Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/23/25: Trump Big Beautiful Bill Passes, Secret Crypto Dinner, Trump War On Harvard & MORE

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Trump's secret crypto dinner, Harvard foreign students banned, Trump 'big beautiful bill' passes and more! To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week

early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited

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Welcome to a CounterPoints takeover of this Friday show. Just some programming notes. Stick around for the very end. If you're a premium subscriber, if you're not a premium subscriber, it'll cut off about halfway through. You're gonna miss a lot of good stuff. You know, we give so much of this show away.

You know, we give so much milk away. We got to figure out ways to make you buy this cow. And so we're going to have Matt Stoller and James Lee in the back end of it. Matt Stoller talking about the definition of oligarchy. James Lee doing an interview with a former layman trader about the private equity bubble, which I actually think is one of the, maybe the biggest issue facing the economy right now is the potential collapse of private equity, which could just rip through everything and give us another 2008, 2009. We're also going to talk in the back half

of the show about the latest developments in Israel. And wanted to talk about one piece of that before we move to domestic news, and then we'll pick more of that up. Actually, a producer, Mac, who has the YouTube channel GoodPolitikGuy, picked up on this earlier this week. I only noticed it recently, but Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, Israel's finance minister, gave a speech this week where he basically says he won an internal battle. And Israel is now, because he has won this battle, deliberately targeting civilians and the civilian infrastructure of Hamas and Gaza. No longer just focusing on the military, but going after civilians. That is a crime against humanity. It's against international law. You cannot target civilians, even if they work in the government. If anybody told you that it was legal to kill two

Israeli members of the embassy here in Washington, D.C., because there's a war going on, they are lying to you. That is a crime against humanity. You cannot kill civilian members of the government. The IDF is finally conducting a campaign against the civilian rule of Hamas and not just focusing on the military infrastructure. We are eliminating ministers, officials, money changers, and elements of the economic and governmental system. So we'll talk more about that, what that means about this next phase of the economic and governmental system. So we'll talk more about that, what that means about this next phase

of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the back half of the show. Emily, any quick reaction to that? It's an important clip, so we'll at least have a lot to discuss when we get to that portion of the show, which, again, is for premium subscribers. You can head over to BreakingPoints.com to get access to the back half of these Friday shows. Usually it's more of a party.

We've got Crystal, sometimes Sagar. But now it's like today. You don't want to miss it. It's like Rising Fridays, like circa four years ago. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, you're definitely not going to want to miss that.

Ryan, also, we have in the front of the show, we're going to be talking about Trump's crypto dinner, which happened last night, and the reports are trickling in about exactly how that went. The claim is now that the big, beautiful bill cuts the deficit, which is incredible. So we will break all of that down too. Yeah, not true. We'll have some updates on immigration policy. Trump telling a 400-year-old university, the top university in the world, that it can no longer accept foreign students. They cited no rationale, no legal rationale for that. So that's going to head to court. But, you know, the fight with Harvard is kicking up. And I desperately, you know, hate Trump for making me defend Harvard, you know, one of the worst institutions in the world. But come on, what are you doing? What on earth are you doing um the the though the white immigrant the denmark guy in mississippi is

kind of making waves um on on the on the right and you know across the spectrum the this guy we'll talk about this guy who's been in the country since 2013 was doing everything right went to a immigration hearing uh father of four married to an american citizen uh you know on on his you know he was doing did nothing wrong, except I think they missed one filing or something. Arrested down in Mississippi by ICE agencies in detention now. Trump, now that the stock market has recovered, he's doing his best to smash it again. He's threatening a 25% tariff on Apple, 50% tariff on the EU, and also the old tariffs are still in place. He's going after media matters. Democrats are proposing a whole bunch of different changes that we'll talk

about going forward. This is an interesting story in the, in the bulwark. I mean, even everything you just said, the fact that it's happening all at once, it gave me a little bit of whiplash. I was like, wow, you told me 10 years ago that that would just be the casual rundown of a Friday show. Wow. Okay. There we are. But it is all happening at once.

And everyone give me a little patience. This morning I moved yesterday and had all kinds of tech fun this morning. So if there's weirdness in the audio and if I'm at an odd angle, just we're working on it. Yeah, your computer's buzzing. So is it hard for you to put up elements? If you can, I was just trying and it looks like I'm on an iPad. Because you're on an iPad. Speaking of boomers, I'm on an iPad. Yeah. Cause you're on an iPad. Speaking of boomers, I'm on an iPad. So we will.

