Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/2/24: Israel Withdraws Troops From Gaza, Israel Constitutional Crisis, Media Flips On Ukraine Amid Russia Strikes, Maine Drops Trump From Ballot, MSNBC Rips Biden Poll Numbers, Tucker And Shapiro War Over Israel Loyalties'

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

Krystal and Emily discuss Israel withdrawing some troops from Gaza, Bibi shut down by courts, media flips on Ukraine amid intensifying Russia strikes, Maine drops Trump from 2024 ballot, MSNBC rips Biden's devastating 2024 numbers, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro war over Israel loyalty.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to Breaking Points. It's 2024. Crystal, happy new year. Happy new year. I can't say that I feel great about what's coming at us in 2024, but ready or not, here we go. And we do have a lot to talk about. In the show this morning, some major things unfolding in Israel, a huge court decision that could trigger a constitutional crisis.

And this comes as they've actually announced they are recalling some troops from Gaza. So we will tell you what all of that means. We also have major attacks in Ukraine as the West could be laying the groundwork to potentially try to come to some sort of negotiated solution there since things are not going particularly well. We have another state that is trying to kick Trump off of the ballot. And obviously, look, the Iowa caucuses are in weeks, which is absolutely insane to me. So things are coming down to the wire here. We've got Biden getting some dire poll numbers from MSNBC, of all places. And Sager making a little bit of news with his Tucker Carlson interview.

Tucker coming after Ben Shapiro. So I'm actually really interested, Emily, to get your thoughts on all of that. Because as I was saying to you, I don't really have a dog in that fight. Girl shows are fun, but Sagar really did do the impossible and made news over the holiday break. It took a lot, but he did it. People are very, very interested in that interview. So we will show you that and talk a little bit about all of the fallout.

But first, let's start with what is going on in Israel. Put this up on the screen. This is a huge development. The Israeli military announcing a partial drawdown. This is the headline from the New York Times. Israel says it will pull several brigades from the Gaza Strip. Let me just read you a little bit of this report.

Israeli military announced on Monday, it will begin withdrawing several thousand troops from Gaza at least temporarily in what would be the most significant publicly announced pullback since the war began. They cited a growing toll on the Israeli economy. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. Following nearly three months of wartime mobilization,

Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, emphasized the move to demobilize some soldiers, did not indicate any compromise on Israel's intention to continue fighting, and he did not mention the American request to scale back. He indicated some will be called back to service in the coming year. Still, the fighting remains intense across Gaza. And some of the details here, they say reservists from at least two brigades will be sent home this week, and three brigades will be taken back for training. They vary in size, up to roughly 4,000 troops per brigade. The Israeli military does not disclose how many troops it has deployed in Gaza.

So hard to say exactly what this means in the grand scheme of things. Could be shifting to another phase. Something we've looked at here before on the show is just how, you know, what huge cost this war is imposing on the Israeli economy. Of course, it's nothing compared to the suffering that Gazans are experiencing. But we know in terms of their stated goal of destroying Hamas, even by their own very rosy estimates of they say they've killed roughly 8,000 Hamas fighters. Well, Hamas had a fighting force of roughly 30,000 people. And we know they haven't announced that they've been able to take out any of their top targets in terms of Hamas leadership.

So they are nowhere close to their stated goal, which always seemed to many analysts to be completely impossible, of taking out Hamas and destroying Hamas completely. And we do know also on the ground, Hamas continues to release their propaganda fighting videos, and they continue to have the ability to shoot rockets into Israel. So they're not in any kind of notable disarray. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is the latest Hamas propaganda fighting video

that you can see. They're using a tunnel here. They see a tank. They're able to put this explosive on the tank, and they've got their sort of trademark little red arrow there showing their target and putting this explosive device onto the tank. And then you're about to see it detonate. So in any case, intense fighting going on. They have been able to exact some casualties from the Israeli military.

And you also have, as I was mentioning, major economic pressure on Israel. Part of that comes from the Houthis' ability to hold up shipping in the Red Sea. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But put this Washington Post report up on the screen, and then, Emily, I want to get your reaction. We've got a report saying that gross domestic product is going to fall from 3% growth to 1% in 2024. That may sound like not a lot,

but that is actually really significant. Huge impact on Israel's high-tech sector. As many of the individuals who've been called up to, you know, who are in the reserve forces, who've been called up, work in the high-tech sector. Not only are they paying for those reservists, the bombs and the bullets, they're also supporting 200,000 evacuees who have been displaced from Israeli villages. They're being housed, they're being fed in hotels, all at government expense. You have tourism, which has completely flatlined. Tel Aviv beaches and the old city in Jerusalem bereft of foreigners. Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank were canceled. Construction, which is very dependent on Palestinian labor, that has all come to a near halt. They've suspended the work permits of more than 100,000 Palestinians. So the sort of labor force that does a lot of the jobs that Israeli citizens don't want to do is not being permitted to come in. So those industries

have really taken a huge hit. And economists have estimated the war has cost the government about $18 billion. That's about $220 million a day. So Emily, that's part of what they're citing in their decision to announce this partial drawdown. Yeah, and I think it's also worth remembering that the Biden administration for the last month or so has been anticipating publicly or saying that its best goal for Israel in the new year is exactly what the New York Times headline that you read from essentially said is a scaling back of the invasion, if not, you know, indefinite pause of the invasion, if not an indefinite pause of the invasion. That's basically exactly what Joe Biden, what we were hearing in press reports, what Joe Biden had been telling Netanyahu behind the scenes, is that the timeline is that as soon as the new year rolls around, this invasion of Gaza should be scaled back significantly. So I think it's worth remembering that. And also worth remembering the political pressures on Netanyahu at home, I think, get papered over in domestic American press. He has this wide spectrum of pressures from people within his own government, from

members of the public. And Crystal, we're actually about to talk about some of the political reality that Netanyahu faces domestically when it comes to the legal landscape in Israel. The economic points are so, so well taken. That's another thing. It's easy to forget how disruptive the operation has been since October 7th to the daily lives of thousands and thousands of Israelis and how disruptive it has been to the entire country. So the pressures on Netanyahu are just immense. So it's not at all surprising that Israel made this decision. But to your point, we're going to see what it actually means over the course of, you know, the next couple of days and then, you know, into the future as well. Yeah, that's a really important point. Just because they are drawing down some number of troops does not mean that the results will be any less brutal

and deadly for Palestinians in Gaza because we know that the air assault, the bombardment that they've faced, which has now completely destroyed Northern Gaza. I mean, it's completely uninhabitable. You know, there's barely any civilian infrastructure, left houses, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, etc.

And the South is not much better off. This has also been one of the most deadly periods, actually, in Israel's assault on Gaza. So the fact that they're withdrawing troops doesn't necessarily mean that the results are going to be any less brutal for Palestinians who, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit more, half of whom are now facing starvation conditions. But to your point, Emily, about the incredible pressures facing Netanyahu and an Israeli society, which frankly is in sort of chaos and disarray, put this up on the screen. So the judicial reform that critics call a judicial coup that Netanyahu and his governing coalition had pushed through has now been struck down by the Supreme Court. Now, this was all about the sort of balance of powers between the judicial branch and the legislative branch led, of course, by Netanyahu and the Likud party.

And they attempted to undercut some of the judiciary's power and the Supreme Court's power in particular. The Supreme Court now saying, no, we don't accept that and striking it down in a narrow decision. Let me go ahead and read you a little bit of this report so you can get a sense of the crisis. They say in a momentous ruling that could ignite a constitutional crisis, Israel's Supreme Court on Monday struck down a law passed by Bibi Netanyahu's right-wing

government that was meant to limit the court's own powers by a majority of eight judges to seven. It's likely to rekindle the grave domestic situation that began a year ago over the government's judicial overhaul plan, which sparked mass protests that brought the country to a near standstill at times, even as Israel is at war in Gaza. You have the Likud party calling the Supreme Court's decision in opposition to the nation's desire for unity, especially in a time of war. And then you have parliamentary opposition leader Yair Lapid hailing the court for, quote, faithfully fulfilling its duty to protect the people of Israel. And the reason that this is really tied into both October 7th and this war effort is, I mean, Netanyahu has almost no support in the country at this point, not on the right, not on the, quote, unquote, left, liberal anywhere.

And part of that comes from a sense that by pushing through these reforms, which were incredibly divisive and also meant to attempt to get him off the hook for corruption charges that he was facing, that they really lost sight of the security situation. You had troops who were moved from that area near Gaza that was most aggressively attacked on October 7th to the West Bank or near the West Bank to sort of placate his far-right coalition partners. You have this list of security failures. There was just a big New York Times expose actually on how even on the day of October 7th, the IDF was in complete disarray, leaving ordinary people to try to fend for themselves for hours and hours and hours.

And the sense was that this judicial reform, which really tore the country in two, had distracted them to the extent that not only did they fail to anticipate October 7th, but they were then unable to respond on that day. So that's part of how this is all tied in. And also, of course, Emily, you know, really calls into question the ability to maintain any sort of unity across the country and among the citizenry because this is such an incredibly divisive,

difficult issue. Yeah, another thing that I think has been, you know, underplayed in the Western press is the amount of criticism that Netanyahu has faced. And even, you know, sort of from the coalition, even from sort of the far right members, allies at points with Benjamin Netanyahu since October 7th, it has been brutal. Hostages that have been returned, the families of hostages who have not been returned. There have been really bad leaks out of some meetings that Netanyahu has had. There's been immense displeasure that he hasn't met with everyone. I think one meeting a few weeks back was capped at 15 people, something like that. And so he wasn't able at that particular meeting to confer with all of the families. And all of this has created a really bad domestic picture for Netanyahu.

And to your point, this was passed by parliament in July, supported by people like Netanyahu. Israel does have a very, very powerful court. And reading from an old New York Times article before October 7th, they'd say supporters of the measure, which parliament, this is at the time, is expected to vote on next Monday, presented as a boon for democracy, a modest limit on the ways in which an elected government can be stymied by unelected judges who will in any case still have other tools to overrule ministers. So that's what this was essentially about, that the court could say, nope, on this definition of reasonableness, we will not rubber stamp this ministerial appointment. And for some people, they say that's reducing judicial oversight for Netanyahu and his allies.

