Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/16/25: Dem Flies To El Salvador, Trump Polling Crash, Bill Burr Unloads On Robber Barons, Iran War Looms, Harvard War With Trump, Bernie Picks Successor & MORE!

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Krystal and Emily discuss Trump defies SCOTUS as Senator flies to El Salvador, Trump polling crashes with independents, Bill Burr explains history of robber barons in US, Trump purges antiwar voices as Iran war looms, Harvard goes to war with Trump admin, Bernie picks his 2028 successor, working class homeless crisis.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, Ryan Grimm. It's so great to have you here, Crystal. If people are listening to this, they're like, that's not very funny. You're just talking to Ryan Grimm.

But no, I'm indeed joined today by the one and only Crystal Ball. Thanks for being here. I would be happy to download Ryan's brain, but I'll do my best here. So we're going to start with updates this morning, Crystal. In the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, we have a lot to get to that happened over the last 24 hours. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the movement in the markets and developments in the trade war, also developments in potentially an upcoming hot war, hopefully not, but Iran, tensions continue to escalate with Iran. There are, so there were some moves taken here in D.C. towards Trump administration officials who may not be on board with the administration's plan.

Just yesterday, who ended up on administrative leave, we'll dive into all of that. Crystal, the story of the Ivy Leagues in the second Trump administration is heating up. Harvard is now pushing back on Donald Trump. And you will be shocked to learn that the Dems are in disarray, dare I say? Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, yes, they're always in disarray. But there's some interesting emerging data about how, first of all, the Trump 2.0 era plus sort of centrist capitulation has really shifted the Democratic base, both against their leadership and also for the first time that I can certainly recall, a majority are saying they actually want the party to be more progressive. And AOC is, according to one new poll, really rising in the esteem, the Democratic base as like an actual potential national leader. So a lot of shifts happening there. And then we have Brian Goldstone on. He's written a really important – wrote in – oh, this is going to be a great show – written a really important new book about – you know, we talk so much about the working poor.

He digs into the working homeless, which is increasingly a reality. People who are doing everything they can, working full time, but because housing and rent is so expensive, they still cannot afford a home. And he specifically tells the story of a number of families in and around Atlanta. So I'm really looking forward to talking to him about this because obviously housing is just a central issue to everyone in the entire country. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that as well, Crystal. Let's start with developments in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Yesterday, the judge in that deportation case said that she was going to demand information from the government judge, quote, we have to give process to both sides,

but we're going to move. There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding. Now, we have a clip here of Obrego-Garcia's wife speaking ahead of the hearing that happened yesterday in Greenbelt, Maryland, so actually not too far from Washington, D.C. We can go ahead and roll this clip. It's A1. I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn't forgotten about you our children are asking

when would you come home and I pray for the day I tell them the time and date that you'll return as we continue through Holy Week my heart aches for my husband who should have been here leading our Easter prayers. Instead, I find myself pleading with the Trump administration and the Bukele administration to stop playing political games with the life of Kilmer. Our family is torn apart during this scary time, and our children miss their dad so much. So, Crystal, the district judge in this case ordered administration officials, I'm reading from NBC News here, to, quote,

turn over evidence of their efforts to help bring him back to the U.S. since she first ordered them to, quote, facilitate his return, saying the government had not shown her anything of note on that front. I've got nothing, she said. I've gotten no real response and no real legal justification for not answering. Adding that if the admin is not going to answer questions, quote, then justify why. That's what we do in this house. And many people read that as a sign that she was weighing contempt charges in this case, which would get incredibly interesting. It's already quite an interesting case, but that would make it even more interesting. Yeah. So just as a refresher for people, I know you guys probably know already some of the contours of this case. And we actually, Emily, you and I and Ryan,

had a chance to interview one of his lawyers and get some of the specifics about the timeline of how all of this ultimately unfolded. But the Trump administration, at least initially, admitted that this was an error. He had a court order saying you cannot deport this man to El Salvador, and they deported him to El Salvador and specifically to this notorious torture dungeon in El Salvador. So they acknowledged that they had made a mistake, both in court filings and also in their presentation in court. And their position was, we screwed up,

but we're not gonna do anything about it and you can't make us. And that's been their official position. Now, over the past several days, led by Stephen Miller, they are now reversing course and claiming that, no, actually, this wasn't a mistake. This is the place where he should be. So they've had a

rhetorical shift. But in terms of their court posture, the things that they said previously and attested to previously remain that this was a clear-cut error, that he had an order barring his removal to El Salvador, and the administration screwed up when they sent him to this torture dungeon. So now where we are is the Supreme Court says you have to facilitate his return. They say we want a clarification on this term effectuate that came from the district court because it could potentially conflict with the foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. So we want a clarification there. The district court judge said, you know, it just facilitates good enough. I'm just going to take that word effectuate out. Then she ordered the government to, on a daily basis, provide an update about his well-being and status and about every step they are taking to facilitate his return.

The Trump administration has, at this point, done nothing to facilitate the return. Those filings, which are supposed to come in, I believe, at 5 p.m. every day, they've been late with them. They have not been sufficient in terms of what they are supposed to come in, I believe, at 5 p.m. every day. They've been late with them. They have not been sufficient in terms of what they are supposed to provide. They frequently, you know, one of them just said, like, he's alive and he's in the sovereign custody of El Salvador, basically. So this judge has been for a little while now sort of building a case for potential contempt is certainly what it looks like. And if we put A5 up on the screen, this is the headline from Politico. Yesterday's hearing really was kind of a coming to a head kind of a moment after Trump had hosted McKellie himself in the White House and they played this

little game of Trump saying, I can't bring him back. And McKellie saying, oh, well, I can't release him. Both of them acting like they're powerless, which obviously is utterly absurd. Politico says the judge is now launching an inquiry into the Trump administration's refusal to seek the return of this wrongly deported man. Again, this is really directly in contravention of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling saying you have to help to facilitate this man's return. And so what the judge is saying is, okay, you've got two weeks. We are launching an intensive investigation. She even said, cancel your vacation plans. I don't want any messing around, no gamesmanship. She's giving them a chance to depose the government witnesses, people who have specific knowledge, to get them specifically

on the record about what they know. And then it does seem like potentially this is building up to a finding of contempt. You know, we have had many instances at this point, Emily, of this administration either really taking liberties with how they're interpreting judgments with trying to skate by of not really complying with judicial orders, but giving themselves some sort of rhetorical cover. And I think we've all been wondering, when does this come to a point where there is a direct clash between the courts and between the Trump administration? And I think this is the case that is heading to that point. The last thing I'll say, and this is going on a bit of a tangent, but the reason this case is important is because,

and the reason why the administration is fighting so hard on this case is because the moment you open the door to being able to bring people back from that prison, then it ruins their plan to be able to send people there, whoever they want, including apparently American citizens, with no due process. If the courts have any sort of say over what happens in that prison, then it screws up what they have been wanting to do, which is to use the Alien Enemies Act and whatever provisions, potentially the insurrection or whatever they want to do with regard to U.S.

citizens, where they feel like if we can just get them on the planes fast enough, then we don't have to deal with the court system. We don't have to go through due process. They don't get to have their say in court. And we can just say, oopsie, they're already there. There's nothing we can do. The moment that you are able to bring Gilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States and they are forced to do that, that plan is completely undermined, which underscores that even though, you know, we've talked a lot about the specifics of the case, the specifics of the case certainly matter. All that is important. But this is about much more than this one man. And it truly, especially with Trump out there talking about the quote unquote homegrowns, truly does have direct implications for the entire population, citizen and non. Well, let's get to that clip,

actually. Control room, I'm going to go out of order. But this is A4. It was from an interview that Donald Trump at least aired yesterday evening on Fox Noticias with Rachel Campos Duffy. So here's Donald Trump, A4. Could we use it for violent criminals, our own violent criminals? I call them homegrown criminals. I mean, the homegrown. The ones that grew up and something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat.

We have and push people into subways just before the train gets there, like you see happening sometimes. We are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do that. So to your point, Crystal, that is rather chilling. I'm not quite sure how the Trump administration envisions that process or that execution, but something that we will obviously be keeping an eye on. And I want to play this clip of Caroline Leavitt as we transition

into how Democrats are now mounting a response. This is A3, Caroline Leavitt, yesterday's White House press briefing, addressing many questions on the case of Abrego Garcia. Still going off the El Salvador questions. Yesterday in the Oval Office, administration officials made it very clear that El Salvador is responsible for Mr. Abrego Garcia, yet El Salvador's president said we're not going to do anything with him. So my question is, who is responsible for this man and where he's going to end up? Well, no. First of all, President Bukele said that he is not going to smuggle a foreign terrorist

back into the United States of America, as many in this room in the Democrat Party seemingly want him to do. Abrego Garcia was a foreign terrorist. He is an MS-13 gang member. He was engaged in human trafficking. He illegally came into our country. And so deporting him back to El Salvador was always going to be the end result. There is never going to be a world in which this is an individual who's going to live a peaceful life in Maryland because he is a foreign terrorist and a MS-13 gang member. Not only have we confirmed that, President Bukele yesterday in the Oval Office confirmed that as well. So he went back to his home country where he will face consequences for his gang affiliation and his engagement in human trafficking. I'm not sure what is so difficult about this for everyone in the media to understand.

And it's appalling, truly appalling, that there has been so much time covering this alleged human trafficker and this gang member, MS-13 gang member. It's truly striking to me. So, Crystal, this case study, the Trump administration picked the dumbest possible fight as it's trying to do mass deportations because, and I think from your perspective, there's maybe strategy in it about what they can do with deportations to El Salvador in particular. But it is astounding how stupid this particular case study is. There are, according to the New York Times, there were like 8 million net new migrants into this country over the course of the Biden administration. That is the population of multiple states put together.

And their case studies are Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They have very little evidence that he actually is MS-13. And there were also legal processes in place that they did not properly deal with. And you have the other alleged Trende Aragua members, the Venezuelan barber, etc., as Dropsite has reported, and more down in El Salvador as well. And they're trying to do mass deportations, but they keep stumbling into the dumbest possible fights, not just for a media perspective, but also for the actual substance of doing these policies. The execution has really been a disaster. And it's just unbelievable how poorly they've handled this situation. It's a real, when you're looking back on the last

four years of the Biden administration, for the Trump administration, this is a slam dunk. And I think that's almost hurt them because they came into this with so much confidence and hubris and political capital that they've just wasted it by not handling these legal processes carefully enough because they thought, ah, it won't matter. People just want others gone. So it'll be like a cool on the libs moment to send people down to Bukele. Now, as we transition to Democrats, I want to say. Let me just say, look, I'm sorry. These people are fascists. They want to be able to ship whoever they want to a torture dungeon for life. The entire purpose of that prison is so that people never leave, never leave. You're talking about this man who Caroline Leavitt says alleged human

trafficker. There is zero evidence of human trafficking. No one has ever said that. They will just make shit up. This MS-13 bullshit is because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. That's what we're talking about here. We learned about a 19 year old who didn't even have a tattoo, who I said, this is the wrong guy. Didn't matter. He's now there being tortured in this prison for life. And their position is we don't care. It's not that they genuinely think these are gang members and they're no, the point is to prove they can send anyone, you, me, your family, your brother. That is the point. So, yes, it's a strategy.

And that's why this fight is so important. Because, number one, you should care about this man who does not deserve this. I mean, very few people do deserve to be locked in this dungeon, which is rife with human rights abuses. You barely get fed. It's like 60 people in a cell. No mattresses, no blankets, no time outside, even none for life. That's what they have sent these people to do. And again, yes, there was a significant backlash against the Biden administration immigration policies.

But when you ask people even more specific questions about like, hey, should we deport people who've been here for 10 years and have no criminal record? They're like, no. But they were convinced that the immigrant population was just rife with all sorts of criminals. And that's the other thing with this policy, that the reason why they can't send off the worst of the worst is because, yeah, of course, there are some number of undocumented immigrants who are criminals, much less than the native-born population. And so it's not so easy to round up plane loads of criminals to make your big statement. So what do they do instead? They round up the gay barber. They round up this 19-year-old who's done nothing wrong. They round up Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has a court order

saying you cannot do this. And then they ship them off before anyone has a chance to say, well, are these gang members? Did they commit any crimes? We now know 90% of the people that they sent committed no crimes, 90%. So that's, I wanna be really clear about what we're dealing with here. It's not an optics problem. It's not a strategy problem. It is an authoritarian fascism problem.