Well, your computer broke and you still made it on here. That's right. The one thing that broke. Yeah. That's not, that's not boomer at all. Okay. Uh, so let's, uh, let's start here, uh, with Caroline Levitt, um, talking about the, uh, talking about this crypto dinner last night,

which is, you know, it's hard to remain shocked anymore, but this is truly a shocking level and brazen level of corruption. So let me share this Caroline Leavitt here. On the dinner tonight. You mentioned this is not a White House dinner, but the president is and the Trump family is making money off of this. So can you just explain how is this not the president using the office to enrich himself? All of the president's assets are in a blind trust, which is managed by his children. And I would argue one of the many reasons that the American people reelected this president back to this office is because he was a very successful businessman before giving it up to publicly serve our country.

Did she say a blind trust managed by his? OK, that was comical. That was comical. A blind trust managed by his children. That is that is indeed what what she said said does that mean that could mean a lot of different things by the way it could mean that they are the people who are the the like actual they're they're making the trades and stuff or it could mean that they're managing the people who are handling the investments but it sounds like they're the ones that are handling the

investments from that quote yeah not. Not, not so blind. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I'm sure his, yeah, it's because we're like, give us the money, give us your money. We'll manage it for you. And they're doing all, and they're doing all their deals around the world. Like, how does that, how does that, how does that not make it worse?

Like that feels a little bit worse. Like one of those answers where you're like, oh, wow, this was really bad when When I heard the question, it's worse now that I've heard the answer. So for folks not following this, this crypto dinner, if you what in order to get into this dinner, you had to buy Trump's meme coin. And the top 200 holders of Trump's meme coin would then get access to Trump. And I think the top 15 or 30 would get this like VIP access. Now, the way that crypto works is there's some transparency in being able to follow the coin. And more than 50% of the people who bought into the top 200 and more than 50% bought in the top 30, did so through exchanges that only allow foreigners to participate in them. So we knew for a fact going in that this was a bunch of people from outside of the country who were giving money directly to Donald Trump to enrich him for access to him. Now, the question then is, they just want a selfie?

Or are they actually trying to move policy? Because then you're at the level of bribery. And so the New York Times has... It's incredible. It's exactly what you'd expect, but incredible nonetheless. Yeah. Yeah. Several of the dinner guests in interviews with the New York Times said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

Sang-rok Oh, a Korean crypto executive, arrived at the dinner with a collection of red baseball caps emblazoned with the words, make crypto great again, that he planned to hand out at the event. He said he had flown all the way from Seoul to attend the dinner. Quote, it's kind of a fundraiser for Mr. Trump, Mr. Oh said in an interview at his hotel in Virginia, and he'll always be good to his sponsors. The dinner was designed to fuel more sales. The organizers framed it as a contest. The top 220 buyers would dine with Mr. Trump at his golf club, while the top 25 would attend a more intimate gathering with the president before dinner and go on a tour of the White House. So you can't believe anything I say. I said 230. Just open bribery. And that's not the New York Times. That's Mr. Hananania there. So yeah, so they paid money to Trump, a fundraiser for Trump, not Trump's campaign, which is the way that we've legalized bribery in the United States, but directly to Trump, which is the old school illegal kind of bribery.

Is there, has anybody attempted a steel man of why this is not just flagrant? I think Caroline Levitt did. Speaking of Caroline Levitt, I think she. Oh, because it's a blind. His money's in a blind trust. He doesn't know if all this money that's being given to him actually benefits him or not, because his kids might lose it on cocaine. I was thinking of when she was talking last week about the cutter jet, and she said the notion that Donald Trump would be influenced by anything like that is insane. And I actually really think that's the only steel man that you could possibly come up with. Well, meaning so rich. Well, even with this, at least for a couple of weeks, he was willing to give a middle finger to all the Wall Street guys that were messing with him.

Like that's I don't think it's a good argument, but I think it's the best version of the argument that it's all on the up and up because Trump is just someone who's uniquely resistant to the influence of money in politics, which is how a lot of people see him. On the other hand, that's not how the people who were dishing out millions of dollars to who have dished out millions of dollars to Trump, see him. And that's in this, I mean, you see that in this rundown itself. I think the estimate is about 40% of Trump's net worth is now tied up in the coin, in crypto, which is astounding because that's only happened over the course of the last five months. And this is a man who spent how many years toiling away in the trenches of New York real estate. So it is just to see, Ryan, two things. On the one

hand, the people who are activists in crypto world do fundamentally want to change the global economy, bottom line. That's why they're activists in crypto world. And on the other hand, what they're doing here is so nakedly corrupt that you just, it's head spinning. And so you have activists and corruption combined in one beautiful dinner, one big, beautiful dinner. Yeah. And this is a good example of it. This is a piece in the Wall Street Journal headlined, A Crypto Billionaire Who Feared Arrest in the U.S. Returns for Dinner with Trump. It's about this guy, Justin Sun, who runs a crypto network that is very popular with what the Wall Street Journal calls the criminal underbelly and this this is a top use of crypto is being trying to trying to move money outside of the banking system

