Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/19/25: Trump Call With Putin, Israel Shells UN Building, Media Flips On Schumer & MORE!

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Trump's two hour call with Putin on Ukraine, SCOTUS slams the breaks on Trump judge attacks, eyewitness says Israel shelled Gaza UN building, liberal media turns on Schumer, fired FTC commissioner tells all on Trump.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you,

please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Emily, Crystal Sager is still in the hallway finishing their two-day-long argument. They've been going.

We're going to pick it up today, though, because we've got more news on the Venezuelan migrants. Do I have to play the role of Sager and Jetty? Hey, whatever works for you. We'll see. Stay tuned for that because there's actually some pretty interesting updates and some interesting reaction to how Chief Justice John Roberts decided to handle the situation yesterday. We will get to that. We're going to start first with developments in the ceasefire negotiations. Donald Trump obviously spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday and

did a big interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News last night where we got more and more information about what a potential ceasefire deal could end up looking like. We are then going to move on to how Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked Trump and Magawirl's calls to impeach the judge that halted those migrant deportation flights. The judge impeachment calls are actually a trend. It's not just this judge. So we're going to break all of that down. We're then going to move to a really, Ryan, a segment I think is going to be really unique to something that you're able to bring to the show via Dropsite and talk to some people who have witnessed on the ground in Gaza these strikes. Yeah, we're going to have our Mideast editor, Sharif Abdel-Quds, join us. We may also have Abu Bakr Abed, who many of you on the show

know. He's scheduled to appear. We'll see if he does this morning. He witnessed an Israeli assault on a convoy, a tank shelling that killed some of his friends that nearly killed him. He is safe. He is obviously shaken up from the last couple days of violence. And he'll join us if he can. Hopefully he can. But if not, Sharif will be with us who has been editing him over the last several months. How old is Abu Bakr again?

Maybe he's 23 now 23. Okay Maybe 22 like he does amazing work. Yeah, this is this is a guy who all he wants to do is be a soccer journalist Yeah football we will call it football for him. Yeah So Chuck Schumer is having a hard time selling his new book and Man, Ryan, it just keeps getting worse for Chuck Schumer. Well, he's trying to compete with Ezra Klein. I mean, what are you doing, Chuck? You can't compete with Ezra Klein. I don't know what he was thinking. Did they know? Did they realize? Did they not realize? You do not come out the same day as Ezra Klein.

But Chuck Schumer managed to get booked everywhere yesterday. By everywhere, I mean the CBS Morning Show and The View and Chris Hayes. So we have some highlights and lowlights to share of Chuck Schumer's media tour in the last 24 hours and some really interesting, I think, discussion points about where the Democratic Party is headed, not in the long-term future, I mean that too, but also just in the near term here. And Ryan, we have, thanks to you, Alvaro Bedoya, the FTC commissioner, who was quote unquote fired by Trump yesterday. That is in dispute whether Donald Trump actually has the authority to fire him. Even some people on the right will say he doesn't have the authority because of Humphrey's executor, which is a case I know we'll get into. But they're trying to push that into the Supreme Court like many of these battles, which are intentionally designed to test sitting precedent.

Right. There's supposed to be three Republicans and two Democrats on the FTC. Trump just fired two of the Democrats who were Senate confirmed. Like you said, quote unquote, fired. One of them is Commissioner Bedoya. He's a breaking points guy. And drop site. And drop site. And so he's going to be on the show later today talking about what his approach to the FTC was and what it means that now there will be only actually two Republicans because they haven't even confirmed the third and why, which faction within the Trump coalition may have driven this move. Yeah, this is going to be a really interesting conversation. So very happy to have him here. Let's begin with Russia. So we can put a zero up on the screen.

This is a New York Times headline, just about sort of a tick-tock, everything that we know so far about this deal. As the New York Times says, Putin agreed on Tuesday during a phone call with Trump to temporarily halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin. That fell short of the unconditional 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine had already agreed to at the urging of the Trump administration. They reportedly spoke, according to the Kremlin again, for more than two hours. Mr. Trump, the Times continues, has stated his desire to broker truce as quickly as possible, while Putin has seemed to be seeking more concessions. Zelensky

replied on Tuesday evening that Putin had, quote, effectively rejected the proposal for a full ceasefire backed by the U.S. and Ukraine. Now, Trump sat down with an interview, sat down with Laura Ingraham for an interview on Fox News last night where we learned a little bit more about how he saw that call yesterday. This is A1. We'll roll Trump on. Laura Ingraham from the White House. Russia has the advantage, as you know. They have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They're nicely encircled, and that's not good. And we want to get it over with.

Look, we're doing this—there are no Americans involved. There could be if we end up in World War III over this, which is so ridiculous. But, you know, strange things happen. And I think we had a great call. It lasted almost two hours. Talked about a lot of things and toward getting it to peace. And we talked about other things also. Here's an interesting exchange between Ingram and Trump, actually, about what the Kremlin said after the call regarding aid to Ukraine.

Let's take a look at this, A2. Some negotiables mentioned by Putin. It was reported that I think the Kremlin media actually stated that he demanded an immediate cessation of aid to Ukraine in order to get to the get to this multi-step deal. No, he didn't. We didn't talk about aid. Actually, we didn't talk about aid at all. We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed. So that's Trump directly disputing the Kremlin's report of what happened on the call. And just lastly, let's roll this clip of Donald Trump talking about Russia and economic power.

This is the, this should be A3, next clip here. China needs us in terms of trade very badly. But we have to straighten out the deficit. We have now more than a trillion dollar deficit with China. It's not even believable. And we're going to be doing something about that. And with Russia, they would like to have some of our economic power. Finally, Ryan, let's put how Donald Trump reported on Truth Social about the call on

the screen. This is the next element. He says, quote, my phone conversation today with President Putin of Russia was a very good and productive one. We agreed to an immediate ceasefire on all energy and infrastructure with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a complete ceasefire and ultimately an end to this very horrible war. Continues to say it never would have started if he were president. Many elements

of a contract for peace were discussed, including the fact that thousands of soldiers are being killed, and both Putin and Zelensky would like to see it end. The process is now in full force and effect. But Ryan, interestingly, while the process does clearly seem to be unfolding, full force might not be the best descriptor. If you're Trump, it's one way to spin it, but might not be the best descriptor, given you're Trump, it's one way to spin it, but might not be the best descriptor given the way that Zelensky responded to news from the call yesterday. Well, you can tell Trump felt pretty good

about how it went because he, if you notice, there was only one word in all caps in that truth social, and it was end. He's going to end the war. Obviously, lots of exclamation points, but that's what you're going to get. Of course. You can kind of check his emotional register by mapping it to the number of all-caps statements.

If it's shot through with all caps like he is feeling besieged and angry and how dare people be doing these things to him when all he wants is peace for the world. So in that sense, it seems like he feels like he's getting somewhere. He also talked about something that he understands, which is sports and entertainment, through the bilateral cultural exchange of joint hockey games. This is A5. I put A5. In March 2022, the NHL told the KHL, forget it. We're not partnering with you guys. You can't invade Ukraine. And they've been kicked

out of the Olympics. Russian agents weren't allowed to work with the NHL teams anymore. You may or may not know, ice hockey is a rather big deal over in Russia. And so Trump here is floating the possibility of thawing that, to use a terrible pun. Wow. I didn't do that on purpose. But after I got there, I'm like, look, we got to go. It's dad joke Wednesday, I guess. Accidental dad joke. That's actually more like bad news anchor joke.

Bad news anchor joke. Someone's writing the teleprompter script. I just kind of slipped onto that one. So the problem here that the U.S. is facing, as Trump clearly articulated to Zelensky in the White House is that we don't have any cards. Like he says he doesn't, you know, he told Zelensky he doesn't have any cards. The U.S. really doesn't have any cards either, except for the economic power. Right. Which, by the way, can we just underscore the irony here that Trump wants to destroy our trade relations with Canada, Mexico, Europe, everyone else around the world, except for Russia.

Right. Kind of hilarious? Yeah, it was funny. Okay, whatever. So the problem is— Well, especially because doesn't he blame the lifting of sanctions of Nord Stream 2? And many people on the right do, myself included. The Biden administration's lifting of sanctions on Nord Stream 2 is one of the key factors that pushed Putin to invade Ukraine when he did. Yeah, one of the many incoherent, I think,

approaches where Trump is both uber hawkish towards Russia and also then a dove when it comes to war. Like he wants confrontation right up until the edge. Right. That he doesn't want war. But then he says that Putin was justified in the invasion because of the hawkishness of U.S. foreign policy. It's like, well, wait a minute. You're one of of the hawkishness of U.S. foreign policy. It's like, well, wait a minute, you're one of the most hawkish. Never mind. So Putin has a bunch of demands that are rooted in the fact that they are winning. And that is the fundamental structural problem that Trump is facing and trying to wrap this up immediately.

So we can put this up on the screen. The conditions that Putin is insisting on, the key condition is the one that Trump says they didn't even talk about, a complete cessation of foreign military aid and sharing intelligence information with Kiev. You know, hopefully they're recording these conversations because if historians are going to rely on the competing words of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to get an accurate rendition of how the conversation went, God help us. He said he said. God help the historians. So then the second one, Putin says he wants to stop the forced mobilization in Ukraine and the rearming of armed forces. So stop drafting people and stop arming Ukraine. It's pretty huge demand.

Yep. And then any settlement should be complex, stable, and long-term in nature and must take into account the absolute need to eliminate the root causes of the crisis. It must also consider the legitimate interests of Russia in the area of security. So the easy part of that is, you know, that means kind of no NATO. What it's subtly suggesting is that they don't just want the area that they currently hold, but they want, you know, deeper into eastern Ukraine, which their argument is, you can either give it to us or we're going to take it. And if we take it, it's going to be

bloody and we're going to take a lot more with it. And so basically he is saying that if you're going to give up, we're turning Ukraine into a complete vassal state that we can basically manipulate politically from Russia, which is You know in other words it would be like a country in our sphere of influence Like this is you know, that's how we that's how roughly we would handle Guatemala or so something along those lines. So What how much how much Trump cares about this how much versus how much the.S. deep state cares about this, I think, I guess, would indicate whether or not the U.S. is going to be willing to capitulate to this. On the other hand, the encirclement that he talked about is very real. And this is the other thing that Putin is talking about. He's like, what about these guys? So we're like encircling these guys.

