Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/2/24: Israel Strikes Top Iranian General, WCK Aid Workers Killed In Gaza, Trump Peace Calls Trigger Israel, Gen Z Goes Blue Collar, 60 Minutes Havana Syndrome, Richard Dawkins Islam Debate, Israel Destroys Al Shifa Hospital, Activist Confronts Congressman In Viral Hallway Vids

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss Israel airstrikes killing a Top Iranian general and aid workers at the WCK killed while delivering food to starving people, the Biden Gaza pier putting US soldiers at risk, Israelis meltdown over Trump 'peace calls', Trump loses 1 billion in net worth as Truth Social plummets, Gen Z ditches college for Blue Collar work, 60 minutes releases a new insane Havana syndrome conspiracy, Krystal and Saagar debate Richard Dawkins comments on Islam, Krystal looks at Israel destroying the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza, and we speak to Moataz Salim a Palestinian activist who's been going viral for challenging Congressman on Israel. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. A lot of very consequential news this morning, especially with regards to Israel. So yesterday, they struck the Iranian embassy in Syria,

killing a top commander and a number of other individuals. This has potentially catastrophic and frankly terrifying consequences, the fallout of this. So we will take a look at that. Also yesterday, they struck and killed seven aid workers with Jose Andres organization, World Central Kitchen. That organization has now paused all operations in the Gaza Strip. One of the individuals who was killed is actually an American citizen. So we'll break that down for you as well. We've got some Trump updates for you. He took a billion dollar hit to his net worth yesterday as a result of Truth Social stock really suffering a bad blow. So we'll talk about that.

We also have a really interesting report from the Wall Street Journal that we wanted to discuss. Gen Z increasingly choosing blue collar work. So what could that mean for the future? It's actually really fascinating to look at these numbers. 60 Minutes dropped a supposed expose on Havana syndrome. So Sakura and I both took a close look at that. We will tell you what we make of their big blockbuster report on this. Richard Dawkins, famous atheist, is saying now he is a cultural Christian and also taking aim at Islam. So we will discuss that. I'm taking a look at what has been done to al-Shifa Hospital. That hospital, which is the largest in the Gaza Strip, or at least was the largest in the Gaza Strip, is now completely destroyed. And as IDF soldiers left

after a two-week raid, a massacre has been revealed. So I'm going to take you through everything we know about what happened there. And we have a fantastic guest in the show today who I'm really excited for you guys to get to see. He has been every day on Capitol Hill stalking members of Congress, just trying to get basic answers from them. Some of his exchanges have gone viral. You may have seen a few. So we'll talk to him about what he's been up to there. But before we get into any of that, just want to thank all of you so much for your support of the show. That's right. Thank you so much to our premium subscribers. As we continue to tease,

it is becoming very, very soon a major upgrade in our premium service. I think a lot of people will be very satisfied with the results and there's going to be a lot of new additions. You guys are going to be the very, very first to know. I do recommend that you go ahead and sign up now because we have a discount going on at breakingpoints.com and you will be the first to know. You'll have the immediate upgrade and we will communicate everything, including the big news to you first before it goes out to anybody else. So if you can take advantage and you can help us out, we would really appreciate it. We have some major plans for the election season that's coming at. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into this big news with regards to Israel. Let's put this up on the screen. Yesterday, as I mentioned, Israel struck the Iranian embassy

in Syria. That strike on part of that embassy complex in Damascus killed three generals in Iran's Quds Force and four other officers. One of those individuals is quite a high-ranking commander. So this is extraordinarily significant, not only because who was taken out, and you can see the images on the screen there of that complex, you know, apparently smoldering and on fire. It's not only significant because of who was taken out, but also because of where this occurred. Let's put this map up on the screen so you all can see. The Iranian embassy and this building that was part of the Iranian embassy, I mean, this is sandwiched right in between the embassy of Canada and the actual full embassy building

of Iran. This is right in the center of Damascus, as you could see from these videos. I don't think I could possibly describe to you how extraordinary and how much of an outrageous breach of international law this truly is. In fact, it's hard to think of a similar scenario unfolding and a similar targeting of an embassy building. As you can imagine, the response from the Iranians has been complete outrage at what has been done here. So they, for one thing, are saying that there will be some sort of response. They also, and Dr. Parsi has been doing quite a bit of analysis here, and I'm reading from one of his tweets. Iran messaged Biden via the Swiss following that attack, and they appear to also hold the U.S. responsible here

because of our overwhelming unconditional support of Israel. Iran pressed Iraqi militias previously to stop attacking the U.S. There have been zero attacks in six weeks. Israel may have just killed that ceasefire and put targets on U.S. troops. Now, Sagar, you know, the U.S. is saying, oh, we had no idea in advance. We had nothing to do with this. This was all Israel. Will Iran believe that? provocation from the Israelis who seem to be inviting and courting a much larger and much even more consequential war than what we've already seen. That's the terrifying part.

So this is actually a breach of the Vienna Convention. Vienna Convention is what governs diplomatic relations. It effectively is what keeps people inside of embassies safe. Now before people who are like, hey, well, it wasn't really being used for embassy consular purposes. Let me clue you in on something. All people, all nations, including us, use embassies as fronts for spying, illicit activity, CIA. You can go and read the long history of our own use of that. We know that it's being done to us. That's why the embassies here in Washington are all heavily

surveilled. Ours are heavily surveilled all across the world. One of the reasons that we don't generally attack them, even whenever people who are highly unseemly, including people who we would like to kill, who are inside of them, is specifically to not breach the Vienna Convention and then invite similar attacks on our own diplomats and or spies all across the world. So that's a little bit of the background. Can we go and put the next element, please, up on the screen? Because this is very important. What the Iranians say is that the strike on its compound killed two separate generals and that the envoy to Syria, quote, vows decisive response in their attack. Now, what's been, frankly, not discussed enough in this is that this is the continuation of the last couple of days of a major ramp up by Israel inside of Syria.

And we can put that next one up there, please, on the screen. What this tells us is that the Israelis actually struck previously, just days ago in Syria, killing, quote, dozens of militants, including Syrian soldiers and Hezbollah militants, this explicitly, let's again repeat, has nothing to do with the current war on Gaza and instead was an expansion against Hezbollah militants and including the killing of Syrian soldiers. So let's just repeat here again that we have an attack both here on an Iranian IRGC general who was the major top general of the Ayatollah's kind of personal Revolutionary Guard Corps. We have the deaths of Syrian Corps. We have the deaths of Syrian soldiers, and we have the deaths of Hezbollah militants. These are three very important constituencies that are in the region. There's also, Crystal, there is reports that are currently filtering out of Al-Tanf base in Syria. This is where the United States has several U.S. service members who are stationed there, who are special operators supposedly

going against ISIS. Anyway, we'll recall that that mission and some of these bases have been previously attacked several weeks ago. We are now getting reports, just as of this morning, that the U.S. base in Al-Tanf is now being attacked with suicide drones, very likely from the IRGC. So what the terrifying part of that is that it's not Israeli soldiers who are forward deployed in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and elsewhere. It is American soldiers who are now appearing to be attacked by these suicide drones after what appeared to be at least some sort of quasi-ceasefire after a retaliatory strike on the IRGC previously. I want to make this as clear as possible. Israel's actions here and in the Gaza Strip and throughout the region and our explicit support are going to be put at significant risk because, of course, they're going to be right

there in a war zone. And while we talk a lot here, of course, about Israel's action, the truth of the matter is people throughout the region see us as just as complicit as they should. I mean, what did we talk about yesterday? How we continue to ship these 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs, even as we go out and pretend to hand-ring our concern about civilian life. So the level of risk that our service members have been put at is extraordinary, and it's indefensible. I mean, as you've discussed before, Sagar, even if you don't care a lick about Palestinian life, even if you don't care, how does this serve our interests as Americans? fervency, almost fundamentalist commitment to Zionism and the cause of Israel has put us in an insane, outrageous, indefensible position. And a strike like this, God knows what the fallout is going to be. There are dire warnings coming from the Iranians. There was a statement released saying this attack will have our fierce response.

They're, of course, talking about how this is a violation of international law. And that's the other piece of this is there seems to be an intentional pattern of seeing what the Israelis can get away with. They have violated effectively every humanitarian international law, norm, guideline, whatever you want to call them, you could possibly imagine. Just yesterday, you have IDF soldiers leaving al-Shifa Hospital, which I'm going to talk about in my monologue, revealing an atrocious massacre, potentially hundreds of individuals killed, many of whom proven to be civilians, including a number of doctors, medical staff who were killed, children, field executions at this hospital, which is supposed to be off limits. You have seven aid workers operating in a

deconfliction zone in a clearly marked car there to try to feed a population that Israel is starving to death who are targeted and killed. And you have this strike on an embassy killing a top commander and leading again to God knows what type of escalation here. It is absolute insanity what we're seeing unfold. Well, it's really terrifying, as I said, because we're the ones who are forward deployed and we've effectively been guaranteeing their security. We've got hundreds, actually probably thousands of troops in the immediate vicinity, and ours are the ones who are sitting ducks and who would be and incur the cost of any major incursion. It is not in the United States' interest to get dragged into a war with Iran,

even with Syria. I mean, let's even play this out. Let's say even the Iranians don't get involved here. A war between Syria and Israel would be a disaster for us. We have thousands of troops who are not only in Syria, also on the border there with Jordan, as we lost three already in this conflict. An explosion there would almost certainly draw in the tens of thousands of Hezbollah militants that are currently inside of Syria. And then we could – it would be a full-blown conflagration, and that's exactly how you get Iran drawn into the conflict. This is also an upping of the ante, and this is kind of what we've been seeing, a strike, a breach of the Vienna Convention in downtown Damascus. This doesn't just happen. As we've just demonstrated, there had dozens of Syrians that were killed, militants and others that were just a couple of days ago.

The Israelis have been wantonly striking and blowing up whoever they want inside of Syria basically for the last seven years. They learned that strategy from us. And part of the problem is that when you erase any of these norms around war and about treating Syria as a sovereign state, we get to this point where people can just feel as if they can do what they want. I mean, this isn't Hamas. This isn't even technically a non-state act. This is full-blown sovereign nations with the capacity to destroy tens of millions. And that is where the gamble is really honestly terrifying. And that's what we see here with Biden. I haven't even seen some sort of reaction here from the Biden administration. And instead, what we're basically doing is shipping them the weapons and selling them the planes that they are then carrying out such strikes with. OK, but then should we not have some say in how these things are done and are used?

My only humble suggestion, but apparently that's too much. Well, and they're claiming, oh, we had no idea. Maybe that's true. That's kind of a terrifying possibility in and of itself. If we did know and we're like, yeah, sure, go ahead, that's also a terrifying possibility. But the bottom line is the Iranians clearly see us as complicit here. And you know how the media works here. And you know how the many hawkish members of Congress on both sides of the aisle work as well. So far, the regional attacks have come from proxy groups, not directly from Iran.

Is that trend going to hold or are the Iranians going to feel the need to now directly respond? What if U.S. service members are killed by Iran? What then? How many voices are going to be out there calling for a direct hot war with Iran over Israel's bullshit and our support of Israel's bullshit? That's where we are. That's what we're on the precipice of. And that's why this development is so extraordinary and frankly, so incredibly terrifying. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

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

to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's move on to the other horrific news or some of the other horrific news that we learned yesterday as well. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So as I alluded to before, we now know that seven aid workers for Jose Andres' organization called World Central Kitchen were killed. The Israeli military bombed three cars that were that belonged to these four nationals. We now know that one of the individuals who was killed is a dual American Canadian citizen, but a number of other foreign nationals involved here, as well as one Palestinian. Jose Andres himself put out a statement saying, today, World Central Kitchen lost several of our sisters and brothers in an IDF airstrike in Gaza. I'm heartbroken and grieving for their families and friends and our whole WCK family. These are people, angels. I served alongside in Ukraine,

Gaza, Turkey, Morocco, Bahamas, Indonesia. They are not faceless. They are not nameless. The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost. Peace starts with our shared humanity, and it needs to start now. You can see that message up on the screen from Jose Andres. And of course, the context here is, number one, a policy of collective punishment and starvation, which has been ongoing since post-October 7th. You now have acute levels of food insecurity where people, and especially children and babies, are literally starving to death.

