Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/23/24: CRAZIEST Moments Of 2024: Biden DROP OUT, Trump ELECTION

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Krystal and Saagar look back on some of the big moments in 2024. 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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Happy holidays. We've put together some major highlight reels and all this stuff, so make sure you had some content while we were gone. It's been a crazy year. It's been a wild year. Many, many highlights, lowlights, et cetera, for us to get to.

Certainly one of the most extraordinary timelines and events that unfolded and that we got to experience here live was the Biden debate in which he was unable to articulate really a single coherent sentence and bragged about what we finally beat. Was it Medicare? We beat Medicare. Yeah. We beat Medicare. Good job, Joe Biden. That led to a whole Democratic catastrophe and panic mode set in. And Nancy Pelosi makes her moves. Eventually he drops out. So here for you guys is a little bit of the highlights of our coverage of that sequence of events at the time. Enjoy. We're back, everybody. And we just witnessed a profound moment, I think, in American history.

It was great. I feel great about the country. I don't know about you guys. That one's going down in the history books. I mean, the single takeaway, I wish we could sit here as people who like policy and who would like to get into the back and forth. And the profound truth is we just witnessed, I mean, one of the saddest political moments, like maybe the political death of his delivery. Even whenever we were trying to parse the substance, Crystal, the four of us, we couldn't even get to what he was saying. Incomprehensible, the coughing.

He coughed a record five times in the first 30 seconds of the debate. And, I mean, I'm just sitting here stunned. I don't know what else I can say. I mean, two words. Elder abuse. It was painful to watch. Like, from know what else I can say. I mean, two words, elder abuse. Yeah. That's, it was painful to watch, like from the jump. It was painful. His voice, his face, his inability to maintain a single train of thought. It was horrendous. And like, I mean, Trump is all over the place and said all kinds of things that I can't stand and lies and doesn't answer the question, whatever. But like you said, Sagar, I can't even get to like, oh, let's talk about their different stances on it.

First of all, they don't really have that different stance on immigration or Israel or any number of other issues. But, you know, I would love to get into, oh, let's talk about Biden's antitrust. Let's talk about labor policy. No one who watched this debate is going to get past the fact that he was so much worse than I think we've been, you know, expecting. We know that Biden is not where he was. We expected some problems in this debate. This was so far beyond what I anticipated. I don't know what to say. Yeah, it felt like he spent way too much time

at Camp David rehearsing, like practicing. With the statistics, did you notice that? The statistics. He had all these stats. And he had a couple of

what you could tell were supposed to be one-liners, but he only got through like half the line. I think I saw him heading over our neighborhood around 4.30 or so, so like he just kind of got into town.

Right. If that was. Stepped off the plane and went straight there. Yeah. And he was just worn out. And his voice from the very beginning. Was done. Was awkward.

So people are now like in the Democratic Party are thinking. It's funny. Yeah. In the beginning of this, I said there are some decent number of grassroots Democrats who are kind of hoping that he has such a poor performance tonight that it just forces him off the ticket. That they have to pull him. Not because they don't like Biden, but because they want to beat Trump. So do you think this was that performance? It was that performance.

If it was anything, it's this. I mean, that is the worst. If it's possible. That is the worst moment of his life. So we should know Emily will be joining us shortly. She's doing something else. We didn't kick Emily off the island. We love Emily.

She wanted me to share with you. She also thought he looked old and terrible. Well, she said old as fuck. Let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's actually repeat what she said. She said he's old as fuck and she'll share more of her thoughts when she returns. Yeah, I mean, listen, going into this, I was like, it's going to be Biden.

Right. Anyone who thinks they're going to pull him, you're delusional. It's going to be Joe Biden. Like, deal with it. We all need to live in the realm of reality. This is when it's hitting home. After this, I'm like, hmm. Yeah.

Maybe. I'm very curious. I shouldn't say this because it will incentivize people to switch over to the mainstream coverage. I am actually curious what they're saying on MSNBC and CNN, because I know the cope. Somebody tweeted out like, oh, yeah, I have two sources who say as a cold. It's like that doesn't come close to explaining. So the Biden campaign, Crystal, has called every mainstream reporter in the country and has gotten them to run the reporter. Two sources say he has a cold. And as I said, presumably when you have a cold, you take Sudafed or something with pseudo-ephedrine.

We know what a cold looks like. It doesn't look like your brain melting in real time. The stone face, the open mouth gape. I mean, anybody who has an elderly person in their life has understood what we all just witnessed. It was horrifying almost from the very beginning. And just to give people a taste too, as you said, Crystal, too, of what the mainstream coverage was. Let's put F1, please, up on the screen, just to give people an idea of how such an unmitigated disaster. This is from the AP, the AP, the most middle of the road mainstream.

And this is what they put out on their newswire to their entire subscriber service. Quote, in the first half hour of the debate, a raspy Biden delivers rambling answers while Trump counters with energy and falsehoods. But even they have to say raspy Biden rambling answers, and they even have to acknowledge Trump counters with energy. This is also where I have to eat my words. And the falsehoods, he does fall. Okay. Yes. It was. Politicians are talking. All right. And he's Trump. He's Trump. But I will say this too. The rules unambiguously worked in the favor of Donald Trump.

There's no question. I think that was one of the top five performances of his life because he just seemed like relatively normal. He had a few moments, you know, there's some stop the steal there at the end, people aren't gonna like that. Even on abortion, he was a little bit all over the place. But the whole point is we can't sit here and parse, because the average person, and I want everybody at home to think about this, the average person in your life,

your father, your sister, your cousin, the person who doesn't watch anything, but they did watch this, what are they gonna take away? It ain't anything to do with late term abortion. It is, oh my God, what is going on in front of us? Go ahead, Crystal. So Kyle texted me an update from MSNBC. He says they're waving the towel. Nicole Wallace said people will be talking about whether he should be in the race. Wow. Wow. The MSNBC folks are probably talking to some of the same people, types of people in Washington that I'm talking to.

And yes, they're absolutely, completely panicked. Yeah. People who have been involved in politics for decades, who two hours ago were saying, put your big boy pants on. Like, he's the nominee. Stop wetting the bed. Stop wetting the bed. Like, all this stuff. There's no mechanism.

Some of them are still saying, look, so these are the different paths. Some are saying something's got to give. This is insane. These are very sober centrist minded Washington creatures. Some of them are saying something's got to give. And we've got to- From the control room, they're telling us that CNN has called his performance, quote, dismal. Griffin saying, quote, CNN saying it's Job. I mean, this is just, it is unambiguous. And to a certain extent, look, not so much of a victory lap. Crystal, how many, and Ryan too, how many recriminations have we all received over the last five years for pointing out- We want our apologies. I genuinely do want an apology. This was foisted upon the American people. People in the White

House, you should be ashamed of yourself. Jake Sullivan and all the other folks who see this stuff up close, we've been reporting it here day after day. G7 leaders, he's gotten worse. We have the public moments. But to see this up close, 90 minutes with no filter, it's insane. I mean, we're in 25th Amendment territory. Is this man alive? Like, what the fuck is happening? So I want to hear what the other Washington. So you've got the one group. One group is saying, yeah, like, this is crazy.

This can't go on. It has to change. The other group is saying, no, there's no way to get him off. But what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the House and Senate. Basically, just like give up. That's the idea. I thought this was the end and Senate. Basically just... Just like give up? That's the idea? Just give up. I thought this was the end of democracy.

That always works. And make the argument for Biden that he has a very good staff and that you want Democrats nominating the appointees. You want Democrats in control of these agencies. All right. And you're probably going to lose,

but you can maybe win the House and Senate. Okay. And we went into this... Wait, isn't there a third group? No, that's basically it. That's it. Okay. Okay, I got it.

There's none that are. There's no just delusional. He was great. No, there's none of that. I thought he was very strong. There's none of that. Okay. Absolutely zero of that.

Got it. And before this, the normal Democratic Senate candidate, like a tester or a Jackie Rosen or something, was running about five to six points ahead of Biden already, which showed you that there isn't, and Democrats are heartened by this in the sense that they're like, oh, look, the public likes Democrats. They just don't like Biden. It's like, well, but Biden is your nominee. So they already had a five-point gap before this. That could widen to something historic. You've never had a situation where the candidates are kind of pulling, I mean, the House and Senate candidates are pulling the presidential ticket along. Usually they talk about coattails. Coattails.

Yeah. Right now, everyone is having to live in the reality of like, holy shit, that was bad. How long before the spin takes hold and it's like, well, Trump was lying and he said this bad thing and everyone's just not focused on the substance and Biden had a cold. And seriously, how long before they can reconstruct all of the like artifice and Potemkin village of Biden competence that they had carefully constructed prior to this moment? I think they're making that decision right now. I think literally right now they're scrambling to try to figure out if they can put the cat back into the bag. Because I think if Joe Biden says, no way, I'm in it, Jack, and I'm not going anywhere, Jack, then everyone will-

The idea that you would- The idea that, Jack. I was just- Yeah. I had forgotten about this, but Megyn Kelly just showed this clip of Morning Joe saying it was Mika saying Marjorie Taylor Greene must have might have might as well just written this report on Biden's health. She said this just a few weeks ago.

I mean, it's insane. Right. It's insane. And so the only reason that everyone is now expressing surprise is because they feel like they can't get away with their lie anymore because everybody saw it crumble on national television. But but we all saw Joe Biden after the her report come out and say, I have no memory problems at a press conference in which he had several lapses in his memory. It was like clearly not OK. We've known he's not OK. So if he tells his inner circle whose friends are all scattered across corporate media,

that he's going to do it, they'll find a way to make it work. Well, that experience with that report is what made me question because after that report came out where he said basically like, I can't charge this guy. The jury's going to be like, he's just a confused old man. How can, you know, you can't, you can't put this man in front of a jury and he can't even remember when he was vice president. That was part of it. Couldn't remember when his own son died. Right. That was the type of memory lapses that he was reportedly having. And there was a moment in the media when there were a bunch of pieces written. People were like, oh, my goodness, this is really bad. Like Democrats need to do something about this. And then very quickly the ranks closed again. And you know, you had people out there saying things like that. And I don't think they can get away with it this time though.

That's my inclination is they can't, I don't know. I don't know. It's one thing to that point. I mean, it is one thing to see it in a report. Yeah. It's another thing to watch it yourself. Yeah. Right. And that does make it quite under the, and especially coming on the heels of the G7 and the clips that came out of that, et cetera. I think there's a foreign, the foreign against case is this, is that first time, remember there was Andrea Mitchell when Biden was losing in 2019 and early 2020.

