Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/14/24: Senate Passes Ukraine Israel Aid, House Impeaches Biden Border Sec, Biden Spox Says IDF More Moral Than US Military, Dems Flip George Santos NY Seat, Bill Maher Smacked Down On Inflation, And Pakistan Reels From Election Chaos

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss the Senate passing the Ukraine Israel funding package, House GOP impeaches Biden border Sec, Biden Spox says IDF more moral than US military, Democrats flip George Santos seat in NY special election, Bill Maher smacked down by guest on inflation denial, and Pakistan reels from election chaos.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. 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. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? and subscribe today. 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 Glott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir.

Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. We have an amazing show today, don't we, for this Valentine's Day for everybody out there, Wednesday, February 14th. That's Ryan doing a Sager impression

as producer Mac implored us seriously in the studio before we started. We do have good news, though, for everyone on this Valentine's Day. We're running a special right now, 25% off, BreakingPoints.com, to see our focus group results with RFK Junior voters early. Those will be out today. Yeah, great deal. So hurry up, pause this, go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member. Become a premium member, which also, by the way—

You're from the RFK stands. RFK stands, and it means that every week you get counterpoints, the full show in your inbox early as well. So you get a lot with the breakingpoints.com premium membership, 25% off right now. Ryan, so much breaking news. The House voted actually to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last night. This time they got him. They got him this time. We're going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about the breaking news out of New York's 3rd District where election results are in. The new George Santos. The new George Santos. Is a Democrat. We will start by going to the upper chamber where the bill on Ukraine-Israel aid is pending. Could go over the House. We're not sure exactly how that's going to work out, but we do have some breaking updates on that story. We're going to talk about updates out of Israel yesterday. We're going to talk about inflation as well. And we have a very interesting

guess. Yes. So we've been covering the drama in Pakistan a lot on this show, as you guys know. The elections were held last week. And today we're going to be joined by the former chief of staff to Imran Khan, whose party resoundingly won those elections. But the United States in cahoots with its generals over there is busy trying to trying to steal it. Shabazz Gill is the kind of chief representative for Imran Khan's party here in the United States. He's here on asylum because he was the subject of some absolutely brutal torture under the current regime. We won't get into the details of that, but we'll get into where this heads from now, because it is very clear that Imran Khan's party won a mandate to

govern. It is also equally clear that the military establishment there is going to do everything they can to stop him from being able to govern and keep him in jail. I'm really looking forward to the interview. Very interesting stuff. Let's start in the Senate, though, where, again, they passed that Ukraine-Israel aid bill. Don't forget Taiwan. It's really funny that we're spending $8 billion to help facilitate a war with China over Taiwan. And it just kind of, even in my own article on this, I put it in parentheses, but it's $8 billion. Just a meager sum.

For potentially conflict with China. Yeah. I mean, it kind of warrants, I should have taken those parentheses out. So that's why I'm mentioning it here. Ryan's editing himself on air. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and put a one up on the screen. So Mitch McConnell just yesterday urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to take up that bill because obviously after passing Senate, you have to go to the House. But McConnell, of course, said he would not be, quote, so presumptuous as to tell him how to do it. It's, Ryan, amazing, because this means that Mike Johnson, who just lost, but Democrats actually gained a seat. So he loses how many people that he can have in his margin. What's he down to now?

So he can afford to lose two people on every vote, and he lost three on the Mayorkas impeachment, which passed yesterday. We'll get to that in just a moment. But this is actually pretty amazing. You have now Mike Johnson, who doesn't have the margins to pass this bill because there's no border funding attached to it. Congressman told— On his own insistence. Yeah. Well, absolutely. But also the insistence of their voters. The Republican voters do not want them to pass a bill. And actually, that's a problem with Democratic voters too, increasingly, which is that not just aid to Ukraine, but aid to Israel. It feels to a lot of people like the spigot has been turned on.

And it's sort of like half the country thinks that we've sent. In polling, the numbers specifically are different in every poll, obviously. But polling broadly finds that people around half the country thinks we've spent too much money or sent too much money to Ukraine already. So Democrats are just plowing through with aid to Ukraine. But I think we even have, if we can put aid to up on the screen here, you can see this is the quote from Reuters. After months of negotiations and political infighting, the lawmakers approved the measure in a 70 to 29 vote that comfortably exceeded the chamber's 60 vote threshold for passage and sent the legislation onto the House.

22 Republicans joined most Democrats to support the bill. Now, you're not going to get that level of support on the House side. It tore Republicans on the Senate side apart, Ryan. It's remarkable the, what's the best way to put it, the explosion of a lot of these tensions that have been simmering under the surface. So, for example, some 10 Senate Republicans, we don't actually even know who, because it was a secret vote, voted against McConnell for minority leader last time around. And this exploded those tensions to the surface in a way that I think has been a threat McConnell hasn't seen in a very, very long time, if ever, probably. The backlash to McConnell in the Senate side was huge. Not enough to tank the bill, but enough that the House Republicans are going to follow along with those Senate Republicans that were extremely frustrated by McConnell. And briefly, let's talk about a little bit what's in this bill.

So put up A3 here. So this is a $95 billion aid package. $60 billion of it is set aside for the Ukraine war effort. $14.1 billion to Israel. $8 billion to Taiwan. $400 million for other stuff. Now within that is roughly $10 billion in humanitarian aid, which is dispersed between the West Bank, Gaza, Ukraine also, and also Sudan. You had some Democrats who were opposed to the Israel war money,

but supported the Ukraine money, like Chris Van Hollen, who Crystal talked about yesterday. He also cited the aid that was in there. So this is one of those packages where they put lots of things together. And that way, if a member of Congress opposes like one of the three, they end up voting for it. And that's how you can get through things that most people are against. However, the Ukraine aid is interesting because if you did put it up as a standalone, it would pass, right? One of the House Republicans said that just quite simply, or said this whole package would pass, actually, if you just get it onto the House floor. There's much more resistance among Republicans at this point to the Ukraine

war money than Democrats. It's been quite kind of a sea change. You would not have expected that, say, 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, you know, and it was a smart move constituent-wise actually for Republicans in Washington to say, to demand, you know, say, wait, listen, we have a majority in the House. And, you know, Democrats don't have all that big of a majority in the Senate, but with a majority in the House, we should actually be throwing our weight around a little bit. And that's where they got the idea to say, if you are going to continue funding the Ukrainian military effort, humanitarian aid to Ukraine, then you're going to attach to it border security. And what they meant by that was not millions and millions of dollars to Customs and Border Patrol protection. It was to actually reform the system. And James Lankford, basically,

the bipartisan quote-unquote deal that has been talked about over and over again, was brokered basically by James Lankford and Mitch McConnell and didn't even have support. Those are like the two people in the Senate who supported it. Other Senate Republicans in leadership couldn't even get behind the deal that these two members worked out with Chuck Schumer, essentially. So it's kind of like the way the media is covering it. I saw just now as I was reading some of the coverage that the far right tanked the border deal, but really it was the establishment right that tanked the border deal by knowingly brokering a deal that was going absolutely nowhere, that was going to be done on arrival, because it was so, so opposite to what

was being demanded by mainstream conservatives, knowing that they were going to have to go defend it in their district where people are demanding something completely different, Ryan. So the discharge petition is now what is being talked about, which would allow Democrats, if they could get enough votes, to circumvent Republican leadership and get the bill to the floor for a vote. Because when you have a majority in the House, even if it's a slim majority, you control the votes. And if Mike Johnson doesn't even want to bring this bill to a floor for the vote, which he doesn't, and it could actually be a problem. I'm curious for your take on this with Justice Dems squad members who don't want to get behind this either. And Dems actually, the sort of coalition of the political establishment, they need Justice Dems to get a bill like this.

