Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/13/23: Biden Tells Bibi He Must Change, IDF Runs Psyop On Israelis, Zelensky Begs For Aid In DC, Elon Goes To War With Unions, UAE Climate Conference Ignores Fossil Fuels, And Congress Battles Over Surveillance Legislation

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Biden telling Bibi he must change or lose international support, IDF runs psyop on Israelis, Zelensky visits DC to sway Congress on aid, Elon Musk goes to war with Swedish unions, UAE climate conference ignores fossil fuels, and Congress battles over surveillance legislation.   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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All right. Good morning and welcome back to CounterPoints. I'm glad to be back here in the studio. Emily, how you doing? I'm good. We came here this morning and Sager had a Panera Lemonade tap installed, which we thought was weird. He was still awake. He had just stayed here all night long. But there was no coffee. It was just lemonade.

Yeah, because why? Why bother? Yeah. We don't need it anymore. It's obsolete. It was just lemonade. Yeah, because why? Why bother? Yeah. We don't need it anymore. It's obsolete. Quick plug. If you go to breakingpoints.com now, the note will be in the description or the link will be in the show notes. 25% off, as we've been saying.

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experience. You saw it in the wild. I saw it in the wild. Kristen and I got a picture with the guy. It was pretty great. It's fantastic. So yeah, if you don't have your sweater yet, go get that. Go get your annual subscription. And remember, if you subscribe, you get counterpoints, the full show without any breaks. Right. And you get it early. So that's an awesome thing. We release a few clips on YouTube. But if you're not listening on audio, you can see the full video of the show early if you're a subscriber. And last week I was in California, so people got to see the window behind me being completely dark in the beginning of the show, and then by the end of it, totally bright. That's how long this goes.

It reflected how you felt throughout the show. That's right. I was feeling good. It started really dark and got really light. Yes. All right, well, we have a huge news day because obviously we're going to start with updates from the Middle East. President Zelensky was here in Washington, D.C. yesterday. He was meeting with people at the Capitol. He was meeting with President Biden. So

there are all kinds of updates because right now, House Republicans, House Democrats are figuring out and on the Senate side, how much money and in what sort of format that money should go towards Ukraine and go towards Israel as well. Tesla is in a fascinating union battle actually with Sweden that is starting to kick off. So we're going to go through some updates on that. We're going to talk about what just the agreement that was reached just last night at the COP conference in Dubai. We did find out what COP stands for. Yes, stick around and we will tell you what COP stands for. Yeah, we're going to leave you in suspense because actually we were surprised. We'll probably forget by the time we do that segment, but they did, they reached a deal.

Not a great one, but it's a deal. And we'll talk about that. And really important updates on the battle over Section 702. You see FISA there on your screen. That's a block where we're going to talk about this real fight that's happening right now between the intelligence community, kind of hawkish allies in the Senate and in the House here in Congress. I actually don't know what Biden would do. He'd probably want to keep 702, but we're going to- For sure. And it's the most effective coalition ever, I think, put together between the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus. And it'll be a real test of their strength this week, whether they can deal a blow to mass surveillance. We'll talk about that. I hope so. And you know what? That's a good

tease for next week. We have the new chairman of the Freedom Caucus, Bob Good, coming on. We expect to talk to him about Section 702 as well. Let's start with Israel, Brian, because every day, just incredible new updates and incredible, not in a good sense, incredible in the sense that, you know, we have video we're actually going to play that looks like straight out of Call of Duty. Yeah. And so the news is kind of running on a couple of tracks here in Washington. They're talking about, you know, the day after the war in Gaza, people are just hoping that they can make it one more day as kind of disease and starvation set in

and as the fighting pushes two million people into tighter and tighter confines. And so Joe Biden really kind of kicked off this cycle with some back and forth with Netanyahu that we're gonna get into. Let's play a little bit of the Biden comments that really made news and then we'll kind of decipher these. Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jew in the world that was safe.

And I was a 32-year-old senator, and I wrote on the top of it, Bibi, I love you, but I don't agree with the damn thing you had to say. It's about the same today. The first is Joe Biden's kind of very idealistic 50-year-old kind of version of Zionism, where he says at this Hanukkah celebration, if it wasn't for Israel, there wouldn't be a Jew anywhere in the world that was safe. You had a lot of Jewish people around the world, particularly here in the United States, outrageously offended by that. It's an old saying from many decades ago, kind of lost its valence. And it also feels strange

coming from the president of the United States, whose job is to protect everybody who's in the United States. Feels like a just throwing up of the hands. But it goes back to a kind of split in the kind of global Jewish community after the Holocaust, where you had some portion of survivors who said, you know, what we need is to double down on Zionism. We need a safe haven in Israel. We need to declare this a state. We need to do everything we can to protect and expand it and allow immigration from anywhere in the world. That's the only way we're going to be protected. Another faction said, no, we need to lean into global justice. And that's why one reason you see kind of so many Jewish activists in the civil rights movement here in the United

States, for instance, but around the world saying the only path forward is through this. And by creating justice around the world for everybody, that will also free and liberate us and bring justice to the Jewish community as well. And so Biden is really leaning in on the former one and saying that, no, that's impossible. The only path forward is Israel. Curious for your take on that, but to decipher his second point there, that's a story he's told multiple times where Bibi Netanyahu, current prime minister, was in the Foreign Service in the Israeli embassy in the 1970s when he met Joe Biden for the first time. It's wild. 50 years ago. Yeah. Biden signed an 8x11 photo and he wrote on it, Bibi, I love you,

but I don't agree with a damn thing you say. And then he added, he's told that story a couple times in the past. What's new is he added this time, that's still the same today. And he added it again in a fundraiser later. So it is direct criticism. But we're going to talk about whether that actually means anything. Anything the president says means something because it symbolizes where the United States is sitting. What the president does obviously matters more. Any reaction to either of

those? Well, yeah, I mean, exactly what you've been saying is that you've highlighted some reporting that Biden has been intentional about saying what he, his public posture is part of his strategy with Netanyahu. That when you hear what he's saying publicly, it's part of his private negotiations with Netanyahu. So now we know that Biden is telegraphing different things when, and that's obviously not abnormal, but what I think is abnormal, especially in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, is the level of discomfort that the Biden administration has with the Netanyahu administration at this point. And I know we're going to talk about that more, but that's part of what's incredible about the daily updates coming out of this conflict is that we have so

much invested, like literally invested, financially invested in terms of resources invested. And this in some ways parallels Ukraine, depending on, you know, if you're a Republican or Democrat at this point or what kind of Republican or Democrat you are at this point. But to be on different pages and to be on such different pages and to have that increasingly become a public dispute between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu administration is terrifying. Yeah, and so he zeroed in on that again at a fundraiser, if we can put up a two here to read this quote, he said, I think he, and that's Netanyahu, has to change. And with this government, this government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move. And he went on to say, Ben-Gavir is basically a nut. He's never, he's never, he's like, I've known every prime minister since Golda Meir. Yeah, true, weird that he has. And he's saying that this is the most right-wing government

ever. And he adds, you know, they don't want anything to do with Palestinians. They don't want a two-state solution. But then, and here's the key point, and this is later on, this is right after his remarks. He says, you cannot say there's no Palestinian state at all in the future. And that's going to be the hard part. He's telling the Israeli government, you cannot say there's no Palestinian state at all in the future. Then he says, but in the meantime, we're not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing. So if you're Israel and you're getting these two messages from President Biden,

one, you cannot keep saying that you're never going to allow a Palestinian state. Also, two, in the meantime, we're going to do everything you ask us to. How are you going to receive that? And this is exactly why I think it's terrifying, because again, you have a situation where we have absolutely no exit strategy, because an exit strategy, because an exit strategy that protects people in Israel and is humane for people in Gaza is not anywhere near a consensus point between the Israeli government. And see, Biden, to your point, Ryan, gives Netanyahu himself a little wiggle room by saying it's the government that Netanyahu is dealing with that's pinning Netanyahu in. So I think Biden is being very intentional to the extent that he's capable of intentionality in foreign relations on his own at this point.