We're about to capture them. So if we do a ceasefire, they can just walk out. And that is a legitimate question. It's like, how does that work? Like they invaded, in that part, they invaded the Kursk region of Russia. They just walk out. I don't know, what do you think? Well, let's even put this last element back up to keep this conversation going about Trump and economic power. This is an interesting juxtaposition here where you have Scott Besson. On April 2nd, each country will get a tariff number and then White House. Future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside. This includes enormous economic deals. That's, you know, we have all kinds of sanctions on Russia and who knows what Russia's tariff would be potentially

if this economic relationship is blossoming under Donald Trump. But right, it's kind of, I think it's interesting from the perspective of like what Donald Trump's foreign policy is, because it's very, like we talk all the time, he's not a John Bolton type neoconservative ideologue. But he does believe in economic power as his like source of creating world peace, which is not an insane. I mean, it's obviously not an insane idea that when you have economic ties to different countries, it deters violence, but it's also sort of not where the right is anymore. And if that's, you know, Gaza, Riviera in Russia, if that's part of, I mean, I think maybe that's being hyperbolic, but if Putin, does Putin respond to that in a way that Donald Trump actually wants him to? Does he

respond to the prospect of economic opportunities with the United States the same way that Donald Trump actually wants him to? Does he respond to the prospect of economic opportunities with the United States the same way that Donald Trump wants Vladimir Putin to? I think Putin has ambitions beyond, I guess, the economic ties with the United States in that he wants regional power. And I'm not saying he wants, I don't think he- Which he already has by virtue of being powerful. Yeah. Well, yeah. But I mean, I'm not saying that to say he has this like design set on Western Europe. But, you know, his ambitions are not purely economic. Sure. And yeah, they clearly want influence in Western Europe. Yeah. There's no doubt about that. But yeah. Hence Nord Stream too. Yeah. And we, you know, potentially, there was an opportunity to try to end this in March of 2022.

The U.S. decided not to do that. Whether they could have actually ended it or not is an open question, which will never be answered because we didn't pursue it. And now it has not gone well. Like the U.S. put whatever it could up against Russia here. You know, 100 plus billion dollars. Europe put in 100 plus billion. That was worth of weapons. They drafted everybody they could find.

And they're losing badly. And they hoped that they would weaken Russia. Russia came out stronger. I mean, Russia has been weakened. Absolutely. I guess. I mean, certainly they've lost a lot of men. They mean, Russia has been weakened. Absolutely. I guess if I mean, certainly they have they've lost a lot of men. They've lost a lot of men. Their economy is not incredible. Their economy is not incredible. But just politically, are they weaker today than they

were February 22? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think they're probably in a better position. Yeah. OK. I mean, I think I guess that's's fair. Particularly if he's a V.E.U. There's been a cost to them. Right. But I think they sanction-proofed their economy in a substantial way. They did not get the collapse that MSNBC promised its audience. Yes. Yeah. There was no real split with China. Tighter than ever, maybe. I was going to say, yeah, that is a great point.

Joe Biden does not have a PhD in foreign affairs. He's just that good. He's so, he's just crushed it. We learn more about Joe Biden's successes with each passing day. All right. He showed up for St. Paddy's Day. It was like his first comment on anything. I didn't see that.

When he just put out a tweet or something? Just to celebrate, you know, St. Paddy's Day. He just put out like a social media post. Yeah, some statement or something. But nobody saw him in the wild. I don't think so. Oh, okay. So that would be.

Maybe he was at some bar in Lewis, Delaware. What'd you do? I wore my O'Kelly's shirt from Guantanamo Bay. There's an Irish bar on Guantanamo Bay. You're fun. 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

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So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, This author writes, Hold up, so what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale,

listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships it's more than personal it's political it's societal and at times it's far from what i originally intended it to be these days i'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable

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

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to the raging battle over whether it is a good strategy, not a good strategy, for Republicans to start impeaching judges who block or obstruct Trump's attempts openly to exert the unitary executive theory of power, meaning you're trying to take some power back, as the right would argue, from the, quote, administrative state. This is a really interesting exchange between Laura Ingraham on Fox News and Donald Trump on Fox News just last night, Tuesday night, where Ingraham pressed Donald Trump on whether he would defy court orders. That's obviously at the center, and Crystal and Sagar have covered this, of the debate over what happened with that migrant flight that was ordered by a judge to be turned around, landed in El Salvador. This was Venezuelan migrants alleged to be members of the gang Trenda Aragua, designated

by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization. So Laura Ingraham pushed Trump on whether he would defy court orders. Let's take a look. This is leading people to wonder whether there are court orders that you will defy because you believe that the judge has no jurisdiction or they're political questions and not justiciable at all. And what would you say to that? Are there circumstances where you would defy a court order? Well, I think that, number one,

nobody's been through more courts than I have. I think nobody knows the courts any better than I have. I think nobody knows the courts any better than I have. I would say the chief judge does, but nobody knows them better than I have. And what they've done to me, I've had the worst judges. I've had crooked judges. I have judges that valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million because that benefited his case because he wanted to see me convicted of something. I have judges that had relatives making millions and millions of dollars on the election, ruling on the election. But going forward, would you defy a court order? We all know that. I never did defy a court order. And you wouldn't in the future? No,

you can't do that. However, we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge. The judge that we're talking about, you look at his other rulings. I mean, rulings unrelated. But having to do with me, he's a lunatic. Ingrid, by the way, was a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

She has a good bit of interest in some of these legal questions, but a lot of people, as a lot of people on the right now do, Justice John Roberts, Chief Justice John Roberts, I should say, reacted. He released a statement, a very, very rare thing. We can put the next element up on the screen. Yesterday, midday, he says, quote, for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose. Now, here's how some people on the right reacted to John Roberts deciding to take that leap and actually issue a statement. This is Mike Cernovich, who said Trump has the political capital and then some to ignore judges who tell them to allow terrorist gangs to remain

in the USA. It's not a close call. John Roberts lives in his DC media bubble and overestimates his power. It's all made up. Trump can take it away easily. Jeremy Corll, he replied, this is actually a pretty funny one, John Roberts is George Bush's worst mistake outside of the Iraq war, and he's still got time to take the lead. So this was a pretty common argument, Ryan, on X yesterday that the Cernovich point about impeachment should be pursued by Congress, who obviously, like Congress really doesn't have the votes right now. There's no way to imagine that you could go get some of these impeachments through Congress. But Trump sort of throwing cold water on it in that primetime

interview with Laura Ingraham was quite interesting as well, because this was some of his like loyal MAGA media defenders who spent the day saying impeachment is a perfectly reasonable, rational response here. You have Trump instead saying, nope, not going to do it. You can't do it. And yeah, there is history on this. You can't do it. And yeah, there is history on this. That's why he's saying for more than 200 years and not for the entire history of our country. I think it was under Jefferson. Should have looked this up before we started the show. But there was a judge that I think was a Federalist judge that was ticking Jefferson off and his party tried to get rid of him and tried to impeach him. And I think he was saved by like one vote.

And that set the precedent where Congress decided, look, we're only going to impeach judges for corruption. If we don't like your ruling, we're going to appeal it and we're going to push it to a higher level. And so since then, basically no political party has ever tried to impeach a judge because they didn't like the ruling. I heard the Cernovichs of the world complaining, where was John Roberts when AOC and the rest of the Democrats were saying that they were going to pack the courts? And I would say, okay, fair question. The answer is that's not out of the realm of American historical precedent. Like FDR, that's right there in the law. Like the number of Supreme Court justices is not set by the Constitution.

It's set by Congress. FDR, when he had a political fight with the Supreme Court, threatened to pack the court. There was public outrage at him. He backed down, and the court, kind of intimidated by his move, started letting a bunch of the Green New Deal, New Deal, the Blue New Deal stuff through. Freudian slip. Yeah. So they let that stuff go through. And so then, all right, fine. But it was a push and pull of politics. It is also true that there was an effort to impeach a judge in whatever, 1802 or whatever, for something they disagreed with. So Republicans could try again if they won, which is what gets me to Trump. I think he's like, why are you talking

about this? Yeah. Because you don't have 67 votes to do this. Yeah. It's like this Elon, it all came from Elon Musk or, you know, it's probably a reply. Well, he started echoing Bukele. Bukele, like get out of here. Bukele, we're not taking constitutional advice from Bukele. Seriously, seriously. But Musk was quote tweeting approvingly the Bukele plan we're not taking constitutional advice from Bukele. Seriously, seriously. But Musk was quote tweeting approvingly the Bukele plan to crack down and restore democracy. But Bukele certainly did not invent an executive or getting rid of his independent judiciary. Like that's like textbook. And yes, obviously, if you want to set up a dictatorship or some type of extremely powerful, like, executive, you get rid of the judiciary. That doesn't take a constitutional scholar to figure out. But yeah, they don't have the vote. So to me, the almost more interesting answer there was about, would you ignore one?

Would you ignore a ruling? And he says, well, I never have. Right. But he doesn't say he wouldn't. On the other hand, bro, yes, you did. You just ignored one like yesterday. You're acting like, or Monday. You're acting like you were not told to not deport these guys to the El Salvadoran torture chambers. And you told the judge to F off.

Well, as you said, that was actually another interesting part of what he said, is he's maintaining, and a lot of people in Megaworld are maintaining that, and I shouldn't say Megaworld, in this case in the White House, are actually maintaining that that was not done intentionally, that it just was happenstance. And so... What's that, huh? You're breaking up. You're breaking up. Can't hear this ruling.

