Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/24/24: McConnell Blames Tucker For Ukraine Skepticism, Jon Stewart Unloads On Media's Trump Trial Coverage, Hezbollah Massive Israel Strikes, UN Horrified By Gaza Mass Graves, FTC Bans Non-Competes, Columbia Student Joins Live From Encampment

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss McConnell attacking Tucker Carlson for causing Ukraine skepticism, Jon Stewart unloads on media for Trump trial coverage, Hezbollah deepest strike in Israel yet, UN chief horrified by Gaza mass graves, FTC bans non-competes, Dem Senator calls out Biden over corporate courts, and a Columbia student joins live from the Gaza solidarity encampment.   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. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning

that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to CounterPoints. All right. So today we are excited to announce the Friday edition of our show. Thanks to the support of Breaking Points viewers, listeners, and premium subscribers. Every Friday, you can expect to see us actually right here, but with a slightly different format. We're excited to be hosting long-form debates, interviews, and all that good stuff starting this Friday, actually. And it's not going to be like Crossfire. It's not going to be a point scoring thing. We're

not going to be trying to make people look stupid. Although if somebody is stupid, we're going to- They're welcome to look stupid. They're welcome to look stupid. We're not going to prevent people from looking stupid. Right. But we're not going to try to do it on purpose. It's not going to be a kind of partisan back and forth. It's going to be more of an effort to kind of shed light rather than heat, maybe. We'll see. Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it and like find the contrast, figure out where it actually is,

get rid of those traps that keep us outraged but poorly informed. Yes. Well, like many of you, Ryan and I want to see people that we agree with and people that we disagree with actually just kind of talk it out. Sometimes we'll grill those people ourselves. Other times we'll facilitate debates between different, different maybe elected officials other journalists and thought leaders So that's the plan and we're grateful to crystal and saga for continuing to build this network grateful to all of you for continuing to Make it a profitable enterprise or maybe a profitable enterprise eventually Ryan ever the capitalist. That's right

And that's it's what enables us to do this show What premium subscribers will get every edition of the Friday show straight to their inbox early. So you can head on over to BreakingPoints.com if you'd like to join us for that. We appreciate almost two years now of support from the Breaking Points community, feedback, friendship from everyone. It's been awesome. And with that, we'll leave you with a tease. We've got a big guest for Friday. I don't want to play him up too much. I think you're going to kind of laugh when you see it. But also, I think you with a tease. We've got a big guest for Friday. I don't want to play him up too much. I think you're going to kind of laugh when you see it.

But also, I think you'll enjoy it. I think it'll be a really good conversation. I'm actually very excited about it. It might be a little bit of a spit take. Like, really? This is what you got? It'll be kind of funny. It'll be a good conversation.

Now, last night. Yes. Huge, huge deal passed the Senate. We're going to break down all of that. We're going to talk about some updates out of the Middle East. We're going to talk about Lena Kahn and the FTC voting to ban non-compete clauses. Ryan, you've got an interesting story for us. And we have a great guest from Columbia. Before we get to that, you have some news out of Pennsylvania. There were elections last night. It was a Tuesday. Yeah. So last night, Summer Lee was up for reelection. She had a significant contest. She had, I should say, a significant challenger from her right. Summer Lee was one of the first

members of Congress to come out for a ceasefire in Gaza. AIPAC spent millions of dollars against her in 2022, was aiming for her in 2024. But they saw kind of how strong she was looking going into her primary, decided not to spend money. Now, Jeff Yass, who is a Republican billionaire in Pennsylvania, a close ally of Netanyahu, he actually- Big TikTok investor. Big TikTok investor. He financed Netanyahu's attempt to take over the courts to dodge his little corruption scandal that he's got over there. He put at least $800,000 into the race. We don't know exactly how much because the final FEC reports aren't out. But the election last night was a decisive victory for Summer Lee, winning by at least 20 points as they continue to count the votes.

As Summer Lee put it, opposing genocide is not just good policy, it's also good politics. Here she is last night in Pittsburgh. But you know what? We sent a message and we knew when we set out in the very beginning that this was the message that we were sending, that this movement is stronger than whatever else is. Our movement is stronger than every GOP

billionaire that exists. Our movement is stronger than any wedge issue. It's stronger than any opportunist. It's stronger than everybody who wants to say that the power of the people is not stronger than the people in power. But we know how to do this and worship him for me. And Emily, last night in the Senate, billions of dollars more for three war theaters, Ukraine, Israel, and also China. China just keeps

getting kind of smuggled into this conversation. Like, oh yeah, if we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on war, let's make sure we're beefing up for World War III in that region as well. So what did you make of Congress finally, after months of hemming and hawing, doing what kind of everybody expected that they would do and fund more war. Yeah, no, I would say, so let's, we can put this next element up on the screen. There was overwhelming support for this bill. It's like, how did this take a year? Right. No, it's amazing, actually. Maybe that's the real accomplishment of the Freedom Caucus, is that they delayed this

for a year. Now, there is a pretty impressive list, I would say, of Republicans who voted against this bill, even including people who have traditionally been kind of hawkish, like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz. When you lose Ted Cruz on an Israel bill, that's quite incredible. And actually, on that note, we can put the next element up on the screen. This is what's in the bill, the final bill that was passed. So it's $60 billion for Ukraine. $15 billion of that will include facilitating weapons sales. $15 billion of that is for training and intelligence, military training and intelligence. $8 billion is going to go to the Ukrainian government, government operations, $1.6 billion allocated to the private sector, $14 billion for Israel, $8 billion for roughly the China

theater. So that's kind of how the numbers break down and what was actually passed last night. And no money in there for defense attorneys at The Hague, but maybe there'll be some pro bono help from the U.S. there. I'm pretty sure they always have money for that Yeah, there's always money in the banana stand. Yes so take them one by one Ted Cruz is a Politicians politician. They're all politicians

But Ted Cruz is the one that I like to watch in the Senate to get a sense of you know how Which way the winds are blowing in the political movement, because he really has his kind of finger on the pulse of the grassroots. And so to see Ted Cruz come out and vote no on a war spending package that includes billions of dollars for Israel just, you know, days after the Iran attack, which Israel believed was going to really help Greece this package through, and it did actually help Greece this package through, suggests that there's something bubbling within the kind of Republican caucus that has gotten to the surface if Ted

Cruz is feeling the heat of it. Is that an accurate read? I trust your judgment on the internal Republican politics more than my own. Yeah, I think it's absolutely an accurate read. And what is it? It's Ukraine? Ukraine overriding and isolationism overriding? It's the border. The border. It's the border. It's because this didn't include a dime for the border.

And people will say... Wouldn't have guessed that. People will say, well, people will say, well, you know, what do you, what do you mean? There was that deal that bipartisan compromise deal that was brokered. My opinion on that bill is that it was intentionally designed to, and there are a lot of exemptions in it. We could debate it. We debated it at the time. And I think Crystal and Sagar debated it at the time too. There were a lot of exemptions written into the bill that would have basically maintained presidential power, that you could sort of carve out some of the small concessions Democrats made

on asylum and all of that. But the point is, Republicans were furious with McConnell. So they wanted the border money in there. And if they didn't get the border money in there, Israel doesn't get any money. And so the media is looking at this and saying, Mitch McConnell brokered a deal with Chuck Schumer and James Lankford. And Republicans are like, well, we never supported that deal. We never would have supported that deal. And so because they got so screwed by leadership on the House side,

Mike Johnson said that over and over and over again, that you can't have a dime more for Ukraine until you do something serious about the border. And he basically flip-flopped on it. And again, like what was going to happen? Probably this was always the inevitable result. But Republicans felt like they didn't even fight. And then on top of that, it is the kind of Ukraine. I don't want to call it isolationism because now we're how many years into the war and

people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, like they've, and most Republicans actually were initially pretty supportive of the war effort. It's just the, the Biden administration prosecution of the policy coupled with no border support, basically. And this is what they call in Congress, a free vote, because whenever it's this overwhelming, like the, the outcome is already determined. Like, you know, no matter how Ted Cruz votes, the bill is going to pass. So that means it is a pure political calculation. Like where does he want his name to appear on the yay or the nay column? And so that goes to how is this going to look at back home now?

