Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/3/24: Biden Spox Defends Israel Aid Strike, Israeli Media Weeps For Bullied IDF Criminals, Hillary Attacks Undecided Voters, Jon Stewar Exposes Apple Censorship, The View Debates If US Better Now Or Under Trump, AIPAC Attacks Jan 6 Cop, Biden Donor Says Admin Starving Gaza

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss John Kirby losing it while defending Israel's strike on WCK workers, Bibi bans Al Jazeera, Hillary scolds undecided voters, Jon Stewart reveals Apple blocked him from interviewing Lina Khan, The View debates if US better now or under Trump, AIPAC launches ad blitz against Jan 6 cop candidate, Biden donor Amed Khan says US intentionally starving Gaza.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We have an amazing show today, don't we? You're talking so quickly. Amazing. Amazing show.

It's an amazing show. Oh, wow. Indeed we do. I think that's my cue card. It's like SNL. I need to look at the mugs for my line. We do, though, in fact, have a big show today, Ryan. Lots of news, obviously, to cover out of the Middle East. We have election results from last night. I'm very curious to get your take on some of the election results, actually, out of Wisconsin. Interesting stuff there. Jon Stewart hosted Lena Kahn on The Daily Show. And man, was it a fascinating conversation. Actually gets into some of the reasons, in fact, that the DOJ filed an antitrust suit against Apple just recently. We're going to be talking

about an absolutely wild segment on The View that is probably the most evergreen way to put it. We could say that every single week and come up with some clip. They asked the question, are you better off than you were four years ago? We'll get Emily to answer that. We'll find out. We'll get Ana Navarro's take as well for just how the wealthy Manhattan dwellers are doing versus four years ago. Ryan, you ran a Twitter poll that we're going to talk about on the renaming of Dulles Airport, which is a Republican-led effort. House Republicans want us to have, instead of a Dulles and Reagan Airport here in D.C. and Thurgood Marshall over in Baltimore, they want us to have a Trump and a Reagan Airport. We're going to find out if that's actually better than Dulles. Right. It's important to move beyond the Cold War. I guess so, yeah.

And you're going to lead us on a segment about Harry Dunn, who some people may remember from the fallout after January 6th, the hearings, the investigations. He was a central figure in all of that. Yeah, he's now running for Congress in Maryland. And bizarrely, AIPAC could end up being his biggest obstacle to getting to Congress. We're going to talk about that bizarre story. And we have a good guest. Yes, Ahmed Khan, who has been on the show before. He's been on my podcast, Deconstructed. Leads relief efforts around the world, everywhere from Syria to Rwanda to Ukraine to Gaza.

He's in Cyprus now and he's going to talk about what it's like trying to get relief supplies into Gaza, given the fact that the Israeli military appears willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that this near famine tips into a famine by attacking aid workers as we saw on Monday. And that's where we can start today. Yeah, we might as well start right there. In fact, we can put this map on the screen. Ryan, can you walk us through what we're looking at with A1? Right. So this is the convoy, by now infamous convoy that I'm sure if you're watching, you have heard of this. This was the World Central Kitchen's effort to move hundreds of tons from Cyprus into Gaza, into the kitchens that were gradually kind of replacing the work that UNRWA had been doing

and has been hobbled from doing. Let's not even get into that situation right now, but it goes to, I think, intent. The whack-a-mole effort that the world is making to kind of get aid in continues to meet the hammer of Israeli opposition to simply feeding the Palestinian population. So the three cars that you saw on that map there represent the places where each of them were struck. And we now know from reporting by Haaretz, Al Jazeera, and others that the first car was struck. And at that time, the wounded in that vehicle were taken to the second vehicle, and the WCK workers had enough time to call their superiors because they had been in coordination with the IDF. And so at first – and these are the biggest, most good-hearted people on the planet, the fact that they're dedicating their lives to humanitarian relief efforts. So it's very hard for them, I think, to believe at first that they're being targeted by the IDF.

So they're calling. They're cooperating with the IDF. They are constantly cooperating with the IDF, telling them what route they're in, etc. And so they call their superiors, tell them, call it off, call it off, we're getting struck. They then strike the second vehicle. The wounded that are still able to be moved to the third vehicle are moved. And then the drone strikes the third vehicle. And so the images that everybody has seen has shown the logo, World Central Kitchen on the top. So there's just no credible way that anybody could say that this was anything other than deliberate. Now, Haaretz reported that the

IDF's initial explanation was that the drone operators believed that they saw an armed person on the convoy when it went into the warehouse. But they did not see that armed person when they left the warehouse. Now, we know that three security people, I think one from Ireland, one from Britain, one from somewhere else, died in this attack. So, just pause on that for a second. So, they think that they see a convoy that they know is a World Central Kitchen convoy. Just left the warehouse. Just left the warehouse. And on the way in, they thought they saw a person with a weapon.

They don't see that person with the weapon on the convoy. But let's say they did. Yeah. First of all, why would a convoy not have a person with a weapon going through a dangerous area? A war zone. A war zone. A war zone. Second, what that's saying is that their rules of engagement suggest that if they suspect that there's a single, let's say even a terrorist, a single Hamas fighter within this convoy, that their rules of engagement allow them to light up the entire convoy. And methodically chase the victims from one vehicle to another until they're all killed. That's their own explanation. Except their premise, right? If you accept their premise.

Right, yes, exactly. And I don't think the Israeli government has commented on this yet, but Israeli media has reported that, yes, there's a suspected militant embedded with the convoy. We don't know exactly what their explanation is, but if you take their premise at face value, it's still outrageous. Right. And it's incredible they would think that an armed person with a convoy, with armored cars and everything, is a militant. Maybe it's the Irish guy they hired to do security. And you've made this point before that, you know, when you're part of the big challenge, if you are the IDF, and let's say, again, in a hypothetical world, you want to prosecute the most ethical war to the extent that's not an oxymoron. You want to prosecute

the most ethical war possible. The fact that Hamas is essentially the de facto government of the Gaza Strip, it makes it incredibly difficult. There's no question about that. The infrastructure. If anybody's doing security, it's going to be like a Hamas-linked police force. Absolutely. And that's one of the things with UNRWA. And that would not excuse killing a bunch of aid workers that were with them.

Exactly. And that's one of the big challenges in the UNRWA debate. Jose Andres, Sourabh Amari made a really good point about this. Jose Andres was furious at the Spanish government for not being sort of supportive enough of Israel after October 7th. This is Jose Andres' nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, as many people know, that's doing the aid work that was destroyed, that was killed. So, I mean, it's just, again, it's horrible. Right. And so that's why you have, we can put up this next element. Here's Fran Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, saying, knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli

forces intentionally killed World Central Kitchen workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won't move a finger for the Palestinians. So let's see how John Kirby responded at the White House. Yesterday, by the way, the State Department canceled its briefing, a rare occurrence. And then they were like, let's let John Kirby just handle this one. So let's see how John Kirby handled this one. Is firing a missile at people,

delivering food and killing them, not a violation of international humanitarian law? Israelis have already admitted that this was a mistake that they made. They're doing an investigation. They'll get to the bottom of this. Let's not get ahead of that. Your question presumes,

at this very early hour, that it was a deliberate strike, that they knew exactly what they were hitting, that they were hitting aid workers and did it on purpose. And there's no evidence of that. I would also remind you, sir, that we continue to look at incidents as they occur. The State Department has a process in place. And to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.

And lest you think we don't take it seriously, I can assure you that we do. We look at this in real time. They have never violated international humanitarian law ever in the past five to six months. I'm telling you, the State Department has looked at incidents in the past and has yet to determine that any of those incidents violate international humanitarian law. It really raises the question of what the point of international humanitarian law is. If that's true, you could kill hundreds, more than 200 aid workers, more than 100 journalists, hundreds of nurses and doctors, leave a population of 2.3 million displaced and their homes in rubble and not violate international law. But I wanted to play, unless you have a response.

No, no, no. Let's move to this other one. Another Kirby clip. So notice his body language there. Notice how animated he was in defense of Israel there. At the top of the press briefing, he was kind of forced to read a statement that was critical of Israel. And I want you to notice the difference in the body language when he's kind of forced to be critical and when he's voluntarily defending them. There's only one moment that he gets animated in this clip that we're about to play. And it's when he thinks he's going to be about to pivot into a defense of Israel, but then he realizes he's not and goes back into kind of a mumbling, kind of forced, almost hostage-like reading of criticism of Israel. Here's Kirby at the top of that briefing.

We understand that a preliminary investigation has been completed today and presented to the Army Chief of Staff, and we'll obviously look to see what they discover in this preliminary one. But we expect a broader investigation to be conducted and to be done so in a swift and comprehensive manner. We hope that those findings will be made public and that there is appropriate accountability held. But, I'm sorry, more than 200 aid workers have been killed in this conflict,

making it one of the worst for aid workers in recent history. This incident is emblematic of a larger problem and evidence of why distribution of aid in Gaza has been so challenging. But what, beyond this strike, what is clear is that the IDF must do much more to improve deconfliction processes so that civilians and humanitarian aid workers are protected. The U.S. will continue to press Israel to do more as well to ensure the safety of humanitarian workers and will continue to do all we can to deliver this assistance

to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Thank you. Thanks. John, do you have any worries regarding Israel and Gaza about the floating dock? And how can aid workers be protected? Worries. What do you mean by worries?

What do you even say to that? That was his scripted, if you were listening to this, that was the scripted remarks portion of his appearance at yesterday's White House briefing. That wasn't during Q&A. He actually moved to Q&A right after that. You may have heard. And the first question is,

do you have any worries? He's like, worries? What worries? Goes back into his flip routine. Lest you think we're being unfair to Kirby, let's go to Barak Ravid, who is a reporter for Axios, formerly served in the Israeli military. So we're not talking about somebody who is, you know, some kind of radical Hamas supporter here.

