Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/27/24: Blinken Warns Bibi 'Stuck In Gaza', 12 Palestinians Drown During Botched Air Drop, Baltimore Bridge Conspiracies, RFK Supporters Rage Over VP Pick, Ronna McDaniel Axed After Maddow Meltdown, UK Tax Boycott Over Israel

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Blinken telling Bibi warning Bibi he may get stuck in Gaza, 12 Palestinians drown trying to reach aid drop, the real Baltimore Bridge conspiracy, RFK supporters rage against VP pick, NBC axes Ronna McDaniel after Maddow meltdown, Ryan tries to figure out conservative Twitter infighting, UK taxpayers boycott payments over support for Israel genocide.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game

for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Ryan, how are you doing today? Wonderful. How about yourself? I'm doing well. We've got a big show. We're going to be starting with some really, really big stuff coming from Israel. Then we'll dive more into the bridge collapse. We'll talk about RFK Jr.'s vice presidential announcement speech, which I was just told by producer Mac started with a land acknowledgement.

It's been an interesting campaign. I was going to say. Interesting vice presidential choice. Yes. I was going to say pick a lane, but that's kind of his whole thing. Not picking a lane. Not picking a lane, yeah. Ronald McDaniel was officially fired from her new gig at NBC News, former RNC chair, so we have some updates on that. Ryan has requested a segment on conservative Twitter. What is going on on conservative Twitter? Because I really don't know. And we have somebody here who can tell us.

So why not take advantage? Kind of. Sort of tell us. Yes, we'll do our best. And we have a great guest, Ryan. Yes. So we're going to be talking to the guy who's leading a tax revolt in the United Kingdom. They have discovered a provision in law that allows you to withhold taxes if your tax money is going to genocide.

Can't do that here in the United States. There's zero reason for you to be able to withhold taxes. They are closing in on 100,000 people who are pledging not to pay taxes, which, given the U.K. budget, is going to be a serious chunk. And this is early on in their campaign. So this could lead to the United Kingdom stopping arms shipments to Israel. So we'll talk about that. And this organization is also working with prosecutors around Europe and around the world with the intention of prosecuting

not only soldiers who are foreign nationals who are participating in the genocide, but also Israeli leadership, meaning it could become difficult for them to travel and they could get picked up here or there if these prosecutions go forward. So all of that's going to be interesting at the end of the show. Certainly significant. And also, Ryan, at thebreakingpoints.com, that's where you get the full version of CounterPoints. So it goes right to your inbox and nothing is broken up into different clips. You can just watch the whole thing right there. No ads, no must, no fuss. Get it an hour early.

Breakingpoints.com. Why not? There you go. All right, Ryan, let's start with Israel and actually really with Gaza. Yes. So the United Nations Human Rights Council delivered a report yesterday finding that the plausibility of genocide is growing greater and greater. Let's play a little bit of this clip from the UN.

Following nearly six months of unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied Gaza, it is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of, and to present my finding, the anatomy of a genocide. One of my key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted the rules of international humanitarian law, distinction, proportionality, and precaution in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people. By deliberately stretching the definitions of human shield, evacuation orders, warnings, safe zones, collateral damage, and medical protection, Israel has used their protective function as humanitarian camouflage, with the effect of concealing patterns of conduct from which the

only inference can reasonably be drawn is a state policy of genocidal violence against the Palestinians. In light of this, I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met. Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met. Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with requisite intent, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group. So there's the UN Human Rights Council stating what is increasingly hard to recognize from the

outside, that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. And I found it interesting the way that they, curious for your take on this, the way that they pointed to what we've all seen, which is Israel saying, okay, everybody in the north, you evacuate to the south, and then firing at people as they're going, and then firing at people in the safe zones, and then saying, okay, yes, we attacked this hospital, but it's because there were tunnels underneath the hospital, and therefore these were, quote-unquote, human shields. And so they were unfortunate but legitimate military targets. And the UN here saying, no, none of that is an excuse on genocide, who we were talking with him about the sort of post-World War II historical genesis of the current definition of genocide that we have, which was a reaction to the horrors of World War I, World War II, that had just absolutely

terrorized a couple generations of people in the earlier half of the 20th century. And these questions are so—we agreed to hold ourselves to a higher standard, basically. And when you listen to the UN Human Rights Council, there is something to be said, as you were just discussing, that when, for instance, when they fire on people in the so-called humanitarian corridors or the escape corridors, however they phrase it, they're saying they're terrorists among them. Hamas is putting civilians at danger by embedding in wartime with people who are legitimately trying to evacuate. And it just reminds me of the David Brooks column, I think from last week, where he said, what would you have Israel do?

Not fire on people as they're escaping. Good start. It's not that these questions aren't complicated. It's not that militants are not embedding with civilians. It's just that we all agreed to what happened after World War II, to these new standards. And that certainly doesn't make war easy to fight a war in a way that meets these standards. But what would you have Israel do? Not that. Good reason to reach

a peace deal. And so Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu yesterday. And we can put up this Axios report because I think this puts it well. Blinken unloads on Bibi. You need a coherent plan or face disaster in Gaza. And their lead goes, Secretary of State Blinken warned Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war cabinet in a meeting on Friday, sorry, I said yesterday, that Israel's security and its place in the world are in peril. And quote, you might not realize it until it's too late, a source familiar with the meeting told Axios. And this is the message that we've been getting publicly from the Biden administration to the press and to Israel that, because it almost isn't credible for the Biden administration to say that they are concerned about Palestinian welfare. And so the way that

they constantly frame their concern about Israel's actions is that they say what Israel is doing is hurting Israel because everybody does agree that the United States does not want to see Israel harmed. By the way, it's basically the argument Donald Trump made recently. Donald Trump made, that's a very good point. He gave an interview to Sheldon Adelson's paper, the late Sheldon Adelson's paper. It's a free paper in Israel. It's the most widely read paper in the country. And he said exactly that, right?

He said, you need to wrap this up, was practically his quote, right? He's like, you don't realize how badly this is hurting you. There is some type of bubble going on in Israel right now that does seem to be blocking world opinion from getting through. It's a combination, I think, of the war fever, the trauma from October 7th, and the propaganda inside Israel that the entire world is against us, even though the entire world is kind of, for decades, has supported Israel against the Palestinians. But the entire world is against us, thousands of years of anti-Semitism are driving the criticism of our war effort, rather than the actual images that we're seeing, that the entire world is seeing coming out of Gaza. Yeah, the Trump point, I think,

is that actually... You're right. It's the same point that Biden's making. Like, guys, you don't have any idea how bad this is for you. Well, and so I wanted to get your take, Ryan. I think I showed you this before we started, but I was reading in the Jerusalem Post about al-Shifa, and I know we're about to get to that, but they write, around 6,000 civilians were also evacuated, but unlike the November operation when there was no inspection of evacuees, these civilians were evacuated with a careful inspection to catch all of the terrorists. And the pressure that Biden is exerting on Israel, Israel is mad about. Obviously, there have been, you know, words exchanged between Netanyahu and Blinken and Biden. And Israel obviously feels like it's getting way too much pressure from the U.S.

to move to like precision operations or a ceasefire, anything on that sort of spectrum of wrapping it up to paraphrase you paraphrasing Donald Trump. And yeah, it's true. That's not like the full demand for a ceasefire. And it's not going full, you know, saying as the UN just did, you know, it's not making that designation from the US. I think the pressure is at least real, though. It might not be enough, but I think it is at least real because it does seem like Israel is actually adapting. Yes, the pressure is real to have the United Nations, for instance, special rapporteur there saying that Israel is committing genocide. That represents something that can't be ignored. The case that South Africa brought before the International Court

of Justice with something like 13 other countries backing it up, where the judges found a plausible case that genocide is going on. All of this is creating pressure. And we'll talk in a second about how Israel is actually concerned that this might lead to a restriction in arms flows. But it has created this refrain from the United States that, well, look, Israel's just going to do what it's going to do. It's a sovereign country. And we actually have a clip that we can roll from the State Department making this point here. Let's roll Matt Miller, State Department spokesperson. Number one, when it comes to dictating, you're right. No, we do not dictate to them. We can't dictate it.. They're a sovereign country, and the United States can't dictate to any sovereign country. They're going to make their own decisions, and they have been quite clear about that,

and we would expect nothing less from any sovereign country. That said, we always offer our best advice to them. Ryan, go ahead. Just on your point about Israel being a sovereign country and the U.S. can't tell them what to do, back on May 19th, 2021, you have Joe Biden telling Netanyahu, his quote was, hey, man, we are out of runway here. It's over. And it was over. Ronald Reagan famously did the same back in 1982, told him it was over. Why can't he say it's over this time? Does that mean he supports the continuation of this war, even if it means going into Iraq? So we support Israel's ability to defeat Hamas.

We support Israel's legitimate security objectives. We support them ensuring that October 7th can never happen again. And so we continue to support their ability to do that while offering them, as I said, our best advice on how to go about that campaign, and that's what we'll continue to do. MR PRICE What is your assessment on those two Hamas advice on how to go about that campaign. And that's what we'll continue to do. What is your assessment on those two Hamas battalions that the U.S. has said are so key to take out and that Israel has said are key to take out? What's the assessment on why Hamas wouldn't be able to just create new battalions in the absence of a political solution? That said, your underlying question is exactly right. Ultimately,

something that we have learned in our counterterrorism experience around the world is that you can, while you can accomplish counterterrorism objectives on the battlefield, ultimately, when it comes to winning the larger battle, you have to offer a political path for the Palestinian people's legitimate, or in this case, you would have to offer a political path for the Palestinian people's legitimate, or in this case, you would have to offer, we believe you have to offer a political path for the Palestinian people's legitimate aspirations. So after that, I asked what I think is the obvious follow-up question. I said, would Hamas have any role, any version of Hamas have any role in this political solution that you're saying is essential, that you can't win this militarily. And he said, absolutely not.

Hamas is a horrific and brutal terrorist organization, which you just draw the circle. You get right back to the beginning then. Okay, well now then you have to eliminate all the battalions. Okay, but you've eliminated the battalions. If you don't have a political solution, they're just going to make more battalions because you need a political solution. But you can't have a political solution, they're just going to make more battalions because you need a political solution. But you can't have a political solution that involves Moss, so then they're going to just create more battalions.

