Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/14/23: 20% Of IDF Deaths Friendly Fire, School Massacre in Gaza?, Hunter In Contempt, Tech Firm Company Towns, Schumer Confirms UFO Coverup, Obama Linked Karen Muslim Harassment, Debunking Ukraine Lies

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss reports that 20% of IDF deaths are friendly fire as brutal fighting continues, allegations that the IDF committed a massacre of civilians inside a school in Gaza, Hunter gives public testimony while Republicans hold him in contempt, Tech firms break ground on plans for a new era of "company towns", Schumer reveals the UFO coverup in Congress, an Obama linked wife to a Harvard professor caught on camera harassing a woman's "terrorist scarf", and Saagar debunks the latest lies on the war in Ukraine. 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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Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots to get to. This morning we have updates coming out of Israel. The battles are getting bloodier. And we also have a new look at exactly how Palestinians

in Gaza felt about Hamas prior to October 7th and some indications of how support has only grown because of what happened on October 7th and the Israeli response. We also have Hunter Biden. Looks like he's going to be held in contempt, refusing to testify privately, although he does say he is willing to testify publicly. So we'll break all of that down for you. Also, a fascinating report on how a bunch of tech giants are building housing, new sort of like modern day company towns.

What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong there? We'll look at that. Sagar's got a special report for you on the latest, some very sketchy doings with regard to UFO transparency. We also have a clip that went viral coming out of Harvard. Yet another former Obama official, this time their wife, stalking a student who's wearing a keffiyeh, choosing her, wearing a terrorist scarf. Yeah, you got to see it to believe it. And Sagar also has a report on the war in Ukraine. Before we

get to any of that, though, we're really excited. Later today, we're going to be filming another interview with RFK Jr. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Sagar, what is the release schedule for this one? Yes, so our premium members will be able to watch it first, as promised, for all of our big interviews that will drop tonight for the public. It will drop sometime tomorrow, so you guys stay tuned. You can become a Breaking Points premium member right now, breakingpoints.com, and you can take advantage of our discount if you want to go ahead and sign up to watch it early and or support all of our work going into the election. We plan on covering RFK Jr. extensively because we have seen effectively like a media blackout cover-up where they will include him in the polls, but they just like pretend he doesn't exist.

He's probably going to be the most consequential independent candidate since Ross Perot, and yet nobody seems to be discussing that. Yeah. We'll ask him about it. Bunch of stuff we want to get into with him. Really excited to talk to him again. You know, state of his campaign, there was just a report about all the difficulties of getting on the ballot. So talking some of the nitty gritty of that, how he's thinking about potentially staffing and administration, VP picks. Of course, I got a lot of questions for him about Israel and other issues of the day. So really looking forward to that conversation and we should have a good

hour with him to get into a bunch of different stuff. So stay tuned for that. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the news. Put this up on the screen. So the Israeli government and the IDF have been trying to portray an image of victory as they have, you know, basically already completely destroyed northern Gaza, massive death toll, massive civilian death toll. Well, we're now starting to get these little glimpses into how the ground operation is actually going for IDF soldiers. And we have this report from Ynet. Apparently, one-fifth of the IDF troop fatalities suffered in Gaza have actually been due to friendly fire or accidents. This, again, according to the IDF, according to data, at least 20 of 105 deaths since the launch of ground operations not caused by enemy fire. Military

says they are working to ensure troop safety. Now, a couple of notes here. We covered previously how Haaretz did an investigation and uncovered that the number of injured IDF soldiers had been traumatically understated. They went to the hospitals and said, OK, how many have you taken in? How many IDF soldiers have you treated? Those numbers were far greater than what the IDF had admitted to. So when you're getting official IDF statistics, I think you have to take them with a grain of salt at this point. But nevertheless, Sagar, I mean, this shows extraordinary development if you have this high a proportion of the fatalities coming from friendly fire.

Yeah, well, this is the acknowledged friendly fire. And like you said, I think that's really what we have to focus in on. And one of the things I think that we wanted to try and highlight for everybody here is that the next phase of this is looking, unfortunately, as predicted as chaotic and as bloody and could actually be far more costly to the IDF as this continues, because the initial military operation was a lot of use of air power. Now, the initial ground operation, too, we saw the IDF take some casualties. It does definitely appear that they're covering some things up. But the reason why this friendly fire number is so important

is it demonstrates how chaotic the situation is on the ground. I mean, for 20% of acknowledged casualties and deaths to be friendly fire incidents, that's an extraordinary number, not really on par with many Western military in any modern style campaign. It just highlights the chaotic nature of urban combat. Also just about, you know, frankly, troops who probably haven't seen a lot of combat in the past, and now they're doing this in the first place. You've got a lot of reservists who are there. U.S. military dealt with a lot of that, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to highlight this, as well as a battle we're about to get into. These two things militarily demonstrate the ongoing difficulty of what continuing to operate in this environment is going to look like. Friendly fire fire and as well as, unfortunately, the ongoing nature of occupying Gaza for the IDF whenever you've got a battle, which we're about to show everyone, which took place in North Gaza in an occupied area, which was declared safe already and which had very little air power.

It ends up being, Crystal, the deadliest incident so far for the IDF in the entire war. And before I show you that, there is one other note that I want to make about this report on Friendly Fire. All of the Friendly Fire incidents that the IDF is claiming are post-October 7th. They have a note in here in that report from Ynet, and I believe this is like, you know, Google translated it. The English is a little bit clunky, but bear with me. They say casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7th. But the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the Kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time. So we've already had some indications that some,

most of the killing was certainly done by Hamas. We're not downplaying that. Keep that in mind with all of this. But that some of the deaths on October 7th on the Israeli side were because of friendly fire. And they acknowledge this in this report, but they also say, we have no interest in looking into it. We're not going to do an investigation. We don't think it would be morally, what do they say, morally sound to investigate what the hell unfolded on that day. I think they're going to say that now. I think a lot of Israelis are going to want more answers on that in the quote unquote post-war period. Another reason why Netanyahu is trying his best to get as far away from that as possible.

But we've teased the battle, so why don't we go ahead and play some of it now just to give people an idea of what this looked like. This was a battle in which 10 IDF soldiers lost their lives. Not only just 10, but 8 out of the 10 of them actually were officers. And it happened after Hamas actually ambushed an IDF small team. It was only four guys who ended up having to be rescued in an hours-long firefight. And again, this is in an area of Gaza which was declared safe, where they did not think that it was ongoing. It ends up, again, being the deadliest battle actually that's happened on the ground so far. Let's go ahead and play some of it. This is footage released, by the way, by the IDF.

You know, we've played you Hamas's propaganda battle footage. This is IDF propaganda battle footage. But again, it gives you some sense of how difficult, how brutal things are on the ground. Let's put up the details of what happened in what may have been the deadliest incident so far on the Israeli side. This is per the Times of Israel, 10 soldiers, including two quite senior officers, killed in Gaza fighting and what they describe as a deadly ambush. From what I could tell from the description here, you basically had four soldiers who went into this cluster of three

buildings. Again, as Sagar mentioned, this was near Gaza City, not in Gaza City, but in that part of northern Gaza that they have claimed they've basically, you know, eliminated all the terrorists and pushed everybody out into southern Gaza. Well, not so in this instance. They thought that these buildings had been abandoned, surrounding a courtyard to carry out searches and found the entrance of a tunnel. As the troops entered one of the buildings, Hamas terrorists ambushed them, hurling grenades, detonating an explosive device, and opening fire on them. Then, you know, they're calling for help. Their superiors come in and try to rescue them. All four of those original soldiers lost their lives, along with a number of the other soldiers who came in to try to rescue the

situation. Yeah, I think, again, just to highlight it, it took place in an area that you thought was peaceful. Then you go into a building. It turns out there's an IED in there, IND. Either injures or kills everybody. Then everybody's terrified. And so what really highlighted to me is you had everybody up from a battalion commander on downward, colonels, lieutenant colonels, who somehow became involved in this operation, grabbed their rifles and decided to storm in there. And then multiple of them were actually killed. The search and rescue operation, the commanders of the operation, and obviously Hamas got the drop on them in terms of the ambush

and what that looked like. It ended up being an hours-long firefight just to secure the entire area. And this highlights the nightmare of what actual military occupation is going to be. I don't think it's an accident that the deadliest incident so far took place in a so-called safe area. And this is what it is rolling going to look like when you're trying to occupy this city in the long run. And I think certainly, just like we found out in Iraq, it turned out that the initial three weeks mission accomplished phase was probably the easiest part of the entire Iraq war. And it was the follow on, the holding the population, securing the area, and all of that ended up being some of the deadliest and most brutal fighting.

And you can't bomb your way out of that one. And this is really what the reality of this type of military operation will look like and probably will continue to look like for months, if not years to come, if they're going to remain engaged like this. So that's sort of like the zoomed in view of what this looks like on the ground. And one of the deadliest incidents on the Israeli side that we know about thus far. Let's zoom out. Economist had a good report about sort of where they are in terms of their alleged goal of eradicating Hamas.

