Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/12/24: Ukraine Helped Topple Assad, Trump Doesn't Trust Bibi, CNN Possible Syria Hoax Video, Dan Osborn On Future In Politics

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Ryan and Saagar discuss Ukraine helped overthrow Assad, Trump doesn't trust Bibi, CNN possible hoax Syria video, Dan Osborn interview on his future.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com,

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Some absolutely stunning news just broken very nonchalantly by David Ignatius over at The Washington Post. Some might call him the CIA whisperer. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So Syrian rebels had help from Ukraine in humiliating Russia. Interesting. These Syrian rebels, otherwise known as Al-Qaeda, by the way, who swept to power in Damascus last weekend, quote, received drones and other support from Ukrainian intelligence operatives who sought to undermine Russia and its Syrian allies. Quote, Ukrainian intelligence sent about 20 experienced drone operators

and 150 first-person view drones to the rebel headquarters in Idlib four or five years ago to help Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, aka Al-Qaeda, the leading rebel group there, knowledgeable sources said. The aid from Kiev played a modest role in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, but it was notable as part of a broader Ukrainian effort to strike covertly at Russian operations in the Middle East, Africa, and inside Russia itself. And then he continues to say, Ukraine's covert assistance program in Syria has been an open secret, Biden officials said, and repeatedly in answer to my questions that they weren't aware of it, though.

That was an open secret that we didn't know about. Ukraine's motivation is obvious. Facing Russian onslaught, Ukrainian intelligence has looked for other fronts where it can bloody Russia's nose and undermine its clients. The Ukrainians have even advertised their intentions. Kiev Post on June 3rd quoted a source from Ukrainian intelligence, said that since the beginning of the year, the rebels supported by Ukrainian operatives have inflicted numerous strikes on Russian military facilities represented in the region, Ryan. Yeah, and the Africa point is key too, because, you know, Russia's pretty, or at least has mercenaries that are active in Africa,

and so Ukraine is messing with them there too. But I think that they caught the car here. I think what Ukraine was hoping to do here is to do what the U.S. loves to do with Russia all over the place, which is to just cause it enough problems to drain it of some of its energy and people. Remember Nord Stream? I do said it wasn't them? I do remember Nord Stream. It turned out to be them. Even David Ignatius says it's them? Interesting. But I don't think they meant to actually overthrow the entire government.

Because now, all the effort that Russia was investing in propping up Assad, they can like, right. Yeah, they're like, okay, we're done. Yeah, cool. Now we got a whole bunch of weapons and energy and time and resources that we can put further. Assad apparently fled there with a lot of money so he can pay off the Russians. That's right.

He's not going to get the key. He's like the Shah of Iran, barely loaded down with gold. He's lucky that plane was able to take off. Yeah, that's right. Before he's able to land in Moscow. I'm sure he'll be fine sitting, you know, here. Moscow's a beautiful city.

You're going to enjoy it, I guess, for your years. But you're exactly right. So now the Russians are like, okay, whatever. You know, our guy's gone. So, okay, we now can focus 100% of our military resources here. So, yeah, not great for Ukraine necessarily. No, not at all. You know, another thing that I just saw is that this actually could increase the, it could increase Russian resolve

in Ukraine because they're like, well, now facing the, facing a quote-unquote humiliation or a setback of our major strategic objectives in the outer sphere of our geopolitical interests, then in our own backyard of this war that we're engaged in, that means we must commit all resources and go all out in this war. So it actually could end up backfiring on them. I mean, I know, I guess even the Ukrainians, nobody in U.S. intelligence anywhere had any idea that the entire war, a 14-year civil war, resulted in 13 days. Come on, nobody. Which is ironic, though. We pay how many billions of dollars a year for these intelligence assessments and others? The CIA? We don't even know our boy in South Korea is about to do martial law. Like, come on. I think I sent a tweet to that. I'm like, you know, we probably spend $20, $40, $50, $80 billion just on covert intelligence.