That's what it is. And so when Trump is out here saying the homegrowns are next, you know, again, they when they've polled, even on criminal American citizens being sent to this torture dungeon, people have said, no, no, no way. Like, why would we do that?

But there is no reason you should have any confidence that this administration would truly send the quote unquote worst of the worst. Their worst of the worst is Andre, the gay makeup artist who was applying for asylum. That's their definitionunquote worst of the worst. Their worst of the worst is Andre, the gay makeup artist who was applying for asylum. That's their definition of the worst of the worst. We know the way that they're expanding the definition of terrorism to include people

who dare say the wrong thing about Israel, people who harbor ill sentiment against Teslas, people who go to hands-off protests to push back against the insanity that they see unfolding in their country. That's who they want to use these powers against. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To transition to what the Democrats are doing and why they've finally somewhat woken up, you've got Chris Van Hollen, who's a senator from Maryland, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, of course, was living in Maryland. And he said, you know what,

I'm going to El Salvador, apparently today, I'm going to El Salvador, and I'm going to try to figure out what is going on. I'm going to try to get access to him. I'm going to try to talk to, you know, diplomats, or if he can, the president of El Salvador himself. There are other efforts for other politicians to be able to go, because they finally realized that this isn't, this is part of a broader project. This is not just about this one man. And guess what? The people are on your side.

There is the, when you ask people, do you want to deport and send to a torture dungeon an innocent man because of an administrative error and never get him back? Guess what? You're going to be on the right side of those politics. Let's take a listen. A6 to Chris Van Hollen.

I saw the comments of President Bukele, and I look forward to meeting with them. I've requested to meet with them. I reached out to the ambassador here to ask to meet while he's here. But I've also made clear if we can't meet here, I do intend to go to El Salvador to discuss the release of this individual who is illegally detained. First President Trump could have just said, you know, bring him home. Of course he could have done that. But this is an administration that has lied about Mr. Obrego Garcia, right? The vice president of the United States tweeted out that he had a criminal

record. That was a lie. They're just lying. They've gotten caught lying. They don't want to admit it. And they have an obligation to bring him home. But I will say the president of El Salvador should not now take it upon himself to say that he is detaining him for one more day, because that is kidnapping. I understand that the attorney general said that we would provide a plane to bring him home. So all the president of El Salvador has to do now is hand over and release an innocent man and let him come home to his family. And if we put that in, oh, go ahead, Crystal. I was just going to say, and of course, if Trump asked Bacalli, we need this guy back,

he would be back. If Bacalli went to the prison that he runs under a state of exception and said, we need this guy, of course he would be able to get this guy back. There were some women who we tried to send to, and a few individuals who are from other Central American countries. And McKellie said, no, we can't, we can't take women. We can't take these other people. He's worried about his relationship with these other Central and South American countries. So he sent them back as well. Like, they're playing this game as if we're idiots and we can't see what's going on here. So we can put the next element up on the screen. Other Democrats are doing what Van Hollen is doing reportedly, including Senator Cory Booker and planning trips down to El Salvador or trying to plan trips down to El Salvador. This is according to a new report from Axios.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, if we put a seven up on the screen, continues to, to your point, Crystal, lean very firmly into this case. Vice President J.D. Vance was mixing it up with actually Zed Jelani on Ax yesterday going back. Richard Hedania, too, I think. Oh, really? Was he tweeting at Hed Jelani on X yesterday going back. Richard Hedania too, I think. Oh, really? Was he tweeting at Hedania? Oh my goodness. Okay. He was definitely tweeting back and forth with Zed. In this particular exchange, Zed was making the point, he said, why do you say a beggar Garcia has no legal right to be here when the Supreme Court said the opposite, nine to zero.

And that was in response to JD saying, are you proposing that we invade this is to Mikkel Jolette. We invade El Salvador to retrieve a gang member with no legal right to be in our country. Where in the Supreme Court's decision does it require us to do that? Now, obviously, Crystal, Bukele is an ally of this administration. Bukele was sitting next to them in the Oval Office just 24 hours before that tweet was posted and would obviously help them facilitate or effectuate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States. But the administration

is very much leaning into this idea that this is a guy, MS-13, he can be sent anywhere. And I just want to say, the point that you were making about El Salvador in particular, it is a—this is going to be an enormous problem, I think, for the right in the next couple of years, this relationship with Bukele, this particular prison, because a lot of Republicans—Democrats are now making the trek down to El Salvador, or trying to. A lot of Republicans have gone, Kristi Noem, Republican members of Congress, have gone and done photo ops inside of that prison. They have done their photo ops with Nahid Bukele.

That is anti-American. What is happening in that prison is anti-American. And I get that other countries are not accepting their own citizens. And I think that is genuinely a problem. I agree with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump on that. I think that is genuinely a problem. Sending them to dungeons in El Salvador is not actually going to long-term fly with the public if you are also ignoring the legal processes that are in place when people have done things. And this is what Biden, I mean, some of this is through Joe Biden. Abrego Garcia applied for asylum, and I think he actually applied for

asylum during the Trump administration when he first applied. I think it was 2019. But there are a lot of people, because these pathways were opened up in the Biden administration, and that means the Trump administration has to deal with that. It sucks and it's not fair in every case, but it does mean that we have legal processes in place where you do have to deal with those things. Otherwise, to your point, Crystal, everyone else's rights get eroded down the line. And the flippancy is, I mean, it has some conservatives, Andy McCarthy is one, Rod Dreher is another, like really freaked out by what they're seeing from the Trump

administration. Honestly, I think this is more than I've seen on another issue in the second Trump administration. It's been upsetting to some people on the right. The only other thing I'll add, though, is Democrats need to be really careful, because as important as I think this is, it's going to make it look like they got all up in arms about one guy who did legitimately enter the country illegally when net 8 million people came into the country. They need to play this very, very carefully under the Biden administration, often with their support. So I do think they have to be careful with how they approach going to El Salvador, which I think, by the way, is legitimately a brave thing to do, given how Bukele is likely to treat them and respect on that part. But with their own

constituents, I mean, Democrats were unhappy with the Biden administration of immigration policies. So they do need to play that pretty carefully. I think some of that is overstated. Because like I said, yes, if you ask people, okay, should we do mass deportation? There's still, you know, somewhat of a consensus there. If you ask them any of the specifics, the view is very different. And no, they are not on board with shipping random innocent people to this torture dungeon for life. So, but also, frankly, even if the politics were bad, like, sometimes you have to fight. Sometimes it's important. Sometimes you have to make the case.

You know, this— I think they should have done that during Biden. I genuinely think that's on the substance. They should have done that during the Biden administration. Done what? They should have taken what was happening at the border much more seriously during the Biden administration. I'm not saying Republicans did it for the right reason, but I mean, I think it was pretty obvious there was something disastrous. Well, I mean, that's a whole other conversation because in my view, what Democrats did is completely capitulate to the like right wing immigration hawk framing in a way that was

utterly disastrous. Now, I think there is likely to be a huge backlash in the other direction. I mean, immigration, like expansion has never been more popular than it was during the first Trump administration because people were disgusted with the tactics that he was using then. And it is nothing compared to what it's what they're doing now. And also the very clear with Trump talking about homegrowns, very clear implication that U.S. citizens are going to be next. So last thing, just with regard to the specifics of Abrego Garcia, if we could put a eight up on the screen just in terms of their supposed proof that he's some hardened MS-13 gang member. Apparently the cop who was the person who initially claimed that he had alleged MS-13 membership based on some sketchy confidential informant that are, you know, they're known to be not particularly reliable. He was fired and indicted like weeks later after making this claim for sharing case

info with a sex worker. And the only other evidence that they have that, and by the way, the confidential informant claimed that he was part of MS-13 in a part of the country in New York where he doesn't live and like has, you know, rarely if ever even been to. And then the only other piece of evidence they have is that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. So that's what we're talking about. And then when Caroline Leavitt's like, oh, he's a human trafficker.

No one has ever said that. That is completely, utterly made up false. So, you know, I think Democrats have to fight on this issue. Both, you know, I do think they're on solid political ground, but even if they're not, like you cannot create a massive loophole in the law that allows the Trump administration to disappear whoever they want, whenever they want, and be able to uphold this.

And we can, can't do anything once they're there. That's that. When it's not good for anyone. I mean, that's the, whenever civil liberties are threatened, it's, you know, always the point you can tell if people are principled defenders of civil liberty by how vehemently they defend due process when their enemy's due process is threatened. And so, yeah, I mean, it could very well end up being used by a Democratic administration down the road if we slide fully into banana republicanism in a way that hurts Republicans, in a way that hurts conservatives, Christians, whatever. You can see how it would, those standards can very easily slip. So we have to, before we run on this, Crystal,

we have to get the next element up on the screen. Yeah, you found this. Love this. Kristi Noem, it's sort of a funny image if you're watching this. The Daily Beast made a funny image to go along with it of Kristi Noem in all of her outfits, kind of treating herself like a Barbie. And the Daily Beast writes, Ice Barbie keeps creating all kinds of headaches for Homeland Security. But actually, there was a Wall Street Journal, it was a long Wall Street Journal story yesterday that indicated Kristi Noem's peers are not pleased with her. They think that she, according to this report in the Journal, is harming their efforts, actually, to try and do mass deportations. And Crystal, I think what this highlights is there are real fractures within the administration,

because doing these mass deportations in a way that is actually mass. If you're actually going to hit the targets that the Trump administration promised to do, if you are going to do it without causing these protracted legal battles where even the right is divided on how legally dubious your track is in that case, and if you're also going to do it in a way that is politically going well, they are not doing that right now. There's a lot of internal consternation about how ably this administration is approaching it. And it looks like Kristi Noem is going to be taking some arrows. She already is in the Wall Street Journal, but this could bubble to the surface for her in a rather problematic way going forward that can make all of those Bukele photo ops and

outfits look really foolish. Yeah. I mean, she's playing dress up like it's preposterous. She's just making herself look utterly ridiculous. Did you see the video where her like big ass gun was like pointed at the dude next to her head and he like takes a look at where her gun is pointed and like backs up sort of subtly. I mean, it's just, yeah, she's a ridiculous person. I mean, the Barbie moniker is actually accurate here because she has all these little like dress up outfits. She's doing it to herself.

Swapping in, you know, oh, she's doing her Coast Guard thing. She's doing her, oh, she's doing her Coast Guard thing. She's doing her, Oh, she's got her ice flak jacket on. I mean, she had like a fricking ice, like the big bulletproof vest on in Manhattan and like the streets of New York city. Like, girl, where do you think you are? It's with the full extensions and the full eyelashes and the whole bit. And it's also like, lady, you're like 50 something years old. You know, it's, I don't know. The whole thing is just, uh, is, is just a part of a grotesque spectacle to me. So, uh, I'm glad at least someone is also noticing and being like, you know what,

this is kind of gross. Well, Megyn Kelly went after her. That reminds me Megyn Kelly and some others have, have started, I think Ann Coulter have started going after her. Sarah Palin went after her recently. So yeah, she's definitely taken some arrows. What did Meghan go after her for? The outfits. Really? Yeah, it's ridiculous. It is. It's, like, embarrassing. It really is. Like, she's a law enforcement officer. It's starting to look completely, I mean, I shouldn't say it's starting to look, it looks completely unserious and ridiculous. But I think this is genuinely a problem for the administration because this was like their big ticket issue that they can't put well in the economy.

Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

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

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

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober 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. The Trump administration has some real problems ahead.

Let's get to that because actually what we want to start with is this thought of Harry Enten on CNN yesterday talking about some of the movement for Donald Trump in polling as this trade war has proceeded. So let's go ahead and roll B1 here. Focus in on independence here, and independents feel that Donald Trump has vacated the center of the electorate, catering to his base. What are we talking about? Well, let's talk about the overall net approval ratings. We're going to look at the worst ever, catering to his base. What are we talking about? Well, let's talk about the overall net approval ratings. We're going to look at the worst ever at this point in a presidency. The old record among independents for the worst ever was Donald Trump back in 2016, a net approval rating of minus 16 points.

