Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/8/25: Trump Hypes UK Deal, Trump Plans Gaza Occupation, MAHA Civil War, Libya Deportations & MORE!

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump hypes UK trade deal, Trump plans Iraq style Gaza occupation, GOP to slash Medicaid, MAHA civil war, Trump blocked from shipping migrants to Libya, foreigners flood Trump coin to buy access, leaked pitch deck exposed DC outlet corrupt deals.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today,

and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Breaking Points. Emily, how are you this morning? I'm good, but when the bottom bar comes up, everyone is going to see why I'm not amazing. Good, but not amazing. Because we missed one critical thing. We fumbled the ball here on the A block. Otherwise, it was a full M show in honor of M.

Oh, yeah. I didn't do that on purpose, but I spent all day yesterday trying to make sure we could have an M title for every show because at a certain point, it just happened. And I was like, well, we have to do this now. Yeah. I screwed it up because I did the Fed block, so sorry.

I'm still blaming Jerome Powell. It's still his fault. He didn't have to speak yesterday. You could have called it money. It's your fault too, but still. Oh, and you know what else? You know what else? What?

We added a story to the show, and it's a story about Maha. Oh, my gosh. It's just the level of consistency across the board. It was meant to be yesterday. The stars were aligned. Yes. So everyone enjoy. And there's some stuff going on in Maha

that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. Trump's original Surgeon General pick was pulled after Laura Loomer and others, I guess, criticized her. And the new person who he has picked is Casey Means, whose brother Callie Means, the two of them have become very, like, prominent on Tucker and Joe Rogan, whatever. I, as an outsider, were like,

oh, Laura Loomer is probably going to be happy. Like, Nicole Shanahan, all these people are probably going to be happy, right? Right? Yes. No, they're going after her. So there's Nicole Shanahan is out being like, RFK Jr. may have lied to me directly because he promised me that neither of these siblings would be involved in the administration.

So anyway, we're going to dig into that one. That's a really interesting one. It's so messy. And we have to try to get closer to the truth on this one. There's all kinds of rumors flying around. Yes. So we'll bring you all of that. Of course, after we do the block that I'm just going to call money.

But Crystal called Fed. Yes. Jay Powell spoke yesterday. So lots of updates to talk about from the Fed and on the economy more generally. Yeah, we're supposed to get some sort of a UK trade deal announcement this morning. So we'll see what that entails, whether it's an actual deal or more likely it's like the outlines of a plan to effectuate a deal down the line. Concepts of a plan. Something like that. Yeah. It's a plan. It's the concepts of a plan. Concepts of a plan. Yeah, that's right. We also have some very significant news with regard to the Middle East.

Trump making some pretty wild comments about the Houthis that we had to get into the show. But more significantly, they are, the U.S. and Israel are talking about now a U.S.-led administration of Gaza. U.S.-led administration of Gaza, U.S.-led administration of Gaza. They're modeling it on the Iraq U.S.-led government as if that's a model to follow. I see no problem, yeah. Wild. Nothing but success. Wild.

So get into that. Also, Republicans are making more clear what sort of cuts to Medicaid. David Dayen actually got the scoop on what they're looking at specifically with regard to cuts to Medicaid. They are significant. Any one of the options would entail millions of Americans getting kicked off of that program. So obviously, we're going to dig into the details there. We have some updates with regard to migrants and where they're being sent. Marco Rubio had said, hey, we're looking beyond El Salvador. There are other countries that we're going to try to deport people into potentially prison systems in other nations. New York Times had that report that we talked about yesterday with regard to,

hey, it looks like they're moving forward with Libya. This became quite urgent. There was a flight that was scheduled. Lawyers got involved. They went to a judge. A judge has now blocked any migrants from potentially being sent to Libya. But Libya's war tour is divided between two different governments. Both of those governments said, hey, we have nothing to do with this. We would not accept these migrants. So anyway, there's a lot that is sort of mysterious and interesting going on there as well. And then we wanted to take a look at these several developments with regard to Trump and his meme coin. First of all, it appears that it is largely foreigners who are pumping big bucks into Trump's meme coin, raising even graver concerns about levels of corruption there. There is some legislation that is moving as well, and then also on the topic of corruption.

