Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/6/25: Israel To 'Flatten' Gaza, Trump Movie Tariffs, Bill Maher Panics On AOC 2028 & MORE!

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Israel plotting to flatten Gaza ahead of Trump's visit, Hollywood panics amid Trump movie tariffs, Yanis Varoufakis unloads on Trump tariff plan, Bill Maher panics over AOC 2028, Trump bans gain of function funding, student jailed for Israel protest speaks out.   Yanis Varoufakis: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/ Jeremy Scahill: https://x.com/jeremyscahill    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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are really doing behind the scenes. From drinks and gummies to probiotic pillows. Yes, really, probiotic pillows. We're breaking down what's legit and what's just brilliant marketing. With expert insight from gastroenterologist, Dr. Roshi Raj. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. All right, good morning and welcome to Breaking Points. That's right. It's Tuesday, I guess, so we have to be breaking points. How you doing, Ryan?

We should just all be breaking points, right? Maybe. Just wrap it all up. Yeah, I guess it's time. Who knows? We're just making major decisions without Sager and Crystal, so that's okay. That's the time to make them, actually. Exactly. So today we're going to have my Dropsite colleague, Jeremy Scahill, on the show to talk about the latest between Israel and Gaza and Yemen and Syria and Lebanon, all of which they are bombing.

Jeremy just returned from a major interview with Osama Hamdan, who's a senior political figure at Hamas, as well as a bunch of other background interviews with other Hamas officials that he can sketch out where they're feeling, where they're at in the negotiations as Israel is threatening to literally, quote, flatten Gaza. Donald Trump is promising to make Hollywood great again. Hollywood is kind of panicked. 100% tariff. We're going to figure out what it means to tariff a movie? Yes, we are going to figure it out, actually. Well, I mean, who knows whether we'll figure it out, but the Trump administration is trying to figure it out at this very moment.

And maybe they'll learn that there's really no good way to do it and quietly drop this news. But Trump made this announcement on Sunday. Hollywood was in panic all day yesterday, also trying to figure out what it meant. So we will have updates on that. When you promise to help someone and they panic at the thought, that's got to be kind of an odd feeling. Yeah, well, on some level. And he did kind of step back a little. He's like, I am just trying to help. Well, they, yeah, I mean, we'll get into

all of it. Then we also have former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who's going to join us to go through some of the latest on tariffs. If you guys don't know Yanis, he's amazing. It's going to be a fun one. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. He's super interesting. So good time to talk to him.

We're going to be discussing a little bit from Bill Maher's panel last week. There was Kevin McCarthy talking about how AOC and Bernie are really the future of the party. So there's news about AOC and the Oversight Committee. There's all kinds of fun stuff to get into. And Brian Kemp announced that he's not going to run for Senate, which immediately has the Ossoff for president crowd. Yes. Just wondering, you know, just basically measuring the drapes at 1600 Pennsylvania for President Ossoff at this point. There we go, yeah. Ossoff Nation, rise up.

Dana Function Research executive order was signed yesterday by Donald Trump. So we'll break down all of that. And then, Ryan, we have a guest who's going to talk about some developments in a case that we've covered before. Yes. So Henry McKean Shapiro was one of the protesters arrested by AG Dana Nessel in Michigan, spent four days in jail yesterday with a handful of others, had his charges dropped. We're going to talk about what those charges were, where they stemmed from, why they were dropped, and we're going to be joined by Henry to talk about what his experience was like behind bars and what he was told he was arrested for, because it does appear that these people were arrested for nothing other than protesting. There are no allegations of actual crimes. Yeah. And just as a heads up, by the way, we started a little bit late today.

Brian has kids to take care of. I assume they're the ones who paint your nails. Yeah, my wife's, yes, exactly. You like that? Which hand do you like better? I mean, the colorful one, obviously. Your daughters did that? Yeah, they did. They've started a nail salon in our house. Whoa, okay, capitalism. It's called Slay Nails. So I was one of their first customers. But yes, wife's still recovering from surgery, so I'm just helping get the kids out to school. So when I am co-hosting this week and next, we'll be a little bit later than normal. We're often a little bit later than normal. This time we have an actual excuse.

Yes. Well, it's, you know, whatever we can do to get our fix of Ryan Grimm. There you go. We will do it. And they're starting to chip. Yeah, I mean, the pink is. So I kind of need to go back to Slay Nails. Do you get a discount? Well, and I didn't let them put the thing on that would help them stay longer.

I was like, this is good. Yeah. I didn't pay anything for it, so I don't know if that's a discount or not. I guess you can go back. I don't think they've thought about their business model very deeply. Okay. Well, maybe they should become part of DropSite. They don't pay for the inputs.

This is going to be a DropSite thing. So. I don't know. We'll see. They don't really have to charge. Well, let's bring Jeremy in. Speaking of DropSite, let's go ahead and bring Jeremy in to hear from him about his recent interview with Hamas. Joining us to discuss all this is my DropSite colleague, Jeremy Scahill, who just returned from an interview with senior political Hamas figure Osama Hamdan and others. Jeremy, thank you so much for being here today. Good to be with you guys. And so let's put A4 up on the screen to start. This is the first piece that you've rolled out from this interview, this very wide-ranging interview with Osama Hamdan. Tell us what your kind of main takeaway was from this

as it relates to Israel's most recent demand that Hamas needs to agree to disarm within the next week, return all of the hostages, or else it's going to, quote, flatten Gaza. I mean, Ryan, I think the first thing to be said is that over the past 18 months, there has been almost no substantive interviewing of leaders of Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions by Western news organizations. It's not that they're not interviewed. It happens. CNN has had interviews. NBC has had interviews. But often what happens is that you have one of two things unfold. Either it's a very short interview responding to something that the United States has said or something that Israel has said, or it's an interview where it's just entirely intended to be a relitigation of the events of October 7th. And one of the things that we've tried to do at Drop

Site is to say this is journalistic malpractice not to understand the perspective of the leadership of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or any Palestinian leaders who are at the center of what is a U.S.-backed Israeli war of annihilation. So that's the spirit in which we've been conducting these interviews. Now, Osama Hamdan is perhaps one of the most well-known leaders within Hamas because he was based in Lebanon when the Israeli war began in October of 2023. He was one of the few officials that was actually in a country where Hamas was allowed to publicly hold press conferences. And so he became a very well-known figure in the Arabic language media.

He's been a member of Hamas since 1992, just a few years after the organization was founded. He was the former head of its operations in Iran, former head of its operations in Lebanon, and was the former head of its international relations department. He's actually a chemist by training, a very, very well-educated guy who speaks excellent English. And so I sat down with him on the record about a 90-minute interview, but I did spend several hours meeting with Osama Hamdan and other senior leaders within Hamas. So part of what we can talk about today is what was said on the record, and then I can give you some texture of the broader perspective of people. I haven't spoken about this yet, so this will be the first time I kind of go through some of what I've heard. On the main issue that you're raising, Ryan, Hamas has now staked out a very clear position

that it hasn't in such a clear way in the past 18 months. And what Osama Hamdan told me is that Hamas is absolutely not going to agree to any more short-term truces unless there is a clear path back to one of two places, either back to the original framework of the January ceasefire deal that was brokered by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt. That deal, which Israel blew up after the first 42-day phase, imposed this full-spectrum blockade on Gaza. No food, no medicine, no fuel. Nothing has entered the Gaza Strip in the past two months.

And then on March 18th, Israel starts scorched-earth bombing Gaza again, killing more than 400 people in the opening night. Since then, 2,400 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children. Horrifying attacks, too, burning people alive in tents, using so-called suicide drones to attack camps for displaced people. wanted to avoid getting into, said that there would be a total withdrawal of all Israeli forces and that there would be technical negotiations moving toward a permanent ceasefire, followed then by a full reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. So either we go back to that or we go to an alternative arrangement, which also has a very clear path to the end of the war, full Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Hamas has said, we have a different proposal that we want to put forward in response to Israel. And that is what

is called an Arabic ahudna, which means a long-term truce. And so Osama Hamdan said, they are offering Israel a truce of five to seven years, the immediate release of all Israeli captives living and dead, and an internationally guaranteed agreement that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions are not going to engage in any offensive operations against Israel, and that they are interested in long-term stability and peace and an ability to rebuild Gaza. So they said, though, that no matter what the deal is, they are not going to lay down their weapons. They said it's not just a red line, it's a million red lines. They said that laying

down their weapons would be tantamount to capitulating and surrendering. And once they surrender, then they're at the will of the occupier. So this was, I believe, the clearest on the record statement that we've gotten to date from Hamas, that they will not accept any of the proposals that have been put forward by the United States or Israel that do not include a clear path to full Israeli withdrawal. And they will absolutely not agree to hand in their weapons under any circumstances. You know, Jeremy, one of the interesting things that stood out to me from your report is that they actually, all of that, and also they feel obligated not to put their weapons down, right? Could you tell us more about that part of the conversation? I mean, as I understood it, it was, they see it as an obligation to continue going, not just sort of the practical thing that's best for them, but also something that they must do to keep going forward.

Yeah, it's an important question, Emily. You know, let's remember that oftentimes when events in Gaza are discussed in the broader Western media or the Israeli media, the story begins on October 7th with Hamas's attacks and what Hamas calls Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. But this is actually a 76-year history. I mean, you could go all the way back to the 1930s and the Palestinians resisting British occupation. But let's say that the dominant narrative or the dominant historical arc here begins in 1947-48 with the Nakba, which is when the United States and European powers stole the land from Palestinians and established a state primarily for Europeans that were victims of the Holocaust or were at jeopardy

of being killed during the Holocaust. And so that state was established. And the idea at the time that was promoted by Zionists and also the West was that it was a people without a land for a land without a people. Well, there were a people there, and they were called the Palestinian people. And in fact, there were Muslims and Jews living in relative I spoke with Palestinian leaders who are not even members of armed resistance factions who will say that every time the Palestinians have agreed to lay down their weapons, that they have then just been massacred and wiped out. So it's not just about a strategic position that Hamas is taking. They, for instance, Osama Hamdan said, look, we can look at the example of the north of Ireland when the provisional IRA decommissioned itself and handed in its weapons. That was part of a many years long process.