if you are involved in things that the banking system is going to flag as as potentially illegal drug trafficking human trafficking uh money money laundering you the underworld stuff. And so this guy was persona non grata until recently, and now he has used this money to buy in. If you are Sam Bankman Freed, you have to be feeling like the biggest moron on the planet. Like you put all of your money into Democrats. And then Democrats went and tried to regulate crypto and then locked you up. Like your move, moron, was to put your money into on the Republican side. He did that too, though. He was fairly.

Yeah, it was. I was like 60, 40. Yeah, he was spread. He was spreading it around. He gave a bunch to McConnell. He talked about this on Tucker's show. Yeah, he was definitely spreading it around. Yeah. But he was a little more – No, he was sort of culturally aligning himself with the left, which is, again, very interesting, too.

Because at the time – it's how quickly culture changes now. At the time, the idea of the – what do they call it? It like so out of vogue now the effective altruism um that was really that's right yeah sort of left wing progressive business circles to the extent that makes sense sort of like the center left circles and so he thought he could pitch crypto as effective altruism instead you're right it right. It should have just been, you know, piracy and take it to the huge amounts of stock just before Liberation Day. Now, in their defense, Donald Trump went to Congress in his State of the Union and announced that he was going to do his Liberation Day. And as Jeff Stein kept complaining about Wall Street, guys, we've been saying he's going to do this. He has said it out loud.

He has said it out loud repeatedly. So what I think it goes to a fundamental corruption in the system that these officials hold those shares at all. Like, if you were a public official, you should, to me, you should not have any kind of a public servant, any stocks. Yeah.

Public servant. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yes. Serving, serving the public put, you know, your,

your money should be in an actual blind trust, not run by. It's insane. I mean, but the thing is, it doesn't matter. And I don't even know. I mean, it matters. It doesn't matter for Trump because I guess what's the best explanation of this? It's always been baked into Trump and there's no other politician like it. actually based a not insignificant portion of his 2020 campaign on biden family corruption um the 2016 campaign was not insignificantly based on clinton corruption um and

that was also about um insecure uh use of messaging like either the the personal emails were said to be the greatest like national security catastrophe uh let's get an update on that how's and foreign influence how's that going how's the how's the trump administration handling it was really particularly about foreign influence peddling both with the clinton foundation and with the biden lobby operation and i think hanani described yeah i think he described one of the pictures from the Times article is like a United Nations of corruption because it was people from so many different countries who were racing to be involved in the dinner. Well, again, Trump is the sitting

president of the United States. So Trump is not like, yeah, the only difference between Trump and Hunter Biden or whatever is Trump has Caroline Leavitt go out there and just say to everyone, well, yeah, people can give him money. It doesn't mean it's going to change his mind. Like he's, he's taking all of this, you know, he's, he's doing all these events. Doesn't mean it's going to change his mind. Whereas with the Bidens, it would be, well, everything is legal. You know, everything that nothing is, you know, it's nothing to see here. Everything is perfectly in compliance. They're just like, screw it. You know, it doesn't, don't even worry about that. The question fundamentally is whether it's changing Trump's mind. It's not. So look somewhere else.

Did you see Tucker? By the way, Tucker, sorry. Sean Ryan was on Tucker Carlson's show this week and brought it up, brought up, I think they were in the context of last week's trip to the Middle East. And Tucker was like, sure, it looks corrupt. And if you're a consistent sort of supporter of Donald Trump's because he is a very effective critic of the swamp in Washington, D.C., there's only one way to be consistent. It would be to see that as outrageous. Yeah, it's corrupt. The only defense of it is that people who like Trump like Trump. And that is cool.

They don't care. The argument is that everything else outweighs the, the personal enrichment. But of course, again, it makes it look like the United States is for sale. And the United States has been for sale in many different ways over many, many years. But there's something about.

Right. All they have is what about, what about us? And there's something also about the sort of pretense of it's not even just a pretense. It's an ambition that as you sort of respect the will of voters, that they respect our laws, that they say, hey, we don't have a spoil system. It's something we're very opposed to as like average Americans. We don't like it when the people who are elected abuse their office for the sake of personal enrichment. But the I mean, it just that's out the window.

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

we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon.

This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous.