Well, Donald Trump has broken his own record here. He now holds, in this particular term, the worst ever net approval rating at this point in a presidency among independents. And get this, minus 22 points. He is 22 points underwater with independents. That breaks the old record that belonged to Trump. He has set the new record. He is completely underwater with the center of the electric cape. And this is overall. This is on all the issues. Now, focus in specifically on the economy. Yeah, let's focus in on the economy, right? What is driving this overall approval rating for Donald Trump among independents to go underwater? Let's take a look at the economy. And let's take a look at Trump's net approval rating on it and look at the trend line over

just the last few months. You go back to January. He was slightly above water with independents at plus one point. Look at this drop, Kate. Oh, my. Minus twenty nine points. That's a 30 point drop in under three months of time. What independents are hearing from Donald Trump, they hate they hate what they're hearing from Donald Trump. And they are abandoning him in record numbers. And actually what the chyron said behind Harry Anton there, who I have to imagine is hopped up on Ghost Energy every single day, but what the chyron said was, like Sagar at the DNC, was that was the worst for any president, the worst net number with independents on the economy. And so that drop in three months' time, Crystal, I can't remember seeing anything like that. That's huge on the

economy with independents. Now, obviously, it's early in the midterm election cycle. God forbid we even consider that we may be in the midterm election cycle. But those numbers are devastating. Oh, utterly devastating. And, you know, the tariff policy changes every day, even if tomorrow he's like, just kidding. I made amazing deals and the tariffs are off and we're back to normal. The damage is done. You know, it does remind me of the drop off that Joe Biden unfortunately had during while he was doing one of the few one of the good things in his administration, which is withdrawing from Afghanistan, the negative media coverage, and, you know, Americans getting killed and the chaos of all of that and Taliban taking back

control. Like he took a hit to his approval rating. He never recovered. And I do think with Trump, the honeymoon is over. Certainly the sense that, oh, this is a businessman and he's going to be good for me economically, et cetera, like that is done. And that has always been his strength. That has always been the area where he has performed the best. You know, as much as we talked about immigration's role in the election, the economy was the number one issue, inflation in particular. And people were never really super psyched about the things he

was saying about tariffs. But they he also talked a lot about I'm going to get prices down. And they just sort of assumed, I think, like, you know, it went pretty well last time, like he knows what he's doing. We'll do some stuff on the economy that's going to be good for me. And no, the reality is that he is instituting this massive tariff regime. It will be, if he continues with it, a huge regressive tax on working class people. Rather than prices going down, they're going to go up. That is what their consumers increasingly expect. And huge numbers are already saying that what he's doing is making them personally, financially worse off. Now, I'm actually right now in the process of drafting a monologue probably for tomorrow about as his approval rating falls, I think you will see more of these sort of

authoritarian tactics that are being deployed with regard right now to immigration, with regard to crushing dissent on college campuses. This ties into the Harvard conversation that we're going to have as well, because that's what, you know, people who are authoritarians or have authoritarian tendencies, when they're backed into a corner, they don't back down. I mean, this is what we saw with Trump with January 6th. He didn't just say, oh, I lost, I guess, you know, I have to peacefully go away.

No, they crack down. They go further in terms of expanding the police state and crushing dissent and using whatever weapons they can against their ideological enemies. Send me power. Yeah. Yeah. To, you know, to make sure that they are able to hold their grip on power, even as they become less and less popular. And so I think, you know, that's where on the one hand, the fact that his popularity is diminishing is going to give him less power with regard to Republican politicians. Some of these institutions like the media and the universities, the Democrats are starting to like get a little bit of energy because they can see the way that

his popularity is waning and his plans are being rejected by the public. But it also enters us into a sort of like new precarious phase in terms of what his reaction to that will ultimately be. Well, and so I think the way we set up this block is really helpful on this note, because as a sort of anti-free trade orthodoxy or like dogma type person, the question of short-term pain was always going to be part of this picture. And that's sort of the way the elite set up the system is that if you ever want to bring us back from relying entirely for national security purposes, for pharmaceutical purposes on other countries that are on the other side of the world, there is going to be short-term pain. But the question is, how short-term that pain is going to be, and if it ever is relieved. And so, this is, we can put the next element, I think I just said elephant up on the screen,

element up on the screen, Crystal. This is from Joe Weisenthal, who was pointing out, quote, dismal expectations for the economy in the New York Fed's survey of regional manufacturers. Basically, every line, new orders, employment, et cetera, is going down with the exception of prices received and paid, which are going up. And then control room, whenever you're ready, you can put the next element up on the screen as well. This is the outlook for new orders from the New York Fed's regional manufacturers literally hit the lowest level in the history of the survey. Another Joe Weisenthal post on X that he highlighted from these New York Fed numbers. And that gets to, Crystal, whether in this push or pull,

there's more that's going to be lost or more that's going to be gained. So even if this is a long-term battle, even if we accept that there may be some short-term pain, these numbers over the course of the first week have been not great for the administration. They are pointing to deals with like NVIDIA and other places. But it seems like the industrial policy that they want to couple this with is one going to be codifying a corporate tax cut, which I will say, as annoying as that is, may help with onshoring, but it's not industrial policy. And then their second part of their industrial policy is just Trump calling up these companies

and talking to them. Strong-arming them. Yeah. So far, that's what it looks like the approach is. And you can understand then where these Wiesenthal numbers are coming from. And let's just get to this element from NBC News. This is before. United Airlines, here's the headline, gives two 2025 profit outlooks, calling economy, quote, impossible to predict.

So just the lead of the story. United Airlines maintained its full year forecast on Tuesday but took an unusual step of offering a second forecast should the U.S. slip into a recession, calling the economy, quote, impossible to predict. Either way, it expects to turn a profit, NBC writes, but says the carrier warned alongside its first quarter earnings that a recession could drive down profits this year, but said booking trends are stable, stable for now. And lastly, Crystal, this next element from Newsweek, this is according to Chinese media, I should add, but this is from Newsweek saying that Greenland's foreign minister has said it is seeking deeper cooperation with China and potentially a free trade agreement, according to China's state news agency, Xinhua. So all of this evidence points to a very—if this is a period of temporary pain, Crystal, it is going to be

an enormous period of temporary pain. And the signs that there is more onshoring that's going to happen so far to offset the people who say we are actually going to bet on China or we are going to bet outside of the United States, because the United States, you know, is not a safe haven for us right now. We don't feel confident that we can make long-term investments. It doesn't make sense to us to do that. These are not great signs for the Trump administration. Yeah, well, Trump himself said something like, you know, some of these countries, we may have them pick between us and China. Yeah, yeah.

That's not a hard choice. If I was running a country, like, why would you do a deal with this person? He's all over the place. Like, China is rising power. They have been much more strategic in terms of securing, like, the rare earth minerals that they need. Technologically, they are just as advanced, at least. I think that's actually being charitable

to the u.s at this point as we are like they have mass manufacturing capacity what they have been you know reasonable to work with in terms of the belt and road initiative why what do we have going for us we just have lots of customers with a lot of disposable income and that's a real thing. I mean, China has even more customers just by the numbers. We continue to be per capita a wealthier country, no doubt about that. And I don't want to undersell it. But you also have a human element to this, too. Like J.D. Vance going to Europe and, you know, telling them about their supposed sensorious practices, which is legit, except then he comes back home

and they're crushing dissent on college campuses and being way more authoritarian in terms of their, like, crackdown on any sort of wrong thing on Israel. So, you know, they haven't exactly endeared themselves

to the world. Not to mention, China is fighting a trade war against us. We are apparently fighting a trade war against the to the world. Not to mention, China is fighting a trade war against us. We are apparently fighting a trade war against the entire freaking world. So who do you think has the better, you know, they can think strategically just about us and making alliances and trying to, you know, isolate us. We're rapidly isolating ourselves and giving the rest of the world a very clear choice in terms of what they, you know, what direction they would want to go in. And that's why Greenland is sort of emblematic here. And, you know, just a couple, two other points that I just want to hone in on. I mean, first of all,

even with the tariffs in their current sort of rolled back state, we have 145% tariffs on China. If you are a big guy, you can pay your million dollars. You can go to Mar-a-Lago. You can get your car van. You can be Charles Schwab in the White House and happen to be, you know, perfectly timed Trump's announcements.

So you can make $2.5 billion in a single day, something that Trump bragged about. If you are your average small to medium-sized business, which had no choice but to import usually from China, you're screwed. You are screwed. There is no way you can survive 145 percent tariffs. Even if you wanted to bring manufacturing and build your own factory and do all these things, you're not getting any help from the government. The tariffs are they're here.

Like, it's not like you have any sort of runway to be able to figure it out or raise capital or do any of that. We don't, in many instances, even have the specialty skills here. So you've got to, you know, go overseas to even bring the people in who would know how to do it. Like, it's, it is not possible. It's not possible. Instead, you're just going to die. Like your company, your business, your dream, your life's just going to go under. Yesterday, I highlighted this woman who's a, she's a veteran. She founded this company called Busy Baby. They make these little mats that you can, it's actually a very cool product. You can put it on the table at the restaurant and you can hook the baby's like toys onto it. And so it's clean and the baby can't throw the toys down on

the ground, which is a constant issue. And this thing was taken off. She got to go on Shark Tank. You know, her sales were through the roof. Walmart and Target came knocking, but she had to take out a loan in order to finance the expansion into Walmart. And she leveraged her house in order to get secure those small business loans. And now, so not only is she at risk of losing her business, she and her dream, which was succeeding and which is a product that people genuinely liked. She's also at risk of losing her home. I mean, these are like, you're messing with people's lives. And for what, for what? That manufacturing index should tell you everything you need to know

about whether this is actually going to bring manufacturing back. Quite the opposite, quite the opposite, especially if we end up in recession. Well, one of the problems with those small businesses as well is that people are having a harder time getting in touch with, reportedly, I mean, obviously, I haven't tried this, but with the Small Business Administration because of cuts. And that's, you know, I think, Crystal, we remember with NAFTA, I stumbled onto an interview with David Obie recently from 2000 where he was talking about—he was on CNN. And he was talking about how he supported NAFTA and WTO because there were promises of job training and investment in the communities that would be really hard hit. And he said, I regret that because I never saw that stuff happen. And I think that's a real lesson for the Trump administration in that there will be casualties.

They know that there will be casualties of this adjustment period, if it's just an adjustment period, by the way. That's assuming it's an adjustment period. And what are they doing to make up for that? What are they doing to help the people who set up their businesses around the pre-existing system because it had existed for years and was the way to turn a profit, was the way they were told to be productive members of the American economy. Small business owners, this is the Republican electorate, by the way, has been the Republican electorate for a really long time. So they need to tread very, very carefully. And there just aren't a lot of signs that they're taking seriously the need to augment.

Again, this is taking their argument charitably that this is an adjustment period. But even then, even if we give them that, the signs that they're augmenting this with serious off ramps for people affected, I just don't see much there at all. No, no. I mean, there's been some floating of a bailout for farmers again, which, you know, he did in his first administration, but that's it. And, you know, I think these tariffs are less about economics and more about power. I think Trump likes having the companies coming on bended knee. I think he likes being the person who has sole control over like the entire freaking global economy, certainly the national domestic economy. I think that's really what it's more about. And the last thing I'll say with regard to like bringing back manufacturing, something I support for a variety of reasons, both in terms of, you know, they should be good

union jobs. There are certain things that we should produce here in terms of, you know, they should be good union jobs. There are certain things that we should produce here simply because of, you know, natural security. We all learned this during COVID. We learned about the fragility of the supply chain and the way that that put us at risk. Like I support all of that. Right. But when Trump is talking about bringing back manufacturing, when Letnick is talking about it to all the armies of millions of people or robots screwing in the little, little screws. First of all, number one, a lot of it will be

robots. It won't be human beings. So that's number one. You'll be like, you know, you'll have some humans to like service the air conditioning to keep the robots cool. That's the kind of thing that we're talking about. But number two, to the extent that you do have human beings, Trump is not talking about bringing us back to the 1950s when we were at the peak of post-war manufacturing power at a time when somewhere around half of the industrial workforce was unionized. He wants to take us back to 1900, to William McKinley. That's what he talks about all the time. Guess what that was? That was before you had progressive era labor reforms. That's before you had even federal child labor laws. That's before factory jobs were good jobs. That was much more like, think of, you know, more Dickensian. Think of,

like, you know, Upton Sinclair and the way workers were treated in, you know, in the jungle. Think of the triangle shirtwaist fire. That's the era he wants to bring America back to, where our workers are part of the global race to the bottom. That's the era that he envisions. So everyone really needs to be really clear. There's nothing inherently like good, stable middle class about a factory job. You have to have unions and labor power in order to secure both the safety and the wages and the working conditions to make those jobs good jobs. They were in the 50s. They honestly, at this point, they are not great, especially in the South. You know, the I saw Matt Bruning tweeted out that like Honda workers in Alabama make less than McDonald's workers in Denmark because of those

labor conditions. And so no one should fool themselves about the actual era that in his idealized world he would be returning us to. So I went and looked at this yesterday just before we move on. It is interesting. The Biden industrial policy brought manufactured jobs back to red states with right to work laws overwhelmingly. And if you look at the map, it's like basically not just red states, but it's states like swing states even that have right to work laws, including Michigan until 2024 when that was repealed. So it's really like the Trump administration wanting to be pro-labor, pro-middle class.

