Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/28/24: Biden Spox Storms Out After Dementia Question, Trump War On RFK, RNC Demands Stop The Steal Oath, Rogan Says Israel Genocide, Pro-IVF Dem Flips Trump District, NYT Debunks Own Oct 7 Report, Biden Admin Smears UN Expert As Antisemite

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Krystal and Emily discuss Biden's spox storming off after a dementia question, Trump declares war on RFK, RNC demands stop the steal oath, pro-IVF Dem flips Alabama Trump district, NYT debunks their own Oct 7 reporting, Joe Rogan says Israel doing genocide in Gaza, Biden admin smears UN expert as antisemite, construction workers abandoned during Baltimore bridge collapse.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning. Welcome to Breaking Points. I'm Sagar and Jetty. Just kidding. I don't know how many times I can use that joke, Crystal. I think it lands every time. It's almost like a ritual, part of the morning routine when you're here. Nice to see you, by the way, Emily. Great to have you, as always. Girl show. Always fun. And we have a big show, actually. Yeah, there's a lot to get into this morning. So apparently Obama is back. He's going to try to rescue Biden. He's all in, giving advice, etc. We'll break that down. Also, Kareem Shampir having an inexplicable meltdown on a radio program that we will share with you as well. The RNC has an interesting new hiring process and litmus test that you definitely want to know about that. We had a big abortion oral arguments at Supreme Court this week. This is with regards to that abortion pill and whether it could be potentially banned nationwide.

Seems like a lot of the justices were very skeptical of the arguments that were being made. So we'll break that down for you. We also had related to that a special election for a House district in Alabama. I know you're on the edge of your seats to find out the results. But it was noteworthy because Alabama, of course, was where that court ruling on IVF came down. And the Democrat ran really explicitly on that IVF ruling. And she cleaned up. The margin is actually really shocking. So that's why it's worth paying attention to. Also have some major media fails with regard to Israel coverage that we want to bring you in both The Atlantic and The New York Times. We have Joe Rogan coming out and saying Israel is committing a genocide and what he even described as a mini Holocaust. Speaking of genocide, I'm taking a look at a UN report

arguing that there are reasonable grounds to believe Israel is in fact committing a genocide. Of course, the author of that report was immediately smeared by State Department spokesperson Matt Miller as being, you guessed it, anti-Semitic. And we have Max Alvarez, who is both a Baltimore City resident and also a fantastic reporter, taking a look at the very latest we know with regard to that horrible bridge collapse in that city. Very eager to hear Max's thoughts. Let's start with this outrageous Kareem Jean-Pierre meltdown in North Carolina. Now, North Carolina is where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were visiting on Tuesday, hence why Kareem Jean-Pierre. Oh, I didn't realize that, actually. She was on WBT, local radio, AM radio in North Carolina.

And this is per the Daily Beast. They describe it like this. They say, in the audio, Jean-Pierre called out WBT Charlotte news director Mark Garrison for quote, incredibly offensive and quote, insulting question about President Joe Biden's health during the phone interview earlier in the day. I would add to that, she also was offended that he asked about people's grocery bills. And minutes later ended the chat by cordially thanking the interviewer for his time and hanging up. The White House contended in a statement to the Daily Beast that Jean-Pierre had offered the interviewer seven minutes of her time sandwiched between other interviews and that the station was well aware of the time constraints. There's a lot to say about this.

Let's roll the tape first, though. When I told a number of people that I was talking to you today, it was interesting, though. They all said, would you please just ask her, does the president have dementia? So before I move on from that, does he? Mark, I can't even believe you're asking me this question. That is an incredibly offensive question to ask. But you know people ask it. Wait, oh, let me, no, no, no, no, no. Mark, you're taking us down this rabbit hole. Let me be very clear about this. For the past several years, the president's physician has laid out very in a comprehensive way the president's health. This is a president, if you watch him every day, if you really pay attention to his record and what he has done, you will see exactly how

focused he's been on the American people, how historic his actions have been. And so I'm not even going to truly, truly really take the premise of your question. I think it is incredibly insulting. And so we can move on to the next question. So the next question was, in fact, about grocery prices. And these are basically, Crystal, I'm curious for your take on this, the two issues that normie voters actually really are focused on with Joe Biden specifically is, are you okay? And why can't I pay for my groceries in the same way that I used to just a few years ago? If they are incapable of having good answers to those questions, and by the way,

there are good answers to those questions from a political perspective, from the perspective of strategy, maybe not so much the first one, but you can at least, you know, go full Paul Krugman talking about grocery prices and consumer goods. Yeah, absolutely. They have plenty of data they can point to. Is it, you know, totally representative of how the American people are feeling or doing? No, but there are things they can point to. It's not that hard. And the Daily Beast character, she cordially hung up the phone. Cordially? Okay. After seven minutes. It's almost like they took the White House's line that she only had seven

minutes. She was generous with her time. Yeah. I mean, it's just, she very huffily, after she gets asked the grocery question, just like, you know, it's like, I got to go hangs up the phone. Yeah. And if you do have look, I know she's a busy lady. I'm sure she did have other things scheduled, whatever. There's a an actually cordial way to handle that of like, hey, can we do like one more question? I'm really sorry. I'm just, you know, super slammed. And there's the not cordial way of just literally hanging up the phone. We're done.

Listen, if you don't want to get asked tough questions, don't take this job. 100%. Your whole job is to take these questions. You're the press secretary. It's crazy. And, you know, the dementia thing, like, this is not out of line. People have a right to ask that question. Because we have seen, this man had to give an entire press conference to assure voters that

he was like mentally there. And then he went ahead and confused the president of Egypt with the president of Mexico in the very press conference, in the very like, I'm not senile, I promise press conference. Poll from February, 86% of Americans think the president Joe Biden is too old to serve another term. So you can't get all snippy and offended when a radio host asks you a question that is clearly on the mind of some 86 percent of Americans, at least. But, you know, this is kind of a it's a typical, I would say, Democratic strategy. But I think strategy in general with politicians, rather than actually trying to deal with this, which how do you deal with the age question in particular? They're, you know, all you can say is like the nonsense. She said, oh, just watch him, which that's the problem. We have been watching him. That's why we have the concerns. Okay.

But that's really kind of all you can do with it. And he's not getting younger. So there's no real effective way to parry that. Whereas with the economic stuff, you know, there's at least like I was saying, there's at least something there you can work with. Consumer sentiment is up. I do think that is part of why you're seeing a little bit of Biden positive movement in terms of the polls. But, you know, to just get snippy and hang up the phone is like, why did you do this interview in the first place then? Yeah, exactly. And she should be perfectly capable of handling these interviews. Great questions, I thought. Like, this is not getting down in conspiracy theory rabbit holes. He did a great job. He just asked two clear, fair questions. Now, this is also on

the heels of the New York Times reporting that former President Obama is getting increasingly involved in the 2024 election. We can put this tear sheet up on the screen. The headline from the New York Times is Obama fearing Biden lost to Trump is on the phone to strategize. They write, as the election approaches, President Biden is making regular calls to former President Obama to catch up on the race or talk about family. But Mr. Obama is making calls of his own to Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, and to top aides at the Biden campaign to strategize and relay advice. This level of engagement illustrates Mr. Obama's support for Mr. Biden, but also what one

of his senior aides characterized as Mr. Obama's grave concern that Biden could lose to former President Donald J. Trump. So we've seen other people start really sounding the alarms, saying this is not, you cannot, for example, with Karine Jean-Pierre, you cannot just expect to be morally indignant at questions about Joe Biden's age and people's concerns about the economy and expect that Trump will be so crazy you will just cruise to reelection. That is not going to be a winning strategy. You have to have something better than saying, look at Joe Biden, because to your point, Crystal, it's kind of the problem. They've had that interesting relationship, Obama and Biden, for a long time. And obviously,

this was even in the special counsel, her transcript. Biden conceded that Obama didn't want him to run back in 2016. But now Obama's saying, got to get in there, Joe, because this one is going to be pretty close. By the way, I think Obama's political instincts in 2016 were dead wrong. I mean, obviously, it didn't work out with Hillary Clinton. I think Joe Biden, you know, he was much more at the top of his game in 2016. I think he was probably a more talented political figure. And I think Joe Biden is right to feel like he had a shot. I mean, if he could beat Trump in 2020 as a diminished Joe Biden, I think he had a decent shot at beating Trump in 2016 as well and was better positioned than Hillary Clinton to do so. One can never know. But I do think that Barack Obama's political

instincts in that regard were dead wrong. And with Obama, in terms of his political instincts, they've really never served anyone except himself. He was very good at getting himself elected and getting himself reelected. But also during his time over the course of that eight years, the Democratic Party was really decimated, especially in rural areas. There was just 1 you know, a thousand state house seats that were lost. It was at a critical time because it was 2010. And that's when redistricting happened. The number of governor's mansions that were lost, you know, ultimately they lose the House and they lose the Senate and then they lose the presidency to Donald Trump. So while he is himself personally an extraordinarily talented political figure, there's no indication that there's really an

ability to transfer that over to anyone else. Now, that being said, Obama, even though he kind of stays out of the political limelight, he seeks other sorts of limelights, but stays out of the political limelight, he obviously has been incredibly influential in crafting the trajectory of the Democratic Party in his post-presidency. And basically, you know, his goal, his interests in terms of securing his legacy have always been to make sure that no one does anything like bigger and better than he does. So that's why he was on the warpath against Bernie Sanders, because how does Obamacare look in retrospect if you end up with Medicare for all? Well, that kind of really diminishes him and his legacy, ultimately. So he famously was very involved in DNC and putting Tom Perez in charge. He was very involved then in helping Joe Biden secure the nomination in 2020, even though all the indications were that, once again, he was very reluctant about thinking that Joe Biden was the guy he waited.

He, you know, flirted with Pete and Beto and a whole cast of other Democratic contenders before it was clear, like, OK, if you actually want to be Bernie, you got to line up behind Joe Biden right now. And he made the calls and got everybody to drop out and fall in line behind Joe Biden. And so he really does to a large extent, which I think probably grates on him, owe his election and, you know, his success in winning the nomination to Barack Obama. As you referenced, they've always had what you described as an interesting relationship. A beautiful, beautiful relationship. It's a complex relationship because Obama is this, you know, Ivy League intellectual. He's got all those sorts of types around him. That's the ecosystem that he's comfortable in. Joe Biden, Anna Scranton, you know, with this like—

No, he's an intellect. Working class affect. A towering intellect. I'm not saying he's a stupid man, but he's, you know, they're sort of like oil and water when it comes to their style of politics. Biden is all about the personal and that way it's kind of more like Trump. You know, it's very hands on. He wants to be in there working this person and that person. And at this point, you know, the politics have really moved past that era and is sort of like, you know, very outdated, that mode of doing politics.

And he and Obama just, you know, they kind of clash in terms of their political style, though Obama people kind of look down their nose at him. Reportedly, from other reports, Joe Biden still is like talks about Obama all the time, like, oh, I bet Obama wishes he could have done that. So I think a big motivation in his presidency is just to like prove the Obama people wrong. So anyway, that's, you know, when you talk about their interesting relationship, that's some of the backstory there. And that's why part of why it's noteworthy that, you know, Obama's jumping into the fray here wholeheartedly to try to rescue Joe, because clearly he feels that this campaign is not exactly off to a stunningly successful start.

You know, there were people in 2015 and 2016 that said, you know, Brexit really had a chance. And there were people who didn't. And Obama was very much among the people who didn't. And then that pretended what happened in 2016 with Donald Trump. And yeah, I agree. I think that's a really good point. And now, actually, here's an interesting glimpse also at maybe how Democrats are trying to have good political instincts. We can put this next tear sheet up on the screen from Axios that writes, for the first time in more than two months, President Biden on Tuesday, he was in North Carolina again, publicly uttered a word that he and other Democrats have largely abandoned, quote, Bidenomics. It was the first time that he did that since January 25th. Shout out to Axios

for tracking the times that Biden uses the phrase Bidenomics, because if you look at that chart, it's extremely detailed. They also, I mean, it started, yeah, 29 times in July, 21, then 15, 13, 14. They have these very detailed counts. But it's also gone to congressional Democrats. They have a chart in the same article where they show congressional Democrats mentioning Bidenomics way less in the fall and now basically not using that phrase at all. Meanwhile, Republicans have mentioning Bidenomics way less in the fall and now basically not using that phrase at all. Meanwhile, Republicans have used Bidenomics, quote, nearly 500 times this month in their public statements. So there you see, and this is interesting, it goes back to the Karine Jean-Pierre interview, right, that she could have had some type

of answer to what was going on with the grocery bills and that just basic question that is on a lot of people's minds, even though Democrats don't want to admit that some people still aren't super happy with the economy. And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the rate of inflation can decrease. It doesn't mean that prices are any lower than they were when people remember. And so they just, it's like they're flailing to come up with a good answer to this question. Yeah. Chris, it actually shouldn't be that hard just from like a political perspective. Democrats famously horrific at branding and messaging. Just terrible. Build back that, come on. The inflation reduction act, like they're so bad at this. Apparently Biden was

kind of reluctant about the Bidenomics label to start with. I don't know. His political team seemed like they were into it and he was like a little bit reluctant with it to begin with. And his instinct in this case was much better than the team's because you don't want to own with your name branded on it every aspect of this economy right now. You really don't. And so I think, you know, when they saw the way that Republicans found this branding very useful and seized on it and they sort of realize, oh, people are not feeling great about this economy. In fact, the economy is not great and they still have a lot of really legitimate problems with it. And there's also like I could explain to you what Bidenomics is. You know, I'm sure that their team could explain to you what Bidenomics is. I'm sure that their team could explain to you what Bidenomics is.