And he says we've learned from our counterterrorism experience over the last 20 years with the global war on terror that you can win on the battlefield, but if you don't win politically, if you don't get to if you don't win politically, if you don't get to some type of peaceful resolution, those battlefield victories are quickly reversed and new terrorists are created. So I don't see them, I don't see them getting out of that doom loop there. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest problems with this entire purported plan, the day after plan. We hear so much about the day after plan, day after plan. You can put it out, you can type it operation, what comes the day after. Nothing

feasible has been presented. And that's not because it's like an easy situation. It's obviously an incredibly difficult and complicated situation, but nothing that's been advanced in support of this vast sweeping military operation is feasible. And the U.S. has floated the Palestinian Authority as the kind of political entity that could get you to a Some tour de tour de resolution, but you've had you've seen Israel respond to that saying well there was a PA police officer recently that killed an Israeli a Soldier and injured several others and so you can't you can't have that institution But if you take that logic a step further and you actually have universal values around the question, then you ask yourself, wait a minute. So you're saying that committing atrocities and let's say committing acts of genocide makes you no longer legitimate as a governing force?

But that only goes one direction? Although they don't agree with the UN categorization. No, but they certainly, I would imagine they'd have to acknowledge at least some atrocities, like let's say the four unarmed teens that they blasted with the drone the other day. Just that, you'd say, well, how could you have the people operating that drone be a legitimate political force going forward? It's a total—yeah, I mean, we have done this for decades, obviously. I'll say one thing. I was reading Ollie North's memoir, actually, recently.

And one of the things he says is—one of the things he found frustrating. He's like, you know, the British, the Israelis, they were trading weapons too. The problem when we do it is that we were like sanctimoniously saying, nobody should do this. Like we would never do this. But of course. This is, yeah, this is the Iran, Iran-Contra guy. Yeah. So meanwhile, speaking of global pressure, for three days now, we've seen massive protests in Jordan against the war. We can roll some of the footage coming out of there. Every time you have some type of crisis in the region, you'll have dozens or maybe hundreds of people go down to the

Israeli embassy. The last three days or so, you've seen thousands upon thousands of Jordanians who, most Jordanians actually are of Palestinian descent. It's like a majority of the Jordanian population. And so this is a especially dicey political situation for U.S. ally Jordan. Jordan is a dictatorship that recognizes, that recognized Israel without getting a solution to the Palestinian question. That has always been a source of consternation among, you know, Palestinians and also just regular Jordanians as well. This is the, you know, so-called Arab street that people like Thomas Friedman have been warning about, you know, for decades. But the Arab street is a real thing. And there's only so long that these populations are going to allow their governments to collaborate with Israel in this annihilation of their family members across the border.

It gets to the feasibility of any so-called day after plan as well. I mean, again, it's not because this isn't difficult and complicated. It's not because there aren't extremists in the governments that surround Israel. But reality means that they have to live in that context. They have to exist in that context. And it's, I mean, good luck with how things are going now. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional

limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this 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. 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. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day.

It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor,. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so, meanwhile, relief efforts attempting to get around the Israeli siege of Gaza have taken another tragic turn. A dozen Palestinians drowned attempting to get humanitarian aid. Let's roll a little bit of this news clip here. As they spot a plane and the aid it begins to drop,

they run as fast as they can. It's the rush of a people so desperate, so hungry, who would do anything to feed their children, now on the brink of starvation. This is what survival in Gaza has come to, fighting for food. That little bit of aid that makes it into the north, where man-made famine now looms. People chase parachutes that fell into these choppy waters.

It is desperation that drives them into the sea. What you're about to see next is disturbing. It's the reality of a war growing more cruel by the day. The fastest, the fittest emerged with boxes of American-issued meals ready to eat. Others didn't make it out alive. People gather around the thin, frail body of a man who drowned trying to reach that aid. Twelve people drowned, according to paramedics.

What are we doing to people? This is the airlift that is being carried out by the United States in collaboration with Jordan because the U.S. has refused to put pressure on the Israelis to get crossings through over land. You see videos every day now of trucks, people who you can drive for like 45 minutes outside of Gaza and just see truck after truck after truck just sitting there idling, waiting to go through. If it gets through and they find, so the Israelis are searching these American aid trucks, which is insane. Think about that for a second. The implication there is that the U.S. is secretly smuggling in arms to Hamas.

And our ally Israel needs to search all of these trucks to make sure that we're not arming Hamas. They, for instance, will find a tent pole because they've destroyed most of the infrastructure. So people are living outdoors. So humanitarian aid includes tents. But if a tent pole is too thick, they will turn the entire truck around. Everything in it has to then go back and then it has to wait a certain number of days. So the airdrops are kind of this pretend effort that we're doing to suggest that we're not complicit in the genocide. Do you know what we need? What's that?

We need a pier. A pier? Yes. Why don't they just build a pier? Yeah, because the problem apparently is that there aren't enough access points. And so we need one more access point. If we could just build a pier, maybe a floating one, and then things could come in unmolested from Cyprus.

We could send some contractors down there. Contractors. What could go wrong there? It seems like a foolproof plan. Yeah. And so Cyprus is the launching point for this pier that we're building in Gaza. And Cyprus is now clogged just like every other port is. Like the problem is not an inability to get things in physically.

Like there are plenty of ways that we could do it. Just Israel just simply won't allow it. And so this relates to these negotiations. The starvation in northern Gaza, which is turning into anarchy as Israel continues to kind of target civilian police forces there as well, and also continues to try to have its own presence in there, is blowing up the negotiations, according to Axios. You can put up this from Barak Ravid. He writes, the main issue that led to the impasse in the negotiations on the hostage deal was Hamas's demand for the full return of Palestinian residents to the northern Gaza Strip,

what is known in IDF parlance as drainage between the south of the Gaza Strip to the north. This is what senior Israeli and American officials who live over the Gaza Strip have told me. And then he goes on. The next one, why this is important. A senior Israeli official said that the political level in Israel and to a certain extent in the U.S. made a miscalculation regarding Hamas's position and the ability of the mediators to extract additional concessions from it, especially on the issue of returning to the Northern Strip. It seems rather indicative of Israeli intent here that allowing residents to return to the northern Gaza Strip is such a sticking point for Israel.

What could we possibly draw from that other than that this looks to be a land grab? Again, I mean, again, it's you have Netanyahu caught, we've talked about this all the time, caught between a rock and a hard place with his own coalition of people who said, what happened after October 7th was the opportunity for Israel to make serious incursions, land incursions, back into land that was given up, and to, that would allow them

to create more of a barrier, et cetera. Like this was the moment. And Netanyahu, who is obviously deeply opposed to any idea of a two-state solution, whereas Joe Biden is deeply committed to a two-state solution. And these are two people funding a war together, funding and allowing for war together. It's just, you know, indicative, I think, of that too, that deeper problem for Netanyahu, the dynamic, the political dynamic in Israel too. Let's talk about another factor in these negotiations that most Western news outlets don't talk about. And that is the question of why is it difficult? Why is Israel miscalculating Hamas's stubbornness on some of these negotiations?

And if you follow a lot of the kind of local press about this, you realize that the war for the IDF is going very badly. From the air, it is true. They have been effectively able to raise most of the Gaza Strip. But on the ground, it's a much different story. So the IDF yesterday posted a rather extraordinary video. And this is kind of in response to the way that Hamas, since the very beginning, has been posting on Telegram and other channels regular updates from street battles. And on a near daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. And they become iconic among people watching these where you've now got that little red carrot that kind of points down onto an IDF soldier before, say, an RPG is sent or has become

kind of the symbol of this war. And you'll see people say they're going to get a red carrot, alluding to the fact they're going to wind up in one of these videos. Israel has barely ever put out any of its own videos. So they put one out yesterday, and I think it's instructive to take a look at. This is one from the Al-Shifa complex. So this is a residential house kind of within the kind of vicinity of the hospital. This is seven IDF soldiers. They see a guy stick a muzzle out of a rifle, out of a closet. Now all seven of them take off. If you're not watching this, they kind of start shooting wildly at walls. It looks actually insanely dangerous. It looks like they're lucky that nobody died of friendly fire here. At the very end, the guy comes down the stairs. So this one guy has chased seven

people down several flights of stairs. And then as he's coming down the final flight of stairs, they strike him, seven against one. And they decided to post that. I asked Hin Khadri, who's done some reporting for The Intercept, who is a reporter in Gaza, if she could find out who this was. There were some rumors that it was a police officer. There were some rumors that it was Fayek al-Makhmud, who was killed by IDF forces. He was the kind of senior police commander in charge ofating with UNRWA and making sure aid could be distributed in a peaceful way She said no it was not and we can put this up here. It was Omar al-dadu from the al-dadu family

Who was who she confirmed was a fighter? Not a not a police officer Separately, our condolences to Hind. She posted this morning that both her uncle and her cousin were killed by Israel last night. So condolences to Hind and to her family for that added tragedy. But we also wanted to play, just for instance, we just randomly grabbed the most recent clip put up by the Kassam Brigades on their Telegram channel. So we can just roll this one here. This is the kind of thing they're posting absolutely constantly. So if you're not watching, if you're listening, this is an Israeli tank rolling through the rubble and gets hit by an RPG.

Just every day they're posting something like this. And you can only begin to imagine how horrifying it must be to be in one of those tanks, rolling through this rubble. It's one thing to be in, like the tunnels I'm sure are terrifying too, but at least with a tunnel, you're looking that way and you're looking that way. Going through these bombed out hellscapes everywhere around you could be an RPG any second. And I think with a guy with a GoPro and you're going to wind up on Telegram within a couple hours. You've done some really amazing coverage of how veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are using psychedelics for their PTSD. And in some of the interviews that we've done on this show with people, they talk about how that kind of warfare is a new kind of PTSD because it is so horrifying.

Every second of it is terrifying. Exactly. And so what you have here is this generation of men, obviously, in Gaza, a generation of men in Israel who are embroiled in just the most horrifying, one of the most horrifying, I shouldn't say the most, but one of the most horrifying. War is always horrifying, that kind of war. There's a special trauma to it for sure. Yeah, and there's a tendency toward kind of war porn amongst some folks. And so that's one reason we've showed very little of this footage throughout this entire conflict because it's horrifying and you don't want people leering or glorifying it in any kind of way. The reason we wanted to play it today is to make the political point that one of the reasons that Israel and the United States

is having such a difficult time in these negotiations is that, yes, Israel is managing to push 2 million people to famine, a million of them children. But on the ground, they're not doing well in the actual fighting, which I think then gives the military wing of Hamas, the political wing of Hamas, a different question. The ones in Qatar who are trying to reach a deal, it's a different question. The military wing of Hamas has an incentive to keep this going. Because the thing, what are you going to do? Just keep sending tanks into the line of fire of our RPGs?

