Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/6/23: US Sends Nuclear Sub To Middle East, Israeli Minister Calls To "Nuke Gaza", Obama Nonsense On Israel, DC Protestors Reject Biden, Biden Losing Five Swing States, Secret Push For Russia Peace, Mint Budgeting Retired, Virginia Elections

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the US sending a nuclear submarine to the Middle East as the Biden administration continues to be humiliated in it's conversations with Israel, an Israeli Minister calls to "Nuke Gaza", Obama speaks nonsense on the Israel Palestine crisis, the Breaking Points team hits the streets to get exclusive interviews with DC Protestors at the March for Palestine this weekend, NYTimes polling shows Trump destroying Biden in 5 swing states, Biden secretly pushes Zelensky for peace with Russia, TurboTax makers nuke Mint Budgeting app, and Krystal previews the upcoming elections in Virginia. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. It is a Monday. We have a great show for everyone today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of breaking updates, of course, coming out of Israel that we will get to, including a not very successful trip of our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. Over there, we also have former President Obama weighing in in the most possible Obama way. So we'll react to that. Our own Griffin and Mack producers were on the ground at the massive protest here in D.C., so we have some footage from that.

They were able to interview some of the people who were attending that march to get their thoughts on what was going on and what message they want to convey. Bombshell poll by the New York Times showing Trump beating Biden in five out of six swing states. Some of the numbers under the surface, too, among young people, among African-Americans. I know the Biden White House is not happy about these ones, so we'll break all of that down for you as well. Also, a stunning revelation that the U.S. is starting to talk quietly to Ukraine about how we can wrap this war up, how we can get the parties to the negotiating table as it is increasingly clear that they are in a stalemate and unable to push through. It's also a story that really caught Sagar's attention about a budgeting software that is being shut down. What stage of capitalism is this, Sagar?

This is the latest of the late stage. I'm genuinely furious about it, and we will talk about it. Yeah. It's also just a huge political week. I mean, obviously, we've been really focused for understandable reasons on what is going on in Israel and Gaza, but we also have huge elections tomorrow in Virginia, in Kentucky, ballot measures in places like Ohio and Maine that are really important and may give some indication of where we are politically. So we'll dig into that. Specifically focusing on Virginia today, we'll give you a broader breakdown tomorrow. There's also a Republican debate this week, which is completely under the radar. So we've got a lot going on this week to get into. Thank

you so much to all of you who've been helping us out. This has been a very difficult time in terms of gathering news, in terms of being on alert all the time. Our producers and our crew are working overtime. So thank you guys so much for supporting all of that. Overtime indeed. They took their weekend to go to a protest, compile and edit everything. We just want to say thank you again, breakingpoints.com, if you're able to help us out. Yes, indeed. All right, let's get to the very latest in terms of Israel. These are a couple of things that are just breaking very recently. We now have the U.S. announcing that an Ohio-class nuclear submarine has moved into the Middle East. This is a rare announcement. They say that a guided missile submarine has arrived,

a message of deterrence clearly directed at regional adversaries as the Biden administration tries to avoid a broader conflict amid the Israel-Hamas war. This is per CNN. U.S. CENTCOM said on social media that an Ohio-class submarine was entering its area of responsibility. Sagar, I want to get your quick react on this because it's both the fact that it's there, but also we don't normally like announce to everyone where these things happen to be going. No, the Ohio class submarine is one of the most secret quote unquote submarines. I used to cover the Pentagon. They would never tell you where an Ohio class submarine is ever, unless they want you to know. So whenever they did want you to know, it would usually be whenever they would

be operating off the coast of Crimea, or they would be like, we're making a show against Russia in a pre-announced military drill or some sort of exercise with the joint power, something like that. This is extraordinary. And I remember seeing it and just being like, oh, my gosh. I can barely believe this is real. Just so people understand, as you could saw in the tweet, it's the U.S. Central Command, Central Com or CENTCOM as it is otherwise known, is the area which is included Israel and the entire Middle East. So that's why they said on November 5, 2023, an Ohio-class submarine arrived in the U.S. CENTCOM area of responsibility. So, I mean, that's the biggest like eye emoji that there is in military circles because they don't do this ever. I mean, multiple other Pentagon correspondents who I saw and others were like,

I honestly can barely even remember the last time. And of course, there's only one reason to telegraph this. Hamas does not care about Ohio-class submarines. Hezbollah does not care about Ohio-class submarines. Ohio-class submarines are some of the most, I mean, these things carry like Trident missiles. They or some of the most advanced military technology on Earth, and we don't even have that many of them. So it is a very, very clear signal to Iran about what we have in the region on top of, don't forget, all those carrier strike group assets where the combined firepower of that is more than most nations on all of planet Earth. And we have many more carrier strike groups in our arsenal. To that point, each one of these things can carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, 50% more than U.S. guided missile destroyers pack, and almost four times what the U.S. Navy's newest attack subs are armed with. Each Tomahawk missile, so 154 of these, each one can carry up

to a 1,000-pound high-explosive warhead. You have an expert on this sort of thing saying they can deliver a lot of firepower very rapidly. I think that's a bit of an understatement. And goes on to say 154 Tomahawks accurately deliver a lot of punch. No opponent of the U.S. can ignore the threat. So in case you thought that, you know, perhaps we'd gotten through the possibility of a second front opening up and we had Nasrallah from Hezbollah giving a speech and just sort of, you know, beating his chest, but not announcing a new opening of a war. This should make it really clear to everyone that this is a very present danger, the continued

escalation of this conflict. And it also comes as Israel is announcing a large-scale attack that they are carrying out basically as we speak. They once again cut all the comms coming out of Gaza, no internet, no phone, et cetera. So once again, very difficult for any journalist or any human being there on the ground to get out reports of what is going on. But they are announcing a large attack. Reading from the New York Times here, they say their forces had fully encircled Gaza City and were carrying out a significant operation in the Gaza Strip late Sunday as the entire enclave was plunged into the same kind of widespread communications blackout cut it off from the world during Israel's initial ground evasion 10 days ago. Quote, this is from

an IDF spokesperson. At this hour, we are carrying out a large attack on terrorist infrastructure, both below and above ground. So no signs of certainly stopping, no signs of easing up. They are continuing, if anything, they are escalating even further in terms of the severity of the attacks that are happening on the ground. And this comes, Sagar, we discussed over the weekend and just to give everybody a little bit of an update, what a humiliating trip our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, had to Israel where he pressed them for a humanitarian pause. At the time that he was pressing them for this humanitarian pause, they were apparently,

although they say they were striking terrorists, but they have offered no evidence of this. They were striking a convoy of ambulances at the very time that Tony Blinken is saying, hey, how about a humanitarian pause? They rejected him out of hand, but that was not even the end of his humiliation and our humiliation as the United States of America in the Middle East, he went on to do a press conference with his counterparts with Egypt and Jordan and continues. I mean, this humanitarian pause thing is basically like what literally no one wants and is something that they made up to try to give liberals some sort of cover so that they can pretend like they care about the toll that is being taken on civilian life here. Well, the Jordanian and the Egyptian foreign minister also rejected that completely out

of hand and said, listen, what we really need here is a ceasefire. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. But I would say what we all as human beings, as you said, as I said, as we all say, as human beings, we just cannot accept to see all that killing unfolding, to see all that reduction of life to a complete loss. How can we justify to anybody that killing 9,000 people, killing 3,700 children, destroying 150,000 houses, destroying hospitals? How can we justify that this is self-defense? So this is right after Tony Blinken was saying, hey, no to a ceasefire, and they rejected

that out of hand and publicly sort of rebuked him with their own analysis. That's not supposed to happen. They are never supposed to have all three of the secretaries of state of three of the powers. You've got the United States of America, the superpower. You've got the regional powers. You've got Jordan. You've got the United States of America, the superpower. You've got the regional powers. You've got Jordan. You've got Egypt there. These are some of our closest, quote unquote, partners all throughout the Iraq war, throughout all of our relations with Israel and with Egypt.

We had Sisi directly lecture Blinken to his face. Now we have the Jordanian foreign minister who is openly parting and rebuking, honestly, the Secretary of State. Now we've had multiple diplomatic cutoffs of Turkey and of Israel, of the Egyptians, of Amman, which is what drawn their ambassador from Israel, which has kicked out the Israeli ambassador. I mean, the regional diplomatic situation is deteriorating at a very, very fast pace. So you have the arrival of this missile sub. And yeah, I mean, one of the things that we should highlight, as you said, it's like everyone's like, oh, we can take a sigh of relief after the Nasrrella speech. I'm like, well, you know, it's not been that long. And I hate to say it, but, you know, think back to the first world

war. It took a month before the guns of August start rolling. It's, we're near that month thing. Even then, you know, you look at other things, you had a conflict, a low grade conflict that goes on and on and on. And then some one thing happens, it explodes onto the world stage. So just because, you know, in the recency bias, we can think that things haven't gotten worse. All of the things, the chess pieces are in place for a catastrophic situation to unfold. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And, you know, to go in a little more on this whole humanitarian pause thing, which basically everybody is seeing through. Put this up on the screen. It's a report from Axios about what Tony Blinken was saying to the Israelis to try to persuade them to do this humanitarian pause thing. And it wasn't, hey,

we're really concerned about the civilians. We really need to get food and water in. We really need to be able to evacuate people for medical care, given that so many of the hospitals are no longer functioning. It was, quote, we don't want to stop you, but help us help you get more time. And people who have been, you know, pushing for a ceasefire and I would put the Egyptian and the Jordanian foreign ministers in this camp, I would put myself in this camp, have been saying, you know, the whole idea of a humanitarian pause isn't really about the civilians. It's about providing cover for liberals so they can keep their, you know, virtue about them and pretend like they really care about what's happening to the children and the women and the civilians on the ground and the utter devastation, the complete siege, etc., etc.

And it's also, as Blinken lays out here, to actually give Israel more time, because as long as the overwhelming, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals and schools and refugee camps, et cetera, continues, you're going to have increasing pressure here and around the world to get them to stop. So it's not that Blinken and Biden want Israel to stop bombing. It's that they want to give them a little PR cover to extend this thing, which is exactly why Egypt and Jordan were so willing and so direct to basically shoot this idea down. And the Israelis, on the other hand, they see through it because they're like, you've already told us there's no red lines. You've already told us that our aid isn't going to be conditional. You've already told us you're going to stand with us no matter what. So piss off. Why

should we listen to you? The only way I think I would be like on board with a quote-unquote Humanitarian pause is if the Israelis were to take actual look at their military strategy and be like, all right Like what are we actually accomplishing here? Because what we've accomplished so far is I mean basically you can go back and roll the tape We're really what we said was gonna happen from day one You're gonna kill a ton of civilians in terms of your actual military degradation of Hamas, there's not a lot of evidence yet so far, especially because the Israeli military is not, I mean, whenever, for example, when the US military would conduct operations against ISIS, every single operation, and I was in there, I was in the briefing room, Operation Inherent Resolve.