But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than

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

to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And maybe we disagree on this Harvard issue. Let's move on to that one. So let me put this up. So the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard saying that, the headline in the Times is is Trump administration says it is halting Harvard's ability to enroll international students. That's that's what they did. They sent a letter to Harvard saying you are no longer eligible to enroll foreign students. students uh they're they're what 27 what's 27 percent like some yes 27 percent of the student body 6,800 um international students attended harvard in the in the last uh school year it had been um it had been 19.7 percent in 2010 to 2011 so it's a slightly increasing uh number uh and so

they're telling har, forget it. Like, you can't do this anymore. Now, as people have looked closely at the letters, it doesn't cite any law. Doesn't cite any authority under which they're going to single out Harvard. Bondi said that this is intended to send a message to the rest of the universities that they better not fight the administration. So, you know, presumably, who knows, presumably the Supreme Court or whoever rules on this will knock this down. We could talk about that, whether or not that's the case, but also the merits of it. I guess the argument on behalf of it is that, hey, it's an American university. It should be there for Americans. The argument for it is that the United States doesn't make much anymore, but we are still the innovation center

of the world. China's challenging us, but we're still at minimum competitive with them, if not better. And the reason for that is that other countries aren't just competing against the top graduates of American high schools, but of the best and brightest from all around the world who come to the United States to go to the best university system in the world. Many of those students then become permanent residents and become citizens and stay here. They found companies like Google here that put us in the forefront of this kind of innovation economy. The ones who don't stay here and return to their capitals or to their big metropoles develop an affinity for the United States and give us another advantage when it comes to kind of soft power around the world.

Because they had a good time while they were here, and they have a lot of friends here, and they understand our country in a way that Americans don't, for instance, understand China. I was talking to a Pakistani guy who was here in the United States a week or two ago. And he travels to China a lot. He's in London a lot. And he was saying that the advantage to him that the United States has is that he doesn't feel like he is a foreigner here, but he doesn't feel like a foreigner. He comes to the United States, he feels at home. He's welcomed. Despite all of this Trump rhetoric and the attacks on immigrants and such, you look around and we're a genuinely diverse, pluralistic, multicultural country. So you go to

China, you immediately feel like a foreigner. And that's not the single out China. That's, that's the case for so many other countries. You just feel out of place. And that gives us this, this advantage, um, without which we're then competing in, you know, textile mills and like just, just manufacturing. And we don't have that capacity right now. So if we get so if we cut off our head, like the body is going to die, too, would be my argument. What's your were discussing, which is the value of foreign attendance at elite colleges and universities. And then the other is the value of plus years, a lot of them probably came to the United States because they were exceptional students and got to Harvard or wherever on the sake of their merit and made incredible companies and careers in the United States because they love the United States. And as we talk about often, immigrants in the United States are often the best Americans because they love the U.S. so much. Yeah, they don't necessarily take it for granted in the way because they come from places where you don't have as much freedom, you don't have as much prosperity. So I don't think it's wise to shut that off completely because some of the most brilliant people from around the world. In fact, it's a real benefit to the United States that still today, if you are high achieving in any other part of the world, you're not going to Chinese universities. You're trying to go to Harvard and Yale and Princeton, wherever else.

And actually, even some of our big flagship state schools. So I think that's actually becomes a, creates a, the United States becomes a magnet for the best talent in the entire world. How we then integrate that talent into the United States is another question. That number, 27% enrollment of foreign students at Harvard, which is the pride of America's higher education system, seems exorbitantly high. That seems like it is actually, you know, this is a publicly funded university funded by U.S. taxpayers. That seems like it probably is closing the door to too many American students. So I think it makes sense to have a conversation about that. On the other hand, policy-wise, this is another sort of creative attempt or an attempt to create a new novel avenue to the – they're like bushwhacking their way to screwing with elite institutions. And I have the letter in front of me just to get what Kristi Noem is saying out there.

They are saying they sent a letter in April to Harvard where they, quote, requested records pertaining to non-immigrant students enrolled at Harvard University, including information regarding misconduct and other offenses that would render foreign students inadmissible or removable. They said twice they got insufficient response. They say as a courtesy that Harvard was not legally entitled to, DHS afforded them another opportunity to comply. Harvard again provided an insufficient response. So. Right. And they're asking for like five years within 72 hours. They have like six demands. Yeah. That include that. And they also are saying that this is under the auspices of a revocation of the student and exchange visitor program, which DHS apparently I didn't know this, right. But DHS, and it is part of this administration-wide effort to, again, like bushwhack their way through uncharted territory to screw with elite institutions via all kinds of different mechanisms, creative mechanisms. And so as much as I want to screw with elite institutions, it just sounds completely silly. It doesn't seem entirely lawless. They do administer

the program, but it seems like it seems maybe silly is the best word. It seems like kind of a joke. And yeah, in the sense that they are the law, it's not lawless, but they're not citing any particular authority that they have as the administrators of this program to just kind of arbitrarily target them because they're not turning over footage of protesters. It's like, get out of here. Who are you, DHS? And I miss the free speech right that would be like, wait a minute, you want the government, the DHS wants a private institution to turn over five years

of video footage of speech that people have made on campus. A heavily funded private institution, a heavily taxpayer funded private institution. That's fine. Still, we're all taxpayer funded on some level. It's like Obama. You didn't build that.