Yeah, it's like the Houthis. They're like $7 RPGs. Their incentives are completely different than this like big modern military's incentives. Yeah, absolutely. And the point that I mentioned earlier about David Brooks is what would you have Israel do column? And I know we disagree with this,

but in the macro sense, I think that point is really well taken. In the micro sense, though, it's like these various examples, case studies from the warfare, you just take a step back and you think, in service of what? So like in service of Joe Biden's goal for the day after, in service of Netanyahu's goal for the day after, in service of Netanyahu's goal for the day after, in service of Smotrick's goal for the day after, what's the plan? I mean, what's the plan? It just, it's been an incredible several months to watch the floundering on that point. And to wrap up this block, we can put up A4, which I had skipped over. This is the Jerusalem Post article that says Gallant's Washington. So this is about Yoav Gallant's coming trip to the United States, trying to head off an arms embargo.

And it's an interview that was done on Israeli radio with IDF Major General Nimrod Schaefer, who says just straight up in this article, go read the whole thing for yourself, that if the United States tells Israel not to do an invasion of Rafah, Israel will not do one. That it's just that simple. And he goes into, he just says, look, Bibi's saying this for political reasons. This is just red meat for his base. He said there is no world in which Israel is doing this without the support of the United States. And he said they have other ways of cutting off weapons. They don't have to publicly say we're cutting off weapons.

He describes it as kind of a process on a spectrum that you're like, hey, what's up with that ammunition? Where's that shipment? And you just hear back from the US, yeah, it's caught up in paperwork. We're working on it and it just doesn't come. And then there doesn't have to be Biden and Bibi having a titanic clash over weapons publicly, but privately they don't get the weapons that they need. So that means that if Israel does go into Rafah, it means the United States supported that invasion, no matter what they say publicly. This is according to Nimrod Schaefer. Nimrod, great name. Yeah, not ideal, not ideal. 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. 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. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries

and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. dead workers who were, again, doing construction on that bridge, mostly is from what we know,

six of them presumed dead. Now, the black box has been recovered. We're told that inspection crew overnight went onto the boat, which is still basically stuck in the position after the bridge collapsed onto it. So you have this bizarre situation, utterly bizarre situation, but the black box apparently recovered, which is going to be very helpful because it looks like obviously this was there was some type of power failure on the ship itself. There's a lot we can get into this, but let's just start with B1. This is, if you're watching, you're going to see exactly what we were just talking about. So this is the boat itself. This is basically where it is right now. You can see the bridge just collapsed on the bow and the bridge is, you know, submerged in the river.

So that's, again, this is where they took the black box from because the boat is still exactly right there, basically where it hit. Now, interestingly enough, my dad happens to be a retired bridge inspector. So I made sure to give him a call yesterday. And there were a lot of sort of armchair bridge experts suddenly on Twitter yesterday. But there actually are also some real bridge experts on Twitter. One of them is named John Conrad. He runs the website GCaptain, and they've had some really good coverage of this that basically comports with what I was talking to my dad about, that when you hit the pier, in the way that you hit the pier, there's almost nothing you could do. There's basically a lot of

people have been talking about the fenders. Where are the fenders on a bridge like that? It should have a fender exactly what it sounds like, some type of barrier around the different support structure parts of the bridge. And this one looks like it didn't have much of that. If it did, it was really minimal. And people are like, well, there's massive cargo ships going through here. Why would you not have fenders? When the bridge was built in 1977, I think, they didn't have ships as big and powerful as we have now. So bridges were constructed differently. It's really expensive to retrofit bridges for that type of thing.

The other question a lot of people have is the tugboats. John Conrad made a really interesting point that, so actually the tugboats did escort the bridge. You're not required to have a tugboat escort under the Key Bridge, interestingly enough. And Baltimore, John Conrad said, is not alone in releasing the tugboats early. It's also something that happens, for example, in San Diego with the beautiful Coronado Bridge in the port of San Diego. So big questions about how many different ports are now going to be requiring those tugboat escorts. It does seem like why would you not have the tugboat escort

at the same time? It also seems like this was like a one in a million chance. I'm using that just as a phrase. I don't have any idea what the actual chance is, but a one in a million chance that you have this ship drifting exactly at the point that it did into exactly that part of the bridge, the pier, basically, and hitting it the way that it did. Right. And I feel bad for some of these bridge experts because we don't really need it. I'm glad we heard from your dad. We tried to get him on, but you said that he probably wouldn't be into it. We'd love to have him on at some point in the future if we can talk him into it. But we also, a thousand foot bridge loaded up with stuff.

Yeah. Going something like eight knots into any bridge anywhere is going to take it out. No amount of fenders, no amount of bumpers. Like there's nothing you can do. I think just as a jobs program, I think requiring them all to have tugboats would be a good idea. A bunch of my friends from the Eastern Shore

worked on tugboats. And there are great jobs for like single men in their 20s and 30s. Because you're on it for— I mean, some of them were not single, but it's difficult for them because you're out for weeks at a time. Yeah. And they're really difficult jobs. They're tough on your body.

But you make a ton of money in a six-week stretch, and then you're back on land. It's the below-deck ritual, basically. Yeah, and you can't offshore those. I mean, they're literally offshore, but not far offshore. But because you're only doing the tug operation within several miles of the harbor. But yes, if these ships are going to cut costs by not doing the proper maintenance and by otherwise not having enough redundancies so that if you get a power outage, you just float into the pier or float into the bridge, then you ought to have some extra redundancies in the form of tugboats. Though, they have to be massive tugboats because these ships are so huge.

Maybe they can be big enough that they can just be enough to slow you down enough. Credit, though, to the crew for the mayday call that they put out for people who haven't been following it closely. They were able to get a mayday call out, and Maryland police and Baltimore police were able to get a Mayday call out and Maryland police and Baltimore police were able to get to the bridge fast enough to make sure that the traffic was stopped. You had, there's a radio call from one officer who says, all right, I've got the traffic stopped. I've heard that there's a construction crew on the bridge. I'm racing onto the bridge to warn them. And just as he says that, he hears back, the bridge just collapsed. Yeah.

So there just wasn't enough time. It's a long bridge. To get to those workers. It's almost a two-mile bridge. Right. Yeah, it's a massive bridge. And from the aerial shots, it almost makes it look small. It's hard to have perspective on size when you have an aerial shot like that where it's just water and a bridge.

Because, you know, it's just hard to compare to other things. But it's a huge, huge bridge. So even with the Mayday call, and we can talk about the Mayday call in a second, because there were all kinds of theories kind of bumping around yesterday. And I don't blame X for any of that in particular. I feel like even before X, Ryan, we'd all be at bars speculating wildly about what happened because it looks like such a one in a million chance. And again, many, many ships go through this port every single year. It's a very important, I think it might be the 18th most busy port in the United States. Some like 850,000 cars in particular is one thing that passed through that port a lot. That's just in last year. So let's take a listen to this clip from Fox Business.

This is Maria Bartiromo talking to Senator Rick Scott. And this is B3, is that right? This is, yeah, she brings immigration into the conversation. A Singaporean flagged container. But of course, you've been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play given the wide open border. That is why you have been so adamant. Why has the Republicans had such a hard time securing this border? The president says he's not going to take his executive action. You know that. Well, we all have to stand together. We have have to say that it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. So I think that was like a kind of clumsy attempt to pivot the conversation that she

was having with Rick Scott to immigration more than like a conspiracy theory. She's like, you know, there's a possibility and everything like this. All of us anchors have made some awkward transitions. That's what it seemed like. Let's give her that one. But other people were dead serious about some of these comparisons. In fact, so we can put B4 up on the screen. This is from Michael Flynn. And a lot of people remember Michael Flynn from the Trump administration. He

says, this is a black swan event. Black swans normally come out of the world of finance, not military. The standard operating procedures for all US ports, harbors, and bays that transit commerce and military activities are supposed to maintain an incredible level of discipline, What's he trying to say, though? So I saw speculation along these lines. I thought he was in prison. How's Andrew Tate out there becoming a shipping conspiracy expert? There were a lot of shipping conspiracy experts yesterday. I saw conspiracy theories that weren't totally explicit, but that were kind of floated along those lines or just, uh, conversations about what could have happened and how could this happen?

People saying it was hacked and like, look how it like, look how the, the, the Chinese took the power down and like propelled it right into the bridge. Like all kinds. Yeah. And I don't, kind of nonsense. I mean, I don't disagree. We were talking earlier that this is, like, an extremely unusual thing that happened. But explicable. Thank God. Right, right. So, you know, there—it seems like there are pretty obvious explanations for exactly what happened so far. And that's—not to say that either of us put it past our government to be involved in some shady business.

But it looks very clear, like, that's not what happened here. I don't begrudge people for asking questions at all because trust in government is extremely low, not just among members of the public, but among members of the media, right, including us. And let's put B6 up to talking about trust in government. This is a scoop from the lever. Feds recently hit cargo giant in Baltimore disaster for silencing whistleblowers. So this is a piece that looked at government documents from the Department of Labor that found that the company that runs this ship had recently, about eight months ago or so,

been hit by the Labor Department for this horrendous policy that it had of preventing whistleblowers on its ships from going directly to the Coast Guard or to other authorities with complaints and first having to route them through kind of company management. One of the people that complained about safety issues on one ship was subsequently fired, which he said was retaliation, which the Department of Labor found to be a credible claim and came. Sounds like Boeing. Yeah, and came after the company and said, you cannot do that. You have to have more serious safety measures in place here. And so I think there's something interesting about the way that our reaction wants to find some type of conspiracy in this.

Because if there's a conspiracy, that implies that actually somebody's in control. Like, we've got this. Like, somebody's got this. You know, in that case. And that's like what Michael Flynn was saying. Exactly. He was saying that there are harbor masters. But there are nefarious people who have their hands on all of this, and they use that control

to then create this disaster for some reason that we will then figure out later. But the assumption there is that it's under control. That's a much more comforting thing to tell ourselves than it's actually not under control because we've allowed greedy corporations to take over our government and our regulatory apparatuses and these Singaporean ships that can have low wage labor from anywhere in the world without any kind of training or other requirements, and that they can fail to maintain the ship such that it has a catastrophic power failure and crashes into the bridge. Because knowing that we don't actually have control is much more frightening to some of us than there are evil people who do have control. Right.