But it's not like there's a super clear, this is the Biden way of approaching the economy that most normies would be able to explain to you. So it was a fail on every level. It does sort of remind me of the Obamacare, Affordable Care Act versus Obamacare debates back in the day, Republicans wanted to brand it as Obamacare because they wanted him to own anything that people were dissatisfied with, with the law. And they also wanted to put, you know, he was very unpopular at the time, so they wanted to brand it in that way also to undercut the program itself. And, you know, at the time that was, listen, you guys know my thoughts on health care. Like it was better than the previous iteration, but obviously still has a whole lot of problems.

So at the time that branding was really bad for them. Now it's not as bad as things have worn on and et cetera. So maybe 10 years from now, people would be able to speak to a Bidenomics that they understand and that they could relate to. But right now in the hearing now, obviously this has this particular branding exercise has not worked out well for them. And they've taken more to wanting to blame Trump for any dissatisfaction that people have with the economy, which is a polar opposite approach of branding the economy like Bidenomics and trying to own all of it. Instead, they're actually now trying to more like shift blame like, oh, well, if you're not happy, it's because of the last guy and we're trying to clean up his mess. Unless you're mailing people checks in an emergency or at any time like Donald Trump

did, you're not going to want to put your name on the state of the economy because there are always a big chunk of people who are like, this is the nature of the American economy. There's always going to be a big chunk of people that are deeply dissatisfied with the economy. Yeah. Especially after a pandemic and then recession and all of the various economic fallout from that. It's just an incredibly stupid move to want to put your name on that. Again, unless you are literally mailing checks and signing them Joe Biden. Yeah.

It just makes no sense from a political perspective. I mean, I said a minute ago I could describe to you what Bidenomics is. I mean, if you actually look at the record of this administration, because I'm not 100% sure what they mean by Bidenomics, to be totally honest with you, like how they would describe the policy. The actual policy record is allowing all of the pandemic era social safety net pieces to expire, allowing the child tax credit to expire. So basically- Screwing up student loan forgiveness. Yeah. So basically like undercutting the social safety net. That's been one part of Bidenomics. And you've got the infrastructure. You've got some real sort of like-

You've got antitrust. You've got the NLRB, which is much more muscular than it's ever been. Those are the pieces that I would put on the positive side of the ledger. So those are like the actual realities of Bidenomics. But I don't know that that's how they would, they would probably not emphasize that stripping of the social safety net piece. Probably not. In particular. They just like to talk about cracking down on corporate greed, which I mean, from an antitrust perspective, sure, but they never talk about their anti-trust policies, funny enough. 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.

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So this is where things are going to get really interesting because we talked about, Ryan and I talked about the RFK Jr. vice presidential announcement on yesterday's show. And as much as I know it's fun for people online to dunk on RFK Jr., there's going to be, there's potential for this to really affect the Trump and Biden campaigns. There's no question about it. So if we put A4 up on the screen, what we will see is just Joe Biden and Donald Trump head to head. So to Crystal's point she mentioned earlier, Biden has seen, this is Quinnipiac, Biden has seen some better polling recently. So he's at 48 here and Trump, he's at 45%. So that may or may not be within the margin of error. It's pretty close. And the RCP average has Donald Trump up 1.4. So Trump's at 46.7 and Biden's at 45.3 in the RCP average. But that said, it's actually been tightening for, if you look at it,

about the past month. So it's a close race. And then it gets a whole lot closer because increasingly the Biden-Trump binary is not what is going to be on the ballot. It's not realistic from an electoral college perspective at this point either. So we have more polling that we can put up the next element when you add third party candidates. And that's an additional 7% support if you're looking at this on your screen, for Jill Stein and Cornel West, so not just RFK Jr. But if you put all of them together, he's around 13% in that Quinnipiac University poll, you are around 20% of support for third party candidates.

People have looked at the support for both of the major party nominees and said the polling is on track when you add the third party candidates in the race. For them to be at Clinton-esque eras when Ross Perot was a bit of a spoiler in 1992, that's obviously hotly debated still to this day. But the point remains that he took a share of the vote away from both candidates. And that meant Bill Clinton, I think he was at 42, 43%. He won the presidency somewhere in there. It's not like the big mandate when you have somebody like Barack Obama winning in 2008. You're realistically looking at a candidate that's going to win with

perhaps low 40s or even high 30s percent of the vote and could be, you know, these candidates in a state like Pennsylvania. Ryan and I talked about this yesterday, too, Crystal. Jill Stein only basically needed to be on the ballot in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016 to make Hillary Clinton blame Russia for losing because Jill Stein actually did take a decent chunk away from Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin electorally. Well, that also is hotly contested because if you ask a lot of Jill Stein voters, they're like, I was not going to vote if it wasn't for Jill Stein. Exactly. I think that's true. And obviously, I mean, obviously when you lose and you blame some other entity,

it's almost always cope. So we'll put all that aside. But by the way, I looked it up. You were very close. Bill Clinton, 43% overall. George H.W. Bush, 37.4%. And Ross Perot, 18.9%. So we are right in that ballpark of those potential results. Jill Stein, when you look at these three candidates, is the one who actually has the clearest path to being on the ballots in the most states. Right. And, you know, there is a chance she'll take a few percentage points from Joe Biden. She's certainly not taking any from Donald Trump or very minimal. Cornell West, I think,

has probably the most challenging path to getting ballot access in potentially any states. I don't know. RFK Jr., you know, he also has a challenging path, but he has much more money behind him. He's got apparently a real organization trying to get on the ballot in a number of key swing states that they have targeted. He's in Nevada. Yeah. Well, maybe he did obtain the requisite number of signatures. But my understanding is that, you know, they may they this is not really his fault. They make these procedures as onerous as they possibly can to to try to keep third party candidates off the ballot. Apparently, when he filed his signatures in Nevada, you had to have a vice presidential

pick. He didn't quite have a vice presidential pick yet. So now it's in doubt whether he'll actually get on the ballot in Nevada. I don't know what the latest is with that, but it is a good illustration of some of the obstacles that he faces, even with a well-funded campaign and now a vice presidential pick who can further fund the campaign, as you and Ryan were, I think, aptly discussing. Which to me, I know people are a little confused in some ways by his vice presidential pick, but if your number one challenge is ballot access, it's not the craziest thing in the world to bring in a billionaire who can front you 100 million bucks and help you get on the ballot. If that's like goal number one and you got your eyes on the prize, then maybe that's not such a crazy, such a crazy choice to make. You guys should have

picked billionaires to host counterpoints. We could be doing this from like the top of the Empire State Building. I'm happy with our choices personally.. No regrets. No ragrets. That's from one of my favorite movies, We're the Millers. Oh, really? I've never seen that. Gosh, Crystal. Okay. You know.

It's a pretty, let's say, basic movie. Now, Donald Trump is pivoting to RFK Jr. Let's put this next image up on the screen. This is a truth social post for Donald Trump who says, RFK Jr. is the most radical left candidate in the race by far. He's a big fan of the green new scam and other economy-killing disasters. So if you're watching this, you see Trump posted a pretty hefty paragraph on Truth Social at 1.52 a.m. on March 26th. Always a sign of a coolly reasoned and rational social media posting when it drops at 1.52 a.m. Oh, man. Well, Sager was already doing his morning

workout. His cold plunge. That was for Sager. But this is actually, again, this is interesting, really interesting from my perspective, because I think we are going to see more of this from Donald Trump. I think he's actually really rankled that any group of sort of anti-establishment Republican voters that he has owned, he has created to some extent this movement that is now sort of looking at RFK Jr. Now, I don't think that they're going to shift from in huge numbers from RFK Jr. to from Donald Trump to RFK Jr. Now, I don't think that they're going to shift from in huge numbers from RFK Jr. to from Donald Trump to RFK Jr. I do, though, think that Trump is really bothered by it. He knows that those margins could be thin in a place like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. And as Trump pivots to RFK Jr. and says, for example, he's a fan of the Green News scam. My theory is that actually makes more Biden leaners become interested in RFK Jr. People who have only heard of him as a crazy anti-vaxxer

from the media turn and realize this guy cleaned up the Hudson River. This guy has some real progressive bona fides going back decades. So I think that's one of the interesting things potentially about Dem voters, Biden and RFK. I wish he was actually in favor of the quote unquote green new scam. But I mean, I've interviewed him a couple of times and asked him specifically about his environmental policy. And he was very explicit that he believes in the free market's ability to clean up the environment. He doesn't want to really talk about climate change because he thinks that it's like off-putting to, you know, some of the independents or Republicans potentially that he wants to win over.

So he does not, in fact, support the quote unquote green new scam as much as I actually wish that he would. And that's why Trump is threatened by him because he's not talking about it. Well, and let's put the next up on the screen. This is the other reason why, even though I know recently polls have shown that more Biden voters defect to RFK Jr. than Trump, although it continues to be pretty close. You still have these favorable ratings that are much higher for RFK among Republicans than they are among Democrats. So keep this up on the screen so I can explain this. This is from a new Economist YouGov poll that I found, and they ask RFK's favorability by voter intent. So if you say Biden and Trump are the only choices

and you say you're going to vote for Biden, out of that group, only 19% have a favorable view of RFK. If your intention is to vote for Trump, 58%, so much higher number, you know, large majority, have a favorable view of RFK. And of course, the unfavorability is the polar opposite. 65% of voters who are Biden-intending voters have an unfavorable view of RFK. And for the Trump number, it's only 27% who have a negative view of RFK Jr. I mean, he really is kind of a prism, like depends on what issue, depends on what era. Even his anti-vax stuff, right? Just 10 years ago, that would have read as like kooky, left, liberal Hollywood viewpoint. Right.

Right? Now it reads codes. Jennifer Carsey, yeah. Exactly. Now it codes very heavy right wing, right? You know, the way he talks about censorship. Like he really leaned into Ukraine, which, you know, his view of ending that war and stopping the weapons ship, things I support, by the way. But that codes at this point right wing, which is kind of ridiculous. But

anyway, that's how it often codes. And then, like I said, the fact that he's so prominent in the anti-vax movement, I mean, one of really the leaders there that obviously codes right wing. And you had at the beginning of his campaign when he was running in the Democratic primary, all of these Republicans who found it very convenient, including the Fox News types, to boost him and thought that it was really useful as a weapon against Joe Biden. And then when he switched to running as an independent, they couldn't just turn that off and be like, just kidding. Actually, we hate this guy and he's a liberal and he loves the green news. He's a globalist who is on Epstein's jet. Like that's the stuff that bubbles up on this right in these corners of social media. But truly, like it's when you look at, for example, how he's courted the Libertarian Party's

vote and whether he would run on the Libertarian Party ticket, which had the infrastructure to get on the ballot in some of those states in a way that, you know, the knowledgeable people that were doing this and had like Jill Stein, she knows how to do it. If you look back at how he tried to court libertarian voters, a lot of them had a problem with that sort of regulatory question. But he's running to address that because he seems to think that's his best path to getting significant numbers in some of those states. And how that evolves, if the Republican Party starts really amplifying Trump's message, they have done it a little bit before this True Social post. It's not the first time they've weighed in.

They put out statements and stuff. Well, they also, I mean, Sean Hannity had been like his best buddy while he was running in the Democratic primary. And then he comes back on and Hannity drops like, clearly a whole oppo file that he had gotten from Trump of, like, here's all the ways you're a liberal globalist, terrible, whatever. So, I mean, they did try to turn on a dime with regard to their attitude towards him. There were even some conservatives, like, on Twitter who literally were like,

now I'm going to attack him because now he's no longer useful to me. All of this is a long way for, in terms of, you know, my perspective of saying, it's very unclear to me who ultimately he's going to, quote unquote, take more from. I think, you know, with Jill Biden, Jill Stein and Cornel West, much more clear, like, they're lefties, you know, they're going to pull from that side of the spectrum. That's very clear. RFK Jr., I still think it's a giant question mark.

The Kennedy name, obviously very Democratic coded, some of the more recent views, and the ecosystems he was inhabiting, much more Republican coded. Now he's got this new vice presidential pick, who does seem to be like a lib, you know, in the causes she's funded, etc. And then there's always the question of what ballots will he even be on, which is where the Libertarian Party nomination potential really comes into play. Yeah, absolutely. 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.

