Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/4/23: US Warns Israel Of Strategic Defeat, Israeli Hero Executed By Settler, Paul Ryan Backs Nikki, Dems Rig FL Primary, Santos Unleashes After Expulsion, Mehdi Hasan Cancelled, Israel AI Assassination Factory, And Scott Horton On Bibi And Hamas

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the US sec of defense warning Israel of a strategic defeat, Israeli hero executed by settler on camera, Paul Ryan endorses Nikki Haley, Dems rig Florida primary for Biden, Santos goes after colleagues for corruption after expulsion, Mehdi Hasan MSNBC show cancelled, Israel's mass assassination factory, and Scott Horton on how Bibi empowered Hamas.    BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collection  To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed we do. Lots to get to this morning. So our own Secretary of Defense is warning Israel of a, quote, strategic defeat in pretty blockbuster comments. We'll bring you that as well as updates out of the Gaza Strip. Ron DeSantis' campaign seems to be in total chaos. This comes as some key donor endorsements of Nikki Haley, which is sort of crucial on that side of the race, I guess. I'll break that down for you. We have also Dems in Florida acting like complete authoritarians, blocking Joe Biden's primary opponents from the ballot unilaterally.

They are all speaking out, so we'll bring you those details as well. George Santos expelled, gone but not forgotten, you might say. Not from my heart. A movie is going to come out about him as well, and he is threatening to spill the tea on all his colleagues. So a lot that's interesting to get into there. We also have Mehdi Hassan, his show at MSNBC being canceled and a lot of debate over what exactly is going on there. I'm taking a look at a blockbuster report on exactly how Israel is waging this war differently, by the way, than the way they have approached things in the past. We'll break that down for you. We also have Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute talking about the Netanyahu doctrine.

But before we get into any of that, we got a little bit of a discount for all of you folks. Yes, we got the holiday discount. We decided to extend it. I know that it's very helpful to all those who want to be able to give the gift of Breaking Points. And also, if you're on the fence, you want to go ahead and sign up. So BreakingPoints.com, you can become a premium subscriber. We're discounting our yearly membership, which is what helps us most, especially it's, you know, December 2023, which means the one year that you're helping us out is going to help pay for all of our election coverage going into what is sure to be a completely insane and fun, maybe wild ride.

So anyway, it'll be a wild ride. Let's put it that way. Fun. We can't promise fun. The road to nowhere. It will be wild. As we once famously called it here. So if you can help us out, we would deeply appreciate it. And then a hard turn, what's going on in Gaza? Yeah, so let's go ahead and give you the very latest coming out of the Gaza Strip. Put these images up on the screen. So as we brought to you this weekend, the temporary truce is over. The ceasefire has ended, and Israel is back to a massive bombing campaign. What you are looking at here is six residential towers in the southern Gaza Strip in Khan Yunus that were all taken down by a massive bombing campaign there. You can see,

you know, bodies being pulled from the rubble, children being pulled from the rubble, the horror on the look of the horror on children's faces here as they look at the destruction. This particular video is a 12-year-old little girl named Alma who is trapped under rubble as well, along with her parents, her grandparents, and her siblings. And she is asking her rescuers to rescue them first, to help them first. The very latest numbers that I saw is that in the renewed bombing campaign, 700 Palestinians were killed in a matter of 24 hours. So this is back and it is, you know, an all-out assault as it was before. Only the difference is now, and we can put this up on the screen. So as you'll recall, in the early days of the war, the IDF told everyone to move south, telling them this was the place to go if you wanted to be safe.

Well, they have now divided the entire Gaza Strip into thousands of these little compartmented neighborhoods. And for those who are just listening, what we have up on the screen is this map that's been provided with all of these little tiny areas that have been designated. And they're effectively sending out messages of, hey, if you're in Area 88, move to Area 89, move to Area 270. And it's caused mass chaos and confusion. This also comes, of course, after they have effectively destroyed all of the northern Gaza Strip. I mean, Gaza City is completely uninhabitable. The majority of buildings there have been damaged or destroyed. The majority of any sort of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, apartment buildings, et cetera, damaged or destroyed.

Now they are expanding into the entirety of the Gaza Strip. So, listen, the south was never safe. They never completely avoided bombing the southern part of the Strip, but they are massively ramping up that campaign as they claim that Hamas leadership is predominantly in communists right now. One of the southern cities where people fled to when they were told this was the place to go. That's what's happened over the last couple of days as both sides are claiming that each other violated the ceasefire. Not entirely clear, whatever, what the actual facts on the ground are with that situation. But strategically, things are expanding pretty significantly. So Marshall Kosloff actually was at the Reagan defense forum. He flagged this for me. He was like, this is definitely going to be good for the show. Watched, witnessed this live. The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, with honestly

some extraordinary comments about the Israel campaign inside of Palestine, warning it is going to lead to a, quote, strategic defeat. Here's what he had to say. This kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat. So I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative. So to translate that from military speak, the center of gravity, it's like a Clausewitz term that a lot of people use in the military. The point is just you want to focus in on what are you actually trying to achieve whenever you're waging military campaigns. So the reason that he says here, the center of gravity is the civilian population is because, quote, if you drive them into the

arms of the enemy, you replicate a tactical victory with a strategic defeat. This is almost exactly tracks with the US campaign in Iraq with Shakanah. We defeated Saddam's military. It only took three and a half weeks. Bush flies on the aircraft carrier and it's mission accomplished. Oh, wait, we have a massive insurgent war. The majority of our troops end up dying during the said insurgency. And during the civil war, we have a 20-year occupation and cost $2 trillion. We have ISIS and all the attendant problems. And basically with Lloyd Austin, who forged his entire career in CENTCOM and more, and was deeply involved in most of these campaigns, as well as the U.S. campaign against ISIS is basically watching the exact same thing replicate itself in Gaza.

And so that's really, I mean, I think his analysis is correct. I basically co-sign most of what he's saying. I don't have a problem with going after Hamas. I just think that the way they're doing it, I mean, all this bears out, especially you're going to be talking about in your monologue and the way the actual tactical way that this is being done. We pair it with the strategic overall goal. Ridding the Gaza Strip of Hamas, even in the near term, it seems like a nearly impossible task, especially with the way they're doing it. And the long term is going to

be very, very difficult. We're probably going to be covering that all throughout the week about Hamas support, and not only inside of Gaza, but inside of the West Bank, what the day one after the campaign and all of that is going to look like. But if you pair it with some of the broader problems, not only the way that Israel is conducting itself, the big fear that I think I've always had and tried to hold here is that the rest of the region is not going to stay silent as this all continues. And that's what happened yesterday. Let's put this up there on the screen. Commercial ships, including a US warship, were attacked by Houthi drones in the Red Sea. Now, many of these commercial shipping vessels were not Israeli flagged. They were US or UK flagged. The US missile destroyer that was actually in the area

ended up shooting down three of the drones. But this comes, Crystal, after there was already that Houthi hijacking that Israeli tanker. I mean, this is one of the most vulnerable places in all of global shipping, why we have so many U.S. naval assets in the region. And these are, in the immediate term, they're drones. But don't forget, this same guided missile destroyer has shot down what they say are missiles that are being shot from Yemen all the way towards Israel. Now, no way to confirm whether or not it's true, but what we can confirm is that

they have kinetically engaged some of these Houthi assets. So just one of these things goes the wrong way. A U.S. sailor gets killed on the high seas. We're living in a different world. That's a different game. Yeah. So to start with that piece, I was reading from some shipping experts on Twitter. And as you said, this particular area is really critical and you don't have to, so far, they really haven't done any damage. You know, there hasn't been significant damage. No one has been killed. I don't think anyone has been injured. So you might say, okay, what's the big deal? Well, for these shipping, for these massive, you know, cargo ships, they have to be able to ensure their passage. And if you have any sort of danger in this area, then insurance rates

skyrocket. And then you either have them paying, you know, massive rates of insurance, or you have them having to reroute around this area, which makes the trip much, much, much, much longer. So it has a significant economic impact, even if they aren't really being that effective in doing any sort of damage. So that's on that piece. And of course, it also just shows, listen, the Houthis in Yemen, they aren't going quietly here. You still have Hezbollah hanging out there. And the greater the toll on civilian life that is inflicted in the Gaza Strip, the more fraught things will be, and of course, the more at risk our own troops in the area will be as well. Going back to the

Secretary of Defense and his statement that you can replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat by the type of war that they are waging on the civilian population. This is clear common sense. I mean, I don't think that anyone could really deny this. I don't think that the Israeli government is so stupid as to think that this is not the case. You can already see in the West Bank, because of the toll that has been taken on civilian life, guess what? You're radicalizing more people.

Support for Hamas is skyrocketing in the West Bank. You can only imagine what's happening within the Gaza Strip, where you have such a massive toll on women and children and entire lives upended. The entire northern part of the Strip rendered uninhabitable. What do you think people's politics are going to be after that happens to them and their kids and their family members and everything they have ever known? What do you think that is going to lead to? So that is just obvious common sense. Now, with regard to why he's saying this, do I think it's because they're, you know, genuinely putting real pressure on the Israelis? And you see all these like U.S. media reports, oh, the Israelis are open to the criticism. No, they're not. There is no sign

that they're changing their approach whatsoever. None at all. So what is this? Number one, it's for us. It's for the domestic U.S. population. It's for the, you know, liberals watching MSNBC. Oh, see, look at the Biden administration. They're really trying. They're really trying. They're really good people. They're really trying. They're not just standing by and let this ethnic cleansing and genocide happen. They're actually trying to, you know, constrain the Israelis. That's number one. And number two is so that after the fact, when this is ultimately a strategic defeat and a catastrophe for Israeli security, because you've just further radicalized

an already radicalized population, created even more militants, even more terrorists, so that they can say, look, we told you so. So they can have a sort of like ass covering moment. Those, in my view, are the two reasons for these comments from the Secretary of Defense. But make no mistake about it. Until and unless the U.S. actually wants to use our bite, our dollars, condition aid, say, no, we're not just going to send you whatever bunker buster bombs you want, whatever you want. No, we're not going to provide you blanket cover at the U.N., diplomatic cover throughout the world anymore.

