Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/31/25: Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg Fake Antisemitism Panic, Obama Knew Kamala Was Doomed, Elon Dumps Millions Into Supreme Court Race

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss billionaire Sheryl Sandberg fake antisemitism panic, Obama knew Kamala was doomed, Elon dumps millions into key Wisconsin Supreme Court election.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff. We can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things. Cowboy Carter. I know girl,

the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here.

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A new movie titled October 8th is out, which reports to track the rise of anti-Semitism in America, featuring Israeli propagandist Noah Tishbe, disgraced professor Shai Devidai, and crazy-eyed former Shin Bet fanatic Mosab Hassan Youssef. It is this clip, though, of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and corporate feminism fame that went viral online. I was on a walk with one of my closest friends who's not Jewish. And just out of nowhere, not expecting to say this, what came out of my mouth was, will you hide me? Like, if it comes to that, will you hide me and my family? And like, do I really think that's going to happen in the United States? No. And it was interesting because she didn't really

know what I was talking about. She said, what do you mean hide you? And I explained that there are these righteous people that hid Jews. This is the story of Anne Frank. And then of course she said, oh, I know what you mean. But any Jew would have known what I meant immediately. The movie, which depicts Jews as the ultimate victims and dishonestly conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, drops at a time when untold tens of thousands of Palestinians have been slaughtered. Israel has reinstituted a complete siege on Gaza, and here in our own country, students are being kidnapped off the street for the crime of opposing this ongoing U.S.-backed genocide. Reacting to this context, Andy Sandberg-Klipp, Sam Adler-Bell put it quite bluntly, quote, can we just be honest about this for an effing second? The current

government of the U.S. is using the protection of Jews to disappear people from our streets for their political speech on your behalf. You got what you wanted. They're the Nazis. You're a collaborator. Now, Bell later clarified, in case there was any doubt, he was specifically singling out Sandberg here, which makes sense given her prominent role in pushing atrocity propaganda that has been used to justify Israeli war crimes. Not to mention how insulting it is to all of us to watch a billionaire expect us to see her personally as a victim while an entire helpless population is being starved. His core point, though, is worth contemplating further because he rightly points out the way that liberal language around campus safety and protection of Jews is being used to push the bleeding edge of Trump's authoritarian power grab, a scheme that seeks to silence all critics and hobble all political

adversaries, not just among immigrants and not only with regards to Israel. Many of us watched with horror last week the video of a student from Turkey abducted off the street while stepping out to visit some friends by a mob of masked, plainclothes state thugs. Her crime here? Publishing an op-ed in the student newspaper that happened to sort of be critical of Israel. Now, these scenes have been playing out on campuses across the entire country. Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was taken first from Columbia. We covered that extensively. Another Columbia student and green card holder Yunsao Chung, she was able to get a court order blocking her arrest. She's been in the U.S. since she was seven years old. Badr Kansouri, a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow, was arrested seemingly

over his wife's Palestinian ancestry. He's now in custody in Texas. An international Minnesota student was arrested by ICE, the details of which we actually still don't even know, but it's suspected to be part of this state crackdown on Israel dissent. That's not a complete list, and pretty soon, we're not going to be able to track all of these instances and the specific details. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that hundreds of students are already being targeted by ICE for similar thought crimes. I think it's stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country. They're going to go to your universities as visitors. They're visitors

and say, I'm going to your universities to start a riot. I'm going to your universities to take over a library and harass people. I don't care what movement you're involved in. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa. You're saying it could be more than 300 visas? Sure, I hope. I mean, at some point, I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them.