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Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The RNC, speaking of the 2024 election, the RNC is gearing up to actually address concerns about the election itself, which are rampant in conservative circles, in conservative movement circles, in conservative supporter circles, conservative donor circles. So you can understand why the RNC is then going to try to make this a focus of its sort of campaign on the ground in the next several months. But, Crystal, oh my goodness, a lot of people know probably that Trump's daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, is now a co-chair of the RNC after the sort of soft coup that ousted Ronna McDaniel,

who then faced another soft coup at NBC News. This woman just can't get away from the revolutionaries in the Republican Party. But Laura Trump is now co-chair of the RNC, which is obviously the Republican Party's official apparatus here in Washington, D.C. She sat down for an interview with Garrett Haik of NBC News, and they had a conversation about basically the way they're going to handle the question of the 2020 election, which is huge because it affects the way they're going to handle the 2024 election. It affects the way voters decide whether or not to even go to the polls, whether or not to how to think about election results. So let's

first start by just rolling the clip and we'll dive into it after that. Is it going to be the position of the RNC in 2024 that the 2020 election was not fairly decided or that it was stolen somehow? Well, I think we're past that. I think that's in the past. We learned a lot. Certainly, we took a lot of notes. Right now, we have 23 states that have 78 lawsuits in these states to ensure that it is harder to cheat and easier to vote. We want fairness and transparency in our elections. Does that support for him financially include paying his legal bills directly? Not from the RNC. It does not support paying his legal bills. How do you tell people who are sending money to the RNC,

people who may have never hired a lawyer for themselves before in their life, that it's more important to put their money towards paying the legal bills of a billionaire than helping elect Republicans in Pennsylvania or in Michigan? Well, if you've never had to hire a lawyer, you're doing great stuff. You're in great shape. I'm very happy for you. Look, that is the waterfall of the joint fundraising committee you're referencing. And anyone who does not want to contribute to that very small amount of money is able to opt out of that. So I think he expected her to give a different answer to the question

about whether the RNC is going to pay Donald Trump's legal bills, because then he tried to say, well, what do you say to RNC donors who are giving money to pay Trump's legal bills when she had just said that's through the joint fundraising committee. Now, obviously, money is fungible and people are telling donors where to put their money to do X, Y, and Z. So that's still obviously part of the conversation. But Crystal, I was prepared based on the media coverage of that interview. She stumbles especially a little bit in the beginning where she's like, that's in the past, it's in the past, and kind of didn't know where to go from there. But it's a really, really hard question.

I mean, I thought if you were just watching that and not looking at a transcript, she came out fine. But that question, Republicans still don't have a really, really good answer for it, which brings us to this tear sheet we can put up. This is B2 from the Washington Post. Those seeking employment at the RNC after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test

of sorts for hiring. In recent days, Trump advisors have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states and who are reapplying for jobs about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. So that's from the Washington Post. That is why the RNC is in an incredible pickle. So a lot of people lost their jobs but were invited to reapply for them, as the story shows. And what they're trying to do, what the Trump people are trying to do, is filter out anyone who, kind of like Ronna McDaniel in her first interview with NBC News when being pushed about the 2020 election claims by Kristen Welker, said, you know, when you work at the RNC, you just got to take one for the team.

And I can be more myself now, which is such a swampy thing to say. They're now trying to filter out the operators for the true believers. Like they want people who are genuinely committed. And what they might end up getting are people who are genuinely committed to acting like they're genuinely committed, which is a real skill in Washington. Well, in the end, what's the difference? That's a good point. Truly, you know, if you're, and to me, that's more what it is. I think there were people who did that in 2016, and they learned that those people, when the going gets tough, like in Alyssa Farah.

Yeah, so are you willing in your job interview to basically, like, accept these preposterous things and state it publicly? Like, are you willing to kind of like debase yourself to jump through that hoop? That's the requirement for being hired back to the RNC. They don't want Mike Pence's like people who January 6th comes and they are not listening to what Donald Trump and John Eastman are saying should be done with the electors. Like that's what they're trying to screen out. Yeah.

And it's very, I mean, it's obviously very dissonant with what Laura Trump was trying to say in that NBC interview. Like, oh, that's in the past. Oh, really? Then why is it a central part of your hiring process? Because Trump has made this a central litmus test for the Republican Party. And the Republican base, I think, sees it as a central litmus test. That's why you got the slate of candidates you did in the midterm elections, which was really, you know, unfortunate for Republicans who were hoping for better results there. And obviously, it's not in the past for Donald Trump, who continues to talk about it all the time. I can put this up on the screen from Truth Social just recently saying, how many times is Fox News going to put on rhino Bush apologist, Mark Thiessen. He was wrong about me in 2016. In 2020,

I got more votes than any sitting president in history, but the election was rigged, et cetera, et cetera. This is still very standard at his rallies, in his speeches. This is not the past for him, and he's not going to let it go. He's not going to move forward. And it has implications not only in terms of this, like, RNC takeover and making sure that they're, you know, totally aligned with him in every single way, which, let's be honest, the party committees, like, you know, under Obama are now under Biden, like, obviously the DNC is fully aligned behind Joe Biden, rigged that primary for him effectively. So it's not like it's unusual to have the party apparatus totally in lockstep with whoever the current president or the current nominee is. But it also matters a lot when it comes to this question of early voting.

Yes, hugely important. And that's part of what Laura Trump was kind of like gesturing towards in that interview. You know, if Trump had just leaned into getting people to vote early and by mail, it's very possible he's president right now. But instead of casting doubt on that process, everybody had to show up on Election Day. And you guys know how life is, right? You may have every intention of voting and then you forget. Or your kid gets sick. Or you got to stay late at the job.

Or you're just really tired. Or it's raining out and you don't feel it. Like, there's a million reasons. It's snowing in Nevada. Yeah, there's a million reasons that can come up on election day where you're like, eh, this isn't going to happen for me today. This just isn't in the cards. So if you are banking on trying to get your supporters there on that day, you are putting yourself at a profound disadvantage. Trump has clearly been told by his political advisors that this was a problem for him. At times, he has signaled like, okay, now we got to do the mail-in balloting thing,

but he also is very reluctant. And the views of this among the Republican base are also pretty baked in now, where they feel that this is susceptible to rigging. They feel like they need to wait and show up on election day. And so in every election we've had since then, the early vote comes in more heavily Democratic. The day of vote comes in more heavily Republican. That is a reversal, by the way, of previous trends prior to COVID. So they're trying to reverse that. But the fact that this election denialism and stop the steal stuff is still so central to the Republican Party and so central and important to Trump himself makes it very difficult to move beyond that orientation towards early voting. Yeah, it's just like an incredible catch

22. If you talk about this and you tackle the issue head on, which is exactly what your voters want you to do, then you also sow distrust in the electoral process, which can hurt turnout. Yeah. So it's a really hard problem. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, Democrats made Katie Porter apologize for saying that she felt her primary was rigged. Which it's like, clearly, money does rig elections. And as much as I hate, detest the quote, stolen talk, and that's one of the interesting things about Trump's true social posts is that he said rigged. And he kind of started off saying stolen, and has now moved to using that rigged parlance more.

That takes a lot of money to push back on. You know, Molly Ball had a long report in Time magazine about all of the money that Mark Zuckerberg poured into early voting efforts, ballot curation, all of these things that party apparatuses. Democrats just realized during COVID that they can use all of these mechanisms, put a lot of money behind it in Democratic districts, and that's politics. So as much as I have an ideological disagreement with huge early voting periods, which is a totally fair debate, I think it's an interesting conversation. As much as I might not like that, it is the reality. And so that's why they want to have loyalists stacking the RNC, because they know they need to get on one page about this question. Because it actually, when you have such a close match that could be within

one point between Trump and Biden, and you have all these third party candidates we already talked about, you need to be confident that you did absolutely everything you could in those respects and that your voters wanted to vote because they felt like their votes were going to be counted in a place like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, whatever. So it's a hugely difficult issue for Republicans. They're in a pickle, catch 22, whatever you want to call it. And it's not, there's really no easy answer, but I guess they've realized from a political perspective, it's better that they're on the same page. Yeah. The proof that this is a real problem for them comes from those Georgia elections that happened right after the runoff elections for those two Senate seats. And typically, you know,

Sagar and I, when we were looking at the election day results and we're like, oh, it's going to run off. These are probably both going to be Republican seats because that usually historically was the way the trend went, that Republicans would turn out Democrats in the runoff period. And I think two things ended up being really critical. Number one, Democrats for once in their lives actually had a really good message that was very clear, which was vote for us and you will get checks. That worked very effectively. But the other thing was you had all this stop the steal stuff and you had people literally going down to Georgia, ostensibly to campaign for these candidates who were calling into question whether your vote is even going to be counted. So yeah, if you're a voter and you're like, why am I going to take time out of my life to go and vote when these people are telling me

it's rigged and it's not even going to be counted? So my life to go and vote when these people are telling me it's rigged and it's not even going to be counted? So I do think that that played into as well, the fact that they lost both of those seats and therefore control of the Senate. So let's pivot over to Alabama, where a fascinating special election for a state house seat was just held. There are results. Crystal, the media has talked a bit about it, but I don't think they've talked about exactly how impressive this margin of victory is for Democrats based on what happened just in the 2022 election in this district. So we can go ahead and put the first graphic up on the screen. This is Alabama State House District 10, where Marilyn Lanz ran against Teddy Powell. She ran against a different

candidate, David Cole, back in 2022. You can see the margin there. It was 52 to 45 Republican. Marilyn Lanz just won this district 62 to 37, 38 Democrat, a huge flip. And she, even as conservative media in Alabama has pointed out, she ran explicitly against the IVF decision in the Alabama Supreme Court that got headlines for literally weeks because it was so huge. She made that a centerpiece of her campaign to the point where actually, Crystal, I took a look at conservative media in Alabama's coverage leading up to the vote on Tuesday. And a lot of people seem to think that she was running this national media campaign that wouldn't necessarily resonate in a hyper-local state house race. Oh, interesting. That the other candidate, the Republican candidate, had localized it. Yellowhammer News had an article.

I read them for like the conservative take on Alabama politics. They have some good stuff. They wrote basically that he was focused on these hyperlocal issues and that she had made the abortion conversation a centerpiece of her campaign. And look at the margins. Wow. It wasn't what you know, what some people might have expected, which is if she nationalized a really local race and talked

about these heavy divisive issues, she would turn off voters. And it wasn't, you know, resonant with people in, this is like a district around Huntsville. It wasn't resonant. That's actually turned out to be very resonant. Yeah. Well, this is a district, I know everybody, you think Alabama, you think super red. This is a swing district. Well, this is a district, I know everybody, you think Alabama, you think super red. This is a swing district. Trump won it by a single point, but she won it by a whole lot more than a single point. I mean, I was kind of shocked when we put this graphic up. I actually didn't realize that it was that large of a margin. It's quite astonishing. And I think there's a couple things going on here in these special election results, which this is not a one-off.

We've consistently seen a trend of Democrats really outperforming in these special election, you know, off-year elections that we've seen this year and before. I think there's two things. I think one, Roe, is absolutely huge. The fact that she tied this right into that IVF decision and just went after it really hard and you have this kind of result. I mean, it's pretty undeniable, right? But the other issue you have for Republicans is now that you've had more of this realignment of college-educated voters, like white-collar voters, into the Democratic coalition, Republicans used to always have this advantage in midterms, off-year elections, special elections, etc., which is that their coalition was more likely,

they were the more reliable voters. And that's not the case anymore. You partly have the issue we were talking about before about how there's a deep skepticism of things like early voting or early in-person or mail-in balloting or whatever. So you're limiting yourself in terms of the options you have getting to the polls anyway, making it more onerous on you anyway. And then you have these shifts in the coalition that lead to Democrats actually having more of the like sort of I come out every single election, no matter what voters. And you end up with these, you know, consistent outperformances in the special elections. It does make me question, too, you know, the polling we've been looking at.

It hasn't been reflective in terms of I don't know that there was even any public polling done in this race. But we've seen in other instances, we've seen Trump underperforming in his primaries. We've seen Democratic outperformances consistently again outside of the polls in these special elections. So it also does make me question, are the polls missing some dynamic that's going on here that may have an impact on the presidential race? Now, on the other hand, that benefit of, you know, the Democrats having in their coalition the reliable voter that's going to turn up even in the off-year election, that may not matter as much when you're talking about a presidential election, when, you know, you have a large turnout. And so then you are bringing in

more of the Republican coalition to the mix. But you've had this polling trend as well where Biden does really well with people who actually voted in the last presidential election. Trump, in one poll, I think it was the New York Times Siena poll, he was winning people who hadn't voted before, who said they were going to vote this time, by 23 points. So this will be one of the central dynamics of whatever happens, Trump v. Biden. That's a really good point. And actually, if we put the, this is C2 back up on the screen, actually, this is probably not entirely surprising, but the Lance campaign, or Lance herself, said, today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation. Our legislature must repeal Alabama's

no exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception. The president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, it's the big dem organization in Alabama that's sort of squarely focused on these state races, called the victory, quote, a political earthquake. And of course, Democrats are going to spin something in a way that's best for them. But it's extremely telling that when Lance declared victory in a local House race, she said women and families sent a clear message about the no exceptions abortion ban, access to IVF, and the right to contraception. I mean, it's interesting because Republicans and conservatives in Alabama weren't

necessarily wrong to look at a campaign like that in a local race and say, aren't there other things? Don't we need new sidewalks or bike trails or something like that? It's a common strategic mistake that people make make not in this environment. All politics is national now. You know, it really is. It's just a different it's just a different landscape. And I also think it's very telling, though, that the Republicans decided to run the hyper local race and just avoid. Because, I mean, the other thing, it's not like this IVF decision

was a national decision. It was an Alabama situation. So it is also local. It's not like she was opining on something over which she would have no say and no input in the state house there.