But I think that's a clearly a strategic move to say, listen, I know those extremists in your government, that's your problem. I understand. I empathize with you and trying to sort of go mano a mano with Netanyahu and say, I know you're coming from, and they're making it very difficult for you. Let's be reasonable. Let's be the reasonable ones here. But when you don't have any consensus on that next day plan, and you just say, by the way, we don't even have consensus on the plan right now, which is to quote, eradicate Hamas. That is not happening. And if you quote quote eradicate Hamas to some degree that, you know, Biden says we want to draw down this invasion into Gaza by about the first of the year.

Okay. So if that's your strategy, what does that mean? What does that look like? And did you just actually create a vacuum, a power vacuum that is not going to be, the Palestinian Authority is not going to step into that power vacuum. And they don't even agree on what to do with the Palestinian Authority. Right. And that, so Netanyahu responded with that exact point. And Colvin, if we can skip A3 for now and jump to A4, this is a Wall Street Journal write-up of Netanyahu's public response to Biden. He put out a video in Hebrew saying, basically, we are not going to allow the Palestinian authority to come into Gaza. And once we've gotten rid of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority teaches hate, pays suicide bombers if they blow themselves up.

And we're not going to go back to the mistakes of Oslo, he says. The irony, of course, is that the Oslo process is what cemented the de facto annexation and creeping rule of the Israeli government over the disputed territories, the occupied territories, because the PLO in Oslo recognized the state of Israel, but did not get any recognition for a state in return. What they got instead was kind of just to be recognized as the negotiating partner with Israel. But throughout the entire process, Israeli prime ministers are very clear that they were not endorsing even the idea of a Palestinian state. So it's interesting that even Oslo, which was so tilted toward Israel, which left us in this current situation with 750,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and very little hope of ever getting to a Palestinian state, absent some cataclysmic change.

Even that is seen by Netanyahu as kind of too much, because it kind of just involved negotiations with Palestinians. So he's saying, no, we're not even going to allow even the Palestinian Authority, which is basically just a client of Israel, to rule Gaza. And that comes at the same time that his communications minister, if we can put up this next one, I think this is A5, and get your reaction to this. So this is Netanyahu's communications minister. He says, we respect it. And this is the English translation, butahu's communication ministers. He says, we respect it. And this is the English translation, but it's pretty close. We respect and cherish the president of the United States,

Joe Biden, who went out of his way during the most difficult period of the state of Israel. This is true friendship. But we live here. This is our country, the historical estate of our ancestors. There will be no Palestinian state here. We will never allow another state to be established between the Jordan and the sea. We will never go back to Oslo, he said, echoing Netanyahu there. And in the words of President Biden, the security of the Jewish people is at stake here. Definitely, yes. A Palestinian state would endanger him. Thank you, Mr. President. So just being as clear as they ever possibly could that they have no intention of ever allowing a Palestinian state, yet claiming sovereignty, as the Likud platform does, over everything from the river to the sea, which is then,

those are the claimed borders, basically. If they claim they have sovereignty over everything in the River Sea, that is de facto apartheid, saying that the people inside this region will never have statehood, never have sovereignty, won't have the same rights as the Israeli citizens of the state. Well, I think it's really surreal to see that division in particular bubbling to the surface. And I'm going to read another quote from Biden here. He said, Israel's security can rest in the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union. It has Europe. It has most of the world supporting it. But they're starting to lose that support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place. That's from the president

of the United States. So what'd you make of that? I mean, it's obvious to me that if you look at, and we can talk about the UN resolution in a moment where they got lost overwhelmingly. But yeah, what did you make of that saying that Biden actually warning Israel, like, we've got you, but look out? I think it's, again, the word that I land on here is surreal to hear him saying that, and then to see Netanyahu's communications director tweeting that they're, and Netanyahu himself has said, no more two-state solution. And it's kind of interesting to think back on Oslo because

this is now so far in the rearview mirror that, you know, whatever you think of the decisions that led us to October 7th, we're in a situation now where there's almost a realism to the Netanyahu outlook here that's like, well, what is a peaceful coexistence? There is no legitimate path to peace anymore. This is, you know, after, in this, you can talk about the United States policies in the Middle East as well that have, to some degree, like really stoked the flames and really stoked the flames of extremism in the Middle East in a way that talking about power vacuums, how long has it been since the Arab Spring now? I mean, we've seen how

this has turned out and we now know what if you want to have the state of Israel from the river to the sea, the degree of, I think, violence and the degree of all of that. And that's exactly what they're saying, by the way, that there is no two-state solution anymore. There's no peaceful coexistence anymore. And I think that's interesting to kind of look back on Oslo and say, we're in a very, very different place. That's what this underscores. And the Israeli line for decades has been, there is no partner for peace. And in order to make sure that that was true, what the Israelis have done over the decades is they have assassinated so many of the Palestinian leaders who were more moderate and were trying to reach a peace deal. In the interest of elevating Hamas, you mean.

Right. And the function was to elevate Hamas. Even within Hamas, there was a very charismatic kind of senior official within Hamas, I forget his name, who was stridently opposed kind of to suicide bombings and to attacking civilians. There was a huge faction within kind of the Palestinian liberation movement generally, Fatah, Hamas, others, who said that it's counterproductive. It's, you know, as Taleran said, it's worse than a crime. It's a mistake that all of the goodwill that the Palestinians had built with the first mostly nonviolent for a long time intifada was evaporated when they started killing civilians. So stop

killing civilians. Israel killed that guy and others who were making that same argument. And then they were able to accurately say, well, look who's left. No partner for peace anymore. And so therefore, we can just continue on without any peace deal. It's starting to roll throughout the Middle East. Colvin, we can go back to that one that we skipped on A3, which is the Houthis. Yemen Houthis, they hit a Nigerian tanker. They've now said any tankers that are going near Yemeni waters, which are some of the most important in the world, that are bound for coming from Israel are now clean, fair military targets. They put out that kind of dramatic footage with a helicopter landing and seizing a ship a week or two ago. The U.S., now the Houthis are about to reach a peace deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to end this years-long war. The U.S., before this crisis in Gaza broke out, had been doing everything it could to try to blow up this peace deal because the UAE and

Saudi had lost so badly that the Houthis are going to come out of these peace negotiations in a good place. And so the U.S. has been throwing all of these monkey wrenches into trying to make it so that they can't reach a deal. Now they're saying if they keep attacking tankers, that they're going to list them as kind of state sponsors of terror. And then the number one thing that the Houthis want, which is to be able to pay their public servants. That's the big fight because Saudi Arabia has managed to seize basically all of the revenue and all of Yemen's money. And so all of these teachers, government workers, and others are just working without pay for years now. And so the key thing is they want that money,

like pay our workers and we'll reach a peace deal. And the U.S. is saying, well, we're going to designate you state sponsors of terror, which means then you can't get that money because then that has all kinds of banking implications, which then the question is, well, then what? Then the war starts up again, a war that they were already losing. I mean, yes. Do you have any confidence that any of the people negotiating this are doing any of this in the interest of peace, in the interest of safety? And this is another thing that the realism, I think, which I'm sympathetic to, at times gets complicated by not knowing. Like there's so many hypotheticals involved. Like we're going to take this step at point A, and it's likely to lead to point B, but we don't know that it's going to lead to point B.

And that takes us back to what we were just talking about with Israel, is that there's this step one, step two process. And the US and Israel openly do not agree on what step two of this extremely expensive, costly, and I'm talking in terms of human life, there's also obviously taxpayer money involved, but primarily human life, this costly conflict. We don't even agree. We are embroiled in this and we don't even agree on step two, like the end game, but we don't actually agree on step one either. We don't agree on what happens when Joe Biden says January 1st has come around, the Biden administration says January 1st has come around, quote, indiscriminate bombing. That's Biden conceding, by the way, that he is in his country is supporting indiscriminate

bombing, is funding indiscriminate bombing. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the interest of the United States obviously should be peace. The security of people in Israel, the safety of people in Israel. And that's a thing that I also find terrifying is that does anyone believe that the steps we're taking right now, when you have the president of the United States condemning, quote, indiscriminate bombing, supporting the, quote, indiscriminate bombing, supporting the, quote, indiscriminate bombing, but also in totally, like, it is not a fine line between a two-state solution and a no two-state solution.