Protecting Zionism was only the tip of the spear, however. These efforts are now branching out beyond Israel to any sort of speech or ideological inclination that this regime objects to. A University of Alabama student was arrested with no charges, no seeming connection to any of the protest activity. He was Iranian, however, so I suppose that made him automatically suspect somehow. Ken Klippenstein got hold of a leaked memo mandating all current and returning visa holders be subjected to an ideological test conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture, including government, institutions, or founding principles. One of those founding principles, of course, is freedom of speech, but I don't think they've got that one in mind at the current moment. As part of this purge, Zateo scoops that ICE is manually changing the immigration status of students in a database normally

maintained by universities. Now, visas allow students to enter the country, status allows them to stay, and it's dependent on things like being good standing at the school, taking a certain number of courses, etc. ICE is changing student statuses and in many instances not even notifying students, so we can't even really say what sort of wrong thing they are being targeted for. Nor is the crackdown only aimed at immigrants. Supposed anti-Semitism is being used to control entire universities, and pro-Palestine protests are being routinely described by top law enforcement officials as terrorism, with major potential implications for anyone, citizen or non, who would want to participate. The entire apparatus of the state is being marshaled to

enforce conformity and compliance, targeting immigrant protest leaders while waving the flag of Jewish safety, open the door to an ever-expanding assault on all of our rights. Now, in retrospect, I guess it was predictable that Zionism would be the Trojan horse for ushering in this fascistic program. After all, liberal politicians and Zionists pioneered the use of this sort of language about Jewish safety in order to cover up their own defense of the Israeli Jewish supremacist ethnostate, an explicitly fascist project. How else could they cloak their support for a regime that completely undermines their supposed commitment to equality, tolerance, to human rights. White supremacy, of course, that's a no. Black

nationalism, also a no. But Jewish supremacy? Nearly all democratic elites would defend it to the death. Why? Well, in addition to the well-organized and very influential Israel lobby, Israel aids U.S. empire. It's always served as a critical strategic beachhead for battles in the Middle East over communism or over oil or whatever ends our empire wanted to accomplish. It was also easy to feel after the Holocaust, of course, that the Jewish people were the ultimate victim group deserving of this special status. Now, this sense was deepened by our own national guilt of denying entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. For many older democratic officials, Israel, with its Kibbutzim and dominant Labor Party, also sort of coded liberal, lefty even, until its modern hard right turn. As for the Democratic base, their minds

just largely glossed over, I think, the central contradictions to the extent they really thought that much about it at all. Jews deserved a safe refuge, did they not? Both parties in the media, they all seemed to agree. And Palestinians, they were allowed scarcely any voice at all, so their suffering in the occupation at the hands of Israel was pretty easy to invisibilize. Today, though, due to sustained attention to the genocidal assault on a trapped population that Israel's been committing with our government's full backing, there is now a profound split between the Democratic base and their elected leaders. I suppose for your average Democrat watching Israel,

the supposed victim, reduce Gaza to complete rubble with full backing from the most powerful military on earth, well, you might say that it kind of heightened the contradictions. For the first time, Gallup has found that a plurality of Democrats have more sympathy for Palestinians than for Israelis by a margin of 49 to 38. But unlike the base, the vast majority of Democratic electeds have remained committed to warping liberal values to defend their support of a violent ethnostate. Think of Biden's frequent rejoinder that without Israel, no Jew on earth is safe, or Kamala's full-throated condemnation of pro-Palestine protests. That this ideological framing was already pervasive and embraced by

liberal elites made it very easy for Trump to weaponize in his authoritarian power grab. Democratic Party had already conceded under Biden that protesters were criminal Hamas terrorist supporters, leaving party elites only with appeals to due process to push back against this authoritarian onslaught. Now, casual observer could be left wondering why Democrats would care so much about keeping these students in the country if they're such terrible, terrorist-loving people, after all. Yale professor Jason Stanley, himself a Jew and a scholar of fascism, describes well how Trump has taken this opening, wielded for himself the language of safety, and is using Jewish people in his words as the, quote, sledgehammer for fascism. Take a listen.

What are the most toxic anti-Semitic tropes? Well, Jews control the institutions. This is absolutely reinforcing this. Any young American is going to think, remember what happened when they took down the world's greatest university system on behalf of Jewish safety? And this will go down in history books. The history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism. So if we don't speak out, if we American Jews do not speak out against this, this will be a grim chapter in our history as Americans. It's the first time in my life as an American that I've been fearful of our status as equal Americans, not because of

the protests on campus, which, as I said, had a lot of Jewish students in them. But because we are suddenly at the center of politics, of U.S. politics, it's never good to be in the crosshairs for us. And we are being used to destroy democracy. Right now, today, Zionist groups are compiling hit lists of students for ICE to target for deportation. Betar USA claims to have sent the Trump administration thousands of names of targets, and they don't limit themselves, by the way, to visa or even green card holders. That group posted, quote, We told you we've been working on deportations and will continue to do so. Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month.