And, you know, it's not that they've made no progress or done nothing, but they're nowhere near that goal, which I've always thought was a fantasy, the idea that you could completely eliminate Hamas. Put this up on the screen. They write in this piece the IDF may have destroyed as much as half of Hamas's force, although even that, the numbers don't really add up. The overall death numbers that we know of in Gaza are roughly 18,000, and at least 60% of those are women and children. So if you're saying maybe they've destroyed half of Hamas's force of perhaps 30,000 fighters, I'm just not sure where you're getting that math from. It may have come directly from the IDF. are probably way overstated of how well they've done in eliminating Hamas members. Hamas still has thousands who merged from tunnels to carry out ambushes on Israeli soldiers, like the incident

that we just told you about. In addition, you have about 100 Israeli soldiers, according to the IDF, who have been killed. Again, I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. Hamas still holding, of course, more than 130 hostages who were not released when the two sides called that truce and exchanged captives in November. Those hostages, of course, continue to be at grave risk. And Hamas has indicated that more than a dozen of them have actually been killed. Now, they're saying it's because of the Israeli assault. Certainly possible, but we don't really know the circumstances surrounding that. They say here that they are in danger from constant bombing, of course. On December 8th, Israeli soldiers were wounded in a failed attempt to rescue a hostage. Hamas later showed gruesome footage of a dead hostage,

a 25-year-old Israeli civilian, and claims that the Israelis killed him in their rescue attempt, Israel, that Hamas murdered the man shown in the video. So competing claims around what happened there. They go on to talk about, though, okay, outside of the rank and file fighters, that's where we are. They're at best have killed half, probably a lot fewer than that. And there are still thousands more to run out of tunnels, not to mention the new recruits that you are creating with your mass terror campaign on the Gaza Strip. Nor has Israel managed to obliterate Hamas's leadership or destroy its infrastructure. The IDF has killed a number of senior field commanders, but Yaya Sinwar, the group's overall boss, and two of their commanders of their fighting force have so far survived. That is thanks in part to Hamas's network of hundreds of miles of tunnels, which Israel has failed to

destroy despite its firepower and its drone-borne surveillance capabilities. So even at the best-case scenario, Israel is nowhere near eradicating even the existing Hamas fighting force. And that's before we talk about the longer-term impacts and the way that this has spiked support for Hamas, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. Yeah, I think that's what the economist piece really highlights, the military reality. Even if you accept the most rosy, you know, kind of body count-like figures that we would release during Vietnam, even within that, you've still got 50% of the fighters that remain active.

So another thing they point out is that the political sustainability of the campaign, you know, is basically winding up in terms of U.S. support. President Biden and Secretary Blinken both apparently telling Netanyahu you've got to wrap things up by the end of the year. That's only 16 days away. And so then what's the next day going to look like? What exactly are you going to do? What is the plan for the Gaza Strip? Counterpoints brought everybody the news that Netanyahu outright rejected any idea of not only a two-state solution, but of a Palestinian authority governing it. So it's like, well, what now?

Well, in a break-it-you-buy-it scenario, especially, hopefully, that America's not dumb enough to go in there and to clean up Israel's mess for them, they're the ones who are going to be responsible for it. And in a way, they morally should be. It's like, you went in, you destroyed most of the city, you're doing this under the guise of killing all of these people. Now you're responsible for security, you're responsible for the civilian population. You're responsible for providing water, food, security. And even, let's say, even if they don't care about any of that, even to continue

their military operations against Hamas, you have to have staging areas like in Gaza, North Gaza. That's what all those guys were doing there in the first place. So I'm really starting to see a lot of signs and a lot of military analysts I spoke to as well that this is going to be a brutal and bloody campaign where once you've moved past things that you can bomb and you have to actually come in there, clear out areas. It's a painful step-by-step type process. And you're actually responsible for holding this ground. More and more of these types of incidents, the one where 10 IDF soldiers lost their lives just in a single battle, and now you have the chaotic nature of it revealed in the friendly fire incidents. It just shows people, and I think Israelis too, that is their future.

That's what the future is going to look like for as long as that they remain active inside of it. Based on the comments from Netanyahu, you know, asking his senior aide to develop plans to, quote unquote, thin out the population of Gaza. Based on the report that came out from that, yes, I know, sort of like side ministry that everyone's saying is not all that important. But weighed the different options for what happens after the war in Gaza where they said,, ideally, we're going to push all these people into Egypt. Based on the fact that they are floating legislation and plans here in the U.S. that apparently has some bipartisan support about, hey, we're going to push the regional countries to take in this number of refugees in Egypt

and this many in Jordan, et cetera, et cetera. To me, it seems very clear what their ideal situation is. What they want to do is to make Gaza uninhabitable and then use the humanitarian crisis to say, well, the only humanitarian thing to do is to resettle these people in Egypt, to resettle them in Jordan, to resettle perhaps some of them in the United States. And that's, you know, and frame this total ethnic cleansing as some sort of a humanitarian solution. Now, Egypt has publicly been very against this. They threatened war. The U.S. has publicly been very against this.

But if we get to that place where, I mean, already, you know, they're now flooding the tunnels with seawater to destroy the infrastructure. Okay, you can say understandable. On the other hand, this is going to destroy the groundwater for generations to come. Northern Gaza is already completely destroyed and unlivable. Now the indiscriminate bombing campaign has moved to the south, rendering those areas unlivable. They've razed farmland, they've destroyed greenhouses, etc. So to me, that seems very clear that that's the path that they want to pursue, that in their minds, that's the path that they want to pursue, that in their minds, Netanyahu and his government want to move towards. The only question is whether

or not the U.S. is going to enable that or accept it if they're going to do more than sort of weekly protest and let the thing unfold. So I think to me, it seems very clear that that's the goal, whether or not they're able to ultimately achieve it. I'm a broken record. Whether it's a goal or not, we're actually not the Czech, it's the Arab states. I think the Arab states would threaten a literal war if that were to happen. Egypt has already said that they'll sacrifice millions of lives. And here's the thing, it is actually a matter of national survival. And also, they don't want them. I mean, the Egyptians, Sisi, for example, apparently, by the way, Sisi is very popular than ever. You know why he doesn't want these Palestinians? Because a bunch of these Hamas guys are Islamists. And Sisi hates Islamists. He

came to power by overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood. The King of Jordan goes to sleep every night and prays for his life to make sure that the Muslim Brotherhood and all these Palestinians who now live in his country aren't going to uprise against him because there's nothing that he could do about it. If you think he's going to let in a bunch of Gazans, no way. I mean, all of these people. And then I guess the next question is America. Now, I think that some people are dumb enough to have millions of people come and resettle here, but I would say hell no to that one. I think it's all Israel's fault. So they're boxed in. They can want many things. For what's realistically going to happen, they're responsible for this. They can come to the scenario now or they can

come to scenario six months from now. But in my opinion, this whole ethnic cleansing plan of theirs, it's just not going to work. There's just no political sustainability for it. The last thing I'll say about that before we move on to the next piece is obviously ethnic cleansing is wrong and bad and incredibly immoral. It also seems to me incredibly foolish to think that if you just displace Palestinians to other countries that they're going to give up the fight. You know, if you push them out of Gaza into Egypt, let's say, or into other surrounding countries, you think they're just going to like lay down and die and accept that they've lost? No, they're not. They're not. I think as long as there is breath in their body and any scrap of hope that they could reclaim some semblance of their lost land, they're going to continue to fight.

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All right, so to the point of how Israel's brutality is actually playing into Hamas's hands in terms of swelling support for their ranks and for their approach. There was a horrific report. I was I witnessed testimony, followed by some visual on the ground confirmation of execution style shootings by IDF soldiers of women and children inside of a school. Let's go ahead and put this up. This is from a report by Al Jazeera. I'm just going to narrate here what we're seeing. These are distressing images as they are warning here. You can see the camera is going into a school.

They're showing what they describe as horrific aftermath of an assault on this school. This is in northern Gaza. What you can see are, you know, here's desks, chairs that have been burnt up, completely destroyed. You can see they're walking here into one of the classrooms where they claim bodies were piled up after eyewitnesses say they were killed execution style. This man was one of the eyewitnesses. He says, we found the bodies in the classrooms. He says, there's no sign of any missiles or shells. In other words, they were execution style, just gun to the head executions. All those who were in the building

were executed from point blank. The Israeli soldiers opened fire on them. He goes on to say, many families came searching for their children. They found them all killed. They were all killed, executed at gunpoint. There was another woman who they spoke with as well who had a similar story about the way that these women and children were killed. She says the Israeli soldiers came in and opened fire on them. They took all men, then entered classrooms, opened fire on a woman and all the children with her. The woman said there were newborn children among them.

The Israeli soldiers executed those innocent families at point blank. So you have the combination of eyewitness testimony along with the bodies that were recovered and the evidence that they had been killed by bullets versus missiles, adding up to, you know, a really horrific situation. It's not also the first time that there have been accusations that Israelis have murdered people execution style, murdered civilians in Gaza execution style. Unfortunately, you know, this is something that's a very dark period of Israeli history in terms of the Kibaya massacre involving Israeli Sharon. This is very well known amongst a lot of Palestinians. And I think it also just highlights the need for independent reporting and UN organizations, others, just like we allowed actually during the invasion of Iraq in order to make sure that incidents like this don't happen or they're investigated properly. The IDF actually, as far as I understand it, Crystal, has not addressed what's happened here. So obviously they need to give an explanation. And look, it's possible somebody

else did, I guess. But if they're going to be responsible for it, then they need to actually come forward with some sort of explanation as to what this was. And I just think it's an independent review type scenario, desperate for what we need. One thing to highlight just for everybody to watch out for is apparently CNN was able to get a camera inside of Gaza. They're going to air Crystal some of their footage later today. I'm actually very anxious to see it. It's the first Western footage that will come out of Gaza, which has not been censored by the IDF. Because she went in.

