Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/8/24: Biden Halts IDF War Crime Report, Speaker Johnson Compares Protests To Gas Chambers, Stormy Testifies In Trump Case, Romney Admits TikTok Ban About Palestine Content, Zelensky Thwarts Assassination, GenZ Drowns In Debt

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Biden delaying a report on Israel war crimes, Mike Johnson compares campus protests to gas chambers, Stormy Daniels testifies in Trump case, Mitt Romney admits TikTok ban about Palestine content, Zelensky thwarts assassination attempt, GenZ drowns in debt.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Before we get into the show today, I wanted to do a quick update from last night. The crackdown on campus protests continues. We have some footage from a GW University student that was sent to us last night. Here's police

arresting a student in a wheelchair, putting him in the paddy wagon there. Here's a minor who was also participating in the protest that they put into the police car there There was also a crackdown at FIT Fashion Institute of Technology up in Manhattan also UMass Amherst Saw saw their encampments swept in what was a pretty severe crackdown So these are unfolding day after day Our counterpoints Friday show is going to touch on this campus protest. So we're going to have Glenn Greenwald in debate with Ilya Shapiro. And I think it's going to be a fascinating one. Shapiro has been basically one of the lead champions of this crackdown.

And Greenwald has been one of the lead opponents of the crackdown. All of it extra interesting, I think, because Shapiro himself was canceled back in 2022. Not long ago. And recently wrote a fairly moving essay about the experience of cancel culture. They're also both lawyers. So I think that's going to be pretty interesting from a legal perspective, what the limits of free speech are. And so if you want to get that early, it'll be out Thursday evening. You have to go to BreakingPoints.com, become a subscriber. Most of you probably are already subscribers.

Like, how could you not be? But if you're not, go to breakingpoints.com, subscribe so you can get it earlier in your inbox. Otherwise, that show will be out to you Friday morning. We're going to talk about the ongoing Israeli invasion of Rafah and the US response to it. Emily, we've also got the Trump trial. This is getting fun. Yeah, that's right. Stormy Daniels testified for the prosecution in the Hush Money trial

yesterday in New York. Donald Trump, man, do we have some interesting updates from inside the courtroom because Donald Trump was reprimanded and we'll tell you why. We do indeed, as Crystal would say. TikTok is suing under the First Amendment to overturn the attempted ban. We're going to get into why. I think we both think they have a pretty strong case. There was an assassination attempt against Zelensky. We'll get into that and its implications, as well as a new report on Gen Z debt. You know, and I think there's a media story on Gen Z debt as well, because just a couple of weeks ago, you probably remember there were viral charts showing how great Gen Z is doing compared to other generations. So we'll dive into all of that. But Ryan, let's start in Rafah,

where we have images we can start, roll this is a zero. Yeah, first tear sheet here is from Al Jazeera. The U.S. has been saying that this invasion of Rafah, and this has been interesting to watch unfold. So if Israel finally launches this much awaited invasion of Rafah. And this has been interesting to watch unfold. So if Israel finally launches this much-awaited invasion of Rafah, the response from the United States has been to say that actually this is not really an invasion of Rafah. This is a targeted assault, a surgical operation aimed at disrupting Hamas infrastructure. And also, particularly, they went after the Rafah border crossing. We can roll some of the footage from this yesterday. They went after the Rafah border crossing. We can roll some of the footage from this yesterday. They went after the Rafah border crossing, and the argument was that Hamas, as the de facto government, has been running this border crossing. And as a result, has been collecting customs revenue.

And that customs revenue then fuels Hamas' infrastructure and existence. And so therefore Israel is going to go in and it's going to seize the border. The border crossing is not that deep into Gaza. So you can do a kind of targeted operation there. At the State Department yesterday, a number of reporters were asking, OK, you're saying this is not a major military operation, that these are just a collection of small military operations. Isn't there a point at which a lot of small operations add up to a major military operation?

And they acknowledged, yes. So it became this philosophical debate about how many angels can dance on a pin, when it moves from a targeted surgical operation, how many targeted operations become until they become a major military operation. So we can put up this next element from, I believe this is from the Wall Street Journal here. So the rift that is developing between the United States has to do with the insistence over months and months and months that Israel not launch an invasion into Rafah. Yet, that entire time, Biden continued sending weapons up until just last week, when apparently roughly 3,500 bombs were withheld, because the U.S. finally started taking Israel at its word that they actually did plan to launch this invasion, which they had been saying that they were going to

launch for a very long time. At the State Department yesterday, I asked, you know, what went wrong internally? Like, you're going to review your process? Like, how do you end up accidentally arming an operation that you say that you oppose? Like, how does that happen? Surely not the first time we've done that. Well, interestingly, so we can move to this next element. Politico and others reported that the State Department is indefinitely delaying the release of its national security memo that is aimed at determining whether or not Israel has committed war crimes with American weapons. If they conclude that they did, this report is supposed to be due today,

if they conclude they did, the U.S. would have to stop sending Israel weapons. So they said, we're actually not going to submit this on time. They say they hope they're going to get it done soon, but it's an awful lot of work. And at the briefing yesterday, they said, it was the first time we've ever done something like this. So it's taking a little longer than we expected. Matt Lee, the AP's State Department reporter said, wait a minute, hold on a second. Did you just say you've never put together an investigation into whether the countries that you're arming have committed war crimes reports? Right. Have committed war crimes? You've never done that before? war crimes, like you've never done that before.

So, well, we've never done it like this. And this is all related to the Leahy law. Right. There are laws on the books that say the State Department is supposed to care. Josh Paul quit because Josh Paul, State Department employee, his job was to investigate and certify whether or not the arms that were going out the door were going to be used to commit human rights abuses. He said that during, after October 7th, all checks on that were eliminated. And any effort that he made to interrogate whether or not this was going to go to a unit or to be used in a way that was against international law would be just bulldozed and the arms would go out the door. That's why he famously kind of quit in protest. So we're not sure when we're going to get this report on Israeli war crimes. All of this coming to a head at the exact same time. I was at an event last night where Representative Ro Khanna spoke, and this is my fancy camera work here. He criticized the State Department and the administration for this delay of this report

and said that he'll be introducing legislation to block offensive weapons shipments to Israel. While this Rafah assault is ongoing, we can roll this clip from Ro Khanna. And our entire government has said going into Rafah would be a catastrophe. So I will be introducing an amendment again in the House Armed Services Committee on May 22nd to stop again any offensive weapons going into Netanyahu until this invasion stops. And I was very, very disappointed that the administration is not coming out with its report that was due to the United States Congress on whether there were human rights violations and international law violations that have been committed in Gaza. That report was supposed to be to Congress on May 8th, and it has been indefinitely delayed. No explanation of why.

So I know we're here to talk about climate, but of course, as we're seeing the destruction of our planet in Gaza, one can't help but think of the interconnection between the two. That was at an event for the youth climate group, Climate Defiance. Rokhana, they're talking about the decision not to release this report yet, or the failure to release the report at this point. Emily, where do you come down on this? Are we looking at a major military operation invasion into Rafah, which has included shelling?

There's footage of tanks shelling tents. There have been airstrikes that have killed a number of civilians, as well as the taking over of the border crossing, which a source confirmed to me did result in the destruction of about three to four major aid trucks. There have been reports that it was many more. My source, who does work on the ground there, says that no, it's three to four aid trucks. But when you have miles of aid trucks, every aid truck that you blow up and don't move out of the way, it just delays aid getting in further. Israel has so far just completely blocked ingress and egress at the Rafah border crossing as full-blown famine

has reached the north. So this is where I would say that major is relative, you know, because I don't know that there's any military incursion into Rafah that can be anything but major. And that is a concession I think Israel implicitly makes when they say this is necessary to quote unquote eradicate Hamas. And meanwhile, by the way, I think this is one of the strangest things that's happening right now. Not strange in that it's unexpected, but strange in that it just piques your curiosity as to how they are quote eradicating Hamas while also negotiating a peace deal with Hamas. And while the Rafis, so they say they killed what, 20 militants over the last 48 hours, something like that.

