Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/23/24: Nikki Haley HUMILIATED By Trump Voters, Krystal, Saagar, Ryan NH PREDICTIONS, Biden DeepFake, Ceasefire Write In, Trump GA Prosecutor Affair Allegations, 24 IDF Soldiers Killed, Columbia Students Attacked

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Saagar and Ryan discuss Nikki Haley in a back n forth with a Trump voter, New Hampshire predictions from the team, a Biden deep fake robo call in NH, we speak with Andru Volinsky who is spearheading the "Write In Ceasefire" campaign, Affair allegations unsealed on the Trump Prosecutor in GA, 24 IDF soldiers killed yesterday in Gaza, and Columbia University students at a Pro Palestine protest being allegedly attacked with skunk spray.  To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, 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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or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you

or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn, learn from. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid and listen now. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here. And we here at Breaking Points are 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, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. Extra amazing because it's a bro show. It's great to see you, Ryan. Indeed we do. Fist pump. That's right. Indeed we do. Gosh, I got to set up these topics. This is always so difficult. It's Crystal's job.

So we're going to talk about the GOP primary. All right, we can start off there. It's very similar to yesterday's show. Today is actually the New Hampshire primary. The first six votes have already been cast, all for Nikki Haley. But don't worry, it's in a very, very tiny little town. There are more reporters there than actual voters. We'll also talk about the Democratic primary, some weird stuff going on. I'm curious to get your insight. It appears that there's some phantom Biden effort to try and quash votes there. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. Everybody's closing pitch. We've got some of the ads and everything. We've got actually a guest who's going to be joining us in the show. This is one of those organizers for the write-in ceasefire.

So we will see how that goes, how that materializes. We've also got predictions. I forgot about that. Crystal actually sent us her predictions, and Ryan and I will give ours as well on how we think that the night is going to go in the GOP primary. There are some major developments in the Trump legal front in terms of that divorce case involving Fannie Willis and some of the other things that we're learning about that. Trump truly is the luckiest man alive, Brian. On Israel, some crazy news just happening, breaking overnight. 21 IDF soldiers died in a

single incident in combat. It's the deadliest incident so far for the IDF. That comes amidst a new ceasefire proposal from the Israeli government, as well as a new U.S. military assessment on how Israel appears to be losing the war, and that's according to our strategist. Finally, and of course, Bill Ackman returns to the show, I mean, at least in terms of topics. We're going to talk about some campus censorship stuff and a very insane incident at Columbia University. Before we get to the show, though, do not forget we've got an election special that's going on right now, 25% off on our yearly membership, breakingpoints.com. Also, in terms of planning, so here's what we're going

to have. We are going to have a breaking segment tonight after we get the results of the New Hampshire primary. And tomorrow we will have a special Breaking Points, Counterpoints crossover event where I will be joining the Counterpoints team here in the studio and we will have Crystal joining us remotely before we have our normal Thursday show. So all of your election coverage, you guys are helping us out with BreakingPoints.com again to become a premium member. But let's go ahead and begin with the GOP primary. So what exactly can we expect from tonight? We thought it would be prudent, as always, to give people a preview of the closing pitch to New Hampshire voters. First, we're going to listen to the frontrunner, Donald Trump. This is his last ad in the state of New Hampshire. Let's take a listen.

Americans were promised a secure retirement. Nikki Haley's plan ends that. Social security, Medicare, how would you manage the entitlements? We say the rules have changed. We changed retirement age to reflect life expectancy. What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that. Haley's plan cuts Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans. Trump will never let that happen. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.

Very interesting tactic there, Ryan. We're going to get into some polling, but it appears to have worked. It's also just, you know, sometimes we won't marvel enough at the fact that the GOP frontrunner is attacking somebody else for wanting to cut Social Security. That actually is pretty crazy. In 2016, it was one of the things that had people on the left so intrigued by this Republican primary because we had all seen the polling for many years and done the reporting that the center right, the center left, and the right had been trying to cut Social Security and Medicare for a generation. It broke the Bush presidency when he tried to do it. And despite having all of the power in Washington, they just couldn't do it because

the public was so against it. That was obvious. Trump is good at recognizing what the public is for and against. Yes. They are not for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Nikki Haley, apparently not so good at that. And she can just use a clip of her saying that she's going to make people's lives worse. Right. I mean, we've played it here. We showed it to our focus group as well. It didn't play over well with our New Hampshire GOP focus group. You guys will recall that was one of the first focus groups we ever did here at Breaking Points. Nikki Haley has a defending democracy super PAC running ads on her behalf. So we wanted to give people a taste of what the anti-Trump position looks like in New Hampshire. Here's the ad that they have on the airwaves.

The new poll shows Nikki Haley is now within striking distance of Trump heading into the New Hampshire primary. One state can prevent Trump from winning the nomination. New Hampshire, one candidate can defeat Nikki Haley. Most granite staters want to defeat Trump, but he'll win unless voters stand firm behind a single alternative. That's why undeclared voters must go to their polling place on January 23rd to support Haley. New Hampshire, we can't waste this opportunity to defeat Trump. Defending Democracy Together is responsible for the content of this advertising. Defending Democracy being one of those Bill Kristol groups. The problem for Nikki Haley, Ryan, is that in general, she's surging amongst independents and amongst Democrats. If you want a perfect example of this,

CNN actually was going around doing interviews at a recent Nikki Haley interview. Here's what her own voters had to say on whether they would vote for Trump or Biden. Plot twist, a lot of them are saying Biden. Let's take a listen. Versus Biden, what are you going to do? That really puts me in a quandary. I frankly am more scared of another Trump term than another Biden term. I voted for him twice. I don't know that I could in good conscience vote for him again. I mean, he does things that we teach our children not to do. I would probably end up either voting for myself as a protest or for Biden. Probably end up voting for myself or for Biden. I'm pretty

sure that lady's probably going to vote for Biden. She's younger. Yeah, no shade, no shade at all. That's totally rational position. But, you know, you just got to be honest that a lot of those people, is it really even fair to call them Republicans anymore? And this is not a personal dispersion. It's just like, look, that's what a realignment looks like. That's how Biden was able to win many GOP counties back in 2020 in that election. It was specifically because of these former Trump voters, largely white,ge educated white voters who they would never vote for anybody else. In some cases, they haven't voted in 20, 30 years. So it's the flip side of that coin as well.

But also, this is not the NFL playoffs. This is not single elimination. Yeah, good point. Haley can beat Trump in New Hampshire. Yes. And he's still going to romp everywhere else in the country. Obviously, right. So this line that they have in the ad that says one state can stop Donald Trump, that's actually not how it works.

Yeah, it's just not true at all. She can romp there tonight and it won't actually matter. I don't even think she is going to romp. Well, save the prediction. Save the prediction. We do have another funny clip just came across the radar. I had to play this just to give you guys an idea of how Trump voters and others have a deep enmity for Nikki Haley. This was an incident actually on her final day of campaigning yesterday in New Hampshire. A man

shouts out, will you marry me? Nikki says, well, are you going to vote for me? And she goes, no, I'm going to vote for Trump. And she's like, all right, get out of here. Let's take a listen. But you know what? We've got a lot on the line here. We really do. And you look at what's happening in this election. Yes. Are you going to vote for me? Get out of here. Get out of here. Nuptials are off. Yeah, nuptials apparently are off. I don't know some interesting questions around that, but we won't get into it today. In terms of the polling and all of that, this is one where actually the Washington Post just came out with a new mammoth poll, which is really worth digging into because it gives us a deep insight,

not only into Nikki Haley and her alleged skyrocketing, but some of the group-by-group polling. So guys, if we can please put this up there, and Ryan, just chime in for anything that you see. The reason this is useful is it shows the November 2023 number. Now note this, while Nikki Haley has gone from 18 to 34% since November, Trump has gone from 46 to 52. DeSantis allegedly seven to eight. Remember, he just dropped out of the race. Now Chris Christie was at 11. Now obviously he's at one. It's pretty clear that Chris Christie voters largely have crossed over to Nikki Haley, and that's what helps us consolidate her. The DeSantis number, we just don't know. We don't have any idea. The poll was conducted around the same time that DeSantis was actually dropping out of the race the very last day that they were doing it. So it's not exactly clear to us where those people are going to go. But let's say that we split the difference and we go Trump and Haley.

Yeah, that would put Nikki Haley at 37, but that still puts Trump at some 55, which is just such an incredibly dominant position. The next one, though, is this is the true money, because how different groups of New Hampshire Republicans plan on voting? And they actually have a head to head here of Trump and Nikki Haley. So, for example, New Hampshire potential GOP primary voters are all 52%, as we just said. Registered Republicans, this is a very clear number, 64% Trump, 22% Haley. Registered undeclared, 38% Trump, 48% Haley. So she's winning there amongst those undeclared voters. Extremely motivated to vote. That seems like a category I would want. 58% Trump, 30% Haley. No college degree, 60-27. College graduates, here's another big flag, 39% Trump, 43% Haley. Very conservative, Trump 78. Somewhat conservative, Trump 57. Moderate liberal, Trump 29, Nikki Haley 56. Are you noticing a trend here? And then also amongst

those who believe that Biden won due to fraud, 82% Trump, 6% Haley. Biden won fairly, 14% Trump, 71% Haley. Abortion should be legal in all cases, 38% Trump, 49% Haley. And then finally, abortion should be illegal in all cases, 72, 14. What do you make of all this, Ryan? To me, it's just such an obvious class. Yeah, I mean, Haley's got the people that we understand as never Trumpers. These are suburban voters who are just appalled by Trump. They're more moderate. They're a little wealthier.