Until we do that, they are going to continue to prosecute this war in the exact same way they have been prosecuting this war. And I have this in my monologue today, but I'll mention it now as well. The reason is because Bibi is on political thin ice, to say the least, and the population, the majority of them, some 58 percent, they think the IDF isn't being brutal enough. The percentage that thinks the IDF has gone too far, 1.8% of Jewish Israelis, I should say, of Jewish Israelis. 1.8% of the Jewish Israeli population thinks the IDF has gone too far. This is when you have at the least a 70% civilian death rate and probably much, much higher than that. That's the rate of just women and children being massacred in this. This is with the entirety of the northern Gaza Strip being wiped

down. This is the state with a complete siege, with people starving and disease spreading. They think it hasn't been brutal enough. So with Netanyahu trying to save his political ass, those are the people that he's listening to and the most fringe far-right parts of his coalition who he's trying to keep in line. Does he care if the U.S. is hand-wringing publicly or leaking to the press? No, he doesn't care. All he would care about is if we actually used the material leverage that we have, which they show no interest in doing. Well, I mean, I just have to go back to Daryl Cooper. Something that he said is that, look, the day after 9-11, I didn't want to hear about nuance. And I think that's very understandable. And from their perspective, too, Michael Tracy has talked

about this, but, you know, they're basically photos of one of those babies who's being held by Hamas all over Israel. I mean, if that's the level of the media environment there, you can both be nuanced in terms of, like, I hate Netanyahu for what happened, but screw all of the people who did this. And that was, let's also be real, that was the predominant sentiment here in America. They wanted to bomb the crap out of Afghanistan. That was, if we had carpet bombed all of Afghanistan, the region where bin Laden was, and we'd killed 100,000 people, I don't think anybody in this country would have sniffed whatsoever. Now, you can understand that, but you can also understand that 20, 30 years later, you can look back on some of the decisions that were made in the heat of the moment and the whole,

we don't want the smoking gun to be mushroom cloud and be like, yeah, it was pretty stupid. And we probably shouldn't fall for that next time. So the Israeli populace, I get it. I absolutely do. Especially in the context of how we responded and thought and felt, I think, after 9-11. However, again, you're talking, I think, at the correct point about the US and what their overall posture on this is going to be. At a certain point, I don't actually have as much of a problem with some of these comments because this buys us breathing room in the future. When the Israelis are like, hey, can you guys come clean this up and do all this peacekeeping? We're like, no, you break it.

You buy it. You are the ones who are responsible. When you have a massive insurgency on your hands five, 10 years from now, and you block a peace process, it's like, that's your issue, man. We're not going to be going rolling our troops and humbies into the downtown Gaza city, Khan Yunis or any of this other. So from that perspective, Crystal, I'm actually okay with the way that the secretary is saying it. Now, I don't disagree. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing about conditioning aid and all that, but I honestly don't think it would make any difference. The Israelis have plenty of munitions. They got plenty of bombs. They got firecrackers. They're one of the world's most advanced militaries. Even if we didn't provide them bombs, we'd be dropping whatever they had. The US influence on this is both overstated and understated. Understated to

the point of what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily match the rhetoric. But at the end of the day, they don't need our money or our support at this point to wage war. Now, in 1980, that's a different story. But at this point, wage war. Now, in 1980, that's a different story. But at this point, not really. Maybe not in the short term. They're going to do whatever they want. Maybe not in the short term. But there are famous quotes of Israeli prime ministers, may have even been Netanyahu, basically saying, the only people that matter, it's the U.S.

Yeah. The only president in the world, the only world leader whose opinion I have to care about is the U.S. So yeah, would it be a devastating blow to Israel if we were to withhold our diplomatic cover? If we were to stop sending them the weapons that we've been sending them, stop sending them the billions of dollars in aid that we've been sending them? Yeah, that would be a real blow. Now, could they continue for some time with this war? Yeah, they have enough to continue for some time for this war. But let's not pretend like the U.S. doesn't have leverage here that we can use. I also disagree with the idea that this is buying us some window to, you know, after they do all of this damage in Gaza. And we're actually going to get to this piece in a bit and are pushing us to, oh, we need these refugees resettled.

And why don't you use your aid dollars to push these Arab countries around the region to take in these refugees, that there is no indication to me that we're going to buck anything that Israel wants us to do because there's no track record of that whatsoever, certainly not from the Biden administration. And we have new reporting, put this up on the screen from The Intercept, new comments from Bibi. His goal for Gaza is to, quote, thin the population to a minimum. And by the way, little noticed fact here, but Ryan Grim, of course, notices these things. The White House recently requested billions of dollars to support refugee resettlement from Ukraine and also from Gaza just back in October. So let me give you a few of the details here about what Bibi is up to. He's tasked his top advisor, Ron Dermer, the Minister of Strategic Affairs, with designing

plans to, quote, thin the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip to a minimum, according to a bombshell new report in an Israeli newspaper that was founded by the late Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson. So this outlet is considered to be basically an official organ for Netanyahu. Ryan writes, it reported that the plan has two main elements. The first would use the pressure of the war and the humanitarian crisis being created by Israel's war to persuade Egypt to allow refugees to flow to other Arab countries. And the second would open up sea routes so that Israel could, quote, allow a mass escape to European and African countries. Dermer, who's originally from Miami, is a Netanyahu confidant and was previously Israeli

ambassador to the U.S., enjoys close relations with many members of Congress. Oh, interesting. Let's put this next piece up on the screen. U.S. considers a plan to condition aid to regional states, Arab regional states, based on resettlement. So this new initiative submitted to Congress calls for conditioning American aid to Arab countries on their willingness to receive refugees from Gaza and effectively assist in the ethnic cleansing that Bibi Netanyahu is proposing here. The proposal was shown to key figures in the House and Senate from both parties. Longtime lawmaker Representative Joe Wilson has even expressed open support for it, while others

who are privy to the details have so far kept a low profile, saying that publicly coming out in favor of the program could derail it. So they go on to say this is the way they frame it. They frame this pushing Palestinians forever out of these lands that they'd already been forced into. They frame this in humanitarian terms, saying the only moral solution is to ensure that Egypt opens its borders and allows for the refugees to flee from the tyrant control of Hamas. They go on to say Iraq and Yemen receive an approximate $1 billion in U.S. foreign aid. Turkey receives more than $150 million. Each of these countries receive enough foreign aid and have a large enough population to be able to accept refugees, adding up to less than 1% of their population. And they even go so far as to

have done the math on how many Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip that they want to force into these different countries to quote unquote thin out the population. So apparently there is some bipartisan support here among our lawmakers to assist Netanyahu with this process. The reason why I think this is just all fan fiction is that the Egyptians have already said, quote, we are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to protect our land and to make sure that nobody is coming. I actually think this would start a general war in the Middle East. There's no question in my mind that if they tried to expel millions of Palestinians or hundreds of thousands, whatever, to the various parts of these regions, it would simply collapse. And the populations themselves would not accept it. The Jordanian population, any of the Middle Eastern populations, the Saudis

would almost certainly have to do something just because of the way that they're trying to keep a cap right now on all the videos and all the stuff that's spreading throughout the Arab and the Islamic world. I think really what's going to happen is that, and I think what they're really doing is an indiscriminate bombing campaign. They can think all they want till kingdom come about, oh, we're going to get these people out of there. It's just not going to happen from an international community perspective. So I'm not quite so sure to take it seriously, even if it might be their overall goal. I think the end state of this is pretty clear. Eventually, they're going to come to a point where they're going to stop bombing. They're probably going to level the vast

majority of the infrastructure. I think the vast majority of the population will remain inside of Gaza. Actually, I don't think a large refugee settlement will come out of it simply because the Egyptians control the only other border and they're not going to let it happen. And that's when you get to the whole end state of insurgency, of day, you know, that's when they're going to beg us and the EU to come in and peacekeep Gaza City. They're going to have to deal with whatever comes next. I mean, obviously, I'm saying hell no to all of that, including this, by the way, because it's outrageous and it would have a detrimental impact on overall U.S. security. So they can want whatever they want. And I'm certain that there are elements of the Netanyahu cabinet. But I still fall crystal on the fact is, is that they're trying to just

punish the hell out of the population and they're trying to kill. Or let's put it two ways. Punishing the population is secondary aim number two. Killing Hamas is supposedly aim number one. They're willing to accomplish one and two at the same time by just not really willing to care and pulling the trigger based on 10, 20% type of intelligence, which I know you're talking quite a bit about in your monologue. But I still think there's a big difference between that and supposed like ethnic cleansing and or genocide. I mean, these words do mean something. It's very clear that their goal is ethnic cleansing.

Well, some of the cabinet's goal is ethnic cleansing. Bibi Netanyahu's goal is ethnic cleansing. Now, will they accomplish that goal? That depends on the U.S. That depends on the U.S. That depends on Egypt. Is that their goal? I don't think you can deny it at this point. Like, that is clearly their goal. Now, we can quibble over whether or not it's a genocide. I think based on the international definition and based on Israeli scholars of the Holocaust who've looked at it, I think it has. But you can certainly say, if you don't like those words, you can certainly say indiscriminate killing of civilians. I'm breaking down this report from 972 Magazine, but just to give you a preview of it, you know, when we're talking about, okay, their goal is to kill Hamas. No, their number one goal

is to put a quote unquote shock into the civilian population and hope that they're going to somehow turn on Hamas. We can already see that that has failed. I mean, this has only increased. You look at the West Bank has already only increased support for Hamas. It's only going to increase, these are the comments from the Secretary of Defense, radicalization and support for terror and violent resistance within the Gaza Strip. So in any case, it's important to keep an eye on what they actually want to accomplish because Bibi is a savvy negotiator. He is a savvy politician. He thinks he can work over Joe Biden, who he says he's known for 40 years and who is aging and frail and doesn't have all his wits about him. I mean, that's obviously true.

Correct. He thinks he can manipulate U.S. public opinion, which he also has been very effective at doing as well. So I don't think it's so preposterous to put it off the table that some version of his ideal plan could actually come to fruition. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical

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Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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 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. 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. We also wanted to give you an update on a just unbelievable story coming out of Jerusalem and the facts of, you know, the quote-unquote only democracy in the region. Let's put this up on the screen. This is disturbing. I just want you guys to know. So what you see here is, and I'm going to give you the backstory in a moment, but this is in Jerusalem.

You see this man kneeling on the ground, hands up. He's saying in Hebrew, please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me. And he is effectively summarily executed there and allowed to bleed out from his injuries, and he dies. Now, let me tell you, put this up on the screen. This is Demi Reeder, who is an Israeli journalist, actually one of the co-founders of that magazine, 972, that I just referenced. So here's the backstory. In 2016, Israeli soldier executed a wounded Palestinian militant point-blank on camera.

He became somewhat of a hero to the far right, and the execution of wounded suspects briefly became a wedge issue in Israeli society, briefly because it's been long accepted, at least since the Second Intifada, that even if someone used a butter knife to attack soldiers, they might also have a suicide vest and therefore need to be finished off just in case, which he says makes no sense to me, and I don't know if it ever happened, but okay. Fast forward to 2023. A major cheerleader of that Israeli soldier and a convicted terrorist supporter himself, Itamar Ben-Gavir, is police minister. After October 7th, he randomly begins handing out weapons to civilians, ostensibly because you need a good guy with a gun, etc. Well,

this past Friday, and this gets to the video that we just watched, two Hamas paramilitaries shot up a bus stop in Jerusalem, killed three people, including a pregnant teacher. The first guy to engage them is a local lawyer and former policeman, I should add, Daron Castleman, civilian who happens to be armed, a good guy with a gun. He kills both gunmen, stops the attack before more people could be killed. Then, and this is the part that you guys just watched, IDF soldiers arrive. Castleman, the hero, realizes that he might be mistaken for one of the attackers. So he drops his handgun. He kneels on the road. This is what you saw in that video. He lifts his t-shirt to show he's got no suicide vest on. He asks them in perfect Hebrew not to shoot, explaining who he is.