Even if it's public, even if it's public, even if they went to the University of Michigan, asked for five years of footage of protests, like it is First Amendment, the right to peaceably assemble right there in the First Amendment. Not just speech. Peaceful assembly is right there in the Constitution. It's one of the key things that we're so proud of that makes us a free country. DHS demanding that, and if they don't turn it over, they're going to basically try to destroy them, is just a fundamental threat to civil liberties in this country. Now, everything I have said is an argument as an American for the United States of America. I think for a person in the world, you could argue, go ahead, good. It is actually, it will be better for the world if the United States commits suicide. It will be better for these other countries if the United States is not creating a gravitational pull that creates this brain drain out of all of these other countries.

If the United States is weaker and is interfering less in the democratic governance of other countries, that's probably a good thing. Now, for people in the United States, their quality of life will go way down. This country itself will spiral, but the rest of the world may actually do better. So in that sense, you know, I guess, go ahead, Kristi Noem. Yeah, I mean, that 20, again, 27% just seems, it's probably, what? Although, it's probably low. Like, if you think about it, if this is, you know, there's 300 million people in the United States.

There's 8, 9 billion around the world, maybe 10, all competing for spots in the best college and you the american students are getting three quarters of them somebody's putting the thumb on the scale i mean the public funding of the institution is 100 american but um the yeah right but the private the foreign that's what i was just gonna subsidize it yeah that's what i was gonna say it's it's i wonder how much of that is actually merit versus the rich sheiks buying their kids into Harvard or wherever else. So it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a conversation about that. Also, these schools do have legitimate problems with espionage that they kind of opened in or welcomed in for a long time. They seem like they're all kind of cracking down on it now. But whether it's Qatar or China,

there's been all kinds of stuff happening at these institutions. It's hard to tell whether this letter is specifically. Yeah. And a federal judge has already blocked it. Well, that's why I think so. When you said it's a serious threat to higher education, it's like – I look at that on paper and I'm like, yes, that's true. But then I look in practice and I'm like, yeah, I know some of these people, spend time with some of these people, and they're just trolling with a lot of this stuff. And it's not funny if you're harvard um but the only point that i would make is just and again this is it's it's controversial and not entirely fair but the only thing i would say is i don't know how serious they are about going through with a lot of this stuff it doesn't it doesn't make it right right i just think that they're throwing like

jackson pollocking the whole administration like they're throwing everything at the wall and trying to make a beautiful portrait out of their mess. And yeah, it doesn't make it right. It doesn't mean that it's not going to have implications. But just to explain it from their perspective and explain why it doesn't feel like a grave threat to me is partially just because I'm like, I don't think they're going to go through with it. I think they're just doing this to scare the universities into compliance with other things that they are more serious about. And some of those will be. I mean, the endowment tax that's in the big, beautiful bill is significant. That actually is a huge deal if you're Harvard or any of these schools. So some of this stuff is completely serious. Some of it feels like,

OK, we're just creating these funny, like legal ideas that somebody came up with at a happy hour and was like, haha, this will F with Harvard. Let's see what happens. So let's talk briefly about this, this father in Mississippi. And I guess you can let me know if the right is angry that I would that I call him a Mississippi father, just like they're angry about calling Abrego Garcia, Maryland. Yeah, this is. That was the Atlantic headline. No, they hated they hated Maryland father in particular. How dare you humanize him? So I'll just read from this report. This father went to his citizenship hearing expecting a handshake. Instead, ICE shackled him, threw him into a van, and tore

him away from his pregnant wife and four children without even letting him say goodbye. Casper Erickson arrived in Mississippi from Denmark in 2013, fully documented and determined to build a life here. He started a family, became part of his community, and followed every rule. He was never accused, let alone convicted of any crime. But as best we understand, he's now in prison because of a single clerical mistake made years ago. In 2015, Casper and his wife, Savannah, missed filing one form among the hundreds required on the complicated path to citizenship. Savannah had just suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child. In the painful days that followed, paperwork deadlines understandably slipped past unnoticed. Now, over a month after his arrest, Casper remains locked in a detention facility notorious for

cruelty, neglect, and abuse. Savannah, eight months pregnant, at high risk and terrified, is desperately pleading for her husband's return. She and their children have no idea when or if they'll ever see him again, and she doesn't know if he'll be present for her husband's return. She and their children have no idea when or if they'll ever see him again. And she doesn't know if he'll be present for her child's birth. Every day brings another nightmare under the Trump administration. The actions of our government are evil.