Like, that's not a minor disagreement. That is the single biggest disagreement you can have. We think there should be a Palestinian state. We don't. It's the single biggest disagreement that you could possibly have on this question. And the two countries that are most responsible for perpetuating this war, for prosecuting this war, not, you know, I'm not saying the U.S. and Israel started the war, but the two countries that are right now funding and fighting the war don't agree on what the war is being fought for. Right. And so that's

the geopolitics of the situation. On the ground in Gaza, things are deteriorating. Yesterday, the New York Times, we can put up this next one, published a remarkable editorial from basically the leaders of a coalition of human rights and basically relief organizations. These are people whose job it is to go to war zones, if there's an earthquake, if there's a civil war, if there's a tsunami. These are the people whose organizations go there to try to clean up the mess that was left either by man or by nature. And they're saying we have never seen anything like what we're witnessing now. One of the poignant things that I thought that I pulled from this was the way that their staff are telling them that they can't really leave their house. Like so that they're nervous because if they leave their house,

they're going to get killed. And then they're also nervous that if they leave their house, their family might get killed without them. So they're making these decisions. Do we all stay in the same room so that if and when we're killed, we all die together? We don't have to suffer the sorrow of going on with nobody else? Or do we separate so that somebody can survive and that somebody can carry on kind of the legacy of this family? Meanwhile, these are the people whose job it is to distribute aid, aid which isn't getting in. Because of the blockade, hundreds of trucks were needed every single day before October 7th.

Now you have sometimes 100 or 200 getting in, but workers can't get to warehouses. You know, workers can't distribute it, and they said they're very, very close to a complete breakdown of order. You can imagine, you see what happens like Firefest within like two hours. Everybody there is just like looting the place and going nuts. We're two months into this situation where two million people on top of each other without access to much food. People are talking about half of a meal a day without access to clean water, without access to sanitary bathrooms. They warn that disease

and starvation are spreading rapidly. Yeah. Well, speaking of the health concerns, we can put the next element up on the screen. Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization, which Israelis really see as in the same way that the UN and… Yeah, they think they're Hamas. They think everybody… in Gaza, which is obviously that we need to have human rights organizations and humanitarian causes on the ground in Gaza, and even Israel knows that. But obviously, Israel believes they've made some dubious moral calculations in order to function in Gaza. So Tedros says that he's extremely worried about reports of a raid at a hospital in Gaza after several days of siege. There are 65 patients, according to the Ministry of Health, including several needing intensive

care, 45 medical staff in the hospital. The hospital is already minimally functional due to acute shortages of fuel, water, food and medical supplies. Then he said, who urgently calls for the protection of all persons inside the hospital and calls for an immediate ceasefire and for sustained humanitarian access to health facilities across the Gaza Strip. We've seen that on a daily basis, basically, these horrifying humanitarian concerns in hospitals and all of that for more than two months now. And it's not going anywhere. It's not like there's a point where we're just not going to, the hospitals are going to be fine. They're going to be functioning. We're nowhere near that. Yeah. And so that raid has, in the last few hours, has been carried out. Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya said there was a strike that hit their maternity ward, killing two people, injuring two women, requiring them to be amputated.

There were, I believe, it says that the troops, the Israeli troops then pulled all men aged 16 to 65 out of the building. And then CNN ominously said this interview was conducted Monday. Then they write, CNN was unable to reach Dr. Al-Khalat on Tuesday. It sounds like he also was rounded up. There have been very credible on-record accounts of torture and beatings at the hands of Israeli forces after they've rounded the men up, beating boys, some of them, in front of others. So it sounds like these medical professionals are, as we speak, rounded up somewhere, undergoing at very best interrogation, at worst beating and torture, which then leaves open the question of what became of the patients who were left

in this hospital. As we know, that has not been a priority, as we saw with the case of the premature babies who were left to die, after assurances were given that they would be taken care of. And just to bring the segment maybe full circle, if you are the people of Israel, I'm not even talking about the government, obviously this applies to the government too, and you, but it's even put land aside, but you're concerned about the safety and security of your own people. What the hell are you supposed to do right now? I just, it's obviously easy to be here

in DC in a studio, you know, talking about this, but there's a, it's obviously an incredibly difficult conversation to have. It always has been. It's never gotten any easier. And it's certainly not easy now. But to have so much disagreement over what the actual plan is here as people are dying by the thousands and there are these awful stories of suffering. And by the way, the body of an Israeli woman was recovered yesterday. A 28-year-old woman was recovered in a tunnel in Gaza yesterday. A hostage. One of the hostages, yes. More reason that a ceasefire and negotiations to release the hostages while they're still alive is paramount and is just so quickly pushed to the side. You know, you had Netanyahu's ministers

in the middle of these hostage negotiations during the last last ceasefire saying if we don't resume this war uh we're going to bring the government down these same ministers at the very end had said we need to not uh we need to be cruel and not think over much of the hostages and again and again we hear from israeli ministers things that we just don't kind of absorb here in the United States. The UN, we should move on, voted for a ceasefire. Not surprising to anyone yesterday, but that was- The lopsided vote was something else. Yeah, we can put this next element up. Yeah, so they took a formal vote on a ceasefire yesterday, and I don't think any of those numbers are surprising at all, Ryan surprising 153 countries around the

world voted in favor of a ceasefire 23 countries abstained and 10 including the united states voted no interestingly and we're about to talk about ukraine ukraine abstained uh so the united the united states coalition of no voting countries did not even include Ukraine. It's like Paraguay and some others who were like, we don't have any choice. You read them, you're like, oh, they're a country. They're basically just a protectorate of the United States somewhere in the Pacific. And so that's our coalition at this point. What's interesting is people probably remember that Israel had been pressured by the United States and other major powers to send weapons and munitions

and stuff to Ukraine earlier in that conflict and resisted it. And with good reason, obviously, and they clearly underestimated the threat from Hamas, but that's probably still weighing very heavily on the mind of Vladimir Zelensky. And we can get to that in just a moment. 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.

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Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son,

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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. Ryan flagged this Haaretz article. That is interesting. This is the next element up on

the screen. The headline here is graphic videos and incitement, how the IDF is misleading Israelis on telegram. In the context of the conversation we were just having about the way the Israeli government is prosecuting this war and the end goal of safety and security of the Israeli people, you know, say you're Netanyahu and your ultimate goal here is not, his goal isn't to protect the world. His goal is to protect the Israeli people. Even if that's your goal, what is he doing in a way that actually is, you know, making that goal more and more likely? This, I think, raises some questions about that. What did you find interesting about the Haaretz piece? Yeah, So Israeli law allows the military, the IDF, to run what they call kind of information warfare, psychological warfare abroad. If you're trying to influence populations in other countries, you're trying to do propaganda, basically.

Like that's allowed. They are not allowed to do propaganda inside Israel, directed at the Israeli people. In 2014, Haaretz busted them at the time, running this gigantic propaganda operation where they were publishing just horrific scenes of carnage coming out of the 2014 Gaza War to show to the Israeli public, look at what we're doing in here. And so according to Haaretz, this operation here run on Telegram, which is called 72 virgins uncensored, this is the Telegram channel, is in fact a direct product of the IDF. The IDF denied it to Haaretz, but Haaretz stands by its reporting here. At the very end of the article, they say, they even, I hadn't seen this in an American article. I like the kind of repetition of it. Let me see if I can find it here. This is the final article of the piece. It says, in a statement, the IDF spokesperson's unit said 72 virgins is not operated on the IDF's behalf. If there was any connection by soldiers or other parties connected to the IDF with the page or its operation, This was done without approval and without authority, unquote.