This is Clarissa Ward. Who was there at the fall of Kabul and Afghanistan. She went in actually with an Emirati medical team. And there was no censorship. She was also on the ground in some of the areas for hospitals, etc. So this is exactly why we need people on the ground to be able to investigate scenarios like this. Absolutely. Okay, so let's ask the question then. What is all of this brutality actually gaining Israel?

And how do Palestinians in Gaza, or at least how did they feel about Hamas? Because we've also had, you know, numerous Israeli pundits, officials, American politicians claiming there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza because they all support Hamas. Well, that is really not the case. Let's put this up on the screen. This polling is fascinating to me. So this survey was in the field right up until October 7th. It just happened that you had this error barometer poll where they do in-person surveys in the field right up until October 7th. Okay. So first of all, how much trust do you have in the Hamas-led government? The top response by far among all age groups, more, you know, overwhelming plurality of roughly 45% say none

at all, no trust whatsoever in the Hamas led government. All right, let's go to the next one. How responsive do you feel like the Hamas led government is to what people want? Again, overwhelming plurality say not very responsive at all. So not exactly glowing reviews there. And the second highest response was not responsive at all. So not very and not at all were the two highest responses. All right, let's go ahead to the next one. What do you think is the most effective way to have a say here to be able to influence a Haas-led government decision? The number one answer, nothing is effective. Nothing. The second highest answer is working through personal connections. So basically corruption. Corruption, yeah. Okay,

so that's really interesting. Very dim views of Hamas. There was a huge sense, 78% had said that the availability of food was a moderate or severe problem in Gaza. Now you might think that perhaps that's, you know, they would blame the Israeli government and their blockade, which certainly takes, you know, deserves quite a bit of the blame for that state of affairs. But actually, the largest number said that they blamed the Hamas-led government for the fact that, you know, just on a basic, like, how am I doing? How's my family doing? Am I able to get enough to eat? The Hamas took most of the blame in terms of who they were pointing a finger at. I thought this was interesting too. So Hamas,

of course, they say their goal is to destroy the Israeli state. Majority of survey respondents, though, favor a two-state solution. So they're at odds even with political goals. And here what you see is which party, if any, do you feel closest to? Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, which quote-unquote runs the West Bank, or Hamas, and Hamas actually wins out. They also asked in a theoretical presidential election where you had the head of Hamas versus the head of the Palestinian Authority versus Marwan Barghouti, who's an imprisoned member of the Central Committee of Fatah. Actually, only 24% said they would vote for the Hamas leader. Barghouti received the largest share at 32%. He's, again, that imprisoned activist. And Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PA, received 12%. So

they were not too impressed with Hamas as a governing authority. But, Sagar, there are a lot of signs, you know, at this point you can't pull Gaza because there's an ongoing war, no one can get in there. But there are a lot of signs that support for Hamas has actually dramatically increased because of the brutality of the Israeli crackdown. And that is consistent with history. You know, if you look at the polling, and that's one of the things that they talk about in this piece, if you look at polling over time, it's almost a one-to-one relationship. The harsher the conditions imposed by the Israelis or the more brutal attacks that are being waged, the higher the support for the

more militant terrorist organizations. When there seems like there's some actual path to peace and prosperity through nonviolent means, lo and behold, support for militant groups like Hamas decreases. It doesn't take rocket scientists. No, it's not. And we have a lot of historical precedent we can talk about here. You know, I'll turn to Vietnam. We've been talking about it a lot here. You know, the communists were not popular. There were a million, a lot of people who fled the North to the South because they didn't want to live under communism. But after the sustained bombing campaigns and the corruption of the South Vietnamese they didn't want to live under communism. But after the sustained bombing campaigns and the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and all that became to be

more evident, even though people didn't necessarily want to live under communism, you were able to basically mesh together like a communist and nationalist philosophy for why you should support the VC and the NBA against the American invader and the foreign puppet. So even though they inherently prior to foreign intervention, actually very likely looked like they could have been defeated, it was actually American intervention itself and the strength of it made it such that it actually ballooned their ranks and made them even more popular. There was also a line in here that really struck out to me, quote, the Hamas-led government may be uninterested in peace, but it is empirically wrong for

Israeli political leaders to accuse all Gazans of the same. In fact, most Gazans are open to a permanent and a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet the views of the people who live in Gaza are often misrepresented in public discourse, even as surveys such as Arab Barometer consistently show how different these narratives are from reality. I would also say this is exactly why, from a strategic perspective, this made a lot of sense for Hamas, where you've only got 50% of the population that support you, between you and Palestinian

Islamic Jihad. So what do you do? You launch a war to not only legitimize yourself as the only fighting actor against the Israelis, but then you use the response to say, we're the only ones who are standing up and that's why you got to support me. Again, very, very similar to the way that the Viet Cong and others operated in the Vietnam War. So, and this ultimately, they were the victors. So we got to study what exactly made them effective. And I think that the way that this fight now continues and how that all looks for the center of gravity of that population, who they support, what they support, what they look like as legitimate, I really see this polling as a tragedy to just say that so many of the people who lived under their rule – and this is so obvious, as usual. Most human beings are human beings.

They just want to live in peace. They want enough food to eat, and they don't want to live in know, government where they have to pay somebody so that they can send their kid to college. That sucks no matter where you are and no matter what religion you are. So obviously they didn't like it. Now that doesn't mean that they're pro-Israel. Let's be clear about that, but they're pro something a little bit different. And this is another reason too, why the Israeli strategy of propping up Hamas was very important to them, because I actually think they knew that this was real, and that one of the reasons why they want to continue those Qatari cash injections is we got to keep Hamas up there, because actually there's a whole lot of Palestinians

who would accept something very different, but that would be very inconvenient for the right-wing government and coalition inside. Now, obviously, it's way past October 7th. Who the hell knows where this poll stands right now? A lot of these people could be dead. That's another question. A lot of the moderates and all those other folks who definitely did not support Hamas from day one, they could be gone. And now what you have, more of a literate population, people who've lived through war, and we know how that looks like throughout history too. Absolutely. And there are legitimate questions over whether Israel is intentionally targeting that potential nonviolent, more moderate leadership class, the intellectuals, the doctors.

You know, I did a whole monologue on this earlier in the week with that poet, Rafat, who was assassinated. There's really no doubt that there's an investigation that was conducted by a human rights organization that found, you know, they directly targeted specifically the apartment that he was in with his sister killing him and other family members. He had received death threats from the Israeli government multiple times. So he was very definitely directly targeted, this poet. And there's been a massive loss of intellectuals and thought leaders within the Gaza population

from this war. So I think it's a very open question whether Israel is directly intentionally targeting them for exactly this reason. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. This is a fascinating report from the BBC. They interviewed a number of political scientists in the West Bank, and they also have some numbers to back up what we've discussed before, which is that support for Hamas in the West Bank, we don't know in Gaza, but in the West Bank has been skyrocketing. One political scientist described the October 7th attacks as a turning point for Palestinians, just as they were a shocking turning point for Israelis. That political

scientist said, the people, especially the new generation, are backing Hamas now more than at any other moment. He told me in the previous 30 years, there were no models, no idols for the new generation. Now they see there is something different. A different story is being created. And this was really pretty extraordinary as well because obviously Fatah and Hamas have been bitter enemies for years as well. But this political scientist theorizes

that both Fatah and Hamas are well aware they're complementary to each other. And I think we'll see real integration between the two movements. This is the greatest fear of, you know, Bibi Netanyahu and others who are like-minded. They don't want to see any sort of Palestinian unified front. It's a divide and conquer strategy, and it's also elevating the extremists. So you can say, hey, I've got no partner for peace, even as a majority of Palestinians in Gaza say we want a two-state solution. And even as he and his government are very clear about how they do not want a peaceful two-state solution. We'll get to that in just a

moment. One of these political scientists goes on to say the Palestinian Authority realized targeting Hamas would not eradicate it because it's an ideological movement rooted within the Palestinian people. And Hamas is fully aware it cannot establish an independent Palestinian state without the help of Fatah. So that's why he's arguing that they realize that they need each other. But they track here how there has been a real change in viewpoint among the Palestinian population. Again, this is in the West Bank, not Gaza. Could be totally different, but I think there are probably some similarities here. And remember, in the West Bank, the brutality of what's unfolding there is nothing like, of course, what's unfolding in Gaza. But there has also been a lot of violence there. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th

in the West Bank as well, partly at the hands of the IDF, partly at the hands of these extremist settlers. Yeah, we don't know. You know, it's interesting, actually, something just came across my radar, is you had a top Hamas official, actually, who just did an interview with Al Monitor, in which he suggested that the group would, quote, adhere to the PLO organization's stance on Israel, aka floating Israeli recognition. You can read that two ways. One is that they're, quote, unquote, suing for peace. I would read it very much like you are, Crystal, is that they're trying to become the legitimate successor for whatever this post-movement is going to look like, both for the West Bank and for Gaza. And when you read comments like that, now,

I would put it very much as they are recognizing their political hold here on power and what the next step for them may look like for, but not only to survive, but also to become the genuine governing authority. So actually, you know, I think you can really look at that polling and some of the now increase for support Hamas in the West Bank really is a tragedy to say that while the Palestinian authority itself was corrupt, the ideas which they were built upon, which was Palestinian identity, not nonviolent resistance, I guess, per se, but at least post-Oslo, some sort of cooperation two-state scenario. That was a relative majoritarian position amongst a lot of Palestinians, but it was the extremists, really,

who tried to overthrow it. And they may actually set it back by, I mean, who knows, not even decades. I would say, you know, maybe a century, something like that. Extremists in the, on the Palestinian side and extremists on the Israeli side basically teamed up, not directly, but in a manner of speaking to derail any sort of a peace process. And it worked. It did work. It worked. They won, you know, and now here we are where we are today to go back to, well, let's talk about some of those extremists. Now they run the Israeli government. This is an interview with an Israeli ambassador on Sky News where she's being pressed over, okay, you know, you all say there's no partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Do you all want a two-state solution? Take a listen to this.