They say, actually, it's really important to kind of push back on this idea of unelected judges. And that entire debate was roiling the country. There were mass protests that you mentioned, Crystal, and people certainly remember. And so this is a really, really difficult domestic situation for Netanyahu. It is not, there is not a united front at home or even among his allies abroad about what Israel should do going forward. And it raises massive questions about, you know, people talk about, and myself included, what does eradicating Hamas mean? What kind of comes up in that vacuum?

You know, say the 8,000 number is accurate. So you've gotten rid of a third of Hamas fighters and a whole lot of the infrastructure. Okay, so what is Israel going to do in future steps in the war? Netanyahu or not, what is the plan? What does the Israeli government look like in the next two years, let alone five years? These things are really unsettled right now. Absolutely. And as much as the country has really been torn into by these judicial reforms or judicial coup attempt to

strip power from the judiciary, in other areas, the country is very unified. And actually, guys, if you could put the last element in this block up, A11, a poll that shows overwhelmingly Jewish Israelis in particular, they say they're not concerned about Palestinian suffering. They don't think that Palestinian suffering should be considered in terms of planning the war effort. 81% of Israeli Jews say it should either be not considered at all or considered very little. Total opposite view from Arab Israelis have the complete counterpoint. Emily, appropriate counterpoint view there. And we've also seen polling, of course, about overwhelmingly, especially Jewish Israelis, they feel that the IDF, if anything, hasn't been brutal

enough. 1.8% said that they had gone too far in their assault on Gaza. There was a huge number in favor of basically the ethnic cleansing plan, which we're going to get to as well, of quote-unquote voluntary migration of Palestinians out of Gaza. Now, how voluntary is migration when your home has been bombed and your children are being starved to death? We'll talk about that again in just a moment. But huge, huge developments. And just to give people a sense, lastly, on this judicial

reform and striking down that law by the Supreme Court of how fraught this has been, there's actually a lawmaker, a former cabinet member from Netanyahu's Likud party, Galit Distel Atbarian, sorry, I'm sure I said that name wrong, who just apologized for being involved in this. They said, I'm here sitting and telling you, the democratic secular public, I sinned against you. I caused pain for you.

I caused you to fear for your lives and I am sorry for this. So it shows you how high emotions are running that even someone who was involved in this attempt said that they sinned against the liberal secular public. Let's go ahead and move on to another incredibly important part of this story, which we just cannot lose sight of, which is the risk of a larger escalation into a regional war and of the way that our own troops have become directly implicated in what Israel is doing here. Put this up on the screen.

So the U.S. just killed 10 Houthis and they sunk three ships after a Houthi Red Sea attack. U.S. helicopters repelled an attack by Iran-backed Houthi militants on a Maersk container vessel in the Red Sea. Is that how you say that? I don't really know. Anyway, it's a large shipping company in the Red Sea, sinking three ships and killing 10 militants, according to accounts by Americans

and Houthi officials on Sunday. The naval battle occurred around 3.30 GMT on Sunday as the attackers sought to board the Singapore-flagged Maersk, Hangzhou, Maersk, and USENTCOM said. Helicopters from the USS Eisenhower and USS Gravely joined the ship's security team in repelling the attackers after receiving a distress call. Interestingly, the USS Eisenhower is actually withdrawing from the region. It's been there from the beginning. It's an interesting note. I believe it's the Eisenhower is actually withdrawing from the region. It's been there from the beginning. It's an interesting note.

I believe it's the Eisenhower that's withdrawing. This comes as, put this up on the screen, an Iranian warship has now entered the Red Sea. Iran's Alborz warship entered the Red Sea. A semi-official news agency reported on Monday at a time of soaring tensions on the key shipping route amid the Israel-Hamas war and attacks on vessels by forces allied to Tehran. And the UK looking to get more involved in these attacks on Houthis and even floating direct attacks, airstrikes on Houthi rebels.

Put this next one up. Britain is reportedly considering airstrikes on Houthi rebels after the US said its Navy sank three boats that had been targeting a container ship in the Red Sea. Grant Shapps, the defense secretary, said the government would not hesitate to take direct action to prevent further attacks amid reports the U.K. and U.S. are preparing a joint statement to issue a final warning to the Yemeni group. Obviously, this is massively significant. We are directly engaging and killing Houthi militants. We have put together this attempt at a coalition so that we aren't the only ones who are being attacked or facing these risks. But Emily, all of our allies effectively

have been extraordinarily reluctant. The coalition, such as it is, is quite lackluster, includes next to no Arab allies. There were a number of countries who didn't want to publicly be associated with it. So there's the level of just the humiliation of the U.S. trying to pull something together here that ended up not going very well and continues to not go very well. You still have shipping basically blocked through this area of the Red Sea, which is massively significant for global trade and is applying pressure to global commerce, but in particular, Israeli commerce.

But then you also have just the incredible risk of this blowing up into something much larger than it already is and dragging us much more directly into these sorts of engagements with so many of our troops still in the region with our huge risks that abound. So many of our troops still in the region just completely fanned out across the Middle East in ways that have been highlighted over the past couple of months. People didn't know that we had troops as broadly and prolifically as we do across the region and as many troops as we do across the region. But it's always worth keeping in mind because it underscores, to your

point, what a powder keg this situation is. And we're going to talk about Ukraine shortly, but I think it is really worth remembering that this is happening on a split screen. That, you know, one of the most terrifying things after October 7th and since has been the way that China, Russia, all of these different sort of emerging blocks have responded to different threats and different events that have cropped up over the course of the post-October 7th conflict. And that is really, really scary stuff. And what we are seeing in the naval sector here is a lack of American control, a lack of control among, to your point, our friends, people who are at least countries that are supposed to be the friends of the U.S. Biden looks completely out of control. And that's always been the case. When you see these scrappy groups come in and upend our ability to hold certain areas,

whatever it is, since September 11th. I mean, it's always embarrassing when stuff like this happens, but there seems to just be no cohesion in the response here. And that becomes clear and clear every day. The U.S. and Israel are basically on an island in terms of world opinion, in terms of view of Israel's assault on Gaza. And the longer that Israel's attacks on Gaza continue, the more at risk, not only our troops in the region are, but the more at risk we are of getting pulled into this broader conflict. And one of the updates that I did over the holiday, I talked about the insanity of a former Israeli prime minister in the Wall Street Journal demanding that we try to foment regime change in Iran. Outrageous, completely insane. But you, of course,

have the typical hawks in the US, people like Lindsey Graham, people like John Bolton, out there aggressively calling for us to directly attack Iran. Even though Iran, yes, they support Hamas. Yes, of course, they support the Houthis. They were not directly involved in planning October 7th. But, you know, these warmongers, they just use any excuse to try to get their favorite goal accomplished, which is a direct war with Iran. You know, this ties into the Israeli domestic political situation as well, because Netanyahu is, you know, basically hated across the board in Israeli society.

And the only way that he's been able to hold on to power and remain where he is as prime minister is by continuing, keeping this conflict going. And so he can say, listen, yes, there are many questions that need to be answered about the security situation, the intelligence failures leading up to October 7th, but that's all for after the war. So he has this incentive to keep this war going indefinitely. And he also has an incentive, and they've been making a lot of noises and have been sort of laying the groundwork to open up another full front with Hezbollah in Lebanon after they pull back in Gaza. So this is massively risky. The Israeli domestic political situation is pushing them in the direction of actually

wanting a broader war. And we've seen no ability of Biden and the US administration to push back on anything that Israel is doing, including drawing us into this broader conflict, which we've already, by nature of our engagement here with the Houthis, which we've already been drawn into. I want to go ahead and turn for a moment here because I never want to lose sight of this, of the immense suffering that is unfolding in Gaza right now, which is really unlike anything else that we have seen in this century. Put this up on the screen. We now have a report from the UN that half of Gazans are in danger of starvation. They are starving.

Something like 90% reports that they regularly go a full day without eating anything. And huge numbers are at risk due to the collapse of the healthcare system. Israel targeting hospitals, both in the North and the South of Gaza. Very few remain in operation. There's very little in the way of medical supplies as well. This tweet says we could see almost a quarter

of Gaza's population, close to half a million human beings dying within a year, largely deaths from preventable health causes and collapse of the medical system. It's a crude estimate, but one that is data driven. Let me read you a little bit of what's going on here. They say, tragically, the nearly unprecedented death and injury we've seen so far is likely to only be the beginning. From looking at similar conflicts across the world, public health experts know we

are likely to see more children dying from preventable disease than from bullets and bombs. The World Health Organization spokesperson said diarrhea rates among children in refugee-like camps in Gaza were already in November, early November, that's a while ago now, more than 100 times normal levels. And there are effectively no treatments available. Children can become dehydrated and die quickly. Diarrheal diseases are the second leading cause of death in children under five worldwide. They're caused by contaminated water sources, lack of access to oral rehydration fluids, upper respiratory infections, chickenpox, and painful skin conditions have also increased. There are fears that the recent floods may result in untreated sewage mixing with fresh water used for drinking and cooking and cause a cholera outbreak. This is something Ryan's been flagging for a while now

that oftentimes in war zones, especially when you have all of the sanitation, basic sanitation has been destroyed. You have people living in these crowded camp situations that oftentimes the disease that spreads is even deadlier than the bombs and the bullets, which have been plenty deadly enough. So incredibly dire situation unfolding there with no end in sight. But this next piece up on the screen, you'll remember in the early days after October 7th,

there was a lot of discussion of how the Hamas attack was equivalent to 15 9-11s for a nation of Israel's size. Well, they sort of stopped doing this 9-11 math now because the equivalent figure for Gaza, where more than 20,000 people have now been killed, is approaching 900 9-11s. I actually recommend people read this entire Mother Jones article, How Joe Biden Became America's Top Israel Hawk, because it digs into the fact that he has long been one of the most hawkish with regards to Israel, one of the greatest

allies of everyone, every Israeli prime minister, including Netanyahu, how he actually actively undermined some Obama and Hillary Clinton initiatives to back Netanyahu during a time when those relations were very fraught. So it's incredibly interesting and revealing history for understanding how and why Joe Biden is doing what he is and giving them unconditional support in this moment. Yeah, and I'm curious how this evolves because, again, worth remembering that the Biden administration was telegraphing through the press and otherwise that they wanted in the new year Israel to scale down this invasion. And we don't know because, again, Biden is facing immense pressure in the middle of this non-primary primary. But Democrats around the country are facing immense pressure in an election year as well over their support for Netanyahu and Netanyahu's government and the Israeli military and all of its sort of strategic decisions. And so that has been a point of contention between Biden and Netanyahu.