However, Haaretz reports, as mentioned, a senior military official confirmed that the channel was systematically operated by IDF personnel. We can put up some just images of kind of what is being produced, but your imagination doesn't have to go too far. We're talking about, as you're seeing there, people being dragged through the streets, one Palestinian getting run over multiple times by a jeep, the flattening of buildings, and coupled with the most racist over-the-top type of language directed at the victims of this that you could possibly imagine. And this goes back to your question earlier where you were saying, what is Israel going to do to keep its people safe? Rather than answering that question, what a lot of Israeli politicians seem to be doing is, what are they going to do to kind of make the public who is

braying for revenge feel like they're getting it? And this is one of those things. You're just putting up just this horrific kind of a combat, and a lot of it isn't even combat porn. It's just mutilation porn of human beings to then say, look, you wanted revenge. We're giving you revenge and forget about all of our failures, you know, leading up to October 7th. Yeah. There was an interesting point when Biden, this was a couple of weeks ago, he was calling for a ceasefire. And there were some people on the left in Israel who were really upset by that and said, you know, what was Ben-Gavir saying at that point? Something like, I'll throw the government into chaos, something like that.

I'll bring down the government, something like that, over any agreement towards a ceasefire. And some people on the left, I'm not saying everybody, but I'm saying there were people on the left saying, yeah, we're with Ben-Gavir. We don't feel safe if there's a ceasefire. We don't feel as though the appropriate measures towards protecting us will have been taken if at that point a few weeks ago there was a ceasefire. And that's really interesting. I think that's actually a really interesting kind of contrast with the way some people on the left here have talked about the conflict. But it doesn't make those questions any less important about whether a ceasefire versus a continued sort of what did Joe Biden say, quote, indiscriminate bombing in Gaza is making people any more or less safe.

And that's as we were talking about this in the last segment. These questions, when you're engaged in kind of real politic about hypotheticals, become impossible. And that makes it really, really hard for Netanyahu to say that pushing this incursion into Gaza into January is making the people of Israel any more safe. You sort of need evidence. And I think that's where, Ryan, to your point, they're relying on some of this to give them cover. They're relying on some of this to give them sort of ongoing justification to augment what they're saying needs to happen in Gaza. And, you know, good on Haaretz for reporting this out and for kind of scooping this. Yeah. And the propaganda war is going back and forth between Hamas and the IDF. You know, Hamas from the very beginning was putting out these kind of slick hype videos

followed by a lot of kind of very explicit videos of direct combat. Now followed the IDF. The IDF was then getting criticized because it put out, you know, it put out videos of people like just shooting in a school and it wasn't clear that there was anything else going on. Put out all those videos of the shirtless men, many of whom were then immediately identified as civilians. And so now they're starting to put out videos of actual combat where it's very clear, okay,

there is now, we know there's combat going on. Casualties numbers are coming out of there. But the IDF is now countering with some of that combat footage, some of it really quite something and nothing like we've really seen on a kind of global level ever. And I was going to say, again, from the real politic perspective, propaganda is, you know, I think it's obviously always been a part of that. Like for longer than we even have records, propaganda is a part of war. But it's very, I think we're not used to it in the 21st century yet. I think we're not used to it in the era of social media yet. And some of what the IDF has been putting out has looked really ham-fisted and just also odd. It's looked really just weird. And again, that's easy to say from here in D.C. and from the West,

but it's just a very strange thing. And it's seemed clumsy, I guess, over the course of the last couple of months. Yeah. And Colvin, I don't know, do we have A12? If people are curious about the actual countries and how they voted. Oh yeah, there it is. So you can just pause on that and kind of scroll through there if you're curious. From Halal Flow, our friend. There you go. So we have Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Micronesia, Nauru, Liberia, Guatemala, Israel, like those, Austria. Yep. Those are basically the countries that stuck with the United States. Abstentions from some major countries as well.

You see there Germany, the UK. Right, yeah, the UK abstentions is a real blow to the United States. Argentina. The coalition to continue killing is shrinking. So it's the Biden, this is, if you're Joe Biden, you're looking at these numbers right now. Again, this is actually not that unusual for how the U.N. votes in regards to Israel. This I mean, it's obviously pressure, although you have UK, Germany, Italy abstaining. But this is not surprising to anyone whatsoever.

I'm sure it didn't come as any type of shock to the Biden administration. But that ongoing split between Biden and Netanyahu makes these numbers all the more worse because Biden then has to defend something he clearly no longer wants to defend. Camp Shane, one of America's longest runningrunning 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 fat phobia 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This author writes, Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Vladimir Zelensky was in Washington yesterday meeting with senators and also meeting with representatives of the military-industrial complex, thanking them for their work and pleading with members of Congress to keep the aid flowing lest the entire project collapse.

We can put up this first image here. Very good and productive meeting. Well, we're thankful that we have such friends. I've just signed another $200 million drawdown from the Department of Defense for Ukraine, and that'll be coming quickly. Thank you. Thank you. Now, if you were just listening to that, you heard the robust White House fire crackling

in the background, but that's quite a nice touch, Ryan. That was President, so again, if you're listening, what you saw was Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell walking through the Capitol with Vladimir Zelensky, different senators, members of Congress swarming him like they're backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert, basically is what it looks like. And Schumer said something like we had a, quote, very good and productive meeting. Then Zelensky appeared to have a pretty good meeting with President Biden yesterday as well. Really didn't face tough questions while he was here, at least not publicly, Ryan. But on the next point, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who Ryan and I will, we promise to continue our weekly updates as to whether he is a real person,

and we can re-up our confirmation that he continues to be real despite having the most generic white man name imaginable, Mike Johnson. Let's actually- Not even a white man necessarily name. American name, right? Yeah, it is just an American name. You're right. Thank you for calling me on my non-inclusive language. Here's my- It's not Spencer Johnson. It's not Spencer Johnson. But what we're going to roll is this tape here. And bear in mind that the House has very little time left to fund the government and is bitterly fighting over all kinds of different goodies. And Ukraine is obviously on the table. Here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday. We need a clear articulation of the strategy to allow Ukraine

to win. And thus far, their responses have been insufficient. They have not provided us the clarity and the detail that we requested over and over since literally 24 hours after I was handed the gavel as Speaker of the House. And so what the Biden administration seems to be asking for is billions of additional dollars with no appropriate oversight, no clear strategy to win and none of the answers that I think the American people are owed. President Zelensky made it so clear how he needs help. But if he gets the help, he can win this war. And he outlined in some great detail, A, the kind of help he needs and how it will help him win. Even many of our Republican colleagues talked about we are winning this war.

And if we get the help that, if he gets the help he needs, he will win. Right. Okay. So that was obviously Chuck Schumer. But what's so funny there is when he says, even my Republican colleagues, he's just talking about Mitch McConnell. He's like, even these, even Mitch and even, you know. Explain to people how far out on a limb Mitch is related to the rest of his conference on this, or at least a big faction of the conference. He said, he has said, this is an almost amazingly like impossible quote, but he has really said that it's the most important thing that they're doing right now is funding Ukraine. And that's for the domestic, this is not a domestic hot war.

This is obviously on another continent. It's not to downplay the importance of it. I think it obviously does have implications for the United States. But for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to say that when there's so much suffering and business to be taken care of in the United States, that is how far out on a limb he is. And it's becoming increasingly problematic with about 10 Republican senators. So, you know, they're up, the Senate is almost completely split. So 10 isn't a huge block, but it's enough to cause serious problems for Mitch McConnell, especially because you have about 10 senators who are increasingly aligned with what Mike Johnson just said. There's a huge contrast between what Mike Johnson said on he has yet to hear, quote,

a clear articulation of strategy. This is a fairly establishment Republican saying that. Kevin McCarthy had similar concerns about Ukraine. He really made it possible for the Mike Johnsons of the world to start publicly expressing their concerns about Ukraine when he said, we don't want a blank check about a year ago. And obviously, sort of from a strategic standpoint, that was an olive branch to the Freedom Caucus and maybe kept them at bay, kept the Matt Gaetz's at bay for another six months, something like that. So mission accomplished, kind of. It's true. I haven't heard of him lately. The big news out of the White House was that they're open to this hardline kind of immigration proposal, border proposal that Republicans have saying.