Yeah. Andrea Mitchell has that segment and be like, we need to ask serious questions about Joe Biden's age. And then six months later, she's like, it was a stutter the whole time. I never said that before. The reason why I think this one is substantively different is that there's actually very crazy high stakes now at this point where the national public is so much more coalesced around he is old, that if they try to do a similar walk back that they did before, that they would lose even more credibility. Look, even these shameless liars, we have to believe, have a line.

But I also wouldn't put it past them. I wouldn't put it past Andrea Mitchell and all them to roll out the stutter. So I just don't know. Griffin says we've got a CNN clip to give us all a flavor. We haven't watched this so we can react to it live. Let's take a listen to how things are going over there. It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers. And they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket.

And they're having conversations about what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include, should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside? Others are other of the conversations are about should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel this debate was so terrible. That's the first 10 minutes afterwards. That's right. That that is interesting because he raises a good point because, again, we're not thinking about people doing the right thing for the country or whatever. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about self-interested political actors who have their own careers and paychecks in mind. He's raising what I think is true, which is that, yes, Democrats are going to outperform Biden. But if you have that week of a candidate at the top of the ticket, it is going to drag down everybody's performance across the board. So if you're a Rosen in Nevada, if you're a tester in Montana, you're trying to get reelected, you're any number of congressional candidates around the country.

Suddenly you're going, this guy's a this is a real problem for me personally. You could also, they could also rationalize it though by saying, okay, if it looks this obvious that Trump is going to win, then somebody like a tester or Rosen actually get benefits because from the voters who want to check on Trump because they think Trump, they kind of like Trump. They prefer Trump to Biden, but they don't want him to have full control of Congress either. So you can see it. The divided Congress theory. Yeah, the old divided Congress theory.

There is actually good evidence for that. Ticket splitting is so rare. I mean, there is some ticket splitting. But if you have a candidate at the top of the ticket who is not much of a drag, it's going to be a problem for everybody. It's probably more of a drag. They're going to have to defend him. Then it is a benefit. They will have to defend him every day at every state fair. They'll have to defend him. That's probably, it's probably more of a drag. They're going to have to defend him. Then it is a benefit. They will have to defend him every day at every state fair.

They'll have to defend him. That's right. We have a, apparently we have a Joanne Reed clip. We've got to check in with Joy over at MSNBC from our producers. Let's go ahead and take a listen, guys. I too was on the phone throughout much of the debate with Obama, world people, with Democrats, with people who are political operatives, with campaign operatives. My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. And the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic. The people who were

texting with me were very concerned about President Biden seeming extremely feeble, seeming extremely weak. Extremely feeble. How good? It's bullshit that they're surprised by this. How good is that? But you know what, Emily? I mean, I am surprised by how bad it was. That's true.

Not to that. But we don't spend time. And nobody gaslit the American public. We're not in Obama world, and we don't spend time with the people who spend time with him every day. Right. Yeah, but I mean, the level,

because here's the thing. I thought, listen, we saw the State of the Union. He was okay. Yeah, he was fine. But he was reading off a teleprompter. Right. And he had the audience.

And he had an audience. When he has to gather the words for himself, it's bad. And it was worse. I had low expectations. My expectations were on the floor. I thought he would at least have some moments on abortion or on January 6th or something that they could take and run with. And this was strong. There's not one moment. Because when we were, you know, we were picking clips of like, all right, how do we want to represent this debate?

And I had in my mind like, oh, well, you know, we're going to show all the bad ones. If he has a good one, like we should show them. Yeah. What am I going to show? There's nothing to show. Zero. Is it his handicap? There's plenty of things Trump said.

Morals of an alley cat. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that was funny. Morals of an alley cat. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. That was funny. Morals of an alley cat. Which also sounds like something that a 112-year-old would say. It's like in a fedora. Yeah, that guy's got the morals of an alley cat. Are you in the production of Annie?

Like, what are you talking about? He's got the morals of an alley cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like- What? All the chimney sweeps know. It's not like, okay, Trump looks like a connoisseur out there. He did.

In comparison, but imagine it's Gavin Newsom up there on the station. Gavin Newsom could have picked Trump apart in that there was plenty to work with there on abortion, on stop the steal, on all kinds of things, right? That Trump is just making up shit as he goes along, but he at least seemed like he will survive another four years, you know? And so in contrast, he looked absolutely, you know, incredible. And you didn't see any of that pushback. Any of the attempted pushback was so incoherent, you didn't even know what point Biden was trying to make in response to it. So, yeah, I mean, the fact that you have CNN with their sources,

Van Jones. Nick Kristof. Axelrod. Joy Reid. Axelrod, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace. Casey Hunt. Yeah, Casey Hunt

over who cut off the Trump. Oh, I do want to say the CNN moderators were pretty good. They did a good job. All right, everybody, we have some absolutely massive breaking news, which is that much anticipated or speculated about. President Joe Biden is stepping back from being the Democratic nominee, withdrawing from the 2024 race. He will remain as president. He is not resigning that position. I'm going to pull up for you the letter that he posted, which I'm going to be 100 with you. I actually haven't read yet. So we're going to read it together right now in real time because I wanted to jump on and bring you the news as much as possible. And also, obviously, Ryan Grimm here with us to help us parse through what all of this means. So he says, my fellow Americans,

over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a nation. Today, America has the strongest economy in the world. We've made historic investments in rebuilding our nation and lowering prescription drug costs for seniors and expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans. We've provided critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances, passed the first gun safety law in 30 years, pointed the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court, and passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world. America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today. I know none of this could have been done without you, the American people.

Together, we overcame a once-in-a-century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have protected and preserved our democracy, and we've revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world. It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president, and while it has been my intention to seek re-election,

I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term. I will speak to the nation later this week in more detail about my decision. For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected. I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me. I believe today what I always have, that there is nothing America can't do when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America, signed Joe Biden.

So, Ryan, a few things that jump out at me right off the jump. First of all, the timing is wild. The RNC just concluded. Obviously, we are weeks away from the DNC. So just an extraordinary moment in history. Second of all, he is withdrawing from the race, but remaining as president, not resigning from that position. That was a new push that Republicans in particular were starting to make. But others as well are saying, listen, if you're not fit to run for office, how are you fit

to continue to serve in the presidency? Number three, while he expresses his gratitude to Kamala Harris, his, of course, vice president, he does not endorse her or any specific process to succeed him as Democratic nominee here, leaving an open question whether he will do any of that or just leave it open to what comes next. So what is your initial reaction here? Yes, all of all of that. Thanking Kamala Harris for being a partner in the process, but not endorsing her is huge. It opens up the next several days to be a period of intense jockeying. Biden, as has been reported basically everywhere, was at King Lear levels of resentment and anger over the last several days as he's been being pushed to leave. And Griffin, did you say something? Okay, there you go. Griffin says he just endorsed Kamala Harris. So breaking news from Griffin,

that he did not endorse her in the letter, but waited until afterwards to endorse her might be a way to, you know, sanctify the dignity of the Oval Office and not sully it with the political machinations of political machinations. That's how Democrats think. That is very Democrat brain. So now you're going So, uh, now you're going to see the entire, now you're going to see a contest between, uh, those who are advocating for an open convention, such as Nancy Pelosi, um, such as myself, I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi, but, uh, and those who say, look, it's, it's too chaotic. It's too toxic. It's too late. What we need to do now is just rally behind Kamala Harris and just, you know, ride to the elect, ride to the general election.

So here is the here's the Joe Biden tweet in which he endorses Kamala Harris. He says, my fellow Democrats, I've decided not to accept the nomination to focus all my energies on my duties as president for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my vice president, and it's been the best decision I've made. Today, I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats, it's time to come together and beat Trump. Let's do this. So we'll see whether the strength of Joe Biden's endorsement of Kamala is enough to completely quiet those like Pelosi, who reportedly behind the scenes had been pushing for an open convention process. I suspect that many of the donors also are interested in that open convention process. The reason being that, I mean, if you

look at the polling, one of the weakest candidates to run against Trump, not named Joe Biden, is Kamala Harris, at least according to the polling today. Now, listen, none of that is set in stone. She may be sort of, I think, underappreciated at the moment, given the fact that she just hasn't been in the public spotlight that much. You could see a bump just based on the fact, oh, my God, she's not a thousand years old and she can string three sentences together. This is incredible. But if you're just going by the data at this point, you would look at her compared to a Gretchen Whitmer, a Pete Buttigieg, a Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, a Josh Shapiro, a Roy Coon. The list goes on and on and on and say, if you're just concerned with defeating Donald Trump, any one of these other candidates is likely to be in a stronger position.

The other thing with regards to Kamala Harris, I mean, there are a few things to mention here. Obviously, it goes without saying that her defenders will say that it is outrageous to shove aside the first female woman vice president, black woman vice president. They will also say voters in the primary, which, you know, let's put aside the fact there really wasn't a primary, but they voted for Biden-Harris. So she has more Democratic legitimacy. This is the case that they would make for why she should be the presumptive nominee. So there's that. There's also the based on polling that the people who are most closely associated with the Biden administration really have a weight around their neck at this point, especially because of the sense of betrayal of this administration and the level of cover up

that they perpetrated on the American public vis-a-vis his health concerns. Yeah. And I think the argument that she's been vetted is one of the flimsiest and that she's been a national figure. It's true that she was vetted during the 2019-2020 campaign, and she absolutely withered under the heat of it. So it's not like she was vetted and then succeeded in even making it to Iowa. Like she dropped out before Iowa because once national attention was on her, she crumbled. She was then picked by Biden, not as he says, because he thinks she'd be a great president or but because that's what he wanted to add to the ticket for electoral purposes. There hasn't been a whole lot of focus on her during the Biden-Harris administration to the extent it was about her comment, do not come, about immigration or her

effort to do voting rights. She kept getting handed these really impossible tasks, which is often what presidents do. That's what Obama did to Joe Biden. The most scrutiny she got was over her massive staff turmoil. Now, journalistically, if Kamala Harris does win, it could be delightful for reporters because, you know, the vice president's office has been toxic and chaotic and filled with leaks, less so in the last six months or so. But for most of the Biden administration, her office was just a disaster. Yeah. Just people rotating in and out constantly and leaving and and and trashing the culture there, which is exactly what happened during the campaign. Remember, New York Times and Politico and others did the tick tocks about her campaign, talking about how, you know, what a train wreck

the entire thing was. Now, the reason I think that you're not going to end up with an open convention is because people like Pelosi can manifest the possibility of it because they have enough power to do that. But they can't force anybody to run. And these centrist Democratic candidates are so cowardly and cynical and calculating that I don't think I hope I'm proven wrong here. I don't think any of them will even challenge Kamala Harris. My understanding is that they believe that because she has establishment endorsements and she's the vice president,

that she's very difficult to beat, that they will likely lose to her, that they would be seen as disloyal and that Harris will lose in the general and that they would be blamed for her loss. Or the fact that they challenged her and lost would be considered their shot. Like, hey, you're you had your shot. You pulled your ticket.