But I do think it's a tell because you see this dynamic often where let's say you have a Democrat running in a rural area that's trending red. Let's say in Ohio, it's trending red or whatever. They'll try to localize, I'm not like those Democrats in Washington. This isn't about them. This is about us right here in this place, etc.

And that used to work very effectively. And I just don't think that it does really anymore. And you can certainly point to certain examples where the trend goes in the other direction. But I think by and large, politics is national. And if you're fighting against some big national issue that voters really have on their mind and you just don't want to talk about it and you're just trying to push it off to the side, like, don't think about that and don't worry about that. It's a challenging landscape to try to operate in. But like I said, the fact that the Republican just didn't even want to really approach this, didn't have, I don't know what their response was. I don't know how they were talking about it, but they clearly didn't want to lean into that in their campaign, is indicative of how even in a district that Trump did win by a point, this ruling was so toxic that they know they just have to run away

from it. And even when they did, they're losing by, you know, more than 20 points. So now, speaking of losing, a lot of people predicted that the Supreme Court's oral arguments in, actually, it's a case where conservatives are running against the FDA because of mifepristone, which is the oral abortion drug that is now accounting for more than half of abortions. We'll talk a little bit about that. But Erin Hawley, who is actually the wife of Senator Josh Hawley, was arguing on behalf of an alliance of doctors that is upset about the FDA's fast tracking of Mifepristone. This was back in like 2000. This happened a really long time ago.

And finally, someone brought a case about it that was the Fifth Circuit, which Ryan calls the crazy circuit. It tends to be more conservative, agreed that the FDA was wrong to fast track the approval of Mifepristone when it did so at the time all those years ago. But basically standing was a huge question during the oral arguments that happened this week. And yet, on standing and other issues, that question of standing meaning whether or not the alliance of doctors that Erin Hawley was representing has the question of standing, meaning whether or not the alliance of doctors that

Aaron Hawley was representing has the sort of standing, has the legal sort of, not right, but the legal case to present this argument, to object to the approval all of those years ago. Aaron Hawley was getting really tough questions from the conservative justices. So not just Kentonji Brown Jackson, but also from Brett Kavanaugh, also from Amy Coney Barrett, who of course was ushering in the era of the handmaid's tale when she was confirmed, and others on the Supreme Court. I think even Justice Roberts joined the sort of pile on against Aaron Hawley. So there's an interesting exchange here with Neil Gorsuch.

Just listen to how he asks. It's a pretty pointed question to Aaron Hawley. find that there are conscientious objections that say hospitals take them into account and these doctors do have a way to not do these kinds of procedures should we end this case on that basis? No, Your Honor. We would welcome that holding, but it's not broad enough to remedy our doctor's harm. Why? Because these are emergency situations. They can't waste precious moments scrubbing in. No, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying, assuming we have a world in which they can actually lodge the objections that you say that they have. My question is, isn't that enough to remedy their issue? Do we have to also entertain your argument that no one else in the world can have this drug or no one else in America should have this drug in order to protect your clients?

So again, Your Honor, it's not possible given the emergency nature of the situation. Counsel, let me interrupt there. I'm sorry. I think Justice Jackson's saying, let's spot you all that, okay, with respect to your clients. Normally in Article 3, traditional equitable remedies, we issue and we say over and over again, provide a remedy sufficient to address the plaintiff's asserted injuries and go no further. We have before us a handful of individuals who have asserted a conscience objection. Normally, we would allow equitable relief to address them. Recently, I think what Justice Jackson's alluding to, we've had what one might call a rash of universal injunctions or vacatures.

And this case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule or any other federal government action. So what you heard there is a heavy focus on the question of standing. If you were listening to this and not watching, you heard Ketanji Brown Jackson ask questions about that. And then you heard Neil Gorsuch, Trump-appointed justice, interrupt with some really pointed questions of his own for Aaron Hawley. Yeah, kind of came in over the top, like, let me break this down. Right. Crystal, are you surprised by that? A lot of conservatives are not remotely surprised by how Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett have expressed their skepticism, obviously.

Standard disclosure, you never know based on oral arguments. People are often very surprised by what happens after oral arguments. Yet, this one was sort of resoundingly against Erin Hawley and her alliance of doctors. I'm not particularly surprised because I think the Supreme Court is trying to almost like rescue Republicans from the most extreme conclusions of the positions that they've, you know, staked out, staked out? Sticked. Sticked. Sticked down? Yeah.

That's it. We'll go. We're going to go with that. In any case, I, so, you know, they also are very concerned with especially Roberts with the standing of the credibility of the court. So if the court is going out there and like, hey, IVF is banned and no more, you know, abortion pill that is news now for 63 percent of abortions and they're just like going wild after Dobbs, then you're going to have a real problem of legitimacy of the court. You could have a real movement to, you movement to stack the court or term limit or age limit or something. And by the way, those sorts of things, certainly the age limit and term limits, really popular if you ask the American public. So you can easily see some momentum getting behind

an idea like that if you have decisions routinely coming down that are wildly at odds with where the American people are. My view of the court is that they take into consideration more of the political aspect of things than they do necessarily, like then they'll find the legal grounding for wherever they want to be politically, ideologically, etc. But in terms of this legal question of standing in particular, multiple of the justices, many of the conservative justices were saying basically like, listen, okay, so you're a group of doctors that has this religious-based objection to prescribing mifepristone or performing abortions. So ordinarily, the normal sort of resolution or

solution to that problem would be to give you a conscience exemption. You already have that. So now rather than, you know, being fine or filing some small lawsuit, as Gorsuch was suggesting there, now you're trying to claim injury, even though you already have an exemption here. You don't have to prescribe Mifepristo. No one is making you do that. You're trying to stretch to find some sort of harm that could theoretically be done to you. And in the course of establishing that standing, then you want to take the ability of the entire nation to have access to this FDA approved drug. So a lot of the questioning focused on that and didn't even get into what's called the merits of whether or

not you can use this process to overturn what the FDA found. Because the FDA said, hey, this is safe. There's lots of studies that say it's safe. There are very few problems or complications with it. And their argument is, no, no, no, the FDA was wrong and they didn't go through. They didn't do enough to make sure that it's safe. And so that's part of why we're harmed as doctors, because we could hypothetically, theoretically have to treat a woman who's been injured by these pills, even though we didn't prescribe it. And so I do think it's fair to say that it's a bit of a stretch. They couldn't point to an example where this has actually happened. They're just sort of theorizing that maybe it possibly could potentially happen and using that as a way to try to, you know,

undercut the FDA's approval for this drug for everyone in the entire country. So, I mean, bottom line, listen, like you said, you never know how it's going to come down. You got to wait and see and how it's going to go, whatever. But if you've got Amy Coney Barrett, who is obviously very religious and very ideological on these issues, if even she's looking at your case like, no, this doesn't make any sense to me in terms of the harm, in terms of the standing, then I think you are in a pretty tough position in terms of prevailing here.

And you know what? I bet there are a lot of smart Republican operatives out there who are praying for the Supreme Court to say no to this and to keep you know, keep Mifepristo legal because of the results we were talking about in Alabama and because of the national trend, which has now consistently been post-Dobbs for more and more and more people to actually embrace abortion rights. I mean, it really has sort of tipped the scales on an issue that previously was very much a 50-50 issue. Yeah. And, you know and our viewers know that I represent the minority of the minority on the question of abortion, pretty anti-abortion. I do think there's some scary stuff out there about Mifepristone, and mostly it relates to doctors

not doing a good job of prescribing it and saying, this is what might happen. These are possible complications, and there are some stories of women having awful experiences that's not happening every time people take Mifepristone. But that's at least an explanation for why conservatives felt that they should bring this case and why religious doctors, conservative doctors felt like they should bring this case. And so one exchange that was interesting just on that question of standing was between Justice Alito and the Solicitor General, who is representing the FDA. Alito said, so your argument here is that it doesn't matter if the FDA flagrantly violated the law, didn't do what it should have done, endangered the health of women.

It's just too bad. Nobody can sue in court. There's no remedy. The American people have no remedy for that. The Solicitor General replied, well, I think it would be wrong to suggest that if the FDA had made a mistake and a drug were actually producing safety consequences, that there was nothing to be done. I thought that exchange was sort of the best clash of both sides of the sort of Alito objection and the Solicitor General, the government's position here.

It is just an interesting question. Also, again, Chris, kind of like a flipping of the general political positions on like the FDA versus doctors. Like a lot of times you would have, the FDA is basically funded by pharma and you have a lot of conservatives that are very, in the past, have been very defensive of the FDA because generally it represents the positions of pharma. And so here you have that like totally different clashing of opinions. So it's definitely like like, reading the tea leaves

here, it looks like Thomas and Alito might be the only dissents in this case. And especially because, like, Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh, a lot of conservatives see them as being more libertarian than, quote unquote, like, a conservative, like, Burkean conservative positions, whether or not that's true. Gorsuch especially, people suspect that of. So just a really interesting presentation at the Supreme Court. And the political consequences, to your point, Crystal, we've got some polling on that. Yeah, this is pretty interesting. Our producers pulled this. Let's go ahead and put this first one up on the screen. So we've got specific question here from Fox News on, you know,

that liberal rag outlet, Fox News. Views on Mifepristone and on a nationwide abortion law. And you have 68% saying that access to abortion medication, Mifepristone, should be legal, and only 28% saying it's illegal. I would actually like to see the partisan breakdown there because that level of support means there is a significant chunk of Republicans who also think that you should have legal access to this. They also asked about support for a law guaranteeing access to legal abortion nationwide, 65%. So more than a supermajority, say yes, we're in favor of that law guaranteeing access to legal abortion. Only 32% oppose. That would have been a very different result pre-Dobbs. In terms of views on abortion, here you can actually see the trend, which continues

to move only in one direction. So now in March of 2024, you have 35% who say abortion should always be legal. You have 24% who say it should be legal most of the time. You have 32% who say it should be illegal except for the typical exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. And you only have 7% who say it should always be illegal. And that matters because there are a number of states where that is the de facto position that it should always be illegal. That's how you end up with a decision like in Alabama, even outlawing IVF. And you can see the way that this has shifted over time to move where people are moving more and more to the pro-choice position, as it becomes really clear what the

actual landscape looks like if you don't have those rights enshrined in law and people very, you know, people very unhappy with potential IVF limits or going back to the stem cell debates or banning Mifepristone. These are wildly unpopular positions with the majority of the American public. One thing I wanted to point to in the polling is if you're looking at the movement between April 2022 and March 2024, a lot of Republicans, conservatives, anti-abortion groups will say Democrats' biggest vulnerability on this is the always legal group. That group has gone up since April of 2022. That's the largest group now. Look at that, 35% right now in March of 2024. And I agree, I think politically, that is the sort of anti-abortion side's best, like that's the best political message to defend themselves. I don't disagree with that. I think they're right about

that. But it's getting less and less effective when polls show people say this should always be between a woman and their doctor. If they want an abortion in the third trimester, it must be for a good reason. That's the argument now that anti-abortion candidates groups have to address. And it's actually getting even, that's becoming more and more of an uphill battle. Also what you see there is the legal except for rape, incest, save the life of the mother. That has gone down to 32% from 43% since April of 2022. And it is generally, and it was back in 2022, that was the biggest group. And now, always legal is the biggest group, to your point, Crystal.

Yeah. One reason for that might be people are having experiences with Mifepristone that aren't the exceptions. We can put the Washington Post. This is actually C5. Guys, you can put this up on the screen. The Washington Post headline here, abortions outside medical system increased sharply after Roe fell, study finds. Abortions after Roe fell are actually going up. And I think a lot of that is because of Mifepristone. I mean, undoubtedly, a lot of that is because Mifepristone. I mean undoubtedly a lot of that is because Mifepristone pro-abortion

groups have made a concerted effort to increase the availability of Mifepristone and to increase public awareness about Mifepristone. So this is something that has to be contended with in ways that I don't think, and of course it was clear, Ryan and I said this as it was happening on air when the Dobbs decision came out. The Republican Party has never been prepared for this. It's true. Never been prepared for this, even though the writing was on the wall that something like this could be coming and that people would be really deeply unhappy about it. And Chris, your point

about the court's perspective on itself, how it, The threats to the sort of institutional trust of the Supreme Court, I bet that is weighing on their minds as they consider this huge case. Yeah, because I mean, they're looking, they're consuming the news. They see this, what has been an extraordinary backlash. I mean, I really underestimated just what a massive shift this would be in terms of the politics of the issue, how much it would matter to people, how much it would dictate the results of elections. Every time, no matter what state you put it up in, if you've got a ballot initiative that's about abortion, the pro-choice side has won every single time. Results in Alabama where you're

winning by close to 30 points based on, you know, the fallout after this decision, they're very aware of that. They're very aware of that. And that, you know, if they continue to, you know, push in that direction and codify things that go even further than the Dobbs decision, that they're going to be on really thin ice. Because one thing that was noteworthy to me, looking at some of that polling, is that it's not like after Dobbs, there was a major shakeup in opinion and it just stopped there. The trend continues in this direction of more people saying, you know, it should just always be legal, or it should at least be legal in most cases. And the people who

are on the pro-life side, that number is dwindling and dwindling and dwindling, even within the Republican Party. And then the other thing that has really changed is previously the group that was most organized and most activated on this issue were almost all on the pro-life side, where this was like the voting issue. And that's just not the case anymore. Now you have, I think, probably many more people who are really activated on the other side of this equation. And that's why you see such a tremendous shift in terms of electoral results. We played previously Trump getting asked about abortion. His instincts on this are much better than most Republicans. Yeah, but you can also tell, like, he knows it's a problem.