You have anarchy breaking out because of the desperate circumstances, especially in northern Gaza. And now, amidst that backdrop, you have seven aid workers who they're specifically to try to feed hungry people who are targeted and killed by the IDF. Sagar, I know they're expressing their quote unquote sorrow over the incident, claiming they're going to investigate it. But let's be really clear here. These aid workers were in a de-conflicted zone. They had done everything, followed standard protocol to make sure they were not targeted, that they would be safe while they were conducting aid activities, trying to feed starving people, and they were targeted and killed anyway. In a marked car, there is no excuse for this.

And it fits a pattern of aid workers being killed and slaughtered in the Gaza Strip by the IDF in the context of this conflict. Yeah, we have a statement here this morning just breaking from Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, saying that the killing of the aid workers, quote, was unintended and is a tragic incident. One of the things, though, is that it definitely strains a little bit of credulity is for the pictures that are coming out of the strike. For those of us who cover the war on terror, the image in front of us is not in any way surprising. It's the exact telltale sign of a precision guided munition that's been going through, is fired easily by a drone. In some cases, actually, there's been some speculation by munitions and military experts. It may have even been the telltale, the bladed Hellfire missile. I know that that's one that the U.S. has used in the past

because it's one that can carry directly through a car and create the hole just exactly like what you see, which kills everybody inside but limits the amount of collateral damage then on the outside. So then there's the question of where do they get such munition? Why are we using this on an aid convoy? And presumably, you know, given the fact that the top of the car literally has the picture of food that's on top of it clearly branded with the name, then why was it targeted in the first place? And I mean, I think it does also tell you a lot that the Israelis themselves have basically given no explanation as to how something like this can happen. They just say it's an unintended strike and that they, you that they express their condolences for the dead. This is just another number added to the

hundreds of aid workers who have already been killed by the IDF. And so you can't look at the numbers and just assume, oh, well, this is all an accident. And let's think about the fallout here, because now World Central Kitchen, they've suspended operations in the Gaza Strip. They've been actually one of the more effective operations on the ground. This is their first time working in Gaza, but they've worked in many other difficult regions around the world. They had been quite bold in their approach and reportedly pretty effective. So this is the worst thing that could possibly happen in terms of starving Palestinians. Yet another aid organization cut off at the knees, just like UNRWA has been as well. So the consequences here are incredibly dire. And it is so indes is so indescribable, the number of atrocities that

have been committed day after day. And you just look at this and you say, well, how are they so brazen? Killing an American aid worker, potentially dragging us into World War III with Iran. It was massacre at the hospital, the flower massacre, the targeting of hospitals and mosques and churches and refugee camps with 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs. And you look at it and it's very clear. It's because they've gotten away with all of it. Is there any expectation that even though they just bombed one of our citizens, that there will be any consequences for that? No, absolutely not. Do you think that even as they just struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus, potentially dragging us into a much broader and even more dangerous conflict, do you think there will be any

consequences for that? No. So when you want, well, why do they do these things and how do they? Well, it's because they can because they've been testing and trial. What can we get away with? What can we get? Can we get away with targeting starving civilians who are trying to obtain aid off a truck? Yes, we can. Can we get away with targeting a hospital? Yes, we can. OK, we're going to target basically every hospital in the entire Gaza Strip and destroy the entire health infrastructure. Can we get away with targeting an embassy in a foreign country? Yes, we can. Can we get away with targeting foreign nationals who are aid workers? And we already all know the answer. I also don't want to lose sight

of the fact that these were extraordinary human beings who decided, who signed up to be in this dangerous, brutal conflict zone. We wanted to share with you a portion of a video of two of the individuals who were killed by the Israelis in this strike and the work that they were doing there on the ground. Let's take a look. Hey, this is Zomi and Chef Omedie. We're at the Dirobalaf kitchen and we've got the mise en place. Tell us a little bit about it, Chef Ali.

This is the mise en place to cook the rice. So we have all the spices for the boiling water. We're ready for the boiling water inside the rice. This is the stir fry which is oil, we stir fry onions. We add the spices. And after we stir fry onions, we add the spices and after we fry the rice we add the water. The water is aromatized with this mix of spices. There is the black lemon, there is the chili,

there is seven mixed spices, bay leaves, salt, pepper, and tomato paste. Indeed. So this is the beautiful, fragrant, aromatic rice that will be served today from Djerubalat Kitchen. Thank you. Some of humanity's finest right there. Zomi and Shefali, that was the final video that they produced there. You can see, you know, preparing food for starving Gazans, and now, Sagar, they're gone.

Tragic. I mean, beyond tragic, honestly. Just aid workers, look, we'll see what the official reaction is from their governments, but I'm not going to hold my breath, especially, I mean, with the American, you know, especially for me, I'm like, you kill one of our own citizens in a strike that you say is unintended. You got to release a lot of data here on exactly how exactly this went down. But the thing is, Crystal, we know they won't do that because that would expose the same level of anger and – I mean at a certain point we already know in terms of the indiscriminate, the lack of tactics. You've covered it too in the past, the AI use in some cases, the way that people are just killed willy-nilly. That's another interesting question.

Did a human even make a decision here, or do they just program something in here and says if it's a moving car in X, Y, and Z area, just blow the shit out of it? That's right. And if so, you better answer a lot of questions as to why I don't feel in any way confident that our consular officials or State Department will in any way do something like that. And that's what makes me really upset. We know what their response is going to be, Matt Miller and these other people. Oh, well, Israel says they're investigating. We'll wait for the results of that investigation. And guess what? You never hear the results of that investigation. You never hear

about it again unless somebody like Ryan or another journalist asks about it, to which they just point to, oh, well, we're upset about that and they're investigating and we'll wait to see. So we know exactly where this is ultimately going to go. And, you know, the Israeli military, the IDF, they are famously very technically advanced, right? They have all the technology in the world. And yet we have consistently seen aid workers, medical workers, ambulances. Remember the little girl who was trapped in a car with her dead family members begging for help? The Red Crescent sends out medics in an ambulance, deconflicted with the Israelis in an attempt to save her and everyone involved, targeted and killed. At a certain point, we can't be so naive as to think these are all just

unfortunate accidents that the Israelis are truly, really profoundly sorry about. Because again, this helps to further their goal of inflicting pain and suffering on the Palestinian people, specifically through the tool of starvation as a weapon of war. So the fact that this aid organization has now had to pause their operations and are no longer feeding the people of Gaza who are starving to death is a devastating, devastating blow. Over the past six years

of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to some additional risks for our service members that our President Joe Biden is willingly putting them into. Let's put this up on the screen.

Sagar, you found this. I mean, this is, it's obvious in a way, but the Washington Post, you did a good job writing up here. Biden's plan for Gaza Pier endangers U.S. troops, experts warn. Skeptics fear the humanitarian operation will be an enticing target for Hamas or other militants. They write in this piece, the Biden administration's plan to install a floating pier as part of the broad international initiative to feed starving Palestinians will endanger the U.S. service members who must build, operate, and defend the structure from attack. According to military experts, they say there is a risk of enormous political consequences for the president. I love how the political

consequences for the president are top of mind here versus the lives of the service members who are being put at risk. The Americans' fixed proximity to the fighting and the intense anger at the U.S. for its support of Israel will render the pier an enticing target for Hamas or another militant group, many of whom receive arms and military guidance from Iran. Skeptics of the operation warn rocket fire, attack drones, and divers or speedboats hauling explosives all will pose a threat. Paul Kennedy, who's a retired Marine Corps general who led major humanitarian operations after natural disasters in Nepal in the Philippines, said, quote, if a bomb went off in that location, the American public will ask, what the hell were they doing there in the first place? Which seems like something that the American people are, frankly, already asking. Well, they should ask that, because actually, the more that we learn about this, the more terrifying it becomes. It says, currently, the amount that you, that 1,004

Army ships deployed from southeast Virginia, March 12th, after an estimated 30-day transit, the vessels will pull in offshore. The soldiers then began building a floating steel structure, an 1,800-foot two-lane causeway stretching from the edge of the Mediterranean Sea to a beachhead. All deliveries will then be staged and inspected in Cyprus before being loaded onto vessels that carry them to the pier. U.S. personnel will have to move supplies to that causeway. They say then that officials will not leave it. Now, here's where it gets even crazier is that the Israeli government has said that Israeli forces will only ensure that aid reaches those that it should. Now they're taking over.

So who exactly is this aid being turned over to? Afghanistan and the Beirut bombings from 1983 as two consequences of what it looks like whenever you just have troops in a very uncertain environment. And that really what makes me nervous about this, and I think rightfully so, is these are only a thousand, you know, sailors. Let's not forget, you know, incidents like Beirut, like the USS Cole bombing in 2000. All it took was a piddly little speedboat and they killed a lot of American sailors and they blew some $200 million ship, a massive hole in the middle of the side of it.

So it just highlights the immense danger that these guys are in. I mean, not to mention, it's in the middle of a freaking war zone. The Israelis just bombed aid workers. How do we know that our troops and personnel won't come into contact? How do we know that a Hamas rocket's not going to misfire or intentionally be fired at them? And it just takes one, and then what do we know? We're all in the middle

of something else again, not to mention even accidents. I mean, remember in the Obama administration when the Navy speedboat, what was it, like drifted into Iranian waters and it was a hostage crisis. These are all things that we need to avoid at absolute, you know, that we should not even consider putting our people in harm's way. And instead, we're actually sending more people into harm's way specifically to protect Israel's reputation, I guess, which is what's even more ridiculous. I don't even, I mean, the logic of it is insane and preposterous. There are plenty of aid crossings. There are plenty of aid trucks. The thing that's lacking is Israeli will to actually feed the people in Gaza and not starve them to death.

That's what's lacking. So that's why this whole pure idea has always been preposterous. By the way, after it was announced in Biden's State of the Union like it was some great humanitarian gesture that he came up with, it later was revealed through reporting that actually Netanyahu was the one who suggested it. It was his idea. could ultimately be used to allow Palestinians, allow, quote unquote, Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip. In other words, to help further our aims of ethnic cleansing and demographically thinning this area. So that's what's, I think, really going on here, because the idea that this is the best way to get aid into the Gaza Strip is insane. All we need to do is actually pressure Israel to let in the aid that is sitting amassed at the border, but we won't do that. Instead, we would rather put our service members at risk

on some nonsense boondoggle that's going to take months to even come into effect anyway. And then, by the way, every time the Pentagon or the State Department gets asked about, hey, you know, okay, so once this pier is built, what is even your plan for aid distribution? Because you have effectively anarchy, at least in northern Gaza, and they're, oh, we'll get back to you on that. We don't really know. That seems like a pretty freaking key piece of the puzzle here, doesn't it? even when an aid truck does get in, Israel has targeted the civil society workers and other groups on the ground that have been trying to be responsible for safely delivering this aid and not just having chaos and, you know, or the massacres that have occurred, like the flower

massacre where the IDF directly fires on starving Gazans who are trying to seek out this food for themselves and their families. So just another layer of irresponsibility and insanity that I think everyone clearly sees through. Let's also talk a little bit about some of the other events that have been occurring that fell a little bit under the radar. Let's put this up on the screen. So an Iraqi militia was actually able to strike inside of Israel in their Red Sea port city of Eilat. It came under an aerial attack on Monday, caused no casualties, the military said, but was able to get through their air defense systems. So that is significant. And also just a reminder, the Houthis are still out there doing