Two-state solution? Is there still a chance for a two-state solution? I think it's about time for the world to realize the Oslo paradigm failed on the 7th of October, and we need to build a new one. And in order to build a new one... But does that new one include the Palestinians living in a state of their own? Is that what it includes? I think the biggest question is, what type of Palestinians are on the other side? It's what Israel realized on the 7th of October. Do they have a state? The answer is absolutely no, and I'll tell you why. Well, then how can there be peace? The reason there is no peace is because the Palestinians... Without offering a state to Palestine, how can there be peace in Israel? Israel knows today, and the world should know now.

The reason the Oslo Accords failed is because the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel. They want to have a state from the river to the sea. So the two-state solution is dead. Why are you obsessed with a formula that never worked, that created this radical people in the other side? Why are you obsessed with that? So she says to a two-state solution, absolutely not. This is not surprising. I mean, this has been the position of Netanyahu, the Likud party,

certainly his extremist coalition partners for years. These are people who've been opposed to Oslo from the beginning of Oslo for literally decades. But to have it so out there brazenly stated no hedging in the open is extraordinary for a number of reasons. I mean, it blows up one of the central myths in American politics about what's unfolding in Israel, where it's all the problems are on the Palestinian side. There's no partner for peace there. Joe Biden has said his stated his key stated objective with regard to Israel and Palestine is ultimately to get to a two state solution. that you're supporting unconditionally and shipping arms to and whatever and pretending like this is on the table saying, absolutely not. Your key foreign policy priority is 100% off the table. We have zero interest in it. We will do whatever we can to block it. Yeah, I would know too. It's not just the Biden administration. This has been US policy

basically since 1967 or since the Oslo Accords especially, but also has always been a legitimate, at least political aim of the U.S. State Department. Even under the Trump administration, they never abandoned this, even though they might have done it in practice. So I mean, I think it's extraordinary, Crystal, because we don't hear it in English. We hear it in Hebrew. And I don't know why it's different, but it is just different whenever you have to hit Google Translate versus when you see somebody on Sky News who's a representative of that government. But I think it's – look, the Biden administration too has to grapple with this. You keep saying you want X.

They say they don't actually want that. So what are we doing here? What is the actual political end and how exactly do you come to that? Part of the reason why I think they want the Israelis to wrap up their campaign. But, I mean, that's not going to do anything. You could stop the military campaign tomorrow. You could even have a,-unquote ceasefire. The political end is the one that we've all been working towards supposedly for 50 years.

It's like, well, now what are we going to do? Well, the other thing is even if you take the governments out of it, take Hamas out of it, take the Netanyahu government out of it, and look at the polling of the populations, you actually have far more support for a two-state solution among Palestinians than you do among Israelis at this point. We talked to that pollster Dahlahlia Scheindlin, earlier in the week. I really recommend people go and listen to that. She was really, really insightful in terms of Israeli public opinion. She's a writer for Haaretz. She's a political scientist and a pollster. And it's been a long time since two-state solution has been a majority position in Israeli politics. And she said, you know, it hasn't dropped off that much during this current war, but it's nowhere near a majority. I believe she said support was somewhere around 30% for a two-state solution. So you actually have more sentiment.

And that, you know, that's why these politicians, that's why they get elected. The Netanyahu government doesn't just come out of nowhere, right? That's why they get elected, because there's some public support for the positions that they're taking. And, you know, the idea of, OK, we can just maintain the status quo forever. This was fairly popular, not just on the right, but sort of throughout Israeli politics for probably since the second intifada, I would say, if I had to pinpoint a time. But, you know, look at people who do this research and don't take my word for it on that one. But it's been a long time since the two state solution has really been a majority position in the Israeli public. It's certainly not now. So that's the other puncture to the fantasy that the Biden administration and every other American presidential administration has been peddling, that there's some ongoing

peace process that you've got, you know, the Israelis really invested in, oh, how can we get peace? And the Palestinians that are standing in the way, at best, it's a lot more complicated than that. 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. 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 Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant,

and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the same time, there's a lot of stuff going on with Hunter Biden. So yesterday, the House of Representatives officially has passed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden relating to Hunter Biden's business dealings. Here is the moment that that happened. On this vote, the yeas are 221 and the nays are 212. The resolution is adopted. That objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. That is an official impeachment inquiry for those who covered the two impeachments, which we did. Certainly the impeachment inquiry is the predecessor to a formal impeachment. It basically authorizes Congress, gives them subpoena power to look into and to investigate whatever they deem necessary as opposed to what's put forward to them in the resolution.

It also, though, came at the exact same time that Hunter Biden actually appeared publicly on Capitol Hill answering questions of where's Hunter with I am right here. He is offering to testify to Congress publicly about his business dealings, but refusing to comply with a subpoena to investigate, to be answered to investigators in private. Here's what Hunter had to say. But I'm also here today to correct how the MAGA right has portrayed me for their political purposes. For six years, I have been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine shouting, where's Hunter? Well, here's my answer. I am here. Let me state as clearly as I can,

my father was not financially involved in my business, not as a practicing lawyer, not as a board member of Burisma, not in my partnership with a Chinese private businessman, not in my investments at home nor abroad, and certainly not as an artist. By cherry-picking lines from a bank statement, manipulating texts I sent, editing the testimony of my friends and former business partners and misstating personal information that was stolen from me. There is no fairness or decency in what these Republicans are doing. I am here to testify at a public hearing today to answer any of the committee's legitimate questions. So, Crystal, there's a lot actually going on there. First of all, I believe that's the first time

he's ever acknowledged that the Biden laptop is real. Oh, really? Because he said it was stolen from me. Oh. First of all, it wasn't stolen. He was so high on drugs that he forgot that he left his laptop there. I thought it bore all the hallmarks

of Russian disinformation or whatever. Now, there's a lot going on. I do love how he has to list all of his shady things, like in my Chinese private equity firm, in my board membership of Burisma. Also on the art piece, it just so happened that, what, Democratic donors the same time that the House Republicans are now likely to hold Biden in contempt the way that the Democrats did for Steve Bannon when he refused to comply with the subpoena. Here is James Comer and Jim Jordan immediately responding to Hunter's statements. Here's what they had to say on Capitol Hill immediately after. Shoot a lawful subpoena to the president's son that we expect him to come in and be deposed. This is a normal process in an investigation. This has been a serious, credible, transparent investigation from day one.

We've published four bank memorandums. We've had countless press conferences. This is an investigation about public corruption at the highest level. We have accumulated mountains of evidence that's concerning to an overwhelming majority of Americans. We have accumulated mountains of evidence that's concerning to an overwhelming majority of Americans. We have specific questions in there, and I think we're going to allow you in there to see the piles and piles of documents, of bank statements, of emails, of text messages that we've worked very hard on in this committee over the last eight or nine months. Finally, I would say this. Mr. Biden's counsel

and the White House have both argued that the reason he couldn't come for a deposition was because there wasn't a formal vote for an impeachment inquiry. Well, that's going to happen in a few hours. We think it's going to pass. We think the House of Representatives will go on record with a power that solely resides in the House to say we are in an official impeachment inquiry phase of our oversight. And when that happens, we'll see what their excuse is then. They should have been here today, but once we take that vote, we expect him to come in for his interview, for his deposition. And frankly, we'll also, I think, look at contempt proceedings as we move forward.

