Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/12/25: DHS Attacks Krystal, Shapiro Scolds Poor Young People, Bombshell Epstein Emails, Katie Wilson Wins In Seattle

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss DHS attacks Krystal, Shapiro tells young people to simply move if you're poor, bombshell Epstein emails implicate Trump, Katie Wilson shocking win in Seattle.   Katie Wilson: https://www.wilsonforseattle.com/    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.

I'm Eli Akani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to season two of family therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today,

and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So we have some really significant developments coming out of Chicago at this with regard to that ICE and CBP deployment. So according to the Chicago Tribune, we can put this up on the screen. Those immigration agents are supposed to be pulled relatively soon,

or at least most of them. So let me go ahead and read to you from this article. By the way, this reporter has done some really great on the ground reporting and has been following the court cases that have been going on in Chicago as well. So he is certainly worth a follow. So he writes, federal immigration agents, part of the Trump administration's Operation Midway Blitz may soon leave Chicago, according to multiple sources, who said the controversial mission was rapidly winding down after a contentious two months of enforcement raids

that have set the city and suburbs on edge. Commander Gregory Bovino, the top official on the ground leading the Trump administration's efforts, was expected to depart Chicago for another assignment within days, and most of the Border Patrol agents under this command would soon be redeployed elsewhere three sources told the Tribune Monday. An on-call task force composed of FBI and assistant U.S. attorneys is also expected to close up shop in the coming days. The sources said in a statement Monday, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which is overseeing the operation said every day DHS enforces the laws of this country, including in Chicago, we do not comment or telegraph future operations. They go on to indicate that some of the people who, the federal

agents that have been involved in this Operation Midway Blitz would be relocated now to Charlotte, North Carolina. So it's not like the, you know, insane and violent and reckless and lawless immigration actions are going to stop. Just looks like they're going to be relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina. DHS is pushing back on this reporting. We can put D3 up on the screen so people can take a look at what they're saying. This is Trisha McLaughlin. she says we aren't leaving Chicago since start of operation midway blitz in Chicago. Homicides are down 16% shootings down 35% robberies down 41% carjackings down 48% transit crime down 20%. A lot of people

pointing out online. I don't know if it got a community note or not that these numbers, first of all, included time period when they weren't even in Chicago and those numbers had been coming down anyway. But in any case, she's saying here we aren't leaving Chicago. Emily, I think likely the, you know, full force operation that we've seen with the insane, like, Black Hawk helicopter raids and, um, ICE and CBP agents, I mean, CBP agents literally shot a woman and then bragged about the number of holes they put in her body. We've had numerous traffic incidents. We've had tear gassing of, um, you know, near children getting ready for a Halloween parade, just a lot that has been going on that we've been seeing every single day. I think the height of that

will be diminished significantly. That doesn't mean that they're pulling every single federal agent, which is why I think, I mean, Trisha McLaughlin is that she'll just lie anyway, but I think that's probably what they're hanging their hat on to say like, oh, we're not really technically leaving. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, it's been a similar situation here in D.C. I don't know how much you've noticed this crystal, but the National Guard presence isn't totally gone, but it's diminished so significantly. And actually, I think, I don't know to what extent this will be a problem for the administration, but it feels like homicides, unfortunately, are starting to tick back up as well, just three, I think, over the weekend, and some really

brutal, awful crimes. So I don't know how they're going to start. They've sort of put themselves, I'm just thinking about this even from a PR perspective, but with places like Chicago and Washington, D.C., where they had this big surge, first of all, their own base is not happy with the pace of deportations. They say they're at roughly like two million self deportations, which is obviously part of the goal with the show of force that you're seeing in these cities, but also they think about 500,000 total deportations. And based on, you know, where the base thought those numbers were going to be, this is not even doing it for the like hardest core mass deportation people in Maga World who are getting annoyed, honestly, with Christy Nome's like social media

designed, content designed videos to kind of prove how tough the administration is being. So they've sort of set themselves up for a difficult situation, even as they go forward in some of those cities by their own measures, which is kind of an interesting part of it as well, Crystal. Yeah. And what I've been saying is in response to like the election results and the referendum really against this administration is unfortunately I think people will accept a lot of authoritarianism if their material needs are being met. So they may not like seeing, you know, children dear guests. But unfortunately, I think if you felt like, but I'm able to pay my rent or I'm able to buy a house or I'm able to afford health care or my wages are going up, you know, I guess I'm going to have to deal with that people are not looking like they didn't vote for you including your own base who are fully on board with mass deportation now they did not vote for you for some asmr deportation video they didn't vote for you just so that the dhs account could Nazi post every day right so you know even for the hardest core supporters this is starting to leave them

flat. And for the rest of America, it's very clear, they are completely appalled. They're appalled by your lack of focus on their lives. They're appalled by your sadism. They're appalled by the fact that you want to put absolute cruelty and horror on display every single day. And, you know, I know the idea is that this is going to lead to a bunch of self deportations. And guess what it has? And I would ask people, has that led your life to being any better? Because the sale of this immigration crackdown is that it's these people's fault that you're struggling. It's their fault that housing is too expensive. It's their fault that health care is too expensive.

It's their fault that the job market isn't what it should be. Well, guess what? Yeah, deportations are pretty high. The border is closed effectively. No more asylum cases coming in unless you're like a white South African, apparently. And then, you know, you have had success in getting people to quote unquote self-deport. So the plan is working. Is your life better?

Did that improve your life? And the answer is no. I mean, people say the economy sucks. And so the thing that you were blaming for all of the economic woes, scapegoating, this group of vulnerable people, turns out that wasn't really the problem. And voters are beginning to notice, you know, having these mass thugs in the street is actually creating more lawlessness and chaos and sense of unsafety than I was experiencing before. So, you know, I think it's a note.

worthy to me that, you know, I think the timing of the winding down of this operation probably has to do with two things, three things. Number one, the intense pushback in Chicago. Chicago residents have really been galvanized. And the political class there as well has been quite galvanized. Number two, the election results being so clearly against the Trump administration on every front. And then number three, it's getting really cold in Chicago. And they're probably like, you know what, we don't really want to be out here in the streets anymore. This is, this, you know, violent sadism is no longer as fun as it was earlier. We've got a clip here of J.B. Pritzker, the governor of the state talking about this reporting. This is D2. Let's go ahead and listen to that.

The question was about Greg Bovino and CBP possibly leaving Chicago. I read the same thing. You know they don't communicate directly with us and never have. All I can say is, is that, you know, whether it was the loss in the elections a week ago that's led to Donald Trump deciding to pull CBP out or the fact that Greg Bovino is a snowflake on a day when you can see some snowflakes, whatever it is, the people of Chicago have deserved better than having CBP and Greg Bovino in this city. But I would not say that we're now going to be free of these terrorized neighborhoods because ICE and CBP probably will still be here, though they will have fewer people and we'll have to continue to protect our neighbors and our friends

at the same time, DHS really keeping their eye on the ball and focus on the important things, such as quote tweeting me online, we put D5 up on the screen. So I tweeted out this video of, and we'll show you the video in a moment. So you can judge for yourself what is going on here, but a video, which appears to show ICE or CBP, some federal immigration agent shooting tear gas into a car that is just driving by. And in the aftermath of that, there was a one-year-old in the car who gets hit with this tear gas. The family later said they had to take her to the hospital. They were worried about her airwaves closing up because, of course, little children are very vulnerable to these sorts of chemical weapons. effectively. And so I said, they dumped pepper spray on a one-year-old baby. Demons, actual demons.