their thing, and we are still out there, you know, shooting down their drones and attacking inside of Yemen in another potentially, you know, escalatory scenario. You can put this up on the screen. The Houthis have, the U.S. military says it destroyed Houthi drones over the Red Sea and in Yemen. So, you know, how many months at this point have we had this policy of striking the Houthis? Hasn't slowed them down, haven't changed the dynamics. Not that they even expected that it would, but this remains another potential point of escalation. So a dangerous and horrifying situation all the way around. Yeah, it's scary, especially considering those attacks on the Al-Tanf base and others that could have broken at least what was supposedly some sort of

six-week temporary ceasefire that we saw in the region. All signs point to more U.S. soldiers, more U.S. blood, and more U.S. involvement in the Middle East. That's something I fought against for my entire professional life. So it makes sense that this is exactly where we end up, even though I would contend the super majority of the American public has learned our lessons from our adventures in that region. And yet, you know, Washington, Israel, everybody else can't just keep dragging us into it. Yeah, that's right. All right. So let's talk a little bit about Donald Trump and his somewhat all over the place comments that he made to an Israeli news outlet. The reaction to those comments from the two right wing Israeli journalists who were interviewing him is

now being reported in The New York Times. They can put this up on the screen. So the headline here is Trump's call for Israel to, quote, finish up war alarms, some on the right. Recent remarks he made urging an end to the Gaza conflict with no insistence on freeing Israeli hostages first were another departure from conservative support for Netanyahu. So they write here, two Israeli journalists traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, a little over a week ago,

hoping to elicit from Donald J. Trump a powerful expression of support for their country's war in Gaza. Instead, one of them wrote that what they heard from Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, quote, shocked us to the core. Both U.S. presidential candidates, Biden and Trump, are turning their rhetorical backs on Israel. This is so delusional, by the way, on every level, both about Biden and about Trump. But anyway, concluded Ariel Kahane, a right-wing settler who is the senior diplomatic correspondent for Israel Hayom. The newspaper is owned by the billionaire Republican donor Miriam Adelson. Ms. Adelson has arranged the interview with Mr. Trump personally, according to a person with direct knowledge of the planning. And just as a little reminder of a bit of what he said in that interview, let's go ahead and listen to Donald Trump.

They would have never done that because they knew there would have been very big consequences. That being said, you have to finish up your war. You have to finish it up. You got to get it done. And I'm sure you'll do that. And we got to get to peace. You can't have this going on. And I will say Israel has to be very careful because you're losing a lot of the world. You're losing a lot of support. But you have to finish up. You have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace.

You have to get on to a normal life for Israel and for everybody else. They say if I ran for office in Israel, I'd get 98% of the vote. I'm not Jewish, and yet Israel to me is very important. He goes on to say that's why I did Golan Heights, a reminder of the fact that he was staunchly pro-Israel when he was president of the United States the last time around. But one of those journalists reacting, saying Trump effectively bypassed Biden from the left when he expressed willingness to stop this war and get back to being the great country you once were. There's no way to beautify, minimize, or cover up that problematic message. So a bit of a freak out there. Yeah. I found it really funny, but actually really worth reading this piece. Jonathan Swan, always a very good reporter and astute. And he had an interesting thing. I definitely wanted to get your reaction to, Crystal. This is John Podharitz.

He's the editor of Commentary. People who don't know, we call him J-Pod online. Probably one of the most unhinged Israel supporters has attacked the show, me and you, many, many times. Aggressively. Previously only known because his father was a respected intellectual, but many such cases here in Washington, D.C. Anyway, here's what he says, quote, the only difference between Trump and Biden, and I say this as somebody who is not a supporter of Biden, is that Biden has put his money where his mouth is. He's been sending arms, Mr. O'Panhera said, so that he seems to suggest operationally the

problem with Biden is rhetoric and not policy. Trump is rhetoric, and he's not laying out any policy that should make anybody feel good. Now, I found that very noteworthy because, as you can see there, the actual diehards for Israel are very much appreciative of Joe Biden. They are annoyed that he won't rhetorically back him, but they're like, hey, he's been sent in the arms. That's what we actually want. We want to send the weapons. Trump is a genuine wild card. You have no idea.

And the irony is, is that Trump doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything. And in fact, what comes through is that he has, quote, never forgiven Benjamin Netanyahu for congratulating Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. He's so petty. Hey, listen, take what you can get, right? With Trump, that may be the one thing that will undercut his previous love affair with Netanyahu. For example, in 2021, Mr. Trump told Axios journalist, Barack Ravid, he had concluded Netanyahu never wanted peace with the Palestinians. And his first reaction after October 7th was to criticize Bibi and the intelligence services.

His advisors then privately pleaded with him to clean up his comments. And then he eventually turned to standard lines of support before returning to the ambiguity of you got to wrap this thing up now as much as possible. I mean, look, I've always put some, at least some faith in Trump's complete indifference on these issues because with Trump, it's better rather than Biden. Biden is ideological in some ways, sometimes good. Afghanistan, sometimes horrible, like in many, Ukraine, for example, Israel. With Trump, he'll just go wherever the wind blows. And what struck out to me was with Trump throughout the whole thing, he's like, it's becoming a real problem. You look all over the world, people are really starting to abandon

you. You got to wrap things up. He's like an outside observer. And with that, now, we don't know what policy will happen, you know, if he were to assume the presidency. But at the very least, he is a genius in one respect, which is public relations and with how things are shifting politically and where to stake out a position. And that's why it was extraordinary to hear him say, like, oh, you gotta wrap it up as soon as possible. The safest assumption with Trump is obviously that he's going to conduct himself

the same way he did last time, which is overwhelming pro-Israel support. And one thing that was noteworthy in that interview that didn't get as enough attention is the interviewers asked specifically about this proposal from Trump's ambassador to Israel when he was president of the United States, where his proposal asked for Israel to fully assert sovereignty over the West Bank, what he, of course, calls Judea and Samaria. And they asked Trump about it, and he basically indicated he was open to it. I mean, that's the thing is, you're right that he doesn't have the same ideological fervent commitment to Israel that Joe Biden clearly does. He is a purely transactional character.

However, always up to this point in the modern, you know, in the past 30 years or whatever, that transactional math always, especially on the Republican side at this point, adds up to fervent, unconditional support of whatever the hell Israel wants to do. Because remember, the strongest, most lockstep, diehard supporters, not just of Israel, but of Netanyahu and Smotris and Ben-Gavir and whatever insanity and psychosis they want to unleash is not actually Jewish Americans. It's the white evangelical Christians who make up the most important part and the most fervent supporters of Donald Trump.

You also have, you know, part of why last time around he was so pro-Israel is not just because of Kushner, but because of the close relationship and the money that came from Sheldon Adelson. So it's not clear to me that any of that fundamental transactional math has really shifted from him. So I can't have any, like, hope or expectation that the fact that he made these, like, sort of vague comments saying you got to wrap it up, which can also be construed as you need to sort of like, you know, the guy who said you need to nuke Gaza and finish it off, the Republican congressman. I mean, Trump obviously didn't say that, but that finish the job rhetoric is similar to what that congressman cleaned up his nuke Gaza comments to mean. So anyway, I think the freak out over where Trump would be from the Israeli perspective and from the right wing, we got to support Israel no matter what perspective is misplaced. Although I do acknowledge that he does not have

the ideological fervency around this issue that certainly Joe Biden does. I have no idea what he's going to do. That's always kind of the fun thing with Trump. I mean, I have a relative idea, but I still found it noteworthy and I did find it especially interesting that the Netanyahu personal angle and also the fact, I mean, look, let's not pretend. Miriam Adelson is one of the most powerful people in the entire GOP. Her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, the multi-billionaire Las Vegas Sands, I mean, he's the funder of Birthright, probably single-handedly responsible for a huge portion of the GOP electorate's actual, like, positioning on Israel. For him to still say that to a Miriam Adelson interviewee is actually pretty crazy. Now, you know, you could take whatever you want from that. You have no idea which way

it will go. But noteworthy to me, nonetheless, that at least in Israel, they were like, oh, wow, like at least he is really right. They they're starting to understand that things are a little bit different. Here's what here's what is important is even though, like I said, I don't think that their concern over whether Trump is going to be pro-Israel or not is particularly well-founded. The fact that there's a bit of a freakout over it is actually positive because one of the things that you might expect is that, you know, Bibi would prefer Trump to be in office and thinks he can basically like, you know, thumb his nose at Joe Biden and wait it out, wait out these little, you know, hand-wringing recriminations that are coming from the Biden administration with the expectation that he's

going to have Trump, his buddy to deal with next time around. And so this at least scrambles that calculus a little bit. And in that way, it is a positive thing, not to mention it's just the comments are amusing in and of themselves. They were shocked to their core. Very funny. All right. So let's go ahead and get to the business news with regards to Donald Trump. Let's put this up on the screen. So we just learned that Truth Social lost $58 million last year. And as a result, their stock absolutely tanked. It slid ultimately at the end of the day, 21%. At one point during the day, it was down 25%. That is a direct hit, obviously, to Donald Trump and his wealth because he owns a 57% stake in that company. So as a result of this massive drop, his personal net worth dropped $1 billion in a day. We can put

up the chart showing the trajectory of the Trump Media and Technology Group stock price. This is over a long period of time when it was the SPAC and whatever. So we can see in the recent era there at the end of this chart, kind of up and down movement. Then you have this huge spike just before they officially you know, officially become this Trump media and technology stock. And then yesterday, you see this precipitous fall in the stock price, which, you know, it's a big deal for Trump because he has a cash crunch right now because of his legal issues. He did catch a bit of a break in New York in terms of what he's going to have to put down up front. But it's still a lot of money that he's on the hook for here. So the fact that the stock price took such a hit is significant. And also, as we discussed

before, so Trump Media and Technology Group, True Social, they generated just $4.1 million in revenue last year and lost $58 million. So the idea that this is some multi-billion dollar company is just like the most preposterous thing ever. But it's basically a meme stock. His supporters liked the stock. They wanted to help Trump. They wanted to see if they could make some money off of it too. So they've been bidding it up and up and up and a significant portion of that, although not all of it came crashing down yesterday. Yeah. What's interesting is that I actually highlight some issues with SPACs and with the shell companies and the way that they go public in that the filing was made after actually the offering. Now, as I understand it, this is

something unique in particular to when SPACs are allowed to go public before then they're allowed to report their financials and is a little bit different than a traditional IPO. I was reading a little bit in the business press, but the filing at the end of the day shocked all of Wall Street, not just because of where the price was, because it showed that the company generated, Crystal, just $750,000 in revenue in just the fourth quarter of last year. I mean, I think people need to understand this too. Fourth quarter, especially if you're doing advertising, that's like the best time because that's when a huge portion of ad spend is actually recorded and is actually deployed because that's when all of us are shopping for Christmas presents or Black Friday. I mean, it's usually, like for us, for example,

here on YouTube, that's when we're going to make the most amount of money because that is when our ad rates are going to go up. And then Q1, January through March is usually the worst time because that's like the lowest ad spend period. So for them to bring in just some three quarters of a million dollars in revenue is honestly stunning, you know, given like, it's like, how are you even signing up any clients? And then you give their top line figures, and then you have to wonder about what that growth is and about the burn rate for some $60 million. That's another question I have. I'm like, what the hell are you even spending $60 million on? Is this just, I mean, what is it, servers? Like,

it can't take that many engineers to run this. It's very basic technology. Look at Elon. He fired 90% of the people at Twitter, and this site mostly still works. It's like, what are you doing over there? Apparently, a lot of it was an interest expense. I'm not really clear interest on what, but I guess some sort of loan, massive debt that they, yeah. So anyway, which yeah, that is a problem because that means that's going to continue potentially indefinitely. The thing with true social, I mean, just to get to pretend like this is a serious business model for a moment. We were always skeptical of these like Twitter alternatives back when, you know, Trump was kicked off of Twitter and before it was in the Elon Musk era and whatever. But at that point, at least there was some sort of a business logic to a Twitter alternative of like, you've got all these

conservatives who are upset about the way this company is being managed. You feel like it doesn't represent their values who want to be able to go somewhere else. And so if you've got Donald Trump on this other platform that's basically Twitter, but it's run by someone that you feel more ideologically aligned with, that at least has some logic to it. But now that you have the Elon Twitter era, and it's much more of a sympathetic place to conservatives, and it's sort of coded right wing place to conservatives, and it's, you know, sort of coded right wing now, whether the reality of that is true or not. The business case really doesn't make any sense. I mean, at this point, true social is just relevant

only because Trump is on it. And I can't say that I have personally spent a lot of time on true social, but apparently because there's no liberals there to like, you know, to sneer at and mock, it's also kind of destructive to the conservative movement because it's just them arguing with each other and like tearing each other apart, too. I don't know enough. But it's this, you know, it's this tiny silo where the only thing that really matters on it is whatever Donald Trump says, which gets picked up and also put on Twitter, which is where we usually see it, or also polished, you know, by media outlets when it's something noteworthy, like his various Easter

deranged truths. So it really doesn't have a logical business case at this point. So on the one hand, it's like, oh, I can't believe they only got in $750,000 in revenue last quarter. But it's also like, who is even advertising on this platform at all? You know, what, yeah, what business would say, oh, the place I really want to be is, is true social. It's going to be, definitionally, it's going to be very niche organizations who are really just trying to target this specific ideological group. And, you know, I was trying to look up how many daily active users true social has that information's not out there, but it obviously is dwarfed by other mainstream social media platforms.