So, Crystal, so the beef around public versus private, I know it sounds nebulous, but from what I understand and what I've looked into, the public proceeding will not be able to last as long in the way that the private ones go. So the private ones, as we saw with Devin Archer and others, not only are you testifying under oath, but you're not just testifying to members of Congress. You're testifying as well to investigators, people who are deputized lawyers who work for the House of Representatives, for the committee. So it's more of like a police proceeding than you would think of like a public hearing. And in that, they would go probably nine, 10 hours in some cases, and they'd be like, what about this payment? What about this payment? All this under oath. And if you lie, of course, you're going to be violating it and you'd be held in contempt and charged with that. So that is the beef over that. Now, in terms of what Comer and Jordan are looking into and what they're

going with, the latest report that I have seen that looks like the most direct thing that should be looked at was this from just last week. Hunter Biden's company made direct payments to Joe Biden. These involved the earnings on Hunter Biden's company that were then made directly to President Biden. Now, this is being billed by the Biden team as Hunter having paid him back for, I think it's cars, personal loans, etc. It's not necessarily legal, but I'm not sure yet if the paperwork involves there. Then it does, though, of course, raise the question of like, well, what are you doing it for? I actually think the sketchiest thing and that you weren't there whenever I covered this was the main thing that the big

red flag from Hunter spending over 2017 to 2020, whenever he was on drugs and all that was not all of the payments to hookers and all that. Cause that was actually itemized. It was the 1.7. Yeah. I was the one to say, what is the difference between hookers and adult entertainment? I'm still trying to figure that out because that's like 600 grand whenever you combine that. But that's a whole other conversation. It's the $1.7 million in ATM withdrawals of cash. Cash. And so that's actually the one where there's most area for inquiry of corruption and who are you paying to.

As I said at the time, presumably a large chunk of that went to drug dealers. I do find it difficult to believe that he was able to even consume and still be alive $1.7 million worth of drugs because that's a hell of a- He's an exceptional guy. Maybe. I mean, he is exceptional in a lot of ways. Anyway, I'm curious what you think about all this. I mean, it's such a mess because, listen, obviously I want public officials to be investigated for corruption. I want them officials to be investigated for corruption.

I want them to be held accountable for corruption. I want there to be a much more stringent standard of corruption than what the Supreme Court, you know, even counts as corruption at this point. I don't think there's any doubt that Hunter was trading on the Biden name and his dad's access to power and insinuating to these various shady characters he's doing business with that he could get him X or Y or Z. I mean, why else do you put Hunter Biden on boards and pay him, you know, invest in his funds, et cetera, et cetera? Why else do you buy his artwork? I don't think there's like to me, there's no question that there's a very high level of shadiness. But Republicans have been investigating this for a year now and they really haven't come up with much. So the other piece of this, you know, on the other piece of this,

you know, on the public versus private testimony, I understand their perspective that you lay down of like, no, we want to go through this other process that's behind closed doors. So it's not like a circus and theater, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're Hunter Biden, you're also thinking, number one, there was, you know, Steve Bannon and other Trump-related people who refused to testify when they were subpoenaed. So the precedent has been set. And number two, if you do it behind closed doors, then they can, and we've seen this before, including with Devin Archer, selectively leak the parts that may be out of context, may be misleading, that they feel are the most damning. Whereas he apparently feels some level of confidence that he's able to testify publicly that it would come out at least okay for him. And it's not a good look for Republicans that they're afraid of that.

It's like, all right, this guy's here. He wants to testify. Like, what are you afraid of? If you won't do it behind closed doors, why not take the next best thing? With regard to the impeachment investigation, you know, I sort of feel similarly. Like, first of all, unfortunately, I feel like no one really even cares about these impeachment inquiries anymore. This is more a stop to a base than any sort of a legitimate fact-finding mission. This is impeachment inquiries are now just sort of like a standard issue part of politics. And some of the haziness of what this impeachment inquiry is even really about was laid out when one Republican was asking

another, like, what are actually the high crimes and misdemeanors that we're looking into? And they couldn't just succinctly define it. Yeah. So I don't know. To me at this point, this is like the least of Joe Biden's worries. And I think Republicans are more performing for their base to show like, no, we're not a mess. No, we're not a train wreck. We're actually getting things done here. Then they are making any, you know, real like attempts at fighting corruption or even appealing to a broader political base than their constituents. It's definitely an intra-GOP issue. It's also a thing of retribution. They did it twice to Trump. You know, they did it. They had multiple, you know, they leaked all the, remember how many times Adam Schiff leaked, you know, Mueller investigation testimony and all that.

So they're like, screw them. We're going to do the exact same thing back. I do agree. I think it's going to be normalized. I think it is now basically every president is going to have some sort of impeachment inquiry against him. I am not necessarily against it for corruption purposes, especially I'm really enjoying getting all the visibility

into the first family's finances. You're like, oh, that's very interesting. We have this going on. The president's brother is being called to testify. The more that we normalize shame against trading and openness, I actually think it's a net benefit to all of that. So I would like to see Hunter Biden testify in some sort, either publicly or privately. I absolutely, I mean, the tax investigation was incredibly eye-opening. I'm really glad that the judge stepped in and was like, this is too sweetheart of a deal, because the public actually does deserve to know about all this cash that is being here, about the fact that Burisma changed his payroll and cut it in half after Trump was elected, and Biden no longer had control of the Ukraine portfolio. It's like the most naked thing

that you can see in all of his financial records. So I think all of that should be normalized. In terms of this investigation, all that, obviously, they don't have a, quote, smoking gun yet. The payments that they directly have been able to prove so far are either not papered over properly, they haven't been able to show, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to continue to investigate it now, per se. I don't think politically, politically, it depends. There is some polling to indicate that if people had been able to get more information about the quote-unquote Hunter Biden laptop, that then they would have been able to have, they would have made a different choice. I'm not sure how true that actually is, but you

never know if they do stumble across something or any of that. It becomes a political scandal for the White House. You could see a scenario where that would have some impact on the election. I don't think it'll be number one, especially because Trump is the number two person that other people are going to be weighing up against. But you don't know. Sure. And it's certainly possible that they come up with, you know, that they're able to find now that they have these other tools at their disposal, something that's more of a direct link. far. Anybody outside of the Republican base is just sort of like dismissing this as a, you know, Republican witch hunt and not paying too close attention to, you know, the details here of exactly what's going on. So at this, who knows what could develop in the future? You never know. But as of today, as I said, I think this is like the least of Joe Biden's worries.

Well, let's move on to the next part here. This is the biggest problem for a lot of people. Housing. Every time we cover it, we see a tremendous response and we want to continue on that beat. There's a fascinating and really honestly troubling thing happening as housing becomes more and more unaffordable. We've talked about in the past private equity giants coming in and buying single family homes. But the real end state for this are company towns.

So you would have large industrial employers just like Henry Ford did and they had what company, I forget what it's called, Scrip or something like that, that they allowed people to trade inside of the, inside Ford Village you can have Ford bucks that you can trade different things from. Somehow none of it ever ends up into actual money, into your bank account. Well, the new development of this appears to be Google and other big tech companies that are building new housing that they would then own and make it available for their employees. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. This is from Business Insider. It says, meet your new landlord, Google. And what they lay out here is a huge proposed development in Mountain View, California, one of the most expensive places in the entire country.

There are 7,000 new homes, three distinct neighborhoods, 300 square feet of retail and community space. None of it bears the name Google. But what they say is that these corporations are using their considerable sway in resources to build modern company towns, mini cities that will feature all the trappings of traditional civic life, housing, shops, and public spaces. The projects won't have corporate logos on the buildings. Many of the unions will be technically available to the general public, not just employees, but in the grand scheme of real estate, they are distinct. After running up against the housing

shortages, companies like Google, Meta, and Disney are now taking matters into their own hands, and they will create places that have no names even technically attached to them. Middlefield Park, Willow Village. They could might as well be, though, called Zucktown or Google City. So we have some of the quotes here. We can put this one up the screen. For example, Google's North Bayshore project, the new community will replace a suburban office park with a sprawling new neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley. Let's go to the next one. They say that the plan calls, as I said, for 7,000 new homes across a mix of income levels, as well as parks, restaurants, shops, and more than 3 million square feet of office space on 153 acres.

Let's go to the Zuckerberg one now, please. You can see here from what they quote about Facebook, last year, Menlo Park, which is where Facebook is headquartered, voted in favor of a plan for a Facebook 59-acre project known affectionately or cynically as Zucktown. It promises 1,700 homes as well as office, hotel, and retail. Now, we have one included with Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Corporation. They say that Disney World, so this is in Florida, plans to break ground next year on 1,400 affordable housing units

across 80 acres, a few miles from its flagship theme in Florida, the company said in the spring. And the reason that they would be doing it is specifically for its employees and temporary housing. So Crystal, as you can see from what's happening here, we've got Walt Disney, we've got Zuckerberg, we've got Google, all these people that are moving in. And it's actually really, I think it's terrible for a variety of reasons. One is that it makes it so that the employees are totally reliant on the company. This was the problem with the original company towns. So let's say you're working at Google and you got a new job somewhere else. Now you're not just giving up your job,

you're giving up your house, you're giving up all this other stuff. It can become a little bit of a golden prison. But that's more for white collar employees. It also makes it so that even more of available commercial, or sorry, available residential real estate is getting zoned to big Fortune 500 companies that are going to use it then to their own ends and not allow people to come pick and choose as they may for what they would privately be able to either lease and or own. So if this is the available housing stock and you're going to shrink it to what they can own, it's not good. And it has a bad track record history-wise. It does have a bad track record. And there's a reason for that. I mean, it really is like everything old is new again. My dad and his side of the family, they're from West Virginia, so I have a lot of, and his dad was a coal miner, so I have a lot of familiarity with like the West

Virginia mining company towns. And same thing, they sort of framed it as this like humanitarian, like, you know, virtue signaling of, oh, we're going to build all this housing, and then workers can live so close to their job. And, you know, we're going to have great school system, et cetera, et cetera. But just think about from your perspective, you want to have your boss in charge of also like where you live and be paying rent to that. Let's say you have a problem with the house because we're not talking about you owning your home. They own it. You're paying rent to them. Let's say you have a problem with the housing. Let's say they, you know, aren't fixing the plumbing or some other issue, which happens all the time in a, you know, landlord-rentee situation. Are you going to feel confident, you know, raising a fuss about that? So the real goal here for these companies is not altruistic.