And it was agreed to by both sides. Hamdan said to me, look, this business about storing our weapons temporarily. He said, first of all, that's just a media story. No one has ever seriously raised that with us. But are they going to tell the Israelis to store their weapons? Who's going to monitor the Israelis? Because every time we have a ceasefire, they raised that with us. But are they going to tell the Israelis to store their weapons? Who's going to monitor, you know, the Israelis? Because every time we have a ceasefire, they continue to bomb us. So I think it's very clear.

And the issue of armed resistance remains one of the most popular position points in all of historic Palestine, not just in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to use armed resistance against an occupation, an apartheid state that has been repeatedly condemned under international law by world courts and by every major human rights organization in the world. They believe if they lay down their weapons, the cause of Palestinian statehood and liberation is totally dead. And so let's put up A2 briefly, because this references, this is an Axios News report about the flattening of Gaza that they're threatening if there's going to take upwards of two million Palestinians, move them into a tiny quote-unquote humanitarian zone, and they don't really say what they're going to do next beyond, you know, invade, occupy, and hold the ground rather than kind of move in and move back out, which allowed then, you know,

Hamas to move back in after the IDF would move out. And so Hamas has this proposal, this counterproposal of a five to seven year truce. Donald Trump likes to talk about cards. You know, you don't have any cards. Who has the cards? What are the cards that, from your reporting, that Hamas has left to play against Israel? Like, what makes it so that this is a serious counterproposal that Israel needs to take seriously? And from the Israeli side, you know, they're talking about calling up tens of thousands of reservists. Do they have the cards? Do they have the ability to carry out this invasion and long-term occupation and complete ethnic cleansing that they're suggesting they're going to carry out? I mean, there's a technical answer to your question, and then there's a much bigger

answer to your question. First, the technical answer. Anyone you speak to from a Palestinian resistance faction that is holding captives, Israeli captives inside of Gaza, will say this is our only card right now that we have. And so when the Israelis propose short term truces with no clear path to an end to the war or an Israeli withdrawal, and they try, for instance, to get half of the living Israeli captives out in one fell swoop, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad look at that and they say, this is a death trap for us. From their perspective, they believe that they have kept as many Israeli captives alive as Israel has been killing them with its own bombings. We don't know the fate, for instance, of American citizen Aidan Alexander, who was in the Israeli military when he was taken by Palestinian fighters on October 7th, 2023. Hamas's armed wing Qassam Brigades lost touch with him some weeks ago after an Israeli airstrike.

And I was told by two senior Hamas officials that they still do not know his fate. So from the perspective of Palestinian resistance movements, their only card in these negotiations right now is the fact that they are holding Israeli captives. In the bigger picture, though, they feel that they have a moral and a legal card and also a very strong card in the region. And that is that international resolution after international resolution has declared Israel's occupation illegal. You have a genocide proceeding that is going forward at the International Court of Justice. And you have Arab regimes, anti-democratic Arab regimes that are watching very nervously the events on the ground unfold as Netanyahu expands Israel's attacks across the region. Public anger is growing inside the capitals and borders of many Arab nation states. And we could be at the beginning of a period where we start to see

potentially major revolts happening internally in Arab countries against their rulers, against their governments, in part because they have stood silently by as the Palestinians have been subjected to genocide, or because they've normalized relations with Israel under the auspices of Donald Trump's Abraham Accords. So the Palestinians are great students of history. And one thing I just want to say parenthetically, every time I speak to an official from one of these Palestinian resistance movements, it's remarkable. They are doctors, they're lawyers, they're Islamic scholars, they're veterinarians, they're engineers. Osama Hamdan himself is a chemist.

Several of them have been educated in Western countries, including the United States. The portrayal of them, you can think what you want about their positions, their policies, their actions, but the portrayal of these individuals as cartoonish villains who are interested in killing Jewish people because they're Jewish is so just clearly false. And part of what I was told, and we could talk about the details of this, Ryan and Emily, you know, I met with both Hamas officials that led the talks with Adam Bowler, who was Donald Trump's special envoy on hostages. One thing I found interesting is they didn't know that he had been at Jared Kushner's roommate or that he's a personal friend of the Trump family. And when I shared that, they said,

well, that makes sense why he's still around, because Israel tried to destroy Adam Bowler after he made the mistake of just saying that he was surprised at the kind of interactions that he had with Hamas. But they described to me very cordial, friendly at times, diplomatic meetings with Adam Boehler. They said that Boehler asked a lot of probing questions, not just about the current political situation or the situation from October 7th forward, but that he seemed truly interested in understanding the historical perspective of the Palestinians. And they said he just kept remarking on how they are so different than they seem from the portrayal that he had read.

And what they told me is that, you know, they had these good meetings with Bowler. It wasn't just about the American captives that are being held. It was about a broader political solution. The Israelis go nuts when they learn that these direct talks had happened and that Bowler is out there in public saying on American television and Israeli television that Hamas has proposed a multi-year peace deal with Israel. Ron Dermer was just like yanking his hair out, Netanyahu's political hitman who's in charge of the negotiations now. And they said, so, you know, the Americans are subjected

to this thing where Adam Bowler is now being smeared and targeted for having the audacity to say some basic civil things or observations about Hamas. But what happened, Ryan, is that there was supposed to be a subsequent meeting directly with Steve Witkoff, who is Donald Trump's the top envoy negotiating all of these deals with not just with Gaza, but also Ukraine. They were going to have direct talks with Steve Witkoff. And Hamas was confident that the way the dialogue was going, that the Americans were actually understanding the position and understanding that Hamas did, in fact, have some flexibility in its position. And Hamdan said he believes that part of the reason why Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the former political leader of Hamas, and has been assassinating others, is because Israel doesn't want anyone capable of actually speaking with the United States to be alive to do so. 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.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. This gets to the question Ryan was asking about the cards that Israel has. A clip here of Donald Trump yesterday being asked about some of this. We can go ahead and roll a one now. We're going to help the people of Gaza get some food. People are starving and we're going to help them get some food. A lot of people are making it very, very bad. What do you if you look, Hamas is making it impossible because they're

taking everything that's brought in. But we're going to help the people of Gaza because they're being treated very badly by Hamas. Thank you very much. Hostage families were protesting Netanyahu's decision yesterday as well. So, Jeremy, can you tell us what you make of the last 24 hours after your conversations about all of this with the other side? Yeah. I mean, first of all, either Donald Trump is lying or he's being intentionally fed bad information. I mean, you can talk to anti-Hamas people involved with international aid on the ground, and they'll tell you that it is entirely false that there is any significant amount of aid that is being stolen or commandeered by Hamas. In fact, when private gangs that many

Palestinians suspect are in some way or another collaborating with Israel have been trying to loot supplies of aid, when the civil police force, this is not Kassam brigades, but when the civil police force in Gaza tries to respond to this looting, Israel has then attacked the police who are trying to prevent the looting from happening. And of course, you know, there were executions recently of people that were involved in looting and people made a big deal about this. And it was portrayed as, you know, Hamas is executing Palestinians who are just trying to get food. The reality on the ground is that some of the most powerful and influential families in Gaza were demanding that somebody somewhere take action to stop the looting of what little aid is left some of the most powerful and influential families in Gaza were demanding that somebody

somewhere take action to stop the looting of what little aid is left inside of the Gaza Strip. So we should be reporting accurately and factually on these matters and not falling into this trap of looking for every incendiary story that we can hype. And it turns out that it's actually not even based on something that is fully true. On this issue that Trump is raising, though, I'll tell you something that I learned in my reporting. A few weeks ago, the Israelis approached, my sources told me, the United Nations. And they tried to get the United Nations to agree to take charge of distributing aid that Israel

would send in. But Israel had a long list of conditions about how many calories could be in each packet, about who could receive the aid, about the kind of security checks that Palestinians would be subjected to if they wanted to receive aid, about the kind of checkpoints they would have to pass through and the distances they would have to travel. And the United Nations told Israel, we're not going to participate in that because it's weaponizing the use of food for crimes of war. So then the Israelis go to international aid organizations. Now, I'm told that some aid organizations initially were considering going along with Israel's plan, in part because they felt that the situation was so dire that it

was a compromise to make. Other aid organizations then looked at what Israel's terms were and said, absolutely not. These are de facto internment conditions. That's a direct quote from a letter signed by 20 aid organizations. So these international aid organizations said, we won't participate in weaponizing food for Israel's war aims. So what Israel is now left with, and Trump is referring to, is that they've come up with a plan. They've already divided Gaza into three sections with these two massive corridors. They're essentially going to try to push as much of the Palestinian population toward the south as possible into Rafah, which basically doesn't exist as anything vaguely resembling a city anymore. They're going to work with potentially an American security

company and others, and they're going to force Palestinians to go through extensive security checks just to get some food to eat. So, you know, it now is the case that Israel and the United States seem to be trying to engage in a propaganda campaign that also weaponizes food as a tool of war in an effort to say, oh, look, we're helping the starving Palestinians. This is a way to avoid having to make an actual deal that would bring some peace and stability and would halt this genocide. And in your interview, Hamdan responded to the Egyptian proposal, which he rejected out of hand, which effectively required Hamas to fully disarm. You're all saying that they're willing to move, you know, they're willing to make some concessions. So what would be the concessions that Hamas is willing to make in

order to, you know, get to this five to seven year truce? Now, saying that there would be no offensive operations, obviously that's a concession as well, because up to today, their stated position is they will continue, you know, carrying out offensive operations against Israel until they say they won't. So that alone is one. How would they allow that to be internationally guaranteed while also maintaining, you know, their weapons? So one thing on this issue of offensive, you know, Hamas would say all of their operations are defensive because Israel is an illegitimate, illegal, you know, occupying power. So, you know, just to be clear, that's their position on that. Well, doesn't that undercut their promise then if they're, because what Israel wants is them not to like do another October 7th. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're not playing like

semantics here. I think what they're saying is we're not going to attack Israel unless we are directly attacked militarily. Like they're not going to launch an operation that in the existential sense of it is defensive in nature from their perspective. But it's an interesting question. First of all, let me say this. What I was told by Hamas officials is we don't actually want to be the government of Gaza. We won democratic elections in 2006, not just in Gaza, but in all of the Palestinian territories. Ismail Haniyeh was supposed to be the prime minister of all Palestinian territories, not just Gaza. A civil war then breaks out between Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party and Hamas in Gaza in 2007 that results in an effective split of the Palestinian government, where you have Abbas

and Fatah controlling the occupied West Bank, and then you had Gaza controlled by Hamas. The United States and other Western countries immediately impose sanctions, and Israel imposes a blockade on Gaza. So the place has been being strangled ever since then. There hasn't been a democratic election since, not because Palestinians don't want it, but because it's been convenient for Mahmoud Abbas not to have such else. So it's an interesting point. So they're saying we don't even want to be the government anymore. But if we sign this kind of a deal, we will fully relinquish all control of Gaza. We will submit to the democratic will of the Palestinian people. We'll go one of two ways.