I stand by that. And then Homeland Security quotes me and says, DHS law enforcement does not pepper spray children. Here are the facts. During an operation, rioters began throwing objects at agents and blocking the road. This did not occur in a Sam's Club parking lot. Border Patrol deployed crowd control managers, that means pepper spray, and safely cleared the area. So they're claiming that the they did not in fact pepper spray a one year old and that the whole presentation of this video is not correct so let's go ahead and put the video up you guys can judge for yourself of what happened here this is the aftermath this is the little baby who is um being comforted by her mother and clearly uh distressed here after this event um and so here is the

incident so they're just driving and you can see they have a window open and uh whoever this is ICE or CBP just dumps pepper spray into their window. Now, these are not, these are lawful residents. They were not protesting. They're citizens, actually, according to their report their citizens. Exactly. And let's put the next piece up on the screen. There was a news report about this incident and spoke to this family. And the family basically said, we were going shopping at Sam's Club and saw that there was some sort of something going on here. So we went to turn the car around and as we're trying to drive away, that's when they, um, you know, dumped this pepper spray into their vehicle. And you know, everyone in the vehicle,

including the one year old baby is affected. Um, this comes after to Emily. There have been court orders saying you cannot use pepper spray in this insane way that you've been using. Like, you should be using it incredibly rarely. You have to issue multiple warnings before you deploy it and you are not allowed to just be using these aggressive riot control tactics whenever you feel like it. So when I talk about them being lawless, this is a perfect example of that where, you know, there was no warning to this family. This family did literally nothing wrong. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were trying to, you know, leave the scene and like, okay, you guys are doing whatever you're doing. We're getting out of here.

And that's when they're hit with this pepper spray according to what they told local press. You know, just unbelievable stuff. So reading from this local report, this is a local PBS affiliate, there's a sentence in here where it says it is unclear how a family driving the opposite direction is the convoy. Vehicles driven by federal agents on a major thoroughfare could pose an immediate threat to agents to merit the use of crowd control weapons. And I think that rings pretty true. That is clearly, I mean, the little girl has clearly been pepper sprayed.

That's the typical reaction to pepper spray. awful to see it on at one-year-old. But your point about the lawlessness, Crystal, listen, I think this is an important one. I'm saying that as somebody who actually believes that you have to do something about this, everyone defines, like, quote, mass deportations differently. I do think that there should be significant deportations. I don't know what mass deportations really means.

I don't think the administration or anybody who's promising to do mass deportations really knows what that number means as they constantly are trying to redefine what it means. But when you do it lawlessly, first of all, you completely lose support for the overall project. And it's wrong. It's just, it's wrong. It's plainly wrong. It's not American. And it's a real problem when you're trying to do things so, so quickly that you have, like, very little control over or concern for the way that it's being played out on a local level.

So, I mean, of course, there are going to be people who protest these deportations that put themselves in others in dangerous situations, but that's obviously not what we're looking at in this case. There are some cases where you can look at that and say, you know, this is, there's a legitimate question as to who was being unsafe in the presence of law enforcement. This is not one of those situations whatsoever. They didn't check to see who was in the car. they saw what looked like a Hispanic male and dump pepper spray into the car. He's a citizen. That's exactly right. He's a citizen. And he's a family with a little girl in the car. And they don't even, they're driving by so quickly they wouldn't have even known. Yeah, that's, that is exactly right. And, you know, the other thing that's interesting, first of all, DHS just lies. They just lie routinely like it's nothing. We can all literally watch the video. It's attached to my tweet and see that what you're saying is not true. Like, we see it. Or what's happening. is that they're getting lies from local people who are implicated and could potentially be legally implicated and then they repeat them and which is not okay either way but that's what like I just it's it's but like they could also watch the video you know it's right there you can watch the video

judge for yourself maybe decide whether this is the hill you want to die on um but the other thing that's interesting to me is that they even want or feel the need to push back which in the past they didn't you know I mean it's a new thing I see not just with me but with other people posting things online, they're quote tweeting and putting out their narrative about the story, et cetera. And so, you know, to me it is an indication that they realize that this

is, you know, people aren't just going, oh, that's so base that you tear gas to one year old, base, base, base. They're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Right. And feel at least some level of, oh, we better come up with some kind of a justification here for what looks to be a horrible act. That little girl's an American.

She's an American. According to the reports, she's an American. There you go. Wasn't doing anything wrong. We're just in a car. All I know is what I've been told, and that to have truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

I'm telling you, we know Quincy. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her. Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.

They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County. A show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You know the shade is always shady. It's right here.

Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Jazele Brian and Robin Dixon. is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us

each and every Monday. I was going through a walk in my neighborhood. Out of the blue, I see this huge sign next to somebody's house. The sign says, my neighbor is a Karen. Oh, what?

No way! I died laughing. I'm like, I have to know... You are lying. Humongous, y'all. They had some time on their hands. Listen to reasonably shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Jenna World. Jenna Jamison, Vivid Video, and the Valley. is a new podcast about the history of the adult film industry. I'm Molly Lambert, host of Heidi World the Heidi Fly Story, and I'll be your tour guide on a wild ride through adult films. We get paid more than the men.

We call the shots. In what way is that degrading? That's us taking hold of our life. In the 1990s, actress Jenna Jameson crossed over into mainstream culture, redefined stardom, then left it all behind. I'm a powerful woman. I think that's intimidating to a man. With a cast of hundreds of actors and comedians playing key figures,

we'll take a look at how adult films became legal in the 70s, hugely profitable in the 80s and 90s, and fell off a financial cliff in the 2000s. Listen to Jenna World on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Crystal, let's move on to the affordability question. and Ben Shapiro was on with friends of the show, Triggernometry. I think I can say that, right?

We have that relationship. Yeah, they're definitely going to watch this, by the way. Well, it is important, of course, to watch before you react, as they reminded us. When was that a couple of months ago? I don't know because I didn't watch, though. That's great. Have you even been to the Triggernometry Studio? All right.

You've never been. All right. Ben Shapiro was on Triggerometry and weighed in on the affordability question in a way that we thought might make for a fun little conversation here about what actually can be done, nuts and bolts, meat potatoes to make the country more affordable for everyone. Crystal and I will probably disagree in different directions on this, but I think we may have more agreement than we realize. Let's go ahead and roll this clip of Shapiro talking about affordability. Affordability is not like beetle juice, where if you just say it over and over suddenly arrives, you actually have to pursue policies that are likely to alleviate an affordability

problem. But if your solution is always, give me more power, and it does seem like that is the solution of the day from both sides, actually, then you're likely to just continue penduluming one side to the other. Because people don't want to learn the actual lesson, which is if you actually want affordability, then either you have to change policies or change locations. Those are really the only two things. And also, I think more broadly, it's not about affordability. We have trained an entire generation of people to believe that if their lives are not what they want them to be, it's the fault of systems, as opposed to decisions that are in their own control. I mean, I was looking around at property prices, real estate prices in New York. I'm doing pretty well for myself.

I feel kind of poor looking at those. Oh, no, it's not, and I'm not saying it's not affordable. It absolutely is unaffordable. If you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here. I mean, that is a real thing. I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up. But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity. And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.

Okay, so I absolutely hate that last part of the argument. That's probably not as a surprise day. Okay, all right, good, because I was a little worried. No, I mean, that's actually one of the arguments that I think is, the least conservative and the most detestable argument to hear from conservatives because one of the reasons I think places, New York City is not the best example of it. D.C. is a pretty good example of it, a very transitory city, but also in San Francisco, places like that, one of the reasons that we see so much malaise in those cities is that the

people who grew up and have family there can't afford it and move away. And you have people who are sort of in and out for five years, 10 years, don't really care that much. in the way that you care about the place that you grew up because you're part of the social fabric. You know people who know people on city council. You got a church with people or you're in the PTA with people or that person was your teacher. Crystal, you know this because you live this.