And where does this go? If Biden's pressure, and we'll learn more in the days to come, if the Biden administration's pressure was absolutely instrumental in what proves to be a long-term indefinite sort of pause in this invasion, that's a very different question. It's a different side of Biden. We'll see potentially, and the Mother Jones article highlights how this would be a different side of Biden when it comes to Netanyahu. And it just highlights the political pressures here at home, the political pressures actually abroad at places like the United Nations, at, you know, allied countries that think differently and have always approached this conflict differently than the United States. And that raises one more huge question, question crystal, and this is where the rubber really meets the road for me.

The eradication of Hamas, when you're looking at that 9-11 number in particular, this stands out, the aftermath of our response to 9-11, as many people have highlighted since October 7th, was a lot of power vacuums that actually allowed really radical movements to fester. And is that what is being set up? Like, what is the plan? Because there really is not going to be a response that fully eradicates Hamas from Israel. And it sure as heck is not going to eradicate that kind of underlying ideology and a long-term, drawn-out response. Crystal, along the lines that you just mentioned, the humanitarian concerns for civilians when it comes to wide-scale illness and starvation, what does that do in Israel's

interest going forward? This is a lesson that many countries have had to learn over the last several decades about what happens in inhumane power vacuums and whether it is ultimately in the interest of a country like Israel or a country of the United States for that situation to continue long-term. And that's just looming over all of this right now. Yeah, there's no doubt that they are radicalizing many more

than they are eradicating. There's just no doubt about that. And you can see through the history of recent Israeli politics that when Palestinians feel that they have a chance at a peaceful resolution through negotiation, support for armed resistance and radical groups like Hamas drops. And when they don't feel that they have that opportunity or that possibility, support for Hamas and other radical groups rises.

And we already see, you know, obviously it's very difficult in Gaza to conduct a poll at the moment, but there's indications that support for Hamas has actually gone up during this time period. And in the West Bank, it's very clear where, you know, they don't have to deal with the failures of Hamas has actually gone up during this time period. And in the West Bank, it's very clear where, you know, they don't have to deal with the failures of Hamas governance and they are suffering, don't get me wrong, but not at the level or extent that Palestinians in Gaza are

right now in support for Hamas, as opposed to the Palestinian Authority, which is, you know, basically a collaborator with the occupying force, support for Hamas has skyrocketed. So in terms of, quote unquote, eradicating Hamas, they have utterly failed and only made the situation worse at great risk to their own population and at great risk to us as well, because these bombs that are being dropped close, you know, somewhere around 30,000 at this point, a majority of which are, quote unquote, dumb bombs being dropped indiscriminately on civilian populations. These are made in America, and we continue to ship them. We continue to expedite, in fact, military weaponry to Israel, even as our own president admits that they are engaged in, quote, unquote, indiscriminate

bombing, which is, of course, a war crime. The last piece I want to bring you this morning is, you know, it's been pretty clear for a while now what the ultimate goal of Netanyahu and his coalition partners are, what their goal is for the quote-unquote day after in Gaza. And the goal is, I think, cleansing. And now they are saying it much more clearly. So put this up on the screen. This is one of the ministers in the Netanyahu government, Bezalel Smotrich.

He says that Gaza is a ghetto. If we act strategically, they will emigrate. And we, we Israelis, will live there. We won't let 2 million stay. With 100,000 to 200,000 in Gaza, the quote, day after debate

will be different. They want to leave. They've been living in a ghetto for 75 years. Yeah, I'm sure many do want to leave an active war zone where they are being bombed and starved to death and their homes are being destroyed. You also had the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, on Monday said the Netanyahu government should, quote, encourage the migration of Gazans out of the Palestinian enclave. He says, quote, this is a correct, just, moral, and humane solution during a meeting of his Jewish power party in Jerusalem. So these are two ministers in the Netanyahu government. These are not nobodies. These are incredibly influential voices within his coalition.

And they're saying outright that pushing Gazans permanently out of the Gaza Strip is the ultimate goal. There's been a plan that has been floated reportedly in the US with some bipartisan interest to use USAID dollars to basically force local Arab allies of the United States to take in this refugee population. And so, again, this has been pretty obvious for a while, but now there's not even any denials around it. It's coming directly from top officials themselves. And I think every US politician and every US media figure needs to be asking every US politician about whether or not they support this and what their plan is to stop it. Another reminder of the biggest disconnect in

the war, which is that Joe Biden publicly says he believes in a two-state solution. Joe Biden's government is instrumental in the prosecution of this war without the United States. Not just, you know, we supply about 20% of in a two-state solution, that disconnect is not sustainable. to lay waste to civilian populations if the two major powers involved in the war are on completely, this is not a minor difference. They're on completely different pages and completely different universes when it comes to the end goal. And that is a recipe for disaster.

And I say that as somebody who actually believes that there was a real necessity for a military response after October 7th. It shouldn't have been a ceasefire October 8th, October 9th, October 10th. But you cannot lay waste to civilian populations with that level of a disconnect because it means that you are intentionally

driving headfirst into a quagmire and causing suffering without a clear path out of that destruction. It's embarrassing that we are involved in a conflict where there's that little clarity about what the end goal is that has caused and is continuing to cause so much suffering. That's the thing that really is among the most disgusting elements of all of this. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

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

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick.

Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black

sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us

about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And yet, that is not the only war that we are directly involved with, Emily. No, it isn't, Crystal. It's important to move on here to the increasing violence, escalating violence just over the last couple of days in Ukraine. And we were just talking about the conflict in Israel. These things are happening on a split screen. And remember what a powder keg the world is right now. So strikes, we can put the

first element up on the screen here. CNN is reporting basically strikes began on Friday. Russia has launched, I'll just read from the article, the biggest air attack on Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, which remember, we are coming up on the anniversary of. This is from the Ukrainian military telling CNN that, quote, with an unprecedented number of drones and missiles fired at targets across the country, they've killed at least 31 people and injured more than 150 others. The wave of attacks began overnight into Friday and struck nationwide, with blasts reported in the capital of Kyiv, as well as at a maternity hospital in the central city of Dnipro and the

eastern city of Kharkiv, the southeastern port of Odessa, and the western city of Lviv, far from the front lines. It's also worth emphasizing. The strikes continued Friday afternoon. Ukraine's air force said as a barrage of missiles targeted the northern Chakassi region with one hitting the city of Smila. Other missiles were detected from Russia's Kursk region heading towards the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy. The massive overnight assault, CNN adds, comes just days after Ukraine struck a Russian Navy landing ship in Crimea on Tuesday. So this is all within the last week.

And the onslaught CNN continues also came shortly after Ukraine received the last package of military aid from the United States until Congress approves the Biden administration's funding request. Biden is requesting another $60 billion. We're already around $100 billion into this, which Biden's allies like to point out what a bargain. It's about 1% of our annual GDP. So as Lindsey Graham says, you couldn't ask for a better return on your investment. This is all just a great deal for the United States of America. That is front and center as Congress returns in the new year. They're going to have to make all kinds of

decisions. And we heard, Ryan and I talked to the new chair of the Freedom Caucus, Bob Good, just a couple of weeks ago, who said straight up on the show, on counterpoints, that Ukraine aid is dead on arrival because the Freedom Caucus has a huge ability to maneuver. We saw that play out over the course of the last year, and they don't want Mike Johnson to basically give an inch on Ukraine aid without also doing what's basically impossible to see Biden compromising on the border. Another thing worth emphasizing, the Polish military reported a quote, unidentified airborne object entering their airspace from Ukrainian territory early on Friday morning. Their chief of the general staff said everything indicated that a Russian

missile had entered and then left Polish airspace. That's from Polish reporting, basically. So another reminder of what a powder keg this is, Crystal. Yeah, absolutely. It's easy to lose sight of what a dangerous situation is continuing to unfold every day that that war continues. And so you have the looming specter of Trump potentially coming back into office. And he has become very critical of our support for Ukraine. Even before that, Emily, as you're pointing out, you've got House Republicans in particular,

but Republicans more broadly, who have become extremely skeptical of continuing this support. And they were unable to, you know, the idea was, all right, we'll give Republicans some border security money. Everybody apparently just wants to give Israel whatever they want, even though it's a wealthy country. And then we'll stick the Ukraine aid in there. And that's how we'll try to get it through. Well, maybe that'll still work, but maybe it won't. It certainly didn't come together before they all left for holiday break. So very, very much in doubt. And then you also have internationally, the global South has always looked, most of the world, frankly, has always looked at this conflict

differently than how it has been presented in the Western press. The Biden administration and other people who love to talk about the international rules-based order, they held this up as, oh, this is our fight for democracy. This is our fight against this imperial power grab and might makes right by Russia. But now as this is unfolding, as you said it before, Emily, on a split screen, with this all-out Israeli assault on Gaza

and a complete siege and a million people in danger of starving and thousands of children killed and journalists and civilian infrastructure destroyed. I mean, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes what Russia has done in Ukraine look like child's play. As this is playing out,

it just becomes totally undeniable that all of this supposed U.S. commitment to the rules-based order and to democracy and to these values-based commitments is all bullshit. And so you had Mehdi Hassan pointing this out, put this up on the screen. I thought this was interesting, sparked a lot of conversation. You can see Mehdi's tweet here. He says, I challenge you to read the statement from the White House today, but change the words Russia, Ukraine, and Putin to Israel, Gaza, and Netanyahu. Go on,

do it, see for yourself. And let me read you this, what he actually said. It's a statement from Joe Biden on Russia's aerial assault on Ukraine. Overnight, Russia launched its largest aerial assault on Ukraine since this war began. This massive bombardment used drones and missiles, including missiles with hypersonic capability to strike cities and civilian infrastructure all across Ukraine. Strikes reportedly hit a maternity hospital, shopping mall, residential areas, killing innocent people and injuring dozens more. Stark reminder to the world that after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin's

objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped. Of course, none of that emotional and clear language has ever been applied to what Israel is doing on a much vaster, much more devastating scale within Gaza. And this is incredibly apparent to people around the world. You now have, put this up on the screen, the global South effectively abandoning Ukraine. The UN was having a bad 2023. Then came the war in Gaza. As I mentioned before, there was already a different view in the global South. However, they write, the war between Israel and Hamas has upended their calculations. The atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th shook

