't do it. We have to be pragmatic. We have to stop Trump. That, all of that calculation appears to be out of the window. I mean, you see it with Zoron's election. You see it with the way Graham Platner is just wiping the floor with a sitting governor comes out of nowhere. And, you know, Abdul al-Syad's strength in Michigan again against another establishment approved candidate. I think these are all signs that and this shut down, the fact that the base forced the hand of Democratic leader. it's all very encouraging to me about the way that the base wants the Democratic Party to be and that they're not going to be manipulated like sheep, the way that they were, frankly, in the past.

So now my big question is, you know, are there going to be like free and fair elections that allow for that transformation to happen and create a possibility of, you know, taking the country in a different direction? And maybe now's the time to play Steve Bannon talking about Trump 2028. But, you know, you have a lot of very troubling things that are happening on the election front. They are openly floating using militarized forces in all 50 states that would be there in time for the midterm elections. You have an executive order that forces all states, mandates all states, to send their voter rolls into the DOJ. You have people in key positions in the Trump administration overseeing this like, you know, elections who are 2020 stop the steel complete. jobs. You have the refusal to seat at Alita Grohava by the Speaker of the House. And now you

have Steve Bannon saying, by the way, in 2028, Trump's not going anywhere. I think we should believe them. Like, I don't think, and that's not without even talking about all the redistricting stuff. And the Supreme Court should probably got to hand the Republicans, another maybe as many as 12 seats in the House. We're going to have a guest on from Virginia who can talk about some of the redistricting, like the counter redistricting efforts in Virginia. But. you know, they are really, they're really going for it. Like, they are really going for it. If it's with the Venezuela conversation, too, you know,

claiming the power just randomly murder people. Oh, they were terrorists. They were Antiva terrorists. They were drug terrorists. Do we have any evidence? No, but they're gone now. So you should be happy. So we can imagine what that looks like in 2020.

Yes, exactly. And we can imagine like what that looks like in a presidential election. What does that look like for a midterm, though? I don't know exactly. I mean, I think part of it could, So I think the one scenario that Ryan floated is that, no, they allow them to go forward more or less, but then they just don't actually, like, if there are subpoenas in the House, they just don't listen to them. So they effectively just bypass Congress like doesn't exist, which is not hard to imagine because they basically already do that, right? Now, at the current moment, it's because Republicans have just completely capitulated to them.

But you could see them continuing to just do whatever they want and not actually paying attention. into any of the legitimate subpoenas or investigations that are launched by the House. That's one possibility. Another possibility is that they, you know, they're obviously doing all the redistricting efforts to try to tilt the playing field, which would make it so the Democrats have to win by something like five points plus in the popular vote. So it would have to climb a big hill just to be able to win. Another possibility is that they use some of the tactics they used in the, have been using

for years, but ramped up in the last election, where they kick legitimate people. people off the voter rolls and, you know, target, especially minority groups that vote disproportionately for Democrats, usually black voters, kick them off the voting rolls. And so skew the results that way. Another possibility is that they, you know, the elections go forward. Democrats win the House. And Trump just insists it was all rigged and that the mail-in voting was fraudulent and refuses to seat them. And then we're in a standoff who's going to force them to seat these new members of Congress. That's why the thing that's happening with Adelaide Grahalva, I think, is important because, you know, Mike Johnson is just refusing. This woman won her congressional. He's just refusing to seat her. So where's the forcing mechanism for that? Are the courts going to intervene? Like, how is that all going to go? And then you also have this little detail of Dominion voting, which is, you know, they're the makers of voting machines in any number of states that were the center of all sorts of wacko conspiracy theories in 2020. Dominion voting is now owned by. a Trump 2020 Stop the Steel Psycho.

So there is a lot here. Nice. There is a lot here to be extremely, extremely concerned about. Should we play, should we play Bannon talking about Trump 2028? Yeah, let's get more. If we're not concerned enough, folks. Yeah. Well, he's going to get a third term.

So Trump 28, Trump is going to be president of 28. And people just ought to get accommodated with that. So what about the 22nd Amendment? There's many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we'll lay out. what the plan is, but there's a plan, and President Trump will be the President in 28. We had longer odds in 16 and longer odds in 24 than we got in 28, and President Trump will be the President of the United States, and the country needs him to be President of the United States.

