Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/8/24: Tampa Mayor Dire Hurricane Warning, Lindsey Graham Downplays Helene, Kamala 60 Mins Word Salad, Trump Surge In Betting Market

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Saagar and Ryan discuss Tampa Mayor's dire warning to evacuate, Lindsey Graham downplays Helene damage, Kamala 60 Mins word salad, Trump surges in betting markets.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and we need to talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like,

that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jeff Perlman. And I'm Rick Jervis. We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down, and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.

Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHe 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, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. Extra amazing because Ryan is here. Bro show. People live for the pound. That's what it's all about. Let's go ahead and see what we've got on deck. We're going to start with Hurricane Milton and all of the updates around that. I actually looked at the data. Florida is one of the largest states in

terms of audience for our show. So for all of them down there, we are thinking about you and we're going to try and update you and the entire country about this imminent potential disaster. Huge portion of our audience may be in the car right now listening to this. Very possible. We wish you absolutely the best. We're going to try and keep you guys as up to date as possible. Obviously a storm that's going to devastate potentially Florida, but also potentially reshape a lot of our national conversation around that. But we're going to start with just the facts and then perhaps we'll get into some of the analysis. We're also going to talk about Kamala Harris. She appeared on 60

Minutes last night. There is a lot to say about that. I think we'll just leave it at that. There's quite a few clips and other things, her foibles, perhaps her strengths. As president, we're going to talk about the polls. We are going to look with Logan Phillips in one of our exclusive segments here. Some of it will be public available today, but a lot of it is going to be behind the paywall up until later. That's for our premium subscribers. That's an incentive for you to go ahead and sign up. We're going to talk about the State Department, where Ryan actually dropped a big story over at Dropsite with his colleagues, and then the State Department was pressed about that. Finally, we are going to talk about Hillary

Clinton in a recent interview on censorship. And then we have a great guest, Jefferson Morley, on JFK and some new revelations about Lee Harvey Oswald and some of the other shenanigans that he was potentially up to. I won't tease too much because Jefferson is just such an intelligent guy. He's been following this for almost his entire life. So much scholarship on the JFK assassination. He's got even more new revelations that add to the picture of what happened. So let's get ahead and start with Hurricane Milton. We're going to borrow here from Ryan Hall. Some of you may know him on YouTube. Never met him. We reached out to him, by the way, Ryan, if you're listening, we would love to host you. But he really has some of the

best weather analysis out there. And so we thought we would just borrow from him and play some clips so that you guys can see what he is looking at. And in terms of Hurricane Milton, its acceleration into a Category 5 hurricane. And now I believe it's the fourth or fifth most powerful hurricane in this region of the world ever seen by humanity. So let's go ahead and take a listen to Ryan. Major Hurricane Milton is a high-end category three hurricane with 125 mile per hour winds and the pressures down there around 945 millibars. This is astronomically stronger than what it was yesterday. And that intensification is going to continue today As soon as 2 a.m. early in the morning tomorrow, we could have a high-end Category 4 with 155 mile-per-hour winds right here just to the north of the Yucatan

Peninsula near Progreso, Mexico. I really hope that the people down here in Mexico are watching out for this one because this is taking a really strange approach. I don't know if this area has ever had to deal with a hurricane like this coming in at this angle and at this intensity. This is going to be a pretty bad situation for Mexico, especially if it takes a more southern track here because it's going to be at its peak intensity right here. The official forecast is, of course, for 155 mile per hour, a category four storm. However, I really do believe that this could very well be a category five, maybe even by the end of today, not even tomorrow. And then it could be a high end category five by the time it gets to this area, especially if it continues to strengthen in the unbelievable fashion that it has so far.

But from there, it is going to start slowly weakening. We do expect it to be down to 150 miles per hour as it goes a little bit farther to the east. Once it gets between the Yucatan Peninsula and Florida, as it's really starting to approach Florida, it's going to be down to 144 miles per hour. And then we expect it to make landfall or at least be just off the coast of Florida as a Category 3 major hurricane on Wednesday, sometime after 2 p.m. and before 8 p.m. There you go. So 8 p.m., that is really when, sorry, Wednesday, overnight up until the morning on Thursday. Unfortunately, by the time we do the show here on Thursday, we're going to have potential, some images for you. We'll know the extent at least of some of the limited and early amounts of damage. Let's go and put this next one up on the screen. This is from Noah Bergen. He is

a meteorologist down in Florida for Fox Orlando. Here's what he says. Quote, this is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you. The storm's small eye and intensity, 897 mbp pressure with 180 miles per hour max sustained winds and gusts of 200 miles per hour plus. This is now the fourth strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. The eye is tiny at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over the ocean water can produce. So let that one sink in about just how powerful a storm can get. As of last, or I guess what, 5 a.m. this morning, the update that he's given us is just that

they're continually looking at the storm, that there's been some mild weakening, but that is not going to stop the impact and the potential storm surges. Those surges look devastating, Ryan, and all of this has prompted massive evacuation. We have some pictures that we can show here. Let's go ahead and see some of that video. Yeah, you're looking there. This is evacuation in progress in Sarasota. This is a look at the northbound traffic on I-75 as residents began to make their escapes. A lot of reports coming out of Florida about sold-out hotel rooms, about gas lines, about horrible traffic. So really thinking about everybody there.