diplomats from all over the world. But the ensuing war's massive humanitarian toll and U.S. refusal to support a ceasefire in Gaza over the past two months, coupled with European states' divided response to the war, has alienated the majority of U.N. members. Diplomats who previously backed Ukraine in the General Assembly have indicated they will not do so in the future. Out of frustration over the West's lack of solidarity with the Palestinians, Kiev quietly dropped a planned resolution commemorating the Holodomor, the Soviet-era famine in Ukraine manufactured by Stalin

as it became clear it would not secure strong majority support in the General Assembly. So listen, much of the world, Emily, has already felt the U.S. to be very hypocritical where it comes to our quote-unquote commitment to the international rules-based order. It's been quite clear for decades that we apply these rules when and how we see fit. But it has never been quite as stark and quite as blatant as it is right now in this situation. So any attempt by the U.S. going forward, I think from here on out, even after Israel is done doing what they're doing in Gaza, any attempt by us to use this language of

morals and appeal to international rules-based order, it's dead. It's done. This is over. There's not even any ability to sort of like pretend like that's how the world is governed or like there are any real limits on what we and our allies can do. It's just effectively baked back to might makes right. And, you know, Russia capitalizes on this. It makes it much easier for them to muddy the waters. They're going to muddy the waters either way. But let's put B2 back up on the screen just for a a city of Belgorod Saturday killed 21 people, including three children, according to local officials. Now, Russia's defense ministry is saying that these are checkmate vampire rockets

and Ulka missiles that were fired with cluster munition warheads. The Associated Press adds, importantly, it provided no additional information, so they were unable to verify those claims. But cities across western Russia have come under regular attack from drones since May, with Russian officials blaming Kyiv. Ukrainian officials never acknowledge responsibility for attacks on Russian territory or the Crimean Peninsula. However, large aerial strikes against Russia have previously followed heavy assaults on Ukrainian cities. Now, let's also then move to B7. This is from the New York Times on December 23rd. This is about potential, I'm so sorry, this is B6. There are two New York Times tear sheets we're about to talk about. The first one

is that Putin quietly signals he is open to a ceasefire in Ukraine. That's the headline. This is remarkable reporting that will not be a surprise to any listeners or viewers of this show, but again, undermines the Biden administration's or the lack of strategy and then occasionally horrible strategy that the Biden administration has applied to this conflict. So reporting here from the New York Times, Mr. Putin has been signaling through intermediaries since at least September that he is open to a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along the current lines, far short of his ambitions to dominate Ukraine. Two former senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin and American and international officials who have

received the message from Mr. Putin's envoy say, hell of a lead there from the New York Times. That was all one sentence if you were following along, but jam-packed with information. The story continues. In fact, Mr. Putin also sent out feelers for a ceasefire deal a year earlier in the fall of 2022, according to American officials. That quiet overture, not previously reported, came after Ukraine routed Russia's army in the country's northeast. Mr. Putin indicated that he was satisfied with Russia's captured territory and ready for an armistice. Now, again, many of you know this, the captured territory, much of it has been under contention since 2014, at least, and there has been, you know, on and off fighting in those regions.

And many of those regions are already very favorable to Russia. So Putin sort of being satisfied with the territory that he has, it makes sense. It's sort of logical from his kind of cold, calculated, strategic perspective, a logical reason behind that. The New York Times later in the story says the signals come through multiple channels, including via foreign governments with ties to both the U.S. and Russia. Russia's unofficial emissaries have spoken to interlocutors about the contours of a potential deal that Mr. Putin would accept. Putin and the Russian army, this is a quote from the story from a source, they don't want to stretch their capacity further. That's according to point of the story. Some American officials say it could be a familiar Kremlin attempt at misdirection and does not reflect genuine willingness by Mr. Putin to compromise.

The former Russian officials add that Mr. Putin could well change his mind again if Russian forces gain momentum. So there you see the New York Times giving a little bit to its sources in intelligence. Just reading this as a journalist, it looks like what they're doing is giving a little bit. You know, they're reporting something that American intelligence doesn't want them to report because they're saying that it's just Putin trying to muddy the waters, blame the U.S. for scuttling peace talks, which makes him look like the negotiator who, you know, the U.S. is turning its back on peace with over and over again. But actually, we are turning our back on peace over and over again. And it's not just Vladimir Putin's claims are not the only proof of that. We have. We have the proof of claims of people in the Ukrainian government. Fiona Hill wrote a story reporting about this in foreign policy. Of all people from the sort of Brookings sect writing about this in foreign policy not long ago,

we know that Mark Milley encouraged Keith to negotiate, what was this, last year, fall of 2022. Actually, I guess that was two years ago now because it's newly 2024. But other American officials, according to The Times, believed it was too soon for talks. So again, Crystal, very, very clear that the U.S. is not satisfied with the terms that could be brought to the table right now to stop. We're at hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to serious estimates. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is, to me, such a moral atrocity and just absolute failure that we scuttled negotiations that were occurring at the beginning of this war. And listen, they could be right. It could be misdirection from Putin. It could be that he's not serious about it.

But there's one way to find out, and that's to actually engage in the process and try to negotiate a settlement in some sort of good faith. I actually read this article a little bit different or interpret a little bit different than you, Emily, because we have had these multiple reports now for years about those early negotiations and the fact that it was US pressure specifically, and then with our buddies coming in from the UK over the top, that killed those negotiations. And we said, no, we want you to go to war.

We want this fight. We wanted to use Ukraine as our little pawn to try to weaken Russia. We used them. And then now here we are years later, as you said, after hundreds of thousands of lives lost after so much. And that's, of course, the worst of it. And then you talk about the economic destruction and the lives ruined that we pushed for.

And I've said this before, it's actually made me really learning and understanding. This has actually made me more sympathetic to the like all in for Ukraine people, because what we did was the most morally indefensible, which is we're going to make you fight this war, but we're not going to give you everything that you need in order to be successful. We're just going to dribble in enough to keep you hopeful so that you can fight to the last man standing. And if you read the reports about the enlistment shortage and the way they're pulling men off the street and the average age of the fighting force now,

it's absolutely atrocious. They've lost effectively an entire generation of men in Ukraine because we wanted them to fight this war. And now the reason the way I read this report is this was not, none of this information about a potential peace deal, potential negotiation, none of this information about a potential peace deal, potential negotiation, none of this had been reported out by Western media. They just ignored that any of this happened. So the fact that you have the paper of record for which, through which

the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment speaks, now saying, hey, maybe Putin is actually open to a deal. Here's some details about some previous openings and previous potential negotiations that he reached out to us and tried to float. That to me is a significant shift. And then when you add that to put the B7 up on the screen, guys, this is a New York Times editorial board member who wrote now, and again, these were things you were not allowed to say without being a Putin apologist, et cetera, et cetera. Yep, blood on your hands.

That's right, absolutely. Ukraine doesn't need all its territory to defeat Putin. Again, New York Times Ed Board member writing this. And part of what he says, which are things that, you know, much of this is things that people like us have been arguing for quite a while. He says, regaining territory is the wrong way to imagine the best outcome. True victory for Ukraine is to rise from the hell of the war as a strong, independent, prosperous, and secure state firmly planted in the West. It would be exactly what Mr. Putin most feared

from a neighboring state with deep historical ties to Russia, and it would be a testament to what Russia promised to become in 1991 when both countries broke free of the Soviet Union before Mr. Putin entered the Kremlin and succumbed to grievance and the lure of dictatorial power and imperial illusion. In many ways, Mr. Putin has achieved the opposite of what he set out to do. The Ukrainian nation whose existence he poo-pooed

has been steeled in fire. And on December 14th, the European Union formally agreed to open accession negotiations with Ukraine, the very westward shift. Mr. Putin went to war to block. Finland has joined NATO. Sweden is edging closer to membership. These are not the elements of victory. Because the alternative perspective, Emily, which has some validity, is to say, well, if you let Putin get away

with just taking this territory, what message does this send to China? What message does this send to Russia? What message does it send to Russia? That, okay, well, we let you get away with it here. You know, what else is on your list, on your wishlist? But what he points out is so important, which is that this has already been a disaster for Russia. This has not gone well for them

in the sense that they have forged a very strong Ukrainian national identity, polar opposite of what they wanted. They have pushed Ukraine closer to the West, the polar opposite of what they wanted. They have introduced now Finland and Sweden edging closer to Finland's join NATO, Sweden edging closer to NATO membership, the polar opposite of what they wanted. Even Ukraine edging closer to NATO membership, the polar opposite of what they wanted. Even Ukraine edging closer to NATO membership. It's not like they can look at what has happened here

and a lot of economic turmoil. I mean, Russia has held up better under sanctions than most people thought, but it's not like this has been smooth sailing. They can't look at this and say, this has been great for us. It's something we would like to repeat. And so that's, I think,

what's important about these pieces and the framing here is, again, this conversation was not allowed. Now that it's happening in the New York Times, it marks a dramatic shift in the tenor of the conversation and the sorts of things that are allowed to be floated. And I hope that it enables us to move to a place of being open to negotiate settlement because, listen, it would have been better to try to do the deal early on when Ukraine had more momentum. Now they are in this stalemate. Now they're in a sort of weakened position. It's very clear, you know, if Trump comes in already, there's a lot of question about whether they'll get any more aid. So they're in a very weakened position. But when you're in a hole, stop digging.

It could get much worse than it is right now. And so that's why I see these as almost, I mean, it's horrifying what's happened in Ukraine. These are at least some hopeful signs that perhaps diplomacy, negotiations, and peace could theoretically be at the table. A couple of things you just said that I want to repeat that are, I think, first of all, you're so right that the story does feel like a turning point in the war, because this is what, you know, as members of Congress are returning here to Washington, D.C., this is what is on their desks.