You got your order. Get in the back of line. And so everybody else. So everybody's like, OK, let's let her lose. And then we will run in 2028, which, of course, flies in the face of all the Democratic arguments that they make that there won't be a 2028 election. So wait a minute, which which one is it here? So I want to come back to this, but I do want to back up for a second and just talk a little bit about Joe Biden's decision making process and these extraordinary past

several weeks. Obviously, this all began with that utterly disastrous debate performance, which, Ryan, I want to give you and I will pat on the back because in our pre-debate coverage, I don't know if you remember this. I think we both were saying that there is a possibility that he's so bad tonight that it is not recoverable. I even said a bunch of Democrats were like secretly hoping for it. Hoping that it would be such a disaster. That's right. And that is what unfolds. Now, I didn't actually expect it to be that bad.

I thought it would be bad, but in the way that it is. Exceeded our worst expectations. It did. I thought it would be bad in the way that he's normally bad. But it was, you know, an extra special level of bad. And that has just sent the whole party into a total tailspin. Yeah, that was certainly insane. I'll never forget that.

People loved our live cam during the debate. Of course, yeah, because we were like, I think it was literally a shot being like this, like in the first 10 minutes too, because that was the craziest part of it is it started off bad and it just somehow got worse. It was like, how is this gonna last for two hours? Like, how is this gonna happen?

I still can't believe it lasted as long as it did. I think the most insane part of that whole thing is that it was part of the most insane week in American politics because you had the Biden debate, then you had the insane like month in American politics. You had all of that. And then on the heels of it is the Trump attempted assassination, which was so crazy to live through because it happened on a Saturday. You have the immediate images of literal blood on his face. Then you have the fallout. Then you have the Secret Service investigation, which, by the way, you know, whatever happened with that. But anyways, it was totally, totally insane.

Well, and his reaction in that moment, which becomes, you know, an enduring image and certainly an iconic image. I still see posters of it around my conservative community, etc. So just for you guys to recall, here was our immediate reaction at the time and some of our coverage of how that wild series of events all unfolded. We have full spectrum coverage here at Breaking Points this morning of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. We brought you two breaking news segments over the weekend, breaking some of that down. But we're going to go a full through the timeline of the events, some of the fallout, what we know about the shooter so far, the FBI investigation,

President Biden's response. We'll then dissect exactly what we know about the Secret Service's colossal failure here in preventing this attempted assassination, some of the holes that have opened up, and some of the background also into the problems inside of this agency that are now glaringly revealed after this incident. We're going to talk a little bit about President Biden and his political future. His political future appears saved more so now by the attempted assassination and some of the news coverage and some of the planning going on now behind the scenes by the Democratic Party, how they think that they can weather this and perhaps go all the way to election day without more calls from elected officials calling on Biden to drop out. We're going to give everybody

a preview of the RNC, which of course kicks off today and will go all the way to Thursday. Some news about Donald Trump and the speech that he has given and about also some changes that he's made to that speech in the wake of a shooting, how he's feeling exactly, and how this will change the presidential election race going into 2024. We'll finally end the segment on a funny note. Somebody who you saw very recently here on this program, the advisor to Democratic billionaire mega-donor Reid Hoffman, has apparently been caught in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, who you saw in our counterpoints debate against Cenk Uygur about Biden staying in the race. Well, he apparently was caught telling journalists in the hours after the attempted assassination that the entire thing was apparently staged. So a real view into the Democratic elite mind and some of the conspiracies

that harbor there. As we said at the top, this is a full-spectrum Breaking Points coverage. Thank you to everybody, our premium subscribers, who enable us to be able to put out that breaking news coverage and to continue doing this show here every day. Our own Emily Jashinsky is on the ground at the RNC. So throughout the week, we'll check in with her about what's going on. She'll be doing interviews and other things. And then don't forget, we also, the entire crew will be on the ground for the DNC, which is in August in Chicago. So thank you to all of our premium members. You're the guys who enable us to continue doing this work. Let's start with the attempted assassination on Donald Trump. And I'll try and just start at the very beginning of the incident. So let's go ahead

and play some of the video here. This was in Butler, Pennsylvania, approximately 6.15 PM. You saw Trump. He was in the middle of his speech, only five minutes or so. Immediately, you see shots begin to ring out and Secret Service agents who jump immediately on top of the president. The most striking things is that you can see the incredible confusion going on behind Donald Trump. And unfortunately, that heartbreaking scream that you hear in the background is people realizing that an innocent bystander, just a normal person who woke up on Saturday, he was excited to go to the former president's rally, lost his life and was shot. The ER doctor who was on the scene said that he was shot in the head and almost certainly a fatality immediately after it happened.

We know a little bit more about that individual and I'll bring you some news about him. But what you're watching, obviously, is just an incredibly chaotic scene. You have these Secret Service agents. We can actually hear them on the microphone that is being picked up there, where they're saying, get down, get down. Then they realize that the shooter is down. They say that the threat has been neutralized. As Trump begins to rise, they bring him up and they surround him and create a barrier with their own bodies around the former president. One of them is actually checking him for wounds while he is standing there. Trump obviously is both, he's a little bit confused in the immediate moment, but then he says, wait, wait, wait. And that is their, one of the most

iconic moments where he shouts, fight, fight, fight to the crowd, puts his fist up, also creating that iconic image that we have now all probably seen over the weekend where you can see the Associated Press photographer was right below him and was able to capture Trump with his fist in the air, blood on his face and the American flag flying high in the background as he is rushed to his vehicle. Let's go to the next part here as well. Put that image, please, up on the screen. This is where a lot of the questions now are centering. What the hell happened here with this response from law enforcement? So what you can see directly in front of you, this is a map that's been put together. You can see the stage where Donald Trump was speaking in Butler, Pennsylvania. You can also see where the Wounded Rally attendee

was sitting. You can see behind where the law enforcement counter snipers were positioned on the rooftop. There's been a lot of discussion around the actions of those counter snipers. But then over to the left on that building rooftop was the location of the gunman's body. So there's a lot of questions here about how exactly a gunman is able to walk on to a rooftop with a direct line of sight to former President Donald Trump, he's able not only to walk onto the rooftop, he's able to get into the prone firing position and then able to squeeze off some seven to eight shots at the former president. Let's go and put the next graphic up, please. That is also very helpful in kind of discovering what happened here. This shows you actually on the ground image and also realizes just how close that this individual was able to get. We're talking about 130 yards that this individual is able to get from the former president and one of the most obvious and direct lines of sight.

Now, there's big discussions here about the failures of the Secret Service, but I think that image actually puts everything together quite well. You could see exactly where the shooter was. You could see where the Secret Service snipers were. And you can also see where Donald Trump was there on the stage. And unfortunately, in the path of that assassin's bullet, an innocent bystander was hit in the head while he was covering his own family. Just absolutely tragic in the results that have happened here. for us is the failure and some shocking questions that now have to be asked of the Secret Service and how exactly they allowed something like this to happen. Everything that we're beginning to learn now behind the scenes points to absolutely colossal incompetence. All right, so elite media

news. This is breaking just this morning. Just had to put it here in the show because it's delicious. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Report from CNN's Oliver Darcy. Morning Joe has been pulled from the air Monday because of the Trump shooting. MSNBC will not air Morning Joe, its, quote, celebrated politics roundtable, opting to instead air continued breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination. They confirmed this decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show Sunday evening after CNN reached out to them.

The network said that the show will resume on Tuesday. The decision by MSNBC to leave one of its most recognizable programs on the sidelines amid a seismic politics news-driven news cycle with the RNC underway is going to raise eyebrows. Now listen to this, because this is the delicious part. A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show's stable of two dozen plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail

the program and the network as a whole. Given the breaking news nature of the story, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking coverage and fraught political moment. Given the gravity and the complexity of the story, NBC and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking coverage. As we continue, these networks continue to cross simulcasts alternating between NBC News and MSNBC. So there is one feed covering the assassination and the alleged attempt. Now, there is a lot to be said about that. But for one of the bosses to say, we don't trust our own flagship anchors not to say something crazy is an insane thing to admit. Because what you're really saying is that we don't want the potential criticism of our flagship

anchors in the time when it matters the most. So if that's true, then why should we want them on the air at all? If they can't be trusted in them, this is the thing, too, about news. And this is something I've learned a lot about doing this business. We do this show basically all the time, every day, et cetera. And we're on call 24 hours. And most of the time, nothing that important is happening. Like we're bringing the people to the news. It's not earth shattering.

But one of the reasons that you have to do that is because this is all about trust. This is me coming to you. I've been doing this job almost five years now that some of you have been sticking with us between rising and breaking points. You've been watching the show almost every single day. At this point, we have a relationship, right? And so because you stuck with us now through all the ups and downs, not just the big times, but in terms of inflation or, you know, any times we pick random or fun stories or whatever, you know, stuff that is going on. You know, and you know a little bit about me and you have trust in me and you have trust in Crystal, Ryan and Emily and everybody else here at the show about this type of the things that we have in place to both check ourselves, to check each other, to look about

what's going on here with the news, to report it to you properly. And if you hear any opinions, especially in a fraught political moment, you're going to know they're well-considered, that we're coming at it from the long perspective, and you can bake that in. And in fact, I would say it's times like now, I'm not going to say you need us the most, but it's times like now where we feel most gratified because you have the most amount of wanting to know what the hell is going on. We feel very, very fortunate that you're willing to put your trust in us at that time, in the bad times, the good times, and also in the medium and the downtime. So whenever you take somebody off the air

in a breaking news situation, at a time when news consumption is near an all, I mean, I don't have the data yet. I'm willing to bet this is an all-time high for just the last couple of years. We take somebody off and you say you don't trust them to cover it then, that's actually an admission

you should never trust them at all. That's really what I know the most about having done this job now for quite some time. And the sad thing now is I think they're right, is that they're obviously right in that look at the way

that Scarborough burned all of his credibility on Joe Biden on saying he has, you know, even more cogent than ever before, attacking the Wall Street Journal. And then three weeks later, admitting, saying, yeah, maybe Joe Biden doesn't need to drop out of the race after they can't cover it up anymore. And then back, you know, changing that, flip-flopping, saying, oh, no, no, he should stay. Mika Brzezinski saying, actually, I'm cool with him staying. But more so, think too about what's the story I just did,

right? These guys, Dmitry Melhorn, these people are crazy. They think that Donald Trump and Putin staged a shooting that came within inches of ending Trump's life for political benefit. That's what they think in the immediate aftermath. Those are the type of people who are on Morning Joe. Remember Donny Deutch or whoever that guy is who claims that Trump is gonna come and kill him?