They went to college. They have been gravitating towards the Democratic Party. A lot of these, for whatever reason, kind of are the ones who are lagging behind in the realignment. But that's who they are. And yeah, they don't like Trump. And so what Haley has been doing is that she has been consolidating the support of those never Trump type voters, but she has not been peeling any support away from Trump, which is the key. Yeah. I mean, that's just such a problem for her. And then let's put the final slide, please, guys up there on the screen. And what we can see here is Trump has a big advantage over Haley in trust to handle immigration and the economy.

Those are important because those are the two most important issues for Republican voters. So for example, on immigration policy, you can see that 62% say Trump, 26% say Nikki Haley. On economic policy, you've got 58 Trump, 29 Nikki Haley. Foreign policy, it's 57 Trump, 26% say Nikki Haley. On economic policy, you've got 58% Trump, 29% Nikki Haley. Foreign policy, it's 57% Trump, 32% Nikki Haley. Abortion is actually the only one where there's a little bit of a split, only 40% Trump, but obviously still got the plurality there. Something interesting that was flagged to me, Ryan, was that the economy numbers actually were a big one for Trump, that he was actually consolidated over time. And the reason why is those social security ads that he's been running. Those social security ads have just been killing Nikki Haley with a lot of older GOP voters, people who, you know,

we had that one woman in the ad, she said, I may vote for myself or vote for Biden, but people think that age group, especially 60 plus, and remember, this is the vast majority of the people are going to vote in the primary and frankly, in the election too. So you always got to wrap your head around that. And in that, what do we see? Trump domination. That social security policy might be the single most popular thing that he actually believes in this primary and a very hidden part of the media. Media wants to talk about abortion and stop the steal. Obviously, very important issues, big in 2022. But social security, pretty important too. We don't focus enough on it. The media hates Social Security. The media class, like the owners, top editors in general,

are the ones who believe in their heart of hearts that Washington spends too much money and we need to get our deficit under control. We watched that circus all throughout the Obama administration, all these different efforts to cut a grand bargain where you're going to raise taxes and you're going to cut Social Security and Medicare and you're going to make the CBO numbers look better. Good point. And people hate that stuff. I think a lot of wealthy people in Washington, they're kind of glad that they're going to have Social Security down the line, but they think of it as like gravy. Like it's their IRAs, their 401ks, and their kind of generational wealth, which is going to take care of them in their retirement.

That's not the case for most Americans. Most Americans believe accurately that they paid into Medicare and Social Security, and they're relying on it in retirement. So the idea that you're going to make them work longer and get fewer benefits is just infuriating. Yes. I mean, no, you're absolutely right. And that's part of the problem that we see overall. Now, finally, let's just put the RCP numbers up there. What we've got is Real Clear Politics shows Trump at 15 points leading currently in the RCP average. You've got the overall that you can see in almost every – there's not a single poll, Ryan, that we can see from the last couple of days that doesn't show Trump at least at 50 percent with over 50 percent in many of those. And obviously that still does not even factor in the DeSantis number. So look, if Trump wins by 60, I mean, that's just one of those where not only is it not outside the realm of possibility, I would actually consider it,

you know, relatively likely. I'm not quite sure, you know, what exactly she's doing here. And this is her last stand, I guess you could say. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about

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And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

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If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's move on to the predictions. I've got crystals here that I can read for everybody, and we will see. Okay. So she says this is going to be 55-40 Trump over Nikki Haley. Now, we're also going to include her Democratic predictions because these are interesting. 62% Biden, 18% for Dean Phillips, 7% for Marianne Williamson, and 3% for the ceasefire. What's your back of the napkin math for the GOP and then for the Democratic primary? What do you think? I think Trump pushes like 58

to about 35, like a blowout. Because I think a bunch of those DeSantis people actually wind up with Trump. I agree with you. It's not as simple as people think that, oh, Trump and DeSantis only. DeSantis and Haley don't like each other either. And also there's some, like some people just don't like Nikki Haley. Yeah, and DeSantis endorsed Trump, right? Right, yeah, that's not nothing. Democratic side, I think Biden may be 50 or slightly less. You're going to have to write him in.

Yeah, that's a lot of work. Now, write-in campaigns have succeeded, Murkowski and all that, but it's rare. It's a rare thing. So maybe, I think Crystal's probably about right, maybe Dean Phillips pushes close to 20, Marianne pushes close to 10. Ceasefire, we'll talk later in the show about this, probably is going to be lucky to get like a thousand votes total because it's very late. It's an unusual thing. People are like, what do you mean write-in ceasefire? Do we get a ceasefire if it wins?

It could shock people. DMFI, the pro-Israel group, just wrote yesterday to the New Hampshire secretary of state saying, don't even count them. So at least there's some concern out there. Yeah, well, they don't know what the number of period. Even 1,000 is 1,000. It's one too many. Okay. So mine, I actually think I'm going to go Trump 60.

I think he's going to break the 60% threshold. He's got, you know, momentum is on his side. Everything is going. Just the energy that we see. New Hampshire was already Trump country back in 2016. You've got tons there. Sure. You know, the New Hampshire establishment is behind Nikki Haley.

Who gives a, you know, like, whatever. Who are they? Look at Iowa. You know, the freaking governor of the state endorsed Ron DeSantis. How much good did that do for him? So, okay. Everyone's like, oh, Chris Sununu. I'm like, all right, whatever.

You know, he's running the general election. They like Sununu, but they don't listen to him. And they're also not electing a governor of New Hampshire. Exactly right. Right. So how they would vote for their senator. And look, we've seen this previously. They can vote. They elect Democratic senators when it's a general election, but not in a primary. That's not how things work. Remember

who they put up in their senatorial candidate? That wild general. Exactly. Yeah. How did that go? But my point is being that the electorate, the primary electorate, very, very different. So we can keep that. I think Trump is going to beat that. I think Nikki Haley lucky to get 35 something percent of the vote. And then the big question is, is she going to drop out tonight? You know, if she does not cross that threshold, if she doesn't win the primary, because we got to set the calendar up for everybody. We have to remember the South Carolina primary is more than a month now away after this. So you got to twist in the wind for a whole month before you're about to play in your own home state. Staring at polls showing you down by 40 points in your own home state.

Doesn't make a lot of sense. Kamala Harris dropped out because she didn't want to get rinsed in California. Yes, exactly. Right, which was ahead of Super Tuesday. Or no, not Super Tuesday, but I think a little bit after. They revised it. Yeah, the mail-in voting started very early, but it was a Super Tuesday. So we can just surmise like it's very possible that if Trump absolutely romps,

I think a 60 would do it. I think that would be enough to push her out. But listen, she's a narcissist. Who knows? You know, some donors enjoy lighting their cash on fire. So maybe they're going to keep doing that. It's certainly possible for the Democratic primary. I tend to agree with you. I think Crystal's underestimating Dean here a little bit. She has Dean at 18. I'm going to give him 35. I just think that, you know, being on the ballot counts. Being on the ballot matters. It's just one of those is easier. It's going to be, you know, near the top of the ticket. It's got the one with the most quote-unquote name ID that actually is there. You know, putting Ceasefire and writing in Joe Biden, that takes some effort. I think he'd be lucky to crack 50. Marianne, I mean, her campaign is just really

struggled. I haven't seen a poll with her above three, so I'm not even sure I would give her the 7%. Ceasefire, I'm with you. I haven't seen a poll with her above three, so I'm not even sure I would give her the 7%. Ceasefire, I'm with you. I don't even think it rates maybe less than 1%. Yeah. I think less than 1%. Yeah. I think you're going to be counting ceasefire in numbers of votes rather than in percentages.

But I think you're right that people have been telling pollsters 18% or whatever for Dean Phillips. But they've also been telling pollsters they badly do not 18% or whatever for Dean Phillips. But they've also been telling pollsters they badly do not want Biden to run for president. And so voting against somebody, against somebody against him, you know, voting for somebody against him is a way to protest that. The other way to protest it is just to not show up. So I think, I would guess, like, you have lower turnout than before. That's a good point. Because if you're a Democrat, you can either go out, vote for somebody you don't really like, vote for these two other candidates that are on the ballot but you don't really have much passion for.