There's a complicated puzzle that needs to be put in place. And again, we're, what, two weeks into the liberation era, but there's just, all of the energy right now is to fix this tax bill and to figure out this reconciliation bill, which is tax policy, basically. And I mean, that'll probably have an expanded child tax credit, but that's about it when it comes to, you know, like relief for middle class, working class families. And there are just, there's not a lot of policy momentum at all. And again, maybe that'll change, but there's not a ton of evidence of that right now. It just, as someone on the right, I just don't see a lot of energy on that right now. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often

unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

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

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

Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Crystal, we should play this Bill Burr clip because it's really something. Yeah. Here's Bill Burr on his podcast. David Sirota actually pointed this clip out. We can go ahead and roll B6, Bill Burr addressing the economy over the course of the last couple weeks.

This whole idea that other countries stole our jobs, like our factory jobs and all that, as far as I remember, that's not the case. Here's a little quick history from someone who doesn't read a lot. In the 1800s, during the, what was that period called? The Industrial Revolution. They had like kids working in factories, like fucking 12, 14 hour days, like four, five year old kids in dangerous situations. And people weren't making any money. And the one guy who owned the factory was keeping all the money. The working man finally has enough. They start organizing unions. The robber barons hire police, the army,

all of these people to come in and kill these people in riots, crack their skulls, do unbelievable sorts of damage to them to try and force them to go back to work for sweatshop wages. These people died, were maimed, catastrophic fucking injuries so that we could have a decent wage in this country. And they had unions and all of that. So then there was like a 40, 50 year period where being a middle-class person, middle-class white person, was the dream. Eventually, these corporations just got sick of dealing with these unions,

and their hard-nosed negotiating and all that, and then they just said, well, fuck you then. Keep your union, keep your factory, we're leaving. And they took their factories outside of the U.S. and went back to 1,800 wages. What the fuck? You should be making those things here. And then what the corporate guy said was, well, you know, we would make sneakers here, but to pay the American worker and everything, the sneakers would then, instead of costing 50 bucks, they'd now cost 700.

And I was always thinking, why? It would cost 700. I can't afford that. And what it really was, was they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. So if they came back to America, we weren't going to work for that. So, and they weren't going to take, they weren't going to lose the profit of sweatshop labor. So they were going to pass it on to the consumer. Easy to see why Bill Burr is popular, Crystal. Yes, he needs to run for president. I'm not even kidding. Like, have you heard anyone else, any Democratic politician explain it as well as him?

We were talking yesterday and you made such a good point that and producer Griffin, I think, mentioned this as well, that he just sounds like a normal guy, which is something that most, like, left class critics don't. I think what Griffin said is he doesn't come off as soy. Yes, I was going to leave that for someone else to say. But if we're attributing it to producer Griffin, yes. And I think that's actually very well said, because that's the problem. We're going to run a James Carville clip later in the show, but I do think that James Carville is right about it. Nina Turner has said this too. The way Democrats talk, because so many have been sort of funneled through academia, is really academic. It's coded in a way that I don't want to say feminine because it's not all feminine, but it comes across as like very like doesn't always connect. Yeah, that's that's the thing is it just doesn't frequently does not connect. No, he's got a gift for that. And he's 100 percent right.

You know, the Trump framing is like, oh, these countries stole our workers. No politicians here collaborated with corporations to create this global race to the bottom. That's what it is. And so, you know, the left people like Bernie Sanders, who has been extremely consistent, extremely prescient about the impact of NAFTA, the impact of PNTR. It's not that they're opposed to trade. They're opposed to trade that creates a race to the bottom where you are just, you know, where you aren't dealing with labor standards. You aren't dealing with wages. And so, of course, capitalists are going to search for the lowest paid labor force they can possibly find so that they can endlessly juice their profits.

Like that is the system that we have. And so, you know, Bill Burr, I think, explains it really perfectly there. In the post-war period, the U.S. in a lot of ways was kind of like the only game in town. So we benefited from this unique period of prosperity. And then once you get into the neoliberal era and there's stripping away of union rights and there's, you know, bad trade deals like NAFTA, like, you know, then the opening up fully of trade to China. Once you have those deals and you create the global race to the bottom, that's, you know, that's how you end up with the dynamic that we have now. And to go back to my earlier point, Trump doesn't want to reverse those trends. He just wants to get American

workers back into that global race to the bottom, right? He wants them to also, or robots, right, also participate in that global race to the bottom. And we know that because, you know, there's relentless attacks on unions from this administration. The National Labor Relations Board has been gutted as effectively, I think, without a quorum, unable to operate. That's been a lifelong project and direction for him. He's always been a union buster. We see with regard to like the labor standards, you know, just like basic workplace safety and stuff, even in industries where Trump has a particular affinity, like, for example, with coal miners, they are completely destroying

the health and safety measures for coal miners, already an extremely dangerous job where younger and younger men are getting an incredibly like virulent form of black lung. Doge is stripping that away and Doge is stripping the ability of the government to be able to regulate any big business so that even without changing the law, they can kind of sort of go back to when you could have your sweatshop and you could lock people in and you could pay them whatever wage you wanted and you could get away with it. So when you couple the tariffs with the direction of Doge, that's the picture that you ultimately get. And then you add to that the other piece that

Bill Burr talked about, which is how somehow these billionaires keep being in a position to make lots of money on these big market swings. Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he had to say about that. I don't understand what that whole fucking thing was. But all I know is once again, the market tanked and a bunch of rich people right before they turned it back on again, went in and made a ridiculous amount of money. And they're all high-fiving with each other. And I don't know. This guy told me something a long time ago. He says, when you watch the stock market and they go like, $2 billion was lost today. He's like, money isn't lost.

Like, where did it go? That's just how they frame it. It isn't lost. It, where did it go? That's just how they frame it. It isn't lost. It changes hands. All right. That's enough of that shit. And obviously, go ahead, Em. Well, I was just going to say, I mean, I do think there are elements of the Trump administration. I actually even think Donald Trump himself, who thinks that he is somehow like the savior of the American working class and all of this, and like genuinely believes that what's happening is going in that direction. The problem is his administration is infiltrated by billionaires, and now a lot of influence

from Silicon Valley and out the Wall Street, for example. And to one extent, you can look at what he did with the tariffs, and Wall Street freaked out and say he just gave them the middle finger. The 10% global tariff is still giving Wall Street the middle finger. They absolutely hate that. The huge China tariffs, they absolutely hate that. But in a way, it also does put them in the driver's seat. And the bond market is what made him, as people were getting, quote, yippy, is what made him

walk back. And again, he hasn't walked everything all the way back. We still have that massive 10 percent global tariff and the massive tariffs on China. Nobody in the business community wanted that. But what happens next is really critical for Donald Trump and for people in the administration who want to, genuinely, it's people on the right who say, these are our voters now, and you—let's just attribute to them political motivations and say, we are going to lose these voters back to Democrats. We're talking about that later in the show, how Dems have

taken their fighting the oligarchy tour to really, really big audiences, increasingly big audiences. So even if they're politically motivated and they look at that, you have to then step back and say, well, why is Howard Lutnick behind the scenes, the operator here? Why? That's interesting. He seems to be the one that's making the deals. Didn't he just get off the street?

Has he been in Washington long? Yeah. Well, I mean, it wasn't infiltrated by billionaires. Trump is himself a billionaire and he brought a bunch of billionaires to be around him. I mean, the terror policy is clearly all him. Clearly all him. It is absolutely all him. Yeah.

And his advice, you know, Scott Besson is like putting his game face on and going out and defending it. And that's his job is to be a sycophant. That's all these people's job is to be a sycophant and go out and defend whatever the Mad King does. But there's no doubt the, like, tariffs on penguins and this ridiculous formula and the whole chaos of the whole situation, like, that is all 100% Trump. And where I thought you were going

with the, like, them being in the driver's seat is they're in the driver's seat because if you are a well-connected CEO oligarch, you get to be the one that's, you know, these auto part, like, this is really a problem for us. Or you could be NVIDIA and get your exemption or you could be iPhone. I mean, think about this, like these high tech components that actually we really should have. And under the Biden administration did have some concerted policy, industrial policy to reshore here and manufacture here.

Those are the pieces that are getting the exemptions. Meanwhile, like, you know, this lady's busy baby, Matt, American consumers just will not be allowed to buy it. She's going to look for markets all around the world to sell her product because not only can she not make it here, she won't be able to sell it here because of 145% tariff. Yep. And people will notice that. Yeah. And then on the insider trading piece, like not only did you have the Charles Schwab and some other billionaires there the day that Trump sends the market soaring with a single tweet and he brags about Charles Schwab making $2.5 billion on the day, real Main Street, you know, Main Street over Wall Street guys, right? In a post, good time to buy. I guess you can make the argument that that's actually

very egalitarian. But yeah, what a day that was. And then, you know, we're looking at Marjorie Taylor Greene bought a bunch of stock on the day. And you just like, OK, when you and this is the problem with having one person in sole control of this massive economic nuclear weapon, you single handedly can move the market up and down in huge ways and so then it's okay well who knew you were going to do that and stood to profit and we know that this administration you know trump's got his shit coin and whatever and his development properties all around the world like they are extraordinarily corrupt nakedly corrupt so i would be shocked if people weren't out there trading and making billions based on these like monarchical announcements that are coming down on high on a day to day basis. Now, some people are theorizing that's the whole point of the policy.

I'm not there. And I think the whole point of the policy is more about Trump's power, which I guess is like sort of related to that. But I would be shocked if there weren't insiders who were trading based on knowing like 10 minutes ahead of time, an hour ahead of time, what was coming down. Because, you know, that's the MO of this administration. That's what they do. Well, and Trump gave everyone cover with his good time to buy post on True Social because it'll be, and they knew that. I mean, if you're somebody who's really into trading on this, like, it'll be impossible, impossible to prove that this was motivated by inside knowledge because it'll be impossible to disentangle. Well, here's this vague true social post from the president. I just had the sense that when he posted that, it really was a good time to buy,

it really was a good time. There were a bunch of purchases, though, betting on the markets to go up before, like 10 minutes before that post even dropped. But you're right. I mean, are they going to be able to track it back? Also, we're relying on Trump's SEC to track this out. Like, come on. They're going to get away with whatever they want to get away with. about while, you know, small business owners are getting screwed and consumers are worried, are having to dye potatoes because eggs are too expensive and they're worried about prices,

et cetera. While all of that is going on, Charles Schwab's making $2.5 billion somehow, somehow, and he just happens to be at the White House that day. Well, and all the spokespeople for this policy and the administration, And this is for all of the dunking on Peter Navarro, who is genuinely an odd man. Their other spokespeople are billionaires or multi-multi-millionaires. And increasingly when—I mean, Trump is one thing. He's obviously like a singular figure. He can, you know, wear a multi-thousand-dollar suit and give helicopter rides to kids at the Iowa State Fair, and people will still connect with him more than any other Republican politician, even if they roll up their sleeves. But these other guys don't have that. It just doesn't hit the same way.

And that, if you're messaging this trade war as Wall Street veterans who are worth multi-millions yourself, it's gonna start to wear really thin. The public's patience for that is going to start to wear very thin. Already has, I would say. Yes. As the Harrington polling numbers showed to bring this block full circle crystal. Let's move on to Iran. So we can put C1 up on the screen.