It might be more. Hamas, obviously, was it Sunday that they got four Israelis? Near the Karam Shalom crossing, right? Right. They killed four IDF soldiers. But there's just no way, I think specifically with Rafah, that you can do anything there that isn't major. And one question I had for you, Ryan, you had mentioned that you were at the State Department

briefing yesterday. And we went through both the Al Jazeera article and the Wall Street Journal article about how the Biden administration obviously has always said that this would be a sticking point. Now, whether they're able to actually execute on not being a sticking point when they're so deeply entangled in this conflict is a different question. What sense do you get? I mean, just having been in the room at the State Department yesterday, asking questions, Matt Lee pushing the State Department as well, that these are genuine frustrations. I actually think in this case, they seem to be genuine frustrations. And it may be from a lot of officials.

Sometimes the inexorable force of American policy is one thing. And what some mid-level officials want it to be is another thing. And I think that might be the case here. There does seem to be, you know, they continue to say that they do not want Israel to launch an invasion of Rafah, that they oppose such an invasion. They were clear that, so they suggest that Israel urged 100,000 people to flee to a different zone. State Department yesterday was clear. They don't believe that the area that they are sending those people to is adequate because they're sending people to just giant piles of rubble.

Like in their current situation, it's one of the only places that has not been reduced to rubble. And so where they're currently sheltered, you might have, say, 300 people for one bathroom. And everybody might have an average of about, it seems like, one liter of water a day for all uses, hygiene and drinking and cooking. They're now being asked, urged, told, forced to move to this rubble-strewn area that has zero bathrooms, you know, zero access to water, zero, you know, humanitarian aid facilities set up to receive those people. And as the State Department accurately pointed out, you might tell 100,000 people to move, but once you start bombing, hundreds of thousands of people are going to

move there. And you're going to have, you know, fire fest, but actually dangerous for people. I believe about half of the population of Gaza, roughly half the population of Gaza is around Rafah, but at least before recent evacuation started. And obviously, Israel did the sort of usual leaflets and text messages and all of that. But the point from some genuine complaints in the United States is, but to where? You know, if you're dropping leaflets, where are you telling people to go? And Israel will come back and say,

I mean, we're doing what we can do. Right. They bought a bunch of tents and they put them by the rubble. Right. And anybody with any sense is like, that's okay. That might be okay for like an hour, but you can't live like that. What if you get thirsty? What do you do? What if you go to the bathroom? What if you have to do all the things that humans do when they're trying to stay alive?

Again, the negotiations were just a sloppy disaster this week. I know Crystal and Sagar covered this as well, but Israel and the United States were on completely different pages. And this is the way the deal fell apart, whether there was even a deal that was workable. We still honestly don't really know what happened with that. But all of this is, again, in the name of, quote, eradicating Hamas while they're negotiating a peace deal with Hamas. So I just think that tells you a lot in and of itself about what's happening right now. And the State Department was yesterday saying, and so was John Kirby over at the White House, that they have a lot of hope that the deal will be overcome. Because the differences between the deal that the US called extraordinary and worked out with Israel and presented to Egypt and Qatar, which presented it to us,

are trivial. They are minor differences. And those two minor differences are, and do we have the Netanyahu, because we can start with Netanyahu here if we do. Yeah. Let's roll Netanyahu. This is basically the argument that he's making. You can just read the translation on this if you're watching it. Otherwise, basically what he's saying is that there was no ceasefire deal on the table for Hamas to accept. And Hamas made changes to the deal. And the changes were major. And that it was a gigantic ruse to make Israel look like

it doesn't want peace when in fact Israel does want peace. Although he contradicts himself because he says Israel does not want peace if it means that any formation of Hamas remains in Gaza. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's absurd when you're negotiating that. Right. They're negotiating. Hamas is already in northern Gaza once again. Yeah. Right. And so basically the differences were around the definition of sustainable calm. The New York Times and others have reported on the slight tweaks that Hamas did make to the ceasefire deal that they then accepted. And so Israel had not defined the phrase kind of sustainable calm in the document. And sustainable calm is the phrase they're using to replace permanent ceasefire. Because permanent ceasefire has become toxic and they're fighting over it.

And so that was the substitute that kind of U.S., Israel, Egypt came up to. Okay, let's let's agree to a sustainable calm and Hamas basically defined sustainable calm as something like a Permanent ceasefire and the US had agreed to that the US privately had assured Hamas Okay. Yes, like if if you do get through all these different phases, then yes, we will assure you that Israel will not relaunch a war in four or five months or whenever this is over. The other difference was that the initial phase of hostage release was supposed to be in the first proposal, six weeks. Hamas slowed that down in its response to three hostages every week, which adds up to more

than six weeks. And Hamas also said, not all of these 33 that you want are actually alive. And so we can't guarantee that. And so while that is a big difference, if that's true, at this point, there's nothing Hamas can do about that. They have the living hostages that they have. Israel's persuasive counterargument to me is those who are in ill health need to be released as fast as possible. Exactly. They need to get out because they're dying. Everyone in Gaza is dying.

The conditions are horrific. Not only do they risk getting blown up in a bombing, but there's no medical system to speak of. There's little access to clean water, and there's very little food. So if you're a hostage who's in ill health, elderly, you, just like everyone else in Gaza, is suffering. Even though, ironically and paradoxically, the hostages have more value probably to Hamas than a random Palestinian civilian, because they're going to be traded for Palestinian hostages that are in Israeli administrative detention. The one other thing that Hamas said was that Israel had wanted to take like 200 people off the list that they would not release. And Hamas said, no, don't, you can't, don't take anybody off the list that you're not going to release. But ultimately,

of course, it's up to Israel who they let out of their prisons. So no matter what they agree to. And then off with the last agreement, they went out, Israel went out and re-arrested a bunch of the people that they arrested. Because they know where they are. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

It's a cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

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get your podcasts. 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.

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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 has kind of star-studded 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

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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 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. Also in all of this, the broader geopolitical ambitions, I think even here in the United States, you hear way too little about the remaining American hostages. I believe there are five

remaining American hostages. And President Biden was giving remarks in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. He had a long speech. And we have some video of that speech that we can roll right now. This is President Biden, and it should be A7. In 2023, on a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in their kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated, and sexually assaulted.

Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets, and shrapnel from the memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage. And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad even when we disagree. My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages. Just as we have freed hostages already, and will not rest until we bring them all home. On college campuses, Jewish students were blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the

world's only Jewish state. But there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for anti-Semitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind. Okay, so he did obviously mention the hostages there, but Ryan, we also heard from House Speaker Mike Johnson. Let's roll this clip of Mike Johnson. German universities like those at Stroudsburg were at the heart of renaissance and intellectual life. But it was at those same elite centers of learning where Jewish faculty and students were suddenly expelled, where anti-Jewish courses were introduced, and where professors performed horrific pseudoscience experiments on Jewish people brought from nearby concentration camps.

