Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/18/24: Trump Says RFK Not Radical, Bibi Parades In Syria, NYT Hoax, Shock CEO Assassination Poll, Ukraine Moscow Assassination,

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss RFK makes push on Capitol Hill for HHS, Bibi parades in Syria amid Gaza ceasefire talks, NYT hoaxed by fake Hamas docs, poll shows young people approve of CEO assassination, AOC loses key oversight position, Ukraine admits to assassination in Moscow, Justin Trudeau faces calls to resign.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Emily, how you doing? I'm good. We've got a lot of news to get through today, even though we're so close to the holidays. The news cycle just won't slow down.

It won't. It won't. I did want to start out with one quick personal thing, which is apologies for this show getting out as late as it is. About two weeks ago, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. That might also explain kind of losing my voice at the same time. This will be our last show, plus we're doing Counterpoints Friday until the Christmas and New Year's break, so we'll see you guys again in January. They've made extraordinary advances when it comes to treatment of breast cancer,

and she's already getting the treatment, and we're very confident that this will be something that's just, that we deal with in the past, but kind of have to bear with us a little bit as we go through that. Yeah, well, we're all pulling for you guys, Ryan. You've got all your kids, a lot to worry about. And, you know, we've got, speaking of health and human services. Maybe your best transition ever. Luckily, there's going to be a very steady hand on the till. Yeah. RFK Jr. was on Capitol Hill yesterday meeting with senators.

Looks like he actually might make it and become secretary of health and human service. We're going to talk about that. A bunch of folks are in Doha trying to cinch up a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Saudi Arabia has gotten involved as well. We're going to talk about that. Over at Dropside News, we kind of busted the New York Times relying on a Hamas-adjacent source to verify documents. We talked to the source about those documents. He said, bro, I told the New York Times I have real doubts about whether those are authentic documents or not. And they just ran with it anyway. I hope he did say bro.

I don't think he said bro, but close enough. So we'll get into that. AOC got crushed in her effort to become a ranking member of Oversight. Luigi is getting charged as a terrorist. What else we got? Yeah, he was indicted last night, so we have updates on that. Some interesting polling. It'll be an interesting conversation topic, maybe for everyone's holiday dinner. We can talk about this. I was coming out of GW Hospital on Monday. I can't wait to see this. I don't think we're ever going to see it, but I

got stopped on the street by two reporters. I said, do you have a second to talk about the health insurance industry? They're doing man-on-the-street interviews with people in Washington, D.C. They happen to run in a running room. They're British accents. They said they're from Sky News. I'm like, sure, I'll do this. Well, we won't spoil it in case they do air it because what you said was. At the end, they asked my name.

I told them. Amazing. Well, stay tuned. See if that goes to air. We're going to do updates from, well, actually, there's a lot going on in Capitol Hill. So we will be talking a little bit about what happened with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Connolly for the Oversight Committee, it sounds like. I feel like we're usually talking about Republicans when we're talking about random parliamentary stuff,

but this time it's Democrats. It's a fun one, yeah. Yeah, there's all kinds of parliamentary stuff randomly going on with Republicans right now as they look to keep the government funded. So we'll probably touch on that a bit as well, Ryan. Updates from Ukraine and updates from both Germany and Canada, where the leadership is in dire straits. Center-left is collapsing all over the world. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Macron as well, maybe we can talk about that too. He's facing some stiff troubles right ahead. But to return to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., let's start with his trip around Capitol Hill, which seems to be going very, very well. I want to start with this mashup of clips so that you can just get a little

flavor of what's been happening over the last couple of days as RFK Jr. meets to discuss his confirmation with senators. Here you go. Can I follow up on Robert Kennedy? He's on the Hill today. He's meeting with senators. What do you say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe? No, I think he's going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he's got a very open mind, or I wouldn't have put him there. He's going to be very much less radical. But there are problems. I mean, we don't do as well as a lot of other nations and those nations use nothing.

We're trying to gain GOP support to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to be pressed on his views on vaccine. Senator, you met with RFK Jr. yesterday. What was your takeaway? Very impressive. I mean, here's a guy that wants to focus on health. It's called health and human services, health, not sickness. So he wants to make us healthy. It's exactly what we do. I ran the biggest hospital company. I know we've got to figure out how to get people healthy. And that's what he's going to do. I think he's going to do a great job with regard to vaccines. If you listen to what he says, he is pro vaccine. What he wants is give you information so you can decide what you put into your body or your child's body. Yeah, it makes all the sense of the world to me. Yeah, I have more information.

Senator, it's great to see you. We so appreciate it. Get away from guessing and do facts, do science, get behind the science and stay with it. Don't be guessing. And that's what a lot of these vaccines have done. They haven't been 100 percent proven. If you look at the number of vaccines these young babies get over a short period of time, it's dozens and dozens of them. And he's totally against that. He wants to make sure that parents understand the good and the bad and the ugly. So I also grabbed about 15 minutes

with Senator Tuberville after his meeting with RFK Jr. He said something similar, but in a little bit more detail. He said he talked to RFK Jr. about how he has a grandchild coming. And he was saying, you know, there are all these, like the vaccine schedule, there are all of these vaccines. And RFK Jr. said to him, we only got three when we were kids. And that was a little bit from their conversation was like, it's basically you've just had all of these. It was like polio, smallpox and something else. It's just been added up and added up. And so Tuberville is using this line that he thinks RFK Jr. is going to, quote, follow the science. And saw a little bit of that from Rick Scott as well. Part of this is a sincere ideological conversion from people like Tuberville, who has been now questioning people about Red

Die 40. I mean, you just never saw this from Republicans, right? And you know this better than I do. I mean, there was this ideological and political deference to the business community, and there have been sincere ideological conversions. A lot of it is obviously political. Now, let's actually skip ahead to A3, because this is what Tuberville told me. His first question was to RFK Jr. It was about abortion, he said. And this was going to be the big sticking point with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being confirmed by a Republican Senate. Josh Hawley posted a thread last night saying that he got all of these concessions, which I think are very significant concessions,

whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, these are significant concessions from someone who says that he's pro-choice, reinstating the Mexico City policy. That's what Josh Hawley said. What is that for us? Foreign funding. Non-initiated into the lingo of the abortion wars. Taxpayer funding for abortion internationally and domestically is what he committed to Hawley. That's Mexico City. Mexico City is foreign, right, yeah. But he also said in the same post

that he would end taxpayer funding for abortions domestically. And what does that mean? Probably Planned Parenthood taxpayer funding. Because currently Planned Parenthood doesn't use the money that gets from the federal government for abortion services. But what he's saying is don't give them a penny, period. Perhaps. Yeah. I mean, they don't specifically say that, but that's how I would,

that's how Republicans would interpret it. And I think other people already have interpreted that way. Reinstating the bar on Title 10 funds, going to organizations that promote abortion. So that's probably also an umbrella on Planned Parenthood. I'm not entirely sure about that. But he also said, and I think this is the most significant, that all of his deputies, according to Hawley, at HHS would be pro-life. So that's basically Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who says he is pro-choice, saying, I will have a pro-life Health and Human Services Department. Right. Then the problem there is that Planned Parenthood, as you know, does an enormous amount of health care services for

low-income women who use them because they can't get any services anywhere else. So he's saying he's all about health, but obviously those types of services are crucial to health. But he's just going to kind of capitulate on it in order to get in there. I guess nobody should have expected him to die on, like, the altar of women's rights. Like, that's not what RFK Jr. was ever going to do. His, like, big life's mission is vaccines, you know, and pharma and food. And yeah, I would imagine. I mean, he's always actually talked about this in the language of bodily autonomy, which is where it gets really tricky for him to now come out and talk about how he'll be running essentially a

pro-life HHS. The reason that it's worth going through this Hall-Leaf thread is that this is enough. I think this will be enough to put him on a glide path to confirmation with Senate Republicans. This should satisfy them for the most part on the pro-life issue. On the issue of abortion, this is going to settle the pro-life groups down. They're going to stop lobbying against him or chirping against him. And now his tough thing is going to be, we heard Trump address it, is going to be talking to like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins about vaccines and people who are even less moderate than them. Tuberville, Scott said they've been satisfied in their conversations, but that's still a sticking point. Yeah. My guess would be, and tell me if you think I'm right, getting into the Republican mind,

that as long as he's good for them on abortion, they actually don't care about HHS. It's like not a top tier concern of theirs. Are they really? Oh no, he's going to run HHS into the ground. Boy, that would be so sad for Republicans if something like that happened. What's funny is that I think they used to care about HHS to protect business interests, right? You know what I mean? It is interesting that, yeah, they're like, okay. They're adopting some of the crunchy, hippie vibes around what you would call a raw milk politics. Yeah, exactly. But Trump seems to be nowhere near that. And so that's why you saw at the top of the segment there, him saying, like, no, he's not really into all that.