You heard it here first. Those who support jihad and intifada and originate in terrorist states will be sent back to those lands. Some liberal Zionists are starting to become uncomfortable with what is now being done in their names. Shalabin Ephraim tweeted this response to Betar's glee over sticking ice on student protesters, quote, the amount of damage these people are doing to Jews and to Zionists is immeasurable. Free press contributor Eli Lake objected to Mahmoud Khalil's deportation on Twitter, saying, quote, as much as I despise campus solidarity with baby stranglers,

I love American values poor. Now, these posts, though welcome, fail to realize that their own ideology is helping to grease the skids for Trump's crackdown. Beitar is the logical end result of the zero-sum ideology of Zionism, in which the very existence of Palestinians poses an existential threat to Israel as a Jewish supremacist state. Mass deportations of students like Khalil are going to be easy to get away with if you succeed in convincing the public that they truly are in league with quote-unquote baby stranglers. And to return to Sheryl Sandberg, how can you not realize that in your rush to imagine yourself, a billionaire, as a victim here in America,

in some sort of grave danger, you are feeding the exact narrative which is putting students in actual danger. Your anti-Semitism panic is helping Trump execute on an authoritarian crackdown. At this point, if you can't see that, yeah, I think it's fair to call you a collaborator. America's defense of a violent authoritarian state is being used to import that violence and that authoritarianism back here at home. And treacherous road cloaked in the language of safety makes all of us, citizen and immigrant, Jew and non-Jew alike, much less safe. And Sagar, I know this isn't the entirety of what's going on here, but if you look at the... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player,

Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does.

It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Very excited to be joined by two fantastic journalists. We have Jonathan Allen, who's senior national politics reporter for NBC News, and Amy Parnes, senior correspondent for The Hill. And more importantly for today, authors, co-authors of a new book called Fight, Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. It tells the inside story of everything from concerns about Biden, Biden dropout, debate night, Nancy Pelosi, Obama's involvement, Trump's reaction to the assassination, Kamala Harris going in, what they thought about whether or not they were going to be victorious on election night. So super excited to dig into all of that with both of you guys. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, of course. So, Amy, let me go ahead and start with you. We'll start chronologically here. So leading into that now infamous debate with Joe Biden, where he performs catastrophically and it ends up in a push and an eventual successful push to get him out of the race. Were there concerns among his aides about his ability to stand for a second term? What sort of things were going on on the inside to keep the public from knowledge of what his present condition was? I don't think there were any real deep concerns from his aides. I mean, I know that there was concern, a little bit of concern about the debate, but almost, you know, they just didn't feel like Trump was worthy of a debate. It's not that they thought that Biden couldn't handle it. But of course, as we report in the book, there is a lot of, there's a lot that has happened

behind the scenes, people looking at things. We detail one anecdote about Eric Swalwell, someone who ran against Joe Biden in 2020, someone that he's not, he's a rank and file member, but he's been more public than that. Joe Biden doesn't recognize him at a congressional picnic. People had moments with the president that weren't very flattering to him, we should say. And so we think that President Biden at the time, you know, he held a lot of responsibility for the outcome of this election. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the central themes really of your book. We have the moment here. We should relive and then we'll get to some of the fallout. Let's take a listen to that debate. me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare.

Thank you, President Biden. President Trump? Well, he's right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. I mean, that was it. That was the moment. It was almost, what, 15 minutes or so. It was completely undeniable. And it was even more downhill from there. John, can you just go into some of the background and the immediate aftermath of that debate and what that was like here in Washington with all the phone lines and who decided to finally get him out of the race? Yeah, let me start with during the debate, we opened the book in Nancy Pelosi's condo. She's watching this debate by herself. She had actually urged Biden not to debate Trump.