Or they need a handful of Republicans, right? Because if they lose some Democrats on the left, they need to pick up some Republicans. Which they could probably do. I mean, obviously, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, they're not voting for, and a decent number of other Democrats, we should start a whip count to see, who aren't ready to support this $14 billion for Israel while, and this is very important context that we'll get to later in the show, while Israel is planning an invasion of Rafah, which is an enclave of somewhere between 1.3, 1.5 million huddling and starving people. The population of Rafah before the war was something like 300,000,

400,000. Now it's quintupled because Israel has, over the last four months, repeatedly told people, you have to leave this area for your safety. And so they've moved them all down to Rafah. And now they're saying that, well, actually we have to bomb and invade Rafah as well. The U.S. has called, the State Department has called it a potential disaster if it happens. Even John Kirby said it would be a disaster if it happened. But the latest reporting is that we're not doing anything to stop it. So at the same time, you're going to then give them $14 billion. You're going to have a lot of, a handful of Democrats on the left who are going to say, no, we're not doing that right now, which to your point, right, means you're going to need

Republicans then to join with Democrats to implement this discharge petition. 218 is the number that they would need. Yeah, I think it's never been done successfully. There have been threats of a discharge petition in the past, but I don't think there's ever been one that's actually been implemented. If the House of Representatives ever does successfully do a discharge petition, it will be to fund wars. Yeah, that's for damn sure. So there's a shot. So the exception on the Republican side that proves the rule actually is kind of sort of not even Republican anymore, Mitt Romney. We can play his assessment of the vote this week. The vote we will soon take to provide military weapons for Ukraine

is the most important vote we will ever take as United States senators. Oh, it just makes me gag to listen to that. It's unbelievably stupid. It's a really instructive window into how he sees it. Right. It's wild. Like that he sees this as, there's something about this war in Ukraine that the Mitt Romneys of the world have decided represents a kind of. It's the Cold War to them. Chris Van Hollen called it a hinge moment in history. Yes. These are not stupid people, but it's very hard to understand what on earth they mean by this as a hinge point in history. And Mitch McConnell speaks in this sort of lofty rhetoric about Ukraine as well. And obviously he's been the engine for so much

Republican support towards Ukraine thus far. And this is a quote when they were talking about the vote a couple of days back. He said, in the United States Senate. In this chamber, we must face the world as it is. We must reject the dimmest and most short-sighted view of our obligations and grapple instead with actual problems. This is really his quote. As they come in the harsh light of day. And today, the questions facing this body are quite simple. Will we give those who wish us more harm more reason to question our resolve? Or will we recommit to exercising American strength? Will we give those who crave our leadership more reason to wonder if it's in decline?

Or will we invest in the credibility that underpins our entire way of life? I mean, give me a break. Talk about that. And this is where a lot of constituents would say- It's like this is 1978 or something. Yeah. That there's Russians under the bed. A great, yes, exactly. And a great point that Zed Jelani made about Mitch McConnell recently on Twitter is this guy represents one of the poorest states in the country. And this is where if you see rhetoric like this, that Mitch McConnell gets so excited to express on the Senate floor, you wonder why you don't hear him talking like this about, you know, for example, to a lot of his

constituents in Kentucky, they'd say, what about the border? Why don't you talk like this about the border? Why don't you talk like this about crime? Why don't you talk like this about X, Y, and Z? They cannot help themselves but wax poetic about Ukraine because in their mind, it is still, like you said, Russians under the bed. It is, you know, Mitch McConnell's role in, you know, because Mitch McConnell also was instrumental in getting through the last aid package. Yes. Which got through before, you know, Republicans took over the House of Representatives and he made sure that there was enough money that would get us to this point. Right. And for a lot of people who are watching who, let's say they're, I think actually

pretty much everybody watching is sympathetic to the Ukrainian side. Like the Ukrainians were invaded. Yes. And it's horrifying to watch. But realistically, the way that this war is going to end is through some sort of negotiations. The more money that you continue to throw at it, the more weapons you continue to throw at it, just delays the time when this can actually get to a negotiated end. You know, Vladimir Putin talked in his interview with Tucker Carlson, which we're going to get to later, a lot about the negotiations that were unfolding a year and a half ago in Istanbul, which were scuttled by the West. And what does Ukraine have to show for the last year and a half of fighting compared to what was potentially on the table in Istanbul? Just hundreds of thousands

of dead and more territory lost. Yes. So if there was some idea that Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer had that with enough money, they were going to push all of the Russians back to off of every inch of Ukrainian territory. I still wouldn't want to see that many people die over over territory. But OK, at least that's a strategy. There's a strategy. At least I understand what you're doing here. Yeah. But Yegor Kotkin, who we've interviewed before, a Russian socialist over there, commentator, the way the way he put it was, you know, it either ends now in a negotiation because Ukraine runs out of money or it ends in two years because Ukraine runs out of people. Yes. Well, they've already run out of people.

They're now drafting people up into their 60s. So what do you do? Like, what's your long-term plan for two years from now? According to Wall Street Journal reports, they're actually, like, pressuring people into conscription. They're conscripting people in ways that seem to be illegal to fight. Oh, they're trying to find people overseas and get them to come back. Yeah. So, yeah, no plan. 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 Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no

one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's 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. Senator Rand Paul, one of the voices in the Senate that has always been a staunch opponent of Mitch McConnell and the sort of war-hungry political establishment. Here's what he had to say. I believe this is a clip from yesterday. Support what he's doing here. And I'm very outspoken that he's made a mistake. He's siding with Schumer and Biden.

But after the election, you said there's a vote after that. Should we vote for him? We'll vote for him when we can. I can say right now he doesn't represent me or conservatives in Kentucky or conservatives across the United States. He's doing the bidding of Schumer and Biden. We're only here because of just one prick. And he decides that the rest of all of our schedules and our lives and holding up this bill, getting to the House for all of this aid,

it's incredibly frustrating. And there's no work being done. It's just bad performance art. So that was also Senator John Fetterman reading off his phone and calling Mitch McConnell a prick, which, by the way, fact check. They're all. I think he reads the questions off his phone. He reads the questions off his phone. Right, because he still has the auditory processing issues so that his phone translates the questions that he hears into words.

And then he responds with his hawkish. Calling Mitch McConnell a prick. I think he was calling Rand Paul a prick there. That was Rand Paul? Yeah, because Paul, for holding the bill up. For holding the bill up. Okay, that makes more sense. He's saying he just wants to be out of town and be done with this.

Okay, so. But Paul's forcing them to stick around. Okay, thank you for the correction on that. And either way, though, the fact check is. I'm sure he has feelings about McConnell, too. They're all, if you're in the United States Senate, odds are good that you have some prickishness in you. So let's also go now to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was asked about the discharge petition maneuver just yesterday by Chad Pergram. Is there any chance of a discharge petition? Is that something you oppose? I certainly oppose it, and I hope that it would not be considered. The House has to

work its will on this. There's a deliberative process, and we're engaged in that, and we'll see how it goes. But as I've said many times, national security begins with our own board. And we'll see how it goes. And we'll see how it goes. And we'll see how it goes across the building. We'll determine that as soon as it happens. So no discharge petition and no vote on the bill on the House floor.

Meanwhile, let's put A7 up on the screen. This is one of my favorite tweets in a long time. David Frum, he says, Putin's last hope is Speaker Mike Johnson, which is an echo of the ruthless fellows, the McConnell hacks over at the Ruthless podcast, saying that Mike Lee's only, the only thing he cares about is protecting Hamas when he opposed the spending bill last week. Just some real incredible takes here. The flaw here in the thinking, again, is that if we pass this $60 billion in aid and all those weapons and ammo gets over to Ukraine, that Ukraine is then going to launch a counteroffensive that is going to turn the war around and be the undoing of Putin.