So I think basically what they're trying to say is, okay, he's going to be really good on abortion for us. And he's not actually going to do these things. He's not going to ban the vaccine. He's not going to stop you from getting the vaccines. He might have out there ideas about it, but he's not actually going to implement them. Yeah. Which is kind of a funny, you know funny way to kind of get yourself through. Yeah. I mean, I think it'll probably work. At this point, although Tuberville told me he thinks that Democrats are essentially saving their biggest

attacks on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until after the holidays when the confirmation process is really heating up. And actually, people have to make the decision to vote yes or no. So we'll see. Do you think it gets through? As of right now, I would say yes. I think there's just, like, the voters really, really like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Republican base really likes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for whatever reason. Yeah. I also think just from a Democratic small d perspective, like if you win the White House and you run saying you're going to like bring a certain person into the White House. Right. It's really like, all right, guy won. Yeah.

He said he was going to put this guy in a job that's very similar to this, like HH. This is not a surprise. Yeah. And people vote for him. So go ahead. Well, and really quickly, this is a great transition to A2, if we can go back to a great Christian parenti piece in Compact about how RFK Jr. could, quote, take on the CIA. Now, you can't do that from HHS, but the position you can do that from is just sort of like, you'll wink at each other across the table while he's talking about whatever? No, he's actually very much in the inner circle. He is trusted and valued.

And so to that extent, he could do a little bit of what Parenti talks about here. And the CIA links to HHS are kind of interesting. And he writes at one point, this is, I thought, a really interesting passage. Parenti writes, between 2013 and 2020, USAID, which is basically a CIA front, along with Anthony Fauci's NIAID and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense all gave millions of dollars to a New York-based nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. We've reported about that over and over. Run by Dr. Peter Dajak, EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2015, EcoHealth Alliance also pitched In-Q-Tel,

which is basically the CIA's private equity firm, for funding with a proposal called, quote, identifying predictable patterns in disease emergence. We don't know the results of these proposals because In-Q-Tel provides limited public information on its investments. And then Parenti writes, though thoroughly documented, this set of facts is so insane that they make any person reiterating them sound insane by association. It's one of the kind of advantages that the CIA and the USAID and the Defense Department have had in the entire bioweapons space is that it just sounds completely nuts. And RFK Jr. has written an entire book about this.

Yes. The Truth About Wuhan, I think it's called. Yeah. Or something like that. Or about Fauci. Something. In any event, this is not a kind of hobby horse for him. Like, this could get interesting.

Yeah, you have to know. And meanwhile, in the NDAA, last night they shoveled a whole bunch more money towards gain-of-function research that's headed towards passage this week. Yes, and towards the Global Engagement Center that was funneling money towards basically websites that were recommending suppression of, for example, the Federalist and the Daily Wire. So the NDAA is getting interesting, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to your point about parentes links from HHS USAID to EcoHealth, you, in order to actually change this, have to basically know the ins and outs. You need to do chapter and verse in them while you're sleeping, and he can do that, which should be terrifying to the people who benefit from those funds. I don't think RFJK Jr. remotely has all the answers here, but I also know that we are a

deeply unhealthy country. You can just travel around the country or look around, and you can just see it. We need help. We're not in a good place. Yeah. And the corporate capture of our food, our medicines, is obviously a huge problem. So if RFK Jr. comes in as a wrecking ball, just because he doesn't know how to rebuild it doesn't mean that a little bit of creative destruction wouldn't be useful. Because whatever path we're on is not a good one. Right. Yeah, creative destruction wouldn't be useful. Because whatever path we're on is not a good one. Right. Yeah. Creative destruction. The pollutants, the chemicals, the plastics, all of it together is like we're on a suicide path. Yeah. Creative destruction is, I think, the best case scenario here. So perhaps. It's what people voted for.

It's exactly what people voted for. Let the wrecking ball swing. Although Tuberville also told me he was satisfied by RFK Jr.'s answers on climate, so that might not be so good for the crunchy left. What did Tuberville hear? I don't know. I wasn't there, Ryan. I just asked questions. RFK Jr.'s willing to give up on climate too. Yeah, he's like, I can't do it. Also, actually, I bet what, so here's how I bet RFK Jr. finesses the climate issue with deniers like Tuberville. What I bet he said is that we overemphasize carbon. Yeah, yeah.

And that we don't emphasize enough the problems of plastics, which come from carbon, by the way. Don't tell Tuberville that. And all the other poisons that go into our bloodstream and our actual streams. And so RFK Jr. is not saying climate is not a problem. He's saying that a monomaniacal fixation just on climate misses the holistic problems facing the Earth. And I think Tuberville would hear that and be like, oh, he's with me. He doesn't care about climate either.

He literally said he agrees with me on climate. Yeah, so I guarantee you that's how that conversation went, and Tuberville, it was like, whoop. Yeah. Well, don't tell anybody where the plastic comes from because then it gets really sticky. Yeah. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

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All right, Ryan, we're going to be talking about Tourette's here. What have you got for us? So yeah, there's a bunch of reporting coming out of the Mideast that they're getting increasingly close to an actual ceasefire deal. I tend to think that they're exaggerating how close we are. This is just my gut and following this fairly closely that I suspect Netanyahu will continue to drag this out right until January 19th and reach a deal on like January 20th. What Hamas has said publicly is that they are ready to make a deal today as long as Israel stops adding new conditions constantly. So what is happening is as they narrow each gap, then Israel will put in kind of one more new thing. Say, oh, do this.

And then it takes another couple days. People got to meet again. You got to pass the paper back and forth. Well, we saw this, by the way, around, it was like late August around the DNC. We were in another cycle. I mean, this seems to be closer than that, but we've seen it. Hamas was saying the exact same thing. We'll take the deal on the table. Biden put forward a public deal

that Israel's cabinet had approved, their war cabinet had approved. Biden made it public. Hamas said, we'll take it. We're done. We're good. This is it. We'll take it. And Israel kept saying no and just kind of moving the line. So the current deal that's on the table includes huge concessions from Hamas. The main concession that it includes is that Israeli troops would not have to withdraw immediately from Gaza. Like, that was a huge sticking point originally. Hamas was saying, there's no ceasefire until you withdraw from Gaza. Now they're saying, fine, Israeli troops can stay as long as there is some path for them leaving in the future. And during the pause in

fighting, all the vulnerable and civilian hostages would be exchanged for several hundred Palestinian hostages. And then next, you would move to talks towards a permanent ceasefire. Saudi Arabia has gotten involved, saying that they would help to finance the reconstruction of Gaza while normalizing relations with Israel. And Saudi Arabia has dropped its demand that Israel recognize a Palestinian state and replace that with a, quote, path toward a Palestinian state. And this is all from, we know these broad contours from the Haaretz report. Haaretz, another reporting, there's some Axios reporting, there's some reporting from Arabic outlets as well.

It was from yesterday? It broke yesterday? Yeah, these are the broad contours of the deal. And think about that when you follow the news over the next several days without a deal. I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love that

just as we walk out of the studio, they announce that actually everybody has agreed to the ceasefire. Yesterday in Gaza, there were celebrations in the streets at the news that a ceasefire deal was close. Like everybody wants this. But I think Netanyahu sees another six weeks or five weeks or so that he can kind of rain hell down upon Gaza. There are still hospitals left standing. Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza,

which has been subject to now more than a month of relentless assaults from Israel, leading to the killing of multiple doctors, nurses, their families. Yesterday, doctors were attacked while they were operating, like through the windows, but the hospital is still operating. And I believe that Israel is attempting to completely ethnically cleanse northern Gaza and need to shut down all the hospitals. So I don't think that they'll reach a deal until they've completely shut down all of the hospitals. So this sounds very cynical, not quite. I mean, I would be surprised, to be honest, if Netanyahu brokered this deal and agreed to this deal under Biden as opposed to under Trump. I think he obviously realizes. The reason that might happen under Biden is that that's kind

of what Trump has been demanding. Like Trump has been saying that he wants this done by the time he's in office. And he will then take credit for it. Which fine, I don't care who takes credit for stuff. He could do it on day one though, right? Which is why he might. That's why I said it might be on January 20th. Speaking of credit, I don't defend Biden ever,

but like he was getting dragged yesterday for saying that he had helped, you know, broker a deal that freed a hundred, you know, he got a hundred, more than a hundred. And in fact, in November, when there was a week long ceasefire, 105 hostages were released by Hamas. And if you're going to say that Biden is facilitating the genocide, which I do say and I do believe, he also brokered that deal. So it's like, I don't understand why people were getting upset at him. It actually, to me, makes it worse for him because it shows that was possible. Like the only thing that has freed hostages at scale was a ceasefire. Like that, and the deal that we will eventually reach probably on January 20th, after another several thousand people are killed violently and tens of thousands, maybe more die of starvation

and disease and malnutrition. Because like,rition. Because imagine going a year plus without access to reliable clean water medicine. Even the healthiest people are going to collapse under those circumstances. The deal we'll eventually get was on the table a year ago. They didn't want it a year ago. They wanted to do what they did for the last year. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, I mean, we should even take a look at Syria because we have some video of Netanyahu in Syria. Oh, that's right. So there's this kind of debate. There was some reporting that Netanyahu was on his way to Doha to finalize this deal. And then they said,

no, he's not in Doha. he was supposed to be in court actually he got for his corruption trial but he got us he was allowed to like not show up for his corruption trial and then they released video of where he actually is over at the Golan Heights he's addressing people in in Hebrew here stunning visual I mean yeah he's got his flak jacket on. His flak jacket, but what's he wearing a flak jacket for? Right. Like, he's not remotely at any risk there. But he's standing basically atop Mount Hermon,

which Israel wants because it is basically the only way for Israelis to go skiing without having to fly somewhere. So within their own borders, so they can now have a ski resort. Their argument is it's a buffer zone. The buffer zone and the buffer zone and the buffer zone and the buffer zone to the buffer zone. It's a ski resort.