So in any case, I think it was only a matter of time before there was a significant crash, and I would expect that there's more to come. And again, it is one more illustration of just how incredibly fake our economy is because the idea that this, even after the crash, it still has like a $6.6 billion valuation. It's crazy. No, it's going to need, yeah. And that's the other thing is that

they haven't yet had to tell us what their number of monthly users is. There is an estimate that there are approximately 1 million monthly active users, but not daily active users. I mean, for context, I think Twitter has 217 million, I believe, like actual daily active users. I'm pretty sure. I'd have to go back.

Yeah, daily user base of 217 million as of April of 2022. Don't know what it is under Elon. According to Elon, it's actually up. So, you know, anyway, so we're looking at two to 300 times. And just so everybody knows, Truth Social is what? Worth $6 billion. Fidelity has marked down their investment in Elon's Twitter by some 70%. So let's do the math here. Let's do 0.3 times. What did Elon pay for?

$44 billion. So Fidelity is valuing Twitter under Elon around $13 billion. So there's no way that it's worth double. That actually sounds reasonable to me, $13 billion for the current Twitter. But $6 billion is wildly outrageous. I mean, think about that. Okay, obviously it's not exactly apples to apples because we're in a very different business here. But only a million monthly active users.

That means way more people watch our show in a month than are active on Truth Social. I don't even know. So to show you what a tiny niche sliver of the market is and how completely irrelevant it is the moment that Donald Trump stops boasting there. Yeah, not to brag, but, might as well if we have the data in front of us. It would be some 20 million, something like that. That sounds pretty good in terms of how we're doing. But yeah, we're not idiots. We don't think that our business is worth $6 billion. So there we go.

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

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

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the same time, we wanted to put some good news actually in the show. There's been an astounding development amongst Gen Z, even though a lot of people are very concerned about their political views and maybe their online phone usage. It seems that they're a lot more sensible than my millennial generation whenever it comes to employment. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Quote from the Wall Street Journal, how Gen Z is becoming the tool belt generation. More young workers are going into trades as disenchantment with the college track continues, rising pay and new technologies shine up plumbing and electrical jobs. Let's actually

go to the next part because this is a really interesting chart that people can see. It shows that enrollment growth in four-year college degree in vocational community-focused community college has gone up by some 15% from the 2021 baseline. Whereas there has been maybe a single digit increase if you look at other four-year institutions and even community colleges that are not vocational focused. What that tells us is that the spike, the overall 15 or so percent spike, is the one most extraordinary that we've seen in modern American history for younger people who are explicitly choosing to go into trades-based educations with set wages that are much higher than they ever were before than at any time previously when they were choosing for more service-based economies. We can go to the next

one too, because this is really, really fascinating, is you can watch there how the precipitous decline has happened in the average age of select trades. Electrician, heating, air conditioning, carpenter, and I think every trade except for welding has seen a precipitous drop just since 2020 and especially since 2017 in the median age of the people who are engaged in the trades crystal. And the main thing that comes through in this piece over and over again on top of the data is that people believe a couple of things. Number one is that the wage premium for college is no longer worth it. That is absolutely 100% true. But two, and even more interesting to me, young people are sitting there, 18 years old. They're looking at AI.

They're looking at the productivity gains that are being rolled up into the stock prices of these big tech companies. And they're saying, yeah, you know what? The one thing you can't AI is plumbing, welding, having a job as an auto mechanic, having a job as an EV technician, having a job as an electrician. They're always going to need that. If anything, that's what's going to build the backbone of the future economy. And they're choosing to make that choice. And I think they're setting themselves up for a much easier and previously trodden path to middle class and frankly, to prosperity. They're not taking out a lot of debt. They're setting themselves up for very, very well. They're going to start earning

a lot more money than they would have previously. And it's a very, very sensible direction for a lot of people who are out there. Yeah, it's incredibly rational. College is insanely expensive and debt loads are skyrocketing with no real relief in sight. So you've got that on one side of the ledger. You have a bunch of young people who may have watched their parents, you know, white collar professions and seen how their life is consists of staring at a computer screen all day and thought, you know what, this isn't really what I want for myself. And so I think there's a reaction in the other direction there. There's also tremendous demand in some of these trades where there had been previously

a crisis of a lot of older journeymen who were retiring and there wasn't a clear pipeline of new young talent to replace them. Well, that is now reversing. And you pointed to the pay. So in this piece, they point out that the median pay for new construction hires actually rose 5.1% to $48,000 roughly last year. By contrast, new hires in professional services, so like your sort of traditional white collar job out of college, earned an annual $39,000 and experienced a 2.7%, so a lower increase from 2022. This is according to ADP. So at least in terms of where you start out, you may start at a higher salary if you go

into one of these trades versus if you go and spend all the money on a four-year college degree. Now, still over the lifetime of these different careers, blue collar versus white collar, right now, the median for white collar work once you're into your career continues to outpace blue collar work. But, you know, does that remain the case? Is it worth it given the extraordinary expense that you have to incur on the front end? The fact that there's been a shift away from this idea that everyone has to go to college and if you're going to succeed in life, you have to go to college and that's the only path forward. I think it's a really positive thing because, you know, there's also a lot of people who find tremendous fulfillment in the trades and like being able to

build things and work with their hands and don't want to just sit in an office all day. So I think this is a really incredibly positive and hopeful development, honestly. The other very important thing with this is we are talking about the part of the problem that we talk about with wages is that we look at the average. So, yeah, it's true. If you're in the white collar work, if you're college educated, you are probably on average your lifetime earnings are going to be higher. But where do you live? What are you netting out? One of the nice things about trades is you can live wherever you want. You don't necessarily have to live in a city if you don't want to. And 100K a year in a smaller town where they need HVAC just as much as HVAC as we live here in Washington, D.C., in some cases,

your cost of living can be, especially on housing, can be like one-fifth the amount in a major metropolitan area. You have a lot more flexibility. I see this all the time with people who are skilled, especially like nurses. Nurses, they can just decide to move whenever they want, and they're in demand literally everywhere, from small town, big town. They wanna make more money, they can travel too. It's an incredible career field.

I see this too with people who are electricians and plumbers. When you have such a valuable skill that you can effectively transplant anywhere in the entire United States, you have more job security, and you also make it so they don't necessarily have to live in a major metropolitan area if you don't want to. It just gives you a ton of optionality. Because if their revenues start to go down, they're going to have to start marketing themselves as to why they are actually worth it and not just so mom and dad can feel good that you went to a four-year college degree. They actually got to be like, no, no, no. If you come here, we're going to get you a job. So actually invest some of that money that they're basically stealing from people and from the government into actually getting you a job on the other side.

Or maybe they'll lower their admissions rates. Or maybe we can change up our policy. That's probably the most fundamental important thing is the shakeup to higher education. Yeah, I think that that is correct. I also think there's something really important happening in terms of cultural views of college-educated white-collar work versus blue-collar skilled trade work, which this was really, you know, for a lot of years, especially in sort of like the peak of the neoliberal era, college was viewed as the pinnacle and trades were considered sort of like the fallback,

right? The lesser choice. It was like the stepchild, you know, they talk about in this article, they talk about a high school where it used to be, you know, the trade building was sort of pushed off to the side and people sneered at it and looked down their nose at it. And now it's got a nice new equipment. It's at the front of the school. It's featured. People actively seek this out. You know, it doesn't have that same sort of like stigma around it that unfortunately it has for far too long. So I think that's a really positive direction as well. And also could lead to, you know, blue collar people, average working people having more say and more political power in terms of our politics as well. So I think that's really important. I also think there's

something soccer to the fact that just like the mystique and the fantasy of college is really worn off. Yes. How many people go and, you know, they do the thing they're supposed to do and they get their four-year degree and then end up, you know, barista at Starbucks or working in a field or an industry where they didn't even need a four-year college degree, or they're certainly not working in mess. I mean, perhaps a majority of people end up not even working in the thing that they studied in college. So it's like, what are we really doing here? Are we just here for some sort of a life experience or is this actually leading us to where we want to be in terms of our life and career trajectories? So the fact that stigma is being removed, the fact that wages are going up, the fact that this is being seen as like a viable, positive, affirmative choice by more

people in Gen Z, I genuinely think this is such a positive thing. Absolutely. Let's spend some more time on this. 39% of 18 to 24-year-olds are enrolled in a post-secondary program. That's way too high. Way too high. The vast majority of those people are enrolled in the quote-unquote knowledge-based service programs and previously were not engaged in vocational programs. The previous percent of people who went to college, I think the right amount, was roughly around 19%. It should be a luxury good. It should be something where, yes, you have to take out a tremendous amount of debt or you come from a family that can afford it, and then you can use that wage premium in the service-based economy. But the vast majority of people don't need to attend. It's not a good trade. So 20% or so of people who attended fell exactly into that bucket. Now,

I'm not saying it's fair. I don't think it is fair. But what I do think is that watching people go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, the average college, what is the average student loan that's out there? Something like 25, something $30,000, especially on these variable interest rates with some of these private loan programs is usury. I mean, it's insane. And thanks to our current president, by the way, you can't even discharge it through bankruptcy. So it makes it, it's just incredible news around people's neck. In this country right now, we have a huge problem where the average woman wants to have 2.2 kids and is having 1.8. The number one reason that families cite as to why is money and debt specifically. A huge portion of this is student

debt. The other issue, as I just was talking about, if you want to have a job and you want to work with your college degree, the likelihood is like us, you need to move to a major metropolitan area, which has a very high cost of living and is where the major concentration of these things are. And so over and over, you're getting on the wheel where very few people are actually winning. The people who won are the boomers in the past. And like I said, traditionally, some 20% or so of the population, which does really justify that college premium, highly concentrated in STEM in particular for what is actually worth it. But we never thought about it as a trade. We just thought of it as an intrinsic good. And that's really how we ended up here. I mean, I'm just in favor of more choices, right? I think we should have debt forgiveness. I think we should have free public college. So

people who want to pursue that path and want to go into STEM, want to go into a white collar career, for them, that's the thing. And it makes sense for them that they have that opportunity. And that's fantastic. I think it should be, you know, like I said, I think public college should be free. It should certainly be way more affordable than it is right now. And we take it for granted because of the era that we grew up in, that it should be this incredible burdensome load when not that long ago, the University of California system was free. And many other schools were extremely affordable where you could work and actually afford to pay your way through school. Like the idea of being able to do that is preposterous now.

