Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/10/24: Arizona Civil War Era Abortion Ban, CNN Debunks Israel Flour Massacre Lies, Ecuador Raid On Mexican Embassy, MTG Threatens Johnson Ouster, Norfolk Southern Fined Over Derailment, NPR Editor Blasts Organizations Bias

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Arizona's Civil War era abortion ban, Lloyd Austin claims no evidence of Israel genocide, CNN debunks Israel claims on Flour Massacre, Ecuador raid on Mexican embassy, MTG threatens to oust Mike Johnson, 702 surveillance battle in Congress, Norfolk Southern fined over East Palestine derailment, NPR editor blasts the organizations bias.   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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be a discount, subscribe to the premium version of the show, then we will do a Friday show. Make sure to subscribe to the premium version of the show. We might do it anyway. We might as well subscribe. It was almost like a threat. Yes. Well, today we're going to start, obviously, in Arizona. Huge news from the Supreme Court in Arizona yesterday on an abortion ruling, 160-year-old abortion ruling that is now in effect in the state of Arizona. We'll break it all down. We're then going to talk about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's conversation with Tom Cotton during testimony in front of Congress yesterday and some other big updates out of the Middle East.

CNN has a new investigation into the Flower Massacre. Looks very similar to the World Central Kitchen Massacre. Looks to be a deliberate assault on the distribution of aid for the purpose of what Lloyd Austin says is not happening. So we'll break that down. People can also see Ecuador on the screen. Not every day that we have Ecuador on the CounterPoints rundown. But today we have a good reason to talk about Ecuador and a really interesting guest. Yes. You may remember

Guillaume Long, former foreign minister from a previous show. He's now going to join us because Mexico yesterday released harrowing video of Ecuadorian police raiding the Mexican embassy in Ecuador, dragging out the leftist vice president who they've charged with corruption, and kicking off an international incident. And we'll talk about the U.S. response to the behavior of its U.S.-backed regime in Ecuador, which is quickly becoming, going from one of the safest countries in South America to be a U.S.-backed narco state. So Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the precipice of moving to vacate the chair. She already, I guess, filed the motion, but when she pushes for a vote on it is anybody's guess.

And one of the big reasons for that is actually a really admirable fight over Section 702 that Freedom Caucus-type Republicans and Justice Democrat-type members could come together on and try to get to some reform. It's a huge surveillance mechanism. We've talked about it many times, and most of you are probably familiar with it, but there's a lot going on. The Biden administration is backing a terrible reauthorization bill, essentially. And that vote is today and tomorrow. So this is a six-month fight over surveillance authorities that is coming down today. Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social. We'll try to figure out what he was trying to say. And Norfolk Southern agreed,

announced that it will settle for $600 million with victims in East Palestine. So we'll bring some details, talk a little bit about that. And an NPR business reporter of 20 plus years penned an essay in the Free Press yesterday. It was super buzzy, kind of blowing the whistle on NPR, but I think Ryan and I will have a lot to talk about in that segment. Yeah. All right. Let's start in Arizona. We can put a one up on the screen. This is a report from NBC News in which they point out this 160 year near total abortion ban that's still on the books in the state was ruled enforceable by the Arizona Supreme Court yesterday. They call it a bombshell decision that adds to the state growing list of places where abortion care is effectively banned. Now more from the article. This is

an 1864 law. In the middle of the Civil War, before Arizona was a state, it made abortion a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performs an abortion or helps a woman obtain an abortion. Now, there's some back and forth in the courts after Roe, as happened in a lot of states. Arizona is similar to a lot of states in this respect. The Civil War era law, NBC writes, enacted a half a century before Arizona even gained statehood, was never repealed. So an appellate court ruled last year that it could remain on the books as long as it was, quote, harmonized with a 2022 law, leading to substantial confusion in Arizona regarding exactly when during a pregnancy abortion was outlawed. The other thing I think is worth noting in this case is that the Attorney General of Arizona has said that she's not going to enforce it,

but local prosecutors can enforce the old law. So that's not entirely comforting to supporters of abortion in Arizona or even opponents of this move from the Supreme Court. The other thing that I want to point out that I haven't seen in a lot of media reports is the way the Arizona Supreme Court handled this. Basically, they said, we think a decision of this gravity should be left to the people of Arizona. Basically, that there's legislative supremacy over the court in this case. So it's not sort of like the Alabama, you know, sort of, what's the best way to put it, like Judeo-Christian theological decision about IVF. They're actually just saying that we think

the people of Arizona, this is almost, I'm paraphrasing from the decisions, the people of Arizona, the legislature of Arizona, their representatives should make a decision on this. And in fact, it looks like that's what's going to happen in Arizona later this year. It's like, hey, you know, the people of Arizona spoke in 1864, 50 years before Arizona was a thing. And there were probably, what, 15 settlers who passed and voted on that. I like how you said before Arizona was a thing. Yeah. I mean, it was a thing. It was like part of Mexico and it was home to a lot of indigenous populations still at the time.

But yeah, seven of them got together and wrote a law banning abortion. And so now, but yes, so before we get into Kerry Lake's response here, the stage was set by Arizona Republicans, and you correct me if I'm wrong, because you followed this closer, when they passed this 15-week abortion ban in 2022, before Roe v. Wade was overturned. And they put into that law a provision that said, if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, then actually forget this 15-week ban. We're going for broke. The entire 1864 law goes into effect. And that's why the court was able to make this completely ridiculous ruling and go back to 1864, because they had re-upped it in 2022. And it's also why Carrie Lake kind of knew ahead of time that this was going to happen.

So it's not as if she can say she was caught off guard here. Carrie Lake, of course, the Republican senatorial candidate in Arizona. So we can put up her reaction here to this ruling, which is saying that this would be a three. This is her saying, I oppose today's ruling and I am calling on Katie Hobbs and the state legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support. What's odd about this reaction is that she was asked about this in 2022, and this is in a presidential debate. This is not like a gotcha moment with somebody on a rope line. Here she is in a 2022 senatorial debate. Terry, we'll start with you on this one. The new law banning abortion in Arizona after 15 weeks. There's that law and there's a territorial era law which bans all abortion, Zippo, over. Which law do you

think should take effect? My personal belief is that all life matters, all life counts, and all life is precious. And I don't believe in abortion. I think the older law is going to take, is going to go into effect. That's what I believe will happen. Okay, but you approve of that? What, at conception? I believe life begins at conception. Okay, what do we do about abortion pills? What do we do about...

I don't think abortion pills should be legal. That's a very good question. Not in Arizona. So there you have Carrie Lake saying, look, I suspect and I support the older law going into effect. Did she not? So what explains the change in two years? Is it the shellacking that Republicans took and the polls in 2022? Yeah, I think that's absolutely it. I've sort of seen the pattern after Roe. And again, like Doug Ducey passed that law. He was the governor of Arizona. He was on Twitter

complaining about it. He was on Twitter complaining about it. It's considered sort of moderate. And Doug Ducey said, this is not the outcome that I would have preferred. And actually, a lot of Arizona Republicans, it reminded me in many ways to what happened in Alabama after the IVF ruling came down, where you had a sort of race among Republicans to get out that statement condemning the ruling and saying, you know, it's not a workable solution. It's basically sounding similar to Democrats on some of those questions, but with the caveat that I'm really pro-life, but X, Y, and Z. It really is like condemning the panther eating your face after you nominated the panther to the court and signed into law legislation that enabled the panther to then

eat your face. It does seem like there was something intentionally ambiguous about what happened with the 15-week ban versus, yeah, it does seem like that. But obviously, Doug Ducey says it's not the outcome that he would have preferred. Kerry Lake is now backpedaling. I saw a senior advisor to Kerry Lake talking to Steve Bannon yesterday saying, you know, this is obviously Democrats. Basically, Democrats have a huge electoral gift in the question of abortion. And so there has to be a way to talk about this. And that puts the writing on the wall for where

Cary Lake is going to go going forward. Now, I think a lot of Arizona voters are going to be heading to the ballot box and making decisions based on economics, their pocketbooks in the fall. I think it's probably going to be a heavy border-related election. But man, in terms of mobilizing the base or demobilizing the base, not getting people excited to vote for, for example, Carrie Lake, brutal. I mean, that will matter on the margins. So you think Carrie Lake going kind of wobbly on this from the rights perspective could kind of hurt her with some of her ground support? What do you mean by that? I think it's the type of thing that makes a kind of the opposite.

It makes a suburban woman who's really upset with what they see as radical policies from the Democrats, from Joe Biden, from Gay Ho, all of those things say, I just am not going to vote. I can't vote for Carrie Lake. You know, I don't like the other guys, but I'm not going to vote for Carrie Lake. So I'm staying home. OK. Yeah. Or they become single issue on that on that question. I can't vote for Carrie Lake. You know, I don't like the other guys, but I'm not going to vote for Carrie Lake, so I'm staying home. Okay, yeah. Or they become single issue on that question. Definitely that will happen, too. And come out and say, look, we're not going to be governed by seven settlers from 1864.