And knowing actually that sort of forces of oligarchy are really in control in this like haphazard like cocktail of different interests way. I think that's maybe the scariest thing of all. Exactly. Because that's much harder to take on or at least it's harder to accept then. Because if you can find some QAnon-type conspiracy here, then at least you can then tell yourself that you've kind of figured it out, rather than you live in a world where these oligarchs are chipping away at your ability to regulate safety in a way that just keeps people basically safe. And then, of course, it being Twitter, the racism surfaced and bubbled all the way to the top. A couple of tweets really ricocheted around. We can put up B2 here, which is, this is Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott speaking at a press conference.

And you had not just this account, but a decent number of them say, this is Baltimore's DEI mayor commenting on the collapse to Francis Scott Key Bridge. It's going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly. And then I think B5, if you can throw B5 up there, DEI did this as another, you know, just another clown on Twitter. But it represented a reaction that you did see. And because of Twitter's new kind of algorithmic efforts where you can pay to get your racism boosted, it became a thing that people were talking about. First of all, can I say, Brandon Scott, an illustrious graduate of my alma mater, St. Mary's College of Maryland. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. I've been following his career as he rose up through Baltimore politics proudly. Interesting. He's class 2006. So he was six years younger than me,

but he would have overlapped my brother who was class of 04. Interesting. At the same college. So Brandon Scott, graduate of the best college in America, St. Mary's College of Maryland. So how dare anybody come at him? But also, there was nothing, like, he gave an eloquent performance. It's, like, cold out, so he's got a jacket on. And, like, what's your problem other than the fact that he's black? And DEI, like, do people think that affirmative action is required for there to be a black mayor in Baltimore? Well. Like, are people this stupid? Yeah, I mean, so population of Baltimore is about 65%. I think he won with like 75% of the vote. I think it's just like, yes, I think, unfortunately, that conflation is now happening. That's what DEI means to people now. Although I tend to blame,

like, insist people who insist on affirmative, as a lot of black Americans do, for casting that stereotype, for putting people in that unfortunate position of like, oh, you're successful in black. You must be a product of affirmative action. Otherwise, Baltimore would have just the greatest white mayor ever. The guy from The Wire? Yeah, he would be great. But the DEI thing, actually, one point on that is, you know, the David Sirota piece in The Lever that you were just talking about, I think there's a really very legitimate argument about DEI and American infrastructure. And I get that. I think we have funneled an absurd amount of resources that could have been spent in other places into some of these different initiatives, corporate initiatives, municipal initiatives. And I think our resources probably could have been better spent elsewhere,

like millions, billions of dollars. I think that is a very real thing. But I also think if people who are just sort of like throwing DEI out there constantly actually put as much effort and thought as Sirota does into examining how corporate interests are influencing this in a sort of financial way, there's even deeper elements to the story. I mean, as Sirota discovered in this case very quickly, he was able to put the story together that like there are economic forces that, you know, push. And it's not to say that people aren't talking about the confluence of like oligarchy and culture DEI stuff. But in this case, there are actual oligarchs that allow these things to happen.

And we don't know the full story here yet. We do know that this boat had problems in an inspection recently in Chile, I think just in the last year. There were problems raised. And it crashed into a pier in Brussels, I think. It crashed into a pier somewhere in Europe in like 2016. And Conrad, John Conrad was talking about from G Captain points out,

but it's not, again, it's not uncommon for ships that fail different parts of their inspections to keep operating if they don't rise to the level that's a serious threat. But that's the interesting part about this conversation on corporate interest is that for different corporations, I think Boeing is a really good example. Some of these failures that can lead to loss of life, that can lead to huge infrastructure costs. We're not going to see all of the, I mean, traffic in Baltimore is going to be a nightmare for people for the foreseeable future. We're rerouting all of these car shipments, sugar, all of these things that go through the

Port of Baltimore are going to be like routed on a 95, which is going to probably cause worse in traffic for, you know, regular people up and down the sort of a cellar corridor, as it's called in the upcoming months. But the problem is the cost of doing business has become such that some of these major corporations sacrifice these potential calamities as just like a cost of doing business. It could happen, but we can save money and it probably won't. If it does, we'll pay for it. We'll take the public relations hit because we can afford it and that will allow us to keep doing business. And on your DEI point, I have a slightly different take, although you might agree with it too. I think that there was an actual cost to corporate America to maintaining the kind of WASP cartel that it had for so many decades.

There was actual racism for many decades in the leadership of corporate America, which still exists and made those corporations less effective because it coddled underperforming WASPs and it kept out higher performing non-WASPs. The way that DEI plays into this, though, is too often you'll bring in a DEI consultant after you get accused of some type of racial injustice inside your corporation. And that will be your answer. Rather than making structural reforms that make you an actually better corporation. It's a PR band-aid. People in power will say, all right, well, we're going to have these consultants come in for two days and you're going to examine your internalized racism, which is much more comfortable for a corporation to ask you to do than to examine the externalized corporate racism at work or what the corporation is actually doing

in the world. And so to the extent that it furthers the kind of lack of diversity and the lack of racial justice inside an organization, it ends up being harmful. But then you have the reverse critique from actual racists who are like, oh, DEI just means black in my mind. I think there's another important point in all of this about, so I was asking my dad about the state of bridges overall in America, because that was a huge conversation yesterday, especially when, before we totally knew what had happened. There's tons of speculation about the bridges. And he described it as he said that it's safe, but they need maintenance. That was like his overall take that bridges in America are safe, but they generally need maintenance. And I think that's probably going to prove to have been true with the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It may have needed the cost of being retrofitted with giant fenders.

Whether the fenders actually would have stopped that boat is a huge question. It looks like nothing would have stopped the boat from causing that bridge, if you hit the pier like that, to collapse. That said, John Conrad points out, he quote tweeted somebody who found that at one point, this is like an old, it looks like it's an old newspaper blurb, that that bridge could have actually been a tunnel. That some people said that this should have been a tunnel instead of a bridge. But the bridge was just easier. It was more cost effective at the time. And this is going all the way back to the 1970s. There you go.

Good call. Like there already is a harbor tunnel. Maybe when they rebuild it, they'll do another harbor tunnel. The clip you saw of Biden at the beginning was him saying that's where our focus should be going forward. Now still, as Baltimore rebuilds over the course of, my gosh, I can't imagine how long this is going to take, that in and of itself is a big story. Conrad pointed out in another tweet that other countries can rebuild this type of infrastructure much more quickly than we can at this point. But it's just our system is not optimizing the potential of our

workers in the United States. It's just, it's not. And it hasn't been for some time. Yeah. Your friend of the show, Matt Iglesias, had been joking earlier that the U.S. should hire Hamas to like work on our subways, given the effective kind of tunnel structures they built. Have them do the harbor tunnel. I mean, imagine what they could do without like having to smuggle everything in. It'd be impressive work, right? I don't know if I should dignify this with a response. Anyway, thank you to the control room for that one, as we moved all those elements all over the place.

We were jumping around. You guys were on top of it. Very much appreciated. 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. 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 voice over,

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. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's move on to Ronna McDaniel. Let's move on to RFK Jr. Oh, RFK Jr., okay. Two friends of the show. It's easy to confuse. Who among us has not confused RFK Jr. and Ronna McDaniel? Big news week for both of them. Yes, indeed.

But RFK Jr. yesterday announced his vice presidential running mate. There were some interesting reactions that we're going to get to in a second, but let's start here with C1. This is a clip from the announcement RFK Jr. made just yesterday. I'm so proud to introduce to you the next vice president of the United States, my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, a fierce warrior mom, Nicole Shanahan. So Peter Hamby pointed out, this is C2, we can put it on the screen, some reactions just among RFK Jr.'s online fan base to this pic of Nicole Shanahan were immediately negative.

One person said Kyrsten Sinema would have been like a million times better. Just one person said Tulsi, exclamation points. Now, one person did say Nicole has a heart of gold. Someone said terrible pic improves how meaningless words can be. This is some clear sexism there, actually, when it says, well, I'm not even going to read it. But Shanahan is right out of globalist central casting was another reaction. And, you know, people might say online reactions not representative of the broader population, which is absolutely true. His whole base is online reactions.

Although in that case, it is also true that he has a huge proportion of his supporters are the types of people that are, you know, frankly commenting on videos like we put out, like he put out right there. So there is something representative about it in that sense. But Ryan, what did you make of the announcement yesterday? The person who said she's out of this like WEF central casting kind of hits the nail on the head. It's the kind of person who was gravitating towards RFK Jr. after he made his campaign focused on independent media, basically. Yes. Went around the gatekeepers in the mainstream media. Rightfully.

Smart play. That kind of person does not like the profile of a Nicole Shanahan. So the number one thing, as people said, that they know her from is she was the husband, Sergey Brin, which sounds sexist to say, but in general, that's correct. He's ultra powerful and famous. So yeah, the association I think is entirely fair. And she's a patent attorney. I guarantee if I had a patent case that I needed, I couldn't do any better than her. I'm sure she's an incredible patent attorney. But 30-something patent attorney is generally not the kind of bio that we think of for, okay, well, that person should be, therefore, be vice president. Amusingly, from my perspective, she funds all sorts of causes that I'm all about.

Climate change stuff, progressive prosecutors, criminal justice reform, reproductive justice. And so if you were kind of a Trump curious but didn't like Trump type of person who was then gravitating towards RFK Jr., a lot of those things are going to turn you off from her. The thing that she was in the press for was then the divorce from Sergey Brin. Because, put the next element up on the screen. According to the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk's friendship with Sergey Brin ruptured by alleged affair. Now, both Shanahan and Musk have denied that there was an affair, but there's also been reporting that Musk got down on one knee at a party and apologized

to his good friend, Sergey Brin, for it. They were divorced within weeks of it. It almost feels perfectly fitting for our time that the kind of choice of the independent space would be linked to billionaires and involved in all sorts of drama. Because that kind of is what our kind of online politics is, is drama and billionaires. Actually, that's a really good way to put it. Well, to that point, I was actually going to say it reminds me of the tension also between sort of like OG Silicon Valley and post-Obama Silicon Valley, where at first you see yourselves as like the pirates and the disruptors. And now it's like, well, you are now the man. It's not screw the man anymore, fight the man.