So let's get Barack Ravid's analysis of this on CNN. The movement of this convoy was coordinated with the IDF. This convoy moved on a road that is a humanitarian corridor that the IDF knows that cars that are driving on this road are carrying humanitarian aid. The IDF is a partner of the World Central Kitchen in its work in Gaza. It gives security to the boat that is coming from Cyprus and delivering the aid. It's not some rogue group that started delivering aid in Gaza. It was all coordinated.

And this is why the claim that this was, quote unquote, unintentional, raises a lot of questions. Yeah. And to go back to Kirby's point, his claim that there's no evidence that Israel knew that this was an aid convoy is a lie. Like, I don't use the word lie often with these spokespeople because usually they're gaslighting, they're spinning, they're BSing. Yeah. You know, and they're tethered somewhat to like a little piece of the truth. Their job is to be very clever at avoiding a lie. There is lots of evidence that they knew this was a convoy.

Like, A, the fact that the convoy was communicating with the idea. Like, B, the fact that it said World Central Kitchen on the rooftops. C, that Haaretz has reported they knew it was a convoy. Right. But they thought there was a militant associated with it. So, just a flat-out disgusting lie to cover up a war crime. And so, Netanyahu responded, and we can play the video of that. This is, if you're watching, you see Netanyahu's response. And the translation is here,

unfortunately, a tragic instance of our forces unintentionally harming innocent people in the Gaza Strip. It happens in war. We'll investigate it. We're in contact with the government, and we will do everything so that it doesn't happen again. Just so we can be as perfectly fair as we can to Netanyahu, in this clip, in the first half, he's talking about how he himself has left the hospital and has recovered from his procedure that he underwent. He thanks the people that cared for him. And then the second half, he transitions to talking about this tragic incident. He says, this is war, but we'll investigate it. And people have slammed him for, you know, the kind of joyfulness with which he's delivering this message. And it's understandable

to talk about the joy of, you know, thanking those who treated you. but he remains, that effervescence kind of remains as he continues to talk about the tragedy and that this is war and we're gonna investigate this. He doesn't quite, he doesn't, there's no solemnity, there's no suggestion in the body language that there's any disappointment or sadness from the Israeli leadership that this has happened. Because if the intention was to tighten the grip of starvation

on the population, it's working like a charm. I think it's also worth mentioning a Jerusalem Post headline. This is from earlier this week. Friendly fire, IDF helicopter pilot shot at Israeli soldiers after pressing wrong button. It's not just, again, this is like if you are accepting- Time to stop sending weapons, I think, to this army, this military. And John Kirby, he had a quote where he said, the IDF must do much more. And that was in reference to protecting civilians and aid workers. And it's, Ryan, it is interesting to have the American government in a defense of Israel saying that actually the IDF must do, quote, much more, not some more, not more, much more to defend civilians and aid workers while at the same time maintaining the posture that you just mentioned. That's a really,

really difficult position. Right. And if you're Israel, why would you? If your goal is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population from Gaza and the United States is willing to arm you no matter what you do, like why would you not kill aid workers, kill health care workers, like attack every hospital in Gaza, make the place unlivable and expect that the American government will continue to support you all the way? So this is what's especially like for Netanyahu, that question of what comes next, like day after, what do you actually want to do with the Gaza Strip? That's why all of this continues to be an untenable position, period, because they don't know. They have no agreement, consensus at all on what comes next. There are people that don't want to take any control of the Gaza Strip in Israel, that don't want that to happen. There are people who very, very, very much do and don't want to give up an inch of it, want every last inch of the Gaza Strip back under Israeli control or whatever it is. So that's how

the war ends up being prosecuted in just an utterly bizarre and tragic way. And what predictably came next is, we can roll this clip relative to the aid shipments. This is about the killing of seven aid workers in the Gaza Strip with World Central Kitchen, the charity. We're now hearing from Cyprus that the aid ships that have been traveling from Cyprus into Gaza, of course, this was a big development for those in Gaza that the aid was able to come in that way. Aid ships are now being turned around, still carrying aid. 240 tons of undelivered aid is now heading back to Cyprus because of this attack on a car killing seven aid workers. Because the charity obviously unloading the ship and distributing that aid in Gaza World Central Kitchen, one of those charities involved, has now suspended its operations because of this apparent Israeli airstrike.

And so the UAE has also suspended aid operations, saying that it can't guarantee that its personnel won't be killed by Israel. Anera has paused its relief efforts. The World Central Kitchen paused its relief efforts. UNRWA has been banned by Congress and President Biden from getting any funding from the United States, and Israel has banned UNRWA from operating in northern Gaza. The predictable and intended consequence will be a rapidly expanding number of deaths by malnutrition and starvation and disease.

And again, this brings us back to the question, just before move on of, you know, if this is, if Israel wants to admit that it's engaged in total war, that's the, if that's your tactic, if that's your strategy, they are not owning up to it. No, the most funding it to the tune of like we've heard so many people in the Israeli government say we could not continue the war without the unconditional support basically of the United States. The United States is attempting to kind of condition it with gentle guidance from the White House that, hey, let's, you know, pull back on killing aid workers. And that's where you end up. So it's like, not only is it awful and tragic, it's also just glaringly dishonest and disorganized. The level of like incompetence when you have a helicopter firing on their own soldiers. I mean,

it's just. And if the aid community believed that it was a fluke kind of tragic accident, they would not be withdrawing all of their personnel from the situation. Like their blunt reaction to this. Yeah, that's true. Shows that they believe that this is deliberate. As Barack Ravid wrote in that Axios article, the Emiratis handle much of the coordination with the Israeli government for the humanitarian mission, which has delivered tons of supplies to the enclave via a ship from Cyprus over the past few weeks. So the Emiratis backing out, it's not just some random country that said no. I mean, there's a huge component. Yeah. And they're the ones that Israel's always thinking is going to bail them out in the end.

Like, oh, well, who's going to reconstruct this after we've destroyed it? Oh, we'll get the Emiratis and Saudis to do that. You know, you've got Sullivan meeting with the Saudis now, pushing this delusional fantasy that they're going to come to some mega deal that involves Israeli normalization without any progress toward resolving the question of the Palestinians beyond simply annihilating them all. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing.

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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.

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Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brent, here's some interesting, actually, reports about the press, actually. So this is Netanyahu. We can go to, this is 8.8. Netanyahu, again, this is translated by Google, said, Al Jazeera, this is a tweet, harmed Israel security, actively participated in the October 7th massacre and incited against IDF students and soldiers. It is time to remove the shofar of Hamas from our country.

The terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel's activity. Ryan, you know, whatever. I mean, it's true. Al Jazeera is absolutely an arm of the Qatari government. There's no question about it. Funded by the Qatari government.

Right, yeah, absolutely. And that doesn't mean, I mean, actually I read Al Jazeera a lot throughout this conflict and have found it fairly helpful. It's somewhat interesting that Netanyahu is just now cracking down on Al Jazeera, because it kind of gets to what we were just talking about, in how Israel wants to sort of maintain the moral high ground and puts a lot of effort into even just naturally the propaganda of maintaining the moral high ground. I can't believe they allowed Al Jazeera actually to operate in Israel this long, to be honest. Well, Israel wants normal relations with the wealthy Gulf countries. And so just banning one of the most popular news channels in the world is a step against that. Israel has already basically made it

impossible for Western media to operate inside Gaza. Al Jazeera is, to the extent that it is a Western news out in the sense that people in the West are familiar with it. People in the West go on it. It has an office here in Washington, D.C. It's kind of a known quantity in the way that some other kind of Middle Eastern news networks aren't. And so Al Jazeera was really the only well-resourced news outlet that was watched by Westerners in Gaza. And now the Knesset has passed this law and Netanyahu's saying he's going to enforce it, that's going to ban them. It's not entirely clear how that affects their ability to operate inside Gaza. Al Jazeera reporters do coordinate with the IDF when they're going to go to different areas. Sometimes that coordination has led to them

being killed, as The Intercept, we've reported on some of that. And the IDF has then also dragged its feet in allowing kind of rescue personnel to get to the, in the case of the Al Jazeera cameraman and reporter that died back after December, back in December. Does this mean that Israel will now consider all Al Jazeera correspondence kind of like fair game in their kill zones in Gaza? I've reached out to Al Jazeera correspondents kind of like fair game in their kill zones in Gaza. I've reached out to Al Jazeera. I don't have an answer back on what they understand the new laws affect to be. But people who have not been following this closely might not realize that Israel, which continues

to call itself the only democracy in the Middle East, has censorship laws that are as aggressive as anywhere in the world. You can be arrested for reading different news outlets. You can go to jail for reading different Telegram channels, for commenting or liking, or even just being subscribed to a particular channel. Anything, and that's what they describe as kind of terrorist sympathizing or terrorist supporting, but they consider anything basically affiliated with Palestinians to be terrorist sympathizing. It's absolutely also true that Qatar has housed some Hamas leadership. Well, they do. That's where the negotiations are happening. Yeah. Right. But

even before, I mean, that, you know, you had Hamas leadership. Taliban's there. Like, Qatar is like the Switzerland of the Middle East. When there's a crisis, that's everybody goes to Doha. And like the U.S. begged, actually, Doha to allow the Taliban, for instance, to have its headquarters there so that we could negotiate with Taliban. Like, you need somewhere for that to happen. And so Qatar has been the country that's been willing to do that. It also has a base of 10,000 American troops. So it's not as if it's like just a nest of terrorists. It's exactly what we want. Well, actually, it is a nest of terrorists, American ones, yes. So the Israeli law, interestingly, and again, they're making this argument that Al Jazeera poses a

