Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/27/23: Hostages Released, Possible Ceasefire Extension, Massive Destruction In Gaza, Ukraine Official Says NATO Killed Peace, UFO Whistleblower Says We Aren't Alone, Fox News Falsely Claims Border Terrorist Attack, And US Officials Exposed On Israel Vs Ukraine Hypocrisy

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss a potential ceasefire extension as hostages are released, new images of the destruction in Gaza, Ukraine official admits NATO killed peace deal, P Diddy and Cuomo hit with MeToo allegations, UFO whistleblower says we 100% aren't alone, Fox News falsely claims terrorist attack on border, and US officials exposed on Ukraine vs Israel hypocrisy. BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collection  To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed, we do. Broke out the Christmas decor here in the studio, which feels nice, even though the news, of course, continues to be quite grim. We have, of course, that temporary ceasefire in place. Big question today is whether it is going to extend beyond the initial four days. So we've got details there. We also have pretty stunning, I guess, confirmation of some previous reports coming out of Ukraine that indeed it was us and the Brits who made sure there was no peace deal at the beginning of this war. So we'll break that down for you. Also, we had a slew of lawsuits last week filed in the state of New York. I'll give

you the reason for that. But against many famous people, including Sean Combs, including Eric Adams, alleging sexual assault. Break that down for you. And also, like I said, why those claims are emerging right now. Sagar's got a UFO special for you. Yes. Dave Grush on Joe Rogan. Break all of that down for you, too. And Fox News with a really embarrassing walk back after they claimed that an explosion at the U.S.-Canada border was terrorism, as confirmed, they alleged, by law enforcement sources. It was nothing of the sword. They had to walk it back. And you will never believe the cope that they are offering at this point. Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. Before we get to that, though, as Chrisley,

you guys did a great job. And I think I mentioned it as well. We've got our Christmas merch that is currently on sale. We're going to put that up there. That's right. That's right. It's limited edition. The socks, I can attest, are some of the best socks I have ever. I'm not just saying that. I swear I wear them all the time in my normal life. But this is the piece de resistance. Yes. The sweater. Those are flying off the shelves apparently.

They're flying off the shelves. It's all available right now. Shop.breakingpoints.com. Also, if you can help us out, become a premium subscriber. Of course, that's very useful as a thank you. We are having a Black Friday special, I guess, if you will. We're currently giving it for $90 a year. That's a steal. So you can go ahead and take advantage of that. Both of those available on our website right now. And then I guess in the hardest turn

of all time, what's going on with the ceasefire? Yes, indeed. All right, let's go and put this up on the screen from the Financial Times. This is some of the latest reporting about the details of who has been exchanged thus far and what some of the holdups are in terms of extending this temporary pause. Now, just as a reminder here, the basic idea was a four-day ceasefire. Hamas was agreeing to release 50 Israeli hostages. Israel, in return, was going to release 150 Palestinian prisoners that they had been holding. So far, as of the writing of this article, 39 women and children plus 18 foreigners had been released by Hamas. Israel had freed 117 Palestinian women and children. So the headline here from the Financial Times is Hamas must locate dozens more hostages in order to extend that truce, according to Qatar, which has been central, of course,

in these negotiations. That four-day pause is set to expire after today. So that's why this is such a crucial piece right at this moment. Now, indications from both Hamas and Israel are that they would like to extend the truce, the idea being that for every 10 additional hostages that Hamas releases, that truce would be extended for another day. But Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told the Financial Times that more than 40 other women and children were being kept captive in Gaza who were not believed to be held by Hamas. He said the truce could be extended if Hamas were able to use the pause to locate those hostages. He also said that Israel had provided Qatar with a list of more than 90 women and children seized during that horrific October 7th attack. About 240 hostages total were taken and dragged back to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Other captives include

Israeli soldiers and elderly civilians. So that is basically where we are right now. I do have some comments for you from the president of the United States, who says he is also hoping that the pause gets extended further. Let's take a listen. Beginning this morning under a deal reached by extensive U.S. diplomacy, including numerous calls I've made from the Oval Office to leaders across the region, fighting in Gaza will halt for four days. This deal also is structured to allow a pause to continue for more than 50 hostages to be released. That's our goal. This morning, I've been engaged with my team as we began the first difficult days of implementing this deal. It's only a start, but so far it's gone well. And I wanted to take this opportunity to keep the focus on the human beings here who have been through an absolutely horrific ordeal.

We can show you some of the Israeli hostages here that were released. Here they are, you know, being led by Hamas militants. I want to make everyone aware this was a video released by Hamas. So this is Hamas propaganda. That's why everybody's waving and smiling and, hey, have a great time, because this is the face that Hamas wants to put on this exchange. But you can see women, you can see children. They put a priority on the elderly. They put a priority on also these Thai nationals who are sort of like migrant workers within Israel

who also were released as part of this exchange. So that's the Israelis who were released. Go ahead to the next one. We have some footage of some of the Palestinian prisoners who were released. I went into a little bit of this over the weekend just so you have some understanding of who these people are. And these were mostly women and children. You see these boys here who are being led out to be released as well. Israel has this system sort of equivalent to what we did at Guantanamo Bay of indefinite detention, the overwhelming number of these Palestinian prisoners who are being released were arrested but have never been found guilty. And they're held in this sort of legal limbo. So that's a

lot of the individuals who are being released on the Israeli side, Palestinians who are being released. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you guys did a great job covering it while I was out. And I think that it's obviously a good step in the right direction anytime that there is not only a ceasefire, but there's actually hostage release going on. The big question, as you laid out, Crystal, is, is this going to continue? So currently, Hamas, as you laid out, appears to be wanting an extension. Israel saying that maybe it can continue with 10 to 15 more prisoners per day. Obviously, the Thai prisoners and all that was almost a bit separate, as I understand it, from the way that the Israelis were negotiating this. The Qataris saying that there is potential in the long run. For the back end and for people who want to see this continue in terms of hostage

release, I think that's what really all of us should want, not on the Israeli side, but have the prisoners returned, is that there currently is some optimism about extending this because the previous ceasefire that was negotiated in 2014, there were four separate instances where that happened. They broke down three times, but as I've laid out here before, once you have some sort of diplomatic breakthrough like this, it is generally difficult to not at least see the beginning of the end. However, the Israelis are pushing back on that. Yeah. So there's, I guess, a question, because we reported at the time how Tony Blinken, when he went to Israel to argue for a pause

similar to this, and also keep in mind, actually, the contours of this deal were negotiated a month ago. And then it was dramatically delayed by Israel's ground invasion. And really, Netanyahu's government has been very reluctant to move forward with any sort of a deal. The furthest right-wing factions of his government voted actually against this deal because they just want to keep bombing. They just want to keep the fighting going and have showed, I think it's fair to say, no concern about the safety of the hostages and, of course, are interested in indiscriminately bombing Gaza. So he has pressure from his right in terms of just keeping up the fight. Now, domestically, and I think this is what led him to finally cut this deal, you have huge domestic political pressure to try to bring these hostages home safe and sound. And of course, Hamas should release all of the hostages. That's what they should do morally, ethically, etc. But also we have to acknowledge that the longer that the indisc some of the competing pressures on Netanyahu. So

when Tony Blinken originally went to Israel to make this case of, hey, we should cut some kind of a deal to have some sort of a temporary pause, humanitarian pause, temporary ceasefire, whatever you want to call it, his argument wasn't, oh, it's for the good of the people or the hostages or whatever. It was, we want to buy you time diplomatically, internationally, so that you can continue your campaign and your offensive longer. So put this up on the screen. This is from Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who said to troops that this will be a, quote, short respite, after which the fighting will continue with intensity and pressure will be made to bring back more hostages. At least two more months of fighting is expected. So on the one hand, there's an argument, as Sagar was saying, of, you know, if you have a pause, you can start to see the end of a conflict.

The fact that there are negotiations helps to build some sort of a trust if both sides are fulfilling their side of the agreement, which we'll put that aside for a moment. So there's hope, you know, that just by nature of having those negotiations, potentially they can be cool. You can be closer to the end of the conflict. But that's different from what the Israelis are saying. They're saying this is just a pause and then we're going to get back to an intense level of fighting. And we know, of course, that they are broadcasting that they're moving now from bombing the north, which is basically completely destroyed and uninhabitable, to bombing the south. Khan Yunus is where they say, oh, now the Hamas leadership is there. Hamas HQ is there. This is one of the areas that people have been told to flee to, to find safety. So

that's kind of where we are. And Sagar, the other piece here, just as a note, is during the ceasefire, it's not like all things have been quiet. Put this up on the screen. Israel launched airstrikes on the outskirts of Damascus during this ceasefire. Now, technically, Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah, they were not part of this ceasefire technically. But in addition, you had Israeli forces killing at least seven Palestinians in the West Bank in the past 24 hours. You also had Israeli troops fatally shooting two Palestinians and wounding 11 others in Gaza itself as they were trying to return north after the IDF had told them to stay put in the south. You also have a peacekeeping force in Lebanon that was fired on by Israeli fire as well. And the last thing that I'll note as part of this, so the Israelis have

released 117 Palestinians over the course of the ceasefire. At the same time, they've detained 116 new Palestinian prisoners across the occupied West Bank. So it's interesting, too, to also see those airstrikes because the airstrike, or at least a missile strike, we're not exactly 100% sure what it is, was in the Damascus International Airport, which only that day resumed flights after a month-long hiatus. They are saying, I mean, nobody's acknowledging whether this is Israel or not. It almost certainly is.