We remember what happened then, and now today we are witnessing American universities quickly becoming hostile places for Jewish students and faculty. The very campuses which were once the envy of the International Academy have succumbed to an anti-Semitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers are now known for stabbing their Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags and with our survivors before us. If you close your eyes in the quietness of your own heart, you can almost hear the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers. You could see fathers being executed at point-blank in the

ghettos. You can feel a brother's hand slipping out of his sister's as men in uniforms separate them into lines and they can only mouth to one another everything will be okay hoping that it would be. You can hear screams coming from the gas chambers. And it's in these troubling times, we must look to this audience, to the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, to help us remember and to bear witness. Several weeks ago, I am very proud to report to you that the United States Congress overwhelmingly passed security assistance to Israel. All right. So meanwhile, Code Pink caught up with Republican Representative Brian Mast in

the halls of, it looks like it was one of the House buildings. Interestingly enough, Code Pink and Brian Mast both tweeted this video. We should mention that President Biden and Mike Johnson were speaking at the same Holocaust Remembrance event in those last two clips, but let's roll Medea Benjamin and Brian Mast here. structure, level, anything that they touch. Clear enough? Congressman, the world is calling for a ceasefire. You used to say Hamas won't agree to a ceasefire. Hamas had just agreed. It was a proposal put forward by Egypt, Qatar. You know CIA Director William Burns has been there negotiating.

You know what? If there's an American being held or somebody else being held, there's yet to be every expectation that Americans come and kill them as well. If there's an American being held, we should go kill the people that are holding them. Why are you so hateful? It's not hateful. It is, because my people are Palestinian.

You're killing my people with our tax dollars. And you're saying that everything should... Those people should associate themselves with terrorists. They shouldn't vote terrorists into office. We keep saying to you that... Israel is the terrorist. Palestinian office. Israel is the terrorist. Israel is the terrorist. Martyrs Brigade, Lions Den, Fanta, all those terrorist organizations. We say to you every single time, the majority of people are children. They're the ones that are bearing the brunt.

Just because you say it doesn't make it true, which is what you're processing. Let me say this very clearly. I literally don't believe a word that you say. I think what you see there is the narrow spectrum of political opinion within the power center here in the United States from Biden to Johnson to Mast. Not a whole lot of differences between them, but not a whole lot of daylight. And we can go over each of them. But did Mike Johnson basically compare campus protesters to Nazis? Like that was, like you walk around these campuses and you can hear the screams from the gas chambers? Is this where our discourse is? If it wasn't direct, it was certainly getting close to it. And I actually agree with you about the narrow spectrum of opinion. Because first of all, Mike Johnson repeated the eye-stabbing claim

the the flag did you hear mention that well what I find interesting about that is you have Republican speechwriters the highest the the upper echelon of their career and they're clearly not even listening because you wouldn't want to embarrass your boss by putting that in a speech, something that's been debunked, putting that in a speech. Surely you could find another example. In fact, we've talked here. We even talked with a student about some of the legitimate examples that are problematic.

You could find something. But I think it just speaks to how uninterested in dissent on this they are, how uninterested they are in looking at it through any lens of good faith, rather than just dismissing everyone as Nazis, as anti-Semites, etc. And we can talk about this in the TikTok block. I know that we're going to. But this is one of the, I think, biggest problems on the right. But it's not just on the right. It's sort of in the center left to the pro-Israel center left that is now dismissing a lot of, you know, very deeply held sentiments among Gen Z as bigotry when it's something different for many of them.

That's not to say there isn't any legitimate bigotry. Of course, there is. But to dismiss all of it, to paint it with a broad brush as bigoted, that's actually reflective, I think, of a deep problem for the right and the pro-Israel center. Yeah, and Biden, who continues to attack campus protesters as just filled with anti-Semitism, refuses to acknowledge that they may have genuine concerns with what they're seeing unfold in Rafah. He talked about babies killed on October 7th. October 7th was a day of deep trauma. Nearly 700 civilians were killed. Just horrifying day from start to finish.

There were three babies between the ages of zero and three who were killed on October 7th. Three too many than should have been killed. Last night in Rafah, and I can read this from Dr. Mustafa El-Masri, he says, I am utterly heartbroken to announce the tragic loss of my dear colleague, a devoted psychologist and psychotherapist, along with her four children in an Israeli airstrike on their home at dawn yesterday. More children than he described there. So the President of the United States is not going to talk about the four children who were killed last night in Rafah. He's not gonna talk about it the day after it happened. He's not going to talk about it six or seven months later. The gap between his willingness to express his horror, legitimate horror, over what happened on October 7th and his

refusal to acknowledge any of the horror that is being visited upon Palestinians on a daily basis strikes people as just deeply immoral. And then to have him also lecture the protesters and tell them that they are, in fact, simply driven by anti-Semitism is just beyond the pale. You know, it's interesting that I keep going back to us that Brian Mast also tweeted the video that Code Pink tweeted. Oh, he loved it. Yeah. So Brian Mast, by the way, if you were- Level everything they touch. If you weren't watching and you're not familiar with Brian Mast, he lost both of his legs in Afghanistan. I think he was in Kandahar clearing IEDs in 2010. And he then tweeting the video, to me, Ryan, it reminds me a lot of the sentiments around the

hardhat riot. Remember in 1970, you have all those construction workers in New York City, like the Blue Collar, pro-Nixon construction workers, just absolutely unloading on people associated, I think it was with student strikes back in 1970. And that dynamic, you can just see it becoming, just blossoming right now in American politics. It's not a 1968 rhyme, but it's close enough to 1968, especially with the Chicago convention approaching and lots and lots of protests planned, that you just have this Joe Biden, for instance, going after the campus protesters. You have this kind of cultural dynamic where he doesn't want to be seen as being on the side of disruptors, being on the side of sort of the far left in an election year.

And the politics of this are pretty fascinating in and of itself. When you think about what's going on, you know, the image of the custodian at Columbia getting pinned against the wall by a protester. And the Free Press has had more articles with a couple of different custodians that have come out in the last week. It is an interesting dynamic that's being set up. And I think the politics of that are what Biden is responding to, what Brian Mass is responding to, what Mike Johnson is responding to. There's something there. But again, I think it's a much bigger problem to dismiss everyone as bigoted when some of these really deeply held opinions are coming from a place that if you dismiss it, you're never going to persuade people away from it. Yeah, because it just comes back around. The Biden administration in withholding 3,500 bombs

from Israel will get attacked as being anti-Semitic for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. And those are the terms of the debate that Biden himself has established. And the more that he becomes critical of Israel's operation in Rafah and in general, which he's going to have to do because he has set himself up because he has publicly said so many times that he is opposed to an invasion of Rafah, which Netanyahu seems intent on carrying out anyway. He's going to speak out against it. And then his own words were used against him. And he will be told that he's anti-Semitic because he's insufficiently supportive of Israel's right to, quote unquote, defend itself. And by the way, I should mention the hardhat right was in the wake of Kent State.

So very on the nose, actually, looking back on that. You might think, why would anyone want to be affiliated with people letting themselves loose on students who were protesting after Kent State. I think there's a very similar dynamic playing out exactly right now. You say these students are just, they genuinely are opposing a massacre for students, for their other fellow students. These students are, in some cases, very genuinely protesting what they see as a genocide, in many cases, very genuinely protesting that. Why would you want to be affiliated with the crackdown? And I mean, I think there are pretty obvious political reasons that we're going to see either Joe Biden continue to distance himself from that, but also Republicans embrace the crackdown, run on the crackdown.

I think that the difference will be that there's always a bellicose nationalist element of the working class. And that's what Nixon was channeling at the time. And that's what was behind that kind of hardhat riot. Currently, there's a Democrat in the White House. And it's hard to identify the nationalist impulse right here. It's not like the kids aren't even protesting an American war. Like the kids are protesting an American-fueled and funded and armed war. And so I think that the nationalist impulses that do exist in some elements of the working class will be blunted by the fact that why are they going to stand up for a foreign country? Like standing up for the Stars and Stripes? Okay, one thing. Standing up for a foreign country's right to wage this war with our money?