I also think this is such a bad, this is just a particularly egregious flip-flop on such a high-profile issue for Carrie Lake where she's on tape one way. Right. flip-flop on such a high-profile issue for Carrie Lake where she's on tape one way. And now it's just, that's one of those things that seeps into your public persona during an election like this. It's hard to get rid of that. Nobody likes to see that. Yeah. And yeah, the soundbite is not great for her because she also tried to do a little play on like all lives matter. She too too kind of web-brained and i'm sure she regrets that but at the same time how do you not see that coming like if if you're going to be a calculating politician then be the calculating politician in 2022 also yeah it wasn't some ancient history i guess the only thing you say is that it was pre-Roe

and that she genuinely just did not grasp, you know, what a electoral albatross it would be. Although she seems to be in the minority on that. Most people who were, have been pushing this, you're, you know, you've been very open about this, that this is our view, but it's not an electoral winner. No. So maybe she's not, maybe she hasn't thought about it enough. Maybe it's more of a surface issue for her. Because if you spend any time thinking about it, you're like, this is not going to work out electorally. Yeah. No, and I heard Nancy Mace talking about that as a Trump surrogate actually on NPR yesterday. She did a pretty good interview with NPR, as much as I loathe to, like, congratulate Nancy Mace sometimes. But she, you know, talked about it as a survivor of rape.

She said, I understand why there need to be exceptions and I understand why this is terrifying to women, basically. And you can see that's just, it's very, they didn't expect to have to talk about this in that way. They didn't expect post-Roe. And I think that's the big mistake of both the pro-life movement and the Republican Party. There was just not preparation, adequate preparation for what would happen if Roe fell. People, and people on the left too, it just seemed so unthinkable that this would actually happen. It was like the pipe dream of the pro-life movement. And it was the nightmare of the actual Republican Party where people are sort of moderately against abortion, but mostly in favor of winning elections and gaining more and more power. So I just, it can't Lake to me is an example of somebody who was really riding high on the Trump wave. Somebody who was super popular with Trump's base,

ultimately lost the election when a lot of people said Carrie Lake is going to win this thing. Like she's, man, I've never seen anything like it before. She lost, but she was riding really high. And I think that bubble kind of popped. Yeah. And so if we can put up A5, this is to Emily's point earlier, that the Attorney General has said that she won't enforce this. A reminder of sometimes every vote does matter. 280 votes separated the Democrat and the Republican in the Attorney General's race. If you remember, that was one of the races that wasn't called for weeks and weeks and weeks. She won it, and now she's saying that she's not going to enforce this. Like you said, local prosecutors still can do that. In the fall, it looks like Arizona is going to have a constitutional referendum, basically. In every single state, including Montana, Kansas, Kentucky,

abortion rights have triumphed at the ballot box. And so the ones that we're looking at this time are what? We got potentially in Florida, Arizona. Florida, Maryland, New York. Looks like now definitely it's going to happen in Arizona. They have to collect 384,000 ballot signatures by July 4th. That should be quite doable now, thanks to the Supreme Court. Probably could do it today. Yes. So it looks like that constitutional amendment, as you said, Ryan, is going to be there. There are efforts underway also in Arkansas, Nevada, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri, Colorado. It's possible but unlikely, according to the AP's analysis, that it ends up on the ballot in Iowa, Maine, and Pennsylvania in the fall. But a lot of swing states in there,

obviously Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and maybe Missouri and Colorado, but states where this is going to be a huge issue. This is better for turnout for Democrats than Republicans. There's no question about it at this point. So actually, in a way, by kicking this back to Arizona voters, what the Supreme Court did is give Arizona voters a chance to get rid of the 15-week Doug Ducey law. Yeah. When I saw that ruling, I wanted to check, was this Democrats? Yeah. No, seriously. check, was this Democrats on the Supreme Court? Or do they just really hate Carrie Lake? Like Carrie Lake must be thinking to herself, what have I done to this Arizona Supreme Court to treat me this way? Well, this also happened the day after Donald Trump sort of,

you know, Chris Lansager talked about this, but had a little bit of an earthquake or induced a little bit of an earthquake in Republican politics with his statement on abortion. And his statement on abortion was one that basically only Donald Trump can get away with. It's sort of a blueprint for other Republicans. And that's where you see Carrie Lake, her senior advisors, Nancy Mace, all kind of clustering in that region, which is basically saying things like, look, we think the voters should decide. The voters are wildly against the Democratic position, which is to not ban third trimester abortions. We all basically agree that somewhere, you know, meeting in that second trimester is the way to regulate abortion. We don't agree with completely cutting off access.

There have to be exceptions. And, you know, it is an electoral disaster, blah, blah, blah. That's sort of like taking from Trump, adapting it to different candidates. But I don't know how it works if you're not Donald Trump in particular. It's like when he went off on Hillary Clinton in that one debate, you remember, where he was like, she wants to rip babies out of wombs. But at the same time, he also believes like pro-life Mike Pence type people are kind of crazy. And everybody knows it. Frankly, like everybody knows it. So. Yeah. Yes. He's creeped out by them. Yes. Yeah. But he also, every time during his presidency when he was in trouble,

that's who he would go back to. The pro-life community. Yeah. And they know it. Most ardent supporters. So he knew it and they knew it. They know it and really resent it. That's part of the reason that people were really upset yesterday, on Monday. They feel like they've really been taken for granted by Donald Trump, that he'll go to them when he needs that kind of bolstering.

Nobody can be happy in America even the even the like anti-abortion crowd that got Roe v. Wade overturned by Trump I think you got to cut the guy some slack he delivered to the right the thing that they've been gunning for for 50 years you sound like Nancy Mace yeah there you go I mean from from their perspective is like come on what do you want from this guy he he obviously is personally pro-choice completely opposed to everything you guys believe in, like culturally. But he's doing it anyway, just cynically. So just ride that. No, I agree with that position completely.

Although it's going to get written right in the ground, right? Like the effect that this is having on Republicans. It's interesting to think what kind of Republican party you'd have if the Supreme Court just decided not to do that you'd have probably 10 20 extra Republicans in the house they probably control the Senate right now and maybe control the Senate for the next 50 years yeah I don't know I mean I think that's an interesting question because I feel like the benefits have been pretty marginal to people like Alyssa Slotkin and like there are just some races where like okay clearly women were super motivated.

The pattern of turnout looks like it was here. But I think a lot of Republicans have had this interesting position, like this needs to—hardcore anti-abortion people like myself have said, you're not going to solve this problem. Rod Dreher had a good post on this yesterday. You're not going to solve this problem at the ballot box at this point. All you're going to do is have catastrophic losses on every other policy issue. If you force an issue at the ballot box, that's going to lose time and again because the culture is not anywhere near the anti-abortion movement's position on it. So like, what's the wisdom? But on that side,

you get immense pressure from people in the pro-life movement who are against this incrementalism, as they call it. And so that's, I mean, it's a smaller and smaller wing as time goes by, but like people in the anti-abortion movement actually are facing pressure from their right, even like hardcore people from their right. And again, it's understandable if you believe that ending a life after conception is murder, it's understandable why people would be against the incrementalism. But politics of the possible, I mean, there's really no path. And correct me if I'm wrong they would they also would make parallels to the abolition or the anti-slavery movement absolutely which

Just was a fundamental misreading of everything But like it had the same moral force to those particular people who were involved in it but what they what they didn't understand is that There is a day after you overturn Roe. And so if you've got this guerrilla campaign, which is different than the Civil War and emancipation. Now, well, we don't need to go into Reconstruction and Jim Crow and all of that. But there's a day after Roe. And so they run this guerrilla campaign to take a minority position and make it the law for

the majority by taking over the courts. But then in the decision, they kind of didn't have the guts to go all the way. Like Alito in the decision says the Constitution is silent on the question of abortion and therefore it needs to go back to the states. And it could even go to Congress. So now you recognize that you're a minority position and you had to run a guerrilla campaign to ban it. Now you've thrown it up to the public for them to vote on. The public's not with you. And so now you've got Roger Miller going,

oh, maybe voting isn't the way to do this. Let's go back to the courts. You just did. What else is there? I mean, he's saying wage a cultural war and persuade people exactly but okay good luck with that yeah and but that's really the only route i mean that's the only way to do it and it's it's not a you know it's it's definitely not a one that's looking great um but saga pointed this out yesterday on twitter basically he's like listen the whole the the message of the pro-life movement my entire life was, let's kick it back to the states. And, you know, that's, and now they're saying

exactly the opposite of that to the point you just made. Not like that. But what I think is interesting about that is, yes, the Republican Party said that. The pro-life movement itself as a whole has. I just want to ban it. Yeah. Because, again, there are a lot of students of, a lot of like deep students of John Brown and the abolitionist movement and the pro-life movement that take that comparison really seriously, do see it as a civil rights issue. And in that case, incrementalism to a lot of people looks ridiculous. So, again, there's just plenty of people in the Republican Party who are not logically, intellectually consistent in their positions on abortion. And I feel like that, I'm very curious about Carrie Lake, who spent most of her life as a Democrat. I'm very curious as to if she ever thought some of that stuff through.

Because from Republican politicians, a lot of the pro-life talking points are cynical. And they're necessary in primaries. And then when push comes to shove, it's like, well, do I really? Usually not because there are electoral consequences that don't jive with the logically consistent position. Right. And basically, if you're trying to enforce minority position on a country

that still has some democratic mechanisms in place, you can't do it. You either have to be kind of have dictatorial power or like you said, you have to have a cultural revolution where everybody just, where you win over a majority, you persuade a majority of people to agree with you. But, you know, the polling and our global experience suggests I think that's not going to happen. But I would love to see them, like, try. Like that, I think to me, that is the appropriate way to do it. Go try to persuade people rather than having the court, you know, come down and tell people what to do. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard,

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So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice.