Egypt has made a proposal that there could be a sort of technocratic committee of experts that would govern Gaza until democratic elections could be a sort of technocratic committee of experts that would govern Gaza until democratic elections could be organized and held. Or you could do something under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. Even though Hamas is extremely critical of Mahmoud Abbas, who they perceive as a collaborator with the Israeli regime, they and other Palestinian factions have submitted 40 to 45 names as suggestions for people that they would accept on a committee. And they're willing to submit to the authority of the Palestinian authority, their political

rivals. That's a massive political concession that Hamas is making. On the issue of weapons, what Hamas has said is there will be no need for resistance factions to have any weapons if Palestine as a state is allowed to constitute its own military and police forces capable of defending its territorial integrity. The final thing I'll say about this is Osama Hamdan said to me, I thought he was going to say, I asked him about two-state solution, what's called two-state solution. I thought he was going to say it's dead in the water.

I've been told that by other Palestinian resistance figures. He said Israel is the party destroying the two-state solution, and Hamas would welcome a two-state solution if a majority of Palestinians voted for it. We would never stand in the way of it if it was constituted along the pre-1967 war borders, if East Jerusalem was the capital, and if Israel was forced through international oversight by the United States and others to respect those boundaries, that Hamas would not stand in the way of a two-state solution. So people can dismiss what Hamas is saying, but since 1992-93, the Hamas leadership has been proposing these long-term truce deals with Israel, which are intended to create a multi-year but defined period where Hamas and other resistance groups will agree to engage in no attacks unless they're militarily

attacked in the hopes that there can be a longer-term political solution. From Donald Trump's perspective, that doesn't sound like a bad deal. And I think that's why the Israelis didn't want someone like Adam Bowler, who's a friend of the Trump family, or Steve Witkoff directly speaking to Hamas, because it might put in their heads the idea Trump could actually preside over a very long term deal. Yeah, I think if Trump just, and Amir Tabon and Haaretz wrote a column saying this, if Trump just tweeted the same way he tweeted at Putin, Vladimir, stop. If he tweeted, this is what Tabon had written, Benjamin, stop. Get the hostages out, make a deal.

Like, that would actually work. Like, tweeting at Putin, not going to get you very far. That tweet might actually work. Before you leave, I wanted to get your response to what Israel has been doing instead. If we can put up A7 real quick from the drop site Twitter feed. In the last 24 hours, Israel has bombed eastern and southern Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. It's almost easier at this point to report, you know, which neighboring countries Israel is not bombing. I'm curious, and let's put up the one before that, which is A5. I'm curious from your conversations with the Hamas officials, this is a Houthi spokesperson saying that the Houthis are going to shut down air travel on an ongoing basis into Israel in response to Israel's siege on Gaza. They're saying that their strike on Ben Gurion Airport is going to be repeated,

and he warns international airlines not to fly into Ben Gurion Airport. I'm curious, two things. One, how did Hamas respond to this kind of escalating war that's now involving almost every country touching Israel? And how do they feel about the Houthi response in solidarity? You know, I think not just Hamas, not just Palestinians, I think that, you know, really sharp observers in the region of history understand that what has happened is that Israel has run around throwing a lot of punches and they think that they've knocked out all of their adversaries. But no one can predict what the counter-strike is going to look like. I had one very senior Palestinian resistance figure tell me last week

that Israel is going to be wishing one day that Hamas was back, because what's going to come next is going to be a much more radical, much more ferocious enemy, because a whole generation of children, not just in Gaza, not just in the West Bank, but now in Lebanon, the children that were maimed by the Pager bomb plot, the Yemenis who are being bombed on a regular basis by the United States and Israel, increasingly Syrians. This generation that rises up is going to be coming of age in the shadow of one of the most brutal campaigns of lethal arson waged by an Israeli leader in history. And so while Netanyahu might feel that he's at the zenith of his life's mission to take it to all of these resistance factions and try to redraw the maps of the Middle East.

History shows that this is only the opening salvo and what comes next is likely to be much more ferocious than what Netanyahu and Israel have dealt with to date. So, you know, Trump should tread very, very carefully in his embrace of this arsonist agenda because history shows that what comes next, the fire next time is going to be much more ferocious. proposal of a five to seven year truce, handing over power to a civilian authority as something that they would desperately like to go back and be able to take. Ryan, can I tell you one bit of news that's, one bit of just bit of news that I haven't reported anywhere, but I feel it's appropriate to share it with you guys. You know, our colleague Hossam Shabbat was assassinated in late March by Israeli forces. And Israel had alleged that he was a Hamas sniper in the Beit Hanun battalion of the Qassam brigades. I've been asking Palestinian

officials about this from Hamas. And what I was told is that they actually did an audit. They wanted to get to the bottom of this. And they actually had Kassam Brigade search documents, interview people. What I was told is that they are saying that not only was Hossam Shabbat not a sniper and not in the Kassam Brigades, that the documents that Israel released purporting to show that Hossam Shabbat and other journalists are members of Hamas are fabricated documents. That's what Hamas told me on the record. Yeah, and the document that they were circulating about Hossam suggested he would have been, I think, like 16 years old when he was in some training camp. And what I can't understand about Israeli fabricated documents is why they don't make them more credible.

Remember the one where the guy would have been 11 when he was in it? Like, if you're going to fabricate the document, like, at least try to make it, like, you have a blank space in front of you. Like, the page is blank. You can put whatever numbers you want in there. Why make it so incredible? That's interesting, though, that they dived into those accusations. Do they plan on putting anything officially out about that? It's hard to, there's no document that, I guess, that could. Well, I was raising it with them because he's our colleague. And so, you know, I had really been pushing them and saying like,

you know, can you, is there any legitimacy to this? Is there something maybe that they're basing it on? You know, I think that's the responsible thing to do as a journalist when these kinds of allegations are levied against a colleague. And it's been, you know, weeks and weeks I've been pushing them on that. And finally they said, okay OK, we've done we've done that and we've done this audit. Now, people could say, oh, well, Hamas is going to say that. Not really. I mean, Hamas and Qasem are you know, they they claim they're martyrs publicly. And and so, you know, their initial response was, no, nobody's ever heard of it. And I said, no, well, that you know, yeah, you can say that, but I mean, have you actually checked? And so I was quite surprised when I met personally with them that they said, we actually did that, and here's our finding. No, you're right. People should understand that point, that if somebody dies who's in Kassam, they very publicly will claim him.

Say, like, he was a martyr in our—and we'll list all of the different affiliations. So that is the history. you know, affiliations. So that's, that is the history. That's accurate. Yeah. Jeremy, thank you so much. The story was fantastic. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Ryan. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

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

that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir.

We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King,

John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch.

What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. announcement that he would be implementing 100% tariffs on films, just films by the way, we can get into what all of that means, but that are produced outside of the United States. Now we don't even know what that means because there's some questions of co-production, there's production in one place and also another place, but let's just take a listen to Donald Trump on Sunday explaining what he's doing. What they've done is other nations have been stealing the movies, the movie-making capabilities from the United States.

And I said to a couple of people, what do you think? I've done some very strong research over the last week, and we're making very few movies now. Hollywood is being destroyed. Now, you have an incompetent, grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen. So I'm not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. And I'm saying if they're not willing to make a movie inside the United States, then we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money.

I mean, they're supporting them financially. So that's sort of a threat to our country in a sense. And it's been a very popular thing. I can tell you what, movie makers love it. And so you can see the Truth Social post, this is B2, that Donald Trump put out that again, this all sent Hollywood absolutely reeling. You can see here, he narrowly mentions movies and he says, movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands. He invokes the question of national security, and we can control and throw up B3 whenever we want. This is The Hollywood Reporter, which has had pretty good coverage of this over the last 48 hours. The Hollywood Reporter basically is, I don't want to say they're forced to admit this, but Hollywood in general is kind

of forced to admit that it is true. There have been incentives for some productions to go to places like Canada and Hungary. There's production that happens, post-production that happens in places like the UK. But what's I think also very interesting is this sounds like Donald Trump is thinking about China in particular. So when he is invoking national security, it sounds like he's making an argument people like me made five years ago about China. And since then, since the pandemic, actually a lot of that has changed. I'm going to skip ahead here to B5 and we can just roll through A and B. But if we look at B5A, this is a chart from The New York Times.

And you can see here the top 10 movies each year in China in the 2010s. A lot of them were actually Hollywood movies 2010s, a lot of them were actually Hollywood movies. Now, a lot of them are non-Hollywood movies. 2023, not a single Hollywood movie in the top 10. And so what happened is that Hollywood reached out to China. We've had Chris Fenton on to talk about how he was a leader in trying to broker that relationship between Hollywood and China. And it was a massive source of growth for Hollywood as they were being wrecked by streaming, as everything was being thrown into chaos by streaming.