This is like, it does make a difference. No matter what you say, it makes an absolutely significant difference. It makes better communities. And communities is an important part of what lifts people into a sort of satisfying and fulfilling life. maybe you can actually just speak to that moment because again you do live that yeah i mean i'm a person who values very much place and values very much i live and i'm raising my kids in the very same town that i grew up in you know my kids are in class with the kids of people that i

graduated high school with like and went to preschool with yeah i mean literally and um you know i moved one to be here in particular because my parents are are getting older just celebrated dad's 90th birthday so i wanted to be close to them and i wanted my kids to be able to be close to them But I love the feeling of, you know, having that connectivity to this specific place. It is, it's hard to describe the feeling, but it is a very rooted feeling. And that loss of community in our country, which has been tracked, you know, all the way going back to bowling alone, which is this seminal sociological study of the way that we're all sort of like coming apart. And all of that accelerated, of course, by social media and smartphones. I think it is an affirmative value that we should aspire to that if people want to be able to live and raise kids in the places that they're from, that, you know, that's something we should value as society. And there's nowhere. I mean, on the one hand, rural areas have been decimated because of the free trade regime. So, you know, a lot of places don't have opportunities. So people feel they have to move then to a New York city because Ben Shapiro says that, well, you go where the opportunity is. Well, where.

do you think the freaking opportunity is it's places like new york city but then you get there and you're living in a shoebox and you can't afford to make it so it's like damned if you do damned if you don't um this is a i i think liberals have had a blind spot for the you know the that importance of place and that being an affirmative value and then um the the economic uh elites over the past 40 years you know their view has always been as they're destroying jobs in these various places like basically big deal creative destruction i guess you just need to move away so they of course you know haven't had any um any appreciation for the importance of community or you know they also i think find it easier to like control and um make you and you know make it so your whole life is your job

if you are uprooted from a place in a community that has meaning for you so it serves them on that end as well yeah you know uh Ryan and i were texting on Friday and i was looking for a movie to watch and I asked him, you know, should I watch Bowling for Columbine and Roger or Roger Me? Because I'm just going through, I'm working through my list, and Ryan's like, you've got to watch Roger Me. I've never seen it before. And, you know, I'm from the Upper Midwest outside of Milwaukee and watching that movie. It's like of a really emotional experience because you look at what happened to Flint. You look at the way the people who were in the auto industry were treated. it didn't make for, they weren't able to just, like, find jobs.

A lot of them, you watch it. They're leaving Flint. They're leaving and going to other places. And what you take with you when you do that is this, like, real love for your community. And it makes worse businesses. It makes, like, small businesses in a local community operate differently than massive global companies, which bring with them all of the problems, by the way, that conservatives hate about global governing organizations. Whether it's like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations, there's just something that is completely detached and different and it's much easier to do mass layoffs and conservatives will say, okay, well, that means it's much easier for you to be more efficient. But efficiency isn't the end of the economy. Nobody just believes the economy should exist only for the sake of efficiency. And I say nobody, but some people, of course, do. They're just a minority. You know, hardcore libertarians basically are the ones who will tell you that. So I wanted to, uh,

put this chart on the screen because one of the things Ben talked about was how both sides are basically trying to consolidate power. And that has created a less affordable America. And this chart is from AEI. It gets updated like every six months. This is the 2022 version of it. From the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry, who's an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. It's a little bit of an inkblot test. You can kind of look into it. You can read into it a lot of different things. Stoller and I were going back and forth about how you can read antitrust into this chart, but what you see is you look at overall inflation and then you can see certain things that have gotten more expensive since 2000 and certain things that have gotten less

expensive, so more affordable versus more expensive since 2000. And everybody knows this in their hearts. Like you just, this chart hits you like a ton of bricks when you see college tuition just going up so high and then TVs going down so low. 97.7% drop in the affordability of TVs, nursery school, child care going up, medical care services going up, college tuition, food and beverages going up. And then you see computers, software, toys, TVs, clothing, new cars, roughly going down, a little blip around the COVID time period. And I think the reason that I think Ben, in a sense, is correct. This chart points to it from my perspective is that I really do worry about subsidies in the like Mom Donnie era New York City making things in the long term less affordable.

This is a huge part of the debate we're having right now about the Affordable Care Act subsidies and Obamacare. Subsidies really can create oligopolis. They actually do have that effect. I think it's been pretty clear with college tuition that subsidies have created little incentive for these colleges to compete with one another on tuition price. And so I do think that should be part of the conversation. I don't know, Crystal, how you feel about it. But the question for me as a conservative is like, well, if the status quo is also miserable, which is the case with health insurance, then you can't just ask people to wait until there's

some type of like comprehensive conservative market-based solution in, you know, six months or six years. People don't deserve to have their premiums spiked because the system is failing. And just like shoulder that on the promise that someday, you'll do, like, a reform to the subsidies. Like, I don't think the subsidies are a great option right here. I don't think just subsidizing housing, freezing rent. I don't think those are good long-term options. And so I think, you know, that's a blind spot in some ways, I think, for the progressive left.

Although Mamdani is kind of interesting because he engages in the abundance conversation in an interesting way. But neither you or I are like full abundance people. Well, I'm a yes. I'm yes and on abundance. There we go. There we go. Right. Right. You got to do the amount, but you also have to, and their focus on like you actually need to deliver, agree. But their lack of focus on you're going to have to confront capital is where that analysis falls short. Right. I think you're right about subsidies. And to me, though, I don't see that as progressive left. I see that as neoliberal. Perfect. You know, that's a we're going to do a tax credit and we're going to give you, you know, we're going to, okay, Obama care. Obama care. We're going to subsidize it, right? And look, better than nothing, right? It's a Band-Aid, though. It's absolutely a band-aid.

And if you're going to wait for your like conservative market-based solution, you're going to get things like a 50-year mortgage. We have left to the market the instead of having our own values and priorities in the way that, for example, China has, we have said we are going to outsource our thinking and our values to the market. And all the market does is says, great, we're going to figure out how we can bilk you for all of the money that we possibly can and consolidate power. wealth among a very few people. And that's how you end up broadly with the system where the core building blocks of the middle class life, housing, health care, and education are wildly unaffordable because we can't as a country say, you know what, put them like the profitability aside. These are things that are just basic goods and values that everyone should have access to. And we're going to do what we need to do to make sure that that is the case. So, you know,

Your comment about subsidies is absolutely I don't disagree with that at all. Where I would disagree is, so for example, with college education, Zoran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders wouldn't be saying that's why we need to have a better student loan program. They'd say that's why we need free college education, free, you know, public colleges that are free and available to everyone on housing. They wouldn't say, you know, that's why you need an extra tax credit for affordability. I mean, they may be on board with those sorts of things, but they would say we need more direct. government building of social housing so that we can surge affordable housing into the market and don't have to wait for some developer to decide that it's in their best financial interest to do it. And by the way, when they do, they're going to build luxury high-end condos, not starter homes for young families. And on health care, obviously, they're not looking. Like, yes, they'll support subsidies in the short term just so people don't, 15 million people don't lose their health care or whatever the number is. That's not. their long-term solution though what they would say is medicare for all we have to tackle putting

profit at the center of our health care system instead of health and care um so you know to me what you're pointing to is the failures of a neoliberal democratic party that doesn't want to confront capital wants to deal with some problems and sees the you know sees the pain and is empathetic wants to deal with the problems but doesn't want to confront capital and that's where all of these weird subsidies and tax credits. And, you know, if you're this kind of business owner in this kind of town, weird, bizarre, piecemeal, non-universal programs ultimately come in. Yeah. And I think probably where you and I have, and Sager and I and Ryan, and you have, like, more fundamental disagreements is on, like, I still have a really hard time with Medicare for

all and, like, seeing that, that, or feeling comfortable with, like, the level of quality. that a program like that would look like. The same thing with, you know, I mean, all kinds of things at public colleges, that sort of thing. But my position on Medicare for all for the last several years has been, will it be more miserable than the already miserable system that we're in? And I don't know that the answer to that is no, because this system sucks.

It sucks. And it is great for people who continue to profit off of it. And that does go in both directions. I mean, the biggest enemies of capitalism. And this was a common sentiment in the Gilded Age, by the way. The biggest enemies of capitalism are the capitalists. And that's how you end up with people reflexively going towards subsidy regimes because they're band-aids. And it's understandable that people are looking for band-aids when they're bleeding out.

And so actually the capitalists continuing to prioritize themselves over, and let's bring this full circle, the public, their communities, Michigan's such a good example of this, such a good example. Oh, yeah. You, mother effing capitalist, why do you think you got Trump? You didn't want Trump. Why do you think people voted for Trump? Well, it's because of what you did to Michigan. It's because of what you did to Wisconsin.