They're like, here's what we accomplished today. We took out, you know, 54 different ISIS strongholds. We bombed their oil fields. We took out X miles of what they had built. And this area of Mosul was retaken. Now, the Israelis have not been doing this actually at all. It really is shocking to now think of the Pentagon as being transparent, which I did not think at the time. But here we are. The Israelis have not released the number of miles that have been destroyed by Hamas. They haven't actually confirmed all that many Hamas targets. Many of their operations are conducted in complete secret. Even in terms of the briefings that they're providing to

foreign military or their own military, they're not telling us exactly what they're doing. Everyone's like, oh, well, you know, in war, that's not what you do. Well, in modern warfare, again, I'm just telling you, as a person who covered the United States military, that's how they operated. They were very clear after every single operation. We're like, here's what we're doing. It was within this context. Here we're trying to retake this. The grand strategy is to destroy ISIS. This is how it contributes to the overall goal. And we would have a lieutenant colonel or whatever, who was a spokesperson, who would come over the air in a Zoom call from Iraq to brief us all in the American press. None of that currently exists right now. So even on their transparency,

they're not really giving us insight into their operations. I think that is where I really think people need to have a hell of a lot of skepticism because, and I did, you know, as well. How many times did, even in their so-called transparency, did the Pentagon tell us, like, we are 100% certain we killed this member of ISIS. And we're like, okay, where's the proof? And they're like, well, here's the proof and here's how we got there and all of that. And what did we find out in Afghanistan? Oh, turns out he's a water salesman. He killed like five of his kids. And that happens all the time. And that was with great intelligence, with great supposedly on the ground presence,

ISR, et cetera. So the Israelis, I mean, they have to be and should be in the modern military, which is how you conduct operations on war. They should be conducting themselves or trying to achieve that same standard, but they're basically rejecting it. They're like, no, we're not going to fight that way at all. So anyway, if there was a humanitarian pause that could restore any semblance of like how modern military fights, what's the actual military objective here? They say it's to destroy Hamas. On the other hand, many of their actions read as collective punishment. Nobody's really saying anything out loud. So it's like, well, what are we doing here? And what are we actually- They're saying a lot of things out loud, but-

Right, but what are we moving towards? Like, what is the end state of this? Do we just bomb until we stop bombing? Because now what? Now we're in a worse situation, arguably. Absolutely. And less safe for everyone. Less safe. Like, you know, for the long term prospects of Israeli security, there is no doubt they are making their own people less safe with what they are doing right now. And, Sagar, you know, to your point, I think we should just stop pretending that the goal here is actually to dismantle Hamas because the military approach is wildly inconsistent with that supposed goal. And this is something that, to her credit and very courageously, I think, Ilhan Omar has been pointing out. She said recently, U.S. policy is essentially that Netanyahu has no achievable goals in Gaza and a ground invasion risks regional war, including potential U.S. troops. And also, we should give him $14 billion in weapons with no restrictions and say there are no red lines as he bombs refugee camps. See how this doesn't add up.

I think if we're being honest about what the actual military objectives are, is retribution and collective punishment. I mean, that's just, you know, an analysis of what they're doing and what they've been doing from the jump when the very first thing they announced was a complete siege of every single civilian cutting off water and food and fuel to the entire population and the way the bombing campaign has been conducted. So it's retribution. And it's also after their own humiliation and failures on October 7th to try to reestablish that they're the baddest MFers on the block. That's the other goal. And I would add a third goal to that, which is Netanyahu trying to hold on for dear life to his political position

as prime minister when an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone either now, a near majority want him gone right now, or some close to 80% want him gone now or when the war is over. So he is trying to buy time and trying to satisfy the desire for revenge that exists among the public so that he can hope to survive another political day. And listen, the man is a survivor, a political survivor. Let me tell you that. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen about, you know, what could come after this, you know, what's going on in the ground in Gaza. So Blinken is telling the head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, that the Palestinian Authority could play a central role in Gaza. Now, it's hard to see how that would really work, to be honest with you, because the PA doesn't really have legitimacy in the West Bank,

where they are rightly seen as basically like weak collaborators who have done very little to protect Palestinians who live in the West Bank from escalating settler and IDF violence there. But in terms of what Abbas is saying, he says the PA would only assume power in Gaza, which Hamas has controlled since 2007 as part of a, quote, comprehensive political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a Palestinian news agency. So this is what the U.S. is floating as the PA to play some sort of a central role. But again, it's hard to see how that is any sort of a real solution. And also, by the way, remember, we reported on the fact that

this official government ministry put out a report of like, OK, here are some of the options. They rated this as the least desirable, not because of the PA's weakness, which, by the way, is something that the Israeli government has tried to ensure that the PA is very weak, but because they do not want unity between Gaza and the West Bank, because that could potentially further the aspirations of Palestinian statehood. And so they want to keep these two territories divided. They want to make sure that they have this talking point of like, ah, we got no one to negotiate with. So sure, we'd love peace, but what can we do?

Yeah, I mean, I'm getting serious Ahmed Chalabi vibes off of Mahmoud Abbas. For people who don't know, you can Google it. I'm not going to go into all the history right now. It was basically about who the US tried to install as the next president of Iraq, and it didn't work out so well. I guess that's the short answer for it all. The point is just that he is increasingly viewed as a very feckless figure. And of course, he himself is actually quite old, has been in power now for decades, and somebody who is viewed as unable to stand up for Palestinians against the Israelis. Hamas already has a very, very high approval rating. So again, let's assume that you get to a scenario where you do destroy Hamas inside

of Gaza. It's going to be a very difficult operation. It's going to take many months, if not years, in order to accomplish that. Now you have a foreign occupying force, and you're going to try and install a government. It's like if you're the government who's being installed by the military occupying force, ask America how that works out every time that we have tried to do that. That's why these things are very, very difficult. So look, I don't know.

At the same time, we just want to flag this. As usual, Americans are smarter than most people who are in charge. Let's put this up there on the screen. Over 80% of Americans right now are concerned that the U.S. could be pulled into the Israel and Hamas war. 84% were either very or somewhat concerned the U.S. could be drawn into the conflict. The response is actually varying by political party. Republicans showing a higher concern than Democrats. 52% of Republicans said they were very concerned compared to 30% of Democrats, probably because of trust in Biden. But the quote is just, American voters who are watching the cauldron

of the Middle East reaching a furious boiling point are fearful of the war so far confined to Israel and Gaza will metastasize to include US troops. And considering what we started with about an Ohio class submarine, about these carrier strike groups, about these marine expeditionary forces, about our guys who are taking hits in Iraq and Syria. You know, I was just looking at the photos, Crystal. Secretary Blinken landed in Baghdad to go and to meet with the Iraqi prime minister. Even now, you know, as my friend Dan Caldwell so eloquently puts it, after 4,400 lives, 30,000 wounded, 2 trillion in Iraq, America's chief diplomat still has to show up 20 years later

in Baghdad at night in secret wearing body armor to go in to meet the Iraqi president. That's where we're at right now. So just to show you again our track record of doing this so well, 20 years later, we've got a government in Iraq, which we don't go into this all that often, but it is a nightmare what we have done to that country, how they have ended up. They're basically an Iranian proxy state. And now our chief diplomat landing in the dead of night in a secret trip, wearing the fake body armor over a suit like Jared Kushner, like a J.Crew model, and all of that, and having to take, again, having to take a helicopter to the, having to take a helicopter to go in to meet with the Iraqi prime minister. It's like things haven't changed. George W. Bush landed on the ground there some 20 years ago

for his first presidential visit when we were in the middle of an active war. That tells you really everything that you need to know about our own track record here. Yeah. And the last thing I'll say before we move on to what increasingly is clear, what the Israelis actually want to do in Gaza after this offensive is complete, whenever that is the case, you know, the White House realizes that this is, you know, this is a mounting political disaster for them. And you've already got two thirds of the public that wants to cease fire. You've already got 80 percent of Democrats that want to cease fire. We're going to cover some poll numbers that are terrible and are only

getting worse because you have young people, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans who are disgusted with the Biden administration's approach. And the longer that this goes on, the more the horror of October 7th fades. And the images that endure are of these Palestinian babies and women and refugee camps and hospitals and ambulances just being bombed with our complete support, with our bombs. So they're trying to create some sort of narrative of like, oh, we really tried. We really tried to rein them in. And, you know, it was we did our best, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this sort of bizarre article in the Washington Post

where administration officials are leaking to them just how they can't get anything done and they're really working behind the scenes. But the Israelis just won't listen to them and we just really don't have any leverage. And it's once again, this complete feigned impotence because obviously, I mean, the amount of money that we give all of these countries, but Israel chiefly, but you know, since it's off the table to condition that, to touch that, to even say a word about, you know, even discriminating about what kind of weapons we're going to send, they put that completely off the table. And then they're like, oh, there's nothing we can do. It's like, yeah, because you took all of your leverage off the

table from the jump and advertise to them from the jump. We're not going to draw any red lines. We're not going to condition support. We're with you no matter what you want to do, even as you've got ministers as we're about to report on talking about Israeli ministers talking about, hey, maybe we should nuke Gaza and plans for ethnic cleansing being intentionally leaked to the public, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, we've got no leverage in the situation because you decided you would take all of the leverage off the table. And it just annoys me, Sarah, to no end, this like feigned impotence, which is the only thing like this is the thing that they do in domestic politics. Oh, parliamentarian, the Republicans. It's just so hard. We just can't do what we you know, I know we would love to do these great things for you. We just can't do it. And it's the same freaking thing here. It was the

same thing with Ukraine too, which we're about to get to and they're changing their tune there as well. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, it just reminds me of Ukraine. It's like when you set us a thing where you're like, no, this partner, this person is our ally, no matter what. We're blood brothers. The whole, my whole thing, and I've always thought this, you should only bestow that status on maybe one or two countries. To me, it's like the UK and Australia. That's basically it. Everybody else, in my opinion, can eat it. And it's like, we've got to be very, very transactional. The issue for all of these, like Israel, Ukraine, you know, it's everything. We refuse to condition our aid. We just say you can do whatever you want. And then where it's like a given that we're just going to get dragged in next to you. Now, listen, you can be an ally. That's a, that's a thing that it's fine then,

but that means that there is a transactional relationship. I can guarantee you in Israel, they have no qualms calling out the United States whenever they feel like they're not getting taken care of. They have absolutely, they spy on us. They steal secrets. You know, the open, dirty little secret in Washington is that the biggest penetrator of the US government from spies is Mossad. And then go look at people like Netanyahu, who went to go visit an Israeli spy in prison and beg for his release and then welcomed him with open arms after he openly turned traitor to the US government.