Also, it is... I hope that's what actually happened. He's like, You're breaking up. You're breaking up. Can't hear this ruling. Also, it is... I hope that's what actually happened. He's like on Air Force One. Also, it is important to point out, Trump has named it the Gulf of America. So therefore, not international waters. Right? Interesting. Lawyers, fact check that for me. I mean, things can be called America. If it was the Gulf of Mexico, then he might have an argument, but it's not the Gulf of Mexico

anymore. It's Gulf of America. Go look up of. They're also, but even on that, they're disputing whether or not the verbal order, I mean, it gets into insane, arcane legal questions, whether the verbal order, the time that the verbal order came out versus the time the written order came out, compare that to the flight logs and when all of the process was able to. We don't need to get into it. Right. And also, we have learned that, as suspected, they made some mistakes. Somebody who came in legally was seeking asylum, just an artist, has nothing to do with this gang, is on the flight. And who knows if Bukele has tortured them since then, has killed them. To me, the people involved in this, when Bush used to do it, they would call

it an extraordinary rendition. We have rules against torture. And so what Bush would do is he would send people mostly to Egypt and elsewhere and say, you torture them. Therefore, we're not torturing them. We now understand that, no, that doesn't count. That doesn't get around the constitutional prohibition on torture. What you're referring to is these reports. This is one from the Miami Herald. That is the Venezuelans alleged to have been gang members trying to iragua. Their families who have seen them in the, actually the Bukele video,

speaking of Bukele, the video that Bukele released of them getting off of the plane in El Salvador, they sort of spotted their family members and have said they're denying actually that these family members have any ties whatsoever to Trend de Aragua. We can put B7 on the screen. This is getting back into the tattoo debate. This says, quote, relatives said he had several tattoos that are testaments to his love of family. One bears the name of their daughter. Another on his arm reads, fuerte como mamá, strong like mom. A third shows two clasped hands representing him and his partner next to the date they began dating. But it gets into that question again, Ryan, of whether people are being swept up into these deportations because they have tattoos that are

identified with Trenda Iroquois, which is something we do repeatedly hear cited by the administration as reasons for the deportations. You've done some reporting down on the border. You've met ICE agents, right? Would you want your fate in the hands of the, think about the ICE agents you've met, all right? And it's a meritocracy. Yeah. These are the people who wound up as ICE agents, right?

Would you want your fate in their discerning hands? And the question that they have to answer, this ICE agent who's working down in Southern Texas or wherever they are, has to look at a tattoo on a Venezuelan person's back. And they have to distinguish whether that tattoo is a Trendy Awagwa gang-affiliated tattoo, or it is some other ink that the person found to be attractive the day they went. Or, like for many people, the artist just drew it. Because you go in, you're like, you're an artist, give me what you got. So the question of whether or not you will be hooded, have your head shaved, tortured, and potentially killed in an El Salvadoran prison is going to be answered by one ICE agent looking at your tattoo and deciding whether or not that, like, is that enough due process, you think? I hate the El Salvadoran.

How confident would you be that that ICE agent is going to get it right 100% of the time? I hate the Salvadorian involvement here. Obviously, I hate that there are any allegations of torture. If I were concerned about due process, I would not enter a country illegally or stay in the country illegally. And that's one of the questions that I have right now is whether these hundreds of migrants are people who were... What if you were told, here's the process? Well, that's what I'm wondering. You apply for asylum.

That's what I'm wondering. You report to this particular spot. Yeah. You get a number. Then you show up for court. Yeah. That's what I'm wondering. That's the process.

You're told that's the process. That's the legal process. Yes. And then some ICE agent says, actually, I kind of think that tattoo might mean you're in a gang. I'm going to send you to Bukele to check out. We were talking about this months ago. I think one of the biggest challenges or tensions in the Trump administration's deportation policy is that the United States of America, under Joe Biden,

unfortunately opened up an actual legal asylum process. And that's where you end up having some roughly 8 million, according to the New York Times, new people, a net of migrants coming into the country just under the Biden administration, a huge, huge chunk of that, close to half, I would say. It's hard to actually know exactly how many were people who came in and legally applied for the asylum process. You cross the border, you claim asylum, and Joe Biden had opened up people's ability initially when he was president. This is one of the things he cracked down on over the last year that brought immigration numbers down dramatically. So that's what I'm actually

genuinely interested about with this number, these hundreds of migrants, is whether any of them were here because the Biden administration said, claim asylum. And coming out of Venezuela, the American government- They can have temporary protective status. Oh, yeah. The American government- It's a communist government that's like torturing and killing. And it's, you know, it's the most awful government ever. Like, come to the United States, we'll give you, we'll protect you. Right.

Literally give you temporary protective status. Right. Yes. So, and I would say the administration, I don't think this matters to most voters. From my perspective, someone who's like in media, I don't think the administration has done a very good job explaining exactly what these migrants are accused of, because that distinction to me is really, really important. Whether they crossed the border illegally, stayed illegally, and then committed various crimes, didn't even show up for asylum hearings. That could be reason enough in my book to deport people if you're obstructing the process that you're benefiting from, all of those things. That's

what I'm curious about. So I don't think the administration has done a particularly good job. It's very, there's a hubris because they know the public is completely on their side about deporting military-age men who came to the country and are tatted up. And likely, you know, I think Crystal mentioned this the other day, if there are several hundred, as her estimate, the estimate she cited said, several hundred Trendyaragua members in the United States, that's a significant gang cell spread out throughout the country. It's not millions, but that's a significant gang cell spread throughout the country that people want to get the hell out of the United States of America. So I think because the administration knows the American people are rightfully supportive of that, they aren't really eager to pony up the evidence.

And the problem for me is that on the right, there's this recognition that the government is inherently incompetent and fallible. Yes. Anybody who's gone to the DMV, you show up at a Social Security office if it's still open. Yeah. It sucks dealing with the government. They lose stuff. They lose stuff on purpose. They say they're open and they're not open.

There's a lot of legitimate criticisms that people have of the government from their immediate interactions with them. And this is why I'm making fun of the intellectual capacity of these ICE agents. Yet we expect then the government to be infallible when it's picking up a Venezuelan off the street and to be certain that they are not grabbing a citizen, not grabbing a green card holder, they're not grabbing somebody who legitimately and legally applied for asylum and has a case that is still being adjudicated. We know that in Chicago, they picked up a brown guy and who turned out to be an American citizen and he spent the entire night in detention. Well, they botched the Khalil arrest.

Right. They showed up, arrested Khalil, thinking that he had a student visa, telling him they were revoking. This is a Columbia protester saying that they were telling him that they were revoking his student visa. And his lawyer's like, bro, he has a green card. And they're like, well, we're revoking that too. Like, they didn't even know. So you want to enable these morons with this unchecked power.

Like, the point of due process from the right is you don't trust the government. Like, you don't, you think they might make mistakes. And so you want to check. Because sometimes you can't get a do-over. Like if you accidentally, as they appear to have done, I'm using accident very generously to them, accidentally send people who are here legally and going through the correct process, and you send them to a torture chamber and they're tortured, there's no do-over. You can't undo that. You've destroyed that person. And maybe they get

killed. And maybe there are actually legal avenues they can pursue. Depends, but we'll see. They didn't have jurisdiction over the Gulf of America. How do they have jurisdiction from this dungeon? The due process question is an interesting one because as long as you've established, people are not in the country legally. But that's the thing. Do we trust that they even established that? To establish that. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I haven't seen enough, frankly, from the White House to just trust that they established that, especially, frankly, after the Khalil arrest, where they did not know. There's the report of them on the phone. This is a report from his wife who can hear them on the phone being like, oh, okay, we'll take them in anyway. Like that's the exact word, anyway. So no, I mean, I don't have a ton of trust in

the government. That's why I always say the most hillbilly thing that J.D. Vance has ever said is that he hates the cops. He apologized for it, but it was like an old post of his. And yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with that. I also think it's fairly important to get a hold of the 8 million people, and that's going to make for some really unfortunate and sad and heart-wrenching stories. But, you know, if people are legitimately members of Trend de Aragua, the government should make that very clear. They should show what their evidence is. Otherwise, it's like you're just throwing people to El Salvador. That was a very real moment from J.D. Vance because that is one of the key divides of where you are in basically a social class. When you see a cop, do you get scared?

No. Do you not care or do you feel more comfortable? Yep. And the immediate feeling that you get puts you in a very particular place. And for J.D. Vance to understand that, he should then understand that when you see that cop, that cop should not have the unilateral power to pick you up, hood you, and send you to El Salvador to be tortured, and then figure out later whether or not they did it right.

I think Sagar was getting at this the other day, but I think one of the tough things here is I care significantly more about the fact that Joe Biden let in 8 million migrants than I do about, and that's not to say I don't care about both. I mean, you can care about both. Sagar made that point too. I don't understand that point. It's like, okay, you can hate that, but it is what it is. Like now here we are. Do we have, are we a country of civil liberties and constitutional protections or not? The part that kills me, like it's all the problems I have with the United States, at least we have these civil liberties. That's always the thing that has separated us from the rest of the world. The first amendment, the fifth amendment, the fourth amendment, all of these different protections that we have against tyranny. We don't get universal health care. We don't get a decent minimum wage.

We have complete total economic precarity. But at least we have these other things. If we don't get that, then just give us China. Like, just give us some economic security then if we're going to live in a totalitarian government without any individual freedoms. I think the point Sager was making about the left broadly, not about you and Crystal, is that sometimes it feels like concern trolling. That after eight million plus people come in illegally, you have case studies like Lake and Riley, and the left is most angry. I'm not saying this about you, but that's what I think people are reacting to the left is furious about Potential likely illegal immigrants not getting due process right the left Is gets angry about different things than the right like that shouldn't be news to people but there's do but part of our civil liberties are

based on having the rule of law and as soon as you start eroding the rule of law and Letting people hide out in sanctuary cities over the course of years, that's a significant, I mean, that's a significant threat to civil liberties of Americans, a significant threat to Lake and Riley and to other people who have found themselves in the crosshairs of this. So I mean, that is legitimately tough for me. I think it is possible to care about both. I do care about, like, genuinely care about like genuinely care about not disappearing people into a Salvadorian prison.

I mean you can't put these guys in front of a judge and be like here's how we know they're part of a gang. Or at least put the evidence out. Like let the public know how you know that. I mean preferably before you send them to the dungeon. Yeah. Well just don't send

them to El Salvador. It's a stupid political stunt. You just straight up can't do that. It's a stupid stunt. Yeah. It's just, yes. I don't disagree with that at all. Well, I guess we found some common ground. There we go.