They're nuts. Joy Reid, you know, over at MSNBC, she's locked her entire Twitter feed after the attempted assassination. Why? What happened, Joy? What'd you tweet out there in the past that you're worried that people might come and look at? And I just think it's stunning. I mean, Lawrence Tribe, he's a lawyer. He's somebody who's been on Morning Joe, elite Democrat, propped up all throughout Russiagate. He literally tweeted out, you reap what you sow after the attempted assassination on Trump. Now, listen, I want to say this too, because this is important. A lot of people are out there talking about unity, et cetera, like, oh, we got to tone down the rhetoric. And I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. But a lot of people are also doing the same thing that

Democrats and the media did against Sarah Palin in the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, where they're like, oh, you said, you know, Biden said something like, we got to put Trump in the bullseye. It's like, guys, that's bullshit, all right? He wasn't targeting Trump for assassination. This is just normal political rhetoric. Now, should it be that way? I don't know, whatever. But I've seen plenty of Republicans do that too. And when Sarah Palin put out a map, which had a quote bullseye over Gabby Giffords and targeting her for political defeat, that was not legitimate to say that she was trying to incite assassination. We are allowed to criticize each other. We believe in free speech in this country, especially here on this show. And that's not necessarily the grounds. But what we do know with the MSNBC situation here and taking Morning Joe off the air is if they were to say something inappropriate like that, it's more that they don't have the wherewithal to even understand the moment that they are in.

And I think this should be a lesson for everybody and hopefully maybe send this to your boomer MSNBC relatives, the people who put their trust. If their bosses can't trust them to maintain their composure, to meet the moment, to deliver information in a timely and a useful manner to their audience when it matters the most, why should you trust them to do it at any time? So that was a Trump assassination. Then shortly afterwards,

I always say assassination. Attempt assassination. Then Biden drops out of the race, right? Then Kamala gets, you know, jettisoned in. And then we have the 100 days, the craziest 100-day campaign in the history of modern American politics. Literally a recall to the days of before, the before times. No primary or any of that other stuff. A lot of speculation.

Is this stuff going to work? How is this going to happen? What does it look like? Was Cheney on the trail? Was Cheney? And Mark Cuban out there? All these theories. The Lita Condobates.

Weird. Yeah, exactly. The millionaires. J.D. Bantz and the couch. Yeah, couch crisis. Cat lady. The cat lady psy-op. That was a good one.

The podcasting strategy. The Joe Rogan interviews. So many questions, right? All of it, of course, culminates in election night, which was wild to watch it all unfold. We, of course, were here at the desk covering it live with Ryan and Emily. And then also even after the election, some of the things we learned about the Kamala Harris campaign, which raised an extraordinary record-breaking sum of money in this short truncated period of time. And some of the things that they spent that money on was truly crazy. In fact, I'm still learning new details

to this day about various celebrities that they threw hundreds, if not millions of dollars to out of these campaign funds. So here for you guys is a little bit of our immediate reaction and then some of the things we learned in the aftermath. Donald J. Trump officially declared the president-elect of the United States. He won the election last night. The AP called the race around four in the morning or so. He took to the stage roughly around 2.30 to declare victory in a speech. We have some of that speech. This is the correct one this time. Let's take a listen and let's cue it up and watch. Well, I want to thank you all very much. This is great. These are our friends. We have thousands of friends in this incredible movement. This was a movement like nobody's ever seen before. And, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time.

There's never been anything like this in this country, and maybe be, and now it's going to reach a new level of importance because we're going to help our country heal. We going to help our country heal. We're going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We're going to fix our borders. We're going to fix everything about our country. And we made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that. We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy?

But it's a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this. I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you. And with every breath in my body, I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. So there we go. That was the victory speech. It continued for a little bit while. Kamala Harris will be giving her concession a little bit later today. Guys, we can put that up on the screen roughly around 4 p.m. Eastern time here in Washington from Howard University, where she

spent some of election night at her party on Tuesday, decided the news leaked out roughly around 2 a.m. that she wouldn't be taking the stage to give her concession at that time. But yeah, I mean, yeah, for those who were not watching live, we had a fun, like, you know, joke about the fact that the right is very upset that she is not giving a concession. And I mean, like, on principle, I do agree that she just conceded last night and or this morning like Hillary Clinton. But yeah, she's decided to drag it out a little bit. Also, we haven't heard a word

from the White House, which is kind of crazy. The people weren't there for it. Let them hear our decent counter, which is that Trump still to this day has not given his concession speech for 2020. Well, now he doesn't have to. Now he never has to. He should get one. Now would be the guest. Trump still to this day has not given his concession speech for 2020. Well, now he doesn't have to. Now he never has to. He should get

one. Now would be the time. What does he have to lose? He'll give his farewell speech. I actually did lose in 2020. JK, guys. What did he say? He was being sarcastic or something? He said he was being sarcastic. Yeah, because he did actually sort of kind of admit that he lost and then when he got asked about it at the debate, he was like,

I wasn't being for real. I was just joking about that. Now he could do the reverse and be like, that will stop this deal stuff. I wasn't, I didn't mean it. Anyway. It's over. It's finally over. I will say this is legitimately a huge lingering question for the MAGA right, which poured millions of dollars.

Everyone knows, I mean, if you were in the conservative space for the last couple of years, all the donor energy and money was behind election integrity. And they were yesterday. Donald Trump was saying he was pointing to alleged irregularities all over the country. And so this is going to be a huge, huge question. Did it. Are they going to claim that the election integrity counter efforts worked? I mean, seriously.

Let's all be honest. It's all fake. It's never going to happen. But this is actually a point I want to elaborate on, because I was just on Piers Morgan with that guy Vinny from PPD. Okay. And he was saying all this, oh, my, the number one priority in the Trump administration needs to be election integrity, because the Democrats flew all these illegals into swing states, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, if they did that, why didn't it deliver for them? Like, what happened?

They voted for Trump. The plan fell apart. They voted for Trump. I guess that's it. The Latino them? Like, what happened? The plant fell apart. They voted for Trump. I guess that's it. The Latino shift. Like, you ended up winning them, so I guess you're welcome. So we do have an element that I think really hammers home just how titanic of an election this was.

Let's go ahead and put the Financial Times chart, please, on the screen. It's in the rundown called the Red Wave chart. And basically, Donald Trump gained ground in 48 out of 50 states. Washington holding strong. Utah and Washington, where he did not improve his performance from last time around. And if you look at the map, like coast to coast, I mean, it is just a sea. It's astounding. That Washington Post map we kept pulling up last night and referring to that shows the shifts in every county. It's like just a wash in red.

And so it wasn't just. The biggest shifts were among some of the demographic groups we talked about. Latinos in particular. That's the big thing of the night. The bro demographic too. Donald Trump wins the Latino men. You know, young men. Gen X men actually were big.

Showed up big for Donald Trump as well. Gen X men, that sounds like a TV show. Really bad one. Coming to TV land. But, you know, the gains were almost across the board. Yeah, it was basically every demographic. Yeah, and so it makes it very hard to, you know, we're going to react to some of the media stuff later. But it makes it very hard to be like, oh, it was, you know, Arab Americans. It was this, it was that. It really was a sort of

national movement repudiation, which I think, you know, also makes it more difficult for liberals and Democratic Party supporters in certain ways to deal with in 2016. Because 2016, it was like, Comey, Russia, sexism, didn't go to Wisconsin. Next time we'll get him. This time it's like, holy shit. What now? We have our election guru, Logan, by the way. We're going to bring Logan in here now. Go ahead, Logan. I think you're right about that, Crystal. This is a tough day if you're a Democrat. But I also would say there's been like five times in the last 24, 28 years where a party thought they were completely out after a bad election. You know, from 1996 for Republicans to after 9-11 in 2004, Democrats thinking they were hopeless.

Republicans feeling hopeless in a way. Like, we just go through this all the time, and I'm just starting the list, but I won't finish it, so I won't bore you. Well, no, you're not wrong that we should. This is not an obituary forever, but it is a near-term problem. It's a huge problem. Not only a problem, it's a narrative buster in so many ways. Like, we have the Latino men who went majority for Donald Trump. We had white suburban women who they bet the house on who also went majority for Donald Trump. So we did see an overall increase in some of the female vote.

But one of the things actually that was incorrect was this idea that the gender gap was going to be exclusive amongst Gen Z. It's not. Actually, it was just roughly around 20 points, which is normal. It was just up and down the chain all the way from senior men to senior women. Total mirror image. Absolutely. In terms of the retrospective, too, it's really interesting, you know, thinking about polls and modeling and kind of like what went wrong here. I haven't looked at the exact number, but I believe that the poll on average

in the battleground states off by about 3.5% away from Donald Trump's direction. But really, the big failure here, no offense, Logan, because it's not your fault, but it's everybody for all of the modelers, was they simply had no idea how to facilitate a model where you had such major independent young voter, Latino voter, and even black male voters all breaking for Trump in a way that they have never voted before in modern history. At the same time, got to pay attention to the campaign that flopped big, and that was Kamala Harris. And it appears the biggest flop not only was just the vote total, but it actually was a lot of the money decisions that were made inside the campaign. So we have curated now a list. It appears that the Kamala Harris campaign, despite raising over $1 billion, still ended up some $20 million or so in debt and is now currently fundraising, still asking people for money after she lost. Let's put this up there on the screen. So this

is an example of one of the emails that she's been sending out now. She says, first and foremost, we want to acknowledge the fear, the confusion, the sadness many of you are feeling at this moment. For others, you may be looking for something meaningful and important to channel your emotions. If that's you, then we're asking you to make a donation to the Democratic Party today. Here's why this is important. As you read this, there are U.S. Senate and House races that are too close to call or within the margin of recounts. They all need your help to get across the finish line. So can you please rush a contribution to the Harris Fight Fund program today? Does anyone want to name a high-profile race other than Pennsylvania that's not in recount

territory? That's right. So this is a grift. Let's all be honest. Let's put this up there on the screen from Newsweek. It appears that there is significant amount of debt within the Harris-Walls campaign, enough so, possibly up to the sum of some $20 million. And people are starting to ask major questions about how

some of that got spent. What we see actually, and very interestingly so far, is not only could she possibly, it appears there are reports out there that she's not able to pay some staff. The staffers came out and said it wasn't true. Okay, so the staffers came out and said it wasn't true. This article actually debunks that thing. But the 20 million does seem to be correct. Yeah, the 20 million does seem to be correct. And that's a lot of money. And so we should start to take a look then at where some of that money went. And the craziest is this. This is hands down the craziest. Let's put the next one, please, from the New York Post. The Harris campaign reportedly spent some six figures on the Call Her Daddy podcast set. So as they say, it didn't even crack a million views. But what's fascinating is that,

you know, Call Her Daddy, as I understand it, you know, Alex Cooper, all of this, she has a home, she has a set, like she films it, you know, normally. But for some reason, this set, the one that people are in front of, which frankly doesn't even look that good. It doesn't even look as good as our set. And from what I can tell in the dollar figure crystal, I think they spent more money on it. For a single appearance. A single appearance. That is astounding.

