Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/14/26: Trump Threatens Iran, Miller Says ICE Has Immunity, Rogan Rips ICE, Saudi UAE Hot War
Episode Date: January 14, 2026Ryan and Emily discuss Trump threatens Iran, Miller says ICE has total immunity, Rogan blasts gestapo ICE, Saudis UAE hot war. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the... show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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We're going to talk about the kind of fading protests in Iran and what seems to be the fading threat from Trump to bomb Iran, although the Israeli drive to push him to do that is just a
as strong as it was before. So we'll, I think we should know in the next day or two whether or not
we're going to get, you know, war number two on Iran from Trump. We have a lot of different
updates from Minnesota and from ICE around the country. We're also, we talked about the fact that
we, because there's always something kind of that breaking that gets in the way, we haven't
really done enough in covering the conflict in Sudan, also the Horn of Africa, and the
real tensions that are bubbling up in the Middle East that are related to the Horn of Africa,
particularly you've got the UAE in Saudi Arabia breaking into like a hot war over the last
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Because there are millions of lives at risk.
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and who will be slaughtered if that's allowed to happen.
Yeah, so for the near future we'll be for sure doing that on Wednesday,
something to stay tuned for.
We have Elizabeth Warren after she's recently had a call with Donald Trump.
We have Thomas Massey, as he is.
at the middle with, of course,
at front of the show, Rokana.
Not talking to Trump.
Not talking to Trump at all,
but, well, talking to Trump
through social media.
But frequent, frequent breaking
points against Rochana.
It is amazing that Trump is more likely
to call Elizabeth Warren at this moment
than Thomas Massey.
Yeah.
So we will be talking
Right, exactly.
Looking to do abandon.
Epstein News.
The Clintons are looking to do abandon,
meaning they are not replying
to a subpoena.
They put out a big...
Well, not, not,
Not complying would be the correct.
They replied with an effort.
The correct word would be, yes, not complying with a congressional subpoena.
So big news on that front, we will obviously get Congressman Massey's take on that, but we are going to break down the new developments as well.
Ryan, let's start with Iran, where as we were putting the show together yesterday, there was genuinely a question as to whether we would wake up or stay up all night watching a kinetic conflict with the U.S. and Iran break out.
It seems like the potential for that to happen at any moment very much is looming over the news cycle right now.
Let's watch his interaction with CBS News Tony Doku Pill.
And we could kind of pick apart how we read this language and body language.
Let's play Tony.
Americans woke up this morning and they saw that you said help is on the way.
What do you mean by that?
Well, there's a lot of help in the way and in different forms, including economic help from
our standpoint and not going to help Iran very much.
And, you know, we put Iran out of business with their nuclear capacity.
And now, depending on what's actually happening, nobody's been able to give us accurate
numbers about how many people they've killed.
Well, on that point, Mr. President.
But it looks like it could be a pretty substantial number.
And that's going to be a lot of problems.
A lot of problems.
On that point, you did say the U.S. would get involved if Iran started killing protesters.
They have, by the many thousands, according to reports.
I've heard two numbers, but we'll see what that is.
Well, now we're hearing that they're going to start hanging protesters tomorrow.
So it comes back to the question, have they crossed your red line or as the line moved?
I haven't heard about the hanging.
If they hang them, you're going to see some things that, I don't know where you come from
and what your thought process is, but you'll perhaps be very happy.
What do you mean by that?
We will take very strong action.
If they do such a thing, we will take very strong action.
And this strong action you're talking about,
about what's the end game?
The end game is to win.
I like winning.
How do you define that in Iran?
Well, let's define it in Venezuela.
Let's define it with al-Baghdadi.
He was wiped out.
Let's define it with Soleimani.
And let's define it in Iran where he wiped out there,
Iran nuclear threat in a period of about 15 minutes
once the B2s got there.
And that was a complete obliteration, as it turns out,
which is what I said initially.
Then some questioned it and they said,
you know, Trump was right.
So we've been right about everything.
We don't want to see what's happening in Iran happen.
And, you know, if they want to have protests, that's one thing.
When they start killing thousands of people and now you're telling me about hanging,
we'll see how that works out for them.
It's not going to work out good.
So a couple of things there.
Trump clearly thinks that Tony Doku-pil wants him to attack Iran and will be very happy
if he does it, attack Iran.
if he thinks that he probably also knows that Tony would be upset at the original answer.
So what kind of help are you going to be providing? He says, it's all economic help.
And for Lindsey Graham and those who are calling for war on behalf of the protests,
like, whoa, whoa, economic help? I thought we were going to do a regime change war here.
Economic help. And then he's like, but it's not going to help them. It's going to help us.
And Trump is reportedly being pulled in different directions by his own advisors.
And so that's where the point in that interview, actually where Trump questioned Docapable's numbers.
So Docapul, as the newsman, is giving the numbers to Donald Trump.
And Trump is saying, well, I've heard two numbers.
And we know that from reporting, if you believe it, but the reporting is that Rubio World and Vance World are pushing for some type of indirect.
right? Like, you would know, like, you would know this better than Ryan, but some type of, like,
American version of Havana syndrome type activity in Iran rather than kinetic.
Do a little hack, hack them a little bit. Yeah, and he also pushed back against some other reporters.
You want to roll A2? Let's do it. So put, yeah, here he is, again, quibbling with the casualty figures.
I've been killed in Iran. Nobody's been able to give me an accurate number. I have heard
numbers from everything's a lot. One is a lot. But I've heard numbers much lower and I've heard
numbers much higher. We'll be knowing we're probably going to find out over the next 24.
I think it's a lot. It's too many, whatever. So the context here is that there was an Iranian
government source who gave some news outlets a number around 2000 that appeared to include
also security services deaths, because at least hundreds, it seems like hundreds.
of police officers and others were killed as well.
That number is far from verified.
But then you had CBS News come out and say they'd heard 20,000.
Right.
And if you peeled back the sourcing on their 20,000.
Probably did hear 20,000.
They definitely heard 20,000.
The sourcing was like somebody called them from Iran
and said that that was the number they'd been hearing.
It's like, all right, that's interesting, but you can't,
that's not a number you put in print and circulate.