It is you're the man. And to Elon Musk sort of walks that fine line in an interesting way while constantly criticizing U.S. foreign policy, but also being a major defense contractor and having all of these various interests going on. But with Shanahan, the point you made about how if you're someone that's uncomfortable with Trump, I think it could actually be a preview of the RFK Jr. strategy to come and an example of why I think Biden is increasingly worried about RFK Jr. I know people – didn't the DNC actually do like a press call yesterday amid the announcement, which would be unusual for a third party candidate to have the DNC. Liz Smith is running that effort now. Right.

Yeah, like they've- Anti third party effort. They've steered some real resources into this. And I think that's because he's around 9.9%, I think, in the RCP national average. When you put Cornel West, who I think is at like 2% in the RCP national average, and then there's another like 1 point something percent for Jill Stein in there. If that remained constant going into election day, and RFK Jr. is able to pour vast resources into a state like Nevada where he's on the ballot, imagine Jill Stein, but Jill Stein with way more, like a higher proportion of the vote in Pennsylvania in 2016, just in Pennsylvania

and Wisconsin. So we'll see, you know, ultimately how many states he's able to get on the ballot in. But I think, you know, him going with somebody that has real sort of progressive bona fides is a pretty interesting signal that he's going to make a real push for those voters. And I also continue to have the theory that as soon as Donald Trump turns to RFK Jr. in earnest, like really starts pushing back on RFK Jr. if he's worried about losing some of his own supporters to him, that will also highlight RFK Jr.'s progressive bona fides. Because as you know, as well as anybody, he was kind of a mainstream dude in progressive circles for a long time. Someone that was like, he became fringe also with vaccine stuff, with vaccines, with some other conspiracy, but he was still showing up at the

events. He was like persona grata. Yeah. Persona grata. That's a good way to put it. Uh, and so I think as his wife, if Donald, well, right. Uh, a good way to put it. And so I think it is his wife. If Donald, well, right. If Donald Trump starts talking about how RFK Jr. is like an environmentalist who's pro-regulation and pro-Medicare for all and all of that, I don't know what the Trump attacks will look like, although we've seen a little preview of it. That also reminds some potential Biden voters that RFK Jr. has has decades of work in that space in ways that they might really like. So maybe it's a smarter pick than people realize because is he going to lose some of his hardcore fans over a weird vice presidential pick that they're unhappy with? I don't know.

I would think he would. The informed speculation, though, of why would he do this? Number one answer that you've seen from people who have some clue on this is that when she went through her divorce publicly, it's known that she asked for a billion dollars, went through arbitration. We don't know exactly what she got. We know that she got a lot of money. She financed the Super Bowl ad that RFK Jr. later apologized for. Remember that one? But there is a, you can call it a loophole in campaign finance that says that if you are on a ticket, you can spend an unlimited amount of your own money.

So she could have, from the outside, an RFK jr. Super PAC. They get they don't get favorable rates They can't coordinate with the campaign With her on the ticket if she gives a hundred million dollars to the campaign the campaign can directly spend that hundred million dollars So yeah, that is the number one benefit she offers. The second one is this looks like RFK Jr. has long ago given up on the idea that he's going to win the presidency and is making sure that he will still be a palatable kind of social figure when he returns to Los Angeles and Silicon Valley after this, to have somebody that is well regarded in in that community as his running mate I'm not sure if that calculation is correct yeah because if

he well did different elements of Silicon Valley in different elements of LA have different hopes coming out of this presidential election you know some of them are fine with Trump but the elements that are not fine with Trump if they blame him for swinging the election to Trump, it doesn't matter who his running mate's going to be. He's not going to get those dinner party invites. Yeah, that's interesting. That is really interesting because you'd think- These are the risks that our public servants take. Although I still maintain that people who are fundamentally making protest votes are not making

protest votes based on VP picks, but there are people with this sense. It can contribute to people making an argument that they trusted RFK Jr.'s sort of anti-establishment streak. And then when they see his position on Israel, or they see who he picks as a VP candidate, it hurts his credibility as like an anti-establishment guy. And so it can contribute to that broader narrative that a lot of people have started picking up on and it does frustrate a lot of potential RFK junior voters. Again, it's not a huge slice of the population, although I continue to think that it can be a huge part of some of these key states and does pose a real threat to Biden's reelection. I mean, I do think there's a counterfactual history where he could have been a credible

candidate. If he flowed out of the RFK senior in an anti-war, if he carried that mantle forward. Which he tried to do until October 7th. Which he did, right, with Ukraine and otherwise saying that the U.S. empire needs to mind its business. That plus progressive domestic policy is a potent combination for independent voters and for a lot of Democrats and Republicans who are not locked in on their party. But yeah, after October 7th, he happens to be a very strident Zionist who was out of the gate. You saw his interviews here and elsewhere. He was out of the gate, unapologetically, unconditionally supportive of Israel and willing to give as much American support to Israel as possible. And so that lane was no longer available to him.

But I think there is a world with the combination of his name and that positioning that he could be polling in the 30s. And then he's with three people in the race. Then you're in the ballgame at that point. Because then all these other people who reluctantly are voting for Trump or reluctantly are voting for Biden are like, oh, wait, this is not a protest vote. Yeah. I can actually vote for this guy.

But also the voice. The voice. I'm sorry. It's tough. People don't want to hear that for four years. And it's a health condition. It's terrible to say, but it's a huge obstacle for him. I'm just seeing a Charlie Kirk tweet that's upset about the land acknowledgement that the VP of RFK Jr.'s VP announcement opened with. We kind of teased that earlier. But yes,

the Native American tribe did give a land acknowledgement before they started. And this is indicative of and actually, apparently that was at his campaign launch, too, according to Brent Sher of The Daily Wire. This is, I think, indicative of the really tough road. It's sort of like what Bernie Sanders had to deal with with some of the cultural issues in 2016 and then in 2020. But it's on a much, much, much intensified scale when you have someone like he's on independent media all the time, like openly criticizing, aggressively criticizing some of the culture warriors on the left. I mean, he is, there have been some polls that find him around 30% or higher with young voters. That could have been reflected in the broader population. I still have a lot of respect for the campaign that he's running. I'm curious to see, you know, what kind of course correction, if any course correction, or even just pouring more money into those nostalgic ads. I'm curious to see what's ahead. I still think he's, even all of these divisions, the demand for a protest vote right

now, even if it's literally uncommitted. No, that's true. Just the bland phrase uncommitted is so high that he could do a lot of damage to Biden. Now, there was also a chance that he might have discovered a preternatural political talent who was going to take the world by storm. Let's roll a little bit of Nicole Shanahan's speech and let you decide whether or not you think he discovered that. People talk about my age. It's true. I will be the youngest vice president in American history. Let me tell you why so many of us young people have turned away from politics. It's because we lost hope that change would ever

come from inside the system. After all, which party wins with promises of hope and change or to drain the swamp? Things proceed as usual, declining bit by bit each passing year. So that's the reason. But the other reason is that we can't stand the phoniness anymore. We can't stand the lies. We can't stand the inauthenticity. And that's why Bobby Kennedy leads in all the polls among young people. We are hearing our voice in his. About as effective a speech as I deliver up there, I think. It's a youth uprising.

That's right. If she counts as youth, so do I. Let me tell you what the youths are thinking about. Go to Ryan for all of your Gen Z pop culture questions. There you go. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a

miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and 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. 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 Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable,

showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor,

going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, should we move on to Ronna McDaniel? Let's do it. Hell of a week for Ronna McDaniel. Hell of a week over at NBC News. Ronna McDaniel's out. We put up this first element here, one of the briefest tenures as an NBC News analyst in NBC News analyst history, I would think. She did one interview with Kristen Welker, a bit of a grilling on the Sunday show, and that was it. Now, she'll still get paid,

is my understanding, her entire contract, because they don't. It's what happened to Megyn Kelly, too. Yeah, because they don't have a justification other than, oh, that was a mistake. It turns out. Their employees are mad. Turns out everybody is mad about this internally. Nothing changed. Yeah. Like Ryan McDaniel didn't say anything new that's egregious that anybody's taking issue with.

It was Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough have said basically it was they would have objected before the announcement was even made. That's out there in the open. So it's a pretty good case for no real reason to drop the contract in a way that would take funding away from her. So there's an interesting part of Rachel Maddow's long rant about the hiring of Ronna McDaniels that now, in light of McDaniels' firing, I think is perhaps worth revisiting. This is Rachel Maddow talking specifically about the distinction between NBC and MSNBC on her show earlier this week. It's my understanding that MSNBC's leadership did not object to Ronna McDaniel being hired by NBC News when the matter

first arose. But when the hiring was announced and MSNBC staff essentially unanimously and instantly expressed outrage, our leadership at MSNBC heard us, understood, and adjusted course. We were told this weekend in clear terms, Ronna McDaniel will not be on our air. Ronna McDaniel will not be on MSNBC. And I say that and give you that level of detail because there has been an effort since by other parts of the company to muddy that up in the press and make it seem like that's not what happened at MSNBC. I can assure you that is what happened at MSNBC. If you care what I think about this, I will tell you the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me, that is inexplicable. I mean, you wouldn't hire a wise

guy. You wouldn't hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA's office, right? You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. Okay, Ryan, something really interesting there that gets to the heart of the story, where she's saying you wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work at, I think she says TSA in the clip. But you know, in journalism, you would interview the pickpocket, right? That's kind of part of the job. If you have a massive surge in retail theft, which some cities actually have been dealing with recently, you might want to get the perspective of the thieves.

So even if I buy her comparison, and by the way, I would apply that to literally all politicians. They constantly, Joy Reid said on MSNBC, we want more Republicans on MSNBC. Give me more, this is a real quote, Adam Kinzinger's and Liz Cheney's. Also pickpockets, by the way, Nicole Wallace, who lied about the Iraq war for the Bush administration, hosts a show on MSNBC. So while we are drawing red lines in the sand at anybody who could potentially be the pickpocket, come on, give me a break. I'm not sure that MSNBC or NBC News is in any position to do that. Yeah. And she also said you wouldn't have the mafia come and work with the prosecutors. But actually, when you set up the SEC,

they had Joe Kennedy run it, who was mob-linked and was brought in because he was one of the most corrupt kind of traitors. You can say that because you're also Irish. There you go. Otherwise, it's yeah, exactly. It's anti-Irish bigotry. Yeah, it's in the family. But look at the people who are complaining. Joe Scarborough, Republican congressman. Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most bloodthirsty kind of imperialists that our government produced in the 20th century. And yeah, like you said, Nicole Wallace, George W. Bush, all of those MSNBC viewers at one point were chanting, Bush lied, people died. And Nicole Wallace was the one writing those lies and was the spokesperson for those lies. Then you've got Jen Psaki, who was an Obama and Biden partisan spokesperson.