One of the soldiers, a settler with a self-confessed extremist background, shoots him anyway in the abdomen on camera and walks off. So that man that you just saw killed on camera, executed on camera with his hands up, that was an Israeli hero who had stopped these gunmen who were massacring people, these Hamas gunmen who were massacring people. When more security arrives, they assume Kasselman was a gunman, so they let him bleed out. He bleeds to death. The settler soldier who executed him gives smug interviews, gets much kudos from other far-right figures. They later erase those tweets.

The army and police said they won't be investigating before you turning under pressure. Netanyahu, you ready for this one? He chimes in and says, I support the policy of handing out weapons. Sometimes there's a price to pay, but say la vie, say la vie. That's what he said in Arabic. So this, sorry, in Hebrew. So this man, Duran Kaselman, true hero who was there, who stopped these Hamas militants, was executed by Israeli soldiers, even as he was there kneeling in the street. This is the reality of the quote-unquote only democracy in the Middle East.

Well, I mean, I guess it happened in the West Bank, right? Look, the whole, or sorry, it happened in Jerusalem. The problem is that with this entire thing is it actually demonstrates all of the worst pressures that are on Netanyahu, because this showed you the settler who was provided with weapons under the Ben-Gavir policy. Then it also showed you that Netanyahu, because this showed you the settler who was provided with weapons under the Ben-Gavir policy. Then it also showed you that Netanyahu himself has a very hard time grappling with this. He didn't even call the family until yesterday, the Israeli military. After there was a massive public reaction. Right. So after there was a huge public reaction saying, hey, how can you do this? He put out a

tweet and said, Yuval Kasselman is the hero of Israel. He saved many lives. Today, I spoke with his father. This is a wonderful family. The entire nation mourns with them. Now, in terms of the investigation to itself, they don't know which way that they're supposed to go because they initially were not supposed to have the police or the military even investigate this person, the settler, whether he should have had weapons or not, and what punishment this person will suffer. You know, the original case that he talks about, I remember covering a lot of that at the time. Because if anyone's seen the video, it's crazy.

Because basically, there's a wounded guy on the ground, and he's just walking around. And despite no orders or any of that, he just shoots him in the head. There's no other way to describe it. I've watched the video a dozen times. Reported on it a lot at the time because there was a big controversy around putting him through court-martial and then his eventual trial

because in old Israel, it was an open-shut case. It's like, there's no way this is gonna happen. But he became a genuine hero and to the point where he, even by a decent segment of society, is celebrated today for what happened to him and they're seen as a miscarriage of justice. The overall prosecution, the initial court-martial, it split the IDF apart.

And more importantly, it split Israeli society apart. So that is what is downstream of a lot of the settler providing them guns. And then also, when it comes to this, I think it's a big rip between secular society, settler society, and then the way that people inside Israel are looking at this. Because as I've explained here before, a huge portion of the Israeli population didn't even serve in the military. This is a retired policeman, had a gun on him, did the heroic thing at the time. He literally kills him. He's a trained police officer. Right.

And then does everything you're supposed to do. He's like, oh, I'm in a chaotic situation. Drop the gun. Put the hands up. Show that I don't have a vest on. Because he knows. He's like, well, a lot of them will shoot if they think you have a vest. He did everything that you were supposed to do. Then he gets executed. So that's a tragedy. And the person

obviously involved should be at the very least, you know, fired from the job, removed from service, not celebrated. The fact, though, that it took days for the prime minister to have to respond to this, I think demonstrates to everyone very clearly what the pressures inside of Israel are on Netanyahu, not from the general population, from inside the coalition himself. Because inside that coalition, they don't want to talk about this at all. It's a tragedy, c'est la vie, et cetera, and they want to move past it. It shows you who he's really, really working for. And I think that is the single, you know, broken record, single biggest problem in the prosecution of this war is that you have the overall leader of the country with some of the worst pressures on him from a fringe element of society, which is not how you should be wanting to conduct a, you know, a defensive operation, a war, which is supposed to bring the entire country together. It's a nightmare from a political strategic perspective inside Israeli society.

I think something will break eventually. I really do. You know, one thing I want to say related to this, because I talked about, you know, the poll numbers of it's like 58% of Israeli society who thinks the IDF hasn't been brutal enough, only 1.8% is like, yeah, maybe they've gone too far. So you have a majority who want even more viciousness, even more brutality. And I just want to make it really clear. I don't think that Jewish

Israelis are different than any other people on the planet. But I do think that when you have, for so many decades, you've had this brutal military occupation of the West Bank, and now you've had this brutal blockade of Gaza. And, you know, there's Israel's doing very well as a society, relatively wealthy society, people doing well, living good lives, all of that. And just over these borders, you know, in effectively the same territory, territory that at this point is controlled by Israel, you have people who are living in these desperate conditions. I think that does something to a society. Again, I don't think that, you know, people are different in Palestine versus Israel versus here versus anywhere else in the world. But when you live in that kind of a society,

you know, the level of dehumanization that you have to sort of internalize to justify this treatment of millions of people right across the border, right there, you know, that you could go and see with your own eyes, I do think it does something to a society. And so, you know, that's why, you know, someone who, if this had been a Palestinian who was unarmed and posing no threat to anyone and who was executed in the street, that settler who killed him would still be a hero. You know, they would still be bragging about it. It still would be broadly supported. And, you know, the number of Palestinians who are, you know, rounded up and arrested and no charges filed and in this indefinite detention, this is not really controversial within Israeli society. So I think that's where, that's why the governments have for a long time now been

increasingly right-wing, increasingly right-wing, where they're very clear they don't want a two state solution. You know, they're doing everything they can to block the possibility of two-state solution or openly talking about that. I think that's what happens over time when you have these conditions that are imposed on a population for so long. I will take a turn in trying to explain it, which is, and if you know, if you've ever been there, it's understandable, so just bear with me. Most of the people, the generation of today, the people who are serving the IDF, grandfather or grandparents of great-grandparents likely liquidated in the Holocaust or survived. We're lucky enough to survive. You were beaten into you from day one. The state of Israel exists so that will never happen. Again, you have mandatory military service going back to basically the founding of the country. Your fathers and or grandfathers fought in 67

and in the Yom Kippur War, where Israeli annihilation was absolutely on the country. Your fathers and or grandfathers fought in 67 and in the Yom Kippur War, where Israeli annihilation was absolutely on the table. So you have had two lessons in the span of 100 years where you have learned if we don't fight back with everything that we possibly have, they will wipe us off the face of the earth. And on top of that, you now live with 20 years of war with Hamas. And look, I'm not saying that Hamas doesn't suffer more, obviously, in terms of casualties, but it's no picnic living in a country where you've got rockets coming down, you had to have Iron Dome, and everybody knows somebody who was affected either in that war at the same time, too, in modern society and what it's like to live in Israel. You can't even go inside of a shopping mall without getting wanted for a suicide vest

because they had, I think, over a thousand attacks that happened inside of Israel, suicide bombing style attacks, blowing up buses, public infrastructure, all that type of thing before they eventually built the wall with Gaza. So, you know, that's not that hard to, that's actually not that hard to understand why you get to a mindset of where that's predominant inside your society. And the total separation seems necessary because it's an us or them mentality. And let's be real too. A lot of the Palestinians, they would kill them if they had the chance and if they had the means. And so, and they've shown that throughout decades now of bordering both Gaza and Hamas.

I understand it completely. I'm not saying I like it or I'm even justifying it. But it's a different set of circumstances than we live here in the West, just completely and utterly different. And it's one of those where, you know, when you're saying it, Crystal, I think the dehumanization and all that, that is just inherent to what it's like to live in an active war zone and what it's like to also have a generation at war today, your father's generation at war, a grandfather, and to have and know and have the knowledge that probably 90% of your descendants or ancestors were liquidated by the Nazis. at war, a grandfather, and know and have the knowledge that probably 90% of your ancestors

were liquidated by the Nazis. That's just a deep cultural imprint that's not going to go away, I think, for a long time. And they spend all their time in society. They don't let you forget that either. When you're in school, whenever you're coming up, it's a part of the culture which I think goes to the very core of what it means to be Israeli. Even if you are a Sephardic Jew or any of that,

it's beaten into you that over the 2,000 years of persecution, the pogroms, a large portion of Israeli societies. Also, Russians suffered horribly under the Soviet Union, under the Tsar before that. So I think culturally, I understand it completely. I'm not trying to justify it. I'm just like, you have to try and put yourself in the mind of what it is like to live in that state for the last 75, 80 years.

And also to suffer, you know, society-wide level terror bombings, which America would never tolerate. Even 10% of what Israel has had to go through, too. The number one song in Israel right now is this, like, rap song that calls for annihilating everyone and assassinating specific celebrities who have supported the Palestinian cause. Yeah. That's the state of the society. And part of what I have found so wrenching and sickening and disturbing, because again, I don't think Israeli Jews are any different than any other people around the world. They're not. Is how quick there is a justification of things that should be moral atrocities that should be completely morally off the table, certainly among a nation that considers itself, you know, developed part of the first world democracy, quote unquote, etc.

And that's what to me is so disturbing. And, you know, every basically group of people who justifies these sorts of horrors and atrocities against their fellow human beings, they all have that sense of it's us or them. They all have that sense of like, we're the victims. I mean, you know, Nazi Germany, same thing, like the sense of victimization and it's us or them and we're under threat, et cetera, et cetera. Like that is the feeling that is used to justify absolute horrors. And so to watch that unfold in real time has been, you know, has been absolutely stunning. There was a journalist who posted this long thread. I don't know if you saw it on Twitter about like, I want you to understand that when you are posting pictures of dead Palestinians, like I don't care. I do not care at all. Posting this publicly. Again, a journalist, an Israeli

journalist posting this publicly. And so that to me has been one of the things that has been so shocking to watch unfold is how quickly and how quickly even people here in the U.S. who haven't experienced all this trauma and don't have that, you know, generational wound and aren't experiencing the suicide attacks and the, you know, sirens going off and that, you know, generally generational wound and aren't experiencing the suicide attacks and the, you know, sirens going off and the, you know, quote unquote, rocket fires, et cetera, who are also like, yeah, justifying the annihilate them all, wipe them out, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's disturbing. I guess that's all I can say. I understand. I understand where you're coming from. I think, you know, we should all just try and put ourselves in the

minds of both of these people. I'm not, I can put it from the Palestinian perspective too. I understand where you're coming from. I think we should all just try and put ourselves in the minds of both these people. I can put it from a Palestinian perspective, too. I mean, it's crazy. Daryl Cooper, I think, does the best job of that. He's like, look, we tried everything. We'll go in this, in our lifet from them in 1948. And that gets passed down. Even though that woman's mom is dead, it was passed down to the mom. They still have that key mounted above their door. So don't forget that too. You know, on the other side, they remember and they remember as deep. It goes into the kids. It goes into their grandkids. So these are, these things don't heal easily. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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, 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. 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 But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. 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. 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's move on to domestic politics. There's absolute craziness going on here with Paul Ryan, with Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. But I think the major story of this is the absolute downfall of Ron DeSantis, not necessarily in the polls, although some of that too, but amongst the donor set who have done the hardest pivot of all time.