How is this going to look in presidential primaries in the future? And clearly, he made the calculation A no vote is the winner here. Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, kind of doing a victory lap or a dance on Tucker Carlson's head here. So really kind of interesting comments from Mitch McConnell afterwards. Let's roll him on Tucker Carlson. The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which was interviewing Vladimir Putin. And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake. How dare you interview foreign leaders? Yeah, I mean, set aside whatever you think of Tucker

Carlson, the idea that you can't interview a foreign leader, even a dictator, is utterly absurd. But what's interesting about that clip is that's what passes for a motion from Mitch McConnell. There may be no stronger supporter of the war in supporting the war in Ukraine than Mitch McConnell. His ability to move money to Ukraine through the lame duck was one of the biggest gifts to the Ukrainian war effort. And, you know, he put all of the capital that he had remaining, you know, into it. And people have talked about it as really one of the only things he has really ever believed in other than opening up campaign finance laws. Like it's that plus the Ukraine war. And we don't need to get into the psychology of why that is or what happened It's it just is and and he played he and Kevin McCarthy

Come teaming up with Democrats who were almost unanimously supportive of it, you know have been able to muscle through all of this support but I found it really interesting that he pinpoints Tucker Carlson as You know kind of the problem, the problem with inside the Republican coalition that produced this opposition internally. And the implication of that, by the way, is that his own voters who disagree with him on this are so stupid, they just mindlessly follow Tucker Carlson. They're boozled by this bow tie guy. Exactly. Not that they found—

They don't wear bow ties anymore. They're intelligent. No, he doesn't. They're intelligent people who maybe found an alternative argument compelling. And it's hardly just Tucker Carlson. It's never just been Tucker Carlson. There have been plenty and plenty of other people Mitch McConnell would complain about. It's not as though Tucker Carlson is like the origin of what McConnell sees as this cancer spreading throughout the country. Because to your point, even Ted Cruz, this is Cruz on Fox. I pulled this up after you mentioned it, Ryan. He said, I'm going to vote no on Fox, but I will tell you this is a very close call.

And I struggled for a long time without a vote because there are elements of this bill I really, really strongly support. This has military aid for Israel. Israel is in the middle of a war. We should have provided this emergency military aid, but I can't support this bill ultimately because it gives money to Gaza, gives money for the NGOs that are trafficking illegal immigrants, and it does nothing, zero, to stop the invasion at our southern border. That's got to be the priority. If you're listening to this, Ryan just put his head in his hands and just seemed to sigh in exasperation. So Ted Cruz, with more than 2 million people facing starvation,

voted against the bill, not because it was sending weapons to the people who are organizing that starvation, but because it also sent food and water and humanitarian relief supplies to the people in Gaza, which he claims is somehow connected to a Train of trafficking to the border well and notice he he mentioned yet

So the NGOs it's it's a lot of things throughout Central America like those guys saying this issue is and right he's saying that like Hamas is like trafficking people to the border and they're going to use this money. Oh, no, I think he's talking about the various aid groups, whether it's things that are being funded by USAID. He thinks UNRWA is a Hamas front, for instance. the stuff in, you know, like the Darien Gap, some of those groups, not so much that they're facilitating, although he objects to this too, I'm sure, facilitating terrorists coming up or using the border. How he connects that to Gaza is... But I think he's talking about like the Catholic charities or whatever that incentivize, and they are funded by the UN. They are, I don't know exactly about this bill, but I think that's what he's objecting to, just the broader question

of those NGOs facilitating people coming in. And actually, we've written at The Federalist about some of those groups that are explicitly evangelical and Catholic, and they basically help people get through the Darien Gap. Like, here, you might die, but clearly you're going to do it anyway, so we'll be here to help out. You and I probably disagree on that. I think that's what he's talking's what we may or may not, but like to connect that to humanitarian relief organizations in Gaza, uh, to me is it, it makes it almost impossible to even like have any kind of non-psychedelic conversation about the situation. It's like, like there is a genocide going on. Hundreds of thousands of people are

at immediate risk of famine, millions at risk of starvation. Israel's blockading relief efforts from getting in. And this has some peanuts for the people who are suffering through that. And Cruz connects it to the aid organizations that he objects to the activities in the Darien Gap and the way that they're incentivizing migrants, which like to me- I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Tom Cotton did not. He supported the bill. Katie Britt supported the bill. $95 billion in total, by the way. We haven't even mentioned that it includes the TikTok divestment or the package. That's right.

TikTok divestment. So Peter Welch- right. It includes the TikTok divestment. So Peter Welch. Extended it to a year. So your TikTok's okay for at least a year. I mean, it will likely always be okay. It'll just come under different owners because they know they can make a ton of money off of this. And that's how it'll go. They might screw it up.

Like Chairman Xi's doing a good job with it so far, right? Even better. I mean, it's too addictive. China China where the kids are eating their vegetables on Douyin. I think the compromise should be that the Chinese regulate social media for our children. We have a collective action problem here as a parent of kids. When everybody else's kids is able to see YouTube and is able to be on like this or that, like it's asking too much to say that each individual parent needs to solve that. You need a collective solution. What's Chairman Xi's rule over there? You get like one hour on

Friday of video games, one hour on Saturday of video games, and then that's for everybody. It's blocked out for kids. Right. And so the kids then are not like complaining and throwing a temper tantrum and the parents being like, all right, fine, just leave me alone. So that should be the compromise. Let she manage our kids' access to social media. And then maybe that's the political speech. But then they can also apparently they can also do the social media apps like TikTok, because apparently they're better at it than our people are.

Like, we can't win without just passing a law banning their stuff. The list of people who voted, no, I mean, I'm looking at it right now. At one point in the list on the Washington Post website, it goes Jeff Merkley, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, Eric Schmidt. I mean, it's just a really interesting coalition of people. And again, they're finding different reasons to disagree with the bill. So, for example, Ted Cruz cited first. The first thing he cited was the Israel problems that he had with the bill that we just talked about, but then went into the border.

I think for a lot of these guys, they would first and foremost say it was the lack of border funding. Some of them might have objected to, in fact, the TikTok divestment. But overall, when you find Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio together against, you know, this huge, what was the final vote was 79. 79 in support, 18 against. And so three didn't vote. Two of them came out against the bill. One of them came out for the bill. That's Tim Scott.

Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville were against the package. They didn't vote because it was, like you said, a free vote. So if you're fundraising or whatever, I don't agree with it, but that's what they do. Well, and it's easier then to tell groups, like, oh, I would have voted your way. I would have scored you. Yeah. And to say, like, I would have, you know, if he's meeting with a pro-Israel group, you can say, yeah, I would have voted for that money. If he's meeting with a border group, you can say, yeah, I was going to vote against that. Members of Congress are known to do that. But sometimes they score you and it goes into your score. So you're like, yeah. So then, but putting all of these things together in one bill is just one more way of kind of abstracting politics away from people.

If everybody is forced to vote yes or no on TikTok, yes or no on Ukraine, yes or no on money for a war with China, yes or no on money for the war, for Israel's war. Then when they run for reelection, people will know, oh, they voted yes on this, they voted no on that. Here's who I support. So it's a little bit more representative democracy When you put everything in there together and just ask people to do one giant yes or no it's it's just a one more effort to confuse people and and

To kind of separate the idea of accountability and representation. That is such a good point and it was one of the conditions actually The Freedom Caucus wanted like single issue votes. Single issue votes. And that was part of their deal in the rules package with Kevin McCarthy. And it has not turned out that way at all. And Mike Johnson, of course, is somebody who's always been, you know, in just, he said many times, we shouldn't govern by omnibus. And we shouldn't govern by omnibus precisely And we shouldn't govern by omnibus precisely because of this. It was the only way, and they knew this, and Mike Johnson knew this, the only way that Mike Johnson was going to get the money for Israel, he figured this out pretty, you know, it was pretty

quickly apparent to him after he took the job, the only way that they were going to be able to get money allocated to Israel was to tie it. And Mitch McConnell, same thing, the only reason they were going to be able to get money allocated to Israel was to tie it. And Mitch McConnell, same thing. The only reason they were going to get money that was going to go to Ukraine was to tie it to Israel. And for Johnson, he just realized he couldn't attach meaningful border security to it in the way that the rest of his conference wanted, because there was nothing that you could do in the Senate. And so he said, this is more important. Israeli, it's more important. He flip-flopped on Ukraine aid. It's another thing he said he wouldn't do without border security. And here we are,

because when you combine them all together, it's the only way that you can build coalitions instead of having people forced to be courageous and vote up and down on individual items, it's not a good thing. It's not a healthy thing. 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 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 Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I always had to be so good, no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree.

It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at taylorpapersilling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real?

I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also watching very closely yesterday the second theater of conflict, which was in the courtroom in New York. Donald Trump had a real one yesterday. We can put this first, we're going to roll this first element because as the Trump trial has commenced in New York, there are no cameras, there's no audio allowed. And yet we are still getting so much drama actually from it. Jon Stewart took issue with the way the media has been just in the first couple of days.

We're now, this is the third day of the actual proceedings. He took issue with the way the media has been treating this trial. Let's roll this clip. Here we go. It's on. It's happening. History will be made. Shaping up to be the trial of the century. Maybe the trial of the century. The trial of the century.