Republicans have said, look, you want Ukraine money. Yes. You can have it. But to get it, you have to do our like our bill on the border, not like some compromise immigration plan. But basically, you have to just rubber stamp our bill. And the White House was signaling yesterday that they're actually open to that. What did you make of that? Yeah, that's always been I actually think and we've talked about this for weeks. If there will be any compromise struck before the end of the year, and as this funding is on the table, it's going to be over immigration. I would have zero optimism because Republicans have no leverage. I'm fairly supportive of HR2. That's the bill that they're talking about, which would basically redo the asylum system here, which is at the heart of a lot of the problems

that are happening at the border and are happening in South and Central America. But that said, the reason the White House wants to negotiate with it is because they know Republicans have basically no leverage. And that's where the Freedom Caucus comes in and is going to, like the odds that all of this gets completely torpedoed and Speaker Mike Johnson is out on his butt in a couple of weeks are honestly really high because what Republicans don't want to do is allow Biden to say he took tough steps to control the border because he negotiated with Republicans on H.R.2 and sent more funding to ICE and CBP and sent more funding to the border drones and all of that

stuff, which is part of H.R. 2. And so it allows him to compromise and say, I negotiated to pass part of this bipartisan bill. If he doesn't touch the asylum situation, it basically doesn't matter. You can fund the border as much as you want. It doesn't matter if you don't reform that central part of it. And so that's what's really a problem for Mike Johnson. And when Chuck Schumer said, quote, that Zelensky provided, quote, kind of the kind of help he needs, he described the, quote, kind of help he needs to win the war. That's a huge contrast with Mike Johnson saying there was no clear articulation of strategy. So these are some real sticking points going

ahead in the next couple of weeks. And this is where we get to the weird incentives that our political system produces. Because on the one hand, Republicans want border security. Like that's, they've been running on it, the wall, built the wall. Like that's, it's central to their whole thing. At the same time, mass numbers of migrants at the border

and chaos at the border is a political, as they see it, a political gift to them. Like that's good for them. So it reminds me of that saying, you know, it's very difficult to convince somebody of something, you know, if their paycheck depends on not understanding it. It's very difficult to get a political party to solve something if support for them depends on them not solving the issue. On the flip side, Democrats constantly tell their base that they're not for these hard line type migration policies. But they would like nothing more than to have the Republicans kind of force their hands to do a crackdown so that they don't have to think about it anymore.

Yeah, it's weird though because there's part of the Republican argument is that allowing, you know, this this this unstanched flow into the country is good for Democrats because, you know, everyone who when they're when they're naturalized, everyone is just going to vote Democrat. Like there are Republicans really believe when they start looking at their own polling numbers like, oh, wait, yeah, we actually can win these folks' votes. The Rio Grande Valley. Yeah, absolutely. That doesn't seem to register. No. It's like this gigantic Democratic scheme to let in all of these brown people who then end up voting Republican. Yeah. What kind of Democratic scheme is that? Well, maybe after like 10 years, but yes. Yeah.

They can't vote for 10 years anyway. No, I mean, well, but that's the problem. And I mean, I think that's why these, it's not necessarily, like, HR2 is not necessarily a hard line. It is in that it would make it really hard for people with dubious asylum claims to come here, live in sanctuary cities, like, in the shadows, and maybe never have a path to naturalization. I think that's what's so sad about a lot of this is that unless, and some of them bank on this, unless there's huge reforms that broaden what an asylum claim is, or broaden what a legitimate refugee claim is in the United States, there's not a path to naturalization for a lot of people who are fundamentally, and admittedly, they'll tell you this, economic migrants. That's not the same as asylum. These are two different categories. And that's why what H.R. 2 is trying to deal with is kind of streamlining what constitutes asylum so that you don't have people coming here and going to San Francisco and just trying to stay there until the law changes and just scrape by and just trying to get by living in pretty sad conditions. And so the question of

what's hardline anymore, I don't even know after how many years of a failed immigration policy. I'm surprised that since they're combining immigration and Ukraine here, I'm surprised that none of the senators have done the most cynical thing yet, which is say, well, just draft them and send them over to Ukraine and train them and put them in the front lines. And then after they fight for the U.S. over in Ukraine, they can come back here because this goes to a little piece from Eric Wasson here, if we can put up this next element. Zelensky told senators that Ukraine is considering conscription of men over 40 to bolster frontline troops. That's from Senator Wicker. As a man over 40, I'm like, whoa, I thought I missed my window where I was going to get drafted and to go kill somebody or get killed.

But this goes to a fundamental problem that Ukraine has, which is, you know, they've something like 700,000 people can check the exact stat. Military age men have, have left Ukraine. Yes. And a hundred, a hundred thousand plus have been killed, many more wounded. You can only fight for so long. And so we could send, you know, military hardware and weapons over there endlessly. But at some point, they start running out of people, whereas Russia does not run. Even if you take the U.S. leaks this week at face value and say that Russia has lost 300,000 plus troops of something like an army of 350,000 to start with. Right.

They've gone through a mobilization that is bringing hundreds of thousands of more. It's just a, look at the map, it's just a much bigger country. And so now if they're going to have to move to people over 40, then what? Yeah. And that brings up a hugely, I think it's just a pathetic question as to whether the will of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and elite politicians in D.C. to wage this war is more powerful here than it is among the Ukrainian people. When you start talking about conscription of men over the age of 40. Right. Obviously, there are many who are deeply committed to the fight. Absolutely. And see it as existential to them. Absolutely. Obviously, if you have to start

conscripting people over 40, it's not enough. Yes. When the United States cares so much about the contested territory in the Donbass, that they are funding a government that is conscripting men over the age of 40, you really have to ask that question as to whether this is more important to Mitch McConnell than it is to the majority of the Ukrainian people. I think that is a very good point. There's a lot of support in Ukraine for the war. There's no question about that. But at the same time, we are how many years into it at this point? And the levels that we know of deaths, yeah, two years in February, the levels that we know of death right now are staggering. I mean, we're talking about hundreds

of thousands of people who have died over the last couple of years. At a certain point, you feel that much more acutely in Ukraine than you do in the United States. And that is, I think, a very kind of pathetic contrast and will be brought out more going forward. 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John.

Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair.

Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh, my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means

destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 voice over, 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. Fascinating clash in the EU, in Sweden in particular, between the kind of Tesla's anti-union model, we can put this up here, which relies on non-union labor to build Tesla's, versus the very strong industrial unions of Europe, who are now engaged in, they've kind of, there's this very kind of small, relatively small fight, kind of 100, I think it's 134 metal workers. We're not even putting together necessarily. They're not working in a Tesla plant, but they're working with Tesla.

Mechanics, yeah. And they, in collaboration with unions around the country, are trying to shut Tesla down to force them into bargaining. And across the EU. You have these, like you were saying, it rippled into Danish transport workers. And that's the big news this week, saying in solidarity with the Swedish mechanics, about 130 of them, which isn't much in the grand scheme of Tesla's operations, they're not unloading Teslas. Like, they're not taking them off of ships. They're not going to ship them anymore in solidarity with the Swedish workers that have been on strike for about a month now. Yeah. Oh, and let's pause for a little bit of, like, labor history and theory here.