It's because of what you did to Pennsylvania. Do you think the country is healthier because of any of this? Because you push people to the brink of desperation that they voted the host of celebrity apprentice into the presidency? No, and it's not. And there's been zero self-reflection about how their policies, whether they were subsidy band-aids or whether they were bailouts for the auto industry, whether they were complete, you know, just treating people like widgets and abandoning communities that had

lifted them, lifted their profits, and supported them and been a part of their team and taken pride in working for Milwaukee and thinking about like MasterLock, but if you're in Michigan, GM, those types of things. It's just me, it just like I'm talking. talking about it, I'm almost crying. It's just so horrible. And there's no reflection on it whatsoever from the capitalists themselves. And again, that was a common sentiment in the gilded age was that the capitalists were the enemies of capitalism. But nobody wants to, even after Donald Trump gets elected, and Bernie Sanders almost gets elected, nobody wants to talk about that. Well, let me say that what was done to Michigan, what has been done to small towns and small

cities, the hollowing out across the country, the deindustrialization is going to look like child's play compared to what they're planning with AI. Now, maybe AI is just a big hype in a bubble and it pops and there's, you know, massive economic fallout and chaos, which is a horrible outcome, but doesn't end up with all human labor being replaced. But, you know, those are basically the two directions. But their goal is to make everyone irrelevant. That is, you know, we talk about like late stage capitalism, like that is actually their end state that they're trying to achieve because the whole history of labor and capital is that capital basically hates labor, wants to pay them as little as possible, work them as much as possible, like not that let them

have maternity leave or paternity leave or sick leave or whatever. It's this adversarial relationship. And they would love nothing more than to make it so they don't have to deal with us at all. And the level of power and wealth that would flow to them in that scenario is just, I mean, it's beyond anything that we have even come close to seeing before in human history. That's what they're aiming for. I mean, that is the goal. And that's the market-based solution. And, you know, I think a few of them realize, like, if we're going to pull this off,

we're going to have to give them like a universal basic income or throw them some crumbs or something. Yep. Um, but, you know, let's let's be clear about what they actually want. And, you know, I've been thinking of this. We don't have to open this whole can of worms, but I'll just put this idea out there. We can flesh it out more because I'm still flushing it out myself. But capital is very happy with Trump. Like they're, you know, Wall Street CEOs are hanging out with him at the White House. They figure out if I just bring him his gold bar in the White House, I can get whatever I want. I got my tax cut. You know, he's I can, the tariffs are now.

Now, you know, being rolled back in any way I was able to get my car out. So it wasn't that big of a problem for me whatsoever. And the big thing that they're getting these tech giants in particular is off to the races on AI. They think they're going to get whether this is, I mean, I think this is reality. They think they'll get government bailouts to backstop their losses. They think that government is going to affect it, like actively help them with their compute build out and allow them to achieve the grand dream and vision, which is. to get rid of all of our, like, the need for any of our labor. Like, that's the actual goal.

Exactly. And so when you hear Shapiro talking about, like, you know, his market, like, classic conservative market-driven solutions, that is the future that the market has in mind for us. That's the goal is to pay us zero, employ us zero amount. Like, that is the driving push. So just be aware. That's like, that's what he would advocate for.

That's what he would say is fine and good and acceptable. And, you know, we can get whatever, you know, with our pitchforks, we can sort of extract from the, the trillionaires that run the show. You know, it kind of makes, so what I was going to say with regard to the connection with immigration is, you know, in the past, the anti-immigration position was anathema to business because they do abuse and exploit undocumented workers. There's no doubt about it. They love the cheap labor force.

And they've kind of come to terms with it in Trump's second term because what's even better than cheap labor is no labor at all, not having to pay human beings at all. So it's part of why I feel like, you know, the focus on immigration misses the point at this point. Like there is a great replacement theory playing out. It's these tech oligarchs who literally are telling you they want to replace you with a robot. that is the that's the big battle that's going on right now and um you know i i hope and we've been covering closely on the show i hope there is a cross ideological coalition that is able to come

together to push back forcefully on that view because it is genuinely existential i mean it's it's easy to be uh black pulled on the right because during the kind of peak woke era is when you saw people uh in the republican party saying we're done with the chamber of commerce and we're creating our own chamber of commerce. You know, these capitalists are, you know, Marco Rubio gave this entire speech at Catholic University. There's a wonderful piece of theology and politics, where he's talking about the ends of markets are not efficiency. The ends are families and community. Like, that is why markets don't exist for the sake of efficiency. They exist because we create them via our democracy in order to have strong, prosperous families, like,

flourish and communities that can flourish and people that can flourish. And that's like obviously true, but that is not what the tech giants believe. And the tech giants, some of them might have these like sincere libertarian positions that I think are insane. But they may like genuinely believe that UBI is, you know, the peak version of humanity. But it's not a conservative belief. It might be a libertarian belief. It's definitely not a conservative belief. And that's what, I think you're so right, Kroesel, like, that's where this is all heading,

is the UBI Band-Aid is going to be applied in ways that's like, all right, sorry, humans, you guys can't do this as well as our LLMs and our LLMs inside our robots. So just be content with this, you know, $2,000 a month or whatever it is and, you know, get in your autonomous vehicle and that's where it's going. And it's exactly what we were talking about, which is, when you don't actually want to do the hard work of having a well-regulated market. Very hard work to do because you're swamped by lobbyists all of the time to create a market that is in their direction, one way or the other.

Substance can be a tool towards that, but also so can deregulation. So that's much harder work to have a fair market and a place where people actually can, you know, create small businesses or they can have meaningful lives and thrive. through the digging need of work, nope, we're just going to get UBI. It's easy? Yeah, UBI and no Epstein files, Emily. That's the name of your next book. We do a breaking Epstein news to get to.

So let's go ahead and move on to that story. Congressman Rokana is going to join us in just a bit. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a how. have truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.

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

From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Ibel Angoria.

And I'm Maite Gomez-Rajuan. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these Oster Khan,

to vote politicians in exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way. Bring back the Ostercon. And because we've got a very mi-casa is-sou-casa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. No, the America. The Gulf of Mexico, continue to be forever and ever. It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform, they had labor rights, they had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the

My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism.

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're, You're, like, super charming all the time. Being more able to look to people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We have breaking news for everyone this morning. The House Oversight Committee's Democrats released several emails from Jeffrey Epstein, Gulen Maxwell, and author Michael Wolf, that also.

offer more insight into Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We can go through some of these emails. We're going to put them up on the screen. My goodness. So first of all, 2011, you have Jeffrey Epstein emailing Gieland Maxwell saying, I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump, redacted victim's name, spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned, police chief, etc. I'm 75% there. Maxwell responded again. This is 2011, April of 2011. I have been thinking about that. Dot, dot, dot. Another set of emails here. Fast forward to 2015. This is Jeffrey Epstein, December of 2015. CNN is hosting a primary debate for Republicans as Donald Trump is

completely rocketing up in the polls. I hear CNN, Epstein, Michael Wolf writes to Epstein, I hear CNN is playing to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in scrum afterwards. I want to just pause there, by the way, for a moment. This is Michael Wolf, pulling a little bit of what, Adana Brazil, like tipping off Jeffrey Epstein to something in the gossip, in the milieu surrounding Michael Wolf about a question in a presidential debate. Epstein replies, if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be? So basically, Wolf and Epstein are trying to preemptively give Donald Trump a little something to work with that might be beneficial to them in the long run.

Here is Wolf who styles himself as a journalist who is critical of Donald Trump and is something of a, Crystal, do you have any, like, do you have any thoughts on this wolf part of it all? Because it's making me so mad that I can't even really speak to see these emails. It's not surprising in any way whatsoever, but to see how involved he was. And then to watch him try to claim the moral high ground as like, an Instagram, TikTok celebrity is deeply, deeply irritating. Well, I think you see a window into his methods in particular where, I mean, this is part of how he in the first Trump White House apparently was a fixture, like, just hanging out there

all the time. And clearly, he gives people the sense of like, I'm on your side. I'm giving you advice. Like, we're in this thing together. And then that's how he ingratiates himself to wealthy, powerful, or in the case of, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, wealthy, powerful. and notorious people and is able to write about it. And Michael Wolf has been, you know, out there talking about, hey, I've seen pictures

of Donald Trump with girls of uncertain age. I've, you know, here's what Epstein told me about Trump. He also claimed that Epstein had a lot of insider knowledge into Trump's first administration, so still had a lot of connectivity there. In any case, with regard to this, you know, this question about, oh, he might get asked a debate question about this. CNN did not ask him about Epstein at that debate. probably would have been a good question to ask him, but that didn't get asked at that debate

or in the scrum. And then do you have the other email, Emily, where they're talking about Trump spending hours with one of the victims? Yes. So this is from 2019. And this is from Jeffrey Epstein to Michael Wolfe. So it says, victim name redacted, Mar-a-Lago, redacted. Trump said he asked me to resign. Never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls. He asked, Gilane to stop. And this is after, by the way, back in 2015, that Wolf emailed the advice from Michael Wolf to Jeffrey Epstein about potentially crafting a response to hand Donald Trump was, I think you should let him hang himself.