Against Bukele. No extraordinary renditions to torture chambers. All right. So let's stop fueling the Bukele PR stunts. That would be great. Let's move on to this Brian Dropsite reporting out of Gaza over the past couple of days. And we have some incredible guests, hopefully two guests, but at least one guest lined up.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For today's segment, we're fortunate enough to be joined by Abu Bakr Abed, joining us from Gaza, and Sharif Abdel-Kadous, editor at Dropsite News, often edits pieces by Abu Bakr. Abed, thank you so much to both of you for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you. And so, Abu Bakr, we had an entire segment planned out where we want to talk about all the different updates that have been happening in the last couple of days. But then this morning, you witnessed news

that is now kind of trickling into the international consciousness, which was this shelling of a UN building. So can you describe for us where you were, why you were there, and what you saw? Yeah, the first thing that you have to know is that Israeli tanks have been chilling ceaselessly the eastern parts of Deir el-Balakh. So very expectedly, we know that the buildings along the eastern outskirts

will be hit by those shells. 11.30, I was out for an emergency, exactly 11.30 in the morning Gaza time, and I was along Salah ad-Din Road on the eastern outskirts of Deir el-Balakh. Then I heard a massive shell, which is like a booing sound, a very, very horrifying sound, and it flew over the car which I was in, and then it hit the UN compound, and we saw the smoke, the cloud of smoke that emanated or went out from the building itself. And after that, we went all the way along the Salahuddin Road,

and we saw two convoys, two vehicles of the World Health Organization, along with a UN convoy, one of the vehicles of them, so three vehicles, and another ambulance, which had a UK logo on it. So it was for a medical organization based in UK, which is QDOS, and the foreigners, the medical staffers from outside Gaza, they've come in to take the casualties, and they've rushed to Al-Aqsa Matas Hospital in Deir el-Balah,

and they surrounded the place and they took the casualties. So we understand that what we saw is that one of the foreign workers was killed, five were injured, but we have another report that another one was killed as well. But so far, we understand that one was killed, four were injured, but we have another report that another one was killed as well. But so far, we understand that one was killed, four were injured. And this is what happened. And until the place, for one hour, for one complete hour, I saw the events myself and I saw everything. So it was very clear it was a shell by Israeli tanks. And the arbitrary shelling has even caused many casualties over the past two days. So

it's very expected. And the IDF is firmly and plainly denying that they struck this UN building. How can you be sure that it was a UN building that you saw get hit? And how could you be sure that it was an IDF shell? there were there were flags of the un over it and we know since the un got into gaza they have marked their places with either fences or flags over the place and with their vehicles parking in front of those buildings and we understand that this is not the only building inside Deir el-Balak because since the start of the war in Gaza, as Gaza, as we wrote to Dropside News with Sharif, the first story we produced together,

that Deir el-Balak is the last standing city in the BCH territory. So the UN and the other international humanitarian organizations make sure that they are going to be stationed in the most or in the safest place inside Gaza. That is Deir el-Balak, which has been the least hit over the course of the genocide. That's why it's not the only building. We have Abu Husni Street, which is in the middle of Deir el-Balak, that has several organizations like WFP and UNRWA, as well as UN.

But the fact is that this was along in Al-Birka area, along the eastern outskirts of the Al-Balah, the eastern part, and it was marked clearly with flags and there were cars parked outside, they parked outside the building with clear logo, like, emplacent with logos of the UN and at the same time, the building itself has many flags over it, so it was clear that the UN building,

and I know, by the way, from before this attack and before this attack, I was very aware of all buildings that are working inside the rebel. Because I'm in the city and I've been observing that over time. And I know where the buildings are, the organizations that work. That's where you live. Yeah, that's where I live. That's why I'm telling you.

That was clearly a UN building and Israel hit it. But I think Israel is making the point based on the arbitrary shelling that they did not deliberately hit it. And this is something I might agree with because it's been arbitrary. As I'm telling you, it's been random. So that's why they are claiming right now that they haven't hit the place. But already in the end, even if you purposefully or not purposefully hit the place, it is you. It's a tank from your side. So it's not going to be on the other side because Hamas, again, hasn't fired back a single bullet on Israel, despite the fact that they have killed more

than 420 people in Gaza over the course of the past two days. This is apart from the fact that they have killed 150 during the ceasefire. So it's very clear that they hit this place. They must be held accountable for it. And they really must, I don't know what they have to do. But of course, Israel is responsible for that. And I can make sure of that because I was in the place and I saw that myself. So there is no way that this can be debunked at all because it's in the place and it survived it very, very miraculously. And Sharif, what can you tell us about the, I guess, what we're hearing from Israel, what we're hearing from other involved parties? You know, the first person story there from Abu Bakr is unbelievable and having that reporting from him. What else do we know about how other people are reacting or other entities are reacting to what happened?

Well, to this story, the news is just coming out so far. The only official statement we have is from the Ministry of Health saying that one person was killed and four were injured in an attack on what they described as a UN facility and the Israeli military denying that. But we have to say that this comes in context of this renewed genocide within a genocide that began yesterday with Israel unleashing one of the deadliest wave of bombardments since this began 17 months ago. The Ministry of Health just put out the latest figures. Over the past two days, 430 people have been killed, including over 180 children, which is one of the highest death tolls of children in a single wave of airstrikes ever.

And, you know, once again, our timelines were filled with the images of dead children, of dead babies, of families being wiped out, of the wails and shrieks of parents. And it came without warning. And it came across all areas of Gaza, very heavily in the north of Gaza, where the Ministry of Health has also put out the kind of numbers of where people were killed. And it was 156 people were killed in Gaza, the governorate of Gaza, which is where Gaza City is in Jebelia. This was an area that was already completely devastated by the Israeli military assault.

And it's also the area where over half a million Palestinians had returned to following the ceasefire. Many of them returning and with no, like creating makeshift shelters or putting tents on the rubble of their homes. And that's where they're living. And this is the area that was heavily bombed yesterday. And, you know, I was, Abu Bakr called me when all of this began. And we spoke and he was seeing helicopters flying low outside of his window, relentless strikes and so forth.

The next morning, I contacted another dropside contributor, Hossam Shabbat, who's in Beit Hanun, which is all the way in the northeastern edge of Gaza. He replied with one word, death. That's what he wrote. Another dropside contributor, journalist Rasha Abu-Jalal, who is among those people who went from Deir el-Balak to Gaza City after the ceasefire went into effect. An airstrike hit right next to her home, collapsed onto her home. She somehow miraculously survived with her husband and five children. And she wrote a dispatch for that on dropside that you can read. But, you know, and I think it's important to understand when we're talking about context, this seems to have been Israel's plan all along.

You know, the ceasefire that went into effect, that was agreed on and went into effect on January 19th, this was supposed to be a three-phase deal, the first phase being 42 days. But we know that Israel was really only intending for this to be a phase one deal. As Abu Bakr mentioned, we saw them violate the ceasefire nearly every single day since January 19th, killing Palestinians in Gaza on a regular basis. Over 150 have been killed even before this massive aerial assault on Tuesday morning. They refused to allow in the agreed-upon number of tents into Gaza. They did not allow in a single mobile home, as agreed upon in the deal. They didn't allow bulldozers and other forms of reconstruction equipment. And during all of this, they also refused to hold negotiations on phase two.

And phase two, the negotiations were supposed to start on February 3rd. And it was supposed to entail the release of all the remaining Israeli captives in exchange for a substantive number of Palestinians being held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the beginning of a permanent ceasefire. And this is something Netanyahu has said plainly that they do not want. Hamas spent weeks calling for serious talks on the second phase to begin. Israel simply did not allow the negotiations to go forward. After the first phase ended in early March,

Netanyahu said Israel agreed to what has been described as a new U.S. proposal in which Hamas would release half the remaining captives that it has in return for a seven-week extension. And kind of that's it, nothing in return. And of course, this was not part of the agreement that was set. Hamas rejected that. And then, you know, Israel reinforced a total blockade on March 2nd. Not a single truck has been allowed into Gaza for the past 17 days. No food, no medicine, no fuel.

They cut electricity, which affected a desalination plant, which severely limited the availability of water to hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in Dirbelach and Chanyounis. Prices are skyrocketing. People can't afford. So this is a policy of forced

starvation that is being reimposed. And we reported a drop site. They also started denying doctors and international humanitarian aid workers entry into Gaza on relief missions at unprecedented rates. And then, you know, on Tuesday, we saw this deadliest wave of bombardments. And we've also seen that the Israeli military has sent out ordering people to evacuate, mostly along eastern Gaza, near the border, in places like Beit Hanun, places like Khazan and Khan Yunis, forcing people into the center of the territory. And this indicates that Israel is renewing plans for ground operations, because this is what we saw last time. And today we have the Wall Street Journal reporting, citing, you know, Israeli security sources, that they are planning to escalate a major ground operation

using an even bigger force that they used last time, because much of the manpower that they needed on the northern border with Lebanon, They don't need that there anymore because the attacks with Hezbollah have ceased. So you know, this is where it stands now and it's very ominous. And Abu Bakr, you were telling me just before you came on that your indications were as well that it looks like another ground invasion is underway. What are you seeing that makes you believe that what the Israelis are telling the Wall Street Journal is accurate? Yeah, because I think the shelling has intensified over the past 12 hours,

particularly during the night hours as we've been hearing that. It's not all about this because when we see like the plumes of smoke from the skyline view that we're seeing at the moment, because I have a highest point, I have one of the highest points that I can really climb up and see the sky from where I am in the environment. So the eastern parts of Dar al-Balakh, I need to remind people that they have been utterly arbitrated during the genocide in the Israeli incursion of East Dar al-Balakh last August 2024. Every place, every inch in the eastern parts of Dar al-Balakh was totally annihilated and flattened to the ground. And at the same time, when you see this,

you know, when you see this increase of attacks and this increase of shells across those regions, you feel that there is going to be a military ground operation, not necessarily in Dar al-Balakh, because in the eastern parts. and at the same time, Sharif told you that the eastern parts and the northern border regions of Gaza and Khan Yunis, when we talk about Khan Yunis, we talk about three areas in east Khan Yunis, which are near the borders, like Khzaa, Abasan, and Benishele. So they have all people living there to evacuate.

That means they are preparing for a military ground operation. The same has happened in Beit Hanun and Beit Lahya, and here in Deir el-Balak and central Gaza, the northern regions in al-Buraish camp. And in fact, the fact is that during the ceasefire, when we talk about the ceasefire, the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed many people, over 20 people in al-Buraish camps, northern regions, and I went one time to those places

and I saw military forces there myself in Al-Buraj camp uh northern which is a violation of the ceasefire agreement right yeah and during the violations of this is fine this is absolutely a big big indicator of an intent to military to for military ground operations let me just because I wanted to make sure that I remember this or I mentioned this because we've've talked about the, we talked about the incident of attacking a UN convoy. Now, the Israeli military has given approval for the entry of one of the ambulances from outside Gaza, the Egyptian border, to help treat the patient, the foreign patients inside Gaza and take them outside Gaza for treatment. When the attacks happened, the convoys that were taking children, injured children, women who have been waiting desperately for evacuation, for medical evacuation during the past 15 months has halted.