They're going all in on Nikki Haley after her star debate performance. The best exemplified by this is Paul Ryan, the leader, the donor class hero himself, coming on CNBC, identified as an investor. Okay, to go ahead and endorse Haley. Here's what he had to say. Do not discount the Americans for Prosperity endorsement of Nikki Haley two days ago. That's actually a really big deal. And the reason that that's a really big deal is you could say that Ron DeSantis's big advantage over Nikki Haley was his ground game in Iowa, which is impressive. Americans for Prosperity has an extremely impressive ground game. This is the Koch Network his ground game in Iowa, which is impressive. America's Prosperity has an extremely

impressive ground game. This is the Koch Network's ground game. They just gave that to Nikki Haley. So not only does that level her up in Iowa with Ron DeSantis, that gives her a ground game in all these other states and the counter plays to her advantage. So I'm not saying I'm all for Nikki Haley. I'm for beating Donald Trump. I'm for any Republican who can beat Donald Trump. But I think if you had to pick a growth stock, I think Nikki's the growth stock. And the fact that she got this endorsement, I think, matters a lot. So the question is, since more than about half Republicans do not want Donald Trump to be our nominee, I'm among those half. Can someone consolidate the sport in time to win? And the question, I think that's possible.

I think that's possible. He's got 66 percent in the polls, though, against the other candidates. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but I think it's still plausible because things can still happen. She's got a lot of momentum. If one person can quickly consolidate the non-Trump field, then they'll have 30%. Okay, yeah, that math checks out. This is the Iowa fan fiction is driving me crazy. And somehow people like Paul Ryan, Ron DeSantis, and now the Koch Network have seemingly bought into this. Put this up there. I

know Ryan and Emily covered this, but it's still very important for us to weigh in on. The Koch Network endorsed Nikki Haley to push the GOP past Trump. This is significant for two reasons. Obviously, the Koch Network has boatloads of money. They have some of the biggest consultant infrastructure in all of Washington. They've got Americans for Prosperity. They have super PACs. They've got 501c3s, 501c4s that they're all throwing behind her. They've got polling, ad buys, all these things. This is potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that she's now added to her war chest. Now, the big question for them is around what are you trying to do? Iowa seems to be the consolidation dream. What people seem to forget, Crystal, about 2016, Donald Trump didn't

win Iowa. He didn't even get second in Iowa. He got third in Iowa. You know what did happen, though? He won New Hampshire. Then he won South Carolina. Then he won the majority of the states on Super Tuesday. And he won Florida. And he won, shall I go on? The point is that Iowa itself is actually not all that indicative of anything. The only reason that this myth persists is really because of the Obama campaign. When Obama winning Iowa was genuinely impactful because it showed to a lot of black voters in the Democratic Party, no, no, no, no, white people actually would vote for this guy. Therefore, we now have permission,

which is why he went on to win South Carolina. He ended up cleaning up and basically wrapped up the majority of it on Super Tuesday. But Hillary also did very well in New Hampshire the next time. The thing is, is where Trump is, it's about the states that come afterwards. And for all the media, you know, attention and all of that, no one is going, I'll put it right here. I'll eat a sock again if I have to. Nobody will beat Donald Trump in the state of New Hampshire, period. It is Trump country, has been since 2016. The idea and the polling, a lot of this stuff bears it out.

And the problem too, is that these donors are trying to play pick me with all of these different candidates like DeSantis or any of the Tim Scott or any of these others when they're facing a structural problem of the voters don't like them. Put this up there too, because this is a part of this. The DeSantis campaign is a complete free fall. Their big money, the super pack has completely imploded. The new chief executive has been fired. A new one has been brought on. Several of the major strategists who work for the organization called Never Back Down have either been fired or have left. They appear to be running out of money on a pretty long timescale. And the majority of their support, which was told to them from the

beginning, if you'll recall, Crystal, Ken Griffin, the billionaire, was like, I'll give him as much money as he needs. And then the first sign of trouble, he's like, no, no, no, I didn't mean it like this. And there's, how many of those are out there? The campaign itself is now blaming its own super PAC. If we can put this Politico tear sheet up there, because this is hilarious. They are now blaming their own super PAC for leaking against them and for bad television advertising. They wrote in a memo to their donors that never back down in their field organization. All of that is not up to snuff and that they are leaking about their own problems

whenever it comes to polling, that their TV advertising didn't end up helping them out. I mean, this is not the sign of a healthy overall organization. And it just shows you how quickly I think that these establishment folks can move from one to another, which at the end of the day is a complete fantasy. At least get credit to that CNBC anchor who was like, he's got 66% of the vote. What are you talking about? Yeah, there's a basic math problem here. I just pulled up the national Republican primary polling. We're going to show you the Iowa and New Hampshire in a minute. But there has not been a poll, I don't know when, every single poll in here has

Trump over 50%. So even if you do in some fantasy world consolidate all of the other voters. That still doesn't add up to a victory. So, okay. You know, it is, I mean, I'm just watching with amusement at the whole Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley thing because the Koch network endorsing Nikki Haley, I mean, that must have just been brutal for Ron because he really, he was running his campaign in this unusual way of relying on that super pack

much more extensively than campaigns you usually do. And that's because you can take in these unlimited contributions. So he felt like, OK, I've got these few billionaires who say they're all in for me, Ken Griffin and co. And so I can take in unlimited funds there. And yeah, they don't get as good ad rates and I don't have direct control, et cetera. But since we can get so much money there, that's the way to go. And now you can see that strategy as the donors are fleeing him and they're instead, I mean, they have no loyalty. They're picking Nikki for whatever reason. She's the flavor of the moment.

And Ron is kind of underwhelmed and underperformed and doesn't seem like he's got the juice. And so now he's left in this really dire situation. My sense is basically that if he doesn't win Iowa, he's going to drop out and he could possibly drop out even before that. But I think what's going to happen if I had to make a prediction, he drops out after Iowa. There is some big, you know, effort to unify behind Nikki and try to make her the anti-Trump, like the one to beat Trump, etc., etc. But it's already way too late. It's already way too late for that to have any prayer of succeeding. Yeah. Oh, no, you are absolutely correct on that. And actually, some of that comes through

from the DeSantis campaign itself. In a more recent interview with Meet the Press that happened just on Sunday, where he's like, we are going to win Iowa. And when you start making benchmarks like that, I think like you're right, Crystal, which is they're laying it so that they can make that case to the donors. This is what we're going to happen. But then it puts you in a precarious situation where they can rug pull you almost immediately, whoever is left, if you don't end up winning the state. Let's take a listen to what he said. Well, let's talk about the stakes on caucus night. If you don't come in at least second, would you then drop out of the race? How critical is Iowa?

Well, we're going to win the caucus. We're doing everything that we need to do it. But what if you don't, Governor? And I've said from the beginning, we are we are we're going to win. We're going to win. We're going to win the caucus. Bottom line is Iowa do or die for you, Governor. We're going to win Iowa. I think it's going to help propel us to the nomination.

But I think we'll have a lot of work that we'll have to do beyond that. I don't think you take anything for granted. And I do. I do recognize that there have been people that have won and who've not gone on to win the nomination. I think this year is a little bit different. This year's a little bit different. Yeah. Anytime you had to say that qualifier, it's no bueno. Let's put this up there.

Just in case wondering about what Iowa actually looks like. Here we have our own custom graphic from the Real Clear Politics Average. Oh, look at that. Donald Trump at 47% currently in the Iowa Republican caucus. He barely is even campaigning there. Ron DeSantis, who, let's remember this, has the endorsement of the sitting governor of the state, is only at 17%. Nikki Haley at 14%, Tim Scott at 6%, Vivek Ramaswamy at 5%. 47%, I mean, you just can't, it can barely compete with that. In any other normal race that the media is covering, this is a complete open and shut case.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying you should cancel or anything like that. I support it. But you can't say with a straight face that you're going to win Iowa. Let's take a little bit of a turn over to New Hampshire where the Nikki Haley dream is currently going on. Oh, Trump, 45%. Nikki Haley, 19. Chris Christie, 11. Ron DeSantis, 8.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 7. DeSantis losing to Chris Christie and Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. To be fair, Chris Christie always did particularly well in New Hampshire. He had a big moment there in 2016. It's definitely because of proximity and all these other things. It's definitely more a favor to somebody like him and to Nikki Haley as well. Also, independents vote in New Hampshire. Independents can vote in New Hampshire.

It can be a little bit different. That said, 45%. Like, you're not getting over that hump. And also, if you factor in a media bump, whenever you win like you do in Iowa and quick succession, you have something like New Hampshire come, what is that really going to account for in a multi-field scenario? It did not work for Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2016. He got the media bump that you hope to get from actually winning. Didn't matter. Marco got second.

Same thing. It didn't matter. Jeb Bush, I believe, came in fifth, maybe sixth in New Hampshire. It just demonstrates that money, all of that, even winning Iowa, the bump whenever you're going against someone like Trump, who is such a beloved figure in the Republican Party and now after he's already won the presidency, it's just an impossible task. It probably always was. And if I could go back, I'm not sure DeSantis should have run ever in the first place. Although there's a whole shoot your shot.

There's a shoot your shot argument I think that you should always make. But I don't know. I think this is irreparably hard. It's political. There's a shoot your shot argument, I think, that you should always make. But I don't know. I think this is irreparably hard, his play. Yeah. I mean, I just also feel like DeSantis just doesn't have it. Whatever it is, he just doesn't have it. And so whether it was this time that he was going to lose or next time when he's going to lose to, like, Don Jr.

Or whoever comes next. Or Ted Cruz or whoever. I think it's probably just not in the cards for him. The other big issue among many that they have is DeSantis and Nikki Haley and everybody else. They don't actually want to go directly at Trump that much and his policy or, like, you know, say certainly the things that are obvious that were problems with him, like January 6th. They don't want to talk about that. And so the best argument has always been about electability. But who could believe at this point that Donald Trump's not electable?