Like that's the only way you can understand the logic of a post like that. But he does not explain why this $60 billion in weapons is going to lead to a successful counteroffensive that reclaims all this territory when the last $60 plus billion didn't do do it when they had hundreds of thousands of younger people who were still alive. Right. Right. Yes. No. Absolutely. I completely agree with that. And just as a sort of glimpse into the pressure that Republicans are facing on this, we put a eight up on the screen. This is the calm strategy for Senate Republicans. and I'm sure we'll see some of this from Warhawks in general over the next couple of days. McConnell, I read that quote earlier calling people dim and short-sighted or calling their perspectives dim and short-sighted

if they object to the bill. But Senator Tom Tillis, very close with Mitch McConnell, had just a hell of a quote, one for the books. He said, our base cannot possibly know what's at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what's at stake if Putin wins. So basically, you were too dumb and ill-informed to understand why we need to rubber stamp another $60 billion to Ukraine, which, by the way, as Ryan pointed out, you could probably get it to pass if you attached some border security that mainstream conservative Republican voters were happy with. But why we should rubber stamp $60 billion to Ukraine without any of that?

You're simply too dumb and ill-informed. You can't possibly have the knowledge and understanding of a United States senator if you oppose this bill. Hell of a way to sell it, Ryan. Yeah. And from, let's say, a kind of liberal humanitarian global perspective, if you had the Ukrainian population, you know, rushing to the front lines and urging the entire world to support their war effort and to arm them so that they can continue this fight,

that would be one thing. The Ukrainian population has made very clear with their feet that that doesn't take anything away from the Ukrainians who are fighting bravely at the front lines. Many of them forced to do so. Some of them by choice.

But the vast majority of people who have had the opportunity to flee have gone to other countries. Yeah. Because they don't want to go to the front lines. There are so few men left in Ukraine. Like in the beginning, lots of families left Ukraine during the invasion. But then a lot of the women came back, but the men stayed abroad because they did not want to fight in this war, which I respect. But if they don't want to fight in the war, why are we trying to force them to? Yeah. Well, again, Ryan, spoken like somebody. When negotiations were on the table

and could be again. Spoken like somebody sort of dim and short-sighted and who couldn't possibly understand. Have you been briefed in the U.S. Senate? I guess I haven't gotten the classified briefing about how important it is. But it's also something that as an old man, like I'm in my mid-40s now. And when you get in your mid-40s, you're like, all right, I'm done with the time that I'm a fighting age military male. That's over. In Ukraine, that is not the case. Not at all. Yeah. You are dead set in the middle of that bell curve. But people report walking down the streets and just being conscripted by force. Yes. I know people who have friends over in Ukraine who have men older than me getting

dragged to the front lines. It's like, I'm trying to imagine myself at the front lines. Yeah. And, and. I can barely get out of bed in the morning. Reports. I'm going to walk through a frozen trench, dodging shells, trying to work a drone with my frozen fingers. And there are reports that based on your sort of wealth and social status, you're able to escape conscription. Oh, I'd get the hell out of there. So again, yeah, it's just why we're saying that this is the most, in the words of Mitt Romney, most important vote that you'll ever take is idiotic. It's idiotic. It's insulting.

And they continue to sort of just openly insult people who oppose it, which I don't think is actually helping their cause. I don't think it's going to help them pass anything through the House that they so badly want to. The math doesn't look good for them at all on this. But, you know, they'll pull out all of the stops to make sure it gets funded. So we'll see where it goes. So there was, we'll move on quickly. Somebody had a, in Pakistan, one of the winners, one of the winners of the recent election from Imran Khan's party said that what he was going to do when he got into power was take all of the cops who'd been raiding unarmed, just polling workers' homes and engaging in like a crackdown on the civilian population throughout these regions of Pakistan, locking up old women. He's like, it's very brave of you to smash down the door of an old woman and throw her

in prison for trying to vote. I'm going to send you instead to fight terrorism in the west of the country. So all the cops that were involved in this, guess what? You're going over there. So if people really want to show some bravery, there are opportunities for them to go to the trenches. But if... Like Malcolm Nance. There you go. Right. Didn't he go there for a little while? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Now he's back. And if he's back, then what are we doing? It's the Malcolm Nance rule. There you go. 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 fat phobia 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. I've never

found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody'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. and 6 on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

So speaking of the difficult math ahead, last night, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. And it sounds like, you know, I'm almost sort of numb to this. It doesn't sound like it's that big of a deal. It actually is that big of a deal, Ryan, because this is the first time that a cabinet secretary had been impeached since the 19th century, since actually pretty shortly after the Civil War. This is not a normal thing, even though it feels like we've gone through how many impeachments in the last five plus years or impeachment inquiries. Two impeachments of Trump. You had the Biden impeachment inquiry opened and now this impeachment into Alejandro Mayorkas was successful. After last week, we talked to Representative Greg Kassar about this. Al Green was wheeled in from the hospital to take a vote that tanked House Republicans' efforts. They

thought they had enough votes to impeach Mayorkas last week, brought the vote to the floor, and did not by one vote. The special election in New York, which we'll do a full block on later, affects these numbers because last night the vote was 214 to 213. And a California Democrat had COVID. Yes. So that's what doomed Mayorkas apparently. And so and they were constantly counting who would be able to vote, like physically would be able to vote or not. And that's what you know, but that's how they ended up bringing this to the floor last night. But they lost three Republicans. And now in the future, because there's a new Democrat replacing George Santos, they can only lose two Republicans on these votes.

So the math for Republicans going forward, just on this Mayorkas question, where you had the vast majority of their conference willing to go ahead and take this vote, they had three people who weren't. And that was just enough to tank it last week. One person last week voted against it so they could bring it to the floor again this week. But they squeaked this out with a one vote margin. And now it dies, by the way. It's going to go to the Senate. Nothing's happening in the Senate. Yes.

There's no way that this is going to make anything. Do they have to have an actual trial? No, they can just table it. Can they? We went through this with Trump. They had a motion to table. Yes, I think they can just table it. And that failed. But they, but so, but either way, they actually still have to do that, which is an important enough vote for Senate Republicans. Because. Yeah, I think they'll just table this thing. If you're, if you're voting on the motion table, it's still going to be a

question of how you vote on that, which for Senate Republicans will be kind of interesting to see where they go on that question. Um, so yeah, the first time that this happened, by the way, was 1876. So, uh, first time in nearly 150 years. Um, I don't know where they go from here, Ryan, in terms of, uh, future bills that could possibly be passed. If they have an agenda that they're able to get through, it looks like, uh, basically that's dead on arrival. Uh, that would have been Democrats, right? Because didn't Democrats sweep the midterms of 1874? In 1876. No, that was 1892. Democrats were not back in power until 1892. 1874. Republicans were still riding high in Reconstruction. We have reached Pete Ryan Grimm. That would have been a Grant cabinet secretary that they were angry at. In all seriousness, I don't think either of us will differ.

Somebody tell us in the comments, was it radical Republicans upset with some, like, Grant person not pursuing Reconstruction hard enough? I think he was legitimately, like, a criminal. It was one of those. Yeah. It was legitimately like a criminal. I think it was one of those. Yeah. It was his big corruption scandal. One of the reasons people watch CounterPoints is to hear us speculate blindly about historical events. So if that's why you tune in, and I know it's a lot of you. You can go find us.

You're welcome. Happy Valentine's Day. But in all seriousness, I know we differ, obviously, on the solutions like Crystal and Sagar do, but this is no question humanitarian crisis at the border that Congress is utterly incapable of landing on a solution to, that the executive branch has been utterly incapable of landing on a solution to. I think Remain in Mexico under Donald Trump, which was an executive branch solution to the problem, was hugely powerful.