This is a tear sheet from Axios. This is a Barack Ravid story. The headline is, Trump holds Situation Room Meeting on Iran Nuclear Deal Negotiations. Trump reportedly held a meeting yesterday morning in the Situation Room about the ongoing nuclear deal negotiations with Iran. The high-level meeting with all of the Trump admin's top NATSEC and foreign policy officials was focused on discussing the U.S. position in the next round of talks planned for Saturday, according to those sources. Now, those talks are being led by special envoys, the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is somebody that Donald Trump trusts very, very much. According to this Axios report, quote, J.D. Vance and Steve Witkoff think diplomacy

could lead to a nuclear deal and think the U.S. should be ready to make some compromises in order to get it. Other senior members of the administration, including Rubio and Mike Waltz, are highly skeptical and support a maximalist approach to the negotiations. Crystal, interestingly enough, we've started to see the argument, actually Eli Lake made this argument in the Free Press yesterday, that what is emerging from the Witkoff camp looks a hell of a lot like the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration that Donald Trump sort of famously scrapped. And I've started to see arguments from Iran hawks that are appealing to Donald Trump on this basis, saying, do you want to look like you are Obama, that you are just copying Barack Obama a couple

of years later, and trying to kind of goad him out of the deal that Witkoff seems to be intent on getting. Witkoff himself walked back his comments about nuclear enrichment, saying at one point that Iran could do minimal levels, that they would be limited to certain levels of nuclear enrichment, and then within, I think it was like 24, 48 hours saying no nuclear enrichment. So there are enormous pressures on the administration right now. And that's where I think it's worth mentioning C2 just very quickly. A couple of top advisors to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were put on administrative leave yesterday, including Dan Caldwell, who was basically, Hegsess probably still is, Hegsess' top advisor. He was put on an admin leave yesterday and escorted from the

Pentagon following a, quote, leak investigation to include polygraphs, according to Jennifer Griffin, that was launched by Hegsess Chief of Staff Joe Casper on March 21. After a March 20 New York Times story, Detail plans to allow Elon Musk to attend a briefing in the, quote, tank with members of the Joint Chiefs to hear about future China war plans. Caldwell Crystal is a guy who comes from skeptical sort of Koch world that has always been very critical of the foreign policy blob, meaning he has always been critical of hawkish, neoconservative approaches to Iran policy. And another top advisor to Hegseth seemed to suffer a similar fate, according to Jennifer Griffin and other reporters yesterday. Caldwell is familiar to a lot of people who cover this stuff, which is why that example

stands out. But I have a really hard time separating these two developments, Crystal. It seems like this pressure is coming from a place of, is coming from a frantic place. Yeah, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it at all. I mean, Caldwell, I've never met him personally. My understanding of his ideology is that he was one of the better and more consistent voices within the entire Trump administration. And so you can't look at it as an accident that this guy, all these people are

leaking. They're all leaking. But this is the one that you're going to point out, oh, we can't have this guy around. Come on. I mean, it feels very targeted. I don't know anything about the other dude that, you know, also got caught up in this or what his ideological inclinations are. But especially as these Iran negotiations are heating up in a way that could be encouraging. I mean, the fact that there's direct negotiations going on, the fact that you have someone who's as pragmatic as Witkoff has seemed to be, who also, by the way, has come under fire significantly from some of these same types, it's pretty clear there's a massive internal battle being waged here. And just to return to the Iranian nuclear deal piece, I mean, the hawks who are trying to sink it by saying like,

oh, you're what, you're just renegotiating Obama's deal Obama's deal I mean they're not really wrong I do think that the Trump administration is kind of realizing that the JCPOA it actually was a good deal Iran was actually complying and they're not going to be able to get something that's a lot better than that because when Bibi came to town his whole plan was to convince Trump like, oh, you need to push the Libya model on Iran, which, of course, no country in the world is going to go for the Libya model. After watching what happened to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, who was murdered on camera after following the, quote unquote, Libya model, something that Trump has talked about before, by the way, when he was trashing John Bolton and saying that he was pushing the Libya model for North Korea. So he knew, at least at one point, that that direction was a complete non-starter. Iran is not going to agree to the quote-unquote Libya model, but that's what Bibi Netanyahu was pushing specifically to try to blow up these negotiations. Now, we're a long way from being there. As you're pointing out, there are a lot of very sticky issues. There are a lot

of internal tensions. There are the Miriam Adelsons of the world who contributed a whole lot of money to the Trump campaign to try to make sure that something like this never happens. Bibi Netanyahu frequently gets his way with this administration and every other American administration in history. So a lot of big question marks, but at least there's a little bit of hope. And it will be a ridiculous outcome if Trump blew up the Obama deal. One of, in my opinion, one of the best accomplishments of the Obama administration, actually um biden had a chance to get back in never did that's on him you know he should have right away as soon as he was elected gotten back into that deal he never did so that's his failure as well and then it would be ironic if trump

basically but good do it please please do it if trump ultimately gets back into the something very similar to the original ob JCPOA deal. I have no doubt he can message it as like, this is totally different and this is way better and art of the deal or whatever. Fine, whatever your ego needs, go ahead and do it. Well, there may be some argument there that the sort of regimes, the regime's credibility with its own people, they may make an argument that the economy is really weak and that it's weakened, the regime's hold over its own people. And so maybe it makes more sense now. But that's actually the argument that some hawks are using the other way around,

saying Iran is especially vulnerable right now. But obviously, I mean, I just, there's so much history in the opposite direction, saying that when countries are vulnerable and desperate, that's actually really not the time to try to turn the screws on them when they are unpredictable and eccentric. So let's put, speaking of those pressures, C4 on the screen. This is John Bolton's take. I mean, this Bolton post about Witkoff is just gross. He says, Trump lacks strategy and vision with regard to Iran. While we do not know what Trump has resolved to do, we do know Special Envoy Witkoff. Special Envoy Witkoff is busy building trust with the Ayatollahs.

But the Ayatollahs aren't to be trusted. They have played us for over a decade, accusing Witkoff of trying to just build trust with the Ayatollahs foolishly, like he's some type of idiot. Well, if you're going to make any type of deal ever, ever, it is built on trust. And that has to be the predicate for any type of negotiation. You can trust and verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, John Bolton, but the idea that you can just make a deal with people who don't believe any part of the deal is going to be worth the paper it's printed on is, I don't even know where to begin with this, Krista. I mean, Bolton wants a war. He doesn't want there to be a deal because, I mean, obviously, like, obviously, I do think it's a very negative sign that people like Caldwell are being purged right now in terms of who's winning those internal battles.

I think that's a pretty ominous sign. And did you know that Jennifer Griffin tweet that this was an investigation that came out of March 20th and March 21st? I mean, it's the timing, I think, is quite. Why are we hearing about this now? And, you know, if he was the one that leaked that like Elon was going to get briefed on our China war plans or whatever, like that was a genuine public service. So thank you, sir, if you were, in fact, the one that leaked that piece of information, because that was a crazy, crazy situation. And one of many crazy situations that's just like, you know, we ominous that whatever forces are trying to purge the more, you know, frankly, America first factions within the Pentagon. I think that is troubling. And I think Trump's increasingly perilous political situation could be read in two different ways. One is he's long thought and said publicly, you know, that he thinks like he thought Obama was going to start a war with Iran because it would be good for his reelection prospects, for example.

So he might have this, I think, totally idiotic mindset that a war is good for politicians approval ratings. He also may just like, look, he loves using war powers, right? He's that's his tariff justification is like some national emergency. His Alien Enemies Act is martial law. He's exploring whether to invoke the Insurrection Act. Obviously, that's also like, you know, sort of wartime or insurrection rebellion powers. And so he may also like just the power that comes with being in charge during a war and what that could, how that can in order to his benefit, or perhaps he is intelligent enough to realize that if he thinks he's got political problems now, good luck if you start a war with, you know, that almost no one in the entire country, including your own base, wants to actually see the American involved.

And that doesn't mean that, you know, his base, the hardest core, they'll go along with wherever he goes. But the American public overall is not down for this whatsoever. They will be absolute, they will absolutely reject some sort of hot war and escalation with Iran. So before we run on this block, Crystal, some interesting news just hit my inbox, which is, you know, so we mentioned earlier, Steve Witkoff is negotiating in Rome over the weekend with the Iranian counterparts. Actually, we have a press release from the White House that I just got that says Vice President J.D. Vance and the second family will travel to Italy and India from April 18th to April 24th. Depending on the timing there, it looks like Vance will be in Italy during these negotiations in Rome that Witkoff is taking part in. And Vance, according to the Barack Ravid report,

and just what we know of J.D. Vance, is clearly aligned with Witkoff on this question. Some of the dynamics from that signal chat may be pulled into these discussions about Iran going forward, actually. And that's quite interesting if Vance is sort of dispatching himself or maybe he's being dispatched by the White House to go in and be a wingman for Witkoff during these discussions. Yeah, absolutely. All right. A lot of dynamics to keep an eye on there. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. While the Trump administration is escalating its war on Ivy League institutions in particular, let's put D1 up on the screen. Harvard is now under fire because the Trump administration, as everyone likely remembers, just from the last couple of days, has sent a letter threatening at least $2 million worth of funding. Billion. Sorry, billion, yes. $2 billion worth of funding. That could go up to as much as $9 billion worth of, again, federal funding to Harvard.

Then what you see on the screen, if you're watching this, is MIT put out a letter. This is from Sally Korn, both the president and who said, I write to bring you up-to-date on developments in two areas where recent government actions are interfering with the normal functioning of MIT, diminishing our ability both to serve the nation and to attract the world's finest talent. One relates to federal funding, the other to our international community. They say we are responding to certain federal actions by going to court. Now, this is all on the heels of what the Trump administration did with Columbia

University. There are competing reports on Columbia University's willingness to actually comply with this list of demands that the Trump administration has sent and said. We'll get into that in a moment, by the way, but what those demands are in particular, but has said your federal funding depends on X, Y, and Z being done. Columbia, there was a leak that said Columbia was assuring people privately that it wasn't actually going to comply with the administration's demands. Now it looks like Columbia is standing by its statement that it will comply with the

demands to keep the federal funding. But Harvard is pushing back hard like we haven't seen other universities do, but it seems like it's actually creating a template for other universities to follow. And Crystal, let's just get into this back and forth that Caroline Leavitt had with Peter Doocy. It wasn't really much of a back and forth, but this is what we heard from the White House yesterday. Follow up on something that you just said. Why do Ivy League schools get so much federal funding? It's a very good question. And it's a question the president has obviously raised in his discussions and negotiations with not just Harvard, but also Columbia and many other Ivy

League institutions. We have the anti-Semitism task force, which the president promised and delivered on. The anti-Semitism task forces across the government, representatives from various federal agencies who meet on a weekly basis to discuss the question that you just raised. And I think a lot of Americans are wondering why their tax dollars are going to these universities when they are not only indoctrinating our nation's students, but also allowing such egregious illegal behavior to occur. And here's a post from Donald Trump on Truth Social yesterday. He weighed in once again, perhaps Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and

be taxed as a political entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired slash supporting quote sickness. Remember, tax exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the public interest. Crystal, that is separate from the federal funding question. It's a similar question, but it's obviously a different question. Federal funding, what is being said, and maybe it's worth actually just bringing up D6 at this point. Sorry to skip ahead control room, but this is an argument that has been made for generations in the conservative movement, that if you are getting federal funding, it is tied to complying with civil rights legislation. And this has actually been something that conservatives have pushed back on forever. And it was Ruffo who

really popularized the idea a couple of years ago, a few years ago now, that if Republicans regain power in the White House and the DOJ, et etc., in the Department of Education, they should use that power to turn the screws on these Ivy League administrations that have benefited from this sort of relationship with the federal government, back and forth relationship with the federal government to punish those universities for not, you know, being as open to conservative ideas as people on the right want to be. And it is true. I mean, Harvard is wildly, the faculty of Harvard is not a balanced faculty at all. I think we all know that these institutions lean left. So the plan was then to use the civil rights regime.