I think Donald Trump is probably electable. I don't like it, but I think he probably is. Yeah, obviously. When you look at Joe Biden, his approval rating, the fact young people are abandoning him in droves and, you know, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans and the economy is trash and all of these things. And he's, you know, super old and can barely formulate a sentence. Then, yeah, I think Donald Trump probably can beat that guy. So to argue at this point, well, there's no way Trump can win and I'm the winner. And if you want to defeat Joe Biden, you got to go with me. I just

don't think that that is a compelling point at this point whatsoever. Yeah, we were going to cover this last week, but Sean Trendy at RealClearPolitics, who's one of my favorite election analysts, he wrote a piece called Not Only Can Trump Win, Right Now He Is the Favorite to Win, and describes it as a Republican best set to win the election since George W. Bush in 2004, which is the last time a Republican won the popular vote in this country. So people should really let these circumstances sink in. Now, it's a long time until election day, all of that, 11 months to go. But as where things stand right now, I would hell of a lot be rather Trump, not only in the primary, in the election, as opposed to Joe Biden or any of the other people he's running against. You know who else needs to have that sink in for them is the Democratic Party saga. Oh, well, that's not going to happen because that explicable move, the Florida Democratic Party has now officially put Joe Biden on the ballot in Florida, canceling their primary and effectively making it so that there will be no democracy in the state of Florida for Democrats.

Put this, please, up there on the screen. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years! Four more years! So you can see them chanting four more years. The thing is that they chanted it before there was ever going to be a primary. So let's put this, please, up there on the screen. I love the political headline here. Florida Democrats plan to cancel presidential primary, enraging Dean Phillips' campaign. Not just Dean Phillips' campaign, as we will show you, but—

Yeah, I love how they only mention him when he's not even the leading Democratic contender. Anyway, classic. Let's move past it. What they are doing, and Nikki Freed, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, says that the party has, quote, followed its standard process, and says that it is dismayed now by Dean Phillips' conspiratorial and inappropriate comments comparing the state of Florida to an Iranian regime as part of his knee-jerk reaction to long-established procedures. This comes to the delegation selection plan that they basically sped through the Democratic convention, where through bureaucratic means, they just canceled the presidential primary completely. Here is what Dean Phillips had to say about that. Hey, everybody. What happened in Florida yesterday is a tragedy and a travesty. The Florida Democratic

Party decided, just a handful of people, decided to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters in Florida by saying we're not going to have a presidential primary. I'm running for president, there are others running for president as Democrats. And this is the kind of stuff that happens in Tehran, not in Tallahassee. We've got to do something about this. I've been a lifelong Democrat. You know that. Supported our party since I was in my 20s. Been a member of Congress for three terms and was a member of House Democratic leadership. I've never seen something so absurd, so disenfranchising, and so suppressive of Democratic voters. I mean, I think he's right, Crystal. And unlike Politico, we'll mention some of the other candidates who are in the race. Cenk Uygur and Marianne

Williamson also sounded off. They had a press conference on the subject. Here's what they had to say. Marianne's at 12%. She would be, what, tied with DeSantis above Nikki Haley? She would be second among the Republicans, let alone the fact that she's second among Democrats. On which planet is that not a valid candidate? It's so absurd. It's Kafka-esque. Oh, a person polling higher than almost any challenger on the Republican or Democratic side doesn't exist? It's worth noting as well, there's one person who could put an end to all this craziness, and that's President Biden. President Biden should simply make a phone call, say this isn't right, make sure it's changed. And it would be. Such a great point.

If I was the president, I'd be like, oh, Marianne and Dean are running against me. Great. No problem. Let's hear it out. It is hurting the Democratic Party and its chances for 2024 that they are acting this way. Cenk, Dean and I are not hurting the Democratic chances in 2024. They are. Yeah, I mean, she's obviously right.

And all the candidates should be outraged at this, Crystal. And yet, I think this barely dented mainstream coverage will be an entire one. Yeah, and the only reason it dented at all is because of Dean Phillips. And so that's why I'm glad he's in the race because to have this centrist-y member of Congress who has the right credentials for the media to pay attention to and whatever that's why I'm glad he's in the race, because to have this like centrist member of Congress,

you know, has the right credentials for the media to pay attention to and whatever, helps to elevate the just brazen, undemocratic nature of this process. And of course, it goes without saying, the irony and hypocrisy of a Democratic Party that claims to be, quote unquote, saving democracy by literally canceling democracy in the state of Florida is quite something. And I think Cenk's comment there that is Kafka-esque, like that's the best word you could possibly use for this. Because so in the state of Florida, just to get into some of the nitty gritty of this, in the state of Florida, under state law, it's left up to the parties to decide who gets put on the ballot. Now, that already to me is like, eh, there should be some sort of like a formal process outside of the parties that, you know, you get this many signatures on the petition or whatever, like it is in many states. But there are other states that also have it in their law

that basically the party decides. And in those instances in other states, they looked, okay, who's eligible? You know, some of them said, okay, Cenk, he's not, you know, he's not a natural born citizen, so he's not going to be on the ballot. But they looked at it and they just put, okay, these are the contenders. They're the ones that have filed. We're putting them on the ballot. In Florida, they really did an end run here. Dean Phillips says they were reaching out to the Florida Democrats. Okay, what's your process? How do we get on the ballot, et cetera? They were supposed to submit their list of approved candidates on, I think, last Thursday. They did it before then on November 1st and just put Biden on there, didn't give anyone a heads up about how this was all going to go down and just completely canceled the primary in the state of Florida. It's truly outrageous and exposes how, you know, how hollow the Democratic Party's words about how much they care about democracy ultimately are. It's preposterous. And again, at a time when they claim Donald Trump is this, you know, threat to democracy,

which I accept after January 6th, I think that's accurate. I think he is a genuine threat to democracy and that everything's on the line and this is existential, et cetera, et cetera. But you're doing everything to guarantee that this profoundly weakened candidate in Joe Biden is the only guy that anyone has an opportunity to vote for. The other thing I was thinking about, Sagar, is like Biden is way ahead. You know, Marion's at like 12 percent, like Cenk said. So who cares? Dean Phillips is at like 8%. You know, Cenk's at like 1% or 2% in the polls that he's been put on at this point. So you got a really,

really large lead here. But I think they feel that their position is precarious. And whether it is or not, it's hard to say. But they're looking at the polls, the fact that so many Democratic voters are very anxious about Joe Biden, how many Democratic voters are very upset with Joe Biden, how many Democratic voters really hate his policy on Israel. His policy on Israel is more popular with Republicans than it is with Democrats. And they feel a sense of vulnerability, whether that is actually real or not. And so they're worried that, you know, somebody could catch fire in this moment and really take off and make a run at it, even though, you know, from the outside, you look at it and it seems like he's got this thing sewn

up. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, it's so obvious whenever, look, they are trying to, they are not trying. They are rigging it completely for Biden's benefit. In a certain sense though, Crystal, I think that is probably a good thing because they can own the decision a hundred percent should he eventually lose to Trump. And then maybe they will have a total reorganization and re-examination of their priorities. Although that already did happen and none of that ended up happening. Right. Instead, they just blamed Bernie Sanders and Russia and whatever. I wonder who will get the blame this time. Well, I mean, you can't blame him. You can't blame

primary people this time because this time around, they didn't even get to run against him for real. There was no real primary. They'll blame the third party candidates? That's true. They'll blame RFK. RFK, Jill Stein, Cornel West. That's who they'll blame this time around. This general election is going to be wild.

I mean the primaries are like very anti-democratic and there's not much drama on the Republican side either. But the general election is going to be really wild. If you have RFK, if you've got Cornell, Jill Stein, Joe Manchin, or whoever, this is going to be a different landscape, I think, than we've ever seen before. And it could be, you know, it could be kind of total chaos in terms of who actually comes out on top and whether anyone's able to get 270 electoral votes. It's going to be really interesting. Yeah, we've been reading about contingent elections here to prepare, if anybody's interested. Go ahead and Google that term before we tell you all about it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

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

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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 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. 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 dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. 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 One, 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. Okay, let's go and move on to George Santos. Santos, who will always be congressman in our hearts, was officially expelled from the House of Representatives after the ethics report. America's congressman delivered an ethics report

from the House of Representatives that accused him of using campaign funds for a variety of personal reasons. Botox, OnlyFans. Botox and OnlyFans being the most egregious examples, but many, many, many others, campaign fraud, lying about his background, deceiving the voters of the district from New York

that he eventually ended up representing. Here was the final vote tally against him. The yeas are 311. The nays are 114, with two recorded as present. Two-thirds voting in the affirmative. The resolution is adopted. Under Clause 5D of Rule 20, the chair announces to the House that in light of the expulsion of the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, the whole number of the House is now 434. That makes George Santos the sixth person ever to be expelled from the House of Representatives.

Interestingly enough, he is the only congressman to ever be expelled from the House of Representatives who was not actually convicted of a crime, which is what the justification of many of the people who voted to save Santos said, is they were like, look, he hasn't actually been convicted of this. Matt Gaetz, who also has an ethics complaint against him regarding some of the shenanigans going on with girls and potential hookers. Down in the state of Florida is actually the one who really made that point because I believe a report is coming out against him. Although he, to be very, was exonerated by the department, or not exonerated.

He was, at the very least, not prosecuted by the Department of Justice. So he's trying to say, like, look, just because you have a bad ethics complaint against you doesn't mean that if you're, unless you're convicted, then really that's the only case where you should be expelled. Santos, though, as we have previously shown people, is going out with a bang, almost certainly. Let's put this please up there on the screen. So Santos says he will now be filing official complaints. Let's go and keep these up there. He says, Monday, I will be filing an official complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics against a New York congresswoman regarding her questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means Committee. He says the same thing about Mike Lawler, who was one of those people who had campaigned against Mr. Santos and the Republican Party.

He says, Congressman Lawler owns portions of Checkmate Strategies, and he uses the same firm he is the beneficiary of to pay for services related to his campaign. I'm just sketching, that's true. It is, yeah. I mean, it says of Ray LaLotta, he says, it has been raised in local media that the congressman obtained his ID attending Hofstra in day school while he was supposed to be working

at the board of his board of elections. Sorry, the JD attending Hofstra in day school when he was supposed to be working at the board of elections. Is that a problem? And then on Congressman Menendez saying, while Congressman Menendez has not been invoked by the diligent investigation of the DOJ into his father,

there remains a question of what he did know and when did he know it. Basically, he's being a troll on all of these, but it does hit home a point of this. What is Santos really guilty of? Santos is guilty of just taking it a little bit too far outside of the official-dom. As he points out, like with Congressman Mike Lawler, there are all kinds of legal ways to be totally corrupt. And I'm not saying Lawler himself is corrupt. It's about a system where

you can work for a firm, you're allowed to work part-time for a law firm, which can get business, which literally has business before the House of Representatives. And you can still do that when you're an elected representative. As he also points out, whenever it comes to campaign funds, I remember seeing reports that what was it, Eric Cantor, the guy who lost here in Virginia, who was a house, he had spent more on steak at a high quality steak restaurant here in Washington, D.C. than his primary opponent had spent in the primary race against him. Wow. Which is only just to show people like like, if you're on campaign business,

they can pay for a hell of a lot of steak and alcohol that people are all consuming as long as you're talking about it. They pay for your travel. They can pay for your spouse's travel. They can pay for your spouse's clothes. I mean, as long as you file, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's and file the requisite paperwork and all that, you can get away with a lot of sketchy stuff whenever it comes to campaign finance. Of course, Santos took it to a whole other level, committing outright fraud and also spending money on personal items that have nothing to do with campaign business. But to me, it's only a step or so removed from a lot of legalized corruption that already exists in the electoral system. His fraud and his lies were of like tacky. Yeah, exactly.