I was hoping you would because that's part of why I suggested we do this. Yeah. And this and I'm glad one of one of these articles did make the point, which is so key for people to understand kind of labor politics. They write, unlike many other European countries, Sweden has no legally enforced minimum wage and little in the way of statutory labor market regulation. The very beginning of the labor market movement in like the 19th century here in the United States, the labor movement was stridently opposed to minimum wages and to other kind of regulations. No, they were for regulations against child labor and things like that. But they did not want the state to come in and set a minimum wage because from their perspective, what the state giveth, the state to come in and set a minimum wage because from their perspective, what the state giveth, the state can taketh away. And it would be better to build mass worker power and just set

wages and say, like, it doesn't matter what the state says you have to pay us. This is what we want. And you don't have a choice. You're paying us this. We see what your profit numbers are. We see what you can pay. And you're going to get a little bit of a profit, but we who are providing the value are going to get the rest of it. And so that has prevailed in Sweden because Sweden has such strong industrial unions. They're like, well, don't worry about our minimum wage. So then a Tesla comes in, and they're like, oh, no minimum wage? Interesting. Okay, let's see what we can get away with here. And you can see why that is a threat to the entire system. And so the unions have to come in and say,

I don't care if it's 134 workers. You're paying the prevailing wage. If you don't, we're shutting you down. And pretty much across Sweden, there's support for this because the entire kind of culture understands that their prosperity depends on this arrangement. Even as Sweden has been drifting recently into right-wing territory, there's still this broad support for making sure that you can make a middle class wage at a typical job in Sweden. And that's why this is such a fascinating clash. We can put the Jacobin article up on the screen. This was a really, I highly recommend reading this article because I think it outlines the stakes globally really well and the stakes for actually one of the biggest companies in the world at this point. They write, on one side is Tesla, by far the world's most valued automaker, currently valued higher than the next nine car companies combined.

I think it is so important to remember that about Tesla. It's the Cybertruck and Elon and X. It's become sort of a punching bag. But in terms of car companies, this is enormously, enormously powerful. It has 130,000 workers, Jacobin continues, and the two top best-selling EV models. On the other side is the Swedish Metal Workers Union, a union with 230,000 members, organizing 80% of all workers in its sectors. With a large membership that has not taken part in many strikes, the union has amassed a war chest of about $1 billion, and it's able to pay striking workers 130% of their salaries. So this already has been going on since October. The strike has

already been going on since October. It has rippled into other countries. It's rippled into electricians and dock workers. And Jacobin adds, if either side caves, it will have profound impacts across Sweden. If the unions lose, it might spell the end of the Swedish norm-based labor market system of high unionization rates, sectoral bargaining, and few regulations. If Tesla loses, it will be the first union with which the company has been forced to negotiate. So there you have one of the most powerful car companies, one of the most high-valued car companies in the world, potentially having a serious threat to its non-union business model because of 130 workers in Sweden who have workers around the EU striking in solidarity with them and Tesla refusing to negotiate. Ryan, I actually think the most likely outcome here,

and you've covered this more closely than I have for years, so I'm curious what you think. I think Elon is just going to pull out of Sweden. Oh, straight up pull out of Sweden rather than, because he doesn't want to set a precedent that, I don't know. I mean, it depends on how useful Sweden, you know, the Swedish production is to his supply chain in Europe and how important that is. I think you could, if you're Elon, you know, rationalize it and be like, look, it's Sweden. Of course, we're in a union. Like, okay, but that doesn't mean that you here in the United States need to be in a union. And I think he's, I appreciated his one remark that he made about unionization here in the United States. He said, if we wind up with a union,

we deserved it. And one of the powers and the positive elements of the union movement is to put pressure on bosses. He raised salaries. Like Elon Musk. Right, exactly. In fact, in some ways, the best situation, if let's say you're at, you're never going to get this, but let's say you get 90% union density in the auto industry. Oftentimes, the people who are best off are the other 10% because the bosses are so scared of them getting unionized that they push salaries and pay even higher. Now unions are good at protecting jobs as well so that you can't be arbitrarily disciplined and otherwise cracked

down upon. So that's different. But when it comes to just wages and kind of benefits, the pressure of unions pushes them up. You saw Toyota, Honda, after the UAW's big deal, quickly reach out to their workers and be like, hey, here's a little extra. Because as Sean Fain told me in an interview I did for my podcast, that they're just getting a deluge of messages from autoworkers at non-union plants saying like, please come in and organize our plant. And that in the past had been the big hurdle that they would go to a plant and they'd be outside of it, going to the grocery stores, going to the bars, trying to meet workers that they could then talk into like being, you know, allies of theirs on the inside, rather than workers just organically reaching out and saying, please come in and

unionize us. And that's the difference between kind of a tight labor market and a loose one. And to actually your point about Elon in Sweden, I mean, this guy is doing business, China, that is trying to spread quote socialism with Chinese characteristics. And he is lavishing Xi Jinping in praise. So capitalism with Swedish characteristics. It's capitalism with Swedish characteristics. So, but this is actually, I think that the Jacobin article, which is actually written, I think by folks in Sweden who point out that Swedish union density is down from like 80 percent, but it's down to like 62 percent. So still a country with pretty high union density. But the stakes here, I think, for both sides absolutely are very high.

And especially, Ryan, in light of what we're about to talk about next, which is the climate deal that was struck last night. 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 re-examining 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. give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God.

And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 girlard, 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.

Dubai decided that it was going to be the best place to host the climate change conference called COP28. So as first of all. It's kind of perfect, really. It is perfect. We did figure out what COP stands for. Yes. Distribute questions. Ask yourself, do you know what COP stands for? It's COP24, COP28, Copenhagen.

Conference of parties. It's, again, perfect. Conference of parties. A lot of people came into the show today wondering, A, is Mike Johnson still a real person? And B, what does COP stand for? And by the end of the show, we have answered successfully those two questions. Sort of, because it's conference of parties of the UN. FCC.

I can't remember. Of the Framework on the Climate Change Agreement or whatever that is. It's the alphabet soup. It's a bunch of countries that get together to try to agree on a path forward. Before they reached a deal early this morning, Al Gore unleashed on the conference and shamed them a little bit with, well, actually, so let's put this up here.

This is Al Gore. COP 28 is now on the verge of complete failure. The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is of the petrostates, by the petrostates, and for the petrostates. It is deeply offensive to all who have taken this process seriously. 24 hours left to show whose side the world is on, the side that wants to protect humanity's future by kick-starting an orderly phase out of fossil fuels, or the side of the petro-states and the leaders of the oil and gas companies that are fueling the historic climate catastrophe. In order to prevent COP28 from being the most embarrassing and dismal failure in 28 years of international climate negotiations. The final text must include clear language on phasing out fossil fuels.

Anything else is a massive step backwards from where the world needs to be to truly address the climate crisis and make sure that 1.5 degrees centigrade goal doesn't die in Dubai, they did finally come to agreement on phrasing around phasing out fossil fuels against the interests, obviously, of many fossil fuel producing countries. Yeah. But environmentalists and climate hawks are still saying that it doesn't really create any path toward getting there. It's good that they acknowledged it and said that they're going to, within 10 years, kind of transition away from fossil fuels. It includes big sops to natural gas, which is a big priority of Russia, other U.S. I was going to say us.

Us, yeah, major natural gas. Producers, the EU, which is building a gigantic terminal for liquid natural gas. A lot of developing countries, especially in the South, are very angry about the fact that there's no financing and no plan to say, okay, Linderia is saying, okay, well, you want us to not develop all of our wealth that we've discovered when it comes to fossil fuels, but you're also not putting in play any type of financing that would incentivize us to do that and to move in a different direction. So how are we going to do that? There was a big push to crack down on coal and to insist that any new coal plants not add any carbon emissions, that they use some type of carbon tech. That tech is not developed sufficiently.