Did anybody tap the guy's phone and say, hey, there's going to be an attempted coup in South Korea, which is, by the way, our sixth largest trading partner, more than France. You know, we do several trillion dollars a year, or sorry, $100 billion a year in bilateral trade. No, oh, we just had no idea. And by the way, a massive Air Force base there as well under the United States. Same in Syria. I mean, let's all be honest. We've had our fingers on that situation all over the place. You do not see your own takeover. Yeah, we have thousands of troops who are stationed illegally in the country who possibly could be at risk now from this. Well, we've got about 900, I think, plus all the mercenaries. Okay, but that's what I was going to say. 900 officially. Right, and then we've got 40,000.

All these contractors. 40,000. Yeah, all these guys are rolling around the country on the U.S. dime. If they get killed, how about this? If they get killed or wounded, who's coming to save them? I think we all know the answer. And more to your point on the geopolitics involved here, Turkey and Russia have basically been adversaries for hundreds, almost thousands of years. And in this country in particular. And so by taking an L here, like you said, it further incentivizes them to take on NATO in Ukraine. Turkey, a member of NATO. And the a fulcrum of their competition is in Eastern Europe and in the Caucasus region. And so all of it bleeds together

in a way that, yeah, I don't think spells anything remotely good for the Ukrainian cause here. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Just looking through all of this, I just see, you know, for the Ukrainian cause here. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Just looking through all of this, I just see, you know, for the Ukrainians, it's like they're just grasping at straws. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets.

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This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHe Heart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor,

going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, there's been just interesting development just this morning. Donald Trump was officially named Time Magazine's Man of the Year, something that you as a child of the 80s will know, Ryan,

that he takes very seriously. He takes it very, very seriously. Yeah, he's going to frame that sucker. For people my age, I think this is his third time personally here, for people my age, Time Person of the Year will always be the YouTube 2006, the mirror cover. You are the Time Person. Did you frame that?

One of the absolute dumbest. It might be one of the dumbest stunts of all time. For me, time, see time has no cachet. You read about it. It's kind of like Life Magazine. You know it was once important. It means nothing to you. Time for kids is about as big as it gets, which I remember sitting in a doctor's office or something like that. But Trump takes it very seriously. He did sit down with them for a long interview. So I can give an interesting quote here. He was asked about Ukraine and he says, quote, I think the most dangerous thing right now is what's happening where Zelensky has decided with the approval of, I assume the president, to start shooting missiles into Russia. I think that's a major escalation. I think it's a foolish decision, but I would imagine people are waiting until I get in before anything happens. I would imagine. I think of turn. The numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are the numbers that are

staggering, both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. I know they like to say they weren't, but they're fairly equal. The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It's crazy what's taking place. I disagree vehemently with sending missiles, hundreds of missiles into Russia. Why are they doing that? We are escalating the war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now are they doing not only missiles, but they're doing other types of weapons. Interesting. I think it's a very big mistake, very big mistake, but the level, the number of people dying is number one, not sustainable.

And I'm talking on both sides. It's really an advantage to both sides to get this thing done. So interesting rhetoric, at least there from the president-elect. Because we talk about Trump as one of the like most clear examples of a narcissist ever in like a world history. But I mean, his, yet. I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, he's right. Well, yeah. I would say I would put him up there with all other presidents. All other presidents. Yeah. But he gets talked about.

Yes, in his own unique way, I agree. Yeah. Yet, he talks so frequently about the number of killed in this conflict that it just feels like it has to come from somewhere genuine. Yeah, I agree. I don't know where it comes from. But, I mean, good for him because, like, I agree. I don't know where it comes from. But good for him because like, you know. Well, it goes to that famous CNN clip, remember? Where she's like, are you going to abandon Ukraine?

And he said, I want to stop the dying. Yes. And she keeps saying, do you want Ukraine to win? It's amazing. I want them to live. Again, when you read these idiots, they're just like, will you abandon Ukraine? People around the world want to know. Will you abandon Ukraine?