And also very repeated and undeniable nature. I saw there was another Republican congressman who was accusing him of like stealing their credit card info. Yeah, and his mom's. And charging. Was it his mom or his wife? His mom. His mom? Oh, my God.

And charging campaign, max out campaign contributions to it. And then we know from this report, allegedly, that he was then using those campaign contributions as his own personal piggy bank. So, you know, I mean, that makes it pretty hard to deny that the repeated lies, the fact that it was everything, the fact that it was, you know, things he didn't even need to lie about. Every single thing that came out of his mouth. Even his name is in doubt. Like his, you know. What's his real or what's his alleged name? Whether or not he's really gay is in doubt. Remember he was married to a woman.

Like everything about this man is up for debate. And nothing is as it seems. Which is part of why I'm just so fascinated by him. Because I can't, I just, I'm not wired like that. You know, I don't know if I had guilty conscience or what, but the fact that he could just anything that he thought this person wanted to hear in the moment, he would tell them, you know, oh, you were a volleyball star. I played volleyball. Oh, you went to this college. I went to that college. What, you know, oh, you're looking

for like a token gay conservative who doesn't, you know, is critical of trans rights. I'll be that guy. Like, I'll be that guy. No problem. Let me lean into that. Oh, you're looking for like a token gay conservative who doesn't, you know, is critical of trans rights. I'll be that guy. Like, I'll be that guy. No problem. Let me lean into that. Oh, you're looking for, you know, someone to speak at your Jewish event. I'm Jewish. Sure. I'll speak at your event. It's wild to me. And I guess that many other people are also interested in such a character because there's a movie that's going to be made about him. Put this up on the screen. I would watch the hell out of this. The meteoric political rise of George Santos and the web of fabulous tales that was built on her. Getting a movie treatment. HBO Films has optioned the rights to a new book.

Mark Trusano, maybe, I'm going to go with. The book is called The Fabulous, The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, which was published on November 28, 2023. He has sort of a uniquely American character. Oh, absolutely. Like uniquely American, like con artist, charlatan, snake oil salesman, the fake it till you make it all the way to becoming a member of Congress. There's some Trump-esque qualities here, but Santos doesn't quite have the talent to pull off what Trump has been able to pull off. He doesn't have the Riz, Crystal. Riz, by the way, is the Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year. Oh, really?

So I will be incorporating it more into my book. Thank you to the Gen Zs for popularizing it. But I agree with you. I mean, Santos is actually not just an American character. He's a throwback to some of the original House of Representative members during a totally rigged process and the way that snake oil and all that. What do you think the modern West and the American economy was built on in the Gilded Age and all at that time? So in many ways, he reminds me of that. I'm sad to see him go, but we will, of course, he's not going to

go out with a bang. We just saw a report that came across that no television networks are hiring George Santos. Unfortunately, honestly, for us, I would love to see him go at it now that he's totally unchained. Maybe we'll have him here on the show. He's always been pretty unchained, if we're being honest. Yeah, fair enough. I'm going to send him an invite. I'm going to send him an invite. Oh, my God.

I don't know if I can handle that. That'd be fun. I'd just be like, all right, just tell me about yourself, Mr. DeValder. We'll start there. What's your actual name? Who are you? And what are you alleging? So, anyway, it's going to be fun.

Indeed. All right. So, you brought up TV news. We got some TV news updates here. MSNBC, major shakeup of their weekend lineup, including the cancellation of Mehdi Hassan's show. Let's put this up on the screen. He confirmed it in a tweet. Yes, the Mehdi Hassan show has ended on Peacock. That's their streaming service and will be ending on MSNBC next month. Still a few weeks left. Thank you all for watching over the past three years.

Going forward, I will serve as guest anchor across prime shows and beyond. And as an on-air political analyst goes on to say, thanks for the outpouring of love and support. Thanks, of course, to my team. Humbled and appreciative. Not going anywhere. And you'll hear from me lots in 2024. Interesting. So Mehdi is one of three Muslim anchors at MSNBC who have come in for quite a bit of scrutiny and criticism because of their dissent in Israel's war on Gaza. We reported this.

You know, this happened a while ago at the beginning of the war. Put this up on the Israeli war in Gaza. MSNBC, they say, has quietly taken three of their Muslim broadcasters out of the anchor's chair since Hamas's attack on Israel last Saturday amid America's wave of sympathy for Israeli terror victims. And it also comes immediately after Mehdi did an interview with a Netanyahu spokesperson that, listen, if you guys aren't familiar with him, he's kind of famous for being a really aggressive questioner, grilling people in power. He's done famous interviews with like John Bolton, et cetera. And so he had one of those interviews with a Netanyahu spokesperson that we actually covered here because it revealed a few new details about what happened and unfolded on October 7th in particular. Here's a little bit of a taste of that.

Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one. Is that by accident or is that because Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza? Mark, you asked me a question and you said you would be brief. I haven't. You're right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. Because they're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Wendy. They're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. But they're also people your government has killed.

You accept that, right? You've killed children? Or do you deny that? No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don't know how those people died. Those children.

Oh, wow. First of all, we don't want to see a single child killed. Okay, here's my question for you, Mark. I agree with you. I agree with you. We shouldn't blindly believe anything Hamas says. But why should we believe what your government says either? Your military spokesman on Monday pointed to an Arabic document in the basement of a Gaza hospital and claimed it was a guardian list on which every terrorist writes his name. But that was false. It was just a calendar with the days of the week on it. Your colleague in the prime minister's office, Ophir Gendelman, posted behind the scenes footage from a Lebanese short film and claimed it was Palestinians in Gaza faking their own injuries.

That tweet is still up a week later. That is endless disinformation from your government, is it not? So now these clips frequently went viral on Twitter, but his show, like many other MSNBC shows, was not getting, you know, exceptionally high ratings, was not doing all that well in the ratings. And so that's what MSNBC is basically saying is it's a ratings issue. It's a cost cutting issue. I'll tell you, you know, what I'm hearing from people is, you know, the dissent on Israel is part of the picture. But the bigger picture is that he's also very, like, aggressive on social media in a way that is uncomfortable for NBC executives as well. So do I think that they're sending a bit of a message by canceling Mehdi's show and, you know, so publicly demoting him? Yes. Do I think it's like a variety of

factors that went into this? Yeah, that's probably true as well. I think that is true. I will not cry for Mehdi Hassan. I think he is a complete blowhard. He was a Russicate fanatic whenever he was on his various shows. COVID freak whenever it came to,

you know, going against the lab leak theory and all of this. I will quote again from my good friend, Zed Jelani. Having worked with Mehdi, this is a pattern. He learns very little about a topic, goes 100% full throttle with no nuance. He plays to a partisan crowd and frequently makes elementary errors, like claiming that black people cannot vote in Georgia. Now, that said, I don't support him being canceled

for his views on Israel and Gaza. My biggest problem that comes from Mehdi is exactly this, is he is a fundamentalist in everything that he believes. Now, is he a talented interviewer? Yes. But there's also a very famous clip that people can go and can watch of him talking about his, at that time, fundamentalist Islamic views and how he viewed other people. Has he evolved or not? I have no idea. But it just is demonstrative of the way that he carries himself in public. And what comes and hits for me was a video here that he did with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter files where he attempted to go after him. Let's take a listen. Your own words, Matt. You crossed that line and Musk has you. Those are your words.

The hilarity of this coming from MSNBC, which did nothing but vomit up fake Russiagate stories that came straight from the FBI for six consecutive years that you guys still haven't apologized for. Great. I wasn't there in that period, so I've got nothing to apologize. I'm asking you your words. So, Crystal, as I understand it, Ayman, how do you say it? Ayman? Ayman. Ayman will continue to be on the air. He will, I think, still have a prominent role at the network. I think he's a far more responsible person whenever it comes to this conflict. And I understand, look, you can think, still have a prominent role at the network. I think he's a far more responsible person whenever it comes to this conflict. And I understand, look, you can think he's done a good job on Gaza and all of that, but he is not a person that I would want on my side.

Even in terms of debating and holding up the record of the Biden administration, he's pushed some of the most ridiculous propaganda. So, I don't know. This is not somebody who I think should be spoken up for as some sort of like paragon of being truly independent. I think on Gaza and on Israel specifically, yes, it's an issue where he may be, quote unquote, courageous whenever it comes to his colleagues. Although I guess the only fair rebuttal is that he's no worse than many of his other MSNBC colleagues. Well, here's the thing, is are we better off with Mehdi Hassan on MSNBC or not? And I think undoubtedly the aspect of the job of

interviewing powerful people and actually challenging them, he is very good at. He is very good at. And I do think that that is a major part of the reason. And the fact that those clips of him pushing powerful people go viral on Twitter is a major part of the reason that he's main canceled. And it's not just on Israel and Palestine. I went back. I actually just Googled like many grills on YouTube. Yeah, that's his thing. Because that's his thing. He grilled John Bolton on Iraq and on war crimes. He grilled the U.S. an American U.S. ambassador on hypocrisy with regards to war crimes in Yemen. He grilled

Cedric Richmond, a Biden aide, on health care failures. He grilled Bernie on Build Back Better. He stood up for Julian Assange. Very unusual in the cable news landscape. He pressed Corinne Jean-Pierre over Biden administration failures. He pressed one of those Lincoln Project ghouls about their failures as well. He criticized identity politics of hiring Lloyd Austin as the secretary of Defense after he had served on the Raytheon as a board member. So I'm not saying I agree with Manny on everything. Manny and I have had plenty of differences and have many disagreements that he would attest to as well. But is he being fired because he's bad at the job? No. He's being fired because of the part of the job that he's actually good at and also because he's apparently not the job? No, he's being fired because of the part of the job that he's actually good at.