And here's another great chart from the New York Times. Revenue from top-grossing movies is shrinking in China. So again, 2023, non-Hollywood movies, all the revenue in China. So all this is to say, this has changed significantly over the last five years. These questions of national security concerns that were raised during the filming of Top Gun 2, for example, where you had the Pentagon heavily collaborating on a movie that's

all Pentagon equipment that's very common in Hollywood, has been for a couple of decades. They literally cooperate with the Department of Defense and bring in training exercises. And that's what you see in a lot of like Jerry Bruckheimer movies and things like Top Gun, frankly. So that was considered a national security concern because China had censorship power over the script. They took the Taiwanese flag off Tom Cruise's bomber jacket. And what's very interesting— Why did he have a Taiwanese flag on his bomber jacket? It was in the 80s, too.

It's sort of like part of the whole thing. But anyway, this has already changed so much. Hollywood feels like China has already learned everything that it can and is already making some of these incredible movies by using what Donald Trump says there about how they're taking American film know-how. I mean, that process has kind of already played out, and China isn't even the concern anymore because Hollywood isn't cooperating with China at the rate that it was just a couple of years ago. So it's a really interesting move. I mean, you can, I guess, reshore some stuff that's been pushed to Canada and the UK. But a lot of this, first of all, movies do need to be filmed on location in other parts of the world.

And some of it is just the, for example, for Toxic T. Ryan, the strikes in Hollywood a couple of years ago, it costs more money to make movies in the United States than it does in other places. And so if you're also not dealing with ensuring that Hollywood is paying writers in this age of IP questions and technological upheaval, actors, anybody in this space, I mean, it's just an enormous thorny challenge. 100% tariff maybe can have some effect, but it'll have to be, like all the other tariffs,

augmented with other significant policies. Yeah, it's another example of us trying to, you know, compete with the rest of the world while the rest of the world is able to do sophisticated strategic policymaking, and we just don't. Like, we have tariffs. In this case, Trump is going to, I'm going to put a tariff on it. And then you're like, oh, what, I'm going to put a tariff on it. And then you're like, oh, what does that mean? Does it get tariffed because one of your editors was in Paris or London? And yes, it's not just other countries. Atlanta has been pulling the rug out from under Hollywood as well.

By reaching out to these production companies and telling them, if you come here, we will give you this tax break, this incentive. It's cronyism. So the way to, well, I mean, it's also just kind of industrial policy in another way. Like you're subsidizing the thing that you want. And so the U.S. would then have to say, okay, Hungary's doing this. You can either negotiate with Hungary and Canada and say, stop doing this or else we're going to retaliate against X. And that's how you do a kind of trade war because this is a service that is an export of ours. And we import your maple syrup and we're going to be mean to it if you don't stop subsidizing these Toronto film shoots. Or we equalize the subsidies and go to the Hollywood and say, look, if you do it here, it's worth it to us as a taxpayer

to match those subsidies. And that would require Congress. Good luck with that. So yeah, let's roll Howard Lutnick, because actually filming in Canada has been happening for a very long time. So this is B6, Howard Letnick talking about the policy. So Mark Carney, whom I've met, a central banker, you're going to, are you optimistic? Can we make a deal with Canada? I think it's really complex. I think this is really complex because they have been basically feeding off of us for decades upon decades upon decades, right? They have their socialist regime and it's basically feeding off of America. I mean, the president calls that out all the time. Why do we make cars in Canada? Why do we do our films in Canada? Come on. So I think the president's going to have, I think it's going to be a

fascinating meeting. I'm glad I'm going to be there listening, but it's going to be a fascinating meeting tomorrow. And of course, that meeting is happening later today, Donald Trump and Mark Carney. So it's possible, Ryan, that one read on the situation is that Donald Trump was trying to put more on the table ahead of his meeting with Mark Carney. I mean, this is not an insignificant part of the Canadian economy. There have been productions in Canada for a long time, and Hollywood has done movies and TV shows there for a long time. Trump's true social posts, again, only mentioned movies. This is another question that The Hollywood Reporter has raised is, first of all, how are you tariffing things that are coming across borders when a lot of this is just streaming?

It's a significant, I mean, it's not like people are buying DVDs that are produced. It's a very, the data that is encoded onto a DVD, I guess, potentially is produced in China if it's post-production. Or, I mean, in Canada if it's post-production. But I guess it's possible that Trump just wanted to throw some leverage out there ahead of his conversation with Mark Carney. That might be one way to look at it. It's probably more animalistic. Trump loves Hollywood. He has a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. And like an old man, he sees that it was better when he was younger. And he's right about that. What he doesn't want to think about is that the biggest blow, probably, to Hollywood is his trade war with China.

One of the first responses from China was, we're going to significantly reduce the amount of movies that we're going to allow from Hollywood into China. But that had already stopped significantly. Even though it was down, it still, on an absolute basis, represents enormous sums of money. And that's the thing about the Chinese market now. Like, it can be, maybe we're not in the top 10, but it's still huge amounts of money, right? Yeah. I mean, it was a really big part of their growth plan going forward.

And then sort of the pandemic made them realize that probably wouldn't be the case. But yes, there's still, you know, I imagine a decent chunk of money on the table, but a ton of money on the table in Canada, UK, Hungary, where some of these productions have been moved. So we'll see. So it looks like in 2023, Hollywood firms earned $8 billion in China. And a lot of that is probably on older stuff too,

would be my guess. That's, but we'll, is that box office? It's a lot of money. I just, revenue, would be my guess. Is that box office? It's a lot of money. It's revenue. I don't know. Okay. Yeah, so also— It's way down, but it's a lot of money is my point.

Yeah, yeah, of course, especially when they don't have a lot of money to toss around. Yeah. Like they're doing great right now. Anyway, all that is to say we will see how Donald Trump's meeting with Mark Carney goes today. We will see how real this policy actually is going forward. If Donald Trump wants it to be real, even just the process of implementing it, given everything we just laid out, does it apply to things that are co-produced in other countries that are partially produced in one country? Does it apply to TV shows? Does it apply just to box offices? Does it apply to streaming?

There's really no clear idea of what this would look like. So Hollywood is left to scramble and lobby and I guess hope for the best. So we'll see what happens. And we should get to Giannis Varoufakis now, Ryan. All right. Stick around for 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. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back.

In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. We're moving now to Yanis Varoufakis, writer and former Greek finance minister. Yanis, thank you so much for joining us.

It's my great pleasure. Thank you for having me. And so let's start with Howard Lutnick, who's the kind of man about cable lately, commerce secretary for President Donald Trump. Speaking yesterday, I believe this is on CNBC. So, of course, it's going to be a top 10 economy. What's that? A top 10 economy from Asia? Listen, the Asian markets are very complex.

And there's a lot of talking to do, right? To get these things right, you've got to do a lot of talking. Now, we've only got 90 days and we've only got 60 left. So these things are coming. But you've got to be patient. Now, we're going to get some deals done pretty soon. The president will decide when he announces it, because remember, I'm his commerce secretary. I do the work. But the boss and you know, the boss as well as anybody in the world. I do. This is his deal to make. I'm told.

And his deal to do. No, no, I appreciate that. That was on Fox Business. But I want to play that clip because as we've been trying to report on the Trump administration's ongoing trade war, we've tried to give kind of the best possible perspective, put the Trump administration's argument in the best possible light so that people can agree with it or disagree with it. And I've had a really hard time figuring out what it is. I don't exactly know what they're trying to accomplish. And some of your writing has been really helpful in laying out what possibly could be driving some of what the thinking is behind the Trump administration's kind of reorganizing of the world economy. At this point in time, what do you think the Trump administration is trying to accomplish? Two basic things. The first thing they want to do is they want to substantially devalue the dollar

while simultaneously, and that may sound like a paradox, but I don't believe it is, maintaining the exorbitant privilege, the so-called exorbitant privilege of the dollar, maintaining its hegemonic presence in the world economy. That's one of the, possibly the most significant goal. The second thing they are trying to do is essentially tie together the extent to which the Trump administration is going to assault its allies and foes with Trump's tariffs, to tie this in to the extent to which tariffs are going to be used. So use tariffs in order to enhance the penetration of the American

military industrial complex in other people's economies and to calibrate that penetration by means of the tariffs. But the first task, which I mentioned, seems to be judging by what Scott Bassett is saying, what Stephen Miran are saying, it seems to me the number one priority. It seems to be working, right? And what would be the consequence if they do successfully devalue the dollar but maintain the hegemonic presence? And can I also say, Yanis, especially in the context of Trump pulling back originally because of what he saw in the bond market? I think he said people were getting, quote, a little yippy. How does all of this fit together? Well, there's no doubt that he got his care. He felt that a Liz Strass moment may be coming his way, undoubtedly.

So he stepped back, but he's going to step forward again in his usual shuffle. But allow me to just... By the way, lest I am misunderstood, I'm not supporting the Trumpian project. But I do believe that those of us who are politically opposed to it, we have a duty to understand it and not to dismiss them as a bunch of Neanderthals, which is what most of the liberal establishment,

to their detriment, I have to add, are doing. So, look, if you heard Scott Besson at the IMF the other day, he was really very clear. He talked about the Bretton Woods institutions. He talked about the Nixon shock in 1971.

And essentially what he was telling his audience was and it's not an irrational perspective to present to the world. What he was saying was, look, folks, ever since we became a deficit country at the end of the 1960s, by 1970, America was a deficit country. We achieved something quite spectacular. We managed to grow our hegemonic power in proportion to our trade deficit and our budget deficit. That has never happened before. No empire has managed to grow its power while going into the red. And the United States managed to do it at the expense of the American working class, at the expense of a very substantial portion of the American middle class, but

we did it. And then he adds, I don't believe we can carry on doing it because there is a limit beyond which trade deficits are not sustainable anymore. And you see, the success of the Nixon administration, the Carter administration, the Reagan administration, and so on and so forth, was that they managed to make other people's capitalists pay for the American deficits in a manner which enriched, violently enriched, the American rentier class.