I think she had a sneaking suspicion that it would have been difficult for Biden to beat Trump. So she's watching alone. We do a sort of a 360 of all these sort of influential people. We take them inside their houses while they're watching this debate with concern, many of them not going to the traditional debate watch parties because of that lingering concern. And then Joe Biden walks out and all of a sudden the text message chains in the Democratic Party start lighting up, just like you guys know. I'm sure you were hearing from friends, from people you interview, what they were thinking as the debate's going on. This is going on throughout the Democratic universe, this incredible just uh, just sort of, um, disillusionment, uh, concern fear. It was so bad, uh, that one source we spoke to, uh, who had talked to Nancy Pelosi that night said her concern was that the party was going to rush

to get Biden out so fast that they could only end up with Kamala Harris as the nominee. Uh, Pelosi had concerns about Harris, certainly had concerns about Biden. And when you ask about, you know, what ends up happening, Joe Biden gets choked off by his donors. It makes it more difficult for him to move forward. I think a lot of the Democratic elected officials, I know a lot of the Democratic elected officials were scared to say that they wanted, you know, say publicly that they wanted him to get out because their own bases were split over that question. So no matter what they say about it, they end up alienating half the people. Pelosi just kept pushing it along behind the scenes. You saw

her repeatedly go on television, sort of say things that encouraged him to get out. Joe Biden needs to make a decision. She said that three days after he said affirmatively that he was going to stay in the race, she wanted to see an open primary. Barack Obama wanted to see an open primary. They were in communication with each other. We take you inside in this book to Pelosi's conversations with Joe Biden himself. But basically there's this, I think this divide in the Democratic Party that happens between the people who think only Joe Biden can win and the people who think that Joe Biden is the only person who couldn't possibly win. And what's important, I think, for readers, and you'll really get the sense as you read it, if you're looking forward to 2028,

is you get a sense of what it is the politicians and the political establishment are willing to let you hear as a voter versus, you know, what they're really thinking and getting inside that and understanding how that works so that you can make good decisions as a voter, a donor, an activist in the future, I think is really important. I think that's a really great point. Amy talked to us about some of those things that they wouldn't say publicly. One of them was a lot of people, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Biden aides had concerns about Kamala Harris, which is like, I don't know why you put her on the ticket in the first place. If you know, this is the person you're supposed to hand the baton off to, and you have all of these great political concerns about

her, but you don't talk about that and how that played out in her rush to get Biden to endorse her, to try to close the door on any potential competitors and also some of the machinations behind the scenes with Pelosi and Obama specifically to try to push more towards an open process because of their concerns about her. Yeah, I mean, they were, as John just mentioned, they were in touch, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, a couple of times. And we report about that in great detail in the book. But they both thought, particularly Barack Obama, former President Barack Obama, that he didn't think that she could win. And we spoke to people very, very close to him who say this, and there

were major concerns. So I think they were doing a quiet sort of lobbying effort to see, you know, what to see what the mood was and whether there was enough support for it. Certainly, I think Barack Obama was hearing from some donors. I know Nancy Pelosi was, too, that that Kamala Harris couldn't win. And so we take you behind the scenes and we show you what was happening and what transpired. And I think that they kept doing this up until the final minutes of, you know, right after Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris. I think they were still calling around. It's why I think Barack Obama kept his powder dry for several days. He wanted to see how all of this would play out. But he had major, major concerns. What were the concerns? What were the nature of the concerns? I mean, the fact that she just wouldn't be able to win. I think that they all saw her as a weaker vice president. I don't think that they felt like Joe Biden had really championed

her enough. She was coming in kind of ill-prepared to run as president. Certainly, they looked back at her last campaign, I'm sure, and made that. But they were pretty open behind the scenes about how they felt, and we report a lot about that in this book. Guys, if I could jump in here for just one second. I think one of the things that's really illuminating is just how much Joe Biden and his team tried to do to undermine Kamala Harris in order to keep him above water after that debate. You know, they just kept pushing her down. His aides were talking to donors and telling them, you know, basically threatening them with Kamala Harris saying, if you keep pushing on him to get out, you're going to end up with Kamala Harris and she's going to be terrible. And some of these people were idiotic enough to send these messages electronically.