What just might be the trial of the century. The tax man is here, Donald Trump. He will finally be forced to face the music. The legal walls closing in around Donald Trump. The legal walls are starting to close in on Donald Trump. Yes, this time, Mr. Bond. It truly is your doom. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave this room.

Obviously, when I leave, I'm not going to press this button right here that opens all the doors and dismantles the killing machine I've established. Perhaps if we limit the coverage to the issues at hand and try not to create an all-encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details, perhaps that would help. You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade. It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and the court building. Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. They're now making their way across town along 57th Street.

They just crossed Park Avenue, making their way up towards Lexington Avenue. He's heading down the FDR... ...to the Manhattan courthouse on Chamber Street. Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance. Arriving at the intersection of American history with defiance. Northeast corner of that intersection

is where I'll meet you. Yeah. He had another good line. He said, seriously, we're going to follow this guy to court every effing day. Are you trying to make this OJ? It's not a chase. He's commuting. Yeah.

He's commuting. He's going in and out. So the media's first attempt, the very first attempt on the first day at self-control failed. Now, it's worth noting the vast majority of those clips were from MSNBC. He threw Jake Tapper in for good measure. But the glee of MSNBC actually kind of reminded me of what Pramila Jayapal said on the Sunday shows this week. I forget what show it was, but basically she was like, if impeachment had worked, we wouldn't be here right now. And the reason that reminds me, like you can connect those two dots. It's just like MSNBC has been

going to the bank. Like they've been cashing in on this every day for years now and impeachment didn't work. So all of the different attorneys who Politico revealed are on conference calls, the media attorneys. Did you see this political story? No. These media attorneys, Barbara McQuaid, Jeffrey Toobin. I don't know that you want to be in a Zoom with Jeffrey Toobin, but they've been No, uh-uh. We have to get them. We have to get them. And every opportunity to do that is great television for them, too. And it's not as if there's nothing else going on in the world. That's the impression that you would get from this type of coverage. I've said a million times that I agree with Jayapal in the sense that if they would have impeached him on the night of January 6th, early morning hours of January 7th, write it just down on some bloodstained paper, vote on it right there, kick it over the Senate

and force the Senate to deal with it in the remaining couple weeks before he left office, there's a chance that they actually impeach him. Like, Lindsey Graham was completely done with him. Like, they believed that his time was over, that he had come for the system and he had missed. And when you do that, you're finished. It was when people went to the airport. Lindsey Graham got mobbed at the airport by people that were there for January 6th. They're like, oh, wait, no, we're changing our minds.

Well, that's why I think it never would have gone away. Because say they had voted to impeach Those are still their constituents. And so now we've even in can he can he run right as an impeached? Former president right like it this is the MSNBC's big problem CNN's big problem right now is that they fundamentally do not want to make the argument to people who still support Trump They just want to sort of wish it away and have him embroiled in this legal drama. But what they're left with really is they have to beat him at the ballot box. Right. Which they did in actually 2016 by 3 million votes. Yeah, it's not impossible. They did it in 2018. They did it in 2020. They did it in 2022.

They can do it again. But the way to do it is not by censoring a Hunter Biden laptop story. It's by making the arguments on the merits for your candidate. And that's where all of this stuff completely distracts them from that. And they're left with, but Trump, like they're left with, but you know, this hush money case. And we can put this next element up on the screen because this is what they're talking about in the courtroom, that the national inquirer made up the story about Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald, according to David Pecker, who has taken the stand in, again, this case, which is over the hush money payment, Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal. So reading from this article, David Pecker, the former publisher of National Enquirer, testified at Donald Trump's trial Tuesday that the tabloid completely manufactured a negative story in 2016

about the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who was then Trump's rival for the GOP presidential nomination. The paper had published a photo allegedly showing Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963, not long before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Trump repeatedly referred to the story on campaign trails and interviews. Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked Pecker about the story's origins during the trial Tuesday in Manhattan. Pecker said that then National Choir editor Dylan Howard and the tabloids research department got involved, and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo that was the foundation for the story.

We mashed the photos in the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together, and that's how the story was prepared, created, I would say, Packer said on the witness stand. They talked about some other headlines. We can put the next element up on the screen. One point on that one, the irony is that Packer and Trump did not have the courage to go forward with the actual potential conspiracy there. There was a son of somebody who may have been involved in the JFK's assassination Running against him at the time and that was Jeb Bush But he did not he didn't have the

He'd have the guts to go ahead and say that Jeb Bush's father one of the only people who doesn't know didn't know her where he was on the day There are several Everyone else in my generation remembers that but but not me. Where was I then? Well, he goes back to the OSS, doesn't he? I don't know about all the way to the OSS, but he ran the CIA. But yeah, he may have gone all the way to the OSS. But let's put this next element up on the screen again. This is what's happening in the courtroom. Pecker gave some examples of stories fed to the Inquirer on Trump's opponents, including, and this is paraphrasing some of them, Ben Carson left sponge in patient's brain.

Ted Cruz shamed by porn star. Family man Marco Rubio's love child stunner. I think Crystal told us that was her favorite of the headlines. The one that was killing me was that Ben Carson left a sponge in a patient's brain. I remember that story, actually. It's good stuff. But seriously, like this trial, there was an op-ed in The New York Times just yesterday from someone saying, at first I thought, and I'm paraphrasing it, I'm looking for the headline right now, but it was basically, at first I thought the Alvin Bragg case was an embarrassment. And now I think it's a historic mistake. I just brought it up.

Like this case, again, you can have the conversation about should he have classified this as a campaign expense but then it's like you want him to classify a hush money payment as a campaign expense that's probably an issue in and of itself i mean obviously step one is don't like pay off porn stars with this weird scheme but it's legal to do that. It is it's perfectly legal because the campaign finance law Is that you can't do it if it's only purpose Is or you can only do it if it's like you can't have multiple you can have multiple purposes so if you're saying Fundamentally the only reason was for the campaign. But Trump is saying,

I wanted to protect Melania. I wanted to do X, Y, and Z. He's trying to have an affair. She was pregnant at the time. He was embarrassed about it. Ironically, the question for the jury turns on whether or not Trump has any shame. And as actually trying to keep secrets from his wife, or as just a complete and total scumbag who wouldn't even bother. But, you know, he's probably trying to keep some secrets. Yeah. He's probably got some shame. But when you're in court.

And if he does, if he has the tiniest bit of shame, then the jury can be like, you know what, you legitimately can cover up your affair this way. And when you're in court he can like continue to deny as he does that any of this ever happened and hypothetically again he denies it even happened yeah well that he denies that he had the affairs with the women um so again like he can yeah i know it's funny but like he can still cling to that and there's nothing legally you know that's not what's on trial what's on trial is the payments And so he can still continue to say that I was trying to quash a false story, which is a perfectly normal thing that happens in the course of campaigns.

Like people do it all the time. And now actually there's an interesting conversation happening about the precedent for other campaigns that this would set going forward. Like what if he's found guilty on this, what does it mean for different campaign expenses, you know, down the road as people mull some much more innocuous questions, not even hush money payments to porn stars? Yeah, there's so many other things you can charge him with. I'd say just do that instead. So here's Donald Trump talking about the gag order. Let's roll this clip of him yesterday. Can't even allow articles to be put in. As an example, these are articles that were over the last day and a half.

They're very good articles. The case is a sham. It shouldn't even be tried. It shouldn't have been submitted. And I don't even know if you're allowed to put them in. We have a gag order, which to me is totally unconstitutional. I'm not allowed to talk, but people are allowed to talk about me. So they can talk about me. They can say whatever they want. They can lie, but I'm not allowed to say anything.

I just have to sit back and look at why a conflicted judge has ordered me to have a gag order. I don't think anybody's ever said anything like this. I'd love to talk to you people. I'd love to say everything that's on my mind. But I'm restricted because I have a gag order. Having to do with the schools and the closings, that's Biden's fault. And by the way, this trial is all Biden. You know, this is all Biden, just in case anybody has any question.

And they're keeping me in a courtroom. It's freezing, by the way, in a courtroom all day long. Well, he's out campaigning. That's probably an advantage because he can't campaign. Nobody knows what he's doing. You can't put two sentences together. But he's out campaigning. He's out campaigning. He's out campaigning, and I'm here in the courtroom sitting here,

sitting up as straight as I can all day long, because you know what? It's a very unfair situation. I think that's a reference to him getting caught sleeping, right? Yeah, they claim. Yeah. There are all kinds of weird pieces of color. Which if he wants to sleep through his own trial, you know, that seems fine with me.

I mean, it's really a power move. Power move. But yeah, again, so like the judge's daughter, by the way, one of her clients is Adam Schiff. She works at a progressive consulting company out of Chicago. One of her biggest clients is Adam Schiff, who fundraisers off a lot of the lawfare against Donald Trump. That is, again, like he's the judge. That's his daughter. It's not him. But there are some reasons that Donald Trump is going to want to continue to talk about this case. It's obviously salient in the campaign context.