Yes. And there is no, he did the thing that you suggested of like, oh, let's talk about, you know, these partial birth abortions or end of third trimester or when the baby's been born, which, of course, doesn't happen. But anyway, he tried to pivot to that, but that's just not the landscape that things are being fought on right now. The landscape that's being fought on is Mifepristone and IVF and how much are you going to curtail the rights and personhood bills and is there going to be a national abortion ban, et cetera. And so I really don't think there is a messaging fix for this. So like I said, I'm sure Trump and a lot of other Republicans are very happy that the Supreme Court is going in the other direction with this Mifepristone decision,

likely because it would be a total political catastrophe for them if they went in the other direction. And they're just hoping that emotions around this die down and that they're able to reassure people enough that they're not totally out on the fringes on this. But Trump is the guy that put those justices there. And you can't really run away from that, ultimately. Like, it's very difficult. Like I said, I don't think it's something you can message your way out of because the reality has become so apparent to people. No, it would need to be a culture shift for the politics to shift.

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It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Crystal, I hear the media is doing their thing. Yeah. As usual. At it again. All right.

So let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from The New York Times. So leave this up for a moment because I'm going to give a little bit of a preview here. You guys will recall we've been covering it here. Ryan's done great work on this. Grayzone has done a lot of work on it. There's a lot of journalists who have done a lot of work on this. But New York Times published at the end of last year this piece that was supposed to be this seminal investigation into systematic rape as a weapon of war used by Hamas on October 7th. Okay. This piece drops, you know, they news alert it, they get it in under the deadline to try to submit it for Pulitzer, et cetera. And immediately some of the accounts are called into question. In particular,

the main account in the story that they lead the story with that makes up, you know, a third of the written out reporting in the story. The family of this woman that they're alleging in the piece was subjected to sexual assault by Hamas says, we don't think that happened. And we didn't know that this was what you were reporting on. You interviewed us under false pretenses. Some of them went so far as to say this, this is just not true. This is a lie. They have other evidence that contradicts it. So you got that. Then you have the reporters themselves very much called into question. So there were three people on the byline. You have Jeffrey Gettleman, who's sort of like the heavy hitter, Pulitzer Prize winner, et cetera. He comes out after the piece

and is like, well, what I do isn't really providing evidence. It's just telling stories. It's like, wait, what? The other two on this, who shared this byline, had very little journalistic experience. One of them, Anat Schwartz, literally had none prior to October 7th. She had been a small-time documentarian. And they're sent into Israel to do all the on-the-ground reporting. And this is an incredibly sensitive topic. Like, the fact that they're working with the New York Times, the pinnacle of journalistic excellence around the world, and they're put on this assignment is

crazy. And she gave an interview, Ryan Unearthed this in Hebrew, talking about her process as she's going around the country, talking to the hospitals. She wrote a podcast. Right. Can't find a single survivor, can't find any forensic evidence. but she finds this, she finally lands on this account of a medic who claims, and they write this out in the piece, that he saw two teenage girls murdered at Kibbutz Be'eri and describes them in this state, semen smeared on one of these, their backs, horrific things that he describes, right? So she runs with this. This is put into the piece, et cetera. Now the New York Times itself is debunking that portion of the story. So they say Israeli soldiers' video has undercut this medic's account

of sexual assault at Kibbutz Biari. Kibbutz residents concluded that two sisters killed on October 7th were not victims of sexual violence. And again, this was a key part of the story. And in fact, I believe if memory serves, when she came upon this account, this was what Anand Schwartz said, convinced her that, oh, there was something systematic here. You've got two teenage girls here. And this is what persuaded her that, oh, there was something systematic here. You've got two teenage girls here. And this is what persuaded her that there weren't isolated incidents, that it was a pattern of contact. Well, this turns out to now, according to The New York Times, have been debunked. Let me read you this. They say new video has surfaced that undercuts the account of an Israeli military

paramedic who said two teenagers killed in a Hamas-led terrorist attack on October 7th were sexually assaulted. The unnamed paramedic from an Israeli commando unit was among dozens of people interviewed for a December 28th article. Even that is very disingenuous because most of those dozens of people said they had no evidence of sexual assault. He said he discovered the bodies of two partially clothed teenage girls in a home in Kibbutz Be'eri that bore signs of sexual violence. But footage taken by an Israeli soldier who was in Be'eri on October 7th, which was viewed by leading community members in February and by the Times this month, shows the bodies of three female victims fully clothed with no apparent signs of sexual violence at a home where many residents had believed

that the assaults had occurred. Let me just tell you what they say. They say that it's unclear if the medic was referring to the same scene. Residents said no other home in Biari were two teenage girls killed. They concluded from the video the girls had not been sexually assaulted. A member of that kibbutz said, quote, this story is false. By the way, Ryan had also gotten a statement from the kibbutz also saying this story is false. The Times backing up his reporting. Of course, he doesn't get don't get many credit, but put that aside. I also, Emily, you know, these are human beings who were slaughtered in a horrible and brutal way. Two sisters alongside their mother. But one of the people at the kibbutz says what happened to them was horrifying.

But it was a great relief to find out they were not sexually assaulted. So think about what the Times did here to these people and to their families. Like on top of all the horror, you have to go with a now thoroughly discredited account claiming that they were raped and that there was semen smeared on one of their backs and totally debunked and disproven. And by the way, in that original report, Screams Without Words is what it's called, rather than take out that section, rather than retract the whole thing, which based on all of the questions that have been raised on it is what's really called for at this point. They kept that reporting in about the,

you know, semen smeared on her back and the partially clothed, et cetera, which we, they are now reporting is not true based on this evidence. And they just added this note in. So they still have all the language there. And then they add in this note, update, newly released video viewed by the Times showed the bodies of two teenage girls in Kibbutz Be'ari fully clothed, undercutting this account from an Israeli military paramedic who recovered bodies in multiple locations after the October 7th attack. It was unclear if the paramedic was describing bodies he discovered elsewhere. There is no indication that there are any other bodies elsewhere that could have fit this description. So it's just one more incident where the Times has found itself, has created this incredible

controversy for itself. And it really has gotten to that level of like WMD or the Caliphate podcast. And I saw one person who's been involved in really digging into this story online saying, it's quite noteworthy that the three major scandals for the Times recently from a journalistic perspective all had to do with reporting out of the Middle East. So, I mean, yes, that this original time story, the intercepts piece on this, as you've mentioned, Crystal, and other people who've done work in the space too, on that particular screams without words piece. I like the way that Ryan puts it, which is that there's about a 0% chance that there was no sexual violence on October 7th.

There's like, it is overwhelmingly clear that there was some sexual violence on October 7th. There is like, it is overwhelmingly clear that there was some sexual violence. So to see this Times story, I think, get absolutely ripped to shreds. It's like, the byline problem is shocking, and it shouldn't be shocking, but it's something that happens across the board on a lot of stories.

So this is, it's kind of the tip of the iceberg as to corporate media doing that. The byline, there were people at the Wall Street Journal who were former members of the IDF who were writing, covering this stuff, and it wasn't disclosed. Meanwhile, they're sneering at the standards of other publications, looking down at new media like us as though we have no editorial standards, which is absurd given all of this. And I say that as someone, I like how you said it, Crystal, 97 civilians were slaughtered at this commutes. There were, I think, more than 20 hostages taken. I think it was close to 30 hostages were taken. Some of them are probably still in Gaza. This was a traumatized and absolutely devastated community of people.

That was just the fact that so many people, the way you put it also about people being upset and relieved to learn that these daughters were not victims of sexual assault. They're turned into political pawns by people with partisan causes. And that's not journalism. Don't do it in the service of journalism. Don't do it, period. But definitely don't do it in the service of journalism, which is a giant lie that just completely eradicates credibility for the entire industry as a whole. Again, as a pro-Israel person, if you are pro-Israel, you should be upset

with this because it has undermined the credibility of the pro-Israel position because now people are going to look at all of the reporting on it and have these lingering questions. How could you? That story was, as you pointed out, it was like a watershed piece of reporting is how it was treated. And so the people who are now learning that there are questions about the story's credibility, that lingers in your mind when you read the media going forward. And the response from the Times was not, how did these incredibly inexperienced junior reporters get put on this story? How did they get so many pieces wrong where you have families who you have retried? I mean, you have added to their pain and suffering who are coming at you saying,

first of all, you lied to get this interview. Second of all, this isn't what happened. You know, here's video evidence, et cetera. Rather than figuring out what the hell went wrong here, instead, they went after the leakers and launched a whole leak investigation to figure out who was providing internal information to Ryan and other reporters. That was their response. And so, yeah, they had a partisan agenda. They wanted this story to come together in a specific way.

They didn't want to show a few isolated incidents. They wanted to be able to paint this picture, because this is what was being offered both by the US government and by the Israeli government government of rape systematically used as a weapon of war. And they basically found the facts or fit the facts to create that narrative. And it's just piece by piece been falling apart. But, you know, I always come back to Anand Schwartz. Again, she had never. So bad.

She didn't have a single byline before she gets picked up by the New York Times. Journalists spend their entire career wanting a byline at the New York Times. How does this happen? It does not make sense. On such, like, the most sensitive issue you can imagine. Mind-blowing. It's inexplicable and it doesn't make a lick of sense. Her career path does not make any sense whatsoever to be to sort of be a documentarian and then to be suddenly plucked to The New York Times as a reporter on the ground. Right. You said, Crystal, like people have to, you know, sort of pay their dues and, you know, like Middle Eastern bureaus, you know, doing the driest copy, like wire reports, basically. So it's very, very odd. I think let alone it's odd enough that the byline was there

without any disclosures. But it's odd that that byline exists. Well, as you're noting, because I don't think I mentioned that she had previously served in the IDF in an intelligence unit. So an intelligence unit and then randomly gets a job at the New York Times. Riddle me that one, guys. All right. We have another incredible use of journalistic resources coming at you from The Atlantic. We can put this up on the screen. This got a lot of interest for reasons that will quickly become apparent. So headline here, the war at Stanford. I didn't know that college would be a factory of unreason by Theo Baker, son of New York Times reporter Peter Baker. No way, really? Oh, yeah. His mom is also a journalist. So, you know, he's a sophomore at Stanford and gets this big cover story at

The Atlantic. I'm sure it's fully on his merit, Emily, and absolutely nothing else. So in any case, in this story, he says he spent five months reporting on basically any views of his fellow classmates that he felt he should all monitor as being a little bit outside of the norm or the mainstream. Starts the story, I'm not even going to read this piece because I find it inappropriate. Start the story by basically doxing this 23-year-old Stafford student that he goes to school with and, you know, calling out, like listing out his views and framing them, you know, as inappropriate. They're certainly, I think, outside of the mainstream, it's fair to say, but this is a, you know, powerless 23-year-old. You would think that the Atlantic would have journalistic resources better spent in other

directions while there is this massive assault going on in Gaza that a majority of Biden voters and probably a majority of Stanford University students think is a genocide. You might want to focus on the powerful people that are involved in the policymaking versus these powerless students whose views you find to be uncomfortable. There was this one part of the story, though, that to me, Emily, it almost irritated me the most. I think there are genuine privacy issues with this tattletale hall monitor putting this person's name in, highlighting their views first and foremost. I think that is inappropriate and incredibly unfortunate. Again, this is just one person. But in any case, he also writes, elite universities attract a certain kind of student, the overachieving

striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple choice questions with clearly right or wrong answers or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test. Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they're here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters and condemn Israel. So he smears this entire group of student protesters who are opposed to Israel's onslaught in Gaza, which a UN report has just called a genocide. I'll be breaking that down in my monologue.