They're the only ones really who have been conducting this type of activity. The reason being that it is a main artery for a lot of supplies and others to these Iranian-backed militias. They may have also done it with the behest of the U.S. because many of these militias are attacking U.S. troops. So we never know what some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that's going on here. With the hostage situation in general, it seems to me the Netanyahu government itself is completely torn because you had those two ministers who voted against it. Now, in a traditional system, and I saw a lot of people saying this at the time, they should resign. Like, if you're going to disagree on such a fundamental issue inside of

the Israeli cabinet, then you should resign and you should say, I don't agree with the coalition government. But one of the reasons why they can't resign or Netanyahu can't let them go is because he needs their right-wing support to maintain his status as the prime minister of all of Israel. So I think what this actually highlighted most to me is how tenuous the support for Netanyahu is within his own government and really how that's actually hamstringing international peace, I guess, if you will. His own domestic political considerations are driving so much of the policy in this current government. And that is just so detrimental. If you actually want to see the release of all hostages, if you want to see the resumption of some sort of peace,

if you even want to see like some different diplomatic approach or long-term thinking, it is literally not possible for Netanyahu to conduct himself in a long-term manner because he always says, we'll talk about who's to blame on October 7th once the bombing and the fighting is all done. And given some of the information that's been released so far, these guys screwed this up more than we did on 9-11, which I did not think possible. In the background, in terms of the memos that were written to them, the forward deployed units, the fact that, I mean, even most indefensibles, that many of the troops that were supposed to be there were in the West Bank. I mean, the security failure is so multifaceted that basically everyone involved should resign and possibly even be prosecuted for negligence. And that's just from

what's publicly available today before any such investigation. And I think, to me, it just highlights, I'm like, dude, he has got to go. Like there's just – there's no way that he can maintain the head of the Israeli government right now with any really sort of credibility for a person who wants anything long term. And I actually do think though that people inside Israel, given his very, very low approval rating and the almost certain fact that if there were an election he would not win today, they should be most furious I think really about this. And especially if you want the return of hostages. Because I mean if you think about it too, Crystal, if all the hostages are back, then there's going to be a lot of questions inside Israeli society. Like, now what? What are we doing here exactly? Because the hostage, bring our people back, is, of course, the rallying cry.

But if that's over, what are they going to do now? What's their forward position? Well, and even if you just have like the women and the children and the elderly and the civilians returned, you know, then it's a much different and less emotionally fraught issue. And I think your point is really important. And it's really important to understand the domestic political pressures. Bibi is very ideological, but his number one concern is maintaining his grip on power. And I think that's very clear. And we may say like, listen, this guy's done. He's finished. The Israeli public is disgusted with him. If elections were held

today, not only him, but Likud would be, his entire party would be tossed to the curb. That's true. But this is also a person who has been a survivor for a lot of decades in Israeli politics. And so he had a very difficult time cobbling together this coalition government in the first place and was only able to do it basically by like the skin of his teeth. And it's a little bit analogous to, you know, to put it in like American domestic political context. And obviously this is not a perfect analogy, but when you have the Republicans with a very thin margin in the house where they barely got that majority by the skin of their teeth, who has that handed power to? The Matt Gaetz of the world. So Bibi is very beholden. And these far right extremist factions, and I don't think anyone, even they would not dispute the

characterization of their views that way. He is really beholden to them because he has to have them on his team and as part of his government to maintain his grip on power. So that is part of why he is so constrained. And then you also have within the Israeli public, and this is borne out by the polling, they aren't concerned about Palestinian life. They're concerned with revenge. And so that's the plan that he has put in place. And all this talk of, oh, we're going to eliminate Hamas or even degrade Hamas, et cetera. According to their own analysis, somewhere they say they've gotten between 1,000 and

2,000 Palestinian, I mean, Hamas fighters, militants. Well, if you put that in context of the numbers of civilians that killed, that have been killed, that means you have like a 90% civilian death rate and have only taken out, you know, a relatively minimal portion of Hamas militants, even after all of these weeks of a massive bombing campaign. So that's basically where things stand on the Israeli front. Exactly. You know, the Israeli domestic political situation is very fraught, I think, with this hostage situation. There are intense pressures right now inside of Israel. They're like, listen, we've got hostages coming back.

Like, you need to keep this going as long as possible. So if they walk that back, it is going to, I think, open up a fissure. And I was thinking, you know, you're saying in terms of analogies, I think Chamberlain might be a good one as well. If we think to the early days of the Second World War, the reason why Chamberlain ultimately was booted out of power was not Munich, even though that's what a lot of people think. It was a catastrophic failure on the Norway debate and then eventually led to people inside the government saying, we can no longer support you. And then even the coalition government saying, we're not going to continue to serve

under him. So if we think about it that way, he's playing with fire right now because if he screws this up, this actually could be what takes him out from power, even though he wants to keep it going as long as possible. Lots of pressures on him from the right and from the left. I think the predominant view in Israeli society, from what I can tell, as you know, look, let's be honest, they don't particularly care about civilian casualties. They care the most about what's going on with their people. So if he does continue on with the military campaign, or let's say, God forbid, something does happen to some of these hostages and some of them are killed or something like that, and you see a total breakdown, I think he would face a lot of domestic political pressure. But this is all just

from the side we don't know. As of right now, it stands. So I mean, I think that's probably a good thing. And we'll see because international pressure right now is so high. The Qataris, the US, Egyptians, the Jordanians, everybody pressing. Like, let's just at least let this continue. And then when that happens, you see some resumption of talks in the interim. It's possible. 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.

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or wherever you go to find your podcasts. One of the things that administration officials unbelievably leaked to the press was that they were worried that during the course of this temporary pause, journalists would be able to get into Gaza and people would be able to see the extent of the horrors and the carnage and the devastation that has already been brought. And in fact, some of those images have emerged in the days of this temporary truce. Let's put this up on the screen. I mean, just unimaginable the level of destruction that you see in city after city. These places that we're showing you here are all in the northern part

of the Gaza Strip. Now, that doesn't mean the south has been safe, but the preponderance of the bombing campaign has been in northern Gaza, where Gaza City, which obviously is where the bulk of the population was, has been utterly destroyed, completely uninhabitable. Here you see a main road that is just littered with bodies strewn about the road and horrific to see. Here you see, you know, people gathered in the shadow of bombed out, destroyed buildings. And, you know, in terms of northern Gaza, and this is coming out from, you know, Gaza civilians, Palestinians who are trying to return home. There's nothing left. I mean, there are very few homes to return to in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

New York Times put together a piece just showing the historic level in modern times of this destruction and carnage. Put this up on the screen. So their headline is Gaza civilians under Israeli barrage are being killed at a historic pace. Even a conservative assessment of the reported Gaza casualty figure shows the death rate during Israel's assault has few precedents in this century. You can see this chart, leave this up on the screen, from when they started reporting the number of women and children who have been killed in this conflict. You can see how it makes up the overwhelming preponderance of the number of deaths. It's somewhere around 70 percent of the people killed by Israeli attacks here have been women and children. So even if you say everyone else, which is very generous, is a Hamas militant, you can see at the very least 70 percent

of these deaths have come from women and from children. I encourage you to read this article to get a little bit of perspective on the scale and scope of this destruction in such a short period of time, in such a small area too where people are packed in and they cannot by and large leave. More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the number of women and children killed is starting to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war. So it gives you a sense of just, I mean, this is something different that we're seeing here. There is no comparison in terms of modern history of the amount of attacks on civilian infrastructure, the amount of women and children and civilians that are killed. And one of

the things that struck me here, Sagar, that I thought you might pick up on because it's something we've been talking about is there are a lot of comparisons made to our campaign in Mosul. And they talk about how when we were in Mosul, we even thought 500-pound bombs were too much because it's this densely packed urban area. Well, Israel has been routinely dropping 2,000 pound bombs. Again, we said 500 pound bombs. That's too much. They're routinely dropping 2,000 pound bombs on what is one of the most densely packed parts of the entire world. Yeah. I mean, actually, this is something I talked a lot about. If people are interested, I interviewed Jocko Willink. This is something I was trying to get at with him, which is the

fundamental difference, I think, between the way that the U.S. and its partners operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially 2011 onward, and counter ISIS campaigns in urban, even urban combat environments, versus the way that Israel has decided to conduct this war. One of the things that Jocko said, which actually really surprised me, he's like, during the Battle of Ramadi, he's like, I think I called in maybe five airstrikes during my entire year. All we did was we were, he was like, we went in, we identified the target, we had our guys on the ground. And that obviously puts you, your troops at tremendous amounts of risk. That said, one of the things that US commanders were, had a mandate for, even from that period forward, was we are minimizing civilian casualties because our purpose is to

get the civilian populace on our side and to try and separate the terrorists from the overall civilian population. That's one of the other reasons. If you think, too, about the calculus of the bin Laden raid, the easiest thing to do for Osama bin Laden was drop a bunker buster bomb on his compound. The reasons that we decided not to do that is, well, it's in Pakistan. You're not only going to kill every woman and child in the house, you're going to kill probably and flatten every single building around it, but it's not worth it because it would start an international incident and we would lose more high ground. And so we put our people in tremendous amount of risk and we sent them 160 miles in this territory to go kill, grab the body. And at the end of the day, you only can, you ended up killing people who had a weapon in their hand and you were able to bring

it back. I think that's one of the reasons why if you look back on it, it's not only look back with such affection in terms of finally getting the person who was responsible for 9-11, is that it didn't come with all of the attendant collateral damage and the drones that have ended up accidentally hitting a wedding and all these other stains on the US campaign during terrorism. And this highlighted it actually to me the most, which is really the last time America conducted itself was during Vietnam. That was the last time that we did anything like this. And I think we all remember and can even look at the idea that the entire idea behind the massive bombing campaign from Nixon to JFK, or sorry, to Nixon to LBJ, was they were like,

we can bomb these people into submission. And what they ultimately didn't understand is, A, to Nixon to LBJ, was they were like, we can bomb these people into submission. And what they ultimately didn't understand is, A, we're dealing with ideological actor, and B, that they were just going to conduct a guerrilla warfare and insurgency and outlast us the entire time. So that raises the question of like, Israel, what is your strategy? And this has been my fundamental, I think, criticism and departure from them is I have absolute sympathy, not even sympathy. I support the idea of killing every Hamas terrorist who was responsible for this attack. I even support dismantling the organization. But from day one, especially with a lot of their actions,

it just remains questionable about what they want in the future. And I would again point people back to that Jocko interview because one of the things that we really established, a big area between us and subsequently in talking with Daryl Cooper at Martyr Made Podcast is that we were like there has to be a baseline level of trust from the civilian population for this to move forward. Because at the end of this, one day this bombing will end. One day it will end. And we have to think about what the end state of that is going to be. We can bomb for a month. We can bomb for two. We can bomb for 20 years as we all found out in Afghanistan. But if we don't have a

sustainable political project at the core of that, something will crumble and will give ultimately. So in the interim, just thousands and thousands of people are dying. And I mean, you can't help on a human level, but think about that as tragic. Absolutely. I mean, the number of new Hamas militants or other varieties of radicals that are being created by the horrors that are being inflicted on them, like, it's incalculable. So even if your only concern is long-term security for the people of Israel, then this has been a dramatic error and dramatic mistake. And, you know, there have been a lot of Netanyahu has been making all these comparisons to World War II and, oh, what about the bombing of Dresdek? It was fine to kill civilians then. Well, there's a reason why after World War II, why we had the Geneva Conventions and why we said, we can't, we can't have wars like this again. We have to put civilians

and civilian infrastructure too off limits. And so, you know, the basic job description for the soldier to make it, you know, at its most basic element is like to get the quote unquote bad guys and to protect the civilians. That is the job description. And yes, that comes at some risk. So it has been, I mean, it's been horrifying to watch what is unfolding there. And it's very hard to see what any sort of peaceful path forward from this moment is, even based on what's already been done. Even if they were to stop, even if they were to say now, like, permanent ceasefire. All right, we're done. That's it.

We did enough in terms of Hamas. It's impossible to see what the path forward is from here. That's actually my biggest fear is I'm like, you know, you could even end it today. I'm like, but at this point, like, what are you guys going to do? Because as you laid out, like, at this point, we're in a middle ground strategy. I actually think they basically boxed himself into a corner where total war is their only strategy. One of the reasons why we had the bombings of Dresden and the fire bombings of Tokyo is, and people are interested, they should read Sean McKeegan's book called Stalin's War, where he argues vociferously against unconditional

surrender against the Germans and against the Japanese. Controversial view, but the point that he makes is that it basically boxed us in from a tactical point of view where we're like, no, anything but the complete unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and of Tokyo is acceptable, which means you can destroy 70% of their infrastructure and they still will fight because they are not going to capitulate. Now, it's a very controversial opinion, but I actually think he lays it out quite well. And one of the problems and fears I think I have here is at this point, you've destroyed Gaza City. It's a city of 1.1 million. Now what? You think you can just create some sort of political, small occupying force?

Well, of course, what they want to do is ship all the Palestinians here. That's a more recent thing that they even laid out in the Wall Street Journal, shockingly enough. I'm talking about Israeli Knesset members. But let's put that aside and let's assume that their people are going to remain inside of this place. Well, what is the actual political project that you're pursuing? And I think they've boxed themselves into a corner where total destruction really and then buying the future and hoping that the US saves them in the future is probably the most likely path. Now, it's possible that we see some sort of resumption of the ceasefire negotiation and all that, that there isn't tons of international pressure.

But I don't think so. If I had to bet, I would more likely bet on what the defense minister had. He's like, yeah, we're at the very least going to see two months remaining of this type of campaign. But I still come back to like, OK, but what happens the day after that? are you just going to have a massive military presence inside Gaza or around it? Another thing for people who don't know, Israel called up 300,000 reservists. That is costing them $280 million per day. This could bankrupt the entire nation. Not alone.

It's a small country if anybody's ever been there. All the military-age males are now in the military. There's nobody working. Israel, one of their, you know, I think real claims is that they've built the first world nation and first world economy. First world economies don't run when all the military age people are gone. And not to mention, you know, Palestinians have been banned from working in Israel. Who often did something like the lower, like lower tier jobs. Exactly. Do the. Exactly, do the things that the Israelis didn't want to do. Anyone here in the U.S. will be familiar with the types of work that migrant laborers in our context does.

And that's also why those Thai citizens were in Israel as well. But yeah, I mean, it's a huge, huge economic hit. But I don't know if you saw this article, Sagar. Emily and I covered it while you were out about the quote unquote three options for the future. And one of them was push everybody into Egypt, like, you know, the ethnic cleansing plan that we've been talking about, which is the option that, you know, many ministers in the Likud party and other security cabinet ministers have been floating and framing it as like, oh, humanitarian. They'll get to go wherever they want in the region. So there's that option.

One of them, just to show you how what a horrific situation this already is and how preposterous. They're like, we're going to build an artificial island like they do in Dubai. And, you know, and we'll just give them new land. Like, you know, they'll be totally on an island by themselves. And even in this report, which I think was, I want to say it was Times of Israel, but don't quote me on that. They're like, well, you know, Gaza City is so bombed down. You can't even rebuild it. Be easier just to rebuild like a totally new island.

Which, again, if you're talking about completely pushing 2.2 million people off of this little strip of land that you have, you know, had imprisoned them in and had pushed them into already. Well, there's a word for that as well. And it's not a pretty one. So in any case, those are the sorts of preposterous scenarios that they're floating right now. I think tomorrow we'll cover some of the way the U.S. is looking at this, the ideas of putting the Palestinian Authority in charge, which has its own problems as well. But, you know, we're already at a place where, you know, the city, the largest city where over a million people lived has been completely destroyed. You know, taking out al-Shifa was kind of like the last piece of taking out a core of Gaza Palestinian civilian life. You've already got 1.8 million Palestinians displaced. You already have at least one in every 56 Gazans

either killed or injured. That's where we already are this very short time in terms of how long wars normally go on into this conflict as we have this very small pause and look towards what the future might be. I thought this piece from Haaretz, which by the way, Haaretz under major assault from Israeli politicians as well, you know, threatening to pull their support, et cetera, et cetera, because they have done some actually good reporting during this war and in general do

some good reporting. And we've framed them as sort of like the New York Times of Israel in terms of their political positioning. Put this up on the screen. They had a good report where they interviewed Palestinians about what this temporary ceasefire has meant for them. And the quote here in the headline, our lives have been destroyed. Temporary ceasefire offers little relief for Gazan's mourning lost family and homes. They interviewed this woman, Isra, who's an English teacher. She's newlywed. And she said, listen, life doesn't go back to normal during a ceasefire. Only now do we realize the extent of the destruction. She goes on to say, I wish there were no ceasefire because basically now she has to see and come face to face with how much of her life has been

destroyed and will never come back. She says, it's apparently like the aftermath of an earthquake. Nothing remains as it was. What are we guilty of? Israel's problem is with the resistance, Hamas. Why hurt civilians? Our lives have been destroyed. Our families have been broken. There are no houses left, only stones. Another student in Gaza said, for Gazans, a four-day ceasefire means looking for relatives to see if they're dead or alive. It's not just about getting food and water. The second priority is burying the dead and giving them their last respects. So that's the view from, you know, inside the Gaza Strip. Yeah, I encourage people to read that. As we said,

it was actually reported by Haaretz, an Israeli media organization. And actually, it's funny, the more this continues, I look to them, the Times of Israel, even people inside of Israel, much more than I do to so many of our media. And we will give you a perfect view of why with the Fox News segment that's coming up. 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. 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'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company. The podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche

into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide and hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much.

And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off

because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, Oh, Dad, all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all I was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my god, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network,

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. At the same time, there has been yet another extraordinary confirmation about how the U.S. and about that NATO killed a Ukrainian peace deal in the spring of 2022. Let's go ahead and play some of this. In this interview, he made an extraordinary claim. They asked, what is the goal of the Russian delegation? He said that the Russian delegation thought to the very last minute that they could pressure them into an agreement, signing such a deal, quote, taking neutrality. Neutrality, as you'll recall, is what the initial demand was.

They said that the main thing for them and that they were ready to end the war in the spring of 2022 was if they were to take a neutrality pledge like Finland a long time ago, I've talked about that previously, and that they were to give an obligation not to join NATO. Quote, factually, this was the key point. The rest was, quote, cosmetic and political additions, like about denazification, the Russian speaking patient, he says, blah, blah, blah. He says, why did Ukraine not agree to this position, the interviewer asks. And here you come to the critical. First, to accept this, that we would have to change our constitution. Now, obviously, that's something they could do because their NATO aspiration was written in there. But second is that there was, quote, not enough trust to the Russians that they would

fulfill everything, that we could have done only these sorts of security guarantees. Quote, we couldn't cite something, walk away, and everybody would relax. But, and the key move is when he talks about better preparation, about how they would move in and they would possibly take advantage of any sort of peace deal, is he comes in over the top and he confirms that it was actually the US and the UK that they're the ones who said that you should not sign this deal. Here's exactly. He says, after we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson said, quote, we will not sign anything with them. Let's just make war. That is the official confirmation now that we have had from Fiona Hill, from the revelations that came in foreign affairs months after all of this happened.

We know that the trip took place, Crystal. But this is as big as it gets. I mean, here, this is a fit of – I'm trying to think about something similar. Maybe the Speaker of the House, but not even technically because they're separate branches of government. But a very high-level official, a political ally here of Zelensky who says it outright. He's like, what they said is they wanted neutrality. They wanted us to enshrine our constitution that we would not join NATO or they would take away that aspiration. And that the US, the UK, and others were the ones who came in. What I love

about what he says too is that the rest were, quote, cosmetic about all this other stuff, which is obvious. And if we think back to 2022 and the borders that have, that the borders that existed at the time, the incredible amount of fighting and death that has resulted since, it's the best deal they ever would have gotten in those early days of the war. But we're the ones who decided not to. And what is the end result? The net result is America has now forgotten about Ukraine. Maybe not the not the American people long ago moved past Ukraine. The American legislator at this point is willing to, I guess, look the other way. They'll fight a little bit behind the scenes. Everybody says that they're with them. But you have a couple

hundred thousand, at least, Russians and Ukrainians that are dead combined, probably much more when the official KIA numbers eventually do come out. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has been a disaster. $115 billion of American weapons stockpiles are laying in the Eastern Donbass region. Half of it is unexplored in ordinance. The Russian economy is totally mobilized for war. There has been no coup against Putin. He seemed fine, better off than ever in some cases, because he has now total control of the Russian oligarchy. What has been the net result of this? Let's take the Ukrainians out of it. Net, net, has this been a good result for America? This has been a humiliation for NATO and for the West. And so this is our brilliant diplomacy in action.

Our actions with regard to this war have been monstrous. I mean, there is no other way to describe it here. And yeah, you could say,. I mean, there is no other way to describe it here. And yeah, you could say, you know what, there's no guarantee that Russia would have followed the terms of the deal and maybe they would have, you know, taken advantage of this momentary pause to regroup and they just would have reinvaded. There's always a chance to do the war down the road. And by the way, the other thing is like, you don't have to trust Putin. We should be negotiating. We do all the time with bad actors and, you know, the Taliban or, you know, North Korea or, you know, Netanyahu and his government. Like you have to be able to come to terms with

your enemies, with your adversaries, if you're ever going to have peace in any context. So I think it's important that we take ourselves back to that moment because, of course, now we have the hindsight of history. We know how all of this plays out. But at that point in time, Ukraine had dramatically overperformed. Russia had dramatically underperformed. They were a mess. They were in shambles. Things weren't working. They were getting stuck in the mud. It was a total catastrophe and humiliation for Russia at this point. Nothing had gone according to plan. In addition, we had just hit them along with our European partners and other parts of the world. We had hit them with these massive sanctions that it was no telling whether they would be

able to cope with that. Now, I'm not going to say it didn't hurt their economy at all, but now with the fullness of time, we can see they were able to cope and adapt. But again, at that point in time, they didn't know that and we didn't know that. Okay. You also had more domestic political uncertainty at Russia within Russia at that point. conditions were ripe for Putin to come to the table and basically look for a face-saving exit because at that point, every piece of it had been a complete catastrophe for him. Well, now, after hundreds of thousands, we don't, nobody really knows the exact numbers, but of deaths and injuries in combat during that time, now Ukraine is in a much worse, much worse position after their counter-offensive, you know, effectively failed, certainly didn't accomplish anything close to its objectives. After the, they are struggling desperately with manpower issues now, let alone, you know, equipment and ammunition issues. And even their top generals, this is a stalemate at best, at best.

It actually, reading this saga, it actually gave me in some ways more sympathy for the all-in perspective that people were offering here. Because if we're the ones who are going to Zelensky and Cohen saying, no, we want the war. Don't make peace. We want the war. You're going to fight the war. Then we damn well should have given them everything that they needed and wanted to be able to actually effectively fight that war. And so in a sense, it gives me more sympathy for them and more sympathy for people who are taking that perspective. Because instead, we did this bullshit middle ground of, you know, slow walking things and I'll eventually we'll give them to you. And now we're in this horrific position. They're in this horrific position. you know, slow walking things and I'll eventually will give them to you. And now we're in

this horrific position. They're in this horrific position. You know, so many lives have been lost. So much destruction ultimately wrought. And for what? To be in a worse place where whatever deal could theoretically be cut today. One thing you know is you can guarantee it will be worse than this deal that was on the table that we and Boris Johnson said, no, we want the war instead. And let's see. Let's put this up there. We got a graph here about the number of people who were killed. This is just an estimate from Ukraine. They claim, let's be very clear, only 70,000 who've been killed and 120,000. So these are U.S. official estimates. So again, we probably are deflating

the Ukrainian numbers and inflating the Russian numbers. It is almost certainly orders of magnitude higher than that. On the Russian side, we're claiming 120,000 dead and 180,000 who were injured. Again, who knows what that might be? It's probably a little bit more accurate. The Russians obviously claim different. The Ukrainians claim 300,000. Nobody will know really until years from now when the propagandists have died. At the very least, though, we know we can look at a map. Let's put the maps up there because the map is what really tells us all of the story. advance, and then November of 2022, which is right around where things would have looked sometime with this peace deal after April, after the Ukrainians were able to push them out from most of their territory, you have about 20% of most of their territory in the north, I mean,

they have about 20% or so that they're holding onto throughout Ukraine. And despite their, you know, so-called like spring offensive miracle and all of that, where they have reclaimed some territory, basically it's all frozen in time ever since then, except hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and or injured. And I don't think it's fair to call it a stalemate. It might be technically from a tactical level. On a long enough timeline, and you can go and look from day one we've been saying this, there is the strategic position of Ukraine. It can never overwhelm the Russian colossus. Russia has more manpower. They have an actual industry for weapons manufacturing. They have like pet petroleum that they're able to sell to people who don't agree with the U.S. and Western view of Ukraine, long enough, they were always going to be fine. They weren't going to collapse. They were going to be fine. And let's put this up there. This is a view of what it's actually like inside of Ukraine now that we're finally getting some truth from the Western media. And they're talking about how manpower has become Ukraine's

latest challenge as it digs in for a long war. And I mean, this anecdote is just terrifying. They talk about a mobilization center where there are four men lined up at the army recruitment center. Only one man is there voluntarily. He's a 34 year old. The other three were there because they were drafted. And the other guys that were there, two of them had previously filled a medical exemption because they had, uh, had prevented them from serving. And not just any medical. Think about this.

Quote, one-sided brain damage from a freak accident. The other has metal plates in his spine. The fourth is a 42-year-old sales manager with no military experience. He says, quote, I'm not going to hide it. I honestly don't know what I can contribute. This fits with the Time magazine profile of Zelensky, where they let it slip that the average age in the Ukrainian military is somewhere around 40 years old. And how do the averages work? You have a 60-year-old and a 20-year-old. Take the average. That means that

there are enough people on the right side of the bell curve there for the distribution who are in their 50s and 60s. As I've said it before, that is like Army of Northern Virginia 1865 territory, where you have teenagers and old men who are holding the line in Petersburg. That's not where you want to be from a strategic point of view. And you think you're going to last like this for years? and even then only if the west continues to pump you full of ammunition that is depleting our stockpiles to a historic degree strategically it was never going to make any sense you're right I agree uh if you hold that position which I don't which is let's you know fight on the war and all that, then yeah, you give them everything.

The problem is at risk World War III. Whenever there was a consideration of what we can give them and what we can't, this has been a historic disaster. The only counterpoint, the real politic response to mine has been, yeah, but we're degrading Russia's military for only 5% of our GDP. Let me tell you something. We did the Russians a favor, and this sounds cold-blooded because we previewed NATO tactics. We're prepping their military for,

you know, fifth-generation warfare with all these drones and all this other stuff. We have wiped out all the useless commanders that often accumulate in peacetime. They're learning their lessons. They're fighting the Russian way of war. They're a battle-hardened enemy right now. They're going to be more combat effective today than they were in the early days of Ukraine. This is cold and it's heartless because people are like, oh, there's 300,000 dead. Yeah, but the Russians don't care. The Russian military doesn't care. Their families are the only ones who are.

So from almost every strategic level, we have sharpened the knife that we apparently were so afraid of. And at the end result of this, Ukraine is in a way worse position. If I was Russia, why would I negotiate now today? You know, the U.S. has forgotten about you. My entire economy is geared for war. I'm rolling more weapons and ammo off the line than all of NATO combined. I'm just going to keep going. So we blew the only chance that we had. And

there's going to be some sort of Kabul style event. You know, David Sachs has now been saying this. I agree with him. He's like, they're going to collapse. There's going to be some sort of political look at Zelensky, his desperation, the way he is in these media interviews. You got a lot of people around him who were admitting that they're all corrupt as hell, that they're stealing everything that's not nailed to the ground. I mean, this is what it looks like in the end days for a lot of nations. I'm not going to say it's coming tomorrow. Sometime in the next few years, maybe a decade, who knows how long this is all going to go. And when that time comes and eventually the history book is written, we're going to be really the ones who are at fault here. And now we have U.S.

officials who are saying what we've been saying all along. Oh, maybe now it's time. Maybe it's time to wrap it up now that, you know, Ukraine is in a much worse position than they were at that point. And, you know, just look at it like we use them. We use them as our own little like imperial play thing to try to degrade Russia's capabilities and potentially trigger some regime change within Russia and get Putin, get Putin out of there, which, of course, we always thought was fanciful and unlikely to succeed. But that's what we did here. All this talk from the beginning of like, oh, nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine, they're really driving the train, has always been total and complete bullshit. They're fighting this war and they have lost an entire generation

of men because we wanted them to fight this war. That's the reality. And, you know, just to take it back to the beginning here and what that dude was saying in that interview, revealing the contours of this deal, which, you know, I mean, maybe he has an incentive to lie about it, but I can't really see what incentive he would have at this point in time to lie about what was going on there, especially when he had other reporting that backs up some of the claims here. He says, okay, well, number one, you know, our NATO aspirations are in our constitution. Obviously that's something that through a political process they could deal with. Number two was we needed security guarantees, which makes sense, right? Because one of Russia's demands is effectively, you're going to have, you're going

to be militarily degree. You're not going to have as many, be as well-armed as you are right now. So you would need those security guarantees. Well, guess who that also falls to? And then the third piece is, and then Boris Johnson came, you know, and said, no, we're going to make war. So all of those pieces ultimately fall on our shoulders. It has always been clear we are the ones driving the train. We are the reason this conflict has unfolded as it has.

And we are the reason, ultimately ultimately that Ukraine is in such a devastating position right now. And why I agree with Sager. What incentive does Russia have at this point? They can see this as clearly as we can. They can see how poorly things are going. They can see how time is right now at this point at their side, on their side. So if, I mean, if there is some theoretical deal to be had with them, it's going to be a really bad deal for Ukraine. It's going to be a much worse deal than what could have been had at the beginning. So, I mean, just it's it's honestly it's utterly tragic to think about what could have been if we had actually seriously pursued peace at that time. And again, there's no guarantees, right?

The fact that you have contours of an agreement doesn't mean you have an agreement. The fact that Russia agrees to the agreement, you know, doesn't mean that they stick to it. There are all sorts of uncertain, no doubt about it, but there was at least a chance that it might've worked out, at least a chance that they could have avoided

all this carnage and bloodshed. And today that chance is gone. I just want to say the last thing, which is this. And this is what I always, you know, it's all being borne out. It's being borne out in actions, which is, and what we said from day one, I know this is hard to hear. Ukraine did not matter to us. And as we are all watching, what really mattered, you know, to the current politicians,

Israel, of course, you know, triumphs that 10 times here in Washington. They forgot about you instantly. And so I find it disgusting. You know, I'm just thinking about the current things. It's a joke about whatever the current thing is. First, it was Afghan girls. We had to commit $200 million a day to Afghanistan so that girls in Afghanistan could go to school. You're a monster if you disagree with that.

Then you're a monster if you disagree with whatever's going on in Ukraine and the horrible invasion. On a human level, you can empathize, but at the base, it's always been this. Military force and military might was developed to protect trade, commerce, and the American way of life, period. In fact, our superpower status obfuscated with the real costs, all of that are. As trade-offs become more real, and as we all watched, it's even more dehumanizing and immoral, in my opinion, to give somebody so much hope, let them all die, and then abandon them in their last stand. I agree. That's way worse than being honest from day one and being like, listen, at the end of the day, this doesn't matter. 20% of Ukraine doesn't affect my life, doesn't affect my economy. Sucks for you, but, you know, what are you going to do about it?

And everybody would have been better off if they had done that. One of the things I'm talking about in my monologue today is just the utter hypocrisy between how we talk about Russia's actions in Ukraine versus how we talk about what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. And I have, like by side the commentary. But no, I mean, to the extent that the U.S. had any credibility on caring about, you know, democracy and humanitarianism and the international rule of law and the rules-based international, to the extent we had any credibility, which was already in question, that is completely gone. No one can look at the Ukraine conflict and say, oh, we really cared about democracy and human rights. Bullshit. Certainly no one can look at what's happening in Gaza right now and go, oh, we really care about

democracy and human rights and humanitarian. Oh, bullshit. Bullshit. Where all of these international rules-based order people now to talk about what's happening on the ground in Gaza, suddenly they're not judge and jury. Suddenly they don't really know the definition of what a war crime is. Suddenly, they can't really say. When they're very quick to say previously, oh, Putin's doing a genocide, look at these war crimes, et cetera. It's just been used as a cudgel and a weapon against the countries we don't like. That's all that it's ever been. And it has never been more clear than in this moment. Well said, Crystal. 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. It's a cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to

even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never 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. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened.

And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem.

My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh dad, all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money.

I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next.

In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there's so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide.

And hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on to a slew of lawsuits filed against a lot of prominent people, but also a lot of non-prominent people. But a lot of prominent people are what we'll focus on today. In New York, these are all civil lawsuits for sexual harassment, sexual assault. One of the most noteworthy here, let's put this up on the screen. Rapper and entrepreneur Sean Diddy Combs accused of sexual assaults in two new lawsuits. This comes after he had just settled a separate lawsuit with singer Cassie last week after she had leveled some pretty stunning

allegations about sexual assault that had occurred over many, many years. Those two fresh suits filed to New York's Supreme Court on Thursday alleged that he had drugged and sexually assaulted one woman in 1991 and attacked and sexually assaulted another in 1990 or 1991. By the way, his representatives had not commented in this piece as of the time it went to publications. So one of the suits was brought by Joy Dickerson Neal. She alleges Combs drugged, sexually assaulted, and abused her after a date in New York City in 91. She also says that he drugged her before videotaping himself sexually assaulting her. The second suit, in which the claimant is unnamed, alleges that Combs and a friend forced her into having sex after a party.

It also claims that Combs later visited the claimant's home and physically assaulted her, choking her until she passed out. In addition, as I mentioned before, Cassie had reached a settlement on November 18th, the day after she filed a lawsuit accusing him of physical and mental abuse that spanned roughly a decade. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. They first met in late 2005 when she was 19 years old and he was 37. Combs' lawyer labeled Ventura's claims Cassie's claims outrageous lies and said she was seeking a payday and to tarnish his reputation. Now, listen, none of us knows the facts of what unfolded here. I will say, though, you know, with all three of these stories, you have the use of drugs to, you know, sort of compel behavior and enable sexual assault. Those are common elements

in all three of these accusations. And with Cassie, she also had some contemporaneous or some backup to some of the claims. One of the claims that she made is that she had tried to leave Sean Combs and she was dating this other rapper Kid Cudi. And Combs became enraged about this. This is again, according to her, and threatened to blow up Kid Cudi's car. And lo and behold, Kid Cudi's car blows up in his driveway. And by the way, they asked him in this report, hey, is this true? And he said every word of what she said is accurate.

Yeah, how wild is that? Is that he came confirmed on the record. He's like, yeah, no, my car. What? Car bombs? This is totally nuts. Wild. But all of it fits.

And Crystal, if you can really break this down, because I also, I tried to read about it and I'm trying to understand, is that the Survivors Act, that's what it's called, the Adult Survivors Act, allows a filing with a look-back period to Me Too. But it's not criminal. It's all civil. So then what are the, like, what's the burden of proof for a jury to find like a determination against you? What are they supposed to look at? So it's a preponderance of evidence versus, you know, a guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So it is a different level of, you know, evidence that you have to offer and a different standard in a civil case. This is actually interesting, this law that has enabled all of these suits to be filed. And this is why there was a rash of them that came out, because the law had a one-year period where basically people who had, you know, wanted to claim sexual assault, where they could file these lawsuits even though the statute of limitations had expired.

So you had one year to do this. And so all of these suits came in underneath the deadline. One of the more famous suits that you all, I'm sure, are aware of that was filed with, you know, with regards to this law was E. Jean Carroll's suit against Donald Trump. That's what enabled her to be able to file this civil suit during this period, even though the statute of limitations had run. So I looked into some of the, and by the way, I think there is good reason to think that part of the reason this law was passed and signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul was specifically because of the E. Jean Carroll allegations. But I will also say I looked into this a little bit. So before 2019, there was only a three-year statute of limitations applied to civil suits for sexual misconduct in New York, which does seem really short, especially given what we know about the psychology of survivors at this point. Then in 2019, New York extended that statute of limitations

for civil suits arising from sex crimes against adults to 20 years, but the extension wasn't retroactive. So you had this change where it used to be three-year statute of limitations, then they changed it to 20, but it wasn't retroactive. So this was kind of like a middle ground attempt for people to have some ability to seek justice for past sexual assault allegations, but not over an indefinite period. You just got this one year. If you want to file, you can file and then it's over and you move forward with the 20 year statute of limitation. So that was the thought behind it. It's called the New York's Adult Survivors Act that was signed into law by Kathy Hochul. Yeah, it's interesting. I was trying to think about it.

I kind of agree that three years is definitely not far enough. But the evidentiary burden and so much of what we have with Me Too, and even if you think about, I mean, not even E. Jean Carroll, but you zoom out, about the idea of, like, juries in a civil trial litigating sexual assault and all that. Obviously, we have precedent, and, of course, that should exist. For me, I'm so weary of any sort of punitive kangaroo court type action, just given what happened in the campus cases. This is obviously a little bit different because it moves through a civil process. At the same time, you can basically bankrupt someone through these laws and dragging them through that. Of course, it's going to rise to the courts to adjudicate whether it's legitimate or not. And then it's going to eventually fall with the jury. I have trust in the jury system generally within this, but it does seem that there are a lot of perverse incentives with some of this in terms of the money, in terms

of the high, you know, all the me too accusations that we'd seen previously that didn't bear out. So I have complicated feelings about this law. I'm curious what you think. I think that's fair. Where I came to this, because I also was like, hmm, I'm not sure about this, this look-back period and this year only. Like, what's the deal? Activists want more, right? They want there to be no statute of limitations, period.

They want you to be able to continue to file these lawsuits. I felt like this was a reasonable middle ground because we also know that back in the day, I mean, all like Bill Cosby, how much did he get away with, right? Harvey Weinstein, like for years and years and years, if you had a claim against a powerful man, there was no way that you were gonna be heard. There was no way that you were gonna be able

to achieve justice. So I felt like this was kind of a good compromise of, all right, we'll give you a year. We'll get rid of the statute of limitations. It'll only be civil, right? So we're not talking about criminal charges. We're not talking about people going to jail, but we are talking about some possibility for accountability. And there were roughly 2,500 lawsuits. So, you know, we're talking about the most high profile examples, but there were 2,500 lawsuits that were filed here. A lot of them were also not against the people who did the sexual assault. A lot of them were also against institutions that knew that this was going on and kept this person in power and enabled the behavior, which I also support that

level of accountability. So I agree with you. It's complicated. And especially when you throw Trump into the mix and, you know, raise the question of like, was this just an attempt to get Trump with the E.G. and Carol stuff? But I feel like it was kind of a good middle ground to allow for the possibility of accountability. There were some additional examples here that you're going to be hearing about in the news that we wanted to raise with you because, as I said, a lot of powerful people were accused. Mayor Eric Adams put this up on the screen. He's been accused of sexual assault that was also filed under the jurisdiction of this law. The plaintiff in this case, we know very little about this one. No details, no idea whether there is anything to these claims at this point. But the plaintiff is a woman whose name is being withheld right now due to the nature of the allegation. She filed a summons on Wednesday night. It also names the transit bureau of the New York

Police Department and the Guardian Association of the NYPD as defendants because it came during that time when Eric Adams was at the police department. So that's why they are also named as defendants in this case. That gets to what I was saying, Sagar, about how it's not just the people, it's also some of the institutions that allegedly enabled the behavior. Let's put the next one up on the screen.

Disgraced former governor and noted Italian, Andrew Cuomo, sued for sexual assault by former executive assistant, Brittany Camiso. Obviously, Cuomo has faced allegations previously, so this is not the first time he has faced these sorts of allegations. And I think these may have even been public previously. She alleges while she worked

in the executive chamber as an executive assistant from 2019 through August 2021, her ex-boss subjected her to humiliating and demeaning tasks, hugs, kisses, sexual touching of the buttocks, and forcible touching of the breast. After Sharia reported Cuomo's alleged conduct, then-Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul demoted her, reassigning her to demeaning task of just answering the phone in Lieutenant Governor's office until she was moved to other offices. So Cuomo, again, as I said, has faced some allegations in the past. He did that whole, wasn't it like a PowerPoint presentation about how it's all just because he's Italian, he's misunderstood. He also, at this point, so you've got Mayor Eric Adams facing allegations that he

also was apparently interested in running for mayor of New York City. So anyway, I don't think that's going to work out for Mr. Cuomo. Yeah, you never know. Yeah, it is. It was more interesting that they all just hit around the same time because that was what the look back period had within the law. Overall, it's obviously hitting quite a few other celebrities, by the way, not exempt. Let's put this up there on the screen. You also had Axl Rose, Jamie Foxx, and a few others that had allegations against the event. Cuba Gooding Jr., who had faced allegations in the past. That's right. That had come out previously, but it obviously was filed under the law as well. So this law certainly making some waves.

Again, I have some complicated feelings, I think, about the implementation. I definitely agree with the institutional one. I actually think that one might be more important than any sort of individual accusation and more just because that was – I think the primary disbelief on Me Too was not necessarily like a creep like Harvey Weinstein was a creep. It's that the Weinstein company and all of Hollywood and the entire institution and system was protecting him. That's the same thing with Epstein. It's not a story that there's a rich guy who's a pedophile. It's that it was created as a system which arguably connected to foreign intelligence networks and was propped up and used for blackmail purposes that enabled real-world things to then happen. Not erasing the victims, just saying why these matter from a big spotlight institutional level. So anyway, we'll see how this one works out. I'm curious, actually, on the Eric Adams piece, given how shady he is in the behind the scenes,

whether he's not going to try and interfere in the process. Because that actually could end up coming to bite him even more in the future. Yeah, because he's going through it right now. FBI seized his phones. He denies any wrongdoing and hasn't been charged or anything like that. So it was to be clear about where things stand. But never a good sign when the FBI is seizing your phones and raiding the offices of your top fundraiser. The allegations are that they're looking into these potential corrupt ties to Turkey.

And so he's going through it with that. Obviously, he's under dramatic fire, including from Cardi B, which you missed the covering of that. Don't worry, I saw it. Okay. Of course I tuned in. Over huge cuts being made to the budget, and they're struggling to deal with an influx of migrants. He's sort of gone to war with the federal government over that. So it has not been smooth sailing for Mr. Adams. And again, I have no idea the veracity of these claims. We'll

wait and see if any evidence, any sort of evidence is produced, but not an easy time for him. One last thing I wanted to note here, just in terms of talking about what sort of suits have been brought under the jurisdiction of this law, because it's obviously not all famous people and powerful people, et cetera. Lawsuits also were filed on behalf of survivors who say they were sexually assaulted by former Columbia University gynecologist Dr. Robert Haddon. I don't know if you all remember the news reports about this was horrific. He was convicted of federal sex abuse charges in January. Columbia University will notify nearly 6,500 former patients of Haddon's conviction and sentence and provide information about its

settlement fund. It said in a statement November 13th. So some of the alleged victims of, and survivors of Dr. Haddon also were able to file suit under this law. So in any case, 2,500 suits filed, you know, some of them will be bogus, some of them will be legitimate. And obviously the ones regarding powerful people are going to get a lot of attention and will continue to follow. They certainly will. Okay, let's move on to UFOs. There's been a lot of big developments while it was gone. I guess, I don't know why he had to have them on during Thanksgiving break, but it is what it is. So Dave Grush, the UFO whistleblower who we've covered here previously, appeared for almost more than two hours on the Joe Rogan podcast.

He faced a whole bunch of questions. He made some pretty eye-popping claims and also just described some of the things that he alleges that were happening behind the scenes of which he is blowing the whistle on. The TLDR of it really is that there is a massive scale cover-up inside the U.S. government around UFOs, crash retrieval, reverse engineering programs, and a lot more about what is known to the public. Here's some of what he had to say. This answers a fundamental question for humanity. Are we alone or what happens when we die? Well, I don't know about that, but are we alone?

Well, the answer is we're not alone. And I know that with 100% certainty, which as an intel officer, you never say 100%, but all things pointed towards, based on the people I talked to like Harry Reid and I use him as an example. But I talked to the highest of the high people you could possibly talk to to catch my drift. So unless all of them are lying and they're covering up something else, which I don't even know what it would be at this point because the phenomenon is real. It's been going on for thousands of years. People have been seeing strange things and not everybody is mass hallucinating.

We're concerned because we think you might have an ongoing mental health issue. I'm like, what are you talking about? I reported that I had PTSD from Afghanistan in my military service several years ago. And I sought help for that. Like, I'm not ashamed of that. You know, I'm high-functioning autistic and I didn't know that until my early 30s. And how I process trauma, I didn't really understand until many years later. And, you know, I sought help for that. And they were trying to say that, like, I had some secret mental health problem that I haven't been reporting to. So I had to go through this whole process.

Three agencies at the same time investigated me for that, which I don't even know if that's like legal. They tried to say that I like mishandled classified, all this other stuff. It was insane. Apparently, I was under criminal investigation for a couple months, and I didn't even know that, and nor did they interview me. But they made a finding with no evidence they tried to use against me that I had to spend money to basically litigate and maintain my employment and my clearance, which I did, for the record. So a couple of interesting things there. Really, what he talks about is the retribution that he's faced since from inside the government in which he's filed a report.

But more importantly about what he alleges that he saw behind the scenes. There was a lot of talk about, well, you say you can say this. How come you can't say that? And that's really where I think some of Rogan's best questioning came in. He's like, look, what's really going on here? So before we even break it down for you, Rogan himself addressed whether he believed it or not. Here's what he had to say. It's hard to say, man. The thing about it is, I believe he's telling

the truth as far as what he's experienced and the documents that he uncovered and the people that he talked to. But how do you know whether or not they're just using him as a useful idiot to just get out some silly story because they're covering up for the fact that there's

some very advanced drone system that the United States government has. They're trying to keep under wraps. Right. It might be both. I think it's probably both things. My theory is that they have this ability to make something move in this insane way with gravity, but they can't put a body in it and they can't put weapons in it. They can't. It's just an object that they can get to move at insane rates of speed. That's what I think. I think the military applications of this thing have yet to be figured out, but I think they do have something that can do things that we have no knowledge of. But the United States government is probably, they probably have in their possession something that was either back engineered from something from somewhere else or something that they developed in a completely top secret

environment. Interesting. Okay. All right. So I'll break it down for you. Yeah. I disagree with Rogan and I'll tell you why, which is, and this was actually, I believe, some of this was laid out on his show as well, is for to believe what he's saying there is that there are craft that move at high rates of speed that defy the laws of physics does not really, it does not bear historical precedent for breakthrough technology. So, for example, the atom bomb. The atom bomb, if you watch Oppenheimer, was theoretically possible in 1923 or so, with the discovery of the atom and Einstein and all of that. It was a practical engineering question.

That's why we were afraid that the Germans could do it. It's not that they had breakthrough research. It's that, from an engineering point of view, splitting the atom, figuring out how to weaponize it, the practical implications were the hard engineering problem to be solved. It was both theoretical physics, but actually why they had refining plutonium. These were real questions about whether it was feasible as opposed to theoretically possible. There's nothing that exists in all of academia to suggest that. So to believe that this is some secret government program, Chinese, Russian, U.S., or any of that, you would have to believe that not only has the engineering been secretly done, that all the research from all the universities in the world had gone black, that it all happened top secret, behind the scenes. They were able basically to classify it from inception onwards. And there's just no

technological breakthrough, you know, that bears comparison. Like the car was an engineering problem and then a mass production problem. You know, even computers, graphical user interfaces, iPhones, all the things. They were implementation problems about how you can do this stuff at scale, whether you can really do it, prototype, et cetera. None of that exists in the academic research.

So that's why, and if that's the only other possible explanation, that actually is easier for me to dismiss as opposed to this is all just fake and it's completely a psyop. These are fake videos and all that. But I don't think that really bears scrutiny either. That's where a lot of my certainty comes from. Now, some of this does also connect to a basic question of, look, he's either lying or he's not.

And I've said this before. If he's lying, I want him to be prosecuted because he's wasted my time. He's wasted a lot of the nation's time. But behind the scenes, I don't think it's deniable to say that a cover-up of some kind is not happening. I don't know what they're covering up, but put this up there on the screen. This is from Liberation Times, a UFO-based outlet, but I've gone through and I've confirmed some of this myself, is that there is a big movement going on right now behind the scenes to actually go after the UFO transparency legislation that was slated to be enacted in the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. It was called the UAP Disclosure Act. It was sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sorry, Senate Majority

Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds. However, now there's pushback inside of the Senate Armed Services Committee led by Republican members of Congress, both on the Senate level and also in the House, in order to try and gut anything that would require the Department of Defense to simply disclose everything that they know for very specific questions, Crystal. So that's like my big meta take, which is at the end of the day, government transparency on this issue, what's the problem here? What are you covering up at the end of the day on the JFK thing? It's the same question. We actually know what they're covering up. We have a pretty good idea. We have a pretty good idea of it. We just don't want us to see

official confirmation. So that's kind of where I stand on the whole thing and how it connects also to what's going on in Washington right now. And Congressman, new House Speaker Mike Johnson, one of the villains in this attempt to quash the transparency legislation. And just so people know, this legislative process, it should get a lot more attention and coverage. People use the National Defense Authorization Act to get all kinds of little pet projects

or things killed, whatever. They use this process in order to achieve that. So that's why this is being used as a vehicle to try to kill this transparency. I mean, on the whole matter, I guess, I'm relatively agnostic. I do feel like me and most people are just going to need something more than one guy's work. And you should. Because it's not even, and this is something Rogan points to too, you could even accept that he's not lying, that he seems like a genuine, sincere person, but he's being used for some other end.

Like that is another possibility that's on the table. And in the absence of any sort of concrete proof of the things that he's discussing, you know, it's, for me, I'm just going to need a lot more to believe something that is so incredibly extraordinary. Which, you know, I think is fair for, not just for me, but for people in general. The other thing I was going to ask you about, Sagar, because I started to listen to some of the podcast is there was a lot of like, well, I can tell you this, but I can't tell you that. What was his rationalization for why there were certain things that he could disclose and would disclose and why there were certain things that he put out? So he went through something, a pre-publication review, as he described it. And as I understand it it too, having talked to people who've published stuff

that had some classified information or not, you basically submit to everything that you want to talk about publicly to the DOD. They're not confirming it happened or not. They are allowed to then come in and say, nope, can't talk about that. You can talk about that. Everything that they don't X out, you are allowed to then publicly discuss. That doesn't mean that they're endorsing the claim. Let's not forget though, that they did say X out, you are allowed to then publicly discuss. That doesn't mean that they're endorsing the claim. Let's not forget, though, that they did say that his accusations were credible and that they were urgent in terms of what he was alleging for his whistleblower complaint. This is from the inspector general of the overall intelligence community. The reason why when he's like, well, what did you say?

He either did not receive clearance to talk about that subject or he was told, no, you can't talk about that. So all of the things that he's saying publicly are things of which there is either publicly available reporting and he was cleared to discuss or not. I'll give you a good example. I remember a long time ago reading the book by Rob O'Neill, who's the guy who shot bin Laden, and he was in SEAL Team 6. But in his book, he has to black out the word SEAL Team 6, right? He can only say SEAL Team X. It's stupid. Everybody knows SEAL Team 6 exists, but they don't want to publicly acknowledge SEAL Team 6. No. So when he says, you know, I was in the SEAL Teams or I was in this, he is not that, you know, and he removes the word 6. It's because he specifically

did not receive clearance to say that word. A lot of them are like that. There's several other examples of these things. Even the bin Laden raid itself had all sorts of secrecy around it. And if you've ever read like Admiral McRaven's book who talks about it, there's a lot of things in there too that you have to submit for pre-publication review. Again, they're not endorsing it. They're just like, there are some things which they do take out. Now that's his explanation. Does it sound fishy and annoying? Yeah, it's annoying to listen to. I agree with everybody when he's like, no, I can't talk about this. Like, ah, but that's what I want to know the most. So that's why I just come down on, okay, you got a whistleblower here, testified under oath. He submitted all these claims to members of Congress. The two members of Congress who wanted

to hear questions from him said, I want to hear everything you've said that's classified in a SCIF, which is a secure compartmentalized facility. Guess what? They won't give him SCIF access inside of Congress. Nobody knows why that is. Again, why? Let the man talk. Let the members of Congress hear it out. Our elected representatives exist for the very reason that they can investigate on our behalf. And if it's so secret, then they can go find out for themselves. If it's urgent, they can bring it to us. Second is the matter of transparency and of legislation. What harm possibly could be done by having transparency around non-human biological creatures? If they don't exist, then you can come out and say

they don't exist. We have no evidence of that. And so there's a lot of reasons why I think this is trying to be quash. And, you know, to bring it back to the, you know, the Occam's razor or the other side of what it could be, secret government program and all that, you honestly would have to expect more competence from the government to do something like that than you would for covering up information, in my opinion. To secretly develop a Manhattan-style project as it relates to aviation with no knowledge as opposed to keeping things secret for a long time. Now, the government is bad about both of those things, but I think they're a lot worse at proactive innovation in complete darkness and secrecy than they are at some sort of program that's been running now for generations in order to try and keep the truth

from the American people and from the world. So that's where I come on the whole thing. I don't know. I've thought a lot about the government explanation. Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense as to how that's possible. To me almost none of it makes sense because you're not just talking about a U.S. government cover-up. You're literally talking about a global cover-up, right? I mean, it's not like all of these incidents are happening in the

U.S. In fact, Rush is talking about things that are happening overseas himself. So you have to imagine that there's a global cover-up. You know, I mean, your objections to the idea that it's some like secret government technology that we have no awareness of, I mean, your objections to the idea that it's some like secret government technology that we have no awareness of, I think are also really founded. So I'm just sort of like in a hand, you know, my hands thrown up. Let's have as much disclosure as possible and figure out what that was about. Well, and that's, there's no downside. There's literally no downside to any sort of disclosure or transparency or investigation. If anything, the fact that they are trying so actively behind the scenes to try

and kill the amendment, Christopher Mellon has also talked about this, former assistant secretary of defense. I would only say like that tells you leaps and bounds. And you know, even if it is some sort of secret aviation program and all of that, think about the commercial applications of such technology. Then we should know about it because that sounds, you know, I was on a red-eye flight. It took a long time over this weekend. I'd love to be able to go at supersonic speed. So let's get it done if that's the truth and that's the case. Let the people who supposedly paid for it, let it pass. My last thing I'll say of this is the Pentagon officially failed its audit for what, the sixth time in a row as of two weeks ago? Every time they've done an audit, they've failed it. Right. However many times that is.

Where's some of that money going? 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 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'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next.

In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide.

And hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here.

If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade,

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You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. Let's move on to Fox News and their epic screw-up that happened over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of people were afraid after they saw a high-speed crash and explosion at the border between the U.S. and Canada. So Fox News immediately almost jumps on their air and reports something shocking, that it was a full-blown terrorist attack.

That there were, quote, a lot of explosives in the vehicle after all of this happened. Listen to what they said, which turned out to be completely false. Let's take a listen. Yes. Oh, here we go. Oh, Alexis McAdams is reporting that according to high-level police sources, the explosion was an attempted terrorist attack. A lot of explosives in the vehicle at the time. The two people who were in the car are deceased. One border patrol officer was injured. Driving from the U.S. apparently to Canada,

and we're trying to drive toward the CBP building. So all bridges in the area have been closed. All government buildings in the area have been evacuated. Well, it turns out, Crystal, literally none of that was true. And the same reporter who put that to the network then had to walk back hours later what she said. The thing is on this, before we even play what she said, Maybe if it was a official who said that and you're citing a law enforcement official who said that publicly and claimed it and then everybody reported it and they had to walk it back later. That's different. That's a government screw up. This is a reporter basically going off of what she claims to have heard. Fox is the only outlet which runs with

this. And then it takes forever to correct the record. Here's what she said in terms of why she screwed it up. Yeah, they're collecting it all. But I think the point that I want to point out here is that when we were told that this was being investigated as a terrorist attack, it's because of the explosion and the size of the explosion, so much so that it caused them to evacuate government buildings in and around that area, and also to close the airport down. So when I just checked back in with these investigators who are out there working the scene, they said that is not a typical response to something that would have been a car explosion. So that's why that information came in as it did. And then we started seeing those conflicting

reports. But that's what happens with breaking news. They get new information, they give it to us and we bring it back to the viewers. So as of now, they've walked back that it was a possible terrorist attack, but say they've never seen a car explode in that way. So there's still a lot more investigating that needs to go on, Edward. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, Crystal, is not only did they, were they the only ones who reported that, but that also that they brought on experts in the hour afterward to discuss what all of the implications to that could it be. It was then clear that there were no explosives in the vehicle and that the crash is a result of reckless driving. To me, this is such

an indictment, A, of live news, but really of running with extraordinary incendiary claims in the immediate aftermath and then really refusing, I think, to take major accountability. Absolutely. For a good example, so everyone knows, for people who have been following the news, there were three Palestinian guys who were shot in Burlington, Vermont. And you know what? I can mention that, and I don't know a damn thing else. Because we are not going to cover it here until we know more details and can provide people context.

Otherwise, if you're going to sit here and claim, oh, the shooter was this or possible implications of that, you're just talking. That's nothing else. Yeah. You know, you're fanning the flames. And what Fox did in this instance, really with this reporter,

just, you know, according to these sources, A, these sources, like, you should probably never trust them again. But what editorial standards do you have for going to air with something like this? They set off a firestorm. I was in, I was like, oh my God, this is not good, you know? You know, full-blown attack on the northern border with something like this. They set off a firestorm. I was like, oh my God, this is not good. You know, a full-blown attack on the northern border, something like this,

and it ignited this whole thing. And then immediately, it's like as if it's totally forgotten. A couple things. Number one, it's very clear they were basically cheering for this to be a terrorist attack, which is why, I mean, it's confirmation bias, right? They've been for weeks talking, oh, there's Hamas terror cells and we're all at risk. And after the Gaza Strip in Israel, America's gonna be next, which is absurd and there's zero evidence for. But so they're all hyped up on this idea that we're at some elevated risk for a terror attack.

And then this thing happens at the border. You get apparently one cop who's like, I don't know, I've never seen an explosion like that. Maybe it was a terrorist attack. And they run with it. They run with it because they want that to be the story. Because that's the story they've been selling to their audience now for weeks. So that's part of why all the guardrails are taken off in addition to all of the normal incentives to just like be the first.

Even if you end up being completely and wildly wrong. So I also thought it was very revealing the way that she walked it back, which again was not to say, I'm sorry, we made the error. I'm sorry, we reported totally inaccurate information. It was to explain this, this like BS rationalization of like, well, it was a really big explosion and they closed the airport. So never seen anything like that. That's why they said it was being investigated as a terror attack, which even if that was in the early minutes, accurate being investigated as a terror attack and looking into that is very different from having any evidence that it actually is a terrorist attack, any evidence of any sort of motive intent intent, or explosives in this vehicle,

which is what they ran out and sold. And by the way, Senator Ted Cruz and all kinds of others jumped right on and definitively claimed that was exactly what was going on. And there'll be a lot of people who never see the walkback, who actually think that is what unfolded. And it's going to impact the way they view, you know, events that are unfolding and their own sense of personal safety day to day. Yeah, it really is. This is just, you know, it shows you where, A, you know, events that are unfolding in their own sense of personal safety day to day. Yeah, it really is. This is a just, you know, it shows you where, A, you shouldn't trust first reports. B, you should have way higher editorial standards whenever you're going to bring something to air and you're going to claim something so completely insane and then walk it back quietly and not even fully take responsibility. You should just be like, yeah, either you should say we got it wrong or our sources screwed up. They lied to us. We're going back to them and saying, hey, what's going on here?

How can you claim that the car was filled with explosives? Their explanation was, well, we've never seen a car explode like that. Then say that. Our sources claim that they have never seen a car explode like that before. Not that there are explosives inside of a car. Those are two very different things. One is responsible, the way that I put it. And then this was the way that they tried to clean it up later on their so-called media watchdog show about why it wasn't really their fault. It was everybody's

fault that went with it. Let's take a listen. The cable news networks went wall to wall when a car exploded on a bridge on the New York side of Niagara Falls and the speculation began. The threat environment is, to quote FBI Director Wray, sort of is high. We know it because of international terrorism and what's going on in the Middle East and also how domestic terror groups have been activated. Julia, please don't tie to something more on the local side. Or was this an intentional act? And if it was an intentional act, what is the motive?

What is behind this? And is it, in fact, terrorism? It's just too soon to say. Ted Cruz said it was terrorism, flatly declaring that before we found out that, in fact, it was not. was talking about the implications of terrorism. Yeah. The difference is the other two were like, threat environment's high. We don't know anything. It's too soon to say. And you were the ones who were like, it's a straight up apparent terrorist attack. And the car was full of explosives. Those are two very, very different things.

Even, frankly, the other people who were just sitting there being like, it may be a terrorist. Even that is, I think, bringing on a guest to talk about threat environment. It's a little bit ridiculous. And maybe it implies they were receiving some of the same reporting and they were preparing for it. But couching it and saying things that what you know and what you don't know is the most important thing in this business.

And they just threw that out the window. Yeah, and never once did he mention, and by the way, Fox News, my employer, blatantly got it wrong. So it kind of lessens his credibility on this matter. But yeah, I mean, I do think, listen, I've been in the anchor chair at MSNBC when you have some freaking breaking news, whatever, you know, a potential school shooting, a potential, I remember there was like a potential school stabbing that they of course want you to go wall to wall on your coverage. Yes. You know nothing, right? You have like a headline, and even that may be inaccurate.

They're scrambling behind the scenes to bring on guests just to fill the air. And in that space of filling the air, people engage in all sorts of wild speculation. And I think you, as news consumers, hopefully not of cable news, but in case someone you love, hopefully not of cable news, but in case someone you love is a consumer of cable news, it's important for you to understand what's happening behind the scenes. They're floating things because they have to say words and fill the time until they actually know something. And so that's why you end up, well, what the hell? Let's bring on a terrorism expert and see if they have something interesting to say about this. How does this

compare to past explosions? Look at this video. What do you think? They don't freaking know anything. So keep that in mind because I agree with you. Even the, like, tendency to, oh, this could be a big event. Let's wildly speculate about it until we actually know anything about it. Even that is pretty irresponsible.

But Fox News just took that extra level of blatantly reporting something that ends up being utterly false and then not even having the decency to fully correct and acknowledge that they got it blatantly wrong. Totally, totally agree. Okay, Crystal, it's been a long time since I said this. What are you taking a look at? Well, it's hard to look at what he's doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine, and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that. Sorry. It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that. So I can't talk to his psychology, but I think we can all speak to his depravity. This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly. And it's going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward. I wish I could tell you something

different. I wish that that wasn't going to happen. But it is going to happen. That was National Security Council spokesman John Kirby holding back tears as he spoke of innocents killed by Russia and then casually dismissing innocents killed by Israel as mere collateral damage, chalking it up to the unavoidable costs of war. The Biden administration has spent the last several years now rending their garments about the international rules-based order, decrying, with plenty of justification by the way, Russian atrocities committed against Ukrainians. Biden framed this struggle in grand idealistic terms as a fight to protect the post-World War II order, our arming

of the Ukrainians as a noble front in our war for democracy, for human rights. My, what a difference a new war makes. Democrats and other administration officials who had no trouble spotting war crimes when they were committed by resistance-lib boogeyman Putin suddenly decided they really weren't qualified to opine on the topic once Israel launched a complete siege of Gaza and bombed everything from refugee camps to schools to hospitals to every sort of critical infrastructure. In the early days, this took the form of vaguely encouraging Israel to not commit any war crimes, please. Once it became absurdly obvious that the entire military operation was being conducted on the basis of seeing how many war crimes Israel could get away with, they then shifted tactics, adopting a more philosophical

posture, you might say. Who can really say whether they're committing war crimes? What even are war crimes, really? Now, there are a wealth of examples here, but let me give you just a few. Here's Senator Ben Cardin on Russia. There's no question about Russia's crime of aggressions, no question about their committing crimes against humanity and genocide. We've had hearings in this committee that have established that. We've had hearings in the U.S. Helsinki Commission that has established the fact that all the conditions for genocide have been committed by Russia. This same senator was suddenly less sure of himself in a recent interview by The New Yorker's Isaac Chotner. Chotner asked Cardin, do you have a sense of whether Israel is operating according to the rules of war? Cardin dismissively responds, I know that once elected to the United States Senate, I'm supposed to be an expert on every

subject. Chautner then replies, sir, you are the head of the Foreign Relations Committee. But I suppose it would be unfair to pick on Senator Cardin here, who is simply taking his cues from so many others. Here's White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Russia versus Jake Sullivan on Israel. I think we can all say that these are mass atrocities. These are war crimes. These are shocking and brutal acts that are completely unacceptable beyond the pale for the international community. So whatever label one wants to affix to them, the bottom line is this.

There must be accountability. And the United States will work with the international community to make sure there's accountability. You said today, as you said a number of times, about the importance of the laws of war being upheld. Israel has killed around 11,000 Palestinians. Around two-thirds of those are women and children. The situation in the hospitals is dire. Israel has dropped an astronomical amount of ordnance in very built-up areas. Is Israel, in your view, abiding by the laws of war?

And if it is, how do you come to that conclusion? Well, as I said yesterday, I, Jake Sullivan, standing here, am not in a position to be judge and jury to make that determination. It's a legal determination. This not a judge and jury formulation has become the standard go-to when anyone is asked about Israeli war crimes. I have lost track of how many cowardly Democrats have deployed this moral cowardice in the face of undeniable horrors. Republicans, for their part, they're mostly more brazenly bloodthirsty in their own justifications. This tone, of course, comes right from the top. President Biden himself, no trouble calling Putin a war criminal, accusing

him of genocide on Israel. He has not only demurred, as his advisors did there, but he has actively defended war crimes such as raiding al-Shifa hospital, causing untold civilian deaths, numbering in at least the dozens, including premature babies. Now, if you're thinking, this war doesn't compare in any way to the brutality that was unleashed on Ukrainians, you are 100% correct. What Russia unleashed pales in comparison to the horrors inflicted on all 2.2 million people in Gaza. It's not even close in the amount of destruction, in the absolute number of civilians killed, in the targeting of civilian infrastructure, and in the denial of the basic needs of life. Substack journalist Caitlin Johnstone recently did an analysis comparing just the impact on children alone. As she writes, Israel has killed as many children as Russia

reportedly kidnapped, an action which led to charges being filed at the International Criminal Court against Putin. Why, she asks, is one a war crime and the other apparently fine? Both are awful, obviously. But it would seem pretty obvious that murder is worse than kidnapping. However, we're somehow supposed to reserve our horror only for Putin. Of course, we all know the answer to why we're supposed to apply completely different standards to these two atrocities. It's never been more blatantly clear than right now. International law is nothing but a cudgel to be used against official enemy states. When it's the US, it's our allies,

suddenly these crimes are erased, they're excused, and the people who were just pretending to care so deeply suddenly plead complete ignorance. Even the New York Times has begun to report on the unprecedented horrors being unleashed on the people of Gaza. Just based simply on the likely understated numbers, which we know today, they report that, quote, Gaza civilians under Israeli barrage are being killed at a historic pace. They go on. While wartime death tolls will never be

exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows the pace of death during Israel's campaign has few precedents in this century. People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than even in the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups. This article cites the number of targets and the wildly destructive 2,000-pound bombs that have been used. For reference, in the U.S. bombing of Mosul, we judged even 500-pound bombs to be too large for that type of urban combat. The number of women and children killed in Gaza is fast approaching the number that the U.S. killed in 20 years of war and occupation

in Afghanistan. It's double the number who've been killed in two years of Russia's war in Ukraine. Now, Ukraine is, of course, a nation of nearly 44 million. Tiny Gaza is home to roughly 2 million. More than 60,000 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza, and between the level of destruction and the leveling of critical civilian infrastructure, all of northern Gaza has been rendered unlivable. All of this before we talk about the desperate siege conditions clearly amounting to collective punishment, which have been imposed on everyone from the elderly to the premature babies gasping for air in hospitals with no electricity. If these politicians and so-called diplomats are suddenly ignorant of the laws of war, they should feel free to seek the advice of experts such as this gentleman, UN relief chief Martin Griffiths. So you have been, you know, on the front line of this since the beginning, but you've also been, you know, UN special envoy and advisor to many, many, many issues. Yemen, Syria, you've been in UNICEF, you've been doing this for a long time, head of relief operations, NGOs, the whole lot. Have you ever seen anything like this? Well, how do you assess what's happening right now in terms of humanitarian needs in Gaza? The worst ever, Christiane, and I don't say that lightly. I mean, I started off in my

20s dealing with the Khmer Rouge, and you remember how bad that was, the killing fields and so forth. But 68% of the people killed in Gaza are women and children. They stopped counting the numbers of children killed after 4,500 had been counted. Nobody goes to school in Gaza. Nobody knows what their future is. Hospitals have become a place of war, not of curing. No, I don't think I've seen anything like this before. It's complete and utter carnage.

I would ask you to really take those words in. When even typical Israel apologist outlet, The New York Times, is acknowledging that the scale of the atrocities committed here outpaces any that we've seen in modern history, you know we are watching something historic in the level of evil and butchery. And make no mistake, for all their pleading ignorance, the Biden administration knows that too. That's why they worried that this temporary pause might allow the world to see and really understand what has been done with our backing, with our bombs, with our support by our client state. Apparently, hypocrisy and selective outrage has always been the rule of the international rules-based order. Not a soul could deny that now. History will judge with horror those with power who enabled these crimes against humanity. Historians will write that this was when

the U.S. discarded its last tattered thread of credibility. And Sagar, you know, the world that we pretended to be in for— And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. 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'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company. The podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there are so many stories out there. And if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen.

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I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then Me Too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh dad, all they was doing

was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of ninth grade and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh dad all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my god, it's go time. You actually sent it?

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. Okay. Just so you know, monologues are going to be interspersed, you know, throughout the weeks. We're not necessarily going to be able to do them every day. Crystal wanted to do this one today. I'll probably do one, I think, on Thursday.

I'm thinking we're trying to fit them back into the workflow as we're trying to manage Israel-Palestine. But we support everybody. Thank you so much for your support for the show. And yeah, it just means a lot to us as we continue to try and work through all of this, the crew and all the moving parts and this beautiful holiday set that they were able to pull off. We appreciate you very much, and we'll see you all tomorrow. 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. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices

podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.