They're wrapping it in, oh, there's an affordable housing crisis, and some of these units are going to be for people who's below median income, et cetera, et cetera. The real goal is to have more control over their working population and to get butts back in seats in the office after the remote work revolution and to hopefully turn a buck while they're doing it as well. So it's very troubling. It's very dystopian. And it fits also with the trends of, you know, we've talked about the way that permanent capital has gotten in the game of buying up all these single family homes. They're making it more and more impossible for people to be able to have their own home, own their own home, have control over their own lives, et cetera. So think about, okay, for those of you who live in neighborhoods that have HOAs and have

homeowners association, like is Google going to now be involved in like the running of your homeowners association? Those things are a nightmare to begin with without getting your boss involved in it as well. Because that's what happened in the company towns of yore. They would run the schools. They would stack the local political officials so that all of the policies that passed were beneficial to them. And it ended up being really a sort of

catastrophe for workers and for worker autonomy in particular. The other thing that of course comes to my mind here is, let's say there's a union drive, you know, and you're dependent for your housing on your boss, not just your job. It's already scary enough to engage in a union drive and to push for a union when it's, quote unquote, just your job at risk. Now your housing is at risk, too. Very, very dystopian potential scenarios that are quite obvious and apparent to see how it could fold out. It also shows you how these municipalities become weights. So actually, back in the day, there was a time when the governments would even pay their employees not in dollars, they would pay them in script because of the towns themselves. They ended up having to outlaw that during the Great Depression because

governments were printing script and it didn't end up pegging or have any monetary value. But we had to learn a lot of those lessons from the 1880s all the way up till the 1930s when this became really popular because of the amount of control and that when those companies went bust, then the whole thing just gets totally wiped out. What they even point out here is that we have a modern day version of this where because everybody's bidding for HQ2 for Google and all these municipalities really want this, they're giving them tremendous amount of tax breaks and including they're relying on them to fund the housing that's

accessible to them. But this creates all kinds of skewed tax incentives where you're totally reliant on the major employer to do everything for you. And then again, what if they change their decision? What if a city down the road is willing to offer them something? Then things could change. There's a lot of dangers, I think, that continue to go down this road. Are you going to give preference in terms of hiring to people who say they want to live in your neighborhoods? Are you going to prefer them over someone who wants to live outside, know their own home or whatever? So the fact that you have such a disastrous housing landscape, especially in a lot of California cities, but in all kinds of places across the country,

it creates this predatory opportunity for these companies to posture like they're doing something that's altruistic for the community, altruistic for their employees, when really all they're seeking is more money and more control. Yeah. 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. 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 Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those

who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Next part here, UFOs. Been waiting to give an update on this one. Now, the top line is we brought everybody the news about the UFO transparency amendment. It was included by the Senate, specifically Senator Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds. It was a bipartisan bill. It actually passed the Senate with like 87 votes. Massive support. It ended up, unfortunately, being gutted in the House of Representatives, specifically by two individuals, Mike Rogers and Turner. These two individuals were very close ties to the intelligence community, basically working at the behest of the Pentagon and the CIA to kill any transparency efforts,

which would have required both the setting up commissions, would have required mandatory disclosure. A lot of people in the UFO community are actually very upset about this. And they're also now highlighting a very interesting speech, which was given by Senator Schumer yesterday upon the passage of the NDAA, where he protested against the House of Representatives stripping out these transparency blocks and specifically said, based upon presumably what he knows, he gets the highest level of intelligence briefing, of a genuine cover-up that's taking place here. Here's what Senator Schumer now had to say. Closure Act that he and I co-sponsored and portions of which we will pass in the NDAA. I say to my friend that unidentified unanimous phenomena are of immense interest and curiosity to the American people. But with that curiosity comes the

risk for confusion, disinformation, and mistrust, especially if the government isn't prepared to be transparent. The United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades, but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and additionally, it breeds mistrust. We've also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which if true, is a violation of the laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch. A lot of important things there. Wow, that's pretty wild. It is, and it's like these things just happen and they float into the ether and everybody thinks it's too wacky so they don't want to cover it.

I mean, this is a Senate majority leader. Now, look, politicians lie all the time. But one of the reasons why I thought the legislation was so important is it doesn't rely on individual testimony of a whistleblower, of a legislator, of I saw this, my uncle saw that, or any of that. It was straight up like, look, if you have info, you have to legally disclose it. That's it. It's very simple. And I think it's very telling that they ended up covering it up. Now, Dave Grush, the initial UFO whistleblower, kind of sparked a lot of this, gave some of his reaction on NewsNation immediately after. Here's what he had to say. What we're witnessing right now is, quite frankly, the greatest legislative failure in American history.

You know, you had a very strong amendment for government transparency on this issue, whether you believe my allegations or not. We need to advocate for the executive branch, you know, the office of the president through executive action to instate such a body to advise him on the best course of action now that, you know, Congress has failed to legislate appropriately. Yeah, well, I would hope to see that. I'm not going to hold my breath. And I think that's the unfortunate part of it is that there's no statutory things that are in place. One of the reasons why the JFK Records Assassination Act was so important was because it let everybody see in the open, every time they push declassification,

we all know what's happening here. But the fact was is that previously, they could just pretend they moved on. Ah, we already had the Warren Commission. Just got rid of the Warren Commission. And then they opened it up, and then they still have parts of it declassified. Why? Everybody involved is dead.

Or you just don't want us to know truly what happened. I think the fact that now we have to rely on presidents. I mean, if you have to rely on the capricious political leanings of the executive branch, you're already screwed. You're screwed. So I will say the only hopeful note that I've been told is that this, is that there were a lot of people who were inside the government who were really reliant on this legislation. They want to do the right thing. They're like, I want to go through the official channels. This isn't this. But if Congress is going to engage in a full-blown cover-up, you know, at the behest, then they're going to have to come out and quote-unquote unauthorized,

uncontrolled type disclosure. So it's possible actually we'll see even more than we might have through a legal process. But you have to always remember a lot of these people are terrified of being prosecuted and thrown in jail for the rest of their life or worse, you know, which is we've seen some allegations. So curious what you think, Crystal. Yeah, I think your analogy to the JFK Records Act is really important because it's not like that solved the problem, but it gave people a tool so that you could sue and say, hey, this is what you're required to do under law. You're not meeting your obligations. And so we're going to take you to court. And also it exposed the lack of transparency because you could see the shortfall between what they were supposed to do and what they were actually doing.

So I think that's a very analogous situation here. And it also reminds me similarly of the Stock Act, which requires disclosure of stock trades. And it's not that that solved corruption in government, but again, it gave good government activists and grassroots activists and the public a tool where you could see at least some of what's going on and expose it. You could also see the gaps between what people are supposed to disclose and what they are actually disclosing and how often they're failing to disclose what they're required to under that regulation. So to me, it sort of fits in a similar category here. I want to know more from you, Sagar, about what you made of Schumer's comments, because to me, that was pretty extraordinary to have Chuck Schumer.

Like I can't imagine he would just make accusations like that willy-nilly. Has he been a – like which side of this has he been on? Has he been a real transparency advocate or has he been kind of in the middle or what's the deal? Chuck is a recent convert. Okay. He kind of came out of nowhere. We're not really sure why, but we'll take it. Look, I have no idea.

He's a member of came out of nowhere. We're not really sure why, but we'll take it. Look, I have no idea. He's a member of the Gang of Eight. The Gang of Eight are the people who are supposedly the members of Congress who get the most insight to the US intelligence community. Although you can't necessarily rely on that. If I had to guess, maybe he had somebody who came to him. He was moved very much by Dave Grush or some other whistleblowers, others who had spoken to him. This actually happens a lot.

You'll have people who are in the government. They'll go to a member of Congress because members of Congress also have security clearance. They're like, here's what I know, and here's what's happening inside the government. And then the Congress will come. This is kind of like the church committee, many other transparency efforts. They will come through because they have clearance, and then they will enforce a provision in the government, which will require then disclosure. But I mean, the exact statement from Schumer is that there is a actual cover-up. He says, for the government to obtain any recovered UAP material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people. That's a direct quote from Senator Rounds,

an Idaho senator, a Republican here, who is working with Senator Schumer. I mean, they are alleging, I mean, effectively saying alleging, I mean, effectively saying that they have knowledge of something. Same too with Grush. If you look a little bit more and you dig into some of the things that he's talked about, he's now saying he's got some firsthand knowledge of things that happened. But, and I get it, you know, everybody who's watching this is frustrated because they're like, oh, it's always a guy, heard from a guy. And I agree. I don't want to rely on Dave Grush. I don't want to rely on Chuck Schumer. I don't want to rely on Mike Rounds or any of these other people that have come out because you can't prove any of that. I want something you can see in my hands,

like documents. That's why some of the, all the stuff from the past to me, all these government records about Roswell, about Blue Book, about the coverups and the history. And I've talked about all that. That's so compelling to me because these are the people who were actually involved in the program who lied about Roswell, then came out, and then wrote down classified records, all that, that didn't come out for decades later. And you read this and you can't even believe some of what you're saying. Most of it we've now moved past. So for the Disclosure Act, unfortunately, I was even led to believe by a lot of people involved. They said they thought they really were going to get past it. But

it really does seem that the two individuals here, Turner and Rogers, just, it was an absolute non-starter. They were like, this is going, this was tier one top priority. And then you got to ask yourself, why? Imagine the JFK thing. If a member of Congress who had such big ties to CIA and Pentagon just blocked the JFK, or somebody like Arlen Specter, if anybody remembers that was, he was a Senator from Pennsylvania. He was on the Warren Commission and he came up with the magic bullet theory. Imagine if at the time that he was lobbying hard openly in the public against JFK assassination. We all know what's happening there. We know why.