Biden has not implemented Remain in Mexico at the levels. A court basically forced him to reinforce remain in Mexico, and he's been enforcing it at very low levels. That said, reports in Mexican media suggest that a deal that was struck from the Biden administration with AMLO in late December and early January has actually stopped in the last month a whole lot of- Because we accused him of being funded by terrorists. And gave them. Narco-terrorists. And agreed to give them a lot of money, basically, too, for border enforcement. So even like La Bestia, the train that was carrying so many migrants, they've been stopping that. They've been stopping people at Tapachula. They've been stopping people all over the country in Mexico enforcing their own immigration laws because it seems like we

actually, there's been no transparency on what really happened. It seems like though we offered to give AMLO a whole lot of money in return for this enforcement, which honestly is great news. I know it's not great news for Republicans in a political year. I think they have plenty to run on the border period. I don't give a damn really about whatever they're saying in terms of their electoral success. But it's great news for people who are not going to be kidnapped and raped and sexually abused and will reconsider whether to take those trips if it's not a legitimate asylum claim. Again, I know Ryan and I differ on the solution and on some of this, but there you know, this is there's no question of millions of people have flooded over the Biden administration. It's understandable why Mayorkas is up for impeachment, because it's it truly is a crisis in every single way.

And Ryan, you know, another thought I had yesterday is we are debating border security and Ukraine aid and not debating aid to all of these countries that get a lot of aid from the United States. But if we're concerned about border security, because so many people are fleeing countries in South and Central America and coming up to the United States, if it's a security question, by Republicans' own logic, you could secure the border with some humanitarian aid. Do you have any idea what you could do With 95 billion dollars in Venezuela Honduras Guatemala El Salvador Like all of these countries that are that are you know sending migrants absolutely up to our border But no

We're gonna send it we're gonna send it elsewhere anyway. It's just amazing that these two conversations are happening completely separate arenas. Nobody even thinks to put them together. Yeah. If it's about security, because people are flooding into the United States. I'm glad that they don't, because as I said before, the second they do start putting them together, they'll realize that Ukraine's manpower problem can be solved with the U.S. migration crisis. I don't want them to go anywhere near that. Well, it already happened with Cuban migrants.

What'd they do there? They were going to fight for Russia. Oh, good Lord. Oh, that's right. They did, yeah. Yes. And Cuba said that they had nothing to do with it and it's been stopped.

But yes, the less opportunity they have to put two and two together, maybe the better for now. 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 episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fat phobia 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. Subscribe today. 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. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. And so truce talks have collapsed between, that were brokered by Qatar,

between Israel and Hamas, as Israel makes clear that even in the face of global opposition, it intends to launch its invasion of Rafah. This is a city of some 300,000 people at the start of the war, is now a city of some, let's say, 1.3, 1.4 million people. It's impossible to know precisely. People are packed on top of each other in there. It was said to be kind of one of the last and only safe places in Gaza. Of course, it has been hit by IDF airstrikes since the very beginning, sporadically. Just recently, more than 100 people were killed in airstrikes there. From the podium, the State Department has said it would be a disaster if Israel went in. John Kirby has said it will be a disaster.

But at the same time, and you can put up the first element here about the truce talks ending inconclusively. But at the same time, the new reporting is that the United States has not only gotten basically no concessions from the Israelis, but is, and relatedly, is suggesting there will be no consequences if Israel completely rejects our insistence that they not engage in this assault. And so John Kirby was asked about what the U.S. position was on the Israeli assault on Rafah. Here he is. Oh, we never said that they can't go into Rafah to remove Hamas. Hamas remains a viable threat to the Israeli people and the Israelis and the IDF absolutely are going to continue operations against their leadership and their infrastructure as they should.

We don't want to see another October 7th. What we said is we don't believe that it's advisable to go in in a major way in Rafah without a proper, executable, effective, incredible plan for the safety of the more than a million Palestinians that are taking refuge in Rafah. They've left the north and they certainly went south out of Khan Yunus to try to get out of the more than a million Palestinians that are taking refuge in Rafah. They've left the north and they certainly went south out of Khan Yunus to try to get out of the fighting. So Israel has an obligation to make sure that they can protect them. What's crazy is that John Kirby was recently given a promotion.

He's now overseeing all comms for basically the entire kind of, I forget exactly his title, but it was a signal that the White House is pleased with how he's been doing at the podium. But what he says from the podium about what Israel ought to do is as useful as what I say from right here about what Israel ought to do. He's like, Israel has obligations not to kill civilians, to give them an opportunity to find safe passage. I hope that they do this. I say the same thing. Well, it's very useful, Ryan. They're listening to neither of us. But yet he is one of the most powerful people in the world representing the most powerful government in world history. Yet he can't get even the most basic concessions

from a country of, you know, 10 plus million people. Well, Joe Biden, who like actually, and this is not a cheap shot, in a speech where he's trying to prove how great and competent he is, confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt and is the one basically, the commander in chief. He's the one ultimately at the end of the day that's brokering these negotiations. Obviously, they've sent burns from the CIA and they have other people who are doing the day-to-day negotiations, but it's his decisions at the end of the day, and he's not all there. So you have to also wonder how much that's affecting dialogue and the decisions that are being made when you have negotiations like this

happening. Obviously, they're happening between the U.S., Egypt, Israel, and Qatar, as you mentioned, but Joe Biden's not there. But he's ultimately, the buck stops with him. And they know they're negotiating on his behalf. But what does anyone know about what he thinks should happen in those negotiations? Everything we hear about the decision making in the White House is that this is a very Biden-driven policy. Yeah. And Biden is not senile. He mixes things up. He's not as sharp as he used to be. But he still has his faculties in the sense that he is, as he says, a committed Zionist. And he is a committed supporter of Israel, basically unconditionally to the end. And I think he's kind of the last

of this breed of kind of liberal Democrats who are going to feel this way. That's Fetterman erasure, but sure. Well, maybe Fetterman's a whole other thing. But if you had a Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Whitmer as president right now, or even Kamala Harris right now, I think there would be a more balanced approach, where from Biden, the signal down to his people is that there is nothing that the U.S. is going to do to restrain Israel, period, beyond talk. But that's where I think his senility is affecting this because, yes, it's all downstream of that, but nobody knows what implementing that looks like when he's saying other things, too,

for public relations purposes, when you're sending people to Dearborn to have these conversations. I don't know what's going on behind closed doors, but I do think that what he actually wants to happen for political purposes and what he wants to happen for moral purposes. There's a lot of muddied water in between those things, which is leading to a completely muddied policy. Yeah. I don't think we need senility to explain it because the White House has been clear that what their strategy is. They called it the bear hug. They laid it out very clearly. We're going to be super friendly to Israel in public. That's going to buy us the credibility with the Israeli leadership and with the Israeli public to then be critical behind the

scenes. And that is going to give us the maximum amount of influence. Like that was the strategy that they have laid out. And we've seen them execute it. Every day we get multiple articles from sources familiar saying that Joe Biden called Netanyahu some other name. Yes. A doo-doo face or like, you know, a jerk. An African jerk. All the different things. He's very frustrated, increasingly frustrated. In fact, every single day he gets increasingly frustrated. And so that allows news organizations to continue saying that he's increasingly frustrated because he's more frustrated than he was the day before. And so that's not senility.

That's an expression of this bear hug strategy. It's the White House's expression of the bear hug strategy. Well, it's what it would look like if you were going to do this. It also isn't working. It has been signaled to Netanyahu that that's what we were going to do. So he hears it. And he just last week went on ABC Sunday morning and said, okay, I appreciate Biden's money. I appreciate what he has to say about this, but we're going to do what we're going to do. Yeah. And he and his party have consistently said, we're going to do what we're going to do. And in the face of that, you can either

try a new strategy, which uses actual leverage, which you have, the money, or you can just continue to get increasingly frustrated and come up with new names that you're going to leak to the New York Times that you called Netanyahu. And I wish you could pin that on senility. I think that it's just what Biden wants to do. And he must be comfortable with the outcome. Otherwise, he would do something different. I agree with that completely. I think the senility leads to some bad, I guess, I think the senility affects the strategy and the expression of the strategy. But I think it makes a bad strategy worse, essentially. I think his brain might be stuck in time.