And the WHO, the humanitarian organizations, haven't done any, haven't really exerted any efforts to make sure that this process can be resumed. So when you talk about this, that the lives of foreigners are much better or more important than the Palestinian children and women who have been suffering every single day and people are trying to get that comparison up. So why the WHO and the humanitarian organizations have worked so hard to make sure that they are going to take the patients, the foreign patients or the war wounded from their workers, their foreign workers outside Gaza. But when it comes to Palestinians, we're talking about more than 12,000 patients inside Gaza. They are in desperate need of evacuating right now. 40% of them have died. And many of them, five to 10, have died when they reach the hospitals outside Gaza, like Egypt and Jordan,

because of the continuous procrastination by the Israeli military and the delays and the restrictions. This is a very, very important point. And when we talk about another point that Sharif mentioned and quite elaborated on, the overpricing. Right now, there are completely different prices. We talk about... Yeah, can you talk a little bit about what the effect has been of the blockade going back into place on March 2nd? Like, what was it like before and what's it like now? Before, the prices were quite reasonable for the entirety of the population. People could really afford. But right right now we talk about an onion for $5, a nigger plant for $3, a tomato for $2.

We're talking about one of each type. How can people really afford? People are fasting here. They are spending almost 12 hours without a single plate. And at the same time, they don't have anything for service. So the both meals that you should have very peacefully, now they don't have them. A lot of families cannot really afford. Not all families do have the ability to bring their kids food every single day.

The insanity of this crisis now, right now, as I was roaming around and going inside Gaza's markets here in Dar al-Bal, talking to people from northern Gaza, there's not a single bag of flour. I was roaming around and going inside Gaza's markets here in Dar al-Balak and Khan Yunus and talking to people from northern Gaza. There is not a single bag of flour in the territory. There is not a single cooking oil inside the territory. So how can people really cope with that when there is no single type, one single type of fruit is not found inside Gaza? Discussive vegetables is insane.

We're talking about just various past quantities of vegetables, like zucchini, like tomatoes, potatoes, and they're not even available. And their prices are extremely exorbitant. Like you talk about one potato for $5. Oh my God, how can people really do that? In the United States, it's not the same thing. I think you can buy a kilo for $5.

So if people in the United States cannot really afford that, how can people of Gaza, who 80% of them, 80% of them have lost their work since the genocide started and they have tried to get back to essence of normality when the ceasefire started, but now their hopes are dented, their lives are shattered yet again. I know people, one of the very important points about this, I know people personally that

they were searching for their loved ones under the rubble before the start of the series of attacks. They were killed yesterday. So instead of having retrieving the bodies of their loved ones and their families from under the rubble after they have been there and stuck there under the rubble for months, they are now killed and they are now both buried in the same graveyard. This barbarity that we're trying to tell you and trying to tell the world is what we need to talk about. There's nothing about Hamas here. There's nothing about the ongoing violations and the ongoing escalation that we are living through.

Most of the population here, like, sorry, but Israel does want to destroy Gaza. I drove in northern Gaza. I drove in Khalil and I drove in central Gaza. What else Israel wants to destroy in Gaza? There is nothing like utter devastation, utter obliteration of every means of life. There are no buildings. People are living in the wreckage of their homes. People are trying to salvage the ruins of their homes. What do you want toage the ruins of their homes. What do you want to destroy? Really, really, what do you want to destroy? Whom do you want to kill?

You want to kill the entire population? Do it with a nuclear bomb. That's what people want because they cannot really take any more seconds of this brutality and this barbarism. It can't really go on like this. But the world has allowed this. Our world has allowed this in the United States because I told you. I need to remind you both, Ryan and Emily, we talked about Trump last November.

I told you that he's not good. He's not going to be good for Palestine. He's not going to do anything. He's not someone who wants to stop wars. He wants to break out wars and that's what we are seeing right now. And we talk about his plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza. So this is absolutely

sheer hypocrisy and sheer barbarism that we haven't seen before. And he's much, much worse than Joe Biden. That's my thought. Sharif, I actually wanted to ask you about that, because as people try to maybe find, you know, or think about where there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, that would turn to politics. And I'm curious what you make about how a potential ground invasion, it sounds like from both of your reporting, and as Ryan mentioned, that does seem to be on the horizon. How does that affect the Trump administration, which Donald Trump has been unorthodox in some ways, criticizing Netanyahu for a, quote, public relations crisis. He's obviously sensitive

to seeing, you know, the awful images and stories like Abu Bakr's just there, people being pulled from the rubble and being killed while they're trying to pull their own deceased loved ones from the rubble. At the same time, he's, you know, has Mike Huckabee and Tom Cotton surrounding him. So it's just so, so very hard to predict. But you followed this closely. What could happen, I guess, politically if Israel does move back into a ground invasion? Well, as you mentioned, Trump is very hard to read. He, you know, says things, kind of shoots off the cuffs, says, you know, we're going to ethnically cleanse Gaza and then kind of seems bored about it and doesn't mention it again.

It's hard to know where he stands. I think we do have to acknowledge that the initial ceasefire phase that did go into effect, I don't think it would have happened unless Trump was president. He wanted, you know, sometimes he does the right things for the wrong reasons, and he wanted some kind of optics for the day before his inauguration. And, you know, him and his envoy, Stephen Witkoff, did kind of force this through, where the Biden administration completely failed in that and just allowed Israel to continue. And Witkoff went to Gaza, talked to Hamas. People didn't want him to do that. He's sort of willing to push the envelope, I guess, a little bit more than a conventional Republican. And the U.S. is negotiating directly with Hamas now, although apparently the Biden administration did that briefly as well. But, you know, after these

attacks on Tuesday, Israel said that they had received the green light from the White House. The White House has voiced its approval of this new stage of Israel's assault on Gaza. Netanyahu took to the airwaves and said that this attack was only the beginning. Those are his words. And that all further negotiations about the ceasefire will take place under, quote, under fire. So this is all happening with the approval of the White House. So it does seem that we're entering kind of this new normal phase where Israel is going to attack in these different ways. We may be seeing the beginnings of a major ground operation. And that's where the negotiations are going to be. There isn't going to be, you know, the second stage of a ceasefire, any talk of a permanent halt to the conflict, any talk of permanent withdrawal.

As I said, like, you know, at the same time, Stephen Woodcuff, in his comments over these past few weeks, seemed much more reasonable than Antony Blinken was as Secretary of State under the Biden administration. He was saying things that seemed reasonable about Palestinians will be allowed to return to Gaza, that we will get to a permanent ceasefire, that we do need to rebuild. However, none of this seems to have all broken down. And basically, Israel has completely violated the ceasefire, made very clear that it was never going to get past this first phase. And now we're seeing what everyone predicted, a massive reengagement of this violence. And trying to force Hamas to release all of the captives, which I don't think Hamas would do if there's nothing in return. And so, you know, we're in a moment now of just increased violence and death. They were just, you know, as Abu Bakr is describing, these attacks, there was this incredible wave the other day,

but they're continuing all throughout today. They bombed tents in Mawasikhan Yunis, killing a family there. And yeah, it's quite frightening to see where this could go. We'll put Abu Bakr's dispatch down in the notes, as well as some of the other pieces, including Sharif's recent piece about doctors and nurses being kept out of Gaza. But Sharif, thank you so much for joining us. And Abu Bakr, please stay safe and thank you for all you're doing for us. 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. find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author

wants to reveal this terrible secret even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together.

How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. After Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer caved to Republicans, allowing the spending bill to go through, blocking Democrats from their effort to force a government shutdown, things have gone from bad to worse for him as he has canceled his book tour, citing security concerns, but citing actually there would have been a bunch of protesters yelling at him from the left,

from the Democratic Party at his events. And now Nancy Pelosi is clowning him for his failure to do his job. Let's roll the former House speaker here. Well, I'm concerned about the next time. I'm concerned about the future. What happened last week was last week. We're going into the future. And this morning, Huck Kim Jeffries and Chuck Schumer joined in this kind of an event in New York where Hakeem said that he had confidence in Chuck Schumer. So we're to the next stage on this now.

But your question, yours, it is about what comes next. I myself don't give away anything for nothing. I think that's what happened the other day. We could have, in my view, perhaps gotten them to agree to a third way, which was a bipartisan

CR for two weeks, four weeks, in which we could have had bipartisan legislation to go forward. I'm an appropriator. Mr. Schiff is an appropriator with the Appropriations Committee. They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they're not agreeing to it. The plan she laid out there, by the way, is precisely what Republicans did with Biden in a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021. Democrats tried to do a partisan CR. Republicans said,

no way. We're not participating in that. And they forced Democrats to do clean CR. So it's not a radical strategy that she's laying out there. Schumer has avoided politics and prose in other bookstores, but he hasn't avoided the cable circuit or the network circuit. Here he is on CBS. In your own party, they're saying, look, it's time for you to go. They no longer trust your leadership. They want somebody else in there. What do you say about that?

Here's what I say. In your own party saying that's to go. Here's what I'm saying. I'm the best leader for the Senate. We have a lot of leaders. You know, when you don't have a president, there's not one leader of the party. There are lots of them. We have a lot of good people.

But I am the best at keep winning Senate seats. I've done it in 2005. Just in 2020, no one thought we'd take back the Senate. Under my leadership, we took it. So we now are executing. You're not going anywhere. We have a great, we're moving forward. Hakeem and I have a plan.

Here he is on The View also getting confronted. And it gives me no pleasure to say this to you because we are friends, but I think you caved. I think you and nine other Democrats caved. I don't think you showed the fight that this party needs right now because you're playing by a rule book where the other party has thrown that rule book away. True. And so in my view, what you did really was in supporting that GOP partisan bill that Democrats had no input in, you cleared the way for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to gut Social Security, to gut Medicare, to gut Medicaid. Why did you lead Democratic senators to play by that book that the Republicans are not playing by? Okay, first I'd say, Sonny, no one wants to fight more than me and no one fights more than me.

We've got to fight smart. And then Jen Psaki, former Joe Biden White House spokesperson. Experience is a good thing. It's important. But seniority and keeping people in charge simply because they have done it before should not be the only thing. Chuck Schumer was a hell of a majority leader in his prime. I grew up in politics when he was majority leader, when he was the aggressive senator, when he was the aggressive member of Congress who was dominating media coverage, arm-twisting Republicans and members of his own party, and raising an absolute boatload of money for Democrats.