Or you can mess around and maybe jump over into the Republican primary and vote for Nikki Haley you don't really like either. Yeah. And it's not even going to matter because Trump's going to win either way. So I think a decent number of them stay home. On the other hand, they have so much pride in their little New Hampshire primary. Yeah, that's true. That's my thing. He did snub them. He certainly did. So I think there's a chance. There could be a shockingly low number. That's possible. Yeah. So let's go through the scenario. So like very, very low turnout, which Biden win, but maybe Dean over

performance. There could be medium turnout, which actually, again, I would put Dean a little bit higher up in there. Here's the question too. Yeah. Polls have Biden beating Trump in New Hampshire lately up by like five points or so. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how many votes Trump gets compared to Biden. And I think the media might pick up on that because Trump could actually end up getting in a competitive Republican primary more votes than Biden gets in an uncompetitive one. Right. And that would, I mean, to a certain extent though, it's like, what is that? We're comparing apples to oranges because you've got a competitive primary versus non-competitive primary. So it's not exactly the best barometer, but yeah, you're right. It's certainly something that we will look at. Like we said, we're going to have breaking news on that actually tonight. So you can look forward to that. And then we will

also have a show tomorrow morning. All right. So let's actually go to the Democratic primary. As we said, there's a very strange thing happening in the state of New Hampshire. We've gotten a little bit of inklings, Ryan, about the Biden campaign getting worried about this. Now they're telling people to go and write in Biden, even though they're like, oh, we don't actually care, but now we do care. So they're panicking a little bit. And one of the instances you could know this is that there are now robocalls with deep fakes of Biden's voice actually telling people across the state to not vote tomorrow because it's important that you save your vote for the November election. Pretty sure it doesn't work that way, but let's take a listen. And again, this is going out to a lot of people in New Hampshire. Let's take a listen to this. We know the value of voting Democratic

when our votes count. It's important that you save your vote for the November election. We'll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday. So it's a deep fake Biden telling people not to vote for Biden. What do you make of this? So obviously, these are all these dark money groups. You never know who's actually behind this stuff. I mean, I'm not going to say it's connected to the DNC or whatever, but clearly someone on behalf of Biden is putting this out for a reason. They don't want people to come out to vote.

Why would somebody on behalf of Biden, though, want him not to vote so that they can say, well, we didn't lose because we didn't try? Yeah, something like that. I think they were, I think they just want to, or maybe you're right. Maybe it's a, what do you think it's an anti-Biden? It's Mary Ann. Oh, right. I think that was actually Mary Ann's voice. She was impersonating Biden. Yeah. And it's just one of those where- Where was Dean Phillips last night? So, I mean, already though, this is getting attention. The New Hampshire Attorney General is actually investigating whether this is a voter suppression. Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah. I mean, it definitely is. There's First Amendment carve out when it comes to election, like deliberate misinformation around, like you're not allowed to say voting day is Monday.

Right, exactly. When it's actually Tuesday, unless you can prove to a jury that you really are an idiot and didn't know. But, like, that's illegal. Like, what you just heard, deep faking the president's voice and then telling them not to vote. Also, it should be legal to make so little sense. Yeah. Like, it's a crime against logic. Yeah. You can vote in both the primary and the general. Obviously, people do it all the time. That is quite legal. Here's what's a little weird, Ryan. The message has a phone number at the end that belongs to the former Democratic chair of

the New Hampshire primary, who now runs a super PAC, which is supporting the New Hampshire write-in campaign for Biden. So that's, I mean, that that's probably somebody like planting drugs on somebody, right? All right. Yeah. I think it's, that's, that's trying to point fingers. So according to her, she says in an interview that she began receiving Sunday evening calls for people who had received the message, she says that she's had called her. She was not a Biden supporter. She says that, you know, they had nothing to do with it. So I don't know. I don't know exactly what's going on here. But we can track it and we can just say something is happening. There's definitely a voter suppression effort, which is going on in state. Let's put this up there as well, which just shows you a little bit of his

panic. This is from the New York Times. And again, I want to get some of your analysis. They say that while they don't care necessarily about the New Hampshire ballot because they're not on it after moving the primary to South Carolina, the quote, they are still hoping that he will win. And by doing that, they're actually spending a decent amount of money on the write-in. So I'm curious what you think of this. What, what is this something that's coming back to bite them? Are they actually panicking? You covered a lot in terms of the way they rigged the Democratic primary. Give people some background on that. The background around this particular fight is that Biden wanted to basically reward South Carolina for making him president by making South Carolina the first primary.

They also punished Iowa, got rid of the Iowa caucuses after that. That one's fair. This one's fair. Yeah. And also, Iowa was helpful to Democrats because it was a swing state for so long. Right. Not a swing state anymore. We used to say that elections started in Iowa and finished in Florida.

Not true anymore. Both are red states at this point. And so, Iowa's gone. New Hampshire then, always first nation primary. And they Iowa's gone. New Hampshire then always first nation primary. And they would say, look, it's right in our constitution. They love telling people that their constitution says they have to be the first primary. The DNC is like, we don't really care what your constitution says. We can set the primary. And we're making the first one South Carolina. New Hampshire said, screw you. We're holding one anyway. And so Biden was like, well,

then I'm not going to be on the ballot. We're not going to sanction this. We're not going to participate in it. But it's so ingrained in people's minds that if you even travel to New Hampshire to this day, even though it's not a sanctioned primary, let's say six months ago, a Democrat traveled to New Hampshire. Oh, look at that. Gavin Newsom going to New Hampshire. Maybe he wants to be president. So the mythology around it is still locked into people's minds. And so as it gets closer, and as Biden's numbers continue to plummet, they reckoned that they just simply could not withstand getting annihilated in a state like New Hampshire that has this mythology around it. So now, right, you've got these Biden allies who are like, we can't have this. We need to write Biden in. And

then if we can, you know, write in with Biden, if we can get that going, then we can show that the grassroots support is really there for him. It was New Hampshire that knocked LBJ out. Yes, that's right. I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of mythology around New Hampshire. You can go both ways, right? So New Hampshire is what saved the Bill Clinton campaign back in 92. New Hampshire is really the first state that Donald Trump ever won. So the two of them have a lot of affinity for that. Iowa, that's like an Obama state. That's where Obama was able to launch 2008, but he ended up losing New Hampshire. So there's a lot of things. Hillary famously crying in the diner. There was also the Tabasco thing. Am I forgetting? Was that right around the same time? I think it was around the

same time. I'll personally never forget that moment. But let's get and think about some of the closing pitches. So as we already predicted, I think Dean is going to actually do a little bit better than a lot of people are expecting just because his name is literally on the ballot. And Dean gave his final closing argument in a video that was posted yesterday to New Hampshire voters. Let's take a listen. Well, tomorrow is the big day, January 23rd, the first in the nation primary right here in the Granite State. I've spent the better part of the last three months with so many of you, Democrats, independents, Republicans, libertarians. And I just want to say thank you.

It's been a remarkable experience. I know how to do this. I'm the second most bipartisan member of the entire U.S. Congress. I came from the business world where you could never succeed by demeaning, endangering half of your customers. You actually do the opposite. You invite people. You listen to them.

You learn them. You welcome them. That's what I'm going to do as president. We're going to solve these problems by working together. I'm going to take what I learned here and spread it all around the world. The way you practice democracy, what you've shared with me, and most of all, how we're going to fix it. So if you're ready for change, I'm ready to be your president. Just an uber normal pitch there. I mean, in a sane world, I think something like that would have worked. But the thing is, Ryan, I mean, you know, we covered this before. MSNBC literally refused to have this man on. He still has not done an interview on the network. And the reason why is MSNBC knows that the Democrats actually trust the media. They are. I've seen a few things. The Financial Times had a piece on him, the Wall Street Journal as well. Let's be real. That's not going to make any difference. It's all about television, especially for a lot of these boomers.

The world that they're living in is one where if it's not on linear TV, it doesn't exist. And so Dean's had a rough time. He had a campaign event where nobody showed up. But I'm just not going to discount your name being on the ballot. I just think that's a massive strategic advantage. He never made a case for who he was or why he was running. He started out with this Medicare for all. He was for free college.

And so you thought for a second that this guy who had been this centrist kind of lawmaker is now going to kind of run. He sees like room to Biden's left. That didn't really catch on because I think it just didn't map to him. Right. That didn't really catch on because I think it just didn't map to him. You see that closing ad. Where do you see Medicare for All and free college fitting into that ad? I'm the most bipartisan guy out there. So after that fell apart, he goes back to I'm the bipartisan guy.

And then you're just Biden except cogent. And at that point, you're like, well, we already have Biden. Well, Biden and Kojin is not a terrible pitch. I mean, something. Could work. People would have to know who he is. Yeah, that's true. Like, I think Biden but Kojin could be like a Newsom. But he's already understood to be like a threat.

To get next to him, to get onto MSNBC requires you to have a little bit more kind of muscle behind you. That's a good point. We also have some video of Marianne Williamson in one of her last campaign events that she posted yesterday. Let's take a listen to her closing pitch. We have always been this kind of bipolar American mind. We have always been this inherent struggle. It's in the DNA of this country. Other generations rose up and they responded to the Gilded Age.

They responded to it with the establishment of the labor movement. Other generations rose up and they responded to institutionalized suppression of black people and segregation in the American South. I'm running for president because it's our turn now. All right, so we'll see how it goes. I mean, Marianne, Crystal said this yesterday. I think it was totally true. On Israel, seems to have just fumbled the ball because it's like clearly that's an animating issue against Biden.

Dean is pro-Israel from what we've seen in Crystal's interviews with him. So obviously that's just something that's just on the table. And now you've got these ceasefire votes, which may even draw away from Marianne. But by not making her name synonymous with that, I think she risked the only chance of cracking, let's say, 7% to 10%. Which, look, I mean, at the end of the day, that's just not going to cut it, period. It doesn't really matter. But, you know, if we're thinking about 7% to 10%, it's a lot different. 7% to 10% is a lot different than 3%, maybe 4%.