Apparently, one of the things that countries are being pressured to do in order to get on the U.S.'s good side is to adopt Starlink. So and that's being, you know, used in part of the trade negotiations. Jeff Stein did a fantastic report over the Washington Post. Finally, however, Emily's got a big scoop. You want to break down, give us the top line of what you're looking at? Yeah. So Breaking Points obtained a document from Inside Punchbowl News. And we have basically we're ready to reveal their entire business plan because for partnerships in 2025, that's the document that we got our hands on and got some comments from the White House. Because you may remember just a couple of months ago, there was a big controversy

over the government getting premium subscriptions to Politico. So in light of what we have in this document that Breaking Point's got its hands on, we heard back from the White House about punchable subscriptions. So basically what we're going to be looking at here is the, Chris, I would call it soft corruption. It's just so, it's just corruption, plain and simple, but it's so banal and mundane here that nobody even blinks or thinks twice about it. But it is so, so gross. And we have some great excerpts, pictures from this document that we obtained that I think is well worth taking a look at. Yeah, the documents are not indicative of Punchbowl being particularly unique in terms of the D.C. ecosystem. They just simply expose how banal and how commonplace these relationships are and, you know, how much money is at stake as well.

It really is. It's a fascinating look inside the Beltway media and specifically the world of these sort of niche newsletters, which are just printing money because they're not that expensive to put together. But the whole business model is, hey, if you can tell advertisers, you know, my tip sheet is read by Mike Johnson, my tip sheet's read by John Thune, my tip sheet's read by Chuck Schumer, then advertisers will pony up big bucks to get their messages just in front of those basically handful of people. Yeah, in this case, Google, Goldman Sachs, and just our last teaser here, so you stick around for the block, we have the actual price. First of all, we have their email open rates. We have their subscriber numbers, at least the ones that they send to corporate partners or prospective corporate partners. But then we also have the pricing levels that they offer newsletter sponsorships for. And that's what you're really going to want to stick around for because it will make your eyes pop out of your skull. So make sure to stay tuned for that block.

Yeah. All right. With all that being said, let's turn to the economic news. This broke yesterday evening. We could put this up on the screen. So Trump expected to announce some sort of trade quote unquote agreement with the UK. Most of the experts are saying this probably isn't going to be a finalized agreement because it will be more like a framework, including issues that they intend to resolve. But we don't know the specifics at this point. Trump said that he is going to make this announcement in the White House at 10 a.m. He put out a tweet, Truth Social it was, big news conference tomorrow morning, 10 a.m. Oval Office concerning a major trade deal with representatives of a big and highly respected

country, the first of many, Trump wrote. And this is, of course, the first of the many trade deals that they were allegedly negotiating, 90 deals in 90 days. So far, we're at now maybe the outlines of one is what we're looking at. There's a lot that's interesting about this. Obviously, they've been under a lot of pressure, Emily, to be able to show something. And the world has been pretty resistant to what they see as, you know, U.S. bullying. Even close allies like Japan have really taken the side of we are not going to be bullied into some sort of a deal. You know, much of the world has made some overtures to China. And the whole idea here was, oh, we're going to try to isolate and encircle China. That has not worked out either.

The U.K. is interesting because Keir Starmer, the leader there, is really unpopular. You know, he was just elected prime minister not that long ago. His approval is dramatically underwater. People are not happy with him. They're not happy with the economic situation there. And whereas a lot of liberals and, you know, liberals in Canada, liberals in Australia, have actually really buoyed their standing by opposing Trump. Starmer has taken the opposite path.