I don't think it's an easy question because on the one hand, you know, you should have rule of law and that's why, you know, it doesn't like Donald Trump getting sued over this or going to court over this, the criminal charges. I mean, it bothers me that it's not a consistent standard, but people should be obviously held to the law regardless of how powerful they are. And so the same thing with the gag order, but at the same time, there's this intersection with an obvious campaign question as to whether he should be able to make his case to the American public in the middle of a presidential election. I think that's a real challenge and a real question about how this is transpiring. Is he trying to get locked up, you think? No, I don't think so. What do you think?

I don't know. It feels like going out and talking about your gag order and just constantly attacking the judge after you've been told you're going to be held in contempt. Warning after warning after warning. Yeah, I could see an explanation either way. That one, he just is so unused to the idea of consequences that he feels like there can be no consequences for him for anything, or that he sees political value and historical value in,

you know, getting handcuffed and frog marched out of there. But it's very hard to see that because he knows that that would be deeply unpleasant. He doesn't like that it's chilly in the courtroom. He doesn't like he has to sit up and can't just nod off when he feels like it's like it really sucks to have any of your freedoms taken away from you. Right. And the criminal justice system is just absolutely brutal start to finish to go through. It's dehumanizing. It's ugly. It rips the soul out of your body. And so I would imagine that he's feeling that and doesn't want any more of it. On the other hand, he's just walking right into handcuffs here if he doesn't listen to the judge.

Or if he doesn't win and then pardon himself. And I think that's what's the, I think that's the big bet right now. Um, or that there'll be immense pressure on whoever comes next to, to pardon him. Now, the reason Packer was on the stand is because they're trying to, the prosecution was trying to show this close relationship between the Trump campaign and the national inquirer, which very obviously existed. But if that's where MSNBC's glee is coming from at this point in 2024, proving that Donald Trump was feeding stories to the freaking National Enquirer, amazing. I just couldn't make it up. Yeah, a lot of people don't like Ronan Farrow

for various reasons, but his book, Catch and Kill, highly recommend it. It's a thriller. He's got so many interesting documents and inside sources that he's able to tell it like a novel. And he'd tell catch and kill is is the phrase that the National Enquirer would use to help somebody like Trump catch a scandal and then kill it. So like, hey, there's is there a love child somewhere?

Sure, that's interesting. We'll pay you $30,000 for that story. And then boom, you kill the story. And now that person has signed an NDA so they can't leak it anywhere else. And so that's one of the services that the National Enquirer was willing to provide for people like Trump. 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. 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. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before.

I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.

Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was

getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move over to the Middle East where there is escalations and tensions, escalations and violence.

Frankly, Ryan, we can put the first element up on the screen. Hezbollah, tell us what happened just over the last couple of days. So Hezbollah launching one of its deepest forays into Israel in years, two drones going deep toward the Akra base, Israel's Akra base. Israel saying that there is no reported damage. But a lot of this is just kind of people probing and testing defenses and seeing how far they can push the envelope. It has led to significant evacuations. And the evacuations are fascinating because a lot of people talk about the West Bank and the settlements in the West Bank as a fait accompli. It's like, look, these people are there. There's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't matter that the international community says that these settlements are illegal. It is what it is,

and it always will be this way. This war has shown that that's not necessarily true. Southern Israel and Northern Israel have seen massive evacuations of tens of thousands of people into the interior of Israel. When people talk about reorganizing the West Bank after a peace deal, it's not as if all 700,000 settlers Who were there would be moved out It's more along the lines of between say a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand because the the deals that have been on the table Before would say look. All right You've been here for 50 years like this community is gonna stay there

We're gonna get a land swap in exchange for that, where Palestinians are going to have sovereignty and be able to live. But then there are certain settlements that are so illegal and so new that even Israel will say, okay, yes, we will dismantle those. And the far right has often said, well, that's impossible. You're never going to do that. People live there, they're not moving. And what we're seeing and what we're seeing just from this, this Hezbollah attack is that no, actually people, people can move. And in, in Israel, there is a, a dawning realization that they, they might not actually kind of resettle the North. Like they're, because without a,

and that's why you have so many people in Israel calling for this full-on war on Lebanon and just raise Beirut to the ground so that they can reclaim, because they have sovereignty over this territory, but they have moved, but so many Israelis have moved out of it that it's sovereignty without any of the benefits of it, because you

can't actually live in it, because it's not safe to live in, because there's rockets flying constantly. And so without some type of peace deal, that just becomes land where nobody can live. And so that's one of the things that I find fascinating about this attack. Now, Israel has responded. We can put up B2 here with more bombing of Gaza and retaliations against Hezbollah. And in southern Lebanon. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

So their airstrikes killed two Hezbollah fighters, according to the IDF in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah then confirmed those deaths. Didn't add any details at the time, but Israel has killed about 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 civilians since October. That's according to Reuters. So two more just yesterday to the point you were just making. Right. And the media has described, the U.S. media has described the war in Gaza as reaching a kind of low-intensity phase. But the images you see coming out of it and the reports that you hear continue to show significant bombing campaign.

Relative to October 15th, of course, it's going to look a little tense today. But also, Gaza itself is much diminished relative to October 15th. They have pushed everybody into one area, and now they're bombing that area. And the casualty count keeps soaring. That gets us to our next point, which as the nation is, and the globe in some ways, like Columbia University becoming like international news. As everybody's focused on these encampments that are spreading throughout universities, we're finding Palestinian civil forces are increasingly finding mass graves as they're returning to hospitals. Some of these mass graves appear to have been originally made by Palestinian medical personnel. Others appear to have been made

by the IDF. And this also goes to the question of, you know, how significant is the undercount that Hamas is putting out? Because Ralph Nader was actually making an interesting point recently. He's been, you know, his background is actually in casualties and fatalities and the number of people dying as a result of, you know, back in the 70s as a GM. Now he's studying it as a result of this war. His argument is that the numbers are much, much higher than people are saying they are. And that you shouldn't necessarily trust Hamas figures, not because they're overcounting it, because they have an incentive to undercount it, and because it is Hamas's job, in the end, to protect the civilian population.

Even though there's little they can do if the IDF drops a 2,000-pound bomb on a refugee camp. That's going to kill hundreds of people at minimum. But in general, and their numbers are broadly trusted, like by the UN, by the US, by Israel. But what he's saying is it might actually be an undercount. And the identification of these mass graves suggests that there may be something to that. There's truly so much we don't know yet. And according to this report in The Guardian, a total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 just in the past day, according to Palestinian officials. Now, these are obviously at two of Gaza's largest hospitals. That's where the mass

graves were found. And so Israel, you know, rightfully does say that there's Hamas infrastructure in hospitals. Ryan, we've talked about this before. Even granted that, where Hamas would be able to, let's say, hypothetically separate itself from the civilian population, which obviously I think was the much more humane, well, violence in general, not humane, but you would be able to separate from the civilian population. It's incredibly difficult in a densely packed area like Gaza and a tiny area like Gaza. So just the kind of conversation on both sides of that, Israel is going to say that this was, you know, first of all, they say the claim that the IDF buried Palestinian bodies is baseless and unfounded. They said after examining the bodies,

the IDF returned them to where they had been previously buried. So that's the claim from the IDF. Obviously, there's also the issue of the hospitals themselves, where we've had conversations over the past several months about raids on hospitals and the legitimacy of that as anti-terrorism operations versus operations that are going to disproportionately end up targeting vulnerable civilians. Obviously, we've debated it for a couple of months now. For my Intercept podcast that'll be out on Friday, I just interviewed a doctor from Dallas who just recently came back from Gaza. He was working at the European hospital. The stories he told from there are so disturbing because some of the doctors that he worked with had come from Al-Shifa Hospital because after that was raided. And he confirmed something that my colleague, Jeremy Scahill, had heard from other medical personnel who had worked in Gaza, which is that

doctors, when the IDF is approaching, have started to take off their scrubs, and nurses as well. That there is now a belief among medical personnel that they are more at risk by appearing to be medical personnel than if they can blend in with the civilian population. which if you sit with him think about what that what that says is just profoundly deeply disturbing and you know he he said that the entire time that he was there he never saw anybody that looked remotely like a Hamas fighter at the same time he said that the European hospital where he was working, everyone there assumes that they are next, that the raid is coming. But not that there's some pretext that as if like there's Hamas guys everywhere, but just that it's coming. And they were hoping that these

international doctors would stay as long as they possibly could, because they thought that that was the one thing that was standing between them and the entire thing just getting completely flattened and people rounded up and killed. The way that people are seeing it on the ground compared to the way that people are understanding it here couldn't be much different. By the way, David Satterfield, we could talk about this, who has to be the biggest failure of any kind of administration official almost in history. Who tells who he is.