And they say they're going to settle it and populate it as well. They're going to double and then some the population in the area. The State Department will say, oh, it's a buffer zone and this is temporary, while Israel's saying, actually, we're going to settle it and populate it. So two different lines coming from A, which is not unfamiliar at all, because this is an administration that on one hand says,

we support a two-state solution, but we're supporting a war from a man who says there's no such thing as a two-state solution. So this is along those lines. Right, yeah. You have Israel being a little bit more open and honest about what they're doing, and the State Department just lying directly to our faces about that what we see and what they're saying is actually not what they're doing and saying. It's like, what's going on here? Yeah.

So no, so he was not in Doha reaching a ceasefire deal. He was working on the invasion and occupation of Syria, taking the opportunity of the Syrian people overthrowing a dictator to get a ski resort, call it a buffer zone. Meanwhile, you guys at Dropsite have a really interesting report about Hamas documents provided by Israel to the New York Times. And all of this goes to Iran as well, which is the, I mean, that's the central fear of Americans here is the World War III component. And now you have the New York Times. This is a great story. You should just add, like. Yeah, really fascinating and embarrassing for the New York Times story in Dropsite by Jeremy

Scahill and Sharif Abdel-Kadous. We can put this up on the screen. We can put a link in there. So basically to give the gist of what's going on here. So twice now in the last couple months, the New York Times has run major bombshell stories citing Hamas documents that were found by Israel and then given to the New York Times. So that's the chain of custody, alleged chain of custody of these documents. So when you're doing this reporting, what you need to do is figure out whether or not the documents that you're being given are authentic. One of the ways you can do that is by verifying that the source of the documents would have access to those documents and doesn't have a motivation to lie about them. So in other words, if a Hamas whistleblower, for instance, or an IDF whistleblower reaches out and you can confirm that that is who they are, and they hand over some documents to you,

you start out with a threshold of, okay, these are probably authentic, but I'm going to need to cross-reference some things. I'm going to need to figure some other things out. Now, if Hamas came to you and said that they had discovered some IDF documents and then gave you those documents, you start from a place of skepticism. Yes. Because they are motivated to lie about them, and they wouldn't really have access to them. They say, well, it was during October 7th, we were in one of the military bases, and we made off with some hard drives, and here are the documents that we got.

What you would then do is you would take those documents, and you would give them to sources one of the military bases and we made off with some hard drives and here are the documents that we got. What you would then do is you would take those documents and you would give them to sources connected to the IDF, presumably former because if you give them current, then they're not going to be able to do that unless they're quite trustworthy. And then those sources will then try to figure out, okay, here are some problems with these documents or say these actually kind of look authentic. There's other things you can do to try to figure out, okay, here are some problems with these documents, or say, you know, these actually kind of look authentic. There's other things you can do to try to authenticate them. So, New York Times gets these documents from Hamas, I mean, allegedly from Hamas,

through Israel, and so they take it to a former Hamas guy. They take it to Asala al-Awada. That's who they name in their article as saying that they bear resemblance to Hamas documents and that these are good enough. You should go ahead and publish these documents. That's who the Times cites. So Jeremy Scahill calls the guy up and says, what else can you tell me about these documents? This sounds very interesting. And you can read the full story. He tells him, I didn't tell the New York Times these were authentic documents. I'll just read one portion of it. Al-Awadah told Dropsite that the Times only shared one page out of 30 with him. After looking it over, he said he told the Times reporter that there was a particular phrase in the document that he suspected was a translation and that the person who wrote it did not sound native in Arabic. I told him,

this looks translated. It doesn't look real. This phrase is out of context. It is not used, and its meaning is not clear. The phrase in question roughly translates in English as, quote, air cover. Quote, I told him it might be translated from another language that whomever wrote it translated it literally, but it is not used in the modern Arabic context, unquote. And he also shared a voice note with Dropsite that he had sent to the reporter where he had raised these doubts. And he also shared, you know, the exchanges that they had. So we know that this conversation happened because the Times says it happened. Like the time says they talked to this guy and he shared with us what he told them. So, and so think about that. So now imagine that you are a reporter. Hamas has handed you documents that they say are Hebrew documents

from the IDF. Yeah. You show it to a Hebrew speaker and the Hebrew speaker tells you who, who, and Hebrew speaker used to be with the IDF, Hebrew speaker says, this word actually looks like it was originally written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew. This doesn't look right. You could not then source that person as authenticating your documents. What that person told you is that you have fake documents. And how pathetic is it that Israel, which is in the Middle East, doesn't have Arabic speakers to fabricate their documents?

It's like not even a good fabrication. Like they're using Google Translate? Like they're starting in Hebrew or English and then just having it translated into Arabic. And what happens when you do that is that your language doesn't sound authentic. And so that particular story was a claim, you remember this bombshell, was a claim that Iran was read in on October 7th. Right. And that Hamas wanted Iranian help for October 7th. Which is a hugely significant. And which was used as a pretext, you know, for the expansion of their

assault on Iran. Yeah. Turns out that's just completely fake. So now, fast forward to just a couple days ago, they put out a new investigation that they said was from Hamas documents that Israel had obtained and given to the New York Times. This one, the document said, basically, it was Hamas saying, we love to hide our militants inside UNRWA schools, and UNRWA is our secret weapon to go after Israel. That's basically what they're saying, this document says. In that article, they say that they were not able to authenticate the documents, but they believed they were authentic because they bore similarities to previous documents

that they had been able to authenticate. So they're clearly referring back to these Iran documents, which we now know were fabricated themselves. So Israel is just concocting. And then what did they do? Bombed two honor schools and killed more than 60 people. So like this is all premeditated. So they cook up these fake documents. They give them to the New York Times. They say these are Hamas documents. And then they use that article as pretext then for some slaughter that they carry out. They did get busted by Bild. Not by Bild. Bild, and I believe it was Jewish Currents, ran a piece based on, quote unquote, Hamas documents

that said that Yahya Sinwar was planning to escape to Egypt with a bunch of hostages. That turned out to be demonstrably proven to be a hoax. And a bunch of egg on Bill's face. And that's not in question. You don't need to take it from me that that was fake. But that happened before the New York Times getting hoaxed here. So the reason, I mean, there are many reasons, but one of the pieces of this puzzle that's so significant is obviously the Iran link, because the New York Times, what, in 2002,

2003, was relying on bad sourcing, and that reporting was used over and over again to substantiate war. It's a lesson that has very recently been learned specifically, specifically by the New York Times. And some of this, you and I probably disagree on some of this, but some of it doesn't even need to be faked and exaggerated because we've talked before about how there's a genuine challenge for UNRWA in Gaza to disentangle itself from the government, which is de facto Hamas. Right, they have tens of thousands of employees. Right, right.

So all that is to say, for the New York Times, I mean, Israel is another question, but for the New York Times... And to the point, most of those tens of thousands of employees are teachers and those types of folks. So do some of them work on the side for Hamas? Yeah, like a handful, no doubt. Yeah, it's a problem. But what Israel had claimed that they had found,

a much more sinister collaboration and then used that to slaughter a bunch of civilians who were sheltering in these schools. It's very, very sloppy. I mean, on the part of the New York Times and such a high stakes reporting. Yeah, and I don't even know why Israel and New York Times bother at this point. Israel has shown that it can slaughter endless amounts of Palestinians without any cover. They don't even need the New York Times to lie for them. So if you're at the New York Times, you can stand down. The world has given up. The world is just

allowing this genocide to unfold. You want to go ahead and burn your credibility in order to facilitate more of the genocide? You go ahead and do it, but you don't actually have to anymore. Nobody's going to stop them. It's a, I mean, Jeremy just calling the guy up. He's like, oh, can you prove that? Yeah, here's a voice memo, here's texts. That's such a sad statement. It's so embarrassing. Oh, so we went to the New York Times for comment.

And they responded by saying that they didn't answer any of the questions directly. They responded by saying that it was a rich story based on lots of different sources. Sure. So they talked to analysts and other people for other parts of the story. The headline, the lead, and the whole story are about these documents that you obtained. And you're not even going to stand up for those documents. Right, exactly. That's a cop-out.