It's like, they're happily willing to look at this as transactional. For some reason, we're so stupid that we're not. And this is not way bigger than an Israel problem. This is a Ukraine problem. This is a Saudi problem. There's so many different countries that come on, even an Egyptian problem or Jordanian problems. Like, we can't get these people to do anything that we want because they think we're fools. It's just, you know, the humiliation just goes on and on. But this is a bipartisan story, unfortunately. Yeah. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.

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I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get to what increasingly is clear, what Israel actually wants to do with regards to Gaza and the Palestinians who live in Gaza. Put this up on the screen. They have been quietly pushing for Egypt to admit large numbers of Gazans. Let me go ahead and read a little bit from this report. They say they've been trying to build international support in recent weeks for the transfer of several hundred thousand civilians from Gaza to Egypt for the duration of its war in the territory. Israeli leaders and diplomats have privately proposed the idea to several foreign governments, framing it as a humanitarian initiative that would allow civilians to temporarily escape the perils of Gaza for refugee camps in the Sinai Desert just across the border neighboring Egypt. The suggestion was dismissed by most of Israel's interlocutors,

who include the U.S. and Britain, because of the risk that such a mass displacement could become permanent. Some Israeli hardliners advocate keeping control of Gaza and permanently expelling its Palestinian residents. A Likud lawmaker has called for another Nakba that would, quote, overshadow the original mass displacement in 1948. Here's the quote from that Likud lawmaker. Right now, one goal, colon, Nakba. Nakba in Gaza and

Nakba to anyone who dares to join. Another far-right government minister said on Wednesday that Gazan land should be given to former Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza or to former Israeli settlers who lived in the enclave before Israel withdrew in 2005. Video has also emerged of an Israeli military officer calling for Israel to reoccupy Gaza, as well as a separate video that shows a pop singer calling for that reoccupation, prompting the approval of an audience of soldiers. So they have been pushing, working behind the scenes to try to convince Egypt, hey, just take a few hundred thousand of these Gaza residents just for the duration of the war. Pinky promise. We're totally going to take them back. Meanwhile, their own government and affiliated think tanks are laying out proposals for the permanent removal of Palestinians from Gaza, which would be an ethnic cleansing, like very clear textbook by

the definition. And so it's very hard for anyone to believe that this evacuation would truly, truly be temporary. Certainly the Palestinians don't believe it. The Egyptians don't believe it. The Jordanians don't believe it. Even we don't, even our dumb asses don't believe it. So in terms of the United States government and Tony Blinken. So this is, you know, becoming pretty clear that this is what they're pushing for behind the scenes. And Sagar, you know, in that report that came out, which there was some suggestion that it was sort of intentionally leaked as like a trial balloon. They even talked about how they would overcome this type of initial opposition. And it's like, basically, you create facts on the ground where you have such a humanitarian catastrophe, which is already

unfolding. You know, you have now residents of Gaza who are living on two pieces of bread coming basically from the UN a day. Water is extremely scarce. No fuel. I mean, you guys know the horror that is unfolding there. So you create such a humanitarian catastrophe that it creates all this pressure on Egypt in particular to take people in. You already see them taking in some to a field hospital, very small numbers at this point. And you make it so that there really is no feasible alternative. Like, what is the feasible alternative? So I think that's the direction that they continue to push on, both in terms of their private negotiations and in terms of these

public trial balloons. And, you know, in terms of very clear statements from these aren't fringe people who are saying openly, hey, let's call for the knock, but these are members of the governing party. Yeah, this is where I think that the U.S. power actually could be the most exerted, where they're going to Israel and they're like, this is a red line. They're like, if there's any discussion of this in the official government, you're nuking it. It's not happening. That's where conditional aid is. Same thing for Egypt. They're like, we're going to set up a safe zone. Not a single person has to be worrying about ethnic cleansing. Everybody's going to be able to return. We can have some sort of military operation. We can negotiate the battle space, the military objective, and all of that. And that is how we keep a cap on a major

regional war. Instead, we're not doing any of that. And I would point actually to that shocking comment that came from Egypt five days ago, which is starting to make a hell of a lot more sense when he said, quote, quote, we are ready to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory. That was the prime minister of Egypt. And it was said with, look, Sisi didn't say it, but he definitely was ordered to say it, or it was conditioned and it was greenlit by the Egyptian government. And at the time there were some eyebrows. Then started, you know, we started seeing inklings about Israeli plans and all that. But now it seems that this was actually asked and pushed for behind the scenes to the Egyptians

and explains initially also why Sisi so rejected Anthony Blinken in that initial October 8 and October 9 visit when Blinken was like, hey, maybe we open up the Sinai. And Sisi was like, absolutely not. Hell no, I'm not doing it. At the time, even people can probably go, look, I was like, I don't know why they're not doing this. Now it all starts to make a lot more sense. And it's because also, again, we can allay these fears. We can tell the Israelis, we're like, this is not going to happen. Period. End of story. Never. We will never live with this. This is a red line for US policy. If it's even openly discussed, then aid and all that is not going to happen. But in this environment, which is basically a vacuum of the Israelis get to do basically what they want, and then the Egyptians even, I don't even know if we have proper relations at this point. Can the President Biden even get Sisi on the phone?

They're not going to believe a word that we say. So the trust deficit is actually making things way more unstable in the region. And that's, again, the prospect for regional war increases on behalf of that. I also just have to comment on, I guess, what you would call a historical irony of the Jewish-Israeli government trying to push a stateless people to wander in the Sinai Egyptian desert indefinitely. Like I said, I think you might call that a historic irony. To speak to some more of the just, you know, utterly extreme genocidal, like open, like advocation for,

advocation, that's not a word. Anyway, advocacy for ethnic cleansing coming out of the Israeli government, our great allies, who we have drawn zero red lines for, made it really clear we're not drawing any red lines. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. This was from Bezalel Smotrich, who is the Israeli finance minister. So he's the cabinet minister. He said on Israeli TV, quote, I don't see a big difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian Authority, of course, in charge of the West Bank, the Arabs are the same Arabs. Okay, so this puts into context what has been going on in the West Bank that we broke down for you last week in Counterpoints, also covered extensively. Massive escalation in violence in the West Bank, Jewish settlers aided in a majority of the cases directly by the IDF, pushing Palestinians off of their land, killing over 100 just in the time period post-October 7th. So while this war has been being waged on Gaza, you have over 100 Palestinians in the West Bank being murdered there as well. So he's laying out the groundwork here for, hey, Hamas is not just Gaza. We see the West Bank. We see the people who run the West Bank as being basically the same as Hamas. The, quote, Arabs are the same Arabs. So it gives you insight into the thinking of some of the coalition partners and one particular cabinet minister in the Netanyahu government.

And, Sagar, this is what we mean when we say this is the most extreme government that Israel has ever had in their history. And just to add one more that I referred to before, go ahead and put this up on the screen. Another far right minister saying that, quote, nuking Gaza is an option. Population should, quote, go to Ireland or the deserts. This was in an interview, a local interview, where this minister was, he's the heritage minister, was suggesting that some kind of nuclear bomb could be dropped on Gaza. He was asked the question, you know, whether this would be a good idea. And he said, quote, that's one way. He also voiced his objection

during the interview to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying, quote, we wouldn't hand the Nazis humanitarian aid and charging that there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza. This is exactly the type of dehumanizing rhetoric that throughout history has been used to justify genocide. Because if there are no uninvolved citizens, there are no innocent civilians, then hey, no problem to just wipe them all off the map. He goes even further. He backs retaking the Strip's territory and restoring the settlements there. Asked about the fate of the Palestinian population, he says, quote, they can go to Ireland or deserts. The monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves. He says the Northern Strip has no right to exist, adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag should not

continue living on the face of the earth. This is a government minister who is saying these things and who, again, we have said, no red lines, no matter what, do what you want to do. Yeah. Again, I just can't come, I can't help but come back to the way that we are apparently just not even, we're not talking to Netanyahu about this or they're not listening or a little bit of both. In every respect, I mean, none of this is helpful in any way. It's also funny, I think we were talking about this, Crystal, one of the reasons he got in trouble, this minister, is for admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons, which they're not supposed to admit, even though they obviously do. You should also go look. I was talking a little bit about spying and stealing technology from the US. You should go look into

the history of how they acquired those US weapons or those nuclear weapons. Very, very interesting behavior for an ally. But that's something that we could put aside. The point, I think, just for all of this is that the open calls within Israel are bolstering the worst claims of Hamas and of Palestinians, giving them the power to enforce their ideology and their governance, but we're protecting you against these. It's also inflaming the tensions of our allied Arab and or Turkish countries in the region, which are saying openly, look at what they are saying. We cannot abide by this. So with all that trust deficit, the U.S., by basically being caught in the middle here, is making it so that we have very little authority

to exert over the conflict, which just means more uncertainty and more chaos and more prospect of war. Yeah, indeed. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

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It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust

and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've got former President Obama weighing in on this. In words that nobody asked for, President Barack Obama, former president,

decided to weigh in in the most Obama fashion ever on Israel-Palestine. Let's take a listen. If there's any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas, that what Hamas did was horrific and there's no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what's happening to Palestinians is unbearable. And what is also true is that there is a history

of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents or your great-grandparents or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of anti-semitism and what is true is that there are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did and what is true, right? I mean, we can go on for a while. And the problem with the social media and TikTok activism and trying to debate this on that is you can't speak the truth. You can pretend to speak the truth. You can speak one side of the truth. And in some cases, you can try to maintain your moral innocence, but that won't solve the problem.

And so if you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody's hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree. I look at this and I think back what could I have done during my presidency to move this forward as hard as I tried. I've got the scars to prove it. But there's a part of me that's still saying, well, was there something else I could have done? That's the conversation we should be having. Not just looking backwards, but looking forward.