Yeah. Harder to, I think, get regular people to rally around. And just one final point, because again, the rhymes of history here are pretty strong, because the union representing the custodians has actually been putting the screws to Colombia over creating an unsafe situation for their employees. A union leader after the hardhat riot said the unions had nothing to do with it. The men acted on their own. They did it because they were fed up with violence by anti-war demonstrators, by those who spat at the American flag and desecrated it. And again, this lumping together of legitimate violent protesters that

we see today with the actual peaceful practitioners of civil disobedience, that is a problem that, you know, it's not going to get better if you don't deal with it. By lumping everyone together as a bigot right now, that's, I think, in the long term, a serious issue for the right and the sort of pro-Israel center. But even just like the pro-Western center, if you continue to dismiss people simply as bigots rather than people with a deeply held, vastly different worldview, it will not pan out well in the long term. And one thing that we skipped over but is worth just keeping an eye on,

and Paaretz reported that it has agreed to, and it's an interesting language, allow basically an American company to occupy the Rafa port. At the State Department briefing yesterday, a reporter asked the spokesperson, Matt Miller, about this report. And he said he had nothing to add to it, was not familiar with what Haaretz is talking about here. But it is interesting that this is being floated through Haaretz, that Israel might attempt to maintain kind of indefinite control of the Rafah border crossing by

outsourcing operation of it to an American mercenary company. Just a strange development to keep an eye on, especially as the U.S. is building a port outside Gaza as well, amid all of the fears that the occupation that is underway is not going anywhere, that they're just going to try to lock this area down. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this

day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any

kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 call 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, But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. 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. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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 is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.

We 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 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. So meanwhile, two huge developments stateside because former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, continues to be in court in the Hush Money trial. He was face-to-face with a porn star in court yesterday. But at the same time, we're going to get to this in just one moment. One of his biggest trials, a classified document case, was indefinitely postponed by Eileen Cannon yesterday.

So let's start first in New York, where Stormy Daniels, who is alleged to have had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006 in Lake Tahoe, looks like that affair likely happened. I don't know that we need the allegedly, but— We can go with fact check true on that one. But that is, of course, part of the case, which is why she was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. So we can go ahead and put the first element up here. We're going to roll a clip. This is a clip from CNN of people just talking about what was happening in the courtroom yesterday. One thing that I've been sort of noticing as this has gone on is that there have been a couple of times where she seems to be cracking a joke, trying to get a reaction from

the jury. And our reporters in the room have noted that the jury hasn't seemed to respond to that. No, they're taking their job seriously. I mean, what do you make of that? Humor is risky in the courtroom, especially if you go in with lines, like it looks like stormy. If something happens spontaneously, if an easel falls over, people will laugh. They're human. But it's never going to work. If you go in there like, I'm going to amuse the jury. I'm going to sort of say this clever thing. So there's Jake Tapper, Casey Henn, I think Eli Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst, talking about what was happening in the courtroom yesterday. And actually, it was a pretty interesting scene in the courtroom yesterday. The judge at one point

actually admonished Donald Trump for cursing, and this is a judge one merchant. Cursing about like in response to probably just saying BS. Probably. Because there was some reporting that people could audibly hear him saying BS. And that's right. And that's what the judge again, Juan Merchant was saying. I think he said something like, I don't want you to continue, I don't want you to embarrass yourself, basically. Sometimes the judge. Patronizing, yeah, approach from the judge. But he said something like, you're audibly cussing. And Stormy Daniels, meanwhile, was regaling the jury, or as Casey Hunt was kind of describing

there, attempting to regale the jury in very colorful terms about what happened allegedly in 2006, going into intimate details, quite literally intimate details about all of that. The judge actually cut her off at one point. CNN's analysis said that it seemed like the prosecution was trying to focus Stormy Daniels on this. Now, substantively, an interesting part of her testimony is that she said her publicists had been trying to sell a story about the affair around the time of the 2016 election, but didn't really get any interest until after the Access Hollywood tape came out, at which point they were able to sell it to AMI, I think is the formal company that was the David

Packer. And David Packer has already testified as well, the catch and kill attempt. And that's what this hush money trial is about, that there was a hush money arrangement, catch and kill arrangement with this $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels over what happened. Now, she is going to be back in court on Thursday. The judge seemed to be pretty displeased with how everything proceeded. And I think at one point said some of these details needn't have been in court. The point of Stormy Daniels, the prosecution getting Stormy Daniels to talk about in detail, she talked about spanking Trump with a magazine. She talked in very, very great detail about what she says happened that night. The point is obviously to establish that it was something that was real. Thus,

here's the incentive for the hush money payment. You know, if it wasn't a real gripping story, why would Donald Trump pay this money? Now, Trump would and will obviously argue that he paid the money because he's trying to silence somebody who's spreading a vicious lie about his marriage. That's going to be the argument. It has been the argument. But Ryan, that was just quite a scene in the middle of an election. It's yes. And it's just wild. And right, like you said, Eileen Cannon, who was Trump-appointed, seems about as Trump-friendly a judge as you could possibly get, just basically said, never mind about this trial. Yeah, this is, we can put B2 up.

She said, well, there'll be, yeah, we gotta do all this discovery, and there's a lot of work to do, and so we're just gonna punt this and we'll Get back to you about when we're gonna when we're gonna have this the one that he seemed that is moving the fastest and that He seems to be the most obviously, I mean a bunch of them. He's kind of obviously guilty of everybody Guess their day in court, but come on like Well, whether he's legally guilty or like ethically guilty exactly a different question. Exactly. Like, did he do this thing? Like, did he have an affair with Stormy Daniels and then direct hush money payments to silence it in the middle of the campaign? Yeah.

Like, he did that. Is it an illegal campaign expense? That's honestly a much tougher question. Right. Because it's this, they have to prove that, you know, he did it, you know, for the campaign reason and not because he just was embarrassed. Only for the campaign reason. It can't be for anything else. And how do you get inside his head? Does anyone want to get inside his head?

What's going on in there? And so, yeah, he did the thing. But also, it's the least, he's in the least peril. The only way to me that I can see him going to jail as a result of this Stormy Daniels trial is through contempt conviction, which almost feels like he wants to. Yeah. He wants the judge to throw him in Rikers for a day or two. And he could have. Yeah, I agree with that.

I completely agree with that because he might see that as something that makes it even ratchets up the stakes even higher for anyone else to throw him in prison. If you sort of test the country's reaction to a former president actually being thrown in Rikers, and it could just be for a lunch hour, it could be for a day or two, in the contempt for him not listening to the instructions of the judge, not to, yesterday I think he came out of court and said something very vague, like any honest reporter would say that was a crazy day in court, something like that. But if he keeps pushing this judge, who Trump is probably eager to push because, again, his daughter works for a public relations firm in Chicago whose top client is Adam Schiff.

It's a narrative for Trump. Shocking they found somebody with liberal family in New York. Yes, yes. But I mean, you can see how Trump would seize on that. And, you know, it's I kind of agree with you that he's intentionally pushing this potentially to the brink of going to jail. He's not far from it at this point at all. And even in this case, you've had The New York Times publishing lawyers on the left, progressive attorneys saying that the Bragg case is weak. So does Donald Trump want to push the Bragg case, since it's first here front and center,

to the brain, get thrown in jail, and then sort of see what happens in the rest of the cases? Dare everyone else to push the country in that direction? I actually think that could possibly be part of the strategy. And Trump going to Rikers would not only be amazing for the drama, but it would also have potentially long-lasting implications for his approach to criminal justice reform. Basically every politician who ever goes to jail comes out changed as they see the criminal justice system. Blago, yeah. experiencing it firsthand, experiencing the incredible dehumanization that goes on in our criminal justice system, and experiencing it with other humans who you come to recognize as just people who've had, you know, some of them did horrible things, others didn't and just got caught up in the system, but they're all humans.