This is what sort of gives them that permission slip. You know, say, well, there's a member of the New York Times editorial board even talking about this now. That is very, very different than just before they went to Christmas break. That is a huge, huge difference. And that may seem silly because, of course, it is. You shouldn't need to take your cues from a member of the New York Times editorial board when it comes to war and peace, but they do. And Crystal, the other point there is from A to B, tens of thousands of lives were lost. From A, when it was not okay to talk about any of these things, lest you have blood on your hands or be

a Putin apologist, to point B, where now it's like, you know what, maybe they can give up the Donbass. Tens of thousands of lives were lost. And you alluded to a Wall Street Journal story that was published right before Christmas that showed pretty clear evidence, people on the record, being illegally drafted by Ukraine into war with a system of bribery that was disproportionately shielding affluent Ukrainian men from service. So after this failed offensive that places like the New York Times were drip, drip, dripping, telling us was going to change the war, was going to send Putin back on his heels, all of this, now we have a wild mismatch between Western elites' appetite for war, and much of Ukraine's.

That's not to say there aren't Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainians that aren't still saying, let's go out there, get Russians. We will lay down our lives for this territory. Of course, that still exists. But if you are having to illegally draft middle-aged men by pulling them off the street, as this Wall Street Journal story documents. And Western elites are still saying, let's go get them. Let's keep sending you this money in the way that, Crystal, you made a great point. We'll kind of send you the money, but it's going to be on the schedule, and maybe you won't get everything you want when you want

it. And we're kind of in charge of the war, but we'll also kind of let you do things. Like you go do what you do with the Nord Stream. It's just a disaster. And a lot of people are dead because of it. Yeah, that is absolutely right. So we'll see what the new year brings and if there are any serious efforts to reach for a negotiated settlement. But I will never forget the direct role, the central role that the U.S. played in blocking any sort of possibility of a negotiated settlement at the beginning before these hundreds of

thousands of lives were lost. I will never forget the way that we used Ukraine as our pawn and how much we have been exposed as full of it when it comes to all of our supposed concerns about democracy and the international rules-based order. It's just never been more clear than it is at this moment. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what

it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek.

I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, I'm Max Chavkin. inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin,

it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all

episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Let's go ahead and turn to some domestic politics because while we were out over the break, major development in terms of Donald Trump and his various legal battles. So we had covered previously Colorado, the state Supreme Court, issuing a ruling that if upheld by the Supreme Court would keep Trump off of that ballot. This under the provision in the Constitution that says you cannot engage in an insurrection if you'd previously held an office, taken an oath, etc. So now we've got another state attempting to remove Trump from the ballot. You can put this

up on the screen. Now, this one came through a slightly different route. Maine's Secretary of State decided to remove Trump from the ballot because of the 14th Amendment's insurrection ban. Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows paused her decision pending a potential appeal in state court, which Trump's team said they intend to file. Just to give you some of the nitty gritty here, they say the decision makes Maine the second state to disqualify Trump from office after the Colorado Supreme Court handed down its own stunning ruling that removed him from the ballot earlier this month. She said her decision will be put on hold until Maine's superior court, a trial level

court, makes a ruling. It is not the highest court in the state, but it's the next level where Trump or others can appeal. Maine's laws mandate that the Superior Court must make a decision within 20 days from Thursday. That would be January 17th. So the Maine Superior Court has to weigh in here. That is not the highest level court in Maine, so I assume it'll go all the way up to the Maine Supreme Court. And then very likely, I would assume, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to weigh in

on these challenges and how to interpret this part of the Constitution. Maine Secretary of State was pressed on her decision here on CNN. Let's take a listen. I think it's really important that people understand the process. As a general matter, states have the power to control their own ballots and, in fact, do under the Constitution. And Maine law specifically delegates to me, as Secretary of State, a requirement to review the qualifications for any candidate running for office. So, for example, last week, the Superior Court found that my decision to bar Mr. Chris Christie from Maine's presidential primary ballot due to lack of signatures was lawful and correct. So my job, I qualify Mr. Trump for the ballot. And under Maine law, any registered voter can bring a challenge to that qualification. In this case, there were three challenges, and I was required by law to hold a hearing, an administrative hearing, to review the evidence, hear testimony.

Both sides were represented by counsel. Mr. Trump was represented by an attorney. And then I'm required to issue a decision. That's my obligation under the oath I swore to the Constitution. In terms of the criticism that your decision takes away the right for voters to have their voice heard, do you believe that's a valid concern? Again, my first and foremost obligation is my oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Now, different states are different. For example, our neighboring New Hampshire, there are more than a dozen candidates on the Democratic presidential ballot that Mr. Joseph Biden is not on the Democratic presidential primary ballot in New Hampshire. And there are more than a dozen Republican candidates. In Maine, there are two candidates on the Democratic presidential primary ballot and less than a dozen Republican presidential candidates.

So every state is different. My obligation and duty, my sole consideration is my oath to uphold the Constitution. So Emily, you and I haven't talked either about Maine or about Colorado also with their Supreme Court decision that would ban Trump from the ballot that's now been put on hold waiting for what happens at the Supreme Court. But what are your overall thoughts about what's going on here? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, really difficult to watch this play out knowing that, you know, as awful, and I say this all the time, I was there on January 6th covering the riot. And it's one of the worst,

if not the single worst thing that I've ever seen. I've covered riots. That was the worst of the worst that I've ever seen. And it was awful. And Donald Trump was playing with fire and he bears responsibility for it. He has not been charged with insurrection. And Crystal, there are historic, I think, differences between what was being discussed. And we have an article on this, actually. You can put C3 up on the screen. This is from ABC News, what was being discussed

as the 14th Amendment was written, very specifically about people who took up arms personally, personally took up arms against the United States. Now, the 14th Amendment does have a point about people who gave aid or comfort to people who took up arms against the United States, and that sort of makes it much more open-ended and kind of vague, but it has never been interpreted in this way at all. And with nobody, let alone Donald Trump, being charged with insurrection,

and I don't say that to mean that Jack Smith should charge Donald Trump with insurrection personally, with the kind of insurrection that Confederates did when they literally fought to the death people from their own country to preserve, as Nikki Haley is a little bit scared to say, the institution of slavery. We could get into that, Crystal, but really there's no need to because there's no point to talking about Nikki Haley anymore. But I mean, this was a very specific, this was a very, very specific phenomenon

that was being addressed in the 14th Amendment about taking up arms and fomenting an insurrection, a war against your own country. And Donald Trump had insane disagreements, some that he didn't even believe in, I think is very clear, and did mislead people about. I continue to think that's one of the most disgusting parts of all of this is the way Donald Trump treats his own voters. And, you know, he did horrible things. That's all true. Charging him with insurrection, Crystal, not only do I think it is legally wrong, or not

charging him with insurrection, but then taking him off the ballot, not only do I think it is legally wrong, or not charging him with insurrection, but then taking him off the ballot, not only do I think it's legally wrong and dubious and sets a terrifying precedent, I also think it's really pushing us towards the brink of something very, very frightening. It feels like a recipe for a lot more January 6th going Going forward, when you kind of take that out of the voters' hands, people feel powerless. It makes people feel powerless more and more. And that's when people get desperate. So I just, the whole thing is frightening. But I mean, we already are on the brink of something ugly. We already had January 6th. Like, I mean, I'm thinking about 2024 and like, I'm normally so excited about a presidential election year because I'm such a political nerd. I can't even imagine a good outcome.

There is no outcome that appears to be on the menu that is a good outcome. So I think the legal issues here are genuinely very tricky. I read the Colorado State Supreme Court ruling and like all of the different pieces that they were grappling with. I just want to read for people what section three of the 14th Amendment actually says in terms of the just like plain, you know, English meaning that people are taking from.

Because you do have a majority of Americans, actually a pretty strong majority, including a quarter of Republicans, who said, yeah, I actually agree with the Colorado Supreme Court on this. So it says no person shall be a senator or representative in Congress or elector of president and vice president or hold any office, civil or military under the United States or under any state who having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress or as an officer of the US or as a member of any state legislator or as an executive or judicial officer of any state to support the Constitution of the

U.S. shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability. So we just had the Colorado GOP appeal the state Supreme Court ruling there. One thing that was interesting to me is they did not actually contest on the grounds that Trump was not engaged in or giving aid or comfort to the enemies engaged in an insurrection. They challenged some of these more technical legal pieces, including whether the president of the United States is a, quote, office of, you know, that this would apply to, which I always have thought was preposterous. And one of the things that the that that news article we had up a moment ago mentions is that

in the debate over the language of this amendment, this actually came up. There's a single reference in that Senate debate to the fact that president and vice president are not specifically mentioned in this draft. And a Maryland Democratic senator said, why did you omit to exclude them? And this person who drafted it responded, let me call the senator's attention to the words or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States is included. And that ended the discussion, basically meaning like, well, it says any office. Like, of course the president is included here. So it was interesting to me that the Republican Party that filed this appeal did not actually take issue with the idea that Trump engaged in an insurrection or gave aid and comfort to it with some of these tricky legal issues. So listen, my view is it's appropriate

to have this provision in the constitution to protect the state from, you know, insurrectionists and people who give aid and comfort to insurrectionists. I think it is appropriate to have this in. I think it is very, right, like Sager. Gotta block, gotta keep Sager out of office. I think that the only appropriate avenue in terms of the like vagueness of this provision and the fact that it hasn't been applied in modern times, really since the Civil War, or at least very rarely,

I think it's entirely appropriate for it to go to the Supreme Court and for them to set the guidelines of, here's the process of here's the process, here's the definition, here's what it means, here's how you know, and here's how we can, you know, here's how we can work with this moving forward. The last thing, and I'll call your attention to in that news article about what the debate was at the time is, you know, there's a question of whether this was even meant to apply to future insurrections

or if it was really just specifically for the Civil War. And there was some language in the debate about, they say, this is to go into our Constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present. And I should like to have that point definitely understood. So there was a sense at the time, and, you know, for the conservative justices who claim to be originalists and to look at what the meaning and intent was at the time and to look at the plain text reading of the language of the Constitution, the Colorado Supreme Court in particular wrote there, my cat's going crazy in the background, guys. The cat is fomenting an insurrection against your chair.

Salem is going to be barred from holding office in that chair. Anyway, they really wrote the language to sort of challenge the judicial approach of the conservative justices. Now, what do I think is going to happen? I think they're going to say, no, Trump's going to be on the ballot. I think it's very unlikely that they uphold the Colorado State Supreme Court decision. But, you know, Maggie Haberman did actually say something about, I guess, Trump is kind of worried that his own justices that he put on there might flip on him and keep him off the ballot. So listen, crazier things have happened. I guess you never know. Yeah. First of all, Crystal's cat has turned her chair into like the teacups at Disney World. It's just amazing.