Like, this one expenditure obviously is not responsible for the hair. But it really displays a stunning lack of understanding of what matters in the new media space, too. Like, no one is showing up for your friggin, like, aesthetics. Yes. You know? I mean, it's not. We have a great set. We're proud of it. We, like, really were proud that you guys helped us build it.

It looks great. It helps us attract bigger guests. Whatever. Especially on a podcast like Call Her Daddy, like the aesthetics are really not the important part. So it just also displays this like lack of really understanding of the space. But the other thing that disgusts me with this is, you know, Kamala had her big money backers, no doubt about it. A lot of these donations didn't come from big money backers. They came from like regular people. You wasted their money to pay Oprah a million. You took regular working people's money and you siphoned it to Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce and

Katy Perry and these other celebrity stars. That's disgusting. That is utterly grotesque. It's one more reason why you really should have public funding of elections. It should not be this constant emotional manipulation of the public begging them for dollars to go fund another Oprah Winfrey show and a Beyonce speech where she doesn't even perform. I just, the whole situation is completely grotesque to me. And another thing I would say, obviously, like, the money really didn't matter. At the end of the day, it really didn't matter. Yeah, it didn't matter at all.

You can argue, I think the best case you could say is in the battleground states, she actually performed better than she did in the non-battleground states, meaning that, you know, the ads that were played and the field program that was run were at least somewhat consequential in terms of narrowing the gap. Obviously not enough, but the money really wasn't a thing. And if Democrats are going to get serious about winning again, which I doubt they will, but maybe, you never know, they need to throw the whole of their big donor class overboard. They need, you know, everybody talks about like, oh, sister soldier moments with the left or right. No, no, no. The whole party has been like nothing but a series

of sister soldier moments with the left for decades now. You need to have a sister soldier moment with the donor class because you don't even need their money. Their money is actually a hindrance. And it just leads to grotesque expenditures like a million dollars to an already like Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire. She did not need regular people's million dollars. And what does it say about her that she needed to be paid to come out? And what does it say about you that she needed to be paid to come out and endorse and back your candidacy? Just disgusting. It's just so emblematic of what is deeply wrong at the core of this party's ideology.

Yeah, and, well, we'll continue within that. Let's go to the next part because this is honestly the craziest one, is that it appears that Kamala Harris paid Oprah Winfrey a million dollars during the failed campaign. What's even crazier is it wasn't just Oprah. It includes people like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin. There was almost $10 million that were spent behind this, many of which actually did go into the pockets of these event management companies and the stars. Now, here's how naive I am. I am a very cynical guy.

Can I think everybody agree with that? All the people who've been watching for years? I genuinely did not know that celebs get paid for it. I didn't either. I was like, listen. They believe in the cause. They show up. You do a concert.

That's what I thought was going on here too. If I was a billionaire and I was like, listen. They believe in the cause. They show up. You do a concert. Like, that's what I thought was going on here, too. If I was a billionaire. If I was a billionaire and I was Oprah, right? You know? Like, it's one thing. Like, okay, you donate money to the campaign. If anything, it should be the other way, right? Of course.

You should be giving money to the campaign. Because they're like, look, she's something I believe in. All of this. Oh, all you want is my time. I'm famous. You want me to come and speak? Okay, cool. Yeah, I could do that.

Honestly, I would do that now. You know, if I was in a position of where, but to shake you down for a million bucks, that's crazy. And then Katy Perry, apparently they also had to drop, I can't- Alanis Morissette, right? Alanis Morissette. I don't know how to say her name. Alanis. I'm a boomer. I don't even know who this lady is. That's the opposite of being a boomer. Okay. I'm old enough to remember when she was cool.

Okay, got it. So I don't even know who this woman is, but whoever she is, they didn't have the money to pay her. And I was like, wait, why? Like, why is she getting paid? She should just show up. You don't need to be compensated for your time. Like, to me, that's crazy. So anyways, I don't know how all that is going down, but yeah, that was the wildest one. There's one more, too, that we can put up on the screen.

They spent half a million dollars a day to pay for the Vegas sphere thing, which is, who did this persuade? Like, really, who did this persuade? And I saw someone who said, you know, this is the perfect emblem of a campaign that had all the money in the world and no ideas. And, you know, that's basically it summed up right there. All the money in the world. But just like with Hillary in 2016, who also wants to spend Donald Trump, it doesn't matter if you aren't selling something that people don't want to buy. And Trump's campaign fundamentally understood the media landscape vastly better than the Harris campaign did. So obviously that was crazy. That was the fallout. But really going back to this before that, we not only had to cover so much election stuff from 2024 onwards, even though we expected that to be the major story, But we came into it, obviously, with a lot of foreign policy news. Israel dominated a lot of the foreign policy conversation,

especially in the early 2024, because it was in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and the initial days of the war. So there were a lot of takes, things that were flying around. The debate got wild. It got pretty crazy. Yeah. Not necessarily at the desk. I would say more in the country in terms of how things got to a lot of dual loyalties. Other things were exposed. So, yeah, it got interesting. Yeah, for sure. And both of us made a few attempts to branch out from just this at times ill-advised attempts to branch out to other shows and podcasts. I was on Piers Morgan, had some interesting experiences there going up against some former IDF dude.

I also was on, remember when I was on with that lady who claimed she had her eye stabbed at a project? Oh yeah, she was total fake. Which turned out to be totally fake. Insanity. And there were a lot of cultural figures that reacted in extraordinary ways

to the events post-October 7th. And obviously this was an incredibly significant foreign policy story, story about the nature of humanity and our commitment to humanity, story of the world's superpower just greenlighting unimaginable atrocities. And it also ended up being an election story as well, since this became an important part of the disaffection with the Democratic Party, with Kamala Harris in particular. But in any case, we've pulled a few clips of some of the things that you guys really responded to from our coverage, talking specifically about some of the cultural figures and their reactions. So let's take a listen to that,

starting with one of those Piers Morgan appearances from me. I can, listen, I believe fundamentally in the right to free democratic protest. I mean, it's the bedrock of any free democratic country. But I don't believe in violent hate rhetoric. And if you're a Jewish student at one of these colleges, hearing some of these chants, which we're all hearing, it's pretty terrifying, isn't it? Well, here's what I would say. First of all, I echo Wajahat in saying I'm glad that both of our two co-panelists are OK. And I certainly support the call for justice for Yusuf. And I hope his assailant is, in fact, apprehended and accountability is meted out. I think it's disgusting and frankly, a cheap trick to use some isolated incidents to smear an entire protest movement. And I think it's very clear

what's going on here. A majority of young people and a majority of college students, majority of Biden voters believe that Israel is committing a genocide and that American taxpayer dollars are going to assist in that genocide. They're outraged by that, and they're protesting. And by the way, they've won. Hold on. I listened to you, and I'm not finished. Yousef, you must. Yousef, you must let other guests speak. Am I going to be allowed to speak here? Yes, you are. Of course you of young people believe that Israel is committing a genocide and they are protesting that. And by the way, they've won the argument. If you look at now, it's 60-40 against sending military aid to Israel. It's a majority that disapprove in America of Israel's action with regards to the Gaza Strip.

So it's a cheap trick as old as time, use a few isolated incidents to try to smear an entire movement, which has the benefit number one of attempting to delegitimize it. And number two of distracting from the continued atrocities which are unfolding at the hands of the IDF in the Gaza Strip. So this is, listen, I condemn anti-Semitism. I certainly condemn violence. But let's be serious about who the villains are right now. Would you agree that Hamas are villains?

The villains are the terrorist organization Hamas. Hang on, I'm asking a question. Would you agree that Hamas are villains? Terrorists. And so is the Israeli government, given the number of civilians that they have intentionally targeted and killed, including targeting with a complete siege, which has triggered a famine. So first of all, intifada means uprising from the river to the sea.

Somehow when it's Benjamin Netanyahu using that phraseology or holding up a map that literally shows Israel from the river to the sea with no Palestinians. Who cares about Benjamin Netanyahu? Answer the right direct question. Can you please, dude, just for a second? What do you mean Antifada means uprising? Have you seen Antifada, first Antifada? Calling for equal rights. Have you seen the second Antifada? For equal human rights. You don't know anything. You are not from the Middle East. Israel's assault on Gaza continues

endlessly, seemingly no end in sight. The U.S. limply looks on, makes some meaningless disgruntled noises from time to time. Some superpower we are. The ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocidal attacks, to no avail. The ICC has threatened arrest warrants, while they have failed to materialize as of yet. And we all wait with bated breath to see if Iran's retaliation in response to Israel's provocation will plunge the whole region into an even bigger and much more deadly war. It often feels like the Israeli state can just act with impunity,

raining terror down on a trapped population with no one and nothing able or willing to stop them. But just below the surface, a doom spiral for the Israeli state may already have been set into motion, a mounting economic calamity that threatens to collapse the state entirely. The BDS movement in their wildest dreams could never have imagined the economic toll that the Israeli state is basically inflicting on itself right now as we speak. So here are the details. Mondo Weiss compiled what data is available on the Israeli economy, and the picture is really quite dire. Quote, over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt. Tourism has stopped. Israel's credit rating

was lowered. Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost junk bond levels. And the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 as a result of the policies of Israel's far-right government before October 7th show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the state of Israel. Now those business closures, they may actually just be the beginning. An estimate cited by the Times of Israel found that up to 60,000 businesses might close before 2024 is over. This is a greater impact than the COVID pandemic shutdown and would only be exacerbated by an expanded war with Hezbollah

and with Iran, the impacts of which frankly would be unfathomable. Just think about the realities right now, though, for the Israeli economy. Israeli workers have been called up to participate in the Gaza annihilation, undercutting the country's much-celebrated tech sector. Another key sector, tourism, has completely dried up. Construction is at a standstill because the Palestinians that Israel relies on as cheap labor force have been banned from coming to work outside of the occupied territories. Israeli attempts to import foreign workers as a new source of cheap labor have been largely unsuccessful. Turkey has announced a ban on exports to Israel, further crippling the construction industry. And efforts to import from other nations are hampered by the efforts of the Houthis to block shipping into Israeli ports.