If he says he hasn't been on a plan or to the House, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or if it really looks like he could win, you could save him generating a debt. interesting line right there. Of course, Wolf continues, it is possible that when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy

and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime. Now, when he says, of course, Trump knew about the girls, this is from Jeffrey Epstein, he asked Geelaine to stop. That is in the strangest way ever confirmation

of what Donald Trump has said, which is also in the strangest way ever confirmation that he clearly knew, as he alluded to in media reports, before he was president, before Epstein became such a mythical figure. Trump said, Jeffrey likes him on the younger side. He said recently, I think he was on Air Force One within just the last few months saying, yeah, they were stealing girls from Mar-a-Lago, which is exactly what happened to Virginia Jafray, who was working at Mar-a-Lago, was poached by Gilairene Maxwell at Mar-Lago. So these evens,

again, these are ones released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. As the government shutdown ends, Mike Johnson is going to face enormous pressure to bring an Epstein vote to the floor. There may even be a discharge petition that goes around Mike Johnson to bring some of this to the floor. So, Crystal, no surprise that we are starting to see these as the government looks poised to reopen, hopefully forcing a vote. Yeah, and Trump even got asked specifically when you're talking about they were stealing girls from Mar-a-Lago, are you talking about Virginia Goufrey? And he said something to the effect of, yeah, I think, I think I am. I am talking about her.

And so it is strange the way that their two stories, in a sense, can burn each other because Jeffrey says, of course he knew. Because we were taking girls from there. And he told Galane to stop. So he knew exactly what was going on. And then you add to that the color of he spent hours with a victim. And then him pondering, like, why isn't, why isn't Donald Trump getting mentioned in all of the coverage surrounding me.

And, you know, I mean, that would be, that would be a sort of head-scratching thing, given how close we know that their lives were intertwined for years and years, where, you know, again, according to Michael Wolfe and Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein and Trump were besties. They were super close. They were hanging out in New York City. They were hanging out down in Palm Beach, you know, both living this sort of high-flying lifestyle, both of them.

them loving women in Epstein's case, girls. And so, you know, these paint helped it to fill in some of that, that portrait. And yesterday, Sagar and I covered the unbelievable special treatment that Galane Maxwell is getting in her club fed prison. First of all, she's not even supposed to be in this club fed prison because she's a sex offender. That's number one. Number two, they're providing her with extraordinary perks, what they described as concierge service. One of the prison officials said, I'm tired of being Galane Maxwell's bitch because she's getting, she got a freaking puppy. She's got a puppy. She gets special meals.

She gets to go to the exercise area when no one else is there. She gets to have these long meetings where people bring in computers so she can communicate with the outside world and whatever kind of way she wants. Oh, and lo and behold, she's filling out her application for a presidential commutation. Gee, why is she getting such special treatment? I wonder. I mean, it doesn't take a job. genius to figure out, Trump is afraid of what she has on him, what she would say about him.

And so he is directing his administration to make sure you keep Galane happy, do what you need. And every time that he gets asked about a potential partner commutation for Galane Maxwell, he demurs. He will not say one way or another, whether he would consider that. Because you know, as soon as she got moved to club fed and started getting this cushy treatment, well, that's when the leaks to the Wall Street Journal and other places about the birthday book and other things, that's when those leaks stopped. So again, put two and two together, you can likely see, okay, those initial leaks were kind of a shot across the bell. Like, hey, here's a little taste of what I might have, what I may be able to say about you.

And again, given their long history together and the incredibly guilty and bizarre way that the Trump administration has acted around the Epstein files, you know, it's, I don't think anyone should be surprised that some of this is coming out. And Emily, you know, one example of that is they refused to swear in Adelaide Grijalva for almost two months, seven full weeks. They refused to swear this lady in, meaning that that district has no representation whatsoever in Congress, just so they would not have another vote on that Epstein discharge petition. Mike Johnson, like shut down the entire house and ended the session to avoid that vote previously. You know, they are, and the way that this has, you know, really undercut their reputation as though we're outsiders, we're going to shine a light on the truth here.

You know, it tells you they, he is very concerned about what could potentially come out and be contained in emails, in government records, in FBI searches, whatever sort of material they were able to. to obtain CIA. Ryan and DropSight have been doing in Maz, Hussein, Mertaza Hussein, have been doing the only reporting, by the way, and extraordinary reporting, confirming that Jeffrey Epstein, yes, in fact, was an Israeli intelligence asset. So surely the CIA would have a lot to say about this guy as well. And the Republicans, led by Trump and Mike Johnson, have gone to extraordinary lengths to try to keep any of this from becoming public. So I'm wondering, actually, if the House Oversight Committee got these. emails from Michael Wolf. I think that seems to be the most likely case. It's potentially

could have come from Gillen Maxwell, who was meeting with obviously Deputy AG Todd Blanche. Over the last several months, that's certainly possible as well. Johnson is set to swear in Adelaide de Grova today. And that's the vote they need for the discharge petition, which Thomas Massey, I believe, Marjorie Taylor Green, among other Republicans or among the Republican conference support. So that gets them around Mike Johnson to a vote demanding a release of all of the Epstein files. And so the House Oversight Committee had that conversation back and forth with Alex Acosta, former Labor Secretary nominee who dropped out because Vicki Ward's reporting and other information surrounding the sweetheart deal in Florida that happened under his watch

regarding Epstein. And the House Oversight Committee asked about that Vicki Ward. quote from an anonymous source. Many people speculate to be Steve Bannon that Acosta says he was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave him alone. Acosta denied basically that in spirit, but he wasn't really, I mean, there are a lot of other ways that that question could have been posed to him to get around the technicalities of whether Epstein was an asset or an agent and who told him what, that the House Oversight Committee just did not get to the bottom of in that interview, at least according to the transcript of it that we have. So, Crystal, this story to see in writing from Jeffrey Epstein that Trump has never once been mentioned by police chief, etc.

I don't know what Epstein means when he says, I'm 75% there, but it sounds like maybe he's speculating that Trump is cooperating with an investigation. I don't know. Yeah, I didn't know what that 75% there piece meant. But I just want to underscore for people why this matters. You know, Ryan and Maz's reporting has proven the deep ties that Epstein did, in fact, have with the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence specifically. You can go and read their numerous stories at this point based on the leak of a former Israeli prime minister's emails, which also worth noting, as we always do, any mainstream outlet could have looked at these emails and reported them out. they're all sitting out there for anyone to report on they are the only ones who have put that aside so you're the president of the united states and you know whatever whatever things you did or

you know you're worried that defrey epstein knows about you have to assume that the israelis know about as well you have to assume that right and so what kind of pressure does that create in your relationship. How does that impact your foreign policy and the way you conduct yourself vis-a-vis this state? That's one of the most obvious reasons why this reporting and getting to the bottom of this is so incredibly, incredibly important. Because even if Jeffrey Epstein, you know, there's all sorts of reports about the cameras he had and the sort of documentation he kept, even if he didn't actually have the goods on whatever it is that Trump is terrified, of coming out about him. And clearly there are things he is terrified of coming out about him.