India and China and others were able to push back on that. And so it's nice. They're saying some decent things. It's better than it could have been. But we're already at like 1.2 degrees increase. So staying below 1.5 looks basically impossible. There's an interesting line in a Bloomberg article on this where they actually go back to the Glasgow conference two years ago and say, after a pledge to phase down coal in Glasgow two years ago, consumption has continued to rise and the world remains very unlikely to limit warming to the Paris Agreement's target of 1.5. So yeah, they talked about this two years ago and coal

consumption continues to rise. And that's sort of a good, I think, window into how this stuff actually goes. It's kind of already being dubbed the, quote, UAE consensus. And this is another line from the Bloomberg piece. They say, well, the outcome falls short of the specific fossil fuel, quote, phase out, as Ryan mentioned, that most countries wanted. It does break new ground. No previous COP text has mentioned moving away from oil and gas, the fuels that have underpinned the global economy for decades. I was listening to an NPR report on this yesterday when I was driving, while I was driving a gas guzzling vehicle, and they said something, they were talking about how countries largely in the global south, you just mentioned Nigeria, were really unhappy with the agreement so far because they are facing sort of more acute consequences quickly, more quickly than countries sort of in

the middle are on the geographic middle, that is to say, are when it comes to climate, that these are going to hurt poorer countries in the global south more and more quickly than they are countries in the middle. What's interesting about that is actually those countries also, Nigeria being one example for the reasons you just listed, Ryan, are the ones that will lose some of the modernization and humanitarian benefits that fossil fuels brought to different parts of the world really quickly. And we're starting to see that become part of the debate in the EU, in the United States. That's like, listen, if you want these countries to have a robust and growing middle class, limiting fossil fuel consumption or limiting the profits that they

can make on other people's fossil fuel consumption is saying, we got rich off of these fossil fuels, but you can't. And that is a real problem, I think, for the left to sort of explain and work around. This deal itself was- Which would just say, well, fine, let's redistribute a lot of wealth. See, Ryan has the easy, honest answer that John Kerry and Al Gore don't. They won't go so far as to say this. This was reportedly made with. Al Gore might because he's kind of out of power. I guess, yeah, at this point, probably John Kerry would not.

Right. But that is a real problem, I think, for the people who are flying to these conferences in private jets and living luxurious lifestyles to say, we got rich off this stuff. I'm sure the Heinz fortune came in no small part due to fossil fuel consumption and use of fossil fuels and shipping that stuff all over the world, actually, shipping that delicious ketchup all over the world. All 57 varieties. But no, you guys in Nigeria, that's where we're stopping this. And so Al Gore, I'll read some of his follow-up statement after they reached a deal. By the way, Al Gore is 75 years old, six years younger than Joe Biden. He says, the decision at COP28 to finally recognize, this is after

the agreement was reached, to finally recognize that the climate crisis is at its heart. A fossil fuel crisis is an important milestone, but it is also the bare minimum we need and is long overdue. The influence of petro-states is still evident in the half measures and loopholes included in the final agreement. Whether this is a turning point that truly marks the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era depends on the actions that come next and the mobilization of finance required to achieve them. And that is the key point, because the states are going to have to insert themselves into the financial markets

to drive financial decisions, like they did with the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, saying, look, if you invest in this clean tech, it's going to be more profitable because we're going to give these X subsidies and tax breaks. That's basically the question that the world is facing. Do we want to use state power to drive finance in that direction? Right. Or do we use things like COP as a cope, as like a shield to say, listen, we came to the negotiating table. Reportedly, this deal was helped enormously by negotiations that John Kerry was having with China. And privately, we're going to continue taking our private jets and investing in fossil fuel companies and allowing fossil fuel companies to run ads on how they are transitioning to green energy while they're still making bank on fossil fuels. And it's all just kind of a show that protects, you know, that gives a little. As Al Gore says, it's, quote, bare minimum.

Sort of gives a little in order to continue doing other things beneath the surface. 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 re-examining the culture of fat phobia 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead,

but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and see. 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 other big news here in Washington is that mass surveillance is getting a second look. A coalition of the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus have been battling to reform what they call 702 authorities. This is the kind of key provisions of the Patriot Act that allow the U.S. government to surveil foreigners and through their surveillance of foreigners to kind of do backdoor searches with regard to like Americans, either abroad or on American soil. A lot of dispute and an argument about, you know, how often it's abused, you know, what the backdoors like allow for. And so this is an opportunity to say, okay, well, let's codify this. Let's seriously reform this. On top of the kind of developing, the developed industry

that where private companies obtain all sorts of information that it would be illegal for the U.S. government to obtain. There is a law that says the U.S. government cannot use a private, cannot buy privately what it couldn't obtain legally, you know, through a warrant. What they've done is they've gone to like third party brokers. Yes. And said, oh, well, we're not buying it directly from them. We're buying it from these guys. Right. That, you know, pathetically, the courts have been like yeah sure that seems fine right so this new push would also make very clear that you that you cannot do that and so as our resident Freedom Caucus correspondent what's your sense of you know how serious the opposition is and we can get get to kind of where this is heading today,

tomorrow and throughout the week. You know, I wouldn't even look to the Freedom Caucus on this. I would look to Senator Lee because he has been all over this, not just in the last couple of months, but for a long time because this is, so FISA Section 702 is expiring on December 31st and that has the intelligence community scared out of their minds

because they rely so much on this oversight. They have abused it tens of thousands of times, according to Inspector General reports. So that's according to our own government. It has been abused rampantly. And basically, whenever Chris Wray goes in front of Mike Lee and goes in front of the Senate or goes in front of the House, he says, just trust us. We have put reforms in place and it is not currently being abused. But of course, we have absolutely no insight into that. You really just have to take Chris Wray's word for it, or you have to have ongoing IG oversight. And what's interesting about FISA is that it came out of the church committee era. And we've talked about this many times, Brian. FISA abuse, it's the abuse of the system that was meant to stop abuse of the system. And so it shows how easily even the intelligence community's sort of self-government and its

oversight bodies can be abused because the intelligence community is able to operate. It gets so much sort of leeway to operate in the shadows. And so then you really do have to just say, hey, Christopher Wray, I'm trusting that you are better than J. Edgar Hoover. Even though you work in the J. Edgar Hoover building, although not for long, but we're just trusting that you're doing this and you're doing it all on the up and up. And so Mike Lee has been just reaming them out publicly. And so to have that on the Senate side, Rand Paul is also on top of this on the Senate side, and to have the Freedom Caucus with the negotiating power that it does. You know, the sort of GOP on the House side at large doesn't have much negotiating power, but the Freedom Caucus does have a lot of negotiating power over the GOP because of the slim margins. They have decided to take this up as a cause, and rightfully

so, because we can put the next element up on the screen. This is an article from my colleague over at The Federalist, Tristan Justice, who actually went and looked at a letter that some of the folks in the intelligence community released recently, where they said, as you well know, our nation is under significant threat today with wars in Europe and the Middle East, a potential conflict with China and the Indo-Pacific, and the deadly flow of fentanyl across the southern border. It is so insulting that they just invoked fentanyl to keep spying on people. They add, in these circumstances, we cannot hamstring the intelligence community either by failing to renew Section 702 of the FISA Act or by limiting it in ways that would make it difficult for the government to protect

Americans. People like Mike Lee want them to get a warrant every time that they invade our privacy, which is basically exactly what the Constitution says they have to do. They say they cannot afford to get warrants because that would impede their ability to keep Americans safe. That letter was signed, as Glenn Greenwald surmised on Twitter, he was like, there's overlap between this letter and the Hunter Biden laptop is disinformation, it must be censored letter. Indeed it was. And that's what the Federalist Article pointed out and also pointed out that 702 was abused. This is where the Freedom Caucus is coming from, was abused in surveilling Carter Page and the sort of Russia collusion hoax. And it's funny how we each try to reach our

respective audiences because over at The Intercept, and we could probably put this up in post, our headline was Trump allies are, you allies are gunning for more surveillance authority. Because if you're going to reach kind of normie Democrats, you want to make it clear to them, hey, okay, maybe, I don't think you should, but maybe you trust Joe Biden or Barack Obama with these authorities. Do you really trust Trump with these authorities? And so while it is very much the case that a lot of Trump allies are Because of their experience with crossfire hurricane and Carter page And the FISA Court are very hostile to some of these authorities. That's why the Freedom Caucus is there also some Because he had plenty of deep staters in his administration who were heavily supportive of them. So you've got Mike Pompeo William Barr John Ratcliffe Robert O'Brien Devin Nunes all of them. So you've got Mike Pompeo, William Barr, John Ratcliffe, Robert