He might not be able to adapt to the new political realities of 2024. Possibly. Because he keeps talking about Golda Meir, and he seems very rooted in that liberal Zionist understanding of the project? Yes, in the sort of Carter era. Which doesn't really exist anymore. There is no Goldmeier wing anymore. To your point, the thing John Kirby just said there about having an operation, he's saying we don't want a large scale, something massive basically in RAFA, but we also don't want another October 7th. So that's actually a pretty interesting quote.

It's totally unsurprising, but it's actually a pretty important glimpse into what the strategy is or distillation of what the strategy is, which is that to prevent October 7th, to prevent another October 7th, these operations have to continue. And obviously they just rescued two hostages from Rafah. So that's a powerful sort of bargaining chip in their selling of their strategy. But if this is preventing another October 7th, it goes back to this question Biden fundamentally believes. They disagree on one state solution, two state solution, but they fundamentally agree that they can eradicate Hamas. And that is, the evidence for that crumbles every single day. Right. Even if you're rescuing hostages. Yeah. And Hamas reported that in that operation,

which, which involved these devastating airstrikes that killed more than a hundred civilians, Hamas's telegram channel reported they also injured eight hostages, three of whom died from their injuries. And so that's why the families of the hostages have been urging them to accept a deal that involves exchanging hostages rather than barreling guns blazing into Rafah because the chance that you kill the hostages in the process of trying to rescue them is very high. And then having to wait on tenterhooks to find out whether the Hamas propaganda that three hostages were killed is true. Right. And it's just unimaginable, torturous uncertainty. They don't say who. For those families. Right. So now you know you're, you don't know if your family member's still alive, period. Now you don't know if they lived this hell of four months in captivity, that then they died in an aerial

bombardment by the IDF or not. Yeah. So let's put B3 up on the screen. This is Terry Street Scoop, Israeli minister, blocking flower Bibi promised Biden would be allowed into Gaza. That is a picture of Bezalel Smotrich, and he is the Israeli minister in question here. Ryan, tell us about what's happening with this. So the U.S. negotiated a deal whereby they would send in an enormous amount of flour into Gaza that Matt Miller at the State Department yesterday said it would be enough flour, I think, for like 1.5 million Palestinians for five months. Now, how you turn that flour into bread or anything else is an open question for people in Gaza. If you talk to them, it's very difficult for them to find wood to burn to cook.

It's almost impossible to find electricity or a stove or all the bakeries have been destroyed. And also clean water, which you need for flour as well. All of that is a challenge. However, getting enormous amounts of flour into Gaza would be a godsend for the starving people there. Chris Van Hollen, in his speech the other day, said that on Sunday, he, for the first time, was hearing reports of people actually dying of starvation, which is a step beyond being on the brink of starvation and famine. And he texted Cindy McCain, who's the head of the World Food Program, and she said, yes, I can confirm that. This is happening.

There's not enough food getting in. Famine is imminent. People are actually dying at this point. And the people who are not dying are going to suffer, particularly the children, lifelong physical, not just the obvious trauma, but physical problems for the rest of their life from the lack of nutrition for this extended period of time is going to retard their physical and emotional development. Lots of kids.

In a way, yeah. Hundreds of thousands of children. Because Gaza is two million plus people, and half are children. And in Rafah right now, which before was... Oh, in Rafah. You had 300,000 people in Rafah, and now you're... Just have multiplied that incalculably. And so Smotrich, who's one of the hardest right members of the Israeli cabinet, has the capacity to stall this from getting in. And so now the U.S. is going to have to put some pressure on him and have stern conversations privately until he gets out of the way and lets it in. Not letting in flour to starving people is a war crime. This guy should be in prison for the rest of his life just for this one act.

Meanwhile, there are now raves being hosted, and we can put this up here, outside of Gaza. You've had for weeks now, if you're listening on the podcast, we're showing, this is an actual rave. Pretty pathetic looking rave. Pretty pathetic looking rave. Pretty pathetic looking rave, but a rave nonetheless. By the border, by the fence where aid trucks are trying to get into Gaza, for weeks now, Israeli civilians, clearly with the cooperation of the military, like the military, this is deep into the desert, the military could block civilians from getting down here if they wanted to, have been protesting and blocking aid from getting in. So it's not just the government that is using all the tools at its disposal to prevent humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza,

but civilians themselves are going down there and now they're dancing to electronic music while they're doing it. It's one of the more obscene things I think I've ever seen. At the same time, South Africa has gone back to The Hague and asked for an emergency injunction to try to stop Israel from going into Rafah. It's not as if they could even enforce that if they could get it implemented. But every single day, people like Smotrich are producing more and more evidence for the Hague. So let's roll John Kirby being asked about some of the tactics of the IDF and making a hell of a comparison, totally unprompted by the way. This is B5. Yeah, let's roll B5.

We have seen them take actions. Sometimes actions that even, I'm not sure our own military would take in terms of informing civilian populations ahead of operations, where to go, where not to go. They have taken steps. Now, obviously those steps, while noteworthy, haven't been enough to reduce the civilian casualties, which is why the president spoke so forthrightly about it yesterday and why we're going to continue to do everything we can to press the Israelis to be more careful. Israelis are now, have hammered people into this tiny corner in southwest Gaza, tied up against the Egyptian border, where people think there's a looming catastrophe.

Shouldn't there be more forceful action than just words? We are working very, very closely with our Israeli counterparts. We've made clear our concerns that we would not support a Rafah operation that did not properly account for the more than a million refugees that are down in RAFA. We've been very, very clear and consistent about that. So, Ryan, is that the first time we've heard that comparison? But what was interesting in that line is that nobody was asking him to compare the U.S. and the IDF. It's the first time we've heard it from Democrats. If you remember, Ted Cruz made that exact comparison when we interviewed him. And after, and you may have.

Well, you pushed him on it because he had said it earlier and you pushed him to sort of explain it. Yeah. And so you may have had the same experience, but afterwards I got a ton of messages, emails from the current and former service members, American service members, who were appalled to hear him say that. Saying that, you know, for instance, we'd have a high value target, let's say in Baghdad, in a house, somebody like an ace of spades, you know, somebody that they'd been gunning for, you know, for months. And there was, you know, one potential civilian nearby, and the whole thing would be called off. The idea that Israel is doing that does not scan at all. The New York Times did an in-depth comparison of the U.S. military and the IDF's operations. Now,

this was more than a month ago at this point, so obviously some of these numbers may have changed because the type of war basically changed when the calendar year changed. Under pressure from the U.S., we still don't actually know exactly how all of that transpired. So maybe these ratios are different, but when the New York Times looked into it a little more than a month ago, the numbers did not suggest that John Kirby was right to make that comparison in terms of civilian casualties. You know, the actual comparison that you can make, it was with Hamas on 10-7, which was a, I think, two to one, you know, civilian to military casualties, which we would all consider horrific and horrifying. Does John Kirby think that Hamas's proportionality on 10-7 was appropriate? I mean, that's insane.