These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So yesterday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin showed up at Congress and he was protested during his speech, as pretty much everybody is who comes to Congress to talk about anything touching on the Israel-Gaza war. He was accused of facilitating genocide. And so

after the protesters left Senator Tom Cotton, engaged him in a bit of a back and forth about whether or not there is a genocide going on and whether or not the U.S. and Israel are affecting it there. Let's listen to his response. Secretary Austin, thank you for acknowledging in response to Senator Wicker that Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th and has been committing them every day since by using human shields. I want to address what the protesters raised earlier. Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Senator Cotton, we don't have any evidence of genocide being created. So that's a no. Israel's not committing genocide in Gaza.

We don't have evidence of that, to my knowledge. Thank you. What do you make of the, you know, he could say yes. He could say the ICJ has said there's a plausible case for genocide. He could say no. Instead, he said, we don't have evidence for it. What do you make of that? He said, we don't have evidence for it. And then he also said, there's, quote, no question that there have been, quote, far too many civilian casualties throughout the Israel-Hamas war. And that he has stressed to Yoav Galant that Israel's military must protect civilians. So my basic takeaway of this is it's super characteristic of the Biden administration's attempt to have it both ways, right? Like they

want to be citing international law in one case and then shirking it in another. And I know a lot of people are familiar with the definition of genocide at this point, the UN accepted definition, the ICC definition. I'm just going to read it again because I think it's worth talking about in the context of that exchange. So they say, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. So in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. And the reason I bring that up is because, again, it shows how the Biden administration wants to have it both ways on international law. And I think this definition of genocide, which was adopted in the aftermath of World War II,

is lacking. I think if you are destroying, quote, in part, a national group, basically anything that Israel did after October 7th would have been categorized as genocide. In whole, a national group, when you have an ethno-state and another ethno-state, there's just no way to have that battle. I'm not saying it's right, the way Israel prosecuted the war. I don't agree with that at all. But I also don't think that this definition of genocide has stood the test of time because it's just, I mean, there's almost no way to prosecute a war after October 7th or to respond after October 7th, which even Hamas expected would happen, and not fall into that definition. Because it really depends on the definition of the legal definition of in part. Right. Because, you know, Hamas killed several hundred Israeli civilians on October 7th. Does that count as in part? Legal experts generally say, no, that's not what we mean. We had one on the show. In part. Right. And he was saying no. He was saying no because intent.

For October 7th. Right. He was saying Hamas may have the intent but they don't have the capability whereas Israel has the capability and that is an understandable distinction But yes that question of in part is huge and so Sayid Eric hot at the State Department s a really good question Which goes to this where he did not obviously get a really good answer But the question is one to sit with, which is, is there a definition of genocide that would allow Bosnia and Rwanda to apply, but not Palestine? Oh, that's interesting. Because the U.S. is comfortable with saying, this was a genocide in Rwanda, this was a genocide in Bosnia. The International Court of Justice.

Everybody around the world is comfortable. Even the Uyghurs. Right. Well, the Uyghurs, he also mentioned Rohingya, I believe. Yeah. Because the Uyghurs, you don't have the, you have the cultural destruction, a cultural genocide. But you don't have the kind of mass death that you had in Rwanda with the Rohingya and in Bosnia. And also that one is contested more so than, you know, at the international level, Bosnia, Rwanda. But a lot of people that embrace that one would contest.

Exactly. Like you'd have, you know, right. Ask Jake Sullivan or Blinken. Exactly. Right. They're going to leap at that one. A hundred percent. It's just so, it's, you know, right. Ask Jake Sullivan or Blinken. Exactly. Right. Yeah. They're going to leap at that one. A hundred percent. It's just so, it's, and it's typical.

I mean, we talked last week about this quote that I came across in Oliver North's memoir recently where he said, you know, Israel, Britain, they were all selling arms to Iran. The thing that really disappointed me, and I know this is ironic, obviously, coming from Oliver North, but in his memoir, he says the thing that really disappointed me that is basically that the United States was like lecturing everybody to not do it while doing it. Reminds me of this famous Chomsky interview where he's asked, what's the difference between counterterrorism and terrorism? And he says, terrorism is when they do it. Counterterrorism is when we do it. So speaking of terrorism, if we can put up the third element here,

Gazans returned to their neighborhood of Khan Yunis over the last couple of days now that the IDF has withdrawn to find it unrecognizable. The Associated Press lead says, you know, stunned Palestinians found their home city, unrecognizable Monday as they filtered in to salvage what they could from the vast destruction left by Israeli troops who withdrew from southern Gaza's Khan Yunus a day earlier after months of fighting and bombardment. And the scenes are utterly dystopian. And you don't know how many people are still buried under this rubble. Families who've returned back can't even kind of figure out which block

is theirs anymore because it's just so completely flattened and rubble-strewn. The reporter sees them find one plastic red flower that helps them identify, like our apartment was over here, and the mom puts that in a bag as they're headed back to who knows where. And as the Associated Press points out in this article, this is what Rafah would look like if Netanyahu moves forward with that coming invasion. And he has said they now have a date, that it's going to happen. There's been reports that when the Israelis and the Americans met, the Israelis suggested that they're going to buy tents, hundreds of thousands, you know,

tents for hundreds of thousands of people that they're going to move kind of somewhere else. They've already bought 40,000. And yeah, they're already trying to purchase 40,000. And the Americans asked, well, okay, that's one thing, but you've got, what about food? What about sewage treatment? What about the water? What about the other things that 1.3 million people would need to survive? And that was kind of brushed off. Going to the question of whether or not there's any evidence of genocide, it's one thing to say that, okay, we haven't come to a final conclusion that 100% certainty that genocide is happening. As Lloyd Austin said, to say there's no evidence

denies the actual evidence that we do have on the ground. And one of those, and we can go to this next element, is before CNN put together an interesting investigation into the flour massacre of late February. This was one of the turning points, I think, for a lot of global opinion. The U.S. had purchased enough flour to feed millions, to create millions of meals. And for about a month, Israel was keeping this flour out, not letting it into Gaza. Finally, a Connecticut-based kind of charity was able to contract with a couple of trucks and work with the IDF, which escorted it in with tanks. And the very first day that this flower that had been waiting outside for so long came in, the IDF starts opening fire. And this is what the CNN investigation finds.

IDF initially said, actually, we never fired. And then later said we fired warning shots. And then they said we fired at quote unquote suspects. CNN has obtained a bunch of different videos from Palestinians who were there, who were filming at the time that this happened, that show that their timeline is a lie, that they started firing at people who were at the checkpoint. And to me, if you add everything else together, the fact that they had been keeping this out for so long and had only let it in under intense pressure. And then you learn from this reporting that they did open fire on people waiting for them and then did lie about it. And it did then lead to what they wanted, which was the rest of the flour not getting in, which then did lead to what they also have said publicly that they wanted, which is depriving Palestinians of food. It's kind of one more deliberate act. And so that's why I say that there is evidence.

Whether or not Lloyd Austin wants to say it's conclusive evidence is a different question, but there's evidence. But this is Netanyahu's version of the Biden problem in that he has people saying, you know, yes, use food as a weapon of war. In what case throughout human history has food not been used as a weapon? In what case throughout human history are people feeding the nation that they are at war with? Well, it's kind of what we decided to do after the horrors of World War II. It's kind of how everyone sort of came to the table and said, you can't let that happen again. So if you agreed to those standards of war, then yes. But there are people in Netanyahu's right saying, why are we doing this? This food is going to be used to bolster the people who

are trying to kill us. And so Netanyahu, again, has to kind of try and have it both ways and not say outright that there's a position in the Israeli government or there are factions in the Israeli government that don't want to feed Palestinians because it's not conducive to flattening Gaza. It's not conducive to their definition of winning the war, which is still, by the way, completely unclear. The Biden administration, which to a point that you and Crystal and Sagar often make, is essential to the prosecution of this war from Israel's position, is not even cued in on what the date is. Netanyahu is not telling them the date of this invasion of Rafah, probably because of leaking concerns, intelligence sharing concerns, but that just tells you how fraught the relationship is right now. Or if it even exists or if it's a bluff.

Throughout the week, Hamas reported earlier this week on its various public channels that in one day in three different engagements, 13 IDF, at least 13 IDF soldiers had been killed in combat. Yesterday they posted some video confirming that that had in fact happened. These kind of setbacks are lining up with the IDF announcing that it's withdrawing from these significant areas of southern Gaza. So in some ways it might just be public facing bluster from Netanyahu that actually a ground invasion is not something that the IDF thinks is kind of advantageous at this point when it's also continuing to threaten and be threatened by Hezbollah up in the wings, the Iranian response to Israel's attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which was a massive breaking of international norms, which brings us to our

next segment on another massive breaking of international norms, which seems to perhaps have been triggered by Israel getting a green light to go ahead and attack a consulate in Damascus, may have led to Ecuador believing that it could just smash its way into the Mexican embassy in Quito and drag out the former vice president. We'll have kind of harrowing footage of that up next. And we'll also be joined by Ecuadorian former foreign minister, Guillaume Long. Stick around for that. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? Stick around for that. 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. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull, we'll take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms,

even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm JR Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of

Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The climax of this wild insanity that you're looking at here is these gang members taking over a TV station live on air, holding people hostage, and really putting an exclamation mark on what had become an extraordinary kind of devolution in Ecuador from one of the safest countries in South America to basically what is drifting towards a narco state run by kind of US-backed gangs at this point. Now, that brings us to just last Thursday, there was this remarkable moment on the international stage where you had Ecuadorian forces burst into the Mexican embassy. So this footage was released yesterday

by Mexico. These are kind of basically Ecuadorian stormtroopers here outside of the embassy bursting their way in here. They're looking for the former vice president. They run into embassy staff, as you see here, top officials there, throwing old diplomats down onto the ground and dragging out the former vice president who had been formally offered asylum by the Mexican government. It's hard to describe a greater breach of international norms other than perhaps an airstrike on an embassy. It's happened in Damascus quite recently. Now, the U.S. took two days to respond with a very modest statement where they didn't condemn.

The headline on their statement was, events at the embassy of Mexico in Ecuador. Then they said, the United States condemns any violation of the Viennese Convention on Diplomatic Relations. So just generally condemning, but they never go on to specifically condemn what had just happened. This is 48 hours earlier, bear in mind. And then they write, Mexico and Ecuador are crucial partners of the United States, and we place a high value on our relations with both countries.

We encourage the two countries to resolve their differences in accord with international norms. So really taking a hands-off approach there. They continued to be under pressure to say something about what their U.S.-backed government had done in Quito. And so Jake Sullivan yesterday came out at the White House press briefing, and this is how he addressed it finally. I also want to take a moment before going to your questions to address the events of April 5th in Quito, Ecuador. We condemn this violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, including the use of force against embassy officials. We've reviewed the security camera footage from the

Mexican embassy and believe these actions were wrong. The Ecuadorian government disregarded its obligations under international law as a host state to respect the inviolability of diplomatic missions and jeopardize the foundation of basic diplomatic norms and relationships. The backdrop of all of this is quite interesting. If we can put up this fourth VO here, this is former National Assemblyman Ronnie Aliaga, who you're looking at here, who has created a huge stir in Ecuador over the past several weeks by releasing text messages between him and Diana Salazar, who is the U.S.-backed attorney general in Ecuador. It was Salazar who issued the arrest warrant against the former vice president before Daniel Namboa issued the order to carry it out inside the embassy. And what Aliaga has been saying is that the text

messages between him and her confirm that she and the U.S. ambassador have been working hand in glove on various prosecutions and political interventions over the past several years, and that Salazar is effectively kind of the U.S.'s closest ally inside Ecuador and is being groomed for the presidency. What we can add to this, I've spoken to the former National Assemblyman for several hours over the past couple of weeks, and he passed on to me, we can put this up on the screen here, a forensic analysis of his two phones, because there's a lot of speculation in Ecuador that he is making this entire thing up. So he basically allowed a Miami based firm to have access to his phones and they confirmed that in fact these text messages

between him and the number that appears to belong to Salazar are in fact accurate. So to kind of give us more background on all of this is the former foreign minister of Ecuador, Guillaume Long. Guillaume Long is joining us from, like much of the government of Rafael Correa, of exile. And so, first of all, Foreign Minister Long, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thanks very much for the invitation. I'm not formally in exile, but I certainly don't live in Ecuador right now, unlike many

of my former colleagues who are in exile who enjoy political asylum in a number of countries, actually, Mexico being one, which we'll discuss with you, Argentina also, but also Belgium, where former President Correa himself has been granted political asylum. It's not my case, but I don't live in Ecuador at the moment. Would you feel safe going back to Ecuador at this point? Or do you think that the kind of persecution of your party is so broad that there might be some risk? Yeah, I mean, I've been going back to Ecuador. I went back in the most recent elections in October 2023.

I was also there in August 2023. I've been going back regularly and I have family in Ecuador, so I do go back. But, and it was better for a while. It's gotten significantly worse now again. There was a lull a little bit, but yeah, I mean, for a few years I did not go back and it has been unsafe, largely speaking, for Ecuadorans because of the general security situation in Ecuador, but also for obviously the political left. Yeah, there are lots, I mean, the deep state is very active and very noticeable if you've

been part of the Correa government at some point in time. Yeah. So tell us about Jorge Glass, the former vice president who was dragged out of the Mexican embassy. What's behind these charges and what do we know about his safety? Because as I understand it, the Americans privately did finally tell the Ecuadorian government that he ought not to be harmed while in prison. We'll see how effective that is. Yeah, so the story of persecution in Ecuador is a long and complicated one, which I'm not going to go into too many details about. The big pivotal moment is when Lenny Moreno becomes president in 2017, elected on a continuity ticket after Correa.

He had been a former vice president of Correa. Then he betrays that and does a U-turn, sides with the Trump administration, does all the things that many of us know about, you know, throws Assange out of the London embassy, brings Pompeo and Mike Pence to Quito and then signs loads of deals, including an IMF deal, grants an airstrip in the Galapagos to the Pentagon and South Com and so on, really realigns geopolitically within the sphere of

the United States and within the sphere of the Trump administration, right? And then he organizes a referendum in 2018, which is the big problem till this day. So I'm just going to say a quick word about this. The referendum, while he was still popular, a few months later, he would have lost it. And he ended his term as the most unpopular president in Ecuadorian history.

This is Lenin Moreno. But when he had held the referendum, he was still in his honeymoon and supported by the media, managed to pass this referendum. And there were a few questions. One of them was to bar re-election, so that Correa could never be president again.

But the other crucial question was to do an overhaul of the judiciary, if you like, to purge the judiciary. The Moreno government actually called it a decoreization, if you like, it's a Spanish term, but to decoreize, coreaize, as the president, the Ecuadorian state. actually called it a de-Correaisation, if you like. It's a Spanish term, but de-Correais, Correais as the name of the president, the Ecuadorian state. And so you have to get rid,

purge all the Correista elements of the Ecuadorian state and that includes the judiciary. And then he managed to name all a series of new, very diehard anti-Correa judges who then started the persecution. And this was a persecution that was essentially carried out in 2019 and 2020, in part against Jorge Glass, who ended up in jail. He perched six years in jail. And another one, a big case involving several people, including President

Correa himself, who got an eight-year jail sentence. But because he was already living abroad in Belgium, the Belgium government, seeing that he was the actual sentence, says Correa was guilty of psychic influence over others who commit crimes, right? This is actually in the sentence. So the Belgium government eventually gave Correa political asylum based on the fact that there was a clear case of political persecution. Interpol also denied several arrests. Red Alerts, they're called for the arrest of Correa. And so, internationally, the case crumbled, if you like. But domestically, in Ecuador, they doubled down on this.

And there is an arrest warrant for Correa, for several other people. And Glass, because he was in jail, they managed to start, as soon as he was freed, they managed to start a new case, which is even more ludicrous than the other. This essentially has to do with the reconstruction funds after the earthquake of 2016. Ecuador had a terrible earthquake in 2016 and Glass, as vice president,

was in charge of the reconstruction. And they're saying he used those funds not for reconstruction, which, okay, they're saying he used those funds not for reconstruction, which, okay, he headed a committee, and those funds were actually used for economic dynamism, you know, to stimulate the growth and so on and so forth. That's not strictly reconstruction. So they're not even accusing him of stealing money, using them of not using the funds for reconstruction, but for something else, which was also public policy. So the whole case is a sham. So he saw that it was a new sham, and so he sought asylum in the Mexican embassy.

There have been a number of Ecuadoran, particularly former Correa collaborators, former ministers, so on and so forth, seeking asylum in a Mexican embassy over the last few years. Several of them were granted safe passage during the previous administrations to enjoy their political asylum. That's the technical term, to be able to reach Mexico and enjoy their political asylum there. But this time under Novoa, Ecuador refused to grant the safe passage. And in fact, as we saw this weekend,

quite dramatically, stormed the embassy, which is a massive violation, we can talk about this, of Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which is really the ground floor of international law, right? It is the convention that establishes before any other agreement on international law is made,

how we're going to interact between states, what are the essential rules of the game of diplomacy. You have an embassy in my country, I have one in yours, we can't touch those. It's kind of common sense. Everybody knows that. Anybody who's watched the kind of an action movie knows that you don't storm the embassy, right? It's pretty common sense. But they violated that. And it's one of the right? It's pretty common sense. But they violated that. And it's one of the few times it's ever been done in Latin American history. So it's very traumatic. And right now Ecuador is very isolated. So actually on that, I know Ryan has questions about Vienna, but I also wanted to ask for people in the States trying to like put these

puzzle pieces together. There's this question of why is AMLO involved to this degree? And obviously, the big picture context about crime and cartels and COVID and poverty and all of that sort of comes together. And AMLO's relationship with Korea and with the sort of exiled former Korea allies. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe what's in it for AMLO, why AMLO and Mexico are involved to the degree that they're involved,

and maybe how that speaks to that big picture question of Noboa and Bukele and a lot of Latin American politics kind of in general? Yeah, that's actually a great question. I mean, it's AMLO, but it's also Mexico. Mexico has a long history of being this sort of land for asylum seekers, right? So it played a key role in the 1954 Caracas Convention on Asylum, which is sort of a piece of international law that Latin Americans are quite proud of, Latin American diplomats are quite proud of, because it was a precursor law in international law that Latin Americans drafted in the inter-American system to protect asylum seekers.

And it was key in a number of ways to establish the rules, what the rules of political asylum are. So Mexico played a big role in that. But then in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, in that sort of heyday of military dictatorship, particularly in the Southern Cone. Mexico was the land of exile, of political asylum, of the opponents that were being persecuted by all these Cold War, US-backed largely, military regimes. So Mexico became famous as a sort of safe haven. It never did have the military regimes that other countries in Latin America had.

And so Mexico's kind of got this kind of prestige. There's also something called the Estrada Doctrine, which is a doctrine of a former foreign minister of Mexico that has a big impact on the doctrine of Mexican foreign policy, but the foreign policy of other Latin American states. So there's a whole sort of Mexican, I would say almost institutional culture of international law and asylum law, which is symbolic here. And it kind of had been a little bit abandoned in the last 10, 20 years. And Mexico, you know, after joining NAFTA, stopped sort of being seen like this. And AMLO really insisted on bringing back this sort of age-old tradition of Mexico being a land of asylum.

And when you had, during the Trump years, this kind of conservative backlash in Latin America, including coups, like in Bolivia, like where did people seek refuge? Where did people hide? You know, people who had been part of Evo Morales' cabinet, so on and so forth, they went to the Mexican embassy. Actually, they went to the Mexican and the Spanish embassy

in the Bolivian case. And in Ecuador, when Moreno started persecuting the left there, same, they went to the Mexican embassy. And AMLO eventually granted people asylum and a number of people asylum.

Right now, Mexico is the place where there is the greatest number of Ecuadorian refugees. There are some in Argentina, as just said, President Correa himself is in Belgium. But lots of people, lots of former ministers are in Mexico. So Glass went to the Mexican embassy.

This seemed to be the logical sort of place to go to. And yeah, I think it speaks of two things. So answering your question, one is Mexican tradition. The other is AMLO, who's kind of on the political left. So there may be some sympathies there. But I think it's more of a political left that wanted to revive this age-old Mexican tradition, right? And to go back to the Estrada doctrine I've just mentioned. And the other element is, of course, the geopolitical context.

Since 2015, 2016, a sort of rightward shift in the hemisphere, which is less aggressive now because Bolsonaro is not there anymore. And there have been a few victories for the left in Colombia and Honduras and Chile, elsewhere. But there was, 2015, 2016, a big pendular shift to the right and an authoritarian right, which persecuted people, which meant there was suddenly, just as you had in the 60s and 70s, Mexico playing that role again. And let me ask you about these charges that have been leveled by Ronnie Aliaga in his conversations with me and also in these videos that have gone viral inside Ecuador. One of the charges he made is related to the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio.

People will remember probably that we covered this. This was the presidential candidate, kind of anti-corruption crusader who was assassinated right after a rally as he's walking to his car. People probably remember seeing that footage. What Aliaga says is that Diana Salazar, the attorney general, told him that she had dinner. She had a dinner with the U.S. ambassador, and the U.S. ambassador told her that they had three field offices working on this because Villavicencio was a high-level kind of U.S. informer, U.S. asset, and that they were putting out a $5 million reward for any information leading to his killing, and that they knew their investigation had already uncovered the fact that it was the Los Lobos gang that was behind his assassination.

These are narco traffickers. But that Correa's party was surging in the elections. The first round was coming in two weeks and that it would not be good to get that information out because at the time the Ecuadorian media was blaming Correa and Correa's party for this assassination. So it's better to allow that to play out rather than give a gift to the left heading into the election. Neboa does end up then winning a very tight election in the second round against Correa's party. So what do you make of these allegations from Maliaga? And how seriously are they being taken in Ecuador? So these allegations, which are just coming out, and they seem to be certified by this US-based verification, IT verification outfit,

which is going to be very important because he's going to have the proof that this is legitimate. They're only just starting to play out now. And because of what's just happened in the Mexican embassy in Ecuador, this kind of news cycle is focused on that. But I think once the story is out and once it hits the mainstream press, including outside Ecuador, it's going to have a huge impact because they confirm a lot of our suspicions and a lot of the accusations that were leveled at Salazar back then and have been leveled at Salazar back. So that's the sort of equivalent of the attorney general in Ecuador, fiscal general, we say in Ecuador, the prosecutor general, if you like, who did not prosecute and did not accelerate the investigation before the elections,

as you just said, because it would have deflected attention or accusations away from Correismo. And Correismo was ahead in the poll, and she's been the arch-persecutor of Correismo and the left in Ecuador in the last few years. So it's extremely serious, but it would mean that the prosecutor general, the attorney general, would have acted in a politicized way, would have decided to not investigate a crime and who the authors of that crime are, or at least delay it for political purposes

so that Correísmo would get accused of this crime during elections. And bearing in mind that Villavicencio was an arch-opponent of Correismo, sort of one of those kind of very, yeah, I mean, sort of played the role of a whistleblower, you know, and sort of a very, you know, on the media constantly sort of throwing accusations pretty much against everybody. He was that kind of character.

And he was, we always suspected, supported by the United States. We're now going to see whether there's any more evidence for this, but this was kind of vox populi, right? It was the rumor everywhere in the political circles that Villavicencio was essentially a U.S. agent. Whether that's exactly true or not,

or whether he was supported in some way or another, we're going to find out. And then when he was murdered, when he was assassinated, in something which really hurt Ecuadorian democracy and the Ecuadorian elections, right? Because he was murdered, when he was assassinated, in something which really hurt Ecuadorian democracy and the Ecuador elections, right? Because he was a presidential candidate. And this is the first time in contemporary history that you have a presidential candidate that's murdered in Ecuador. I mean, he wouldn't have won the elections. It didn't change the outcome. Well, it did in a way, but he wouldn't, it's not as if he was leading the polls. He was depending on different polls

in fourth, fifth place, sixth place, whatever. But, you know, it was still traumatic. This was a, you know, a crucial sort of, yeah, it was a political, a well-known politician in Ecuador who was running for the presidency. He was murdered. And there were lots of suspicions at the time

that his murder was politically motivated in order to hurt Correismo, that because he was such sort of an arch critic of Correismo, because he was, you know, constantly throwing accusations of Correismo, the natural conclusion of that would be that it was Correismo that had him murdered. So you see after his murder, which was on the 9th of August, I believe, yes, on the election, 20th of August, you see between the 9th and the 20th of August a decline of the leading candidacy of the Correista candidate, the left-wing candidate.

And she, Luisa Gonzalez, lost probably eight, seven, eight, nine, whatever points. She might have made it without the need for a runoff, without the assassination. She did recuperate a few points right towards the end, when it became clearer and clearer that this was not a, you know, that there was more and more evidence showing that it was a sort of deep state narco plot that had nothing to do with Correísmo. So, I mean, yeah, I think it significantly changed the results of the elections. We don't know what would have happened.

It's very difficult to establish counterfactual here. But certainly, it's very, very serious. if judicial authorities in Ecuador decided not to investigate this crime or to delay the investigation of the crime in order to prejudice candidacies. It was a massive judicial wrongdoing and intervention in the electoral process, in democracy, essentially. And if the U.S. supported this,

if the State Department or its US representatives in Ecuador supported this, it is extremely serious. And it appears from the preliminary information that we have that the Prosecutor General in these chats with the former member of Congress, Roni Aliaga, is saying that she was backed, supported, encouraged by U.S. diplomats to do this. And yeah, that does indeed appear to be what the chats say. And as I've said, the Miami-based forensic firm confirms that these chats are authentic. For people who are confused about why that would be needed, there's this app called Confide used down in South America, which you can pay a little extra to get it so that as soon as you press the button, the message goes away. You read it, and boom, it's gone. And so people in Ecuador have said, there's no way he has these,

because they were communicating via Confide. And as he showed me, he always carries two phones. So he would film himself reading the message. And so he has the film of all those messages, and so he sent basically the metadata and the guts of both of those phones to the Miami-based firm to confirm that his story actually does line up, that that is what he did. We'll continue to follow the story because, as you said, the U.S. involvement here is extraordinarily profound and crucial.

And the result has been basically a collapsing of the state and society of Ecuador. But, Guillaume, looking forward to have you on again, and we'll continue to follow this. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Pleasure. All right, up next, major surveillance reforms in Congress, voting today and tomorrow. Stick around for that. 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. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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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. Speaker of the House right now. Once again, a little rinse and repeat going on. But this time,

it's over an issue that has real bipartisan support against Section 702. This has become a flashpoint in the House Freedom Caucus's battle with Speaker Mike Johnson, who they accuse rightfully of working with Democrats. Now, from Mike Johnson's perspective, he would say, who am I supposed to work with? I have a one-vote margin here in the House of Representatives. My majority is slim, one vote. So we kind of have to be at the table with Democrats. But the Freedom Caucus believes, rightfully again, that he's made a lot of promises about not doing omnibus bills, about not funding the war in Ukraine, and then seems to be moving closer to Democrats on the issue. So Marjorie Taylor Greene actually released a letter she

sent to Mike Johnson. It's basically, I think, well characterized as an airing of grievances, Ryan. It sure seems like an airing of grievances. In fact, The Hill outright called it an airing of grievances against Mike Johnson. Happy Festivus. Yes, yes, exactly. The Eid airing of grievances. And you can actually, she tweeted out the full letter, which I'm sure Mike Johnson was very happy about. That's D2. It's a long letter. And she goes through seven points, essentially, and walks through

things that Mike Johnson says and seems to be reneging on. She also talked to CNN about her plans just for this week. So there's a real question here if Mike Johnson survives the week. And again, Section 702, hugely important part of all of this. But let's listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene in this interview with CNN talk about what happened after she released that letter and sent it to Mike Johnson. So you sent this letter out to your college this morning. What kind of response have you got? Mostly support. It's been pretty incredible.

Everyone's flying into town today, though, so I haven't spoken with everyone. But most of the members I've talked to agree with what I've said. They may not come out and publicly say it. Many are relieved I've said it, and I've even heard within the ranks of leadership there's agreement there. There's agreement from members of the leadership with what you're saying? With my letter, with much of what I said in the letter. Ryan's laughing over here. It made me laugh.

It reminds me of Trump being like, many people are saying that I wrote the greatest letter. Like that meme of the guy who's like, all my friends are just out of the picture here. We're having an amazing time. They're standing out of frame. Yeah, we're all having a blast. We're all going to overthrow the Speaker. So Matt Gaetz last night around 8 p.m. on his podcast said, if Speaker Johnson is unwilling to fix FISA, we are left wondering what he is indeed willing to fix.

Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a member of the House Freedom Caucus anymore. She's sort of Freedom Caucus adjacent. They kicked her out. They're having all kinds of internal battles. You can go watch our long interview with Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good that we did late last year. I'll call her a useful idiot. Yeah, he called Marjorie Taylor Greene. He told us that Marjorie Taylor Greene was a useful idiot. So go ahead and watch that if you need a primer on all the Freedom Caucus dynamics at the moment. But they are all in alignment on this question of 702, which is

becoming, again, this is one of the things in the push and pull that Mike Johnson has with the Freedom Caucus type Republicans. Marjorie Taylor Greene has already filed that motion to vacate. That's what got rid of Kevin McCarthy. It's what Nancy Pelosi herself got rid of after she watched Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan use it to get rid of John Boehner. She said nope. But then Kevin McCarthy made a promise to the Freedom Caucus to bring it back if they elected him speaker.

They elected him speaker, then used the motion of AK to get rid of him. Marjorie Taylor Greene is now doing the same thing to Mike Johnson, but hasn't actually forced the vote on getting rid of Mike Johnson yet. She could do that basically at any moment. You know, that's not parliamentarily accurate, but it could basically happen any day if she has enough support to force that vote on getting rid of Mike Johnson. And if Mike Johnson does not come to the table on FISA reform, that's going to be a huge problem for him that could lead to getting rid of the Speaker of the House. Now, Brian and I would love to see Section 702 reformed finally because this is, I mean, people who care about government surveillance going back years, this has been one of these central problems, one of the biggest sources of abuse. Trump tweeted recently or Truth Social recently that FISA was abused against him.

He tweeted last night, kill FISA. It was illegally used against me and many others. They spied on my campaign, DJT. It's funny to say someone who is upset saying kill FISA because FISA came out of the church committee era to protect people against government surveillance. But because the surveillance state is so powerful, FISA as this protective measure is abused. So people are trying to interpret, well, what does this mean about the details of this ongoing 702 fight? And a lot of people are interpreting it as he's with the Matt Gaetz side, which I think is a totally fair reading of it. And so this is a live fight. So the House Rules Committee produced a rule last night that will be voted on on the floor later today, unless he pulls it, which is as he's done before. Gates has said he's against the rule with a one vote margin. If Democrats don't join,

that means it could, the rule could go down. There are basically three key things that they're fighting over in 702. The main one you could call the backdoor search loophole, which is 702 allows the NSA to basically spy on any foreign person outside of American soil. So they then use that authority to gobble up basically the entire world's communications. Within the entire world's communications, you obviously have hundreds of millions of Americans communications. So what the NSA says is, well, we legally acquired all of this data and all these communications. Right. So now we can search it and we can search it for Americans because we acquired it legally. Right. We don't need a warrant.

Right. Because we already had the legal authority to pick this stuff up. It's like if you get a warrant to search a home and you find something that's a different crime than the one you're looking for or a different person, you're allowed to use that. So they're trying to kind of shoehorn it into that. But that doesn't even make sense because that would be like, it would be like going into a different house. They didn't have a warrant to go into a different house. None of it makes sense. And so, but the courts have upheld it. And so what civil liberties advocates have been trying to do for years is to close this backdoor search loophole. And so that's a key live fight right now. Right. broker loophole, which people are probably pretty familiar with, which is that the U.S. is not

allowed to collect American data without a warrant. You can't do it. And so aside from the backdoor search loophole, what they have is a data broker loophole. Private companies are allowed to collect all this data. So they go out then and they buy up the data and then they search it that way. And this amendment would say, you can't do that. It's called the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which passed unanimously through the Judiciary Committee with the support of who? Representative Mike Johnson at the time. Mike Johnson has now made a change in the rule last night that will make it impossible for there to be a vote on the bill that he, the amendment that he claims to support, the bill that he claims to support, the Fourth Amendment is not for sale

act. And so Mike Johnson is currently screwing everybody on closing the data broker loophole. Then the third one is what Mike Johnson's done. He's turned over a lot of the bill to the Intelligence Committee. This is Republican Mike Turner and Democrat Jim Himes, who are absolutely just in lockstep with the intelligence community. And the Biden administration. They were out a couple, you may have seen this a couple weeks or a couple months ago. They were out there saying, they leaked this news about how the Russians were using nukes in space, and therefore we need to hurry up and give more spying authorities to the government. It's been bad faith from start to finish. One of the provisions that they are putting into this so-called reform and that they're saying is a narrowing would actually allow the U.S. to spy on any American business if it has some connection, some foreign connection. And so what Civil Liberties folks pointed out was so you can just just walk into Starbucks then, and without a warrant, you can hit their router.

Because there are Starbucks everywhere around the world. A lot of these kind of landlord firms own properties all over the world. So you could, so that basically all these landlords, you can search them. And you can imagine why this would be valuable information to the FBI. Did this person go to this Starbucks? What about this person that lives in this building? For months, Mike Turner and Jim Himes said that people were just fear mongering and lying and that the bill wouldn't actually do this. the new language that came out last night says that all of these authorities on businesses remain in this new bill, but there are carve-outs for food service and for landlords,

which is an admission that the critics were correct. And what it also means is that anything, there are like four carve-outs that they list in there, anything not mentioned there would then be subject to this warrantless spying, like whether it's a bowling alley or something. Hey, they don't serve enough food. And the pizza that's spinning underneath that lamp, that doesn't count as food. That's cardboard. So therefore, we as the FBI, NSA, we can go in and we can scoop up all of this data here. We laugh, but they will sink to no.

Also, it's not food. It is cardboard. So you'd have to be like, all right, fair enough. They're serving cardboard. I don't know. But what if you eat the cardboard? Does that make it food? That makes it food.

That's why you got to go to the courts here. So basically, what started out as reform could end up with an actual expansion of surveillance authority. And it's all up to Mike Johnson, who his whole career, 2018, he voted for the toughest surveillance reform. His whole career, he has been a surveillance critic. He's been with the Freedom Caucus on everything. Now that he's in power, the question is, can he stand up to the intelligence community or not? And I think that goes back to the way Matt Gaetz put it. He said, if he's unwilling of the House right now because one member

was upset about an ethics complaint about whether he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. And McCarthy said, I don't know if he did it. But that's what this was all about. The point is, Matt Gaetz, that was a hair trigger because the majority is so small and the motion to vacate just requires one member. It's already been filed in this case. And so where you have that sense of betrayal that Mike Johnson, his friends with many of those Freedom Caucus guys, who could be easily persuaded by this argument, granted, where else do they go? You know, who else is going to be speaker at that point? And does it serve their purposes? I think a lot of them ultimately aren't happy about how everything has gone post-McCarthy. And, you know, it's easy to get to laugh at that and be like, yeah, no kidding. Well, yes, no kidding. So all that is to say, Mike Lee, here's a good tweet from Mike Lee. This is D5. Mike Lee has this point that

Ryan just made. Speaker Johnson and Jeffries, Minority Leader Jeffries, Hakeem Jeffries, voted for a FISA 702 warrant requirement back in 2018. And then he said, why do the Intel bros trademark get to tell House leadership what to do? This is also a D6. This is a tweet from an expert on 702 at the Brennan Center. So from the left, surveillance, anti-surveillance experts from the left, laying out exactly what Ryan just said. And I would encourage everyone to go check out this thread. It's called RISA. That's the version of the bill that has this ridiculous permanent reauthorization basically embedded into it. Such a familiar tactic to a lot of people, Ryan, coming with the label of reform and actually having a backdoor either reauthorization or permanent codification

of these types of rules. Now, let's roll D4 just so people can get a taste of how doggedly the Biden administration, House Republicans and Senate members and Senate Democrats that are so tied to Section 702 because they get these briefings. They go into the secure briefing center, get this terrifying information from the FBI, and then come out. Russian space nukes. Russian space nukes. They're coming for everyone. I don't even go to space anymore after hearing that. Yeah, it's too dangerous. So anyway, let's listen to Jake Sullivan.

The administration strongly supports the bipartisan bill, whose text is now with the Rules Committee, to reauthorize this essential intelligence authority and other FISA provisions before they would expire on April 19th. If we lost 702, we would lose vital insight into precisely the threats Americans expect us in government to identify and counter. Terrorist threats to the homeland, fentanyl supply chains bringing deadly drugs into American communities, hostile governments recruitment of spies in our midst, transnational repression by authoritarian regimes, penetrations of our critical infrastructure, adversaries' attempts to illicitly acquire sensitive dual use and military commodities and technology, ransomware attacks against major American

companies and nonprofits, Russian war crimes, and more. My absolute favorite part of that is when he—it's actually not bad strategically messaging when he's saying we need 702 to do what the people expect us to do. Yeah, and Russian war crimes, they can't investigate Russian war crimes without the story. All of that's a lie. All of that's a complete lie. They have the authority to do overseas searches. And they can even continue their investigations. They're doing this fear-mongering over the authorities expiring on April 19th.

But the authorities are like, everyone that's stamped is good for a year. So it's actually good for well into 2025. So all of it is lying. All of it is fear-mongering. What do you think? What should people root for at this point? I'd say voting the rule down later today on the House floor and forcing Mike Johnson to at least allow a vote in the rules committee hearing last night. They put two provisions in that specifically grant new protections for members of Congress when it comes to surveillance that do not apply to anybody else. So it's the-

Can't FOIA them, can't surveil them. They get amazing healthcare and a cool pension. So one of them is like they get noticed, and you need different authorities. Basically, it sets members of Congress apart in a way that they hadn't been before. It has been used against them. And it comes from, yes, a member of Congress was spied on like a year ago or two years ago or so. It was a kind of rank and file Republican who had been really supportive of like five authorities, right? I forget who exactly it was. But as a result of that, they're like, okay, fine, we'll stop surveilling members of Congress without going through these hoops, rather than what you would

hope Congress would demand is actual reform for all American citizens. Yeah, I mean, it's just so ridiculous. And it's a great example of why so many people are upset with Mike Johnson, but also how the kind of DC blob feels the public time and again. It's just, it's plainly unconstitutional. If they want it to be constitutional, they should make that case as to why we should amend the constitution to allow them to do that. And Marjorie Taylor Greene's list of grievances was mostly abortion related, Green New Deal, climate change, trans stuff. Like it was a four page list. Hopefully people like Gates can channel her into a 702 direction. Oh, they absolutely are. Yeah. I mean, they're absolutely, yeah. Marjorie Taylor Greene's- If you got this club, you might as well wield it for something

useful. Well, yeah. And it comes down to, again, if you're not, all of those grievances from Marjorie Taylor Greene, it was basically about Mike Johnson saying all of these things before he became speaker, talking a really big game about what's wrong with Republican leadership in D.C. You know, voting by or ruling by omnibus that's packed with all of these handouts to the left's special interests via nonprofit funding and grants and all of that. But what a lot of people see, and we just talked about this, but it's worth emphasizing, what a lot of people see in that is this is the, Mike Johnson, like this is the central, this is one that we all agree on. You've agreed with us on this for years, 702. This was used as a weapon against Donald Trump politically. It is one of the most glaring and egregious things. And if you're flipping on this, we can't trust you on anything else.

And Matt Gaetz basically came out and said that last night. So that's totally on the table in these conversations about the motion to vacate. No question about it. So stay tuned. We'll see what happens by the end of the week. I think Johnson, I don't think they have anywhere to go. They learned that after McCarthy. So I don't think they'll vacate Johnson, but that's totally up in the air. It could happen. Yeah. Call your member of Congress. Tell them not to do this.

Get rid of 702. Reform 702. Whatever. Get rid of what they want to do with 702. Vote the stupid rule down. Yes. Vote the rule down. 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'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.

A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.

But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast.

From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's talk about Norfolk Southern, which has, yesterday it was announced that Norfolk Southern reached what could be the largest settlement in the history of railroads in the United States over the train derailment in East Palestine. We can go put the first element up on the screen here. $600 million to residents and businesses in East Palestine, Ohio. And some, I think it's like within a 10-mile radius, something to that extent. So on Tuesday,

the lead attorneys representing the victims of Norfolk Southern announced the Atlanta-based company had agreed in principle to a $600 million class action lawsuit settlement. It does, though, still need to be approved by a U.S. district court judge in Youngstown. I'm reading now from the Canton repository. often confidential, but this looks significantly larger than any other derailment settlement that we're aware of in the United States, said Jane Conroy of Simons Hanley Conroy, one of the lead attorneys in a Zoom interview with the Canton Repository yesterday. Although, Ryan, I want to put this next element up on the screen as well. This is actually a tweet reacting to the settlement by Erin Brockovich, who is quoting one of Julia Roberts's big lines, obviously based on her own life in the movie Erin Brockovich, quote, before you come back here with

another lame-ass offer, I want you to think real hard about what your spine is worth, Mr. Walker, or what you might expect someone to pay you for your uterus, Ms. Sanchez. And then Erin Brockovich added, the money never makes them whole. That's, I think, a really apt way to put it, looking at the $600 million settlement class action lawsuit that is going to be spread across many, many people in East Palestine, many, many businesses in East Palestine. The money never could make you whole. Yeah, and there's still open questions about criminal guilt here. There have not been prosecutions yet. There are important questions that investigators need to be asking about. In particular, what did the company know when they did the controlled demolition? Was that actually necessary? What information did they have? Did they,

did they, did they willingly, you know, create an environmental catastrophe in order to just get the trains moving a little bit quicker? You know, they, they have claimed that they really had no choice, but they're, the evidence does not seem to be lining up in that direction. And, you know, this does not admit any guilt. So, you know, hopefully, you know, prosecutors are still looking at this. You know, if history is any guide, they're not. But, you know, you've got J.D. Vance, you've got Sherrod Brown, you've got, Vance you got Sherrod Brown. You've got you know politicians from both parties who continue to put pressure on Norfolk Southern yet The JD Vance and share Brown's rail safety reform, you know, we haven't seen that

You know, we've seen that get bottled up so, you know that yeah, it's good that people are going to get some compensation. But systemically, it looks like so far the culprits are getting away with it. Yeah, that's a really important point. That bill, the J.D. Vance bill, has gone basically nowhere in Congress because of opposition to people who take money from the industry or are close with the industry. It's a real uphill battle. Now, the attorney said, Norfolk Southern actually settled quicker than what was expected. And Ryan, you made the- It was quick, yeah.

Yeah. And it looks like victims could potentially get money by the end of the year, which is, I mean, that is fast as these things go. But the other important point that you made, Ryan, is that they're not admitting any guilt. So no liability, no fault admitted in this settlement. But they're also still facing a lawsuit that was filed by the Ohio Attorney General for environmental damages that resulted after the derailment. And Yost has said, Dave Yost, the AG, has said he wouldn't settle the suit, quote, without a detailed understanding of what happened, who is responsible, and how we avoid other communities like East Palestine from being victims to this type of incident. Also worth noting, as the New York Times does, that the National Transportation Safety

Board is continuing to investigate the incident, hasn't released its own report into what happened. So there's plenty more in all of this to come for getting to the bottom of actually what happened. So there's plenty more in all of this to come for getting to the bottom of actually what happened. Now, a little bit more in the details of the settlement, the lawyer said that it would provide payment to residents and businesses in East Palestine and also the affected surrounding communities within a 20-mile radius, pending the court approval that we mentioned earlier. Now, East Palestine alone is almost 5,000 people, and they would all be eligible for payment from the settlement. Then it also has a voluntary program that would compensate individuals within a 10-mile radius for past, present, and future personal injuries

that result from chemical exposure. Norfolk Southern highlighted their contributions to the community, which, again, like they've already poured more than $100 million into different infrastructure. You know, they've done community, they say they've done $2 million for community-directed projects, $4.3 million to upgrades, drinking water infrastructure, $500,000 for an economic development grant, and that huge $104 million for community assistance to communities around East Palestine, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, $25 million included in that for regional safety training, improvements to their city park, direct payments to residents,

$21 million for that, and then $9 million to local first responders. So just the cost of doing business, I guess, for Norfolk Southern until Congress acts and steps in here. Right. It's the $700 million accident. They're using the money that they're saving by reducing the number of workers that they pay and keeping their pay low. Yeah. $700 million accident so far. You can put a price tag on it. Yeah. Yes, indeed. Until Congress does anything, this is basically what you're stuck with. But I thought the Erin Brockovich quote was poignant.

The money never makes anyone whole. These are people's homes. It's their community. It's just unbelievable, but believable that Norfolk Southern settled so quickly, given, I think, what we will continue to find out about their liability. 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. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action, and that's just one of the things

we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Let's move on to this extremely buzzy viral story that the Free Press published yesterday from a current, at least as of right now, employee of National Public Radio. Right, at least as of the time the op-ed was published. This Uri Berliner, who has worked for NPR for more than 25 years, for more than 20 years, I think he said 25 years, penned an article sort of blowing the whistle on the internal ideological bias at NPR, which, again, people will laugh at because it seems so obvious. But he does have kind of an interesting quote when he writes about,

actually, he acknowledges that in this article for the Free Press. We can put the first element up on the screen. That's a picture of him. And the headline is, I've been at NPR for 25 years. Here's how we lost America's trust. He does cite, in fact, polling that shows NPR. It was celebrated internally by NPR. This was one of my favorite parts of his article. But the poll, let me just read from him. He says, in February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or the New York Times. But the research from the Harris poll is hardly reassuring. It found that three in 10 audience members familiar with NPR

said they associate NPR with the characteristic, quote, trustworthy. That's what NPR was internally celebrating because it was higher than the trustworthiness of the New York Times. But he also does write into that question of like NPR is sort of a punchline in conservative circles. Like, of course, you know, the NPR tote bag crowd is something that everybody makes a joke about. Of course, NPR is liberal. He says, if you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way, he writes. But it hasn't. Back in 2011, although NPR is liberal. He says, if you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way, he writes, but it hasn't. Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. 26% of listeners described themselves as conservative,

23% as middle of the road, and 37% as liberal. By 2023, the picture was completely different. Only 11% described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives. We were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. He goes on to complain about coverage of the pandemic, of the lab leak, of the Hunter Biden laptop, of Russiagate. He talks about how often NPR would interview Adam Schiff, but then how quickly Russiagate faded from NPR's coverage after the Mueller report came out with basically no mea culpa. He also has a really interesting section

about how NPR's union has pushed for affinity groups, as he calls them, to allow or to require NPR management to tackle, this is his word, DEI issues in the coverage. And that's a particularly interesting one where you bring labor into this question of ideological bents in newsrooms. I don't know what you make of that, Ryan. And I don't know what you make of this whole article. I'm curious. It is an interesting phenomenon in that, you know, the traditional role of unions has been to, you know, fight for better job protections, wages, benefits, general workplace issues, but to be kind of ideological, ideologically and politically agnostic. In newsrooms the last five, six years, you have seen a trend where staff unions have argued much more around editorial content, which is an interesting

development, an interesting way to think about unions. He also said that he felt like NPR was kind of too supportive of the Palestinian cause. Oh, you found a tweet, actually, an interesting tweet from him, right? Yeah, and a couple, actually. Z Squirrel flagged a couple of these, that Twitter account. So one from October 2023. It's about a, Barack Ravid reported that there was going to be an event in New York called the Intifada Fundraver. And so somebody else.

Sounds like something you'd go to. Somebody else. It sounds like just such a great time. Yeah. So somebody else then posted, one hopes a lot of FBI and NYPD types will be in attendance. Also press, taking pictures and getting names. Opportunities like this are hard to come by. Uri Bertliner retweeted that.

So, which is, you know, you can be like, look, I don't think there should be an Intifada fundraiser. Like, that's one thing. To say that there ought to be FBI and NYPD surveillance of people who are outside of it is in contradiction with Berliner's claim that he's like anti-censorship. Oh, 100%. You know, pro-free speech, and it's published in a, what does she call her news outlet? Free Press?

The Free Press. Yeah, the Barry Weiss newsletter. Yeah, but Barry Weiss would have, you know, Weiss would have eagerly made that exact same position. I mean, it speaks to a broader problem with the Bill Ackman sort of contingency on the center that has been sort of very critical of Harvard. And I think rightfully highlighting a double standard, but some of those same people are in favor of restrictions or will have inflated definitions of anti-Semitism that will broadly sweep speech into the category of hate, I think, in ways that are objectionable when, for example, talking about, as he does here, pro-trans advocacy groups briefed their newsroom and asked them not to use the term biological sex. NPR brought them in as part of this DEI push. That is broadly swept into this category of

hate speech sometimes, and that's wrong, but it's not consistent. Yeah, I do think newsrooms should not, newsrooms I think should make their own judgments and should not be taking guidance from advocacy groups one way or another. Right. On, you know, it's fine to like, obviously you should talk to everybody. That's what reporters do. They go out and talk to people. But I, and I actually think, so one of the things he complains about was that this database that was listing the kind of race and gender of the guests that were on air. And I actually kind of disagree with him on that one because if you are just blindly booking guests and let's say you're a white guy and most of your friends are white guys, you're going to end up not through any kind of conscious bias, you're just going to

be booking endless white guys. And that is a disservice, from my perspective, to your audience, because you're cutting out a lot of interesting perspectives by keeping this really tight circle. And so what- Even accidentally. Right, yeah.

And so what a database does is after a couple months, you look at it and you're like, oh, we've had like 30 guests and like 28 of them were white guys and two of them were white women. Like maybe we need to make a more conscious effort to not just call the people that we know. Yeah, I think that's if that's what's happening as to like, if there are internal quota systems, because the way I'm interpreting it is- The quota system should be, come on. The quota system, yeah.

Come on, look, come on. I think it's, yeah, I feel like you can make that internal effort to include genuinely diverse voices, whether that's race, sex, ideology, which I know NPR- Not doing so great on that. Yeah— Not doing so great on that. Yeah, not doing so great on that all the time. Although, like I said, I was listening to Nancy Mace do an interesting interview with them on the Arizona Supreme Court thing just yesterday. So I think they still try.

But whether they're actually capable of that is a different question because this is one of the biggest problems in media right now is the idea that people who, for example, support Donald Trump, Nancy Mays, huge Donald Trump supporter, but she's a little different because she has this different perspective on abortion and that's what they were interviewing her about. But people who support Donald Trump, for example, I don't know if you were still at HuffPost when they did the asterisk thing with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a racist. Oh, yeah.

So if you extend that to Donald Trump supporters, that means they're necessarily supporting racism, sexism, bigotry, etc., which is not the case for why a lot of people vote for Donald Trump. If you have that sort of categorization and say this isn't ideological, it's like Joy Reid saying we want more Republicans on our network. We want more Liz Cheney, more Adam Kinzinger on our network, but not Ronna McDaniel. been seen as a lack of ideological diversity in some newsrooms because they categorize people who support, I mean, roughly half of the country who voted in 2020 voted for Donald Trump. So if you categorize them as supporters of perpetuators of racism, sexism, bigotry in that sort of direct sense, then you're not going to think it makes sense to interview them. I'm not going to interview, you know, Strom Thurmond on this, this, this. That would have been a mistake back then.

It's a mistake now. We can't repeat it. It does feel like NPR in recent years has taken on a more kind of democratic feel. Activist kind of feel. Yeah. It's like they really do feel like a lot of the assumptions that the standard Democrat makes about the world are the assumptions that the NPR is also making about the world. And the Russiagate situation, I think, is a good example of that. And the way that they handle Trump as well. I was listening

to an interview with Scott Walker a couple of months ago, and basically every single question they asked Scott Walker was about January 6th and like, was the election stolen? Yeah. It's like, all right. And come on NPR, is there anything else you can, is there anything else you want to talk about here? Like it's 2024 now. You've got Scott Walker, like ask him some other questions. Like what? Labor. Anything. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot that could be asked. And then like, why is, and then they'll say, why is Donald Trump obsessed with this? It's like,

you're the one that just won't stop talking about it. A hundred percent. And, you know, I was listening to NPR. I just looked this up. It was obviously in on March 21st, because that's the date the story was published. But I was listening to a segment on the Murthy v. Missouri case, and they were talking to Barbara McQuaid, who's a former U.S. attorney for Eastern District of Michigan. If you watch MSNBC, you have seen her all of the time. And the conversation, it was on point, was outrageous on free speech and the press and the First Amendment. It was like to hear a journalist talking about that case with a former prosecutor in the way that they were, which is basically terrifying, but basically saying like the First Amendment, you know, the government has to police dangerous speech, et cetera, just like operating on that presumption and acting as though anybody who questioned that was either a victim of right-wing disinformation, which has been a

charge that Matt Taibbi has been hit with and Glenn Greenwald has been hit with. I mean, it's just so disturbing to see that baked into the presumption, again, from like a news outlet that's not supposed to be super far to the left. It's funded by taxpayers to some extent. It's national public radio. It's just unfortunate. It is. And part of the reason I want to do this segment is I feel like a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for NPR. They grew up listening to NPR.

Even across socioeconomic divides, it's just in the past it it was kind of a consensus outlet. Like a lot of people listen to it. They might've disagreed with it. Conservatives definitely disagreed with it, but it's convenient to listen to. And there's each, each local station is so important because, you know, I think a city is really enriched by having a local public radio station that then feeds up to the national one. And I think we are enriched as a nation, as like a single people to have, you know, one place that everybody kind of trusts. Yeah.

As you're sitting in traffic frustrated. Yes, I completely agree with that. Before we wrap the show today, Ryan, I just want to say that $700 million from Norfolk Southern, I just quickly looked it up. They had almost $2 billion in stock buybacks in 2023. So $700 million, basically $600 million in the settlement, more than $100 million so far in voluntary payments to East Palestine for infrastructure cleanup and all of that. So a company that has around $2 billion in stock buybacks in a year, it's a $700 million fine, essentially,

it's the cost of doing business. Well, that does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. Ibn Mubarak to all who celebrate. I'm going to a feast later, but I feel like I didn't earn it because I did zero fasting. I mean, you did not earn it at all. It's not just a feeling. You really didn't earn it. But I'm going to go anyway. There's food on the table. I'm going to be there. There you go. Well, we'll be back next week with more CounterPoints. Make sure that you subscribe to the premium version at BreakingPoints.com because we do have some really cool stuff coming down the pipeline. Actually, I don't want to give anybody a date yet, but sooner than you might even think it's within the next

several weeks so stay tuned everyone we've got some fun stuff coming up see you then see you then Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

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