And then to have yourself lumped in with them in this dehumanizing system It changes people and it changes the way they think about the criminal justice system now Trump is not a normal human So it might be impossible for him to absorb the same kinds of lessons that other people do Given whatever weird kind of psychology goes on inside that that noggin of his but it's it's possible Anything is possible. Anything is possible. Anything is possible. So just a couple of quick bits about the Eileen Cannon case. So I don't know, like a lot of people on the left have been saying this is a, and sort of center analysts, this is a big win for the Trump team. And this is the documents one where he like-

Classified documents. Left with all the boxes of documents and stuff. Right, Mar-a-Lago classified documents. And again, a lot of people say there's a win for Donald Trump, a straight win for Donald Trump. Well, maybe Team Trump thinks that and maybe anti-Trump people think that, but this could push the case to August and September. So that's where the Trump people right now want the case to land. The prosecution is pushing for a July trial start date to begin. There's going to be a hearing on June 24th, and this is what looks like a win for Team Trump. They wanted to sort of have a conversation or have a hearing about Biden records, essentially Trump's request for Biden's records. And Eileen Cannon actually agreed to that on June 24th. So that's something coming up fairly quickly, just a little bit over

a month away. But the May trial date now will be pushed either to midsummer if the prosecution gets its way or late summer, early fall within months of the election. And whether or not that's good for Donald Trump, I actually think is an open question. Eileen Cannon did, I think she makes an interesting point when she says that this case presents some serious novel, is the word she used, challenges with classified information. No question about that. So it doesn't seem like an insane decision to me. But pushing it into late summer, early fall, I don't know that that's even helpful for Donald Trump, to be honest.

That's an interesting point. Yeah. Because that's when things are going to be really heating up. A lot of the other legal dates are coming up around that time period too, and that's when he has to be campaigning You know from just pure political strategy perspective. That's when you would want to be it's more important You can't campaigning then than it is in May. Yeah, so who knows? Yeah, and what about and so then the Georgia case is Just petering along because of the prosecution debacle.

The Fannie Willis stuff, right. And then Jack Smith, what happened to that guy? Still out there. Didn't he, like, he had a case. What happened to his case? I mean, it's. When's that case coming? It's still out there. The full timeline is, like, almost impossible to keep track of. And because, honestly, precisely because it keeps changing all

the time. I'm looking at it right now. If you get into the fall, so if you push, for example, this one into the fall, CNN has a crazy calendar here. So Fulton County prosecutors proposed trial date is August 5th, which is literally like three weeks after the Republican convention, right ahead of the- It's about a week before the Dem convention. Yeah, about a week before the Dem convention. So his trial would still probably be going on during the Democratic convention. So you'd have a split screen of Democrats giving their speeches in Chicago, protests roiling Chicago, and Trump getting prosecuted. Right. And remember, also, that would be if Trump's team gets their way,

then he would be pivoting right before Labor Day or potentially right after Labor Day from that trial back to the Eileen Cannon trial. I mean, this is really crazy, this timeline into the fall, especially if this one changes. And this, by the way, we should mention, is what a lot of legal analysts see as by far the most serious case against Donald Trump. The Jack Smith one? The classified documents case. I mean, it does seem like a slam dunk, but also, you're going to lock him up for that? I mean, they certainly have locked up plenty of whistleblowers for it. Yeah, they absolutely have.

It's just impossible for me to believe they'd lock up anybody with any power for that. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I don't disagree with that. But whether the legal case is probably the best for the prosecution, I guess, because they've had some success with the Espionage Act over the years, which is, of course, what Trump has tried with. And also, he so flagrantly did it. And he's telling people, there's audio of him telling people, this is classified. I shouldn't have this. It's just hilariously guilty stuff. Billionaire white collar criminals going to Rikers is typically delicious. But if it's going to be Donald Trump, you know, I would really like to see Hillary Clinton too. If we're going to do this, let's do it.

Lock them all up. Let's do it. Yeah, lock them all up. Let's put bars around this whole city. Probably fair. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, somebody's daughter, if it was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 one 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 2 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. All right, let's move on to TikTok because, Ryan, you actually have some original reporting here. This is unraveling in a crazy direction, and you have some audio, actually. between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney over the weekend,

in which apparently they forgot that they were speaking in front of a live audience and were being recorded and just got super honest. So now the audio that we have, you can excuse them a little bit because they did not think that they were not in front of a public audience, but somebody leaked it to us. We'll play that in a moment. But first, here's Romney and Blinken. Why has the PR been so awful? I know that's not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that.

Which is, I mean, as you said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire. And yet the world is screaming about Israel. It's like, why aren't they screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire. Bring home the hostages. It's all the other way around. Typically, the Israelis are good at PR.

What's happened here? How have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view? How this narrative has evolved. Yeah, it's a great question. I don't have a good answer to that. One can speculate about what some of the causes might be. I don't know. I can tell you this. We were talking about this a little bit over dinner. With Cindy, I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment. And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing.

You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment, your house, you picked up a hard copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. And then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 630 or 7 o'clock and watched the National Network News. Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this is played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can't discount that. But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative. A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support

for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I know that's of real interest and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard. Now, normally after a clip like that, we'd like to help people read between the lines because sometimes politicians speak in code. Not there. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they tell you exactly what they're thinking. Another case is Representative Mike Lawler, who was recently in a private meeting with the organization

No Labels, which is kind of a pro-corporate group that tried to recruit Joe Manchin and a bunch of other people to run for president. He met with some No Labels donors in a private Zoom with Josh Gottheimer, who is another kind of leader of no labels. And this was what Mike Lawler had to say about his role and Congress's role in the TikTok ban. This audio was obtained by The Intercept. My colleagues, Akayla Lacey and Prem Tucker, wrote about this, wrote about his comments, also calling for the FBI to investigate all campus protesters. But he also spoke about TikTok, which they mentioned. But I wanted to play this clip here. As Josh pointed out, when you have Hamas, Iran, China endorsing these protests,

it speaks volumes to the absurdity of them. It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you're seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S. And so all of this is relevant because, as we can put up this third element, TikTok has now sued, as was expected, to overturn the law on constitutional grounds. First Amendment is very clear. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. Shall make no law. A bunch of the Bill of Rights are confusing and vaguely written. What does it mean that a well-regulated militia allows you to keep and bear arms? They've been

arguing about that for hundreds of years. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press is pretty straightforward. And culturally, the First Amendment has been upheld by kind of the American people who deeply believe in this idea that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of press. So according to Mitt Romney and Mike Lawler, Congress made law to abridge the freedom of the press. Well, what's interesting about that is they seem to be talking about TikTok as though it is, and Blinken is especially interesting in this context. He's comparing TikTok directly to newspapers and, as he says, news networks. Now, I would actually disagree with that. And I think Section 230 is one of the big questions here about what constitutes a publication, what constitutes a news outlet. If you're just a platform, do you have the same roles and

responsibilities as a newspaper? I think that's genuinely a major question, and I think it's heavily implicated in this conversation about the First Amendment and TikTok. The government is going to argue, for example, that you can say whatever you would say on TikTok. Nobody's right to say it, whatever you were going to say on TikTok. Nobody's saying you can't say that. You can just say it in another forum, just not on this forum. But that becomes, again, a pretty serious discussion about what the First Amendment actually means. It is, again, fascinating as well. We talked about in the Israel block, and actually we talked about all of this, we talk about this all the time, how avoiding the

issue, saying everybody is either a bigot or they've had their brain poisoned by bigots, as you heard Mike Lawler argue in that audio. Manipulating the young people. Yes, that it's not, none of these sentiments are legitimate or part of sort of deeper worldviews. That is a huge mistake from Republicans and from sort of center pro-Israel people to just dismiss this either as bigotry or purely manipulation. And that's exactly what they're doing. I have like actual serious national security concerns about TikTok. I've had that conversation. We've had that conversation many times. But to be so dismissive is a huge, not just a tactical error, but an ideological one too. And at least Lawler's comments are a little bit less reckless than Blinken's and Romney's when

it comes to kind of a legislative intent perspective in when it comes to like giving away the game, because at least he's sticking to this idea that actually it's Hamas and Iran and China that are using the platform to manipulate. However, the law is like the law is specific to like China and a couple other countries. He's really talking about the content. What's so clear is that this really is content-based. Yeah. And that means it's a violation of the First Amendment. You may remember when the Osama bin Laden letter went viral just a few months ago. And there was this panic about how the algorithm may have been tweaked by