Except that... Like, the numbers are roughly the same. The proportionality between the number of Hamas figures that Israel claims to have killed and the number of women and children that we know it has killed, versus on 10-7, the number of soldiers and security forces Hamas killed versus the number of civilians who were killed. And obviously Hamas argues that that was a defensive action, even though I think most observers in the West would say it was offensive, at least in terms of the question of the actual military operation. Hamas argues that it's resistance, that it's defensive. But either way, it's military versus civilian. It's like one for every two. And Kirby's suggesting that that's equivalent

somehow to how the U.S. would operate. Well, him offering the comparison of his, like, nobody was asking him. Nobody was confronting him with numbers about the u.s he just volunteered you can see in the clip that he's just kind of he's like and actually and he's been in comms like never mind i don't want to get into kirby but it's just ridiculous utterly like ridiculous now and and and also he's forcing me to sit here and defend the u.s military which is probably you don't want to do that killed like four million people in the last 20 years. So it's not as if we're like some angels out here. And the absolute scale and power. His administration, the way they got out of Afghanistan was a massive civilian casualty incident. Yes. The massive amount of power that we projected around the globe has meant that the

scale of our slaughter has been significantly greater than what's happened in the last four months in Gaza. But by proportion and by execution, it's absolutely not even close. Like the U.S. military has also – setting aside the absolute collapse of discipline, if you pretend that what the Israeli soldiers are doing on TikTok is undisciplined and is outside of the strategy, it might be, I think at this point you have to say it's part of the strategy because it's so rampant and so many soldiers are allowed to just post their war crimes on, you know, on TikTok. You see that, like, they were, they raided a woman's house in the West Bank the other day and were holding up her lingerie and posting photos of themselves with it. Haaretz just did an article about how they're cooking with all of the, like, Palestinians, like, spices and using their kitchens to cook their meals. Anyway, it's bad stuff. And to compare that,

for John Kirby to actively denigrate the U.S. military in service of what more than a dozen countries have already concluded is a genocide, is just beyond the pale. I didn't think I'd wind up here. It should be a bigger story from yesterday that he offered that up. 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. 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 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. So let's move up to New York, where a special election yesterday actually could tell us a lot,

even though it's just one district. And it's George Santos' seat, so. This is George Santos' seat. The results are in. We can put this first element up on the screen. And actually, former Congressman Tom Swozy won this race by eight points from what we have now, with most of the votes actually being counted. If you're up in the New York area, as Producer Griffin is, you got shellacked with a snowstorm yesterday on Election Day. And Ryan, you actually have some thoughts on how that may have affected the voting. But Mazie Pillip, who was the Republican running in this race, a lot of people are going to look back. She's like a former IDF soldier or something?

She's a former IDF soldier, exactly, yes. Versus a very, very committed Israel supporter. So like, it's not as if there was a divide between the two. Right. Yes, absolutely. Ethiopian, who I think was able to flee to Israel as a refugee and then ultimately came over to the United States. This was the Democrats, it should be noted, outspent Republicans, like basically two to one. It was 14 million versus 18 million overall in spending. A lot of the heavy issues here were abortion and immigration, but Swozy supported the quote unquote bipartisan immigration deal that Chuck Schumer had brokered with James Langford and Mitch McConnell. And there's some analysis that

that allowed him some cover on the question of immigration. But either way, Ryan, an eight-point race here flipping. Now, Joe Biden won this district by eight points in 2020. The reason that this district is interesting is because it's long sort of been a swing area. It's Nassau County, a little bit of Queens actually in it. But it's been a district that helps us sort of gauge the sort of barometer. It's a barometer of political sentiments in the suburbs. And it looks like Democrats used abortion, blunted the Republican attacks on immigration effectively, and won this one pretty handily. And also the voting. Republicans have put themselves at a structural disadvantage by refusing to vote by mail, which then puts themselves at the whims of the weather. And if there's something crazy like a snowstorm on

election day, you're going to be in trouble. Yeah, like middle of the day, I posted that Republicans refusing to vote by mail is going to cost them this House seat. It wasn't a hard prediction to make because this is by the morning, and there was so much snow that the polling locations were empty. We actually have a clip here from America's mayor outside of his own, it looks like, elementary school talking about the weather a little bit. Let's roll some Eric Adams here. Out in Queens, PS 140, my old public school, checking out the roads and clearly you see that DSNY is out plowing the streets, doing what they're doing best. So just as a visual, if you're listening to this, Eric Adams is wearing this $700 Fendi scarf that he wore to a briefing about, I think it was about migrants last week.

And the New York Post, like Daily Mail wrote it up. And he is holding firm, standing on his principle and refuses to give up the $700 Fendi scarf. It's probably his favorite scarf. Well, if you spent $700 on a scarf, I would hope it's your favorite. Imagine what that feels like. It must be just. Must be nice. Yes. Yes, must be nice. Hell of a flex there, Eric Adams. But Ryan, your point is one that a lot of people who are on the right are starting to internalize and realizing especially that if you're sort of, if the margins that you're trying to make up, maybe with the white working class, are not energized by a particular candidate and are not energized to get out the vote when there's a snowstorm. If you're not doing the mail-in voting ahead, you are going to be screwed when there is a snowstorm.

And you reminded us of this yesterday. You had a funny conversation about Reno. Yes. Tell us, because it's a perfect anecdote. Yes. During the, was it 2020 election or 2022? I think it was. 22, right. When there was a Nevada Senate race up. Yeah. Yeah. Republican Senate strategist, I was talking to him in the morning on how you look and he's like, we're looking great. Things are looking good for us as long as there's not a blizzard in Reno on election day.

And sure enough, blizzard in Reno, Reno turnout collapses. It also sets up Republicans to get screwed by their opponents. So in Arizona, remember there were some like Maricopa voting problems that slowed voting down for a couple of hours? Yeah. Hey, you know, sometimes you have problems. But think about it. If one party is voting ahead of time at a huge proportion and the other party is waiting until election day to vote, but the party that does all of its early voting also controls all the cities and therefore controls the voting in those cities. Not that they would do this, but it does allow them the opportunity to forget a printer cartridge or

somebody forgot a password and you know what, we got to reboot the computers. Real shame. Sorry about this. Voting is going to be a little bit of a pain here at this center. You might have to vote provisionally over here. Don't worry. We'll take care of it. Not that anybody would do that, but it does set you up for a situation where you're putting your entire fate in the hands of the good Lord and his good weather or the good Democrats and their willingness to run smooth elections for you because all of their voters have already voted. The level of short-term thinking is incredible. And it's happening at the same time that the realignment is making it so Republicans have a lot more itinerant voters. Yeah, if you're a suburban, you're a suburban, now sort of upper middle class educated Democrat. You've got an ID, you know where your polling place is, you're a homeowner.

Or you get your ballot in the mail. You will return it early. You're going to vote. Like, you can put up all the voter suppression tools in front of, that you have at your disposal. Those people are going to vote. That was the theory for Republicans through the 80s and 90s, and way before that too, that Democratic voters, if you put in universal voter suppression efforts, like forcing people to jump through a bunch of different hoops, that Democratic voters were poorer, more working class. It was going to be harder for them to get through those hoops, and it would be an advantage to Republicans. That's now flipped.

And if you put up hurdles for everybody, Democratic voters are now going to be able to get through those hoops more than the Republican voters who might jump through hoops on fire for Donald Trump. But other than him, they're going to be like, eh, it's snowing. I'm not showing up today. Just from a conservative perspective, this was a raging debate. It still is a conservative perspective, this was a raging debate. It still is a debate, but it was a raging debate for a while as to whether you just adapt vote by mail or you basically try to convince your candidates to have plans that would totally tighten up elections. And personally, I detest mail-in voting. I think it's an insecure voting. I think it's a very, I think it's an

insecure voting method and it's easily manipulated. That said, if you are not coupling all of this with some strategy to actually limit mail-in voting and make it so that people have to go to the polls on election day, I'm like one of the people that believes it should just be a day. You should give people off. You should make it a holiday and vote that day unless you're, you know, in the military or disabled or have some like obvious mitigating circumstance. I think that's the best way to do it. But, but if that's not happening, which it's just hard to see how that's happening. Like we're not moving towards that on a policy level. And Republicans, I think, to some extent, are going to be burying their heads in the sand if they think that's coming and that's doable on any type of mass scale. Then you're really going to be screwed when this type of thing happens. Now, Ryan, to be fair, Swozy would have won this race,

no storm or not, it looks like. It does look like that because the polls had him up by a couple, between one and three. And I think the eight point win, you can maybe attribute half that to poor Republican turnout on election day. People can sort through the numbers more, but yes, it does look like regardless, he would have won. But when control of the House hinges on a couple of seats and you always have dozens of seats that hinge on just a couple thousand votes, then it will end up mattering. Pillip is actually, by the way, still a registered Democrat. And so when you want to get high Republican turnout and enthusiasm for somebody who's being pushed on why she hasn't changed her registration from being a Democrat, she got questions from local journalists about this. That's going to be very difficult. She said the Democratic Party left her,

which can be a persuasive and convincing message if you had changed your voter registration. She never left the party. Maybe. So I think there's going to be a lot of speculation just that she was really not a good candidate. She didn't seem to want to campaign. A lot of people said she was kind of MIA from the campaign trail. They were relying very heavily on surrogates. One of the interesting things is that Santos got money and acclaim when he was running for the checking off a lot of the identity politics boxes. This is a suburban area. So he's a gay minority Republican and was able to sort of be MAGA without being MAGA. He got money just by swiping people's credit cards.