Most spokespeople wind up going to one network or another. So clearly what they're saying is that that's okay, but Ronna McDaniel is beyond the pale, basically because she was vaguely supportive. Do you tell me how supportive she was of Trump's January 6th insurrectionary activities? Yeah, that's what it all comes down to. This is how Jen Psaki actually explained it. Jen Psaki came out and addressed head on the. I'm a hack.

Yeah. She was like, you know, I'm here. Right. She was like, you people have pointed out that I work at the CDC. And she was like, but it's different because of election denialism. And Ryan, I think we've been clear. Somebody circulated a clip of her pretending that the U.S. never interferes with South American elections. Perfect.

I mean, you can just, there's such a wealth. Those elections you can deny. The things that they said, I saw clips going around, the things that they said that, you know, maybe they had good reason for saying them back in the early days of the pandemic, but that were, I mean, Fauci is a great example. Fauci himself, like Nicole Wallace, Fauci, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney. I mean, people who have trafficked in disinformation, period, that we don't draw the red line at. We're drawing the red line at this Trump insurrection, like, well, not even the insurrection, but like the Trump election denialism, as they call it,

as Jen Psaki, I think, directly called it, because Ronald McDaniel flirted with it. The bad news for MSNBC is that Ronald McDaniel is like moderately pro-Trump compared to a lot of the Republican base, not all Republican voters. But Ronna McDaniel, I think in her interview with Kristen Walker said something so gross. I don't know if you caught this part where, and this is before she was fired. It was her first interview. It's when she's, you know, wants that $300,000, wants to make a good impression, wants to get invited to the NBC Christmas party or whatever, saying, you know, when you are head of the RNC, when you work for the party, you just got to take one for the team. And I can now be more myself. That's what she said, which is code for I lied for years to make money. You're just following orders.

Yes. I lied professionally for the power and the money. And now I can get the power and the money, but without lying. But why would MSNBC viewers or NBC viewers want her actual thoughts? Like, who cares what her actual thoughts are? To the extent that she's remotely interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's because of her access to power. Yeah. And because of the insurrectionary support. Like, those are the kinds of things that actually matter. Right. Like, what Ronna McDaniel actually thinks about X, Y, or Z issue is, I can't begin to imagine why that would be remotely interesting to anybody. Yeah, they actually should have the guts to hire somebody who actually makes their journalism worthwhile.

Or just interview them. That's the funniest thing. You want Republicans or Democrats on your channel? Right. Just call them. Yeah. And they will come on because you have millions of people watching you. You don't actually have to pay them.

It reminds me of the New York Times hiring James Bennett to run their opinion section so that he could bring more conservative voices on. Them running a conservative piece by Tom Cotton and then freaking firing James Bennett to run their opinion section so that he could bring more conservative voices on them running a conservative piece by Tom Cotton and then freaking firing James Bennett over it. This is like the dumbest thing in the world. It's because they can't figure out their business model. Like the New York Times hasn't realized that it now has to be, instead of being like the paper of record that's responsive to this broad swath of the public that reads it around the country, they're responsive to like the NPR tote bag crowd, which creates a different business incentive. You're not doing neutral news for all of America in the new business model where mass media

is dying. You're responsive to a different group of people. For the sake of the journalism, the quote sacred airwaves, that's an actual description from Nicole Wallace, they purport to care about, you would want to have someone even more hardcore than Ronna McDaniel. You would want to have an actual Trump 2020 election was stolen type of person on the show, because if you're confident in your facts- Get Steve Bannon on there. Get Steve Bannon on there. But in all seriousness, normalize Steve Bannon on NBC, because people don't need to be protected. What they need is to trust that the people who are saying Steve Bannon

is wrong because of A, B, and C are themselves telling the truth, and that those disputes with Steve Bannon are rooted in something real and now nobody trusts anyone. So when Steve Bannon says something that's wrong, it's like, well, who do you trust? Do you trust him? Do you trust the people who are also wrong, who are saying he's wrong? Nobody knows who to trust and one good way to rebuild trust is to actually like talk to people and figure that stuff out. And yes, agreed.

We solved the problem for NBC. We do have one final element we can put up the screen. And relatedly, by the way, the biggest gift to Trump has been his deplatforming from liberal media. And here's an example of corporate media not learning that lesson. This was from Sarah Fisher at Axios last night. She reported that Cesar Conde of NBCUniversal, he's the chairman of the group, took full responsibility. He said he approved Ron McDaniel's hiring. So that went all the way up, though, unfortunately, apparently not to Joe and Mika. They had no say in it. But you're right, Ryan, this massive effort to say,

like, we have guilt about Donald Trump being elected in 2016. We think people need to be protected from Trump. We're not going to air his rallies. We're not going to let him say whatever the hell he wants to on Twitter or Facebook, whatever. It has given so much credibility to Trump's claims of censorship. He is really extremely sensitive. And the more normie people see of Trump He is really extremely sensitive. And the more normie people see of Trump, the less they like him, the more he's in their face, the less they appreciate him. And when he's at a distance, you're like, oh, wasn't that guy kind of funny? And wages were good. That's true. But then he's get back in your face. You're like, oh, yeah,

that's why I didn't like that guy. But the liberals, by keeping him off of Twitter and Facebook and kind of keeping his antics away from people's faces have actually done the thing that Trump's advisors had failed to do, which is to get Trump to just cool it and stop being such a freak all the time. So he gets to be a freak all the time, but people don't see the freak outs. Yeah. Is this a Corey Lewandowski or Steve Bannon quote, like, let Trump be Trump, don't try to make Trump someone else? That was like the Trump campaign motto, but it should also be the anti-Trump motto because letting Trump be Trump is actually more powerful. And if you have a good, like if you're working with Hillary Clinton and

Joe Biden, it might be harder to control the opposition to Donald Trump, but most of the country doesn't like Donald Trump. So let Trump be Trump and you just focus on doing a better job as the anti-Trump side instead of clinging to the crutch of censorship and disinformation. Yeah. All right. So now we're going to move on to the segment that I've been waiting for because I am genuinely curious what the heck is going on on conservative Twitter. I have some sense that it has something to do with this Babylon Bee article.

So you can put up this E1. They put out a headline. The white race must maintain our genetic purity, says inbred man over an image of an inbred man with a Nazi flag and a Confederate flag behind him. Inbred Confederate supporters apparently took extraordinary offense to this or something. And so maybe this isn't even the thing that prompted this meltdown on conservative Twitter, I don't know, but you put up E2 and then E3. Oh yeah, so here's E2, you got people unfollow, disgusting organization, the Babylon Bee is run by,

looks like, Starra David there, who often lash out against Christians. Just antisemitism and white nationalism just on display, angry at the Babylon Bee. I put up the next one there. And you've got Ali Batstucky who's been on this program. There is no way to explain to a normal person what's happening on conservative Twitter right now.

Chris Ruffo also been on this program, says it's getting insane. We have a problem on the right. The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement. I'm skeptical that they're talking

just about the Babylon Bee thing. I know there was the Candace Owens, Daily Wire stuff. Chris Ruffo later says that Tucker's show by getting taken away, took away kind of a North Star that helped to organize right-wing discourse. But yeah, what's going on? What's all the drama about? So I work very hard not to have deep, intimate understanding of Twitter beefs, but I will say, unless I think that they're relevant in some ways, and there may be an argument that this is relevant in some ways.

I think Rufo's point about the economics of online incentives or the incentives of online discourse. Incentivizes beefs, right? Yeah, and I actually think this is something the left has been dealing with for a really long time in ways that you're very familiar with. Oh, yeah. Because it's— I have YouTubers who, like, have entire subchannels just, like, about my hair. Right, Yes. Again, speaking of things that are relevant to the average American, we kind of get to the bottom of it.

It's important stuff. Yeah. It's important stuff. But it reminds me of how I felt during the, like, Force the Vote whirlwind that absolutely consumed the online left. And again, I actually think there were some, that was a very legitimate- Yeah, that was a substantial dispute, yeah. Right, and sometimes I think things are online. Things that are legitimate disputes

among organizers in the grassroots are also online. So they get dismissed as being just online beefs instead of real representative ones. This one, I don't know how representative it is of anything broader except what Rufo said, that these conversations online are making it really hard for conservative media, conservative activists to focus on what matters because it puts you in a bubble. If a lot of your work is being conducted on Twitter, you're just in a bubble where the incentives are totally different for what you talk about, how you talk about it, as opposed to like appealing broadly to the American public. So I definitely don't think it's unique to the right. I think the

right didn't learn from the online left and has now leaned fully into the influencer space without taking some of those lessons to heart. Like even back in the day, Young Turks, you know, you definitely remember this. It just, they had like the beef, they were in on the sort of online beef economy before anyone kind of, you know, you had these like warring YouTube channels going back and forth and the Twitter beefs, like this is, this goes back a long way, you know, to the dawn of the new media ecosystem on YouTube and Twitter. Before that, like radio hosts on the same channel used to have management tell them, okay, now you two hosts are fighting for the next two weeks because that would bring in the ratings. But is the current meltdown more about Candace Owens or like?

Yeah, I think that's accurate. And the Babylon Bee thing? Yeah, I think so. The Babylon Bee, for what it's worth, I love them. And they are equal opportunity. I would be tempted on another account to see that as kind of classist. But it's... That's one of the first ones that approached being funny that I've seen.