significant threat to state security. And it's just, I don't want to bring TikTok into this, but it does sort of echo some of the conversations about, obviously, they're involved in a hot war, and we're sort of involved in a cold war with China. But yes, cracking down on speech when conflict boils to the surface is, you know, you understand from the perspective of security why, yeah, sure, free speech is harmful to security. You obviously have to have red lines. And to show that this is really not about, you know, who's funding it and it's about what they're saying. We can look at this Channel 13 report that aired yesterday, absolutely unhinged and hysterical. So if you want to read it, you can read the translation of it here. This is a Hebrew language report about a young reporter named Eunice Tarawi,

who, if you are following this conflict, you have probably seen his work. He and others have done absolutely essential work of just following IDF soldiers' TikToks and other social media accounts and finding the evidence of war crimes that they post themselves and then reposting that, but taking it out of the context of them bragging about it to their friends. So they did this long investigative report naming this guy, essentially trying to put a target on his back. And what's amazing about the report, and you can find it on Eunice's Twitter account, is that they don't identify a single fact that he got wrong ever. Like, no, you would think that, okay, because he's done dozens and dozens of these at this point. Most of the ones that you've

probably seen, these TikToks of them, you know, wearing women's underwear or blowing up a mosque or riding around in little bicycles or grabbing a trophy, or as the one we just showed, the French national admitting to having just tortured a detainee. Like those are his. You would think that there'd be one case of mistaken identity or something that an entire investigative news outfit at Channel 13 could find to kind of undermine his work. They found nothing. Instead, what they found are IDF soldiers who say that they have been bullied as a result of him posting the evidence of their either war crimes or despicable behavior. Because they quibble a lot with the definition of what a war crime is. Fine. Call the the parading around in the panties

of a displaced person, call it despicable. Call it whatever you want. Right. And we can play this second part here. Here's the French national complaining, he says, complaining that his admission of torture is now causing people to say mean things to him online. I'm being threatened with all sorts of lawsuits and in international court,

but I know it's one big BS. They marked my nephew who lives in France and his family because it's easy to turn the hate towards him. Now, I'd say, look, leave his nephew alone, leave his family alone. But this soldier himself to be complaining that he's now potentially facing prosecution in the International Criminal Court or prosecution back in France because Yunus exposed his admission of torture. And also, all Yunus did is take a public post and share it elsewhere. Like the French national with the IDF is the one who decided to commit torture and then post about it. Or if he didn't torture the guy, he then lied about having just tortured somebody on his own social media. And so I think what this shows is that, yes, they don't like Al Jazeera, but it's not because of how Al Jazeera is financed. Yunus is not getting cutter funding.

He's just a guy who's good at using social media and has been dedicated in an impressive way to this craft. I've worked with him in the past. We've worked on some stories together. We haven't ended up publishing any yet over at The Intercept. I hope we do. He's done incredible work. And as a journalist, I think we all need to stand by him and condemn this type of Channel 13 threat, unless they've got something. They have nothing. If they said, okay, this reporting was flawed in these ways, then fine. But to say it's unfair that because of Yunus's reporting,

the International Criminal Court is looking into this French national, you know, that's your consequences, actions meaning your consequences or whatever. Yeah. To your point about Al Jazeera, I mean, I think they may genuinely care about the source of funding, but it seems as though the priority here is cracking down, basically right on dissent. It's a question of, and again, like I said before, yes, from a security, pure security perspective, speech and reporting and journalism is, sure, it's a threat to security, right? What have, though, are in democracy is red lines that protect your ability to speak, even if so that it doesn't allow for fascist total control of everything. And so, yeah, huge concern. It'll be interesting when John Kirby has to answer questions about that going forward.

And I think the White House, I think Matt Miller actually said basically they support freedom of the press. And basically the implication was that they don't support cracking down on Al Jazeera from Israel's point. 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. Back here in the United States, at least voters have a way to express their anger

at what's going on here. So Hillary Clinton appeared on a late night program to talk about the way that here in the U.S., the world's cradle of democracy, we have a way to work through these very complex issues. Let's roll Hillary here. It's Biden versus Trump. We know that. Yes, it is. It is. What do you say to voters who are upset that those are the two choices?

Get over yourself. Those are the two choices. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, it's kind of like one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies. Yeah, OK. I mean. OK. I don't understand why this is even a hard choice, really. I don't understand it.

But we have to go through the election and hopefully people will realize what's at stake because it's an existential question. What kind of country we're going to have, what kind of democracy we're going to have. And people who blow that off are not paying attention because it's not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they're pretty clear about what kind of country they want. So if you are not planning to vote because you don't like either choice, maybe you're planning to vote for RFK Jr., according to Hillary Clinton, you're simply not paying attention. She doesn't understand why this is even a hard choice. That's a direct quote from her. I had the pleasure of watching the entire interview, Ryan, just for the sake of hashtag journalism. And towards the end

of it, she's promoting this new Broadway play that she produced about the suffragette movement. And Jimmy Fallon is lavishing her with these kind words, noting that when she goes to a Broadway play, she gets a standing ovation. This is a direct quote from Fallon. He says, it was a pleasure. It was an honor to sit next to you at some Broadway production. And it's like total state TV, like North Korea, while she is patronizing voters who don't want to pick between Donald Trump or Joe Biden as people who are just, they're simply not paying attention. They don't get why this isn't a hard choice. It's very, very easy to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, don't you see? They're so very different.

A huge portion of the Democratic electorate disagrees. And we had elections last night that showed that. We had polling going into those elections that showed that it was going to be ugly for Democrats. We can put up this piece from my colleague, Prem Tucker, over at The Intercept. People should go check this one out. But the headline here, so you can find it, one in five Wisconsin Democrats said Gaza war will impact their primary vote in that he has an amazing crosstab of a poll. I've never seen anything like it. It said voters under 29 supported an immediate and permanent ceasefire by what, 100%? I had to double check that. 100%.

Because I've never seen it. Not that I doubt that that's true, but I've never seen it. Like you said, I've never seen it. Not that I doubt that that's true, but I've never seen it. Like you said, I've never seen anything like that. Not even a one. Not sure. Like just a hundred, a hundred percent. And so so last night, if we can jump to. Although, by the way, that poll was commissioned by Listen to Wisconsin. As the Intercept story notes, it's a campaign to mobilize protest votes during the battleground

state's primary in order to push the White House to change course. The other thing the Intercept story notes is that in 2020, Biden won Wisconsin by some 20,000 votes, which is actually a smaller margin than Trump won by in 2016. Right. And so if we can actually control them, jump to B5. With a decent amount of the vote reporting last night, it looked like that the uninstructed vote was going to at least hit 30,000, which, as you said, is 50% more than the entire margin by which Biden beat Trump in 2020. Now that fuller results are in, it's much closer to 50,000 people came out and voted uninstructed. So these are people who are paying enough attention to know that if they vote uninstructed,

this is what it means. That's enough people to throw the election to Trump. People who are screaming, warning. And what the organizers have said here is that despite all the heat that they're taking from Democratic Party officials for what they're doing, most of these folks were very close to lost by what they're seeing Biden do in Gaza. What this is doing is giving them an opportunity to have their voice heard one last time. And I don't know if there's anything Biden can do at this point to act on it, but at least they're giving him a chance. They're saying, look, we're still participating in this process that is leading to genocide at the moment,

but we're still participating in it because we have some hope that our voice is going to lend some power to the side that is fighting to end this genocide. Whether it can happen between now and the election, I don't know, but it wasn't just Wisconsin either. This is in the context of new polling showing Trump with a fairly comfortable lead in six of seven swing states. So it's not as if Biden is sitting on a comfortable margin where he can say, you know what, 50,000 people in Wisconsin can go pound sand. Right. And that's where, to your point, you know, whether or not Hillary Clinton agrees on the sort of definitional question of genocide or Joe Biden agrees on that question, they are

actually hurting their chances by, again, Hillary Clinton going out there and being incredibly flippant about how people don't understand. They're not paying attention. It's not a hard choice. Since 2016, that has been exactly what has screwed Democrats over and over again in some of these close competitions. That's exactly the wrong way to treat voters who do feel, and for some genuine intellectually defensible reasons, that the choice is absolutely a difficult one between Trump and Biden, between Trump, Biden, RFK Jr., or between just not voting. So to treat people like their concerns aren't serious is how you alienate them further and further. And it's something that Democrats have been doing for almost a decade now on that

Trump question in particular that Hillary Clinton once again brought up about how, yeah, he's just, he's so unhinged. Well, people think that about Joe Biden too, for what it's worth, that Trump might be temperamentally, transparently more of a madman, but that Joe Biden policy-wise acts just as much, if not more, like a madman. And that's a perfectly intellectually defensible position. She could have a long, interesting conversation with someone about it. But instead, when she's in public, she's just saying, nope, you're not paying attention. You're too dumb. You're too dumb and lazy to figure this one out. It's just idiotic as a strategy, and it's going to make things much, much worse for them.

And in New York, the organizers were pushing people to do a blank ballot. Probably a bunch of people watching this did that. We don't have final results on that. New York takes several years to count its votes. The traditional years-long vote count. Yeah, we'll know by 2029 how that went yesterday. But let's talk about two interesting actual non-symbolic elections. One, let's get to the Zuckerberg one in a second. But first, did you see the one where Milwaukee and the surrounding area was asked if they wanted to spend hundreds of millions of more dollars on education? Tell us about this, Ryan.

They won. Yeah. I mean, it's looking like it's going to win, right? It's like 50, 51% right now. I don't think we can call it yet. But basically, it asked, you know, for the purpose of, you know, maintaining high teacher quality, arts, sciences, etc. Are we, you know, can Milwaukee and the surrounding area kind of bust its budget and spend more on education? 51 to 49 is the number as of right now, according to TMJ4. Pretty solid at this point. Yeah, they'll pay $216 more in taxes for every $100,000 of their home's value.