So David Satterfield is Biden's guy who's in charge of humanitarian relief in Gaza. And everybody there is dying. So just on an objective level, just complete and total failure. He came to the State Department briefing yesterday. Rather than offering contrition, like this is the vibe that he decides is the appropriate thing to give off to the public. Let's roll David Satterfield from yesterday's State Department briefing. Three weeks later, can you say you're satisfied with the steps that Israel has taken so far? Has the deconfliction mechanism that you talked about,

you said there's progress, is that in place now and is working? And the final thing is about the pier. We're being told U.S. will rely on Israel for security. Can you elaborate on that? Is it going to be security of U.S. troops provided by Israel? Who will distribute the aid inside Gaza? Thank you. I'll take your last part and turn to Sonali for that. But I am not going to give you, now spare the rest of your colleagues, I'm not going to give you a grade. Did they get an A plus, an A or a B? We are in the constant process of monitoring, assessing, facilitating, supporting progress towards the goals the president set. This is not a gotcha test. At 2 p.m. on the 7th of May, will Israel pass or not? This is a set

of requirements to help the people of Gaza and the humanitarian workers whose role is vital in facilitating assistance. Progress is being made, but I am not going to stand here and give you a grade on that. More needs to be done. They're so bad at that. Yeah. They're so bad at that. That was Reuters so bad at that That was those Reuters reporter whom I rip hammock by the way Yeah, like not only is bad at his job like of getting humanitarian relief into Gaza But not not good at even making us feel like he's trying he seemed to be almost making us feel like he's trying. He seemed to be almost like trying to answer the question. It's like a book report when you're in third grade. You can see this a lot with flacks.

And he's not even a flack. He was flacking. Right. He's in the rooms. Point of time. Yeah. But he just like goes, May 2nd at this exact point of time, I'm not going to give Israel a grade. It's a test. You're just talking to talk at those points that you don't answer the question. You're talking around the question. Yeah, I don't know what he's doing up there because there's nothing he can say. Except, I resign and I apologize. And I will turn myself into the Hague.

But other than that, what are you even doing? I actually think, and that's what's, again, because we disagree on some of this stuff, but I actually think you can make this argument in a way that, you know, whether or not the public is in the right place is another question, but in a way that appeals to the public. That is not a way that appeals to the public whatsoever, because basically nobody in the United States, I mean, the public polling is overwhelming, that people are upset about the humanitarian issues in Gaza. And so to just kind of brush it aside like that and say, I'm not going to give them a grade. What are you talking about? We're working on it. Don't worry. It's just there's you can actually do a better job. There is a better way, even if it's

like for the sake of propaganda, you can do a better job than that. And that's it's like just not only is it problematic, it's incompetent. Like the combination of those two things is just the Biden administration defined right now. 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. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it.

I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real?

I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The FTC yesterday moved to ban non-compete agreements. This is Alina Khan's kind of latest victory over corporate power. It was described by some as perhaps the best thing that the Biden administration has ever done.

Because what it can do is unleash significant wage growth and significant economic opportunity for people up and down the ladder. Let's actually roll Lina Khan first. This was an interview posted yesterday with the news organization More Perfect Union coinciding with the final vote. Here's a little clip from that interview. Here's FTC chairwoman Lina Khan. A lot of the comments that we got were from workers that actually wanted to go start their own competing business. We heard from people in the asphalt business that saw an opportunity in the market, wanted to go start a rival firm, but weren't able to do so because they were locked in with a non-compete. And there's actually, correct me if I'm wrong, there's attorneys and bankers

who make a decent income who are also affected by non-compete agreements, right? That's right. I mean, we got comments from across the income level, people making near minimum wage, but also people making tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars sharing stories about how non-competes had been devastating for their lives. We heard from doctors in rural America who shared how non-competes really limit their ability to continue providing care for their patients if they ever look to change employers. So this is having real world effects, harming Americans and harming their communities. As you were talking, I was thinking of corporate M&A attorneys and big bankers at firms who

work on mergers. And I would just want to make a point to them that Lena Kahn's got your back. So you'll have more freedom of movement as a result of this non-compete ban. And so the joke there that they're making at the very end is at the expense of these mergers and acquisitions attorneys because their whole job is to merge, is to consolidate corporate power, to bring corporations together and Lena Kahn's FTC. No, no, no. It's consumers, right? Yeah, they're bringing benefits for consumers. And so their whole job is just to sit in the middle of these mergers and make money. And actually, they go out and pitch them constantly. Like, it's one of those situations where the economy gets sort of a kink in it and then in

the kink develop a bunch of parasites who make a living off of it. Like lobbyists, for instance, and we can talk about this in a future program, lobbyists are constantly going around creating problems that they then pitch themselves able to solve. It's this extra layer of problem that is deeper than just the fundamental layer of corruption. But nobody hates Lena Kahn other than the Wall Street Journal more than kind of mergers and acquisitions attorneys because she's making it harder for corporations to consolidate. And so that's Faz Shakir, that's Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, saying, look, now you can go find another job. Go start a new firm. Thanks to Lena Kahn.

Because non-competes up and down the ladder really make it difficult for economic innovation. I believe, I think, Crystal and Sagar had one that they had to fight to get out of when they went from rising over to here. Because corporations are always trying to make sure that they control absolutely everything. Yeah.

And if they had their way, you wouldn't be able to have independent competing businesses like the one we're sitting in right now. Yeah, the FTC is estimating that it's like one in five workers currently bound by non-compete clauses. Now, in some industries, that's where the FTC is saying it's stifling because you don't have the freedom to kind of move competitively because that industry is so dominated. Whereas it would be one thing moving from industry to industry, one industry where

maybe there's a non-compete or it's common to have a non-compete, another industry where basically nobody has non-competes, something like that. Matt Stoller has written that non-competes, though, have just exploded. He said it was because of the ease of printing contracts out, which is probably true, that it's just so easy now to throw non-competes at people. It's so cheap to throw non-competes at people,

and why not? But in certain industries, it does clearly stifle competition. There's no question about it. But where there are questions being raised, so the Chamber of Commerce has said they're immediately going to sue. They were beat to the punch, though. Let's put C3 up on the screen. So this is the argument from the FTC Republican Commissioner. Two voted against on the FTC, and he said he was sympathetic to the rule banning non-competes. But beginning with policy puts the cart before the horse.

And Matt said exactly what I thought, opposition on procedural grounds. And that was the lawsuit that was filed in Texas basically immediately by Eugene Scalia, the son of Antonin Scalia Scalia who's making a very broad argument and Stoller already sent out a newsletter You know arguing against it rebutting the points in the suit that was filed But basically big you guys should subscribe if you don't it's great But basically saying that the FTC itself is unconstitutional the FTC's powers are overly broad. That's an argument that I'm kind of sympathetic to. But Matt also kind of walks through how the FTC came to be because Congress was having an impossible time regulating such rapidly changing industries in the 20th century. Technology and the way markets were moving just made it very hard. And that's where the FTC came in. But where

Republicans are going to challenge this, you even where the FTC came in. But where Republicans are going to challenge this, you even see the FTC, Republican FTC commissioner saying there, I'm sympathetic to this. Non-competes, the proliferation of them is genuinely problematic. That's the sort of predicate for what he said. But the FTC itself has overbought authority. And so we're challenging it on those grounds. I don't think that will be successful, but I don't know, Ryan. And the ruling, the new rule leaves in place non-competes for high level executives that are already in place, but bars future ones. But it invalidates ones for places like, for instance, Jimmy John's.

My colleague Dave Jamison, almost a decade ago, had kind of a breakthrough story that really put this issue on the map when he wrote about the fact that Jimmy John's, the sandwich place, was making its sandwich makers sign non-competes. In other words, and attempting to enforce them. So in other words, you're making $9 an hour at Jimmy John's making subs. And then you see that there's another job at Subway. They're now offering $11 an hour. They're short staff. They need help.

They would tell you, no, you cannot take that job. How dare you take that proprietary knowledge. Yeah you, no, you cannot take that job. How dare you take that proprietary knowledge. Yeah, this proprietary knowledge of the way that you, I mean. Great sandwiches. They are freaky fast. It is true. They really are, actually. It's like, wait a minute, I just ordered this. How did you already make this thing? So, however, the idea that you're going to prevent somebody from taking a better paying job at a different sandwich shop is just so anathema to the basic idea of freedom and the free market and all of the things that we're told are real about the market, like competition, supply and demand. Yeah, I agree. Everybody is taught these basic things. And it would be as if consumers were told, no, you're only allowed to shop at this store. Now, that is what the monopolies try to do structurally. But what these businesses are

trying to do is legally say there are other businesses. You're just not allowed to work for any of them. Matt also pointed out that Lena Kahn made the argument that non-competes have forced people to stay at employers that sought to violate their religious liberty and said these non-competes are robbing people of both core constitutional liberties. And Matt said, who's the conservative here? But yeah, I mean, there's legitimately a point to the way competition has been hampered. Obviously, you have even Republican FTC commissioners saying it's problematic. Now, Congress did legitimately delegate this power to the FTC. And they appoint the commissioners and they fund the agency.