He smears all of them as basically just disingenuous strivers who are trying to be on the cool side of a popular cause, rather than saying, hey, maybe, just maybe, they see these images of kids being murdered with weapons that our tax dollars are paying for. Perhaps they have a genuine issue with that. Maybe that's like actually a moral problem for them. So it's just astonishing on every level. I mean, the Nepo baby part is always present. The fact that The Atlantic, again, spent apparently five months of journalistic resources doing tattletale work on college kids and framed this as important journalism in the context of everything that's going on. And the way that these kids were just sort of lumped together

and are college students. I mean, they are mostly adults, right? But college students lumped together and smeared as having disingenuous motives and, you know, being extremists, I think is just wrong. It's just wrong and it's inappropriate. So he has a line in this piece where he says, I've watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. And what's interesting about that is, listen, not to like both sides things, but this is as with any like extremely politically charged hot button issue. People on both sides are treating death very cavalierly on this question. You know, and that's something that you've talked about. Yeah, I would argue that magazine fixated on what basically powerless

people are doing and saying and painting them all with this very broad brush rather than actually challenging the powerful people who are running the Israel policy. Again, you tell me who's treating death more cavalierly and who is, you know, more interested in like college debates than what is actually happening to people right now in Gaza, all of whom are 100 percent of whom are suffering from, you know, on the verge of famine, 10 children a day starving to death, etc. Well, Stanford is also the home of the Hoover Institute, which, by the way, is the sort of home of a lot of the architects of the Iraq war. So it's you know, there are criticisms of the university system that I

actually think are really important. And I do have a different perspective on this. I think it's, I've actually always found what happens on college campuses to be newsworthy and salient. I've reported on a lot of the stuff myself because I think what people were so caught off guard by everything that happened in 2020. It's like, well, if you were paying attention to some of these trends on campuses, the public would have understood that young people have very different ideas than they think young people do. And people have been shocked. For example, we're blaming TikTok for all of the anti-Israel sentiment and the sort of disparate pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel sentiments that were going viral on TikTok after October 7th. And it's like, again,

if you were paying attention to college campuses, this wouldn't have been surprising to you at all, and you wouldn't have blamed China. You would have understood that this is organic. And by the way, we know that it's not China that was manipulating this sentiment entirely, because it was repeated on different social media platforms that are not controlled by China, because young people are supporting Palestine on these questions. So I don't necessarily take issue with the concept of reporting. He talks about how people have had mezuzahs ripped from their doors at Stanford. And the quote that he has from his section leader saying

he thinks Joe Biden should be dead. Someone should kill Joe Biden. If that's true, that's pretty wild. And I think it's, you know, like, if people are ripping off people's doors, then, you know, and Stanford isn't doing anything about it. That's insane. But that's one of the crazy issues on this is how poorly college campuses have been able to defend their own like anti-speech policies and then like that have silenced and suppressed conservative ideas

and then tried to explain away, you know, punishing students who take issue with Israel. It's been a glaring incoherency. And it's one of the—I've talked to Ryan about this before. It's one of the issues where elite—the polarization in elite opinion is unusual, where you have some very virulently pro-Israel voices in academia, high-profile academia positions. Like, this is what Bill Ackman has basically been reacting to. And then you have some people in academia that are deeply pro-Palestinian. And there's this weird clash happening on college campuses. Now, I don't think, I saw someone tweet this and say it was ritually reported. I wouldn't call this story ritually reported. I think that might have been his dad that tweeted that. He did tweet something to the

effect. Well, let me just say that I think your, you know, your nuanced perspective is well taken and appreciated because certainly we talk here like about the polling about young people and how their perspectives are different generationally. To me, I find that very relevant. Yeah. What one kid thinks about Joe Biden at Stanford when he has literally no power in the context of what is actually happening in terms of our foreign policy? Do I find that particularly relevant, certainly relevant enough to dox him in a way that could direct a lot of hate and horror in his way? No. And to use that quote then to paint with a broad brush. Well, did he know that that was

being reported on when he said it, by the way, because that's another thing. He very much disputes some of the quote-unquote facts that are in there, including that, you know, Theo Baker says, oh, I moved sections, and apparently even that, he says that's not why he moved, etc. So he does dispute some of the way that he was characterized. But, you know, I think what we've seen is if you had a similar piece reported about, let's say, a crazy Trump supporter who says some QAnon insanity, and then that's used to say, and I think everybody at the Trump rally or everybody that's supporting Donald Trump, like this is what's really going on with them. Nut picking. this is what's really going on with them. Nutpicking. I object to that too. And that's what, we don't do that here. And we really tend to avoid these like, man on the street type things where you find the craziest person

and then you use that to say, everybody thinks this way. And this is, now, should we look at poll? Okay, how prevalent are QAnon theories? What are the actual views of Trump supporters? What can we glean from the data? Very different. And why are people coming

to those conclusions, not smearing their intentions? So I try to be consistent in objecting to that form of quote unquote journalism, whether it is with people who agree more with me ideologically or oppose me ideologically. So you're right that there is something important and relevant about what's happening on college campuses and the fervency, the fervent emotion that many young people see and have voiced and come out and protested and engaged in whatever activism they can figure out with regard to that conflict. I'm not saying that's not important, but to smear them, tag them all as extremists to engage in

this like five month long journalistic odyssey in order to accomplish that goal, that I find to be disgusting. Well, and to be congratulated for like a journalistic accomplishment. We don't need to nutpick on the show, like and find someone, throw a microphone in their face and have them say something crazy because we have S soccer. That's why he's like the crazy perspective of like your cousin on the street. Like spend 10 minutes every day staring right into the sun when you wake up. That's right. That's right. Okay, don't drink booze. All right. 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son,

even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous.

But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our

family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's transition into what Mr. Rogan is thinking about this conflict because, you know, to the point of whether the views of these college students are extreme or mainstream at this point, when you have a majority of Joe Biden voters saying this is a genocide, when you have the International Criminal Court of Justice saying that's plausible, when you have a new UN report saying there's reasonable grounds to

believe. And now you can add, oh, you have Alex Jones saying it's a genocide. I believe Candace Owens has said similar things. AOC has now come out and said the same. You can add to that growing list of voices, Joe Rogan, who made some very interesting comments on his podcast. Let's take a listen. Even in the right, like, look what's going on with Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro. Like, what did she say? I want to know what she was fired for. Because was it criticism of Israel?

Was it, I mean, did she show that Edward Snowden video that he put up on Twitter that shows them drone bombing those kids that are – those men, I should say, unarmed people that were walking towards the rubble that clearly weren't causing any danger to anybody? Yeah, right. They just bombed them? Yeah, no. It's your duty. It's just like for Biden or whoever you like, you're supposed to cover up for them because you have – But the whole thing is like they're always saying they're only targeting hamas and everybody else is a casualty well if those guys are just unarmed civilians and they're walking alone that's what they appear to be dresden and you just blast

them from the sky with robots this is the tragedy of war yeah this is insane and no one knows what to think now because if you can't talk about that, if you can't say that's real, then you're saying that genocide is okay as long as we're doing it. That is what we're saying. And if you're saying that from a perspective of someone who literally went through the Holocaust or your people, your tribe, went through the fucking Holocaust and now you're willing to do it? I hope the irony is not lost on you. It's so nuts. It's so hard to imagine that someone where a culture, like a country was like officially founded in what, 47? 48. 48?

Okay. Officially founded. So that's so recent. And you guys are willing to do what was done to you that led you to believe that you needed to start your own country? You're willing to do that at least on a small scale in Gaza? Like there's nothing left. If you see the videos, let's see some recent footage of Gaza. So some really pointed – the Atlantic would say those comments were extremist.

Greg Abbott would say anti-Semitic. There you go. And apparently Matt Miller would as well talk about that also in my monologue. But, I mean, he really goes in. Apparently that video that Al Jazeera obtained, the drone footage of them striking and killing these four unarmed civilians who were just walking along in Khan Yunus. I mean, it's horrible to watch. We played just a little bit of it. But if you do watch the whole thing, you know, you see the initial drone strike. You see one of them at least like crawling after being hit initially, wounded, and then hit again and all of them killed. And,

you know, you can't but Hamas that, you can't, oh, human shield that. It's just so naked. And I think one of the things that people have reacted to so strongly, because I've been trying to wrap my head, Emily, around why this video, this seems to have been the thing for Alex Jones. That's what he quote tweeted.

It seems to have been, you know, the thing for Joe Rogan. And just judging by the tenor of the commentary and the shift, you know, AOC then comes out shortly thereafter, also calls it a genocide. I've been trying to wrap my head around what it was about this video because we've seen so many horrors play out in front of our eyes. And I think it's the fact that all the typical justifications are null. You can't, like I said, you can't bat Hamas it.

You can't, there's a tunnel there. You can't, you know, it's anti-Semitic to say this. All the normal justifications are, they're not human shields, are kind of null and void. And then there's something so nightmarish and terrifying. Alex Jones called it a robotic mass genocide, I believe, about the fact that they're walking along totally unawares. And then out of the sky, boom, it's over. And also the David and Goliath nature of that. I mean, they're unarmed. They have nothing, right? And everything around them in the video too is complete rubble, as Rogan is saying, right? Look at Gaza. There's nothing left. His guest there says it's like Dresden. They're completely unarmed. They're completely vulnerable. And meanwhile, Israel has this, you know, incredibly high-tech killing technology.

And that's what they're up against. And there's something about that video that marked a real turning point for the way a lot of people were viewing this conflict. So Alex Jones apparently has also been calling Rabbi Shmuley the butt plug rabbi? They had a debate. He did. Yes, he did. Okay, good. Interesting enough. Well, the Rogan clip to me is fascinating because he goes back and says, listen, this is really recent history. Like the Holocaust is really recent history in the living memory of many people. That's right. And the founding of modern Israel comes in 1948. And what also happens there is, and Brian and I talked

about this a little bit yesterday, but the new definitions or the formal international agreement on what the definition of genocide is, because basically the UN comes together after World War II and says, we need to prevent Dresden. We need to prevent the Holocaust. We need to, you know, all of that. And that living memory is also why, you know, you see Netanyahu and other leaders in Israel. And even, by the way, some well-intentioned liberal Israelis feel the need to turn Gaza into a, quote, parking lot because those threats remain, you know, so ingrained in the minds. And that's what Rogan is reacting to and saying it's strange. It's a strange, like, dissonance between, you know, saying we want to prevent another Holocaust

and then seeing the destruction of Gaza and calling for the destruction of Gaza, calling for it in the name of stopping another Holocaust to be turned into a parking lot. And I understand, you know, why that's why that hits home with people like Joe Rogan. I completely understand the perspective of being grossed out by the drone attacks and the sort of like, it is, this is a different kind, like since we have, since World War II, this is a new kind of conflict. And I don't think the Netanyahu's and the Joe Biden's of the world were prepared for how the public was going to react to it. It's similar to other conflicts like urban warfare, but Syria, other places, but it's different. It's completely different. And I think they underestimated where the public would be when watching this because,

I mean, it's just, these videos are tough. Yeah. You know, it is sort of, there are quotes from the early Zionists, and I think it's very much illustrated in not just the Israeli response here, but in, you know, wars since their founding, basically. This notion of, because of the horrors that they were subjected to, and this idea that they're, quote-unquote, in a tough neighborhood, part of why they go in with such an force and commit these horrors and war crimes and totally annihilate all of Gaza is this idea of we have to demonstrate that actually we're the biggest assholes, that we are just as tough, tougher and badder than anyone else. And they talk openly about restoring deterrence. And that's code for

basically what I said. We need to put on display that we can be the brutal barbarians just as much as anyone else. And so it is a deep horror and deep irony that the people who, you know, suffered through the Holocaust and, you know, the state that is founded out of, you know, the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust, that then would turn around and repeat some of the same ideology, some of, you know, Rogan calls it like on a small scale. And obviously the death count isn't approaching what the Holocaust is, but there is a similar quest towards annihilation. There is a similar, I mean, there's a Jewish supremacist ideology here, so I think his comments are entirely appropriate. In another way, it shouldn't be surprising because you see this on a human level too, people who were victims of abuse, and then they turn around and become the abusers. I

mean, that is a common pattern that plays out. Psychologically, right? In human life. So obviously, you know, for Rogan, who's kind of like, you know, litmus test for normie opinion, you know, is not a particular ideologue in any direction to have come to this conclusion. And again, like that it was this video that seems to have led him there. I just, I found that very interesting, very noteworthy and obviously he's very influential, very impactful. So in and of itself, it matters a lot. What I was going to say, just another kind of wake up call probably for Biden and Yahoo and people like Ted Cruz who sat and respectfully talked to us about this would be that Joe

Rogan also isn't going to deny that Hamas and actual Islamic extremism isn't genocidal towards Jews. It, of course, is. And he's not the kind of person that's going to make the Judith Butler argument about Hamas being a part of the global resistance, whatever. He's not that kind of person. Like you said, Crystal, he has normie opinion on all of this. And so that's where this becomes, and even, I'm going to mention this, Chris Ruffo reacted to, I made a little joke about Greg Abbott earlier in this segment. That's because Greg Abbott instructed universities in Texas to update their speech policies to ban anti-Semitic speech. And Chris Ruffo, obviously a conservative, obviously pro-Israel, and other kind of conservatives on the new right, like Sager,

and people like myself, who have objected to the new speech policing since October 7th, on the grounds that it's sort of hypocritical from people, like both wrong and hypocritical from people like Greg Abbott. Chris Ruffo reacted and said, what's the difference between, you know, this and banning quote anti-black speech or anti-white speech? It's not how we do things in this country. And that has been, again, wildly underestimated by people like Greg Abbott, who probably had no idea or had no, nobody in his circles was like, you're going to, you're going to upset people like a Chris Rufo or like others in those circles that take issue with this. They don't have awareness that it really rankles people because it's a bubble. Yeah, it is a bubble all the way around. And we

have some polling that shows you also the public shift that I think speaks to some of the points that you're making here. So these are the overall numbers. And you can see the difference between November 2023, so we're talking about shortly after October 7th, versus now. In November, a majority, 50% of Americans, approved of Israeli military action in Gaza versus 45% who disapproved. So it's pretty closely split, but you got a majority in favor. Now, totally different. Only 36% approve, 55% disapprove. It's interesting to me in these polls, the no opinion number actually goes up in all of these polls I'm about to show you, which is kind of that as a conflict has gone on, there are more people who are moving from that

approval to just like, I don't know, I don't have an opinion. I don't want to talk about this anymore, which you'd see some in the discourse online where people who were previously like staunch defenders have just kind of gone quiet. I think we have additional polling we can put up, don't we guys, that has the partisan breakdown here because the way that Democrats have moved has been interesting. So here we've got an indication of how closely people have been paying to the conflict and what their views are based on whether they say they're following very closely or not. Those who are following very closely, 55% disapprove. Those who are following somewhat closely, 56% disapprove. Those who are not following closely, 54% disapprove. The numbers in terms of approve are highest among those who

are following very closely. So there's a bit of an indication here. It's not like a huge shift, depending on the biggest difference you see is just the number of people who are offering no opinion. And then put the next one up on the screen, guys. This is the partisan breakdown that I was mentioning. So we'll start with the Republicans relevant to the Chris Ruffo and Texas discussion. So back in November, 71% of Republicans say, yes, I approve of this military action. Only 23% say, no, I do not. Now, both of those numbers have shifted. 64% say they approve. That's still a large number, but 30% is a significant minority who now say they disapprove. Yes.