100%. Pathetic. They should be ashamed of themselves. They feel like they have total impunity because the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, all these other outlets that used to be major competitors of theirs have all withered. And so the New York Times now just stands alone. And so they're just completely unchecked, except by people within their newsroom and by independent media at this point. But the editors, will they even hold a meeting about this? Oh, hey, by the way, guys,

turns out we got hoaxed and ran two major stories based on documents that were fabricated and dozens of people were killed. Many of them were burned to death as, as a result of, and on the predicate of these articles that we published and got hoaxed. Should we meet about this and try to not have this happen again? Because even if you don't care about all the death, it's embarrassing. But because they have so much impunity because they have

no competitors at this point. That's a really interesting point. They're not even going to have a meeting about this. In prior eras, the Washington Post would have loved to have run your drop site story.

It would light them up. And they would have been calling the source. Yeah. If they had more resources and absolutely. Yeah, more like, I mean, right now they're really just not even competing with the times. So it's not necessarily even a thought. Like, oh, let's spend some of our reporters' time calling up one of their sources.

Yeah, and there's also a kind of colonialism where it's like, you can actually just say whatever you want about Hamas and Hamas documents. Just say it. And nobody's going to raise an issue with it. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to

a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.

Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.

But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Let's move on to the indictment of Luigi Mangione. He was indicted last night. We can put C1 up on the screen. He was indicted for first-degree murder, obviously, in the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. That is according to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. So that's a step towards actually getting, he's facing two counts, we should add, of second degree murder. One of it is killing as a crime of terrorism. Two for second degree criminal possession of a weapon. Three counts of third degree criminal possession of a weapon. One count for fourth degree possession of a weapon. Three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

One count for fourth-degree possession of a weapon. And one count of second-degree possession of a forged instrument. So he's facing all kinds of charges. This one, obviously, is the headline charge. But it also comes amidst discussion about an Emerson poll. This is C2 we should put up on the screen here. Ryan, did you see this Emerson poll where This is C2 we should put up on the screen here. Ryan, did you see this Emerson poll where a majority of voters think the actions of the killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO,

Brian Thompson, are unacceptable. 17% find the actions acceptable, while 16% are unsure. Now, interestingly, the pollster says, while 68% of voters overall reject the killer's actions, younger voters and Democrats are more split. 41% of voters% of voters overall reject the killer's actions, younger voters and Democrats are more split. 41% of voters aged 18 through 29 find the killer's actions acceptable. But to be clear, the breakdown of that is 24% of those 18 to 29-year-olds said it was somewhat acceptable. 17% said it was completely acceptable. And when you combine both of them, that's where you get the 41%, thinking that it was acceptable, even though some of them just said somewhat. And Mediaite covered this, as you just

saw on the screen, as a, quote, stunning poll. I don't know that it's that stunning, Ryan. What do you think? Well, also one detail I think we should let the viewers know is that, you know, this murder happened on December 4th, which is the day that we were recording Counterpoints here in the studio. And if you remember, there was a kid named Luigi Mangione who came by and was in the control room from about 6 a.m. until about, I think we did a Counterpoints Friday recording afterwards. So that went until 11 or 11.30. It might be a different Luigi Mangione but from seeing him he said he was from Baltimore it seemed like the same guy seen Baltimore we talked I remember we talked about Gilman his prep school kid he talked about how you know

he'd never been to New York yeah didn't have any plans on going to New York yeah and he can't even ride a bike actually from what I remember that he couldn't ride a bike he would never ride a city bike because you do it people don't know this hates McDonald's you love to talk about bikes I do like yeah, we had a long conversation about bikes curly hair anyway So the terror by the way, I'm curious for you taking the terror charges. Yeah, I've seen I've seen people make a But I think it's a fair point that like hey wait a minute January 6 guys I was there were they were trying to terrorize all sorts of people.

They don't get charged with that. Lots of people don't get charged with terror. On the other hand, you know, if that wasn't Luigi who was here in the control room, I think it was. But it wasn't. Whoever was guilty of this has said that, like, the goal was to sow terror. It's in the paragraph manifesto. When Lennon and Robespierre use the word terror, they don't use it pejoratively. was to sow terror. It's in the paragraph manifesto. When Lenin and Robespierre use the word terror, they don't

use it pejoratively. The goal is to terrorize. Please, please don't charge me with terrorism. Not saying that he did it, but if he did, the goal was to terrorize. The pearl clutching around the terrorism charges to me is like, well, look man,

if you're going to do this stuff, that's what you're doing. Right. And Mangione is pleading not guilty. Right. He says this is not what happened, which is very interesting. Because he was here in the control room. Yeah. But it continues to be very interesting because there's a manifesto that is being pinned to him.

And maybe it is him. It seems likelier than not. If the manifesto doesn't fit, you have to quit. It seems likelier than not that it is. But, but we've seen setups. It's not impossible that there are, I mean, really though, like he's pleading not guilty. The whole situation is extremely bizarre. He's able to get, he shoots a guy in cold blood in Manhattan during the day and just gets away for days, just blends into the crowd in Midtown and is able to actually get out of state to Pennsylvania and isn't caught for days. Like that, I think in and of itself is pretty strange. That continues to me to be the weirdest part of all of this. I would like to know the real story on how they caught him, because, you know,

whenever, like, this feels like one of those stitched-together cover stories for how they caught him, where, in fact, they were using surveillance technologies that are, to put it generously, maybe on the constitutional edge of being allowed.

And so what will often happen if you use those types of authorities to solve a crime or to catch somebody, you then figure out a way that you could have done it legitimately, and you pull that together. Or maybe they really are completely incompetent and just, you know, somebody, you know, saw him at the McDonald's and made a phone call. Speculation is that he's going to plead not guilty by insanity, which is obviously a different, you know, that's very different than saying I flat out didn't do it. The not guilty by insanity, like, right, there's two. Basically, you're trying to get the jury to, you're trying to give the jury a reason to acquit you even though they know you did it. And the one would be, I don't know, I wasn't there.

It wasn't me. This was all planted. And it's like, like you said, it's getting hard. Yeah, it's pretty hard to do that. There's a lot of footage. Yeah, because they could subpoena our cameras here and find that actually Luigi wasn't here. But then the second one would be to say he was insane. And then the jury can be like, yeah, he was temporarily insane. Right. And that doesn't

mean we condone it. We mean it was an act of insanity, but it means we're going to let him go. And then they give him a gun charge or something. Right. Well, he has a bunch of gun charges. So they feel like they've still said there have to be some consequences here. means we're going to let him go. And then they give him a gun charge or something. Right. Well, he has a bunch of gun charges. So they feel like they've still said, there have to be some consequences here, but not necessarily life in prison. Right. I think that's my guess of where the strategy goes. Yeah. So, I mean... Are you surprised that the 41 to 40 youth, that's 29 and under, say that by 41 to 40,

now it's Emerson, they're like... It's a thousand person000-person poll. Right, but anyway. Well, I'm saying that's not. I mean, I'm sure pollsters would look at me and be like, 1,000 people, that's statistically stupid, blah, blah, blah. It is, but if you're a bad pollster, you can get whatever you want out of that. Well, when you're down in the 17%, you can find 17% of Americans who say just about everything. Like, it's usually

around 20% you can say in a poll. But it's 41% that say it's somewhat acceptable. It's 41% combined with the 17%. Right. Right. So, somewhat, that's... Somewhat and definitely acceptable. Right. Completely acceptable. Right. Yeah. So, all that is to say... I think it's a tough one because people have complicated views about this. I think they're like, it's wrong to commit murder. I wouldn't commit murder. I wouldn't urge anybody to commit murder. What do I think about this?

Kind of rather not say. So where do you come down? Like, how do you pull that sentiment, which I think is pretty widely held? And by the way, we should be clear that we don't exactly know how Mangione is exactly going to plead. Again, the speculation is not guilty by reason of insanity. It does look like all of the indications are not guilty. That's his case. It's going to be he's not guilty. But how exactly he makes that plea is a different question. Now, back to this, there's two different things here. I mean, if you're asking the question of somewhat acceptable versus completely acceptable, to your point, the complicated feelings about acceptability are going to come in.

And that's where it seems. I guess that falls under somewhat acceptable. But that's the thing, right? Or somewhat unacceptable. There's a totally different question as to whether it's acceptable to talk about Thompson's corruption in the aftermath of his death. And I feel like it's very easy to conflate those two things, especially if you're just like responding quickly to a poll. And so I think some of it comes from that. And there's all of this like hysteria over people getting, Zoomers getting

like Mangione tattoos. They're doing it because everyone's going to their fainting couch and acting as though healthcare executives are beyond criticism. And it just strikes me as such a, like, when somebody, take an example of a Columbine. What do we do after something like that? We talk about bullying. We talk about why it's not okay to bully people because it makes people snap. It doesn't mean it's okay. Nobody's saying it's okay for people to snap. Like, we are adults and can hold multiple views at the same time that are not inconsistent. Like, two things can be true, that the more you create a climate that pushes people to extremism and makes them miserable, makes them angry, the more likely you are to get situations like this. It doesn't justify it and it doesn't make it right.