And so we get into sort of CFPB territory, too, about if this is something that Congress delegated, it's power that Congress delegated. Can you make this case on strong constitutional grounds? That's what's going to be tested. Yeah. And it's a kind of micro version in some ways of what I was talking about recently with the way that TikTok was able to come in and dominate the social media space was because we allowed our big tech overlords to just basically stay in place on top of their piles of cash. And any time a new tech company was coming along with some type of innovation that threatened their dominance in the market, they would do a catch and kill. They would just buy it and bring their engineers in and smother the thing. Or if it was big enough, they'd kind of, you know, make it part of their monopoly operation.

And that stifled innovation. And TikTok came from outside and was like, oh, you guys haven't developed any new social media in 10 years. We've got a new algorithm that we think people are going to like. And now our response again is, well, we're going to ban that and we're going to make you sell it to an American. So the point would be, if you are a company like Jimmy John's that is making Freaky Fast sandwiches, if you want to maintain your hold in the marketplace, you just have to continue to make freaky fast good sandwiches.

Like you cannot use this lawfare to try to build walls around your employees and to try to otherwise prevent competition from rising up. What you have to do is you have to out-compete. And I hate that these people are making me sound like some free market ideologue. I know. I was going to say, you were earlier in the show when you were like, thank you for subscribing and making this a profitable enterprise. And here we go with the competition and the free market. There is a place for markets. You're going to sell me crypto later. You know where they actually have pretty effective markets where they allow businesses to rise and fail ruthlessly and quickly and in a way that produces actual economic value.

Heaven. China. China. Same thing. And that's what people misunderstand about the kind of Chinese miracle over the last 20 years of economic growth is that they actually allow businesses to fail. Our system is so corrupt that failing businesses are able to just build up, you know, different mechanisms of maintaining subsidies. I don't know if I agree with that, but regardless, we'll put a pin in it,

and you can transport us to Ecuador. 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. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, with 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. I always had to be so good no one could ignore me.

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She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment,

that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We recently covered the turmoil engulfing Ecuador after the U.S. ambassador there colluded with the nation's attorney general in what amounted to blatant foreign election interference, pushing the fake idea that the left-wing party of Rafael Correa was somehow responsible for the assassination of a rival presidential candidate.

That smear campaign did the trick, and the heir to a banana fortune, Daniel Neboa, was elected with U.S. support. Now, the fact that the U.S. is still helping elect banana magnates 120 years after we coined the term banana republic, suggests an extraordinary lack of imagination when it comes to our imperial managers. But at least now the bananas double as cover for cocaine exports to Europe. Now, the goal of installing a right-wing government in a South or Central American country, of course, is to make way for American corporations to profit. The new mechanism we have to do that is called ISDS, or Investor State Dispute Settlement. Those are global courts that

allow multinational corporations to sue small countries and overturn their democratically enacted labor or environmental protections, which the corporations claim inhibit their natural right to profit. Ecuador's Neboa, in taking office, moved immediately to bring those courts back after the government of Correa had gotten rid of them. Last week, in a Senate hearing, there was a surprisingly honest conversation about those courts and our role in pushing them between Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and US Trade Representative Catherine Tai. Take a listen.

But I really think that there's something very evil about the entire ISDS mechanism. And it's perhaps best embodied by the attack through the ISDS mechanism of the tobacco industry on the little country of Togo. Togo had the nerve to try to control the packaging of cigarettes with warnings about tobacco's known health effects, and they were sued by the world tobacco industry,

which has enormous resources at its disposal. Togo is a country of about 8 million people. It has less than 5,000 miles of roads. Its annual budget is about $1.2 billion. It is in no position to take on an international industry like that that can use it to, first of all, bully Togo into submission, and then take that and leverage against other countries. In fact, the tobacco industry even ultimately went up against Australia

and got themselves tangled up in the complexity of their effort. But that shows how evil this is. So the quicker we can get rid of that as a vehicle for putting private interest over public interest and putting size and weight over virtue, the better off we will be. And I'd ask for your thoughts on how we can remove ISDS from those existing agreements and treaties. Now, you don't hear American policy described as evil in the Senate very often, even though that label could often apply. Now, over the weekend, Neboa's effort to bring those courts back to Ecuador was required to go before Ecuadorian

voters. And even though the ballot measure was written in the most confusing way possible, more than 60% of Ecuadorians said no. Now, a few weeks ago, we also reported on how the left-leaning government in Honduras is bucking the World Bank's ISDS court in its fight with crypto investors who have seized actual territory inside the country and are claiming they have actual sovereignty there. Both fights, the one in Ecuador and the one in Honduras, were subjects of protest at last week's annual World Bank IMF meetings held here in Washington. This comes as more than 300 economics professors urged the White House to strip these courts out of trade deals. Now here's how Tai responded to Sheldon Whitehouse.

We're very, very interested in the views of members of Congress, especially those who sit on the Judiciary Committee and are lawyers. Indeed. The U.S. was responsible for pushing a lot of this ISDS nonsense into those treaties in the first place, correct? I think that's absolutely correct. Yeah. Okay. Well, Godspeed. Stay in touch with us on the conclusions that you draw. So what's really remarkable, Emily, about that exchange is, first of all, White House is being pretty clear in how he's feeling about these. But that's one senator. They can make a video, they can make an appearance at the Judiciary Committee, but they can't do a lot more than that. To have Catherine Tai basically agreeing with him

is kind of a sea change when it comes to U.S. trade policy. Tai is, like Lena Kahn, also a former Hill staffer like Lena Kahn. One of this coterie of seriously populist aides who have wound up in the Biden administration through kind of a real organized effort to make sure that the populist wing of the party has, quote unquote, representation there. But what they're doing is pushing forward real policy change in an impressive direction and giving support then to, say, the Ecuadorian people who are pushing back against Neboa, the Honduran government that is pushing back against uh against the world bank but it creates this bizarre split screen where you have the biden administration foisting neboa on the ecuadorian public you know boosting him to the presidency uh the ambassador is supporting him all the way, supporting his push for to bring back

these corporate courts into Ecuador, while other elements of the Biden administration who are responsible for trade are against that. So it creates this really schizophrenic situation. But at least, I guess, inside the imperial core, there's some opposition to what the rest of the empire is doing. Although, Neboa, correct me if I'm wrong, is fairly, in terms of polling, polls pretty well with the Ecuadorian public. There's a lot of, there's maybe a parallel to Bukele in that crime crackdowns, nationalism. The public supported. So at the same time that this, uh, that this measure was up on the corporate courts, he also had some, uh, referenda up about cracking down on the mafia and drug cartels. Right. Right. Um, and that's, which, which passed and they, and they support him there. There are huge questions about the role of that banana industry that we talked about at the top.

His role in it and relationship to other narco traffickers. So some of this is seen by the Ecuadorian public as kind of intramural warfare among rival kind of narco clans. Yeah. And this gets to, that's an important point. And there's a, you were, you were making this point about how the goal of installing a right-wing government in the South or Central American country is to make way for American corporations to profit and for American control to come in, whether it's trafficking, whatever it's, whatever's going on. If it's, you know, Nicaragua, et cetera. We want it to be us, not China, that kind of thing.

Us, not China, but forever it was us, not Russia. And I think that's what's interesting about the point you were making with Lina Khan or Tai is that people are now, there's a generation of young leftists and increasingly people on the right who saw what happened with the Cold War, see the same playbook being regurgitated

or being trotted out again in these different countries. Now, China is obviously part of it. Still Russia, though, in Africa and in other places. And they're like, we know exactly what's happening. You cannot continue to use the specter of communist nuclear annihilation. The world has changed. We don't live in the 60s anymore. And I think that's a really healthy reaction to some of this. And the increasing like I hope that young leftists continue to be as sort of like anti this global, you know, used to be just like a World Economic Forum getting protested by young leftists. Now you only hear it talked about on the right, essentially. I think that's an important pillar of being in favor of workers,

not letting them be dictated by these totally disconnected international bodies that are run by oligarchs. Right. totally disconnected international bodies that are run by oligarchs. All right. Well, the only thing that anybody seems to care about in the world is the protests up at Columbia University. And so we're going to be joined after this by a lead organizer of those protests. Stick around to hear her perspective. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small

for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I'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. 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. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey.