He has really made a lot of overtures to Trump and has been, you know, aggressively courting him and trying to work out this deal, thinking that if he can blunt some of the impact of tariffs on the UK, that that would benefit his country and benefit his political standing. So that is the bet that he has placed. And that's sort of the context within which this framework agreement, whatever this is, is being negotiated. Yeah. And like you said, we don't know much yet, but I think Keir Starmer is in the now Mark Carney category as well, where they're recognizing that the economic benefits they can get their own people, because the disadvantages, the costs of this are going to—are likely going to be, if they don't handle it diplomatically and in a way that pleases Donald Trump, or

where they're at least able to make a deal with Donald Trump, then the costs to their country are going to be way greater than the benefits of sort of making a kind of stand against Donald Trump. And that's not to say Mark Carney actually managed rather cleverly to do both, to be really, you know, sort of diplomatic to Trump and to butter him up while also putting his foot down and saying Canada will never be for sale. Well, Starmer here got a carve out for high-end British cars, according to Politico, at least. So that, you know, you had Aston Martin, Bentley looking at really disastrous

consequences of the 25% tariffs. So, yeah, I think that's the right bet if you had Aston Martin, Bentley looking at really disastrous consequences of the 25 percent tariffs. So I think that's the right bet if you're Keir Starmer, who, again, is not particularly popular. But maybe this is a way for him to turn a new leaf in the U.K. I sort of doubt it. I don't think he necessarily will be able to do that. But it's probably better than him doing nothing or making some type of like petulant virtue signal stand while people end up not getting any benefits to the economy. Yeah, we'll see how the politics play out because Donald Trump is not popular in, you know, certainly among Keir Starmer's base in the UK. And as I was saying before, you know, Mark Carney, the reason he was able to win

was by positioning himself as an oppositional figure to Trump and someone who would be a steady hand. You know, when we talked to David Dole about how, you know, how people saw that him, it wasn't that he was elected with this. You need to aggressively stand up to Trump. But it was more we feel you're a steady hand who's going to have our interest and not going to kowtow to him. Starmer, potentially because of the way that he has, you know, tried to maintain diplomatic relations with Trump and gone out of his way to do such. The UK has avoided some of the criticism that has been leveled at other European countries. You know, Vance, J.D. Vance famously, you know, went and was really

aggressively chiding them about their free speech, etc. And so, you know, they've sort of avoided and certainly they haven't been subject to like the 51st state smears that Canada was very, very upset about

and continues to be very upset about. So I think maybe some of the the fact that Trump has not rhetorically gone after them is also probably because of Starmer's efforts behind the scenes to kind of butter him up. But on the other hand, they still were hit with the same 10 percent tariffs and other higher tariffs on things like steel that the rest of the world was as well. So those efforts were not really rewarded in real time. We'll see what comes out, what the specifics are with regard to this particular deal. Trump needs this for the markets too

because everyone's waiting for deals. It's not just about the one deal. It's about the one deal showing that there are actual deals coming and that is obviously yet to be seen. So we will pay attention to that. But Crystal J. Powell, speaking of the markets, J. Powell popped out yesterday and made his announcement.

Yeah, that's right. So holding interest rates steady and sounding some, you know, very significant warnings about where he thinks the economy is and where it is heading. Let's take a listen to that. If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they're likely to generate a rise in inflation, a slowdown in economic growth, and an increase in unemployment. The effects on inflation could be short-lived, reflecting a one-time shift in the price level. It is also possible that the inflationary effects could instead be more persistent. Avoiding that outcome will depend on the size of the tariff effects, on how long it takes for them to pass through fully into prices and ultimately on keeping longer term inflation expectations well anchored. So, you know, Fed chairs, they're always trying to be very

neutral, mild mannered in their comments, but he's sounding a warning about the tariffs and the tariff position has really put the Fed in a tough bind because on the one hand, you see slowing economic growth, as we saw with the GDP numbers and some other indicators. That would push you in the direction of let's lower interest rates. However, you also see rising inflation. That would push you in the direction of let's lift interest rates to try to keep inflation under control. And so that's why stagflation is so difficult to deal with where you have low or no growth and you have inflation because you have to use some tools outside of the Fed's toolkit in order to deal with both of those problems because the

tools that the Fed would use go in opposite directions with regards to those two things. So he's in a bind. So he's basically saying, hey, we're holding where we are until we see what's going on. Yeah. I mean, this wasn't surprising at all. It's kind of exactly what everyone was expecting to see from Jay Powell, though you never totally know. But this also is connected to the block we're going to do on Medicaid, because a lot of the economy right now is going to hinge on Donald Trump's ability to pass this big tax cut bill. And his ability to pass that big tax cut bill is going to depend on his ability to actually make enough cuts without going into the political weeds of cutting Medicaid in any way whatsoever,