So people even at state schools leave with tens of thousands of dollars in debt to start their life. That has ripple effects throughout their entire life, as you're pointing out, not only with family creation, also really stifles entrepreneurship. Yes. out not only with family creation, also really stifles entrepreneurship because you know you've got this thing you got to pay every month and that's hanging over you. And so you just feel like, all right, I got to get to work. I got to get whatever's the highest paying job that I possibly can. Forget about potential entrepreneurship. Forget about whatever the dream job might be that potentially is lower paying. I just got to get on that grind and try to pay this sucker off. So it really does

constrain from the jump your life choices, which is a disaster. So the fact that you have, you know, other pathways that are being seen as attractive, that people are pursuing, that, you know, have that the stigma around them is going away and that lead can lead, you know, very clearly and like on a direct path to this sort of, middle-class life. It's a really good thing, really encouraging. And I think will potentially have some impact on college affordability as well, because you are already seeing actually enrollment declines in four-year institutions as things are shifting. So I do think it's a good direction. Yeah. And I hope that these private colleges in particular, I hope they get crushed from the wave of this because it is criminal how much they've been jacking their tuition.

Yeah, so true. For some, like, freaking mediocre school and you're paying these insane amounts, it's crazy. Did you see that in the Northeast some of these premium, like, liberal arts colleges are now charging some $90,000 a year? Look, Yale, maybe. And maybe. I want to say, again, a big maybe. The rest of them, Sarah Lawrence or something like that, you are an idiot if you're paying $90,000 for something like that. It ain't worth it. It ain't worth it. Wow. That's wild. Let's move on to Havana syndrome.

This is, it's the syndrome which simply just won't die. The fake syndrome that won't die. It has killed more people in frustration at its coverage than it actually has allegedly killed. The fake syndrome won't die. name, where allegedly U.S. workers, embassy workers, were being targeted with some new directed energy weapon and experiencing a bizarre array of symptoms. This was then accepted as fact, published by the media, ascribed then, even though it occurred supposedly in Havana, to the Russian government and became a full-on Russiagate craze throughout the 2000s, to the extent that the United States Congress passed money to help them with their health bills, where the U.S. intelligence community at first was treating it as real. The media has an entire panic about whether U.S. diplomats are being attacked with this newfangled weapon. It was eventually killed and said that it was

totally fake and by the U.S. intelligence community itself. And yet, 60 Minutes has decided to resurrect Havana syndrome and say, no, even though the people who have every incentive to lie and say that it is real, even though they even say that it's not real, they are actually orchestrating a cover-up. Here's what they had to say. If it is Russia, investigative reporter Christo Grozev believes he knows who's involved. In 2018, Grozev was the first to discover the existence of a top-secret Russian intelligence unit, which goes by a number, 29155.

These are people who are trained to be versatile assassins and sabotage operators. They're trained in counter-surveillance, they're trained in explosives, they're trained in using poison, and technology equipment actually inflict pain or damage to the targets. And Grozev says he found one that may link 29155 to a directed energy weapon. And when I saw it, I literally had tears in my eyes because it was spelling out what they had been doing. It's a piece of accounting. An officer of 29155 received a bonus for work on, quote, potential capabilities of nonlethal acoustic weapons. So he supposedly, this literally reads like a Tom Clancy novel, Crystal. Unit 2915cat, which has been funded by the CIA, and head of the investigations at, quote, The Insider, which is an online newspaper, supposedly founded by a Russian journalist and obviously hostile to the Russian government.

Now, I don't know very much about this man. What I do know is that if you just look, it's very basic in terms of the Maidan, the the Maidan, the Bellingcat connections and all that, with all the incentive in the world to play up some grand conspiracy. And all of this just taking at the word of, frankly, a bunch of diplomats and other people who could be suffering from any kinds of health maladies from, for whatever reason, hypochondriacs and others who are just being totally believed with, frankly frankly no skepticism by the media here and in parroting an outrageous crazy accusation which is that somebody is firing a secret microwave energy weapon through the walls at your head to i mean for what purpose to immobilize you and just keep coming back to why what for what reason, what purpose would this entire thing exist?

Yeah. So this was really sold as, you know, blockbuster story. It was a partnership between 60 Minutes, German newspaper Der Spiegel, and Insider, which as Sagar was just saying, is this outlet of Russian dissidents. So clearly, you know, they have a perspective, that's fine. But you have to take that perspective into account when you're considering the quote-unquote reporting here. And they even have to admit in the piece that the quote-unquote evidence that they're able to produce is circumstantial. So the big smoking gun is the piece that we just showed you, this translated memo of accounting referring to some ambiguous directed energy acoustic weapon, right, that has no specifics. We have no tie-in to what's happening here. We don't even know if this is a real thing, right? So it's very speculative, okay? Yeah. There's another piece. There was an incident that unfolded in the country of Georgia, and they have some sort of a brief

intercepted communication in Russian where someone says, is the green light supposed to be flashing and should it stay on all night? Now, again, this is very speculative, okay? To connect these pieces and say, aha, that must be what's happening. The evidence is just not there to justify that conclusion. I'm trying to be as diplomatic as possible here, okay? Okay, the green light thing. That could be anything. That's something I, you know,

for those of you who are whoop gang, that's what I say when I plug in my whoop charger because it's green and it shines in the middle of the night. I'm going to guess there's like a fair number of Russian speakers in the country of Georgia and Tbilisi at any given moment. So, you know, the idea you intercepted this call, they paint it as, again, like this kind of smoking gun when it really, really isn't.

But to me, perhaps the most revealing part of the 60 minutes, you know, segment on this expose on this came at the very end where one of the primary people that they're relying on for this analysis, they mention in passing that now he's left the Pentagon and he wants to get government contracts to deal with Havana syndrome sufferers. So he has a direct monetary incentive to, you know, spin this story and paint this picture, et cetera. One of the other key individuals that they interview as part of this is a lawyer who's representing a bunch of Havana syndrome, quote unquote, sufferers.

So you also have, you know, a monetary and personal incentive to paint this picture. So, you know, when you put the pieces together of what they actually were able to produce here versus, you know, what we know and what the government has even had to admit at this point, and I don't think that they were excited to admit this, by the way, because they seem very gung-ho about the whole heart syndrome situation. It doesn't really add up. No, it certainly. And there's also a hilarious part of the interview where they attempt to disguise a woman by just putting her in a wig and hoping that if she looks a little bit like Lady Gaga, nobody will be able to guess who she

is. So if you're watching in particular, you're going to want to see this. Let's take a listen. One of them is Carrie. We're disguising her and not using her last name because she's still an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. She says in 2021, she was home in Florida when she was hit by a crippling force. And bam, inside my right ear, it was like a dentist drilling on steroids. That feeling when it gets too close to your eardrum, it's like that, you know, times 10. It was like a high-pitched metallic drilling noise, and it knocked me forward at like a 45-degree angle this way. As you can see, she's talking about some bizarre symptoms, but frankly, just from watching that crystal, look, I'm not going to look into who she is because

she shouldn't want her identity revealed, but it's like, how is that possibly going to shield you from any public scrutiny? Just ridiculous. They're actually trying to protect somebody's actual, you know, their identity. Let's also go and put this up there on the screen. As we mentioned, the intelligence community itself says that this is fake. They say the Havana syndrome was not caused by an energy weapon or a foreign adversary, according to them. And the basic 60 Minutes theory is that all of this is being covered up to avoid some sort of war with Russia or some sort of accusation. Just think about this very clearly. Our government has every incentive in the world to whip up conspiracy theories about Russia, to keep the

American population against them so that we can continue to buy into their Ukraine funding hoax, which they are dramatically unpopular and underwater with. There's no reason that they would want to cover this up. If it was even 2% true, they would say it was true. Think about the other crap that they've pushed on us, the Russian bounty story in Afghanistan. I mean, I can go on forever. But for some reason, this one in particular, yeah, yeah, yeah, that one, they're covering up. We're not even talking about deaths. We're talking about alleged attacks. Another very clear sign about who are the people who are very, I guess, rejoicing around this. Here you have John Bolton saying that it's real

and that we need to get very serious about it. Let's take a listen. When I was a national security advisor, I was briefed on this. I was very concerned about it. I did then and do now think that there's very likely some hostile adversary behavior here, whether it's Russia, China, maybe somebody else, more than likely Russia. I don't think the government, frankly, when I was there, took it seriously enough. I don't think they've taken seriously enough since then. I commend CBS for going after it. I think you should continue to go after it, too, because the danger that the Russians or any adversary could actually perfect this kind of weapon, the damage it could do to our troops, to high-level government officials in a time of crisis is very, very concerning. And I just think people swept it aside too quickly. Some of the people who were affected

actually were National Security Council staff when I was there. And the idea that these people had some kind of psychosomatic experience was not credible to me. But we know that the Russians have used directed energy efforts against our embassy in Moscow in years past. The speculation this time on 60 Minutes was it was acoustical devices. I think directed energy is probably more likely. So there you go, Crystal. For directed energy, this is the likely reason. It's definitely the Russians. Anytime I see something like this, you just have to be deeply skeptical. And I think the broader point to all of this, why do we even care, is because certain psyops that the media deems credible of airing here, basically with very little shreds of evidence. Again, on 60 Minutes, our premier television investigative review program, for some reason, as long as it's Russia, then, you know, we can roll it out there. We can even allege that the U.S. government, which has cooked up the most insane Russia conspiracies of

the last seven years, that they itself are in on some grand Russian conspiracy. Yeah. It doesn't pass the smell test. Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a war criminal. I know. And his administration's official position is that they're committing genocide in Ukraine. Thank you. But he's going to be afraid to say that they're using some sort of directed energy or acoustic weapon or whatever against our diplomats. It just doesn't really make sense. And as I said, I genuinely listen to this thing with an open mind, okay? I am perfectly willing to be wrong. And as someone who, you know, I trust and respect, took it seriously and was like, really give it a genuine listen. But the scraps

of quote-unquote evidence that they offered just do not justify this really extraordinary conclusion. And it is an extraordinary conclusion. I mean, as you said, it sounds like something out of a spy novel. So if you're going to assert something that is really extraordinary and also potentially leads to escalation and provocation and all of these sorts of things, you better have some real stuff to back it up. And they definitely did not in this instance. And also they relied on the credibility of a number of people who have direct financial interests or personal interests in Havana syndrome being real and being, you know, from a foreign adversary. National Institutes of Health, in additionavana syndrome being real and being, you know, from a foreign adversary.

National Institutes of Health, in addition to that, um, Intel assessment that said, you know, we really don't think that this came from a foreign adversary. There were new studies that were just conducted by National Institutes of Health, NIH, which failed to find any evidence of brain injury in scans or blood markers of the diplomats and spies who said they suffered symptoms of Havana syndrome. Now, this did contrast with there was a previous earlier study done by University of Pennsylvania that did claim to find some differences in the brain scans. What NIH says is that they were able to do a more comprehensive study, both in terms of the brain scans that they had, but also in terms of the control group, more closely matched the demographic characteristics of the brain scans that they had, but also in terms of the control group more closely matched the demographic characteristics of the people who were the sufferers. So they felt more strongly

about their conclusions. So, you know, the very latest studies from the NIH, for what it's worth, say we don't actually even see signs of injury in these individuals. I don't want to say like that they didn't suffer something real, because even if it is stress-induced psychosomatic, that can still be experienced as a very real and potentially debilitating event. really suffer anything whatsoever, but to put all these instances together and to allege one culprit and to craft this narrative, which really, you know, beggar's belief is just, it's just way too many bridges too far, multiple bridges too far. You are very, you're a lot more charitable than I am. Let's just say that. And yeah, I guess, look, if you, if you have suffered from Havana syndrome and you can prove it, you're welcome on the show anytime. You know, we'll talk to you for sure. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on to the next part. This was brought about by a side at the end of our last show. Yeah, we weren't really planning to cover this. We're not planning to cover it at all. Don't usually.

Richard Dawkins, who some of you may know, probably one of the most famous atheists in the entire world, gave a very interesting interview to the LBC, the London Broadcasting Corporation, which has caused a lot of discussion about atheism, cultural Christianity, Islamophobia, and more. Let's take a listen to what Mr. Dawkins had to say. Church attendance is plummeting, but the building, the erection of mosques across Europe, I think 6,000 are under construction and there are many more, I mean, are being planned. So do you think, do you regard that as a problem? Do you think that matters? Yes, I do, really. I mean, I might choose my words carefully.