Like Title IX is a good example. Conservatives used to be against Title IX because it forced compliance with the federal government and the schools in ways that would sometimes disproportionately hurt men's sports. We donated debate whether or not that was righteous and just, but conservatives used to be against it because it was using federal funding as a carrot in particular ways. So that brings us to D4. What is the Trump administration threatening Harvard over? Well, some of it is civil rights, but Michael Tracy points out that one of the bullet points among the many bullet points in the Trump administration's letter to Harvard that kicked all of this off is titled Reforming Programs with Egregious Records

of Antisemitism or Other Bias. Crystal, I'm going to kick it to you on that point. Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't want to hear from Christopher Ruffo or any of these people again about supposed like woke, wokeness. This is the most woke authoritarian shit you could possibly imagine, including effectively what they want from Harvard is some sort of like MAGA affirmative action program, both in terms of the students coming domestically and abroad and in terms of the professors. They also I mean, there's just all kinds of ridiculous demands here. And the demand that you get rid of DEI does not sit easily with the demand that you also, you know,

do everything to combat anti-Semitism. Like the whole thing is just, the specifics of it are almost less important than the fact that this is about the Trump administration, just as they have with media, just as they have with lawyers, just as they have with the courts, trying to bring to heel institutions that they see as ideological adversaries and potential alternative power centers. It is also a very classic authoritarian playbook, right? They want to be able to have to ultimately control what is taught, who teaches it, and what students get into the school. Now, to zoom out because the Columbia thing is, I think, important. Harvard was seemingly planning to kind of comply. They got an initial list of demands from the Trump administration,

things like banning masks, that they were like, yeah, we can probably live with that. Then they got a more elaborate list from the Trump administration, you know, the one that Michael Tracy is referencing there. And they saw that when Columbia tried to comply with what the Trump administration wanted, it's not like the Trump people like, OK, you're good to go. Thank you. We've we've art of the deal that we're good to, you know, all no harm, no foul. Noumbia's capitulation only led to more and more demands now the federal government is seeking a consent decree with columbia that would give them direct power over you know over that university and specifically have taken into like uh have taken over the

middle eastern studies department har Harvard is extremely wealthy. I think it is one of, if not the wealthiest school in the country in terms of it has like a $50 billion endowment. If anyone was going to stand up and fight, it was Harvard. And so I think watching the way that things went down with Columbia, they realized that there was no choice but to stand up for themselves. And the fact that MIT then rapidly follows in their footsteps, I think is an indication that you will see more of a united front from the university system in trying to stand up to what are, you know, ultimately like insane and like peak woke kind of authoritarian demands

coming from the Trump administration. So, you know, I think those are kind of the dynamics that are playing out here is that they realized they were not going to make them go away by attempting to comply with the things that they ultimately wanted. And, you know, last thing on this question of like, oh, well, why do they even get federal funding? Right. A lot of this is like research grants. You know, Harvard does a lot of medical research. They run a bunch of hospitals. A lot of the larger $9 billion that would be threatened, that's like funding that goes to a number of these hospitals.

I know there were some researchers who already were, I think one that was researching tuberculosis, if memory serves correctly, like their grants are already being pulled. So that's the sort of thing that a lot of this money is ultimately going towards in case people were wondering. It won't be easy for Harvard to make up the multibillion dollar gap because their endowment comes with certain restrictions about how the money can be spent, et cetera, et cetera. But I think they feel like they have the

firepower to be able to fight this and that, frankly, they really don't have much of a choice. Well, I mean, some schools take the funding and put in lazy rivers, which is genuinely a serious problem. They take the research funding and then they have these big endowments and they keep, you know, using tuition, jacking tuition up for stupid stuff that gets them up on the U.S. News and World Report list and attracts more students or doesn't attract more students. But I think the Trump administration's definition of anti-Semitism is obviously woke and it is obviously undermining what, listen, as a conservative, I think is a very righteous cause, which is to scare the living daylights out of these universities that have done, I think, a very poor job preparing people to enter our society after four years of education at supposedly the best institutions in the world.

Ruvot is right, like he's run down these examples of where Harvard in particular has engaged in actual discrimination by the definition in our civil rights legislation and in our court system and And that is something that, again, was used repeatedly during the Title IX battles of roughly the last 10 years. The Obama administration, we don't have to get into all of this, but this has been going on for generations, used federal funding as a way to get sports to change their policies about men's and women's, schools to change their policies about men's and women's, schools to change their policies about men's and women's athletics and locker rooms and bathrooms and all of that, which I think brought conservatives to

their sort of boiling point. And that's where you saw this new momentum come from to actually do these things. I think that's, you know, Rufo has pointed out a lot of DEI coming from all of this. And DEI can be used in a way that is not in compliance with federal discrimination laws. So again, schools like Hillsdale have had to operate without federal funding forever so that they didn't get the ideological coercion. I always think that that's the best model,

even if it's sad that we can't fund public universities in a way that's ideological. model. Even if it's sad that we can't fund public universities in a way that's ideological. I mean, maybe we can, but ideologically beneficial to everyone. But anyway, all of this is to say the woke definition of anti-Semitism is undermining, I think, a pretty legitimate conservative policy argument here because you end up scooping people like Austerk off the streets of suburban Boston and then claiming the moral high ground on free speech. It's just completely stupid.

On, by the way, a generational opportunity to flip the script on the left and actually get some genuine concessions out of schools. I'm not talking about quotas and affirmative action for conservatives, but just scaring the living daylights out of schools. I'm not talking about like quotas and affirmative action for conservatives, but just like scaring the living daylights out of them to like just using the money that they have in a way that is actually beneficial to the public. That's all great. I think that's fantastic. But this is completely, you do not have the moral high ground when you're scooping kids off the street for op-eds. I mean, it's just stupid. Yeah. Well, and I mean, a lot of the, like, you know, the lazy river and the fancy dorms and athletic facilities or whatever. I mean, it's just stupid. Well, and I mean, a lot of the, like, you know, the lazy river and the fancy dorms and athletic facilities or whatever.

I mean, we know what that's about. That's about attracting rich students. That's what it's about. Yep. It's a market capitalist. Who can pay full tuition. Kind of a situation where, yeah, who can not only pay full tuition, but are then going to be in a position, them and mommy and daddy, to help to continue to fund the endowment. The direction I would go in is, you know, public funding for colleges and making tuition free or at least much more accessible.

But, you know, certainly the cost of education is a big issue. This has nothing to do with the cost of education. And even on the DEI piece, like, you know, this is specifically about these Ivy League universities, although there's some, I think the number is 60 universities across the country that have gotten similar letters. They're not all, you know, Ivy League. I know my, the school I went to, University of Virginia, was one of the people who got these letters of like, you know, threatening them. Basically, you have to do X and Y and Z in order to continue to receive your federal funds. So it's not just the elite, but they like picking the fight with the elites very publicly because they feel like they're on solid, more solid ground there in terms of their kind of ideological framing.

But, you know, these broader executive orders about DEI, something that, you know, I am in certain ways sympathetic to because I do believe in like a colorblind meritocracy. Well, I don't really believe in meritocracy, but I do believe in the colorblind aspiration. And I think that the, you know, the sort of like extremes of wokeism with the emblematic Leo, Ibram X. Kendi and these sorts of people went too far. But also these executive orders, it could be interpreted to ban the teaching of things like redlining, the history of redlining.

Uh-huh. You know, the accurate history of Reconstruction. The accurate history of slavery and Jim Crow. And that is a tremendous step backwards. And it's also, you know, this is part and parcel of a playbook of like, you know, wanting to control history. History is always contested. Wanting to control the narrative that we're allowed to tell, the story we're allowed to tell about ourselves and to erase how central the battles over race and racism have been in this country. And so, you know, this is a little bit removed from the Harvard example, but I see all of these things as connected to an attempt to, you know, they'll use language about,

oh, we want it to be neutral. No, you want a certain narrative to be taught. You want certain students to be allowed to attend. You want like MAGA affirmative action, both in terms of the students and the professors. You want to control these. This is not about academic freedom. This is the polar opposite of that. This is about this administration specifically wanting to control these institutions in terms of what they can teach, how they can teach it, and who they can teach it to, even including, you know, they wanted, they wanted to, one of the demands from Harvard was that they should be vetting all international students for quote-unquote anti-American sentiment. Well, what does that mean? What does that mean? You know, are you allowed to be, you know, have a

critique of the Iraq war? Are you allowed to have a critique of Tesla? You know, are you allowed, you know, certainly, are you allowed to have a critique of our policy vis-a-vis the Middle East? That's, those are the sort of like authoritarian woke demands that were laid at the feet of Harvard. And, you know, I, the last point I'll make about this, just zooming out from education, is I do think as Trump has become more unpopular and as there has been a visible grassroots movement in the streets to push back against him, et cetera. I do think it has bolstered the courage. You're starting to see a little bit more galvanized resistance from these, you know, cultural institutions, whether it's Harvard. The media is being a little bit more outspoken. There's still a lot of problems there. Some of the law firms are now getting together and fighting back.

You see certainly the courts are starting to take a harder line. Democrats are getting a bit of a spine. We're about to talk more about the Democrats in the next block. So you do see some of these elite institutions getting their act together to push back a little bit. And I guess you could say that with regard to like some of the business institutions on the tariffs, too. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I mean, if people want to read a good book on this, Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell is a short read, and it was hugely influential. I mean, I've seen some people point

to the book Richard Hanania wrote a couple of years back, but Caldwell is the book that really was influential on the right at kind of mapping out how civil rights legislation and then its, I guess, its process of moving through the courts over the course of decades allowed the federal government to use a lot of that for ideological purposes. And what you're describing, Crystal, is the Trump administration saying, all right, screw it. We're not going back to neutrality, which is what a lot of, or quote unquote neutrality, there's no such thing as real neutrality, but sort of this pro-American, pro-Western civilization sense of consensus in society that used to exist, whether or not that's good or bad. That was the aspiration of a lot of critics of this, actually on the left and on the right, mostly on the right for a long time. But this is the Trump administration saying,

screw it. This is about, I guess, our agenda items. And that's where I think this definition of anti-Semitism is dragging down what is a great project overall. And it is a real, I mean, it's a huge unforced error. I don't know who in the administration is pushing this so forcefully without listening to any of the feedback on it. I actually, like, again, I agree with what a lot of Christopher Caldwell outlines in Age of Entitlement. But man, I don't know how you can approach this issue as, you know, it's like we were talking about earlier in the show, J.D. Vance going to Munich and then being the vice president for, and talking to the UK about speech policies and the EU about speech policies and then being the vice president of an administration that is defending scooping kids off the street for op-eds against Israel.

I mean, it's just – this is like a generational opportunity for people on the right. On the white. Maybe that'll amuse some people. But on the right that is like just utterly squandered. And I do think, by the way, that the way that civil rights bureaucracy has been wielded by the left has been intentional in some cases, not in every case. But I do think, you know, there were abuses of it that were for ideological purposes over the course of the last however many decades. That doesn't mean that the right thing to do is do it yourself. Like, it's just, it's stupid, whatever. Yeah, it's, I mean,

anti-Semitism is the cudgel that's being used to, you know, embrace, it's truly authoritarian tactics. I mean, that's what we're talking about here, both, I mean, and I'm not just talking about with regard to universities, but certainly with the snatching up these kids off the street and, you know, cracking down on speech and dissent, forcing universities to, you know, either kick kids out of school who are American citizens. I mean, this isn't just about immigrants either, the actions that have been taken. And so they've adopted this, like, the most hyper-woke language you could possibly imagine about, like, safe spaces and microaggressions, etc. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. That is, I mean, we saw this argument made at a Senate hearing recently from a rabbi. That's right. Matt Walsh pointed out, actually, of all people, that this is exactly what Abram X. Kendi has

argued. You know, Natalie Winters, I was talking to her yesterday from Bannon's War Room, actually of all people that this is exactly what abram x kendy kendy has argued you know natalie winters i was talking to her yesterday from bannon's war room she makes a great point that like the and you would still disagree with it crystal but like anti-americanism would have been politically a better framing for the administration than anti this this definition of anti-semitism that is also anti-Zionism. Now, where you and I might disagree with that is, okay, now that you have defined anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism, I'm going to need to see you outlining exactly what you think anti-Americanism is because I'm not sure that I trust that definition at this point. So if they want to

do anti-Americanism, which they are trying in some different ways that aren't as, I think, front and center as the anti-Semitism point, then they should enumerate exactly what they're looking for when they're telling schools to screen for anti-Americanism. I would be very curious to see that. Because personally, I'm like, yeah, maybe you shouldn't bring people here who hate the United States. And there are people who hate the United States. But what are you going to do to screen for that? Is it going to be people who didn't like the Iraq war? Is it going to be people who don't like Israel and the way that it's treated policy?

I mean, it's just like. Or who aren't a fan of Elon Musk, who, you know, South African born. You know, I personally would like to screen this administration for anti-American sentiment, given that they want to turn us into El Salvador. Yeah. And apparently are not acquainted with the First Amendment and freedom of speech or, you know, whatever requirements for due process either. Dems can do that as soon as they get the power back. They can do it again.