which, as Steve Bannon will tell him, a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid. So uncertainty, I think, coming from all of that as well, because he wants that tax cut bill to also have industrial policy for reshoring. And if that doesn't get passed, that's a huge, huge setback for, I mean, they see this as, it was described recently, as there are two barrels to the gun. And one of the barrels is the trade war, the tariffs, the other barrel is the tax cuts. And if you can't have that, that's a big problem. Interesting. Yeah, that's an important note there for sure. Scott Besson, part of maybe potentially why they're anxious to announce this UK trade deal is we talked yesterday about how they said, OK, we're going to meet with Chinese negotiators with regards to trade. And we all

just happen to be in what, Switzerland? We just happen to be there. So we're going to get together with them. The Chinese, by the way, are saying the U.S. were the ones that requested the meeting, which is an interesting note as well. Scott Besant, though, yesterday really downplaying expectations for what could come out of these talks. Markets really took notice of this as well. Let's take a listen. On Saturday and Sunday, we will agree what we're going to talk about. My sense is that this will be about de-escalation, not about the big trade deal. But we've got to de-escalate before we can move forward. Well, they said that they would not talk unless the reciprocal trade tariff of 145 percent was removed. Would it be likely that you would be able to go back to the president and say,

to show good faith, we could drop this down in the interim to 50 percent? Could that be in the cards? Laura, you know, I'm not going to negotiate. You're on TV. You're one of the most popular anchors in the world. So I'm not going to give away our strategy. And look, everything's on the table. It's up to the president at the end of the day. The president has said that he's happy just to give all countries a number if the negotiations don't go well. And that's what we're doing with the other 17 important trading partners is, look, you can negotiate in good faith. You can come with your A game or President Trump is happy to ratchet the number back up to your April 2nd number.

So, you know, seems like those talks are very preliminary, you know, long way from any sort of a deal actually being struck with China. And of course, that is the really main focus. And China, of course, subject to those 145 percent tariffs, which effectively cuts off trade with China. Now, I'm sure there is going to be 145 percent tariffs, which effectively cuts off trade with China. Now, I'm sure there is going to be some because the tariffs in other nations are much lower, 10 percent. I'm sure there's going to be some of China shipping to other places that ship here. Already is.

They call it trans shipping. They call that. Yeah. And that that was already being done. And I'm sure that will only expand to try to fill the gap of trade that is just being completely blocked from China. But it's still going to have quite a significant impact. Well, which is why if they're still doing trade deals with every country that was hit by the reciprocals, that means they're going to

have to do deals with places like Cambodia, Vietnam, and some of those places where things are being shipped first from China and then into the United States. So the level of unpredictability here, I mean, I know things feel like since what was Liberation Day, April 2nd, it's been more than a month now. We've sort of slipped into some sense of normalcy and we're almost numb to what we're in right now because everything changed so quickly. But the level of uncertainty in the economy is hard to even capture with words. I mean, we're not out of the woods, that's for sure. Yeah. And there have been concerns about looming shortages, retailers sounding the alarm about that. We played the director of the LA port or executive director of the LA port, whatever his title is, saying basically, look, it's already way down. The shipments we're receiving from China,

we expect it to be much worse. I saw indications yesterday that, you know, there is vastly diminished activity at some of the major ports in the country. But, you know, the White House is saying basically like, yeah, they're just crying wolf. Everything's fine. There's been no shortages yet. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Hassett talking about that. Well, the scaremongering is happening now, but I can tell you that I get real time data every day on whether there are shortages and I can report that there are still plenty of things on the shelves. There were a couple of weeks where shipping from China was lower, but now shipping from a lot of other countries is going way, way up. So people don't have to be worried about what the scaremongers are saying. These policies are onshoring jobs, onshoring production. You can see

it in the jobs data. You can see it in the explosion in manufacturing jobs already, even before the tariffs came in. The way to think about it for me, Laura, is that President Trump did something last time, looked and saw that it really worked, and now he's doing more of it a little bit bigger. But that's what you should do. You should do something, see if it works or not, and then change. And that's what he's doing. He's ramping up the ante because he saw that it worked in the past. So the question is whether this situation is able to persist. It's also funny. I mean, what he's saying there, well, trade with China is down short, but trade with these other countries