But that gave rise, in the end, to an incongruity. If you look at the dollar world, the world out there, the economic sphere that is denominated in dollars, it is gigantic and it has been growing since the 1970s. But the manufacturing capacity, the real material economy of the United States, on which this dollar world is parasitic has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking so you have a huge parasite and a tiny little organism on which the

big parasite is being parasitic to so their concern is that this is becoming completely disproportional they need to shrink the dollar world and increase the extent to which the American economy can manufacture stuff. This is what they want. So from their perspective, a devaluation of the dollar by around 30%, which is ballpark what they want, will restore something like an equilibrium. Not an equilibrium, but it will take the whole gamut closer to an equilibrium. But they are very, very worried that this devaluation should not be allowed

to diminish the exorbitant privilege of the dollar. And this is why they're playing hardball with China. This is why they're playing hardball with the Japanese. They're telling the Japanese, sell a chunk of your $1.2 trillion of savings, but don't buy Japanese yen. Do not buy the euro. Do not buy the Chinese one. We will tell you what to buy. So tariffs are in that context, in the context of recent, they are a sideshow. They may be very high up the list of priorities of the great Donald, but not his economic team. His economic team is far more interested in what they call the rebalancing of the dollar

paper money trail and the actual productive capacities of the United States. And let's put C1 on the screen. So this is from Arnaud Bertrand, who points out that China, Japan, South Korea, and the countries of ASEAN just issued a joint statement in which they take a unified stance against, quote, escalating trade protectionism, a clear reference to Trump's tariffs. And I want to ask Giannis, now that we've sort of established, I think very accurately, what the administration's goal is, and that's hazy in a lot of corners of the media where they have this distorted idea of what the administration is actually trying to do. How would you say that they're doing towards their own goal?

If that is their own goal, how is the progress? Is it working, let's say, on their own terms? Allow me to be frank. It is far too early to know. Imagine we had the time machine and we went back to, let's say, October 1971, a couple of months after the Nixon shock. It would have been impossible to predict whether the Nixon shock would have worked. Because it took a decade for the Nixon shock to be implemented fully. Which means that the Trump administration,

this Trump administration cannot... Can you explain to us what the Nixon shock is? In 1971, 15th of August, those old enough can remember that because it was a shocking day. It was the day when effectively Nixon blew up the international monetary system that the United States had painstakingly put together

at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The golden age of American capitalism, of global capitalism, which was the 1950s and 60s, as we all know and remember. It was predicated, it was built on that monetary system. It was a remarkable system, come to think of it. It had, the anchor was the dollar. People say that it was the gold, because indeed the United States guaranteed anyone with $35

an ounce of gold from Fort Knox. But that was a sideshow. It was more for show. The reality was that it was a monetary system predicated on the United States dollar, which was, in fixed exchange rates, completely pegged to every other currency in Europe and in Japan, and the Japanese yen, for years, for decades. There were no fluctuations in exchange rates.

Interest rates were stuck at around 4.5%, plus or minus 0.1%, 0.2%. It was wonderfully boring, you know, the whole financial establishment. Imagine, you know, you never had to check the exchange rates or interest rates because for decades they were the same. And it was a golden era because what was the essence of the Bretton Woods system? It was that the United States exited the Second World War as the only creditor nation, as the only surplus nation, the only country with a

large, gigantic trade surplus. It was the only country that was not in ashes after the Second World War. And the idea was to maintain those surpluses, the American administration would do whatever it took in order to dollarize Europe and Japan, essentially taking part of its surpluses, sending it to Europe and

to Japan, either in the form of aid or loans, private loans, public loans, so that the Europeans and the Japanese could afford, would have enough dollars to purchase the American exports. And this worked brilliantly until the United States no longer had the surplus. And with typical bravado, Richard Nixon, it wasn't Nixon himself, there were some very interesting people around him. The Nixon team comprised Henry Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor at the time, before he became the Secretary of State. It was John Connolly, the former Texas governor,

Democrat, who absconded and joined the Nixon administration and became the Treasury Secretary. He was shot, actually. Really? Yes, indeed. He was in the car when JFK was shot. And primarily, a young man called Paul Volcker, that no one knew at the time,

who was the real brains of the Nixon shock. But the reason I'm mentioning that, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that, is the Nixon shock took place on the 15th of August 1971. It was major. You know, Nixon sent Connolly, his treasury secretary to the Europeans, who were pulling their hair out

because the dollar divided so fast. And essentially, inflation and unemployment was coming the way of the Europeans as a result of that move by Nixon. And Connolly, very arrogantly and aggressively, looked at them with cynicism, I would say, and said to them, guys, the dollar is our currency. But from today, it is your problem. So when people say that, you know, what Trump did is unprecedented, and never before has America treated its allies so badly. That's rubbish.

They did it in 1971. And they kept doing it for years and years. And indeed, Paul Volcker, before he was appointed by Carter, chairman of the Fed, a couple of months before that, in 1987, sorry, in 1978, if I remember correctly, he gave a speech at the University of Warwick in England, which was remarkable. Because there he outlined the plan. And the plan was, and I am quoting here, because it's etched in my mind, this speech of his. He said, the United States has opted for reasons of its own national interest for the controlled disintegration of the world economy. Does this remind you of anything? This is 1978, the controlled disintegration. And the Japanese and the Europeans were pulling their hair out. But you see, it took 10 years, because it wasn't just the Nixon shock in 1971.

It was the Carter administration that continued that by appointing that same man, Paul Volcker, to be the head of the Fed. And then Reagan continued it, and then Bush continued it, and Clinton continued it. So whether, you know, this is my excuse for saying it's too early to judge whether the shock is going to work. Because the question is, is there going to be this continuity in implementing the basic idea which people like Scott Pesant are outlining? And so I often also fall into the trap of thinking that these are Neanderthals that are organizing this policy. But I agree and follow along with their analysis all the way up until basically implementation. When it comes to the implementation, it feels like there's no, and therefore, this is how it's going to work out. And maybe I'm missing this as well. But they are effectively devaluing the dollar, creating conditions that could create

some manufacturing turnaround without having done the work of giving us the foundation on which we could build a manufacturing capacity. You still need things and people in order to feed that. You know, economics by itself is just magic. Like it can't, you know, by magic, it can't just create things out of nothing. And if China tells us, well, we're not sending you any semiconductors, we're not sending you any of the magnets, you're not going to get any of the refined rare earths that your manufacturing capacity needs, we're going to have a collapse in our manufacturing base relative to last year.

And then the politics are going to reverse and end this entire experiment before it even gets out of the lab. And that would then answer your question of whether it's working. Because in order for it to work, you need political continuity, and you can't have political continuity, I wouldn't think, if you get a significant recession and you don't see any green shoots of manufacturing out of it. So what am I missing there? Like, what does Besant see as the potential for us to revitalize our manufacturing capacity while simultaneously cutting ourselves off from trade? And Yanis, I'll just add, they're now saying the tax cut bill that Trump hopes to pass

over the summer will include like 100% write-offs on building expenses, equipment. Okay, well, that's something of an answer. Retroactive to January 20th. So I don't know how you would react to all of that. Yeah. Well, I'll start with the last point you made about the tax cuts. We keep forgetting that trump's shotgun has two barrels one of them contained the tariffs the second one the tax cuts the second has not

been fired yet and i think there is this is a very important part of their plan for attracting foreign capital particularly particular german capital or Japanese capital or Taiwanese capital into the United States. But yes, look, you have every reason to be despondent about the lack of preparation, the chaotic nature of all these announcements. The very sloppy language that Donald Trump in particular uses. Reciprocal tariffs. There's no reciprocity in what he's doing.

He's just going all out with gigantic tariffs in proportion to the trade deficit that the United States has vis-a-vis particular countries. So, yes, I mean, it is a bit, you will excuse my unscientific terms, a bit of a shit show. But then again, I have to take you back to 1971. It was exactly that in 1971.

You know, Richard Nixon was not the most coherent or reasonable people in the world, right? He was probably one of the worst ones. He also, on the 15th of August, what we tend to forget is that not only did he uncouple the United States dollar from gold and spearheaded a massive devaluation of the dollar, but he also did something else. He introduced tariffs, 10% tariffs immediately, the same day. And then he took those back three months later. So that's why I keep insisting that we've seen this play before.

And we have seen the chaos. And we have seen how remarkably it worked. Not on behalf of the working class of the United States, of the middle class of the United States. They were destroyed. I mean, as you know, in your country, hourly real wages are still below the level that they used to be at in 1973. When Trump talks about the carnage in the heartlands of the United States, he's completely right. Of course, he uses this to exploit the people who vote for him and trust him. And I think they trust him in a manner in which they will live to regret one at some point.

But we've seen all this before. Now, let's get to the point. Is this going to work or not? Well, I don't think it's going to work. I think that it's not going to work from the perspective of the MAGA base who put their trust in Trump to bring back a sufficient number of jobs and a quality of jobs that would somehow restore their capacity to dream the American dream. And the reason is not that capital is not going to rush to the United States. I have no doubt that it is already rushing into the United States. I have no doubt that it is already rushing

into the United States. I've spoken to people in Germany, I've spoken to people in France, I've spoken to people in Japan, and they are increasing very substantially the amount of investment they are going to be putting into the United States. That is not the problem. Capital is flying already in the United States. But I don't think the number of jobs is going to be proportional to the amount of capital because if you think about, take Apple, for instance. When Apple introduced manufacturing again in the United States some years ago,

they built that factory that makes their laptops, MacBook Pros, somewhere near Austin, Texas. Well, the number of jobs was minuscule because of automation. So a lot of the new manufacturing capacity is going to create a jobless surge. So this is problem number one. But allow me to tell you what I think is the real danger that Trump should be thinking about, especially during the night, keeping him awake.