Well, he did that too. But money from like the Republican Party, they were like excited about him. And Pillip, by the way, I think probably excited Republicans for similar reasons, which is fascinating because it shows just the utter stupidity of Republicans who think, you know,

if we can just check off the identity politics boxes, we'll convince everybody that we're cool. Yeah, you guys are doing it. One funny point on her voter registration, you know how everybody always says, I didn't leave my party, my party left me? She literally didn't leave her party. She didn't leave. She meant that literally, like, I didn't leave my party. So right before we wrap this- Well, they're all still registered Democrats too. She's like, well, I thought they left. Yeah, I thought they were gone. So let's actually roll this clip of protesters at Swazi's Election victory party basically where Democrats go notice his protested. Yeah robotic

Like he actually looks like an animatronic guy at Disney World when they're protesting and he just keeps fist pumping So take a close look at that and then I'm going to ask Ryan his thoughts on how Swazi will govern. Get fired now! Get fired now! You support genocide! At the very end, you see that protestor just like thrown off the stage. Yeah. Like, ooh. A turn from a normal protest to, oh, hope that person's okay pretty quickly. Yes, and you made the point that Swazi, first of all, he did sort of tack to the center on immigration. And you made the point about not a lot of daylight between him and Philip on Israel, likely. And everything else. Like he's a very kind of center-right standard. He's not even a standard. Actually, today's standard Democrat is more like

a center-left one where he's more of an old school kind of blue dog center right suburban Democrat. In his victory speech, he kind of went after the squad a little bit and also said he's gonna make sure that your state and local taxes can be deducted. That was in his victory speech. And that got a big cheer also. That always does it for those blue dog Democrats. So if you make a bunch of money in Long Island, what he's basically telling you is that you're

going to get a nice tax break. Sounds good. Sounds good for those people in Long Island to make a lot of money. And Republicans were hoping definitely that the sort of general Biden malaise would bring Swazi down. And if that's the case, if that brought Swazi down, he still won by eight points. That's not the district where it's going to bring him down. 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

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So actually on that point, let's talk about new inflation numbers because Paul Krugman is out with a column that says Biden should be running on the election. This is a repeat of what New York Times columnist, and he's won a Pulitzer, hasn't he? Krugman. I don't know about a Pulitzer, he definitely won a Nobel Prize. He won a Nobel Prize as well. One of them. But yes, a Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, has repeatedly in the pages of the New York Times been telling people that the economy they sense as bad is actually fine. And from his vantage point in Manhattan, they're wrong about how they feel about the economy. And right, I think some of these inflation numbers, we can put this first element up on the screen. I think some of these inflation numbers explain why both Biden and Krugman are having a hard time making that case. When we got the January inflation data, consumer prices rose 3.1% in January 2024 from a year

before. According to the Wall Street Journal, they rose the fastest for frozen non-carbonated juices and drinks. That's a very specific place where inflation saw. It was a change from 29% from prices a year ago this month. Eggs had the largest drop. They fell from 28.6%. Let's roll this clip. Let's roll this clip on inflation. This was actually posted by the RNC, and you can sort of see why they might have posted it. Let's roll it. Headline number expected to be up two-tenths of a

percent is up three-tenths of a percent. That's the hottest since SEP of 23 when it was up four-tenths of a percent. Strip out food and energy, even hotter. Up four-tenths of a percent, also one-tenths of a percent. Strip out food and energy, even hotter, up four-tenths of a percent, also one-tenth hotter than expected, up four-tenths of a percent. Well, you equal that going to May of last year. You surpass it going to April of last year when it was up 0.5. The year-over-year numbers, also hotter, 3.1 on headline year-over-year. We're expecting 2.9, but did make progress versus the rearview mirror, which stands at 3.4. Now, if you consider 3.1, we've already been there. We were there in November of last year, and we were at 3.0 in June of last year. Finally, CPI year over year core, I think one of the ones I'm paying most attention

to, 3.9 percent, exactly as the recent month, December 3.9, two tenths hotter than expected. So let's also run this clip of Jillian Michaels on Bill Maher. She actually specifically mentions the price of eggs, which, as we saw, just had the biggest drop, but she sort of went toe to toe with Bill Maher on his show about inflation. Let's roll that. But isn't it amazing to you, like it was in the paper today about this country came out of the pandemic way better than, we just fuck, we won the pandemic economically. I mean, America. God, I don't feel that way. Explain it to me. I feel like inflation's insane. Numbers. Inflation is not insane. Bill, go buy a car.

There's numbers. I understand. A house has tripled here. Look, I get that people- Buy some fucking eggs. Explain it to me. I'm not an economist, so I'm just trying to... There's feelings, and then there's the numbers. Okay, what are the numbers?

Well, the numbers have come down a lot in the last six months. Okay. Of course, it was inevitable when we gave out $6 trillion so that everybody could hide under the bed from the forever flu. That was never going to end well. It was taken by the richest people ever and didn't get where it needed to go. And a lot of it was stolen. We agree on that too.

It was like, was there some response needed? Of course. You don't want the hospitals overrun. But it was just a massive overreaction. And that did cause some of the inflation. What do you make of that, Ryan? Because I think when you look at the inflation numbers, and you and I were talking a little bit about this, they have gone down.

But they've gone down from such a high that they're still high. So saying that they've gone down is not enough to say. And also, by the way, if you're experiencing, for example, vehicle insurance, car insurance is one of those things that is like extremely high right now. So for different people experiencing the economy. Partly because of carjackings and break-ins. Exactly.

And also actually significantly because of severe weather. Like storms. And this is, so a significant, this is, I'm glad you brought this up, a significant driver of the overall inflation number, believe it or not, is the price of car insurance. And a significant driver of the price of car insurance is not just the theft, but more precisely, the number of storms, floods, hurricanes, just damage being done by extreme weather events to cars. And so it's a way that climate change is creeping into our general life in a way beyond the obvious of like, oh wow, it's a whole lot warmer. And like, there's droughts everywhere. If you don't find yourself buying car insurance, then, you know, especially if you're really urban

and you don't have a car, you rely on public transportation, then this is a part of inflation that you're just not experiencing. It's totally out of your mind, out of sight, out of mind. And for everybody else who is experiencing it, you see it, you see your numbers go up, but the way you feel is you just have less money in your bank account because, you know, you're probably doing automatic withdrawal. It's like, wait, why do I, what's going on here? And so it's just a, it just contributes to this kind of overall sense that you're running faster and like in a dream and just not being able to move as quickly. And depending on where you are, gas prices, for example, are really, really bad or okay. So there are a lot of different parts of the economy that if you're experiencing those as quickly. And depending on where you are, gas prices, for example, are really, really bad or

okay. So there are a lot of different parts of the economy that if you're experiencing as a different person, well, you can look at, you know, maybe the overall basket is down over the last couple of years. You can see where a lot of Americans don't feel good about it. And yes, to the point that we were talking about earlier, it was so bad that dropping from it being so bad to just being bad is not a great line for Biden to run on. I think you've got some precise numbers there. But since Biden was sworn in, and I think this is the key thing that people like Krugman need to keep in mind, inflation has run at roughly, I think, 17%. Things are 17% more

expensive now than they were when Biden was sworn in. And hourly wages are up like 13 or 14 percent, which which means that your purchasing power is down. Like your standard of living is down. You're poorer than you were when he was sworn in. Yes. And people don't people watch gas prices moving day to day. But but I think the way that they understand prices is on a longer timeline, thinking back a couple of years. And you also remember kind of the best moments more than you remember, and you remember the worst moments, but you don't remember the ones in between as much.