But he is not in his prime. The Republican Party is not the party of McCain or Romney or even George W. Bush. Feels to me like instead of just making tweaks to the margins of the message, which by the way is important too, maybe it's time to spend more time to throwing out the hard copy of the old playbook. And a pretty fascinating exchange here with MSNBC's Chris Hayes. All of those things you enumerated, which all sound like good politics to me, are the kinds of things that you'd be doing if Mitt Romney were president. That like there's this weird asymmetry right now, which is that they are acting in this totally new way in which they are ambitiously trying to seize all power

and create a presidential dictatorship in the United States of America. And the Democratic opposition is acting like, well, if we can get their approval rate down a few points, then what happens? Well, what happens is, look, first, we get it way down. He's going to have much less. This worked in 2017. You say now it's a different government. It's different, though. Oh, it is different. But health care, we beat them. Taxes, we beat them. And guess what we did? Guess what we did, Chris? We took back the House and won in the Senate and that. And then we were allowed to do all those good things. This is not the only tactic. We have to stand strong in certain instances and not give them the votes at all. Let me get there are instances with this. The two work together. First of all, I don't know what he means by we beat them on taxes.

I truly have no idea what he's talking about. Trump pushed through his $6 trillion tax cut. He might be talking about some small ball thing that we don't even remember. Or maybe he means, because he doesn't care about policy, maybe he means they let them pass the tax cut bill and it hurt them in the midterms. And so we beat them on the issue of taxes. If that's what he means, we're at another level of meta. Yeah. So the reigning critique, as you saw from all of these different mainstream center-left

anchors, is that he's out of his prime. He's out of time. He's an anachronism. He was very good from 2005 to 2020. That's a really good run. And he was good at raising money. And he kept Democrats competitive in a Senate that is unbalanced. And unified. And kept them unified. And it's unbalanced in the sense that smaller states, small rural states, get the same number of senators as, like, California and New York get. And so, you know, you have to, as the Democratic Party, you have to, you know, significantly overperform in order to just stay even. To his credit, yeah, like, yeah, 2006,

2008, 2020, yeah, great. But it's now 2025. And to me, the most revealing exchange there was with Hayes, where he said it worked in 2017. Mm-hmm. So he's going back to his 2017 playbook. What did you think? And how are how are Republicans seeing this? Like, how do they see his resistance? That's a really smart point, because I think one of the central divides among Democrats last week was whether or not to recycle the 2017 playbook, which is you look like from their perspective to voters, the adults in the room, do everything you can to look like the adults in the room, the people who are not the obstructionists, the people who are serious about doing business so that you can frame Republicans as the unserious teenagers, to quote Alyssa Slotkin, kind of should probably quibble with my characterization there, but they're the ones who look like the, you know, wild rabble rousers to, that's another quote, actually. So, I think that was the playbook

in 2017, when Democrats were confident that Trump was going to sort of hoist himself by his own batard and would inevitably crumble and melt into, like, a puddle of just political inviolability. And that never happened, partially because Democrats never bothered to muster a serious response. Their response was just, Trump is really bad. And now the question is, okay, so what are you proactively, what do you want? What do you want from Republicans in a spending bill? You weren't going to get it, but the opportunity to shut down the government was an opportunity to fundamentally tell the American people what you think should

be in the damn bill. You know, what do you want Republicans to come to the table on? So to me, that's a great point that it really was the split. Do we throw out the quote unquote resistance playbook that really banks itself on just resisting, not being sort of proactive about that resistance. And, you know, we talked about this last week. I think it was an insane, insane failure to learn from the lessons of the Tea Party about shutdowns and about populism and just a complete wasted opportunity for Democrats. But I think part of it is because Schumer, even invoking the year 2017 there, tells me they are still stuck on this idea of just being the smart resistance. And not even MSNBC is interested in that anymore. Yeah. And it's certainly true that

going into a government shutdown is not without risk. Of. Although, you know, I've spoken to a ton of federal workers. You and I live in here in Washington, D.C. You know, a lot of the people we meet are federal workers. All of them wanted a government shutdown, even though it meant there was a possibility they might not even get back pay. You know, you could imagine Republicans saying, no, our line in the sand is we're not even going to pay. We're not even going to do back pay, even though we've done that for every shutdown before. And despite the fact that there was so much uncertainty around what would happen in a government shutdown, all of them were like do it.

Just put up a fight. Because the second he passed that CR through the Senate, that night, Trump put forward the plans for this massive reduction in force, put out memos saying, you know, just let, it's time to absolutely completely gut the federal government to the greatest extent possible by the law. And the law that they had just passed made it that much more, that much easier for them, for Trump to accomplish. Because it included some, it included some provisions that would allow them to sequester even more money. And because people like Russ Vogt were telegraphing, we don't see this spending figure as a mandate. We see it as a ceiling. We're not going to spend this.

And we're going to use the authority that you grant us through this CR to destroy the administrative state. And they did it. And Democrats did it anyway. So, and now, whatever is coming at the federal government from Trump in the next couple weeks is going to be very, very bad for federal workers. Now, maybe people will, maybe you love it as a member of the public. But from the perspective of federal workers who really do believe that the federal government

should work, they think it's going to destroy in a functioning government, a functioning public. And now they've just kind of ceded all that until September to Trump. Yeah, where they could have had a fairly easy, I don't mean this pejoratively, but a political prop to trot out from now until then. And I actually think they would have gotten something small from Republicans out of this. And small victories are victories. You could get a clean CR, even. Even that. And Schumer is out now saying, I don't know if you saw him say this, Republicans were telling him it would have been a six to nine month shutdown. What the hell are

you talking about, bro? I don't know what Republicans are genuinely telling you that, but they're messing with you, Chuck. It would have been a Saturday-Sunday shutdown because you could have controlled that. What are you talking about? A weekend shutdown was like the lowest risk. It was absolutely a risk, there's no question about it. But for risk-averse Democrats, this was like the warmest pool for them to dip their toe into being like actually a party of taking risks. And they couldn't even do that. Even when you have MSNBC and Nancy Pelosi, Jen Psaki, all of these people saying maybe our strategy needs an update. Maybe we actually need to give the base a shot in the arm here, that we can rally hundreds of people at protests over the weekend. We can tell people that we fought. We can get some small concession. They had leverage.

They didn't have a lot of leverage, but they had a tiny amount of leverage. And you should use your tiny amount of leverage when you have it. Otherwise, you're going to make your base more and more angry. And that's Brendan Buck. A lot of them might check out. Yeah, we were talking about this. Brendan Buck, who is a Paul Ryan strategist, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times agreeing with Chuck Schumer because he was saying that was the successful, he said Republicans actually ended up giving too much to the Tea Party. Like Republican leadership, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, were too nice, too indulgent of the Tea Party. And it's like, again, no, the reason you ended up with Trump is because you guys were trying to block the Tea Party, which was representative of your own party's base, your voters. It reminded me of the Sam Godaldig research paper that we covered about a year ago,

where he showed the people from the poorest districts are represented by the Freedom Caucus, and they're represented by Justice Democrats. And that's bipartisan. And these are the people that Washington is trying to treat as unserious, quote, rabble-rousers, is how Brendan Buck refers to them. So if you want to judge the wisdom of the Schumer strategy, look no further than the fact that establishment Republicans who now have zero influence in Washington are saying he made the right move. Right. Stupid. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to that calculation that some establishment figures in both parties make. Would they rather win, but empower their left or right flank? Yeah. Or would they rather lose and disempower them? And for Brennan Buck, he'd have rather lost but maintained the cohesion of the kind of chamber of commerce wing of the

Republican Party. Yeah. Maybe Schumer's trying to make that calculation. On the other hand, Schumer's also taking the bullets for his entire caucus. It's not as if Schumer pushed his caucus to cave. Like, they all wanted to cave. I mean, not all of them. A lot of them wanted to fight. More than 10 wanted to cave. And more than voted to cave, wanted to cave. And so Schumer here is being a kind of good soldier for his own cowardly caucus that wants to cave but wants to pretend that they don't. Now they can pretend to be mad at Schumer over it.

Democrats should be furious with the way leadership has handled the entire Trump era. And I feel like that hasn't broken into the main discourse until now. It's pretty bad. Yeah. They have no idea what's coming for them. They lost to this guy so badly. Republicans lost to him badly first. And it was a years-long lesson in what not to do with your party's populists for Democrats. It was handed to them on a silver platter by the way Republican leadership treated mostly not just Trump, but Trump's voters, because Trump's voters took that as a message that they were being rejected. It's the same thing with AOC's voters now. It's the same thing with the voters of people who were like, you're doing nothing?

You're laying down? What are you doing? They take that as a front to them, and they're not wrong to do it. So good luck with that, Chuck Schumer. Yeah. All right. Up next, Donald Trump fired both Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. One of them, Alvaro Bedoya, joins us next. Stick around for that. 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father?

Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money

back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about

going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, seemingly out of nowhere, President Donald Trump fired both Democratic commissioners on the FTC. That's the Federal Trade Commission. Lena Kahn is no longer there. So that means that there are just now two Republicans, because the third has yet to be appointed. Among them are Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. You can put up

the second element here, former commissioner. I'm just going to call him commissioner, because I don't recognize the validity of these firings. His statement that he put out last night can move on to E3 as well. Lena Kahn standing up for the former Democratic commissioner as well. She said the administration's illegal attempt to fire commissioners to slaughter Amadoya is a disturbing sign that this FTC won't enforce the law without fear of favor. It's a gift to corporate lawbreakers that squeeze American consumers, workers, and honest businesses. And joining us today for his first interview since this illegal firing is Commissioner Bedoya. Commissioner, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So this was always considered to be a possibility. But on the other hand, they could easily have three Republicans. All they have to do is hold a possibility. But on the other hand, they could easily have three Republicans. All they have to do is hold a vote, and they can get the third one. I think it's scheduled for Monday. Yeah. So then three to two, you guys can complain. And also, Andrew Ferguson, the FTC chair, you guys work with him fairly well. When he was named the chair over Holyoke and over other possibilities, it was seen in the anti-monopoly circles as kind of a win for the Vance wing because he's closer to you guys and Lena Kahn than anybody else. Oh, this bipartisan anti-trust thing where we're actually going to go after corporate power, might actually

be gaining some steam here. And they don't need to fire you, because like I said, they can just outvote you every single time if they don't like where you come from. So did you expect that they would do this? And how did you learn? Did you learn from Fox News? I thought it might happen. I was surprised at the moment it happened, because, well, when did I learn? I just left work and I was at my daughter's gymnastics practice when Commissioner Slaughter called me and said, have you checked your email? And there was some guy at the White House claiming that the president was firing me. Look, I think timing is important because if this were just a unitary executive thing, we would have been on that checklist week one or week two along with Gwynne Wilcox at the NLRB. I think instead you got to ask who this is helping and why they did it when they did because this doesn't help MAGA, this helps Musk. I think you got to think about the billionaires over the

president's shoulder at the inauguration. Three examples. I am currently suing Amazon in not one but two lawsuits. I am responsible for enforcing a privacy consent decree against Elon Musk and X. And I am a judge in a matter where FTC staff is trying to ramp up the privacy protections that apply to its users. Who else have we been investigating? Pharmacy middlemen who allegedly send kids with cancer home and say, no, no, no, you can't get your cancer medicine at that independent pharmacy. You got to get it in the mail in the pharmacy we own. Can we pause for two seconds on the pharmacy middleman? Sorry. Absolutely. In the lame duck between the election and the inauguration of Donald Trump, there was pharmacy middleman reform included in that legislation that was about to pass when Elon

Musk jumped in and stopped it from passing and a new bill passed. I understand since then, something like 300 plus pharmacies have closed as a result. That's what I've heard as well. Can you tell people just very briefly, like, who are the, like, what's going on? Absolutely. So it used to be that there were multiple health insurers and lots of independent pharmacies. And over time, there grew to be this middle layer of these entities called PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers. And frankly, when they're all independent, it's great because they cut good deals for the insurers

from the manufacturers, all right? But what happened? It started to be that each of the big three insurers bought or got their own pharmacy middlemen. And then those pharmacy middlemen have their own pharmacies. Often mail order, sometimes not. So what happens? A lot of those multi-billion dollar companies don't consider it profitable to serve rural America, urban America. It's the independents that serve those folks. My first trip as an FTC commissioner was to Charleston, West Virginia. I met in a strip mall with a bunch of pharmacists who took care of a

lot of folks during COVID when no one else did. And what those folks say is, yeah, I got people showing up at my pharmacy with prescriptions for cancer medicine, and they're told, go home, wait for it, because the PBM says, I can't give it to you. You need to get it from their pharmacy. I met with pharmacists in Louisiana who said, after Ida came through, there were about 24 pharmacies served, two parishes. People were showing up at the four pharmacies that were open, including like three or four independents, and they got a screen that said, you cannot give this person their insulin prescription. They need to go to the pharmacy we own down the street, which is under three feet of water. That is who we're talking about here. Right. And you guys are coming, we're coming after that.

We have been in the middle of a, I think more than year-long market study into the pharmacy benefit managers. What's more, me and Commissioner Slaughter are sitting as judges in a case in which FTC staff alleges that these middlemen are competing not to lower the price of insulin, but to raise it. And if our lawsuit to make clear that we are still commissioners fails, I don't know what happens to that lawsuit. So I'm curious about this timing question as well. That is very interesting. And, you know, Ryan mentioned some of the common ground between you and Andrew Ferguson and common ground that Andrew Ferguson had found with Lena Kahn.

But you guys had a dust up recently over I think it was diversity, equity, inclusion stuff at the FTC, which Andrew Ferguson said he would strip out. And I'm curious also if maybe, because it strikes me as, you know, Sundar Pichai is trying to have a great relationship with Trump, despite the Trump DOJ originally filing the Google antitrust suit and all of that. So they had to have known. I mean, Ferguson has been no friend of Amazon and Jeff Bezos. They had to have known some of this was coming. I wonder what you make of the case that maybe they realized you wouldn't be cooperative with them at all, that there wouldn't be. And who was they? Just people like whoever was pushing for you to be quote unquote fired. They said, well, he's not getting along with Andrew Ferguson. That's a good question. Who is that?

Yeah. Look, I don't know who the they is, but I can tell you how I spent the last couple weeks. About a week and a half ago, I called out Jeff Bezos by name for his blithe statement that the post editorial page would focus on free markets and personal liberties. And I said, hey, man, when I think about free markets and personal liberties, I don't think about the post editorial page. I think about the vending machines in Amazon warehouses that dole out painkillers and not potato chips. Bernie Sanders put out a report showing that people are literally working so fast, so hard, their hands stop working, their shoulders stop working,

the discs in their back bulge and break. And it called them out. I got 2.5 million views on it. That was the last thing I did. A little before that, I pressed Chairman Ferguson, who you're right, did a great thing in ratifying the merger guidelines, which had special protections for labor in them. That was a good move, and I respect him for it. But my beef with him, as it were, has been that he is in a position to do extraordinary things for affordability in this country.

And I was disappointed he'd spent the first four weeks not saying anything about the price of eggs, about the price of milk, about grocery prices. And I was pressing him to investigate the price of eggs and calling out the fact that eggs in this country, our ability to get them is controlled in part by what appears to be a duopoly in Europe that controls the supply of layer breeder hens.

Since then, DOJ said they're investigating it. I think it's a great move. But I think it's pretty notable that the firing comes now after I've been calling out duopolies in agriculture and the way Mr. Bezos treats his employees on the warehouse floor and not in week one or two along with Gwen Wilcox at NLRB. I think your point about the timing, which Emily picked up on, is really important because

I can easily be persuaded that a president should actually be able to control the various agencies within the executive. If Bernie Sanders had magically won the White House, I wouldn't want some retrograde commissioners on the NLRB and FTC thwarting the Bernie Sanders agenda that the people had elected. So on a level of principle, and I bet most of our viewers would probably agree on a level of principle, fine. But so your point about the timing is right. Because if that's the principle, then he just, like day one, he would fire you on day one. But the MAGA world of which, you know,

J.D. Vance is a strong element, has liked your work, has liked Lena Khan's work, has liked Jonathan Cantor's work over at DOJ, Doha Meki's work. And so, therefore, you stuck around for a while. The fact that you're now getting booted, I think, has some political implications. Raises the question that Emily was asking, like, well, where did this come from? Because let's say, what is, and it goes back to my original question, what is getting rid of you accomplish? And I'm curious, like, so on the commission, let's say you're reappointed. You're back there. I would imagine that you might disagree and might agree with Ferguson and some of the others. They can then move to a vote 3-2 and move something forward.

But you would be party to deliberations. You'd be able to come on this program and talk about what's going on. And you might also hear, oh, hey, by the way, we got a call from the White House that said that these deliberations are out the window. We actually want you to drop this case. So having you there is kind of intel for the public because you'd be able to say, actually, Ferguson is for this enforcement action against Amazon or whatever or Facebook or Elon Musk. But Elon Musk called. Precisely. So what would be the role of a minority commissioner?

Yeah. Are you a potted plant or is there some reason for you to be there? No, I think there's two elements that need to be looked at here. The first is our ability to keep suing the folks we're suing in the face of this claim by the president that he can give us the boot any time for any reason. Because like you said, Chairman Ferguson has said, I'm going to keep on suing Amazon. I'm going to keep on suing Meta. Excellent. What happens if he gets the phone call that says, well, actually, you know, we just nominated Jeff's guy for OSHA. And the other thing he said is you got a pesky lawsuit.

Because literally they just- Literally they nominated the guy to run OSHA. The one agency that's consistently called out the horrors on Amazon warehouse floors, the guy is a former Amazon executive. That's right. And so, hey, Jeff is also saying he wants this lawsuit to go away. And by the way, what's that lawsuit about? That's about small business sellers.

If you're a small business seller, you have to be on Amazon. It's a monopolist. It is forcing them to pay up to 50 cents on every dollar they sell on the site and making it impossible to offer lower prices, right? And so whether or not Chairman Ferguson wants to bring the lawsuit, if you get fired for just saying no, what's the point, right? And so it's more, it is both calling out misconduct, but it is also about laying the groundwork for overt corporate pardons and corruption. You know, I saw Rohit Chopra, he talked about this when he was on earlier. Yeah, and I'm actually surprised, Ryan, you mentioned you could see this sort of unitary executive theory about control over some of these independent agencies from the president.

I'm surprised that you say that. I'm really curious what you make of that, because that to me seems like maybe the biggest ideological difference between me and you guys is that, you know, Eric Schmidt, who's been very good on antitrust from a kind of populist perspective, did a thread agreeing with Andrew Ferguson yesterday where he goes back to Humphrey's executor, says it's bad law. It undermines the president's centralized authority, is granted under Article 2, and creates very power-unaccountable federal agencies. That is the key to the entire fight against the administrative state, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that is the project of the conservative movement is saying, this is the growth under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt that has created, as we say, unaccountable bureaucrats, whatever. And so by firing you, for example, the president is reasserting whether or not he had any quibbles with you. This is a matter of taking Humphrey's executor to the Supreme Court. I'm curious what your defense of these independent agencies is. I think it's a good one.

I disagree with it. I think it's a reasonable one. But these agencies existing as independent from presidential power. Who is Eric Adams? Pardon me, who is Eric Schmidt? Senator. What does he care about, right? I'm pretty sure he doesn't care about the small businesses we're trying to defend in the Amazon case. I'm pretty sure, you know, a world where a merger goes through if a billionaire donor has the president's ear is a great world for the Magnificent Seven. It's

a shitty world for startups and small businesses. But I have some news for Mr. Schmidt, which is, if the president can fire me for any reason at any time, he can also fire Jerome Powell for any reason at any time. And so I frankly don't care about Mr. Schmidt, not one bit. I do care about a bunch of retirees who have their 401ks loaded up With a bunch of stocks in the stock market and and I am deeply sympathetic to the chaos they're experiencing right now and so I agree with you look I Understand folks who want the president to be empowered to have their agenda be made law understood, but this is about corruption It's about chaos and it but this is about corruption,

it's about chaos, and it is about having happen, my worry is that what happened with Eric Adams at DOJ happens at FTC. Let me make one concrete example. So you guys know about the Kroger Albertsons merger? Yeah. So we had one of the largest grocery chains in the country try to merge with.