There's simply no other way to describe it. May God have mercy on all of us for allowing this to happen. Here's the family. You know, this comes at the same time that ICE is also denying Mahmoud Khalil a contact visit with with his one with his one month old baby um for for no reason like there's contact visits are a thing that you can

allow people who are um in detention khalil was arrested uh or blocked up a month before his child was born as he has not seen his child since then. This one struck me. We also suffered a stillborn with our first daughter and also now have four children. That, of course, you're missing paperwork amidst amidst the deepest grief that that a human being can imagine losing a child. Like there's there's nothing deeper than that. And to. To use that to have a system that says, are you missed that deadline? There's nothing we can do. We must put you in this private prison for months on end as we work to deport you to Denmark. Is like this, this guy here described it as evil. And like, I'm the legal question and the ethical question. And on the ethical question, one of the things that bothers me about the way, particularly, we looked at like Venezuelan asylum seekers who ended up in Seacott and were legitimate asylum seekers like the barber that we discussed. What bothers me about that is I feel like the United States made a promise. And I feel that about many of the asylum seekers who came under Biden.

It's one of the things that bothered me about the Biden policy, because I knew that at some point we were going to break the promise because it was unsustainable to make those promises to so many different people, that you will have a fair asylum hearing and that if you are and I know I'm just talking narrowly about asylum here, but the point is that we do promise rule of law and legal processes. And people come here with the expectation that the United States will do it fairly and will treat people humanely. And so whether something is legal in a narrow sense is different than whether it's ethical. And it does, looking at some of the particularly some of the asylum cases, Cubans. I mean, it just eats me up when I think about just having that sort of removed after people because the United States extended a hand and said, make an appointment on CBP one. Come here. You know, you can just tell us, like, go through the legal process.

Tell us why you want asylum. Tell us why you're a refugee. And it's, I think, sort of been that it feels like we've let ourselves down in some of those cases. supportive of a lot of what Donald Trump has done on the border. Like the crossings are down so significantly. The border basically is closed to the point where it doesn't justify any policies based on a quote unquote invasion. But, you know, it's not Trump's fault that Biden did what Biden did, that the Biden administration did what the Biden administration did. It's not the Republican party's, well, Republican party is different. It's not the Trump administration's fault, but they do have then a moral obligation to deal with the people who came here humanely. Yeah, right. Because we can choose what kind of country we want to be. If we want to be vicious and cruel, that is a thing we can do. That is within our power and our ability. Or we can try to be a civilized country. That's the choice before us. And we are a haven for refugees, and we always should be. That's the other thing.

The United States, we were just talking about this when we were talking about academia. We have been a place, a talent magnet for generations. And there aren't, and there have been excesses of that. We have been a magnet for desperate people seeking freedom for decades. And there have been some excesses of that. But in the concept in and of itself is part of what makes us a great country is because we are comprised of this amazing collection of people who are really talented, love freedom. And that's in addition to our native-born population and its additive. And people integrate and love the United States. And again, we have to fix those processes, too. There's nothing to say that – I think there's more. There are plenty of questions to be raised about that. Butoss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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

DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to

reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

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

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. temporary victory, but it's a significant one, being allowed to temporarily remove Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and also Kathy Harris, who's on the Merit Systems Protection Board. People understand the NLRB. This is the board that oversees labor rights.

The kind of, I think, failure of the bipartisan populist movement or transpartisan populist movement, whatever you would call it, has been that despite the kind of working class shift in the Republican Party, the NLRB has remained a public enemy, number one, because of the kind of corporate control and kind of medium business control as well of inside the Republican coalition. We can talk about that in a second. I just want to say a word about the Merit Systems Protection Board. But basically what this is, is there are all of these rules around, you know, how you can hire and fire people in the federal government. And so if you are wrongfully fired, you can then appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. And what Trump is doing here is trying to destroy the Merit Board, which then would allow him to get rid of all of the protections, because the protect if the protections are there on paper, but there's no avenue for you to challenge them, then they don't really exist. And so and so this