We have to finish what we started, and the way we finish it to Trump, Trump is a vehicle, I know this will drive you guys crazy, but he's a vehicle of divine providence, he's an instrument. He's very imperfect. He's not churchy, not particularly religious, but he's a vehicle. He's an instrument. But he's divine will. And if you tell this of how we, how he's pulled this off. All right.

That's the gist of it right there. Crystal, what do we make of that? I mean, implement divine providence. Like, and they get mad when we call it a cult, you know? I mean, the audacity of these people. And here's the thing. I saw, I saw someone on Twitter. I think it was Weigel, though.

I don't want to, like, blame him if it wasn't Weigel. But I think it was Weigel who was like, well, listen, if Democrats can't beat an 80-some-year-old Trump in 28, like just wrap it up, call it quits. You don't deserve to exist anyway. But that assumes that elections, again, are like a thing. And not just, and when I say that, I don't mean that there won't be the trappings of tomorrow. There's the trappings of democracy in Russia. There's the trappings in Hungary. There's the trappings of democracy in Turkey. But I'm talking about a more or less even playing field where voters actually get to express their preferences and maybe greater man or, you know, the better man or woman win.

I think we're very unlikely to have that in 2028. And certainly not when they're talking like this is God's, you know, divine will to have this man occupy the White House until he strokes out. My question for Mack then, Matt, what do you think? Like, you think that even like 1% of the people that support Trump now would not support him running again in 2028? Will he have the same exact coalition? Well, I mean, like Crystal said, at that point, if they're actually,

actually making a play for 2028, it almost doesn't really matter. Like, if he has a lock on 30% of, of his base or whatever, then that might be enough to pull it off. I guess another thought that I had watching that banning clip is I'm, you know, we've, we've covered on the show a few times, like some of Trump's health related stuff, his hands bruising up, his ankles are extremely swollen. He has this, this reported heart thing or whatever. And so I'm like, as a broader fascist project that they're trying to build here and dismantling the sort of facade of democracy that we have in this country? Like, is this so in a cultish way centered on Trump that they don't even have a backup plan to carry on this project in 2028? Like, it's going to be like a borderline

a borderline like on death's door Donald Trump in 2030 who's running this project still. I mean, is that the plan? Like, if Trump were to die, does this all of this? fall apart or like it doesn't seem like they really have a plan outside of Trump. What do you think, 100%? I mean, we, I mean, the J.D. Vance vibe, uh, check. He's, he's, he's been not passing. People have been saying that on both sides of the spectrum. No, yeah. I mean, all this does kind of go with him, which means that you just keep putting out fake videos of him. This administration's already shown that they're willing to post any fake

bullshit, like blatant lies, memes. just completely fabricated video evidence. So, like, what's to stop Trump from, like, being half dead in a bed and then just posting videos of him, like, walking around doing the dance? Like, I think there's a hundred percent a chance that we would see something like that in 2028, you know, a Biden basement strategy combined with AI. Yeah. Imagine if Biden had had the AI that we have today.

He could have, like, barnstormed the country on virtual tours. I don't think it's quite there yet. Like, it's still in a little bit of the under. Canney Valley zone. But very likely by the time you get to 2028, they will have figured it enough that we could legitimately be fooled by it. And certainly there's Trump is so distinctive and there's enough of his comments on record that it wouldn't be hard to like come up with things that he's allegedly said. I mean, this stuff sounds so fucking insane. But every day I read some other news article that is equally if not more insane than the craziest things I could

come up with in my head. So it's your question of whether or not this whole thing falls apart without Trump. I am of two minds about it. Okay. Number one, I think Trump is a kind of singular figure. I used to kind of reject that. I used to kind of reject that. But now I do think the combination of his celebrity,

his comedic stylings, his charisma, his unique pull on the culture, like this, you know, almost reptilian instinct that he has for pushing society's buttons and keeping his, You know, name in the news constantly and, like, keeping us all just agitated about him all the time. Like, I do think he is a sort of singular figure. However, we have to look around the world. Like, we're not the only country that's backsliding in democracy.