I mean, if I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I'd choose Christianity every single time. I mean, it seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not. I think you're going to have to explain why you say that, Professor Dawkins. Why is Islam fundamentally not decent like Christianity? Yes, I mean, the way women are treated, I mean, Christianity is not great about that. It's had its problems with female vicars and female bishops and things. But there's an active hostility to women, which is promoted, I think, by the holy books of Islam.

I'm not talking about individual Muslims who, of course, are quite different. But the doctrines of Islam, the Hadiths and the Quran, is fundamentally hostile to women, hostile to gays. And I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith. Okay, so that last part, that is what set the internet on fire. What was interesting is that because we live in parallel universes, on my timeline, I follow—this is on Twitter, okay, it's just to reveal my own bias. I follow a lot of right-wing Christians in particular, just to keep my tabs on what exactly is going on. And a lot of them were attacking Dawkins.

They're like, oh, he tore down Christianity and he advocated for secularism and now he's coming back and calling himself a cultural Christian. And I'll just say this, I've followed Richard Dawkins for a long time. It was a personal inspiration. I had my cringe atheist phase like anybody else who was a young man on YouTube, had copies of The God Delusion, gave them out to people. I read every book that the man has literally ever written. At least I stopped 10 years ago. I don't know if he's written anything since. His pop science books too before God Delusion. Yeah, they were great. Phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, I think it's controversial. I think he created the word memetic, like the word meme, which eventually became meme online. That's, again, controversial in terms of the attribution of the term.

Let's return to this. The reason I was annoyed by that is because having read and listened to a lot of Dawkins, even attended one of his lectures, we could put this up there here on the screen, which I went back and found, is he's been calling himself a cultural Christian here for quite a long time. And why I was annoyed in terms of the Christian reaction to Dawkins is that Dawkins has always said that he ascribes, as he points out here, a celebration of Judeo-Christian type values, but not in the actual text of the Bible and of the religion of Christianity himself. Egalitarianism, equality, just the general respect of English common law, which of course, even atheists and secular people like me can

acknowledge comes from a Christian tradition. That's what he meant by the term. So anyway, for me, watching a lot of the Christian right attack Dawkins as somehow being hypocritical. I mean, frankly, he's been saying stuff like this for 20 some, probably before I was even born, but at least in my adult lifetime, nothing that he said was new. Anyway, I'm curious for what you think. So the reaction from the left, I mean, there was a little bit of commentary on the cultural Christian thing because it, I mean, I understand why people are like, your whole thing is being an atheist. But now you're like, well, no, actually this is my tribe. There is something about that. They're like, all right, dude, like you're just making a full right turn now. But the

part that I saw more reaction to and which I personally reacted more to were the comments about Islam, which, again, are actually not new. They're not new at all. From Dawkins, who has been smearing Islam and by extension, all followers of that faith for quite a while. And, you know, I personally think it's outrageous. And actually, to me, if you're a serious intellectual and you know that you're you consider yourself a cultural Christian, whatever that actually means, you should interrogate your own potential bias towards this ecosystem that you grew up in and the belief system that has been sort of like humanized and made normal to you because he clearly has a huge blind spot. The problem is not any particular faith. The problem is extremist in any faith. I think we can look throughout history and see that. I mean,

Christianity was used to justify slavery. It was used to justify Jim Crow, right? Do I think those are true and faithful readings of Christianity? No, but I mean, I'm also not a religious believer at all, so I'm not really the person to determine that, right? you know, heightened sensitivity to the smearing of Islam in this context is you have Muslims who committed a terror attack on October 7th, committed atrocities, no doubt about that. You have a response from a Jewish state and a lot of, you know, led by Jewish extremists who claim to be doing this in the name of, you know, basically their religion and who have used and perverted and tortured that religious doctrine to justify a genocide.

And then if you go back one step further, well, why do we have the creation of the Israeli state to start with? It's because of the Holocaust and before that, because of pogroms throughout Europe, which were by and large committed by Christians. So to think that any religious faith has a monopoly on truth and justice, or to think that any religious faith has a monopoly on violence and hatred is just, I think, incredibly ahistorical and inaccurate. So, you know, a lot of what I saw in my timeline, which is, again, you know, I think to give us some

credit, part of what makes this show interesting is, again, you know, I think to give us some credit, part of what makes this show interesting is that we, you know, have to expose each other to these different conversations that are happening in different corners of the world and in the internet was a lot of like, actually, thank you, Richard Dawkins, for confirming what we suspected about your actually ideological worldview based on your previous comments. And by extension, what others who were sort of in this fervent new atheist camp were really about at the time. See, this is where, look, I guess it's time to piss off some of the Palestinian viewers here. I gotta say, what I think Dawkins is trying to talk about

is that if we look at majority Islamic countries, and particularly ones ruled by Islamic theocracy, I mean, look, I've lived under Islamic theocracy in the state of Qatar. I wouldn't recommend it. I don't think it's a good way of living. Some of that is rooted in the faith of Islam. Now, do I think that individual Muslims, as Dawkins was saying, are bad? No, absolutely not. I don't believe that for any individual person. I do believe that the application of said theocratic law on people is very counter to a lot of the things that we value here in the West. So for example, egalitarianism, equality, the treatment of women. I mean, personally, I'm repulsed by it. Like whenever I'm in the Middle East and I see four women

shrouded in a burqa walking 10 paces behind their husband, I think it's disgusting. I know that they have no rights. In India, for example, where my family's from, there's been a huge tension where India has effectively an English common law system, but then you have 200 million or so Muslims who want to, or at least some, want to live with their ability. This was a huge controversy about the ability to divorce their wives by saying that they divorce them as required in Sharia law. And it comes into major tension because then they're saying that it's discrimination if you don't allow that whenever you're trying to have equal application and protection of the law. So I'm not saying individual Muslims are bad. I would never say that about anybody. I think that extreme interpretations, or I would more put it this way.

I would never want to live under Christian theocracy. Got a taste of it growing up in College Station. I definitely wouldn't want to live in Muslim theocracy. Got a taste of that as well. And I, in general, you know, like and respect places, places like Thailand, I think India to some extent, Japan and others, which have non-Western interpretations and or worldviews in their governance that when you combine with English common law and some Judeo-Christian values and influence, you come to more of an equal application and understanding of the law. So that's where I will defend him a little bit. But what you're saying is different than what he said. So secularism, as you're laying out,

the ideal of the American model of, you know, freedom of religion, and we're not going to have a theocracy, that very clearly to me is the way to go. Because yeah, I mean, if we were ruled by the, and we had an actual Christian theocracy with, you know, the minority of real Christian fundamentalists in charge, how do they feel about gay people, right? What would their life look like for them? How do they feel about women and women's rights? What would life look like for women here? We can see with, you know, we had a conversation yesterday about ultra-Orthodox Jews within Israel. And, you know, Israel is moving more and more to being this overt, pretty extreme religious theocratic government. That's a real

divide that is unfolding right now in real time in Israel. I wouldn't want to live under that either. And you're absolutely right. I don't want to live under a Muslim theocracy either. But to, you know, point to this one faith and say, oh, this is the bad one and Christianity is the good one. I just, like I said, I think if you take any, even taking religion out of it, if you take any fervently held ideological belief system, someone is going to pervert it to do horrific things. We've seen this throughout history. But religion is a particularly potent one. And perhaps my view of this is part of why originally I like Dawkins and, you know, I like the way that he laid out these arguments.

Religion is so potent because the minute that you see, okay, number one, these people who share my belief, these are the tribe, these are the people who really count and really matter, and God is on our side. The things that can be used to justify are horrifying. And, you know, I keep bringing up the example of Israel-Gaza because obviously this is, you know, top of mind for me and many people around the world right now. But just think about, you have these settlers in the West Bank who truly believe that the righteous and holy thing to do is to steal the land of Palestinians, potentially by force, and if necessary, murder them. They believe that they are righteously doing God's will when they do. Just listen to that Daniela Weiss, that settler activist.

Sure. She thinks she is righteous and absolutely moral. Again, no one faith has a monopoly on being twisted and perverted to justify things that in any other sort of moral context, you could see clearly that this is wrong, period, end of story. So yeah, that's my problem with Dr. Thomas. The problem is that what he's really referring to, and this is true if we look at the data, is that most Muslims are far more observant, at least, and also in a Western context when we're talking about the mixing, especially in Europe, than they are, let's say, secular Christians in the West. And so when you have fundamentalist Islam brush up against Western democratic values, it leads to a lot of tension. I totally agree in terms of extremist interpretations

of all of that. But it is a legitimate question as to where should this be tolerable and acceptable in a Western-style democracy. Even that I want to dig into a little bit, because why is it that you have such, you know, fervently held beliefs, because part of that story is U.S. meddling in the region that went against any sort of, you know, secular nationalism that had any sort of tie into the Soviet Union or communism or socialism. We crushed. I mean, how many fundamentalist Islamic movements did we back and side with throughout the region? That's not. Of course. Think about how we prop up the Saudi regime. I mean, so much of what is unfolding in the Middle East right now is a result of, you

know, our meddling and our policy over years and years and years. So I think to, you know, remove us from the situation, that's where this gets to me. And I'm not putting this on you, but, you know, I listen to comments from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others. It gets to this place of basically insinuating, if not outright saying, well, these people are just barbarians. They're just uncivilized. That's part of the justification that's being used right now to justify this genocide of Palestinians that's unfolding in Gaza. Netanyahu saying, we are the children of the light and they are the sons, children of the darkness. This is a war for civilization, et cetera. It ends up resulting in this argument that they are just inherently inferior, barbaric

people. And I think that is absolutely repulsive bullshit. I don't support that, but I don't think it's America's fault that Saudi Arabians cut people's head off in the street. I mean, that's their regime. That's not our, I mean, if anything, actually, it's their own people that want something like that. I don't want to live there, and I definitely don't want any of that that's over here.

And look, it's not America's fault that Muslims in India have, for example, have become way more observant, basically, as you've had Hindu nationalism on the rise. These are natural, inherent tensions when they run up against each other for real, frankly, it's just a battle of values. It's like, what do we actually want? What do we, what should we have? Evil application of the law. Should we not like, should we allow people to

marry three people because their religion says so? I think no, but they say yes. I mean, it's one of those where I don't think that's on America. Like, and if you look, why does Saudi have the regime they have? Why does Iran have the regime they have? Okay, but it's not just because of America. Why does Iran have the regime they have? Why does the Taliban have power in Afghanistan? We have nothing to do with any of that. Not nothing, but they also have— We've just allowed free and fair elections and self-determination throughout the region. Come on, Carter.

If they had free and fair elections, I guarantee you Islamists would still win in the entire— And by the way, I don't care. If they want to be Muslim and they want to rule under theocratic rule, be my guest. I'm talking about how we govern ourselves here. I don't give a shit what they do over there at the end of the day. But really what it is, is that what I think Dawkins is talking about and what is a fair conversation is about here, what we tolerate, what we think is acceptable. And I would stand what I think what Dawkins is trying to say for a Judeo-Christian influence, English common law egalitarianism, which is what I believe in. That is absolutely counter to

Christian theocracy. Luckily, that is mostly on the decline here in this country. Luckily, we don't have the same Jewish level, I guess, here in the US in terms of Orthodox Judaism, that's taking over the entire culture. But that is not necessarily the case of majority Muslim countries that are all across the world. Indonesia, for example, Malaysia, any of these places, there's high levels of diversity and others, but there are what I think are troubling ways that they use, right, I mean, which they treat women or in terms of how they have different views of what homosexuality or any of this. I think it's abhorrent, and I think it's bad. So do I.