Even if Epstein didn't have the goods, you have to assume that he did. And you have to assume that he was sharing that information with his very close friends, allies, business partners in the Israeli government. So, I mean, that is extraordinary and incredibly important for the American people to know and understand. I think it is so important because when people say, I think, you know, Trump and then some Republicans who rush to defend Trump and it happened with Democrats, some of the Biden administration say this is a silly sideshow. It's not in the question of foreign policy, right? You know, people have important questions on their plate every single day about, you know, cost of living and just trying to put food on the table, keep a job, all of that. Yes. Our foreign policy, is downstream of the shadow government in many ways that we aren't quite aware of. And that sounds crazy, but go ahead, read the emails that the mainstream media probably isn't covering because they don't want to go into what looks like a hack from Iran, but one that

Ryan and Maas are confirming is verifiable by talking to people saying, is this these emails, this is you in this email, is this a real email, et cetera. So when you see it put so plainly in those drop site stories, Jeffrey Epstein and Ahubarak were puppet masters, and they were doing it, putting it in writing. We have that evidence for everybody to see. They were actually pulling the strings of geopolitics and foreign policy, willing and dealing in their punctuation error-laden emails,

which Ryan says is a power move. I'm not so sure that it's, I agree, it's a power move. It may just reflect actual incompetence. And that is remarkable when you look at it because you see how few people have such disproportionate control over foreign policy. Foreign policy affects domestic policy. So these are enormously serious questions. And I think Epstein is an example of something that is still happening right now with other names that we just don't know. And I think that Trump and the Republicans had hoped they had kind of put this story to bed, you know, it was quiet there for a while. We were getting any new lease, the Republican efforts, Mike Johnson's efforts at least to Stonewall in the House had been successful. It was very much on the back burner. And Sagar and I were talking about this. And what I said is, but this is the sort of thing that can erupt back into the public consciousness at any time because it's completely unresolved. And, you know, I think a lot of magic.

that were upset about it first, kind of made their peace with it, kind of like bought into some convoluted like, oh, actually Trump is playing the deep state somehow or their fake or Clinton, Comey, whatever. They just were like, all right, we're just going to move on. When things like this come out makes it pretty hard for you to just like close your eyes and pretend like nothing's happening here and pretending like, pretend like this is all fine, especially when you have a voice, a renegade voice like Marjorie Taylor Green out there who is willing to make her own side uncomfortable for whatever reason, doing it. She is that voice right now willing to make her own side uncomfortable. So, you know,

we talked about the, the MAGA revolt when you have a president who was just weakened by an extraordinary electoral defeat for his party really across the board. You know, he's effectively already a lame duck, at least not, is not legally allowed to run for another term, is aging very clearly in front of our eyes, you know, sleeping through White House events at this point and outsourcing major parts of his administration to his aides seems to only really care about like his parties at Mara Lago and his renovations. Yeah, when you have all of those sorts of things, then people start to feel a little bit bolder about their criticism and start to be looking at and contemplating, okay, well, what is the world after Trump going to look like and where is

the place to be how to position myself in in that world? So I think. even as, you know, Democrats just capitulated in Anthony and are embarrassing and all of that sort of stuff, you also have Trump at a becoming increasingly sort of weakened in his own administration. Approval rating is very low. You know, some errors starting to come at him from his own side, economic troubles and, you know, a lot of unfulfilled promises. And then you add this to the mix. It's not, it's a, it's a pretty, pretty challenging landscape for him, I would say. Right. Yeah, I think after those elections last week, it's becoming clearly the administration that they're approaching the one-year mark. And after you get past that one-year itch, as we've talked about Crystal before in the show today, you can't keep blaming Biden. I mean, you can. But whether or not you're successful, it continue to blame the Biden administration or what you're inherited, yeah, people are not going to buy it. And you are Mr. Drain the Swamp. So as emails come out showing you part of a swamp. And then when you campaign, you know, when you're not in power, it's easy to say, yeah, yeah, we'll release the Epstein emails,

even though Trump was a little bit more hesitant about those than JFK files and such during the campaign. But when you're actually in power, you can't just say like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. You know, you actually, you have to look like you're draining the swamp if that's the predicate for your political career. And that's where you see the people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey breaking away from Trump on that particular question. all right guys very fortunate on last minute notice here to get congressman rocana to join us this morning of course he has been the democrat leading the push to get the epstein files released um great to see you congressman two breaking point appearances in the same week must be my lucky week here our lucky week

yeah people are very interested in what you had to say last time i have a suspicion they're going to be very interested in what you have to say today as well so emily and i just went through some of the new emails that were released tying donald trump directly to jeff Epstein. First question for you is just, why are these emails coming out now? What was the sort of chain of events that led to these revelations? Well, you know, I was on Lawrence O'Donnell about three months ago, and the attorney for the survivors is the guest right before me. And he says, I don't understand why no one has subpoenaed the Epstein estate. And shockingly, Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, and no one in Congress had done it. So I talked to Comer. I said, we've got to get

these documents, at his credit, he subpoenas the Epstein estate. And the Epstein estate has been producing these documents, grip by grip by drip. And today, of course, comes out the first time some of the e-mails thing that Trump knew about the abuse of these young girls and the guilty conduct. And I expect far more documents are going to be coming out over the next couple months? I mean, I was speculating earlier that maybe these emails came from Michael Wolf or Galane. Are you able to tell us anything about that, Congressman? Not the specifics of who they're coming from other than the Epstein estate and that the estate has thousands of more documents. But what this really says is we've got to get the full release. We shouldn't be reliant on the Epstein estate to be giving us piecemeal documents.

We have the full files at the Justice Department. Those files have all of the interviews that were taken with men who abuse these young girls, with people who are involved in the cover-up. And today, as you know, Adelaide Grijalva gets sworn in. We get 218 signatures, and that triggers a vote in seven days in the house to release these files. The bombshell document dropped today, I think, is going to increase the stakes of just saying get this out there. Yeah, no doubt about it. And just your reaction to what we learned today. So we had emails from Jeffrey Epstein saying, first of all, of course, Trump knew about what was going on with the girls because he told Galeen Maxwell to stop. He also claimed that Trump had spent hours with one of the victims. You also see him strategizing with Michael Wolfe about a potential question to Donald Trump in the debates during 2015. Those questions didn't end up getting asked. But in any case, interesting. to see them strategizing back and forth.

You see them talking about how surprised they are that Trump hasn't been brought up in the context of Jeffrey Epstein in a more significant way, given their longstanding ties. So what is your reaction to the content of these emails? Well, this whole Epstein class needs to go. The issue in American politics is in left or right.

It's, are you for working, ordinary Americans? Are you for this Epstein class? And this is what's so important about those emails. It's not just rich and powerful men who may have abused, and raped young girls. It's a lot of rich and powerful people who knew that the abuse was going on and did nothing about it and actually still solicited Epstein for funding and were friends with Epstein

and just swept it under the rug. And what these emails show is Donald Trump was aware of what was going on. And that it was such a culture of abuse that people just thought, oh, this is just the way the way the world works. Well, their time is up. People are sick of it. Anyone involved in this stuff needs to move aside. We need to have a moral cleansing in this country. And Congressman, if this discharge petition goes through as I think everyone can do the math and expect it to at this point, what ways might the White House and the administration have to wiggle around? What do we expect potentially to see from them, assuming that they try to continue

blocking access to some of those files? What could we expect in terms of their methods of blocking release? Well, first of all, there's a full court press today to try to get one of these Republicans to drop before Adelaide Grahova gets sworn in at 4 p.m. I'm pretty confident they won't, but it's not done until 4 o'clock. And then Johnson has dozens of procedural motions. He can try to obstruct it. I mean, we could spend the whole day talking about the tools he has.

The confidence I have, though, is that there are a lot of Republicans who do not want, on the discharge petition tool to be rendered useless. They want to use it to get a bill on banning stock trading. They want to use it to get votes on other reforms. So I am hopeful the coalition will hold to say, no, you've got to bring this for a vote. Because when Johnson stops our petition from getting a vote, that will hurt Luna and Chip Roy and any Republican who wants to bring any bill using that mechanism. Congressman, do you have any other plans to, you know, public event awareness raising to sort of focus in scrutiny on the lack of transparency on the Epstein files and on the horrific abuse of these women?

We do. We have a press conference that Thomas Massey, Marjor Taylor, Green, and I are planning next week. And a number of survivors from around the country are going to be flying in, some who have not spoken out before. You know, Mike Johnson keeps thinking, okay, if you just shut down Congress long enough, people are going to forget, but he doesn't realize that this story has gripped the American people. They know there was horrific acts that were committed. And I think when they hear from these women, again, these brave women on next week, it's going to make sure that we have action and an overwhelming vote in the House of Representatives. Well, please keep us updated, as always, Congressman. Yeah. Thank you for joining us last minute, Congressman. Great to see you. Appreciate it.

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

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

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County. A show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up.

Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits

to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm I'm Yvalongoria, and I'm Maite Gomez-R-R-Hun. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history.

Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these Ostercon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way. Bring back the Ostercon. And because we've got a very Mikaasa esucasa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. No, the Gulf of Mexico, continue to be so forever and ever.