And that can't happen if we are confining ourselves to our outrage. I would rather see you out there talking to people, including people who you disagree with. If you genuinely want to change this, then you've got to figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side. Oh, man. All right. Okay. Lots to say. If anybody wants to know why I viscerally hate Barack Obama, that's actually probably the other side. Oh man, all right, okay, lots to say. If anybody wants to know why I viscerally hate Barack Obama, that's actually probably the best clip because you could look at it one way, and this is how most liberals do it, like what an eloquent man. He's able to summarize

the both sides and bring it holistically. It's so nuanced. A, it's not nuanced, but B, he literally was the president. He had the power. He actually, at one point, had the ability to change these circumstances. And he hemmed and he hawed and he did exactly what you talked about previously. He's like, well, you know, it's like we just my hands were tied and all of this. And there are so many different things, you know, from the Middle East and so many other policies that he pursued that actually did help us get to where we are right now. It's funny, you could look at it from a right angle and a left angle, actually, to give both the pathways to creating this situation. But most importantly, that is such a helpless and effectless way to look at it because it takes power away from basically every person who is involved in the situation. And so that is why I truly despise Barack Obama,, in my opinion, he was smart enough to know better.

And he was a good enough politician to actually try and to change some of these systemic problems that he talked very eloquently about in 2006 to 2008. And by 2009, basically just washed his hands, gave up, and now he's an Instagram president. Him and his wife are Netflix brands. They're not even human beings now at this point. This is a perfect example. This is calibrated to keep his Netflix deal and his dumb ass national park series, not to actually do anything. That's what is, that's the guiding North star of his life at this point. Yeah. Mr. Uh, content creator, personal brand dude has a lot of gall to be castigating the Tik TOK activists for, uh,

not presenting a wholesome picture to his liking. And that was the I mean, I have a million things to say about this, but that was the part that to me was the most enraging and also the most classic Obama. Rather than, you know, digging in on what you could have done when you were president, which he gives a nod. Oh, I think about maybe what could I have done different? But really, the problem is all of you people out there on TikTok, and maybe you need to just get out there and talk to someone who disagrees with you. Or maybe, Barack Obama, you could get on the phone to your buddy Joe Biden and actually exert some influence on someone who has some real power to change the situation rather than just lecturing young people about being on TikTok.

I mean, that's the part that's so irritating to me is he says, he has this quote, you have to admit that all of us are complicit to some degree. It's like you more than us. Maybe, but only one of us was president of the United States for eight years. Okay, so and only one of us is besties with the current president of the United States, by the way. So perhaps some of us are more complicit than others of us is besties with the current president of the United States, by the way. So perhaps some of us are more complicit than others of us. That's the part that most enrages me. The other thing is, it's just so classic Obama, too. It's the same red state, blue state formulation where he has

to go out of his way to... It's classic nuance trolling too. Like this is like the definition of nuance trolling, which listen, no one is going to deny the history is complex. There are a million podcasts that I recommend you listen to or books you can read to really understand the ins and outs of the deals that were crafted and rejected and who rejected them and why and how we got to this, you know, strange situation to begin with. And you know with, and all the events that unfolded, there's no doubt that that is all very complex. But also the current situation is actually not that complex. The immediate situation is there is mass civilian death, huge indiscriminate bombing,

and the risk of a huge regional, if not world war, on the table. Those pieces are actually not complex. I don't need you to nuance troll over that. I don't need you to wring your hands about how difficult and how complex it is, et cetera. Because actually some of the both geostrategic pieces here and the moral pieces are very, very clear. So that's why I find all of that so irritating

and so enraging. And this man never pops up to do anything useful whatsoever. The only thing he really cares about is like burnishing his own legacy and trying to preserve his own legacy. But in terms of actually like pushing policy or pushing the very powerful people

that he has tons of sway with in any sort of positive direction, he's got nothing to say about that. Everything he said is technically true. It's like, yeah, it is technically true that you can't have a full picture on TikTok. It is technically true that everyone at some point, or every US policymaker, I would say, is cancerous. I would argue I've seen some TikToks that were more illuminating than what he just said right there.

Sure. I mean, he's like, you can't tell the whole picture. You can't get both. I agree. I mean, I agree that much of modern online discourse is cancerous, but I also am always reminded that that discourse is equally cancerous and it's a helplessness. It's a powerlessness. It's the ability to try and assuage the feelings of liberals without actually doing anything. That was the, if you want to really know what he invented more than anything, it was that it was the celebrity president, the man who does nothing. And you often hear that. You're like, he was the most eloquent president we ever had. And it's always like, is that eloquence? Because real eloquence, real power was the ability to combine rhetoric and the actual like force behind it to the force of action for words and to translate into something. He never actually mastered the second part,

but we are also, you know, we're also anxious to be led by such a great man that we're willing to just like forget what real leadership is supposed to look like. Anyway, I can go on forever as people can see. This is something that sticks deep for me with Barack Obama and it's good to see absolutely nothing has changed on his front. Let's go to the next part here. There were some major protests here in Washington calling for a ceasefire. Our team was actually there on the ground. We have some images that we can show you before we actually throw to some of the interviews that our team was able to conduct. These ones were not, by the way, from our team. These were ones pulled from the internet. We just wanted to give you a sense of the size and scale of it.

You can see just how big it is, the time-lapse footage. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were in Washington. You could see the Palestinian flag. You could see people that were standing. We are told it was a very, very diverse crowd by our team, and they were able to conduct a lot of interviews. So why don't we take a listen and see what they found out for us. All right, it's Mac here with Breaking Points,

just at the National March here in Washington, D.C. for Palestine. It's absolutely massive. We're here to lend a voice to Palestinians in Gaza, to tell them that we hear you. We're here to express your thoughts to the leadership Gaza, to tell them that we hear you. We're here to express your thoughts to the leadership in the White House and in Congress to stop genocide and stop the killing and come up to a peaceful resolution.

I came out here because my family in Gaza can't. I came out here to raise awareness of what's going on in Palestine, what's been happening in Palestine, and to raise our voices and let people know that we do not want our money going to this war, to this genocide, this apartheid. As a Jewish person, raised with Jewish values, proudly Jewish, I refuse to have my identity hijacked by Zionism. Zionism is a genocidal, secular nationalist movement that has nothing to do with the Jewish values that I grew up with. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are not Jewish values.

Our pain as Jewish people, our trauma, even the trauma from October 7th, is being hijacked to justify long-term plans to completely ethnically cleanse Gaza. So we have to stand against it. We see the U.S. is funding a genocide. So this is our opportunity to show that this is enough. Enough is enough.

We have enough. I've had enough. I'm just some regular old American guy. I mean, I have no connections to Israel or to Palestine, to anything. But I see that this is just about humanity. There's been a lot of talk in the press that these are hate marches. So I wanted to see for myself

if there was a lot of hate out here. I have not seen any hate yet. If I see any hate, I will report back. My first cousin's son with his family were bombed in their own house and they were killed. Now tell me, how am I going to look my cousin in the eye and give her my condolences when she knows and I know that her son and his family were killed with my tax dollar, with

my money. And how can I sleep at night? Would you be able to sleep at night if this happened to you? Now that's the problem here. That's what I face every single day. We are human beings and these are babies, brother. And how about the ones that are not dying, right? That now got to suffer and they're traumatized for the rest of their life. They're watching their parents decapitated. Their limbs are gone. Their homes are gone.

They have nowhere to go. It's literally an outdoor prison, right? And at least in a regular prison, eventually you might get out. Over there, there's no getting out. I don't know how many more they're going to kill before they just wipe out the whole group. So to me, it's ethnic cleansing. And I'm here and I'm against that. My tax dollars going to support that. What do you think of Joe Biden's handling of this so far? I think this is a lot. He has a lot to do with this because his strong, he has such a strong attachment to Israel that he has no way to back out now. He is now fully involved with this genocide.

He's beaten thousands of civilians. The blood is on his hands now. There's a whole generation that are going to be raised with nothing but hate in their hearts because what Israel has done to their families and their friends and their communities. I mean, we're creating thousands of people that are going to hate us, Israel. We need to stop and have a ceasefire right now. What do you think of Joe Biden's handling of all of this so far? Well, you know, I support him because I don't want Trump, but I'm very bothered that he isn't calling for a ceasefire.

Are you going to withhold your vote from Joe Biden? Yes, I am. I'm not sure how I'm voting for it, but it will be Joe Biden. I'm very, very disappointed. I voted for him in the last election because I felt he was the lesser of two evils. And he's just proven that he is the most evil. A hundred percent going to vote for somebody else. I'm looking for an independent party that supports the liberation of Palestine. Who's Joe Biden? He's not handling anything at the end of the day. He's just a puppet.

That's what we feel like. He's talking about, I don't believe in the numbers of how many Palestinians died. And it's all just to distract everybody from what's happening, man. The U.S. cannot give aid to countries that commit war crimes. How could I vote for Biden now? I mean, Trump is a fascist, but how could I vote for Biden? My partner has family in Gaza. You tell me, how could I vote for him?

He cannot do the job well. He cannot finish the job. He cannot do anything. He cannot accomplish anything. All our taxes, he just burn it. He's just killing people with children, innocent children. This is a G-rated channel, right? Up to you. So I think he's being insensitive to the views of the other people,

to the Palestinian people. His one-sided view, save Israel, and without serious consideration on the happenings in Gaza. What do you think of other Americans who may be a little bit hesitant to support the Palestinian cause or they think it's a really complex issue? What would you say to them? I get it because we want to be careful with our words and we want to be careful of who

we support. But this is not, this is the fact. The facts are that we have thousands of civilians dead. They're being murdered. This is a genocide. This, I get that we want to be careful, but we've gotten to a point where you can't be careful anymore.

He's fired now. It's all stopped the genocide. It's all the same message. We're all in this together. Just listen to your fellow human, I think. If you're Jewish in the U.S., if you're a taxpayer in the U.S., it's especially important to speak out

because your voice matters more to the people that are perpetrating ethnic cleansing in your name. We love Jews. We're standing with the Jews. It's the Zionists. It's the Zionists that we're against, okay? And Chazelle, we love you. We're here for you. You're in our prayers. Wallahi, if we can do more, we will be there for you. There are Palestinians that need freedom. My family, I love you so much and we're here for you.

Media, media, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide. Media, media, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide. Oh, that was pretty shocking actually just to see so many people. They did a good job elucidating different response. They got some Jewish Americans, they had some Palestinian Americans. They had some Arab Americans asking there the most interesting question there, of course, are you going to withhold your Joe vote

from Joe Biden? Not a lot of positive responses there for the president. The one lady, the most honest, she's like, I voted for him because he wasn't Trump. But now I'm not sure. So look, we should also all be honest. Let's be real. Let's look at the polling. Most Americans support Israel. Younger Americans, they don't support Israel, or they're mostly like a wash on the issue. They have 30% some approval for the Palestinian cause, but it's like 17% for Israel. Everything else is don't know. But the vast majority, people who are older especially, who are going to vote. They're Israel supporters. However, this is a powerful contingent in American

politics. If you're thinking of things as razor thin and something that is a major theme, I think of our coverage recently, Crystal, has been the threat that RFK Jr., Cornel West, and other third party candidates could face to Joe Biden. So on that front, I don't think that there's any question that this is going to be a potent political force in that it can swing when the margins are only 1% to 2% that we're talking about. And this, I mean, look, I'm not going to say this is 20%. Maybe 5%. 5% is enough. 5% can swing. These are the largest anti-war protests that we've had since the Iraq War, for sure. I don't even think it's close. And, you know, I tried to look at estimates.