250,000 Israelis continue to be internally displaced as a result of the tit-for-tat war with Hezbollah, and panic has set in as Iran threatens a large response to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh that occurred on their soil. Now, perhaps the biggest body blow, however, was intel pulling out of a planned $25 billion investment in the state of Israel, an indication that capital is engaged in their own self-interested BDS, weighing the ever-risking risks, ever-rising risks of operating in Israel to be greater than the benefits. Even more trouble, though, could be ahead. Here again is Mondo Weiss. Israel's power grid, which has largely switched to natural gas, still

depends on coal to supply demand. The biggest supplier of coal to Israel is Colombia, which announced that it would suspend coal shipments to Israel as long as the genocide was ongoing. After Colombia, the next two biggest suppliers are South Africa and Russia. Without reliable and continuous electricity, Israel will no longer be able to pretend to be a developed economy. So while the U.S. will apparently never cut Israel off of literally anything, including the 2,000-pound bombs that they use to drop on schools where displaced children are sheltering, the rest of the world apparently not so keen to continue doing business with this terrorist regime. There's another dynamic that's a little

harder to quantify here, though. It came up in our recent interview with an Israeli Zionist analyst, Shael Ben-Ephraim, who we brought in to discuss the right-wing riots that broke out in Israel to protect the right of Israeli soldiers to rape and torture Palestinian detainees. I asked Shael what this trend meant for the future of Israel if they continue to drift towards lawlessness in a state governed overtly by Jewish supremacy. I was frankly a little bit shocked by his response. I think there's going to be a lot of people in Israel who, if this continues to be the kind of government that they have in the long term, will leave.

And those will be the most productive members of society. Those will be the high-tech leaders. Those will be the professors. Those will be the literati and so on and so forth, which is something that I think the extreme right in Israel wants because that will help them run the country better. And there's an attempt to dismantle the Israeli judicial system because that's the one check and balance the Israeli system has against this kind of power. So right now, Israel, similar to a lot of other countries in the West, the United States, as an example, is having a battle for its soul. And I think if the liberal democratic forces in Israel lose, Israel will be lost. It's not going to be able to survive if it doesn't have allies in the world, and it's going to be sanctioned by everyone,

treated like a pariah state, that liberal part of the country is what kept Israel as part of the international community and what kept it allied with the United States and what kept it as a big trade partner for the EU. And if Israel loses that, it's not going to be able to survive. The extreme right fringe and the fundamentalists aren't going to be able to support the Israeli economy, aren't going to be able to support Israeli society, not in the long term. Many don't serve in the army. It's a disaster for Israel. If these people take over,

and this is a step towards taking over, like make no mistake, they're hindering the functioning of the state. If they completely take over, the state of Israel will not exist in the long term. And I don't think, I think that's quite a possible outcome. So Shael alludes there to the fact that the most conservative ultra-Orthodox members of Israeli society

are increasingly represented in terms of governing ideology, but don't actually contribute too much to society. They tend to have large families, rely on government welfare, and receive a religious exemption from military service. The numbers supporting this dynamic were already getting kind of dicey because this group has much higher birth rates than more secular Israeli Jews. If you see a significant brain drain due to unending war and overt fascism, according to Shael, quote, the state of Israel will not exist in the long term. Bolstering this point, Mondo Weiss quoted an Israeli economist, Professor Dan Ben-Tavid,

as saying that the Israeli economy is held together by 300,000 people, the senior staff in universities, tech companies, and hospitals. Once a significant portion of those people leaves, he says, we won't become a third world country. We just won't be anymore. Has this exodus already begun? Difficult to say, and frankly, some of the data is really conflicting. But according to the Times of Israel, Israelis have already begun leaving the country prior to October 7th due to the Netanyahu government's extremism and attacks on the judiciary, which had led to a large protest movement for more secular elements of society. That outflow accelerated after October 7th, leading to about 42,000 permanent departures from November through March of 2024. And one can only imagine what an all-out war with Hezbollah and or Iran

could do to those numbers in a country where a significant minority of the population hold multiple passports. By enabling the worst of Israeli atrocities and excesses, self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden may have unintentionally helped to galvanize a force that could actually destroy the Israeli state. We may be watching in real time as Israel collapses under the weight of its own internal divides, capital's aversion to risk, and the world's revulsion to apartheid and genocide.

Hello, everybody. There's been some extraordinary news that has gone ahead and happened tonight. The Islamic Republic of Iran has launched retaliatory airstrikes on Israel. As we speak, literally right now, Shahid-style drones, hundreds are raining down upon Israel, being intercepted, at least some, by air raids. There has been sirens all across. Air defense systems are firing. We have some video that I'm going to go ahead and play for everybody right now, and I'll continue to talk over it. So what you guys can see in front of you, this is video that has been put out by the Israeli media and as well as the Israeli government. So we feel comfortable sharing it with you. At the very least, what we can say is

they claim that this is what is happening above their skies. This has now come, this extraordinary moment, after a dizzying last few hours. Some indications happened earlier today. President Biden was at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. He flew back for an emergency meeting of his National Security Council. Almost immediately after he returned to the White House, the news became official and they put out a statement.

I'm gonna go ahead and share that statement with all of you right now. Here's what we had, and this was given to us a few hours ago from the White House. They say Iran has begun an airborne attack against Israel. President Biden is being regularly updated on the situation. Here's the key line. President Biden has been clear. Our support for Israel's security is ironclad. The United States will stand with the people of Israel and will support their defense against these threats from Iran. What is very also important that everybody takes into mind here is this, that I'm going to go ahead and show everyone. The United States actually is engaging in shooting down some of these drones over either Iraqi or Syrian or Jordanian airspace. Here is the key message.

This is from a U.S. defense official. In accordance with our ironclad commitment to Israel's security, U.S. forces in the region continue to shoot down Iranian-launched drones targeting Israel. Our forces remain postured to provide additional defensive support and to protect U.S. forces operating in the region. So there you have it. The United States is now officially engaged on Israel's behalf, shooting down these drones. Not the first time, remember, that we fired against Houthi ballistic missiles, which were headed towards Israel, but extraordinary nonetheless, because the U.S. has now officially entered this war in terms of Israel's defense.

The big question is what is going to happen next. Now, what is very important for everybody to know is that this message that came out from the Iranians that actually happened after the strikes became official. So I have it here in front of me. This is from the permanent mission of Iran to the United Nations. Here's what they say. Iran's military action was in response to the Zionist regime's aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus. This matter can now deemed concluded. Let's spend some time on that. That's very important. The matter can now be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran's response will be

considerably more severe. It is a conflict between Iran and the rogue Israeli regime from which the U.S. must stay away. So let's pay very close attention to that. The Iranians are saying this is our response to you bombing our embassy in Damascus, where an IRGC commander was killed. They're making clear America stay out of this. Now, already that line has been crossed. But what they're saying is if we ended here, then that's it. But we are now receiving news that is actually coming out of Israel. Keep in mind that it is the middle of the night over here. But I'm sharing here a senior Israeli official. This is from Israeli media.

They are saying from a senior Israeli official pledging an unprecedented response to Iran's attack and urges Israelis not to go to bed due to what is coming Iran's way. So this is a very, very dangerous moment for the world, everybody. I mean, just to do a little bit of analysis here, the Iranian response clearly was calibrated to give a ton of heads up to the U.S. and to Israel. It took hours for those drones to fly. They could have used cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and much more destructive technology. This is a show of force on their behalf, but also it was calibrated as they put in their message. And it was one where they knew that the vast majority of the drones would be intercepted by their air defense systems.

This wasn't really calibrated to be like a major and a stunning attack. They had a ton of heads up. The question now, right, does it end here? Or now are we on the escalation ladder? The United States military is now involved in this. We are shooting down drones on Israel's behalf. The Israeli military now, are they going to engage militarily directly against Iran? This would be unprecedented in terms of what is happening. And I deeply fear that this is the exact nightmare

scenario that could that we've all been waiting for since October 7th. You know, it's been exactly almost six months now since the conflict. But really what we all saw when Israel struck that embassy in Damascus is that entered a new kind of phase of the conflict and entered a big decision matrix that we talked about with Dr. Trita Parsi on the show. And I know that Crystal and Emily talked about this as well. What is Iran's response going to be? Nobody knew. And now we do know.

And now the question is, is how is the West going to respond to this? How is the US going to respond to this? How is Israel going to respond to this? If Israel responds with overwhelming force and they directly strike targets in Iran, Tehran, for example, well, it is almost certain now at this point that the United States would be involved in this, given the fact that we literally shot down some of these drones and the military

is now engaged here. The big question, and this is where my heart goes out to every U.S. service member, family and serving in the Middle East right now is that we have tens of thousands of service members who are all across the Middle East, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, as we all found out when three of our service members were killed. Bahrain, we have the U.S. Navy, the Fifth Fleet. Warships have been flooding into the Persian Gulf apparently over the last 24 to 48 hours. What's even more extraordinary is that the U.S. military central command commander was on the ground in Israel when the news broke that the Iranian drones were coming. Apparently, the general has departed. But just to give you an idea of how deeply involved the

U.S. military is here in the response. Let's transition into what Mr. Rogan is thinking about this conflict, because, you know, to the point of whether the views of these college students are extreme or mainstream at this point, when you have a majority of Joe Biden voters saying this is a genocide, when you have the International Criminal Court of Justice saying that's plausible, when you have a new U.N. report saying there's reasonable grounds to believe, and now you can add, oh, you have Alex Jones saying it's a genocide. I believe Candace Owens has said similar things. AOC has now come out and said the same. You can add to that growing list of voices, Joe Rogan, who made some very interesting comments on his podcast. Let's take a listen. Even in the right, like, look what's going on with Candace

Owens and Ben Shapiro. Like, what did she say? I want to know what she was fired for. Because was it criticism of Israel? Was it, I mean, did she show that Edward Snowden video that he put up on Twitter that shows them drone bombing those kids that are those men, I should say, unarmed people that were walking towards the rubble that clearly weren't causing any danger to anybody? Yeah, right. They just bombed them? Yeah, no, it's your duty. It's just like for Biden or whoever you like, you're supposed to cover up for them because you have- But the whole thing is like they were always saying they're only targeting Hamas and everybody

else is a casualty. Well, if those guys are just unarmed civilians and they're walking alone, that's what they appear to be. Dresden. And you just blast them from the sky with robots. This is the tragedy of war. Yeah, this is insane. And no one knows what to think now.

Because if you can't talk about that, if you can't say that's real, then you're saying that genocide is okay as long as we're doing it. That is what we're saying. And if you're saying that from a perspective of someone who literally went through the Holocaust or your people, your tribe, went through the fucking Holocaust and now you're willing to do it? I hope the irony is not lost on you. It's so nuts. It's so hard to imagine that someone where a culture, like a country was like officially founded in what, 47? 48. 48?