And so I think the way the question is worded is in that direction. And I think the reason that so many people are acting out and like ironically and sometimes not ironically, like embracing Mangione, it's not the way that I'm reacting to any of this. But the reason is because there's now so much hysteria

that's like weirdly defending the healthcare industry and acting like he was just a guy who was trying to do his best. Diving deeper into the poll, the other interesting number is the somewhat unacceptable. Because it's somebody who shot a guy in the back on 6th Avenue. And to get people off of totally unacceptable, which is where everybody starts with that act, and move them even to somewhat unacceptable, that's something. That's some gray area. For young people, that was an extra 7%, so that takes it to 48%. 48%, which leaves only one in three people under 29 saying that it was completely unacceptable. So two-thirds of young people confronted with, hey, somebody walked up and shot somebody in the back in broad daylight. Is that completely unacceptable?

Two out of three were not willing to say that that was completely unacceptable. So even though only 41, so it's actually kind of a higher number. Yes, and I do get why people are, I get why, you know, there are people who, the types of people who introduce themselves at happy hours as like classical liberals are disturbed by these numbers. And I get why, like normal people are disturbed by these numbers. And I get why like normal people are disturbed by these numbers. They are like, yes, it's that's it speaks to the problem of the health care system. And it speaks to the problem of like the deep, deep anger and sense of unjust, like unjustness and just misery that people are experiencing. And this is like cathartic. So yes, it's disturbing because the system,

in order to operate, in order to, in order to, let's say, exact justice peacefully and through the classically liberal process, you have to have buy-in. And what you're losing is public buy-in. And you can't just blame the public for that. You have to also blame the top for that. And just to lash out at the public is the exact wrong way to go about it. And it's only going to make things worse if you're just lashing out at the public.

And I feel bad for TikTok, just as they thought they were maybe going to get some salvation from their coming ban. All of a sudden, all these young people are now celebrating Luigi. So TikTok is like they're starting to take it out of app stores, right? It's like the ban is coming. Like it's like a month away or something like that. But there's still time to stave it off. Donald Trump at his press conference this week hinted that there might be some daylight there. Let's roll Trump here at C3. How do you plan to stop the ban on TikTok next month?

We'll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points. There are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. Now, Joe Rogan did, and some of the other people that were recommended by my son Barron,, who have any new names,

I said, who is that? Tell me, who's that? Dad, you've got to be kidding. I can't believe you don't know. And I did those interviews. And it was actually sort of cute. Do you want to know the truth? So I have a little bit of a warm spot in my heart, I'll be honest.

I love how transparent Trump is about the transactional nature of his support for someone. Yes. Trump is about the transactional nature of his support for someone. We've always known that, that the only litmus test for Trump, whether he likes you, is if you like him. Yes. Kim Jong-un does like TikTok, young people, Muslims in America. Yeah. Doesn't matter. Yeah. If you like him, he likes you. By the way, not to be the actually guy, he did not win the youth vote by 34 points. We're in a circle which does that. Leave him alone. I think it was 52-46 for Harris.

Let him bask. Don't kill the vibes. If he wants to think that young people supported him by 34 points, and he wants to then govern based on what young people want for this country, then Donald Trump, you won young people by 34 points. Absolutely. Don't believe anybody who tells you otherwise. One of the funny things is when we were talking with our friend Luigi in the control room on December 4th, he said that Trump won 90% of the youth vote, but we never checked it out. But it could be true. And Luigi said that he really separates Trump from the rest of the oligarchs right now. By starting this bit, you have probably gotten us in so much trouble.

Although I didn't start the bit. People would probably know that I'm just referencing memes on like Facebook and elsewhere of all these people saying like, just wanted to talk about this cool December 4th morning I had with my friend Luigi down in San Antonio. We got coffee. We did the little walk on the river there. You brought the bit here. You'll have to accept that blame. That's fair enough. In any event, I think TikTok has a chance of surviving for this reason. The deep state had wanted to ban TikTok for a very long time because they don't control it. China's got its influence over there.

And they don't like having their U.S. news media. They want U.S. news media to be the sovereign domain of our corporate overlords, not our Chinese overlords. But they could never get any traction with that belief until after October 7th. After October 7th, people were able to see people in Gaza who they connected with in a parasocial way being slaughtered on a daily basis. And it turned the public who was getting their news from TikTok off of the genocide. It convinced them that what they were being told in the sanitized version of the news did not comport with what was actually happening on the ground. That's when they were able to get bipartisan buy-in to pass the legislation to force a sale,

which they're saying they won't sell it, so therefore they will shut it down. I think now that they basically are successful in their genocide and nobody's going to stop them, that the main thrust behind the ban is kind of gone. So maybe they'll give it a reprieve. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, the, just wait until we start talking more about China and the drones, right? Republican and Democrats. Like this is, they're... Right, and Michael McCaul saying- Michael McCaul yesterday. That's news. That was news last night. He said it was likely Chinese technology or likely Chinese drones, which I don't know why he's saying that without, you know, it's just we've heard from Jeff- We were already told they were Iranian drones. We were told they were Iranian from Jeff Bandrew. That was transportation committee member which yeah like get out of here with you. Yeah

I don't know who told credential. He said someone told him that He said I'm on he said I'm on the committee and I talked to people but talk to people in the business You know, he's talking some drone company owner. So yeah, when Paul came out and said that last night my Spidey senses went up. I mean So now this is coming from the intelligence side. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, maybe. But I think your point about control is really important. But I commented on it and said he doesn't know.

I have a very unpopular take on this. I've said that TikTok should be banned for a long time, but not for any of these reasons. And the TikTok bill is such a disaster. I didn't support any of that because it was complete deep state overreach. I think all social media should be banned for people under 16 or something. I'm getting close to that. Because it's a collective action problem. As a parent, I'm completely failing when it comes to my kids and social media. Parents can't do it alone. So I think that the deal, the grand bargain that we should strike with China and Trump

Trump's already talking about Trump us and China together can do great things for the world. So here should be the deal We will allow tick-tock to continue But chairman she gets to regulate our children's social media consumption in China It's like you get one hour on Friday, one hour on Saturday. I think that includes video games. But you know they just pump government propaganda into the... Fine, but it's only an hour.

Fine. You want your kids getting U.S. government propaganda? If it's only for an hour on Friday and Saturday? It's like Top Gun 2 clips. Yeah, whatever. Fine. So I look at China's regulation of social media for their kids, and I'm so jealous. They've got that under control. So if we can outsource that to Xi, then we'll let TikTok keep going. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that

exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action.

And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.

So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Ryan, I've been excited over the last couple of days to get your take on what went down in the back rooms of the Democratic House caucus when Jerry Connolly just snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Victory for himself, defeat arguably for the Democratic Party when he took chairmanship of the House Oversight or ranking member of the House Oversight Committee from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who wanted the job. Yeah, so the backstory here is Jamie Raskin had this position as top Democrat

on Oversight Committee. He moved over to take the top spot on the Judiciary Committee, which is kind of higher ranking spot. He and AOC are very close. He had made AOC the vice chair, which is the kind of position that he made up but came with real authority on the committee and ability to learn the operation of it and how to get things done and how to do oversight both towards the law enforcement direction, subpoena direction, but also using the committee as a platform for creating political controversy and narratives and videos, which is like 99% of Congress's job at this point. Well, and Jim Jordan used it very effectively as well. When you're in the minority, you still have a lot of power if you're on oversight because you're just driving different investigative narratives. Yeah. And so if the vote were just up to the Oversight Committee, the Democrats there,

they're mostly all AOC allies, which win that overwhelmingly, goes to the steering committee, which is a kind of secretive leadership situation. It was where, you know, like she never had a shot there. But then you can challenge it and take it to the entire caucus. Right. And we can put up the results of that caucus vote, which just happened. She lost 131 to 84. And so later today, but it'll air on Friday, Thursday, if you're a premium, we'll be interviewing Greg Kassar, congressman from Texas, who is the new chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Progressive Caucus has,

we'll ask him, 95 members, 100, something like that. It has more than 84. So in other words, so these are secret ballots, by the way. So nobody knows how people voted. AOC didn't even win the entire Progressive Caucus, that shows. And she's close with a decent number of people who are not in the Progressive Caucus. So Connolly did fairly well creeping into the CPC. How? Explain that. That I think is probably very baffling. And we'll talk to Kassar about this. The progressive caucus, for many Democrats, is a branding exercise to just tell people back at home that they're progressive. Which is the opposite of the Freedom Caucus, which actually like pretty rigorously enforces membership. Right. And they kicked out Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There have been some efforts by Parilla Jayapal to tighten

to tighten kind of conditions for getting in. You have to support two thirds of the things that, you know, that they, you know, complicated litmus test, but a lot of room for letting people walk. And on the one hand, like, there are circumstances like Matt Cartwright, who lost RIP, Scranton Progressive, who kept winning this Trump district. And Progressive would say, okay, look, there are going to be some things he's not with us on because he represents this kind of rural Pennsylvania district. But he's for Medicare for all. He's for green utilities. He's for all this stuff. And he's a populist Democrat. He's the kind we want. That's a good argument.