Beijing to get all of these young Americans to discover the bin Laden letter and post about how it really changed their perception of the US in a negative direction. And I think part of the problem here is that is entirely possible and entirely problematic. That should be something that legislators are concerned about and they deal with, and that is front and center on their minds. But there was some really excellent reporting tracing the arc of virality in that particular place. And it looks like it had nothing to do with TikTok tweaking the algorithm and everything to do with organic sentiment among young people who were discovering the bin Laden letter for the first time and saying, oh my goodness, you know, was it totally naive from my perspective? Yes. But

saying, oh my goodness, this completely radically changed my perception of the United States. The evidence that it was organic and then maybe it had like a Streisand effect is strong. You know what really happened, I think, from watching that whole bin Laden letter virality take off? Yashar Ali. Yes. Remember this? Yes. So he's a power Twitter user who identified this phenomenon. International man of mystery. On TikTok. And he found like three clips of people doing this on TikTok. And he brought it over to Twitter. Yes.

And shared it with the boomers on Twitter. Yes. And the boomers had a moral panic. Streisand affected it. Yes. And so then that moral panic is what poured the gasoline on a couple of sparks. It's a good Washington Post article on this. Yeah.

So the idea that China did it is kind of undercut by the fact that we know who did it. It was Yashar. It's like he's the one that supercharged it. And I don't think, did he respond to that? I'm not sure. I think he said, well, look, I was identifying a real phenomenon. It's not my fault that you all panicked and freaked out about it. The same thing, though, is true if you look at the, so one thing that people like Lawler will point to is the breakdown in posts that are pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel on TikTok, to the extent that

we can actually break that down. It's dramatically different, you know, more pro-Palestine posts on TikTok than there are pro-Israel posts on TikTok. And that is pointed out and said, this is evidence of foreign manipulation. Again, it's entirely possible that is true, but there's significant evidence that shows that breakdown looks a lot like how young people view the breakdown themselves. And there was an interesting poll this week that found that the issue is not rated among the most important for college students. So they're more likely to say the most important issue to them is healthcare and education

financing and all of that. Doesn't mean that they don't think that the United States and Israel are wrong in the conflict because public opinion polling on that shows they do and that the TikTok breakdown actually matches the opinion breakdown better than anything else. Right. And it's all relative. So for Romney to say, you know, there's more pro-Palestine stuff on TikTok than there is anywhere else. Two things on that. People who post all the time about Palestine on TikTok will tell

you, like, there is still significant censorship. There's so much censorship on TikTok of pro-Palestinian content that people, you know, who were told that, you know, the Chinese must be, you know, juicing the stats for Hamas are like, are you crazy? You go on here and try to post pro-Palestinian content and see what happens. But it's relative to these American companies that massively put their thumb on the scale against Palestinians less than the American and other platforms, which make it very, very difficult to push pro-Palestinian content through without being censored and shadow banned and so on. Setting that all aside, the way that Blinken and Romney frame it is just kind of incredible. Just a PR problem. How did we lose the narrative?

Should have hired Don Draper. It's not the 34,000 plus killed. It's not the more than 13,000, 14,000 children killed. It's not blocking humanitarian aid. It's not deliberately targeting a World Central Kitchen staffers. It's none of that. It's the fact that we used to have the New York Times, Watch Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Evening News. And we could then shape the narrative that was being delivered to people. Now they can see for

themselves what is going on. That they then follow that up with, therefore, that's why we banned that and are trying to go back to where we could put things in a bottle, is a moment of just such absolute self-unawareness. Is that a word? Unself-awareness? Do you remember Obama pining for the position that Xi Jinping was in? That's what he and Trump agree on. Yes, and this is Blinken pining for the days of John Foster Dulles, where he could just call up. Just call up Time Magazine. Which he still can. But he can't call up TikTok. But it doesn't have the same.

Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have the same power. The last thing I'll say on this is, it's also people are making the mistake of assuming this was the same thing with like the Russian interference that actually like to the extent that it did happen, it was those silly viral memes and everything that what China would want to do is to strictly advance the Palestinian cause in the United States as opposed to destabilize public opinion. That's really what Russia was trying to do back in 2016 was sow discord. You know, they were of the memes. There were some really cheesy, awful pro-right memes and some

really cheesy, awful pro-BLM, pro-left memes. So even their conception of what might be happening here is just in this sort of box that it's either going to be China wants us all to be pro-Palestine because China supports the Palestinians. China just wants us at each other's throats, if anything. That looks like the strategy. It looks like the long-term strategy is to weaken Americans' love of America, frankly, and to sow discord, which is similar to how Russia has approached it for decades, too. And how Voice of America approaches it, you know, radio-free, all of radio free. You just had to do it. It's not wrong. It's not wrong.

We love to sow dissent also and prop up like civil society organizations that profess to have concerns about human rights. And so, you know, nobody's doing anything new. No, not at all. We will never escape the Cold War. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. daughter to steal somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. 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. three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th, ad free at lava for good.

Plus on Apple podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg. And this is season two of the war on drugs. 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 a 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 is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We 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 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. Vladimir Putin's inauguration is happening right now in Russia. I don't know if you caught this big news, Ryan, but Steven Seagal is there. He was there to support Vladimir Putin as his inauguration unfolded this week. It's his fifth term. I think by the end of this term, he will actually have been in power in Russia longer than Stalin was.

So huge news also. This is the New York Times. Just as we were talking, reports a large Russian missile and drone assault caused serious damage to several power plants across Ukraine early Wednesday, according to Ukrainian officials. It's Russia's fifth attack, the New York Times says, on energy facilities just in this last month and a half. Part of their campaign, as the Times describes it, to cut off electricity to big swaths of

Ukraine and to make life harder for Ukrainian civilians. Meanwhile, Ukraine is saying that it arrested two colonels. We can put the first element here up on the screen. Two colonels who had taken money from Russia, allegedly, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, charged them with treason, charged one of them with a terrorist act, attempted terrorist act. They had allegedly taken drones and ammunition from the FSB to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, obviously.