And that's Milwaukee Public Schools. Milwaukee Public Schools, as this TMJ4 story rightfully notes, it's facing a $200 million budget deficit for the next school year. That school district is an abject disaster. I'm not from Milwaukee. I'm from outside of Milwaukee. But just about everybody can acknowledge the deep, deep problems in Milwaukee public schools. Milwaukee in general is not in a great place right now. And Milwaukee public schools are suffering enormously. Obviously, there's some real fallout from the pandemic in terms of learning that increasingly is obvious. Ryan and I could probably debate the question of what teachers unions have done to Milwaukee Public Schools. I'm sure we

disagree on that, but it's another really, I mean, serious, the school district is in a world of hurt. So it's not entirely surprising. Right. Money alone doesn't solve the problems, but taking money, taking significant amounts of money away certainly doesn't help. You can see where, I mean, it's, it's obviously close, but you can certainly see where people were favorable to it. And interestingly enough, Wisconsin as a whole, not just Milwaukee, but the state as a whole approved question one last night. We just had that one up so we can put question one back up. So yeah, question one is amendment amendment that stipulates, quote, private donations and grants may not be applied for, accepted, expended, or used in connection with the conduct of any primary election or referendum.

Question two, which also, again, you can see question one, you can see the Milwaukee area, which voted on the MPS question, voted against question one. But question two is that it requires that, quote, only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums. That one also passed. And Ryan, I am really curious for your thoughts on this because I was trying to, the election issue, even though my own publication covers it really closely, for me, it always just made my eyes kind of glaze over. And it seems like it's one of those things that is owned in many cases by like outright crazy people are talking about it all the time. You're just like, calm down. It's just everyone relax here. But when you dig into what happened with Mark Zuckerberg's,

what's the, it's like CTCL, the acronym, the group that he at least ostensibly was founded to help people vote during the pandemic. When you look at what they did with that billion, those billions of dollars, I imagine if the Koch brothers at the height of their sort of limited government giving during the Tea Party era had done what Mark Zuckerberg did, or another like a Sheldon Adelson or now a Miriam Adelson had did what Mark Zuckerberg did. If she did that in 2024, 2028, for example, just in Wisconsin, Mark Zuckerberg's group gave out 31 grants, 28 went to cities, 20 of those cities voted for Biden and only eight ultimately voted for Donald Trump.

So basically he's flooding the zone with money and with aid to counties that are almost certainly going to go for Biden, not like necessarily swing counties, but overwhelmingly counties that are going to go to Biden. And as Katie Porter said about her own race in the California Senate primary. It looks a whole lot like rigging an election when you can just have billionaires flooding the zone with money to swing different districts. I don't like it. So I thought this was actually fantastic. I thought it was worded, both questions were worded very tightly. Ryan, what did you make of it? I mean, I agree on the principle that the public should be funding elections, not private folks. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the tears of Republicans in Wisconsin because they took over the state.

They gerrymandered the heck out of it. And then they tried to basically defund the election apparatus and make it really difficult for people in Wisconsin cities to vote. And then they're like, hey, wait a minute. It goes back and forth. We're trying to make it really hard for people in cities to vote. Now you're coming in and making it easy again for them to vote. That's completely unfair. So yeah, I agree. The public should finance elections. But also kind of Republicans brought it on themselves with their like really partisan gutting of the election system and election apparatus and kind of like made space for somebody like a Zuckerberg to come in and try to fix it.

So let's just have functional elections. Like we're more than 200 years into this democratic experiment here Because the United States of America, let's let's just like in Brazil. They know the results by like 9 p.m every night on an election night and and and they're like And they're audited they're checked like it's it's legit like this can be done. Of course it can be done But we're so, yeah, to your point, we're so owned by private interests that have co-opted the system, whether it's from the left or the right. And, you know, I actually think this is a great measure in and of itself just because

it prevents people from the left or from the right from doing this in the future. Zuckerberg replicated what happened not just in Wisconsin, but actually in some of those swing states that we were showing are really, really tight races right now. So to some extent, you know, if you're declaring, you know, unlimited money in politics and you have the way that like the CTCL operated and you're saying we're not going to put any limits on that and you can just sort of do it, it can happen in different ways than just what the CTCL did. There could be different, that can be exploited.

I mean, they really pioneered a new method of kind of electioneering in 2020. So I think to your point, yeah, it's the, there have to be dramatic questions about how the elections are run in this country. The second one, I don't know anything about it. You can't have poll workers who are volunteers now? Like that feels, that can't be right. Well, so it was about curating ballots. And that's kind of a different can of worms if you're sort of funding ballot curation. Is that when you go door to door and pick up ballots for people? Right.

So if you're doing it and you're allowing, some states allow like volunteers to do it. Actually, my boss, Molly Hemingway, wrote a great book about this called Rigged, which a lot of people would look at and be like, on the left, they'll look at that and be like, this is crazy, like blah, blah. You read the book, there's basically been no substantive pushback to it at all. It's super interesting. And you see, yeah, some of these processes like ballot curation that you heard nothing about in the media were being funded in heavy-dem districts by things like Zuckerberg and by people who are not election officials and are volunteers. And just if you're uncomfortable about the process of somebody's vote, actually making it to the counting position. Or even if you're not, the book made me personally very uncomfortable with the laws and the way that it's run in some states. But Ryan, partially that's also the problem is like our system of government and federalism means that we have a patchwork of election laws based on different states' decisions to run their elections.

So it's just a blast. 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. Lena Kahn appeared on Jon Stewart's show, The Daily Show. Finally. The Daily Show. She appeared on Jon Stewart's show now that he's not at Apple, which is what we're going to get into.

And so Jon Stewart revealed during this interview with Lena Kahn that Apple had effectively blocked him from having her on. Let's play a little bit of this back and forth with Jon Stewart and Lena Kahn. It's already being consolidated. Apple has bought 30 AI models. Microsoft has probably bought. Google has bought. They all buy AI startups and put them behind their paywall.

And they're already having an arms race to see who will be either the monopoly or this will be an oligopoly. I got to tell you, I wanted to have you on a podcast. And Apple asked us not to do it, to have you. They literally said, please don't talk to her. Having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just, I didn't think they cared for you is what happened. They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?

I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies. I mean, going back all the way to the founding, there was a recognition that in the same way that you need the Constitution to create checks and balances in our political sphere, you also needed the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to safeguard against concentration of economic power because you don't want an autocrat of trade in the same way that you don't want a monarch. Apple disagrees. Yes, exactly. So first of all, lean a con for president. Second of all, Luther Lowe, you can put this up here, pointed out that part of the DOJ's

suit against Apple says, quote, Apple's conduct extends beyond just monopoly profits and even affects the flow of speech. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its role as a TV and movie producer and had exercised that role to control content. This was filed before they knew the lengths to which they were going to control what Jon Stewart was able to put on his podcast, which he's talked about a little bit since then. In reference to China, right? China and yeah, and just, yeah, it sounds like anything that was encroaching on their interests. And I think it was Matt Stoller, obviously, who made the point about, you know, here's Jon Stewart on Paramount, on Paramount Network, then saying what he couldn't do on Apple. So, you know, some might say, oh, this is perfect competition. You see how it works. But imagine if Jon Stewart wasn't Jon Stewart. Would Paramount allow a lesser known Jon Stewart who wanted to interview Lena Kahn to interview Lena Kahn?

So Paramount is for sale. There's that. So who's going to buy that, Apple? That's a good question. But I think there's also something even more interesting, which is what happened with Parler in the App Store after January 6th is that in terms of Apple monitoring and controlling speech, the App Store is unquestionably a duopoly.

That was hilarious. I mean, arguably a monopoly. If you have an iPhone, you have to use the App Store is unquestionably a duopoly. That was hilarious. I mean, arguably a monopoly. If you have an iPhone, you have to use the App Store. January 6th was basically organized on Facebook. Facebook groups. And afterwards, right, there were a couple of parlor images that circulated. A Facebook app. Yep.

WhatsApp. Which is just text messaging. They're going to ban text messaging. And so, yeah, then they just, Apple just kicked Trump, you know, they all kicked Trump off their platforms, and then they kicked Parler off, which was hilarious because, A, like I said, it was mostly organized on Facebook, not Parler. Parler also. But Parler was tiny.

It was tiny. Like it would have happened with or without Parler. Parler also. But Parler was tiny. But it was tiny. Like it would have happened with or without Parler. But the other ironic part of kicking Parler out was that the entire argument about cancel culture had been that, okay, look, you got kicked off Facebook. You don't like it. Go start your own platform. Facebook's a private platform. They make their own rules. So some naive folks, you know, took them at their word. And were like, okay, we will go build our own platform. You don't want us on yours? We'll go build our own. And they're like, oh, yeah, not like that.

We're nuking your entire platform. Yeah. Not defending the people on Parler or anything like that. That's not the point. You don't have to, yeah. The point is they were told to go create their own platform if they didn't like the rules of the other private platforms and then were nuked anyway.

And that had nothing to do, this is the point in the DOJ suit, this is the point that Stoller makes and this is the point that Lena Kahn is making. That had nothing to do with Apple's business. Apple didn't get rid of Parler for business reasons. They might have thought it was good PR, better PR than allowing Parler to sit there and get questions from Ben freaking Collins over at NBC about how they're just, you know, fueling disinformation because they allow a tiny app to remain on the App Store. So maybe you can make that argument. for business reasons because I think the business reason was deflect attention.