Independence, big movement here. So it was split, basically 50-50, 47 approved, 48 disapprove. Now you only have 29% of independents who approve, 60% disapprove, and the Democratic numbers are just overwhelming. So you've always had a majority of Democrats who disapproved. Now that number has shot up to 75 percent and only 18 percent say that they approve. And once again, you have an increase in the number who are like, no opinion, count me out. I don't want to talk about this. Let's just move on, which I did find noteworthy, given that you would think that as the conflict goes on, more people form an opinion. But it actually has been the opposite here. I read into that people who previously were on the approved side that are now like, I don't know, I'm just going to say no

opinion. Yeah, I think that's right. But this is a huge blind spot. This isn't the same. The public is not reacting to this in the same way that the public has reacted to other conflicts, frankly, in Gaza and in Israel. It's just completely different this time around, and people were unprepared for that. Yeah, absolutely. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

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

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

My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago.

Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's

political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Crystal, I'm excited to hear your monologue. What have you got for us today? Well, Atlantic Magazine was dedicating months' worth of journalistic resources to investigating whether powerless college kids have opinions slightly outside of mainstream acceptability. The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine was engaged in what one might

reasonably say was a slightly more pressing endeavor, reporting on whether Israel is in fact committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Here is Francesca Albanese explaining her task. 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. History teaches us that genocide is a process, not a single act. It starts with the dehumanization of a group as other,

and the denial of that group's humanity, and ends with the destruction of the group in whole or in part. The dehumanization of Palestinians as a group is the hallmark of their history of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and apartheid. In the words of Edward Said, Palestinians were made orphans of a homeland

by the creation of the state of Israel and its continuous policies, intended to erase their presence from their land. Genocide is defined in international law as specific sets of acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. It is often referred to as the crime of crimes due to its complexity and because of the challenge of proving the specific intent as the Convention requires. And yet, this complexity is not about the creation

of a hierarchy among atrocity crimes. It's rather a reflection of a different nature and scale. The heightened threshold for intent, namely to destroy a group as prescribed by Article Two of the Genocide Convention, must be proven directly or inferred from facts which admit of no other reasonable inference. But when genocidal intent is so conspicuous,

so ostentatious as it is in Gaza, we cannot avert our eyes. We must confront genocide. We must prevent it, and we must punish it. I hope you really took that in. Here we have Albanese, she's a human rights lawyer hired by the UN Human Rights Council to provide analysis. She is telling them in no uncertain terms that there are, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide. widespread validation among everyone from UN-hired experts to the International Court of Justice to

a majority of Biden 2020 voters to cultural figures like Joe Rogan, as we showed you earlier. And as time passes and awareness of what has already unfolded seeps in, the truth is only going to become more undeniable, which is why when questioned about this report, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller reacted in the most predictable way possible. Rather than engaging with the compelling facts of the report, he smeared its author as an anti-Semite. Let me ask you, did you see or read the report made by Francesca Albeniz yesterday in Geneva, where she cited what she showed was irrefutable as far as she's concerned, irrefutable evidence that Israel engaged in genocide. Did you see the report? What is your

comment? I did see the report. Let me say a couple of things about it. First, we have for a long standing period of time opposed the mandate of this special rapporteur, which we believe is not productive. And when it comes to the individual who holds that position, I can't help but note a history of anti-Semitic comments that she has made that have been reported. She made anti-Semitic comments? She has, and comments she made in December that appeared to justify the attacks of October 7th. So I think it's important to take that into account. But with respect to the report itself, we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded. But at the same time, we are deeply concerned by the number of civilian casualties in Gaza. And that's why we have pressed the

government of Israel on multiple occasions to do everything it can to minimize those civilian casualties. Yeah, well, she's been getting a lot of death threats and other threats and so on, you know, because people think she made anti-Semitic comments and so on. Let me just go over to another topic. Hold on. You can't make a comment like that without letting me respond. Obviously, death threats against anyone are inappropriate. Of course, Francesca Albanese has not made anti-Semitic comments. It's a baseless smear. She has, though, been critical of Israel and is now offering compelling evidence and analysis of grave crimes,

which directly implicate the United States and Matt Miller himself. His nasty response there is an indication of how significant this report actually is. It's especially impactful for three key reasons. First, because of the clarity and analytical precision with which it is written. Second, because as a report by a UN hiring expert delivered for the benefit of that body, it may carry special weight with the International Court of Justice itself, a UN body. And finally, because it calls for specific actions to be taken by UN member states, including or perhaps especially the United States of America. Now, let's start with some of the details from the report, which led Albanese to her dramatic conclusion.

She identifies three genocidal acts as defined by the Genocide Convention. Number one, killing members of the group. Number two, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. And number three, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Now, as evidence of these acts, she cites everything from the tonnage of explosives used in just the first several months of the onslaught, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, to the lifelong trauma those who survive will no doubt struggle with after seeing every aspect of their civilian lives destroyed.

And the siege, which is causing 10 children to starve to death every day. She writes in the report, quote, Gaza has been completely sacked. Israel's relentless targeting of all means basic survival has compromised the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to live on that land. This engineered collapse of life-sustaining infrastructure corresponds to the stated intentions to make Gaza, quote, permanently impossible to live in where no human being can exist. She also, of course, critically spends quite a bit of time on intent. The mens rea, or mental state required to prove genocide, includes both a general intent to commit the acts and a specific intent to eliminate a group in whole

or in part. This would be the now somewhat infamous dolus specialis. Here's a portion of what Albanese writes with regard to how intent may be established and why she believes that intent has been demonstrated with regards to Israel in a uniquely clear-cut way. Quote, the nature and scale of the atrocities, if demonstrably capable of achieving the genocidal outcome, are strong evidence of intent. The words of state authorities, including dehumanizing language combined with acts, are considered a circumstantial basis from which intent can be inferred. Dehumanization can be understood as foundational to the process of genocide. Evidence of context may help determine the intent

and must be considered with the actual conduct. Intent should be evident above all from words and deeds and patterns of purposeful action such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn. Now, in the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced. High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent. She then proceeds to list a selection of such harrowing public statements, many of which you will probably already be familiar, and which, taken together, paint an undeniable portrait of

dehumanization and intention to annihilate, coming from every level of government and echoing throughout society. For anyone who has acquainted themselves with the South African filing against Israel, the facts and utterances offered in these sections will likely be pretty familiar. But there were two areas in which I thought Albanese's report was particularly illuminating. First, she systematically exposed the way that Israel's perverted the language of international humanitarian law in order to justify crimes against humanity. Albanese writes that Israel's use this jargon to transform all civilians into human shields who can be murdered at will, all civilian infrastructure into legitimate military targets. Quote, After October 7th, this macro characterization of Gaza's civilians as a population of human shields

has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel's top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, accomplices,

or human shields among whom Hamas is embedded. In November, Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs defined the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields

and accused Hamas of using the civilian population as human shields. The ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately embedded in the population to such an extent that it cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming civilians or civilian objects have been targeted that an attack was unlawful. Now, two rhetorical elements, she writes, of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a legitimate, targetable shield. The use of the all-encompassing combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects, Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon. Another particular strength of this report is how Abanis acknowledges the context of this process of genocide, arguing that since the

birth of the Zionist settler colonial project, the groundwork has been laid for exactly this current outcome of annihilation. That's a radical departure from the liberal Zionist claim that Israel simply lost its way under Bibi and the current horrors are due to a few bad apples, rather than being the logical outgrowth of a decades-long attempt to ethnically cleanse this land of its Arab inhabitants. Take a listen to how she describes this logic and its importance to the present. The genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process over Asia of the native Palestinians. For over 76 years, this process has oppressed the Palestinians as a people in every way imaginable, crushing their inalienable right to self-determination

demographically, economically, territorially, culturally, and politically. Israel has attempted to displace them, expropriate their land and other resources, and ultimately replace them. The colonial amnesia of the West has condoned Israel's colonial settler project from the violent history of the very birth of the state of Israel to its oppressive occupation since 1967, the crippling closure of Gaza since 1993, and its military assaults on Gaza since 2007. The world now sees the bitter fruit of the impunity afforded to Israel. This was a tragedy foretold.

Tragedy foretold. Now, the report's not particularly long. It's about 25 pages. It's not intended to be exhaustive, but it is a highly effective summation and analysis of what's becoming increasingly undeniable. This is not, it's never been, a targeted hunt for Hamas. It's an excuse to attempt to finish the job of Zionism by fully dominating the Palestinians, destroying them in whole or in part, establishing a new demographic reality that can safeguard their state policy of Jewish supremacy. The second reason that this report is consequential is because as a report prepared for and delivered to the UN, it may carry special weight with the International Court of Justice, which is, of course, a UN body. The International Court of Justice has already determined that South Africa's case against

Israel on violation of the Genocide Convention is strong enough to be plausible. I had the chance to speak with Muin Roubani this week for Crystal Collins Friends, fresh off his debate on the Lex Friedman podcast. He went so far as to say that Albanese's report obligates the ICJ to take seriously a finding of genocide. Take a listen. I think the significant issue here is that the International Court of Justice, unlike the International Criminal Court, is a UN organ. It's one of the principal UN organs. And therefore, you could almost consider it a kind of obligation, even if that's putting it too strongly. The ICJ will take UN documents particularly seriously. And I think this is part of the reason

that it ultimately responded positively to South Africa's application in December was because so much of the information contained in the South African application was based on UN sources. So the ICJ basically had to either confirm the validity of what the UN was saying, or go against its own organization, so to speak. I think this report is a little different because of the way it was produced. But nevertheless, it will now become an official UN document. It will have to be carefully studied by the ICJ. And again, I have to read it in detail, but from what I've seen,

it seems to be a well-argued summary of the case against Israel, which once again finds that there is a plausible case against Israel for genocide. And finally, this report is significant because it demands action of the UN and its member states. After all, it is incumbent on every signatory to the genocide conventions not just to abide by the conventions themselves, but to work to prevent genocide and to punish genocide. Specifically, Albanese calls for a complete arms embargo of Israel and suggests sanctions may also be required to secure an immediate and lasting ceasefire. Unfortunately, of course, the U.S. has gone in the polar opposite direction. The very week that this report,

titled Anatomy of a Genocide, was presented, the U.S. outrageously claimed that Israel was acting in compliance with international humanitarian law, accepting that country's perversion of such law and the logic that all civilians and civilian infrastructure can be safely marked for destruction and extermination. This certification was granted specifically in order to enable the weapon shipments on which Israel is wholly dependent for continuation of their genocidal acts. The U.S. State Department additionally asserted that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid, which is funny since the U.S. has been reduced to dropping aid into Gaza from the sky at great danger to civilians, as if into some hostile territory rather than into a strip of land controlled by our great ally Israel. Those of us who have been paying attention have

been watching this genocide unfold clearly for months, from the reporting on how civilian power targets were being intentionally destroyed to the early announcement of a complete siege in which Palestinians were described as human animals, to the dire warnings of starvation and seeing those dire warnings becoming a nightmare reality. But for some reason, the last couple weeks do seem to have really shifted perceptions. That Al Jazeera drone video showing four unarmed Palestinians strolling along, obviously before being killed by a robot, which was controlled do seem to have really shifted perceptions. That Al Jazeera drone video showing four unarmed Palestinians strolling along, obviously, before being killed by a robot, which was controlled by some murderous human being who was doing the bidding of their entire genocidal government.

Seems to have been what flipped Alex Jones, Joe Rogan. The Flower Massacre, where over 100 Palestinians were murdered for the crime of seeking aid for their starving families. That seems to have brought home for many the scale of barbarism and cruelty, the levels of absolute desperation that Israel has driven these people to, with our help, of course. A new poll taken after the flower massacre actually shows a majority of Americans now disapprove of Israel's military action. Democrats disagree by a margin of 75 to 18. In addition to everything else, this report is validation. You aren't crazy.