Very hard to get estimates of, like, exactly how many people were at this particular march. The largest, so the people who organized it said it was 300,000. Other reports said at least tens of thousands. The New York Post had a source who said around 100,000. You can see from the video, it was a lot of freaking people. Okay. Mac and Griffin did a fantastic job getting a cross section of the folks that were there. You have young people, you have, you know, that one lady just seems like kind of like a typical liberal, you know, who's out there and just like disgusted with what she sees unfolding in the news. You have people with direct connections to the region. The one woman who says she has family members who she knows who lost loved ones

in Gaza. So you really get a sense of, you know, the breadth of the coalition that is really standing in favor of a ceasefire. And I think to your point, Sagar, about sense of, you know, the breadth of the coalition that is really standing in favor of a ceasefire. And I think to your point, Sagar, about the polling, you know, it really depends on how you ask the question, because you have two thirds of Americans already who say we want a ceasefire. And that's what this march is calling for. the people who are going to show up at a protest, like this is an activist engaged group of people, but they actually reflect the overwhelming majority of Americans with regards to their demand for a ceasefire. If you're talking about Democrats, it's actually 80% of Democrats who support the demand that is being made at this march of a ceasefire, 80% of Democrats. And this is why this is, you know, obviously, you know, the moral issues for me are paramount. But it's a huge political issue for Joe Biden because he needs young people to show up and vote for him and believe that he is the lesser of the two evils and bother to go to the polls on Election Day.

And if you look at all of the polls that come out, there is such a massive generational divide. And we've also seen in terms of Arab American opinion, I mean, the way that his support in the Arab American community has fallen off a cliff is really, I can't think of a similar polling demographic plummet that we have ever witnessed. And this is something that we talked to Jim Zogby about last week in terms of his views and his perspective on the issue. So, you know, it's quite extraordinary to see this many people in our nation's capital and reflective of also marches that we're seeing all over the world with the very same demand, which is a ceasefire now. The last thing that I really noted, Sagar, which I thought was interesting,

is you had a number of people bring up the fact that part of what compelled them to be there was that they felt that since this was our taxpayer dollars that were being used to support these actions by Israel, it gave them a special sense of responsibility to lift their voices. And I think that is an incredibly important dynamic of this, because sometimes what you hear is like, oh, why do you care so much about this issue? And, you know, why aren't you spending more of your time talking about like, okay, Hamas released the hostages, which they 100% should do. Well, part of it is because our taxpayer dollars aren't going to support Hamas. They are going overwhelmingly to support Israel and including this, you know, additional $14 billion that they're trying to secure for more weapons to our great ally Israel. So that is part of why the American people feel, I think, a special responsibility to lift their voices in protests when they see our taxpayer dollars going to support something that we, you know, a majority

of public opinion says we wildly stand against. And that's before you even get into the risk of escalation, the risk of the broader war. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a totally fair point. That's, you know, that's any American citizen, especially if who's talking about this from a taxpayer perspective. I think that's totally legitimate and it's fair. And that's something I get very annoyed. People are like, oh, everybody is anti-Semitic who stands. Were there some nasty signs? Yeah. I mean, there's nasty signs like every protest. You ever been to a protest before? That doesn't mean that they're necessarily representative. That applies to a Trump support too, just by the way. And that's exactly my issue is we're seeing like an erosion

of free speech norms. We're seeing an erosion of the discourse. The discourse has never been more poisonous than I've ever seen in my life, just around these things. Maybe the Iraq war, I guess, wasn't old enough to participate. But all the pieces are in place, you know, to try and crack down on some sort of dissent. But that is a potent reminder that this is certainly not going anywhere. And sure, you know, the Iraq protest didn't stop the war, but it was a preview of what was to come and of the price to be paid in 05, 06, and for the years to come of people who are skeptical of the government from there on out. So I would pay attention if I were the people who were in charge.

Yeah, indeed. And lastly, we saw our own co-host Ryan Grimm there. Oh, yeah, that's right. At the protest. We forgot to shout out Ryan. As well, checking things out. I'm not so sure about that hat, though, Ryan. I think that hat's got to go.

We're going to have to talk about that hat. I'm calling. I will censor that hat. But, you know, he made a point online and also on his sub stack that I thought was a good one, which is we're kind of in the phase now of people starting to think about how is it going to look for me in the future that I supported all of this. And you even saw Richie Torres, who I don't know if you guys have been following. He's a Democratic congressman who has been going all in at war with Rashida Tlaib, like fighting on behalf of Israel's right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, etc. And even he, Sagar, put on a statement after the far right Israeli minister was like, hey, how about we nuke Gaza? It was like, OK, this is way too far. This guy needs to be fired.

This is completely over the line. And I think that's consistent with what Ryan is talking about is as these images continue to come out, as we continue to see the extent of the devastation, I mean, you can go look at the maps that are coming out of how much of Gaza has already been destroyed, of the suffering that all of the civilians there are undergoing as we speak, that people are starting to think about like, how in five years is this going to look for me, that I was behind this this whole time? And you certainly see that in terms of the White House trying to, you know, trying to put out there like, oh, we're really trying. We're really trying. We really care

about the civilians, et cetera, et cetera. So in any case, it's it was pretty extraordinary to see that many people coming out to the nation's capital to call for a ceasefire. And, you know, even in like how we feel about the state of our quote-unquote democracy, even in the most repressive countries, they have to worry about public opinion. Of course, yeah. Like, you can only stifle dissent so much, and I think this is only going to grow from here. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her her until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap

my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. This is a good place, actually, to turn to politics on any other day, week, whatever. This would be by far the biggest story that we started the show with, but some really quite eye-opening polls coming out from the New York Times, the liberal paper of record. Put this up on the screen. They did polling of swing states,

and in five of those six swing states, Trump is winning. Leave this up on the screen so I can just go through all of the numbers here so people get a sense of what we're dealing with. In Nevada, Trump 52, Biden 41. In Michigan, Trump 48, Biden 43. In Georgia, Trump is up by 6, 49 to 43. In Pennsylvania, Trump is up by 4, 48, 44. In Arizona, Trump is up by 5, 49, 44. And in Wisconsin, this is the one state where Biden's hanging on by his fingertips. He's winning 47, 45. I probably do not need to remind you that last time around, Biden won every single one of these states. That Nevada number should be really shocking to people because I don't think Nevada even ended up being all that close. It's one of the states Democrats have continued to perform well in,

even as some of the demographics there have tended to shift to the right. Let's go ahead. I'll give you some of the details and then, Sarah, get your reaction. Then we can show some of the additional polling graphics we have here. Part of what is driving this shift to Trump, voters under 30, some of those people that we saw at the march there, now favor Mr. Biden by a single percentage point. One point.

Voters under 30, key part of the Democratic coalition, favor Biden now by a single point. His lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits. His advantage in urban areas is half that of Trump's edge in rural regions. So he's still winning in urban areas, but it's not nearly like what Trump is doing in rural areas. Women still favor Biden, but men prefer Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that has fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years. Let me throw one more at you. Black voters, long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden, the New York Times says, are now registering 22 percent support for Trump in these states, a level unseen inold electrical substation specialist in Pennsylvania, says, the world is falling apart under Biden. He backed Biden in 2020, but he is now backing Trump, albeit with some reservations. Quote, I would much rather see somebody that I feel can be a positive role model leader for the country, but at least I think Trump has his wits about him,

Sagar. Yeah, I think, look, and this is where even everyone always tries to make it about a certain thing. I actually think the single biggest problem for Biden is he's too old. Go and put this up there on the screen, please. C2. Share who think each candidate is too old. From 34% in 2020 to 71%. Listen, we tried to tell you all last time around. We tried to tell you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I remember actually getting a lot of hate mail about that. We're like, oh, you're making fun of a man with a stutter. Oh, yeah. It's just a magical stutter that reappeared whenever he turned 78 years old. 34 years old, 34% to 71% of the American people. Only 18% have thought about Trump, 39%. Now, by the way, 39 is still high. But I mean, Trump is leading that by double digit margins. Now, does not have the mental sharpness to be president. Look at that Biden figure.

2020 was 45%. 2023, 62%. That's almost a super majority. Trump's mental sharpness has actually gone down in terms of people who think that he doesn't have it and does not have the temperament to be president. This is probably the worst one for Biden because this is why a huge number of people voted for him. Yep. 39% in 2020 said Biden did not have the temperament. Now it's 51. Trump had a 58 in

terms of people who say he didn't have the temperament. And now it's 55. To be narrowly tied with Trump on the area where you most were able to succeed him in terms of I have the statesmanship, I have the temperament, I'm not Trump, which again, the vast majority of people who voted for Biden, whether they admit it or not, did it because his name wasn't Trump, not because of anything that he was actually saying or wanting to do. This is the biggest, the core problem. Put the next one, please, up there on the screen. Cohen goes into this. How Trump has fared now in the Times and Sienna polling four years ago, four years ago, it was Democrats plus two for Joe Biden. Today,

it's Republicans plus five. A named alternative, this is actually pretty interesting in and of itself. Like Elizabeth Warren in 2019 or Kamala still has Republican advantage, although Kamala actually appears to be faring slightly better than Joe Biden, which takes skill. That shows you how bad it's gotten. Now, for an unnamed generic Democrat, they say Democrats plus three and Democrats plus eight. So generic Democrat and generic Republican actually both faring incredibly well in these. Dean Phillips loving that number. Yeah, but it's fake. It's like it's not going to happen. It's going to be Biden and it's mostly going to be Trump, barring some black swan events, of course, which, you know, could of course happen.

And we don't know what those look like. But on the path that we are today, we've got 365 days or so until Election Day. This is a blaring red signal. I saw Nate Silver say that, too. He's like, look, the American people have been telling you for three straight years. He's too old. He's too old. He's too old. Hey, by the way, he's's too old. He's too old. He's too old.

Hey, by the way, he's way too old. He's old, old. Did you hear me? He's old. And Democrats are like, no, we're not going to do a primary. We're not going to do any of that. We're going to start. Biden's going to have to start going up the short stairs on Air Force One.