This is, they had taken money from the FSB, so those drones, those ammo, money. There were assassination attempts. I mean, there have been, Zelensky's had a number of close calls over the course of the war. Sometimes that's just from him like going to the front lines, but there were also attempts last August and in April, according to officials on Zelensky's life. It's amazing how many brushes with death that Zelensky's had, Ryan. This one is particularly interesting, given that the allegation here is Russia paid two colonels to assassinate Zelensky, which means that Russia's penetrated the inner circle

of Zelensky. Also interesting because it means potentially people on the American payroll, in some indirect way or potentially direct way, depending on how you look at our funding, were paid by the FSB to assassinate Zelensky. One more reason that, as Trump said to the Israelis, you need to wrap up your war. Yes. Good reason to wrap up this war. The American advisors to the Ukrainian forces at this point are chiefly and almost solely focused on advising the Ukrainians how to hold the territory that they currently have. wage a counteroffensive and retake territory is no longer taken seriously by American advisors who are basically running the strategy for the Ukrainians. So if they have acknowledged that,

then why keep fighting if it is possible to get a deal. Like if peace defends the same territory that you currently have, why would you not choose that rather than war, which comes at a much higher risk of collapsing. Now, a peace deal can collapse. Peace deals throughout history eventually always have collapsed. Like we always get another war at some point.

But the current war has significant risks to the Ukrainian front lines and forces who could collapse at any point and then could see major Russian gains. And now you're negotiating from an even weaker position. And you may even have Zelensky assassinated. Why at this point are we continuing this other than the fact that the money was appropriated and it's got to be spent? Maybe I just answered my own question. Well, and the assassination of Zelensky isn't just about Zelensky potentially. If it were to happen tragically, it would mean complete destabilization of the government, an already unstable government. It's also worth mentioning that the energy attack that Ukrainian officials say happened just today while we were taping this comes as Ukraine is looking for more air defense, basically.

Air defensive weapons. Its ability to protect its energy sources. And in the middle of that, it's asking, I think, Spain, maybe even like a couple of other countries directly for this right now. Talking about Romania also has been in talks about this. So I agree with everything you just said, Ryan. Here's an interesting quote from Zelensky. He said, today everyone who, so this is right as Russia is about to commemorate World War II, Ukraine is commemorating World War II. Zelensky says, today, everyone who remembers World War II

and has survived to this day feels a sense of deja vu. Russia has brought the terrible past back into the daily lives, into the daily news, proving with each crime that Nazism has revived. Surely, Vladimir Putin is going to also invoke Nazism tomorrow from the other side of the conflict. Just really ugly, really ugly stuff. So Zelensky's saying Putin's a Nazi now? Yes.

And Mike Johnson is saying that the camp's protesters are Nazis? There's Nazis everywhere. Everyone is a Nazi. Nazis everywhere. Everyone is either Hamas or a Nazi. Did you see this? Or maybe both. Did you see the Tom Brady roast?

Oh, actually, there is a whole Hamas or Nazis thing. Oh, absolutely. Did you see the Tom Brady roast? No. Tom, there is a whole Hamas or Nazis thing. Oh, absolutely. Did you see the Tom Brady roast? No. Tom Brady's also a Nazi. He's a Nazi, too. Also Hitler, yeah. That was a bit by Tom Segura and Bert Kreischner.

I heard it was good. I got to go back and watch it. It is good. Yeah, I think you'll like it. I think you'll like it. But yeah, everybody's a Nazi. We can't escape the Cold War. We can't escape World War II.

We are perpetually reliving the 20th century for partisan football games. Right. And as Chris Lansager covered, the UK foreign minister recently said that it's okay for Ukraine to use its long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia. Right. And Putin responded by saying, if they do that, that he considers the UK a legitimate target and also launched a tactical nuclear weapons scenario planning strategy, you know, gaming out, which he said to say that it is Western provocation to shift from it is not okay to launch You know Western long-range missiles into Russia to say actually it is okay to look like that is an escalation on a provocation Yeah, why at this date?

Like how it almost feels like the West just hates Ukraine and is baiting Russia to just overrun It's it's decrepit front lines? Well, it's constantly living at the end of World War II and the Cold War. I mean, that's where people like the Ann Applebaums of the West and the Tony Blinkens of the West are focused. It's only the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War. Those are the only possible dynamics. And that's why NATO needs to expand all the way to Ukraine. That's why it needs to, you know, bring in Finland, and that's why it needs to move further and further towards Russia, essentially, because we're still at the dawn of the Cold War era after World War II. The stakes are the exact

same. And in some respect, it is true the stakes are the same, like nuclear war, same stakes. But we've now had 100 years nearly to learn. Actually, we've had just under 100 years to learn, which is interesting in and of itself, how new this technology is, how to navigate these waters. And we refuse to learn those lessons, are constantly stuck exactly before any of those lessons could have been learned. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 uh ricky williams nfl player hasman 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 man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corps vet.

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 podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcast. So you wanted to talk about a new phenomenon around Gen Z debt. Yeah. So the Wall Street Journal had a report. We can put this up on the screen because I want to juxtapose it with something that went viral just a couple of weeks ago, right? I don't know

if you remember this headline from The Economist. We'll get to it in a second. But here's the Wall Street Journal. They say Gen Z sinks deeper into debt. And I'll read a little bit from the beginning. Bless you. They say young Americans are starting out with more credit card debt than generations before them. That financial burden can have long-lasting effects. No kidding. The rising debt load largely reflects a surge in prices for food and shelter, food and shelter at the start of their careers, coupled with a larger percentage of Gen Z who graduated with student loans. Now, the average credit card balance for 22 to 24-year-olds was $2,834 in the last quarter of last year, compared with an average inflation-adjusted balance of about $2,200 in the same period in 2013. That's according to TransUnion,

data from TransUnion. Younger people with higher debt are more delinquent on credit card payments and need to rely on family for help if they lose their jobs. The economists and financial advisors, they also often delay life milestones, including home ownership and marriage, say the economists. Yes, obviously. Now, Ryan- So it's up about 10% in 10 years? Yeah, about 10% in 10 years. They also compare it, though, with boomers. Another news outlet that compared Gen Z to boomers recently was The Economist, and this went fairly viral on Twitter. There were a lot of conversations.

It looked like libertarian Twitter was just gloating over this. Gen Z is unprecedentedly rich. That's the headline from The Economist just a couple weeks ago. That was published on April 16th. And The Economist wrote, Gen Z is taking over in the rich world. There are at least 250 million people born between 97 and 2012, about half are now on a job in the average American workplace. The number of Gen Zers working full-time is about to surpass the number of full-time baby boomers,

those born between 45 and 64. America now has more than 6,000 Zoomer chief executives and 1,000 Zoomer politicians. And they're saying that Gen Z's full-time employment puts them ahead of boomers and millennials. I would assume, Ryan, that's mostly due to women in the workforce. And millennials because of the 2008 financial crisis and the massive recession. Because what y'all Gen Z people don't remember is what it was like to have high unemployment. Except for COVID. Although a lot of them were still in school. Right. And there was a $600 a week unemployment bonus on top of your regular unemployment. So, but the idea of looking for a job and being unable to find it is something that people obviously still experience,

but nowhere near the scale that they experienced in the 2010s. And then also in like the late 70s, 80s, or into the early 90s, which is, and it's a tragedy that there's been this kind of cultural memory holding of the pain of unemployment because we have been grappling with the pain of inflation instead. And it has made people kind of forget how good it is to be able to tell your boss to F off and go to another job, to tell your boss that you and your coworkers have organized a union and there's nothing they can do about it except recognize it. And so on. Yeah, and so the journal goes on to talk about credit scores.