But a lot of other Democrats use that argument to smuggle in a lot of corporate behavior. What really happened here, though, was predictable from the very beginning. And that is that AOC ousted Joe Crowley. Right. Came in in a way that is unacceptable to her colleagues. Unforgivable. And unforgivable. Came in with other people who had unforgivable views when it came to Israel and Palestine,

Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and then proceeded to continue to endorse some primary challenges to sitting Democrats. Not as many as the left would like. Not as early as the left would like, not as early as the organizations would like, but far more than was acceptable to incumbent Democrats. The acceptable number of primary challenges for incumbent Democrats is zero with the asterisk being, it's okay if you want a primary. Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, those kinds of incumbent Democrats. You can challenge those, and that's not actually a threat to the Democratic Party.

You can still be a team player. Although even there, it's like you didn't have a whole lot of Democrats openly going against Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush for that reason, that there's this like omerta within the House. Which is, again, it is so, so different. And we'll talk about this a little bit, but it's so different from the Republicans, which basically are, I say this not pejoratively, like a circus. Like they air their stuff out. Which is good for them. And so in my book, The Squad, I interviewed a lot of AOC staff members who said that very early 2019,

this was a fundamental question facing her as she came into office. Would she try to get along with her colleagues well and move up the ranks of the Democratic Party, build power that way, and then use that power for good? Or is she a constant insurgent who uses her platform in the House to build a national movement and just understands that the House is not the place where she's going to exercise her power, but that the House is actually a defanged institution anyway, and that there's more power culturally and politically at being a national figure. And her staff who were on the other side of this argument disagreed with the idea of kind of playing by the rules and moving up to the ranks, said, it's actually not even a choice for you. There is nothing that you can do to shrink yourself down

small enough that they will ever forgive you for what you did. And I was, last night I was, I wanted to pull up one quote, because I think it's quite prescient, from Corbyn Trent, if you remember, that was her Tennessee communications director who had that fun Southern drawl. It was always kind of discordant and fun to hear him representing the Bronx congresswoman. So at one point, so this is from the book, he said, Corbyn Trent said he would often warn Ocasio-Cortez that because of the way she had burst onto the scene and because of the threat she represented to others, her hope of being accepted as a member in good standing would always be frustrated. Quote, disarming will not make them happy, he said. Even if she left politics and became merely an influencer or an MSNBC talking head, he argued, they'd still hunt her until the end of time.

He said, quote, the funny thing is it still wouldn't prove to her that it won't work. I just have to get a little smaller so nobody thinks I'm a threat. Okay, sorry again, guys. Sorry again for all this trouble. And so she tried that route of, sorry for all this trouble, but look how prepared I am at the oversight committee hearings. Look how much good I do for the party. I've gone to Nevada, which we won. I helped Jackie Rosen win in Nevada. You sent me to Pennsylvania with Puerto Rican population. I'm popular on TikTok. These oversight hearings are going viral on TikTok. Young people absolutely love me. It is their hook into the Democratic Party. And she kept believing that the Democratic Party cared about any of that. That the Democratic Party cared about winning or doing good things.

That's her fundamental disconnect. If you see these members of Congress as just individual, you know, power seeking politicians, rather than people who are engaged in a collective fight to make the world a better place, then you're going to analyze the situation right. So it's by having too much faith in her colleagues that she, and you found a good post from her Republican friend. Put that up here. Yeah, let's put the next element up. And as we do, I just want to say, like, I think it's true. They care about themselves winning, right? Like Nancy Pelosi cares about, they care about power among their friends like Joe Crowley. That's why you want Joe Crowley to win, not necessarily. Although ironically, she was even fine to see Joe Crowley lose because he was going to challenge her

for Speaker. But she just didn't like the idea that broadly speaking, you're going to challenge Democrats. The block of establishment, right, who are loyal to her. So Tim Burchett, who I believe is Freedom Caucus, but they're like Fight Club. You're not allowed to know. Some of them will say Freedom Caucus, like we know some of them are. But I'm happy for us because the Democrats don't realize that in their youth circle, she is a rock star. That's what Tim Burchett, a Republican, said of Connolly defeating Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And there's also, David Sirota posted after this happened, today's reminder that no change agent will be able to, quote, nice their way to power inside the Democratic Party. Power will have to be ripped away from the establishment. They're not going to give it away in exchange for good manners or being a team player. When I read that,

I just think that is so accurate because it reminds me of the exact dynamics that happened with John Boehner and who was going up against John Boehner, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan. And ultimately, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, they were not interested in playing nice at all. That was clear. They thought they, the establishment sort of thought that they snuffed out the Tea Party. Donald Trump came along. And Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, you're going to get a Donald Trump if you are elevating Connolly over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And AOC is just trying to tell them that. She's trying to say you have to listen to the populists. But at some point, you just have to go completely, you have to go completely like outside the

structures of power because they don't care. Right. Because even from a cynical perspective, Democrats, even for their own individual advancement, should actually have sided with AOC here. Because there was reporting that she was telling Democrats that she was going to stop endorsing challenges to incumbents. Right. If you give her the ranking seat, you have brought her fully within the tent. Yeah. And she's going to then stop. You have them completely pulled her in.

So she's no longer a threat to you. She's in the club. But they hate her and what she represents so much that even if she completely surrenders it, it's not enough for them. So the only question will be, does she respond to this by saying, well, Pelosi was my problem, and once she's gone, I'll be okay, because Pelosi organized behind the scenes. And if I just keep showing my colleagues that I care about the party and I care about making the world a better place, that I'm a good person to have on the team, that they will eventually welcome me in.

And maybe she can just outlive them all. Like, she's young enough and they're old enough. I think she definitely will. So that's one option. Like, they all just actually die. And then she's in her 50s and there's all these people in their 30s and 40s who kind of came up in politics admiring her. That's one path. The other is to say they're never going to accept me.

They're never going to accept you. And I'm going to build my power base as the leader of a movement, which was the kind of Bernie Sanders wing of the party, was the Elizabeth Warren wing before that. Now I'm going to make it the AOC wing and then that's going to be my power base. Yes. Like that's an option that's in front of her and we'll get to see where it goes. She knows that voter sentiments are way closer to her than they are to Nancy Pelosi, the base of the party. And so what she should realize is that maybe she, I mean, I don't know. It sounds like she doesn't realize this, but the House Freedom Caucus operated as a block. It said we are taking the Tea Party sentiments because we recognize they are what is popular with our voters,

and we are going to vote in lockstep. They're losing their ability to do that. We should report right here the House and Senate released a 1,500-page NDAA, or basically it would fund the government. The government will shut down on Friday at midnight if a bill is not passed to continue funding the government. And Mike Johnson has put out a bill in order to hit the 72-hour review rule. It's kind of funny how he's being hampered by the concessions that Kevin McCarthy made to people like Mike Johnson and then more broadly to the Freedom Caucus specifically to become Speaker, which was putting conservatives on the Rules Committee.

So that's Chip Roy, Thomas Massey, who are now thwarting the parliamentary procedure of how Johnson ends up getting this bill to fund the government through. So that's just an amusing little takeaway that only happened because the Freedom Caucus operated as a bloc. That is, if the squad, if there was something between the squad and the Congressional Progressive Caucus that's like a middle size between squad, which is too small to operate as a bloc, and the CPC, which is like too sprawling to be in lockstep on progressive priorities, they would be so powerful.

Well, it was headed in that direction and in 2022, a ton of them got nuked by APAC and DMFI. So it was a real... I mean, the squad was growing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, it's... You can't... You can't... Which is the... They don't want you

in the club. One of the final chapters in that book. Even if it's smart for them to put you in the club, they don't want you in the club. Yeah. They don't want you in there. Yeah. So, good luck.

And they're never going to, yeah. Yeah, and by the way, changing and reforming the entire system, this entire, Mike Johnson, who was Freedom Caucus adjacent, he wasn't in the Freedom Caucus, but he talked like a lot of them. He's now putting an omnibus out that is full of pork that Republicans said they would not do. And he's forcing them to vote on it. He's probably going to have to work with Democrats. So have anti-establishment Republicans changed the system through the Freedom Caucus and through saying, screw John Boehner, we're working outside of the halls of power? No, but they're getting closer. And at the very least, they've set the standard that

this is not acceptable. And Democrats don't have anything like that right now. No. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need

to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Business Week editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the

backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. to wonder about, you know, how the footage was taken or what happened here. We can roll this V-Hoe here. So this is the moment that General Igor Kirillov, who's basically in charge of Russia's nuclear protection force, is walking out of his, there you see it, walking out of a building and boom. And if you're listening to it, yeah, you just see snow and debris covering the camera all of a sudden.