So the question people want to know is, will you abandon Ukraine? Will you commit to protecting Ukrainian sovereignty? I mean, again, what does that mean? I mean, the current government doesn't protect Ukrainian sovereignty, right? The current United States government, basically, since Obama on, is like, yeah, Crimea, it's bad, but what are you going to do about it? Okay, so is that what you're saying? These people have no idea what they're even talking about or the stakes. Another reason I'm annoyed by it is that if you had asked it in a

different way, how will you handle Ukraine in a more neutral way, we might have gotten some more interesting information. How about a real interview? You know what I would dig down on and be like, okay, plus Ukrainian President Zelensky says 73,000 people have been killed in the war. What does that mean to you, Mr. President? Mr. President-elect, who's just received a classified briefing. Maybe you get something out of that, right? That's how you actually get some information

out of your subject. Just reading through this is maddening, but it is clear, at least, you know, right now, he's talking in an interesting way. Also, before we get to your Israel thing, Ryan, he did say something interesting. They said, do you trust Bibi Netanyahu? He says, I don't trust anybody. Yeah, you should. And on the question of Israel being allowed to annex the West Bank, he says, what I'm doing, I want a long-lasting peace. I'm not saying that's a very likely scenario, but I want a long lasting peace, a peace where you don't have October 7th. There are numerous ways you can do it. You can do a two state, but there are numerous ways it can be done.

And I'd like to see who can be happy, but I'd like to see everybody be happy. Everybody go about their lives and people stop dying. That includes on many different fronts. I mean, we have some tremendous world problems that we didn't have when I was president. You know, when I had left, Iran was not very threatening. They had no money, and they weren't giving it to Hamas or Hezbollah. So not a no, not a yes. He says two-state, but you can do it many different ways. So maybe he's like a Peter Beinart, and he wants to do a one-state solution.

I mean, that's the just solution at this point. It's the only one on the table. The one-state Arab, the one Arab state that would happen. I mean, it's in the Middle East. Okay. Well, we all know that's not going to happen, right? Under Donald Trump. It is interesting though, just reading through this, there's some skepticism there of Israel. He says that he wants, that he told Bibi he does want the war to come to an end by the time that he does take the office. And apparently there were some meetings between the Israeli government and Hamas in Doha that just happened yesterday. So that's a segue for you that someone can set up. Right, yeah, no, to that point, there is, I think, genuine hope that there will be some type of a deal.

Hamas is backing off on some of its red lines. Now Hamas is saying that they would allow IDF troops to temporarily remain in Gaza as they work through the prisoner exchange. Previously, Hamas had said the exchange could only happen if the IDF agreed to completely withdraw from Gaza. What gives people the hope is that Trump is making it extremely clear to Israel that he wants this deal done. The reason a deal hasn't gotten done over the last year is quite clear. Israel had, through Netanyahu, made a bet sometime around December, January last year that Trump might win and that he had enough of a chance to win that it was worth completely bucking Biden, ignoring him, taking a few lumps here and there,

a few complaints from Matt Miller every couple of months after the latest atrocity or spread of famine, and then just bank on Trump winning and then reset from there. So that's over. Trump has been very clear he wants a deal. The Israeli public desperately wants the hostages home. And what else is there to accomplish at this point in Gaza, the northern part where Israel is relentlessly assaulting Indonesian hospital and Kamal Adwan hospital, killing doctors, killing nurses, killing patients, killing their families to completely depopulate northern Gaza. It's flat. It's flat. There was a survey that came out that said half of the children in Gaza wish they were dead. And that's on top of the 10,000 plus that are dead from this. What more do you need to do? What more? And if Trump

wants us done, then that puts pressure on Netanyahu. The U.S. has always been the one that can make this happen, period. So we'll see. That's why I think people are hopeful that these moves in Doha might actually amount to something. But to your point, we also have this pretty fascinating story at Dropsite, we can put up on the screen here by Sammy Vanderlip, where he exposed this U.S. nonprofit called Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202. Okay. So this is a C-3. So you can make tax-deductible contributions to the U.S.

And it purchases, quote, helmets, rain gear, barrels, vests, sniper stands, silencers, camouflage, etc. Is this illegal? It is raised. Well, we're going to see because certainly complaints are going to be filed against this. So they raised in 2023 $304,000 and bought equipment and sent it over there. And our correspondents over there obtained footage of this unit killing unarmed Palestinians and acknowledging it. So U.S. taxpayer subsidization. So not only are we buying their weapons, like buying the basic weapons, but if the sniper unit feels like it needs even higher tech to shoot and kill unarmed civilians, then they can get a tax deduction. Well, you have some photos of that. Can we put E3 there on the screen, please?