We're just going to cover it up as best as we can. People aren't stupid. Everybody knows somebody who is that old and has watched them decline. And it's just like, I don't know, man. You're going to put him in charge of the nuclear submarines. You're going to put him in charge of the nuclear arsenal. It gives people a lot of pause. And then on top of that, can anyone deny that the vibes of the Biden presidency have been awful? It's like you combine all these things. You've got Jimmy Carter levels of disapproval. And that's exactly what shows us. He's got the lowest presidential approval rating at this time in his presidency since every president since Jimmy Carter. Even George H.W.

Bush and Bill Clinton, you know, all these people who did not fare all that well in the year or so before, they were doing better than Biden is right now. And you know what? If people felt like their life was going great and they felt hopeful about the future and then maybe they'd be like, yeah, grandpa, like he's lost his dad, but I can live with it. Right. It's fine. Things are going pretty good, but people don't feel that way. They don't feel that way at all. And so, you know, one of the reasons why Democrats were able to do as well as they did in the midterms, one of the reasons why they've done so well in so many special elections is because of the overturning of Roe versus Wade and the focus on social issues and the, I would say,

real extremism, some may say perceived extremism, of the Republican Party. But within this poll, nearly twice as many voters say that economic issues will determine their 2024 vote compared with social issues. And those economic voters favor Trump by a landslide 60% to 32%. Now, I've been pointing out for a long time here that at the beginning of the Biden presidency, when he was doing a lot of stuff that was like manifestly helping a lot of people, including sending out checks and child tax credit

and student loan forbearance, all of these sorts of things that made people feel like, all right, I'm getting by, I'm doing okay. Even as inflation started to spike, his approval rating was very high. Lo and behold, the story of his presidency has been pulling all of those things back. So that not only are Americans, even before we talk about inflation, in a worse economic position than they were previously, and seeing all of these things that were helpful to them previously go away under a Democratic administration. But then you also have, of course, the specter of inflation, which has made it so that people

are taking a pay cut month to month to month. And it's no surprise that folks are feeling like, hey, the economy hasn't been too great under you, buddy. This hasn't gone too well. I don't appreciate the decisions that you've made in this regard. So you have that. buddy. This hasn't gone too well. I don't appreciate the decisions that you've made in this regard. So you have that. You have, of course, the perception and the reality that he is struggling just to complete his sentences and, you know, a sense of sort of listlessness and a sense that he doesn't really have control of the world around him. And then you've got, you know, the Ukraine

war and now you've got what's going on in Israel and Gaza. So I don't think anyone should be surprised that you see these kind of numbers coming out in swing states. It's been the writing has kind of been on the wall for a while. We talked last week about how much support RFK Jr. is actually garnering at this point in the general election. In this poll from Quinnipiac, he's getting 22% when it's a three-way race. And that actually lifts Biden over Trump to 39-36 and then Kennedy at 22. I would say this is maybe the one thing that could save Joe at this point. And I do think it is a little bit negligent that The New York Times didn't include Kennedy. I would personally, and they have the money to do this, I would want to do a head-to-head that's Biden and Trump, and I would

want to do the Biden, Trump, and Kennedy. It would be good to have Cornel West in there as well, though I think there are a lot more questions about whether he will have ballot access and whether that'll be a real choice going into the election, but it would be good to have him there as well as a reference point. Because when you're talking about a candidate who could potentially garner 20% of the vote, that in and of itself could completely change the dynamics. So I think that's maybe the one thing that the Biden team has got to be looking at with a little bit of hopefulness at this point. Yeah, and this is where, look, I just gave the case against, I personally, I think Biden probably will lose. If you were to ask me today, one year ahead, you can, you know, make fun of me, you know, a lot of stuff can happen in a year. I think at this moment, I think he's probably going to lose. But let me give

the case for why I think he could win. What I would say is RFK Jr. could absolutely save him, especially in the margins. All he's got to do if he's getting 22% of the vote is shave off. I mean, all those margins in the swing states are 8%, 9%, 10% at best. That's not that much that he has to take. Let's say that he draws on average more from Trump than he does from Biden. Boom, you're golden. So even though you're only getting 30-something percent of the vote in Michigan or something like that, you're still winning. So a win is a win. That's how a guy like Bill Clinton, who only got 42% of the popular vote, became president with 300-some electoral votes in 1992 because of Ross Perot. So that, you know, not unprecedented

to see that type of situation. The other case is, let's be real, the New York Times-Siena poll had all the Republicans in a red wave in 2022, and it was totally wrong. I mean, they were off by almost five points. Democrats have overperformed in every single special election. Virginia's going to be a massive test for abortion on the ballot. If Democrats overperform here again, then that's a blinking sign that, you know, just like Trump was able to get all of these like non-college educated whites like crawl out of the woodwork who've never been polled because they never voted before. Abortion has been a very similar, you know, effect on the electorate. So I would, you know, look, I like I said, I think Biden will lose. I think it's like 55, 45. But I think that's a lot

closer than some of the Trump people are trying to paint it as, you know, 45 percent is, you know, that's a better chance than Hillary had or sorry, that Trump had in terms of winning the election. He had only a 30 percent chance. Well, here's the thing that Democrats will say. Here's their cope at this point, which I think, you know, there's some real justification here for their cope. They'll say that right now, all the focus is on Biden and his failures and what's going on with him and these wars and the bad economy, et cetera. As we get into a general election, more focus will be on Trump and Trump. Yes, he's been indicted, but he's going to have trials. He could be facing convictions and that could change the dynamics here. That's one.

The other thing is they feel like, you know, some of these voters who said they'd vote for Kamala Harris, but they wouldn't vote for Joe Biden. They feel like those people are ultimately going to be persuaded to come home. They'll be convinced again that, oh my God, we can't do four more years of Trump and they'll suck it up and vote for Joe. That's what they think is, you know, is going to ultimately happen. And like I said, especially with the specter of Trump facing criminal prosecution, potentially being found guilty and being sentenced, et cetera. That's what they're hoping for is that there's enough time between now and then that the dynamics could significantly shift that some of these young voters who, you know, are saying either they're going to stay home.

It's not that they're really going to Trump, but they think they'll be brought into the fold eventually. So that's kind of what they're hanging their hat on. RFK Jr., I would say, is the real wild card here. And again, I just want to say, I don't know that RFK is going to be able to pull off 20 percent of the vote when it actually comes down to it, because typically support for third party candidates ends up collapsing as you get close to Election Day. But if I don't see how you can really justify just completely leaving him out of the analysis at this point. I just I just really think that that, you know, changes the landscape significantly.

And I've long said right now, I think he takes more from Trump. I don't know if that will persist, especially as you do have so many young voters who are disgusted with Joe Biden over what's happening in Israel and our unconditional support for Israel. So I think those dynamics could shift. And, you know, I really think one of the most undercovered political stories at this point is what's going on with him and the coalition that he is attempting to bring together. So that's something we want to keep our eye on. Yeah, totally and completely agree with you, Crystal. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around

what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Developments in the side of Ukraine is shocking just to see how quickly sentiment in Washington has turned and how quickly also when the blank check gets withheld for even a couple of weeks, all the knives in Ukraine and all the things that we knew that were true all began to come out. And now President Zelensky has taken to meet the press here in Washington, D.C., to castigate Trump, to go after his own top general for admitting that their military is in a stalemate, and to basically act like some sort of resistance Twitter poster whenever he's talking about Putin. Here's what he had to say on our national television. Let's take a listen. I hear you rejecting the characterization

by your top general that this is a stalemate. Are you changing strategies? I believe that today, indeed, the situation isат. Це такий шахтар на частини російської армії. Але перед тим ми робили багато, ми робили багато, ми були в важкій ситуації. Вони думали, що вони бачать нас, але це не сталося. This didn't happen. On the contrary, we took the initiative in our hands. Now Russia wants to attack us. They are attacking us in the east of our country while losing thousands of people and hundreds of units, pieces of weaponry. Because the war takes the best of us, the best heroes, the best men, women, children.

That's it. But we are not ready to give our freedom to this terrorist Putin. That's it. That's why we are fighting. That's it. So that interview where he's like, Putin is an effing terrorist, you know as again as People compared him to Winston Churchill It turns out that he's just like every Twitter user and see appears to be hanging out too often

with Bill Kristol in terms of his discourse, but Clearly he's on the back foot here and he's desperate in these interviews. Let's put this up there on the screen It turns out we know why it's because US and European officials have broached the topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, quote unquote, sources tell NBC News. And those conversations have included broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia. So here we are, hundreds of billions of dollars later, who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian dead or wounded. And finally, with Russia holding 20% of all of Ukraine, something that we told was totally

intolerable, would never be accepted by the United States, with Ukraine, without Ukraine, all of that, we are now saying, quote, some military officials have privately began using the term stalemate to describe the current battle in Ukraine, with some saying it has now come down to which side can maintain a military force the longest. Wait, you mean it wasn't like that from the very beginning? Except it was, and all of us have been completely hoodwinked. The issue right here, Crystal, is that now we're all allowed to admit the truth, that the Ukrainians are, quote, stealing like there's no tomorrow, that the military is in a stalem all allowed to admit the truth, that the Ukrainians are, quote, stealing like there's no tomorrow, that the military is in a stalemate,

that behind the scenes there is no military assessment for them ever to be able to accomplish these goals without drawing the United States into some sort of massive war, that actually there are trade-offs between Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan and anything that the United States wants to be able to accomplish militarily. And that pushing Ukraine to negotiate,

that doesn't make you a Russian sympathizer. That just makes you a realist, somebody who can look at this, somebody who wants to minimize humanitarian casualties, civilian death, military death, and to restore some sort of peace and order and minimize the amount of chaos in the globe that might embroil the United States into a major war. So it's, you know, it's like it's so – on the one hand, I guess we should be grateful that we're like starting to get to this point. On the other hand, can't help but be furious for being castigated for over two straight years for saying all of these obvious things and being shouted at, denied, losing friends. I mean, losing paid subscribers, losing so many people, repeating Russian talking points. And now the top Ukrainian general says it, and we're all supposed to just pretend like it wasn't the case for the entire period. That part, I'm not sure I can ever forgive that one. Well, the part that I really can't forgive either is, you know, this peace deal that was apparently pretty close to coming together at the beginning of this conflict.