is a huge win in his kind of assault on the federal on this federal and federal workforce. Kagan and Sotomayor agree with that. I'm reading from their dissent here. She says the current president believes that Humphreys, so that's the Humphreys executor case, should be either overruled or confined. And he has chosen to act on that belief, really to take the law into his own hands, not since the 1950s or even before has a president without a legitimate reason tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency. And they write, our Humphreys decision remains good law, and it forecloses both the president's firings and the court's decision to award emergency relief. So it's a very long

dissent, but basically they feel that Humphreys is threatened here. And Humphreys is, my preference would be that Humphreys executor is overturned. I do think that these outside agencies need to be accountable to the executive, but at the same time. Although the Fed – in here they also say that the Fed is cool, right? Which is just – they're just making it up as they go along. That's really funny. yeah like this is just just there's no principle here by the way just this independent agency you can destroy this independent agency which we're very nervous about what trump would do with that one constitutionally is protected it's like what they all are none of them no argument with me on that one um but that's what's like when they when they handed the white house to uh bush there's this famous line in the in bush v gore uh this sets no precedent and can never be referenced again

oh all right i'm gonna add that as my email signature yes delete this email but that is the reason that's a fault. Actually, to your point, the reason that the NLRB is particularly a fault line, even amidst the transpartisan like FTC populism, all of that is because it brings into the question the size of the executive branch period. And most people on the right still believe that the executive branch is bloated and unaccountable to the president. I include myself in that category. So Humphreys, to the point that Kagan and Sotomayor are making, is sort of a foundational – like that is a load-bearing decision for the entire executive branch. uh let's talk about this comical um clip with uh caroline levitt being asked hey man you guys said you're going to cut the deficit bill explodes it um she had a very she had a very clever response to that challenge um you know let's let's play this the one big beautiful bill also that our fiscal cuts in order by carrying out the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.

Every single Democrat in the House of Representatives who voted against all of these common sense and massively popular policies, the Democrat Party has never been more radical and out of touch with the needs of the American people. The one big beautiful bill is the final missing piece toward ushering the golden age of America. The Senate should pass this as quickly as possible and send it to President Trump's desk for a... Yeah, so we want to hear that again just for fun. It's just amazing. Also helps get our fiscal house in order by carrying out the largest deficit reduction

in nearly 30 years. That's amazing. The fiscal, I didn't know you could do that. So in order, you are going to be sick of the fiscal house being in order. It's a really clever governing strategy. So instead of actually creating a bill that, that cuts the deficit, as you said, you would do you, you create, you create a bill and pass it to the house that blows up the deficit.

But then you say that it cuts it. It's all about brand genius. It's you're putting diet on the sugar, full yogurt. That's exactly what this is. It works. That's the American way. Except the problem apparently is that American people don't,

don't quite buy it. So this is the Kobe Kobe. See, we were trying to figure out yesterday how you say this to Kobe letter. Americans have never been so pessimistic about future finances u.s consumers expectations about their financial situation over the next year dropped to an all-time low in may so this is how do you feel like you will be doing one year from now um and you can see that uh so that chart there if you're listening to this it's just a just a cliff like the the fluctuating over the years and over the last couple of weeks to two months. button and start like zooming out to give it to give it more room to be able to very, very, very difficult. But what the passage in the House suggests is the Republican Party is sufficiently desperate to have some type of augmentation for the tariff policy. and they're freaked out about the chart, for example, that you just showed and other charts

like it because that's the only way you really get people on board with blowing up the deficit is when they are deficit hawks is saying, well, if nothing passes, then you are even like you're tanking the economy because you're not having – you have no reshoring legislative policy. You have no 100 percent tax write-offs, retroactive to January for building, all of that stuff. And so if you don't pass this bill, cut the corporate taxes, you don't have the reshoring incentives, then you have a much worse situation. So it's a wonderful way we make laws. By the way, I got some details from that Trump meeting that he had with the Republican conference from a source that hadn't made it into the press yet. You take some of this stuff back to your sources. They'll enjoy this. You know, the thing that the Freedom Caucus put out, leaked out, where he said, I love the Freedom Caucus. You know, the thing that the Freedom Caucus put out, leaked out, where he said, I love the Freedom Caucus.

You know, these are my guys. The fuller quote was, I love the Freedom Caucus. These are my guys. You know, give me liberty or give me death. And then he added, vote for this bill or it's going to be death for you. And when the Freedom Caucus members leaked that out to the press, they conveniently skipped that part of it. They gave it to the Washington Journal. Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah, he loves us. He loves us so much. They left out that he's threatened to kill them, metaphorically kill them, I assume. He also at one point, I forget the exact context, said he was the first gay president because he was complimenting somebody. And it would be Buchuchanan come on this is buchanan erasure yeah okay it's fair not he was married to a senator uh from like mississippi or whatever like well yeah it's an interesting one um uh and then um he got into a back and forth with massey uh source told me uh where he said, like, Massey, very smart guy.