Like, we don't know where that's going to end up. I think there was absolutely a path for a credible candidate to take a critical of Israel position over the last three months and put real pressure on Biden. Separately, this is another conversation we can have another time. It would be fascinating if RFK were in that camp. Yes, that's a good point. That would be – and the parallels would be amazing to 1968 and LBJ and A.J. Ward. I mean, I think he would win. I don't think there's any question he might win. He might win.

But he's like to the right of Biden on Israel. So it's just not in the world of possibility. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's one of those where I think he would definitely win a New Hampshire primary just because, again, name ID on the ballot. That's just one. He was already doing well there anyway. So it's one of those where he decided to go independent. I get it. He says the DNC was working against him and all that. He just didn't identify with the party anymore. But you cannot ever forget this. Getting on the ballot is really hard.

California does not want you on the ballot. We were looking yesterday. It takes like a hundred and something thousand signatures. And look, the signature wars are nuts. It requires you to get like 30% more than you actually need because lawyers are going to challenge the validity. And even if you get totally legit ones, if you don't write legibly, or if you don't write the proper address, there's all kinds of legal tricksters that the Republicans and the Democrats have used in these states. Yeah. I mean, Texas, same thing. Good luck getting on the ballot in some big states with 30, 40, 50 electoral votes like in these ones. And that's what you actually need to really compete, you know, and actually to draw some stakes away. So look, keep that in mind as we continue to cover the RFK Jr. campaign.

Right now, he's only still on the ballot in Utah. He's got some time, you know, he's got a little bit of time, but some of the filing deadlines and all that stuff are coming up. It takes a hell of a lot of organization. So final thoughts on the Democratic primary tonight. What do you think? It's a rare primary where I really don't know what's going to happen because of all these different variables, the write-in, the absolute disgust with Biden, but the anemic performance of his opponents. And so it just leaves so much room for people to have a bunch of difficult and unpleasant decisions in front of them, trying to express something to a system that doesn't want to hear from them

and doesn't give them a good way to actually express anything. Yeah, I think you're right. Like I said, I think Dean will overperform a bit. But in general, there's some tough work right now just for everybody going against him. And unfortunately, I think Biden has basically gotten away with rigging the primary. I think it's unfortunate. Yeah, it's crazy. You get to deem a state which by all means is totally in the tank for you with the most machine politics arguably in the whole country

whenever it comes to a primary. And it's a red state. Like both of these primaries, first primaries should obviously be in actual swing states. I've always thought Michigan was a great pick, something genuinely 50-50 industrial working class. Or you could go the other way. You could say Super Tuesday should go first and everybody should be forced to compete national. But people just basically rigging things for themselves. It's not right. And, you know, prior to Biden, nobody even dared to try. But he had the opportunity, decided to pick it. And I've said here before, you know, if you can go into this, too, you know, Obama will never happen again. That type of scenario, it will never happen. The insurgent cannot win if South

Carolina is going to be number one. It's going to be incredibly difficult if you've got the establishment there. It'd be very hard. But it's not completely impossible. But the other thing that's changing is that these races are now so national. Like even back in 2007 when Obama is running in Iowa, he could be a lot more popular in Iowa than he could be nationally. Yeah, that's true. Now, for the most part, your national polls have a gravitational pull on your regional and local polls. The moments where you're going to have somebody who's doing extremely well in the state but not doing well nationally are basically gone. Yeah. but not doing well nationally are basically gone because we are now a national culture and a national media environment. Because we're all in the same slightly tweaked feeds from TikTok, Twitter, and everybody else. And so that's the other reason that you're not going to have

somebody that can kind of come from nowhere because you have to have... And the only reason that Obama got the national numbers that he did was by winning Iowa. Exactly. That showed that he could win. And so then other people were like, oh, if he can win, then I'm with him. And if, but if you don't have that chicken, if you don't have that egg, you can't get the chicken. Very, very, very true. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future

where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1.

Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.

Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

to ask the questions no one else is asking. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is Andrew Walensky. He is a organizer and former new ham let me get this correctly former executive counselor in new hampshire and he is an organizer in the write-in ceasefire campaign andrew welcome to the show thank you for joining us hey thanks for having me absolutely so andrew you sent us a picture of your ballot we're going to edit it and put it up on the screen you have written in ceasefire there and you've been an organizer and kind of this last minute movement. Give us some of the reasoning behind wanting folks

to write in ceasefire on the New Hampshire ballot as opposed to rallying around a different candidate. Well, in New Hampshire, first in the primary means first in the nation primary means that we have a great deal of responsibility to make our concerns known. And our vote is our agency. I watched on October 7th as the attack happened and hostages were taken in horror. And then I kept watching in November and December, and I saw the Israeli siege of Gaza, the destruction of the healthcare system, the apparently indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants, and not enough response from the Biden administration. And so in the middle of December, I penned a letter to the editor telling everyone that

I was going to write the words ceasefire on my ballot. That's where it started. About 10 days ago, other people started reaching out to me. And now this effort is taken off with coverage on shows like yours, press coverage and Politico, Nation, HuffPost, Al Jazeera, Ha'ar at the Boston Globe. It's really gotten a bit of a life of its own. And we hope to send a message to the president about our concerns, in particular the violence that's happening perpetrated by the Netanyahu government.

In the time between your letter to the editor being published and, say, 10 days ago when you started to get some modest financial support from around the country to actually turn this into a real campaign, how much traction had it gotten just kind of virally grassroots, word of mouth wise in those couple of weeks? Or are we really only looking at the last 10 days as a serious effort? So I have a decent following here in New Hampshire. So there was response by, I would say, the people most interested in social justice issues in our state and some rather colorful responses complaining about my letter were anatomically incorrect. incorrect, but picked up really, and this isn't just the influence of other people. In New Hampshire's primary, focus really grows in that last week to 10 days and builds right

through to the primary. So the idea that it was somewhat limited and then exploded, isn't that unusual here? Now, you recently had the Secretary of State announce that they actually would be tallying the number of people who wrote in ceasefire. You've also had a super PAC called Democratic Majority for Israel written to the Secretary of State kind of urging them to reverse that decision. So where does that stand? When will we learn how many people wrote in ceasefire? So I spoke directly to the Secretary yesterday, late morning. He told me that all the write-in votes would be counted and that he was intending to report both the Biden write-ins and the ceasefire write-ins. Ceasefire doesn't have a million two and a pack behind it. Last night sometime a pro-Israel pack wrote to the secretary complaining that it was illegal to report the ceasefire results. I disagree with their analysis.

I've done election law in New Hampshire for the last 25 years. I don't think they have a leg to stand on, but there's been no announcement by the secretary that he's going to change his position. And I expect later this evening, after the polls close, the secretary will announce the ceasefire write-in votes. Andrew, while we have you, it's the day of the election and all that.

Just what's the feeling? You know, you were elected in the state of New Hampshire. What is the feeling there of being bypassed by the DNC, by Biden, and this current now effort to do a write-in campaign for Biden? How does it make people feel, voters there? Well, I understand the arguments that a more diverse state should go first, but someone at the DNC should have looked at our laws. We have a particular statute that says New Hampshire has to hold its primary seven days before the next primary. Caucuses don't count.

The Democratic Party lost the governor's race, the state house, and the state senate. So it's all Republican controlled. There was zero chance that the Republican controlled legislature was going to repeal that statute to accommodate the DNC. It was probably one of the dumber moves I've seen for the DNC to change the order, not recognizing that the Secretary of the State was legally bound to hold the primary when he's holding it. So it's been an odd primary. You've got this supposed small-time grassroots effort to write in the president, and then Washington Post yesterday reported it's backed by a million two in a pack. You have Republicans dropping in and dropping out almost by the minute.

So now that it's a Haley and Trump race, our very popular governor backing Haley, we'll see how that works out. You have two unknowns running as Democrats, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. There's also an interesting comedian named Berman Supreme. Okay. Don't want to erase him. And Berman Supreme's goal is to beat Dean Phillips. So it's, there you have it. What's your sense of where the ceasefire votes are going to come from? Are they pulling from Berman Supreme? Are they pulling from Biden, Marianne, Dean? Why not endorse a candidate who's for a ceasefire? What was your thinking there?

And what's your, go ahead and I have a follow up. That was intentional. I am not interested in replacing Joe Biden. I didn't want to support a person who would then be a threat to the president in the November election. I wanted him to do better by recognizing the importance of this issue in the one way that he seems to pay attention, which is to the vote. So if we get people to go out and actually mark their ballots with a vote, we're in a position where President Biden can veto UN resolutions, but he can't veto the vote. And this effort has grown. There are another 10 or 15 states now looking at repeating this effort

of writing in ceasefire instead of backing a third party candidate or a farm team candidate like Phillips and Williamson. Interesting. What's your number in your mind as the votes are counted that would be a success for you and that would land for the president? It's not a specific number. So part of it starts with the coverage we're currently receiving across the nation in a big way. Turnout is supposed to be high on the Republican side. It's not clear to me that it will be as high. It likely won't be as high on the Republican side, it's not clear to me that it will be as high, it likely won't be as high on the Democratic side. So getting a number of votes, enough that show up that make a difference,

I'll be happy with that. But quite frankly, given all of the attention that's been paid to this and people now talking, ceasefire. Why isn't the president doing more? We've already won. What kind of blowback have you gotten from other Democrats over this? Because I've heard people complain that this is going to give people the idea in November that they should do this. So have you heard that from people? And what have you heard? Yeah, so I'm being called an anti-Semitic bigot a lot, which is kind of amusing

because I'm a former synagogue Sunday school teacher and I was president of our synagogue. So it just shows you how quickly and how crass people become. The organized democratic leadership in our state has put out all kinds of rumors that the votes won't be counted, that we have a couple of special elections in addition to the primary, that those votes won't be counted. None of that is true. The votes will be counted and ceasefire has no impact on the local elections. We've heard stories about how this is going to keep

poll workers late into the night. I talked to the secretary and he said, no, we count write-ins in the usual course. This isn't that big a deal. It's basically a one-position race today. And we'll get the votes out, and we'll tally them, and we'll report them this evening. Very, very interesting stuff, sir. We appreciate you joining us, and we'll be watching the results tonight. So thank you very much. I know a lot of cops and they get asked

all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1.

Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players

all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.

We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned

as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the same time, electoral-wise, we always got to keep an eye on this. Let's put this up there on the screen. Trump remains the most blessed man in the U.S. legal system. I mean, the Georgia case, Ryan, was one where he had a lot of problems. You know, there was not the same constitutional questions around state election law. They genuinely can indict and prosecute whomever

they want because it's totally under their purview in terms of how they view election interference, et cetera. And the lead prosecutor there, Fannie Willis, seemed to have a pretty good case. She had one, look, regardless of whether you think it was legit or not, she had people flipping, including Sidney Powell and all of these other individuals who worked for Trump and, you know, including his lawyer and, you know, all of them were cooperating. Well, it then comes out, you know, soon afterwards, just in the last month or so, that the person that she had chosen as the case's lead prosecutor may have been involved in a tumultuous affair with Fannie Willis, all stemming from his divorce case. So let's just

keep this up there so I can read from it. It says that the future of this election interference can now hinge on a bitter divorce case playing out in the suburbs of Atlanta, involving the case's lead prosecutor, his estranged wife, and the testimony she is now seeking from Fannie Willis, who the estranged wife says is his alleged paramour. Now it appears that this is going to actually be unsealed. Emergency court hearing just yesterday evening, the judge says that a decision on the question of whether Willis can be called as a fur testimony in this divorce case, Nathan Wade, will be stayed. Now, what this means is that right now, the co-defendant, one of Trump's actual co-defendants, he's the one who unearthed this, because he discovered that the two were, quote, having an improper cland most damaging because this gentleman, Nathan Wade, who Fannie

Willis tapped, had very little experience and has now made hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by the state in legal expenses. So, I mean, this is, you know, classic problems for dismissal that could be challenged, especially if something like this comes out. Willis herself, I mean, is one where, look, you should always take this with a grain of salt, but here's what the estranged wife says. She says, Willis is trying to hide under the shield of her position to avoid testimony. We are not seeking her deposition as the district attorney of Fulton County. We are seeking the deposition in individual capacity as the alleged paramour of my client's husband. So whatever her

job is, it has nothing to do with whether or not she should have to sit for a deposition. Now, Fannie Willis's attorney says that the knowledge that she may or may not have about Wade and his marriage, quote, is not unique. You have got two parties in this case, one that is alleged to have an extramarital affair. If that's the case, if that is true, Nathan Wade has that information. So pretty noteworthy that her own attorney is not denying that this is true, which, I mean, to me it seems pretty true. Look, allegedly for Mrs. Willis' lawyers, I'm just saying, you know, for my own reading of the facts that are publicly available, which you have not disputed, it's not looking good for you. I mean, I can't believe this, Ryan. I said this last time with Chris on the side.

What? Trump has truly been touched by God. Like, there's no other explanation. And I don't even believe in God. Yeah. Yeah. Like, the Georgia case was always, to me, the biggest threat to Trump. This is the go find me the votes case. It's unbelievable. This is the one where he straight up got on a call with the state's secretary of state and instructed his team, find me 11,000 X number of votes so that we flip this thing and I become president. It just seems like blatant criminality on tape. And like you said, she's a hard-charging prosecutor.

She's got people flipping. She's got people ready to testify, grand juries, ready to go, and then boom. Because Trump doesn't have to necessarily win here. What Trump needs to do is to delay this long enough that it's too close to the election and you can't prosecute it anymore. There's nothing better than a divorce case when it comes to opposition researchers and the journalists who are looking to dig into public figures, because that is when it all comes out. Now, you also have to take everything with a grain of salt.

Of course, yeah. I'm couching it. Be like, this is the guy's ex or estranged wife. There's nobody more motivated than somebody filing a divorce case against. Because divorces are, all divorces are hard. But divorces that wind up in court where filings are public,

that's like the top 10% of divorces because they've gone past the place where you're going to amicably settle anything, gone past the place where you're even just going to go to court. You're now like airing everybody's dirty laundry. And in some cases, you're just making up dirty laundry and airing it. Like, that absolutely happens. But like you said, doesn't look good in terms of the response. Now, what does this have to do with the case? You know, not really anything in the sense that like that doesn't change the kind of facts of the case of what Trump did or what the prosecutor has. Fannie Willis, her defense, she said, look, there are three, you know, made primary attorneys that I've hired on this case, all friends of mine, a black man, a white man, and a white woman.

It's unfair that they're only coming after the black man and accusing me of this, you know, improper relationship. On the other hand, a lot of people are saying, you know, as Trump would say, many people are saying. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing, though, Ryan. It's like, yeah, go ahead. No, I mean, I mean, more in looking at this, they allocate, like she's not denying some of the substances and stuff. For example, the man's been paid 650 grand charge in the state of Georgia. Now, also- The travel stuff is problematic. This is what I was about to get to. They say that there were many questions about trips that Mr. Wade paid for and took with Ms. Willis as county officials are prohibited from receiving anything of value from people doing business with the county.

So literally, if he paid for a hotel room or something that she happened to be in, again, allegedly, that if she did not immediately reimburse him for that half or she took trips or accepted airplane tickets and all these things, this is cut and dry corruption stuff. And these laws are in place exactly for a reason. Now, maybe she can make restitution, she can pay it back or something like that. But again, we're talking in the court, not only of public opinion, we're talking about in courts of law, this is the exact type of stuff can get a case thrown out or they can delay it. Like you said, if you get the lead prosecutor removed from a case and you know, so much is going to happen now legally in terms of pushing that back. If you push it back after the 2024 deadline, boom, now Trump literally could be the president again. Now he's got immunity. There's all kinds of different things going on. Right. So the lead prosecutor plus one of the top three kind of secondary prosecutors.

But yeah, if you take the potential romantic relationship out of it, these are standard kickback laws. Like in other words, a prosecutor cannot pay somebody or any state official, you can't pay somebody and then they give you 10% back. That's a kickback. Those are banned. as evidence of him kicking things back to her, that falls under the kickback laws. Even if it wasn't a kickback because she, you know, she wasn't, she wasn't paying him so that she would get paid. She was, she was, they were just going on trips together, allegedly. Irregardless, like you pick somebody. It's still illegal. You know, allegedly, you know, you got a personal relationship with, and you're, you know, you're getting them, putting them in a nice cushy job. We don't have a lot of experience. 650,000 is a lot

of money. Okay. That's a lot of money. That's one of those. Yeah. Maybe you had to pay an associate. Okay. Still pocketing a decent amount of that. And that's only just so far. If the case goes to trial, I mean, who knows? He could be making a million plus of taxpayer dollars. So keep in mind that that's just one of Trump's legal issues. Don't forget, he's also got another one coming. Let's put this up there. This is actually going to happen on Wednesday, which is kind of interesting. The defamation trial, round two, by the way, is happening now with E. Jean Carroll, delaying Trump's possible testimony.

The judge who is overseeing Trump's defamation trial has actually delayed those proceedings after the Tuesday primary contest, where this was complicated because it meant that Trump was supposed to actually offer testimony in his own defense. In the testimony or in court, his lawyer said, my client reminded me tomorrow's the New Hampshire primary. He needs to actually be in New Hampshire. Seems to be, you know, a decent enough excuse. A lawyer actually for E. Jean Carroll then objected to the delay, saying that they want to get this over with. Can you give people a little bit of a, you know, come up with some background on the case, like with E. Jean? Because this is the second defamation trial. And I guess we should remember, they found that, what, they found that he defamed her,

but they did not find that they, any substance to the claim that he raped her. Okay, so, but this is where it gets, you know, confusing. Well, they found that there's enough evidence that her claims are solid. Okay. And that him, that his attacking her over making those claims is defamation. Got it. And laid a judgment on him for it. He immediately defamed her after that judgment. Right, right. And- According to the court. Yeah, according to the court. Or according to her lawsuit.

Yes. Exactly. Right. Well, and also, like, to take a victory lap, he put out a statement, like, right afterwards. And immediately, I think it was on this show, I was like, that's the same defamation that he just got nailed for. Like, there's no difference between what he just said and what the court just said is defamation. And so this time when he went back to court, they skipped the whole trial.

The whole fact finding part of, you know, was there sexual assault? They said, we've already decided that there was. And so now the question is, these comments, do they count as defamation? So they skipped that. And if he could pay, he's going to get hit with another judgment.