And also because he's apparently not boring enough on Twitter. Now they're using Eamon, who I have known for a long time and respect very much as a journalist, and especially on Israel and Palestine, where he has a depth of knowledge. They're using him to basically be like, see, it's not about the fact that he's Muslim. But do you don't think that people get the message about how loud and aggressive you're allowed to be, how far out of line you're allowed to step, especially when you're not a Rachel Maddow or you're not like their number one star or rating scatter. People are definitely getting that message loud and clear. And, you know, it also isn't lost on me that you had that ADL dude go on Morning Joe and accuse him and Eamon and Ali Velshi of like Hamas talking points in this absolutely outrageous thing. So I think that they felt like they needed to do something to appease people who

were accusing them of being like Hamas propagandists. I think that's fair. I guess it's just, you know what I think the fundamental difference is, is that he is somebody who assumes the absolute worst faith of every single person who does not agree with him. That has not been my experience because many has disagreed with me on Twitter and said it in an actually very respectful way of like, listen, we disagree. But he agrees with a lot of what you think. No, but especially it was on this fraught thing about like, you know, economic, what was the thing that people, economic insecurity, that this was part of electing Trump. And he very much

disagreed with that. He was like, no, it's the racism. And I'm like, listen, it's complex and you can't look at economics and say, and that's a very fraught issue. And he very much disagreed with that. He was like, no, it's the racism. And I'm like, listen, it's complex and you can't look at economics and say, and that's a very fraught issue. And he disagreed with me very respectfully without attacking my personal character. My experience has been the opposite, where I basically had to mute him because he constantly blew up me and Zed for exactly actually on the same topic. So I think his orientation on whether you're a fellow liberal or like a fellow traveler or somebody who's opposed to him. And especially the type of what I perceive as identity politics and Islamism that he likes to justify and push here in America. That stuff drives me absolutely crazy.

Give me an example. I mean, the video that he is, the video that shows him virally. Okay, who cares from how long ago? He's never apologized for his views. Was it on MSNBC? No. No, so it has how long ago? He's never apologized for his abuse. Was it on MSNBC? No. No, so it has nothing to do with the cancellation. This is about the character, about the person who we are disagreeing with.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the disagreement him and I had was even before he was on MSNBC. But my point that remains here is about the way that I think that he has approached most of his detractors, including people like Zedd, who actually also had to block him. So, look, maybe all of this is a little bit too personal. But some of what Glenn Greenwald has brought up, let's go and put this up there, please, up on the screen, is, and he makes this point, I think what you're saying, MSNBC anonymously is denying that Mehdi's criticism of Israel had anything to do with his firing, insisting instead that it was due to his almost invisible ratings, and Mehdi will not say. Go to the next part, and this is where I'm curious what you think.

He says it could be anything. One would expect a journalist to provide the explanation, but I guess Mehdi doesn't want to anger the corporate bosses so he is staying quiet and then surmises that people with self respect would quit. So what is it like in this situation having worked inside the beast where like what are the strictures that he would have around him? Where it, like, what does his non-compete look like? What is he allowed to do?

What is he allowed to say? I mean, he definitely, if he was going to speak out and quit right now, he would definitely have, at the very least, a legal fight on his hands. Okay. So it's not just about, like, I mean, listen, I think it's very difficult to stay if he's indeed been canceled

for effectively doing his job well. I do think that that is a difficult thing. I do think Medi, you know, he was at the intercept. Then he moved over to MSNBC. I think he wants to be in mainstream press. And so that may factor into his decision making, too. I don't know. But yeah, I think they put you in a bind to make it so that it is very difficult to speak out against them.

If you left, you'd have this long non-compete or you couldn't do anything for some period of time. Or like I say, you have this huge legal battle on your hands. And Tucker basically told Fox News to shove it, but Tucker also has a lot more money, is a lot more famous. I support Matty going independent. I think his non-competes are BS. Even if I don't like the guy, I think it's crazy if he was canceled for this particular reason. But it also is a little bit of nature of the beast in terms of when you're working for this organization. You know what I would say is, ironically, I actually think that Metty would do a lot better independent.

No question. Totally right. The things he's doing at MSNBC, like MSNBC audience is not all that interested in like holding Biden officials to account or standing up for Julian Assange. So in that way, he may have been an awkward fit there just based on this sort of small sycophantic audience that they've cultivated. And his clips do routinely go viral online. So he's sort of better at that game than he is necessarily at the cable news game. So I think if he did step out on his own, I think he could be successful. I think that maybe the reason why is, as you said, he's famous for interviews, but Karim Jean-Pierre is not going on independent YouTube.

That's right. That's exactly right. Or the Israeli president is not going. Listen, we've tried. It's not going to happen. So if he wants to remain famous for his interviews and all that, it is going to be tough. But I mean, I guess that just comes down to the nature of the beast for what he's doing. This, by the way, is why Cable was flawed and also an inherently bad model. Yes. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

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

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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. 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 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. 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 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. Bristol, what are you taking a look at? Well, we may never again see a headline that so perfectly encapsulates the U.S. policy toward Israel's total war on Gaza. U.S. sends Israel 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs for Gaza war. After sending massive bombs, artillery shells, U.S. also urges Israel to limit civilian casualties. What a sick joke this all is at this point, leaking to the U.S. press how concerned you are about civilian deaths while expediting shipments of the very weapons that Israel has used to slaughter innocents on a scale that we have not

seen from a developed country in modern history. Every day, practically every hour, we learn of some new fresh horror. Here is one of the very latest. A journalist allowed into a hospital that had been forcibly evacuated by the IDF makes the most grisly of discoveries. Four premature babies in a state of unimaginable decay, their bodies eaten by worms and mauled by stray dogs after doctors were forced to evacuate that facility. Now, the nurse responsible for their care described the wrenching decision to leave them behind in an interview with the Washington Post. He said, quote, I felt like I was leaving my own children behind. That nurse took the baby he considered to be the strongest and most able to survive without oxygen with him when they were all forced to flee.

That baby was then taken to al-Shifa Hospital, which was raided mere days later. Now, I want you to understand, these atrocities and the many others we've witnessed in Israel's assault on Gaza, they are not normal. They are not the unavoidable cost of war. These babies and the other untold thousands of innocents who have died are not collateral damage. They are intentional targets. And a new expose by 972 Magazine lays out the exact strategy that lies behind what can only be called a campaign of all-out terror. In this war, civilians and civilian infrastructure, things like hospitals, are targeted directly with the explicit goal of shocking the population. And in a dystopian

flourish, AI is being used to accelerate the carnage. Here is that piece from 972, a mass assassination factory inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza. Now, when you look at today's videos of children buried under rubble, entire residential neighborhoods destroyed, lifeless bodies of babies in the arms of grief-stricken parents. Keep these words in mind from one of 972's sources. Quote, nothing happens by accident. When a three-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it's because someone in the army decided it was not a big deal for her to be killed. Israel's periodic wars on Gaza have never been the beacon of humanitarian warfighting that Israel has presented to the world, but some of the minimal guardrails that did prevent mass civilian death have been lifted in this current assault.

This is evident in Israel's overwhelming focus on two types of targets, private residences and so-called power targets, which are things like hospitals, apartment buildings, infrastructure, and other key centers of civil society. During the first five days of this war, half of the targets that were bombed were, quote-unquote, power targets. And the goal of this bombing campaign was not to eradicate Hamas, as Israel has claimed. Instead, the goal was to, quote, create a shock that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas, as one source put it to 972. Another source

explained that the buildings only needed the most remote connection to Hamas or Islamic Jihad to be targeted for complete destruction. Quote, if they would tell the whole world that the Islamic Jihad offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism, so they do not say it. In other words, terror is the explicit goal here. It's the very same goal, by the way, as Hamas on October 7th, except in this instance, it's terror by a supposedly civilized nation-state

armed to the teeth by the world's superpower and given diplomatic cover with zero red lines. The attacks on these power targets have also stood out for their unprecedented scale of civilian death. According to 972, in prior wars, civilians were more consistently warned ahead of bombings. The IDF would leaflet, they would send messages, they would use a quote-unquote roof knock to warn the building was about to be attacked. They would use drones then to even monitor civilian departures to make sure people were leaving. Not so in this war, where many buildings have been bombed with no warning and with hundreds of civilians still inside. Another major focus of Israel's bombing campaign has been the private residences of low level Hamas operatives. As one source who was unhappy with this practice said, quote,

in the majority of cases, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. I remember thinking that it was like if Palestinian militants would bomb all the private residences of our families when Israeli soldiers go back to sleep at home on the weekend. The blanket assault on these private homes, where many families were still located, has been aided by a new AI tool, which uses algorithms to produce targets. According to The Guardian, this has dramatically accelerated the IDS target-generating capability from 50 per year to 100 per day. Quote, Hamas members who don't really mean anything live in homes across Gaza,

so they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there. Taken together, these reports thoroughly debunk the already preposterous idea that Israel was surgically targeting Hamas. No. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari was closer to the truth when he said this, quote, The emphasis is on damage, not on accuracy. These are the tactics that the U.S. government is meekly protesting as the bombing campaign now moves to the south, where most of Gaza's 2.2 million residents have been forced to flee. Already, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in that renewed assault. If this bombing of six residential high-rises in Khan Yunis is any indication, the focus on destroying power targets to terrorize the entire population remains firmly in place.

And the truth is, the Israeli government can't be so stupid as to think that any of this is actually in the long-term security interests of Israel. To think that massacring children by the thousands is going to lead the Palestinian population to turn on Hamas, it will not lead the population to turn on Hamas. It will certainly lead some of the population to turn into Hamas or to embrace other groups advocating violent armed resistance. No, the real goal is to put on a show for the Jewish-Israeli public, 58% of whom do not believe the IDF has been brutal enough, and only 1.8% of whom believe that they have gone too far. The real goal is a last-ditch attempt by Bibi to stay in power by showing just what a monster he can be to satisfy a monstrous public appetite for death and destruction. As one source explained to 972, there is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7th, and they are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image of victory that will salvage their reputation. Apparently, that sought-after image of victory is that of decomposing babies left to suffocate and starve in a power target also

known as a hospital. Real tough guys. And so, Sagar, these are the details. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

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

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast True Crime Plus. So don't wait. 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 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. 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 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 21 Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Wanted to talk a little bit more about Bibi Netanyahu and what he might be thinking in this moment. So excited to welcome Scott Horton. He's with the Libertarian

Institute and also Antiwar.com. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you, man. Thank you very much for having me, both of you. So let's start with this. Put this news article up on the screen. We mentioned this earlier from The Intercept. They're reporting Netanyahu's goal for Gaza, quote, thin population to a minimum. He is apparently tasked, one of his top advisors, with coming up with a plan to, quote unquote, thin the population and pressure the U.S. to go along with this plan. Scott, I wanted to talk to you because you have sort of studied Netanyahu and his political ideology and how he's operated for a long time. So when you see a headline like that, what is your reaction to it? And how does this dovetail with Netanyahu's

political ideology throughout his career? Well, I mean, just with the last thing first there, I think this represents the complete failure of the Netanyahu doctrine and his panic. He has to keep the war going as long as he can to stay in office, and he has to try to figure out how to make his legacy as the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history be anything other than the catastrophe of October the 7th. And so he's got to come up with something. And this is his brilliant idea, is he's going to cleanse the Gaza Strip.