So there's records preserved. You can read about that in the book. You know, what Pelosi is doing behind the scenes, what Obama's doing behind the scenes, all of this is basically an argument against the only person who is likely to win the nomination if Biden got out, right? The idea that the Democratic Party is going to somehow skip over Kamala got out, right? The idea that the Democratic Party is going to somehow skip over Kamala Harris, given all that we know about the Democratic Party, is a non-starter. So in order to survive, Biden starts knocking Harris internally. He's trying to harm her internally, and his team is trying to do that. We have this great scene in the book, even to the point that a lot of this is ego too. When Biden eventually hands off, you know, and says to Harris over the phone that he's going

to get out, she asked him for his endorsement. And he kind of says, well, maybe like, you know, Wednesday, maybe a few days from now. And she's like, no, I need you to endorse me now, because if you don't do that, there's going to be an open convention and it's going to be, you know, a crap show for lack of a better term. And they go back and forth. There are multiple phone calls never before reported on this effort by Joe Biden to sort of, you know, kind of extract this, you know, a pleading, a begging from Kamala Harris, because he wanted to take a little bit of a victory lap after he got out and she, of course, needed him to get in immediately. That is crazy.

Yeah, I mean, John, can you— The way these people think. It's all so delusional. Yeah, it's crazy. And, you know, I think the craziest part, guys, of the book, to me, was about the no daylight moment where he, not only after he drops out, he's stage managing her from behind from a position of power. And he's like, no daylight.

You can't put me down. There's no distance. And this leads to her some of the most disastrous moments of her campaign. So, John, you can start and Amy and follow up on this. I mean, I just thought it was an insane dynamic and such excellent reporting also from the two of you. Thank you. You know, it's the sort of mantra that you have with your vice presidential candidate. You know, they go back to 2020 with her running with him. No daylight between us, you know, try to make sure the vice presidential candidates on the same page. What is insane is that now that he's out, he is telling her all the time, no daylight between us. You're not allowed to run your own campaign. You still

work for me, basically. He says no daylight kid to her on the day of the debate that she has with Trump. Amazing that he's calling her kid at this point, Bill. But there really was a belief in his mind that she shouldn't be able to win the presidency or wouldn't be able to win the presidency if she distanced herself from him. And of course, as we all know, she needed to distance herself from him because number one, he had become less popular. Number two, the agenda had become less popular. She needed to at least be able to point to the American people and say, here are a couple of things I'm doing differently. Here are a couple of things I would have done differently.

And, you know, look, part of this is Kamala Harris's loyalty and then politics that's seen, I think, by a lot of people as a very good character trait, you know, that she was it was difficult for her to be disloyal to somebody who'd been good to her. And at the same time, if the Democrats wanted to win, she absolutely had to break from him. And he did not want to let her do that, did not want to let her win without being tied completely to him. And the ego and the narcissism and the selfishness of that is something that I think for people who really loved both Joe Biden in 2020 and thought that he was the goat, the greatest of all time, now look at him and say he's more of a lowercase goat. Yeah. Not to mention, I mean, she had to inherit his staff. You know, she brought in a few of her close aides. They were

relegated to a room off to the side. They were never really fully embraced. I think that they all felt a little like they were the JV team and the Biden team was the varsity team. So there was that sense. And we get into that a lot in this book. There's a chapter called, I won't say it, but it's Ephory. And it goes into all the civil war that it was essentially playing out inside the campaign after the switch happened. Well, because some of these people that are on the campaign are probably the same people that were leaking that Kamala Harris could never win and what a terrible candidate she was, et cetera, et cetera. And now they're on the team supposedly, you know, trying to, trying to help her be able to win. Um, Amy, just to wrap up here, you know,

Tim, Tim Wells made this, uh, comment, I'll paraphrase about how, you know, he didn't think they were ever really ahead and they were playing this sort of like prevent defense. And he's like, I don't know why we needed to take more risks because I feel like we were always behind. Did they have a, like, what did their internals say? Did they have a chance to win? Did they think they were going to win going into election day? They had a chance. They had a big chance. And they were both shocked. And we take you inside the room. We take you inside into what Kamala Harris is thinking and feeling as she is told that she has lost the race and is losing the race in the final hours of the campaign. And Tim Walz is just as shocked. He's sitting in the Mayflower Hotel. We also take you inside that

room where he just can't believe it. They were gaslit. They were led to believe that they were going to win. And the end will shock you. All right. The end will shock you. Good teaser for the book. And by the way, guys, we focused on the Harris Biden piece of this, but you all also go into the Trump part. I know you've got an anecdote in here about how Biden says he will never forgive Nancy Pelosi for her role in pushing him out. So there's all kinds of fascinating tidbits here. And really appreciate you guys taking the time out to talk to us about all of it. Thank you, guys.