Yeah. And so this is happening as Zelensky is huddling with European leaders, doing everything he can to try to get as much support in place for his war effort as possible before Trump takes office. But meanwhile, things are collapsing politically around him. Not only is Trump coming into office in Washington, you have Trudeau on his way out. We're going to talk about that in a moment. Trudeau on his way out in Canada. Canada has been one of the really top Western supporters of the Ukrainian war effort and I think has the third largest population of Ukrainians in the world, including Ukraine. And you have the German Chancellor, Scholz, on his way out, which is, and he's probably going to be replaced by the Christian Democratic Union, whatever they call that center-right party over in Germany, which has actively been saying that

they want to reduce support for the Ukraine war effort. You've got Macron in trouble in France. And so the writing is clearly on the wall when it comes to Western support for this war effort. Meanwhile, Ukraine is running out of Ukrainians to throw into the trenches here, while the Ukrainian economy is in complete collapse, as any economy would be facing these circumstances and just completely propped up by NATO financing. Whereas Russia's economy is not completely booming off the walls, but they're doing well. Putin is facing no political backlash to speak of. It's not as if his position is threatened. His goals continue to remain achievable. So looking like a complete mess. And Trump just the other day calling for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.

A sign of what I think is some desperation comes from a recent tweet and video. We can put this up as just a VO. This is related to this charge by Western allies that North Korea has surged a bunch of special forces oper, to support the Russian cause. A couple of weeks ago, I repeated that on this show because I thought it was just a fact. Like, I thought it was like a publicly known fact and that North Korea was like, that North Korea wasn't denying it. Nobody was denying it. I was like, this is what we're doing. It turns out, no, like, it turns out that this is an argument that Ukraine and Ukraine supporters in the U.S. have been making in order to try to gin up support for the war effort. And it seems, it was like, wait a minute, that's what this is? Are you saying that the claims are exaggerated?

Or it may not even be true. So there's no evidence that North Koreans are actually fighting in Russia other than these claims that are being made. And so what we showed you there was Zelensky tweeting that the reason that they have been able to provide zero evidence that there are North Koreans participating in this assault is that Russia has been deleting all the videos and that they've been burning the faces of the Korean troops who've been killed so that Ukraine can't then get the bodies and prove to the world that this claim they made about North Koreans being there. And I don't know, if you believe that, I don't know what to tell you. Like, if that's where you are at this point, you're saying that they're burning their faces, and so they put up a little bit of video that purports to show something along those lines, and it's like, I don't know, man.

So, and the reason I repeated it on the show is like, I just thought it was true. I just thought like, oh, North Korea is sending some troops because Russia asked them to do that. Okay, fine like We should end this war But but the source of this has been kind of NATO sources saying that North Korea is doing this. Therefore We need to you know ramp up more funding for this war which is like that's how far removed I am from the propaganda here, because it's like, I don't even see how that's a persuasive argument. Like, I don't even

get the idea that that's a persuasive argument. Like, to me, your position on whether or not this war should continue shouldn't be changed whether or not there's some North Korean special forces involved. Well, it's actually, I think, the opposite. I think that's what's interesting about this line, which is they think, they're convinced that what this means is we need to give, people will respond to this and say, oh my gosh, yes, please send all of the money to Ukraine. Let's continue this war. Let's defeat Putin. He is now engaging. This is like axis of evil. I think that's what they assume people interpret it as. Whereas a lot of people look at it and they're like, you're kidding me. There's

another nuclear power involved. Stop. It's so out of touch. The New York Times reported yesterday on a general, a U.S. general, who's Air Force Major General Pat Ryder. The Pentagon spokesman told reporters on Monday that the North Koreans had entered combat last week in Kursk, and they assessed that North Korean soldiers have engaged in combat and have indications they have suffered casualties, both killed and wounded. Reportedly, I think they think it's around 30 casualties, something like that. The New York Times, to think they think it's around 30 casualties, something like that. The New York Times, to something we talked about earlier in the show, said those claims could not be independently verified. Because they're burning their faces. Like, are you kidding me? Like,

and look, if North Korea is sending troops to Russia, like, it's not as if I believe that North Korea has some, like, morality that would prevent it from allowing its special forces to become mercenaries for Russia. I'm sure they'd be fine to do that. But we need a little evidence and this like claims could not be corroborated. That's one thing. When you go and say your claims could not be corroborated because Russia is destroying video evidence and burning the faces of the Korean soldiers, that's when I'm like, hold

on a second. That makes no sense. It actually, I mean, North Korea's involvement isn't entirely surprising, but... It wouldn't be, I mean, sure. But if they're not involved, we shouldn't say that they are. Definitely not. Definitely not. I mean, and look, maybe I'm totally wrong,.S. military is telling the truth for once.

But we need some evidence. And the excuse for there not being evidence really cannot be that the Russians are burning the faces of the people killed. Which is in the Zillow exhibit. How do you do that? They're all walking around with gas cans. No idea. I just find that, and you still would have the rest of the person, even if you burn their face.

Oh, face is burned. You can't tell who this is. Right. Or, right, like uniforms and there are other things. I don't know. Maybe we're as stupid as they think they are. What do you think they are? They think we are.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us

think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.

But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

Speaking of stupid people, this is a good transition to Justin Trudeau. Smart dude. and subscribe today. You think he's like a sort of snowy Gavin Newsom? Yeah, he's read books. He's read books. I bet he's read books. He's read like Gone Girl. Oh, by the way, I do have to like, I totally face planted during that interview that we did with Guy Stewart, the Syrian who went to fight in Syria. I was making fun of our audience for not reading and told everybody that they should go read. I thought I was saying For Whom the Bell Tolls. Oh, yeah, that was bad. So I'm blaming Guy since he's not here. So Guy was saying that there's this character in the book that keeps talking about manana, which is, there's a similar phrase in Kurdish. That's from For Whom

the Bell Tolls. Obviously, people say manana in George Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia, but it's much more of a thing in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Manana, Manana, which is by Ernest Hemingway and is a great book. But I've conflated Homage to Catalonia andest and From the Bell Tolls while making fun of young people for not reading. It's utterly embarrassing. It's quite all right. I mean, none of us caught it. There's three of us here and none of us caught it.

The audience caught it right away, though. Of course they did. Well-read audience. But actually they didn't catch that. They're like, no, dude, that's by George Orwell. The actual own would have been, no, dude, that's for whom the bell tolls. That's the actual. Because I said it was an American who went to fight in Spain. Right. George Orwell is not an American. No. So you had that part, right? Yeah. Just a lot of jumbled. Yeah. You know, it's, people are easy to confuse.

It's fair. Yeah. You guys tried doing four hours of shows straight. Well, exactly. This is, we're about to talk here about the German Chancellor Justin Trudeau. Exactly. Did you catch that one? Good one. So, not a good one at all. But Justin Trudeau has, Justin Trudeau is facing very serious calls for his resignation, very serious calls for his resignation. We can put First Almond up on the screens from the BBC. His finance minister quit, resigned. And this is, as the BBC puts it in the headline, all coming amidst a, quote, spat over Trump threat. The Trump threat obviously being the tariffs and his finance minister resigned, she said, because he's prioritizing political

gimmicks, meaning he flew down to Mar-a-Lago and sort of made nice with Donald Trump. And then the two have exchanged barbs ever since because Trudeau realized that his own party was furious about that. And so this is a significant threat to his party, a significant threat to his leadership. Ryan, how do you think this is going to shake out for Trudeau? I will say, to give Trump credit, it is funny when he calls him Governor Trudeau. Oh my gosh. And calls the great state of Canada. It's hilarious. That's good stuff. Yeah. So he asked Chrystia Friedland to step down as Minister of Finance and take a different cabinet position. She said no,

and then she timed her vicious resignation letter for maximum political damage to him. Basically, what her argument is, is that, you know, the game is on. Like, Trump is coming for us. This is an existential threat. It's 25% tariff. Canada needs to be put aside all of our different differences and completely unite against Trump right now. The same way that they did, say, when they were renegotiating NAFTA, as we can in order to be ready for the trade war that they believe that they should have to try to back Trump down from these tariffs. Because like Trump's predicate here is kind of ridiculous. He's saying that he's going to slap these 25% tariffs on Canada because its border is insecure. Come on. Seriously, you're like,

the Trump base really wants a wall all the way across the northern US and southern Canada. Really? That's what we're going to do? Come on. Also, if it's a state, if it's just another state and he's the governor, we don't have walls between our states. None of it makes any sense. Not yet. Freeland's argument was, look, we can win this if we stand up to him. Yeah.

Because he's not really serious about us. He'd rather take on China and Europe and Mexico. He's willing to negotiate, too. And also they need, like we. Like USMCA. We need their wood, their oil. Like we need, there are imports from Canada, maple syrup, because it's not getting cold enough in Vermont. There are imports that we need from Canada that putting a giant tariff on is not

going to do anything for domestic manufacturing. New England is making as much maple syrup as it can. Like putting a tariff on Canadian maple syrup is just going to let them charge us more. I'm going to be honest. I like the cheap maple syrup that RFK Jr. is probably about to ban. I don't even need it to be authentic. Oh, the corn syrup stuff? Yeah. One of my daughters likes that.