Okay. Officially founded. So that's so recent. And you guys are willing to do what was done to you that led you to believe that you needed to start your own country? You're willing to do that at least on a small scale in Gaza? Like, there's nothing left. If you see the videos, let's see some recent footage of Gaza. So some really pointed—the Atlantic would say those comments were extremist.

Greg Abbott would say anti-Semitic. There you go. And apparently Matt Miller would as well talk about that also in my monologue. But, I mean, he really goes in. Apparently that video that Al Jazeera obtained, the drone footage of them striking and killing these four unarmed civilians who were just walking along in Khan Yunus. I mean, it's horrible to watch. We played just a little bit of it. But if you do watch the whole thing, you know, you see the initial drone strike.

You see one of them at least, like, crawling after being hit initially, wounded, and then hit again, and all of them killed. And, you know, you can't butt Hamas that. You can't, oh, human shield that. It's just so naked. And I think one of the things that people have reacted to so strongly, because I've been trying to wrap my head, Emily, around why this video, this seems to have been the thing for Alex Jones. That's what he quote tweeted. It seems to have been, you know Alex Jones. That's what he quote tweeted. It seems to have been the thing for Joe Rogan. And just judging by the tenor of the commentary all the typical justifications are null. You can't, like I said, you can't but Hamas it. You can't, there's a tunnel there. You can't,

you know, it's anti-Semitic to say this. All the normal justifications are, they're not human shields, are kind of null and void. And then there's something so nightmarish and terrifying. Alex Jones called it a robotic mass genocide, I believe, about the fact that they're walking along totally unawares. And then out of the sky, boom, it's over. And also the David and Goliath nature of that. I mean, they're unarmed. They have nothing, right? And everything around them in the video, too, is complete rubble, as Rogan is saying, right? Look at Gaza. There's nothing left. His guest there says it's like Dresden. They're completely unarmed. They're completely vulnerable. And

meanwhile, Israel has this, you know, incredibly high-tech killing technology, and that's what they're up against. And there's something about that video that marked a real turning point for the way a lot of people were viewing this conflict. So Alex Jones apparently has also been calling Rabbi Shmuley the butt plug rabbi? They had a debate. He did. Yes, he did. Okay, good. Interesting enough. Well, the Rogan clip to me is fascinating because he goes back and says, listen, this is really recent history. Like the Holocaust is really recent history in the living memory of many people. That's right. And the founding of modern Israel comes in 1948.

And what also happens there is, and Brian and I talked about this a little bit yesterday, but the new definitions or the formal international agreement on what the definition of genocide is, because basically the UN comes together after World War II and says, we need to prevent Dresden. We need to prevent the Holocaust. We need to, you know, all of that. And that living memory is also why, you know, you see Netanyahu and other leaders in Israel, and even, by the way, some well-intentioned liberal Israelis feel the need to turn Gaza into a, quote, parking lot because those threats remain, you know, so ingrained in the minds. And that's what Rogan is reacting to and saying it's strange. It's a strange, like, dissonance between, you know between saying we want to prevent another Holocaust and then seeing the destruction of Gaza and calling for the destruction of Gaza, calling for it in the name of stopping another Holocaust to be turned into a parking lot. And I understand why that hits home with people like Joe Rogan.

I completely understand the perspective of being grossed out by the drone attacks and the sort of like, it is, this is a different kind, like since we have, since World War II, this is a new kind of conflict. And I don't think the Netanyahu's and the Joe Biden's of the world were prepared for how the public was going to react to it. It's similar to other conflicts like urban warfare, but Syria, other places, but it's different. It's completely different. And I think they underestimated where the public would be when watching this because, I mean, it's just, these videos are tough. Let's move on to Bill Burr, who was on Club Random with Bill Maher. And they obviously, why not, got into a conversation about the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on

campuses around the country. Lest you think we weren't watching Aaron Rodgers on Joe Rogan, or on Tucker Carlson's show yesterday. He did weigh in on the Cuba policy of Allen Dulles, and accurately, by the way. That was a historic first. I think the first former Green Bay Packers quarterback to go after Allen Dulles. Excellent. A triumph for him. So the podcast universe is thriving, and Bill Burr is a part of that wonderful ecosystem.

And Bill Maher, this went pretty viral. I think got kind of owned by Bill Burr here. Let's take a watch. You don't realize that college campuses erupted with the kids demonstrating for Hamas? They are in with the terrorists? They were for the Palestinians. Well, it's sort of the same cause.

Why? Are you? I'm on the side of the kids. Yeah, that's easy to say. You know, no one wants to see kids dead. This is a war. That was very brave of you to say that. This is a war. No, I'm the one who's actually brave on this.

Oh, pat yourself on the back. It's easy to say, I'm for the kids. Who's not for the kids? It comes down to real hard-nosed decisions. No, stop talking like you're a general. A country got attacked. Israel got attacked. I'm not saying that they didn't have a right to go back.

I'm just sitting there going like, how do I look at what— They're the only country in the world that they get attacked, and then as soon as they counterattack, it's like, well, we got to stop this shit now. Don't attack them. There's a very simple solution to all this problem in the Middle East. Stop attacking Israel. Hey, you just solved it. Stop attacking Israel.

You just solved it. I actually did. There you go. That's fantastic. Anyway. All right. We don't need to get onto that. Let's go to Russia and the Ukraine.

How do you solve that one, Bill? Let me hear your hard-nosed decision about that. Well, let me ask you a question. How is war still legal? All this shit that's been canceled. Legal. Why is that still fucking legal? Would you like a real answer to that?

Because for something to be illegal, you have to have the capacity to enforce it. And you can't enforce against war, or else you have to go to war with the country that's going to war. And we don't want to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. What would be the sense of making it illegal? Oh, that's really going to stop Putin. No. To stop people from going to war, you have to also put boots. You can't sit down and talk it out. Why can't Putin do a podcast with the head guy? Like you just solved the Middle East on a podcast. Why can't Putin do a podcast with the head guy? Like, you just solved the Middle East on a podcast.

Why can't they solve what they're doing on a podcast? This is why this is not your thing. Make some hard noise. It's not your thing. It is my thing. It isn't your thing. This is not your thing. You're like that guy that has a fantasy football team and thinks he's a fucking GM.

No. That's exactly what it is. Like, why am I fucking listening to you? Like, you've done something. What have you done in Washington? Nothing. That is a great point. Bill Maher saying this is my thing.

That's your thing. You're just getting high and, like, mouthing off. I was going to say, yes, which is really your thing. But it would be like me saying that I'm some expert on this. It's absolutely ridiculous. I mean, you regularly have covered that you've been there. You've interviewed people. It qualifies.

But I feel like Bill Maher here really has celebrity syndrome where he doesn't realize how poorly he's coming across when he's sort of like in this very patronizing way, like verbally patting Bill Burr on the head and saying, I got this. Don't worry about it. My thing. Your opinion counts as less because I'm a talk show host. There was an interesting window into Bill Maher's mind for a moment there where Bill Burr says, I'm with the kids. Bill Maher had just said the kids are supporting Hamas or whatever. Right. And they're protesting.

He was, Bill Burr was referring to the college kids. Yeah. Because Bill Maher had just said the kids. Right. Bill Maher's mind,

in his mind, he thinks, he's saying that I'm with the kids who are being slaughtered by Israel. That's what I, yeah, that's how I interpreted it too.

That Bill Maher's mind went to the kids being slaughtered. Right. And then said, I'm the courageous one because I'm okay with the kids being slaughtered. Because I understand in a hard-headed world that there is no other choice than slaughtering all these kids. It was fascinating. And dark. Maybe it was just really high. Well, yeah, clearly.

But that's a window into, like, I mean, he's high most of the time. Yeah. So that's, it's like a philosophical question about which Bill Maher mind exists. And I would say if you're high more than half the time, then it's the high one. I also found that interesting because he was, they were in a conversation directly about the kids on college campuses. They had both used the word kids in relation to the kids on college campuses. They had both used the word kids in relation to the kids on college campuses. And as soon as Bill Burr said that, Bill Maher, like the switch flipped and he jumped on Bill Burr from, oh, you say you're with the Palestinian

children. But Bill Burr then going back and just driving the knife further with that last comment about what have you done in Washington? Yeah, why am I listening to you? It is a very good question. Like, why on earth? I mean, because it's funny, I guess, to watch these two people, hopefully. But yeah, like, him pretending like he has, him saying, like, this is my thing and it's not yours, get out of here. As usual, Bill Burr, always interesting. Joe Rogan. People always love to see them sound off in cultural ways. If we also think to some of the crazy domestic stories, you know, a lot of these go in and out, but one that has stuck with me was this one, the Boeing whistleblower.

We actually talked about it even on the day that we're filming this because we just covered the story about the open AI whistleblower. We actually talked about it even on the day that we're filming this because we just covered the story about the open AI whistleblower. And you were like, well, do you really think they whacked him? And I was like, look, if you asked me five years ago, would Boeing whack somebody? I'd say, you're crazy. But nowadays, I'm like, well, look at the body of evidence. Look at where things are in terms of what the stakes are, the billions of dollars at stakes, and all these other things. So my mind is much more open than it used to be. For the lawyers out there,

Boeing denies all wrongdoing as does OpenAI, I'm sure. Pure speculation on my part. It is crazy, though, because the public basically just generally accepted, like, oh, Boeing killed these people. And there were multiple, two whistleblowers. There were a lot of people who think that. Many people think that. And again, for the lawyers, Boeing ties responsibility,

but many people believe that. And it's crazy that we live in a society where that just happens and it's like, yeah, corporate assassins, like corporations killing people are inconvenient, maybe a thing. All right, I guess we're going to go on about our business. So I do think it was quite an extraordinary moment. One that certainly you all were quite interested in, quite disturbed by. And so here was a little bit of our coverage as we were uncovering those details. Been wanting to cover this story for quite some time, and then some shocking, shocking news broke yesterday. Let's put this up there on the screen. A Boeing whistleblower was actually found dead here in the United States in what is being claimed is an apparent suicide.

John Barnett, he had previously worked for Boeing for 32 years. He retired in 2017 and since then has spent his life being a whistleblower against the Boeing Corporation. In fact, in the days before his death, he was giving evidence in this lawsuit against the company. He was actually found dead in Charleston. The real thing that Mr. Barnett had been whistleblowing about is that he previously worked as a 787 Dreamliner quality manager at the North Charleston plant. And he had specifically told BBC and other outlets that under pressure workers had been deliberately fitting substandard parts to aircraft on the production line. And he also said he had uncovered serious problems with their oxygen systems, meaning that only one in four breathing masks would not work in an emergency.