And yet for somehow with this, the press, everybody just moves past it. It's like me and a bunch of other guys on Twitter. I don't understand it. I think everybody just thinks it's wacky and they think it's, you know, they don't want to be tainted by looking like a kook. But this is the Senate majority leader. This is not, you know, this isn't just Daily Mail articles and things like that are happening. Well, and the other dynamic that could be playing out here is, you know, members of Congress can really get in their feelings when they when there's like a turf war and an ego battle, too. Like if they feel like they're being lied to and like, you know, members of the executive branch are not being upfront with them. That can create a certain dynamic there.

But also, so it's Turner and Rogers who are the, so isn't Turner the guy who like worked in the defense industry and takes like tons of like aerospace and defense? Yes, he's one of the top aerospace defense contractor, like in terms of donations. It's out in the open. And wasn't Rogers, wasn't he like FBI? Exactly.

This is what I'm saying. Just checking that I have the right people in my head. Look, Rush did an interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday. I recommend you look at it. You know, he continues to speak out. And props to the guy. I'm trying to get him here on the show as well. I'd like to talk to him a little bit.

But in general, what you continue to, it's everything you have now is out in the open. So it's up to you. And also it's up to a lot of us. Like we got close this time around. Maybe we can do it next time. But it's going to do, it's going to take a long time, I think. This is evidence of just how big of an uphill battle that people face. Just again, to get official transparency.

I don't know why it should be so difficult, but maybe it tells us something. So we've got a little viral clip we wanted to share with you guys. Amidst all the concern nationwide about harassment and anti-Semitism and hate speech on campus, this video went viral of a woman. We don't see her on camera and she decided to remain anonymous, apparently wearing the Kafia scarf, which is associated with Palestinian cause, walking around Cambridge near Harvard and getting harassed and stalked by this woman. I'll go ahead and play it for you. And on the other side, I'll reveal who this woman turns out to be. Take a look.

Between you and people who wanted to murder you. Hi, camera. Thank you for walking through neighborhoods and making families feel unsafe with your tourist scarf. Palestinians felt pretty unsafe when Israelis occupied their country, you know. I'm glad you're so proud of the slaughtering of civilians. I'm not. So she's alleging she's making people feel unsafe by wearing a scarf. Okay.

Turns out this woman's name is Eve Gerber, and she is the wife of former Obama administration official and still very prominent economist who works at Harvard, Jason Furman. He's a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. Very much reminiscent of our friend Stuart. Yeah. Jason Furman literally might be, aside from Thomas Friedman, the most preeminent economist in this country. I'm not kidding. It's true. Also, well, and probably because he gets in these, like, Twitter battles and goes on podcast.

He's very visible. Very known and very visible and obviously was an Obama official. And now his wife is out there. The woman who is wearing the scarf, according to her, Eve Gerber stopped her car, pulled over to get out and harass her and accuse her of wearing a quote-unquote terrorist scarf and making people feel unsafe.

I mean, it's insane on a lot of levels. I also have to comment on the fact that there are like wild turkeys or something. Yeah, we're wondering about that. I don't know what's going on with that. We're like, why are there wild turkeys in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Yeah. Anyway, we'll put that part to the side. But, you know, it really shines a light on some of the claims of people feeling unsafe and the crackdowns on campus on what I

would describe as crackdowns on free speech based on people like her saying that a literal scarf is making her feel unsafe. This is insane. And it's like outrageous harassment that she's stalking this girl and accusing her of supporting terrorism because of a scarf that she's wearing. Yeah, it's not. I mean, that's like the biggest Karen energy I've ever seen. It's just ridiculous, obviously. And yeah, I mean, the double standard here in terms of who, imagine if the person was wearing a yarmulke and they were walking through Dearborn, Michigan. Thank you. You think that was going to go viral?

And someone stalking them and accusing them of where, yeah, it would be, I mean, that would be front page news. Every politician in America would be getting asked about it. And who is really being made unsafe here? The person who stops her car and like follows this woman because she doesn't like her scarf or the student who was being stalked by this total psycho. It's just so, it's so crazy to me that somebody who is so rich and so privileged would be driving through their neighborhood and pull their car over just to engage in an altercation with their neighbor who did nothing to them, who's walking through their neighborhood. Yeah. Like you said, too with the scarf. I assume that this lady knows what that scarf means.

A lot of people don't even know what the scarf is. You know, when I lived in the Middle East, everybody had that scarf. I even had one. We thought it was cool. People even wore it as part of their thobe or whatever. And it was one of those where it wasn't even a statement on Palestine. It was just a scarf. It was not even a political statement. What if she had pulled over or said something to somebody who wasn't even doing it? And yet,

even if they were, I see people who walk around Washington, anywhere in this country, usually people wearing MAGA shirts whenever they get on a plane. What are you going to say something to them? Or if somebody who's wearing like a BLM shirt whenever I'm walking my dog, same thing. Let people live. Why do you care? It makes no, it literally has zero impact on your life. And that, look, if you are actively threatening one of your neighbors, this is what, that's a very different conversation. But you're just walking down the street and somebody yells at you. Yeah. That reminds, the only time I've ever experienced something like that is when I wasn't wearing a mask in the middle of, outside, by the way, and I was on the phone. Yeah. And somebody across the street yelled at me. Yeah. By the way, listen, I want to be clear, like, this conversation about anti-Semitism rising,

like, I have seen genuine incidents of anti-Semitism, you know, here and around the world. I do not doubt for a second that there is an increase in anti-Semitism for a variety of reasons. One of them is that groups like the ADL insist on acquitting every Jewish person in the entire world with a state that is at best pushing for an ethnic cleansing and at worst on its way to a genocide. That could make Jews unsafe and spike anti-Semitism. Of course, it's on the bigots themselves for their actions and for the hatred that they hold. But when you see things like this, it also calls into question, to say the very least, you know, the ADL puts out some report that's like, oh, anti-Semitic incidents have increased by 300%. Well, is this the kind of thing that you would classify as a quote-unquote anti-Semitic incident? Someone wearing a keffiyeh scarf or someone protesting at a rally and saying a chant that they don't like? Is that classified

as a quote-unquote anti-Semitic incident? Because apparently this woman wearing the wrong scarf is making Eve Gerber feel that she and others in the neighborhood are unsafe. Well, you're scratching the surface here, Crystal. I've been talking about this for a long time. I basically, and this will be controversial, I don't care, I don't believe most quote-unquote hate statistics. Anytime somebody's like, oh, it was a hate crime, I'm like, yeah, what was it? And the reason why is because I don't trust these classification regimes. The FBI, they compile these statistics. They do it based upon local crime stats and all these other – but they don't verify the actual criteria.

For the reason why, for example, I've talked about this before, mass shooting. Well, Obama dropped the mass shooting definition from four to three. Okay, so now there's more mass shootings. Well, are there really more mass shootings? And then what is so-called mass shooting? It turns out a huge bulk of people where three people die, get shot or more are mass suicide, tragic and gang violence. Are those mass shootings in the same way that a school shooting is?

So it's, you know, you look at this, same with a lot of these hate speech. Well, what do they say? They say the N word. Okay, that's hate speech. Did they say get out of here? It's like, well, what was the context? And I know that this can be controversial, but the reason why I'm so, I reject so much of this is I watched all of this come to fore in the campus regime and kind of then eventually make its

way to the government where, like we said, you know, the hate incident would be somebody like Bubba from NASCAR who says that there's a noose on a tree and ignites like a national incident. And it turns out that that didn't actually happen at all. I've watched too many of these that might now smile at rule. And maybe this is callous is my default is, I don't believe you.