And I don't think we should have it here. But it doesn't just come from Islam. I mean, again, if you look at what evangelical fundamentalist Christians believe, it would not be good life for gay people to live under that sort of regime, which is why, to me, you're wanting to see, give Dawkins the most charitable interpretation. And that's fair. Yeah, because I like him. That's fine. That's fair, you know, to give him the best faith reading. But you're also reading

into his comments a lot of things that he didn't say, because he didn't talk about, you know, a secularism and a universalism. He didn't talk about common law or any of these things. He's just saying, he said very blatantly that you know New Moss are a problem, but new churches aren't he said that Christianity is a fundamentally decent religion and Islam is not I think that is Total bullshit. I think it's xenophobic. I think it's Islam a phobic. I think that it is, you know completely at odds With the ideas it really that you really, that the best thing is to have actual universal values, not the sort of like moral equivalence, universal values, and secularism, where, yes, people's religions are respected and they have a right and, you know,

freedom to religion, but also within the confines of respecting and acknowledging basic human rights. And, you know, as I said before, any religion taken to an extreme place, yes, ends in ugliness, can end in ugliness, can be easily perverted. And, you know, to give any one of these faiths a pass for that, I think is, I just think it's wrong. What I'm drawing from is just his, look, nobody can express himself properly in a two and a half minute clip from LBC. I'm drawing from his books, what he has put out there in longer interpretations. In general, if you were going to see atheists and others, people who talk and debate some of these subjects, they're going to bring up a lot of what I am.

Now, I mean, a lot of Christians would be very upset. What they would say is that you owe egalitarianism, you know, to Judeo-Christianity. And I would say that's bullshit. You can look at countries like India or Japan or Korea or anywhere else that don't have majority Christian populations. Thailand actually is a country that I truly love. Deeply Buddhist culture, lots of egalitarianism, no Christian influence. So I can give the counter too. I'm only bringing in what I think he is best trying to say, and I'm giving him charity because I also think that he's done a lot of good in this world. It opened up a lot of people's eyes.

I will steal from Mehdi Hassan's commentary on this where he said, you know, if you just swap in Judaism for Islam in these comments, imagine their reaction if he said that Judaism is not a fundamentally decent religion. There would be a massive and correct reaction against those comments because they would correctly be seen, I think, as anti-Semitic. But Islamophobia is much more accepted, frankly, and is much more commonplace worldview in the West, which, again, is part of how this genocide in Gaza has been justified. And you see it very nakedly, that case made very nakedly in certain instances, certainly from the Netanyahu government, but also from many Americans who see things through that lens. I think it may be true, certainly, that 9-11 and the lasting impacts have colored and have changed.

I guess I just don't want to get away from legitimate conversations about, you know, about rubbing up against Western democratic values and what we think is acceptable or not in our own cultures, because ultimately that's what I care about. I don't really care what these people do in their own time and in their own lands. But I do really care whenever it brushes up here.

And I do see often a very permissive nature, unfortunately, but I think by elements of the American left, when they don't really grapple with some of the actual tenets of, let's say, of widespread, deeply fundamentalist Islamic values, especially when we're talking about immigration, which is why I guess I'm standing for Dawkins in this entire purpose, is I believe very much in being able to scrutinize and to debate what is acceptable in U.S., specifically in the U.S. and also in the West, what we want and what we don't want to encourage and what we think should be acceptable or not, as opposed to, let's say, trying to litigate how people should be treated in Afghanistan. That's Afghanistan's problem. Does that make sense in

terms of what I'm saying? It would be Afghanistan's problem if we hadn't. Okay, well, we're not there now. Now they can do whatever they want. And apparently- Yeah, but to pretend like, okay, no harm, no foul, you're good to go, and we had no impact there is, you know, that's preposterous. Taliban rose to power in the 90s too. They were a popular government, let's be honest. And nobody wants to admit this. It's not just America's fault. They liked it. In many cases, the Taliban was enforcing their own beliefs, at least in some of these regions. I mean, at a certain point, what are we supposed to do about that? Listen, I don't want to relitigate the entire history of

U.S. involvement in the Middle East, but I think suffice it to say that, you know, we certainly played a significant role in creating some of the backlash and in actively supporting some of these extremist movements that have come to power in various parts of the region. So in any case- True, but they elect their own, Pete Kristoff. I remember Muslim Brotherhood getting elected there in Egypt. Let's acknowledge that the ideal situation that I think we, and I wish Professor Dawkins there was speaking to, was secularism, universal human rights, and values of the type that we see being trampled

right now, certainly, with Muslims in the Middle East. You know, I'm gonna reach out to him. I wanna talk to him. We should get him here. Okay, all right. Good luck with that. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist

and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still

somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Journalists have now been able to access al-Shifa Hospital following Israel's latest assault on that complex, and the scenes of devastation and carnage are gut-wrenching. This was Israel's second major raid on Shifa. This time they claimed it was necessary because Hamas was reconstituting itself in the north and hiding in the already damaged hospital complex. This is frankly embarrassing for Israel if it was true and speaks to the failure of their alleged war goals. They destroyed Gaza and massacred tens of thousands of civilians, but Hamas

is still able to regroup in northern Gaza. But is anything the Israeli government is claiming about Shifa even true, given their history of brazen lies in general and specifically a history of lying about this particular hospital? I'm going to break down for you everything we know about what appears to have been a massacre on a historic scale and one of the most sensitive places you can possibly imagine. A hospital meant to care for the sick has instead been transformed into a slaughterhouse. So first, a little bit of background. One of the fiercest early propaganda wars in Israel's war on Gaza came in the early weeks when they launched an all-out PR blitz to justify the storming of al-Shifa hospital complex. Netanyahu led a

multimedia presentation asserting that Hamas had built a Dr. Evil-style lair underneath of this hospital, a command and control node, where even now he claimed they were operating and where they expected to be able to locate hostages once they went in. The U.S. government provided a major propaganda assist in this operation. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, quote, I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages. Hamas and the Palestinian Palestinian Islamic Jihad,

PIG members, operate a command and control node from al-Shifa in Gaza City. They have stored weapons there, and they're prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility. Kirby went on to clarify, "'This was not just based,' according to him, "'on Israeli intelligence, "'but was also based, according to him, on Israeli intelligence,

but was also based on our own U.S. intelligence. Within hours of this green light from their American benefactors, the IDF stormed the complex. When they did, there was no firefight with embedded Hamas fighters, as we were led to believe. There were no hostages held under the complex, as was also claimed. And the Israelis never came close to proving their wild claims about a Hamas command and control node, as illustrated by their fanciful computer animations. What's more, we've now learned from Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen that Kirby and Biden, they were lying about what our own intel actually showed. In recent comments, the Washington Post, the senator, who is a key Biden ally, by the way, delicately said there was a, quote,

disconnect between the administration's public statements and the classified findings, noting important and subtle differences. Oh, you don't say. At least 40 patients died in that raid, including the most helpless and innocent people imaginable, four premature babies died in that raid. It was no accident that Shifa was chosen for this propaganda blitz and raid as it was vital to Israel for a number of reasons. First, because it's the largest hospital in the entire Gaza Strip, if Shifa could be violated, then any other medical complex would be fair game. And second, because Shifa was a center of civilian life in Gaza City, a city that was being systematically sacked by the IDF, attack Shifa and no part of civilian life is untouchable. Attack Shifa and there will be nothing left for

Palestinians to return to in northern Gaza. Sure enough, after Shifa, other hospital raids, attacks on ambulances, medical clinics, and the like, they were barely remarked upon in the media. Once Israel got away with this raid on the most important medical complex in all of Gaza, they then operated with impunity with regards to the rest. According to Euromed Monitor, Israel has now attacked 256 healthcare facilities, including 28 hospitals. They've killed hundreds of doctors, injured hundreds more. I'll remind you that hospitals are supposed to be completely off limits in war, except in very rare circumstances. That, of course, has served as no barrier for Israel or for the Biden administration, for that matter. So that's the background here.

Let's turn now to what we know about this latest two-week raid on Shifa Complex. Reports that trickled out during the onslaught were harrowing. Journalists who were seeking to cover the operation, they were arrested, they were stripped naked, they were blindfolded, interrogated, and assaulted. I'll leave it up to you to define the reason why journalists seeking to cover IDF actions at Shifa were targeted in particular. Doctors and other medical professionals received very similar treatment. In fact, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that five doctors were ultimately killed by Israel over the course of this raid. Journalists were able to confirm multiple instances of Palestinians attempting to flee the area, waving white flags and still fired

on by Israeli tanks and Israeli guns. But during the raid, as we all feared the worst, we had a little insight into what was actually unfolding on the hospital grounds. Once Israeli forces withdrew, the government issued celebratory declarations claiming that Israel had killed the bad guys and saved the innocents. Here's how former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described the operation, quote, Amazing battlefield achievement! The IDF has just completed a two-week operation on a Hamas command center that Hamas embedded within the Shifa Medical Center. Hamas used staff and patients as human shields in order to cause maximum civilian casualties

as to create more criticism and pressure on Israel. The results are remarkable. 6,000 civilians were evacuated by the IDF to keep them safe. 200 Hamas terrorists were killed. 500 Hamas terrorists have been captured. No civilian was killed. Not one, he says. He goes on to finish,

I'm proud to be Israeli and proud of the IDF, a beacon of light. An amazing battlefield achievement. No civilians killed. Beacon of light. Oh, really? Let's see the results of these IDF beacons of light, shall we? Here is what Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in all of Gaza, looks like now. As you can see, it is utterly destroyed. It no longer exists as a medical facility. Now, I know Gaza can feel foreign. It can feel far away.

Imagine this was the hospital in your town, maybe where you were born or maybe where your children were born. Imagine it was the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins. It's actually so much more central than those famous hospitals because it comprised a full 30% of all of the healthcare delivery in Gaza. Now it is burned out, gutted,

reduced to rubble. Before and after satellite images show you the absolute scale and totality of the destruction both of al-Shifa and of everything around it. On the left, you can see al-Shifa from two years ago. Looks like the overhead in American City. Streets with bustling traffic, large medical complex, surrounded by smaller, likely residential apartment-looking buildings. On the right, you see Shifa now. Gone are the highways, courtyards, parking lots, and sidewalks replaced with dirt that was churned up everywhere after armored bulldozers plowed up the ground. What few trees remain appear charred or dead. Many of the surrounding buildings are just gone.

They're flattened. Reportedly, more than 1,000 houses in the area were demolished. And Shifa itself is damaged, unrecognizable, not salvageable. Al Jazeera's Ismail Al Ghul attempted to capture the feeling on the ground. He said, quote, there is no life here. The complex is in ruins and cannot be revived. That alone should shock us. But the destruction of this physical place, formerly a place of healing and center of life, is nothing

compared to what we're learning now about the human carnage. According to human rights organization Euromed Monitor, the Israeli army carried out a massive, shockingly horrific military operation in al-Shifa medical complex in Gaza City over the course of the past two weeks. According to them, indiscriminately targeting and attacking Palestinians regardless of their civilian status, professional standing, gender, age, or health condition. They continue, quote, though the exact number of casualties from the atrocity is still unknown, preliminary reports suggest that over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, injured, or are reported missing as a result of the massacre at al-Shifa with women and children making up half of the casualties. They go on to say Euromed

Monitor is able to confirm from its initial investigation and testimonies that hundreds of dead bodies, including some burned and others with their heads and limbs severed, have been discovered both inside al-Shifa medical complex and in the hospital's surrounding area, end quote. This is an almost unimaginable toll. Additionally, according to the World Health Organization, 21 patients died during this latest siege of al-Shifa. Gruesome videos from the scene, which I have chosen not to show you, are consistent with this horrific assessment.