So Wisconsin native here, so. Oh yeah, you know, one of the third or fourth largest grocery market chains in most thousands of small towns that have taken the biggest chain, merge it with the next biggest chain. We had an executive under oath say, they're jacking up the price of milk and eggs above inflation. We had union leaders saying, I can't negotiate higher wages if I can't point to the guy down the street paying higher wages. You would not believe the amount of political pressure that was sent to us in the form of letters. Some folks saying, yeah, I'll block it. Other folks saying, including prominent Democrats, let this thing go right ahead, right? But we still blocked it because we can call balls and strikes

without fear that some mega donor is going to give us the boot via the White House. And this was under Biden. It's under Biden. And what happens with the next mega grocery store merger? I'm worried that it's not going to matter if it jacks up prices. It's not going to matter if it pulls down wages. What's going to matter is what billionaire donor has the presidency. And I'm glad you raised Joe Biden, because I think this problem of money in politics is not limited to the Republicans. I think a lot about what happened during Vice President Harris's campaign when what Chair Khan did for the American people was wildly popular. Who likes not being able to cancel

a subscription unless they call on Tuesday mornings, you know, between 10 a.m. and noon, right? That's the breaking points premium policy, though. That's right. You have to get Sagar on the phone. That's right. You have to tweet at him and he has to follow you back. Who likes non-competes? Who likes cancer companies trying to corner the market on cancer tests

or companies trying to monopolize treatments for Pompe's disease? Nobody. And yet Vice President Kamala Harris would not say, I will keep Lena Kahn on as the chair of my FTC. What's that about? It's about money. Yeah. She had Reid Hoffman. She did indeed. Yeah. Reid Hoffman out there saying. So where does this go now? Are you, have you followed suit?

What are you doing today? Like, are you going to try to go back in? Is it like a USAID situation? Good question. So I'm not going to put to go back in? Is it like a USAID situation? Good question. So I'm not going to put the security guard at the front desk in the position of having to listen to me or listen to the White House. I'm not going to do it to that guy. And so what I'm doing is calling out the fact this opens the door to corporate pardons, that this was not an effective legal firing, that I remain an FTC commissioner, and will soon be filing suit to make that clear for everyone involved. And what's the legal argument? So much as people are trying to overrule Humphrey's executor, you know, in their heads, Humphrey's executor is still good law. And the day the Supreme Court says it's not, and the president says, you're gone, I'm gone. No problem, right?

But until that day, I am still there. I will say something about Chairman Ferguson, who I do agree on, and I think genuinely cares about working people. When he was nominated to the Senate, he was asked, do you think Humphrey's executor is good law? He said it is.

And he also said the only people who can change Supreme Court law is the Supreme Court. So I believe in that. And that's what I'm gonna go to court to try to reinforce. You think this was Trump kind of pushing back on Roberts' statement? Oh, that's interesting. Like Roberts came out with a statement saying, you can't, you know, stop all this tweeting about impeaching judges. And then Trump kind of ramps it up. I mean, who knows? Because, you know, Trump, it's whoever he talks to last. Yeah, I mean, Humphrey's executor is such a,

it is seen in the conservative movement as such a foundational ruling for the creation of everything that Elon Musk right now says he opposes. I mean, he's a crony capitalist. He's not, you know, we don't have to get into that but um you know it's just to me i imagine they always you know russ vote and stephen miller always envisioned somehow finding a way to get humphrey's executive which is why ferguson was asked about it because it was and this is a target of the conservative legal movement and the conservative the greater conservative movement and has been for decades yeah i guess i mean it's the last point i'm curious for your take on this.

My, like I agree with the principle that a president should be able to be the president and execute, you know, his vision within the law. My concern from the rights attack on the administrative state is they're not worried about more efficiently creating an executive that can

enact legislation and the will of the people. They want to destroy the administrative state. They want to end the capacity of the government to be able to govern. So that even if there is a will from the public to go after corporate power, all of a sudden they don't have the capacity anymore to do that. What, from your perspective inside the government, what would it take to denude the FTC of the capacity to actually take on corporate power, even if Ferguson wanted to? Well, look, this is a great first step in that effort. I watch the Republican Party, you know, as closely as, maybe not as closely as you do,

but quite closely. And you're right. There is an element of rural pharmacists, rural grocers, working people, people in unions who voted for the president because they wanted to make sure they could pay the rent, right? That is not the wing that won here. You're right. There's folks who want to have a unitary executive, but there's also folks who want to marry that executive with corporate power. Yes, that's right. And just look at the numbers here. They are grotesque.

You have Elon Musk donating $280 million to the president. Again, I'm the guy who enforces the privacy rules against Elon Musk. You have Jeff Bezos, a million bucks at the inauguration, $20 million for the first lady. At least that was the cut of the documentary. And just licensed episodes for The Apprentice. You know, you think he's not going to place a phone call to the White House saying, look, I got two lawsuits against me from the FTC. Would be great if that was one. You think it's not gonna happen? And if you look at the law, because we've been talking about Supreme Court precedents,

corruption isn't just about the actual act, Eric Adams style of quid pro quo. It is also about avoiding the appearance of corruption. And that is what's being defeated today. The ability for us to have the appearance of independence and not be fair-minded people trying to promote a fair market and call balls and strikes. That's what's happening here.

If we lose, but we will contest this, and I think we'll win. Super, super interesting. Thank you for giving us your first interview. Thank you. Eager to see where this goes. I'm glad. Catch him tonight on Aaron Burnett and then later Chris Hayes, right? I'll be on with Chris.

Oh, okay. Looking forward to that. 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.

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So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what

are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

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

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

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, that was Alvaro Bedoya. That's it for us. Still going through those JFK files. That's right. We forgot to cover that. Well, we didn't forget. We didn't forget. Right. But we planned to cover it, but the volume of documents and the ostensible lack of redactions is fairly impressive. It doesn't mean we're going to get significant new information out of it. But we did want to read the Jefferson Morley statement, Ryan, you sent this morning. And I think it's helpful. Jefferson Morley is probably, we'll just say it's fair to describe him as the preeminent living Kennedy assassination

researcher. He wrote, quote, the first JFK files release of 2025 is an encouraging start. We now have complete versions of approximately a third of the redacted JFK documents held by the National Archives. Rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated, and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document. Seven to ten J.F.K. files held by the archives and sought by J.F.K. researchers are now in the public record. These long-secret records shed new light on J.F.K.'s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald. The release does not include two-thirds of the promised files, nor any of the 500-plus IRS record, nor any of the 2,400 recently discovered FBI files.

Nonetheless, this is the most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s, and that is a better sort of report from the trenches. I'm sure Jefferson Morley was up all night. This one was last edited at 9.42 p.m., put that statement out on X with the Mary Farrell Foundation. He told me CNN finally reached out to him. Fabulous. Wow. Interesting. But kind of a mix. It sounds like a mixed bag, but one that's mixed enough to be positive. So it's a crazy volume of things to go through.

There was all kinds of armchair quarterbacking happening on X right now. People are, that old Ramparts magazine excerpt that people have been circulating, thinking that it's some new evidence of CIA connections to, I think, Israel in that case. So there's a lot of stuff floating around, but I think it's valuable to wait it out. So much of this was already released. Like you said, a third of the remaining documents that we know of, we can get into

what we don't know of. So that's good. And keep it coming. Jeff was telling me after this is over he wants to get back to broader reporting

like he was doing in the 1980s before spending 40 years dedicated to this. Great to have him back in the game. I mean, and I'm just looking forward to seeing more and more from him on this. The last thing I wanted to recommend was, I meant to mention this in the block when we were talking about the courts, but over at the Volokh conspiracy, Josh Blackman had, I thought, a very interesting case. He said, the constitutional crisis is a coin with two sides. Trump causes judges to overreact, and the judges cause Trump to overreact.

Any resolution must be bilateral, not unilateral. Roberts could de-escalate the situation by promptly reversing some of these out-of-control lower court rulings, but instead he would rather sit on his hands and pontificate. I've long said that the chief justice is living in a different reality than the rest of us. This episode proves it. There are three co-equal branches of government. The judiciary is not supreme. The only reason I wanted to point that out is it's true in conservative circles, especially conservative legal circles. People are increasingly very frustrated with John Roberts and see him as somebody who's like would maybe be described as like a, I don't know, a dispatch or bulwark reader, somebody who's kind

of, it doesn't understand what time it is to borrow the phrase from a lot of people on the right. And I don't think Volokh, Blackmun writing in the Volokh conspiracy is either entirely wrong or be frustrated by Roberts jumping in here and not jumping in when there are efforts to impeach Clarence Thomas or whomever else. If you're a Republican appointed justice, it seems like those concerns would maybe prompt equal responses. But anyway, this is a huge trend. However, okay, last however. Let's do it. The effort to impeach Clarence Thomas was over corruption. And so from Roberts' perspective, where he's saying we do not impeach judges over rulings, that actually stands outside the scope of that. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah.

They were going after Clarence Thomas. And I'm sure Roberts was actually very upset with Clarence Thomas. And I'm sure Roberts was actually very upset. Yes. With Clarence Thomas. Yeah. For constantly getting caught, taking all of these trips with billionaires. Yep. Who had business before the court.

And they just had business before the court. Like, were, like, central to the entire political strategy of revamping the court. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Buying his neighbor's house. house. This is old school corruption. And so it is not out of the norms or the precedence of American jurisprudence to impeach judges over corruption. So I think that's why Roberts could be forgiven for not jumping out and saying, hey, we don't impeach judges for corruption. Because actually we do.

Blackman addresses that in the pieces by saying that the AOC wasn't, the AOC one wasn't like good, I don't know if he would use this word, but good faith because it was just Thomas. And we could have an entire argument about this. It was just Thomas and Alito and not Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Katonji Brown Jackson, who had had similar disclosure lapses that I think they corrected. Yeah, so anyway. Right, but there's a disclosure lapse and then there's taking a bunch of gifts from people. Like there's an effort to like shoehorn it into a paperwork violation. But it's like the problem was robbing the bank. The problem was not filing paperwork saying that you robbed the bank. Read the piece.

Yeah. Right? And then we'll argue about it later. Maybe we can argue about that in the future. Yeah, there you go. All right, well, thank you so much for tuning in. That was a long addendum. Sorry, everyone, for taking this down the rabbit hole.

But you're right, sometimes it's fun to tag things on a little bit. That's right. And we'll see you on Friday. Sounds good. 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the okay. Storytime podcast on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm hope Woodard, a comedian creator and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.