I wouldn't quite call it funny, but at least it was like, all right, that's an attempt at being funny. Yeah, they're not all winners. They also, they started as like a really internecine, internecine is sort of, I didn't even mean that as a pun, but like a real internecine mockery of like evangelical subculture. And it was really funny or like even just like Christian subculture it was it was actually really funny on those those types of along those lines and yeah they're not all winners but they have some genuinely very biting and funny stuff that mocks conservatives mocks the left mocks rich people mocks poor people mocks everyone so I don't the replies to that were taking issue with alleged, like, I mean, these were like pretty bigoted. There were some pretty bigoted replies saying that they're, it's just run by a bunch of Zionists and some people were outright saying Jews. over Candace Owens and her departure from the Daily Wire, which saw, obviously, Jewish leadership at the Daily Wire from Ben Shapiro to, you know, Andrew Klavan,

who talks about how he's ethnically Jewish and is very proud of that, although he's Christian now. Like, it was just a pretty ridiculous, like, I don't even know. And the Daily Wire feeds into it, I think, to some extent by putting out statements. I actually kind of disagree with their decision to do that. Like you can just – things can just happen and you can kind of move on. You know what I mean? But to Rufo's point, though, the economics of Twitter makes everybody think that they kind of have to comment on everything because you're getting piled on. And is that good for the brand? Is that good for your ability to make arguments?

That's the big question I think that is relevant. It is, I think, very much a continuation, though, of the Candace Owens discourse from last week, which is a tough one for the conservative movement. You were talking before we started filming about a poll that found, what, 30% Republican opposition to the ongoing war in Gaza? Right, yeah. 70 New Gallup poll after the Flower Massacre found Democrats now against the Israeli war, 75 to 18. But yes, 30% of Republicans. It was like something like 55-35 among independents against it.

But as many as, I think it was 30- some percent of, yes, Republicans are against that war. So that's a non-trivial chunk of the electorate there. My own guess on the broader level is a couple of things. One is that I think Twitter actually did the conservative movement a favor by elevating some of the more out there woke stuff. Yeah. And keeping out a lot of these kind of Nazis and Pepe frogs. Yeah. and Confederate sympathizers, I think they actually did the kind of conservative Twitter movement generally a favor by not having them engage, not making them such an element of it. By Musk allowing them not just to come back, but then to pay to amplify their stuff is similar to what we were talking about earlier in the way that liberals have done Trump a favor by getting

rid of him, by keeping him off of some of these platforms. And so Twitter, by kicking the Nazis off, I think did a favor to conservatives. And so now what's happened under Musk is that almost all of those liberals either have left Twitter or not posting as much, or are refusing to pay the $8, $10, $12, whatever it is now. And so they're not showing up in the verified feeds of conservatives. And so they're only seeing other conservatives. And it's becoming more like Truth Social. You're on Truth social, right? No.

Anyway, on truth social, it's just a bunch of people accusing each other of being pedophiles because there's no liberals to own. And if there's no libs to own, you just then just fight each other. I kind of disagree. Like threads are on the left. I kind of disagree on the point about the Pepes, because I think just from an inside perspective in the conservative sphere, there was less consternation and hand-wringing about the Pepes when they were on Twitter, because it was easy for everyone to just be like, this is weird. These people are weird. It replicated the social dynamics of regular life, and that you're just like, okay, freak. Like, please stop spewing this anti-Semitism, like outrank anti-Semitism into people's feeds.

I'm going to mock you. I'm going to, you know, ignore you, whatever. So I think it's an interesting point, although that's my impulse on that. Now, I think a lot of conservatives have been in a sort of bubble on the Israel stuff, not just conservatives, like people in general. And because this is a war that's playing out on as a, again, someone who disagrees with, when there's a lack of transparency and people find information that's contrary to what they're being told, that's contrary to propaganda,

that's extremely powerful. And it makes people think, it makes people question Israel, period. So instead of people just saying, well, Israel is engaged in this wartime propaganda and is really wrong about what happened in this instant. It makes you question literally everything that Israel has done. Because people are like, man, I've been lied to about our support. I've been lied to about from the river to the sea. This is not what I'm hearing. And that's powerful. That's extremely powerful. And I think some of what's playing out in the conservative movement right now is people who follow new media really closely. I know we have like a lot of conservative viewers of this show, learning new information that you just don't

hear, you know, in people, the circles of people who are ardently pro-Israel for some very good reason, you know, descended from people who fled there and found refuge there before the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, after the Holocaust. You know, when there is no transparency, it makes the contrary information even more powerful in ways that are counterproductive. And I feel like that's some of what's playing out right now. I don't know how exactly this fits in, but I wanted to add, because I think it feels related. So last night there was a special election in Alabama, which you may have followed. It was a House district in the Huntsville area. So in 2022, Republicans won that seat by seven points. And it consistently, this is Trump, this is a red district.

This time, the Democrat won by nearly 25 points. And this is just not long after the IVF ruling kind of rocked Alabama politics. feels like there's something related here that that there is a segment of the right that is coming into contact with the consequences of their own rhetoric and and and success hmm that is Causing them then huge huge fallout. Mm-hmm. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, Tucker Carlson recently said that he was wrong. I think he said this on Lex Fridman's show,

that he was wrong about U.S. imperialism, that he's like a child of the Cold War era and was sort of doggedly pro-U.S. and in that foil with anti-communism, like in that binary. He wanted to join the CIA. Yeah, as Putin said. And he recently said, you know, he's looked back on all of that history. And I think that reckoning is happening with about 30 percent of the Republican base.

Actually, it kind of matches up to what that poll found about support for the war in Gaza. I do think that there's this big reckoning that's happening. And I think it's going to push people in some really unhealthy directions into, for example, rank anti-Semitism, following, for instance, Candace Owens down whatever rabbit hole she chooses on any given day and flirting with bigotry.

I think it's going to lead some people in really good directions, which means that the conservative movement or conservatives more broadly, hopefully at one point, the Republican Party would have a more nuanced approach to foreign policy than this sort of Cold War binary, you're with us or against us. And any person that flirts with communism in any part of the globe must be eradicated by the CIA or American forces, or we should sic Samantha Powers on them and see what happens. So anyway, yeah, I think the economics of online discourse, though, that broader point,

I think it's been really unhealthy for American politics. And I have people who remind me, what it was like to cover politics before Twitter and say, listen, it was actually way harder to get different information and different perspectives. And it wasn't impossible. Just Twitter does make it easy in ways that we take for granted. At the same time, it also puts virtually every person who works in politics and who is in power in a giant bubble because they're constantly exposed to the algorithm and the algorithm incentivizes, you know, extremeness or like extreme perspectives and disagreement, division over anything else. And that's warping, distorting the way that powerful people see the world. All right. Well, up next, we're going to have

Ashish Pashar from the No Taxation for Genocide campaign, which has been surprisingly successful in the United Kingdom. He's going to break down that for us. Stick around. 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. 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 Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty.

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, up next is Ashish Prashar from the No Tax for Genocide campaign. Ashish, thank you so much for joining us here. Thanks for having me.

All right, so break down this campaign for us. What does No Tax for Genocide mean? Thanks for having me. All right, so break down this campaign for us. What does no tax for genocide mean? I think it's important to set the stage a little bit on this and why this is actually legal for people in the UK. You know, 34,000 civilians have been killed. 1.2 million people have been forcibly removed. Those numbers sound eerily familiar, but they're not actually Gaza.

That's the Bosnian genocide. And today in Gaza, we're seeing over 40,000. We've surpassed the 34,000 number. We've seen 2 million people displaced, countless number of people injured. Israel has bombed and starved Palestinians, and the US and UK, in this case, have aided and abetted in those crimes. The ICJ have ruled it a plausible genocide. And only yesterday, I think Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, basically confirmed it was a genocide. And no matter what the State Department says, it doesn't feel like a reputable source right now

because they've, in fact, been lying for six months. Because we've had countless human rights organizations, scholars in this space, and even, frankly, survivors of Bosnia call this a genocide. And the reason that's important is because none of this works unless that is actually deemed a genocide or crimes against humanity. See, the law, we've discovered, has power that can be used on behalf of this

struggle. It can be wielded in service of this political movement and actually liberation of Palestinians. So the UK has specifically aided in a bit in war crimes. Funding war crimes is illegal and taxation is not exempt under UK law. This campaign, which launched on the 14th of March, a campaign that's based on UK statute law, specifically, I'm not going to get overly legal about it, so I'll keep this simple, but the ICC Act, which makes it a criminal offence for anyone in the UK, person or organisation or institution to engage

in war crimes or crimes against humanity. The Terrorism Act in 2000 also does not exclude taxation in its criminalisation of funding of terror and mass atrocities. And that is how people can legally withhold their money. And remember, I just want to be clear, they still pay their taxes. They have to put it in a discretionary trust or another bank account effectively, that the primary beneficiary of that is the UK government. So they're paying their taxes. They're putting it basically into an escrow account. But UK doesn't have access to that unless they do what? And how many people do you have so far who are doing this? So far, I mean, so far, there has been a trial run of a bunch of people and businesses that have done this. On the pledge

right now, we have up to just under 70,000 people effectively engaged in this, ready to go. The goal for me is to get up to 100,000 people because that would eliminate 700 million pounds, close to a billion dollars from the UK's budget. And look, to be transparent, everyone's going, oh, those numbers might seem small, but the UK is not the United States. It doesn't have a trillion dollars budget. It is only 60 million people, 38 million people which pay taxation. You had 100,000 knock out of that and even go as far as we think engagement will be up to a million, 2 million, 3 million. That's nearly 10% of the population. If they stop paying taxation, you will cripple the ability of the Treasury and the UK government to move forward in any policy,

frankly. And to answer your earlier question about who's doing it already, we obviously tested this. We had a couple of small businesses and partners who also, I wouldn't say pro-personally, who just don't want to see children blown up every morning when they wake up on their phones. They don't want to see their government and themselves participate in these actions. And we work with these businesses, they're small in the UK, they have 50 to 60 people to tell the HMRC, inform them through this process that they won't be, they will continue, they don't want to be complicit. They don't want to be complicit in these war crimes that the UK is actively engaged in. They don't want to be complicit in these war crimes that the UK is actively engaged in. They don't want to be personally culpable for these war crimes. And they don't want to collect tax that will be funding

those war crimes. So they sent that to HMRC with all the statute stuff that I mentioned earlier on, showed up the trust that they're actually setting up to put the taxation in. And the UK would only get the money if it could prove it's no longer aiding and abetting and supporting these genocidal acts. The system, just like from the perspective of democracy, sounds like so enviable from the United States. Being able to express your politics through removing your tax funding in this way is just like amazing. Has the right and a testament to like a really impressive organizing on your part and other people who are involved in this has the right flirted with this at all and said for example if if the uk is funding unruh funding the un which is funding unruh which has hamas connections i'm

not paying taxes because i don't want to fund has there been any like counter effort or are you guys really like uh completely and maybe this is reflective of where public opinion is in the uk too yeah i mean it's really interesting it's a really good question i think the the funny thing is um we were very specific about the icc act right i mean because somebody gets me couldn't i do this for climate change is that not a mass atrocity could i not do this for there's so many many reasons. You could possibly... The language around the ICC Act, the ICC Act really was designed to stop war crimes, to stop genocide, to stop what we're seeing in Gaza

and what's happening in Bosnia and Rwanda and everything else around that. So we've been very specific about why you couldn't do this around everything out there. And then also terrorism. It's complex, right? We put people on the terror watch list. We, the United States, the UK, even Europe,

but not everyone sees every organization as a terrorist group. So Hamas in and of itself, you don't have to speak to just me, but the guy who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement between Northern Ireland, UK and Ireland, Jonathan Powell, Hamas is not recognized as a terrorist organization

to about 160 other countries. It's literally, to lack of a better term, Jonathan Powell, Hamas is not recognized as a terrorist organization to about 160 other countries. Right. You know, it's literally, to lack of a better term, white countries in Europe and the United States and Israel. So it's complex, right? When you have like a genocidal act that's been reinforced by, and that's why those rulings are really important. That's why the plausible genocide, which is effectively genocide by international standards. And having Francesca Albanese's report to the UN, all enforcing the fact that this is a genocide, really makes this possible.