Smart. But yeah, I think we can put the last element up on the screen, too. That's another thing, you know, where the legality of this is tricky or dubious. Time magazine says Americans appear more amenable to autocracy in 2024, but they're alluding there to very real polling. And if you look at the RCP averages, for example, of Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, you see this, Ryan described it as like an alligator jaw, crocodile jaw, I forgot which one he said. As soon as the indictments started coming down of Trump's support just going up, DeSantis' support just going down, that the sort of ongoing lawfare against Trump just solidifies people's support for him.

And that's where, Chris, to your point, some Republicans are involved in filing these challenges and some Republicans supporting what Colorado's decision was. I mean, Donald Trump is just incredibly polarizing. And I think maybe one thing that we can agree on is the Democrats have, and never Trump kind of Republicans, sort of desperately have flung lawfare at Donald Trump since 2015, when the dossier was first funded by Republicans, by the way. They have tried to thwart Donald Trump in every way except

actually persuading the voters that they shouldn't support Donald Trump. They have not figured out the persuasive argument for this hardened 30% of the country that supports Donald Trump to the point where he can win a primary and then convince another 20% of the country that the other option is so bad that they have to go with Donald Trump for a number of different reasons for a number of different voters. And that, again, is the real, like, that's another real problem that hangs over all of this, is that that argument of, you know, things are, Joe Biden is talking about the economy as though everything is rosy. And of course he is. He's been president for a couple of years in the middle of a reelection campaign. He wants to say we've made progress. And there's

an argument that some progress has been made, but people express that they aren't feeling like the economy is the same way that Joe Biden is talking about the economy. They express that they're not feeling the same way about geopolitical stability and American leadership on the world stage as Joe Biden is saying that they should. And that's where Trump comes in and is persuasive to a lot of people. So there's still an incredible vacuum in the persuadability of a chunk of the country. Not everyone.

We're extremely polarized around the issue of Trump and very polarized in general. But that continues, I think, to be a real handicap for Trump's enemies. I think I saw some other polling about America's rising comfort with authoritarianism. And that sentiment is most strongly expressed among the hardest partisan Republicans. But the rise is significant regardless of political ideology. And to me, it gets to something you're pointing

to here, which is that it's not that Democrats haven't tried to persuade people they shouldn't vote for Donald Trump. They certainly have tried. But what they've been unwilling to do or unable to do, given their own, like, you know, compromised situations and sea of money in politics that infects both parties, they've been unable and unwilling to offer an affirmative, positive agenda that is a viable alternative. And so to me, it's very logical and, you know, very clear if you look at history that if people feel like democracy isn't delivering for them, then they may sour on democracy or they may, you know, not prioritize democracy. And I think that's a lot of what you're seeing here is people feel like, you know, whoever I vote for in this upcoming election, it's not going to help me.

It's not going to affect my life. They don't feel like these, the stakes of these elections aren't really the same because there's no expectation that either major political party is going to actually deliver for them. And so instead, it's like, all right, well, who's on my side in the culture war? Who's like owning or hating on the person that I also hate? And that's what our politics devolves to as well as willingness to reach for authoritarian tactics to keep the group that you see as an existential threat that you've been told by media is an existential threat to try to keep them at bay. So I think that's part of what's going on here.

In terms of like the lawfare against Donald Trump, I mean, there's no doubt about it, like the Russiagate nonsense, all that stuff. But you do have to separate out like which of these claims are legitimate and have some basis and which are just total like fabricated distraction and bullshit. So the fact that some of the claims are distraction and bullshit does not mean that all of the claims are distraction and bullshit. And I think there's a reason why the normie reaction to the language in 14th Amendment Section 3 has been like, oh, yeah, that sounds like him.

Like, that kind of fits. Because it does. If you just read it, you're like, well, if it applies to anyone, it's this dude. So like I said, where do I think this is going to go? Ultimately, I think the Supreme Court's going to strike it down. And so it's not going to really, you know, matter that much. But I guess you never know what could happen. And it's certainly a test of where we are as a country, and it will be a test of how everyone reacts to what's going on here. Yeah, I agree. And we will expect something on these cases legally in just the next couple of days. So there's a lot of news to stay tuned to when it comes to these ballot qualification questions. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship

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

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding,

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

editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Push have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk about the other side of the ledger here. Joe Biden, not looking so hot for his reelection as we head into 2024.

And none other than MSNBC's Steve Kornacki breaking down the numbers with a dire warning for him. Let's take a listen. How about the Democratic end of things? Joe Biden seems poised to be the Democratic nominee. What kind of year is he had politically? Well, again, he started 2023 coming off those good midterms for Democrats and his approval rating, you know, 46, 50 wasn't that bad, but it's taken a hit this year. And as we start to close out the year, our final NBC poll had him at just 40 percent approval, 57 percent disapproval. How does this compare to past presidents entering the reelection

year? Here you can see it. Here's the 40 that we have Biden at right now. These are all the final polls heading into the election, a reelection year that NBC conducted. You just see all the recent president. Look, Trump got beat in 2020. He was at 44 heading into his reelection year. Bush senior got beat in 92. He was at 52 and heading south rapidly there. But you see how that number compares. That's the lowest. That's the lowest in an NBC poll for an incumbent facing a reelection here. But it is a tight race when you poll Biden versus Trump at the start of the year and the average of the polls nationally. Biden had a two point advantage. Now, at the end of the year, it is Trump who on average has a two point advantage here. And that leads to this final graphic here. A poll from The Wall Street Journal recently.

They included a bunch of third party options and against Biden and Trump, they added up to 17 percent. That's a big question heading into 2024. Is there going to be a real third party candidate to create a wild card in this? So lowest approval rating of an incumbent president heading into reelection ever, ever. That's where Joe Biden stands as of now. And I mean, it's for them, it's complete disaster. I also saw a poll this morning, Emily, that ties into our discussions both about Ukraine and certainly about Israel, that foreign policy, which normally is kind of like a backburner

issue in American politics, has now become one of the top issues that both Democrats and Republicans and independents, all three, are focused on in terms of a vote choice. And we know that Biden is dramatically at odds with his own base in terms of his unconditional support for Israel, young voters in particular, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans. Really, there's a huge racial divide infused towards Israel as well with both black and brown voters much more supportive of Palestinians, much more skeptical of Israeli military actions than white voters in general. So he's got trouble on basically every front. And listen, I mean, in some ways, the best thing he's got going for him, he should be very much opposed to these decisions from Colorado and Maine, because I think the only shot is that

people find Trump even more odious and distasteful than they find him. That's a good point. I also think one thing from Karnacki is the hysteria is about to ramp up when it comes to third party candidates. And this has been something I've really believed for a long time, which is that RFK Jr. is more of he looks to some people on the left, because there's been so little conversation about his long support and just like very substantive activist work in the environmental movement and in other sort of anti-corporate spaces over the last couple of decades. And people can disagree about RFK Jr., but there hasn't been a lot of highlighting that part of his record. And if Donald Trump's a lot of highlighting that part of his record. And if Donald Trump's campaign starts to highlight that part of his record, I think that makes those

numbers tick upwards in a way that Karnacki is saying 17% for a third-party candidate. Well, going forward, depending on who stays in the race, who goes independent, who stays independent, all of these different questions that will be hashed out in less than a year now. That is, I mean, if you have two big independent bids, if you have, you know, RFK Jr. and somebody else, we saw Jill Stein actually get, you know, not because Putin, you know, controlled the minds of voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but we saw Jill Stein actually do better than a lot of elites expected her to in 2016, much of the chagrin of those elites. So if you have someone as high profile as RFK Jr. and then someone else, maybe a Cornel West that gets the type of support that Jill Stein did, you put those

two together. That's big trouble for both of the candidates. And I really would expect Crystal heading into the spring here, heading into Iowa and New Hampshire just in the next couple of months, hysteria about third party candidates is really going to start ramping up. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I really think that RFK Jr.'s candidacy has been undercovered thus far in terms of its impact. And I agree with you, you know, when he jumped in the race, the snap take was, oh, this is going to be worse for Trump. And that was a reasonable take because his approval rating with Republicans was much higher than his approval rating with Democrats. But I always thought it would be more complex than that

because for one thing, what you're pointing to, you know, negative polarization is so strong that if you just have Trump like relentlessly and other right-wing figures relentlessly attacking RFK Jr., then you're going to have, you know, a reaction from people who are more liberal, more on the left. You're going to have an opposite reaction

from people who are Republicans. And so those numbers can shift. He's a Kennedy, right? That's a big thing in terms of how people think about him. And, you know, so I always thought it was very possible that the way people were thinking about him shift, you know, in terms of Israel, you could quibble around the margins, but all three of these dudes have basically the same policy, which is unconditional support. Trump would probably not even been doing the like little

bit of hand wringing that Joe Biden has been doing. RFK Jr., if anything, is the most hawkish towards Israel and most pro-Israel of all three. But that doesn't mean that young voters who are disgusted with Joe Biden won't vote for, you know, an RFK Jr. or, you know, certainly a Cornel West or a Jill Stein, just out of sheer disgust with what he has actively been doing. You know, it's one thing to have a theoretical position on Israel. It's another thing to actually be there sending the bombs that are being dropped on children and destroying, you know, schools and hospitals, etc. And it's dangerous if young Democrats in places like Ann Arbor and Madison, Wisconsin, and all over Pennsylvania, either vote for someone else or stay home, let alone like vote for someone else. But if they just stay home next November,

that is a huge problem in Michigan, Wisconsin for Joe Biden. But Biden's defenders, you know, they've identified the real problem here, which is not the policies. It's not the unconditional support for Israel. It's not the despair. It's not the fact that they feel like he's going to accomplish literally nothing in a second term, which we'll get to in a moment. Put this up on the screen. John Fetterman and other Biden defenders, they see the problem as people who would say a critical word about Joe Biden. They're the real villains here. And, you know, shame on you, John Fetterman, for making me defend James Carville. But Fetterman trashed James Carville for warning of Biden loss,

telling him to shut the F up. I'll use this as another opportunity. He's told, I believe this is what Politico that he was doing this interview with, to tell Carville to shut the F up. Like I said, my man hasn't been relevant since grunge was a thing. And I don't know why he believes it's helpful to say these kinds of things about an incredibly difficult circumstance with an incredibly strong and decent and excellent president. I will never understand that. So, you know, the real issue here, Emily, is anyone who would point out the fact that Joe Biden has literally the lowest approval rating of any incumbent president seeking reelection. I mean, Joe Biden desperately needs some tough love. And James Carville, long close to the Clintons or instrumental in Bill Clinton's political successes.