He went to MIT. But look it up. Wharton, much better school, much harder to get into. I want to see Trump running his house on Tesla batteries, you know, making that. Massey is like an absolute genius. He's like literally self-sustaining farming. Wharton, harder to get into. Incredible. I'm smarter than Massey. So let's here, let's roll Massey's. He did vote against.

He's one of the few that did vote against it. Let's play his, his speech. Anna reserves, gentlemen from Massachusetts is recognized. Mr. Speaker, I yield one and one half minutes to the gentleman from Kentucky, a man who is not afraid to speak his mind about fiscal responsibility. Mr. Massey. The gentleman from Kentucky is recognized for 90 seconds. Well, I'd love to stand here and tell the American people we can cut your taxes and we can increase spending and everything's going to be just fine. But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality. This bill

dramatically increases deficits in the near term, but promises our government will be fiscally responsible five years from now. Where have we heard that before? How do you bind a future Congress to these promises? This bill is a debt bomb ticking. Congress can do funny math, fantasy math, if it wants, but bond investors don't. And this week, they sent us a message. Moody's downgraded our credit rating, and the bond investors who buy our debt and finance our debt demanded higher interest rates on the 10-year note, the 20-year note, and the 30-year note. What does this mean? Very soon the government will be paying $16,000 of interest, interest alone per U.S. family. And what are we telling them? Instead of taking care of that problem, we're going to give you a $1,600 tax break. Under the taxing

and spending levels in this bill, we're going to rack up, the authors say, $20 trillion of new debt over the next 10 years. I'm telling you, it's closer to $30 trillion of new debt in the next 10 years. Mr. Speaker, we're not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We're putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg. If something is beautiful, if something is beautiful, you don't do it after midnight. I oppose this. That's an incredible quote.

It's not true. That's a good one. So that, Massey, not always true. Real quickly, let's, and we got to get to this back half the show. But I did want to talk about this, this bulwark piece real quick, where the Democrats are planning a operatives, they're going to attempt to blacklist them. We'll see. That would be like the first blacklisting of any like kind of mainstream operatives

for anything ever in in Democratic politics. In the past, it's only been a blacklist for people who challenged the Democratic establishment there. And they're also going after South Carolina, like they're all of South Carolina. You mean like Clyburn? No, well,

make it, you know, making South Carolina the first in the nation state, like that was done for Clyburn and for, but for really for Biden, who, you know, credits South Carolina for, for that win. And so, you know, credits South Carolina for for that win.

And so now they're they're looking at that again. We'll see if I don't I don't I don't think they'll actually do it, but we'll see. I think that's actually very interesting because you have both of your books behind you, the posters for them. But we see some of this starting to happen on your resume. But, you know, the idea that someone who worked for a mainstream Democratic politician campaign, presidential campaign for an establishment Democrat like Joe Biden, that that would be a problem for you. I just genuinely don't believe that that's durable. It seems to me like something that is being discussed right now, but then everyone will just pretend never happened

in six months or something like that. But maybe it applies to the tippy tippy top, like maybe your General Malley Dillon, maybe your other people that were up really high in that world. Maybe that's why maybe that's why people like La Rosa are talking to breaking points, for example, to sort of say, well, we were in here and we were the same voices or we tried to be the same voices. I don't know. I would think Jen O'Malley Dillon is done anyway. Like she, you know, she ran the Obama's 2012 campaign, then Biden in 2020, and then this one.

And she's a corporate consultant. Like that's her main gig is her firm does corporate consulting. So I don't expect her to run another presidential campaign. And once you've run them, you don't go into, you know, maybe she'll still do some

like side consulting work for a future presidential campaign. But that's peanuts compared to the amount of corporate money that's available to her and other Democratic operatives. But let's move let's move to the back half of this show. This is for premium subscribers breaking. Go to breaking points dot com. This is because it supports all the journalism that that we do here. And you'll also get a Matt Stoller clip that we're going to play towards the end and also a James Lee interview that he did with this. And we should layman trader. We should also mention we're doing an AMA in the second half of the show.

So we're taking some premium. So if you want to see the rest of the show, breakingpoints.com, you can do that. You can send questions for future AMAs and you can hear all the fun stuff we discuss today. So let's talk about some of the political fallout from the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers and killing here in Washington, D.C., the other night. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast. night. money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy.

But to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible. It's customizable. And it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart Podcast.