It's really difficult when you have an individual act, you know, you can have an act of terror and you can have an act of violence and say, well, that's done by terrorism organizers. Surely I should be able to remove my funding from this right now. And you could argue that they're freedom fighters for some reason. And you could talk about how people felt of the IRA in Northern Ireland,

whether they're freedom fighters and not terrorists. So it's complex there. But that's why all those other rulings are really important to make this possible. And it really doesn't matter what the US and the UK say if the top court, which, by the way, they fund through the UN, is making these rulings. What's the effect been so far on the politics back at home, if any? We haven't had a direct response.

I definitely know that they are worried. We've had a bit of a blowback from, I think, government tax people who've gone on air in the UK to say, this is not legal. And the interesting thing is here, they've sent accountants out to do this, right? They've sent tax experts. There's no tax person that you work with

that's going to recommend you do this. This is based in international law. And the problem with tax lawyers and tax specialists is they don't understand international law. We're using laws that are written by the UN and the Hague, but also your laws that are written by the UK government to address terrorism, to address war crimes, to address genocide, to do this. We're not using tax law. The only tax part is the trust. You know, the fact is we're saying you can withhold all your funding because it's in international law and our own domestic laws, the ICC Act and terror act that say you are culpable right now if we're supporting this. And I think that's the, I feel like they've approached

this wrongly, you know, have an expert who is an expert in war crimes and an expert in international law to call this illegal, have an expert who understands the Terrorism Act to call this illegal. They haven't been able to muster that yet. They've only had accountants basically go out there and say that. And no accountant is going to tell you, Ryan, you know, or anyone on the show that you should withhold your tax. Well, I was just going to say, to like ask that question about how this does, the success of this reflects on where public opinion on the war is

among people in the UK. Do you see the success of this as being a reflection of what we were talking about earlier in the show with Ryan and I were talking about what Donald Trump said about Israel's public relations problem? Do you see this as reflecting real deep fissures and public opinion about that question? 100%. I mean, you only have to look at the public opinion here where it's like over 70% want to ceasefire at this point. And the UK, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but surpass that. I mean, you even have, you asked the question about people on the right. I think people are generally sick of waking up to those images, generally can't understand how our governments are okay with this.

Generally, like, why are we still sending weapons to help this? I think public opinion, I think across, you know, somebody said to me, oh, it's just the global south or the Middle East that cares about this. You only have to look at your streets every weekend to realize how many people care about this. You only have to look at the reason they're trying to ban things like TikTok here and in the UK, because so much engagement around how atrocious all of this is, how we can't believe that we're okay with this, and we can't believe, you know, that this is happening and we can watch it. You know, I think people are over our institutions continuing these massacres. And millions of people across the UK, the West, the world, want killings of Palestinians by Israelis to just end,

just simply end at this point. And whether you are pro-Palestinian or you have a side or whatever, I think the majority of people want it to stop. And that is something you can't, I think most people agree with, right? You're seeing people who are not even engaged in Middle East politics, not engaged in Palestinian liberation out there going, look, I just want kids. I don't want kids that look like that could be my kid bombed, shot or starved. You may have seen this video recently, but if you didn't, there was this French national who was kind of caught on video down in Gaza talking about and actually engaging in basically torture

of a Palestinian detainee. And then there was an effort online to identify who this person was, which was successful. People who were friends with him said, wait a minute, I know who that is. And now there's kind of an effort underway to prosecute this guy when he comes back to France after this. What sense do you have among people who are trying to, you know, bring accountability to people who are engaged in this, either at the leadership level or on the ground? Are there any efforts that are proceeding in any ways that are kind of worth exploring at this point? Yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that obviously, you know, we're working on something like that, which we'll get into.

But I think the public don't want these people coming back and being that teacher of their kids. The public don't want these individuals to sit next to them in the office. The public don't want to engage with these individuals who've killed children and celebrated killing children, who've tortured other human beings, and just sit next to them in a coffeehouse like nothing changed and talk to them. I think people are deeply uncomfortable with that and the fact that they will potentially slip back into society. So, you know, the reason that I go back to the tax thing in just one second, the reason people want to do this is because you've had protests after protests. Millions of people in the United Kingdom march, and everyone's always asking, what more can I do?

This is a way for them to actively get involved. And to answer your actual question, because the public can't do this, there are lawyers across the United States, across Europe, who are trying to hold these individuals accountable. Right now, there are a set of cases being worked on to go after the Israeli administration, but also the American administration for their war crimes. There is a movement of lawyers also across the EU going after individuals, personally IDF soldiers, responsible for for those war crimes too. They're arrogant enough to do it on video. It's not that difficult to bring charges against them. The French government even cleared the way, the Justice Department earlier this week, cleared the way for prosecutions if anyone could identify people, right? There is always a, will the government actually get in the

way? Will the government actually stop us prosecuting these individuals? Well, that's all been clear. The Justice Department made an announcement going, if you have that and you have the evidence, those charges can be brought to court. But yes, to answer your other point about what's happening, so I am working with a coalition of lawyers with other partners like Noda Elikat, who's a famous human rights lawyer here in the United States, who's Palestinian, bringing cases against both Israel, but the United States, he's Palestinian, bringing cases against both Israel, but the United States. And the focus and the lawyers that I'm working on have is the United States, because this wouldn't be possible without them. We have funded it. We have literally sent

cash, just cash. We have sent all the weapons that have been used for this genocide. The amount of weapons Israel has used, they'd be out of bombs in a week. If we weren't continuously restocking that, the amount of bombs they've dropped is shocking, and they wouldn't be able to do that without the United States. So we are complicit, and we've aided and abetted in that. But also the political cover we've provided, the amount of vetoes, when we've already known since the middle of October it's an ethnic cleansing, it's a genocide, we've provided all of that. So we have the coalition of lawyers, specifically the countries where these cases are more towards the end of actually being submitted, are in Ireland and Spain. They will happen this spring, where there'll be cases brought against not just Biden, not just Blinken, not just Austin.

Our targets are the entire administration. And that includes those press secretaries from Matt Miller to Karinji, KJP, and John Kirby, who've outwardly promoted genocide, who've outwardly said this is okay, who outwardly also butcher international law when saying things like Israel has a right to defend itself. Yes, every state has a right to defend itself, but from another state, not from people they occupy. In fact, resistance is the actual thing that is legal from occupation in international law. So they've gaslit and lied to the public blatantly about all this stuff already. So they are culpable. Every press secretary, every member of the war cabinet, every staff member from Jeff Zients, they are culpable in these cases, and they are all being named in these cases because it's important that they don't know any peace going forward. We accept that the president through maybe international,

because of diplomatic immunity, might not be able to be charged immediately. But hey, he might not be in office in November, and might lose the election. So there might be a potential for him to be, justice to be sought against him. But none of those staff members have immunity from prosecution anywhere else in the world if they go abroad. In these cases abroad, they will be named and there will be warrants for them to appear at court. And Ashish, last question, you know, you personally, you've had an interesting journey to this place, worked in some conservative circles in Britain, worked for Tony Blair when he was Mideast envoy.

Can you describe a little bit your journey, how you got to the place where you said, you know what, I can't allow these folks a moment of sleep and I'm going to do everything I can to bring an end to the UK involvement in this as quickly as possible? Yeah, honestly, just knowing, being taught what horrors like this are. I think we do a disservice to our education system by not teaching things like, we want to talk about the Holocaust? Yeah, we teach it properly in the UK. And we're taught that this should never happen. We're taught that we shouldn't indiscriminately watch the massacre of children, babies, grandparents. And, you know, I am also the descendant of someone who had to go through that in Kenya with

the British and having my own family talk about that stuff. Having seen apartheid firsthand when you work in the Middle East Envoy's office is really hard to see. And, you know, and the reason I left that job was what seeing apartheid firsthand, I think people have said much better things than I'm ever going to say about what they've seen when they went there. But it's unseeable after that. And then watching this indiscriminate killing and watching that this could be our future also. I think this is the part that, that I think people who are not engaged need to understand. If we tolerate this, our children are next.

The way they are policing and brutalizing Palestinians, the way they are massacring Palestinians. I've only learned from Iraq, you know, myself and everybody else, that everything we've done abroad comes back home. You know, there were a time when no one believed drones would be over the skies of NYC monitoring us and then SWAT teams would raid your home. But we did that in 2003, 4, 5. Now we do it in Brooklyn. You know, there are things that we're doing in Israel that if we tolerate, they will happen to our own people. And we must. And the only thing standing between us and that is Palestinians right now.

And we must do everything we can to stop these mass atrocities. This isn't just about me coming to this. There are millions of people across the world who've come to this and seen something that they don't want to live with, something that they understand could happen to them. Well, Ashish, well said,

and thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, well, that'll do it for today. That's right. Are you here tomorrow? Is that right? I was just going to say I will be here with Crystal tomorrow,

and we will be back here with more CounterPoints next Wednesday. There you go. All right. See you guys then. Thank you. 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 You're 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 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 voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.