is up. It's because of what we were exactly talking about, that goods are being shipped from China to these other countries and then here to get around the, you know, the extreme tariffs that are put in place with regard to China. And we'll see because it takes roughly a month or more to ship goods from China to our ports. LA, I think, is one of the places that goods can move most quickly to. And we're right in that time frame of when we'll see what the impact is. Now, a lot of companies did stock up in anticipation. That was part of what played into the GDP numbers in the first quarter. A lot of companies knew that something was going to happen. And so they aggressively imported what they needed to

import so that they could have a sort of backlog in storage to be able to weather the storm. So that will help to buffer, especially large companies that were able to do that and to get ahead. I think the first place we're going to really see impact and fallout is among those small and medium businesses that just do not have the size, scale, or cushion in order to maneuver around these tariffs or in order to really prepare, fully prepare, and soften the blow from the impact. Yeah, absolutely. Crystal, also this tear sheet, this Ford tear sheet, if we put this on the screen, A3, this is important because we had that clip yesterday of Mark Pocan going after Scott Besson asking who pays tariffs. Yeah. And Scott Besson was really insistent about not answering that question. He was trying all kinds of clever ways to get around that question. The CNN headline is Ford will raise the sticker price on cars imported from Mexico. It just said it didn't expect significant U.S. price hikes. There you go. That's evidence right

there to the point Kevin Hassett was just making. You see something, you try it, you see what happens, and then maybe you pivot. Yeah. Well, Ford says they're going to hike the sticker price for three U.S. models that they import from Mexico by about $2,000 each. So I would say that's significant. That was only days after executives were like, I think it'll be fine. And they had, you know, I think in an attempt to curry favor with Trump, had said they were going to hold the line with regard to sticker prices on vehicles. Yeah. And now here we are a short time later of them being like, oh, actually, we can't hold the line.

At least on these three models, we're going to up the price by $2,000. And that is another question, too, is we saw this during the post-COVID inflationary period is there were genuine inflation pressures. And there were also companies that were like, oh, people think there's inflation. I can raise my prices. I'm going to raise my prices. And by the way, when the input costs for those companies went down, did they bring the prices back down? Of course not. Of course not. And I actually saw that there's industry jargon for these types of practices. It's called taking price. So it's such a common practice that they actually have like industry jargon for what it means. And it makes sense, of course, if you're a capitalist and you see you can get away with raising your prices, you're going to raise your price.

So that's how you can also feed an inflationary spiral even above and beyond the direct impact of the tariffs, which is also quite significant. Yeah. And, you know, this is where it obviously should factor into the Trump administration's decision making process. I think it's unfair to let some of these corporations off the hook, not that we do, but it's such a small part of the media conversation here is like they take the economic precarity that everybody is living in and just squeeze every little drop out they can and disproportionately end up sending that money continually to executives away from workers. They increase prices for customers. They pay themselves more and more. They do buybacks. And that's why actually an interesting industrial

policy in the tax bill would have been something like the millionaire tax that Trump was talking about to pay for some of the cuts. That seems like it's off the table now. But there are all kinds of other things that you could do. I guess I shouldn't call it industrial policy, but there are all kinds of things that you could do to make this trade war actually help workers and customers and pass those costs off in different ways. And there's not a ton of conversation happening about what could be done creatively in that big, beautiful reconciliation package Trump is hotly anticipating. But it seems to me like that would be a missed opportunity, actually. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And I mean, with regard to the corporations doing what

corporations do, I mean, I obviously we're going to call him out here, but also, you know, it would be like expecting a snake not to bite you. Like, you know, and so that's why you need government policy to protect workers, to protect consumers and to understand the dynamics, the incentives that you're creating. And so what you're likely to have also is this situation where if you are a large player in particular and your competitor is suffering more from the tariffs and the import taxes for whatever reason, import more from China, et cetera, you have two choices. You could hold your prices steady, and then you undercut them, and then you steal their business.