We're not the only country that is seeing the rise of far-right fascist movements. And there's a reason for that. It's because, you know, you've had a failure of the, you know, the Ancien regime, the neoliberal order, which has failed to deliver for people of material. really, which has turned on a wealth pump that has, you know, immisorated the working class and continues to pump more and more wealth into the hands of a few. And, you know, state rep Sam Russell has joined us now. Just finished my rant here about the wealth pump and inequality. And then we'll, we'll chat with you about what's going

on, Virginia. But welcome. Great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. So we were just talking about whether, where if, you know, when Trump is no longer with us, whether the, the MAGA cult coalition is able to survive. And I was saying on the one hand, I think he's singular. On the other hand, we have to recognize the underlying dynamics that brought us to the place where a large swath of the American public is open to effectively a fascist movement. And, you know, I think wealth inequality is at the center of that. And Mac and Griffin, you guys were mentioning AI. Like, AI is only going to consolidate even more. extraordinary powers and in the hands of a few and money and wealth in the hands of the few into absolutely a misery. I mean, their goal is to put to make human labor irrelevant. So, so, you know, I don't think we like there's, even with Trump gone, if we don't respond in a way that's necessary and offer an alternative vision and allow people to share, you know, broadly in prosperity, then we are definitely not going to be out of the woods.

So with that being said, state rep, Rasul, guys, just so you know a little bit of the background, I'll allow you to introduce yourself as well. He is a longtime state representative in Virginia in the Virginia House of Delegates. Also happens to be Palestinian-American, has been attacked by prominent Virginia Democratic candidates and elected officials for his views and his opposition to genocide. He is one of two Muslim members of the Virginia legislature. And, you know, it's just a a really interesting, I think, thoughtful person. So, Sam, great to see you. Yeah, great to be with you.

Thanks so much for having me, Crystal. Yeah, of course. I don't know if you remember, but I'm pretty sure we talked back in 2010 when I was running for Congress and you had just run in 2008. Yeah, and probably, I'm sure I asked you for advice. I probably also asked you for money.

But in any case, it's nice to be reconnected with you. And there's a lot I want to ask you about. But the first thing is, I just saw this news that Virginia Democrats, okay, I think of jumping into the, you know, the redistricting wars and, you know, trying to to redraw the Virginia State map to add a couple more likely Democratic seats. One of them would actually be in the area where I live here in King George County. But in any case, Sam, can you break down for us what is going on

here and your view on it? Yeah, I was one of the few who actually voted for redistricting reform because I believe that there needs to be a fair process. I believe that we should, try to remove as much as possible the partisanship out of it. The reality, though, is that Trump has ordered these, especially Republican state legislatures, to redraw the maps. This is cheating, and it's being done mid-cycle, drinking all the rules as usual. And what we need to be able to do is to keep our options open. The way it works technically in Virginia is Virginia needs to make a decision or pass a resolution before an election. We have an election in about 10, days. And it's a long process, but the end of that process has a referendum going to Virginia

voters. So all we're doing is a procedural motion that allows us to maybe, if things continue to get out of hand, allow for Virginia voters to decide what we should do. How amenable are your Democratic colleagues to this move? Is anyone squeamish about it? Or is everyone like, listen, we've got to fight fire with fire. Look, the reality is when Trump ordered Texas and now other legislatures, we saw North Carolina just completed theirs, to break the rules and cheat and say, we're going to redraw the maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Unfortunately, that's just thrown all the rules out the window. And so in Virginia, what we have said is we're not drawing maps next week. We're not doing that in the short term because we can't constitutionally.

But what we can do is procedurally keep our options open. And so what we have to have is a vote before the election, a vote after the election with the new legislature. And then that sends a referendum. And Virginia voters decide what should we do about this moving forward? Gotcha. So it has to go to the voters before any maps can really be redrawn. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, you represent Roanoke, which for people who don't know is like in southwestern part of the state. and, you know, part of Appalachia, so you're not, you know, up in northern Virginia,

I think it gives you a bit of a unique perspective. What are you seeing in terms of how voters are feeling about this administration, how they're feeling obviously Virginia has, you have an election, everybody in Virginia, you know, the governor's races this year as well. How are people feeling about, you know, the state of the country right now? Look, being the only Democratic legislator in the western half of the state, this little blue dot in a sea of red, the reality is I think that there are a lot of folks, who don't know the difference between when President Obama was in office, then President Trump, President Biden, now back to Trump.

We have been, and it plays to what you were saying just before I came on, about the socioeconomic disconnect. We left so many people behind. Really, about 40 years ago, began the trend in earnest in this area with NAFTA, where we said, hey, we're going to outsource all these jobs, but it was no plan to make sure that people have. an economic future. And so that's what, in my opinion, that has what has given birth to Trump. In 2015, when this guy came down an escalator and says, you know why your life stinks, it's because of those Mexicans, the rapists, the Muslims, the blacks, he said all these terrible things. He used identity politics because people were economically frustrated and needed to place it somewhere. And Democrats need to take that narrative back.

How much have you seen, you know, when you ran for Congress in 2008, you know, in an Appalachian district performed very well, but at that point, the partisan slide in Appalachia had really set it and it was just too big of a hill to climb. And so I'm curious, you've had a front row seat to watching the partisan hardening of rural Appalachian voters into the Republican Party. And, you know, do you, like, are they just gone for good? What would be some of the direction you would take the Democratic Party in that would make it so that, hey, in the future, maybe you could run for that Appalachian congressional district and have a shot at it and not be just, you know, totally destroy down to the gates because you happen to have the D by your name? Look, you know, if a Palestinian Muslim can get elected in Appalachia, I think that there's a place for all of us at the table. But we have to, we have to think generationally here. There's got to be a long-term conversation. And the reality is it begins with building relationships.

We've got to go back and do deep canvassing, get back into these neighborhoods, and people need to believe that the Democratic brand is for them. And what I like to describe the folks is it's not a Democratic Party. We are a coalition of many factions. And our faction that believes that socioeconomics has a prominent place in this conversation, People deserve to be inspired by a vision for their future and the future of their children, and we just haven't given them that. We've been playing into the Republican narrative for too long. There's absolutely a play here in Appalachia, in these rural parts, but we've got to put the elbow grease into it.

So, Sam, you had the audacity to oppose genocide. I wouldn't think that that would be a controversial position, but apparently among some it is. how has that what is the response to your position there been well we've been through the gamut right from two years ago when when we were saying well I mean how could they be attacking these hospitals people would said oh Israel would never attack hospitals and now almost every hospital has been attacked every university has been obliterated there's a genocide that we are funding with our own tax dollars and I think people are frustrated and there's a threat and you're seeing it I'm sure on the right and the left, the people saying, why are our tax dollars going there?

And I think if you take a Republican and you ask them, you know, America first or Israel first, I think their heads will explode because they don't know exactly how to answer that many times. But if we can, you know, reclaim the narrative and say, look, this is one of the darkest moments in human history to watch a genocide play out piece by piece, when is never again really me and never again? And I will tell you that in my lifetime, nothing has brought the Jewish community closer together to the pro-Palestinian community than this genocide. It has been a silver line because on the front line of every single one of these protests have been one of my Jewish brothers and sisters saying, this does not define me. This does not make up who I am. What have you made of the, you know, the failures on the Democratic side?

You know, Democrats are supposed to be these humanitarian, supposed to believe in international law, supposed to believe in human rights. And I feel like belatedly now you start to see a little bit of a shift. But, you know, we've watched these, you know, under the Biden administration, we were funding these whores. You've had very few members of Congress who are willing to call it a genocide. And Abigail Spanberger, who's the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia, was critical of some of the comments that you made. Well, look, I have tried to clarify with folks that it's not Judaism, it's not our Jewish brothers and sisters. This is a political supremacist ideology called Zionism. And Zionism wants to destroy everything in its way to get what it wants. And we know that the APEC network, as well as a variety of other funders, are coming in and pushing this on us. And so when we can kind of, number one, even like, in defense of Judaism, that this is a political supremacist ideology that's been around over the past hundred years that has kind of taken over, saying this is really the enemy. It's not just Netanyahu's war, that we've got to push back against it. It begins to crystallize things for folks because they framed it as though it's Jews versus Muslims and forgetting that most of the Arabs in America are Christian, but it's not a religious war. It is wanting to steal land and eradicate a people as they, they try.

try to have this conquest. Right now, we are seeing that Gaza is the litmus test. If you're running for higher office, for U.S. Senate, for U.S. President, where were you during the darkest moment in modern history? Where are you on this Zionist propaganda and ideology that is wanting to control our politics? I'm glad we're having that conversation. Griffin and Mack, you guys got anything? Yeah, I mean, to your point earlier, it seems like it's a unique opportunity here. where you can make a right-wing case against continued support, funding, arming, giving diplomatic cover to Israel to the right, and you can also make it to the left, whether it's from the America first angle, or it's from a more humanitarian-centered angle. And also in terms of the foreign

influence peddling and organizations like APEC, it does seem like it's a unique opportunity to have a broad coalition on what I think many people used to think of as a super divisive issue amongst the voting base. So where do you think that this could go in a state like Virginia? Do you think there's an opportunity there across the state to build some sort of a cross coalition there at the upper levels? Or is it mostly just consolidated amongst the establishments of both parties right now? Well, there's clearly a thread. And we have seen a variety folks on the right who have taken advantage of the opportunity to kind of break the chains themselves. I wish that they would talk kindly about a variety of other issues that we care about. But more importantly for us is to

not just stand in solidarity with Palestinians. You know, as a Palestinian-American, what we want to show is that this is all interconnected. And we, if you are against the military industrial complex, if you are against war, if you are an environmentalist, if you believe that we shouldn't have paid for American bombs to drop over six times the number of the number of, the amount of bombs that we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima on this little Gaza Strip, then you can see that there's a thread here that's interconnected in the progressive movement where you have, you know, the Israeli military training American police officers, where you've got so much of this that's got to be broken.

If we're going to have a true progressive movement, if we're going to talk about lives mattering. And then we've got to make sure that we're coming together as not just a in solidarity with all these movements, but to realize it's all one movement as we move forward. And Representative Russell, another thing that we hear a lot is like, well, you should just, you know, Americans don't really care about foreign policy. We should just focus on bread and butter economic issues. What is your response to that? Because my experience has been that people actually connect these things quite a lot. First of all, they're just horrified morally to be involved in all at all in the slaughter that they see on their timelines and their news feeds every single day. And second of all,

they're like, wait a second, we have a lot of problems here at home. We, you know, we're about to see these subsidies expire for the ACA. People's premiums are going to skyrocket. Rural hospitals probably in areas like yours are going to be closing. And we're shipping all of this money routinely to the people who are bombing babies? Like, what is happening here? So you described as a litmus test issue. I've also seen it be much more important to the election of Donald Trump, to the success of Zoran Mamdani, to a lot of these Democratic primaries that are playing out. I've seen it be much more central to voters' calculations than perhaps the polls would really suggest, and certainly that the establishment thinks. $30 billion plus we have sent during this genocide. That really opens eyes right away. People are

saying, man, what would that pay for? You pay for a whole variety of things, not only completely ending homelessness in America, but doing things like being able to make sure we've got all of our kids, as I'm the chair of education here in Virginia, and we've got a bill that comes through every year that I hate not being able to fund, which is free meals for all kids, right, in school.

So we've got so many priorities, and here we are feeding into the military industrial complex. And when you tie it back in, look, I think it's very fair for people to ask the question, like, what's in it for me? Why does this matter to me? There are so many problems in this world. And in this case, when you've got our free speech being squashed by the Zionist movement, when you've got $30 billion plus that has gone to this genocide,

when you have this authoritarian regime that's working hand in hand with war criminals, like Netanyahu and some others, it clearly has an impact on us. And we can't divorce it. And so we've got to say, look, this is part of a broader movement, whether we're sending $20 billion to Argentina to a right-wing authoritarian down there. It's 40 now, by the way, the price tag went up. Even worse. 40 billion dollars. The reality is, is we've got our priorities that we've got to figure out here in Virginia, but certainly in the United States.

And that resonates, that resonates with folks. So we need to make that connection and we're happy to do it. And look, and as the only Democrat in the western half of the state and being a kind of super minority out here, I have to do that all day and talking with folks. And I think that that's our challenge and our charge as Democrats moving forward. I got a behind the scenes question for you to state rep. So, you know, we are technically in a tenuous ceasefire right now, very tenuous, you know, Israel is still struck Gaza recently, and we're not sure every day if this is going to hold.

Has that given some of the, I would say, more Zionist or people who don't want to talk about Palestine and Democratic Party, are they relieved? Are they like, finally, we can move on to other subjects? Because, you know, we've done a lot of reporting on groups like the Dem dark funded money group chorus. And a lot of the instructions within that were like, you know, just don't talk about Palestine. You know, it's just too divisive. It's not something that brings people together and unites people.

So let's just kind of avoid the subject. Are you hearing behind the scenes any sort of liberal relief that they can start to pretend like the issue doesn't exist anymore, that they can move on and talk about other stuff? What are you hearing behind the scenes? Yeah, I mean, what we see on the ground is I think people wanting to release the issue. But it was very, very clear right away. I was in a hair salon the other day and just talking with folks. And people were just talking about it.

I told you all that Trump was trying to make that into some kind of real estate development for Jared Kushner. You know, people, I think, saw right past this farce of a peace deal. And that's why you didn't see me and other Palestinians celebrating this at all because we know the reality that the West Bank is Gaza 2.0. They've already tons of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank have already been pushed out of their homes. We see that Americans are being locked up in Israel, even kids. American children are locked up in Israel right now. You know, what are we doing, allowing this craziness to continue? So people would like, I think, to move on in some respect.

And I know it's tough. I mean, watching genocide, watching the mass starvation. the intentional forced starvation from Israel. But if we allowed for this neoliberal movement over the past several decades to create space to justify a genocide, to create space to give us Donald Trump, then anything can happen.

None of us are safe. And we've got to make sure we keep bringing all of this to the forefront. That is such a great point. I do have one last question, which is about, health care in your area. I mean, you have the quote unquote big beautiful bill, you know, the massive cuts to, you know, to Medicaid. You've got the rural hospitals that are under threat.

You have the ACA subsidies, which are, you know, not at this point extended. You know, how does this mess impact the constituents of your district? And, you know, what are you hearing from people about the impact of our broken and wildly expensive and inefficient health? health care system. Well, having the fourth highest Medicaid utilization rate of all of the legislative districts, I have a district that is very much in need. And we have about 350,000 Virginians who are about to be kicked off of Medicaid because of this terrible bill. So it's going to have, and is already having profound impact because people are in anticipation, just frantic about what's happening right now. And so bread and butter coming back to, you know, how can we be defending democracy? This is what

happens when we lose touch. And this is, and I see the establishment of folks wanting to keep pointing at Trump. Yeah, look, I tell them, look, the fight is on two fronts, always. Number one, pushing back against the hateful policies from Trump and his cronies. But number two, we have to have a vibrant debate about how we got here in the first place. And not only how we got here, but like Groundhogs Day, we elected Trump, we had this, what we so-called reprieve, and now we're back with Trump. The reality is, is we just lost touch with way too many folks. And while the wind is at our backs right now with the terrible things that Trump is doing, we need to fix the kind of broken establishment as we move forward.

All right. Well, Representative Rusul, thank you so much for your time this morning. We're extremely grateful. People want to check out your campaigner support you. I know you're up for re-election here in just a couple weeks' time. Voters are actually already going to the polls. So where can people find more from you? Yeah, they can check us out on Sanfordva.com for sure. And hopefully we'll continue the conversation and think through how we can approach all these issues in an intersectional way. Yes, agreed. Great to see you. We'll include your links in our description of our video. Thank you, State Rep. Folks, that's going to do it for the first half of the show.

In the second half, we have a lot of fun stuff. I have an insane artificial intelligence ad from Andrew Cuomo. We have an Eric Adams endorsement. We've got more Curtis Sliwa. I'm also going to ask these cringe lefties, Crystal and Mac, about the Bernie Borders clip on Tim Dillon. We've got a lot of spicy stuff in the second half. If you want to see that, go to breakingpoints.com.

Sign up for a membership. We've got yearly and monthly. And we'll see you all in the second half. See you then. Bye-bye. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock Elite Gaming Tech at Lenovo.com.

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