Right.
that's a person we heard from in Iran who said that was the rumor.
Like, that's not, that, that, maybe it is.
We don't know.
Like, the internet's been shut down for days.
But like that, you can't report it like that.
And Trump is like, I think rightly skeptical there.
Well, you know what you could report is that somebody in Iran is trying to push a number that seems suspiciously high.
If you were going to report that number at all, there's one way to report it.
And it might be, wow, this source is connected to this government or that government.
Now, of course, I'm just speculating here.
but that is, you know, one of the ways that you could actually report it is with that.
And it's not crazy to think that there would be a high number of casualties.
No.
Imagine if here in the United States, a hundred plus police officers were killed in protests.
How many Americans do you think would be killed in response to that?
Be more than 100.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
You put up the next element to your point here about how close the war.
as Israel's Channel 12 was reporting,
the assessments within the defense established
indicate a U.S. attack on Iran is closer than ever.
Security sources say that in light of recent development,
the question is no longer whether the United States
will act militarily, but only when.
In response, Israel has been placed
on a particularly high security alert
in recent hours following President Trump's dramatic statements.
All of that is true, that is Israel's impression.
It does seem like Trump is easing off a little bit
and that this may be some wishcasting
on the part of the Israeli sources, we don't know. We'll see over the next few days.
Whitkoff, inflaming the situation a little bit, put up A4 here, meeting with Reza-Pal-Levi
secretly. This is the kind of guy who wants to be reinstalled as king, but who has
mismanaged this strategically and up and down, up and down, left and right. He was asked,
about the high number of deaths among protesters on CNN.
Did you see his response to that?
Polavi?
Yeah, he said, this is war. People die in war.
He might as well have been an Iranian regime source at that point.
Right.
It's like, well, if this is war, you have just,
you have just completely stripped yourself of all of the leverage that you had,
which is that this is not okay.
It's not war.
These are peaceful protests by civil society that are trying to, like, pressure the government.
Right.
It's not, it's war?
He's the son, of course, of the toppled Shah.
Right.
And that's where people have, yeah.
I mean, that's a really significant question.
And Whitkoff, obviously, this is part of the situation in Venezuela.
And, you know, part of the problem with regime change operations is that you need a new leader.
And you need a new leader that let's just charitably take the,
U.S. explanation for now, someone who would have a democratic traction that would have democratic
clout, credibility, viability, and even in a transitional process. And so Whitkoff, obviously,
meeting with Polavi, who, I mean, the odds that Polyvi is able to lead Iran into a new era
or even a return to an era of democracy, Ryan, seem short, but it may be all they have. And the fact
that you have Whitkoff, who is one of Trump's, obviously, this goes without saying,
top, top deputies, most trusted deputies meeting with him. And then this getting leaked to
Barack Ravid, who's sourcing this, looks like he's sourcing this to the Trump administration.
That's, he's sourcing it to a senior U.S. official. So it looks like they intentionally leaked it.
Quite interesting. Yeah. And as people are noticing, it's also incredibly difficult to
figure out what's going on inside Iran
because all of the sources
pretty much across the board
are biased in one direction
or another. The one that is used by the media
the most, you can put up A6
here, and I had reported on this right after the 12
Day War, is this
organization
human rights,
I think it's called human rights in Iran, and then
they've created the human rights
news agency.
They are heavily funded by the
National Endowment for Democracy, which is
a C.
CIA linked out of U.S. back thing. Now, the AP and others have found their...
Which just got a fat check in the new omnibus, minibus proposal that Thomas Massey's fighting.
We'll ask him later in the show.
Now, their numbers were not way out of line from what other sources were during the 12-day war,
and the AP relies on them. And they're way under what CBS News is out there claiming.
But even they, people are like, we want a reliable source, but what's your methodology
but what's your funding? And it's all, you know, quite, it's all quite opaque. And so it's difficult to,
for people to have any confidence. And so Trump may end up hanging a decision not to attack on that.
Say, you know what? We don't, we don't know. Right. Unless they start, like, swinging hundreds of people
from ropes in the streets. Mm-hmm. And that gets out. Right. So, well, actually, on that point,
Let's put the next element up on the screen here.
This should be, yeah, we can see A7.
This is just looking at Barack Ravid,
and there's this really funny video, Ryan.
I don't know if you remember it of Zelensky
singling out Barack Ravid and saying,
you seem to be listening to all of my phone calls.
It's from like a year or two ago.
This is a post mentioning Barack Ravid,
the former IDF intelligence officer,
writes for Axios, had this to say
about Iran International a few years ago.
Quote, and the Mossade is using this media outlet
quite regularly for its information war.
It is. Yeah, it's an anti-regime.
Yes.
And here you have a former IDF Intel officer, noting that.
Yeah, I mean, it's true.
If anyone would know.
Yeah, Iran International is extremely suspect.
You're like, you're not necessarily going to find.
Credible source.
Now, it's from 2022.
Speaking of suspect sources, but delivering interesting information,
you put up this next element.
This is, yeah.
So we were, it reads, it reads,
we reported tonight on Channel 14, this is Israel's Channel 14,
foreign actors are among the protesters in Iran with live firearms,
which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.
Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.
And so clearly implying here that the Israelis have armed the protesters.
Now, what the Iranian foreign minister did recently was call in
European and also regional ambassadors to watch videos that they had been collecting from the protests
of armed protesters, what call them whatever you want, insurgents at that point,
firing methodically at security personnel and operating with what looked like some level of
training.
Like not just like you know boom boom boom like running like running through like like showing some tactical sophistication and so and they they a few of those clips have have been circulated but they presented a much a much broader compilation of those to these to diplomats from around the world to say look you this is this is not just us doing a massacre right there the
the bullets are flying in both directions.
Now, it does appear like Iran's crackdown has been quite severe.
Absolutely.
You know, we'll learn more about that.
But their argument is this, we are not battling protesters in the streets
simply complaining about inflation or the collapse of the currency.
These are people who are armed by foreign governments to overthrow the government.
And you have to take that into consideration.