So as interest rates have climbed over the past two years, those credit scores have taken a hit. The drop was most drastic for millennials with credit scores between 660 and 719, whose scores fell by 26 points. Gen Z wasn't far behind. The average credit score change for Gen Z with credit scores above 720 fell 24 points during that time period, according to Credit Karma. Now, another thing Forbes wrote about this recently, they said, Gen Z's not just doing okay, we're actually, the authors, a zoomer, actually really well off as a whole. In 2022, nearly a third of 25-year-old Americans were already homeowners,

outpacing both millennials and Gen X at the same age. Our luxury spending is expected to grow three times faster than older generations. So if we juxtapose that, luxury spending, with credit card debt, that's an interesting thing, too. It depends on how you're classifying luxury spending, obviously. But there's also just this moment of really cheap luxury that's accumulated in the wake of China flooding our market with all kinds of different goods, with influencer culture and all of that. It's just like people spend because if you can't afford a home, and I think that's part of what

this is speaking to. I'm curious what you think about this, Ryan, is people are having dramatically different experiences. And that was true of millennials. Obviously, this is always partially the case, but I think it's especially been, it's been acute for millennials and Gen Z, whether you're doing well or poorly, you're going to be doing really well or really poorly, that there's this sort of polarization of people's experiences. And for Gen Z, if you're not in that third of homeowners, probably to get by, you are loading up on credit card debt, and you probably are purchasing what might be classified as a luxury. And we've seen this kind of happening. As luxuries get cheaper, more affordable, it's easy to kind of load up on them just to get by in the misery of

like being a renter perpetually and trying to dig out of the hole when you feel like there isn't a lot of room for upward mobility. You may be employed, but you may not feel like you're in a space where there's a lot of room for growth. You were, you know, promised that college education was your ticket to the middle class. And instead, I've heard this from some of my friends, that you already have $50,000 in debt, so why not take the vacation? And we may disagree with that, and we could get Dave Ramsey here, and he could disagree with that. But the justification for it is fairly obvious.

And one thing that doesn't get talked about a lot is that millennials also got subsidized services. They were subsidized by the Federal reserves, like zero interest rate policies. It's quantitative easing that pumped Silicon Valley full of money. Silicon Valley was then willing to lose lots of money on these different app services, Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, food delivery. All of that stuff was losing huge amounts of money. And they were able to lose that money because they were trying to grow their membership. And that was entirely subsidized by the Federal Reserve, who was just handing money to these Silicon Valley executives who then believed

that they were geniuses, you know, for making an app that helps you get food, you know, from McDonald's to your house. And so it was so cheap to get an Uber and to get Uber Eats and the rest of it that it became embedded in the culture that Gen Z then inherited. Yes. Then they turned the spigot off and the price of Ubers and Lyfts and meal deliveries, you know, went up to a place where the companies are actually trying to make profit instead of just relying on the Federal Reserve dole, that money is coming out of Gen Z budgets. That's such a good point. In a way that millennials didn't have to pay it before. And it's kicked off this like really,

you know, crazy discourse around food delivery and such. But underlying it all is a real structural change in the economy that people may not necessarily identify as having occurred on their watch, but they feel it. They feel it at the end of the month when they're like, oh, my credit card debt is higher than it was last month and higher than it was before, and I just cannot make things work anymore. Why? What's going on?

What am I doing wrong? I'm really curious, actually. That's such a good point because I'm really curious How many of those kind of gig economy expenses are classified as luxury expenses in the calculations that Forbes was citing because if you're Classifying uber eats as a luxury expense But you know at this point you're somebody whose entire life has been sort of built around like maybe you don't have a car Because you've always relied on fairly cheap Uber Eats delivery before, you know, maybe prices keep going up higher and higher. You just didn't

get a car. You live in a city and you didn't need a car. You didn't need to go take a bus to go to this restaurant or whether or not this is wise spending is a different question than whether or not people reasonably came to rely on it because prices were lower than they're getting now. So I think that's it. And even Uber in and of itself, maybe you didn't buy a car because Uber was really cheap and easy to use. And the car that you were in the city that you lived in, is that classified as a luxury expense? Or how is that? How are prices going up in some of these things that have become really baked into the lifestyles of a lot of younger people? Because it was like the air that they breathe.

It's the way that the city worked. How is that being classified? I think the car point is a much stronger one, just from my own sympathetic perspective. Because it's like, yeah, like you budgeted in the past. It was going to cost you X amount of money to take Ubers. And so as a result, you're like, you know what? There's also subways and buses and and I'm gonna cobble that together and I'm not gonna get a car so

you don't get a car then the cost of ubers goes through the roof yeah well at the same time the cost of auto insurance the cost of cars has gone through the roof so you're kind of stuck either way as a Gen Xer I see the food delivery debate and I'm like come on you look get on your bike, go walk to the place and pick your own food up or cook at home. There's lots of YouTube videos. You can learn, you can cook something. I hear you. But even as somebody with antipathy to that whole position, I recognize that the rug was pulled out from people in the sense that culturally and economically, it was dirt cheap

to get all this stuff because of the Fed. And now all of a sudden it's not cheap. And you built your life. So I can, I can tsk tsk people, but things did change. Yes. Yes. And it changed in a boiling the frog kind of way and just slowly getting more and more expensive until all of a sudden you're like, whoa. Right. This was $40 for this bowl? Right. And then, yeah.

It's a good bowl, but come on. And obviously before and after the pandemic, some of this is different. But I think the point about Uber is a really, really interesting one. And you think about like, for example, Spotify. I bet that's classified as a luxury good. Would they have classified a Wall Street Journal subscription 20 years ago as a luxury good? Because honestly, a lot of people subscribe to Spotify for their playlists, but also because it's probably their primary source of news. It's probably where they get the podcast. Where else are you going to get breaking points?

That's right. Well, you can get it everywhere that you download your podcast and that you stream your podcast, right? But seriously, I mean, there's all of these kinds of things that are just different than they were in previous generations that Spotify is profitable, I believe, but Uber is still not a profitable company. Which is insane to me. Uber does nothing. Uber has like Google Maps and like PayPal laid over each other with a chat app in there. Yeah. And they don't do anything after that. Yeah. The driver, you know, buys the car, puts the gas in the car, drives the car. The user connects with the driver. How this middleman can't figure out how to make a profit. They can.

They just don't want to. They want to keep writing it out because they can keep getting the money. I mean, it's a vicious cycle. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway. That's enough of us doing the Simpsons meme of old man yelling at cloud.

Probably for this Wednesday. I think so. Probably, yeah. Make sure to subscribe so that Ryan can continue getting light-colored blue suits. Well, it's the same one from last week.

Per Don Lemon. Should I get one more? I don't know. This is probably enough. We'll start a GoFundMe. Actually, instead of a GoFundMe, just subscribe to BreakingPlace.com. And what you'll get is the debate that we're going to post on Thursday night. Friday, if you're not a subscriber, it's going to be between Glenn Greenwald and Ilya Shapiro arguing the right to protest on campus and everything related.

Yeah, I'm really excited about that one. You can also get these fun CounterPoints mugs on breakingpoints.com. But make sure, yeah, subscribe so you get that Friday show early. We've been having a lot of fun with the Friday show. These are classified by the Wall Street Journal as necessity rather than a luxury. Yes, by Forbes, you mean. How dare you? Two very different publications. Sorry, Forbes.

Yes. But we've been having a lot of fun with the Friday shows. We appreciate all the feedback, all the support for it. Appreciate Crystal and Sagar continuing to support the show. Last week's debate got some, between the Don Lemon interview, the debate with Destiny and Omar, things have been off to a hell of a start, Ryan. So it's been a lot of fun. We have a lot more fun planned too. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I guess we'll see you on Friday. See you then.

You experienced dad guilt i hate it hard and she understands but she still be pissed happy father's day the show may be called good mom's bad choices but this show isn't just for moms we keep it real about relationships and everything in between and yes men are more than welcome to listen in i I knew nothing about brunch. What? She was a terrible girlfriend, but she put me on to brunch. To hear this and more, open your free iHeart app, search Good Moms, Bad Choices, and listen now. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop.

It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more

on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man, Memphis Bleak, right here. Host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month.

So what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process learn, learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app search Rock Solid and listen now.

This is an iHeart Podcast.