Right. But that's like that's part of this. I mean, if you want to write the template for to be exploited in terms of deportation and all of that, here's the template for Dems. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being

pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover,

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

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. No. Listen to Boy Sober 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, well, let's talk about Dems and what's going on with them because there are a lot of interesting developments. Let me go ahead and start with this. So AOC and Bernie have been doing this Stop Oligarchy tour, and they've been going to all these, like, super red places. I'm talking about, like, Idaho and Utah and getting insane crowds, insane crowds, bigger crowds than Bernie ever got in his either of his presidential runs. And he, you know, he was also famous like Trump for attracting significant crowds.

Let's just take a look at a little bit of one of their recent rallies and some of the way he's interacting with AOC and also the energy of the crowd. Now, I want to say a word about my daughter. No. I want to say a word about Alexandria and why what she's doing is so important. And here's the story. Six years ago, six years ago, what were you doing for a living? She was a waitress. But she looked around her and she saw a society that was fundamentally unjust and in many ways ugly to the people in the community in which she lived in New York City. She stood up and took on one of the most powerful people in the House of Representatives.

And she started with almost no money against the guy who had unlimited funds, and she beat him. We saw it just happen. With Trump's corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme. We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip. I got one question for her. How much did you make? How much did you make off of people's despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering? No more. We can't accept it. And I think, Emily, what you've seen as Bernie and AOC, they were first out of the gates.

They launched this tour. They've been all over the country. They're attracting these just absolutely blockbuster crowds everywhere. They're putting up a fight. They have a strategy. And then you see the centrists like Chuck Schumer, who are completely adrift, have nothing to say, out of touch with the moment, putting up no fight, capitulating to the Republicans in the one moment that they have leverage, et cetera. And watching this dynamic play out has completely shifted the Democratic base in ways that we have not seen before, where they are disgusted with their own leadership, very different from last time Trump was in office, where Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and all these people were heroes. And now that is also being reflected in who they see as the leaders of the party and in what

direction they want the party to shift. So this is one of the fascinating dynamics that's playing out. And I think what was important about that clip where Bernie says, you know, my daughter, Alexandria, like, first of all, he clearly loves her. He's not like warm and cuddly guy. No, like to have that level of affection from Bernie Sanders. That's very telling. And number two, you know, people have been asking, like, who's Bernie's successor? Who's he going to, you know, anoint for to lead this movement going forward? Like, I think we have our answer. He's he has picked AOC. Like that is the person he is elevating and I think very likely will be the person he pushes forward in 2028. Yeah, I think that's right. And actually, we teased this segment. I teased this segment

earlier in the show by saying Dems are in disarray. And I still stand by that. But both parties are always in disarray. The reason I stand by that here, though— And should be, by the way. They should be in disarray. Totally agree with that. Totally agree with that. But the reason I stand by this here is, you know, what Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are doing here is showing the establishment of the—like, this is as much a message to all of those people in the crowd and to people who support them as it is to Democratic elites who really, really, really don't want to hear this. But it's going to get hard for them not to hear it.

And I know this is going to be a little bit out of order. But the reason I want to kick to James Carville, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, is because he's proposing that the populist, the economic populist Dems break away from the sort of, he wouldn't use this phrase, centrist Dems, but I think that has to be accurately described as centrist Dems, what he's talking about. He's sort of saying the third way Dems should own the Democratic Party and everybody else should be in another party. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said herself, if we were in Europe, Nancy Pelosi and I would not be in the same party.

And that these two polls, Carville is just proposing a total divorce. And the reason I want to kick it to this with that, and I'm curious for your thoughts, is that is not even good for the movement he wants to succeed. Like you're just asking for everyone to agree on pronouns and neoliberal economics. So anyway, let's roll Carvel, and then we can get into some of those. Most of the things that the faculty lounge at identity left wants, 85% of them, I want to. We'd like to expand opportunity to people. We'd like to expand people that have health care. We'd like to do more to help young voters.

We think that environmental problems are totally crushing that we face. We don't have solutions there. We think income inequality is a terrible thing, and we've got to do certain things to address it. Like, okay, we can raise taxes on incomes over $400,000 a year, raise the minimum wage. These are things that we can work on. I don't think we can work

together on pronoun politics. I think that you're not, this election did not teach you how damaging that is. I don't think there's anything that I can tell you. And you say this guy is stuck in another century, not another decade. And he represents nothing to do with the future of our movement. I can accept that. You're not really going to hurt my feelings. So maybe we could have a kind of amicable split here and we'll go to post in 2026 because you don't ever run. They never run against a Republican. OK, all they do is run against other Democrats.

I don't quite understand why you're so anxious to have the word Democrat in the description of what you do? But maybe we can have a amicable split here. Crystal, this is a very bad time for James Carville to be making this argument because the split screen is AOC and Bernie Sanders drawing record crowds in red states. Right. And you want them out of your coalition? Like, what are we talking about here? On a message of economic populism, quote, fighting oligarchy.

Right. Because here's the thing. It's like, previously, AOC would have been the emblem of that, like, faculty lounge language that he talks about. Okay?

She's out there like, Marjorie Taylor Greene's insider training and stop oligarchy and they're coming for your Social Security and your Medicare. Like, she is fully on the economic populist message. And, you know, Bernie always has been more or less fully on the economic populist message. So talk about being out of touch and missing the moment. And also, by the way, if you're like setting up

your tentpole of who wants to come over to the James Carville version of the Democratic Party versus the AOC and Bernie, I got to tell you, there aren't going to be a lot of takers on your side because even people like MSNBC, Nicole Walls, I'm hearing things coming out of their mouth that I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined because they, I think, were chastened by the fact that Joe Amiga made their trip to Mar-a-Lago and there was such a massive backlash and the network was sort of like cratering. And they took their cue of like, OK, we have to at least align with the part of the Democratic Party that wants to stand up and fight back against Trump because otherwise, what like what what are what are we even doing here? Like, why do we even exist? And we will have zero people watching us and they will all hate us so they've followed the ratings and the people who are demonstrating as you said how to fight and putting on the the class for all of the democratic elites are AOC and Bernie so you

even have people like Nicole Wallace who is is out there, former George W. Bush spokesperson Nicole Wallace, out there praising the Bernie and AOC Stop Oligarchy Tour. Take a listen. And we should say AOC and Bernie Sanders have been traveling the country and generating crowds that size, Christy, all over the place and not just in Democratic strongholds. There is an appetite for economic populism that not just in Democratic strongholds. There is an appetite for economic populism that there hasn't been in many years. And here comes AOC. We have the next element we could put on the screen. This is a poll. Look who's catching up in the, like these numbers are, it's obviously early, but look who's catching up in 2028 Democratic primary poll numbers from Yale.

We've got Kamala Harris at 28 percent, AOC at 21 percent, 21 percent. So, Crystal, to your point, if Bernie chooses Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his heir, man, things are going in quite a good direction for populists on the left. We can put the next poll. This is the next element. We can put this next poll up on the screen. Among Democrats, here are the net favorables. AOC is up 62 percent, plus 62 percent. Harris, plus 59 percent. So that's close. But Harris right now probably, I mean, she's just getting off a presidential run. So that's even a failed presidential run with name recognition and all of that. It's just kind of like the default. Yeah. Yeah. But then you see who's there at the bottom. Steven A. Smith and John Fetterman.

Yeah. But anyway, the like the argument that and I say, Bernie and AOC, I think, have learned from the last four or five years in politics and are not leading with identity messaging in a way that I think AOC genuinely did struggle with. Ryan documents that in some of his books. That really was a stumbling block for some left populists. But I think, and maybe the right is underestimating this. They have learned from that. And James Carville is underestimating that too. Apparently. I'm like, who are you even talking about? Like the pronouns are out of the bio.

You won. Like that's, you know. Go look at who is the emblem of that sort of politics. And she's touring the country, getting massive crowds, many of whom were not Bernie supporters, talking about how we're going to fight back against oligarchy. Probably Trump supporters, by the way. No, really. I mean, some of those people there probably are Trump voters.

Very possible. In Idaho? Very possible. If you're going to Idaho, there's going to be some likely Trump supporters there. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, the thing that to me is even more noteworthy because, you know, it's one poll, whatever, who knows, other polls have said other things, et cetera. But the thing to me that was even more noteworthy is if you could put the last element up here on the screen, as long as I've been following these polls, when you ask Democratic base, do you want the party to

move to the left, to move to the right, or to stay the same, they generally say they should be more moderate. Now, I've always said, usually people's version of moderate is like, they should increase social security and they should increase the minimum wage. It's like very economically populist. But, you know, maybe that was cope. I don't know. So in January, end of January of this year, that continued to be the trend. 45% of Democratic-based voters said they want the party to be more moderate. Only 29% said more liberal. Now, in a new poll, things have completely shifted. Now you have a majority, 50% who say they want the party to be more progressive, 24% who say that it should stay the same and only 18% that say it should become more moderate.

Now, again, I think these terms are very squishy. The one poll says liberal, the other says progressive, maybe for us is better branding, et cetera, et cetera. But when you see this big of a shift, I do think it signifies something going on here. Because again, who are the people that they're seeing who are actually fighting? I mean, this is all the Democratic base wants. They want people to fight back against Trump. And who is fighting back against Trump? It's the progressives. So they're like, yes, we need to do that more. And I think that is what is causing this real sea change within the Democratic base and their conception of who their leaders are, who their leaders should be, and the way that the party should orient itself going forward.

James Carville got Bill Clinton elected so we could get on the path to WTO. I mean, it's just like... Well, and not to mention, Emily, his whole thing like, oh, they only run against Democrats. DLC was all about taking over the Democratic Party and like kicking out the establishment Democrats. Yeah. So like, you know, there's there's a lot there. The last thing I'll say is this just reminds me so much of what happened on the right in 2012 after Mitt Romney lost the Republican National Committee at this time under rights. Prebys, if I'm remembering correctly, put out what is known infamously in Republican circles as the autopsy. And that autopsy called for the Republican Party to quote unquote moderate on issues like immigration, social stuff. And if you read it now, you can tell it's just sort of dripping with anger over kind of Tea Party voters.

And what that missed is Republican voters, to the exact point that you were making. Actually, some of this populist stuff is moderate to voters. It's not moderate to D.C. because it's really radical for the clients of many people in Washington, D.C. and the influences in Washington, D.C. It's radical to their bottom lines and to the way that they do business. But most people would be like, oh, campaign finance reform. That's not radical. That's totally normal. Everybody having health care.

That seems moderate. You know, like that seems like something we should reasonably do. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, Washington is just completely out of touch when it thinks that something that is like the dumbest statement in the world because it's so obvious at this point. But when it thinks that, tune into Breaking Points for these stellar insights about how Washington is out of touch. But in all seriousness, they never learn. And that's what we, this pattern just doesn't stop. And James Carville should look at what Republicans did in 2012 when they said the only way to win presidential elections is to moderate on immigration and social stuff. And then Donald Trump beats Hillary Clinton on a platform of, like, political incorrectness

and building a wall. I mean, they're so stupid. They're so stupid. And they can't stop being stupid. And isn't it Carville's statement? It's the economy's stupid. Isn't that, like, his? That's him.

I just, I mean, and this has been the case. This has been the case since the advent of, you know, the rise of the Bernie movement. You see the energy for this guy. You see how powerful this is. I mean, the number of people who gave him 10, $20, whatever they could, the agenda that they rallied around, that they would show up, they would knock doors, they would do anything for him. And you want that out of the party? Yeah. Like, I mean, that really is a big part

of where they went sideways. Instead, you're going to foist on us Hillary Clinton, you're going to foist on us Joe Biden. Like, Joe Biden, even more so than Hillary Clinton, because she did have some genuine, like, supporters who were excited, first woman president, et cetera, et cetera. Joe Biden had none of that. And then you're like, oh, why aren't we cool

anymore? Why doesn't anyone want to talk to us? Why did all these, you know, bros that we spent years maligning as being toxic and smearing relentlessly, how come they don't want to support us anymore? Oh, gee, I wonder. I wonder. Wonder what caused them to shift away from you. And so once again, here you have just very clear example of where the energy is in the party. And you still have people like James Carville. And I would say also like the Ezra Klein abundance movement thing, like, no, not that thing, that thing, which is garnering massive amounts of energy and which people are responding to in real time. No, that can't be the message of the party. It's like, you know, sometimes you have to put the think tankers aside. Sometimes you have to even put, you know, some of the like focus group tested popularism stuff aside and just see where's energy, what works. And, you know, the Democratic base is going to have a say in the future direction of the party. And it's very clear right now what direction they are heading in. By the way, some of those bro podcasters, Rogan, for example, support universal health care.