The horrors you're watching every day are exactly what they seem to be. The powerless college kids who oppose this genocide, they're not the maniacs, they're not the monsters. The supposedly civilized class of DC elites who have turned the Gaza Strip into a pit of human misery, death, starvation, and despair, they are the true demons. One day, I'd like to see some deep reporting on how these supposedly

liberal humanitarians learn to love the crime of crimes. So guys, we still have our eyes on that horrific bridge collapse just outside of Baltimore. Now the expectation is that six construction workers who had been there repairing potholes are presumed dead after they plunged into that river after the bridge collapsed. We're fortunate to be joined this morning by Maximilian Alvarez. He is editor-in-chief of The Real News. He's also the author of the fantastic book, The Work of Living, and also happens to be a Baltimore resident who had just gotten back from a really important reporting trip to East Palestine, Ohio, when this bridge collapsed and was there on the scene talking to some people who were associated with those workers. It's great to see you, Max.

Great to see you too, sister. Thanks for having me on. So first, let's talk about who these workers were. We have a little bit of a report here from the Washington Post we can put up on the screen. They write, six presumed dead in bridge collapse were immigrants, soccer fans, family men. They say the Key Bridge, now twisted wreckage submerged in the Patapsco, once held six men high above the river. They were fathers, husbands, and hard workers. At least some of them had traveled to this country for a life they hoped would be prosperous and long. Just reflect a bit, Max, about the circumstances that put them in this position of danger and who they were in their lives.

Well, I'll start with the men we have identified so far because I want people to know their names, right? Because as we try to show every week here at The Real News Network, as I try to show on the Art of Class War segment at Breaking Points, and you do the same with your coverage, right? These are not just, you know, name tags and job titles. These are human beings who had lives and families and backstories and dreams and who were just trying to make a living and provide for their families, just like all of us are. These were workers, just like you.

These were, you These were community members. And so far, we, according to the New York Times, have been able to identify four of the men, two of whom were recovered in the last 24 hours, dead in a car. But the names we have so far are Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, age 35, Dorlean Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, Miguel Luna, who was in his 40s and from El Salvador, who was married with three children and been living in Maryland for 19 years, Maynard Yacir Suazo Sandoval, who was in his 30s from Honduras and immigrated here more than 17 years ago. What we know and what I've been reporting at The Real News is that we all know what happened to the bridge. This cargo ship on its way to Sri Lanka that had just left the port minutes earlier experienced a catastrophic

propulsion failure, issued a mayday call. We 90 seconds. We had about 90 seconds from that call to respond to it. And that is why police responded to that call to block traffic from entering the bridge. And credit to them, they did save lives. But you can hear in the dispatch recordings, an increasingly desperate dispatcher asking if anyone's going to go tell the work crew on that bridge about what was about to happen to them. And you hear a police officer saying, I'm here at the bridge, like, waiting for backup, and then I'll go up and tell them. And then the next thing you hear is another voice saying the bridge just collapsed. The thing that I've been trying to point out to people and the thing that Jesus Campos, another construction worker who works for Brawner

Builders, that's the contractor that employed the crew on that bridge. They were contracting with the state of Maryland to fill potholes on the bridge in the middle of the night so the rest of us could have a safe, smooth drive to work in the morning. They got no warning that they were about to meet their deaths. They were on that bridge without like in a clearly potentially hazardous work environment. And let's not forget the construction is one of the deadliest jobs in the country already. Six crew members on a similar crew died last year in Baltimore County when a car barreled into their crew on the side of the road. Right. So it was already dangerous. They were doing that work.

They were contracted out. They were doing that work in the dead of night while these mega ships were passing beneath their feet. And they had no direct line to emergency dispatch. That's why the police couldn't get to them in time. I'm not saying that the police should have raced faster to tell the men on the crew. I'm saying the men on that crew doing that job should have had a direct line to emergency dispatch in case something like this happened. We see why that's a necessity. But these men were just like so many other men and women who were working in this country, trying to make a life for themselves, right? They went to work, they kissed their families goodbye that night

to head to their night shift, which went from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. in the morning, and they never came home, right? I mean, like, and these are the kind of people, people like Jesus, people like the men on that bridge, people like me, people like my own foster daughter and her friends. She's undocumented from Honduras as well. Like, I mean, these are just regular people who we're all trying to make a life for ourselves. And right now, Trump and the people he has poisoned with his ideology are out there saying that we are the enemy destroying this country. But what are we actually doing? We're filling your potholes at night. We're cleaning your office buildings. Our children are being found cleaning bone saws in meatpacking

plants and working in parts distributing manufacturers for Hyundai in Alabama or picking tomatoes in Florida under slave-like conditions for the hamburger that you get at Wendy's, right? But it's not just that. I mean, there are so many of us who are just out there doing regular jobs, trying to like live our lives. We're not out here to try to destroy this country. We are helping making this country great. While the people who are destroying it are clear and obvious and in front of all of us. And yet people have been so brain poisoned by this, this xenophobic crap that they can't, they are too cowardly to confront the reality that is staring us right in the face,

which is that the rich, the corporations, and their bought-off politicians are screwing over all of us and pitting us against one another while everything from East Palestine to Boeing planes is crumbling all around us. I'm truly, as you can tell, kind of overwhelmed right now. Yeah, well, and I wish we could say it was just Donald Trump crumbling all around us. I'm truly, as you can tell, kind of overwhelmed right now.

Yeah. Well, and I wish we could say it was just Donald Trump or it was just right-wing media. But we've seen the way that Democrats have fully embraced the Republican position. I mean, you literally have Joe Biden going out and saying, you know, I thought Donald Trump previously, they were talking about how he's a fascist on the border. Now Biden's going out and saying, oh, why don't you work with me? I would love to adopt your border policy. The media consistently frames immigrants in a negative light, very similar to the Trumpian framing, as criminals, as invaders, as a problem to be dealt with. Versus, you know, when you see who the actual human beings who were here literally risking and losing their lives so that you can have a safer and smoother commute, it's a very different reality

that's out there of who these actual individuals are. Which, by the way, almost everybody in this country has to know an immigrant from somewhere, right? I mean, it's impossible not to. Think about who those people are in your life. Like, think about who those people are, because I can tell you in my life, literally the best people I know in my entire life are people who immigrated to this country. And so even though it's not, you know, affecting me directly, personally, my family, it does because I'm personally insulted by the caricature that has been painted of them and the way that they're consistently smeared again now at this point across the board. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know what else to say at this point. But I mean, like to anyone on breaking points to Sagar, to anyone who listens to him.

And like, I mean, if you can't think of anyone else, at least think of me. You guys watch me on this channel too. Think of me and my family, right? I mean, like, you know, and I don't know, maybe that's not enough. But, you know, I just really want to stress to people that, I mean, like, we are human beings and fellow workers just like you.

Our kids are your kids' friends at school. Like, you know, we're sitting next to you in the pews at church, right? I mean, we are not some horned, fanged, monstrous race of mongrels coming here to destroy this country. And you're absolutely right, Crystal. I mean, shame on the Democrats for just jumping on board this crap and totally throwing us and the constituents who voted for Biden in 2020 under the bus because we were shocked and horrified by what we were seeing at the border. And now we're just seeing a continuation of that. And what are we supposed to do? Who's gonna fight for us? And I just wanna make one more point here, cuz you mentioned at the top

that I got back from East Palestine, Ohio, where I've been like 24 hours before this bridge collapsed. I was there filming with the Real News. I've been interviewing people from that community. That's Trump country, right? I've been talking to those people all year about the hell that they are going through and lifting up their voices and their stories, right? And I told East Palestinians in East Palestine this Saturday,

it's not that working people have forgotten you. It's that so many other people out there feel just as forgotten as you do, right? Because I remember when Donald Trump came to Lordstown just a few miles down the road from East Palestine and told all the manufacturing workers there, particularly the workers who worked at the famous GM plant in Lordstown,

don't sell your homes because we're bringing manufacturing jobs back. I remember talking to workers at the Lordstown GM plant who felt hopeful about that. I also remember when Trump achieved his signature policy goal, which was a truly massive tax cut for the rich and for corporate America in 2017. I remember him gleefully at Mar-a-Lago going to tell his rich friends, quote, you all just got a lot richer. And the you in that sentence includes companies like GM and their CEO, Mary Barra. And I remember when GM got their tax cut, they were making great profits and they still laid off 14,000 people and shuttered the Lordstown

plant in 2019. I talked to those workers. I interviewed some of them on my podcast. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump's tax cuts alone would cost nearly $2 trillion over the next 10 years. That's $2 trillion worth of money out of the tax base, into the pockets of the 1%, into the offshore accounts. And now these same people, this same corporate class that is buying off Republicans and Democrats, like you said, is telling all of us that immigrants are the ones destroying these countries. They are going back to communities like East Palestine and Lordstown, Ohio, and saying that people who look like me, the workers, the migrants who are coming here for

a better life, they're the ones who are ruining your country while they're robbing all of us blind. We have to be able to see through this crap. We have to be able to find one another on that basic human level and say, I will fight for you. You are not that much different than I am. We are working people who are all just trying to make a better life. And we are all getting screwed over by this oligopoly, by this oligarchy that has taken over our economy, that is steering our politics, that is profiting off of war, that is cutting costs, cutting corners, leading to Boeing planes falling out of the sky, railroads derailing in our backyards. This country is going down the tubes because of them, not because of us. And if we band together and actually fight as one, as a community of the forgotten, as working people who say we won't be forgotten no more, we can actually make

a difference. But if you are buying into the crap, if you're taking the bait and you're letting yourself believe that immigrants like the men who were working on this bridge, filling potholes for you and me in the middle of the night, then I don't know what else to tell you. You're being played. You're doing the boss's work for them. Let's talk a little bit about that ideology that is the problem. Let's put this up on the screen. I mean, I honestly, I shouldn't have been surprised, but this is the type of logic that passes for elite economic thinking. So Citigroup's Andrew Hollenhorst was asked by Bloomberg about, you know, rebuilding the bridge, which seems like a pretty obvious basic priority. And he said, quote,

the U.S. is already grappling with an unprecedented deficit that is threatening to balloon in the coming years without substantial changes. If the U.S. borrows even more to invest in nuts and bolts, it would be inflationary in the short term, even if longer term it fosters greater price stability. So he's saying, no, actually, the federal government shouldn't even pay to rebuild this bridge. That's his argument. I mean, again, this is the kind of crap that the conclusions you come to when you live in this sort of elite bubble and everything that you're talking about is just a concept. But you're not talking to the actual people on the ground, working people, Democrat, Republican, non-voter, immigrant, non-immigrant, a union, non-union. If you just talk to people on the ground, you will get a very different picture of America than what people like that are trying to present to you. And we're already seeing this.

I know Ryan and Emily kind of covered this about the, you know, ridiculous, you know, right-wing conspiracy theories that are already like filtering through social media about this bridge collapse. And again, I say to people thinking like that, stop being a coward. Look at the reality that is staring you right in the face. You don't need to come up with some boogeyman explanation for what is patently obvious. I understand that people are gonna try to use towns like East Palestine and play them off Baltimore and say like, this is Trump country and Biden hasn't helped them. But look, he's gonna go try to rebuild the bridge as quick as possible in Baltimore. And what I would say to you

as someone who has been covering this on the railroads in East Palestine and now in Baltimore, that like actually what Biden is doing is incredibly consistent with what happened in East Palestine because that's probably why they made the disastrous decision in Norfolk Southern, pressured the local officials to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, set them on fire, released that massive death plume into the air, even though the manufacturer of the vinyl chloride said that

that was not necessary. There were no signs that the contents of those cars were going to explode like Norfolk Southern said they would, which has led people in the community to, I think, rightly surmise that the whole reason that they have been poisoned by that decision was not to prevent an explosion, but it was to clear the way so that Norfolk Southern could reopen those rail lines as soon as possible,

which I saw trains going through there every 15 minutes. That's why Biden is committing to rebuilding this bridge. It is a major thoroughfare. A lot of our trade depends on it. It's gonna hit the economy hard. I mean, but that's why they're rushing to, again, protect the sort of business interests, the economic interests,

but they are not gonna help the working people. It's about protecting capital. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, Max, tell people where they can find more of your work. And I wish Sagar was here today so he could have this exchange with you as well since his name came up. We'll have to have you back on so you can have some of these conversations face-to-face and engage on the topic.

Yeah, I would love to. I'd love to. I know you would. Have a heart-to-heart, right? Because this is, you guys, this is personal for me. This is personal for a lot of people that you know. We're not just abstractions. If we can at least talk on that level,

I can deal with differences of opinion. But look me in the face. See the people that you are talking about. And then let's talk about how to move forward. So Sagar, I welcome the conversation, brother. And I appreciate, again, all the work that you guys do. But of course, for obvious reasons, like I feel very strongly about this. I feel very strongly about, you know, working people and our collective struggles, which is what we try to cover every week at

The Real News Network. Folks can find us at therealnews.com. Please support the work that we're doing. Like every other media outlet, we're trying to do our best with what we've got. You can find my podcast, Working People, wherever you find podcasts are listened to. And of course, you can catch me occasionally on The Art of Class War here. Thank you so much, Crystal, for having me on. Oh, it's my pleasure. And we always love your segments that on The Art of Class War that pop up here and the audience really enjoys them. So I'll have to work on one of those again soon in the future. Great to see you, Max.

Take care. You too. Thank you guys so much for watching today. Sagar should be back next week. Thank you to Emily. She has like five different jobs. So she had to run to do her other job because the show went long today.

But always fun to spend time with her as well. And we'll see you guys next week. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast.

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