To Facebook. Defect regulatory attention away from Facebook and their own platforms over to Parler. So that we solved the problem. I mean, there's that argument, but they're doing that ultimate. That's even that is rooted in political reasons. I guess. But once you're a monopoly, politics and business are the same thing. Exactly. Yeah.

And that's exactly the point that Jon Stewart and Lena Kahn are making. And Lena Kahn, I'm sure we have some listeners and viewers who are in businesses where Lena Kahn is treated as public enemy number one. If you talk to people who work in those sectors, it is the specter of Lena Kahn looms so large. There's fury at Lena Kahn and people who work in like M&A, businesses that are engaged in M&A. Exactly, people who do the mergers. The people who do the mergers and the executives who benefit from the mergers hate her. But everybody else, even at those companies, is better off because what do those mergers lead to?

Enormous amounts of layoffs and then consolidation of the companies, which means workers get treated worse and customers get treated worse and suppliers get treated worse. And Lena Kahn lays all this out in a really erudite way in that interview with Jon Stewart. And it also hurts, it turns out, shareholders. Like shareholders are noticing that when these mergers are blocked either by LinaCon or by the specter of LinaCon, that both companies' share prices go up. that, oh, it turns out it is a collusion of executives who are defrauding workers, customers, suppliers, and shareholders, and just hoarding wealth for themselves. There was an amazing sort of green light for M&A during the Obama administration, the Trump administration, especially in tech and media. And man, is it amazing how sensitive people in those positions have been. It's not amazing. I would be too if my job was

to do mergers. I would probably not like Lena Kahn. On the other hand, she's making a lot of defense business for you. And people might wonder, you know, hey, why is Lena Khan's interview on Jon Stewart newsworthy? Well, Lena Khan's tenure at the FTC has had pretty sweeping consequences on the economy, and that's why they're so sensitive about it, obviously. But the pendulum's swinging back and sort of having a chilling effect on M&A. There are people who hate big tech on the right, whose offices on Capitol Hill are super opposed to Lena Khan. This is one of the things we didn't have enough time to get to with Ted Cruz back in the holiday season, because he wrote a book basically about tech, about why big

tech, there were a lot of parts in the book about why big tech is bad and overly consolidated. Ted Cruz is a huge opponent of Lena Kahn because from a limited government perspective, the FTC, I mean, I think a lot of like hardcore conservatives would just get rid of the FTC, but the FTC is, you know, very, very much a sort of encroaching regulator and you can quibble around the edges with what Lena Kahn has done. But ultimately, if you're worried about consolidation and big tech and baby formula and meatpacking and all of these different price problems that consumers are having, I find it very difficult to make the argument that in the big picture, Lena Kahn is a net negative. I think that's basically insane. I think the effect that she has had is clearly a net positive, even if from a conservative perspective, you can quibble with some of the regulatory approaches. Yeah, and Cruz has flirted

with supporting her in different ways in the past. And if he has recovered from his last interview here, he's welcome to come back on the program. I don't think he had a problem with that interview. He loved it. They're shilling books. Yeah. And his podcast. Who would ever show books so aggressively? Not you, Ryan. Not me. The ladies of The View have some thoughts on whether or not they're better off than they were four years ago, whether you were better off four years ago. A viewer of this program flagged this for us and was like, I think you guys will enjoy this one.

Indeed. So let's roll a little bit of this clip. I want to get Emily's reaction to this. I think the Democrats need to do more in getting the message out that, yes, we actually are better off right now because of all of the things that Biden has done. But I will say this, you know, while Trump may have, you know, came up with this Operation Warp Speed, which I don't know why he came up with that term, I do believe shouldn't have been in the White House in the first place, handling the response. Someone with absolutely no medical experience. And the one person, Dr. Fauci, who you think very highly of and he thinks very highly of you, was basically silenced by the White House.

I know we all vividly do. Every picture in a mask, from work to school to not being able to see family. My parents don't live nearby. I can't fly. I mean, you couldn't go on trips and not trips like for fun. I just mean literally to get to people you love. It was isolating, depressing. So I laughed that someone didn't catch that part when they said, we're going to go out and ask people, how were you four years ago? That is a time my brain is trying to completely block out. Didn't women have better reproductive health rights?

Yes. Four years ago? Listen, as black people, we were not in this insanity of trying to figure out why our history is no longer welcome in the educational system. For the record, four years ago, Roe hadn't been overturned yet, although the judges put in place would be, and abortions actually have gone up. I thought Whoopi did make two good points. That four years ago, A, Roe v. Wade

was still the law of the land. Right. And we didn't have this bizarre backlash with the books and the, like, in Florida, like you've got these permission slips where, is it okay for your children to be read a book by a black author, stuff like that. I mean, there's also, like, clear pornography in some of those libraries. Well, that was there four years ago.

That's true. That's true. And nobody, you know. What did Donald Trump do about the pornography? Yeah, the world seemed to keep spinning. Probably not much. Yes. Just fine. So, I thought you made some good points on that one. But I think the Democrat effort to do this four years ago thing and point to the pandemic as a gotcha isn't quite going to work because of, I think significantly because of people's amnesia, willful amnesia. They want to forget what that was like. April 2020, yes, horrible. As they talk about that program, people couldn't

find paper towels, toilet paper, basic. People were dying. People were scared for their lives. Everybody was getting hammered by like two in the afternoon, which is fun for like a few days. But then after a while, it's like, if you look at alcohol consumption, it's still up really high. The data, right. I didn't know that it was still up. Yeah, alcohol-related data. You see this massive spike. Yeah, over the last five years, it's still up really high. Makes sense. It's a habitual habit-forming type of thing. Well, and you're talking about a different amnesia than I think the Biden campaign is

talking about. So this whole segment was in response to sort of both the Trump and Biden campaigns sparring on this Reagan era question of ask yourself, were you better off four years ago? Because, and there's polling data, we can put D2 up on the screen here. This is a Fox News poll from December. Economic conditions, you personally, 64% of people said negative. Only 36% said their economic conditions personally were positive. And that's even higher when you ask about the country as a whole. We can move to the next element here. Yeah, it's December. Have you been helped by President Biden's economic policies? Once again, in December, only 17% said they've been helped. 38, oh, this is December 2021. Now, last December, 46% of people said they've been hurt by President Biden's economic policies. Only 14% said they've

been hurt. Now, a Fox News poll, actually from just a couple weeks ago, so March 22nd to 25th, over half of voters, they asked directly, are you worse off than you were in 2020? Are you better or worse off financially was the exact question people were asked. This is of registered voters. And only about one in five voters, Fox News reported today, answered yes, according to their latest survey. Just 22% said that they're better off than four years ago, while more than twice that many, 52%, say they are worse off. So when you put that question to actual voters, not the multimillionaire hosts of The View, the results are totally different. And The View was sort of conflating the pandemic and all of the other kind of cultural issues. The Biden administration, I think, is sort of doing the same. I think COVID amnesia, I agree with, is totally real. On the other hand, while the rate

of inflation may be slowing, inflation on some of those prices in and of itself is still higher than it was four years ago. So I know the Biden administration, and I think they're not wrong about people having some amnesia about the early days of the pandemic, Trump's mismanagement of the pandemic. Most COVID deaths, I believe, actually occurred during the Biden administration, although they would argue that that was set up by mismanagement during the Trump administration. I think most voters, though, they don't have COVID in mind. They don't want to think about COVID, to your point. they're voting on their financial situation. Right. And to the extent they're looking around the world too,

Trump was creating kind of an international incident every other day. The size of his button. And leaving people nervous that he's going to accidentally get in a nuclear war with North Korea. Accidentally or intentionally? Which apparently came pretty close to happening. But Biden is in two hot actual wars in Gaza and in Ukraine. But yes, the economic question is what people are thinking of. And I think it just goes back to housing and rent. Housing and rent is unaffordable. And basically food prices went up significantly in 2021 and rent. Housing and rent is unaffordable. And basically food prices

went up significantly in 2021 and two. That has moderated. And now wages are generally outpacing the growth of inflation, although it's getting close again now. But it hasn't gone on long enough so that you're better off, so that basically you're further behind today than you were four years ago. To me, the tragedy of that from a political perspective is that the U.S. did better than any other country around the world in getting out of the COVID recession and getting out of that hole with the American Rescue Plan and the IRA. We went from a potential depression to the economy surging. The cost was driven primarily by supply chain interruptions from COVID and from corporations recognizing that they had

an opportunity to raise prices. And we were pointing that out at the time and called conspiracy theorists, but it happened. But the downstream effect on people is the same, like prices are up and Biden's president. And so they're going to link those two. My fear is that the next time that we face a recession or depression-like situation, that you're going to have politicians like, well, we didn't get any credit for that. And there was some inflation associated with our response. So let's just let it burn and see what happens. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly possible. And the other thing I want to add, there are a couple of different quotes. Ana Navarro at one point during that segment said, you know, now she's back to playing

words with friends, but during the Trump administration, she was getting death threats. So she just, again, this was in the context. And today you can do both. Today you can do both. Oh, amazing. But she was, this was in the context of her talking about voters, like your average voter and like the, that there's any resonance between Ana Navarro's experience during the Trump administration, where she just didn't have the psychological

comfort to play words with friends, but now she feels comfortable playing words with friends. The idea that she thinks that's resonant with other people in the country, I think it's- I think there's tens of millions of people that are, well, A, they were terrified during the pandemic generally, but are terrified of Trump. No, I think people are genuinely terrified of Trump. I don't disagree with that. And, you know, there's obviously something to the argument that the chaos in the Trump administration that was in some ways fueled by the media, but in many ways fueled directly by Donald Trump, made people uneasy. But Ana Navarro saying that she's back to playing words with friends because Biden is president, kind of for the reasons that we talked about in the Hillary Clinton block. I mean, maybe there's some wine moms around the country with whom that resonates,

but I think a lot of people are actually just as scared now under Biden, maybe because of the hot wars, maybe because they feel what's happening in Israel amounts to ethnic cleansing, or what's happening in Gaza amounts to ethnic cleansing, maybe because they're terrified about the war in Ukraine dragging American troops ultimately into it, or maybe because of- Wondering what Iran is going to do? Right. Respond to Israel striking its consulate in Damascus? Or maybe because of these pocketbook

issues. And, you know, also it could possibly be because of abortion access, abortion rights, which is going to drive so many to the polls. Yeah, agree, agree. And the other one I wanted to highlight was Sarah Haines saying basically that a recovery, she said at one point, you're not going to feel the recovery. After the Great Depression, it took 11 years. Not super comforting to voters in the moment, of course. That was thanks to Obama, like tightening the belt and the Tea Party insisting, you know, taking over in 2010. Oh, she said Great Depression, not recession.