Right. That could have short-circuited all of this destruction and all of the lives that were lost in the civilian casualties and the brutality and all of this horror. And there's no doubt in my mind that whatever deal could possibly be had, and that's, you know, assuming Russia's even interested in making a deal right now when they're doing decently well on the battlefield and they know they've got the numbers on their side where Ukraine doesn't. been had and what was more or less in hand at the beginning of this conflict when there were diplomatic negotiations going on in Turkey that we were covering at the time and that we have now since come to learn and confirmed in multiple ways by multiple sources that the U.S. decided we did not want that deal and we are the ones that caused this war to go on now for years at this point. That I can never get over. But you're right, Sager. The way that it now just years at this point. That I can never get over. But you're right, Sager.

The way that it now just turns on a dime. It's crazy. Listen, we're not military geniuses here. Yes, that's right. Right? But it didn't take a military genius to see the way that this was likely to unfold. And so, you know, all of the justification all the way of like, oh, we can't even talk about giving up land.

Like, that's just what you're just gonna appease. And don't you know that he's exactly like Hitler. And so now it's OK to appease Hitler. Yes. For some reason, what's changed? I thought he was literally Hitler. Right now, it's totally different. You can give him land and it's fine. And he's not going to take over all of Europe like you were trying to convince people was going to happen. What changed here, guys? So it So it is such an example of the way that they gaslight, the way that they lie, the way that they crush any sort of dissent. I mean, we privately had lawmakers talking to us about how sensitive this was and how they could not possibly stray from the script even a little bit without getting completely castigated and completely smeared, etc.

So, yeah, it's, you know, it is no surprise that we ended up in this place. And it is an extraordinary tragedy that our policymakers, led by President Biden, brought us to this place and enabled all of this loss of, you know, innocent life. Yeah. And you know what the great irony is? Ukraine is probably going to come out of this even worse because now if you're Russia, you see the military situation in Israel that's captured the rest of the globe. You see American political support on the fence, trade-offs and all of that becoming, you know, trade-offs becoming real. Your entire economy has been converted now to a war economy. Your political support doesn't seem to have taken much of a hit. Maybe you shouldn't negotiate. Maybe you should just keep pouring men into the, you know, into

the abyss and you can gain maybe 10% more of Ukraine, 5% more of that. And then maybe you negotiate. It's very possible Ukraine will end up with less land and with even more dead after this, or they could fold entirely. That's very much also on the table. So they would have been better off in those opening days with a lot less spent on our part and a lot less dead on both sides than they could be at the end of this conflict, which again was something which was very obvious from the very beginning. Last piece, let's put this please up on the screen just to show you, is in terms of the knives out inside Ukraine, the office of President Zelensky, as he did in that interview, went after

their own top military commander for publicly declaring the war is a stalemate and suggesting that his comments would actually help the Russian invasion. So there is open warfare at the highest ranks of the Ukrainian political system. You've got the top military commander saying it's a stalemate. You've got Zelensky's own advisors admitting to massive corruption. You've got his former aides saying that he's a dictator who doesn't listen. I mean, all of this are the signs of a crumbling political support there at the top. So that's the other issue where in terms of the chaos, there ain't no elections right now in Ukraine. Nobody knows what the hell is going to happen there.

We could have a full-blown military coup tomorrow, and nobody would bat an eye in terms of what that would look like. And the civilian populace too, they're also caught up in this. So look, who knows what could happen? But I think it's not possible to deny this. The situation there will be worse than what would have been in a peace deal in the beginning. And, you know, we should, you know, you were talking previously about how people want to compare their comments from the early days of the Israel situation to now. We should demand the same thing. Yeah, we should demand it. Well, here's the last thing I'll say on this since the U.S. being humiliated seems to be the theme for the show today. We threw—we demanded that the entire world sacrifice for this conflict.

We threw the entire economic sanctions playbook that we had at Russia with very middling results in terms of what we were able to inflict there. Not that I even think that those sanctions work out in very rare circumstances. Do they ever work out to begin with? And we basically threw all of NATO. We're acting like this is a Ukraine versus Russia situation. But I mean, the way that we in the full force of NATO were really behind them, we're losing to this like third rate declining former superpower. Like once again, and we again pretended this whole time of how we, you know, this is all up to Ukraine and we're just backing them. We don't really have anything to do with it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's also becoming very clear that now the minute that we're ready to move on and, you know, it's the aid is a little bit trickier to obtain here in Washington. It also shows you how much control we had in the conflict from the beginning. debatable, devastating situation that has been enabled by, you know, almost such a large

bipartisan majority and every Democrat here in D.C., every elected Democrat here in D.C. Very true. Yeah. Every elected Democrat. You're right in terms of their support for this war. OK, let's go on to the next part here. This is a story I feel very, very passionate about, but actually reveals so much about the modern US economy, about credit card debt, about what the incentives are for major financial institutions. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. So the budgeting app Mint, which I personally have been using since 2010, is now shutting down and pushing its users towards credit karma. So let me explain a little bit. Mint is obviously one of the first personal finance budgeting apps. It was a revolution

at the time. It was one of the premier parts of having the smartphone right around the same time as Uber. It had people have real-time access to their exact financial picture in terms of their assets, their liabilities, what the worth was, the updating transactions. You could set goals. You could see how far you were going. It was one of the best things that actually happened for a lot of people in terms of getting control of their financial picture. And it has now, and is currently being used by millions of Americans. We don't know exactly the total number. But now, Mint was bought in 2009 by Intuit. If you don't know what Intuit is, it's TurboTax, QuickBooks, who else? They have Credit Karma.

They have all these different companies that are under their umbrella. And just like TurboTax, what they have learned by shutting down Mint and by bolstering their credit karma business is that the best way to make money is not helping people be on a budget or even selling their personal financial data. It's to put you even to even more debt. And that is why it's so pernicious here, Crystal. They are moving people from Mint to credit karma. Credit karma will not provide you the same budgeting features like being able to set goals and save towards different things and look at your categories. It will only give you your overall net worth picture or whatever. Now, put this up there, please, because when you dig a little bit deeper into how they make any money, it all makes sense. Credit Karma has a revenue of $1.6 billion whenever you dig into it and its finances. That's actually down 9%

over the year. Do you want to know where that $1.6 billion came from? It's from looking at your credit score and from those pictures and then ruthlessly pushing you to sign up for new credit cards and for personal loans and sending stuff to your house being like, hey, you've pre-qualified for this ridiculous personal loan. Just fill out this thing. Oh, it turns out the interest rate's like 98% or something else ridiculous. And that's how they make their money, by putting you into even more debt. So the net effect of this for Intuit is they are killing one of the first genuinely innovative and best budgeting tools in the United States and instead switching

you over to a system to sell you more personal loans, credit card, put you into more credit card debt. It's mind boggling, but it does just show you that's how they make money. They don't make money when you're doing well. People who are on a budget are going to be less likely to get into debt. So what do we do? We take away their ability to budget and you put them into even more debt. It's diabolical, like whenever you see how it is, but it's just so naked. It's one of the most naked things I've ever seen because so many millions of people rely

on this app. Like I said, including me, I've been using it since I was in college. I found it so helpful. And so when I saw the news that it was shutting down, I was like, I can't believe this. Especially when I saw that they're just pushing people more to Credit Karma, which I remember signing up for Credit Karma in like 2010. Yeah, just to get a real-time picture of your credit score. That's not what they do now. Now they're just trying to, everybody's just trying to sell you a loan. It's like, can anybody just help you keep track of how much money you are spending? No, they don't want you to do that. That's the gross part of this decision. Because I mean, debt is really how they sort of keep people in line. They even say, I haven't used any of these services, so I wasn't

really familiar with them, but on Credit Karma's website, the way they describe is they say, Intuit's Credit Karma uses your credit profile to show you curated recommendations. That's what I'm saying. What does that mean? That means we're going to try to, you know, we're going to use your credit score and give you some tips on how to improve it so that we can send you even more loans. So we can try to get you in even more debt and be able to, you know, make sure we can turn a profit off of that. So, yeah, it makes all the sense in the world. This is also the company, as you know, make sure we can turn a profit off of that. So yeah, it makes, makes all the sense in the world. This is also the company, as you mentioned, Intuit,

they're the ones that do TurboTax, which has been caught. We've done coverage of this before. I mean, the way that they, they, you know, violated government regulations about how they were supposed to go about doing this. It's just, they've completely scammed so many consumers to the point that now actually some of this money that's being fought over, you know how Republicans want to use $14 billion to take that away from the IRS to give to Israel in spite of the fact that that actually would is, of course, wildly against and has spent all kinds of money on lobbyists to try to guarantee that this never comes to pass. So they are wrongdoers in so many senses of the word. But you're right. This is just completely, completely naked. And, you know, to go kind of bigger picture, like debt is, has been weaponized throughout history to force sort of like compliance on people. I'll give you a couple of examples. One example is, um, back when

we were talking about student loan debt relief, you actually had a military, some people in the military coming out and saying, you can't do this because we're going to lose one of our biggest recruitment tools. If people don't have student, you can't do this because we're going to lose one of our biggest recruitment tools. If people don't have student loan debt anymore, how are we going to get anybody to join the military? So you can see the way that it compels a certain direction of a life there. Right now, you have reportedly Israel using Egypt's debt with the World Bank to say, hey, if you take in all these hundreds of thousands of refugees from Gaza, maybe you'll get some of your debt forgiven. That is not even the first time that we have used Egypt's debt to try to force their compliance and their acquiescence to our foreign policy, which we did, I think, in the initial Gulf War back in the 90s as well. So in any case, debt on an individual level, on a state level, a company level, whatever, is very powerful and very often weaponized.

And this is very clearly nefarious. Yeah, the book recommendation I read years ago. It's called Debt. I just looked up the title. The First 5,000 Years by a guy named David Graeber. It's kind of a modern – it's a different take on the way the evolution of money and finance, how it actually wasn't for commerce. It was actually debt-related purposes. And that was and that includes some

of the first writings of Sumerian texts. People keep asking me. They're like, what should I use? By the way, I don't know. So I've compiled a list. There are four appears recommendations that have been given to me. One is the EveryDollar app. That one's Dave Ramsey's. One is You Need a Budget. I think it's called YNAB. One is like Monarch Money. And then the other one was Rocket Money. So those are the four that were recommended. But, you know, the issue with basically all of them have pluses and minuses. Some are premium products, as in you have to pay for it. That was one of the things about Mint is it was free. I mean, nothing is technically free, but some of them, you know, to unlock quote unquote premium features or whatever, you have to pay

an annual subscription fee. Some of them are connected to other multi-billion dollar conglomerates and are basically making money the exact same way. It just happens to also let you do budgeting, but that's part of the issue. You know, in every one of these cases, there's a plus and a minus. And for everyone being like, just use an Excel spreadsheet, they don't real time update. Okay. That's the issue. It's a pain in the ass. Yeah, it's a pain. That ain't happening. Look, as easy as it is to do Apple Pay and to pay for stuff to go into debt, it should be that easy to make sure you're not going into debt. That's what I think we all should be looking for.