So soon after then starting work at that South Carolina company, he became very concerned, eventually concerned enough to leave and to cooperate with law enforcement, with federal whistleblowers. He was an integral part, actually, of the FAA's examination back in 2019 of the problems that were happening over at Boeing and was giving testimony in their most recent investigation into what the hell happened with Alaska Airlines. In the days before his death, he actually gave an interview to TMZ with some pretty shocking claims. Let's take a listen. One, this is not a 737 problem. It's a Boeing problem. And I know the FAA's gone in and they've

done due diligence and inspections to assure that the door plugs of the 737 are installed properly and the fasteners are stored properly. But my concern is, what's the rest of the airplane? What's the rest of the condition of the airplane? And the reason my concern for that is, back in 2012, Boeing started removing inspection operations off their jobs. So it left the mechanics to buy off their own work. So what we're seeing with the door plug blowout is what I've seen with the rest of the airplane

as far as jobs not being completed properly, inspection of steps being removed, issues being ignored. My concerns are with the 737 and the 787 because those programs have really embraced the theory that quality is overhead and non-value added. Well, I'd taken a team of four inspectors to Spirit Aerosystems to inspect the 41 section before they sent it to Charleston. And we found 300 defects. Some of them were significant that needed engineering intervention. When I returned to Charleston, my senior manager told me that we had found too many defects and he was going to take the next trip. So the next trip he went on, he took two of my inspectors. And when they got back, they were given accolades for only finding 50 defects.

So I pulled that inspector aside and I said, did Spirit really clean up their act that quick? That don't sound right. Yeah, they certainly didn't. And in fact, just yesterday, Crystal, there was a new report from the FAA that they caught Spirit Aerosystems mechanics using liquid Dawn dish soap as lubricant for that 737 MAX door seal instead of, you know, the proper lubricant they were supposed to use. That's how they're cutting costs over there in Boeing. And that's why, I mean, there's been a lot of suspicion around Mr. Barnett's death because you can see he was pulling no punches. And this is potentially a catastrophic event for Boeing. Boeing is the most important aviation company

in the United States, arguably in all of the West, huge military supply contractor, et cetera. They are now facing a Justice Department investigation, criminal investigation in this matter. And Alaska really took the wool, I think, out of everybody's eyes on what's going on with this company and how deep the rot really goes inside. Yeah, that's right. There's also news this morning that a six-week audit by the FAA of Boeing's production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems throughout the manufacturing process, according to a slide presentation that The New York Times was able to review.

They initiated the examination after that door panel flew off. The agency announced the audit had found multiple instances in which Boeing and the supplier Spirit Aerosystems failed to comply with quality control requirements, including the company had failed 33 of 89 audits during that examination conducted by the FAA. And just to speak to the claims that this whistleblower was in the middle of making when he was found dead in his vehicle in a parking lot, some of these claims had really been backed up by evidence. According to the BBC, Boeing, of course, denied all his assertions. We should put that out there. But in 2017, they did a review by the FAA, and it did uphold some of his concerns. It established the location of at least 53 nonconforming parts in the factory was unknown

and were considered lost. Boeing was ordered to take remedial action. That's relevant because he had said that they were pulling parts out of the scrap heap that had been rejected as nonconforming and using them to save time and cut costs, et cetera. So the fact that these nonconforming parts were missing were indicative of his story being accurate. On the oxygen cylinders issue, the company said in 2017 it had identified some oxygen

bottles received from the supplier that were not deploying properly, but denied that any of them were actually fitted on the aircraft. Of course, he had indicated that as many as one in four oxygen masks were unlikely to deploy because they were defective upon testing. So, yeah, the fact that he was in the middle of making these complaints, making his voice heard and is found dead is extraordinary. Yeah, it's really suspicious. And again, let's put this up there.

This is just days after that the U.S. Justice Department is now opening a criminal inquiry into Boeing. This is tied to the Alaska Airlines incident specifically. Boeing also said, told a Senate panel, it cannot find record of the work done on the Alaska plane. Really? Interesting. Can't find any record. And I just want to take it back to all of the, I want to take it back to the rot of this company because Spirit Aerosystems used to be a part of Boeing and it was sold off by Boeing in the

pursuit of shareholderism and of profit. So now what's happening now, as they understand that they're in deep shit, Boeing is now trying to rebuy Spirit Aerosystems. And now they're in a major crisis of the company because they're facing a Justice Department investigation. And, I mean, the craziest part of all this is that not even a few years ago, they were found liable and nearly faced a murder prosecution for killing some, what, several hundred people in a faulty software update. All of the fixes were supposed to have been put in place down there. New CEO, new corporate practices. But this tells you it's not the new CEO problem. It's that the company doesn't know how to build an airplane anymore. And that, I can't get over it because this is the backbone of US manufacturing, high-tech

manufacturing specifically. It's one of the pride and joys of the U.S. economy. And as usual, over the last 70-something or 30, 40 years now, since the 1970s, it turns out that it's all just a financial fakery. They hired Nikki Haley on the board, buying back tens of billions of dollars worth of their own stock. The stock is doing great before this, even after the crazy incident. That's all they cared about. They never cared about this. And then it all just comes to head when a freaking door plug blows out of the middle of the airplane. Lucky that it didn't happen when they were cruising altitude and several people would have been sucked out and killed. Yeah. Yeah. I think there are two major societal root cause trends that led to these terrifying, horrifying, and in certain

instances, deadly mistakes. Number one is, as you're discussing, the financialization of Boeing, which is something we see across companies. What does that mean? It means rather than caring about having the best engineers and the best product and making sure, damn well sure, that it is safe and ready to go. Instead, they were more focused on catering to the giant casino that is Wall Street. So, and that is not specific to Boeing, but obviously in the instance of Boeing, the results are absolutely horrifying. Number two is a widespread trend across Democratic and Republican administrations in the neoliberal era of defanging regulatory bodies and handing off some of their key functions to industry itself.

So over successive administrations, including some very recent deregulation under the Trump administration, the FAA has basically handed off a lot of its key functions to relying on companies like Boeing to basically self-certify. And then finally, there was a lot of talk in this election about brain worms, about people drinking the Kool-Aid, about grifters. RFK Jr. became quite an interesting character this year. RFK Jr., that's right. Yeah, I guess this was a crazy year for RFK Jr., right? Probably the biggest year for the Kennedy family since when? Since Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter.

So with that, we thought we would end with a funny segment, which was the literal brain worm that RFK Jr. was said to have suffered and then he then confirmed, which we discussed at the time. It is just so funny thinking about it. Retrospect, let's take a listen. Speaking of wiggling things going around, that was a difficult transition. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. I'm just going to present this without any comment because the details are so crazy.

According to New York Times and according to RFK Jr. himself, the presidential candidate, quote, had previously faced undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he had said ate part of his brain. So back in 2010, while he was undergoing a deposition, it revealed that RFK Jr., quote, was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that friends grew concerned that he might have a brain tumor. He then consulted many of the country's top neurologists who had treated his uncle, Ted Kennedy, who discovered and believed

that he had a dead parasite in his uncle, Ted Kennedy, who discovered and believed that he had a dead parasite in his brain, a literal, a dead worm, like a brain worm. The dead parasite believed to have either been contracted through his diet of which he said, which is very heavy in fish and in tuna, which he said was combining with mercury poisoning, and it also just returned from a trip to Southeast Asia. But the point is that it's a pretty serious, actually, health condition that could lead to strokes, to seizures, and to other things. He had said in an interview with the New York Times

that he eventually did recover from memory loss and fogginess, and he has no current after effects of the parasite, which he said had not required treatment. Nonetheless, it has not stopped both his opponents and many others from making brain worm jokes. So what do you make of this, Crystal, before we get to the actual news? It's just a crazy situation. Yeah. The context of this is he was undergoing a deposition. He was trying to limit or eliminate the necessity to pay alimony. So he was trying to argue, like, I've got all these cognitive impairments, mercury poisoning, I've got this worm in my brain that ate part of it. He says at one point, I have cognitive issues, clearly,

which, you know, it's not a quote that you really want out there about yourself as a presidential candidate, especially coming out of your mouth, especially when he has gone out of his way to contrast his, you know, he's not a young guy, his relative vigor and fitness. There's the whole, you know, shirtless push-ups, whatever, lifting weights. Working out in jeans is the weird one, man. That's the one I just— That's a strange choice. I'm all about getting jacked.

I'm all about that. But working out in jeans is just weird. Yeah. Anyway, that's been a part of, you know, what he's put forward. And he's clearly like talked a lot about health in his campaign and offering himself as, you know, a picture of what this healthy lifestyle could be. So it does cut against that, those claims when you have this on the record, him talking about this brain that ate a portion of his worm that ate a portion of his brain. As the Times actually points out. Cognitive issues and mercury poisoning,

et cetera. Now, again, he says he's recovered and we spoke with him. I seem fine. I don't think cognition is his problem. I'll say that. That would be my assessment as well. Yes. RFK Jr. tweets after the news, I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Biden and President Trump and Biden in a debate. I feel confident of the result, even with a six-worm handicap. New York Times also accurately pointing out that neither of them, Biden nor Trump, have released their medical records and that we don't know very much about their cognition practices. Fair. Either, which I think is a very, very fair point.

Yeah, indeed. There was also an interview. We wanted to add some medical heft. So Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN explained some of the background on medically, how this is even possible. Here's what he had to say. This does happen. I mean, obviously, we're just hearing about it from RFK himself. But I can tell you, as a neurosurgeon, this is a rare condition.

But it's typically something that is caused by eating undercooked pork. And again, we don't know this for sure, but just based on the description that we're hearing, sounds very much like this, where you eat undercooked pork and the larvae get into your bloodstream and then basically can spread throughout the body and the bloodstream. They can go to all sorts of different organs, including the brain, Jim. So again, it's unusual. Let me show you an image here. This is what it might look like in someone's brain. When you do an MRI scan, you might see these areas and you can see them in purple there, Jim, where they basically look like little cysts essentially in the brain. And that is the pork worm larvae that gets in there.

Sometimes it just is sort of sitting there, doesn't cause any kind of problems. Sometimes it can cause other symptoms like headaches or even seizures. And again, we don't know specifically what happened with him or if this is actually it, but this does happen a few thousand times a year. Imagine that image that I just showed you, and you could have these tiny little spots, typically on top of the brain or closer to the surface of the brain. And you basically go in and similar to a tumor in a way, you would go in and basically just remove that cyst. They're not usually associated with memory loss because I think that's what took RFK to the doctors in the first place, memory loss and generalized brain fogginess. Typically, it's more associated with, if any

symptoms, headaches and seizures and things like that. So that's it. Thank you guys so much. We love you. Happy holidays. Enjoy your time with your families and we'll see you all soon. Absolutely. Thank you for spending your year with us and we were looking forward to many good things in the new year. So we'll see you soon.