It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform, they had labor rights, they had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Crystal, you have an interview with the likely new mayor of Seattle that we should get to. Yeah, so just heads up. I recorded this interview with Katie Wilson yesterday.

The vote count at that point, she was up by 91 votes in the vote count. Another drop has come since I interviewed with her. Now she's up by a larger margin. I think it's roughly 1,000 to 2,000 votes. The later votes that are coming in are more in her favor. So the expectation, it's probably going to a recount just because of the narrowness of the margin. But it looks very likely. She is going to be the next mayor of Seattle, progressive, insurgent, taking on an incumbent.

So some sort of momdani, West Coast momdani vibes, I would say. She's a very different character from him, but also really centered affordability and housing affordability in particular. in her campaign, both as a way to deliver for voters across the board and also a way to tackle a chronic homelessness issue that Seattle has continued to suffer from. So with all of that being said, let's go ahead and take a listen to my interview with Katie Wilson. So I am super excited to talk to our next guest this morning. Katie Wilson is the co-founder executive director of the Transit Writers Union. She is also the progressive candidate for mayor in the city of Seattle locked in an extraordinarily close race with the current mayor, Bruce Harrell, and she joins us now. Welcome, Katie.

Great to be here, Crystal. Yeah, of course. So I've been following your race for the past couple of weeks. You know, there's an incumbent who's more, I think, politically centrist. You're more of the progressive, kind of insurgent, outsider candidate coming in, very close race all the way along. And as of yesterday, based on the mail drops, you have now taken a 91 vote lead. So first question for you, you know, just give us a little bit of the sense of the dynamics of this race. What ballots still remain and whether your expectation is that you will be the next mayor of the city of Seattle? Yeah. So the way that we do elections here in Washington State is that it's all by mail. So everyone mails in their ballots.

We also have ballot drop boxes around the city. And there's a very consistent pattern that more progressive voters, younger voters, tend to vote late. And so what you'll see is that the election night results, there's actually a fairly a large shift between election night and the final results toward the more progressive or left-leaning candidate. So on election night, I was at 46%. Now I've pulled ahead by 91 votes, as you said, and there's another, about 10,000 ballots out there still to be counted, mostly from election day, mostly skewing younger.

So we're really hopeful that that margin will widen. It's possible that there will be a recount because the margin will still be very small. but we're feeling really good about this race at this point. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. So talk to us just a little bit for people who have not been following this race closely. As I confess, I actually wasn't until the last couple of weeks before the election. Tell people about the incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell, your issues with his leadership and then

the platform that you were running on as a contrast. Yeah, sure things. So, I mean, my background, I'm a community organizer, a coalition builder. And so for the past 14 years, I've been leading this organization that I, co-founded back in 2011 called the Transit Riders Union. And, you know, we basically fight on economic justice issues. So I've led campaigns to raise the minimum wage to the highest in the country in several cities around King County, fought for stronger renter protections in Seattle and other cities around King County, fought for progressive taxation. So we have a landmark tax

on wealthy corporations in Seattle called the Jumpstart Tax that I played a big role in designing and passing. And then, of course, public transit. right, as the name of the organization suggests, fighting for better public transit, and we've won a bunch of affordable and free fare programs for lower income riders, for youth. So that's the kind of work that I've done over the years. It's very grassroots, community organizing, coalition building. And I really have never had the ambition to run for elected office until this year. And so early this year, we had an election on funding Seattle's new social housing developer through attacks on wealthy corporations.

And our current mayor, Bruce Herald, was kind of the face of the opposition campaign. And he's done a lot in office to try to undermine social housing, which is a kind of a new project for Seattle that a grassroots campaign put on the ballot last year. And nevertheless, this funding measure to fund the developer passed by a landslide. And so that really showed me that our current mayor, Bruce Herald, is out of touch with the issues that people are facing in their daily lives. And I think the affordability crisis is really right up there at the top. And, you know, when I jumped into this race, I'd never heard of Zoran Mondani.

And, but it's very clear that there are some similar dynamics playing out across the country where coming out of the pandemic with really high rates of inflation, the cost of housing in high-cost cities like Seattle is just really out of control. Rents just keep going up and up. Home prices are out of reach for anyone wanting to buy a home. And then everything else, from childcare to food to groceries, everything is just really, really expensive. And people are feeling that, right? Not just the lowest income households, but people up to kind of middle class, people who have decent jobs are just like can't believe how expensive everything is.

So I think that's definitely a dynamic in this race where the work that I've done over the years and what I want to tackle as mayor is this affordability crisis. And really, we also have this extremely bad homelessness crisis here in Seattle. We actually have rates of unsheltered homelessness that are much higher than comparable cities around the country in the U.S. And I really, you know, our current Mayor Bruce Herald, he came into office promising to address issues of homelessness and public safety. And I think people are looking around and not really feeling that he's succeeded at that. So that's kind of a local dynamic, but the national dynamic is affordability.

And then I think also obviously Trump getting elected last fall, right, there's a certain brand of establishment, Democratic Party politics, which utterly failed to stop the train wreck that was Trump's election. And so I think that there's a feeling that people want new leadership. leadership that's that's not going to tower like that. And I think our current mayor, he doesn't break that mold, right? Like he's, he's been the mayor for four years, but before that he was a council member for 12 years. So he's kind of part of that kind of centrist, democratic part of the establishment that people are pretty upset with right now. So I think that's also a dynamic in this race. And so for me, you know, coming in as an outsider, someone who's, you know, worked with City Hall is familiar with the legislative process and all that. But at the same time is

is coming in as kind of an insurgent candidate. This was just the right moment for that to work. And it looks like we're going to pull it out by the skin of our teeth. Incredible. I'd love for you to dig a little bit more into the contrast in the approach of Bruce Harold on homelessness versus, you know, what approach did he take and what did you run on? Yeah. And I mean, honestly, this is something that I didn't have super high expectations when he came

into office, kind of knowing who he was from when he was on counsel. but I've been deeply disappointed relative to those expectations. So basically, the current administration's approach has been to sweep people around the city from place to place without actually getting people inside. So we basically have thousands of people sleeping and sheltered on the streets. And we have two homeless people in the Seattle area for every one shelter bed. And there's been very, very little focus of his administration on actually opening new emergency housing and shelters so that we can get people inside. Instead, they're spending all of this time and energy, just basically telling people, you can't be here and forcing them to move along, but then, like, where are they supposed to go,

right? And so that also contributes to our public safety problems, right? Because a lot of people have issues with drug addiction, mental illness, and those aren't being dealt with. And you can't really deal with those issues if you're sleeping outside. And so the fact that they're not actually focusing on getting people inside is just really damning in my mind. And people are noticing it, right?

Like there's, you know, people who just, uh, residents, small business owners in various neighborhoods around the city who, um, you know, they, they see that there's like an encampment there and they know that they're like, okay, well, the city's going to come and sweep them, but we know that they're just going to go to the next neighborhood and then a couple weeks from now, they'll, they'll be back. And so there's this deep frustration with this approach. So, um, I, you know, what I've been saying on the campaign trail is I'm going to, um, really focus on opening new emergency housing and shelters so that we can actually resolve encampments

by getting people inside rather than just sweeping them around the city. And we know that this works, right? So during the pandemic, there was a program that several nonprofits put together called JustCare, which basically did that, right, resolved encampments by getting people inside. And at that time, it was kind of temporary hotels that had been repurposed as shelter and was very successful. So we know that the vast majority of homeless folks sleeping outside will accept meaningful offers of shelter and support when that's given to them.

And that's just not what we're doing right now. So that's really the big difference in our approach there. And what do you do with the more challenging cases, you know, people who are suffering from addiction issues or from mental illness who don't want to accept that, you know, that offer of shelter? How do you handle those cases? Yeah. I mean, I think we know from practice that that ends up being a fairly small percentage of the

homeless population. But, you know, the fact is we do have lovers, right? So our laws around involuntary commitment are governed at the state level. So changing those is pretty challenging. But here's the thing. Like most people who are addicted to drugs, you know, are also engaged in various forms of criminal behavior, right? In order to obtain drugs or just in order to meet basic needs. The homeless people, that is, right?