If I were him, I would worry about success. Because if he is successful in bringing back manufacturing to the United States to the extent that he says that he will, which I don't think he will, but let's say that he does, then what happens? Then the trade deficit of the United States shrinks. But the trade deficit of the United States is the flip side of the massive rents extracted from the global economy by American renters. Because come to think of it, it is the american trade deficit which keeps german factories churning japanese factories and chinese factories and it is the dollars that these capitalists in germany

japan and in china collect which they accumulate and then they bring it back to or send it to new york to wall street to be recycled in the form of US government debt, treasuries, some equities, and a lot of real estate. So the reason why financial markets have been doing so well over the last 40 years or so, the reason why realtors like Trump have been amassing these gigantic rents for the last 40 years is the American trade deficit. So what happens when he eliminates it, if he succeeds in eliminating it? Well, he's going to have some really very cross rentiers, financiers and realtors.

His tribe are going to be living with him. Can he sustain that or will he choose to betray the working class that voted for him? I suspect it will be the latter. And so, yeah, so what would that look like? So let's say the rentier class is now getting pinched. And it's incredible irony that it is a kingpin of the rentier class that, you know, he's literally a real estate developer that is leading this operation that then pinches people like him. What then happens if you no longer have these dollars, you know, flowing out to German factories, Chinese factories, Japanese factories, and then recycled back into

Wall Street and then circulated throughout the U.S. rentier class. So what does happen? What do the factories do and what do the rentiers do? Well, you see, I don't think we will reach the point where the rentiers' interest will be so seriously jeopardized. That is, even if the Trumpian playbook is implemented and starts working and the trade deficit starts shrinking at some point the administration itself will stop it from

shrinking they will say okay well we have reduced it by i don't know what percentage we have recalibrated rebalanced the dollar world and the manufacturing world, the US manufacturing world, to some extent, and that's enough. And now we are going to do other things. Like, for instance, we are going to give even more tax cuts. We are going to allow Elon Musk to go crazy with his Tesla autonomously driven vehicles, deregulate completely, put

all our eggs in the big tech basket, which is where the United States still has a significant advantage vis-a-vis the rest of the world and to some extent China, and accumulate rents in that regard. But that will create political chaos, because the mega base will have been betrayed firstly by Obama in 2008, then by Biden, and now by Trump 2.0. And therefore, nothing good is going to transpire when it comes to the quality of what we call our democratic process

here in the West. Yanis Varoufakis, thank you so much for joining us. This was fascinating and very helpful. We appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoyed it. 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

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But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about

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It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

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subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was on Bill Maher talking about AOC and Bernie. Let's roll a little bit of this. They gamed the system. They changed it. Who do you see on the horizon for 2028 in the Democratic primary? Right now? Yeah. Bernie and AOC?

No. They got the biggest crowds. That doesn't matter. It won't sustain itself, but right now they have no leader. But this is the thing the Republican Party has to understand, too. Both parties lost in the last election. Trump won. And I don't know if that's going to transfer.

We should have won four more seats in the Senate. If you looked at the last 70 races for the Senate, 69 would follow exactly the same. I think it's Moore versus Youngkin. That's where I see it. Youngkin would be excellent. Youngkin is adjacent, and then Vance and Jr Junior will fight it out for that crowd. But you're thinking AOC and Bernie, and who's at the top of the ticket?

They're going to lead right now. Who's at the top of that ticket, Kevin? Because if it's not Bernie, he's going to be vice president and wait his turn. No, no, it would be. Bernie's been running each time. I'm just saying who's in the lead right now. I don't think that's how it ends up. But big crowds don't necessarily mean who's the right candidate.

You know, when I started in... No, but it drives where the ideas are going to go. It's going to drive the money for a while. It doesn't make them the winner. No, it doesn't make them the winner. You'll have to wait till you get two years out, and then you'll start seeing these governors that start showing solutions. You also have to know what is the issue going to be.

Are we going to have a foreign policy issue? Are we going to have an economic issue? And who's been the best and leading in that? But right now for the Democrats, who's going to lead for the next two years, the money is going to, AOC outraised everybody in the house. And it's all small dollars. It's all small dollars. This is exactly where Trump was when no one gave him a chance at 17. He outraised everybody else. So that's where the base is at, right? And so what will happen, it'll move after the next midterm elections. We do know what AOC will not be doing, and that's running for the top spot on the oversight committee, if you can put a D0 here. She says, Jerry Connolly stepped aside, who had beat her in the race for ranking Dem on oversight. And she says she's not running this time. She says, Jerry Connolly stepped aside, who had beat her in the race for ranking Dem on oversight.

And she says she's not running this time. She says, quote, it's actually clear to me that the underlying dynamics in the caucus have not shifted with respect to seniority as much as I think would be necessary. And so I believe I'll be staying put at Energy and Commerce, unquote. Because if she would be ranking member, then she couldn't serve on Energy and Commerce Committee, which is an A committee. It used to be a powerful committee back when committees mattered. Committees don't really matter anymore, but there's not zero. It sounds like what she's saying there, if you read between the lines, is that leadership is still trying to wield significant power over oversight. She feels like if she went there, she might be- I don't think it's leadership. I think what she's saying is what she means,

which is that the caucus itself is so filled with people who believe in the dogma of seniority and that you rise up through the ranks based on how many terms you've served and that they're not willing to upend that even at this moment. That seniority trumps everything else. And so if – because, you know, there's a very – the incentive for each member of Congress is to support the seniority system because it's not a merit system. It just means if you stick around long enough, you will –

It doesn't matter if you suck. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. You will eventually get your turn, as Connolly called it. He said, I've never gotten to be a ranking member. Don't ask Steny Hoyer about that, though. Well, yeah. At the very top, then you got to compete. And yes, because he had six years of seniority on Pelosi, who he allegedly went on a date when they were interns back in the 50s, which is hilarious. It was the 50s, interning for a Maryland senator. Genuinely hilarious.

Before the Civil Rights Act is when they actually went on a date. Even before the 57 Civil Rights Act, in any event. So she's saying that she wouldn't have a chance. And I think losing once is, hey, you take your shot. You show you're playing the inside, willing to play the inside game. Maybe you even have a shot at winning. You lose. You know, then you go out and go back to what you were doing. Lose twice, you start to get the stench of loser on you.

So she's just not going to go for it this time. And this is becoming something of a panic because we have this other clip. This is D2. So not only was Bill Maher pushing back vociferously in that clip to Kevin McCarthy's point in a way that, you know, I think maybe did reek of a little bit of, I shouldn't say a little, but significant concern. Yeah. Wishful thinking in his part. Right. Please tell me this can't be true. Well, and this is an interesting divide on the right, is that you have people like Kevin McCarthy, who I think are accurately pointing out that this is where the energy is on the left. And then you have people who say AOC's political career on a national level is done in the water. She is a joke. She's way too radical.

But both of those things can't be true at the same time. And so there's some people on the right who are like, it's it, it's AOC. And then, oh, but also AOC is a disaster for Democrats. So let's go ahead and roll D2. This is part of an MSNBC panel where they started to talk about this. They've got to get out of the policy discussion and the policy fight and focus on a purpose. They've got to get out of the policy discussion and the policy fight and focus on a purpose. They've got to broaden the party and they've got to go with a 40 year old because they do well with Obama, Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton. Right. And they've got to they've got to. Well, they they've got to. So to me, I would get in a room and call a summit and I would

say, hey, guys, this person, just to knock off the internet. Gretchen Wimmer mishides behind a clipboard. That's the face of the Democrat Party? The Democratic Party will never listen to Aaron, but they should hear Aaron and say the following. You guys are in disarray. You're having a civil war. You're going hard left with AOC and Bernie. Very bad mistake.

Country doesn't want that. I can't tell by the rallies. Get in there. In Idaho, 12,000 people. No, no, no. That's not the answer. I'm not saying it's not the answer. Kamala had great rallies.

She lost all seven states. I know, but let me think. To his point, look, California, we got 26,000 people. 20,000 in Salt Lake City. 36,000 in California. 12,000 in Idaho. Denver, Colorado, 34,000, Tucson, Arizona, 23,000.

That ain't it. What the Democrats need to do is empower the Alyssa Slotkins, the Tim Ryans, the Seth Moulds, the moderate young Democrats that they've been head padding for the last 10 years and saying, just wait your turn. Yeah, but when is it their turn? But let me ask, I mean, all of those people, do you think any of those people have what it takes to run for president and win? No, because the Democratic Party has not conditioned them. No, no, no. I mean, in a perfect world,

do they really have what it takes to run for president of these United States and win? Well, I believe they have a better chance. I think they're great Senate candidates. No, I think they have a better chance than the progressives and the far-left people that alienated voters. I feel like Stefan watching that clip, like this MSN or the CNN panel, that's what it was, has everything. It has Anthony Scaramucci, a man in a cowboy hat, an Essie cup and a denim jumpsuit screaming about Alyssa Slott. Well, it's such a funny network. It's such a funny network because That's what he tuned in for. It's such a funny network because, and MSNBC is almost the same, that it's a center-left network.

And they've been covering the Democratic Party sympathetically for 10 years, 10 plus years. And Bernie Sanders rose in 2015. And they still don't have, as far as I can tell, definitely not in that panel, I don't think anywhere on the network. Somebody who aligns with that major faction of the party. It's just people looking at them like zoo creatures. They have like Bernie Curious people, maybe like a Van Jones. Van Jones. I know, I know. He just took $100 million from Jeff Bezos a couple years ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this isn't saying— He was a Maoist in, like, the 90s. He was literally, like, a Maoist activist in San Francisco. Yeah. It was why he was— If you had him on then, that would be fun. If you had him on then, that would be fun.

They didn't have him on then. Yeah. No, it's amazing. There are—like, this is, again, it's something that a lot of people on the right don't understand about these networks. They are center-left. They just actually hate the left-left. It's almost more than they hate the center-right, given that Anthony Scaramucci was on that panel. Let's take a look at an AOC being disrupted by protesters.

I think this was at a town hall. This is D3. What are you doing about the genocide in Gaza? You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore!

You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore!

You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore!

You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore!

You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore!

You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! So sorry, that was pretty hard to hear, but you probably saw clips of it going around. Basically, it's somebody protesting her at a town hall saying, you're a war criminal. What are you going to do about the for her convention speech where she said that Kamala Harris is working tirelessly for a ceasefire.