After that, he might keep defaming her. Just keep going back. Because like... Well, how much are these judgments? Millions. I don't mean this. Now, is he ever going to pay is the question. But yeah, it was an enormous amount of money.

Okay. Many millions. Maybe you'll get his supporters to pay for it like you did with the Stop the Steal. Yeah, I mean, you can pay that out of your legal defense fund, right? I'm sure you can. Yeah, I'm sure they can find a way. So it's one of those where it probably only makes him stronger. He put out a truth social. Let's put this up there. Here's what he had to say. He says, I traveled last night from the state of New Hampshire to New York to attend one of the crooked Joe Biden's inspired witch hunt trials. Despite the fact that I was there on time and on schedule, it was then learned that one of the jurors was not feeling well. And for that reason, today's session, having to do with a woman I know nothing about, has therefore canceled with a new date to be determined.

All of these various Biden political opponent trials just happen to be starting with great purpose in the middle of what will be the most important election in the history of our country. They could have all began years ago or years after that, but certainly not during the election. In actuality, they never should have been brought at all because I have done nothing wrong. It is what it is. I will do what I have to do. All I ask is for fair judges and juries, and I will win every single one of them. So that's what the man says. Go ahead. To back up his, one of his wild claims here, he says these are Biden-inspired witch hunt trials. Yeah. It is true that Reid Hoffman. Right, the billionaire. Funded, the billionaire kind of supporter of Biden and opponent of Trump, more an opponent of Trump than he is a supporter of Biden, financed the lawsuit, financed her lawsuit. Right. Like that's a fact, then he is a supporter of Biden, financed her lawsuit.

Right. Like that is a fact. The judge and jury still found him liable for it though. Yeah. Very important point. So anyway, that's what we got. Trump's latest legal wranglings. Don't forget, I left out the business case.

What else? We have the January 6th case. We have the documents case. We have this case, E. Jean Carroll. I have the January 6th case. We have the documents case. We have this case, E. Jean Carroll. I believe I'm missing another one. There's the porn star case too. Oh, I forgot. That one's still. I forgot about that one. And so, yeah, anyway, I think, what is it? Some 91 criminal charges and all that. And he's got to run the table on all of them. It's going to be a tough bet, but we'll keep you guys updated. As I said, though, there's no luckier man in this world than Donald Trump whenever it comes to legal matters. In many ways, I honestly feel like he's like some sort of magical material

which absorbs his opponent's strength. He's certainly the only president in modern memory that looked younger when he left office. It's very true. He's like the sort of Gryffindor, Harry Potter nerds who are out there. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back.

In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corps vet. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast,

hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on to Israel. Some very, very serious news that we can report this morning, a stunning incident happening in Gaza. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. We have, the IDF has confirmed, you know, this says 21 Israeli soldiers, that's been revised this morning to 24 Israeli soldiers killed as they were rigging two buildings in southern Gaza with explosives. Hamas attacked nearby tank with RPGs and explosions in the building, causing the buildings then to collapse on top of the soldiers, according to

the IDF. The Israeli soldiers have routinely posted these celebratory videos on social media of themselves celebrating and laughing while doing control demolitions of Gaza neighborhoods and others. This is noted by Jeremy Scahill. I mean, we don't know yet much about the incident, Ryan, but what's your immediate reaction to this? This is some crazy stuff. The single deadliest incident so far in the war on Gaza for the IDF in this war. Right. This comes after they have claimed to have kind of operational control of major parts,

if not all of Gaza, which clearly is not the case. You know, if Hamas is able to, you know, launch an attack on a tank right near a building that they're trying to do a controlled demolition on, we'll talk about this later, but we have seen an enormous number of kind of TikTok videos and Twitter videos of soldiers, like Jeremy said, celebrating these controlled demolitions of just an absolute entire neighborhood. Right. We're going to get to that. We actually have some of that video.

Universities. Right. Let's play some of the clips that have gotten people so furious. So I can narrate some of these. Our team went ahead and compiled. This appears to be people who are IDF soldiers who are joking about finding sneakers and opening a Nike store actually in the Gaza Strip going through some of the rubble. This one here, again, these are all TikTok videos that they're openly posting inside of a classroom, kind of mocking the fact that it's an empty classroom. This is just, you know, it's like kids with guns screwing around on kids' bikes, rolling around inside of

a house and falling over. This is where things start to become question marks about the literal discipline within the IDF. I mean, these are guys doing just demolition with target practice with shoulder-fired rockets. And then then here you've got a guy just literally unloading his clip into a wall. I believe they're calling it the war on walls on social media. I'm just complete like lack of discipline fired. I mean, I just can't imagine what would happen to a US military soldier or service member serving in Iraq from, you know, within their own command if they were to conduct themselves like this in a single incident. And so, look, to Israel, all we can say is war of

occupation. Welcome to it. You know, it's easy to bomb stuff. It's a lot harder when you got people on the ground. And it's not a surprise to me, Ryan, that the single deadliest incident comes what, months into the war, allegedly in a safe zone. And the lack of discipline and training that these guys have is genuinely stunning to me. Like, how do you lose 24 guys in a single incident? I'm trying to think just off the top of my head. I believe the only time the US military would ever suffer casualties like this was like a terrible once in a decade, some bunch of Navy SEALs in a helicopter, Operation Red Wings comes to mind, and that's where a whole bunch of stuff goes completely wrong. This is not supposed

to happen, period. In general, there's a lot of little things that go into tactics, into way that your command and all that is organized. But it's not lost on me that 21 of the 24 are confirmed reservists who were, quote, working to remove buildings and other infrastructure near the border. For example, Army combat engineers and all this, they suffered a lot, you know, with IEDs and others. So I would just say to Israel, like, you know, you broke it, now you bought it. And now you signed yourself up for, this is the future. This is what the future is going to look like. But don't forget too, this is a small country. You only got 9 million people. That's not very military age males and or females. People

in Israel are going to be pissed about this. Already the prime minister Netanyahu has ordered an investigation into this. It reminds me of an incident that we covered here previously, Ryan, where it was like 10 IDF soldiers were killed in a single incident. It's like literal amateur hour. You're reading this. It's like one guy, a couple of guys wandered off. They get pinned down. Then, you know, some colonel for some reason is like, hey, I'm going to go and help. All of them get wiped out in like 15 minutes. Again, like this does not happen in the U.S. military. And their total lack of discipline and others is really coming back to bite them. But it also just demonstrates like you can lose a lot of people. You know, 217 is the total acknowledged death toll by the IDF. We

don't know what the real one is. And we definitely don't know what the wounded number is. But the longer this goes on and the longer and longer you've got troops in there, that's going to keep on going. And you lose 24 guys. Even in a month, you start to do the math, and we start to think about the toll that's going to take on the Israeli military. The IDF is trained and practiced as an occupation army, like mostly in the West Bank or stationed around the Gaza envelope. But in the West Bank, they are kind of raiding homes

of mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians. They can't fly back. That they're arresting unarmed Palestinians occasionally. Once in a while, there's actual live fire, you know, in Jenin or elsewhere. But it's not as if they're running up against kind of a trained military. And certainly not one that has had years to kind of build tunnel infrastructure that they can exploit against in an invading force. And this is all happening as Netanyahu keeps signaling that he's going to launch some type of ground invasion

against southern Lebanon. Yeah, I know. Good luck. You're like, what you can do is you can occupy the West Bank with the help of the Palestinian Authority. And you can bomb. If they lose the help of the Palestinian Authority to do that, they're in big trouble. And yes, and you can bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age. You can kill tens of thousands of civilians underneath rubble. But you're not a military

that's equipped to do this type of thing. There's a column in Haaretz this morning calling out this discipline that you just mentioned and warning that the army risks losing control, complete control of these soldiers. The column warns that there could be the formation out of this of basically gangs, of paramilitaries, because you've got all of these armed young men who are posting on social media criticism of their superiors. Yes, I've seen this. Both civilian and military. And then getting cheered on by the Ben-Gavirs and the other hard right elements of the government.

And that has the potential to just spiral out of control. Like, if you have lost these soldiers and they feel like they can just publicly tell you, you know, where to shove it, and they have allies in this factional coalition, that's a recipe for a Lebanon-style debacle, like a failed, like, there is a risk of a failed state here. No, it's a great, great point. I mean, all of this, why our military is professional, it's all volunteer and they spend a lot of time on training. None of this would be tolerated for a second. I remember-

Posting on TikTok? I think there was an incident where guys in Syria were wearing like, they were posting their running data to Strava and it was used at one point. And immediately they were like, all right, everybody's banned from Strava. It's not going to happen. It's like nobody's- And the fact they haven't banned TikTok? I can't believe it. It's stunning to me, genuinely, just given how much this is playing. Maybe they just don't care, or maybe because it's a reservist military, they don't want to put too much pressure on them. But listen, I mean, I don't know what you guys are doing. There are entire social media accounts that are just monitoring TikToks and just reposting.