But this is a devastating storm, Ryan, and the storm surges, no joke, somewhere 8 to 10 feet in some areas. As I understand it, one of the things that makes it so unique is it's coming there onto that coast of Florida towards Tampa. Tampa has not had a major hurricane that's hit it in about 100 years. And so a lot of the residents, particularly because- Some damage from Helene even. Right. But there's been a lot of new residents that live in Tampa in particular who are not used to perhaps the hurricane warnings and evacuation and all that. So public officials are sounding the alarm as big as they can. They're like, if you are in an evacuation zone, you need to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

So hoping that our listeners who are in the Tampa area and any others, you know, please heed your local evacuation orders and all this because this looks bad. And what's remarkable about the Ryan Hall clips is that, you know, he's expecting it to come in at, you know, 130, 140. It's going to be a serious storm, but it all of a sudden, almost instantly, like people were saying they'd never seen anything happen that quickly. Yeah, the acceleration from storm to category five. Right, they were expecting that, okay, this is unfortunate for Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, and I hope everybody's safe over there. It'll be down to maybe 130, 140 as it creeps across over closer to Florida. And then Milton had other ideas. And instantly, wow, we're talking 175, 180. I saw some meteorologist saying that it was approaching the mathematical possibilities for our atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. Which is,

what a harrowing line. Like, what does that even mean? And what's beyond those possibilities? Like, this is it? And I think you're exactly right to highlight the fact that so many millions of people have flooded, no pun intended, Florida over the last couple of years

in search of this great weather and this cheaper housing as they've been driven out of other places, to then match that migration with this storm hitting these folks who aren't prepared for it. There's no, nobody in Florida has a basement. And a lot of these, these houses are slapped together. Well, they're very newly constructed. In Jamaica, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, these are cinder block houses weathered by hundreds of years of hurricanes where they can hunker down in that bunker.

That's not what you have throughout a lot of Florida. It's really devastating. Let's go to the next one. This kind of underscores what you're talking about. Only seven hurricanes have gone from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours. Milton is now actually the second fastest to ever do so. Let's go to A5 also, please, up on the screen. This is for anyone who is watching. These are the evacuation areas that you can see from Jacksonville, Fort Myers, Jupiter, Orlando, Tampa. They are also highlighting in green the cities where they are recommending that there will not be power outages. So a personal friend of mine is actually in Miami, lives in the Tampa

area, but they are in the northern, above Florida, above the Panhandle. They're recommending people go to Columbia, Charleston, Savannah, Macon, Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile, Panama City, Jackson, and New Orleans. So yeah, evacuating a hurricane just to have to go to New Orleans. Kind of ironic there. Let's go to the next one. This again just highlights the flooding. This is really devastating. I believe that this is from FEMA. And this shows just on the coast of what the expected storm surge will look like. So as I said, the Tampa Bay area is expecting some 8 to 12 feet of storm surge. I mean, it's 8 to 12 feet of water that will come in. And you know, if you've ever been to that city, just how much of it is there on the coast.

They're also looking at 5 to 10 feet in other areas and even a quote unquote small one of two to four feet in the less affected. But as I understand it, that is double of what Hurricane Helene brought. And already they had a lot of debris that was on the ground from Hurricane Helene. One of the major priorities of Florida authorities over the next 24 hours is actually to pick up as much debris as possible to forestall any flying around debris and projectiles that would break a lot of property in the area. But people there are really bracing. And what we actually want to highlight is an interview that the mayor of Tampa just gave last night where she said, I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever.

If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die. Let's take a listen. What would you say to people tonight who are saying, you know what, I'm going to ride this out. I've ridden others out. What would you say to people who aren't heeding those evacuation orders? Well, I can tell you right now that they may have done that in others. There's never been one like this. And this, Helene was a wake-up call. This is literally catastrophic. And I can say without any dramatization whatsoever, if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you're going to die.