Because at the time, nobody really believed that she was working tirelessly for a ceasefire, nor that Biden was working tirelessly for a ceasefire. We've since had Israeli officials come out and say, yeah, the Biden administration never actually pressured us to reach a ceasefire. So it raises the question of, was the Biden administration lying to AOC or was she lying to the DNC? And if they were lying to her, why couldn't she see that it was a lie? That day, I believe it was, or maybe it was the next day at a protest or at a public event in, where was it, Chicago? Ilhan Omar spoke at a rally where she said, you know, they're not working tirelessly. She quoted AOC, her fellow squad members quoted her saying they're not working tirelessly. And Omar brought that up again in the last couple weeks saying, you know, they lied to us when they said they were working tirelessly. And she's, so kind of direct shots at AOC. And

she's never, as far as I've seen, kind of, you know, confronted that directly. So if she does end up running for president, that's going to be something that she's going to have to address. What was her, because she has been, you know, she took a week or two longer than some others to use the word genocide, but she said it very early. She was one of the first sponsors of a ceasefire resolution. But then she takes some other votes that get people frustrated. So, you know, from her perspective, she's basically done everything she can. From the perspective of her critics, she's lying about the Biden administration working to, quote unquote, working tirelessly toward a ceasefire and undermining pressure on the Biden administration to actually do that. Yeah.

Yeah. And when we were on the ground at the DNC, it was easy to sense a lot of cynicism about AOC among the people that we were talking to. Let's put D4 up on the screen because this is another sort of shot in the arm, perhaps for the ascendant left, Ryan. Brian Kemp announced yesterday, Georgia governor, that he will not be running for Senate. And the New York Times headline actually adds, Ossoff's team must have been stoked about this headline, quote, giving Ossoff a lift. Ossoff Nation is rising up.

We'll put D5 here on the screen, Ryan, and maybe you can explain it for the offline left. Yeah, old Ettinger-Mentum. So among his many posts about this yesterday, basically he's saying an Ossoff-Vance race in 2028 would be similar to JFK-Nixon. So comparing Ossoff to JFK and Vance to Nixon. Nixon in 60.

Not that, I don't think it's that off in an interesting way. Yeah, I don't know. It's just not crazy. You know, there's not crazy. There's a lot of cynicism about Ossoff, but like I've said on this show before, you look into his actual

record. Investigative journalist. And his run as a pretty strong kind of populist progressive in Georgia. He didn't use the terms like Green New Deal and Medicare for All, but when you look at what he was saying,

he was supportive of those basic ideas, but talking about them in a way that he thought would resonate with the majority of Georgians. And so if he is able to win reelection in 2026, then yeah, he's a top tier front runner for 2028. Super interesting. Right. And let's move on to the gain of function news that broke yesterday. We can go ahead and roll this clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now obviously Secretary of Health and Human Services, talking as Donald Trump signs. This is one of those classic Donald Trump second administration EO signings in the Oval Office where he's flanked by Marty McCary, Jay Bhattacharya, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He is signing an executive order against gain-of-function research. So let's just take a listen to this as he won. Gain-of-function is an historic day, the end of gain-of-function research funding by the federal government and also controls by private corporations on gain-of-function studies. This was the kind of study that was engaged in by the United States military and intelligence agencies beginning in 1947, by 1969, the CIA said that they had reached nuclear equivalency,

that they could kill the entire U.S. population for 29 cents a person. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on for a couple of minutes there going back into the history of gain-of-function research, but what the EO did was restrict federal funding for research known as, quote, gain-of-function. And what's interesting about that, Ryan, is that Fauci likes to stretch. You know, he used to say he was enhancing pathogens. You may remember that infamous exchange he had with Senator Rand Paul, but it wasn't quite, quote, unquote, gain-of-function.

So maybe there are still ways for the medical establishment that wants to continue. Desperately many people want to continue doing gain of function research, wiggling around the boundaries of this. But I think you actually checked in with Ebright on this, didn't you? Yeah, and I read the EO and it's pretty tight. I mean, the language is pretty tight. So I think it'd be difficult for them to get around it. But it really focuses in an annoying way on, it says, quote unquote, countries of concern, e.g. China.

It's like, okay, fine, whatever. But, like, it doesn't matter where the research is done. Like, you get a pathogen out in the air. Like, it can be in Toledo. It can be in China. It can be in Sierra Leone. Like, people travel. There's airports everywhere.

So, like, just focusing on countries of concern, it's Trump's kind of obnoxious xenophobia manifesting in a place where it's, like, completely unnecessary. Well, I don't know if it makes anybody feel better if we're even doing it here. Right. I mean, maybe feel a little better. Like, why would that be better? Like, it's cool. We're going to do all of our gain of function research on viruses in your backyard. Yeah.

Not in China. No, North Carolina. It's going to be downtown Washington, D.C. Right. You're going to be fine. You got to, you know, make America great again for gain of function research. But yeah, so I asked Richard Ebright about RFK Jr.'s claim there, which if you could hear him, what he was saying was gain of function research has basically produced nothing of value

for the scientific community. And so Ebright, he's a molecular biologist at Rutgers. He's an outspoken critic of a lot of the scientists involved with this research and also the research itself. So I asked him for his take. I was like, really? Like blanket? Zero? Nothing?

And he says it has added nothing of substantive value. It has had zero civilian applications. It has not contributed to the development of any vaccine or therapeutic agent, and it has not contributed to preventing or responding to pandemics. bioweapons, like in the military capacity, both whether it's the U.S. investing in it, the Pentagon, or the Chinese military. That's what really gave it its boost, and particularly after the anthrax attacks back in 2001, 2002. That's when all of this money started flowing into it.

And they've kind of then retconned some rationale for some civilian applications. But according to Ebright so far, like zero, like nothing has come of it. And it's interesting to think about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. that institute was to identify pandemics early, pathogens that could be of concern, to become a pandemic before they spread too far. I think the evidence is clear that they produced the pandemic. Setting that aside, let's say they didn't. It's the one thing you agree with the CIA on.

But it started in Wuhan. So it started next door to them their whole job is to look around the entire world, identify potential pandemic viruses and then control them before they become a virus thank you it happened right there and you still didn't stop it

so at very best you didn't start the pandemic but it was next door to you and you didn't stop it. How are you going to stop one that happens, you know, thousands of miles away from you? Anyway, so it's not a great track record. That brings us to our friend of the show, Jeffrey Sachs, who chaired the commission that looked into the origin of COVID. And so speaking of Wuhan, there's another locale that also gets brought up here. Let's roll Jeffrey Sachs here. I'll tell you a sad truth. Also, a little surprising. And I have to admit what I'm about to tell you is only 99 percent sure.

But my view, based on very extensive work over the last four and a half years, is that COVID came from the University of North Carolina, which is the leading researcher on beta coronaviruses, working with the U.S. government on a set of grant proposals that identified putting in the viral change that created SARS-CoV-2. It's a grim truth. It's ugly. It's been hidden from view. The reason I mention it in this context is we don't have any global governance that is effective right now to control the manipulation of dangerous pathogens like the manipulation that created the pandemic.

And when it happened and officially it took seven million deaths, but probably if you count all of the deaths associated with COVID, it was probably closer to 20 million deaths. Even when that happens, it's never properly investigated. It's covered up. It's hidden from view. And so that's actually quite a plausible claim. If you want to look into it, just Google Ralph Baric, who's the head of the program there, who was working directly with people in the Wuhan lab. He led the project that came up with basically the recipe that appears to be the thing of UNC in the origin of COVID, it helps to explain why there wasn't an investigation. Well, I mean, even our own funding of Wuhan, either way. Right. where's the U.S. propaganda apparatus to start, you know, saber-rattling and, you know,

banging the drum about how awful China is? If anything, it was, if you were blaming China, Nancy Pelosi was calling you racist. Right, right. And so it's like, oh, oh, I see why, because the U.S. was intimately involved in this as well. And so both China and the U.S. then have motivation to be like, what'd you say? It was the rednecks in Wuhan, you know, buying pangolins. Yeah, let's go with that. Sounds right. Yeah. So finally, we back at The Hill hosted a lot, you set this up, it was a fascinating debate between Johns Hopkins professor named Gigi Gromville and an MIT professor named Kevin Esvelt. And this was like, I think we went for an hour having a pro gain-of-function person and an anti-gain-of-function person talk about whether it's ultimately valuable and whether the costs are worth the benefits of doing the research. So if you're curious in hearing out both sides, I would recommend taking a look back at that because it was very, very helpful for me to hear both of them. And we kept trying to pin her down on

what has it produced. Right. Not that science, it's okay. Science doesn't always produce results. That's what science is. You have a hypothesis, you explore it, and sometimes it goes down a rabbit hole and your hypothesis was wrong. So that alone is not a reason not to do it. If it's extremely dangerous and you're putting the whole world at risk, that kind of can be a reason not to do it.

But she never, you guys can go back and watch it if you want, but like, to my mind, she never effectively presented to us anything that made us feel like, oh, OK, that is that is a benefit that we have derived from this research, which can be weighed against the risk of a global pandemic and millions of people dying. Yeah, I mean, so then we can balance that out. I was left with what we can balance that out. I was left with, well, we know the risks. Yeah. Even if you don't think this happened in the lab,

which I think it did, but even if you think it didn't, it could. There are leaks all the time. So we know the risks, but we don't know the benefits. We haven't seen anything yet. I remember wrapping that segment and being like, yeah, thanks so much to both of you, hearing both of it out. And Ryan, you just jumped in and you're like, think it's pretty clear who won. And I was like, oh my gosh. She didn't like that. I don't think so, but I was really persuaded. I'll shoot the messenger. So yeah, go ahead and take a look at that if you're curious.

And on that note, let's go ahead and get to our second guest of today's show. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family

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

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette.

MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcast. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has dropped charges against people that she rounded up recently for protesting against Israel's war in Gaza. I've rolled F2 here, this video. You guys might remember this kind of viral footage that went around of Michigan police backed up by the FBI, literally smashing their way into

people's homes, dragging people off and then charging them with serious felonies and keeping them behind bars for quite some time. She has now dropped those charges. And so we are joined by Henry McKean Shapiro, who was one of the protesters who was who was rounded up by Nessel and her federal accomplices, ended up spending Henry, what, four days and behind bars before you were released. Is that right? Yeah, actually, just a bit of the correction is that the felony charges that were just dropped against me and six others yesterday are unrelated to the FBI raids. It's the same prosecutor for them, but our charges come from back in September related to the U of M encampment. Yeah, so walk us through why we ended up seeing these raids recently. So what charges resulted from the original encampment? And what was the... What's the relationship between both?

Yeah, that's a great question. So in September of 2024, Dana Nessel dropped 11 charges against people for their involvement in the U of M encampment, seven of which were felony charges. And all of us, including myself, had a felony resisting and obstructing arrest and misdemeanor trespassing. And four others got various different kinds of misdemeanors, ranging from stepping on a $2 small Israel flag to other just ridiculous ones like trespassing. And Dana Nessl has also continued to do charges against people for their involvement in pro-Palestinian activism at U of M.

So in January, she dropped charges against people who participated in a die-in demonstration on the U Mish Diag at the beginning of the school year. And then just on April 23rd, she requested a judicial warrant, which authorized the FBI and a bunch of different police precincts from across the state to raid the homes of several prominent pro-Palestine activists. And so what are the actual charges? How is she trying to take political activism on a college campus and transform it into felonies? What does the paperwork look like there? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because it's really quite ridiculous the way she's trying to do it. So for these raids that happened on April 23rd, it's only it's so Michigan actually has a bit of a loophole when it offers warrants to people who are being searched, which is that they don't have to list the probable cause for why they obtained the search warrant. So it's actually extremely unclear to even the people who were searched what purpose or what they're even perhaps going to be charged with.

And the press releases have mentioned multi-jurisdictional vandalism, which is not an actual legal term, but it's clear that they're trying to quickly manufacture consent for the Attorney General's office handling these cases and to bring in the fbi which is usually not brought in to handle small protest related issues within the state um so it's it's it's so far she's mentioned this multi-jurisdictional vandalism thing um which we know is really just kind of ridiculous way of trying to justify her presence across the state and her cooperation with the Trump administration. And to set the context, right, there was some frustration among a lot of people that local police were not sufficiently aggressive enough against protesters.

Like they wanted more protester blood. The Guardian had a good piece on this recently where they say, the Guardian's investigation revealed concrete evidence of conflicts that defense attorneys argued factored into the prosecutions. Among the findings, a story revealed A.G. Nessel's office charged pro-Palestinian protesters at a higher rate than other state prosecutors. Nessel was recruited by university regents who were frustrated by local prosecutors' unwillingness to crack down on most of the students arrested to take over the case and file charges, three people with direct knowledge of the decision told The Guardian at the time. The investigation also found that six of eight regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel's campaigns. Additionally, her office hired a regents law firm to handle major state cases.

And the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign. And so if people remember, there was a multi-day controversy when Rashida Tlaib said that she felt like Dana Nessel's office was biased against Michigan protesters. And she said it was because, in her understanding, Nessel was getting pressure from the regent's office. She was then accused of anti-Semitism, saying that— By Dana Nessel. Right. By Dana Nessel was biased, and that was because she was being pressured by the regents. So now we have this investigation that shows that, in fact, the regents of the university were indeed upset that local police and local prosecutors weren't bringing the hammer down hard enough on you and fellow protesters. And so they roped Dana Nessel into this. So can you talk

about what your interactions were like, you know, with local police and prosecutors versus now with the state and the FBI? Yeah, I mean, it's this whole thing has been it's just a total, total circus. In fact, a huge factor of why Nle likely dropped the charges is the fact that it's so unclear why she was taking up this case to begin with. In fact, it even came out that it seems like our local prosecutor, Ellie Savitt, had never even received the charges from the encampment. And something that had become really clear to the Attorney General's office in this ongoing, our lawyers had filed a motion to recuse Dana Nessel for, you know, impropriety in taking these cases and strong, both real and appearance of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim

bias is the fact that if she was to continue with this case, it would have opened up her office into evidentiary hearing and opened them up to discovery to figure out exactly why they picked up these charges, because it doesn't make any sense. This was not even remotely a multi-jurisdictional case. It all happened within the Umich Diag, which is about like 200 square feet. So it doesn't make any sense Diag, which is about, you know, like 200 square feet. So it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that's what I was wondering, like this multi-jurisdictional vandalism. You guys were literally camped in one place. Weird. That's the whole thing was it was an encampment. Right. I mean, it's totally ridiculous. And,

you know, like you mentioned before, it's just clearly a result of the regents uh not getting the response that they wanted from ellie savett um the sufficient response that they had wanted to a previous protest that happened in november 2023 um and i mean the links just couldn't be clear even on the eve of dana nussel dropping the the decision to charge those of us from the encampment just the day before a Regent Jordan Acker had posted a selfie on Instagram with her with himself Dana Nessel and Jeremy Moss who are like a kind of like Zionist three stooges in Michigan politics so it's just very clear and Mark Bernstein who you mentioned he's he was a co-chair of Dana Nessel's campaign, has given tens of thousands of dollars in financial contributions to her campaign. And it's clear that Dana Nessel has basically just been recruited by them due to their dissatisfaction with Elie Savitz's insufficient zeal for prosecuting pro-Palestine protesters at U of M?

Last question for me is just basically what this has been like for you, this crazy experience. Any major takeaways or any reflections on it? I think right now those of us who just had our charges dropped're obviously very personally relieved. But I think we're also very invigorated with, I think what we see as a massive victory for pro-Palestine activism, not just in Michigan, but nationwide, which is to show that you can't build up these ridiculous charges against Palestine protesters

and expect to get away with it. That unlike what might've been the case three years ago, that, um, taking such a vigorous stance against anti-genocide protesters is not acceptable, uh, with, uh, with the public, um, and showing that, you know, you can't get away with, uh, just, you know, concocting some ridiculous narrative about, you know, anti-Semitic protesters is just not going to work. So the fact that we were able to hold on long enough for her office to drop the charges under the massive amount of popular pressure, we see as a huge victory, and we're very proud of that. And I'm curious, when you were in jail, what did the other folks who were in there with you

say when they're like, you know, what are you here for? And you're like, protesting the war, genocide in Gaza. No, I mean, obviously all of them, I didn't meet a single person there that wasn't supportive of, of, you know, of our cause. I mean, all of the, you know, a lot of them, not a, not a fan of the local prosecutor says, well, a lot of people there who had been, you know, screwed over by them for just simple things, such as, you know, unpaid parking tickets or just being unable to meet, meet bail. And in general, they were super, you know, a lot of them even had actually been towards the encampment and mentioned that to me. And I've also been targeted by University of

Michigan police before. And we're very sympathetic to our cause, which was very comforting for those four days I was there. All right. Well, I'm glad you're out. Yeah. I mean, it must be a relief. You know, were you like, were you getting threats from the prosecutors like this is the amount of like you're going to spend years if you don't you know plead down or something no actually you know it's interesting is it was that wasn't the kind of thing that they were even looking for and most of all they wanted us to accept a plea that would have required giving them some kind of political victory like saying we admit that we did not in peaceful protest. And we didn't want to do that because first of all, it could be like legally problematic for us down the line, but also we didn't want to, I mean, you know, she's clearly fishing for that for a reason. And probably as an excuse to continue

pushing charges against people who have been speaking out uh against the ufm's complicity in genocide oh so they were offering if you would admit that you were violent that then they would give you no time basically but you would get a charge on your record uh or that it would be like the charge would be there would be a diversion of the charge with time but like it was very clear that the the admission her political agenda was the most important demand for coming from her office. Right. Well, glad you guys stood up for yourselves and didn't capitulate to that. Thanks, Henry. Thanks for your time.

Thanks for having me on. Take it easy. Well, Emily, I think the kids are all right. What do you think? If everyone decides to include that, if the people who edit the show have decided to include us both counting in one or the other, then that is what happened for the audience's sake. We can start that over. All right. Do you want to start it? No, go ahead.

Three, two, one. Well, Emily, I think the kids are all right. What do you say? Super interesting. ahead. Three, two, one. Well, Emily, I think the kids are all right. What do you say? Super interesting. What a wild year he has had. I mean, truly. Rollercoaster of Michigan politics, throwing students through the ringer. Not fun to have felonies thrown at you. No. And then being forced to admit. I mean, their attorneys obviously helped them. Do you make a good decision there? Yeah. good for him for standing up because if he would have admitted and he and his colleagues, comrades, would have admitted, confessed to some violence that didn't happen, then yeah, then they would see, told you this is a legitimate thing that we're doing. Now we're going to go round up other people. Yeah.

So good for him for standing firm. Yeah. I'm sure that the apologies are coming for Rashida Tlaib anytime now. Yeah, I'm sure that'll take just another couple of days. Packed show today. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in, for sticking with us for these slightly later starts. But we've all got so much going on. Crystal will be in tomorrow, right, Ryan? That's right. Crystal's in tomorrow, and then you and Crystal are on Thursday. I think it's you and Crystal, according to the schedule.

No, I have it right here. We'll figure this out. Yeah, we should just start doing this stuff actually on camera, though. It's more like reality TV that way. I think we're already doing it. And then we have an AMA up next for the premium subscribers. So breakingpoints.com, make sure you're throwing away your last hundred bucks on that. See you there. We'll see you next time. I know. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter.

Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard.

Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your gut microbiome and those healthy bacteria can actually have positive effects. Your mental health, your immunity, your risk of cancer, almost any disease under the sun. This week on Dope Labs, Titi and I dive into the world of probiotics, the hype, the science, and what your gut bacteria are really doing behind the scenes. From drinks and gummies to probiotic pillows. Yes, really, probiotic pillows.

We're breaking down what's legit and what's just brilliant marketing. With expert insight from gastroenterologist Dr. Roshi Raj. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.