Oh, Great Depression. I love that too. And then Whoopi Goldberg said, if you were coming from another country, you were not welcome during the Trump administration. I don't think that's how most people are voting when it comes to the border this time around. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, a new NPR poll, and then we'll move on. A new NPR poll, Marist poll, came out this morning and found that, yes, the top, top, far and away issue for Republican voters is immigration.

And surging with independence. And that poll, by the way, had Biden up two. And when you put this nationally, and then when you included RFK Jr. and Cornel West and others, he maintained his two point lead. So despite the fact that you've got this Wall Street Journal poll showing Trump up in six of seven swing states, you also have this NPR-Marist poll showing Biden up by two. Nobody likes either of these people. The NPR poll found that people disliked Trump more than they disliked Biden. But also polls are consistently showing that people don't think Biden is up to it.

Yeah. Well, there's that too. We didn't even get to that. By 30 points or so. Another reason people might. Compared to Trump. How pathetic is that? Your opponent is Trump.

And the question is, who's more fit to be president? And you're losing by double digits to that guy? And that's another reason to the words with friends, the silly words with friends point. I actually think that's another reason that people are super uneasy when there's all of these clips of the leader of the free world, an office that, you know, maybe they felt until Trump came with at least some dignity, and we can go back and argue, you know, who initially soiled the dignity of the presidential office. But, you know, at least until Trump, people felt like, you know, this was a sort of sacred space. But now Joe Biden's in there, like, slurring his words and mixing up everyone every other day. That makes people

really uneasy, too, in the same way that Trump tweeting about the size of his nuclear button made people uneasy. So yeah, again, I mean, I think they're so ardently in Biden's corner, partisanly in Biden's corner, that it's a bubble. Not that it's surprising to anyone that the view is a bubble, but. And the answer to that question would have to be James Madison, right? You think James Madison? I mean, the guy like basically eliminated the government. Hell yeah. Put together a little tiny militia. Sounds great so far. That then got whooped by the British and had the Oval Office burned. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's sullying

the Oval Office. Under Trump, the Capitol sort of was sacked. I don't understand how this small government, like, ideology. Limited, Ryan. Ever limited government ideology, like, survived the burning of the White House. You couldn't even. That's how you limit the government. The British literally ate his dinner. His dinner was hot on a plate in the White House. They ate it. 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. 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. 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. Speaking of the sacred dignity of our offices, Dulles Airport facing the legacy of John Foster Dulles is now coming under target for pro-Trump Republicans who have introduced legislation, Ryan,

to rename Dulles Airport, named for John Foster Dulles, to Donald Trump. And as you point out, this would be, meaning that the two major Washington area airports would be Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and then Donald Trump. Donald J. Trump. Donald J. Trump Airport. DJT. DJT. Coming in the DJT. Yeah, you're going from JFK to DJT. So clearly Ryan's already in favor of this. You ran a Twitter poll. Yes. Let's see. How are the results looking? We can put this up. So you have to get rid of that 30%.

So we've got to do a little math here. Basically, five to one or six to one, my followers said that Trump, that the Dulles brothers have done more harm to the world than Trump. Now, in Trump's defense, the Dulles brothers had a little more time to do all of this harm. Emily was telling us before the show started, your mom just finished reading The Brothers. The Brothers is a great book. Everybody read The Brothers if you haven't read The Brothers. It's a great book. It's incredible. You can add on to that Jakarta method, which I think pairs really well with it, which brings in Indonesia.

But yeah, I mean, should we do some of Dulles' brother's greatest hits? I mean, it's hard to find. We don't have time. Yeah, it's hard to find somewhere that they didn't send the world spiraling in a more chaotic direction, but everywhere from overthrowing, you know, so overthrowing Arbenz in Guatemala and overthrowing the Shah in Iran, which in a pretty direct link led to 9-11. I've got a piece at the Huffington Post that will explain how you can draw a really direct line from that to there. Then you've got Lumumba in Congo. We did a whole long interview on that earlier. of this? Karno and Indonesia. But then also just setting the stage for this interventionist kind of coup regime attempt. Now, one thing I would add is that what Trump doesn't get

enough credit or discredit for, depending on how you feel, is his interventionist policy in Central and South America during his tenure. And we should, I don't know if anybody's fully put this all together, but Trump talks a big game of isolationism, but was surrounding himself with kind of the most interventionist John Bolton types that kind of haunted the Reagan-era Republicans and still haunt the Republican Party today. Even like the Carter administration. So they tried to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela. They did overthrow Morales for a while in Bolivia before he came back into power. They basically overthrew Correa in Ecuador.

But all of these are much more complicated for the most part than the kind of military-backed coups that the Dulles brothers would do. overt, you know, killing a prime minister or a president and putting in a new one, just clashed, you know, too squarely and fundamentally and hypocritically with American values that they had to find a less kinetic way to do it. And so the Bolivia example is a good one where they basically rigged the election and then put people into the streets and then take power by kind of street force, you street force using kind of propaganda efforts in Ecuador. A similar way, they kind of flip the guy that followed Correa, and then they create this alliance of narco-traffickers and right-wingers in Brazil, similar situation. Well, it's basically happening right now in Haiti. I mean, the Biden administration, like we've covered this for a couple of years, the way that they manipulated the Haitian government

while publicly pushing it to be democratic, et cetera, et cetera, but basically backed the government Henri because they wanted them to accept migrant flights in Port-au-Prince. Yeah, exactly. And then of course, Trump in Cuba, which the Biden administration has completely continued Trump's Cuba policy. So I think it's interesting that the Dulles brothers, if they came back to life and were brought to Langley and were told, got a secret briefing, as they would be entitled to, about what the Trump administration did to make sure that its favored governments either got into power or remained in power throughout Central and South America, I think they would be very impressed and say, hey, I'm glad to see that you guys are carrying on the tradition and in a more sophisticated way. So sophisticated, Trump probably doesn't even know about half of it. I think that's true.

He didn't care about it, but he'd be fine with it. The point that was in me is it's completely bipartisan. This is a tradition that was carried on by certainly the Obama administration, the Clinton administration. You can have arguments about the Carter administration, but John Foster Dulles, who the airport is named after, was Secretary of State throughout the Eisenhower administration, basically. And he passed away in 1959. This dedication was in 1962, right after, I think, Allen Dulles had been pushed out in 1961 after Kennedy was furious with the Bay of Pigs, which had been engineered before he took office by the Dulles brothers and by that sort of early CIA establishment that

continues to, the mentality, the ideology continues to have major influence over our foreign policy today. And Tucker Carlson made such an interesting point recently, that he's basically the more he's learned about recent decades and Cold War history. And to be fair to Cold Warriors, not ones that were in the government, but Cold War activists and voters over the last half you know, half a century, we are learning a lot of new reporting about what was happening just in the last 10, 20 years. I mean, Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, a lot of that is like new reporting. That book came out, what, in 2019? Am I right? Yeah, a couple years ago. Yeah, there's a couple years ago. A little

more than that, yeah. So, I mean, obviously people knew what was happening with the Contras because Congress banned funding of it at the time. But still, some of this information about different coups, we're just getting it now. Like, we're only now getting declassified stuff. We're only now getting people to admit, you know, basically what happened. So as more new information comes up, perhaps these remarks from John F. Kennedy at the dedication, where he even mentions Alan Dulles, I think he was there. He says, I want to say how appropriate it is that this should be named after Secretary Dulles. He was a member of an extraordinary family. His brother, Alan Dulles, who served in a great many administrations stretching back, I believe, to President Hoover, all the way to this one.

Kennedy had basically just pushed Alan Dulles out of office. John Foster Dulles, who at the age of 19 was rather strangely the secretary to the Chinese delegation to the Hague, and who served nearly every presidential administration from that time forward to his death in 1959. Also served, of course, the clients of Sullivan and Cromwell, where he was in and out of. So it's just, your point is a really apt one, that a lot of this is still continuing today, the ideology, the mentality is still continuing to this day. And I think hearteningly, a lot of people on the right who used to dismiss this as like hippie nonsense have come around to it actually really being the excesses of our shadow government. Maybe the Eric Trump compromise, Eric Trump airport. The Eric Trump airport. Well, so some of the, the chief deputy whip,

he's a Republican from Pennsylvania, sort of the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania is the one who introduced this. Co-sponsors are Michael Waltz, Andy Ogles. Who was it? Was it Peters? Guy, I don't know how to say his last name, Reschenthaler. Okay. But so also Paul Gosar, Troy Nels, Chuck Fleischman, red state Republicans for the most part. So I don't, well, I don't think the Trump name is going to catch on at Dulles. Maybe pick another one. Because everyone's ready to get rid of Dulles. I would hope that Democrats would be ready to get rid of the Dulles name. So they just need to find somebody other than Trump and Democrats probably go for it. Are they though? Because literally Biden is doing like Dulles type conduct in Haiti. That's true. But yeah, but it would, it would, it goes to kind of show how sophisticated the new conduct is if we can kind of publicly claim that it's different.