You are going to die. So that's obviously pretty intense stuff there coming from the mayor of Tampa, Ryan. It's difficult for everybody to evacuate, but yeah, go ahead. Well, that's what I was going to say. The problem with this is that people think you can just wave a magic wand and you're like, oh, evacuation is happening. But like I said, especially lower income folks, we saw a lot of this during Katrina. People who don't have a lot of money. Gas, obviously, right now is a scarce commodity. As I understand it, traffic as well was a problem. A lot of these hotel rooms are sold out. Many people are going to have to get on the road for eight to 10 hours just to be able to make it to a metro area. I know it's heard some stories in my own personal life. Multiple, multiple flights canceled out of that area.

They're going to have to drive somewhere else just to try and be able to get on a flight. So they have somewhere to go. Thousands of dollars out-of-pocket costs, obviously, that they're incurring. Some people have four dogs or whatever. I just saw a story this morning. People who, they don't know what to do. They don't have any money, and they really feel helpless in this. So that is perhaps the most devastating part out of this.

People who feel, who are elderly, a lot of pensioners, people who live down there on a fixed income, and so having to flex in a disaster time like this is really scary. And you only have 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever to repair, it's just not a lot of time, it's not. A lot of those people have difficulty driving to the grocery store and back.

There you go, right. Driving like 15 hours with no place to go. That's the hard part, especially for people who can't afford the price gouging that's going on when it comes either to gas or if you can eventually find a place to stay. But I would say if you're in that zone, it is worth it. Like whatever the risks are that you have to take to evacuate, like take those risks rather than thinking, you know what, I can actually probably hunker down and get through this. And psychologically it's so difficult

because your home is your sanctuary. It's a place that feels safe. It's the place where you want to go to when you're in danger. And so to be told, no, actually you need to get out of there. There's a psychological barrier that you have to go to when you're in danger. And so to be told, no, actually, you need to get out of there, there's a psychological barrier that you have to climb over. But like that, and the mayor is trying to give you that push over the top.

If you stay in these flood evacuation zones, a higher zone that is an evacuation zone, you're very likely gonna die, but at least you're not gonna definitely die because of the flooding. But in the lower zones, it's going to be hell on earth. I was looking at photos of like Tampa Bay Hospital and others that are, you know, right on sea level, right by the ocean with an eight to 12 feet storm surge. It just looks absolutely devastating. And people in critical care there?

Yeah, that's right. People are in critical care. I mean, look, Florida, obviously, the authorities there, they seem to know what they're doing. They're trying their best with the evacuation order. The government actually seems like it's all in. Ron DeSantis, there was some, like, whatever, controversy where he allegedly declined a phone call from Kamala Harris. He's denying that. But he did say, look, the Biden administration has given me all the resources that I need. And so we'll watch this very closely. October is hurricane season. Obviously, in the US, we have a long history of hurricanes right before the election. There will be a lot of eyeballs on Florida as they have to rebuild, as we have to look at the disaster, perhaps supplementals. Congress may have to come back into town. But right now in the interim, just for everybody there, like I said, we have a large audience in Florida. Please stay safe.

Please heed local evacuation orders, especially with the devastation that this projection of what the storm is. Even if the storm does slow down, as I understand it, just making landfall a category four is still not a joke. And with the storm surge alone, that can cause a significant amount of devastation. So really thinking about everybody in Florida, like I said, for our audience, please heed the advice of your local evacuation authorities and orders. 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. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated,

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. podcasts. Let's go to the next part and just give some political insight. Insight, I think, also into what the American political establishment prefers to care about. Yeah, the depravity of our leaders, what their real priorities are. And I talked a little bit about this yesterday, but I just had to play it in the context of what we're looking at here. Here's Senator Lindsey Graham talking about how, yeah, the flooding in North and South Carolina, yeah, it was definitely bad, but we got to think about Israel right now. Let's take a listen.

You can thank Donald Trump and Elon Musk for that. God bless you. But look, you know, I've been going all over South Carolina, like most people hadn't slept much. But look what's going on in Israel. Our friends in Israel are surrounded by people that want to kill them, destroy them, a second Holocaust in the making. And Biden says be proportional. What is the proportional response to people who want to kill you and your family? They're running out of ammunition in Israel.