Think about what Bill Clinton, we now know thanks to reporting, was telling Hillary Clinton's campaign in the fall of 2016. He was trying to sort of raise a lot of the same red flags that James Carville has, I think, calmly but incisively been raising over the last couple of years, but just in recent times too, his criticisms of the Democratic Party just being coded increasingly as the party of the elites. And we can debate the substance of that. But James Carville has made some pretty good points about how they come across to voters, the issues they choose to talk about, how they choose to talk about them, all of that. If Joe Biden needs anything right now, if I'm putting my, you know, I'm at the Biden reelection campaign right now, if he needs anything, it's tough love. Exactly from people like James Carville, not bear hugs from people like John Fetterman that tell him everything is fine, Joe.

Even saying it privately versus publicly, it's important that it's public so that there's pressure for the campaign. There's pressure from Democrats. Again, this is what the Democratic strategist campaign had on. It's not a hat I like to wear, Crystal, but I will do it for the sake of the show. They need this badly because they're in, again, they're going up against, as Hillary Clinton did, the former host of The Celebrity Apprentice, who, I mean, this should not be hard, but it is for Democrats because they're so, and it's the same thing for the Republicans that are trying to challenge Trump for the primary. Like, why is it hard to beat the former host of The Celebrity Apprentice in an election? Because you guys suck. You suck. And they need someone to tell them that.

Sometimes it's just that simple. All right. So let's go ahead and take a look at how voters are seeing their choice. This is from the pollsters that we partner with for our focus groups, JL Partners. They do these great word clouds where they ask voters, okay, what do you think Biden, and then they ask about Trump. But first of all, what do you think Biden is going to accomplish in a second term as president?

Let's put this up on the screen. And you can see, jumping right down at you, the number one choice, nothing. They think he's going to accomplish nothing. The next ones are like economy. He's going to accomplish economy. What does that even mean? It sounds like John Fenneman said it. Bad chance.

Yeah. Money. But democracy is another it. Bad chance. Yeah. Money. But democracy is another one. Power is another one. But I mean, the top choice, like overwhelmingly, if you guys are just listening to this, is nothing. Which, I mean, how can you even really dispute that when he hasn't run on anything? The only thing he was really promising is just like, I'll be a bulwark against Trump.

That's it. It's even on Roe versus Wade, which is such a pivotal and central issue for a lot of Democratic voters now. It's not like he's promising to do anything on the issue. He's just saying like, I won't make it worse. So nothing to me seems like a pretty logical takeaway from what his goals and accomplishments

are likely to be in a second term. And then they asked the same thing about Trump. What do they think Trump will accomplish? But this up on the screen, he said revenge. That was number one for Trump was revenge. And I actually said, Donald Trump said it. Well, he kind of did because he reposted the word cloud and like owned it like he was proud

that that's what people think he'll accomplish. And then, you know, next is power. You've got economy. You've got dictatorship. You actually have also dictator pops up there. America. So that's funny. Some people were like, what is Donald Trump going to accomplish in a second term?

America. I think he'll accomplish America. I will accomplish economy in America. There you go. There's our choices, guys. Between nothing and revenge, pick your poison. Well, Crystal, I also wonder to what extent the nothing is part of the Biden strategy as well, because to your point, he does seem to be running on this idea that he's a bulwark against Trumpism, that he will just sort of stand in the way as a kind of a rubber stamp against the forces,

as he says, of the forces against democracy, that, you know, I will be here, my administration will be here. Again, though, that might be an electoral strategy that has some benefits. In the long term, that does not defeat the part of Trumpism that has anti-democratic impulses. And I think that's a fair enough argument, as hysterical as I think some people who can sometimes be about that case. I think, you know, Donald Trump posting word cloud saying that he got an accomplishing revenge is sort of a funny point to that extent. And the reason that this doesn't accomplish the defeat of those parts of Trumpism in the long term is because people are turning to Trump in desperation for the substance, as we just talked about. So like if you're not, if Joe Biden isn't running on, you know, real wages, for

example, real wages are not increasing because inflation is stubborn. And there are signs that it's going in the right direction, but overall it has not gone under the right direction in the Biden economy. Student loans are a huge problem for a big chunk of the population right now. People turn to, whether it's Trump or someone from the left, they turn in desperation when the substance is not delivered on. And so it's actually really dangerous to think you can just continue to elect your way out of what feels like a autocratic hole to some people, to Joe Biden and his folks to say, we're just going to keep electing Democrats and that will keep Donald Trump at bay until one of our points of lawfare

is successful. He's in prison. That does nothing to eradicate Trumpism. There's an argument, we were just talking about the polling, that it makes him stronger because there's some voters who really don't like it. And it sort of can heighten tensions in the country in ways that push people more to Trump's side. We don't know, you know, some evidence that that would happen. But the bottom line is we do know people are right that the substance isn't being delivered on.

And so the most moral and effective way to tackle this problem would actually be to try and improve the daily lives of Americans. But of course, they can't do that. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I mean, in a sense, both nothing and revenge are like just oppositional. You know, the nothing is like, I'll beat Donald Trump and then I won't do all the crazy shit. Like it won't be chaos. I won't do all the crazy shit that they would do. And for Trump, obviously, revenge is like, oh, I'm going to own the libs the way that you want me to, which has always been like a core of his appeal. And again,

if people don't have an expectation that these leaders and this democratic system is going to deliver for them in any real way, just an oppositional message holds some level of appeal. So it's not an accident that they both land in that place. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what

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

How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.

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

will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice

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

These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to the news Sager broke over the Christmas break, the holiday break crystal. I want to actually just start here with the clip.

If folks didn't see Sager's interview here on Breaking Points with Tucker Carlson, they should absolutely check that out on the channel. But here's the part of the interview that went pretty viral because Tucker Carlson took a pretty big shot at one of the most successful commentators on the right, one of the biggest podcast hosts in the country, let alone on the right, and that's Ben Shapiro. There was a lot of consternation around some comments you made, I think by Ben Shapiro and other, where you were like, well, I've never seen this level of care about Americans who are dying

of fentanyl, which I think is a traditional nationalist message. And yet I've watched the entire kind of right-wing ecosystem get embroiled in fundamentally what is a third world conflict. Now we can say support, not support. We can have criticisms, et cetera, of that. But what explains this literal allegiance to a narrative on Ukraine, on Israel? Why is it that so many of these people don't seem to have the same level of care for actual American citizens? You know, I find it really distressing. And in both of those conflicts, I approached it with a clean conscience because I just don't have strong feelings

one way or the other. And I'm not hostile. I've never hated Ukraine. I don't have any feelings about Ukraine. And Russia, same thing. I've never been to either place and I'm not invested emotionally. So I could just look at it from an American perspective.

In the case of Israel and the Arab world, I've spent a fair amount of time in both. And I like both. And I felt terrible for the people who were killed on October 7th. I still do. So I didn't, I had no weird motive. I was just like thinking about it from an American perspective. Is this good for us or is it not?

And I was just amazed by the intolerance and the willingness to immediately go to invective and character assassination. And it's like, I said, you know, first of all, if the people who live in Gaza who are being moved out are so evil and dangerous that they can't live in the region, why would you want them to move into my country? Tucker, by the way, then continued along these lines. He did an interview with Vivek Ramaswamy and he likened what just happened in Israel, the kidnapping of women and their rape. I mean, he's showing video of this happening, like as he's talking about this.

He compared that to drug overdose deaths in the United States. Now, I believe we should fully care about the 100,000 drug overdose deaths that happen in the United States. These are two completely different issues. To go this far afield to link the issues, the only reason you're doing this is because you wish to downplay the atrocity that just happened in Israel. You're not upplaying the atrocity of what's happening on American streets. Those are two different types of atrocities. People who are addicted to fentanyl,

sticking needles in their arms and overdosing is a moral blight. It is a moral atrocity and a moral evil for people to kidnap women, rape them, and drag them back to the Gaza border. Those are not the same thing.

And Tucker knows that. But this is a cheap way of telling you not to look. Don't look. Stop caring. Because after all, what does it matter? What does it matter? Now, again, I don't know who thinks that that's a sophisticated point of view,

especially when nobody is calling for America to go to war with Iran. The entire purpose of having an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean is to avoid that. But here is Tucker playing, I don't even know the game he's playing. This is just a dumb, it's a dumb game. So this has all been, thank you, Crystal,

this has all been kind of snowballing after the vague thing. Then Sager brought it up with Tucker and that's how this all started rolling. And this is interesting because it represents a divide in the conservative movement, really since the inception of the conservative movement. And Sager was getting at that.

That's really what Sager was talking about. This is about the sort of paleo-conservative argument that's been around since Pat Buchanan, even since like Ross Perot. But others have made similar arguments. And that's where the personal disagreement, I think, is the least helpful. From what I just saw from Ben, who, you know, I agree with on a lot, but disagree with on some stuff as it pertains to Israel. He's, I think, further to the right of a lot of Republicans on Israel. He would probably admit that himself. I do think Lindsey Graham basically is calling, people like Lindsey Graham and Lindsey Graham included, are basically calling for a war with

Iran, you know, and things that we surely know would likely spark a much broader, deadlier conflict. So I don't agree on that point. I think people actually are putting us in danger of a war with Iran. I agree with Tucker on that point and disagree with Ben on that point. But the kind of personal back and forth there, I think is unhelpful because it becomes, one thing I've seen more and more from the right reminds me of something I saw a lot on the left in the aughts as the left was, I think, much more deft at using digital tools

like YouTube and social media. It became sort of soap operas. There became this bubble of soap operas driven by personality beefs. Great for clicks, great for ratings and all of that, but not super helpful towards the end of landing on the most moral version of the conservative argument. And I guess, you know, I don't think it's super helpful for the personal distractions to get in the way of what is substantively. I don't think either of them should be saying the other person doesn't care about the lives on either side.