So it's easy to think like there was that brutal period of inflation and things have not really come down. And yes, wages are up for a lot of people. But wage gains are not distributed evenly. Wage gains are distributed to people who switch jobs. You get some colas at the end of the year if you stay in your job. But oftentimes you have to switch jobs to get that raise. And so when we say that hourly wages are up 13%, it doesn't mean everybody's wages are up 13%. Psychologically also, people understand price increases as not their fault. Somebody else's

fault, actually the president's fault. That's his fault why I'm paying more for these things. If your wages go up, unless you're an effective communicator like an FDR or somebody, and you're seeing like a mass kind of labor movement, most people are going to say, my wages are up because I'm a good worker and because I deserve those wages. And you are a good worker and you do deserve those wages, but your wages are also up because of macroeconomic policies that have given workers more power. But so that's why I think the economy is so tough in this moment because people are not going to give credit for their wages to Biden.

They feel like they did that. But they are going to blame Biden for the fact that things are more expensive. And then you layer on top of that the most important thing, which is housing. Housing is now so expensive and gobbling up everybody's income that even if your wages are up and this core inflation minus shelter is coming down, you're still suffering from that. And if you already own your house, then you're not experiencing that. But 3% unemployment and wages growing faster than inflation, which we have now, is good. And I think people should not forget that.

And also, to defend Bill Maher's point there, compared to the rest of the world, if he's going to say we won the pandemic, we're doing better than anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else in the world has worse unemployment and higher inflation. So that, you know, that does deserve to be underlined. So one of the things Biden started early in his administration, first of all, comparing himself to FDR and having John Meacham tell him, you know, how comparable he was to FDR in the Oval Office, but also talking about how he was going to tackle corporate greed because corporate greed was a huge driver of inflation. That talk is basically absent from the White House right now. It seems like they've decided on the strategy to just ignore consumer prices and wage growth and not talk about it. You see them every few weeks

like try to trot out Bidenomics, but they've largely kind of given it up. And they talk in these sort of broad sweeping terms about how Americans are all better off. But it seems, Ryan, like their new strategy is just to ignore inflation altogether rather than pinning it on corporate greed because Biden came into office pledging to tackle corporate greed and pledging to make, you know, by some estimates, it's more than it accounts for more than half of inflation. And people can dispute that, but it accounts for a significant chunk of inflation, corporate price gouging, essentially. He said he was going to tackle it. And the FTC, Lina Khan and the FTC and the antitrust folks at the DOJ are suing everybody all over the place and winning some serious cases. But, yeah, it hasn't been rhetorically front and center, but it is one of the strongest parts, I think, of the Biden administration. Trump is really happy to see these numbers because I think Trump's huge fear is that between now and the election, there will be an interest rate cut, which would then spur another stock market boom, which people will say, well, only half the country holds stocks,

but it also does produce vibes. It affects the mood, yeah. Yeah. And also, it would push down interest rates on mortgages. And so people then would be able to start to, right now, people are just locked in Like people who own a home are locked in with their like awesome little 3% interest rates that they refinanced during the pandemic. And if you don't have a home, you're staring at, you know, something like 7% or 8% interest rates on a mortgage, which means that the kind of house you can afford doesn't meet what you need. And so everybody's locked out. It's like a game of musical chairs and the music just stopped. When interest rates come back down, that's the music coming back on.

And you're going to see kind of a lot of wealth flow into the economy because finally people will be able to sell their houses. And there's a lot of pent-up demand for people to move. And people will be able to buy houses finally. If you get interest rate mortgage, let's just say you get mortgage rates back down to like say 5% or something. This 8% stuff, people say in the 80s it got up to 16, 20%, which is insane. But also houses cost like $20,000. It's slightly different. When a house is like $500,000, that is a whole different can of worms.

All right, Ryan, we have a really interesting guest that you brought in. I'm excited to get to Shabazz Gill right after this. Well, that does it for today's edition of CounterPoints. Ryan, Shabazz is a very busy man, as people may have heard. We said we had Shabazz Gill. It was a lie. We did not have Shabazz Gill, although he was booked. He's in the U.S. operating on Pakistan time. I suspect he might not be awake. But we will rebook him. Again, Shabazz was Imran Khan's chief of staff while Imran Khan was prime minister. And he's now kind of his American representative.

These are intense days for anybody involved in Pakistani politics, for sure. And right now also, and maybe we can add this in post, but Korean Jean-Pierre was asked about the Pakistan elections recently. And what she said actually maybe unintentionally mirrors what Imran Khan's party has been saying lately. She says we need to respect the will of the election, respect the will of the people in the election. And a lot of the State Department is saying that members of Congress have been saying that. The phrase PTI, Imran Khan's party has been using is respect the mandate. I don't even know if they know that they're almost mirroring the messaging from Imran Khan's party. Because what Imran Khan means by respect the mandate is that they can prove with documentation given to them by polling locations

that they won 180 seats in the National Assembly, which is a majority and means they can form a government. The military establishment there has gutted that and changed the numbers and is claiming that they have something like a 90-seat victory, which is still more than anybody else, including Nawaz Sharif's party, who is the military-backed candidate. Khan is saying, respect the mandate. Give us the 180 seats. Is it fair to say he's also the U.S.-backed candidate? Nawaz Sharif, absolutely, yes. The U.S. and military-backed candidate is Nawaz Sharif. Here's what's hilarious. The documents also show candidate Nawaz Sharif. Here's what's hilarious. The documents also show that Nawaz Sharif himself lost his own race in the National Assembly by something like 50,000

votes to a woman who's in prison right now. But they changed all the numbers so that he can win, because actually, if he loses, he can't become prime minister because you have to be in the National Assembly to become prime minister. Now, there could be some workarounds because there's some set-aside seats for people who win so they could give him one of the set-aside seats, but it would be an absolute complete humiliation for him to lose his own race. It's like when the Democratic Speaker of the House lost in like the 1980s, lost his race. But he didn't lose it in the 1980s to a woman in prison, that his own kind of force is imprisoned. And her defeat of him from prison is symbolic of the refusal of Pakistani people to be intimidated by the intense amount of violence

and suppression dealt out by the U.S.-backed military there. Just a hell of a week in Pakistan. Your coverage of it has been fascinating to watch. And we'll get Shabazz on some other time. Yeah, absolutely. We forgive him. And it's karma for all of the interviews that I have missed over the years. That doesn't sound like you. People being like, hey, you doing this? I'm like, did I agree to that? Whoops. Sorry. Amazing. Well, we'll be back with more CounterPoints next week. And once again, remember, if you go to BreakingPoints.com, right now there's a special 25% off. You get to see those RFK Jr. focus group interviews early. Amazing interviews. I'm so glad that Crystal and Sagar and Mac and Griffin have set those up. They're very, very helpful. So you

get them early and you get the full CounterPoint show to your inbox if you subscribe to Premium, which is now 25% off at BreakingPoints.com. We'll be back next Wednesday. Actually, that's also a lie. I'll be back on Monday with Sagar and then I'm going to Mexico. Don't worry about it. Crystal will be here. It'll be a ladies' show on Wednesday.

Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun. Not as fun as you'll be having in Mexico at your Phish concert, but fun nonetheless. It'll be a good time down there. I'll be thinking of you. See you later. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture

that fueled its decades-long success. 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. 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 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios.

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