Like, we denounce our past crimes against humanity as a way of signaling that we don't commit those crimes anymore. But we do. Yeah. So at least publicly is what you're saying. Right, exactly. All right, Ryan, you have some interesting reporting on the race in, it's for a Maryland seat, involving Harry Dunn, a prominent figure, a Capitol Police officer who's now running. Yes, yes, indeed. So AIPAC's Super PAC has launched a major air campaign to block

congressional candidate Harry Dunn from winning a Democratic primary in Maryland. Now, you've probably heard of Harry Dunn. He's known for his work as a Capitol Police officer on January 6th, 2001, and he's become a hero within Democratic Party circles for his testimony before Congress and his regular media appearances, slamming Donald Trump and warning of the threat to democracy. He won a congressional gold medal and even published a book called Standing My Ground, a Capitol Police Officer's Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th. Here he is on Jake Tapper's program announcing his run for office. At this moment right now, I don't think any of us have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for somebody else to do something else. You do, until there's nothing that can be done, there's always something that

can be done. And I feel like my role as a Capitol Police officer, I did all I could do to meet this moment that we're in now, to fight, to try to seek justice, accountability, defend democracy. But now I'm stepping into a new role, and I think that I'm up for the challenge to represent the people of the 3rd District of Maryland. In a deep blue district, for your typical Democratic voter, he's an absolute dream of a candidate. For AIPAC, apparently, he's a nightmare because they're on track to drop $3 to $4 million backing his opponent, a standard-issue Democratic state senator named Sarah Elfrith. She's one of more than a dozen local candidates running for the

seat vacated by Paul Sarbanes, and Dunn, until the past few days, was considered the clear front runner. Dunn has raised $3.7 million so far, according to a campaign source. Of that, $2.7 million has been reported. Elfrith, meanwhile, had raised roughly $400,000, largely from high-dollar donors, including corporate PACs. How much he raised in the first quarter of 2024, though, has yet to be announced. The irony for anybody who knows Paul Sarbanes' career is that he dedicated his life to getting big money out of politics. Now, as he leaves Congress, a Democrat hopes to take his seat with super PAC money largely coming from Republican supporters of Israel.

Elfrith appears to have known, or at least hoped, the super PAC support was coming. Her campaign put on its website what's known as a red box on March 21st. Now, a red box is a method of coordinating without legally coordinating with a super PAC. Campaigns are barred from directly coordinating with super PACs, but they get around the prohibition by posting information publicly on a campaign website, typically inside a red box that a super PAC can then use.

If you need a primer on that, go back and check out my 2021 story on the red box put out by Nina Turner's opponent, Chantal Brown, aimed at attracting pro-Israel money. Hers worked too. AIPAC's new ad on behalf of Elfrith does indeed rely heavily on information and footage posted in her red box. It focuses on her record supporting abortion rights, quote, the environment, and quote, our democracy, not once mentioning Israel or any policy related to the Middle East. Here's their first ad.

Sarah Elfrith gets things done. In just five years, she's passed 84 bills, like affordable childcare, expanding prenatal care, and enshrining abortion rights in the Maryland Constitution. Now Elfrith is running to bring that same get things done approach to Congress with so much at stake abortion rights, the environment, our democracy. We need a congresswoman who will deliver. That's Democrat Sarah Elfrid. UDP is responsible for the content of this ad. So Apex Super PAC is called United Democracy Project, which refers to an alliance between Israel, which its backers routinely refer to inaccurately as the only democracy in the Middle East and the United States.

Harry Dunn, of course, has organized his campaign to attract support from Democrats nervous that former President Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Democrats have heavily criticized AIPAC for endorsing more than 100 Republicans who opposed certification of the 2020 election. Taking on a high-profile January 6th officer, suggests AIPAC, has not been bothered by that criticism. UDP's ad campaign cost nearly $600,000 last week. The primary is scheduled for May 14th. With six weeks until the election, the pace of spending suggests AIPAC is willing to drop some four million dollars to lift Elfrith and block Dunn from getting to Congress. But why? Here's the crazy thing. Nobody knows.

In mid-February, the news outlet Jewish Insider, which covers congressional primaries closely with an eye toward policy toward Israel, flagged Dunn as a quote wild card in the race. Dunn as a, quote, wild card in the race. Dunn provided a comment to Jewish Insider saying he supports the legislation to fund Israel's war effort. Quote, Israel has a right to defend itself and I support the goals of returning all the hostages home and eliminating Hamas. I am glad President Biden has advocated for an approach that reduces unnecessary civilian casualties and I support that approach, Dunn said. The crowded congressional primary will decide who replaces outgoing Representative Sarbanes, and the district is solidly Democratic. There is no

serious Republican challenger. So Emily, if you ask people in this race, like, what did Harry Dunn do? 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 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. Joining us now to discuss the fallout of the World Central Kitchen massacre is International

Humanitarian Relief Organizer, Ahmed Khan. Ahmed, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, Ryan. Hi, Emily. Nice to be with you, unfortunately, under these circumstances. And I just wanted to set it up by reading a piece that you published March 23rd in The Intercept to give people context for the work you've done. ongoing aid to Ukrainian frontline villages during Russia's invasion, worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwanda refugees after the genocide, and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army. None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip. But this was late March, before this massacre. Can you talk about what has happened to these relief efforts in the wake of it? Well, it's immediately after, of course, so we'll have to wait and see what happens. But at the

moment, many international organizations have paused their activities, mainly because the local staff does not feel safe. I mean, they haven't been safe for any moment, as we've discussed before, for the last six months. But now they're being killed in such numbers that they do not feel comfortable doing distributions and going to meet the people where they are to distribute them. So we're in a bit of a standstill. I'm actually in Greece, and I have a plane full of urgent medicines that are sort of urgently required in Gaza, and I'm waiting for clearance to bring them there. And it's a very slow process.

It was a slow process before, and now it's basically growing to a standstill. And essentially, it's indicative of a situation where no one in power, none of the decision makers really actually care about the humanitarian situation. There's been plenty of lip service, but the reality on the ground is it is very slow. And there are a number of factors, but it's slow, but essentially nobody in power actually cares about the issue. Can you, you mentioned it's like still the immediate aftermath of what happened with the World Central Kitchen Workers, but can you walk us through a little bit of what so far additional layers of red tape look like to get aid into Gaza? What are some of the big barriers that you're encountering already or that you expect to encounter just to, again, get aid, medicine into Gaza, to the people of Gaza? Well, essentially, the major blocking point is the checkpoint system and the checking of actual physical trucks that come into Gaza through Egypt.

And that's been since day one, since I was first in Rafah on October 9th. And trucks were already backed up then. And it's gotten worse and worse. There are miles and miles and miles of trucks backed up at every checkpoint. So whether it's Rafah on the border, or El Arish, about 45 minutes from Rafah, or Ismaila, another couple hours away. And the trucks are backed up essentially because they don't go through in the numbers they need to go through. And that is, I mean, I've had any number of things happen. I've had incubators taken off trucks because I was told they needed to be on ambulances. I've had blood pressure monitors taken off trucks because they needed to come in ambulances. I've been told that the

crates weren't packed correctly. There were too many crates of the trucks. So any number of excuses to not getting stuff in and essentially, you know, the United States government is fully aware of this. They've been fully aware of this since day one. Senators Merkley and Van Hollen came to RAFA. They saw exactly, they spoke to truck drivers. They've been very vocal since about the situation. So there's nothing new here. It's been like this since the beginning. Essentially, the powers that be don't want aid in significant numbers or the numbers needed to enter. And let's say that they find something on the truck, like the blood pressure medicine or too many crates or whatever else, and they say, oh, this is flagged.

Do they let the rest of the truck through, or do they send what happens to that entire shipment? Depending on where you are, if you are at one of the Israeli checkpoints, they'll send the truck back. The whole truck comes back. And it could come back to a certain checkpoint where if you have another truck available, you can take some of it off, replace it with the stuff that they'll allow in and then send it back. But essentially, you get back in the back of the line. So there's no telling how long it might take. You know, for example, there are trucks that have been sitting in Rafa for three months, literally three months. And you can go through the list. And this is, you know, stuff that I wish, you know, I could make public more widely. I mean, the, you go through,

everything is literally before it enters, everything is, you know, you submit invoices, you submit the packing list, you submit the weight, the quantity, the origin of where it came from, and you just wait and you wait and you wait and you wait. And so it's it's truly soul shattering what you have to go through to get to get stuff in that, you know, is desperately needed and literally is helping keep people alive. And, you know, it's it's it's part of this strategy that i think you know the israeli strategy since october 7th or october 8th has been very clear that their goal is to uh ethnically cleanse gaza and that doesn't mean they want to kill everybody it means they want to get everybody out i think

internally probably there's discussion on whether that means they want to clear out the north part of gaza or all of gaza and that means they want to clear out the north part of Gaza or all of Gaza. And that means they want, you know, people out. And we have hundreds of data points that prove that and to make that a reasonable deduction. So I don't think that's kind of – and they've been open and honest about it. I mean, many members of the prime minister's cabinet and Knesset members have said the same. And so if you look at any of the things that have happened, it looks like a pretty, you know, sort of strategy, a pretty obvious strategy of meeting the end goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza, including the attack on the World Central Kitchen staff.