You know, I don't think that about either of them. I think there's a legitimate question, though, of American interest. And I think it sucks if personal disagreements get in the way of actually debating substantively what America's interest is in Israel and in Ukraine. Yeah. So, I mean, what you basically see here is a divide between paleoconservatism and neoconservatism. And I subscribe to neither philosophy, so I disagree with both of them in different ways, right? Obviously, Shapiro is, you know, very, and understandably,

as anyone should be horrified at the atrocities that were committed on October 7th, he does not care about what is happening to Gaza's civilians in Gaza in the same way that he cared about what happened to civilians in Israel. And he is incredibly hawkish. And by the way, oh my God, the cat just jumped on the table. And by the way, there's Salem. By the way, incredibly dishonest about the history that led us here and basically justify any Israeli action. I dramatically disagree with that. And it comes from a variety of places. I mean, there's lots of,

I think there is a appropriate pointing out of hypocrisy with regards to, this is a man in Ben Shapiro who has made a living and become extremely wealthy with a core argument against identity politics and against quote unquote cancel culture and like the safe space on college campuses stuff. And, you know, supposed commitment to free speech, all of that has been tossed out the window when it comes to a cause that he is very, very concerned about in part because of his identity. So that's the Shapiro side. You know, on the paleo conservative side, this argument of like, well, I don't know why you care. I can't wrap my head around that for a variety of reasons here.

I mean, first of all, for me, what really looms very large is the just moral catastrophe that is unfolding on our watch with our dollars, with our diplomatic cover, et cetera. I mean, this is the most devastating war documented now by a number of Western media outlets that we've seen in this century. More journalists killed, more children killed, more buildings destroyed, more civilian infrastructure destroyed, more people starving to death, like something unprecedented is happening before our eyes. And so to have this view of like, well, I don't get why you care about that. I just, I just can't really wrap my head around that. And then if you also consider that it's not like this is just some, with regard to Israel and Gaza, that this is just some random conflict around

the world that doesn't impact us. Are you kidding me? Do you know how much money we have sent to Israel over all of these years and how close our relationship is and how deeply we're implicated in all of this? And you can take the position like Vivek Ramaswamy does, for example, of like, listen, they can do what they want. We're just like, we're not going to fund it. And okay, that's fine. But that doesn't erase the fact that we are like, have been a hand in glove with them for years and years and years. So even if that's your policy, once you're president, et cetera, you know, that doesn't erase our responsibility

and implicate us directly in what's happening there. Not to mention, of course, all of the implications about how this can spark security threats for us, how this can spark security concerns for our troops in the region, how this can draw us into a broader war. So on every level, the paleo-conservative view of like, well, we just shouldn't care about it, and I don't know why everybody is so upset about this, doesn't land for me. So that's why I say, I don't have a dog in for this fight because in different ways,

like I don't subscribe to either of their ideologies and in different ways, I really disagree with them. But the one piece that, you know, I will say, I think is appropriate to shine a light on by people who are paleo conservatives, which is like Tucker, which is like, you know, I think Sagar would put himself probably in that category, is you had all these people

during the Trump era on the right who ran around calling themselves America first and aligning themselves like they were paleo-conservatives. And then the minute that it's Israel, it all changed us. Now, I don't know that I would really put, would you put Shapiro in that category though?

Because I think, you know, he was a Ted Cruz guy. Like he never was the biggest Trump guy. So on the cancel culture stuff, free speech stuff, total hypocrite. On foreign policy, I'm not so sure, but there are plenty of other people who cloaked themselves in, I only care about America, America first,

who the minute it's Israel, they're like, ship the weapons, ship the aid dollars, get us involved, go to war with Iran, because it happens to be, you know, a country that they feel really tied to for a variety of reasons. You know, I was actually just going to say, you know, I went and watched Ben Shapiro did his Sunday special with Tucker Carlson five years ago. And they had a really interesting debate, interesting conversation. They didn't agree with each other on everything. And, you know, remember five years ago, that sort of smack in the middle of a lot of these changes in the Republican Party and in the middle of the kind of Trump phenomena. And it was really friendly. And it was like a very, I thought it was a very helpful,

like hour long interview. And that's interesting because yes, like Israel is becoming one of those clarifying moments for where the Republican Party wants to go. And that's why, again, I feel like the personal stuff isn't super helpful because there's something serious that underlies a lot of this. I was on a panel earlier this year about the kind of new right for a bunch of political science professors. And one of the other panelists, I think, said something about the new right being anti-war. And a lot of the members of the new right want to bomb cartels. That's long been a part of this sort of America first philosophy. It is not as clear cut sort of Buchananist because they would kind of gladly hand contracts to Lockheed and Raytheon to bomb

the hell out of Sinaloa in Mexico right next door to us. So it doesn't totally work. Or China. Right. Or China. Yes, absolutely. And that's one of the things that I think, you know, Ben, I like both Ben and Tucker. And that to me in and of itself is interesting because, you know, I'm not a fan of many genuine neoconservatives. And I feel like Ben was one of the few people on the right that was kind of humbled by his experience with Trumpism and didn't abandon different principles, but did think differently about certain things when it came to foreign policy. Obviously, Israel wasn't one of those things. The Trump

administration, Ben was very favorable to what they did with the Abraham Accords, and the Trump administration wasn't much different on Israel either. But that argument, I think the most charitable version of the Tucker argument is that our attention to Israel at needlessly at the expense of our attention to suffering in the United States. And that again, like that's the most charitable version of it. So that's again, though, kind of a different conversation. And that's a different sort of burden of proof. You know, what are we doing abroad that we could be doing home when it comes to attention, when it comes to money? There's an argument attention, when it comes to money. There's an argument there, but it's sort of different than what was happening in that exchange too. Yeah. And then there's the, you know, very fraught, Tucker has been accused of,

you know, promoting the anti-Semitic trope that Shapiro has like dual loyalties, right? And, you know, Israel is, leads a lot of people to justify things that should not be justified. And I think it happens on a variety of levels. I think it's number one, there's all this just legacy Cold War, and you see this in the age divide of like, you know, there's the people,

the countries that are on our side, and then there's the countries that are on the other side, and Israel's one of the countries on our side, therefore we should stand with them, period, end of story. So there's this like Cold War hangover. But then there is also this religious and identity-based affinity that isn't just among Jewish people.

I mean, one of the strongest contingents, certainly on the Republican side, of just like, we're locked up with Israel, we'll never criticize them, anything they do is inherently good and just, actually is more like the Mike Johnsons of the world, who are hard-right evangelical Christians, who have this, you know, end times view and the, of, you know, the Jews are the chosen people. And so we have to back them up no matter what. And so as with, you know, the conflict between Israel and Palestine having, being at its core, a political and land dispute, but really having these overlays of religion, which make it even more difficult to untangle. Like we certainly have those same dynamics unfolding here as well. And it was an intentional project of multiple Israeli governments and officials to try to

forge that bond from the early days of Zionism. And in America, it has been extremely, extremely successful. So that's part of what makes this, makes it very difficult to have just like a policy-based or even just morality-based, okay, here's war crimes that are being committed. Here's atrocities against civilians. Why this gets really tangled up is based on these other cultural, religious identity affiliations and layer on top of that this like Cold War hangover mentality. And a lot of things that are just, you know, it's hard to, it's much harder to convince the American public right now that some of these familiar Cold War arguments and actually some of these familiar post-9-11 arguments are worth putting back into action after 9-11 without any sort of,

or after the exit from Afghanistan, I should really say, the disastrous exit from Afghanistan without much reconsideration fundamentally within the Pentagon and the highest heights of American foreign policy elites of what American foreign policy should look like. And I think that's increasingly going to be a problem, actually, for Donald Trump going forward when he talks about what his plans would be for the Israel situation if he's elected president again less than a year from now. What he would

do that would either continue what he did in his administration or maybe take a different tack from what he did in his administration. Remember the Biden administration, which a lot of people on the right felt undercut the Abraham Accords, was publicly, like Jake Sullivan, a couple of weeks before October 7th, was talking about how there's peace in the Middle East like there hasn't been before, basically on a continuation of what had happened with the Abraham Accords. So there is just, not just for the right, but kind of, you know, the blob versus anti-blob, there is a lot to be hashed out, you know, in the next, and it's kind of crazy to me,

Crystal, that we're, it's sort of like what we were talking about with Ukraine, but it's also, you know, Biden saying two-state solution, Netanyahu, who has the support of the U.S. government saying no two-state solution. It's kind of crazy to me we're talking about how this has to be hashed out because we have basically a century of some major foreign policy failures in the rearview mirror that we just have never corrected, essentially, even though the public is pressuring for corrections. The elites have not responded to that pressure in significant ways. And the legacy of those things looms large, you know, and it's the legacy of our failures

and our ability to grapple with those failures and violations of our own stated principles. Our use, you know, Putin talked about our invasion of Iraq as justification for his invasion of Ukraine. Netanyahu talks about not only our, you know, war on terror and ISIS, but also talks about, hey, listen, you know, you all bombed the hell out of Dresden, so why can't we do it as well? So these things reverberate throughout history

when we fail to grapple with them and when we so clearly fall, when we so clearly fail to live up to what we claim to stand for in the world, which again, as I said earlier, I don't think we will ever have any credibility to claim that we stand for international rule of law or any of these humanitarian principles

that we supposedly built the World War II, post-World War II order on. In any case, it was a joy, as always, Emily, getting to chat with you today. Thank you for doing the show with me. Emily and Ryan are going to do normal counterpoints tomorrow, and then I actually have Ryan in with me on Thursday for a full breaking point. So we're mixing it up this week, giving Sagar some very well-deserved time off,

and then he will be back next year. Not next year. We're already in next year. Next week. And next week. I'm sure Sagar will have thoughts on this too when he decides to stop forcing me and Ryan to do his job. I'm kidding.

No, it's so much fun. I love mixing it up. It's a blast. Yeah, Ryan and I will be in studio tomorrow and I'm definitely looking forward to hearing you and Saga talk about some of this as well. The Tucker interview has gotten a huge response. So there's a lot to discuss going forward.

The right and disarray, one of my favorite topics. All right, guys. Republican, civil war, all caps. Yes, that's right. That's right. All right, guys. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today. Emily and Ryan, we'll see you tomorrow and I'll see you Thursday.

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