We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids,

the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her.

Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we are joined now from the Columbia encampment by first-year law student and Columbia undergrad graduate Safiya Salty. Safiya, thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you got it. So when I talked to you a couple of days ago, or whenever that was about coming on to join the show, you were out picking up Seder supplies. Can you tell us a little bit about how Seder went there at the encampment? Yeah, it was honestly one of the most inspiring experiences I've had and not a Seder like anything else. We had dozens and dozens of students gathered around on the floor.

It was my first outdoor Seder. And it was really beautiful, mostly led by Jewish Voice for Peace here on campus. We had a specialized Haggadah talking about the concepts of liberation. And it was just a very wonderful multicultural moment. Nearly everybody on campus was, or everybody at the camp was there and shared in the moment. So very grateful to have that. And can you tell us just a little bit about the logistics of the encampment? How many people are there right now? You guys are overnight in tents. How are you getting food?

What's your life like, basically? We get a good, I think, visual of it, which we appreciate a lot. But what's your life like right now in the encampment? Yeah, so after the first encampment was kind of dismembered on Wednesday, a bunch of students jumped over to the West Lawn of Columbia. And we've been here since Thursday. So students are here overnight. At the very beginning, we weren't allowed to have tents. So we were sleeping on the ground on tarps in the rain, which was not very fun.

We now have tents, which is wonderful. We have probably about 50 students here right now. There was supposed to be a police raid at 8 a.m. this morning, so we have fewer students than we usually do. Usually there's about 200. A lot of them sleeping over here. We have food from donations, and so it's been a really wonderful experience to watch people come in.

There's a system of runners who come and collect food from all over. We have a food table abundance. And it's, yeah, we have water supplies, a lot of students taking care of us. It's a very community-driven place where everybody just kind of chips in whatever they can in terms of like labor and support. And so President Biden recently called the protest that you're a part of flatly anti-Semitic. The Secretary of Education said that he's launching a title. Was it nine? Whatever title they're using to investigate Colombia basically for anti-Semitism. What was your reaction? What was your reaction in the camp to that national attention and to that allegation?

Yeah, I am really disappointed and horrified at that idea. I mean, I'm a Jewish student here. We have a huge number of Jewish students who we have the Shabbat service and a Havdalah service and obviously a huge Seder. It's part of our Strait Columbia, like a community guidelines here in the encampment that we accept everybody if they're here and in support of the cause. There have been anti-Semitic incidents that have happened outside of the campus gates, usually by individuals or groups that are not aligned with the people who have organized the encampment,

or at least the message is not aligned. And so while I do understand why some Jewish students on campus feel threatened in some capacity, the bumping that in with the encampment, I find to be really disheartening, given the fact that this is such a accepting place that has welcomed me and everybody else. And honestly, I find that the protests and the anti-Semitic comments and the focus on that has been a complete distraction from why we are here and the actual message of divestment and transparency and support for Palestinian people that this camp stands for, especially because it is such a welcoming environment that I am very grateful to be a part

of. Yeah, you know, I think it's important that you acknowledged some of the stuff that's been, as you say, off message, because, you know, there was that Al-Qassam's next target sign. That was horrific. But free speeches, there was also the one that saidam's next target sign. That was horrific. But free speech is, there was also the one that said, let it be known. That was the Al-Aqsa flood that put the global intifada back on the table again, a speaker. So that stuff is, you know, it's important though to support free speech when it's really hard.

And I guess I would just say, you know, probably some of your fellow Jewish students on campus who are on the other side of this might say, you know, are you guys cracking down hard enough on those people who are off message? What would you say to that? What would you say to them if they were in front of you and said, you know, you should be cracking down harder on the people who are veering off message? I imagine you've done some of that. Yeah, I will say that it's hard to crack down on people when they are individuals and physically outside the bounds of the school. So we are all in this inner space and a lot of the idea is like taking up the space on campus.

And so the idea of like going outside and releasing individual people for messages is firstly impossible. Second of all, uh, UAD, the divestment group, um, along with the other organizing groups have actively tried to address, um, and, and, uh, and go against the idea of antisemitism, asking groups outside to stop using this kind of rhetoric. Um, the girl with the all Alexa sign was not a Columbia student. We have no idea how she got here. I have not known of a single incident of a Columbia student or somebody in the encampment using such language. And so while there has been an active effort

to kind of wash this kind of rhetoric, it's very, very, very difficult. Somebody's coming and recording. kind of rhetoric, it's very, very difficult. Somebody's coming and recording. And so it happens quite often here. So yeah, so we have been trying to also like tell Jewish students that they're welcome to come with the like seders and services and things like that. We are trying to make this as welcoming a space

as possible and ask those groups to really make sure that they are acting in line with the overall message without it being a distraction to what we're here standing for. One of the big controversies nationally, and Piers Morgan played a role in this, but even without Piers Morgan, I think you still would have had this quote-unquote stabbed-in-the-eye controversy that went around. If we could play E4 here, just put this VO up. A student who turns out to be kind of a right-wing provocateur, she had previously gone viral like a year or two ago complaining about Israeli couscous. So that's the flag incidents that you guys just saw. It's basically a toy little flag that the person is waving as they're walking through. The alleged victim said that she had been stabbed in the eye and sent fear kind of coursing through Jewish communities around the country that the video emerged finally last night

showing that if she was hit at all, it was a grazing by a kind of rounded ball at the end of a toy flag, because she's been on television and clearly did no damage. I'm curious what the encampment felt when they initially heard that story. And also, yes, to Emily's point, what are you guys doing to try to control the message and

control the narrative? Because now this has become a kind of international spectacle that is kind of a competition for the narrative. Yeah, I think that there's a sense, there is a sense of horror, firstly, at the idea of somebody who is kind of on our side, quote unquote, perpetrating such behavior. But also the idea that incidents get blown out of proportion is not fair. We have a lot of students who are counter-protesters who try to come in, who try to film our faces and change the narrative a lot or take things out of context. We have strict policies here not to interact with counter-protesters because we understand that pretty much anything that we do will often be misconstrued or taken out of context.

And so, I mean, our main policy is to not encourage that, not give anybody any fuel, but then also to really not address it for the most part. I think that we try to work to show it with our actions rather than trying to control a certain message, which we have found to be inadequate or futile for the most part. There's so many people that every single thing we say will get used in some capacity. And we do have a lot of instigators here who try to come, who try to video us and change the narrative. And so all we can do is kind of take a step back and

hope that the actual message gets through. And you have House Speaker Mike Johnson coming to Columbia today. One of the things I want to ask, I'm sort of fascinated by, on the one hand, you have people on the right saying Columbia has been too permissive of the encampment, too permissive of the rabble-rousers. On the other hand, the left says Columbia has been, and this may be your perspective too, the left has been cracked down on by the university disproportionately. Tell us a little bit about what your interactions with the university have been like, what your perspective is on how they've handled the whole situation. Yeah, I mean, my experience of joining the encampment was specifically in reaction to watching the students get arrested and watching the swarm of NYPD officers in riot gear come and forcibly extract a couple dozen students from genuinely peacefully protesting.

So I find that a large part of this now has been this idea of free speech and the ability to protest on campus. And this area of campus has been designated by Columbia as a free speech zone. And as we see with the legacy of Vietnam protests, the idea that within 30 hours, the administration came and forcibly removed people with NYPD officers was just a horrific incidence. And then in light of that, I believe that the administration has been scared to act in any way.

And especially after the huge backlash and international movement that those arrests largely inspired, it's been interesting to see their response. So at first, through the course of negotiations that organizers have had, there has been a lot of mixed messages from them, a lot of lack of clarity in terms of the administration. They have given us mixed messages and false promises regarding tents, police presence, how long we can be out here. We were informed last night at 1030 that there was a threat of the National Guard coming that President Shafiq actually threatened to send in the National Guard, which is horrific.

And who did she threaten that to directly? Were there kind of student negotiators? That was sent to, I believe, administration, or like that was through faculty that then told us afterwards. However, we were sent a threatening letter saying that she had a midnight deadline and that if that was for negotiations and if there was no agreement met that she would take further action. So there was a lot of talk. There was supposed to be a police raid last night and then she decided to change the deadline until 8 a.m. today. So we believe that there is going to be a huge police raid at 8 a.m. today.

And then as of this morning, she has changed the deadline to a further 48 hours. So it's been tiring and tedious, and the administration has been consistently arguing in that faith. There has been no communication with faculty as in how to handle it. So the faculty are completely in the dark about what to do or how to manage things with their students, how to manage student safety. So there's been such just a sense of confusion, both in what's happening and trying to both protect the students and protect the right of free speech here on campus,

they're somehow not doing any of it, which is just incredibly disappointing and disheartening to see from our administration, especially from a new president. And so in mid-February, the Sherian Collective, and if we could put up, I think it's F3 here, put up this crazy job posting where one of the things they said they were looking for were infiltrators. I can read from it here. They said they're looking for individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance, maybe uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in our operation. One of the cities they said they were looking to hire in was New York City.