We have to help our friends to keep the war over there from coming here. I've been all over South Carolina, but can't you just think about Israel and our friends to keep the war over there from coming here. I've been all over South Carolina, but can't you just think about Israel and our friends in Israel? I mean, look, that is, that's everything for me. And look, there's been a lot of conversation that I've seen online and people are always attacked. They're like, oh, talking about FEMA resources, where they've gone in the past. But the one where I think people have America dead to rights is look at all this money that we freely, without Congress, without debate, we are willing to ship overseas to fund foreign conflicts. But there are now hundreds of people who are confirmed dead from Hurricane Helene alone. Let's put this up there. 227 people have now officially been confirmed dead from Hurricane Helene. And the,

quote, grim task of recovering bodies continues. Nobody knows what the final death toll from this hurricane will be. Perhaps even this hurricane will be eclipsed in terms of damage by Hurricane Milton, which we just talked about. But just consider that these entire communities destroyed. Something we talked about in a previous show here about Hurricane Helene is that the city of Asheville was one of the most booming cities in all of North Carolina. And we know that statistically 50% of small businesses never reopen after being destroyed by a hurricane. So that just sucks the soul out of what was a thriving tourist destination here on the East Coast. Actually, it had a lot of people who moved there from all across the country and then were devastated by the floods. And I

can't help but think also about Tampa as well. I mean, I personally know people who just moved to Tampa. A lot of people have. That entire area of Florida, one of the most economically dynamic in the U.S., not just pensioners, but a lot of younger people, families, like you talked about, want to be able to afford a home for three, 400 grand, something like that. And now all of a sudden, staring down the barrel of a similar situation. So when I just put those two things side by side, I'm just disgusted. I really am. I'm disgusted.

Did you notice that the control room tried to bail Lindsey Graham out a little bit there? Because he's talking about Israel while they have in the background all of the B-roll devastation from Hurricane Helene, and they very quickly get rid of that and give him just his normal background. So it's just standard Lindsey Graham talking about how Israel is running out of ammunition.

Come on, control room. You could have done the people a solid there and just left the people. Yeah, you should have. You're right. Leave that split screen up for people to really get the full grasp of what's going on. But I was just thinking about how in 2020 I was down at the Panhandle, driving through there, and Hurricane Michael had ripped through there two years earlier, 2018.

I remember that. The devastation was still everywhere two years later. Like, things boarded up, like, you know, debris on the side of homes. It looked like the storm had happened a month ago, but it had been two years. This stuff takes much longer to recover from, I think, than people realize. No, you're right. I had the opportunity at some point to be able to see some tsunami devastation

when I was in Asia, even years later after the tsunami. Look, it's Asia. It's different. But to your point, even years later, you're just like, wow, it's been multiple years since that happened, and there's still a lot of damage that's over here. And so when we're thinking here about storm surge and just coming some 15 days or whatever after Hurricane Helene, that really is just so devastating for people down there. And just highlights about let's see what the national conversation is like, you know, after this, where we were going to have American, already Americans are in need. These people have been devastated just in a way of having to evacuate. And now these victims of the hurricane in Hurricane Helena in North Carolina, potentially, you know, there's some three some million people or whatever who live in the Tampa metro area. That's a lot of people. It's a huge number. Massive.

I mean, and then when we consider the impact on their lives, those businesses, all the people that are down there, you know, I would hope that the U.S. government and others can actually focus its attention on our own citizens. But I'm not going to hold my breath. I'm definitely not going to hold my breath. I'm definitely not going to hold my breath. Not only because you would think in an election year, that's the time when you most want to pay attention to your own citizens and to highlight to others what the government's entire purpose is, if not for literally for disaster purposes. But instead, all attention is on funding as much war in the Middle East or in Ukraine as there is possible. It's like in Ukraine, whenever a Russian facility takes out an energy facility or whatever, oh, there's plenty of American dollars. I remember reading a story about how the United States is funding a small

yarn saleswoman in Ukraine to prop up civil society. And I'm like, oh, it would be nice maybe if you run a yarn store in Asheville, North Carolina. If you had a similar program that'll cut you a check, basically no questions asked, and perhaps now in Tampa. So yeah, I'm just genuinely disgusted by the attitude around this entire thing. 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 fat phobia 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. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, hell and gone, I've learned one thing.

No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on hell and gone murder line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is

Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's go to the next part. We'll talk about Kamala Harris and this interview that she gave on 60 Minutes. There is a lot to say here. I think we'll focus first on this. The answer about changing position, this is where it's funny because even— She's had a couple months to think this one through.

Right, even CNN, right, even CNN and Dana Bash in the most, like, tongue-bathing interview possible by a national news host, she asked in the most tepid way possible, like, well, you know, some people say— You used to say this. Your positions and, you know And how do you square that? And you would think, considering how awful that answer was, that you may change your tune. Well, turns out it hasn't changed all that much. And if anything, frankly, the answer has gotten worse. Let's take a listen. You were for Medicare for all. Now you're not. So many that people don't truly know what you believe or what you stand for. And I know you've heard that.

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people, geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can figure out compromise and understand it's not a bad thing, as long as you don't compromise your values to find common sense solutions.

And that has been my approach. That has been my approach. You basically said, well, I've traveled a lot. And look, I've even said this. Crystal just agrees with me. I'm curious what you think. I think at a certain point, you need to just own up and be like, look, I said a lot of things. It's clear the American people don't agree with me.