We'll have a link in the description to the book. Everybody should go and buy it. We'll see you guys later. Thank you. Thank you. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working,

and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on hell and gone murder line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is Ben Wickler. He's the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party on the verge of a major election, Supreme Court election there. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Grateful to be with you. This is go time in the biggest

election in the first two thirds of this year, and it's potentially going to come down to the wire in the next about 32 hours. Okay, so obviously, Elon Musk has been a major part of this current election now so far. He's been actually campaigning on the ground in the state, subject to legal challenges and more. We have a clip of that, and we're going to get your reaction. Let's take a listen. Like shocking, really. It's insane. Yeah. It's really wild. So, I mean, it was inevitable that at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience. Give my regards to George. Say hi to George for me. USA! USA! USA! USA!

So, Ben, Elon has turned himself into a bit of a lightning rod there in Wisconsin. He's pumped some $20 million into the race. As I understand, you guys have plenty of money on your side, too. Can you tell us about how it reflects the national political dynamics right now on the ground? Absolutely. So Elon Musk has now poured in 20 million through his super PACs and organizations, 3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party. He's given out $3 million in checks. And he has these petitions where anyone who signs gets a hundred bucks. We don't know, you know, if, if 10,000 people have signed, that's another million dollars right there. If it's 100,000, that's 10 million. He's poured in vastly more money than any donor has ever put into any election, judicial election in the history of the country. Many times, much, much more than all the other billionaire donors on both

sides of this race combined, about 10 times as much as, or 30 times, or 15 times as much as Elon Musk, who we mentioned. Susan Crawford's campaign is mostly funded, vast majority, by the more than 175,000 people who've made small-dollar donations. And that's been enough to allow her to go toe-to-toe with Elon Musk's groups and Brad Schimel on the air, because Susan Crawford's actually inspired people who believe in democracy. Wisconsin used to have campaign finance rules. Those were rolled back by Republicans and defended by Brad Schimel, the Republican candidate in the race. He defended the attacks on campaign finance in Wisconsin. He defended the gerrymandered maps, which are Elon Musk's giant obsession.

He defended the abortion bans. He's a big supporter of the abortion ban passed in 1849 before the Civil War that he wants to snap back into place. He's running as a kind of mega activist to be the deciding vote on the state Supreme Court. This will determine the majority. So with Susan Crawford, it's, you know, integrity, an independent judiciary, and someone who believes in democracy and freedom. With Brad Schimel, it is Elon Musk, Donald Trump, rubber stamp. So let's talk a little bit about the nature of this race. First of all, it's worth noting for everybody. Technically, it's a nonpartisan race, but, you know, as you're referring to them as the Democrat and Republican candidate, and I think that's fair enough because they, you know, there's

a liberal candidate, there's a conservative candidate. Musk is all in behind this conservative candidate. Help us understand, like, why this particular Supreme Court race is so important to him. Because he has put himself at the center of this race. My understanding, you can correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of the ads that are being run on the Democratic or liberal side are about Elon Musk. So what is it that has made him so interested in this particular Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin? I think it's three reasons that kind of fell like dominoes. First, his company, Tesla, is suing Wisconsin about car dealership laws so he can sell Teslas directly to people in the state. So he would personally benefit from buying our state Supreme Court, just as he's personally benefiting from running the federal government and giving himself giant contracts. So there's personal self-financial

interest here. The second thing is the thing he talks about all the time, which is that he wants to lock in the Wisconsin congressional gerrymander. He said in his town hall that this will determine control of the House of Representatives in the United States, and that will determine the future of the Trump agenda, and that will determine the future of Western civilization. That's how he put it. Wisconsin has hyper-gerrymandered congressional maps. Six of the eight congressional seats are in Republican hands, and he wants to make sure there's no review of whether that gerrymander is constitutional. There's no lawsuit on the books about this now, but he wants to lock in a gerrymander that guarantees Republican control. So that is his stated reason, which itself is pretty repellent. There's a third dimension here now, too, which is that he's put

his face on this race. So this is now a referendum on whether Elon Musk should be able to waltz into any election and buy the outcome, buy someone who's corrupt and dedicated to doing whatever he wants. If Musk succeeds, then you know every ambitious mega-politician will be doing everything they can to kiss up to Elon Musk, and he will flood the zone in every local election across the country, as he's apparently musing about doing. If Susan Crawford wins, then we demonstrate that he does not have the power that he wants everyone to think that he has politically, and people might start really standing up to him. So he has his own political power at stake in this fight as well. Ben, I know you were involved in the DNC race. I'm curious for your view generally of campaign

finance. From what I see, we've got Reid Hoffman, a couple of billionaires, George Soros, as well as J.B. Pritzker, who are involved on the Democratic side for the candidate you're voicing support for here. So how do you reconcile some of this billionaire talk with some of the billionaire intervention on the Democratic side as well? Well, it's pretty simple. It is in our party's platform that we believe in campaign finance reform. We should go back to public financing of judicial elections in Wisconsin. We should overturn Citizens United. We don't believe in unilateral disarmament. So we're going to fight with everything we've got to elect people to office, especially the offices that can pass laws, to change our campaign finance laws.

What we cannot allow is a situation where the richest person in the world tramples in and, by bringing overwhelming financial force to bear, just buys whatever outcome he wants. And we're very clear at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin that that plank in our platform is not for sale. We're going to try to change these laws if folks are elected who share these values. And on the Republican side, they are, on one hand, changing the laws to allow floods of money. And on the other hand, just doing giant favors for whoever it is that, you know, pays the piper. And that to me is a system of corruption that should end. Ben, one thing I wanted to get your sort of read on as well is really, I think for the first time I've certainly seen you have Democratic base voters who are very upset with Democratic leaders. Democratic leadership in Washington is underwater with the Democratic base.

And it's for a really simple reason. They feel like they're not doing enough to stand up to Trump and to stand up to Elon Musk. So what are you hearing in Wisconsin from the just sort of like normie Democrat rank and file? And what would your advice be to that leadership in Washington of how they can more effectively fight back against an agenda that, you know, much of the country opposes? It comes up all the time across the state. People want to fight back. They're, they're crying out. They're pulling their hair out. They feel like they're being punched in the face every day by Musk and Trump, and they want to punch back. And what we're trying to do in Wisconsin is show what that looks like. Susan Crawford is in a Susan versus Goliath battle

against the world's richest man. She says on the stump, she'll tell her story as a prosecutor, as a judge, as someone who defended Planned Parenthood in the case Planned Parenthood versus Brad Schimel. And then she'll say, and now let me tell you about my opponent, Elon Musk. And the room will light up. And my hope is that when they see how Susan Crawford has succeeded in defeating Musk, Trump, and Brad Schimel, that that will energize Democrats everywhere to fight back. I think, you know, across the country, Democrats should communicate everywhere all the time. They should be on offense, and they should link what Musk and Trump are doing to the harm that it causes in people's lives, to the workers who are laid off, to the people in cancer clinical trials that are suddenly shut down who now have no hope for a cure,

to the folks receiving Social Security who can't get their calls returned when they have an emergency or the payment's not coming through. This is stuff that really matters to people. And Democrats should not be scared of their shadow. We should be going in with both fists to make sure that people can see not just how bad the Republicans are, but that Democrats stand for something, will fight for something, will fight for a country that works for working people, not just far-right billionaires, and will fight for a democracy. Well, I appreciate your commitment to the bit, Ben, and I appreciate your analysis here. We'll see if you guys prevail.

Thanks so much. Thank you, Ben. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. We'll see you all tomorrow. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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