The organization, some of their internal messages were leaked later that said that they actually hoped that they were just going to spark a lot of paranoia and that they might not even need to go forward with this operation that just publicly posting for these job offerings would be enough to kind of tear protest groups in half with everybody pointing at each other as infiltrators. I'm curious what the level of paranoia is, although at the same time, calling it paranoia is not quite fair because we know throughout history there have been kind of provocateurs and infiltrators who have come in to try to, you know, shout, make an organization look bad. So how is the encampment handling that particular dynamic? There is a fear of infiltrators. We try to be on the lookout. There is a lot of security around this perimeter and people that have now been trained to kind of see, to suss out people, for lack of a better word. And it's pretty much impossible.

So we can't have people come in. We have very strict community guidelines that we try to follow. And so when people violate those community guidelines, like filming people's faces, which has like, students have already started to be doxxed and exposed for their involvement in any way. So as soon as we see things like people filming, we can kind of say, please leave. There have been instances of us

having to actively ask people to leave because they were trying to instigate, it's impossible to see who's trying to infiltrate and who's not. However, we have alerts kind of, like when we know that things are higher, when there's things that are less disorganized, like last night in the midst of thinking there was going to be a police raid, we were noting that it's a specific time that would be very feasible for, quote, infiltrators to come in. So there is a level of paranoia.

There is a level of fear. However, everybody here kind of knows that there is a chance of being doxxed, of being exposed, of being arrested or suspended. And so there's only so much that we can do to prevent it. And the only idea is that we can't be scared. We already know that the administration is threatening us enough. And so the possibility of infiltrators is surely not enough to kind of change anything here. And while I've got you, and I don't want to put you on the spot too much as a kind of spokesperson for the entire kind of movement, but here's my old man complaint as somebody who covered Occupy Wall Street, the so-called people's mic. And so for

people who don't know, the people's mic is what protests have developed when the police say you can't use AV and you've got to be able to reach people in the back. So somebody will say something and then the entire crowd kind of repeats it back. And when you're in the middle of it, it can be this production of solidarity and really a moving experience. When you're outside of it, it just looks so creepy and weird. The People's Mic, I'm like, God, the People's Mic has got to go. There's got to be something else. But I'm curious for, you know, how you feel about the People's Mic and if there's any other solution. Because once it becomes a contest for, you know, public ideas and the public narrative, it winds up undermining it by just kind of looking weird. Yes, there was an incident of this a few days ago

in a video that started being put around where some instigators tried to come onto campus, come into the encampment, and we asked them to leave. There was a lot of people, Mike, and then people started singing spirituals, which in the moment made me cry. It was a gorgeous moment, and everybody was in solidarity singing together.

Watched a video of that later. It looked like a horror movie. And I understand that. So I think it's a really difficult line to draw because we need people with mic in order to communicate. There's not a lot of capacity as long as the school is not allowing us to use any amplification. But I mean, I'm in agreement with you. I've seen those videos. I think it's, again, that kind of line between worrying too much about the media and then having to change organizing tactics in a way to make it get less useful and less organized and making it so people can't communicate. So again, I think that there's a sense of priorities.

And a lot of this entire encampment has been trying to figure out what the priorities are. We have finals coming up. People think that this is more important. We understand we can look like a horror movie when using people's mic. But again, we have to do whatever it takes to make sure people are united, even if it gets misconstrued. Because as I said before,

truly everything is getting misconstrued in a way that's supporting the other side. I guess last question for you, how are people handling the professional threats? You have senators, members of Congress, billionaires saying we need to – we're going to have facial recognition technologies, going to identify all of these Hamas supporters, and we're going to make sure that they're never employed ever again. Obviously, these are successful students who've made it to Columbia undergrad or Columbia graduate school. And so that must be something that weighs on them at some level, getting smeared like that.

On the other hand, you're facing this moment of intense moral clarity witnessing a genocide unfold. How are people grappling with that tension? We try to be really careful of privacy. So privacy is one of the number one concerns at the Academy. So we always have masks on hand. We always kind of have levels of, different levels of privacy for different people. We have the groups of people who are willing to be arrested

and then those who don't want such level of attention. We have no photographs of people's faces. We have really strict rules of the media who come here and what they can and cannot do. We understand that this is such a huge concern for a lot of people who have put their life on the line for this. And a lot of what is most useful is the bodies. Just here and occupying the space and who these people are,

we try to keep that protected as much as possible. I am in a very lucky position where my hopefully future employers would never care if I am identified with this, but a lot of people really do care. And a lot of people are putting their friendships, their family relationships on the line. And while we could do whatever we can, again, I think people have assumed this sense of risk coming here and know what may happen. But in the interim, we're trying everything that we possibly can to protect people and also to prevent people from coming in infiltrators and using that opportunity to expose us, which is really all that they're able to do at this point. You know, I was just going to say, I had a funny

thought while you were talking, just having worked with so many conservative college students in the last decade, there's something so similar. And there is obviously hypocrisy, but there's just something so similar about students exercising important rights on campus, engaging in free expression, having challenging conversations and getting targeted for it. And we just have to be consistent when it's hardest. And I think that's, you know, it's when students are within the bounds and outside of, you know, they're not being bigoted. They're not being violent or inciting anything. It's we should be cool. We should be happy to see this happen on college campuses.

Yeah, and college campuses advertise that there are places where this kind of thing can happen. I guess, and the actual last question for you. What have you said and what would you say to other Jewish students who say that they can't be safe at these protests i would say that i understand the fear and i understand that a lot of the rhetoric can feel really personal um i think that there's a huge distinction between being critical of israel and being critical of the jewish people and that is a distinction that I believe that all the Jews here understand. And that I believe that it's honestly more anti-Semitic to conflate those two. So a lot of the fears that people have are those. I do understand that there are sometimes personal attacks

that are outside of the context of Israel. However, I would just try to tell Jewish students that this is not about religion. This is not about personal identities. This is about holding the school accountable and making sure we know where our tuition money is going, making sure we have a say in that, and honestly just championing the solidarity

with people in Gaza who are currently being murdered and that is the issue first and foremost besides and the identities of individual people here or Jewish students on campus and elsewhere is so almost irrelevant to what we are trying and this has been such an honestly inspiring, encouraging experience for me as a Jewish student who has faced absolutely no forms of anti-Semitism here, that I really would encourage students to look at it in that lens and know that they are safe,

at least in this encampment and in these spaces. Well, Safia Southie, first year law student at Columbia University, thank you so much for joining us and good luck with the ongoing protest. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That was a fascinating interview, Ryan. I think an important perspective from somebody who is Jewish and has this argument about the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism,

perspective quite literally from inside the encampment. Thanks for setting that up. I really thought that was interesting. And she was telling me before, she's not at all unfamiliar with anti-Semitism and being in some spaces where it's almost, where it's uncomfortable to even mention your Jewishness. But she said this was one of the places where she's been most proud to mention it and felt most welcomed. Oh, that's really interesting. Which I found rather striking. And I'm glad, you know, it would be one thing if she came on

and pretended that some of the other stuff hadn't happened. The Al-Qassam target. This is real stuff. Yeah. I mean, there was that speech about the, oh, my gosh, that one speech was so bad from someone. It must have been on the People's Mic. The quote was the Al-Aqsa flood that put the global intifada back on the table again and the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters, referring to October 7th. I mean, you have to acknowledge that, and you have to talk about how you're dealing with it. It's a real problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is, and

it's interesting to see how the students are grappling with it as, you know, because there's a contradiction between, you know, their initial kind of rolling out of a small protest aimed at, you know, discrete kind of university policies. Right. Which then steamrolls into this international moment. Right. And then all of a sudden they're trying to grapple with how that looks. Yeah. They've got the Speaker of the House coming to talk to them, to talk at them probably.

I want to see the Speaker of the House use the people's mic. That would be kind of fun. No comment. Well, just a reminder, we talked about this at the beginning of the show. We're so excited to announce that we're going to be doing a Friday edition of Counterpoints from here on out, starting this week with a very big guest. So BreakingPoints.com, if you want to get the show early, you'll get the show early not just this week but every week. But it will be coming to everybody on Fridays, probably a little bit earlier than that Thursday night if you're a premium subscriber.

BreakingPoints.com for that. But we're just excited to get it out there. I'm going to go change my tie so it looks like we did this on a different day. Yeah, we are about to tape it, but I just destroyed the illusion. All right, we'll see you guys next time. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it.

I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community from breaking This is an iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.