I don't, you have to prove evidence because we've just seen too many of these used for disgusting ends. I would apply the same thing to antisemitism. It's like, well, what are we talking about here? Like what's real? Where I went to school, GW, famous incident. There was a girl who claimed that people were drawing swastikas on her dorm room, or maybe around it, on her whiteboard or something like that. And this, everybody freaked out. GW is a very large Jewish population. So they installed cameras secretly. It turned out that the girl

was drawing the swastikas herself. It's like sick. It's like you're sick in the head. It's like you're trying to ignite hatred. But there's a lot of that. Let's be real in terms of attention seeking, in terms of, you know, being at the center of attention and trying to push political narratives. So I would I would have everybody to urge extreme caution every time you see one of these things. Just look for the details, the incidents. The Smollett rule has never failed me. And it disgusts me, too, because it means when you use the term for things that are not anti-Semitic, like wearing a scarf, for example, then you make the term meaningless. And so when there are genuine incidents, you know, there was a menorah that was apparently a display that was smashed. Now we don't know who did it and whatever,

but when there are genuine incidents, then you've cheapened the language surrounding it. Right. And you know, that's bad for everyone. So the last thing that I'll say about this, this video, and then we'll get to, you know, another one of these sort of like disputed incidents that I felt like we needed to cover because we covered the original video. And so anyway, we'll get into that in a minute. But, you know, this also comes after those three men of Palestinian origin were shot students, two of whom were wearing the Kafia scarf. Now, we still don't know, you know, the details of why they were targeted, but they were walking down the street in Vermont, speaking a combination of Arabic and English,

two of them wearing the scarf, and then out of nowhere, this dude comes and shoots them. So in any case, there seems to be this scarf inciting a lot of passions that are insane. It is a political statement. I don't think that there's anything wrong

with making a political statement. With your attire, people should not be stalked. They certainly shouldn't be shot I don't think that there's anything wrong with making a political statement with your attire. People should not be stalked. They certainly shouldn't be shot for daring to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. All right. So this other piece, you know, I feel sort of complicated about covering this, but let me just we'll just get into it. Early on, right after October 7th, there were all these protests. And we covered here how there was just like this outright genocidal language that seemed to be coming from all directions. I think we covered it on October 10.

And one of the most prominent examples that we covered and many other news outlets covered was this protest in Australia, where among other anti-Semitic chants, some of the protesters were allegedly chanting, gas the Jews. Horrific and noteworthy because in the Australian context, that could actually meet the criminal threshold for threatening or inciting violence. Whereas the other anti-Semitic chants, which have been more confirmed than that one that were being chanted, would not meet that threshold of inciting violence. So it becomes a huge story here. And certainly in Australia, there was a massive police investigation that was launched. And so far, nothing has come out of that police investigation. There's an independent Australian outlet. And this is why I was like, not sure whether to cover this story or not, but I felt like we should since we covered the original video.

I don't know anything about this outlet. I did look it up. They seem activist, but somewhat legit. They've been around from since 1999. Anyway, they are claiming that they have sourced, and we can put this up on the screen, who are giving them information about that investigation going on into this chant. There has not been any other video that has emerged with people chanting that specific thing. They say nobody can verify it. The original video was released from this right-wing Jewish group called the Australian Jewish Association. They have refused to provide the original video. There was an analysis that was performed by verification experts that

found a number of signs that suggest the audio was edited. This review, you know, that this outlet, Crikey, was able to see noted that the audio is out of sync with the video in places. A section of the audio was repeated during a clip. Some audio was repeated while different clips were being shown. These suggest that additional editing was done beyond splicing different video clips together. So in any case, at the best you can say, this video has been sort of called into question. Now, the other anti-Semitic, the F the Jews chants, which are also absolutely horrific, are more confirmed. So you may say like, well, why are you parsing this? What does it matter? There were anti-Semitic chants. And I would just say for two reasons. Number one, we showed the video. And so I feel like it's important to correct the record if it

needs to be corrected. Number two, it's another illustration of how even things which are widely disseminated by mass media outlets can be called into question. And number three, I do think the details matter. And we've seen this in some of the alleged atrocities, which have now been debunked from October 7th. Like October 7th was horrific enough as it was. You didn't need to add all of these things, which have now been debunked, like the beheaded babies and the babies in the oven and the children that were tied together that Netanyahu said were all burned together. Those things didn't happen. Other horrific atrocities did occur. So in any case, that's why I felt like it was important to cover this clarification about this video and the questions that have been raised about its veracity.

Well, the reason why it's important is because it set off a firestorm. I think rightfully if we thought it was real. And now it turns out it may not be real. I think that's always important, especially here for us to correct it and to look at it. And it was used as justification for our why, for, you know, similar rhetoric, I think, on a lot of the Israeli side. So look, and by the way, if anybody wants to see if any of that's faked, let me know. I'll be happy to talk about it here. But I think it's important to look and to make sure that things are real.

We've had a number of incidents already of a lot of fake news that spread everywhere with a lot of these allegations that were used specifically to hype people up. And just like Iraq, just like post 9-11 and all that, a lot of it falls apart, but the actions at the time remain the same. Anthrax, that's a whole other one. A lot of these things were used for a very specific purpose. It's why, again, I am so deeply dubious of almost anything that seems unbelievable, because sometimes it is unbelievable. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets.

Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez.

I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor

going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Tiger, what are you looking at? Well, President Zelensky arrived in Washington Tuesday with a single message, give us $61 billion in military aid or you are the friend of Putin. He was aided in this message by President Biden and Democrats who implored Republicans to drop their demand for border security in exchange for the aid's passage. He was also granted a major assist

by the U.S. intelligence community, who leaked rosy prospects for Ukraine to the American press. The press predictably lapped it up and breathlessly reported the following. Russia has lost nearly 90% of its pre-war army to death or injury, totaling some 315,000 losses of the initial 360,000 that stood in the army before the February 2022 invasion. Additionally, they assess that Russia has lost two-thirds of its existing tank force and some 2,200 tanks out of existing 3,500. By any metric, this is humiliating. Russia, before the invasion, was considered a world-class military. And while it was not on par with forces from the US or the UK, for example, the idea that they would have trouble conquering Ukraine entirely was not a question.

But then what the intelligence assessments and the media is not telling you is what does Russia look like today? First and foremost, that must be understood, is this basic fact. Russia is not a Western country. In a normal Western country, when you lose 300,000 guys, you have democratic revolt. In Russia, the elite genuinely does not care, and the population also doesn't seem to care much. In fact, the most recent independent polling out of Russia tells us 75% of the population supports the war in Ukraine. Bizarrely, the number of death pensions now being

paid to widows has actually made the war more popular in the poorest regions. Why? Because the death benefits more than many of these impoverished people would ever earn in a normal economy. For many, fighting and dying in Ukraine is now a very logical economic choice. Furthermore, Russia has now turned to its eternal strength, its vast population and economic resources to plug the hole. Just days ago, Putin ordered the armed forces to expand to a total of 1.32 million active troops, four times what was the start of the invasion for Ukraine.

There have been no widespread draft riots now in months, so that appears to have solved their manpower issues. And let's turn to the tank production. Again, it's genuinely embarrassing to lose that many tanks. But what they fail to tell you is that Russia went from a country that in 2020 produced only 30 tanks to one that this year has delivered 2,200, the exact number that they lost since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. Furthermore, they have now dedicated 30% of their entire spending to just defense. War production has ramped up to levels where they outpaced nearly all of NATO in artillery production, and they have achieved a 3% unemployment rate because so many are now implored in the war effort. War spending alone is not only keeping the economy

afloat, it's actually making many Russians better off on the aggregate than they were before. There's actually a good argument to be made. Russia is stronger today than they were before the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, they lost 300,000 men. That only matters if you care about human life. They don't. They've tripled the size of their armed forces. They've tested which tactics work and don't. On the battlefield, they've hardened their supply chain to produce more arms than ever before. With nothing the West can do about it. As for oil, they are selling it at high prices to nations who don't agree with the Western boycott and will continue to do so. So that's Russia.

Let's think about Ukraine, which is currently asking for $61 billion. In his bid for more money, Zelensky actually was forced to admit things are far more dire than appearances sake. In one of his meetings with senators, he said Ukraine is now considering opening the draft to all men over the age of 40. This comes after Ukraine has already confirmed the average age of its current military is 43 years old, reminding me of the Army of Northern Virginia

and its last legs, or Hitler's Volkssturm policy, where teenagers and old men were drafted in the last defense of the German homeland. Ukraine is at a point where its manpower problems are far worse, probably, than any military capability problems they have, especially so when it's the only answer to the question of what is your plan to win. If it's based on having 50-year-old men run into a trench for another year at the chance of a few square miles of territory before a peace negotiation is launched, what are we doing here? The answer is simple. Our policy towards Ukraine has been nothing short of a disaster. Russia is militarily stronger. Ukraine appears on the brink of literal societal collapse

if this continues for another year. NATO is actually weaker than it was before the invasion. Two years into the war, France now has the number of heavy artillery pieces that Russia loses every month. Germany has enough ammo to last two days of war. The last in the UK is now considering taking out museum tanks and giving them to Ukraine because they cannot produce enough.

The theory behind US support was to strengthen NATO. In reality, it has been to cover for them so they don't have to take care of their own backyard. Every single metric, the policy has failed. If the West does not wise up here, there will not be a Ukraine to seek a peace deal, because Russia will just achieve outright total military victory. Billions of dollars are already been wasted. Hundreds of thousands are dead. This is what America has to show for it. Just the latest in a string of strategic defeats since Vietnam. It is obviously time to try something very, very different.

How crazy is that? The museum piece angle. And also on the European- And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We've got the RFK Jr. interview later on.

We'll post for our premium subscribers later today, and then it will be available widely for everybody tomorrow. Stay tuned. Become a premium member if you can, and we will see you all later. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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. 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 Podcasts, 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. I'm also the girl behind Boy 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.