Maybe you, I mean, that's why Bernie sat down with him. I mean, it is just, it's such a mess. And it's their solution is exactly what the Republicans was in 2012. Trump woke the Republican party up to what their base actually wanted. So that's what AOC and Bernie Sanders are trying to do in a less Trumpian way. So we'll see how that goes. Let's move on, Crystal, to housing, speaking of things Democrats struggle with. And get to our guest. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover

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

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

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez.

I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So one of the issues we've really tried to consistently cover on this show because it is so central to literally everyone is the issue of housing. And with that in mind, we are really happy to be joined by an author, Brian Goldstone, and journalist who's just put on a fantastic new book called There Is No Place for Us, Working and Homeless in America, that takes a look at a number of families in and around the Atlanta area who are working, doing everything right. And yet still, because of the cost of housing, find themselves homeless, a much undercovered. And I guess we could talk to Brian about whether or not it's a new dynamic. But Brian, great to have you. Welcome. Thank you so much, Crystal. It's great to be with you.

Yeah, of course. Just tell us, share if you would, the inspiration for the book and also a little bit about just one of these families and how they end up in this situation. Yeah, so I first got launched into the subject when my wife, who's a nurse practitioner, was working at a community health center here in Atlanta where we live. And she was just stunned by this trend that she was seeing where, you know, patients who were working at like Walmart or McDonald's or driving for Uber and Lyft, when they finished their shifts, they weren't going to an apartment, they were going to shelters or living with others or sleeping in the very cars they had just done, you know, an airport run in for Uber and Lyft. So as she told me about that, I was shocked. I was like, I haven't in all of the reading I've done about homelessness. I've never seen this this sort of disgust, this phenomenon of the

working homeless. And so I ended up writing a magazine story for the New Republic about it. And even when that was over, I felt like I had only scratched the surface. And, you know, one of the families who I profile in the book, who I followed, I think their story really illustrates this trend, this dynamic where families aren't falling into homelessness, they're really being pushed. This one family, Celeste is the parent's name. Her story begins in this really dramatic way with her rental home burning down. But as the reporting shows, it wasn't this dramatic house fire that pushed her family into homelessness. It was the fact that months later after the house burned down, she realized that the private equity firm that owned her home, who was her landlord, had filed an eviction on her on a home that was no longer standing.

That was uninhabitable. And her credit score was tanked. This three digit number that has come to determine whether millions of Americans have access to something as basic as a place to live. Her credit was destroyed. And that is what forced her and her children into homelessness. And what are some of the common, I mean, I'm sure every story is unique, but what are some of the commonalities throughout the families and the people that you talked to? What are some of the common themes? Yeah. I mean, each of the five families who I followed over several years to write this book, they all have really singular,

really distinctive stories and journeys. But I think what comes through really clearly is the common denominator that the reason so many people are becoming homeless in this country is because they don't have access to housing they can afford. And, you know, the term working homeless really demands that we confront not just the homeless side of that of that equation, but the working side as well. These are people who are working and working and working some more. And it's not just that their wages are too low,

although they're certainly that as well. It's that the very nature of work has changed for millions of Americans. It's become ever more volatile, insecure. People don't know how many hours they're gonna be working from one week to the next. Celeste, that woman who I just talked about whose house burned down,

she was later diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer and she was having to choose, do I go to my warehouse job or do I go to my chemo treatment? Because if I miss a shift at work, I don't get paid. And then me and my kids go from being in the squalid extended stay hotel room to being on the street. So that it's not just wages. It's not just rents. It's that the nature of work and really the nature of housing, a lack of, you know, the fact that it is so difficult to earn a living wage in this country. skyrocketing housing costs and you have utter disaster for so many families that are trying to do everything right, you know, that are, they're working hard. They're trying to, you know, follow the playbook of how you get ahead in America. And it just doesn't work for so many people now. You know, I was curious as I was reading the book, I'm sure you've been watching some of the discourse about the abundance agenda and, you know, how one of the factors that has led to housing unaffordability is too many onerous zoning regulations and the way that's limited construction or made it so that it's, you know, there's less affordable housing available.

I just was curious, based on your reporting with these individuals and the dynamics that go into the housing market, how much of a fix some of that you think really would be? Yeah, I mean, I take a kind of ecumenical approach to solutions and how we can finally solve this, this mounting catastrophe. I think we need a kind of both and approach. But I do think that simply like deregulating the market, letting the market do its thing, cutting the red tape and really allowing the private market to sort of, you know, provide for the housing needs of Americans who need it is not adequate. I think what some of that discourse maybe leaves out is power. The question of power, who has it, who doesn't have it, the immense power asymmetry that exists in this country between the renter class and those who are fortunate enough to own property and to be landlords. And also, I think what's missing is

just how incredibly profitable all this insecurity has become, not just for, you know, NIMBY homeowners who don't want an affordable housing complex built near their, you know, neighborhood, but how profitable it's become for some of the most, you know, influential and powerful Wall Street firms in this country. I was absolutely shocked to discover that at every step in these families' journeys, the five families who I follow in this book, there were entire business models designed to capitalize on their precarity. And that's not only the private equity firms like Celeste Landlord, who are buying up vast swaths of America's rental housing and really making that housing much, much more insecure, pushing people out through these

automated eviction systems and algorithms that determine that someone just gets an eviction filing if they're two days late on their rent and there's no human to interact with, not only pushing people out of their housing, but increasingly buying up the very sites and places where families and individuals are pushed into once they become homeless. And nowhere is that truer than with this phenomenon of extended stay hotels. It's an entire world of homelessness that we're not seeing. And, you know, during the pandemic, Blackstone and Starwood Capital, these two private equity giants, they saw that that extended stay America was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars while all other hotels were at like zero occupancy. And they spent six billion dollars buying this chain because they saw that these hotels are

concentrated in areas of our country where working people are most likely to become homeless and to lose stable housing. And so you have entire business models, very powerful business models that are actively exacerbating and really profiting off of this insecurity. Are there examples of communities or policies that have dealt with this in a constructive way? Are there, you know, things that we can point to and say, you know, look, this does work. This community used it to some success. What do you make of that? Yeah. I mean, I think as far as like, if we really open the lens on this crisis and one of the big things I'm trying to show in the book

is that the official numbers on homelessness, as bad as they are. And again, we had over the last two years, the highest level of homelessness on record, as bad as those official they are, and again, we had over the last two years the highest level of homelessness on record, as bad as those official numbers are, the reality is actually much, much worse. It's exponentially worse. And I estimate that the actual number is roughly six times that of the official number. And the reason I say that is because once we get a sense of the true severity and magnitude and, crucially, the actual root causes of this homelessness catastrophe, we realize that the kind of nibbling around the edges solutions that are often floated will simply not be enough. And a huge thing is keeping people in the homes they already have. And, you know, I think I've been disabused in the process of reporting this book of the notion that, like, if this is solved, it's going to be because some policymaker in Washington or at state level wakes up and is like, I'm going to ease the suffering for these people.

Some of the most promising trends that we're seeing is the emergence of a really powerful and vibrant tenant rights movement across the country. People organizing in their buildings, in their rental properties and saying, this is intolerable. We're not going to stand for it. And in cities like Kansas City, we had the emergence of KC tenants over the last several years that has demanded large scale policy shifts. And I think that's the most promising thing we have right now that that this is going if solutions come, they're going to come from those who are closest to the problem and those who are directly impacted and their neighbors who simply say, you know, like we're not going to allow millions of people to be the casualties of our city's renaissance, of our city's success and growth, because that's another dynamic. All of

these people are losing their housing, not in the midst of like poverty, but in the midst of mounting prosperity in cities like Atlanta, Asheville. So that's really what I see as most hopeful right now. Yeah, because you have this mass inequality too, where, you know, in these cities, you need the people who are going to work at McDonald's, who are going to do the Uber Eats or the DoorDash, you need, you know, given that's the economic system we apparently have, you need that working class, but you increasingly have completely priced them out of housing. And then you don't have, you know, I know Atlanta is notorious for not having sufficient public transit also so that people can actually, you know, conveniently commute in. And, you know, speaking to some of that gentrification aspect, one of the families,

I'm blanking on the name of the woman that you focus on, one of them had lived previously and grown up in Atlanta in a public housing project and actually have very fond memories of that public housing project and what life was like there. Those were demolished. And then I believe what happened is they built some replacement in the way that, you know, this kind of like well-intentioned reform movement ultimately exacerbated the issue of, you know, housing crisis for people in the city. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think through Britt's story, Britt is the name of the person that you were just referencing, through her story, I mean,

you kind of get American housing policy in the life of one single family, one single individual. And like you said, she grew up in public housing. She was determined to make Atlanta her home, to make a home for herself and her kids in the city. And she has this line, like, this city is just as much mine as anyone's. Like, I'm not going anywhere. But the title of the book comes from Brett. There is no place for us because she realizes that this city that she's given everything to, Brett works at the airport when the book begins. She's working at a place that's like the pride and joy of Atlanta's economy, the busiest airport in the world. And I think it's important to note

that one of the most perverse things that this book documents is that the working homeless, these are not people on the fringes of society. They are the people whose labor, whose bodies are powering the very growth that, again, perversely is not just pushing them out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, but pushing them out of housing, stable housing altogether. And, you know, the policies that emerged in the absence of public housing, once all the public housing in Atlanta was demolished, because Atlanta was the first city in the country to build public housing in the 30s. And it was the first city in the country to sort of undertake this neoliberal experiment in demolishing it, demolishing public housing, and turning to the private market through vouchers and through other, you know, incentivizing private development to fill that need. And

Britt's story is a really tragic example of how much that promise has failed. And ultimately, her story is an example of how we need just a radical paradigm shift in how we think about housing in this country. Like housing is, as it's currently conceived, it's just auctioned off to the highest bidder. We've, you know, one caseworker in the book refers to it as the housing hunger games. And what we've done is we've said this essential human need is going to be, you know, that people are just going to be at the mercy of a market that may or may not have an incentive to keep them housed. And if rents skyrocket past the rate of inflation, so be it. We need a different approach where we start to treat housing the way we do like public education, where we just say this is a basic part of being in this country. We're going to guarantee it for

everybody. And there was a time when we had that vision as a country and there are peer nations who have implemented that vision. It's not this utopian, you know, radical ideal. That's that's exactly right. Well, the book, it will break your heart. If you read it, it will absolutely break your heart. But I really recommend it to people because you have so many examples of people who they win what they consider is like the lottery. They get the voucher to be able to help them afford housing and just how that process is all but fraught with insecurity and no guarantees and creates this housing hunger game situation you're talking about. You go through some of that history and

just the dynamics that people are really dealing with on a granular scale. It very much reminded me of the work of Barbara Ehrenreich. So highly recommend it to people. And Brian, thank you so much for taking some time both to explore this issue, which I do think that is there's a complete blind spot in society for and also to join us today and help us understand your work. Thank you so much. It's really meant a lot to talk to you. Our pleasure. Crystal, that was depressing, but I think a very important discussion. Thanks for bringing the guest to us and for being here today.

Yeah, my pleasure as always. And yeah, I really genuinely recommend the book, even though it will absolutely break your heart multiple times as you read it. But it's so important to understand what's going on in this country. And Emily, always a pleasure to get to chat with you. And guys, I'll be in like normal with Sagar tomorrow in the studio.

So I will see you then. And then, oh, one last thing. We made it official. Friday show is now every week, every Friday. We're committing to it. We're doing the thing. So and with a bonus second half, that's just for premium subscribers. So thank you guys so much for supporting us and making that possible. We'll see if Sagar decides to show up. Fingers crossed. Well, as everybody learned, he's got some things going on right now. He's a busy man. He's a busy man.

Yeah, he is more than forgiven. Yeah, but the two of us are always happy to slum it with Ryan. So we will see everyone on Friday for that show. BreakingPoints.com for a premium membership if you want that second half. Otherwise, we'll be back here with more tomorrow. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right.

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