We're not going to show some of them. They're extremely graphic. But we do have a slideshow that we can put up there. E3, if you can, so Ryan can just tell us what we're watching. Yeah, and it's from such a distance that at least it's not graphic in a Hollywood sense. But the images and the videos that our reporters obtained show the sniper unit ending people's lives. And by a U.S. nonprofit, their life is over the next moment. And it's just horrifying. It's so horrifying you can contemplate just going out

to get a bag of flour or whatever. I have to think it's illegal though because I remember that there was this congressional staffer here in Washington

who in his spare time was like buying military equipment and flying it to Ukraine which is classic, of course. And I think he got stopped. The only reason we know

about this is because he got stopped at the airport trying to transport military equipment and they were like, hey man, you know, this is illegal. Like, you know, you're not allowed to be carrying weapons to a foreign military.

I think you need an export license or something like that. If they can get around it, it would be because it's accessories to weapons. Oh, I see. Like it's a scope. It's night vision goggles. Yeah, but even then, I'm pretty sure. I mean, I know the list. I think the list even includes bulletproof vests, like in terms of how it all works. But you also need a public

interest purpose to be a nonprofit. So I guess they can argue that. Well, the law is crazy, as you know, in terms of what's allowed and what's not in terms of 501c3. But nobody will touch it because of the IRS scandal from back in the day under Obama. Which, I mean, that was a crazy scandal. But, you know, because of that, the leeway on 501c3 has become so broad that people just don't want to touch it. I don't know. It's a crazy story, man. I know, yeah. It's wild. Absolutely. Okay, let's go to the next part.

We had to put this in the show. Extraordinary video now coming out of Syria. CNN's Clarissa Ward purports to be in a former Assad prison. While she's in the prison, they discover a cell, a cell that has not been opened. The rebel, quote unquote, Al-Qaeda person who is her guard, shoots the door open, opens it, and they discover, allegedly, a prisoner who's been in there for four or five days without water, without food, who clings to her, sees the light, and it's supposed to be a very dramatic scene.

There's a lot of questions about this, but we're going to show it to you first. No, it's very impactful. If it's true, it's very impactful. But we'll talk about the questions. We're going to show it to you first, and we'll talk about it afterwards. I can't tell, though. It might just be a blanket. But it's the only cell that's locked

Is he gonna shoot it? The guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door We go in to get a closer look it's still not clear if there is something under the blanket. Oh, it moved. Is there someone there? Is someone there? Or is it just a blanket? I don't know. Hello? Okay, let's just, let's just move. Yeah, let's move. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

Muffy, Muffy. It's okay. It's okay. Okay, it's water, it's water. Okay. Okay. After three months in a windowless cell, he can finally see the sky. All right. I mean, so again, if it's real, very impactful.

But there's a number of questions. So, Mediites, Charlie Nash has a lot of them and he raises a few. Number one, in this new video, Ward are led by quote, armed guard, a member of the new Islamist regime. They take CNN on a tour through the complex. They quote, soon stumble upon a locked cell in a prison which has been completely emptied and the prisoners are all freed. The guard makes us turn off the camera while he shoots the lock off the door.

Viewers do not get to see the guard opening the door. After a fade to black, we see Ward and the camera crew enter the cell. From what we can see, the cell is clean. There is no waste, only a blanket, which Ward repeatedly calls out to see if anyone's underneath. Receiving no response, the guard lifts the blanket, revealing a man who gets up and raises his hands in the air. He looks healthy. His clothes are clean. His hair and nails are trimmed. He says he's been in the cell for three or four months without food or water for four days. Presumably, the man did not hear the guards shooting the lock off of his door or the camera crew crawling out to him a few feet away. But he appears to be in fine enough condition.

Again, look, we're speculating on this. I don't know. But, I mean, a lot of this rings true. So I'll come to you in a second, Ryan. They escort the man outside. Instead of taking him straight to the hospital, the doctor, the logical thing to do with somebody who's been in a windowless cell for three months without food or water for four days, they sit him in a chair and they interview him. Asked by Anderson Cooper what is known about this man, Ward admits, well, we don't know because as you

can see from the report, he's in a deep state of shock. She says she knows nothing about the man or if any of his statements are even true. Everything in the report is taken at face value from the guard opening the door that, quote, they were not allowed to film to the prisoner's claim. So that's what I would be a little bit skeptical of. It just seems too good to be true. Call me cynical or whatever. I look at that immediately. I was like, I don't know about this man. It's just weird. It's weird. The videos of people being spontaneously freed where you have dozens of people pouring. That's okay, I believe that. And you can see some of that.

That's real. It seems real. Again, look, who knows about what we're allowed to see or not. I mean, we definitely know that thousands of people were held in Assad's dungeons. That's right. And now those dungeons are open. That's been assessed for a long time.

Yeah, you're right. So that's absolutely real. This is like four days without water. That's a long time. Four days without food is one thing. Isn't there a three rule? This is like four days without water. That's a long time. Four days without food is one thing. Isn't there a three rule? It's like three days without water, three weeks without food. Was it three seconds without oxygen or something?

I forget what the number is, but yeah. I can hold my breath more than three seconds, though. What is it, 30 seconds? Three minutes? Maybe three minutes. Three minutes, yeah. But so four days without water, three or four days without water, your face would look different. Your face would be parched. Yeah, oh, yeah. But, so, four days without water, three or four days without water, would, your face would look different.

Your face would be parched. Yeah, oh yeah, you'd be sunken. You'd just look different. Your tongue would be completely swollen. Like they said, there's no wasteland, there's no bathroom, you know. Right, well, yeah. Where's the bucket?

What was happening? Yeah, exactly. Why did you not hear the gun? Yeah, well, he didn't hear the gun. Did he not notice that the entire prison was emptied out? Because there's all, there's cells everywhere around him. In the previous videos, people would mean so. The moment that lock pops off, boom, they're all rushing out, right?

And people are screaming, cheering, and they're so happy to be freed, et cetera. Yeah, this one just doesn't seem right to me. I could be wrong, totally. Maybe somebody should find this guy and ask him and get his whole backstory. They say he's been three months. They say he's from the city of Holmes. Let's go to Holmes. Let's go somebody go find this guy and ask him, get his whole backstory. They say he's been three months. He stays from the city of Holmes. Let's go to Holmes. Somebody go find this guy. And just be like, who are you? You know, did you actually get in prison? Was this all an act?

Or maybe you were a legitimate prisoner and they told you to act this way. You know, listen, they want the best media in the world. Right now, there's a fierce debate here in Washington. Remember, their leader, Al-Jalani, is a wanted $10 million bounty terrorist by the United States State Department. The Brits are currently wondering whether they should take him off of their list so that they can diplomatically recognize his government. And again- Which frankly they should. I mean- I mean, yeah. I don't have a problem. Look, I'm a person who said, I'm not pro-Taliban,

but they won the civil war. It's like, okay, you know, what are you going to do? Well, I think what troubles me in this case is that this is a group which explicitly at one point was understood to be an al-Qaeda-backed regime. But then we decided that we hate Assad more than we hate them. And so we're all just okay with them taking power. And we're not really asking a lot of questions about what the future of this country is going to look like and the potential fallout their own religious minorities. There's just so much triumphalism. People hate Assad so much that they're not willing to wonder, like maybe it's way worse what comes next. And all of the reports are about Jolani and about HTS is that they're branding champions. They changed their name. They

distanced themselves allegedly from Al-Qaeda. They've been reading books and studying the West and how to have good relations with them. So it seemed to me to fit with something like this. Just me personally. That's what I thought. Yeah. I don't think that she was in on it. No, I agree. I don't think she was in on it.

Oh, can you tell the context, though, about Clarissa Ward? Oh, yeah. So the thing that was getting circulated, I think Glenn Greenwald had flagged it, at some point earlier in the war, during, so it would have been 2016 or 2015, she did an interview with Mike Morrell and said that she, well, I don't know when the interview was, but she said in that interview that she had sent a very harsh note to Ben Rhodes, who was Obama's national security advisor. And the note said something like, you know, I hope that you are sleeping well tonight while the freedom, something like the freedom fighters of Syria are, you know, being crushed by Assad. And she said, I cop to crossing the line on this story, on Syria, where I have gone from a journalist

to an activist. This is what she said to Michael Morales, CIA guy. I interviewed him. So if somebody was going to be kind of blinkered into this, It would have to be somebody who feels a deep ideological commitment to supporting this outcome. You could understand it from our perspective. I'm not justifying it. I'm saying you could understand it. You've been covering this probably for a decade. You've seen a lot of people get killed.

An Assad is a murderous, brutal, fanatical dictator. Yeah, you've seen people beheaded, whatever. Her driver was killed. That's right. Her driver was killed. So a lot of these guys, you know, Richard Engle and a few others, they all have personal experience in this. Although the Engle thing, you know what I'm talking about? What was that?

When he was allegedly kidnapped. Oh. It's a lot. That's a weird story, too. I've got to be honest. If you want to go. There was one with cholesterol in Sudan also. Oh, really?

Yeah. Is there questions? About a weird detention or something. Anyways. I mean, she's also very physically courageous. No, yeah. No one is putting her down all of her work. She puts herself at risk all the time.

She did a good job in Afghanistan, I thought. Yeah, that was really impressive coverage. The fall of Kabul, et cetera. While the Taliban is streaming in, she stood her ground. She did really good interviews. But nobody's infallible, and there's some potential questions here at CNN.

To be honest, if this turned out to be staged, this would be like a Brian Williams-style scandal. That's why I would like someone to go interview this guy. Clarissa should break it. Huh? Yeah, sure. You're right. Go break that news. Yeah, the only way to redeem yourself is to then figure out who he is and to answer the questions,

just to maintain your own story. Because some people were speculating, oh, maybe it was a guard who just wanted to stay there. But then it's like, well, how did he lock himself in? Right, yeah, that's right. Anyway, weird stuff, weird stuff. All right, we've got independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. Let's get to it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what

it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States.

Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes

on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming out of the November election, the Associated Press did an analysis, we can put up on the screen here,

comparing Senate Democratic candidates to Kamala Harris. And they found that one particular candidate, who was not in fact a Senate Democratic candidate, outperformed all other Democrats across the country by more than any other. And his name was Dan Osborne, who was running as an independent in Nebraska. It turned out not to be enough to overcome the partisan lean of Nebraska, but he came extremely close to being the next senator from that state. And we're joined now

by Dan Osborne, the independent Senate candidate. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you, sir. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me on. You're welcome. All right, so down the stretch, it seemed like the partisan nature of our politics really started to lock itself into the race. And I actually wanted to ask you about something that I saw towards the very end. You had never said who you were going to caucus with or whether you were going to caucus with either party. You were going to be an independent and you were going to see what was best

for Nebraska. Down the stretch, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, started saying publicly, go out and vote for Dan Osborne to help Democrats here in Washington. Meanwhile, as far as I could tell, Senate Democrats actually did nothing in the state of Nebraska to help you win. When he started saying that, did that get spread around Nebraska? And what was your reaction when you started seeing that from kind of coastal Democrats? Well, you know, I don't believe that part of it got spread around. You know, that was Deb Fischer's negative campaign right out of the gate. We turned in 12,000 signatures from around the state to get on the ballot.

We needed four. And then the first independent poll came out that had Fischer at 39 and me at 38. And so she went negative right out of the gate. You know, that's what she had. She was calling me a radical leftist and, uh, saying, spreading all these lies about immigration about me. And I suppose at the end of the day, unfortunately, the lies won. Uh, but you know, we, we, we remained, uh, positive and just trying to tell the people in Nebraska what, what I wanted to do for them. Because I, I heard, you know, I did 200 public events around the state and

I listened to Nebraskans every single day and what it is they want. And what it is they want was, you know, first of all, they want to know that if you work hard in this country, that you can get ahead, that your paycheck matters, that you're going to be able to have, you know, houses, some property, cars, put money aside for Christmas and college. And then mostly they want to be left alone. People don't want handouts for the most part. They understand some folks need the handouts, of course. But that was it. So I kind of coined the term recently paycheck populism because I was doing an interview similar to this. And they said, well, you ran off an economic populism message. And I was like, oh, I don't really know what that

means because the economy is so broad and deep. But what people want to know is that their paycheck matters if you work hard. Yeah. Dan, I'm curious for your reaction. You started a hybrid pack to talk about this, but there's been a lot of discourse here in Washington about what should the Democratic Party do to win back Trump voters? So you at least have some credibility. You won 46.5% of the vote in the deep red state of Nebraska. So what's your advice to the Democratic Party or anybody else who wants to challenge the current establishment GOP for how they can win a similar amount of votes that you? Yeah, I think, you know, you just you just got to be real. I think candidate recruitment is so important. And that's what I'm doing right now with this Working Class Heroes pack. It's designed to emulate what we did here in Nebraska. We're going to go out. We've targeted multiple races,

top of the ticket races all the way down ballot on the overperformance that we had. If we were to, you know, the targets designed, if Osborne were to run in those areas, we would have won. So we're certainly going to target more races. And it's all about candidate recruitment. We're hiring people. We're starting the process on Monday, and we're going to go into different districts around the country and find working class people that, you know, and pluck them out. Because for me, that's the most important part. Less than 2% of our elected officials in both the House and Senate come from the working class. So it's a complete misrepresentation.

You know, it's the millionaires that work for billionaires, and we need a seat at the table. So that's what this is designed to do. Yeah, there's an interesting view here in Washington, I think, about that type of candidate recruitment, where people say, well, okay, yeah, Dan Osborne did really well, but you got to think about it. You know, he's a union organizer. He was a union leader in the state that led this successful strike. He's a veteran. He's well-spoken. He comes across well. And, you know, we just can't find many people like that. But that's because, from my perspective, they're sitting here in Washington, D.C., or the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and they're looking around at their neighbors. And yes, if that's your pool of candidates, then yeah, you're not going to find a lot of Dan Osbournes.

But if you go outside of Washington, then you just might. But I'm curious what the challenge has been for you as you've started to kind of look for other people around the country who can fit the mold, so to speak, break the DC mold and fit a new mold. Are there the people out there to run the kind of campaigns that you're talking about? Yeah. And yeah, the inherent challenge is it's probably easier to find a self-funder, right, that can step away from their role at their fancy law firm or wherever they're coming from. No offense against lawyers, but, you know, we need those folks as well. But it's, it's the, the challenge is going to be having somebody be able to do what I did is, is step aside from your role, hopefully get a leave of absence from your job and take the plunge and take that, take that dive. So what it's going to, what we're going to produce is we're

going to produce people that, that are passionate about what they're going to produce is we're going to produce people that are passionate about what they're doing for all the right reasons because they love this country just like I do. They love their state and they want to make a difference. But what the PAC, again, is designed to do is hopefully take some of the ease off of that decision. For me, it was extremely difficult.

We had no framework to start. It was just an idea, and we were building the plane as we were learning how to fly it. So, you know, and we had a very difficult time fundraising in the beginning, and right now we've raised over six figures. We're confident that we're going to be able to raise enough money to support candidates financially as they move forward and give them a kind of a boost when right out of the gate that we didn't have. Yeah. And for people who don't know what you're talking about with this, it's easier to go kind of recruit a lawyer. The DCCC, which recruits House candidates, for instance, has a thing, and this is not picking on the DCCC, this is the Republicans

and Democrats, they have a thing that they kind of call the phone test, which is when a candidate is thinking about running and meeting with party operatives here in Washington, D.C., they'll say, take out your phone and scroll through this and tell us how you can find $100,000 in the next 10 minutes. And so you're supposed to go through your contact list. You're like, oh, Steve, he's good for five grand. Kevin, he can do five. Diane, he can do 10. Oh, Jim, I bet he'd do half a billion to a super PAC.

And then DCCC is like, okay, you're our man because you can do our job for us. You can go out and raise the money. Somebody who can't do that, which is 99% of people, has the challenge that you had at the beginning. So how did you overcome that? How do you go from, all right, I'm going to run for Senate statewide. I don't have a lot of rich friends, but I'm going to be taken seriously because that happened. Like, so how did you, how do you, how do you break through that? Yeah, that's, that's funny. I did the exact same thing. I went through my phone and my contacts and it's, it's full of other mechanics and, you know, working class people.

So I was able to get 25, 50 bucks here. And, you know, we had a lot of early angel investors that just believed that, you know, similar to myself, that just believed that this could turn into something. So it was a lot of local people that threw in $1,000 here and $1,000 there. And it really wasn't until we found a great digital firm, you know, that small dollars started to pour in. And that remained the basis of our campaign. You know, we raised close to $14 million, and our average donation was, I think, like $40 at the end of everything. So the small dollars are extremely important in just being able to get that message out, and that's how we were able to do it. Well, Dan, what are your plans for what's next? Are you going to run for office again?

I would say there's a 99% chance that I'm going to find something to run for again. We're keeping all the options open. You know, Pete Ricketts seats up here in Nebraska. There's a couple other ones we're eyeballing. But yeah, I think, you know, we got a lot of momentum. We spent a tremendous amount of work getting name recognition and just getting our message out there, our core message that, you know, we didn't take any corporate dollars. We don't want to be a part of the problem. We want to be a part of the solution and really just represent people, you know, the way the framers of the Constitution intended it to be a government buy-in for the people.

So that was our intention. We fell a little bit short, but I think in 2026, we're going to turn that around. All right. Well, we look forward to seeing it. We hope to see you again on the show should that time come again. All right.

So thank you very much, sir. We appreciate you. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Absolutely. All right. That was Dan Osborne. His new fund is Working Class Heroes Fund, and you can find it at workingclassheroes.fund.

Even if you just go on there and put your email in there, then you'll get updates when he's got somebody cool. So you don't want to give him money now because you don't know who he's going to recruit? Fine. Put your email in there. And then he'll tell you when he's got somebody cool. He's a very fascinating figure to me. Imagine if a guy like him won governor or senate from the state of New Jersey. That would scramble everything.

Instantly a presidential candidate. In my opinion, he would actually have a better shot going a good governor because this is interesting that the voters seem to actually distinguish. Yes. So like, for example, in Maryland. This is a key point. Yeah, this just happened in Maryland. Larry Hogan, he was the governor of Maryland. He was a Republican. He was pretty popular.

But he just got his ass kicked in Senate. Although, if you notice on that chart that we just showed, the Maryland Senate candidate was the greatest underperformer. Yes, that's right. So I'm not saying he didn't do well, but he got lost. And the reason why is, even people who liked him in

Maryland were like, yeah, I like you Hogan, but you would be a vote for Mitch McConnell, and I don't like that. The ads Democrats ran against him were all people saying, I like him. There you go. But he's going to vote for Mr. McConnell.

So you have a better chance of not running nationally. That's why you have these guys. Who's that guy who's the Republican in Vermont? What's his name? Welch? No. He was the governor while I was there. Yeah, he was the governor of Vermont.

People loved him there. People loved him. And this is Vermont. These are like blue-haired liberals in Burlington. They still elected him because he's like a unique guy. He was a working class dude. Who was the Massachusetts governor? He was like a motorcycle mechanic or something.

Who am I thinking of? The Republican who governed Massachusetts. Charlie Baker? Is that his name? Yeah. Okay. Charlie Baker. Although they elected Scott Brown that one time.

Yeah, they elected Scott Brown. I mean, it was a crazy circumstance. But my point is that I think you have a better shot at being governor. And then actually, like you said. Louisiana had a Democrat. Yeah, Louisiana. John Bel Edwards, I think that was his name. Kansas better shot at being governor. And then actually, like you said. Louisiana has had a Democrat. Yeah, Louisiana. John Bel Edwards, I think that was his name. Kansas elects Democrats as governor.

Kansas elects governor. So statewide, you have a better chance of running for a non-national seat. And voters are much more willing to give you a little bit of leeway. So if I were him, that's what I would do. Democrats in Maryland are like, we want to be Democratic nationally. But this guy says we're going to have low taxes in Maryland. Yeah, exactly. All right, I'll vote for Hogan.

Okay, well, you know. And now they have Wes Moore, who's going to bring alcohol to everybody in the state of Maryland. In the grocery stores. That's exactly what Maryland needed. Anyone who's ever encountered a Maryland driver says, you know what, they need more access to alcohol. That's what they need in that state.

Okay, all right, good luck. Good luck to all of you. We had a great show for everybody today. Thank you all. Ryan, it's always great to booze. That's what they need in that state. Okay. All right. Good luck. Good luck to all of you. We had a great show for everybody today. Thank you all. Ryan, it's always great to see you. Great to see you too. And if anything breaks over the weekend, we'll be with you. Otherwise, see you on Monday.

Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes

and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.