Yeah, we just played it here on our show. It's nuts. On top of that, there's some major diplomatic news. Let's put this up there. The Israelis are proposing a two-month fighting pause in Gaza, a.k.a. ceasefire, in exchange for the release of all hostages. Israel, they say, has given Hamas this proposal through the Qatari and Egyptian mediators that would include two months fighting in pause as part of a multi-phase deal that would have the release of all remaining hostages inside of Gaza. You still have 130 hostages or so that are being held, including some IDF soldiers. This is including apparently a presidential advisor, Brett McGurk,

who was in Egypt on Sunday and helping work with the Qataris. In general, I just want your overall analysis on this. Apparently, the Israeli War Cabinet approved this type of parameters about 10 days ago and have been communicating it. The CIA director, William Burns, has been involved as well. What do you think, Ryan, about the prospects for something like this? I mean, usually I would say, if you're not firing for two months, it's pretty hard to turn those guns back on. That said, this is Israel we're talking about, so I don't really necessarily care. If you're Hamas, do you take this deal? Do you not take this deal? What do you think? The other thing that they have proposed, and it's not clear if this is a kind of requirement that Hamas accept this or not, but they said they would offer, quote unquote, safe passage to Hamas leaders outside of Gaza elsewhere.

That brings back 1982, if you remember this history, after Israel invaded Lebanon to try to clear out the PLO, Israel got an agreement from the Palestinian leadership that they would leave for Tunisia and elsewhere. There were international monitors, international forces that came in. And the deal that the PLO and Israel cut was that the international forces would remain to protect the civilian population. Because Israel had, the Dahiya doctrine had been attacking the civilian population to put pressure on the Lebanese to then put pressure on the PLO to leave. Right.

That worked. As soon as the PLO left, the international forces left. And Israel and its proxies engaged in absolutely horrific civilian massacres in southern Lebanon, massacres that involved Ariel Sharon and, like, future prime ministers. This is like, yeah, we're not talking, we're talking, this is Wikipedia-level stuff here. And so that wasn't that long ago for these folks. If you're in your 50s and 60s and you're a Palestinian, you were 10 or 20 when this happened. You remember this. And so hearing again, hey guys, as long as your leadership leaves, don't worry. We're going to cut a deal. Everything is going to be fine. You remember that. And so also you know that Israel is going to hunt you down anywhere around the world.

You can get safe passage to Tunisia or Qatar, but they're going to try to get you anyway. So you're actually maybe even safer, bizarrely, in Gaza, even though nobody's safe in Gaza. It's a Gordian knot, and it's not a good situation. I think that's like the easiest way. I think it shows that Israel is under insane amounts of pressure to actually focus for now on the hostages, which they have not been doing. Well, that's a good segue. Guys, I'm going to go a little bit out of order here, but can we please put DE4 on the screen so I can narrate it a bit? This is showing the families actually of hostages in Gaza storming into a

Knesset meeting, which is their parliament, demanding an end to the war and a deal immediately. They say, quote, you will not sit here while our children die. And clearly, you can also see there's some signs there in Hebrew. Many of these are family members. I mean, they're literally storming the meeting and taking over the entire thing, faces and others of those who have not yet been released. This is a tough, tough situation. I mean, it just demonstrates as well the disconnect in the Israeli war cabinet between those like Gavir, Smotrick, and Netanyahu to a certain extent, where they want the war to continue. They don't care about the hostages. They can say they want to, but listen, they haven't

saved a single one. The only thing they've done is shot three of them that we know. And then in terms of the bombing, I mean, listen, ask the hostages who were released to say that they were bombed. So there's that. We can keep that in mind. There was a mother on Facebook of a hostage who said that the autopsy showed that her son was killed by like a poison gas attack inside a tunnel. Wow. And so there's enormous amounts of pressure from these families on the Netanyahu government to take the lives of the hostages seriously. And at the very beginning, you had Smotrich, you had Ben-Gavir saying we need to not care over much about the hostages. We need to be ruthless in how we wage this.

The kind of a mass version of the Hannibal directive, which is that hostages are too costly politically for Israel. And so it's better that they're killed before they can become hostages. Like that's the Hannibal theory, the Hannibal directive. And so if Israel was accomplishing its military objectives, they might be able to push back on the families who are demanding the hostage release take priority. But without that, okay, you're not accomplishing your military objectives. The demands of the families become that much harder to ignore. I think you're exactly right. And that actually is a perfect segue. We can put E2 up on the screen. This is news we've been holding now for a while, but wanted to make sure that we got to it.

This just happened a couple of days ago. Leaked U.S. military assessment to the Wall Street Journal. They say that Hamas has told us far short of Israel's war aims. Israeli forces have killed 20 to 30 percent of Hamas fighters, U.S. intelligence estimates show. A toll that falls short so far of Israel's goal of destroying the group and shows that it's resilience after months of war that have laid swaths to the Gaza Strip. The U.S. estimate found that Hamas still has enough munitions to continue striking Israel and Israeli forces in Gaza, quote, for months, and that the group is attempting to reconstitute

its police force in parts of Gaza City, which already we have seen major Israeli withdrawals from. Ryan, you and I have discussed some of that previously. Israeli officials concede that despite the aggressive air-ground campaign that has killed thousands of civilians, they have not achieved their goal of destroying Hamas, which has run Gaza now, and that they have withdrawn thousands of troops following pressure from the United States

to transition to a more surgical phase of its war against Hamas. Military officials say that the war can continue for many more months and that their survival has raised questions within Israel, the Palestinian authorities, and abroad about whether Israel can even achieve this most basic aim. Biden administration has now begun to scale down their expectations for the war, they say, to Hamas's degradation as a security threat from its utter destruction, and that the U.S. has urged Israel to shift the war to where more targeted operations are aimed at Hamas leadership. A senior Israeli military official told the Wall Street Journal,

you don't have to win, you just have to not lose. I actually would swap that around. I would say that's Hamas' goal. I would say for Hamas, yeah, they don't have to win. There's no winning against people who've got air power. You've got no air power. But you don't have to not lose. Ask the Taliban how that worked out for them. They're basically saying that in terms of the number of fighters that have been killed, even if you take

the Israeli military estimate, which is 9,000, that is still 30% of the group's total fighting force. And that's on a very, very high end, right? That's not very good. And that was the fighting force at the beginning. At the beginning. At the beginning. We don't even know. Now you've taken two million people and displaced them. How many new recruits have you created by orphaning them, by killing their brothers in Gaza at this point, you're either scrounging for food and medicine to keep yourself alive, or maybe you go try to join Hamas at this point. It's very— That's been the problem with—that's the doctrine. That's the problem that the kind of counterterrorism effort globally has always tried to reckon with. If you kill a terrorist, do you create more

terrorists than you have just killed? And that's not necessarily something that, it's a common talking point. People are like, oh, what does that mean? We should do nothing? It's like, listen, you should just be calibrated and you should think about whether trade-offs exist and what they look like. So for example, if we were to think about where a terrorist group genuinely could have been eradicated, I think Al-Qaeda in 2001 is a perfect example because it's a small paramilitary organization, which has ties to the Taliban, but it's not directly connected. It's not indigenous anywhere. It's not indigenous. You know, half the people in Afghanistan are like, who are you Arabs? Why are you here? I don't even like you. Right. So they're willing to give up.

You're funded by the CIA. Right. Exactly. They're like, get out of here. Just cut their funding. Go kill them. Yeah. So that was a perfect example of one where, yeah, I genuinely think we could have gone in there. As long as there weren't a lot of Afghan civilians around, you could have carpet bombed, you could have killed every single one of them and would have done nothing. But then we're going to think about the Taliban. It's like, well, now you're talking about somebody's cousin, somebody's uncle, somebody who's involved in drug trafficking and all these activities, including police force and anti-government for very different reasons. Now we're not getting into a phase where you can just go in and kill somebody and make sure that you're not having some detrimental effect.

May still be a good reason to kill them. Maybe they're in charge of X, Y, and Z, or if you kill one person, it can have a bigger effect. But at the end of the day, you're going to need a bigger political military strategy. It's why we lost the war in Afghanistan. Same thing. We killed a lot of insurgents in Iraq. How did that work out? It didn't work out so well. Yeah. ISIS is a confusing example and raised people's expectations in a way that was inappropriate because ISIS, basically just a bunch of Europeans who came down there. From Chechnya or Britain or Belgium. And again, people in Syria are like, why are you enslaving my neighbor?

They just got radicalized on YouTube and everywhere else. And then they come down for this adventure. Much easier to kill. Much easier to kill and to remove from the population. And you can extract that from the culture because it's not indigenous, it's not endemic to the culture. Whereas this effort to call Hamas ISIS fails because Hamas is made up of people who are from Gaza.