I want to be president. I'm a consensus builder. But a lot of this is all like clear the American people don't agree with me. I want to be president. I'm a consensus builder. But a lot of this is all like, oh, my values haven't changed. I'm about to be. You never come out and actually just say it. So I'm curious what you think, Ryan. The closest she ever got to that, I don't know if you saw this interview she did with Stephen Colbert, where he said. That was also last night, yeah.

Well, this was a couple years ago. Oh, okay. Like back in 2020 after she was named vice president. He had her on and she said, well, you're now vice president. You basically called this guy a segregationist a couple months ago. Yes, that's right. And she laughed and she said, that was a debate. Oh, that's right.

That's right. I remember that. And the premise, the unspoken premise of that answer is it was a game. I was point scoring. I was just trying to get ahead in a political contest. So that's what she has to try to get across to make your point without sounding like the most cynical person ever. But Tim Walls answered it the best when it was like, well, you used to be for assault weapons. Now you're against them. How did that happen? Well,

I sat with the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Which means another way of saying that is I had new information. I had new information. So I think she could get away with a version of that answer if she said, look, I was running as a Democratic candidate for the nomination in 2020. That was before I was president or vice president. And I've now seen the difficulty of governing. And so now I understand that some of that stuff, while it might be amazing and wonderful, we're just not going to be able to get it done. But I'd still love to see it in a world where it was possible. But then she stuck again because, well, that doesn't answer your immigration question. How'd you go from, because that is a world of possible. That's

executive orders. That's executive action. So yeah, I mean, she kind of, look, I'm a politician. I just want to be president. We all know this. Speaking of word salad, we saw this also on how are you going to avoid an all-out regional war? Let's take a listen. The events of the past few weeks have pushed us to the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war in the Middle East. What can the U.S. do at this point to stop this from spinning out of control? Well, let's start with October 7. 1,200 people were massacred. 250 hostages were taken, including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.

This war has to end. Okay. So what does that mean exactly? How are you going to, so remember the question, how are you going to avoid nuclear war? October 7th was really bad. Well, that wasn't the question that you were asked. You were asked about how you're going to prevent a nuclear war. And then eventually, oh, the war has to end. But when you say, and you lead with, but October 7th was so horrible, what are you saying? You're like, well, maybe I do support a little bit of a regional war. And there's an answer that we're going to get to in a little bit. It deserves its own block about who she thinks America's greatest adversary is, where maybe she does. Maybe she's just being authentic and honest. She's like, yeah,

I think a war with Iran is a good thing. She has this segment memorized very clearly. Like we have heard her say this line of precise words so many times in the month that she's been running. Like I can almost recite it at this point now. Let's start with October 7th, 1,200 people massacred, 250 people taken hostage, including Americans, brutally raped. It's always, quote, brutally raped. And Israel has a right to defend itself.

We would defend ourselves. I said it then, I'll say it again. And then she does her pivot where her advisors are like, you have to now give something to the side of the people who think that this is horrific. And so then she says, but how it does so matters. And then she adds, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And then finally, another non sequitur, this war has to end.

As if it's just going to end on its own or Netanyahu is going to just decide to end it at some point. What's going on here, I think, is that the reason that Israel has no day after plan is that they have never had to have one. They've always just pushed as far as they possibly can. And then the Americans tug the leash and say, OK, Biden picks up the phone, Reagan picks up the phone, whoever, and says, it's over. This is done. You cease fire. We're moving on. And so Israel's waiting for that to happen. And it's just not happening. So they're like, as long as you keep filling up our ammo dumps, we're going to keep unleashing them. And then just again on the, look, we'll just continue in this because I just think in every single one of these, it is so calibrated. And this isn't

about me. This is about the fact that there is a lot of reams of polling data that's still the number one hangup that people have about Kamala. They're like, yeah, I think you did better in the debate. But what do you really stand for? What are you going to do? Are you a shapeshifter? Are you a chameleon? There are actually a sizable part of the electorate believes that she is too liberal compared to Trump being, quote, too conservative. And on the issue of the border, that's perhaps no more where she is least, less out of step with the overall American public. So here she is now being pressed on a lot of immigration flip-flops by this administration. Let's take a listen. You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden's recent crackdown on asylum seekers. And that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings.

If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021? The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up. Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill. Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed. And he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. So he told his buddies in Congress, kill the bill, don't let it move forward. But I've been covering the border for years.

And so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration. Correct, correct. But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did? It's a long-standing problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place? I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem. Okay? But the numbers did quadruple under your watch. And the numbers today, because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. Should you have done that?