Yeah, I mean, we're obviously in the middle of the fog of war, which is a very dangerous position to be, and we've seen it time after time in the last, you know, 100 years since you have the ability to get information from around the globe at any given moment, especially now. It feels like the theory would be there's more transparency than ever, and we remember this during the early days of their spring, go back to 2009, when Twitter was bringing us on the ground and helping the pro-democracy forces. But actually, all of that quit transparency can muddy the water.
so much more because it's being spun very cleverly by, as propaganda, as anybody in the middle
of a war would do or of a conflict would do, that's their opportunity to try and sway the
west in one direction or the other. So that's obviously what's happening. It's just a question
of getting with rational minds and cooler heads the actual facts. Yeah. And as our viewers may
have noticed, I'm curious for your thoughts on this, whenever there are protests in Iran, the American
media and the Western media, you know, really hypes them up, like, very energetic, very energetically.
You would have noticed that we did not do that here. Now, there's a couple reasons for that.
One, they broke out right after we went down for like two weeks. We're not yet a 367 day a week,
24-7, 365-day news program. Anchorman too. Yes, these anchor people needed a little bit of a
break. Yes. So part of it was just coincidental, but part of it also then when we came back was,
we've seen this before.
This may have been the bloodiest crackdown we've seen in a long time.
But we've seen this before and there isn't a
there isn't a serious kind of opposition
that is organized with a plan to take power and run Iran.
Like that doesn't exist.
And the Shah does not,
the Shah's son does not seem like remotely serious.
He claimed that he had 50,000,
regime defectors ready to go.
That clearly was a complete lie.
Because they have basically, that movement has basically said that they will, like, execute,
you know, anybody that was complicit with the regime.
So, like, that's probably going to make it more difficult for you to get defectors over your side.
And it's also, like, defectors over to what?
Like, you need, like, if you were a regime defector at this moment, let's say you're a top IRGC commander or something,
What do you defect to?
Right.
Like who's, like, what's the organization?
Who's the leader that you call?
So there's no organization with any ideology or leader, and the shot doesn't really count.
So who do you call and say, like, I'm with you.
Let's do this together.
And also it's do what together?
Like, what is the what is the what besides the fact that the protesters don't like the regime?
And so all of these things suggest to, like, just a casual observer even, like,
that they're not going to overthrow the government.
And so the more you hype it up here in the West,
the more you encourage those demonstrations,
if they fail and thousands of people are killed,
you have blood on your hands.
Like you push those people into the fire, and they died.
Lindsay Graham out there telling people, help is on the way,
please get out on the streets.
What Trump is doing it as well.
Trump's saying, take your institutions, help is on the way.
And then you're like, oh, what kind of help?
Oh, economic help.
Economic or...
You're asking people to get, to put their lives on the line with no plan to actually win.
So as this is, we can put this back up on the screen, this is A5.
As Barack Ruvide reported, quote,
Secretary of State Mark Rubio said in closed door meetings in recent days that at this stage,
the administration was looking at non-kinetic responses to help the protesters,
according to a source with direct knowledge.
Go seize the streets, hold the town centers, and we will have a non-kinetic response.
Right. So Trump had implied that there would be some type of strikes, and he's obviously openly
flirted with that idea. And to Ryan's point, the goal from the Lindsay Grams of the world is to create
a self-fulfilling prophecy and to kind of will something into action. And it's obviously entirely
possible that ends up with people being crushed and no U.S. strikes in response. If that's what
people are betting on, it's possible that's not what's happened because even Rubio is, according
to this report from Barack Rabid, which, again, I would imagine was placed by Rubio World,
is counseling against direct intervention. Vance World is reportedly doing that as well.
Speaking of propaganda, let's finish here with A8. APEC already in the ad game here.
APEC already running ads about Iran where you can see Ro Kana up on the screen. This is the ad.
He's catching it from the tech oligarchs from APEC.
He's catching him from every direction.
While the Iranian people risk their lives for a better future, Ro Khanna has his head in the sand.
That is an ad on X about Roe Kana from APEC.
Already in action, boy, do they want to take down Roe.
They sure do. They're not big fans of Ro.
And then, yeah, final point, even if they do end up in the next few days launching airstrikes on Iran,
there's no path, there's no theory of change.
There's no idea of how those airstrikes are going to dislodge the regime and replace it with another regime.
I don't blame Israel for that. Israel doesn't actually want another regime in power.
What they want is a fracture to run that is a bunch of little statelets that are at war with each other
and they can fund proxies like they do in Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and wherever else.
Libya.
But the U.S. pretends to want a stable world.
And so we have no theory of how like air strikes are going to lead to the Shah taking power again.
Right.
And how that would actually even be a good thing, what it would look like.
Yeah, right, the next steps.
And it's like you see in Venezuela how ill-considered.
I mean, I suppose different than 2019, like they tried to have more of a off-ramp plan post-regime change than they did in 2019.
But you see right now, even with all of the considerations that were already made in Venezuela, what that looks.
like Iran, a different ballgame as well.
Right.
And Alas Shah had real charisma, people say.
Riz.
He had Riz.
Riz.
And he was still overthrown for a reason.
Like, people hated him and hated the authoritarianism.
Well, they didn't love the encouragement on their sovereignty by his relationship with the West.
And that's, again, something we've been talking about in Latin America.
It's at issue when you have someone who's, whether forced or doing this willingly and eagerly,
making all of these deals selling, you know, Iranian or Venezuelan assets and, you know,
minerals, oil, whatever it is to the U.S. in a way that feels people like it's exploitive,
that's a powder keg. It's a powder keg. And they don't have a plan to deal with that.
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Back here in the United States, President Trump had said one protester death is too many in Iran.
Maybe that's not the case here in the United States.
Stephen Miller came out forcefully.
They call him what, Prime Minister or whatever,
Prime Minister Stephen Miller,
came out forcefully in defense of the absolute immunity
of DHS officials.
Let's roll his aggressive defense of them.
To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity
in the conduct of your duties.
And anybody who lays a hand on you
or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you
is committing a felony.
You have immunity to perform your duties
and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic
insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.
And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction,
into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.
Okay, well, that is certainly one way to respond to the kind of national outrage.
at the killing of René Good, which new polls show Democrats, obviously, overwhelmingly believe
it was an improperly legal shoot. Independence overwhelmingly believe that. And only, I think what was
it's, I think I saw two polls, but roughly 60% of Republicans said that it was appropriate.
So you got a majority, even a super majority of almost a super majority of Republicans,
but still only 60 is awfully low to if you're going to then come out this aggressively and say
ice agents if you're watching this you have complete immunity to do whatever you're doing
out there in the streets overall it's been broken down into like roughly this is again it's
an approximation but you're seeing like a third a third a third of people who say absolutely not
yes, it was supportive and people who are kind of up in the air and polls, but to Ryan's point,
when you break that down by partisanship, independence, not great for the administration,
serious for the administration, and for Republicans that are up in the midterms.
And obviously helpful to Democrats that are using this energy politically, but the politics
aside, I do want to make a point because you and I and Crystal and Sager have disagreed
on the circumstances of the good killing and people can go watch last Friday show,
to see more of that. But even so, what Stephen Miller just said is arguably dangerous for the ICE agents
themselves because he said absolute federal immunity, and he said it with such gusto.
Right. It is technically correct. You might believe it to be true.
Well, it's technically correct because he said federal. And they are currently in charge of the
federal government, meaning that it is almost a 0% chance. Right. He'll pardon you, basically.
Right. States can prosecute in these cases. They are doing it in the Renee Good case, in fact. And the federal government appears to be making that work harder and is intentionally not cooperating with the state investigation. But saying absolute federal immunity as though you are covered, which is the clear implication of what Stephen Miller just said, it's dangerous for reasons that you and I would agree on, which is that you have a lot of
new ICE officers out in the streets with the bravado coming from the administration and actual
threats, you are asking for danger.
And secondly, dangerous then potentially as well, because people have this overconfidence
that could be literally dangerous for protesters and the agents themselves by stoking the
flames.
And they could be legally dangerous for the officers who can be prosecuted.
by the states.
That's a very good point.
And so we have a decent-sized law enforcement audience here at breaking points.
And so if you're in that segment, and particularly if you work for ICE or CBP, take note
of what Emily just said.
You don't have state-level immunity.
Federal immunity is debatable, but the administration will probably pardon you, even if, you know,
by some chance, like, you don't end up with that.
And also what federal prosecutor at this point is going to, like, try to take up the case when
it's so clear, when the administration is making it's so clear, they're not interested in
do that. They're not, they're not prosecuting John Rosson, investigating him. Instead, they're
investigating his wife, saying that, you know, she may have committed a whole bunch of felonies
out at that scene. So yeah, okay, maybe you're okay for the next several years federally.
But Emily's point is key. The fact that he added that in, he's trying to play you. He's
tricking you. He's trying to make you think that you have overall total immunity. You do not.
there are states that will come after you.
And the statute of limitations on murder is the rest of your life.
So bear that in mind.
And also then process that for a second and think, wait a minute, this person just lied to me, basically, to try to get me to carry out his agenda.
He created this 3,000 person a day or whatever it is, insane quota that could never be reached without violating the Constitution.
Now he needs people to go out and break the law so that he can cash checks that he didn't have the balance to pay for when he first wrote them.
And he's going to then hang me out to dry.
He's going to lie to me to get me to be as aggressive as possible.
And then when the pendulum swings back, I'm going to be the one that is left hanging out to dry.
And I actually do want to correct what I just said about the 30, 30.30.
When you look at polling, it's actually in multiple polls here over 53% of people who say it was unjustified.
So that's according to Quinepiac.
There's a UGov poll, and then there's a, I think it's data for progress via Zateo that did a poll on this.
And so those numbers for the administration, like that's, I was misremembering.
That's actually very, like, negative clearly for the administration to lean into this, which is what they've done.
We see Stephen Miller out there tripling down.
It's something like 75% of people say they've seen the video.
So like.
Saturation.
JD Vans can say whatever he wants about it.
Right.
People have seen it.
Right.
So yeah.
So yeah.
It's wild that they're really leaning into this.
Leaning in further, Donald Trump, you can put this next element up on the screen.
Donald Trump said, do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers?
Drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent, released, and escaped prisoners.
Escaped prisoners?
What?
Dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insanest.
Psalms and all, on and on and on, he finishes at the end,
fear not great people of Minnesota, the day of reckoning and retribution is coming.
And so he is surging more federal resources and federal troops, kind of into, not military
troops, but security services, into Minnesota.
And the videos that just continue to come out of there, the reporting on the ground,
just continue to get
to the place where
like Normies are like, what is going on here?
Like you had this one, I don't know if you saw this one
where a woman is, she
comes across a protest
and she says the cops, like I have a
disabled, I have a doctor's appointment right over here.
I have a doctor's appointment and there's some
yelling and shouting. They open the door.
They rip the
disabled woman out of the car.
Rather than just unbuckle her seatbelt,
they come in with a box cutter
and just like slice
the seatbelt,
drop her on the ground,
pick her up,
everybody's screaming.
There's still the case of the guy
who was picked up
at the gas station
and carried away unresponsive
who has not been heard from since.
And the protests are going
from morning until night
looks like, you know,
spoke grenades.
It's just, it's like total chaos.
It's really frustrating because
for me, two things can be true.
And what we disagree on is that I vehemently oppose people obstructing ICE.
I also, though, vehemently oppose.
Ice encroaching on American civil liberties.
I vehemently oppose.
And that would be, I mean, we could have a longer conversation about whether ICE in and of itself is an encouragement on American civil liberties.
But that's for another day.
And I vehemently opposed the security theater.
And it goes into obviously very dangerous places.
and it's why I'm not, I'm genuinely not trying to deflect, but it's why during the Biden administration,
you and I talked about this several times.
Like, you create a situation where Bill Malugian of Fox News posted these names of genuine, convicted
violent criminals, people who haven't been convicted of immigration crimes, but who have been
convicted of violent crimes who are in Minnesota right now because they came over the border during
the Biden administration.
He posted a full list of all of these different people.
That is a real thing.
And it makes me furious at the Biden administration.
The Trump administration is going to lose public support.
They're calling Ryan right now to say.
It was calling me.
But they're going to lose public support for any immigration enforcement,
which is roughly what happened during their first term as well.
Yeah.
Polling went in the other direction.
Biden then overreacted to the polling going against Trump on immigration,
basically opened up the border and didn't enforce it
because they thought that was most politically viable.
And it was a wild overcorrection.
Yes, Trump took, Trump had the American people on his side,
not a huge majority, but he had a majority of people on his side when it came to immigration.
He has completely lost it.
And he's turning people against all of his immigration policy, all of it.
And so instead of taking the billions of dollars that he added to immigration,
enforcement and hiring detectives and other officers to go and find these people who he says are
escaped prisoners and criminals dangerous people escaped from asylums like instead of going to find them
he's just doing this thing where they're going around saying papers please to like american citizens
like show us your ID but that's why i get pissed on to like uber lines yeah but that's why i get pissed also at
obstruction of ICE. And even the people who have done some of the trainings have said always comply.
This is civil disobedience, just comply with the officers, which I think is important.
But even then, Jonathan Ross was dragged in June in the arrest of a convicted sex offender,
non-citizen convicted sex offender. So that those are the people there should be, the focus
should be on. American citizens do not have to give immigration authorities,
who are just wandering the street, their papers.
Like, that is a, it's Fourth Amendment right,
and a Fifth Amendment right,
fundamental basic rights of a citizen in this country.
If they say papers, please, no.
You do not have to get them out.
Maybe you can say they should all say,
yes, sir, here's my papers.
Digital ID, that's what they're doing in the UK,
partially to crackdown on the immigration that they let in.
This is what Kirstarmer is doing right now.
Yeah, and, right.
And so the right has been against a digital ID.
The right has been against, the right has been for liberty.
And now having them be on the side of the papers, please, folks, is crazy.
And also, what Miller wants to do is not what he ran on, right?
They ran on going after the criminals.
Now, it was pretty clear what they were actually really going to do, I think, you could say.
but this like we're going to find 3,000 people a day and get rid of them that's not actually
and we're going to do that by going to Home Depot and going to Uber lines and rating
farms and hotels like that's and construction sites that's not what people voted for
and that matters because now you have lost the public and now the public is out
blowing whistles in their face everywhere they go
Let's talk about this next case, Ryan, of the agent.
This is going to be B4.
You were posting a bit about this.
So let me tell us about what's happening here.
This is also in Minnesota, right?
So we can go roll the video.
You'll be able to see it on your screen.
So this is a 17-year-old target employee who's an American citizen telling these ice agents,
including Bovino, to.
to F off. And he's like walking away from them and they're walking after him.
People say that they saw some evidence of him making contact with the ICE agents. I have,
I've seen this a whole bunch of times. I've never seen it. This is, here's the ICE agent
hitting him, throwing him down on the ground, putting his knee on his head.
You then, you then later see, yeah, there he goes. You hear him say, who should we call?
Like in another video from the Target employee's perspective, he says, call my mom, call my mom.
He then shows up.
Here he is.
So they, here he is.
They dumped him miles away in a Walmart parking lot after they realized that he's a citizen.
So he's bleeding.
He's all messed up.
He's clearly struggling.
And DHS came out and said.
This individual, this is the quote from DHS on J.S.
January 12. This individual is arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers under 18 U.S.C. 111,
assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers. Right. And he wasn't. Like, he was picked up,
was brutalized, and then he was dumped out. Like... Well, legally, they're going to have to make a case
based on impeding. But they, okay, but they said they charged him. They didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where's the charge? Well, that's what I'm saying. They're going to have to rely on a very, based on the video,
at least, to your point. But there's no evidence that they actually arrested him.
They picked him up, dumped him.
Like, when did they arraign him?
When did they take him to jail?
When did they do the things that they're claiming they did?
If he violated federal law, why was he dumped in a Walmart parking lot a couple hours later?
Well, I mean, we've seen cases like this.
There have been cases where U.S. citizens...
Don't you have to at least take them in if you're going to charge them?
ProPublica...
You can't just charge him in the car.
Yeah, I would think so.
ProPublica did a long rundown, what was this, a couple of months ago now,
the cases that have involved U.S. citizens.
and as of then, it was a little database, basically,
where you could go through a check.
And a lot of the cases were people who genuinely had been,
you could make a pretty obvious case
that they were, quote, impeding or getting in the way,
that type of thing, not just swearing or cussing or whatever
or illegally filming, that sort of thing.
On the other hand, there were at least a handful of cases
that I found extremely disturbing at the time.
We've covered many of them of U.S. citizens
who did get unduly detained or arrested or whatever it was.
And that's what I think is really, like the numbers are what they are,
not just because there was all of this polling over the last year
showing people actually were pretty supportive of, quote, mass deportations,
even like six months into the Trump administration,
people were still fairly supportive of that.
It was going to look like, yeah.
Well, no, but even as it was happening,
people were fairly supportive of this idea that, yes,
there are people who are here in this country who are not violent,
criminals who may have to go. On the other hand, when you start seeing ice with masks on doing
this to U.S. citizens more than once, that's, I think, explains the numbers are where they are
right now. We can roll here Bovina on Hannity. So he went on Hannity. He's obviously, his, what is
his position is like regional? He's a regional CBP commander. Yeah. So let's roll this clip of him
on Hannity a couple of nights ago.
Now, is that justify use of force?
To me, that it's not even a close call.
Sean, we call that means intent and opportunity.
Did that individual have the intent?
Look at those minutes leading up to the shooting,
and we will see what I would consider
some pretty important intent.
Did that individual have the opportunity?
Yes, did that individual take that opportunity?
Yes, a 4,000-pound missile
is not something anyone wants to face, especially in a split-second decision-making process
in a very already in hospitable environment. Hats off to that ICE agent, I'm glad he made it out alive.
I'm glad he's with his family. So that was Bovino on Renee Good, of course. And go ahead, Ryan.
I think it was Stephen Lockjaw with some vocal fry.
Right? Doesn't it look like Lockjaw except...
Someone tweeted that he sounded like a Red Scare host.
Yes.
But looks like lockjaw.
It is an unsettling combination.
It is.
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To use the word unsettling one more time, let's go ahead and roll this clip of Joe Rogan, who had Rand Paul on for a very
interesting edition of the Joe Rogan experience, himself expressing the sentiment of being unsettled
about what he has seen from ICE. And remember, obviously, Rand Paul is libertarian. He's Republican member of
Congress, but he comes from the libertarian branch of the Republican Party and the broader
conservative movement. So questions about ICE weigh heavily on the libertarian mind always
and have for a long time. How did Rand Paul respond to Rogan? Let's take a look.
You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up,
many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them?
Are we really going to be that the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come to?
It's also very ugly.
To watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face, where it's like, I'm not that guy.
I don't know what he thought.
And again, this is a guy who had almost been run over.
But it just looked horrific to me.
I mean, when people say it's justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she was kind of turning the car away.
I think you could make an argument when you're working right along the board.
or at night with large groups that there's a lawlessness to the cartels that hiding the identities of ICE along the border.
It's a little harder to make the argument.
And I saw this image in a courthouse in Chicago where it's a big elevator and the ICE agents all have masks on and they're arresting people.
And it's all women and children in a big elevator in a courthouse.
It's like, really, I don't think you really need to be wearing a mask.
Well, they're worried about being doxed.
You know, they're finding that happen.
But our local police have to do that and they don't wear masks.
You see what I mean?
The local police go to the courthouse to arrest somebody and the bright lights of the city during the day.
Right.
But again, the local police have to state their name and badge number.
The local police have always been here.
Right.
The ice element is completely new.
Right.
Or at least at this scale.
I'm saying that for most of the regular arrests, you probably don't need to have them wearing masks.
That's what I'm saying.
So Rand Paul offered some defense of ICE, but what you heard him saying in that clip,
was right, right, as Rogan was talking about the optics of watching a woman be shot in the face.
And I don't mean just the optics of that for the administration politically, but what that does
viscerally to people to watch a woman be shot in the face. And that's where you're seeing
this polling come from. We can put the next element up on the screen. This is a you-gov poll from
January 9th through 12th. So that was conducted from last Friday to this Monday. So in the wake of
what happened to Renee Good.
you see a net
abolishing ice
has received net positive support
in this poll. So
support for abolishing ice
is at 46%.
Opposition is at 43%.
I would imagine that's in the margin
of error. So either way
it's basically split. And again, Ryan,
this is what we said earlier
in the show. That's what happened
in the first Trump administration. I mean,
not at this level, of course, and immigration
enforcement wasn't at this level. But the
numbers were going exactly in this direction. And it's why Democrats hopped on politically the
Abolish Ice train and why people like AOC and other squad members were getting a lot of traction
with the Abolish ICE movement at the time. And now the public is like really moving along with it.
Not according to Third Way, which is the kind of like centrist democratic news organization,
bad timing for them for this memo that they put out. You can put this next element up.
They said, they implore Democrats do not.
use the term abolish ice. Quote, the impulse is emotional. The slogan is simple, but politically,
it is lethal. And we had Chris Van Hollen on the program Monday and asked him about this.
He was sort of almost there, but he was saying, you don't want to imply that some of the
necessary functions that are carried out by ICE would also be abolished. And I don't think,
and some people want that to be the case, but that's not what most of the most of the fact.
people mean when they say abolish ice. When I say abolish ice, I mean it is it is a rogue
ungovernable agency. And when you have a government, you need everything in it to be responsive
to the government and to the people. Like you can't have rogue agencies. You can't. Like that's
that's antithetical to the notion of self-government. And these guys were already rogue in
2019, 2020. 50% of their officers have been high.
hired in like the last year.
They're not rogue from this administration.
I mean, they're very, very responsive.
Well, we'll see.
To the duly elected president right now.
That's, well, we'll see.
Like, if, yeah, we'll see what happens if they try to,
you always think that, you always think that your attack dog is, is under control.
That maybe they are.
Like, and that's a very good point.
I just mean right now.
Right.
That's a very good point.
I wonder if the administration wanted to change.
tactics if they could get them under control. I don't know. Maybe they could. Could a democratic
government? I highly doubt it. I think that's a great point. But that's why, again,
like libertarians, and we'll ask Thomas Massey about this later in the show, and if you want
all these videos, make sure to subscribe to the channel. We've learned lately that if you haven't
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because we do have Thomas Massey coming up later on today's show,
and I'm very curious to get his take on this,
because Rand Paul, I don't know, I heard him kind of conflicted.
And I think a lot of people are conflicted, but not, like this ice polling from you gov
that we just put up on the screen is pretty interesting
because what you see among independence,
so people who describe themselves as moderates,
are almost 45% in the strongly support or somewhat support category
when it comes to abolishing ice.
independence, 47%. So independence and moderate, self-described independence and moderates,
are almost at a 50-50 split on supporter opposition to abolishing ICE.
And what's the Republican number?
The Republican number is only about, so among Trump voters, only about 15% support.
That's a lot. Among Republicans, 14%.
It actually is. I was thinking that when I saw this.
Think about that. 15% of Trump supporters, Trump voters, want to abolish.
Well, the reason that that's a lot is because, I mean, first of all, I'd like to see that number broken down regionally.
But it's also important because on the margins, that makes a big difference when Trump has already has a somewhat fragile coalition of people who basically need to think the left is worse in order to vote for Donald Trump in any given moment.
And so that's a genuinely, you know, it sounds like a small number is compared to the moderates and independence.
I mean, that's huge for Republicans right now, but that's tough.
Yeah, and ICE doesn't seem to have much to worry about in the near future.
You put up B9, Democrats don't, there's been a real push by some Democrats to make the next funding fight around ICE funding and shut either the government or shut DHS down.
There's some hope that they could, and Van Hollen was talking about this, some hope that they could pass other appropriations bill.
so that only DHS would be shut down, I think they're dreaming.
I think they'll have to shut the entire government down.
And according to this reporting, not a whole lot of appetite among Schumer and other leaders.
We'll find out.
We'll see for that kind of fight.
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Let's move on to Sudan, UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
Let's do it.
So an incredible kind of crack up between the Saudi and UAE co-e co-e co-eee.
abolition happening over the past several, several days and weeks and accelerating in recent days.
Start with C2 here.
This is a story that we published over at DropSite by Iona Craig that I would highly, highly
recommend.
I want to highlight two parts of her story.
She writes here, without the UAE's command structure and without air cover from their patrons
in the flat desert landscape of eastern Yemen, the southern transition councils collapsed in the
first week of January, it was as precipitous as its gains had been a month before.
Further waves of Saudi airstrikes quickly routed STC forces. As one SEC fighter put it in a video
posted on social media, quote, we went to Hudramat and Almara with a large force and high-end
equipment and returned on buses. That's about as a dramatic turnaround, as you can imagine.
What she's talking about here is that for the last 10 plus years,
or going back more than 10 years ago,
the UAE and Saudi Arabia were collectively fighting against the Houthis.
They were a coalition against the Houthis with the United States
supporting them against the Houthis.
In recent years, the UAE and Saudi forces became rivals,
but had some sort of a daint with the Houthis being the main aggressor.
Recently, Saudi Arabia has clearly decided that the UAE has gotten way too aggressive
in the region and in Africa and pushed back and bombed a shipment of arms that were coming
into the UAE's fighters, which then caused the UAE forces to just basically completely unravel,
you know, what took them 10 years to build, collapse in 48 hours.
An incredible Mohammed bin Salman moment then unfolded.
This is the guy who, MBZ, the head of the UAE, was warned.
the guy that you're trying to put it in the throne here in Saudi Arabia,
and he effectively did put MBS in the throne, is impulsive.
You're not going to be able to control him.
MBZ said, no, no problem, I got him.
What has he done since?
Well, he started out, he brought a bunch of super-rich Saudis into the Ritz Carlton,
tortured him, took their money.
He then coaxes Khashoggi into Jamal Khashoggi into a consulate in Turkey,
butchers him.
He invites the Lebanese prime minister to Riyadh for a meeting,
kidnaps him,
forces him to resign on video.
You remember this several years ago?
If this man asks you to attend a meeting,
my recommendation is not to go.
Don't go.
So the guy, that prime ministry went back to Lebanon
and took it back.
He's like, I don't resign.
I only resigned because he made me to.
He made me.
So yes, so he invites,
so MBS invited 50 plus leaders
of the Southern Transition Council
to come to Riyadh.
It's going to be good.
We'll talk about our different.
The head of it, Al-Zubeda, said he would come, did not get on the plane, instead got on a boat, and went across the Red Sea to Africa.
Let's test his judgment.
50 plus of the other STC leaders went to Riyadh.
We can put up C3.
This is also from Iona Craig.
She writes, a delegation of more than 50 flew from Aden to the Saudi capital on January 7th.
instead of joining the group, Adara Salzobeda, instead secretly left by boat to Somalia.
Meanwhile, the delegation in Riyadh is believed to be being held incommunicado.
STC officials in Aden say they have been unable to contact any of the group since they traveled.
Dropsite news called several of the STC leaders held in Saudi Arabia but could not reach any of them.
Family members of the delegates have similarly been unable to speak to the party since they left Yemen on January 7.
an STC official still in Yemen told DropSite that communication with the leadership in Riyadh had been cut off and there are strong indications they are under immense pressure. To your point, if you get an invitation to Riyadh, do not go. Do not go. Do not go. What are you doing? Amense pressure is probably doing a lot of work there. I can only imagine the immenseness of the pressure that they're currently under. We put up C4. This is our from friend of the show, Sammy Hamdi.
This is the guy who actually was arrested in Sacramento or Northern California by the Trump administration.
We had it on. You could go check out that interview.
Yeah, held for a couple weeks. You want to do this one?
Well, he, I mean, he posts here that MBZ is, quote, reeling from MBS's sweeping onslaught of his empire.
Somalia cancels his contracts with the UAE and TERFs MBZ's bases.
So that is something that's happened and important to keep in mind here.
Erdogan is close to establishing a defense.
packed with Riyadh and is conferring with the emphatically resurgent crown prince of Yemen,
on Yemen, Somalia, the Red Sea, and Sudan.
India is avoiding antagonizing Saudi Arabia and has strayed from the UAE by refusing to recognize
Somaliland, and MBZ's STC proxy in Yemen has dissolved.
Plus, MBZ, as Sammy Hamdi puts it, quote,
is struggling to find a single regional power to lend support or mediate or stop the unraveling
of his empire.
Ryan, the theory, and I saw this from actually Quincy Institute,
and Nell Shalene, who we've had on before,
just writing that the MBZ strategy is a chaos strategy.
It is to ferment chaos in the region
rather than the preference of MBS,
which is the exact opposite of that,
to try and get everybody in lockstep with MBS,
rather than having total chaos consume the countries in that area.
Yes, I think, and I think that's well said.
And it's, the UAE and Israel are very tightly aligned at this point.
And Israel has a very similar approach to the region,
which is that you want to empower kind of proxy groups and separatists
in every country that you can to then minimize the power of the central government
of that country so that you then, by comparison, have more freedom to operate.
Israel's goal obviously locked down its territory and expand where it can.
UAE, and we can put up this map here so people can understand exactly what's going on here.
So the UAE's goal, so if you look at the UAE, they're up here over the Persian Gulf.
So if you just study this map, everything will start to come into focus of like exactly what they're doing.
So look at the, look at southern Yemen there, Gulf of Aden.
So the Houthis have most of Yemen.
But what the UAE and the Saudis control is the part that's just along the Gulf of Aden and just along the Red Sea.
Right across from them there is Somaliland.
So they're trying to break away this little piece of Somaliland.
And then if you look at Sudan, you've got ports all along the Red Sea there.
If you look just to the west of Egypt there is Libya, which the UAE is now practically, you know,
their UAE's factions are practically in control of.
And so what do you see right in the middle of all that?
Saudi Arabia.
They feel like they have been, while they weren't paying any attention, completely encircled.
Now, if you have a lot of oil that you're pulling out of the ground in Saudi Arabia,
but you look around and every point that you have to ship that oil out is controlled by your rivals, the UAE,
the value of your oil is just gone way down.
What the UAE is trying to do is control the flow of commodities and ports.
And I was going to say, meanwhile, if we put the map back up on the screen,
one thing that you should take a look at here is just the size of Sudan, because Ryan mentioned commodities,
Sudan is massive. Yeah. And it's a huge, huge proportion of the world's gold. So gold prices,
on the other hand, have been up. Surging. Yes, have been surging. And so to your point about controlling
commodities, the Sudanese element of that is not insignificant for MBZ at all.
Yeah. And so where this matters in, so why this matters for,
for Sudan is that the UAE is the main backer of what's called the RSF, which is the faction
that is fighting there that is actually that is kind of surging at the moment. And the UAE has
the Saudi and Egypt kind of back the Sudanese armed forces who are by no means angels.
So this is not this is not this is not like some type of conflict between good and evil here.
But the UAE has funneled extraordinarily advanced technology to the RSF, which the RSF has used to recently turn the tide in the war.
Now the collapse of the UA's mini empire threatens the supply lines of the RSF.
So I think we're likely to see some type of reversal.
If we don't, what matters here is the city of L-Obeyed.
So in October, the city of Elfasher, after an 18-month siege, and we covered this earlier,
18-month siege fell to the RSF, there were estimates of about 250,000 people in that city,
something like 150,000 of them remain unaccounted for and are presumed to be dead.
That would be twice as many of the confirmed killed in Gaza, and that happening just in a matter of weeks to months.
hopefully the experts are wrong about that and then they maybe they snuck out somehow and went
somewhere else but that does not remotely appear to be the case there appears to have been a massacre
of just absolutely biblical proportions the burning of bodies to cover it up as well as the digging
of you know extraordinary numbers of mass graves el-obeyed has people think maybe half a million people
but because of the conflict, there could be as many as up to a million people who have come to the surrounding area.
It's surrounded on three sides by the RSF. You can still get out to the east.
But if that city fell, there is real fear and forecasts by the people who've been following this,
that you could see another massacre of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of the UAE's proxy forces here in Sudan.
It's so ugly. And to your point, I mean, the reason we're doing this because it's happening in the shadow of public attention.
Yeah. And these are people who are alive who could be saved if this, if the international community somehow can just put a stop to this.
One way that it could be stopped is the weapons flow stops.
So if you put up C6, there is real evidence here.
And here's another kind of useful map there of the UAE's encirclement of this region.
This is from organization critical threats.
They say Egypt and Saudi Arabia have reportedly withdrawn overflight permissions for arms flights from Abu Dhabi to
Eastern Libya, while Somalia has banned Emirati military flights and expelled the UAE from
Bossaou, a key transit hub. The disruption comes as RSF offensive intensifies and as Saudi Arabia
is reported to be brokering a $1.2 billion arms deal for Sudan's army. So there is hope that
the RSF is going to lose access to the weapons that it needs to carry on what is just an
absolute, like, cataclysmic slaughter of people. The problem is, it,
If Sudanese armed forces then gets this $1.2 billion, you know, we could be looking at a slaughter in the reverse fashion as the revenge is carried out for what happened in El Fasher and elsewhere.
Yeah, and a lot of it's happening in Darfur.
Right, yes, which we were paying attention to 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, so the politics here, the U.S. basically will not admit that the UAE is doing this.
Here's a clip from recently of Representative Sarah Jacobs pressing the State Department to just acknowledge that it's actually the UAE, our ally, that is doing this and watch him kind of dance around the question of just saying the letters, UAE, place C-7.
Do you agree that the UAE continues to provide material support to the RSF?
Thank you, Ranking Member Jacobs.
I would again refer back to the Secretary's comments on the critical role of ending external support
and our continued efforts to work with all actors on that front.
Okay.
And what is the department doing to utilize its significant leverage in the form of arm sales,
including a $1.4 billion sale of helicopter and F-16 fighter jet parts?
that President Trump circumvented Congress on to push the UAE to stop its support and hopefully
prevent another mass atrocity.
Yeah.
Thank you.
As far as broader arms sales issues in those relationships that have to refer to my colleagues
either in our political military bureau or our near Eastern Affairs Bureau, it's not something
that I'm directly involved in.
For a sense of what this, what a conflict like this is like, we did want to play one footage
with a little viewer discretion advised.
It's not remotely gory or anything, but it is.
It's jarring.
It's jarring.
It's, yeah, Emily has a good word for it.
It's jarring.
We put up C1 here.
So this is a group of RSF fighters.
We're getting trained.
And you can see the kind of instructor.
Wow, that happened even faster than I was ready for.
You can see the instructor there talking to these recruits.
And there's a drone overhead.
And just in the blink of an eye,
the entire
the entire group,
platoon, whatever, is just gone.
Nobody's alive, yeah.
Which raises all kinds of questions
about the nature of war today
and like what, like, how you move,
like if both Saudi Arabia and the RSF,
I mean, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are putting billions into this
and sending drone technology
across this kind of barren landscape,
it's just going to be a,
robot-fueled killing field for it and it could we talked about angola we got a rap because we got
a lizard war in a minute um we we talked about last week about the angolan civil war which
unfortunately you had to miss um but that was a case where even after the u.s and others with
and south africa withdrew their support for jonas subimbi's like uh rebellion he just refused
to put down his guns.
There was even a UN negotiated,
U.S.-backed everything,
election.
And he got like 40 plus percent of the vote or something.
He could have had like a bunch of members of parliament.
And like, he just refused.
He said no.
And went back into the Bush for another 10 years of war.
And so I worry that like I'll have a lot more grays.
You'll have some grays and we'll be here.
20 years from now still talking about this. If we don't, I don't know what.
Well, as Ryan mentioned, we're going to be doing this on Wednesdays in the near future just to provide updates.
And we can talk about the famine conditions next week.
Yeah. Oh, it's dire on a week by week basis. So make sure to subscribe if you want those videos in your feed.
And we will be heading into our interview with Elizabeth Warren now.
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