So I know a lot of people out there are struggling, especially with this Mint thing, because it was an integral part of my life for a lot of people just in their day-to-day. So to get it ripped away and just look at you and to just look so starkly into why exactly this is happening is just, it hurts. It hurts. These companies are evil.

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

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

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't.

I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We also want to talk a little bit about there's some really big elections this week.

There are entire state legislatures that are up. There are governor's mansions at stake. There are a lot of interesting ballot initiatives. And we wanted to focus in today in particular on my home state of Virginia, where the governor is not on the ballot. So that race is not happening. But obviously, we have Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin right now, who really is the face of the Republican Party in Virginia, who had that against the odds victory over Terry McAuliffe just a couple of years ago. And let's put this up on the screen. So the House and the Senate are up for grabs here. Right now, the Republicans have a narrow advantage in what's called the House of Delegates in Virginia, and Democrats have a narrow

advantage in the state Senate. And what it looks like is probably Democrats have a decent path to holding on to the state Senate. Republicans have a decent path to holding on to the House of Delegates. And that state Senate is really critical in particular because they've been sort of like a bulwark against, you know, whatever Glenn Youngkin wanted to do. And so they have stopped a lot of the legislation that he's been pushing forward. But the other piece of this saga that is really significant is Youngkin and the Republicans have decided to place a big bet on actually leaning into abortion messaging at a time when this issue has obviously been basically a complete disaster for Republicans. They pushed unsuccessfully earlier this year for a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of

the mother. Measure was blocked, as I said, by the Democratic majority in the state Senate. But they have actually put money behind talking about this 15-week abortion ban. They believe this is an appealing sort of middle-of-the-road approach. And so rather than just trying not to talk about the issue whatsoever, they're actually leaning into it, which is part of what makes this election so interesting. That and the fact that Virginia is oftentimes, because of these weird off-year elections that we have, is oftentimes kind of a bellwether for what's coming down in terms of the presidential politics and the national politics as well. Yeah, exactly. That's why we need to watch it really closely. I'm really curious,

and I don't know what the hell Glenn is doing, because why would you make the election all about abortion, the single most animating thing for liberals. Yeah. And also we are in Virginia, dude. This is the full of the, like the Karens of Karens in Northern Virginia. These people crawl over broken glass to vote for abortion. It's like, what are you doing? I truly do not understand it. I did send you though, one of these letters that I got in the mail. I've polled some of my friends. They also got it. We're calling it Glenn Bucks, where I'll read you a direct quote. If you've filed for an income tax return in Virginia, here's what you get. You are receiving this rebate because Governor Glenn Youngkin

recently signed a bill passed by the 2023 Virginia Assembly giving taxpayers who filed tax year 2022 returns and have a tax liability a rebate of up to $200 for an individual, up to $400 for a married couple filing jointly. They send that directly to your house with a check for $200 beneath it. So it's obviously a bribe, you know, in order to vote for the Republicans. I'm not, you know, I'm not actually against it. It would be a better thing. From my investigation on where these Glenn bucks came from, it appears that some of it was COVID money that was appropriated to the states and they had extra. So what they decided to do is like, hey, let's just cut a check to everybody who's in the entire state.

So congratulations to everybody who is a Virginia resident. Maybe that will have some effect. But yeah, I think that it was a colossal mistake to bet the House on abortion restrictions, again, in Virginia, in and off your elections. I mean, like, many – I think Matt Iglesias has said this. He's like, many upper middle class Democrats have, like, an elect – like, voting fetish, like, whenever it comes to special elections. They're like, there's nothing they love more than to vote. It's really, like, much more normal people who vote in presidential elections off your already, you really have to be like be highly activated. And then these specials, or not special, these off your, off your ones, like in Virginia, the least amount of people

often vote in those things. So anyway, this will be a bellwether, at least in that regard, how animated people are whenever it comes to voting. There's another piece that's interesting about this, which is they are also trying to reverse the Trump era decline in Republicans voting early and by mail. So they've made a real concerted effort here. This is, again, reading from the APE. They say they're hoping for a boost for a major investment in an initiative aiming to overcome GOP skepticism early in mail voting and get ballots banked before election day. An analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project found that six days out from the election, the share of early votes cast by likely Republican voters, because Virginia doesn't have

registration by party, has increased more than two points from last year, while the GOP share of mail votes is up by almost four percentage points. So it does appear like they were able to, you know, grab back some of the early vote. And this matters a lot just in terms of organizing. You can imagine, like, if you've got your certain universe of voters that you're trying to turn out, if you've got this group that you can check off, like they already went and voted, you don't have to worry about them anymore. Then you're able to focus on bringing out those people that are more difficult and get them to the polls and call them and knock on their door, send them a flyer, whatever your strategy there is. So this was a tremendous advantage for Democrats in 2020, in particular, when Trump was, you know,

all about like, don't vote early, don't vote by mail, it's all rigged, et cetera, et cetera. That may have single-handedly cost him the election. He has since even backtracked, sort of half-heartedly. Yeah, sort of halfheartedly, but realized that this was really a major tactical failure. So Youngkin has tried to reverse this. But yeah, it's going to be, it'll be a very interesting one. And then also maybe Youngkin, and the reason we say that he wants to focus on abortion is because his aligned PAC made a big ad buy on abortion and has been apparently them and these national anti-abortion groups have been pushing candidates to really talk about it and really include it in their messaging. So we know this

has been a big push for him. But then the other question is like, how much does that matter versus the national climate? Yeah, that's a great point. You know, so you've had a few things. I mean, for one thing, as we just covered with the polls, like it's not going well for Joe Biden, the Democrats doesn't look that great. On the other hand, you also just had Republicans with this whole messy situation, the Speaker of the House that also didn't look great in terms of governance. So that's why these things are interesting from a national perspective, because at this point, so much of politics is national versus local. Whatever little strategy Glenn Youngkin and the Republicans and the Democrats have in terms of the state of Virginia may be completely subsumed by just whatever the national mood is.

Yeah, as we've always talked about, Virginia is such a – in many ways gets affected a lot by these national elections because half the people who live in the north work for the federal government. Or they work for the federal government or they work for the federal government and are way more tapped in than the average person. I mean, these people are like constantly reading the news, the most impacted, also love to vote, you know, as I said. So I put that together. I'm looking at this and I'm like, I don't know what the hell you were doing going all in on abortion. I think the Glenn Bucks was a better idea. I mean, even if we think about how did Glenn Youngkin get elected? He convinced these Northern Virginia Karens to vote for him because of the school closures. That was a huge part of it because of the economy and how it was awful. So what do you do? You should do that again. You should keep

talking about the, you know, the economic cycle. Lean into, I cut you guys a $200 check. We're going to unleash, you know, more jobs or whatever in Virginia. Talking about social issues in a state that's like Biden plus eight or something like that just seems like the dumbest possible thing. Not to mention some of the key seats here, both of our, the House of Delegates and the State Senate are in like Loudoun County. They're in like the exurbs, exactly the type of voters that would, you know, maybe swayed by the school closure argument, but maybe swayed in the total opposite direction

by like, hey, let's do more abortion restrictions. What do you think, guys? So probably, in my personal opinion, probably not the smartest strategy from Mr. Youngkin. I just want to throw out there a couple of the other big elections that are happening tomorrow. We're going to cover some more of these tomorrow

with, I believe we have J. Miles Coleman who's coming in to give us a full breakdown. You do have a few governor's races. The most interesting to me are Kentucky, where you've got a Democrat, Andy Beshear, who's actually really quite popular in the state, but it's still Kentucky. So that one, and he's up against a Republican named Daniel Cameron, who's the current AG. So that one will be really interesting. And then it's almost the flip. You have a very unpopular Republican and Ryan Grimms doppelganger, Tate Reeves, down in Mississippi, who was caught up in the whole Brett Favre scandal, you guys will remember, facing a relative of Elvis Presley. Now, I think Reeves is very likely to win. Most of the polling

indicates it is. But there was an internal poll that showed it more or less tied. So that one is kind of interesting. There's an abortion initiative on the ballot in Ohio that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. That one is very interesting. In Ohio, we had some early indications we covered previously that seemed like the pro choice position was sort of overwhelmingly winning there. There's one in Maine that I'm also really interested in where they want to change their utilities to be owned by the public. So some little burgeoning potential socialism there in Maine that has caught my eye as well. So there's a lot. There's other legislatures up on the ballot as well. So there's a lot to dig into. So we'll get into some more of that with Jay Miles tomorrow. Yeah, I'm excited to do that, especially the Kentucky one. I think that guy's going to run for president someday. Bashir?

He probably should. I mean, it's like him and Josh Shapiro. I'm looking at those two guys. I'm like, both of these guys are angling for the presidency. Andy Bashir. I know him a little bit personally because I used to live in Kentucky. Very nice man. Charisma? Not there. He's popular. He's popular from a red state. Yeah, I mean, he's been very smart in terms of how he's conducted himself. And he's really leaned into, and this might surprise people, but now being pro-labor is extremely popular. It's always been popular in Kentucky, actually, which is quite a populist state. Cole, they have the Kentucky truck plant, one of the big Ford truck assembly plants is in Kentucky. They just won some of those new big battery plants. So there's

big economic initiatives that Andy's been taking credit for. But again, it's still Kentucky. And this is a state that has moved, you know, very far to the right. Daniel Cameron, I think, has a real shot at it. Polls are sort of like notoriously really wrong in the state of Kentucky. So even though all the polls have showed Andy Beshear with a significant, at times double digit, lead over Daniel Cameron, you just never know there until election day. And the last thing I'll say on this one, and then we can we can wrap up here. But Kentucky was a real bellwether in terms of the election of Trump. And you had a Democrat just before Trump was elected in 2015. You had a Democrat who, again, was up in the polls consistently, consistently, consistently.

Everybody thought he basically had it in the bag. You might think that's strange, but Kentucky has voted for Democrats at the state level like for a long time. And the Republican, this kind of brash businessman named Matt Bevin, came out of nowhere to win that election. And I'm talking the polls were showing consistent double digit leads for the Democrat. And that really sort of was a canary in the coal mine for Trump. So anyway, none of this is a guarantee of what the future may hold, but it's always better to hear and see what voters are actually feeling and how they're actually voting. I put a lot more stock in that than what the polls are saying, especially at this point. So that's why we're watching it really closely. It'll be fun. I'm excited to see it.

All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We'll have a great show for everybody tomorrow and we will see you all then. 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. The Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.