And so we have the ability to, if necessary, arrest people for criminal behavior and then we have successful diversion programs where because we also know that just throwing someone in jail like doesn't work right and then they're back out of the street and have been destabilized and are more at risk of overdosing but what we can do is put people into a diversion program where there's basically accountability and there's shelter and services but that's kind of like offered as an alternative to the booking and jail kind of route. And so we have programs that have been very successful. And so it's a matter of scaling those up. And I think that we can, if we do that well, I think that we can address

those tougher cases or the vast majority of them as well. And of course, chronic homelessness is a symptom of a larger housing crisis, as you were speaking to, which affects absolutely everyone. What are some of the, obviously, we all know the Zoron platform, he's freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments. And then he wants to surge a building bonanza of additional 200,000 housing units. What are some of the things you ran on in terms of housing affordability because I know that is a major issue in the city of Seattle? Yeah, totally. So there's a few things. So one is social housing, which I mentioned, right? And this is a model which is a little bit unfamiliar in Seattle and a lot of the United States, but similar to Vienna and Paris and other

European cities, which have had really strong social housing sectors for a long time. And so the idea here is to begin to build a non-market housing sector that's mixed income. So here in Seattle would go up to 120% of area median income, which is a fairly high threshold. And then by having this publicly owned and operated permanently affordable housing, once you get that to a certain scale, that also helps to moderate rents in the private sector. Now, we're a long way from that, but there's no better time to start than now. So part of my platform is really having the city and the may or be a strong partner in getting the new social housing developer up and rolling and acquiring buildings and developing buildings. At the same time, I also believe that we need to make it

possible for the private market to build more housing in our great neighborhoods around Seattle. And so that means working on our land use and zoning laws to make that possible because we have had very restrictive single-family zoning laws in Seattle for a long time. And that's beginning to loosen up a little bit, but we can go a lot further than the previous administration has gone. In addition, so we are not allowed in local jurisdictions in Washington state to do rent regulation directly, so we can't do rent control here locally without a change in state law. However, we do have a law called the Economic Displacement Relocation Assistance Law, which basically says if your landlord raises your rent 10% or more and you move out because you can't

afford it, your landlord is supposed to pay you three times your monthly rent and relocation assistance. So that's nice. And it also disincentivizes large rent increase. is because landlords don't want to trigger that law. And so one thing that I've talked about is bumping that threshold down from 10% to, for example, 5%. And so that would help to disincentivize those larger rent increases. There's some other things that we can do on the renter protections front, like regulating or banning rental junk fees,

something that happens, especially if you have a corporate landlord in the United States. There's kind of the sticker price of your apartment, but then there's all these hidden monthly fees or hidden annual fees. that are kind of in the fine print, and so you end up paying a lot more than you think you are going to pay. So something that the city can do is also regulate or ban some of those kind of extraneous fees. So those are a couple of other ideas for how we can like help around the margins. The city can do more to invest in affordable homeownership programs. There's some other things too. But it's kind of a whole range of things, right? There's not one silver bullet,

but we kind of need to do it all. All of the above. Yeah. Kay, my last question for you is, you know, I'd love for you to zoom out and talk a little bit more broadly about the political trends within Seattle. I saw a tweet about this. So forgive me, you can correct if this tweet analysis was incorrect. But basically they said, you know, there were a lot of progressive legislators in Seattle. And then there was after Black Lives Matter and the pandemic, there was kind of a backlash. And that's when people like Bruce Harrell and other war like centrist types get elected to the city council. And now with Harrell's likely defeat, that wave of the backlash wave has now been swept out by a more progressive cohort. And so first of

all, is that sort of accurate, your view of the way that Seattle politics has swung back and forth? And then how do you, what is most important to you in order to make sure that there isn't another sort of backlash swing to the center after your mayoralty? Yeah, that's a really good question. And so, yeah, I think that picture that you laid out is fairly accurate. So we had a pretty darn progressive city council for about a decade. And that included former council member, Shama Salant, who is, you know, a socialist city council member. And now one thing to note, though, is that during that time when we had a very progressive council, we had pretty centrist mayors. And so that really, that dynamic kind of cramped the council style in a sense in terms of their ability to get things not just passed, but really like implemented well.

And then, yes, after 2020 and Black House Matter, there was a backlash. And so then we had actually our current mayor elected and very, for Seattle, very, very centrist or right-leaning compared to usual city council. So this year, with hopefully my election, but then also a couple of council members and a new city attorney, things are swinging back in a progressive direction. Now, we have kind of staggered elections. So this year, there was only, well, for complicated reasons, three, but normally there would be two at-large council positions up for-per-law. So there's seven district council elections, seats, which will be up for election in two years. So right now, assuming that I win this race, right, will have me in the mayor's office and we'll have several very progressive council members, but the bulk of, we don't have a strong progressive

majority on the council yet, but that could happen in 2027. Now, in order for that to happen in 2027, you asked about kind of what needs to be accomplished in the next couple years. I really think that, you know, I have a lot of ambitious progressive policy dreams in my platform. But I really think what I'm going to be judged on, what my administration is going to be judged on first and foremost, is homelessness and public safety. And I really think that in the first couple years, we're going to need to drill down and make progress on those really basic quality of life issues and show, I think we have an opportunity be here for people on the progressive left to basically show that we can actually govern. And so

there's going to be, I'm going to be paying a lot of attention to the work that needs to happen to basically get city hall, the city bureaucracy moving in a good direction, actually delivering services for the people of Seattle and hopefully pioneering a new model of kind of responsive government and communication with the people where we're really explaining what we're doing and why and if we're coming up against obstacles, here's why. And I think this is a similar challenge that that I think, you know, Mom Dani is going to face in New York City where there's a lot of really ambitious things that we want to get done, but there's also real obstacles, right? It's like the reason why these things haven't been done is, is complicated, and there's really entrenched interests that

are going to fight against it. And so we're going to need to be able to tell a story of the things that we're fighting for, the progress that we're making, but also the reason why it's not moving faster, right? So that's going to be big. And, you know, I mean, like, I'm in this race, right, there was more corporate PAC spending against me than has ever been spent in a Seattle race against a candidate. And a lot of those same interests are also going to want to undermine my administration. And so I'm going into this with, I think, clearly right about the challenges, the political challenges, as well as the practical challenges of implementing my agenda. And I mean, it's going to be a massive challenge, but I'm really excited

about it as well. Well, Katie, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you're probably like super busy right now and really in the thick of things. I won't say congratulations yet because I don't want to jinx the result, but I'm very excited to see what you, what you do with the position. And I hope you'll come back and check in with us in the future. I would love to. Thank you. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Super interesting interview, Crystal. And we should mention programming note, we have moved the block. We have not canceled the block on Mar-a-Lago face that we teased at the beginning of the show. We have simply moved it to the Friday show because of the breaking Epstein news. But the benefit of that is now Ryan will be with us to

weigh in and we know that Ryan is going to have something great to say about Mar-a-Lago-Face. He will say something that none of us expect. He'll tie it into some personal experience he had as a plastic surgeon when he was 23 or something. As a plastic surgeon. Who knows?

Who knows what Ryan Grimm is going to bring to the table in the Mar-a-Lago face conversation, but we wanted to make sure that it was inclusive, you know, it felt a little bit because men are also getting their version of the Mar-a-Lago face. So I think it is better actually in the end that we, yeah, exactly. Not naming names, Matt Gates. It is better in the end that we have a more

inclusive, diverse panel of voices to discuss this phenomenon. That's right. I think that's well said, Crystal. So if you want to see, well, I don't know if we'll keep that in the second half or maybe we'll bring it out for everyone. TPD, but if you don't want to miss it no matter what, then go subscribe for a premium membership over at breaking points.com. You get the second half of the Friday show. You also get the show every day in your inbox early, full version of it. No ads, no nothing. It's right there in your inbox. So go ahead and subscribe over at breaking points.com. Crystal, thanks for being here today. Fun one, interesting one. Have her a dull moment. That's right. All right. Well, Crystal and Sager will be back with you all tomorrow. I'll

see you Friday. Have a great day. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You know the shade is always Shadiest right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Jazele Bryan and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the lab.

drama and reality news you can handle and you know we don't hold back so come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday listen to reasonably shady from the black effect podcast network on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts join me danny trejo in nocturno tales from the shadows an anthology of modern-day horrors Inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows. On the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast.