Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/20/23: Potential Hostage Deal Reached, Israel Friendly Fire On Oct 7th, IDF Reveals New Al-Shifa Evidence, US Freaks Over Israel Southern Offensive, Bin Laden Letter Goes Viral, Advertisers Flee Twitter After Elon Post, Sam Altman OpenAI Chaos, Democrat Says Biden Doomed In Michigan

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Krystal and Emily discuss a potential hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu advisor denies fault for child casualties, Israel claims to have found Hamas tunnels under Al Shifa, Israel gears up for southern offensive, Bin Laden letter goes viral on TikTok, advertisers flee Twitter after controversial Elon post, Sam Altman OpenAI chaos, CNN interview on civilians in Gaza goes off the rails, and Nasser Beydoun joins to discuss Biden's 2024 weaknesses.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collectionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's Welcome to Breaking Points. I kind of, Crystal, wanted to whisper it as a sort of, as a tribute to Sagar,

but in a way that I know it would really annoy him. Because he screams good morning. So if I whisper it, I think maybe I'd get under his skin. He's had a little more of a somber opening in recent weeks, given the somber nature of the news. And there is a lot to get into this morning. So we have a potential, potential deal on hostages, a little disputed sort of how close they are to closing.

Brokering that deal would include a quote-unquote humanitarian pause. I'll break that down for you. We also have new details, Israel revealing what they claim to be additional evidence of Hamas's use of al-Shifa hospital that they say justified that attack on that hospital. So we will break that down for you as well. We also have a whole situation regarding Osama bin Laden and TikTok and Zoomers and a lot of questions there. A lot of freak out about what young people are doing on TikTok these days. That should be a fun conversation. We've got a lot of doings with regards to Elon Musk, anti-Semitism, the ADL, banning certain speech on Twitter as well. Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI, was kicked out of that

organization and now has just been snatched up by Microsoft that OpenAI had a business relationship with and also a funder relationship with. This is huge news in the AI world. So we'll break all of that down for you. We've also got some major CNN misses in terms of their Israel coverage that we want to show you as well. And we've got a Democratic candidate for Senate who is going to join us for the state of Michigan, who is calling on Joe Biden to step aside because he says he cannot win in the state of Michigan, especially given his stance on Israel and Gaza. So a lot to get into. Very quickly, before we jump into the news here this morning, we have a little bit of breaking points news, which is that lovely holiday merch that Griffin producer and our graphics team designed for

you guys is available now. That beautiful, ugly sweatshirt, the wonderful Christmas ornament, the socks, the coffee tumbler, all available to you. And apparently we are running a little bit of a Black Friday discount as well. So make sure you check those out if you have a chance, if you're interested. And premium subscribers got early access to this. So if that is something you're interested in for the future, BreakingPoints.com to become a premium subscriber. All right. With that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into the latest on the news. So we do have reports of a potential hostage deal. In fact, originally, The Washington Post reported

this deal was done and dusted. And then they had to kind of walk it back and say, we're still working out the details. Let's put this up on the screen from the Washington Post. The headline here, U.S. close to deal with Israel and Hamas to pause conflict, free some hostages. They had to change that headline after the U.S. pushed back on the idea that this had already been completed. So here are the details of what's being reported in the post. They say there is a detailed six-page set of written terms that would require all parties to the conflict to freeze combat operations for at least five days, while an initial 50 or more hostages are released in smaller batches every 24 hours. Not immediately clear how many of the 239 people believed to be

in captivity in Gaza would be released under the deal. Also not clear, by the way, whether the U.S. citizens who are being held would be part of that deal. They say that overhead surveillance would monitor movement on the ground to police the pause. The stop and fighting is also intended to allow a significant increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance, including fuel, to enter the besieged enclave from Egypt. After this article was initially published, and this is what I was referring to before, National Security Council spokesperson Adrian Watson tweeted that there was no deal yet, but we continue to work hard

to get a deal. And by the way, this is interesting, Emily. So in terms of the domestic politics in Israel, you have very, I guess you would say, competing pressures on Netanyahu, who on the one hand, you have the families of hostages and you have huge public sentiment in terms of doing whatever you can to return these hostages, especially the civilian hostages who are being held right now by Hamas. On the other hand, you have, you know, hard right parts of his coalition who are opposed to any sort of pause in the fighting and in the bombing campaign. So, you know, and that would be a non-starter in terms of any hostage deal if they're just going to continue bombing. So the way that he is, the way he is framing this is, you know, for any international support to continue humanitarian aid is essential. Because

of that, we accept the recommendation to bring fuel into Gaza, speaking about a smaller fuel deal that they've already made. But this is kind of the framing of, you know, in order for us to continue the bombing campaign, we've got to maintain international legitimacy, and this kind of deal would be part of that. Right, which brings us to what Trita Parsi, with our friends at the Quincy Institute, tweeted yesterday. I think he tweeted this yesterday. I'm sorry, this was from Friday. We have the element of Tritaise tweet here. He's saying, a diplomat from a key U.S. ally has told him that Netanyahu is blocking the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden is well aware, but refuses to pressure Netanyahu publicly. The diplomat says Biden's unconditional support for Israel has made

Netanyahu, actually this part's really interesting, Crystal, more obstinate and inflexible. So Biden's unconditional support for Israel, according to this diplomat from a key U.S. ally that conveyed this to Trita, has actually made Netanyahu more obstinate and inflexible. He also has these immense, almost, I mean, untenable pressures at home, as you said, to not do one thing and to really do the other thing. I mean, it's an impossible position to be in, and he's not navigating it well. I would say no. And this is what Dr. Parsi is tweeting here is also sort of publicly known. There was reporting recently, I believe in the last week, that there actually was a deal that was basically already crafted that they were ready to implement to return the hostages,

which, of course, is, you know, high priority, should be high priority for absolutely everyone, especially, as I said, the civilians who, you know, should be left out of this entirely. They should be released immediately. And that deal was short-circuited by the ground invasion that occurred. So again, there's been, I would say, and demonstrated from the beginning, a real lack of care and concern from Netanyahu with regard to these hostages. The hostage families, Emily, it took him forever to meet with them. There was this crazy report that in one of the meetings with all the hostage families, they actually had a plant infiltrator who was an activist Netanyahu

supporter come in and be like, whatever Netanyahu says, that's what we're on board with. And they need to just go forward and continue the fighting. And keep in mind, you know, as this bombing campaign, which has completely obliterated at this point Gaza City and is now we're going to talk about this now they're moving into South Gaza, very place where they told everyone to flee to. They're now ramping up the bombing campaign there as well. Well, it's not only Palestinians who are at risk there. These hostages are also at grave risk the longer that this bombing campaign goes on. This deal was apparently mediated by Qatar and is being crafted.

You know, Qatar is kind of the go-between between Israel and Hamas in terms of these negotiations. So yet to be seen how close they actually are to striking this deal. But I think it has become increasingly clear that the biggest obstacle and the biggest barrier to having some kind of a deal to release at least the women and the children from this group of hostages, has become Netanyahu in terms of their agreement on a potential short-term, five-day, roughly, ceasefire. So that's where we are. We also had a Biden op-ed that he published in the last several days. And there was one noteworthy part that people picked up on. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. He is saying, as we strive for peace,

Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution. I've been emphatic with Israel's leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. And this is the part people really picked up on. The U.S. is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremist attacking civilians in the West Bank. And Barack Ravid is a reporter with Axios. His commentary on this is he said this matters. This is a big deal.

It's the first time the U.S. is publicly considering individual sanctions against settlers. And Emily, just to lay out for people part of why this is such a critical piece is the whole settlement movement, this illegal settlement movement under international law, the entire goal of it is to make a two-state solution impossible. And already you have had, and this has been occurring over decades, this is nothing new. It has ramped up under the Netanyahu administration, and it has further accelerated during this war on Gaza. This was already before October 7th, the most violent year that Palestinians in the West Bank had faced perhaps ever. And now that violence has only escalated. You have settlers coming in and attacking Palestinians, pushing them off their land. And oftentimes, it's not like they're just out there

freelancing. In half of these instances over the years, the IDF is actively involved. So this has been, this isn't, again, some extremist group freelancing. This has been an official policy of the Israeli government in an attempt to make a two-state solution completely unviable because they have built out so many of these settlements within the West Bank territory. The whole thing is basically like Swiss cheese at this point. Yeah, I mean, and this is – it was also the deadliest year for Israelis before October 7th as well because the violence had been so bad in the West Bank. The tensions were so strong in the West Bank. And that's important context for all of this because it wasn't just like out of the blue. It was there were all of these clashes happening in the West Bank because you have a very far right government that has actually settlers in the administration. That's right. In the

Yahoo administration. And so obviously it was going in this direction. It was going to a really bad place really quickly over the course of the last year. Yeah. And part of what people in Israel who, by the way, are not happy with the Netanyahu government, I mean some like 80% blame him in part for what happened on October 7th. There was a recent poll that showed that support for his party, Likud party, had absolutely collapsed because this guy was supposed to be, he called himself Mr. Security. That's what his supporters called him. And then to have this dramatic failure happen on your watch obviously has caused a massive loss of political support. But one of the things that we identified in those early days was the fact that, you know, a lot of security forces and IDF troops had been

moved from the area that was ultimately attacked by Hamas to guard these settlers in the West Bank and help them with these incursions and in pushing Palestinians off of their land. So there was a lot of pressure from his right-wing coalition partners to move those security forces to help the settlers and to protect the settlers. And that's part of why they were caught with their pants down on October 7th. And, you know, the political leanings of that area that was attacked by Hamas near the Gaza Strip tends to be more liberal, tends to be more lefty. You've got these kibbutzim and people who are peace activists. I mean, it's absolutely tragic that those were the people who were attacked, you know, the most aggressively and the most horrifically in what happened on October 7th. But that's part of the domestic rub of the

failures that happened with this Netanyahu administration as they were so, so obsessed with pushing forward on settlements that they left this other group of their citizens exposed to these attacks on October 7th. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and we need to talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was,

my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too so his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is and they're starting to be like yo your dad's like really the GOAT like he's a legend so he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better.

So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4,

5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Which is actually a good transition to, you know, we're learning more details about what unfolded on that day. Mehdi Hassan had an interview with an IDF spokesperson where he was pressing him on, you know, some of the falsehoods that have now been proven to have come from the Israeli government. And there was a bit of a revelation here that was rather interesting. Let's take a listen to how this all went out. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There's no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe

that they're all civilians, that they're all children. And here we have to say something that isn't said enough. Hamas, until now, we're destroying their military machine, and with that, we're eroding their control. But up until now, they've been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one. Is that by accident, or is that because Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza? Mark, you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven't.

You're right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. Because they're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point. Because they're dead, Mark. They're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. But they're also people your government has killed. You accept that, right?

You've killed children? Or do you deny that? No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don't know how those people died. Those children. Oh, wow.

First of all, we don't want to see a single child killed. Okay, here's my question for you, Mark. I agree with you. So you have two pieces there that are very noteworthy. Number one, he won't admit that children have been killed. Yeah. There's no reason to do that. What kind of a fantasy land do you think we're all, like, how stupid do you think that we are? How many of these horrifying images have we seen? We know that the population of Gaza is nearly 50% children. We know that the, you know, death toll is, I think, roughly 40% children. So to deny

they've killed any kids, that is another level. By the way, I want to correct myself. I said an IDF spokesperson. This is actually senior advisor to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The other part, though, that was really noteworthy here is you'll recall the original death count on October 7th was roughly 1,400, and then they revised it down to 1,200. And he says that that's because some of the bodies that were burned beyond recognition that they had assumed were Israeli citizens were actually Hamas militants. So that was another important revelation there. And just in the interest of accuracy and what actually unfolded on October 7th raises a lot of questions, too, about exactly what the response was and what that looked like. And to that point, there's just absolutely no reason to not answer the question

about children. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense from the line that Israel used. And I think, by the way, rightfully so, that in so many senses, Hamas put children in this situation, that Hamas knew exactly what was going to happen after October 7th. So you can't have two be true at the same time. You can't say Hamas is putting their own people in this awful situation, but also that these children are not in an awful situation. There's absolutely no reason to take the first line when, first of all, the entire world—and by the way, I was talking about this with Ryan last week. It's really frustrating because there's no—like, we're going to talk about this in the next segment, but we need to—Western journalists are not in Gaza.

Journalists who are in Gaza are in grave danger. And that means over here on this side of the world, we have to take what the Israeli government is saying seriously. They are making that very difficult. And they have been doing that for years. But in a situation like this, when you cannot even concede that children have been killed, the trust that you desperately need to build with American audiences, with Western audiences, with British audiences, with everyone around the world that is not in Gaza right now is severely damaged. And there's no, it's a totally unforced error. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think Israel has decided, because I've been thinking about this.

Their propaganda is so sloppy. It's been bad. It's actually astonishing to me. You know, we're going to talk later about that CNN report where they were with, you know, the IDF guy and he's showing them what he purports to be evidence that this other hospital, not Al-Shifa, a different hospital, I think it's called, I don't remember the name of it, the Children's Hospital, that it was used by Hamas militants. And, you know, he's pointing to like baby bottles and it's like, yeah, it's a children's hospital where people are seeking refuge. But the real crowning moment is when he reveals this Arabic list that he says is where the terrorists were recording their names of when they were watching the hostages. And immediately people who actually speak Arabic look at this and are like, it's literally just a calendar.

Right. And again, I'm quite sure that the IDF has plenty of Arabic speakers available to them. I'm also quite sure, by the way, that CNN has plenty of Arabic speakers available to them. So to have the level of propaganda be that incredibly sloppy is just, to me, completely absurd. It's one of the things that Mehdi presses him on. But I think that they really, number one, are just so used to, all of this is for a U.S. audience, right? They know that international opinion, they don't really care about international opinion. They just care about a U.S. audience. I think there's been such lockstep

support for Israel across both parties for so long that they never felt the need to have the propaganda be actually very good. And now, really, they're only pitching it to Joe Biden. And Joe Biden seems to be buying it all hook, line, and sinker. So I guess they don't feel the need to up their game in terms of the propaganda efforts here, because the one guy that they need to keep on their side, they seem to be doing the job just fine on that. I saw some people commenting on Twitter that basically the one person who believes all of this is Joe Biden. But that's the only person they need to believe all of this. So I guess there you go. Although, as we were just talking about, they're not, it seems entirely happy with the US pushing

so hard for a hostage deal. And they don't seem entirely happy with the Biden administration's call for humanitarian ceasefire. That seems to have obviously been a point of tension. But I also think, and this is a really interesting point, actually, that you just brought up, the intense level of propaganda that any country would engage in, but the sloppiness and the propaganda, I also think is partial because they're doing so much of it. I don't know if you've noticed, it's like, obviously, we're in

the social media era, so they're trying to be completely aggressive so that when something gets posted on X and all of the journalists are there and narratives start getting crafted, that they're on top of it, they're in front of it. But it's been very sloppy. It's a really strange thing to watch happen in real time on social media. And I think that's where some of this has just looked so ham-fisted, is that they're trying so hard in the middle of a war to be winning the propaganda race. And it's just a it's very odd to watch happen. The other thing is, I think, frankly, that their actions in Gaza, where you have this overwhelming civilian death toll, where you have so many children being massacred,

where you have daily attacks. I mean, we can't even keep track on schools, refugee camps, hospitals, ambulances, you name it, civilian infrastructure, and it's been destroyed. Like they know that that on its face is not actually defensible. And so that's how you end up with this preposterous attempt to be like, well, I don't really know that we killed any kids. You can't prove that we killed any kids. And that's also the reason why they've so aggressively cut off communications. And also, by the way, why they've targeted journalists. I think the number is 50 now journalists in Gaza who have been killed. And by the way, there's been, you know, virtual

silence from the American press, which claimed during the Trump administration care so much about freedom of the press and protecting journalists, et cetera. Pretty much total silence when it comes to the fact that so many journalists have been killed more than any other conflict that we've seen. There's another interesting new detail, and I'll phrase this very delicately, about October 7th that also came out. This was from a Haaretz report. And let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from our own Ryan Grim sort of summarizing what came out here. This was from, just to be clear, it was from the Hebrew version of the paper. This is a translation from Google Translate, so it may be a little imprecise, and I'll get to that in a minute. But the bottom

line here is, you know, one of the greatest scenes of horror and atrocities was that rave music festival. And this Haaretz investigation found that, number one, organizers originally planned to end the event on Friday, but got permission to extend it midweek from the army. And this goes to the idea that actually Hamas didn't even know this festival was going on. They just sort of happened upon it and then, of course, killed a lot of civilians and unleashed horrors there. Hamas did not know about the music festival, only learning about it after breaching Israeli territory. This assessment is backed up by a body cam footage of a terrorist asking a captured civilian where the bad guys are. Now, that part in particular seems to be a poor translation. Apparently, the Hebrew word for bad guys and the Hebrew word for one of the kibbutz

that they did plan to attack and did, in fact, attack is very similar. So the Hebrew language speakers that I saw said, no, this was actually not asking where the bad guys are. They were asking for directions to this kibbutz. But this last one is really key and has got a lot of people's attention. An Israeli attack helicopter fired on terrorists and also killed some of the party goers,

which opens up a real question, Emily, of how many of the civilians who were horribly massacred on October 7th, how much of that was friendly fire? It's a question that a lot of people have been asking from the beginning and were completely shut down like this was off the table. But, you know, in the interest of accuracy and understanding the events that unfolded on this horrific and fateful day, it's important to know exactly what the response was, what the death toll was, and how all of this unfolded.

Yeah, it absolutely is. And again, that's why the Israeli government, the IDF, whatever side you take in this conflict, obviously it's no easy task to be in the middle of a war right now and to also be managing the international press and the international now and to also be managing, you know, the international press and the international community and all of that. But the Israeli government has done itself absolutely no, absolutely no favors by saying things like that's why the children point on Mehdi's show is such an unforced error. Because when you have situations like this and, you know, the Haaretz account is so far the only account we have of the helicopters

and the civilians. That doesn't mean it won't be verified. It very well could be verified, in fact, because as some of Israel's defenders were saying last night on X, it's pretty believable, right? When you're in the middle of this insane attack that sadly, there's going to be people caught in the crossfire. I can't, it's hard to even talk about those sorts of things. But if that's the case, your trust with the public and your trust with American benefactors, the people who are sending military assistance, the people who are in the UN, whatever it is, your trust should be ironclad. And when you are caught in the middle of just ridiculous talking points, you are doing yourself no favors whatsoever. And this isn't to

say that we should all just be able to blindly trust the Israeli government. It is to say that the Israeli government should be doing absolutely everything in its power to ensure that that trust is coming from a serious place and to give the public reason to trust their lawmakers who are saying that they trust the Israeli government. Biden last week saying that as it pertains to the hospital, he really believes the intelligence, but he won't say what it is, that this is a Hamas central command site. Well, if he's saying that he has intelligence, that the Israeli government has intelligence, and the public then has to trust that while the Israeli government is saying, is taking such ridiculous lines in the public, that is incredibly deleterious to the

cause that Israel wants to promote. I mean, I trust the Israeli government as much as I trust Hamas, which is to say not at all. And so it makes it impossible to really know what's happening on the ground. You have to trust, you know, the like doctors at the hospital and take the word of the ordinary civilians who are there and the few remaining journalists who have not been killed, who remain in the Gaza Strip. But, you know, one final point on why this music festival piece matters, because I can see people being like, yeah, OK, you know, friendly fire. What does it matter? Obviously, Hamas came and massacred people. We know that. And no one is denying that here. But let me just say that part of what has been used, in fact, the entirety of the case that has been used to justify the

indiscriminate bombing campaign, the complete leveling of Gaza City, now moving into the south where they told everyone to flee, the very high civilian death rate, higher, by the way, than even the civilian death rate that Hamas inflicted on October 7th. What has been used to justify that is the details of the horrors and atrocities that were committed on October 7th. And so it's important we know those details, and we know what is actually true and what is actually false, because that's how that is the emotional case that they're making to justify committing essentially like daily war crimes in their prosecution of this war on Gaza.

So that's why getting these details, you know, and apart from just knowing the historical record and having an accurate picture, that is the additional layer of why it matters to get these things straight. And that report from Haaretz, it came from an Israeli police investigation. So it has a high level of credibility here. And also, as people pointed out, it does make sense in terms of the response and also in terms of some of the images that came out of the extent of the destruction, which it seems unlikely Hamas would have been able to execute on their own. Over the past six years

of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions

that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now?

Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the

better so the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that i'm really happy or my family in general let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One.

Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One. Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. All right, let's go ahead to speaking of propaganda.

We have some updates about Al-Shifa Hospital, which was that central hospital in Gaza. You know, the Israeli government built for weeks a case that this was Hamas's headquarters, that they had this elaborate tunnel system underneath. They sent out multiple images that they said showed where the entrances to these tunnels were. They had graphics that showed all of these elaborate infrastructure that they claimed was underneath the buildings. They had their famous computer animation of Hamas Grand Central underneath of the hospital. In the first days after they raided al-Shifa at great cost to civilian life there, they put out very limited evidence of certainly nothing approaching what they had originally claimed. There were something like 10 guns laid out on a table. CNN and other Western outlets caught them moving these guns around and manipulating the evidence, something

I covered over the weekend. There was a box of dates that was involved. It was limited, okay, in terms of what they were showing. Now they have a new video that they released that they claim shows a much larger tunnel. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. And you can see the operational tunnel shaft. This goes on for a little bit of time, but I just want to make sure, you know, in the interest of, you know, everybody seeing the full nature of the evidence that they're providing here, I want to put it out there. They say in their tweet that revealed this video that they found a significant 55-meter-long terrorist tunnel 10 meters underneath the Shifa hospital complex during an intelligence-based operation. The tunnel entrance contains various defense mechanisms, such as a blast-proof door and a firing

hole in an attempt by Hamas to block Israeli forces from entering. For weeks, we've been telling the world about Hamas' cynical use of the residents of Gaza and patients of Shifa Hospital as human shields. Here is more proof. So, you know, a lot of people, I think, will be skeptical of this video to begin with because of all the issues with Israeli government propaganda, as we've just been saying. But Emily, even if you take this at face value that this, you know, generally is a tunnel, which is very believable given the fact we know, put this next piece up on the screen, that Israel themselves had built bunkers underneath of this hospital back in 1983 when Israel still ruled Gaza. So it's certainly totally believable that there are tunnels underneath of al-Shifa. I don't think anyone should deny that. But this is a far cry from the original presentation of why raiding this hospital was

justified. Something that, you know, under international law, hospitals are generally off limits. It requires absolutely exceptional circumstances to justify a raid and seizure and bombing of a hospital as what occurred here. As I mentioned, there was tremendous loss of human life. You know, dozens of people died because of this raid at this hospital. And still, and even Western media outlets saying this, nothing approaching what they initially claimed has been proved here. government over the weekend on social media, used social media to sort of win the propaganda war on this question of the hospital. The World Health Organization, which the Israeli government has sort of accused of being complicit in October 7th and complicit in the UN in general, sort of being aware of what Hamas was doing, but not being publicly sort of raising red flags, etc., etc. They put out a report on Saturday saying

they went in on Saturday. There are 25 health workers and 291 patients remaining in El Shifa, which with several patient deaths having occurred over the previous two to three days due to the shutting down of medical services. Patients include 32 babies in extremely critical condition, two people in intensive care without ventilation, and 22 dialysis patients whose access to life-saving treatment has been severely compromised. So at least as of Saturday, that's sort of the state of affairs and where everything stands. But in addition, that was from Tablet. If people just saw that up on their screen about the Israeli tunnels from back in the 1980s, that was from Tablet, pro-Israel publication.

So, I mean, finding the tunnels probably wasn't the hard part for the Israeli government. It was probably more like accessing the tunnels in a way that, you know, they weren't booby-trapped, that they felt was the safest way that they possibly could. But this is the state of affairs. These are the tunnels, and they are giving CNN interviews.

They're giving Fox News interviews where they're actually, you know, there are additional guns, as you talked about. There's additional guns in one of the scenes. They said it's because they found more guns, not that they moved the guns there. They're saying, you know, this was going to be the grand, you mentioned this, central command center, the like central nervous system of Hamas was going to be under here. So they're spending the weekend pushing out image after image after image, and you just have to trust them that this is what it says it is when you also are finding out that things aren't what they say they are. And again, so if we hypothetically say, hypothetically give them the total benefit of the

doubt, say everything they're saying is correct. They are going about it so poorly because nobody has any reason to believe it when you make missteps like this time and again and again. And the cynical person, of course, will say, well, it's not a misstep. It's an intentional propaganda campaign, which people, that's what everyone does in war. But it's just when you have a hospital involved. When Ryan and I were talking about it last week, it was like this is a situation that really is reflective of so many of the different tensions in the conflict. Like this one is almost symbolic of the conflict as a whole. Yeah, I think that's right. And that's part of why they have been so aggressively trying to prove their case.

And also, at the same time they're trying to prove the case, they're also rapidly moving the goalposts, which we'll get to in a moment. But to your point, Emily, about the skepticism from the Western press, put this up on the screen. I mean, you had basically every major media outlet nicely, very diplomatically like, come on, y'all. You said this was Hamas Grand Central, and we've seen nothing like Hamas Grand Central you've got CNN with that analysis video suggests IDF might have rearranged weaponry at al-shifa prior to news crew visits there is also a BBC report that I played over the weekend to the same effect the economist asking was Israel's attack on al-shifa hospital justified if you read the column the the suggested answer is very much no. The Washington Post, Israeli troops scour Gaza's al-Shifa hospital for evidence of Hamas.

And again, the narrative beforehand was this is Hamas's headquarters. That's why, listen, we hate it. We hate that it's a civilian. We have no beef with civilians. But we have to go in because this is Hamas's headquarters. Here's our commuter animation that shows you we know exactly where these things are. And this is what we're going to find. And the presentation of media outlets of like, this is where the tunnels are.

We've got them pinpointed. We know where to go. The U.S. government the day before coming out, John Kirby, NSC spokesperson, saying, yeah, we have intelligence as well that backs this up. I don't think it's an accident that's the very next day that this raid occurs. And still nothing approaching what they originally claimed has panned out. I also don't think it's an accident that now because of the loss of international legitimacy surrounding this raid of this hospital and also what they've been doing overall in Gaza, I don't think it's an accident that that has pushed them closer to accepting some sort of a hostage deal and some

sort of a five-day ceasefire because the Biden administration has been pathetic and they're pushed back. The most important thing that they said is that there are absolutely no red lines for Israel. But you can see Biden putting out this op-ed saying, you know what, we're actually going to maybe sanction these illegal settlers, increasing pressure behind the scenes, et cetera, et cetera, that Israel is feeling at least some pressure because their public case has so clearly fallen apart. And the last piece, let's put this up on the screen, from the World Health Organization, Emily read some of this report. They said due to time limits, I think they were only allowed inside, yeah, they said for one hour inside the hospital, which they described as a death zone and the situation as desperate.

Signs of shelling and gunfire inside this hospital were evident. The team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and was told that more than 80 people were buried there. So there's no doubt that absolute horrors unfolded here. We know that I think four of the premature babies that had to be removed from the incubators because they ran on fuel died. We know everyone in the intensive care unit died. We know that there were patients who were effectively forced to evacuate, who were in no condition to travel, who were moving by foot. We know the horrific conditions that doctors were facing as they were trying their best to care for patients. And, you know, it's Israel scrambling to try to prove that this was all worth it and making a case that I think very few people are believing

at this point. The word scrambling, I think, is really accurate because actually over the weekend, they released video of hostages being brought into al-Shifa on October 7th. And again, a lot of people said, like, look, this proves this is Hamas central command. They're taking the hostages to a hospital. It's also the largest, most advanced hospital in Gaza. So again, I'm not sure that that proves it. And at one point, someone from the IDF, maybe even the IDF itself said, the video is on our side. I think they told media that the video, and they weren't talking just about that particular video. They were talking about all the video in general. They're saying the video is on our side. That quote to me, again, I actually don't dismiss the possibility

that al-Shifa, given the fact that it had tunnels that have been there since the 1980s, may have been used as Hamas headquarters. I don't think that's impossible. But even if you take that, even if you agree with me that it's not impossible that this is Hamas headquarters, obviously, Hamas is operating underground. Obviously, Hamas planned what happened on October 7th somewhere. So even if you sort of say that, yes, this is possible that this is a Hamas central command, here's actually the word that the IDF used. Well-hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex. Well-hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex. Okay, so even if you do that, what they have produced so far is not what you would expect

if you said that there was a well-hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex. That's just not what we've seen so far, which is why they're coming out now and getting ahead of it and saying things like the video is on our side. Yeah. And also in this, we can transition to the next part here, rapidly moving the goalpost. So they're no longer saying this was Hamas HQ. Now they're saying, oh, actually Hamas HQ was really in the South and Hamas all, you know, the Hamas leaders all fled to the South. That's why even they acknowledge they haven't been able to get that many of top Hamas leadership. So now they're saying, OK, communists, that's the real place where Hamas HQ is. So the story has dramatically shifted. And you'll recall, of course, Palestinians were told to flee northern Gaza. There was a line that was established. You must go to southern Gaza.

Otherwise, you're going to be deemed a terrorist. You, you know, will feel free to attack you, bomb your home, whatever, which they did quite dramatically in the north of Gaza. So now you have effectively, I mean, very close to all of two million residents of Gaza who are in southern Gaza. Khan Yunus is one of the places that people have fled to because that's where they were told to go under the assumption that they would be safe. Now, the bombing of southern Gaza has actually ramped up after those evacuation orders. It's not like it's ever really been a safe place. But Israel is now signaling, OK, since Hamas HQ wasn't in al-Shifa, it's actually in Khan Yunus, and that's where Hamas leadership fled. Now we're going to start this more aggressive bombing campaign in the

south. U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner was on the Sunday shows doing his duty, looking very uncomfortable, by the way, in this role. But anyway, we'll put that aside. Raising alarms and concerns that the U.S. government has with this ramped up attack in the South. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. We have been quite clear that Israel has every right to defend itself against the threat that it faces. That includes, by the way, the right to go after Hamas leadership, who they say now have fled to the southern part of Gaza and have sought refuge there. So in the event that we believe that Israel is likely to embark on combat operations, including in the South, we believe both that they have the right to do that, but that there is a real concern because hundreds of thousands of residents of

Gaza have fled now from the north to the south at Israel's request. And we think that their operations should not go forward until those people, those additional civilians have been accounted for in their military planning. And so we will be conveying that directly to them and have been conveying that directly to them. They should draw lessons from how the operation proceeded in the north, including lessons that lead to greater and enhanced protections for civilian life, things like narrowing the area of active combat, clarifying where civilians can seek refuge from the fighting. So, I mean, very diplomatically, he's saying, listen, you bombed the hell out of northern Gaza. You killed thousands upon thousands of civilians, thousands upon thousands of children.

Maybe take some lessons from that as you move into southern Gaza. Well, and to your point, this is where the Biden administration is really under the crunch with the Israeli government. I mean, obviously, again, this is part of their messaging campaign in the media. You know, this is part of how the Biden administration is negotiating with Israel is what they're saying publicly on shows exactly like this. And, you know, it's, Crystal, I mean, it's a very interesting state of affairs as of right now, because again, we were just talking about the hospital. Some of this stuff is fully believable. We don't know that it's true, but it's entirely possible, again, that al-Shifa was being used as a Hamas headquarters. It's

entirely possible that Hamas, knowing the ground invasion obviously was delayed and delayed and delayed as people were waiting for it, that Hamas cleared places and went to the south. But again, this has been happening over the last few weeks even. The Israeli government says that it is doing absolutely everything it can to protect civilians within reasonable boundaries, and then people in the south, in the south, aren't safe. It is an incredible problem for the Israeli safe. It is an incredible problem for the Israeli government. It's an incredible problem for the United States government, especially given where public opinion is heading in the United States. And I think that's what the Biden administration understands. And it's why Reuters is reporting, I think, clearly from Qatari sources that any obstacles

to this peace deal that we talked about earlier in the show are minor, I think is the term that the Qatari source used, very minor, because the Biden administration has to answer questions exactly like this. And if Israel starts turning towards an operation more heavily in the south, they've already had problems with civilians being put in danger in the south. If they start turning in that direction, it's a huge problem, not just for the Israelis, but for the American government as well. The Israelis care, Netanyahu, let me say, I don't like to speak in those blanket terms. When I say Israelis, I always mean the Israeli government, cares about one thing, which is keeping Joe Biden on their side. And all of these little, you know, there's all these leaks to the press about like,

oh, they're really concerned, behind the scenes, they're having these tough conversations. And, you know, they send this dude out who I have actually never heard of before to be like, oh, we're worried about the South, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's already very clear that until there is a U.S. willingness to say you're not getting our money unless you stop bombing schools, bombing hospitals, indiscriminately bombing and killing civilians, nothing's going to change until the U.S. actually starts letting some things, some votes go through the U.N. And you did actually have them let one thing go through, which is about these, quote unquote, humanitarian pauses. But we know from what- The settlement leak. I mean, that's the Biden saying he might sanction settlers. Settlers. So, I mean, that's like a little, little like maybe I'll do that. And that's very minimal in terms of what we could do with the incredible leverage that we have,

the amount of money that we routinely send to Israel and the escalated $14 billion that we're planning to send right now. And the huge list of weapons that they tried to keep secret, by the way, from the American public of what exactly was being sent to Israel. And Ken Klippenstein and others were able to get their hands on specifically that list and reveal what has already been sent. So until the U.S. government is actually inclined to use any of that considerable leverage, Israel is going to do what they want. And, you know, the population is traumatized by

October 7th. They are convinced this is an existential threat. And so the polling shows some 80 percent don't really care that much about Palestinian civilian life. So I think, again, there's not going to be any change in the approach from the Israeli government until the U.S. does more than like leak to the Washington Post that, oh, we're so concerned and we really wish they would stop. And I was going to mention, you know, with regard to this humanitarian pauses, we know from what Secretary Blinken reportedly told Netanyahu when he was there, it's not about actually bringing an end to the conflict. It's about buying time internationally and saving face so that the

bombing campaign can continue for a lengthier period of time. I referred before to the moving of the goalposts in terms of where Hamas HQ actually is. Put this up on the screen from the Financial Times. This is one of the things that people were pointing to. Israel signals operations in southern Gaza after hospital raid. Israel now believes several Hamas leaders have moved south with some in Khan Yunus, the largest city in southern Gaza, according to several Western officials. Some of Israel's allies have asked them to be cautious in their operations in the south, where nearly one million Palestinians have fled after being assured it would be safer than the north. Now, first of all,

we are seeing strikes in the south, they added, and second, operations in Khan Yunus can be incredibly difficult and destructive. Western officials said the scale and intensity of Israel's growing ground invasion of Gaza has caused concerns, despite consistent support for the country's right to, quote, defend itself. I don't think anybody meant that this requires ground operations of such a scope. And they've already started this bombing campaign, Emily, and already, you know, very clear large death toll and large civilian death toll because this is where everyone is now. This is where everyone was told to flee to and this is where they fled to. Yeah. And again, this is we were just talking about this. It's an increasingly big problem for the U.S. government, which public opinion is a very going to be a very, very tough pressure on Biden. In fact, we're going to talk

about that with a guest today in all kinds of ways that, you know, maybe even people didn't originally expect the political pressures that would fall on Joe Biden over this. I agree with you. I think, you know, until there's completely foundationally different conversations about U.S. aid, which actually Tablet magazine over the summer, a very pericial magazine, had a fascinating piece about how U.S. aid to Israel in some ways is bad for both the U.S. and Israel. It's a really interesting piece. I recommend people check it out until some of those foundational conversations start happening. I mean, I don't see how anything, you know, dramatically changes. I do think the Biden administration is very aware of public opinion and is, you know, talking to the Israeli government about different things like this and is probably applying some pressure, but short of immense pressure, short of sort of foundational conversations about the nature of the support.

Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think there's—without having conversations about the foundational questions, you don't get foundational change. And you actually had a report. Bernie Sanders, who has not called for a ceasefire, notably, he came out and called for conditioning aid to Israel. And there was also a report that a number of, I think, all Democratic senators have begun that conversation. So that has started to happen, you know, at least within the Senate. But with Joe Biden, the support has been more or less lockstep.

The other question here that has always been is, okay, so you completely flattened Gaza City. Now you're moving to the south to probably completely flatten southern Gaza as well. What the hell are you going to do after this mission accomplished moment? That makes your people safer. That's right. Yes. That makes your people, that makes any sort of sense that has any sort of reasonable humanitarian potentially situation for Palestinians. Put this up on the screen. This was really eyebrow raising. This is from Al Monitor. Inside Israel's three day after options for Gaza amid government split. So I've got a short list here. Number one, a role for Egypt. First option, which enjoys the greatest support among Israeli decision makers, is for Egypt to basically take

control of the enclave in return for complete forgiveness of its massive foreign debt. I mean, this is very adjacent to the ethnic cleansing plan that was strategically released from the Israeli government and that many members of the far right Israeli cabinet have been pushing for. Next one is from Ramallah to Gaza City. Second option, this is what the U.S. has been pushing for, is the Palestinian Authority's return to Gaza, which several Israeli decision makers regard as a bad idea. Simply put, it would torpedo the government's ultimate goal of severing all ties between itself and Gaza. And also, it would make it so that there was one unified leadership between the West Bank and Gaza, which would take off the table, you know,

their talking point of like, oh, we have no one to negotiate with in terms of a two-state solution. So it would make a two-state solution more possible and more viable. So that, they don't want that, even though that's what the U.S. has been pushing. There are other problems, by the way, I'll get into in a minute, with the idea that the PA could take over Gaza. And the last one is an international coalition. The third option is handing the keys to an international coalition consisting of Arab countries and or NATO, the EU, or the U.N. We also have been floated as part of this international coalition, to which I would certainly say hell no. Which, by the way, is basically how the West

Bank and Jerusalem in particular is run right now. It's under control of Jordan, but there's also international cooperation with how it works. And so we kind of have a test case of how well it works. And the answer is not very. Yeah, well, so in the PA, you know, that theoretically is the governing body in the West Bank has zero legitimacy. And this is sort of intentional, again, from the Israeli government, has zero legitimacy within the West Bank. They are accurately, I would say, seen as effectively collaborators with the Israeli security establishment. And so that's why I say there's, you know, there's a lot of issues with the idea that you're just going to nation build and install your chosen ruler of, you know, Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in the Gaza Strip where they have zero popular support or legitimate legitimacy.

They already have no support or legitimacy really in the West Bank either. Within that international coalition part, though, one of the things they float here as an idea that people are talking about is completely insane. They want to construct a huge artificial island off the coast of Gaza. Quote, it will be cheaper and faster than rebuilding the Gaza Strip itself, a very senior former security official told this paper seeking to promote his brainchild. There is technology, means, and money. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have huge numbers of such artificial islands, which have become hubs of tourism, commerce, housing, and infrastructure. It's relatively easy.

It's cheap, and it will allow everyone to turn over a new leaf. The Gazans will receive new land with efficient infrastructure that will no longer be a land border between Israel and Gaza. The source warned, any attempt to rebuild Gaza is doomed, given the massive underground tunnel network into which everything could collapse. The underground city will suck up what is above it. Disaster is yet to come, the former security official said. The island could be a pretty good solution. So they're like pitching this like it's some resort destination and like it'll be great for everyone. The whole nature of this conflict, which often gets framed in religious terms, but it's really a land dispute. And so what you're talking about here is completely pushing them off of the land that

they are claiming and entitled to, by the way. And it's also very revealing about the extent of the utter devastation and destruction, which has already been unleashed in the Gaza Strip, that they're like, there's nothing to go back to. We can't even rebuild it. It'd be easier to build a whole separate island where we can then keep you in prison than to try to rebuild Gaza City, which is uninhabitable now. This is the most Western galaxy brain solution that you could possibly joke about. It's like some shit that Elon Musk would come up with. It's satire because, again, to your point, this is a land conflict. And the land conflict, obviously, whoever came up with the solution, whatever security officials talking

to the media and floating the solution, understands that fundamentally this is a land conflict. But they have this end of history Western galaxy brain idea that it just needs more land, that people will be satisfied if you just give them a brand new hunk of fabricated land in the middle of the ocean, as opposed to the land is important to them because there are holy sites on the land. The land is important to them. They're fighting, they're spilling blood over the land because of that particular land and its connection to their families, to their faiths, to their sense of honor and dignity. And so this idea that we'll just create new land and everyone will be happy with it is, again,

like it is so perfectly representative of this like end of history Western idea about how to solve conflicts. And we have a really hard time understanding here in the United States, in our sort of comfortable world, why people would fight that bitterly over their land. It's hard for people to wrap their brains around,

but there are holy sites in Gaza. It's not just the West Bank. There are holy sites in Gaza that matter a lot to people. I think it actually sort of reminds me of the thinking of some libertarians and also a lot of liberals that's like, or neoliberals, I should say, that's like, oh, your factory town in the U.S. is destroyed. Yes, move.

Just move to New York or just move to like San Francisco and learn to code. It's like, I say this as someone who still lives in the hometown where I was born and raised. Place is important to people. You know, this is, no, L.A. or San Francisco or whatever is not my home. This is my home. And that matters to people. You know, this is no L.A. or San Francisco or whatever is not my home. This is my home. And that matters to me. So, yeah, I mean, it's just I guess what I what I'll say finally on all of this is all of these options are bad. All of them are horrific. You know, you have a situation now where in the name of, quote unquote, eradicating Hamas, which is an impossible goal, you've killed thousands upon thousands at the number I saw between 12 and 16,000 civilians

killed at this point, you know, a huge number of children killed, huge number of children orphaned. And for every Hamas person that you have taken out, how many more radicals have you created with this destruction? So, you know, one of the things we keep talking about is the lessons that should have been learned after 9-11. And there is no doubt that the actions we took after 9-11 actually made us less safe. And I think that's incredibly clear here as well. And it becomes even clearer when you look at the preposterous ideas that are being floated for the post-war scenario. Everything from outright ethnic cleansing, pushing people completely off of the land into the desert in Egypt and basically using Egypt's debt load to force their compliance. And Israel, I don't think there's any doubt at this point

that that is their top choice. The only question is whether the U.S., Egypt, and other players are, you know, cajoled and convinced to go along with it. radicalized people who just watched their land again turned into a quote parking lot to quote Max Miller and are now in a new country where there are sort of even the embers of the Muslim Brotherhood. And you can easily come back in and imagine how that makes Israel significantly less safe again. Yeah, that's true, too. And then, you know, everything from that, from the ethnic cleansing solution to the let's build them their own island, which also, by the way, pushing them off their land is, you know, I would say that is still ethnic cleansing. But anyway, that's where we are. That's what we know. And it is it's hideous. I mean, it's just horrendous what is happening. And, you know, it's very bleak what the future could look like as well, even after this. They have their quote unquote mission accomplished moment.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country

begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes.

Now I'm curious. Do they, like, rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me. And he's getting older now, too. So, his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's, like, really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend. So, he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family?

It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog. And just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important. And that's what stands out. Is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that. I'm really happy.

Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide. Listen to We Need To Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Crystal, I'm fascinated to talk about this next block because it's been massively viral. But the question is why? Yeah. The question is how organic the virality is. I've been excited to talk to you about this one. It's interesting for a lot of reasons. It's interesting on the sort of tech front, but it's also interesting on the kind of Gen Z, the new sort of discussion about how people see this country, how people see their role in the world. So if people haven't heard, obviously this blew up late last week, but Osama bin Laden's infamous

letter to America that ended up on the internet in like 2002. Somehow someone got their hands on it. I think it was the Guardian that originally got their hands on it. 2002, it is going around the internet back in the day when it was a series of tubes, as Al Gore would have said. But was that Al Gore that said series of tubes, Crystal? It sounds right. We'll go with it. The series of tubes that made up the internet. But this letter started to make the rounds everyone thought on TikTok over the course of the last week. It turns out that's not exactly the case. So let's put the

first element up on the screen here. So Yashara Lee, Crystal, I don't even know how to begin describing Yashara Lee. If you don't know about Yashara Lee, basically a prolific user of Twitter, prolific user of X who has had quite an interesting background. You can Google it because there's no reason for us to dive into the particulars of all of it. Very friendly with Kathy Griffin, although not anymore. It's all up in the air. But Yashar Ali posts, over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks, at least, have been posted where people share just how they read Bin Laden's, how they just read Bin Laden's infamous quote letter to America in which he explained why he attacked the United States. Now, one particular thing to keep in mind there with what I just read is he says thousands of TikToks at least. Okay, so then he continues and says, the TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes and they'll never see geopolitical matters the same way again. Many of them, and I've watched a lot, Yashar continues, say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to hostile power. All right, let's put the next element up on the screen right here. This is actually going to be, this is from, if we put the next one up here, this is, oh, sorry, I was looking at the wrong block. This is going to be the video compilation of that Yashar posted of people saying they just read bin Laden's letter to America and have had their eyes opened up for the first time. So take a listen to what Yashar posted.

This morning, I read Letter to America, which is Osama bin Laden's letter to America explaining why he attacked Americans. And I am ashamed to say that I not only have never read this letter, but I didn't even know this letter existed. And I feel the same exact way I felt when I was deconstructing Christianity. I feel a little bit just confused, like I have entered into another timeline. What is this? So I just read a letter to America. And I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. In the last 20 minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed.

It becomes apparent to me that the actions of 9-11 and those acts committed against the USA and its people were all just the buildup of our government failing other nations. All right, so let's put up how Glenn reacted to The Guardian pulling the letter down off of their website. So Glenn Greenwald tweets, The Guardian's removal of the bin Laden letter from its site after 21 years until Americans started to read it completely backfired. The Washington Post says the removal actually spurred even more interest. And TikTok is now aggressively banning discussion of the letter. And that's the next element. We can just throw that up immediately. TikTok comes out and says, content promoting this letter clearly violates

our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. Well, Crystal, the Washington Post actually started investigating this and came to some interesting conclusions that tell us so much actually about social media and the news media. The fascinating kind of pipeline from, people think of Covington Catholic. You have the snippet of a video that's going viral on Twitter at the time and suddenly ends up in the Washington Post and CNN. And people hadn't really taken the time to do their due diligence. They had just, you know, these professional reporters making lots of money here in Washington, D.C. and New York ran with these ridiculous stories. Well, that's actually kind of at the

heart of this too, because it's a Streisand effect conversation in essence, which the Streisand effect is basically once you publicly complain about something, you know, saying that it's getting too much attention, it'll get much more attention, that there may have not organically been that much attention on it in the first place. So if we put the next element up, Washington Post looked into the sort of source of the virality here and came to some, I mean, just fascinating conclusions. One of which was that if you look at the Google Trends, and this is the next element, there's a lot of stuff to go through here because Washington Post found a lot of evidence here. This is Ryan Broderick. He runs a newsletter. He's saying, if you look at the

Google Trends, he says, there are folks in my reply saying that Google Trends proves the Bin Laden letter was already going viral before it was shared on Twitter slash X. I marked below when it was tweeted. Yes, there was some interest. I never said there wasn't, but it was plateauing. After the tweet, the interest doubled. The Washington Post also talked about this Google Trends data, basically saying that TikTok did kind of make it viral, but that wasn't the whole story. And that's right. If you look at this, people had started Googling Osama bin Laden's letter to America, basically on this timeline, like roughly over the past few weeks. Then he's pinpointed right there. If you're watching this, you can see there's a little blue dot with a circle around it when the Yashara Ali tweet is posted and it spikes right

after that so it's going up before and then spikes right after it that would be the Streisand effect illustrated here pretty neatly conveniently so crystal there's also as Sagar says in this next tweet we can put Sagar up on the screen because even when he's not with us he is always with Sagar says in this next tweet, we can put Sager up on the screen because even when he's not with us, he is always with us. Sager says, if you're going to read the Bin Laden letter and think it's somehow profound, you should probably read to the end is why he says there are no such thing as innocent American civilians and why 3,000 innocents deserve to die on 9-11. And I think the implication there, Crystal, is that it's also the argument kind of being rolled out by Israel that there's no such thing as an

innocent civilian in Gaza. We've heard people in the United States make that argument as well. And this is where the power of the bin Laden letter comes from. That, you know, A, TikTok banning it, horrible idea. Horrible idea. As dumb as I think the people who are posting about it is, this is the dumbest idea ever because what you're doing is making it seem more forbidden. And the power of this history, if you read this letter, which is actually a very useful piece of historical context, if you read this letter, it is so powerful to you if you're a young American who doesn't remember 9-11 precisely because nobody has ever told you that this is what bin Laden thought. Precisely because nobody has ever told you this is how other people on the

other side of the world see the United States. Glenn actually just did a really interesting interview on his show with David Talbot, who wrote Devil's Chessboard about all of these things the CIA has been doing in other countries, especially in the Middle East, that Americans don't know about, but that loom very large in places like Syria, in places like Iran, in places like Iraq, in places like Afghanistan. That's where the power comes in from the bin Laden letter. That's how that stuff goes viral. So first, let me talk about some of the content of the TikToks, which we showed you a few of, and there were others. The ones that we showed, I actually have zero issue with because I think what people, my sense of what people are reacting to and why they're like, oh my God, I actually have zero issue with because I think what people, my sense of what people are

reacting to and why they're like, oh my God, I feel like I've been lied to my whole life is because what's sold to the American public is this very cartoonish like axis of evil, good versus evil. They hate us because we're free. Like, you know, this just came out of nowhere and these are just bad people or the culture's bad or the religion's bad. It's just evil. There's nothing you can do about it. And there is an element of that. And if you read the letter, too, by the way, there is a lot of it that is, you know, there's like horrors in there and completely anti-Semitic and anti-gay and all this stuff. That's the next element.

Right. Yeah. And we can put that up on the screen. Emily actually flagged this, some of what he, you know, objects to. We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicant, gambling, and trading with interest. But, you know, there are also things in there that are legitimate foreign policy grievances, which if you are going to be someone like bin Laden who inspires this horrific terrorist movement that took hold among some group of people, there has to be some core grievance that is actually real. And that's why people study, you know, what enabled the rise of Hitler?

What was Hitler saying about his own justifications? What were the social and political and economic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany? It's not because they support Hitler or Nazism. It's because it's important to understand the conditions that led to this result. It's part of also, you know, what people are talking about with understanding the history of Israel and Palestine that, you know, leads to October 7th. It's not to say, oh to October 7th. It's not to say, oh, October 7th was justified and it was fine for them to attack civilians. It's, listen, if you cage a people and you have them in this open air prison for decades, yeah, you can expect

that there's going to be some horrific, violent, dangerous results. So I actually fully support people reading the letter to America from bin Laden to have a deeper understanding of a of a horrific and traumatizing, you know, in a lot of ways, seminal moment in American history to have some of it's important to understand what your adversaries and enemies are saying about why they do the things that they do. And it's also ironic to me, Emily, because we showed that thing from Sagar. We've probably mentioned Letter to America a number of times on this show. It's you guys. Exactly in this context. It's you guys did this. Yeah, it's our fault. Yeah, we sparked the viral trend. But exactly in this context of, okay, if you are going along with the Israeli officials who are like, all of the Palestinians are Nazis. Isaac Kurzog, their supposedly moderate president, saying we need to really rethink this idea of innocent civilians. It's practically a quote that comes out every day that's basically like, no, they voted for Hamas.

They support Hamas. Therefore, they're not innocent. Therefore, they deserve to die. That's exactly what bin Laden says about us. And by the way, bin Laden has more of a point with America because we are actually a democracy. We do actually elect their leadership. These people have not had an election for Hamas. Most of the population of the Gaza Strip wasn't even alive when they had their last election.

All of this is horrific. None of it justifies attacks on innocent civilians. So it's important to understand that if you're going along with the Israelis when they're saying, yeah, there's no innocent civilians because, look, they like Hamas and they voted for Hamas, you are bolstering the very same argument that bin Laden made to massacre innocent civilians in America. And also, by the way, you are bolstering the very argument that Hamas would make about why there are no innocent Israelis and why it was perfectly fine and justified for Israeli civilians to be massacred on October 7th and in suicide attacks and other

attacks and, you know, firing rockets, et cetera, et cetera, over the years. You should reject all of that. And so I actually think it's a good thing for people to be reading the letter. Now, let me also say, Emily, that there were also some of these TikToks that were like Bin Laden was right. No, Bin Laden was not right. All right. Let's not let's this. No, absolutely not. But do I think they should be banned? Do I think TikTok should pull this down because of this, you know, idiotic, facile and, you know, immature and completely wrong take? No, I don't think they should have taken it down. I think it's absurd that The Guardian, something is popular on your website and that's like a red flag to you. Isn't that the whole reason you have things on your website is for people to find them and read them and engage with them?

That's insane to me. And Glenn also made a good point because it's, it's mostly the right. That's like, you know, these dumb Zoom or TikTok kids, like they love Hamas and they're evil and they hate America and now they love bin Laden, et cetera, et cetera, which is just like a facile preposterous reading of what's going on here. And also, you know, we showed you the data of this wasn't even that much of a thing until it got called attention to, and you had a bunch of people rocketing in to be like, oh, what do these dumb kids actually think? But up until very recently, there was this whole effort to release that school shooter manifesto that was being kept. Audrey Hill. Yes, that was being kept hidden.

And the idea there wasn't we want to read her writings because we support her massacre. No, it was, hey, we want to, I mean, it was kind of like we want to own the libs and the left and whatever. But it was like we want to understand what radicalized this person. We want to read her words and her justification. And the very same principle applies here. Again, like this is powerful because we don't tell this version of history. And I actually think that the right vastly underestimates how powerful this is with Generation Z and the kids that are going to be younger than them who don't remember 9-11. We're learning about 9-11 because the internet has democratized the way

we tell stories about ourselves as a country. And there are really important elements of that story that we are not honest with ourselves about. There are, for example, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda. We can go back to the Cold War and the Mujahideen and have these really serious conversations about nuclear war policy during the Cold War and how actually some of the things that we did from the perspective of a country that had just spilled blood overseas in the Pacific and had dropped a nuclear weapon for the first time ever, twice in Japan, why people were utterly terrified, why there were drills that people were hiding under their desks

because they were so afraid of nuclear war, and how that led us to make some really ridiculous decisions overseas. But if we're not honest about those decisions, we are going to look like we are hiding that. we are to some extent hiding it and it's an amazing country that you know People like David Talbot can write the book that he did And can talk about it in the media and that we can study these things and be honest about them But until we sort of have a high-profile confrontation with those mistakes and what they did Overseas like this is why the fight over the 1619

project, we can go back to the revolution or whatever, but, like, we aren't even being honest about the history, the immediate history of conflicts that we are in right now. Right now. This is also why, you know, we were opposed to, like, banning RT during the, you know, at the beginning of the Ukraine war, when Russia invades Ukraine and all of these like Russian propaganda outlets were banned, not because we think that they're accurate and perfect all the time, but because it's important to know what you're, what propaganda is your enemy putting out? How are they justifying this conflict? And what are also some like potentially legitimate grievances that they had that enabled their justification of this war and this conflict? Those are really important things to understand. So and to your point, Emily, you know, the reason why the big reason why we are so supportive of Israel since the 60s and so

supportive of Saudi Arabia and like these are our best buds in the region is because we found them very useful for combating a pan-Arab movement. And we found frequently, we found these sort of like Islamist religious extremist groups like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, bin Laden connection there, we found them useful for our aims at the time. And so also part of understanding this complex history is not to then go, oh, well, we backed bin Laden, therefore bin Laden must be good or right or whatever. It's all our fault or whatever. But to understand the blowback and the potential consequences of some of the things that we have done in this region and also that Israel has done in this region. Netanyahu is on record saying that he supported Hamas. He wanted to bolster Hamas.

It's the same thing. Because they were an obstacle to a two-state solution and he didn't want a two-state solution. So to say all of these things isn't to say, ergo Hamas is good or ergo it's all Israel's fault that they got their citizens massacred. It's to understand the history so that we can try to keep people safe and avoid conflicts and avoid terrorism and avoid war in the future. And so I just find the whole, like, the entire moral panic over this bin Laden letter situation to be absurd. Like, on every single

level, I find it completely absurd. It's ridiculous. And the last thing we should mention is that there was originally, from people including myself, speculation that the Beijing-owned app TikTok could be in some ways tweaking with the algorithm to make this, amplify this in the United States. And actually, TikTok saying that they're aggressively banning the content doesn't mean that that wasn't necessarily happening in Beijing. But I don't think it does. I don't think we actually even need TikTok as the Google data that the Washington Post pulled shows. We don't need TikTok. We don't need Instagram. Like the Russian memes from 2016 that

they actually did put like $30,000 behind or whatever it was to have some minimal effect. We're trying to prey on these divisions over trans ideology and Black Lives Matter and all of this stuff in the US. Our foreign adversaries know that we are already completely divided along these lines, and they already know how powerful this stuff is. We actually don't need them to pour gasoline on the fire. We certainly shouldn't allow them to pour gasoline on the fire. But even if they do, the fire is already burning. They might make the fire worse, but the fire is already burning because of plenty of the problems that we have on our own. And as of like 10 years ago, people can go read this in the Washington Post, there were CIA textbooks. They were made in like Missouri or Colorado that were encouraging and writing about jihad in Afghanistan that were for madrasas.

And as of 10 years ago, they were still circulating. They're from like the 1980s. Wow. That is still a completely, there are still completely real fault lines that stem from this Cold War ideology that are driving the conflicts today, right now. I mean, some of these things are still being driven by them. So we need to be honest about it. And if we aren't, people should expect, the political establishment should expect a whole lot more sentiment exactly like this. And that is a great point because a lot of this does come down to cope, that younger generations have a very different view of this conflict. And I don't

think you can look at the poll, like none of these social media platforms are so powerful that what they serve you just like instantly brainwashes people into whatever view they're promoting. There is a genuine generational break in the way that people view this conflict between Israel and Palestine. And I think that is attributed to a lot of things. Sagar and I had a conversation about this. I think part of it is that young people didn't grow up in this Cold War era where it was like, these are our friends and that's that. And this sense of like, you know, it being existential that we just back our friends against the bad guys no matter what. And I think it also is attributable to the fact that there is less of a lock on what people are able to see and the media that they're able to consume. There's a lot of reasons, I'm sure multifaceted, that have led to

that, but it's organic. It's very clear in every single poll that comes out. And I don't know that the TikTok algorithm has a whole lot to do with it. Right. No, I agree completely. Let's move on to what is roiling. Axe.com, formerly known as Twitter over the last couple of days, which is Elon Musk firing off a couple of tweets, which is no stranger to the advertisers on X or the board over at X or the people in the sort of C-suite over at X at this point, that Elon Musk sort of doing what Elon Musk does and firing off some tweets can cause these massive explosions of controversy as it regards to their business. So let's put this first

tear sheet up on the screen. This is from The Guardian. The headline is, Elon Musk agrees with tweet accusing Jewish people of, quote, hatred against whites. This then spurred, by the way, he was referring to this weird tweet that said, I'm going to read it actually because if you're listening, you can see it on the screen if you're watching. But if you're listening, I think it's actually helpful to see the whole thing that he was responding to. Okay. Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities So Elon Musk replies,

You have said the actual truth. After this, as you can imagine, it spurs a huge advertising pullout. So this is from Axios. They have a list of companies that have suspended their ads on X, and they posted this to X, actually. Apple, IBM, Disney, Comcast slash NBCUniversal, Lionsgate Entertainment, Warner Bros, Discovery, Paramount. This is really something, Crystal, that already just in the last few hours, I'm actually kind of surprised a lot of those companies were still advertising on X, which I actually, first of all, don't imagine is that helpful to some of their business. I think it is to generating buzz. You know, you can understand why Paramount or Disney, for example, would be advertising there. But I'm actually surprised given what's been happening that they were still on there in any significant way. But this gets really interesting.

So let's put the next element up. This is from Matt Bender who says, Elon Musk is so mad about all the advertisers fleeing X, he announced he's going to sue Media Matters. And in his statement, he appears to confirm the accuracy of their reports in an attempt to downplay it. Good luck with the lawsuit. So this is Musk's tweet of a statement that he said, quote, the split second court opens on Monday. X court will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.

Stephen Miller, the attorney general also of Missouri, replied to Elon Musk. And basically, we're saying fraud is serious. The AG of Missouri said we're looking into this. Stephen Miller said fraud is both a civil and criminal offense. So that they are saying media matters who put together this report. They said basically their report is what gets advertisers to flee. They've done this with Fox News before. They do this all the time and tell places like Disney and Apple that their posts are appearing next to anti-Semitic posts, so that their advertising content is appearing next to anti-Semitic posts, so that their advertising content is appearing next to anti-Semitic posts.

And so Elon Musk puts out this statement that says, of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, this is of the Media Matters report the day they studied, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article. For one brand showcased in the article, one of its ad ran adjacent to a post two times, and that ad was seen in the setting by only two users, one of which was the author of the Media Matters piece. And this is, Media Matters puts together, I think, these stupid reports, like sloppy reports, silly reports, but advertisers are so sensitive about these

things right now, especially when you have Elon Musk tweeting things like this. They're so sensitive to the public backlash that they will respond to media matters like this. Also, they're sort of already sympathetic to the ideological bent of media matters. So it's fairly easy for media matters to sort of control advertisers with things like this. We saw them, again, do it with Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News and other things. But Elon is accusing Media Matters of creating fraudulently like a puppet account and following accounts or taking activities to tweak the or to mess with the algorithm so that it would serve them up the worst content on X. Now, there are people calling for Linda Iaccarino, who's in charge of trust and safety at X. She's the CEO.

She's the CEO now? She's the CEO, yeah. She's the one who— Oh, that's right. She came from NBC, and the whole reason was because she was the head of advertising at NBC. And the idea was that she has all these brand relationships, and she'd be able to bring the brands back over to X and make them feel comfy having their ads placed there. Right. That's right. And so Musk had said on Friday, quote, as I said earlier this week, decolonization from the river to the sea and

similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and result in suspension. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League responded to Elon Musk and said, this is an important and welcome move by Elon Musk. I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate. Yaccarino had also put out a statement without mentioning Musk that there's no room for anti-Semitism hate on X, period. This is from the CEO. So, Crystal, these are kind of two separate things. On the one hand, you have the Media Matters Report. On the other hand, you have Elon Musk and what he posted that sort of creates the firestorm, but in some ways it's separate because there's all of these

different layers when we're just talking about the Media Matters Report. But Musk himself, him expressing that sentiment, what did you make of his reply to the random post that he has no reason to reply to? Well, I mean, I guess I'm just dense because when I first read it, I just didn't understand it. Like the dialectical hatred, it wasn't a conspiracy that I was personally really familiar with. So I just didn't understand it. I mean, I did, like the reference to minority hordes, I was like, that sounds bad. But then Matt Iglesias actually explained it as like, this helped me, sorry.

It did, it helped me. It was like, oh, what they're saying is that Jews, because they vote for Democrats, deserve to die, basically is the idea. And so, yeah, to have Elon Musk co-signing that, like, ain't that the truth, brother? It's like, this is wild. And then to see, on the other hand, the ADL guy who's out there calling everybody anti-Semitic coming out and being like, good job on banning certain words from your platform. And I stand, you know, this is great.

And I support you when you, you legit just like, there is no two ways around the fact what Elon Musk said is like wildly anti-Semitic and, and like anti-Muslim and problematic on all sorts of levels. So there's that piece of the story, which I think speaks to something I've been tracking, which is that, you know, many of the people on the right who were so against identity politics and now are sounding very much like the left used to and throwing the word anti-Semitic around all the time and, you know, engaging their own form of identity politics and safetyism and whatever. It's not actually anti-Semitism that they have a big problem with. It's criticism of Israel. Like that's the thing.

The Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens dispute as a primary example of this. Candace said some crazy stuff about how what Hitler did was fine, except he wanted to take his ambitions worldwide or whatever. I don't want to misquote her. You can go and read the quote. It was an issue at the time and lots of people condemned her for it. That he apparently didn't have a problem with because he then hires her at the Daily Wire. But when she's critical of Israel, that's where he says this is repugnant. I think that's the word. Disgusting maybe is the word that he used, that this is absolutely disgraceful. Disgraceful. There you go. Thank you for reminding me of the exact words that he used there. That's where he draws the line. And it's very similar with the ADL. Jonathan Greenblatt has come out and said that it's very clear

that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. That's insane. Zionism is a political ideology. You can critique that. And there are many Jews who are not Zionists, by the way, and there are many non-Jews who are Zionists. So it's a political ideology. Of course you can critique it. Of course you can critique the Israeli government without being an anti-Semite. So there's that piece of it. Then the Media Matters piece is, Media Matters obviously is an activist organization. And one of their specialties is weaponizing capitalism against companies, right? And Twitter, the reason all of these social media platforms have very similar content moderation policies is not because of the individual billionaire owners or boards or whatever. It's because it's what the advertisers demand. the Twitter head of Twitter, dude, whatever his technical title is now, being like, by the way,

I share your anti-Semitic conspiracy, you can understand why they'd be like, I think I'm going to take my ad dollars somewhere else. And obviously Twitter already in the, you know, in the tank, in the toilet or whatever, in terms of their revenue under Elon Musk's leadership. So there's a lot of layers here and all of them are kind of interesting. The funny thing to me about Media Matters is that they don't, I don't think inside Media Matters, they see these little studies they do as like scientific or anything that could like withstand peer review. I mean, obviously not, but like the media treats them that way. And I think that's so funny. Media Matters is very pro-censorship. They're activists. I mean, they are like, I guess, sort of consistently pro-censorship.

I guess I would give them that. Yeah. And then Elon, Mr. Free Speech, then he's like, oh, you can't say these certain words. From the river to the sea. From the river to the sea, which, by the way, when Israelis say it, and there was a, who was it, an Israeli foreign minister recently said, from the river to the sea, there will be Israeli security. He said from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Yeah. He said from the Jordan to the sea, there will be security control at all times moving forward. That's fine. But when Palestinians, some of whom I'm sure do use it as like, you know, wipe them all out and plenty of

whom mean it as in we want one state with equal rights. That's out of bounds. Decolonization out of bounds. Yeah. And, you know, listen, if you're a pro censorship, dude, I guess. All right. Right. You're supposed to be Mr. Free speech. And you can't use these words and phrases on your site. Listen, I think the right needs to be more consistent on this period. I think free speech people need to be more consistent on this period because this long predates October 7th. And, you know, there's a really serious problem with inflation, like definition inflation that we talk about on the right all of the time when it comes to words like racism and bigotry. Particularly one that's really obvious is white supremacy sort of taking how a lot of people used to understand those terms and the definition that the definition is often inflated. And I think sometimes, you know, there is very much anti-Semitism that gets ignored in the press and that people don't talk about. But there are a whole lot of other things.

Decolonization is not necessarily, necessarily anti-Semitism. Or genocidal. No, it's absurd. And if Elon Musk, by the way, wants to take the side of the Guardian in deplatforming things that are uncomfortable, when we were talking about the Osama bin Laden letter last segment and the Guardian pulling it down, that is a bad move, even if you agree with him that, you know, and I generally do think that a lot of times it is used with a sort of wink, wink. You know, you kind of know what I mean. Not always, but I think sometimes it is used that way. Even if you think that's always how it's used, it should be allowed on your free speech absolutist platform because the minute you start banning things is when bad ideas metastasize in the shadows. The minute you start banning things is when bad ideas metastasize in the shadows. The minute you start banning things is when people get really curious about them,

and it's when you give them power. You give things power by banning them, and we should all be able to read exactly where everybody stands on this. And I understand advertisers not wanting their content on that. Then he needs to figure out another business model, which he's sort of trying to do. But this is not, I mean, this is not the sort of magic wand that fixes, the free speech magic wand that makes Twitter suddenly better again. Yeah. Jim Zogby shared a poll of when Palestinians say, you know, one state or from the river to the sea, they mean, they tend to mean, and again, I'm not saying in all cases, one state with equal rights for everyone. Now, Israelis, Jewish Israelis see that as an existential threat because they see the Jewish nature of their state as being an essential quality. And if everyone in the territory from

the river to the sea had equal rights, you would no longer have that Jewish majority. And so that's why they see it as existential. But the number of genocidal posts that you see coming from Israeli ministers are like, wipe them out, erase them all, who are actively arguing for displacing them all permanently out of Gaza. And that's all fine and good. It makes it very difficult for me to stomach this sort of like, you know, freak out over a chant that has been used for a long time and attempt to demonize a chant that many people genuinely do mean as like a call for one state with equal rights, whether you support that solution or not. But I think your point is the most important one, Emily, which is

that, listen, if you support free speech, you don't get to pick and choose. You know, I don't get to pick and choose when a speech that I don't like, and there's plenty of it. Sager. Yeah. Most of what he says. Not most, but some. But, you know, you don't like making space for speech that you find abhorrent is kind of the point of free speech. Otherwise, those principles don't matter at all. So anyway, a lot going on there with Elon Musk and the things that he's saying and the things that he's doing and the way the advertisers are responding. Sure is. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across

the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and we need to talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old

tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, cause I bring him on tour with me, and he's getting older now too, so his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is, and they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like, really the GOAT, like, he's a legend, so he gets

it what does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family it means a lot to me just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better so the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to

one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Well, perhaps the most influential AI company on the face of the earth was thrown into chaos starting on Friday when founder Sam Altman was pushed out of the company. We're going to get into the whole timeline that transpired over the weekend, but let's just out of the company. We're going to get into the whole timeline that transpired over the weekend, but let's just start with the news. After being fired on Friday, Sam Altman, we can put this first element up on the screen here. He said, I loved my time at OpenAI. It was transformative for me personally and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. We'll have more to say about what's next later.

Well, actually, we know what's next. After a wild weekend where he's pushed out, he's flirting actually with coming back. There's news reports that he's coming back. He's posting pictures that suggest maybe he's coming back. It turns out he's actually landed at Microsoft. We can put the next element up on the screen. He has been hired by Microsoft already. So this is just between Friday and Monday, he was hired at Microsoft. And if we put the next

tear sheet up on the screen, it followed just the wildest weekend. I was telling Crystal before we started filming this, it was like an episode of Succession. The New York Times has a dive into it that they bill as in the headline, the fear and tension that led to Sam Altman's ouster at OpenAI. It looked from reports, especially originally, because of where the fault lines are. Now, OpenAI has a really interesting structure. This is from the New York Times on Saturday. They said, the conflict between fast growth and AI safety came into focus on Friday afternoon when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI's six board members. The chairman of the board actually wasn't on this meeting when they ousted Sam Altman. A couple big members of the team, their chief technology officer, quit after Altman was pushed out by the board. He was asked to join this board meeting over video at noon in San Francisco.

They're reading from a script, according to the New York Times. The remote breakup. That's a rough one. The remote breakup. And, you know, again, this is one of the most interesting parts of it is that they have this nonprofit board. Obviously, OpenAR started as a nonprofit. Altman was one of the people who actually pushed, he was really the person who pushed,

to start funneling all of this corporate money into OpenAI. So they're governed by a nonprofit board. I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal now. Only a minority of its members were allowed to have a financial stake in the company at any given time, according to the company's bylaws. Altman himself had no equity in the company, further diminishing his influence with the board. This setup, as the journal continues, allowed the board to essentially oust Altman without the consent of some of OpenAI's largest investors. And even though he delivered rapid financial success for the company and sent its valuation soaring because the members of the

nonprofit board don't exactly have the same, I guess, financial motives or interest in the financial motives that somebody like Sam Altman would after steering all of this Microsoft cash and other corporate cash into OpenAI. And now, obviously, Altman is going to Microsoft to work on AI. That's part of this deal. He's the head of their AI operations now, which means presumably he's going to be, I mean, I would imagine he's still going to have, because of the stake that Microsoft has in open AI, Altman still apparently has very good will with people on the for-profit side of open AI. That's why this was really shocking to the AI community. He's ousted by this split crystal. I'm really curious to see what you think about this.

This fundamental split in the AI world between people who say we need to reel this in, begging for regulation. People like Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Tech, which worked with the Biden administration on the recent executive orders. So people who are just saying we need to reel this back in. This technology is a Pandora's box. It's open and we need to kind of pull it back in as quickly as we can. And the sort of Marc Andreessen camp that is, you know, full techno optimist and we need to, you know, be actually on the accelerator right now because there's so much good that can be, that can come from this. And the more sort of profit motive and capitalist drive is involved in the process, the better it's all going to be. Altman is more on the techno-optimist

side of this. He's actually been pushed out by some of these same foundational dynamics that he tried to navigate and actually accommodated when he was in charge of OpenAI. So the history of OpenAI is it originally is established, Altman, actually Elon Musk was involved at that time, and a number of other people established OpenAI as an explicitly non-profit organization to try to pursue tech, including obviously AI, under a non-profit umbrella so that all the decision- making wasn't driven by just

the profit motive. So that was the original idea. Which is a good idea, by the way. Which is a really good idea and something that I fully support. Because I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about what AI could unintentionally unleash, especially if you have big business controlling the decision making and driving the direction of development. Not only are you not going to pursue some of the things that actually could be really good for humanity because those things don't turn a profit, but you also run the

risk of unleashing things that are really not ready to be unleashed and have inherent risk. We got a little bit of a glimpse of this when ChatGPT was rolled out. And remember there was that brief period before they sort of like lobotomized ChatGPT where people were having some really wild, some real wild stuff was going on over there. And part of why, you know, AI is different than other tech is, I saw someone explain that, it may have even been Sam Altman that explained this, but I'm not sure. But, you know, like a phone. I don't know how a phone works, but I know there are people who could tell me how it works, right? Who could explain like this piece and this fits

with this and this is how, like there's a functionality that human beings understand. With large language models, it's not like that. You feed in all of this insane astronomical amounts of data. And you create something that is different. That you can't just, there is no human being on the planet who could tell you, like, if you ask the chat GPT this question or the AI this question, because of how it's programmed, you're going to get this result. That's what makes it such a, that's what makes it this result. That's what makes it such a, that's what makes it so different. That's what makes it so, frankly, scary. That's what makes it something that you should approach with some caution and care and not just leave up to the whims of markets and people who want to turn a huge profit on it. So, yeah, I mean, that's sort of the overall state of affairs.

And my eyebrows were firmly raised when OpenAI shifted to making this big business deal with Microsoft. I had a lot of questions about the direction that would go in. Sam was very out front being like, no, it's fine. I totally trust them. It's going to be put towards. thing we can to get wealthy and then use that money in these like directed ways towards the things that we find to be the greatest threat to humanity and civilization and put your feelings aside about whatever cause like emotionally moves you. And we'll just do this complex calculus. I have all sorts of issues with that. I did a monologue on it. You can listen to it. But one of the things that they identified as one of the grave risks that a lot of money should be funneled into is the threat from AI sort of

AI gone wild, I guess you would say. Another one was pandemic preparedness. That's why Sam Bankman Freed's thing was always like cloaked in. Oh, sure. It's not about me getting the regulation or the non-regulation I want of crypto. It's really about pandemic preparedness. Anyway, AI development was the other big cause or one of the other big causes that they're devoting to.

There's a lot of Silicon Valley and tech types who are, do believe in the effective altruist like system. And so that is part of the split here and the tension as well between the direction Sam was going in and the direction that the board wanted to go in. And that's again, interesting about this. Like there are experts, there are people, reporters who cover this really closely who say it's not necessarily, we don't know definitively that the reason he was originally pushed out was because people were like, whoa, Sam Altman, the nonprofit board was like, we just got to pump the brakes on all of this. So much as it could have been that, or it could have been that these tensions stem from that fundamental disconnect between

Altman and the nonprofit board. And in other sort of then logistical downstream ways, he ended up sort of on their chopping board. So if it's tensions that come from that initial disagreement or it was front and center, the initial disagreement itself, I'm sure we'll learn more and more about in the days to come. But this conversation about AI, I find it so incredibly frustrating because the techno-optimist side of this will point to all of these silly pessimists. I love retweeting that pessimist Twitter page that were worried about the internet, that were worried about cell phones, that were worried about whatever else it was, that were worried about cars. They liked their horses, all of that. First of all, as a way to dismiss pessimists now, those pessimists made the eventual product safer and better.

So denigrating the pessimists is not helping the product. Second of all, yes, the call for regulations that sometimes is the Baptists and bootleggers. It is the protectionists. It is crony capitalism. And it is driven sometimes by apocalyptic fears. But actually, those apocalyptic fears are held by people who are not just tech outsiders who don't understand the tech like we necessarily, like we don't, we can't tell you how the phone works. They're actually, as you mentioned, people who do understand how this tech works,

have developed the tech, are also in the camp of the pessimists. Not all of them, but many of them are. So to then act as though people who don't understand the tech are only afraid because they're ignorant is, again, stupid. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And this conversation was just, once again, thrust to the forefront with the ouster of Altman over the weekend. So now he's the head of Microsoft, which has tons and tons of money. Putting tons and tons of money into AI is massively powerful. Crystal, I don't think we got any step closer to safer AI over the weekend. No, I don't think so. And there's two separate genres of AI concern. One of them is the

apocalyptic scenario, like the AI is going to kill us all, and, you know, or like unleash something that is unpredictable, etc. There's that one, even if you don't buy into that one. The other one, though, is that you have massive job loss triggered by rapid AI development, which is something that, you know, corporate titans, like they're all for. So that's part of why people are concerned by this being controlled by the for-profit sector of society. And as you say, Emily, you know, not just people who are outside of it and don't understand, but actually people who are intimately knowledgeable and involved with the development of AI. But I would also just say that sometimes people who have a little bit of a remove, who aren't emotionally invested in the development of X or Y or Z, but have almost like a layman's perspective on what this could mean and what it can unleash. Those views are also really valuable because, you know, at times people get so into the weeds and so like in love with the technology

itself that they have an incentive to downplay the risks and downplay some of the consequences. So personally, I don't, I wouldn't dismiss, you know, people who are sounding alarms who don't have intimate familiarity with exactly what the tech is or what it does. Let's move on to a pretty massive L from CNN over the last few days, which, you know, takes a lot of L's actually. But this one I think is worth discussing here. I'm going to play a clip. This is Anderson Cooper Friday. This is a guest on Anderson Cooper's show, a former Israeli intelligence chief, talking on CNN on Friday night. Let's just watch the clip and then Crystal and I will discuss. And in the south are several areas.

We have been asking the government to move to the Mawwasi area, which is very surgical. It is slow. It is very methodical. We are trying not to reach any of the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip. And I think that there is no way that we can eradicate the Hamas without dealing with most of its forces that have fled to the south. Now, again, one little note, the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a non-existent term because all of the Gazans voted for the Hamas. And as we have seen on the 7th of October, most of the population in the Gaza Strip are Hamas. Nonetheless, we are treating them as non-combatant. We are treating them as regular civilians,

and they are spared from the fighting. All right. So again, the quote there, the non-combatant population of the Gaza Strip is really a non-existent term because all of the Gazans voted for Hamas. And as we've seen on the 7th of October, most of the population in the Gaza Strip are Hamas. That's the quote from the former Israeli intelligence chief. Anderson Cooper just gets piled on when this video is posted to Twitter for, he kind of does a little squint when his guest said that, but basically let it go. You just heard in the clip or saw on the clip, he moved on to another topic completely after that statement was made, which of course there is pretty relevant context in the question. But first of all, even if you're on the side of that Israeli intelligence chief,

you could talk about how there were supportive demonstrations on October 7th in Gaza. People were in some sense supportive of what happened on October 7th. But that's not the same as an election. And the last election that happened, as you pointed out earlier in today's show, was before like half of the population in Gaza was alive, let alone able to vote. Able to vote, yeah. Anderson Cooper just moves on from that. Maybe Anderson Cooper had just read bin Laden's letter to America and was persuaded by his logic that actually there are no civilian combatants since you have elections. It's fair game to massacre civilians or certainly the IDF dude maybe had just let the bin Laden letter. You know what? Osama's got a point. What's up with this noncombatant thing?

No, I mean, listen, there's so much policing of like rally chants of people who are basically powerless or like the Harvard letter, which we talked about here and which I had. Like, you can't say Israel is solely responsible for what Hamas did on October 7th. Hamas also, guys, has some responsibility. And wants that responsibility, by the way. They want to claim the responsibility. True. But for all of the, you know, policing of that rhetoric, you've got someone with actual power here on a cable news network outwardly laying out a case for genocide while he's like, well, of course we're doing what we can about civilians, but also there's not really civilians. So who really cares? And zero pushback, zero

pushback. You could not imagine the same thing happening on the other side. If you had somebody on there who was like making the case that, well, actually all of these Israeli civilians, like they're not really civilians because they voted for Netanyahu and they're complicit in the apartheid and like the blockade and the occupation. So they basically deserve to die. There is no way that that would go unchallenged and it shouldn't. It shouldn't, by the way. But here, this just becomes so normalized and commonplace. And it becomes rhetoric that we hear all the time that, you know, the most Anderson Cooper can muster here is like a little squinting of his eyes before he moves on to the next topic. It's the Tucker Carlson squint.

A little bit. He's taking his cues from Bin Laden and Tucker Carlson. You're right. Okay. Wow. So CNN has taken a few L's over the course of this context. Actually, one of them from the other side is when they kind of immediately, like the New York Times and some other outlets, ran with the Hamas framing of the initial hospital. This was like right after October 7th.

People kind of remember when a hospital was hit. We still don't know exactly what happened with it, but as Israel now claims, as the US now claims, a Hamas missile hit a hospital. CNN took a lot of heat for sort of like the New York Times. Basically, many major news outlets ran with the information that they had. That was one of the first blunders that I think CNN experienced over the course of this conflict. But from the other side, let's look at this footage they ran. This is actually like a package, as it's called in the biz, a package they ran from, this is al-Shifa. Man, the HuffPost did a dive. Here's the next element on what happened. CNN

quietly cut, according to the HuffPost headline, disputed Israeli military claim from some video reports. HuffPost writes, in several other broadcasts of Robertson's report, which had included, we talked about this earlier in the show, a calendar that was supposed to be like a Hamas shift schedule. It was supposed to be, yes, where Hamas militants or terrorists were recording their names for their shifts of watching the hostages. Right. And in reality, it was a calendar. Nobody knows how this aired because CNN, first of all, obviously Israel has people who speak Arabic. The IDF has people who speak Arabic. And you would think before giving CNN and other people tours of this facility and making a claim, that would easily be vettable. And you would, of course, make sure that you vet that.

Why would CNN then air, you know, it's one thing for a sort of government engaged in a conflict to push propaganda. It's an entirely different thing for a media outlet to sort of run with it. CNN has not, by the way, they have changed this package as a, you know, they have, they're being shown through this kind of battleground area around al-Shifa by the IDF. They run a package based on that with the Arabic calendar, with that claim that it's a hostage like shift schedule for Hamas. And then it sort of disappears as HuffPost catches. They're saying in several other broadcasts, as well as on the CNN YouTube page and on their website, none of the false information actually was there. Instead, they say Robertson's report skips ahead to the journalist

asking Higari from the IDF about other hospitals and the IDF spokesperson arguing, quote, we were right to fire upon Al Rontisi. In an email to HuffPost, a CNN spokesperson acknowledged the report, which first aired on Caitlin Collins' program, was, quote, cut purely for length for subsequent shows. Not for total embarrassment and humiliation. Sure, yes. The spokesperson argued that such cuts were, quote, not uncommon at all, especially given the nine-minute length of the original segment. And HuffPost continues, CNN has seemingly provided no acknowledgement or explanation to its online readership about these scenes apparently being cut from other versions of Robertson's report. The CNN.com page for the report includes no editor's note or clarification,

nor does CNN's YouTube page. That is not a common practice, even when news outlets, especially for a pretty high profile and a pretty egregious mistake like this one, where, again, it's a mistake. I mean, even if you give, like, let's say hypothetically, we just give, ascribe the benefit of the doubt to CNN. Say they did everything, you know, sometimes the journalists just make mistakes. Sometimes that happens. Well, when it's a mistake that's as, I think, pretty obvious as this one,

you vet calendars in a foreign language before allowing a foreign government to make a claim about them. It's just a bit like Journalism 101. Yeah. So when you make a mistake, you just issue a correction. Again, like standard operating procedure, common practice in the news industry. That's not what happened here. And this is actually a pretty good HuffPost report getting CNN even to admit that they weren't amending anything, that they are claiming it was just entirely for length, which is obviously untrue. Yeah. I mean, Caitlin Collins

should have come out and issued a statement on her program since this aired on her program. Absolutely. But I mean, they're just, this isating. Like it's humiliating. And the context is that there are very few journalists left in Gaza, as we discussed before. Somewhere around 50 of them have been murdered, killed. They're gone. There's no foreign journalists allowed in Western journalists unless the IDF decides to take you on one of these ride-alongs. And then they vet the footage and you are only shown what they are willing to show you. You aren't allowed to freelance. You know, there were journalists who were allowed, I read the New York Times was allowed onto the Al-Shifa hospital grounds. They were not allowed to go and talk to the doctors. They were not allowed to go and talk to the patients. They had to be just with the Israeli military. And so you're very aware that you're being presented with the version of the facts that the Israeli military and the Israeli government wants you to show. So if anything, you should be even more vigilant and do even more fact checking about what it is that they are presenting to the world because you are being used for their propaganda. Like there's just no other way around it. Now, listen, you may say it's worth accepting those conditions

so that at least there is some picture of what is happening there. And also it's worth knowing what their version of the propaganda is, but it should always be framed in that context. So it's utterly humiliating for them that given that state of affairs, they just run with these claims of the calendar, which is easily debunkable, which again, CNN has many Arabic speakers on their staff and they couldn't bother to just check in with one of them to see if the claims added up. And rather than doing the honorable thing, admitting, taking the L, admitting like, guys, we screwed up here. We should have checked this. We didn't. Here's,

you know, it wasn't a Hamas militant recording of their hostages or whatever. It's actually just an Arabic language calendar. Sorry for that. Which would still not totally undo the harm because more people always see the original report than a correction. But that's what you do when you screw up. You take the L. You admit it. Instead, they tried to do the stealth edit and got called out and caught for it by the Huffington Post. And, you know, Crystal, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the show, which is, and we may disagree on this, but I think it's entirely plausible that Hamas could have been operating in the tunnels, which by the way, are likely the ones built by

Israel in 1983, as the Tablet Magazine reported back in 2014, that under al-Shifa, these tunnels were Israeli. I think it's entirely plausible that Hamas, we know they operate underground. We know that they've operated beneath hospitals. We know that. We can debate the specifics, but at least that is true. And so it's possible that Hamas is operating some sort of central command center out of al-Shifa or out of the tunnels beneath al-Shifa. Possible. Even if you're sort of, you agree with me on that point. Israel and of course CNN, but definitely Israel, is not doing itself any favors. There's no way in which lying about these sorts of things or failing to vet these sorts of things or putting forward such

sloppy propaganda makes any strategic sense whatsoever because all it does is make it much harder. Let alone for the Gazans that want to trust you when you're telling them to evacuate to the South and they're skeptical as to whether A, they'll be able to return and B, they'll be safe if they're in these crowded refugee camps in the South. But the sort of Western population where we're going to talk about some polls with the guest next that show a lot of opposition to Biden's pro-Israel policy. That is not helping Israel at all. This is sloppy propaganda. I'm not begging them for good propaganda. I'm just saying that by their level of contempt, the strategic argument, they're going around saying transparency,

transparency, transparency. The video is on our side out of al-Shifa. We are being transparent. We're putting up these videos. We're giving the media tours. These are, from the pure, cynical, strategic standpoint, these are massively unforced errors because they're losing trust with every single one of these examples. And there's no need to claim that a calendar is a hostage watch shift if it's not. Yeah, I think that is all very true. All right, let's go ahead and get to a Democratic Senate candidate in the state of Michigan who has some real thoughts about Biden's let's go ahead and get to a Democratic Senate candidate in the state of Michigan who has some real thoughts about Biden's Israel policy. Let's get to it.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop.

It's Black Music Month, and we need to talk. It's tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now?

Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good.

Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer

will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3

on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Excited to be joined this morning by a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. Nasser Beydoun is a business owner. He also was the executive director of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce and chair of the Arab American Civil Rights League. And it's great to have you join us this morning, sir. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here.

Yeah, it's our pleasure. So go ahead and put this up on the screen from Fox News. You had a spicy take here. You are urging Biden to drop out of the 2024 race and you are pointing in particular to what you describe as his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, throwing his presidency into a tailspin. Just elaborate on why you're making this call and what you're seeing there in Michigan. Well, you know, being on the ground in Michigan, a lot of the people who had supported President Biden in the last election say they're unwilling to do so regardless who the Republican nominee is in the upcoming election. And I think that the Biden camp is banking on the fact that people are going to forget about the 12,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza and Biden's inability

to do anything or his not wanting to call for a ceasefire and try and put an end to this conflict. And people are going to hold that against them. I think, you know, not only in Michigan, but other very vital swing states, he's lost a large majority of people who supported him in the last election. Yeah, we can put these poll numbers up on the screen. This is from Ben Samuels, who looks at some of these, quote, latest troubling poll numbers for Biden on Israel. And these are from NBC News. 70% of voters aged 18 to 34, so a very young demographic,

disapprove of his policy. 56% of all voters disapprove of his policy. 51% of Democrats say Israel's gone too far. 49% of Democrats oppose U.S. aid to Israel. Sir, that is really interesting, and I'm curious if it is something you're also seeing on the ground in Michigan, as you mentioned, a swing state that had been sort of a place where you had parents going against even the teachers union in a way that caught national media attention when it came to books and schools and people saying, maybe this is sending all of these voters to Republicans that roughly share Biden's Israel policy. I can imagine as you're traveling the state now and talking to people in your state, that's definitely not what you're seeing anymore.

No, it's become a race of which is the better of two evils in terms of a lot of the people in our community. You've got to remember that Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by approximately 10,000 votes. Joe Biden won in 2020 by about 150,000 votes. So it's a very small margin of error, and every vote's going to count in this upcoming election. So what's going to happen is that you're going to get people who choose not to vote or they're going to vote but not choose anybody at the top of the ticket or maybe go to Robert Kennedy or Cardinal West as a protest vote. So I think that one, President Biden has lost his moral leadership in this upcoming election. Two, he's 81 years old.

We can see that he doesn't have the vitality to run this country for the next four years. And also, when he ran in 2020, he said he was going to be a transitional president. He's going to try and fix, write what Trump did to this nation and put it on a better footing. But now that he's in power, he's decided he wants to run when he's 82 for four years. And also he has a vice president that a lot of people don't consider as a viable alternative to be the next president.

If we had a vice president that gave people confidence, then it would be a different scenario. But we don't. And I think that if he chooses to run, he's going to lose. And not only is he going to lose, he's going to cost us the majority in the Senate and no chance of getting the majority in the House. Nasser, you put your finger on something when you said it's the lesser of two evils. And what the White House is saying is, number one, people get over it. Number two, when you're faced with the alternative, all right, it's our guy Biden or it's Trump. People are going to remember the Muslim ban.

They're going to remember, you know, the chaos of the Trump administration. And they're going to suck it up and they're going to go back to the polls and they're going to vote for Joe Biden. Why do you think that it'll be different this time? Well, because you got to remember that when you talk to people, they say, oh, the stock market was better under Trump. Prices were better under Trump. Prices were better under Trump. And Trump might have issued a Muslim ban, but he wasn't complacent in the death of 12,000 Muslims in Gaza. So, you know, if they're betting on the fact that Trump is the worst of two evils, I think, you know, they're miscalculating how people actually feel. This issue has galvanized people all across the country.

And it's not just Muslims and Arab Americans. You know, you have Jews, you have Christians, you have anybody that's anti-war seeing this president take this country on a course that a lot of people don't want to go. And you also have to remember when Trump was president, he didn't cause any wars. He didn't attack anybody. So people are going to look that. And I think that President Biden and his team are grossly miscalculating how people feel and the anger because of what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. And a lot of college towns in Michigan, in your state, Nasser. So how are you seeing this dynamic translate into the primary campaign for U.S. Senate? Obviously, Alyssa Slotkin is running for

U.S. Senate in Michigan, establishment Democrat figure, actually former CIA, which is interesting in the context of this particular issue. So when you see young voters, as you point out, not just Arab Americans, but sort of across the board, young voters opposing the Biden administration's policy here, have you seen some of those dynamics then translate into the Democratic primary for the Senate seat in Michigan? Definitely. We've seen a lot of momentum. You know, I'm a long-shot candidate. You know, I'm not your typical candidate that's going to be running for U.S. Senate.

I've never held office before. I'm an immigrant. I'm an Arab. I'm a Muslim. I'm a man. But I do see that our position, our opposition to AIPAC's dominance and occupation of Congress is really gaining traction with people. And, you know, you mentioned Alyssa Slotkins. Well, if AIPAC and the CIA had a baby, it would be Alyssa Slotkins. You know, we were you know, this is a fight that we're going to take to the people of Michigan and let them choose who they want to represent them in the next U.S. Senate race. Lastly, Nasser, just to go back to the Joe Biden point, would you go so far as to say you think he's doomed in the state of Michigan based on what you're hearing, seeing on the ground? I will guarantee you that he's doomed in the state of Michigan and other states that are going to be too close to call because he has alienated so many people. And you would think a person like Joe Biden, who lost his wife and a child and then another child, would empathize with the Palestinians and the 5,000 children that have been killed in Gaza in the last 44 days.

But we see no empathy whatsoever. And then, you know, President Biden just published an op-ed in the Washington Post, I believe it was yesterday, in which he says that after this, there needs to be a Palestinian peace process, and there needs to be an outcome where the Palestinians have a state. Where were you before October 7th? Why were you trying to circumvent the Palestinians

with the Abraham Accords instead of being, you know, trying to forge a peace deal that could have prevented, had the Palestinians had hope for the last 20 years, maybe we wouldn't have had it October 7th. But the U.S., the Arabs, the Israelis have given the Palestinians no hope. And today is just the culmination of, you know, their despair and their lack of hope of ever establishing what's, you know,

their rights and their aspirations. Nasser, lastly, just tell people where they can learn more about your campaign. Well, they can go to my website at Nasser, N-A-S-S-E-R, 4-M-I-F-O-R-M-I dot com. All right. Well, good luck to you. And we appreciate your time this morning and your very clear-eyed analysis. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And that's it for us today. We will be back tomorrow with all of the latest of whatever is happening in the world. We'll see you then. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is

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