I'm like, what are you doing? Stop it. Stop it right now. Stop all this stuff. Come on. So the opposition reader. Same with the timber and the like oil and natural resources. Like what's the point of a tariff on that? Well, but here's, I actually think to your point about whether Trudeau is smart or stupid, I sort of think he's handling this in a smarter way than raging against Trump's quote economic

nationalism, which is what Friedland did in her resignation letter. And we can put up F2 here. Yeah, this is about her resigning. Right. And, I mean, there's, Trump is, the one way that you don't get a deal with Donald Trump is by going full, like, elite, knocking him and treating him like he's dirt, all of that. That's like a really bad way to get something in your country's interest from the incoming president. They can't prevent Donald Trump becoming the president of the United States. They have to work with Donald Trump. And we saw him negotiate a lot with AMLO, with USMCA. They can get a good deal out of Donald Trump. And I think that's why Trudeau, to your point about maybe him being smart, maybe he is the winter Gavin Newsom, flew down to Mar-a-Lago and tried to actually work something out.

Now, was it a little embarrassingly, what's the right word, sycophantic? Maybe. It might have been. I'm sure that's what caused a lot of ripples in Canadian politics. Probably wasn't a different way that he could have done it, although I don't know if Trump would have allowed it to be done a different way without that photo op at the dinner table. But Donald Trump is the president. Like, it's as simple as that. You have to work with the incoming president.

And Trudeau's popularity, according to BBC in June of this year, it was at 28%. 28%. Canada... He's overstayed his welcome. I mean, he's been there forever. The vibes have shifted. There was a great piece recently about how Trudeau and Obama, like the center left, as we were talking about, we will be talking about with Schultz and Macron in this block.

The center left had its moment where it was riding high and felt really good. And it looked like Trudeau was the future. And Trudeau would be like the, he was the setting the tone for the future of Canada. And it was, I think this was in a piece about Angela Merkel and her new book. And that has collapsed, that vision of the future has completely collapsed. And it's one that the sort of Davos set was really optimistic about because it meant they had control. And that moment has totally faded from Western politics, to say the very least. So his opposition, the opposition leader in this case, whose last name I can't say,

Pierre Palivre, I never can say it, but he is a very formidable opponent. He has a robust presence online, support from American conservatives now, goes viral a lot. He had like a barn burner speech in whatever their congress is. Yeah, whatever their congress is. Well, they're a state, so they don't have that. Right, they're a state legislature. If you haven't seen the video of him munching on an apple while just destroying a reporter, highly recommend looking that one up. But his support from American conservatives, but more importantly, all of that stems from him just being very articulate. He makes his case really well.

He's a good ambassador for his ideas. Canada's next federal election, according to BBC, must be held in October at the very latest. He is calling for, opposition party is calling for earlier elections. Trudeau is facing calls from his own party to resign. It is just a complete mess. And maybe as that Politico headline suggested, the chaos is good for Canada because they need something other than Trudeau. And so if we can put up F3 here, this is an interesting wrinkle here. Amid all this collapse, their dollar is crashing. That has interesting implications for Trump's attempt to do a trade war. So when your dollar crashes or when your currency crashes, then your exports are cheaper.

So what this means is Canadian products that get exported, let's say, into the United States, we can buy them cheaper. Trump then has his tariffs kind of defanged. So the goal of a tariff is to basically raise the price of something for domestic consumers, which then encourages domestic production of that thing. Like we said, when it comes to Canada, some of that's ridiculous because maple syrup, wood, et cetera. But whatever. Setting that aside. It just means that if your currency collapses by 25% and then you come in with a 25% tariff, we actually have to come in with now closer to like a 35% tariff because of math, in order just to get it back to where you were originally. So all the jawboning between Trump and Trudeau, which is driving down their dollar, actually makes it then harder for Trump to do what he's trying to do with his tariffs, because currently it's doing the reverse.

It's like a reverse tariff. Now, over in Germany- We're subsidizing their exports right now through Trump's mouth. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence, and the fallout from that is continuing as well in the parliament. So this really, Ryan, to your point about the center-left, Macron right now is struggling with the center-left coalition. He cobbled together the weirdest coalition that we sort of covered a lot when it was happening. But in this case with Scholz, kind of interesting that it's happening during Angela Merkel's book tour, by the way. That's not great timing, or maybe it is

great timing, but maybe it's going to help her sell books. But as NPR reports, Scholz's fractious three-party coalition government collapsed in early November when the chancellor fired his finance minister, sound familiar, in a dispute over how to revitalize Germany's stagnant economy. Where does this go? Yeah, and so this is heavily Ukraine-related in the sense that he wanted to bust through. Germany loves its deficit controls. Loves its Russian oil. Well, they love their Russian oil. But yes, just the German culture just hates to spend beyond what it believes or its means. But he wanted to do so for the ongoing Ukraine war. And his coalition collapsed basically as a result

of that. His coalition was with the Green Party too, though. It's interesting. And the Greens have been very militaristic too. The reason that he has this bizarre coalition is that the far right, the far, far right party is picking up now like 15, 12 to 15 percent of the parliament and nobody will form a coalition with the far, far right. Good for them. Germany has a troubled history when it comes to the far right. And so that leaves then less of the parliament to form a coalition. It makes it very hard for anybody to have a majority government that can actually do anything. And it's going to get especially interesting next time because this AFD, the far right party, is expected to grow to maybe 20%. Well, and it's a vicious cycle because the less or the more that you have stagnant center-left mealy-mouthed. They can't deliver anything. Right. Exactly.

The more powerful AFD gets and the more fuel you're adding to the fire. So it's, I mean, they're in, like, the exact definition of a pickle right now. And it looks like the far left might be able to barrel its way into the parliament, too, through people probably following her, Sarah Wagenknecht, this like kind of firebrand leftist who... Wagen? Wagenknecht, whatever.

She's this firebrand leftist who, like East German, she joined the Communist Party back when there was still an East Germany. She's like you. Yeah, there you go. Bernie, except she has gone

hardcore anti-immigrants. Not uncommon in Europe. But she's kept all the other left-wing stuff but become like super German nativist. And it's an interesting test for that kind of politics, which are being upended now. Syria because so many Syrians are like, yeah, you thought we were lying. Like we literally are refugees.

We would rather be in Syria. Now that we can go back to Syria, we're going to go back to Syria. But a lot of them have been there 10 years, have built businesses, and have built roots. And so some are, you know, a significant number are going to stay. So, you know,

if she barrels in with, you know, 10, 15%, AFD's got 20%. Mm-hmm. It's pretty, you'd have to have basically every other party would have to team up together to form a government. But those parties don't agree with each other. So, functionally, what do you do? Right. I guess we'll find out.

Donald Trump enters office once again at a very precarious time in geopolitical history. Yeah. I mean, Europe's screwed, as Sager likes to say. Europe is just completely screwed. Yes. Yes. Well, and that's why I think breaking points works is because it's a good example of how the U.S. may be better positioned to not follow in the failed path of Europe. And that's failures on the left and the right. We really kind of, the grass is always greener on the other side. And like over here, left and right, I think both kind of love the parliamentary system because it allows you to vote your conscience and support, let's say, if you're on the right, you know, whichever flavor of right you like,

you vote for them and then they get a little piece of the parliament. So it means you don't have to, you know, if you're on the left and you don't, but you don't like Joe Biden, you vote for the Bernie party. Right. Or there's some technocratic like left Warren party and then there's the, whatever Biden is in. Like AOC said, if in Europe, she would never be in the same party as Nancy Pelosi. And that's correct. She would not be. We saw that play out this week. So we kind of pine for that. On the other hand, it has its problems. Huge. I mean, stagnant. Which we're seeing. I mean, we feel like we're stagnant. We can't pass anything through our own Congress. But what gets worse is when you have the seesaw effect. You're changing

a lot and nothing's really changing. Like policies just swing back and forth. We pass all our stuff in December of after elections. Yeah, right. Yeah. That's the way we do things. When voters don't get a say anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ryan, we're all pulling for you to close the loop on the beginning of the show. And I'm just amazed that you and your family how you're able to keep going and bring us the news. Yeah, well We'll look back on this. It'll be a thing that happened. Absolutely. That's the That's the hope absolutely We will be back with one more show before the new year because Ryan booked a great guest a huge guest I'm chairman of the congressional progressive caucus Gregassar, incoming chairman from Austin, Texas.

And that's a Friday show. So we're going to sit down with him for a good long conversation about a lot of what we discussed without having a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus here to kind of talk about the future and tactics and strategy and recent news as well. So that will be fascinating, Ryan, especially on the cusp of a government shutdown, by the way. So lots to talk about with Greg Kassar. Tune in on Friday for that. BreakingPoints.com. If you want to get a premium membership, you get access to CounterPoints Friday shows early. You get to watch them on

Thursday night, which when we have a lawmaker is cool because you actually get access to breaking news. There you go. All right. BreakingPoints.com. We will be back here Friday with more. We'll see you after the holiday break with more CounterPoints. See you then. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

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