Should you have done that? We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half. But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem. See, I love that clip because anytime he talks about any executive action, it's a longstanding problem. Then anytime that there has been a reduction as a result of reverse of previous executive action, then you're taking credit for it. Well, which one is it? What is the causal link between all of that? And again, what I come through with a lot of that, and look, I care a lot about the border issue and

immigration, et cetera. So I am trying to take my hat off and look at this from the swing state voter, somebody who is looking at this issue and be like, hey, how are you thinking about this? I don't think there's a coherence to this. Now, everyone will be like, oh, but Trump, there's no coherence. Now, actually, though, if you look in the rambling and all that, there is a pretty consistent through line about what Donald Trump thinks about immigration. Other issues, I think you can fairly criticize. But on that, and that one people care a lot about, I don't see that in this at all. It's just a complete muddle. And actually, I think that's the through line of all three of these things that we just took a look at. It's like, what do you actually believe? What are you going to do? And in every single one,

it was a flub. And this one, she's just completely screwed by the trajectory of the Democratic Party over the last five years. There's probably been no issue on which they have swung this much. Yes, exactly. Because in the 2000s and 2010s, they were actually fairly tough on immigration. They torpedoed for political— Well, rhetorically they were. But they also torpedoed for political reasons a comprehensive bill because they wanted to make Republicans out to be the party of nativists. Obama was dubbed the deporter- chief by immigration groups. Obama had kids in cages in 2014, 2015, and 2016. This was not an open border humane immigration policy coming from Obama. Then Trump comes in with his nativist rhetoric and Stephen Miller and all these guys. So they, so Democrats then all of a sudden

put up signs in, you know, in every front yard across America that says, you know, immigrants are welcome and that, you know, this, that we're a nation of immigrants. And so they went from fairly moderate to pretty far to the left, historically speaking for Democrats. And then the second that Biden gets into office and you have Title 42 and you have the end of the kind of COVID era policies and you have a surge at the border, when that becomes a political problem, they swing way to the right. So you're asking any politician to defend that whiplash from center to left to right is going to be impossible when you have kind of executive action at your fingertips that not only can you take, but you did take. So if they had never swung to the right on immigration, she would have a much better answer for that question.

Right. We're consistently – we support – we're pro-immigrant. We believe that we are a nation of immigrants and that immigrants strengthen our country. Democrats decided they're not going to be that party. And when they abandon it, Democrats as a voting bloc, as a public, also abandon it. And so now support for immigrants is at like 20% or something. I don't know. I know this is a convenient leftist narrative, but I still think there's a reality issue. You have tens of millions more people who are here illegally under that administration. The reality people woke up and this whole like, it's not about the philosophy of immigrant. It's

like, well, what type to what system people want order. And the disorder of it is frankly, what changed the status quo far more than any change in position. And maybe we agree with this. I don't know. The real problem here was the end of the guest worker program. I don't agree with that.

But anyway, continue. You need, we don't have enough American workers, especially like to do all the rebuilding that's going to be necessary in Tennessee and North Carolina and Florida. In the 80s, we ended our guest worker programs. We had this idea that everyone in the world just wants to live here and that they don't actually want to live in Mexico or El Salvador or Nicaragua or wherever they're from. But in fact, their actual preference is if they could come here for four or five months, make enough money to send back to their family and then go home to their families and live where they're from.

That's actually their preference. A well-regulated guest worker program where people are protected, given labor protections, treated fairly, but able to come and go creates a much more rational system in a world where you have this much inequality between two different countries. When you build a wall and you say you can no longer go back home, then they send for their families. And then you get what we've got. But Ryan, presumptive in all of this is a very, very low wage.

And that's part of the issue. But look, we can't get into this debate because we got our election forecaster. You like housing prices to being affordable, right? Yes, I do. I also want people to be able to get paid who are American citizens. What's a good wage if you're in El Salvador? What?

I don't care about El Salvador. El Salvador's problems and wages are its own problems. And by the way, they fixed a lot of those problems by locking up every single one of their gang members. But that's a separate issue. Like I said, our election forecaster's here. Otherwise, we would go at it for the next 30 minutes. Logan Phillips, let's get him in here. Otherwise, we would go at it for the next 30 minutes. Logan Phillips, let's get him in here. 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.

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Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Very excited to be joined now by Logan Phillips, our partner here, race to the White House for election forecast. As a reminder, some of this will be behind the paywall up until later, so breakingpoints.com, you can take advantage with BP 2024 if you want that discount. But let's start with something that really caught our attention here, Logan, which is Polymarket, the largest betting place for the election, saw a significant swing in odds towards

Donald Trump yesterday. Let's put that up on the screen. Trump, as of yesterday, was leading some 8.6% in the odds. That was actually his biggest lead since Kamala Harris entered the race. I want to ask you to opine on betting, and we are not giving any financial advice here on the show. How does that comport with your forecast? Is that overly rosy? How do you look at it? Well, a few years ago, people were saying that maybe this is going to be the most predictive way to understand what's going to happen in elections because, you know, people are going to care a lot about where they put their money. Yes.

I think 2022 proved that's not necessarily the case. I think what it shows is what the people that choose to bet on politics will think about the election. Oh, I like that. Yes. And the problem is it's hard for us to say exactly who that's going to be. I think it tends to lean right, specifically college educated right, more establishment. So you're going to see way higher odds from Rod DeSantis than made sense back in the GOP primary. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Okay. And higher odds for Republicans. Now, has anybody polled that? Because that's an answerable question. Well, the problem here is these are all crypto. So it's like, I question. Well, the problem here is this is all crypto.

So it's like, I mean, listen, Polymark is not even legal technically in America. So, you know, you need a VPN. I'm not going to give any instructions. But just in terms of the way that it all gets done, it's not all that easy for the general public. But that's a really interesting point. Can you talk more about 2022? What were some of the observations you saw ahead of that? Yeah, so going into 2022, the odds that this might have something to it seems higher but if all the polls are missing to the left right that means anything that's missing to the right is going to be look

better than it might actually be as an indicator so in 2022 they have the narrative overrated republicans and they overrated them significantly more and so all of these race senate races um people thought they on their thought republicans were to win, that they didn't win. Right. And it just showed, yeah, this is an imperfect measure. That's a great, that's a fantastic point, especially with the more recency of political betting markets and this one and two. And we shouldn't forget, you know, it's a billion-dollar market or so. It sounds like a lot.

It's actually not that big if you think about the stock market or anything else with corrective forces. And everybody knows even those are not all that accurate. Let's go to the next one because that was on Pennsylvania. This was another one where I wanted your input. They're showing a 56-44 spread towards Donald Trump in the state of Pennsylvania. Some 12 points in the betting market. So just from a polling level, where does Pennsylvania actually stand right now? Oh, it's lightly favoring Harris. I would say about 60% chance in my model. Most are about the same. There definitely wasn't anything in the last week. I think in my model, the polls got a little better. I haven't added the New York Times ones yet. Better for Harris. No, they got a little

better for Trump. Post-debate thing faded. But we're talking to my model at least from like, oh, Harris had a 59, 60% chance to win now. It's 57. Wow. So that's a very small reduction. Yeah, it's very, very small. You just mentioned there the New York Times polls. They just came out this morning, and perhaps we'll delve into it a little bit more. But just to get your general analysis, I think what we have from them is likely voters. They show Kamala with 49%, Donald Trump at 46%. This is likely voters at the national level. Is that enough of a national popular vote lead to be able to win the election? Because you can win the popular vote, as we all know, and still lose the electoral college. Well, I was just reading Nate Cohen's results in my Uber over here this morning. And

he makes the argument, which I tend to agree with, that the polls suggest Harris is underperforming a bit in some of the blue states like New York. Perhaps he's underperforming in Florida as well. At least that's what their polls show, even though others don't. Yeah. And so she might have an electoral college advantage because she appears, as Democrats did, to be gaining in places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, at least relative to where the popular vote was. So, I mean, we saw that in 2022. If you had the popular vote tied, like as the Democrats doing slightly better, and you just look at the House vote, they would have won enough to easily win the Electoral College. I believe that would have even included North Carolina,

Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada. Now, it doesn't appear as strong this cycle as it did in 2022, but it looks notably better than it did in 2020 and a little bit better than 2016. Now, will that happen in reality? We don't know. But the two metrics we can look at, 2022 and the current polling, suggest that's the case at least. So let's talk about that. So you talked about Florida there. They show Trump up by some 13 points. That actually fits with something we really, really wanted to talk to you about, which is this bet that Nate Silver has made. Guys, let's put that up on the screen, please. That's C3. So Keith Reboy, he's a billionaire down in the state of Florida. He bet Nate Silver 100 grand that Trump, so Nate said,

how much money are you willing to bet on a Trump plus eight point spread in Florida? Keith says a hundred thousand dollars. Nate says, drop a contract and let's do it. So would you have taken that action? And keep in mind, this is before the New York Times poll that shows Trump up by 13 points. What do you think? Wise bet or not? Well, it's not a bet I would have taken. I think part of that might have to do with the fact that Race to the White House might be doing fairly well, but it's not doing as well as Nate Silver, so I don't know if I have the 100K laying around for this bet. Okay, let's say you had $10 million.

I had $10 million, so I love this question. Let's make this a thing. All right, $10 million, so what is that, 1% of your net worth, something like that? Oh, I would have made it at the time Nate Silver made it. Okay, all right. There we go. I still think it's most likely going to be under eight. This New York Times poll is a giant outlier. And to be fair, for most of this cycle, New York Times has been the outlier.

Now, I don't want to be beating the same drum too much because I've said this before on the show. They're an amazing pollster, but they also have been consistently missing to the right, so most likely then reality will miss to the right unless they're seeing something everyone else isn't. Let's editorially, let's just make sure, because people are like, wait, New York Times to the right? How does that work? We're not talking about editorial, like they have a balance. You're talking specifically about their polling. Just their polling this particular cycle. Their polling has missed. It's been too favorable to Republicans over the years. Just this year, and I'm not even sure if it's wrong, it just probably is because all the polls combined

are worth a lot more than New York Times, as great as the New York Times polling record is. So they're clearly seeing an electorate that's a lot more favorable to Trump. Their read on Florida is that the state has shifted since COVID, measurably, which is viable that people just decided to move there who wanted to escape regulations. In general, people have been moving. You know, there's immigration that can move a

state left, and there's also migration that can move a state left and right. And in Florida's case, the immigration from Cuba can also move it right as well, right? Totally. Good point. So we don't really know yet for Florida which one it's going to be. I think it's possible, pollsters, if this is actually happening, might underrate it because sort of the cheap shortcut for pollsters sometimes is to say, hey, let's find an electorate and ask them how they voted in 2020. And we're going to have the electorate look, be reflective of what happened in 2020. So if it was an R plus three state, we'll show it R plus three. Now off the cuff, I don't remember exactly how Florida voted to the decimal point or anything, but it definitely appeared in 2022 to move to the right. And so if that is a result of

a different voter base, then yeah, some of these pollsters might be underrating Trump there. Now, how do, so North Carolina and Florida are, well, North Carolina was devastated by a hurricane. Florida is about to be devastated by a hurricane. 20 years ago, when Republicans were the party of the upper middle class, the people who had their ducks in a row, had their IDs out, had been voting at the same polling location for decades because they'd owned their home for 30 years at this point. They were the ones that would benefit in an unstable environment. That's why today, like at the time, polls of likely voters benefited Democrats, whereas registered voters voted Democrats, likely voters benefited Republicans because they were more likely to go out to vote. From that, you saw all these like voter restriction ID, et cetera, et cetera.

Now that's flipped. You've got a lot of working class support for Republicans. They're more itinerant voters, less likely necessarily to show up in a difficult circumstance. Florida and North Carolina have extremely difficult circumstances when it comes to voting. So is that going to help Democrats who are now the party of the upper middle class, who kind of know where their ID is, know where their voting location is, etc.? I mean, it's completely unpredictable, but what would you guess if you had to at this point? class who know where their ID is, know where their voting location is, etc. It's completely unpredictable, but what would you guess if you had to at this point?

That's such a tough question. It's entirely possible. I would also say, though, that part of this is how the government responds. Now, North Carolina GOP, more so than most parties who are in control of the state, have been willing to play some electoral games to get advantages, like redrawing the maps. But they're going to do whatever they can to get their voters exactly what they need to be able to vote. So I think you'll see some marshaled effort by the state to ensure that doesn't happen, at least in more of the white working class areas. Though it might happen across the board. I don't want to accuse someone of something they haven't done yet, right?

So that might mitigate it to a degree. I think above all else though, it's gonna be more of a sentiment effect and we don't know how voters are gonna view the response by these politicians. On average, they're gonna be upset. And here's where I'm concerned to a degree, right? Because when political incentives get in the way of what needs to happen, that's where there's some danger.

I'm worried about the House not giving the funding needed to have a good response here because making the Biden-Harris administration look bad might be worth it for them. I'm not saying that's true for most Republicans, but given the way the House usually works is that they need the majority of the majority to agree, or you need the outright majority of House members to agree, and you only the outright majority of House members to agree. And you only have like six to spare, and there's way more than six who are willing to play those types of games.

That's a good point. But what you also want in that moment is a leader who can command the respect of the entire country, who can, you know. Yeah, that's right. Do we have that? I don't know. Here, let's move on to the Senate actually,

because on the state level, you're getting to something that's really important. As a reminder, this is going behind the paywall, guys. You'll be able to watch it later, but for our premium subscribers, they can continue watching. It's going to be good stuff. It is great stuff. Better subscribe. Thank you, Ryan. Let's go ahead and put your forecast. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7. Because our stories deserve to be heard.

Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's

lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jeff Perlman. And I'm Rick Jervis.

We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down, and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart Podcast.