So this is exactly what I was going to ask you about next. Basically, having gone through all of these protocols, which as you just described, I mean, are incredibly detailed. From the perspective of Israel, the IDF, and from your perspective, having been involved so closely in all of this, it seems pretty clear that they should have confidence in their own processes to clear all of the aid that's attempting to come in, that basically they're doing everything possible, if not more than necessary, to ensure there's nothing involved in the aid deliveries that's going to be used against them or that's going to, you know, have any sort of capabilities, capacity for Hamas to kill IDF soldiers or Israelis. And it seems like you've seen that

up close, that their own processes are very sound. They should have all confidence that what's coming into the country or attempting to come into the country for the most part is safe. Yeah, they have a very good system. They've had a system for years and years of clearing stuff, and they know what they're doing. And they could clear many, many more times tons of food and medicine a day than they're doing. They have the capacity to do it. And certainly the United States government has the expertise and capacity to do it, and certainly the UN agencies do as well. They could assist, but it's just not happening because it's never been made a priority. They talk about it. They talked about it over and over and over again about caring about civilians and

humanitarian assistance, but they don't. They literally, they just don't. I want to read one more passage from your recent piece in The Intercept. You write, it's easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza's 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children, yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I've come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel's end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. So what I'm curious about is when you came to that conclusion, you and I have been

in conversation since the beginning of this war, and I'm curious when you moved from this is a heartless incompetence to this is an actively malicious effort on the part of both the Biden administration and the Israeli government to ethnically cleanse Gaza? Was it a accumulation of the days of it or was there a specific moment where you were like, no, this is deliberate? I don't know that I had an aha moment. It was sometime in October. I was in and out of Sinai two or three times in October at the border. And it was very clear that aid was being slow rolled. It was very clear that they were targeting certain sectors. And, you know, sort of sometime in October, I came to the conclusion, which I think is a reasonable deduction, that there were no mistakes and there are no mistakes. And, you know, these really the IDF tells us all the time, you know, how precise they are.

So the hundreds of doctors that have been murdered, the hundreds of teachers that have been murdered, the hundreds of aid workers that have been murdered. I don't think they're mistakes. The hundreds of children, the thousands of children, but actually I know of literally tens of babies that were simply guilty of being in their cribs. And so these are things that are well known to the U.S. government for many, many years. There's a military term called command and control. Sort of any U.S. government official that's been stationed in the region know the IDF has a problem with command and control. If you wanted to, you could go out and dig up any number of U.S. government officials who've been fired on by the IDF over the last 30 years or so. So what happened yesterday, for example,

it will come out at some point that it was an issue of command and control and local commanders decided to pull the trigger once, twice, and a third time on three different vehicles. But this is not anything new. And again, to come back to your point about the White House, this is nothing that the United

States government doesn't know about IDF activities over the course of 30 years, literally. And probably more than that, the 30 years I refer to as those are the years that I've been, you know, sort of affiliated with the U.S. government or, you know, working alongside these issues. So my last question is just going to be something you told Politico back in December. You were basically dropping out of the Biden 2020 National Finance Committee, like the Biden victory fund. 2024. 2024, yes. Oh, actually, yes. But you said this is bullshit. You make moral compromises being involved in politics and ethical shortcuts, but this is a bridge too far. And Politico wrote,

although Khan has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats in previous election cycles, he admits that he doesn't have the limitless wealth as top tier Biden donors, but he hopes it serves as a wake up call to the White House. Since December, do you think your decision there has served as a wake up call? Do you think that maybe now after the World Central Kitchen situation, that will be a wake up call? Are you hearing from other donors, people involved in Democratic circles, that they're also fed up with this? It's a red line for them with Biden. Basically, what have you heard since then? Actually, I'm so far disconnected from the sort of Washington political scene that I have no idea because I'm literally 24 hours a day just trying to get humanitarian aid into Gaza and help get injured citizens in Gaza out to get medical aid where they can.

So I really don't know. I don't know if anyone cares that, you know, I dropped out. I doubt it. You know, it's just a matter of literally doing what you think is right and hoping other people will come to similar conclusions when faced with the facts. You know, it's the reality of the world we live in, and it's very, very sad, and I worked alongside many colleagues of the seven who were murdered. Somi Frankom, you know, a tremendous person. Damien Sobel, an incredible person with years of experience. But the reality is Palestinians have been murdered

in the same way for six months. They've been targeted, they've been identified, and they've been murdered. They've been hit by snipers, they've been hit by F-15s. They've been hit by Apache helicopters and they've been hit by drones, as was the case, the tragic case of the WCK staff. So I don't know, you know, I don't know what it is,

what will wake people up to the reality of what's happening and what's been happening in Gaza. But, you know, you hear, what I hear are excuses sometimes. You know, this is war and the fog of war. You know, Ryan, like you said, I've been to, I've delivered humanitarian aid in every single war zone in the last 25 years, and this has nothing to do with war. This is the targeting and the murder of innocent civilians. And those aid workers are innocent civilians. They happen to be expats, but essentially the Palestinians, the Palestinian,

as I said, the doctors, the teachers, the midwives, they've all been, they've been all executed in the same way and targeted. The Guardian published an investigation yesterday, speaking of Palestinian civilians, that concluded that it appeared that Palestinian children were being targeted by Israeli snipers. And that for that type of investigation to get into the Guardian, you know, shows the level of the evidentiary standard that had to be meet to get it past those editors there. Yet here in Washington, I wanted to read you one last thing. There's still this belief that these are just unfortunate moments. Here's David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post. He writes, Monday illustrated the spectrum of outcomes we have seen from the IDF. Astonishing precision in targeting some of Iran's most toxic commanders at a secret meeting in Damascus in a consulate,

by the way. And then he says, an appalling sloppiness in an apparently accidental strike on a humanitarian team in Gaza. When you see something like that in the Washington Post, what do you think? Well, I mean, you know, it's David Ignatius, so he's a member of the establishment, a longtime member of the establishment. Probably spent too much time in dreadful Washington, D.C. hotel bars at this point. So you sort of roll your eyes. You know, if you're looking at this situation through a prism of the Hamptons, it's different than if you're looking at it from out here in the world. And, you know, to call it an accident is, you know, it's just embarrassing. You know, an accident is when you sort of trip over a cable. An accident is not when local commanders give authorization to fire three separate times over a geographical distance over a series of minutes.

That's not an accident. And with regard to the Guardian story, that's, I'm unfortunately very aware of this reality. I've been in touch with many families live trying to get them out, and they've been killed in that process. And it's hard to imagine that they weren't targeted, and children as well. There was a three-month-old baby I was trying to get out.

Her parents had already been killed, and we had managed to get the birth certificate. And then she was killed, you know, so just sleeping in her crib, in her uncle's apartment. And it's just very, there's nothing imprecise about it. I've said it and I believe it, that every one of these murders has been targeted. And the answer would be, oh, if we wanted to kill everyone, we could kill 500,000. And I just think they've killed the number they think they can get away with.

So whatever that number is, whether it's 35,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 and 75,000 who are severely injured, it's the number they want it to be. And that number is significant. That means that literally every single Palestinian, every single Palestinian in Gaza has a member of their immediate circle, whether it's friends or family, who have either been killed or severely injured, injured they'll never recover from. And this is aside from the 2.2 million people who have gone through trauma that no one else in the world has experienced. And again, I've been to every one of these situations. Now, Sudan, Congo, nobody on Earth can even comprehend what's going on inside of Gaza.

Relentless bombardment from land, sea and air. So literally, it's 2.2 million people and the few of us who've actually been inside of Gaza since October 7th. And that's about it because it's actually beyond the scope of human comprehension to be under constant bombardment, to have to move your family four, five, six times, to lose members of your family in that process. So I think the people in D.C. are obviously just, they're so disconnected from reality So out of touch that you know, that's that's probably what you would expect Yeah, I think that's right. So last night there was a an earthquake in Taiwan which which produced tsunami warnings in Okinawa where my

mother-in-law happens to be on and like an old old person's like bus trip and So I was texting her and she was sending me video uh of her right next to the ocean um as the tsunami is is predicted to be coming and like there there's there was this moment of a you know half an hour uh to an hour where it was unclear if she was going to be able to get to high enough ground in time and it was a terrifying moment and it made me think that everyone in gaza has been living through that moment you know every minute of the day you know for the last uh five months without any hope that the tsunami wave is going to crest and and and. Because now the wave has passed Okinawa, and my mother-in-law is safe.

The wave has not crested through Gaza. In fact, it seems like it's only crashing harder as a result of this World Central Kitchen Massacre, which, as you said, has to be the intended result. We started the show with Johnby claiming there's absolutely no evidence that any of this was deliberate so we'll leave it to viewers to decide um ahmed thank you so much as always for the work that you do and also for for joining us on this program thanks very much ryan thanks emily i appreciate it you're very right that uh that moment that you went through is exactly what they have gone through every minute of every day and every night for the last six months you can't imagine what that

leaves your psyche like after that if there ever isn't after it and your mother-in-law is now safe right yeah i don't know about the boat we'll find out about that that's right the boat was involved yeah because she gets a boat trip that goes around Japan. Bunch of Miami 70-somethings. Oh, sounds nice. Taking Japan in, and then all of a sudden there's a tsunami. Sounds less nice. Yeah.

Sounds much less nice. Ryan, that was a fascinating interview with Ahmed. Thank you for setting that up. Yeah, I think Griffin hooked that one up. Oh, well, thank you, Griffin. Thank you, Griffin. Producer Griffin. We'll be back here next Wednesday

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Only if you subscribe. Yeah, only if you subscribe. Promo code Ryan's Toupee. That's right. Don't use that. It doesn't work. No, an apostrophe will break the link. It's also not a toupee. That's right. It's not. Well, we'll have someone do the Jimmy Fallon someday and grab your head. But not today.

Today's not the day for that. No. But anyway, we'll see you guys next week. Yeah, maybe next week. We'll see you guys next week back here on CounterPoints. This is an iHeart Podcast.