Yeah, that's true. You can say whatever you want about them. They're from Gaza. They're from there, which means it's not going to be that easy to root them out. It's a lot harder to kill them. It's a lot harder to separate them from the population. If you did want to separate them from the population, you'd probably do the opposite of what Israel is doing. And now you've got this bad, you've got this bad,

you've got a bad, bad situation. So you've got 21, 24 guys who have been killed here. How many more are going to be killed, you know, in this war of occupation? And now, you know, they're going to face all kinds. And for what, to blow up a building? They are going to face all kinds of problems inside Israel because already they've done these withdrawals and the reservists, they're sending them back because they need them to work in the military. Well, we all just got a preview today of what a real war of occupation looks like. You need hundreds of thousands of people standing around on street corners with guns. You can bomb them until kingdom come, but you can only keep it up for certain periods of time. And eventually, you know, you're going to be involved in this type of activity. You're going to get killed. A lot of you are going to get killed, especially when you don't have good tactics, good discipline,

good command and control, so many different things. So listen, I think this is a big, big problem. Any final thoughts here? Yeah. And if you're the family of one of these 24 and maybe counting IDF soldiers who died, you're asking, what did they die for? And you're told they were doing a controlled demolition of a building. Right. Like buildings do not threaten anybody. What threatens people are ideologies and people who hold those ideologies who operate out of buildings and who use weapons. But you can destroy them. Like what does destroying a university do? Like, what does destroying,

what does leveling an apartment building do to make Israel any safer? And so, not only did you lose at least 24 soldiers, but you did it to destroy a building. Like, there's no building that is worth that. The lucky thing is that at least in Israel, their population, as you can see, is a lot less compliant than ours. Whenever their people are on the line, they genuinely do kind of act out in many cases, as you saw in terms of storming the Knesset. So perhaps the families of those inside the country will begin to ask questions. It's a small country. When you lose somebody, it's going to hit a lot more, as we talked a lot about on October 7th.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy

winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher.

Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move to the final part here about Harvard. We've been

wanting to cover some of this campus craziness or so-called. I just want to say, I told you so about Bill Ackman, all right? I can say it every time, but every time we get vindicated, this is just the most perfect example to me. So if we'll all recall Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge funder, who's done some very questionable practices whenever it comes to SPACs and to crashing the market after COVID, there's a lot of discussion. We can put that off to the side. Just giving people context about how a man became worth $4 billion. I've done it before. Yeah, maybe I'll do it again. Okay. So Bill Ackman on October 8th wakes up and is like, oh my God, there's all these Palestinian groups that are saying abhorrent and awful things. I should help to cancel them and make sure that they can never get a job. This morphs into after the Harvard

hearing before Congress, an effort to get Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard fired for not saying immediately that calling for the genocide against Jews constitutes a targeted harassment at the university, eventually then morphs into plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, in which she retires. But remember, he didn't actually care about plagiarism. He cared about getting this woman fired over, quote unquote, anti-Semitism concerns. Well, Harvard has now heeded the call, and they've created a, quote, anti-Semitism task force. But now, let's put this up there. This is pretty amazing. Bill Ackman and Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, are now decrying the choice of Derek J. Penzler, who is a professor of Jewish history and is Jewish himself, as the leader of an anti-Semitism task force.

Will you guess why, Ryan? Because, quote, he helped to lead a panel which had signed a letter that was critical of Israel, describing it as a regime of apartheid for its treatment of Palestinians. Now, this is very, very important here because what they are saying is that this man, who is a Jew, a professor of Jewish history, and who is leading the Anti-Semitism Task Force himself, is not a proper person to lead the Anti-Semitism task force himself is not a proper person to lead the anti-Semitism task force because he has been critical of Israel. Okay, so not that he's anti-Semitic himself, but they are saying that criticism of Israel equals anti-Semitism. That gives the whole game away, doesn't it? It kind of gives the whole game away. And so just to give

you an example about Bill Ackman, let's put this up there on the screen. He says Harvard continues on the path of darkness. Again, because he was chosen as the co-chair of this anti-Semitism task force. And he led a panel which then signed a letter and then also called for a ceasefire. Which means then that criticism of Israel, the government itself, according to Ackman, is anti-Semitism. And also according to Larry Summers. We can put his tweet up there on the screen. We're only giving you half of this, by the way. There's a lot more. It's on and on. It's Ackman-esque. But I mean, Ryan, this is just so blatant and transparent, you know, the way that so many

people have like fallen for this. Guys, none of this has anything to do with DEI. It's about Israel. It's about Israel. It's about protecting Israel from criticism. And listen, you know, the whole apartheid thing and all that, who cares? It's a foreign country. In this country, we are allowed to criticize a foreign country. Last time I checked, except we've got an Israel exception apparently in this case. It's just outrageous, outrageous to me.

Israel is a country. Israel is a country with policies. Criticizing those policies does not make you anti-Semitic. For a long time, that had seemed like a pretty straightforward proposition. And you would often have the opponents of that proposition kind of twisting themselves into knots to say that that's not actually what they mean. But like you said, it's now very clear exactly what they mean, that you cannot have a co-chair of an anti-Semitism task force who is a critic of Israel because they are by definition anti-Semitic. He's one of the most renowned professors of Jewish history that is working today, certainly, but in a century. And to call him anti-Semitic

is flatly absurd. And the apartheid question is an interesting one too, because, you know, apartheid means that you have different rights, you know, within the borders of a country, depending on your ethnicity or your religion. The critics of that label say it's not fair to call Israel apartheid because the occupation is temporary. And at some point in the future, there will be a resolution, which means it is no longer an apartheid state, whereas South Africa was a locked in permanent, permanent, this is what it is. Netanyahu clearly stating that there will never be a Palestinian state locks that in. The only alternative, if there will never be a Palestinian state, is that it is all under the security control of Israel. And everyone underneath Israel's security control is subject to those laws. And if you are

Palestinian or Arab, you have different privileges, you have different rights. That is apartheid. And if Netanyahu is not willing to even pretend that at some point in the future, there will be a two-state solution, then it is apartheid. That's just definitionally. So to say that it's anti-Semitic and out of bounds to say that for a Jewish historian who knows the history is to demand ignorance of your panelists. Look, I haven't even thought about it that much because I honestly think that some of these rhetorical battles are irrelevant. It's like, look, are the Palestinians treated worse than Israeli citizens? It's like, yeah, definitely. Okay. I can tell you that from

what I'm seeing with my own eyes. I don't know. You can call it whatever you want. I don't care. Yeah. I agree. The whole point is just that. I agree. I mean, we get devolved into all of these rhetorical battles and it's not, and it is. Like, listen, this is all irrelevant. The whole point is about, are you allowed to say what you want in the United States of America? And the answer should be yes. Yeah, if you're a scholar of Jewish history and you want to say that, you feel safe. Listen, I hate some of these scholars, all right? This man and I would probably hate each other. We would hate over DEI, over so much. And as long as he defended my right to be able to criticize him and vice

versa, we're cool, man. You know, the professor and I. That's the problem is that people are not actually properly implying these principles whenever they're talking, you know, out of both sides of their mouth. This is about Israel, period. At the same time, we have a very strange situation at Columbia University. We have some video, actually we can play here, of two Columbia University students who were allegedly sprayed with something called skunk spray, which is apparently used on Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli forces. It is, quote, known to cause nausea, abdominal pain, and vomiting. And this is self-reported from some of these protesters, but appears to have some verification with their symptoms. Columbia University actually responded

to these allegations. We can put this up there, please. They say that the Department of Public Safety is working with the local and federal authorities to investigate some of these incidents. Ryan, you guys had an intercept story on this. Could you break it down for us and just tell us a little bit about what you guys found? Yeah, we can put this up in post. My colleague Prem Tucker has his pieces headline, Columbia scold students for quote, unsanctioned Gaza rally, where they were attacked with chemicals. And the allegations that two of these students are former IDF soldiers, would be familiar with the use of skunk spray. There's been some confirmation at least of that one of them was. You've had at least, you know, the two were attacked, but you had dozens. You were kind of sickened by this pretty intense chemical spray.

And it wasn't until Prem's story went up that Columbia finally sent out a new statement, like that first statement that they put out put out was what do they say they were concerning incidents now? They're saying that they're you know, they're looking into it like that. There's good. There's going to be an investigation I know if anybody has concerns, you know You know They should reach out like taking it a little bit more seriously than they were before it felt like the Columbia administration was kind of hoping that the press just wouldn't cover this. And that we were the first news outlet to cover it

is kind of shameful because, and also hypocritical, that if this happened in reverse, where, what's his name, Shai Davidson, has been making a huge name for himself as this Columbia business professor or associate professor, adjunct or something, who is saying he feels deeply unsafe on campus and urging all of these students to be disciplined. If this had been a pro-Israel rally and you had SJP students come and like hit them with skunk spray and someone to the hospital. You cannot imagine a world in which the media didn't touch it until the intercept covered it. Yeah, you're obviously right. And again, you know, it's like, look, these protesters, I don't know anything about these people.

But at the very least, they're not hurting anybody. Like, you know, in this country, at least, you know, if someone's going to spray them, it should be the cops. And even then, it's like, we should probably talk about that. It's like, you don't just get to spray people unless they're attacking you. And when you do, it's like, what is happening here? Like, how is there not, again, some outrage? It's just, it's nuts to me. We're not applying proper principles.

I mean, for right-wing people, you want MAGA folks to be sprayed in the face, like with skunk spray by what, agent of like the Ukrainian military or something? That would be nuts. That would genuinely be nuts. Or what if we had a Russian student? Exactly. And there's like a pro-Ukraine rally. I'm sure the media would condone that. They'd be called an act of self-defense or something. But that's my whole point is that you're not supposed to selectively, you know, apply some of this stuff. So the campus craziness continues. It certainly does. And we will continue to keep you guys updated.

Ryan, it's been great talking with you, man. We will be together tomorrow morning for the CounterPoints Breaking Points crossover reaction to the New Hampshire primary in which the whole team will be here. Crystal also joining us remotely. And thank you all very much for joining us. We really appreciate you. Got the discount going on now. If you can help us out, breakingpoints.com. Otherwise, I'll see you tonight.

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