All this talk about targeting Hamas. You know, I've been talking out of both sides of their mouths for two months now, right? Man, maybe we'll just get rid of all the Palestinians. And then they go, no, we're just targeting the bad guys. And we're real sorry if some innocent civilians get in the way, but not that sorry, but it is what it is. And then they go, no, but we really want to kick them all out into the Sinai Peninsula. Or then I can't even believe this. This is just, this alone is world history. The Wall Street

Journal published an article by two Israeli ministers saying, you take them. Yep. And I mean, this is just incredible. And they've leaked all various kind of trial balloons saying, yeah, we'll give 25,000 to all different countries all around the world. You say you love the Palestinians so much. Why won't you help us cleanse them off of their land? And so this is, I guess, supposed to be Netanyahu's big accomplishment.

So he can go down in history as anything other than the guy whose doctrine, the official Netanyahu doctrine, completely blew up in that society's face on October the 7th. Scott, Daryl Cooper, our mutual friend, recommended that I talk to you. And whenever Daryl tells me that you're a guy who's gone really deep on this, I'm like, he knows the ins and outs. And so something I'm curious, as you talked about the Netanyahu doctrine, if you could take a step back about Netanyahu, his relationship to Hamas, to Palestinian statehood, going back throughout his career, and how a lot of it had culminated not only with October 7th, but with the policy that they're moving towards right now. Yeah. So, I mean, what the heck? I'll go back to 1996 when he first was prime minister,

a guy who ended up being Dick Cheney's guy, David Wormser, along with Richard Perle, probably the most powerful of the neoconservatives of the first W. Bush term era. These guys in Douglas fight, they wrote a plan called a clean break and it was for Netanyahu and what it said was we want regime change in Iraq in order to weaken Iran Syria and Hezbollah so that we don't have to live up to the Oslo Accord and give the Palestinians their state and the thinking is completely crazy but the idea was that if Israel and or America could do a coup or ultimately a war in Iraq, that Jordan and Turkey would be dominant in Syria. And then they would force the Shiite clergy in Najaf to force Hezbollah to stop being

friends with Iran and be nice to Israel instead. And then once the pressure on Israel's northern front is relieved, then they won't have to deal in good faith with the Palestinians and negotiate over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. So as in the deal and their sworn promises. So this is the whole point of the Iraq War, of Iraq War II, was to help Israel so they wouldn't have to give justice to the Palestinians. And so Netanyahu was, and in fact, he later was caught on candid camera, and anyone can watch this on YouTube, bragging about how he fooled Bill Clinton at Y River and had promised he's going to make these concessions toward a Palestinian state. But ha ha, Area C is two thirds of the whole thing, sucker, and all this. He talks all about it. And he says, Americans, 80% of Americans support us.

It's absurd. America is easily moved. They'll do whatever I tell them. And so then Sharon was prime minister from, I guess, 2000 or very early 01 or very late 2000 through 05 when he had his stroke or late 05 when he had his stroke, or late 05 when he had his stroke. So Sharon had this doctrine. He was also Likud with Netanyahu, although they ended up splitting

and he created his own party, Kadima. But he had a policy which avowedly at the time was sabotage of the peace process. They called the disengagement, and you'll hear pro-Israel hawks all the time say, gee, we gave them a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and all we got in return is rockets. Well, that's just not true. They withdrew, but they didn't end the occupation. Israel kept complete and total control of the Gaza Strip. Essentially, they just took the warden and the prison guards and moved them to the outer

perimeter, but it's still a prison. It's nothing like a sovereign state. Israel kept total control over their airspace, their borders, their taxation, their revenue, their fishing rights offshore, every single thing. The occupation didn't end. And in fact, I'll urge your audience to Google these terms. It'll come right up. There's no mistake in it. It's Ariel Sharon formaldehyde. And that's, of course, the preservative

that you use for corpses, right? when you're preparing them for burial. And so the quote is from Dove Weissglass. It's Dove with no E, Dove Weissglass. And he worked for Sharon, an advisor to Sharon, and he's explained to Haaretz, the withdrawal, this is again, the 2005 so-called disengagement. The withdrawal is formaldehyde. It puts the peace process in formaldehyde. It means that with the Palestinians divided and conquered, those in charge in Gaza, they can't resort to participation in any international organizations or any kind of negotiation. And we can say, in fact, he says, with the blessing of the Congress and the president, we got a no one to talk to certificate. Like they always say that we just have no partner for peace. Well, we have a no one to talk to certificate and we won't have to talk to them until Gaza

becomes Norway, meaning, I guess, a very polite and harmless and nonviolent society. In other words, never. And then so Ehud Olmert was in there in the meantime between Sharon and Netanyahu. And he was a bit less worse than the two of them, although he was Sharon's guy. But he didn't really make any progress while he was in there toward any real negotiations. And then when Netanyahu came in, the Netanyahu doctrine basically goes like this. He was coming into a situation where all of the Sunni kings of the Arabian Peninsula, all of them sock puppets of the American empire, essentially,

they had promised that they would never normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians got an independent state. And the Saudis had put forward their peace plan, a very reasonable one, in 2002 and had repeatedly suggested that, I think in 2007, it was the basis of the Annapolis talks, possibly. Anyway, very reasonable proposals for a two-state solution. But then Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, figured out that no, everybody's got a price and the American people can afford to borrow enough from South Korea or somebody to pay it. And so what we're going to do is we're going to give Bahrain F-16s, we're going to give UAE F-35s, We're going to forgive Sudanese debt. And the Trump administration is going to recognize Morocco's seizure of northern Western Sahara. And with these bribes, and then they're working

on Saudi Arabia. These are called the Abraham Accords. And with these bribes, what they did was they succeeded in getting the Sunni sock puppet GCC kingdom regimes to go ahead and normalize relations with Israel, which on the surface is great. That's what we want is every nation to get along, open trade, lower and lower tariffs, and more and more commercial relationships, and fewer and fewer political relationships so that everybody in the world can get along. That's fine. But what it was really about was screwing the Palestinians. It was saying, you're not going to get your independent state, and you are not going to get independent citizenship in one state or in any kind of binational state.

You lose. And people can go and look at Netanyahu's speech that he gave to the United Nations just two weeks before the October 7th attack, where he holds up a piece of paper. He shows the map. He's always got some visual aid. This time he shows the map of one state from the river to the sea. There's no carved out piece of the West Bank or Gaza there. And what he's saying is, that's it, we won. The Netanyahu doctrine has proved that I do not have to negotiate with the Palestinians. I do not have to negotiate with the Palestinians. I do not have to concede citizenship rights or independence to them. And I can get what I want anyway.

And the Palestinians, they're just going to have to get used to living on their bellies. Scott, can you talk a little bit about these quotes that have been attributed to Netanyahu talking about Hamas, where he says, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. He also said reportedly this is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank. Can you put those quotes in context for us? Yeah, I mean, that's the other half of the Netanyahu doctrine right there. So the first part is we want to essentially get over the hurdle of dealing with the Palestinians in order to make a deal with the Sunni Arab states. And then the other half was making sure that Mahmoud Abbas, who Donald Trump talked about, like, oh, he's such a

nice old grandpa. He doesn't come across like Yasser Arafat even, much less Hamas, right? And so that's a real problem from Likud's point of view. They don't even care as much about Gaza. They want that West Bank, that land. And the Palestinians there, they're just in the way. We're going to have to figure that out later. Right now, it's facts on the ground. But if the consensus in America and Europe and what passes for the left in Israel is that, no, we have to deal with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority and give them a two-state solution, like in the promise, then that ruins the Netanyahu doctrine. They want that land. So in order to prevent that, Netanyahu essentially accelerated that Ariel Sharon policy. Now, just for time, I'll skip this, but I'll drop a great footnote for you, okay?

Everybody knows there was the election of 06, where Hamas won a plurality, not a majority, 17 years ago. And then there's a great article called The Gaza Bombshell. You got to read it. It has quotes from David Wormser telling the truth about it in there, even. It's incredible. It's The Gaza Bom bombshell by David Rose. And it's about how they tried to do a coup against Hamas after the election in favor of the PA.

But that blew up and failed. And that was how Hamas took over the strip. And that was, of course, before Netanyahu came back. That was during Ehud Olmert. But then when Netanyahu came back, he decided this is great. Just like with formaldehyde and the Palestinians divided and conquered, now they're divided and conquered plus. Now, not only are they divided geographically in this way, but now you have Hamas in control of Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. And so if anyone ever says, it's time for you guys

to negotiate with the PA, they can point at Hamas in Gaza and say, nope, we have no partner for peace. You don't expect us to negotiate with these terrorists, do you? And so there's the one famous quote that you just read there, Crystal, comes from Netanyahu briefing the leaders of the Likud party in the Knesset. And again, the quote is, we have to bolster Hamas. He says, transfer them money. And that means pressuring Qatar to transfer the money, basically. And in order to what? To quote, to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state. And now here's what you do. You go to antiwar.com slash Scott, because I collect these quotes like Hot Wheels, okay? And I got about 10 or 12 of them for you from not just Netanyahu, but Bezalel Smatrich, who is his finance minister, who says

the PA is a liability. Hamas is an asset. He says, in this game of delegitimization, Hamas is an asset. They can't go to the UN. They can't go to the International Criminal Court. They can't put us in a situation where we might need the US to come and veto a resolution against us. They can't do nothing. And the more we have Hamas to point at, then the better situation we're in. And the question even was, yeah, but isn't Hamas dangerous? And he ends with, yeah, I don't

think we need to worry about that. Just like Netanyahu in that quote that you read there, Crystal, ends with, don't worry, we control the height of the flames. And because of this imperial hubris, that's what reached out and got them on October the 7th. They thought that they had this perfectly in hand. As long as we have these good little pet terrorists in Gaza to point at and scapegoat and say, we have no partner for peace. Everybody repeat after me. We have no partner for peace. See the alliteration? There are two P words. You know it's true. We have no partner for peace. And you can memorize it and you can repeat it so you know it's right. And it was some of the most successful Hezbollah probably in history, in fact.

Yeah, so true. Man, dropping knowledge here, Scott Horton. You've given us an incredible amount of background here, sir. Where can people find out more about your work? Just antiwar.com slash Scott? Yes, sir. That's my latest piece. My latest piece is about the current war at antiwar.com slash Scott. And I do have all the best quotes of Likud talking about why they really deliberately pursued this policy of supporting Hamas. It's called Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired. And I'm also the director of the Libertarian Institute. And it happens to be our fun drive right now. If you like what you hear, folks, libertarianinstitute.org slashired. And I'm also the director of the Libertarian Institute. And it happens to be our fun drive right now.

If you like what you hear, folks, libertarianinstitute.org slash donate. And I'm the author of the book Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Excellent. We will have a link

to all those in the description. We really appreciate you taking your time. I don't think this is the last we'll see of you, sir. So thank you. Thanks, Scott. Great to chat with you again.

Appreciate it. Yeah, our pleasure. Okay, we'll see you guys later. We got a great show for everybody tomorrow. I know a lot of cops. 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. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is season two of the war on drugs. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. It's kind of star studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios.

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. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila.

And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms. But not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe.

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.