The videos show burned, zip-tied, decomposing, crushed bodies strewn about the hospital courtyard. Some of the bodies are clearly those of children, though they are destroyed beyond any recognition. Journalists on the ground report stray dogs chewing on the remains and an overpowering scent of death. Some eyewitnesses and journalists have suggested that some of the visible human remains may also be from previous temporary graves that were dug up and desecrated as part of this operation. A CNN journalist on the ground described the scene as a, quote, horror movie. Bulldozers, they say, crushed bodies and people everywhere around and in the yard of the hospital. The surrounding area was not spared either, according to this journalist. Quote, we found entire families dead and their bodies are decomposed in houses around the hospital. Entire families killed by Israel,

according to CNN. A doctor affiliated with Doctors Without Borders who had previously volunteered in Gaza had this to say of the toll on civilians and on medical personnel in particular. Doctor, look, the picture you paint is one of devastation. You'll know that the Israeli military say that they have killed and detained hundreds of Hamas militants within the al-Shifa complex. Do you know if Hamas were there and were fighting with the Israelis? They executed tens of people, point blank, including one of our colleagues, Dr. Ahmed Khalilati, who's a very experienced plastic surgeon, him and his mother, who's also a physician. They executed people point blank. And including many of our colleagues who've been detained now, we haven't heard back from them. Previous students of mine detained, young doctors detained. We don't know if they're dead or alive. They have been gone for over 100 days. So to say that this is a strategic targeting of Hamas is an insult to our intellect and our humanity. This is a destruction of people who

heal. This is a direct targeting of healthcare workers. I just want to paint a very brief picture of what healthcare workers are telling me there. They're saying that when they leave the hospital, civilians give them civilian clothing because wearing scrubs is sticking a target sticker on their back. That is how systematically healthcare has been targeted. And frankly, you know, in the last 24 hours, what we've seen from Al-Shifa Hospital, what we've seen from Al-Aqsa Hospital, and what I worry is coming to the remaining hospitals of the Gaza Strip, because it has been the pattern and we will not ignore it, is a direct and systematic targeting of health care that is unjustifiable.

So Shifa is destroyed. Hundreds are reportedly dead. What few patients remain at the destroyed complex are in desperate circumstances, suffering malnutrition and dehydration, with some reports indicating that six people are sharing a single bottle of water per day. It will take weeks to know the scale and specifics of the slaughter, if we ever do. We already know more than enough to say that this intentional destruction of the slaughter, if we ever do. We already know more than enough to say that this intentional destruction of the Gaza health system is a war crime, that if American politicians saw Russia conducting themselves

in the exact same manner they would say it was a war crime, that the destruction of the health system is consistent with the commission of a genocide, that innocents, including doctors, women, and children were slaughtered. And we know that the Biden administration's decision to back the initial propaganda campaign and to lie about our own intelligence

in order to support the raid itself has paved the way to this fresh horror. For Joe Biden, for Arts Israel, there are no red lines, only green lights. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. So if you've been following Israel's assault on Gaza, you may have seen some viral clips of some activists on Capitol Hill demanding answers from members of Congress. Let's take

a look at what I'm talking about. Support Israel forever. Israel will stay your ally, even though they commit Israel will be my ally. Even though commit genocide. That's your term. Can you explain? Even when they kill 30,000 kids. That is a statistic. That's a statistic. Let me tell you a statistic. Israel will exist.

The Jewish state will exist. That's not a statistic. And that is for God to do and decide. And I will always support Israel. I will always support Israel. I will always support Israel. And you can tell the Palestinians. I will never support them. I am a Palestinian myself.

And I will tell you, I will never support you. I will sell you to your face. And you want my cousins to die. Goodbye to Palestine. Goodbye to Palestine. We will support Israel forever. So you are comfortable with. Just FYI, this guy just said goodbye to Palestine. Always support Israel forever. So you are comfortable with- Just FYI, this guy just said goodbye to Palestine.

Always support Israel. Congressman Sherman, what are your thoughts on the- Would you please get out of my way? I ain't running. Are you afraid of your- Why are you running? Run on your head. You are trying to kill every Jew.

You're trying to kill every Jew. You're trying to kill every Palestinian, sir. No, no. You're funding the death of Palestinians, my whole family. So the gentleman that you saw there in those clips demanding some answers, having some fierce interactions there, is Motaz Salim. He is a Palestinian-American activist, and he is our guest today. Great to have you, Motaz. Welcome.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Talk to us about just what have you been up to? What has led you to, you know, sort of hang out in the halls of Capitol Hill and confront whoever comes across your radar? Yeah. So I'm Palestinian American myself. I'm from Gaza. I have a lot of family in Gaza. And so since October 7th, you know, I on on the show you cover a lot how Israel's response has been.

It's been unconscionable, unprecedented, and there's genocide, weaponized starvation, and I personally have lost over 100 family members in my extended family. Some of my favorite cousins in the world, such as Iman, for example. She's my cousin who her husband and her four kids in one airstrike, they were martyred. And so that's just one example of it. And I think just dealing with all of that while also being in DC and

being like in grad school or just in the spaces here and seeing just. I felt at first powerless. Yeah. But then after seeing Code Pink and seeing Medea Benjamin as well, going every day to confront these people head on. I was really interested in doing it. And so I joined them one day, and it's literally like, you can join us 10 a.m. every day at Rayburn Cafeteria. And I, at first, was very shocked that that's a possibility even. I remember going the first day.

We met actually in the Russell building. And I'm Arab, so going into any government building with, like, security and stuff is super nerve-wracking. It's not a comfortable experience for you. No, no, it's not where I'd like to be. But you just walk in, which was very shocking to me, that you literally just, like, walk in, which was very shocking to me, that you literally just like walk in and you're just there. And we, from that day, like we visited a whole bunch of offices.

And yeah, I just, I wanted to do something about it. I have the privilege of being in DC here, you know, just 15, 20 minutes away from Congress at all times. And so I said, you know, enough, just like looking at the screen, listening to podcasts and just being so upset about it. Like, let's actually try to do something with what we have. Motaz, I'm profoundly sorry for your loss, which is incalculable. Do you find that, I know you know a lot of other Palestinian Americans here in DC and probably around the country is Your loss commensurate are they suffering similar losses of family members who have been killed by the IDF in Gaza? Yeah, I would say my story is very very

Common actually because most people you talk to will tell you that they've lost numerous numerous family members. And the way that Israel has conducted this genocide, like anyone you ask in Palestine, even if they're from the West Bank, they'll know someone who's from Gaza who has lost someone. Everyone's lost someone in Gaza. Everyone. Who has lost someone everyone's lost someone in Gaza? everyone I mean if if for me personally like when I first got a list of like my dad literally sent me a list of every name of my cousins who died or aunts uncles and

It's you know You you don't even know how to process it because it's just like names on a page. And there's so many of them. And, you know, some of them I was close to. Some of them I didn't really know that well. But I would say it's very common. Actually, this has pretty much been a universal experience, especially if you're from Gaza. Have you been able to track all of the loved ones that you have lost?

Or are there some family members that you aren't sure of their status at this point? For, I mean, whenever I tell people that I always say so far, like I've lost over a hundred so far because there's still people under the rubble that we don't know. We don't necessarily have a record of their death. And I actually found out last week about 40 more members that had been murdered by the Israeli state

because we at first were not able to track down the names and the documents. And it's actually like a very rigorous process that the health ministry in Gaza goes through in order to sort of verify the individual, verify their files. But a lot of the files are missing too, because they've targeted all these sort of government institutions, entire families wiped off the registry, like their legal documentation of their existence. So this is what I know so far, but it's very difficult to track the deaths. Over the course of the time period when you've been going to Capitol Hill office buildings and trying to get answers from members of Congress, have you noticed any sort of tone shift? Because you have seen, especially among the Democratic Party, you've seen this rhetorical shift that seems to have been the direct result of activist pressure from people such as yourself.

So have you noticed any of that in your interactions? Yeah, I would definitely say so. I mean, one example I can point to would be Senator Van Hollen. I remember, I mean, his rhetoric has always, like, it's sort of shifted very significantly. And I think he's one of the senators at the forefront of, I wouldn't say he's like staunchly pro-Palestine, but he, you know, recognizes just how devastating this genocide has been. And we met with his staffers and I've gotten really good at sort of gauging people's reactions and like, because I look them straight in the eye and I

tell them my story and about my family. And we do get some very robotic answers, which- Sort of canned. Yeah. Here's my talking point. That's what I'm sticking to. Exactly. We'll relay it to the congressman or the senator. Here's my email, get in touch with us and we can have a longer conversation. Which never happens. Then we email them and we never get a response, obviously. But there have been, like with Van Hollens, I think it was his chief of staff and maybe legislative director. They, I could tell after the meeting they were shaken up because, you know, there was the whole group of us. And we really like, we sort of just stopped any sort of like political talk. And we're just like, you guys need to understand like this is what's happening.

This is like a human issue more than just a policy issue. And I think they actually heard us. And since then, and so part of what we, in that meeting was we were disappointed because he gave that whole speech before voting to send the bill to the House from the Senate. So he like gave this whole big speech, which went viral. And it was like, oh, great. We have a senator actually speaking up for us. Then he still voted for it. And so we went and we told him like, we love this speech. He actually went viral for this speech. And like, he has this opportunity to sort of be this almost hero in terms of his context for the Palestinian cause. But then he goes and votes and it's like, why doesn't the policy sort of match the rhetoric? And we really pressured them

on that. And I think that's caused him to go even more in that direction towards speaking up for Palestinians. I know there are a lot of people out there who feel, you know, they feel disgusted, they feel heartbroken, and they feel that sense of impotence and powerlessness because even as, you know, we had this large uncommitted vote and protests every day and Karine Jean-Pierre and Joe Biden, they can't go anywhere without having to face protests in the eye. What would your message be to those people who are feeling disheartened about the possibility of having any sort of voice in our quote-unquote democracy? I would tell them that I was there where they are right now. I thought I couldn't do anything

about it. I felt very hopeless, especially hearing about my own family as well as others' families. And I will say, if you have the chance to go to an action, whether it's to join us, whether it's somewhere, something local to you where, you know, there's some pro-Israel congressman. I don't know why I'm thinking Richie Torres right now. That's who popped to mind. Quite. I'm not going to get into that. We could do a whole other segment on that one. But I would say go and just, it's very uncomfortable. It is very uncomfortable.

And you do need to sort of like let go of that discomfort and just go for it. And I would say don't underestimate the effect of that because we've heard from staffers as well in the offices. Like sometimes they'll like chase after us after we've left and say like, thank you so much for doing that. Please keep doing it. Like they get so embarrassed, especially when we bird dog them, they get so embarrassed. Like, I think like Brad Sherman was really pissed off about like, you know, that whole thing and it went pretty viral too. And so I think don't underestimate the effect that it has.

It's not, you know, immediate. Of course. You do it and then, oh, they vote first, he's fired the next day. It's a lot of pressure, a lot of like not letting them go about their normal life and holding them accountable. We were both at an event the other night at Busboys and Poets where we reconnected and Professor Finkelstein was there. And I thought he had a good answer to this question as well, which is, listen, if we all do nothing, we know 100% nothing changes. Yes, exactly.

At least with this, we have a chance. So, Motaz, thank you so much for joining us today. More importantly, for the work that you're doing. Is there somewhere where you would want people to follow you online, follow what you're up to? Sure, yeah. Mainly my Instagram. It's at TazSDC, T-A-Z-S-D-C. I do a lot of work with Code Pink. We do a lot of like bird dogging and visiting offices. We just did a die-in yesterday at Debbie Wasserman Schultz's office. Also not going to get into that, but I also like, I give a lot of speeches and try to like just share content to really humanize

The people on the ground in Palestine because I feel like that's something that's really missing people see a lot of numbers and like stats and like data about just how awful it is and Unprecedented but even in looking at all of, it numbs you out a little bit. And so I'm trying to give sort of, use my platform to give a voice of like, these were real people, real human beings with real lives. This was a mundane day-to-day lives. Father, this was their little girl. Exactly. These were the dreams that they had for the future. Yeah. Like my cousin Iman graduated somewhat recently with an MBA. And she had these lovely kids. And it's all gone.

They took it all away. They took it all away. And it's unconscionable. Motaz, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Crystal, for having me. Very grateful. Thank you guys for watching. And we will see you on Thursday.