O'Brien, Devin Nunes, all of them kind of championing giving Biden these reauthorization of these authorities that are headlined Trump allies are giddy about House Intelligence Committee surveillance bill. The opponents of it were able to kick that Intelligence Committee bill out of the NDAA. And so here's how the process is unfolding. The National Defense Authorization Act is this must-pass piece of legislation which is supposed to go through the House, the Senate and the House, this week. And in the Senate, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, as Emily was talking about, are going to make some – the word out of the Senate is going to make some kind of play today to try to reform, you know, what's getting rammed through there. That's going to be one line of defense. Assuming that that eventually gets overridden, it comes over to the House, which is going to try to pass the legislation under what's called

suspension of the rules. And in order to suspend the rules, you need a two-thirds vote, which means that you only need 146 members of Congress to stop the NDAA with this extension of spying authority in it. 146 members, Republicans and Democrats. You've got Pramila Jayapal organizing on the left, organizing the progressive caucus against it. And you've got Warren, was it Davidson or Donaldson? Yeah, Warren Davidson. So Ohio, really kind of a popular Republican. Yeah. Soft-spoken, but kind of just absolutely has been losing it on the Intel committee lately. Did you see this? Yes. That he was like, you're effing lying to me. Yeah. And Warren is known by his colleagues as a good dude, basically,

and doesn't get his feathers ruffled. And so the fact that he has been screaming at Mike Turner behind closed doors seems to be the thing that blocked what was going to be, if we want to get even deeper into the weeds on this, they were going to do a thing called Queen of the Hill. Remember this? So they were going to put both things up. Like, all right, here's what the intelligence community wants. Here's what the reformers, Jayapal, what Warren and Pramila say that they want. And whichever gets more votes on the floor is the queen of the hill and then gets put in there. But they were getting lied on so horrendously that Warren was like, no, this is outrageous.

We're not doing this. And worked with the Freedom Caucus members on the Rules Committee, which if anybody says, all right, what are the actual wins that they've gotten from that speaker fight? Getting those members on the rules committee at least puts them in a position to have more leverage here. So if they can cobble together 146 members of Congress to oppose the NDA with this kind of reauthorization in it, a huge challenge because there's no greater pressure put on members of Congress than to just approve this military policy. To do nothing. Just get,

it's done, move it through. This is status quo. But if they can stop it, then they have to negotiate because then they have to go back through the rules committee to get it onto the floor. Right. And on the rules committee, you've got the Freedom Caucus members who are going to say, well, just reauthorize it using our bill that includes some very basic reforms. And you can tell how shady the intel community is about this. All of the kind of authorizations for this spying expire by, I think, April 11th. And this bill extends them through April 19th. And then what they can do is after April 11th, when they expire, as long as the law is still in place, they could extend them for another year. Yes. Yeah. So, okay, it expires on April 19th, but they will then on April 12th, like extend them all the way to April 2025. And so one of the things that

Warren and Pramila are fighting for is say no like you can't do that Right and you have to we at least have to have this fight again in the spring There was a sunset that happened at one point during the Trump administration and they have all kinds of mechanisms to continue Justifying 702 Authority and that's what Davidson and Jayapal understand and realize. And that's why when they're crafting the text of this legislation, they're being very careful about it. And that's why you've seen the intelligence community come out with a letter like the one that we mentioned, because they're actually terrified that they're about to lose a major power. And they're just asking for the benefit of the doubt.

Now, Mike Lee tweeted last night, tomorrow the Senate, so that's today, has the chance to remove FISA 702 from the NDAA. The Senate rules can make this happen if just 41 senators agree. Lee added FISA should be reviewed on its own merits, not the NDAAs. And that's actually really important. Rand Paul has a Rule 28 point of order tomorrow. And if those 41 senators oppose that, so tomorrow, by the way, is today, and Mike Lee refers to them as, quote, the firm, which is pretty funny. If they oppose that motion, 702 is out of the NDAA. The firm, Lee continues, will try to scare senators, warning of inevitable catastrophe if 702 expires at midnight on New Year's Eve. And so one thing-

Which is crazy. It's not a catastrophe because, I mean, I think it's a catastrophe because it's bad policy. But from their perspective, it's not a catastrophe because it's good for a year. Like even if it expires, you still have the authority. So they're kind of lying to people. Yes. Although if there is proactive legislation that passes, like the Davidson-Jayapal negotiations, then they're actually really in serious trouble.

And one thing to watch out for is just because there's a vote on this now on December 13th, whatever it is, that doesn't mean that they don't find a way. When things get really harried at the very end of these NDAA negotiations, it somehow ends up back in the bill, that it somehow gets out of the bill because they are doing carrots and sticks from now until the end of the year. Although the government could shut down, that's a big question. Does the Freedom Caucus decide to shut down the government over 702? Huge question.

And they would probably say it also would be about Ukraine. It would be about a lot of stuff in the funding bills that need to get passed in the next couple of weeks in order to avoid a government shutdown. But does 702 become part of it? If you follow surveillance and privacy issues, 702 is like the creme de la creme of surveillance malfeasance. This is the apex of American surveillance problems. And is it the worst of the worst? I mean, it's all bad. There's no question about it. But it's been around forever.

Well, not forever, but as long as some of these really egregious encroachments have existed, high-tech encroachments have existed. So they're very scared. And they should be very scared because there's a lot of will right now to get rid of this. And it's happening fast. And to sum up, here's news you can use. If you love spying authority and you trust your government, call Congress. Tell them to approve the NDAA with no changes.

Get that spying authority over call your member of Congress and tell them to vote no on the NDAA and force a negotiation over reforms of the spying authority. That's basically what it is. If you love spymasters, vote yes on the NDAA. If you don't love the spymasters, you vote no on the NDAA. If there's 146 no's, then they're back to the table. And remember, what they're asking basically is just for the benefit of the doubt. And that's what the intelligence community always- Just give them one more year. The intelligence community relies, it runs on, it is fueled by benefit of the doubt because it operates so undemocratically. It is inherently an anti-democratic institution. And that's what

they operate on. And congressional oversight, I don't know. Good luck. Good luck overseeing their day-to-day abuses of the Constitution. You can't possibly do it. You just have to trust them. And have they, in the last 10 years, after fomenting two major lies—let's just talk about Trump and Russia collusion and then telling you on the eve of an election that an important piece of information was Russian propaganda when we now know that they knew that that wasn't true.

Have they earned the benefit of the doubt over the last decade? Obviously not. And we can go back even more to the Iraq War and imperialism in the Middle East, adventurism in the Middle East, and all of the malfeasance they were up to in the aughts and say, did they earn your trust? No, of course they didn't. And so if, yeah, if you believe that we should trust them, go ahead, call them up and tell them, yeah, pass the NDAA. Ryan, one other thing to keep in mind, I think is interesting.

About a month ago, I was poking around on this. And what I was hearing is that they're just not, there might not be time to deal with 702 because even by people who wanted to, because the schedule is so crowded. And the fact that Lee and Rand Paul and Warren Davidson and Jayapal have really made this an issue, I think speaks to what they've been hearing from constituents. Yeah. So keep that in mind. There you go. That does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. Remember, 25% off your annual subscription right now or a Breaking Points description over at BreakingPoints.com. Here on CounterPoints, you can watch full video of the show uninterrupted.

Spotify, YouTube, all that stuff. You get it on for Breaking Points, too. You're losing money if you're not getting this deal, right? Take your financial advice from Ryan Grim. That's right. Well, no, we appreciate everyone watching. We will be back here next week with more. See you then. Well, no, we appreciate everyone watching. We will be back here next week with more. See you then. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance.

Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 Voice Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, Boy Sober 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. This is an iHeart Podcast.