That's going to work out well for you. Or you could take price and also up your prices to match them, knowing that you can get away with it because they had to increase their prices. So there are a lot of dynamics here. And we have actually a lot of David Dayen's reporting in the show. He's been pointing out the way that this policy also really benefits the large players. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And one of them is also just the fact that if you are Apple, if you are Ford, if you are Walmart, if you are Costco, you can get those meetings with the Trump administration. You can argue your case. You can maybe get your car

bound. You can get what you need to be able to survive. And if you are one of the smaller players, you are not going to be able to have that opportunity whatsoever. There's one more piece of market news we wanted to bring you that is kind of unrelated to the tariffs, but also really significant. Put this up on the screen while I was keeping our eye on what the impacts of AI are going to be. Wild story yesterday about the rampant use of chat GPT and whatever cheating in college we could have. We'll do that conversation another day. But in any case, Apple's stock price significantly fell after a top executive there said that it is considering injecting Safari with AI. And the big news here— By the way, I love how they say injecting.

Injecting, I know. I'm going to vaccinate it with AI. I'm going to vaccinate Safari. The AI jab. In any case, one of the big notable comments that was made here is that for the first time ever, Google searches are going down. Because people are using, they're asking Grok,

they're asking ChatGPT. They're not going to Google. And I mean, I can attest to that. It is like better Google effectively when you're using AI. You and Saga are obsessed with AI. I feel like Kyle uses a lot too, but like ChatGPT.

Kyle loves making images with Grok. Loves. Who among us? He spends hours over there just like, what if I did this? Yeah, it's really up to thumbnail game, I have to say. I mean, what can't Grok do? But seriously, the story is incredible. And Stoller was monitoring Google stock price yesterday, and he had a great post on Big, his sub-stock, which is a great subscribe, about how basically the markets were saying, this is his headline,

Wall Street tells Google to break itself up because the markets were reacting to this information as it was being. And he had an interesting point, too, which is that as the day went on, you could see people kind of grappling, investors grappling with what it meant because it was a stiff plummet at first and then it went up a little bit, but it stayed really low. Huge, huge problem, obviously, for Google. And they're about to be broken up. And it looks like they're about to be broken up in a couple of different directions. So huge news for our tech stocks in general. And this came out as part of the testimony in the Google antitrust trial. Isn't that crazy?

I mean, this is the wildest way for Google to have their stock prices crater, as Stoller put it. And last thought, Crystal, Apple and Ford remind me of something. We covered this about a month ago when the Ford CEO around Liberation Day did an interview talking about how they suddenly realized none of their parts for any of their cars were made in the United States at all. They had to get from so many different places. They may assemble them in the United States, but they're sourced from everywhere. And it would be hard to, it's a similar problem with Apple. And these guys now find themselves in these companies. It might not be his fault.

It might not be Tim Cook's fault, but this, we rely on iPhones and we rely on Ford cars. At least I do. I do too. I have two of them. It's not just, I'm not saying the Trump administration solution has been executed well because it hasn't been, but they also hold the economy hostage to their shitty business models. And it's like the same thing. Actually, I think it's the same thing with Google here too. And we're all held hostage to their complete monopoly that, you know, you see their stock tanking when something obvious happens. And it's like, are they prepared for that?

What does that mean for Google? I don't know. But Stoller makes a good point. He compares it to Standard Oil. He compares Google potentially to Standard Oil, which created, when it was broken up, all of these more efficient, broken up companies in its place. And so this actually might be a really positive piece of news, although it would be quite a transition period for the U.S. economy and certainly for Google. Yeah. I mean, with regard to AI, there's a lot to say there. But

I feel like if we had a functioning society, we would have a really aggressive national debate about how far we want to go with this and how much we want to limit it. And, you know, I was thinking about I'm old enough so that when I first I first started driving, I, you could print out the map quest directions, right. But I still had to occasionally, if you screw up the map quest directions, you got to go to the map. Oh, it was bad. You got to open up the map. You got to figure out where the hell am I? You got to stop at the gas station, ask the guy, like, how do I get to this place or that place? And, yeah, it was rough. I much prefer being able to navigate than just have the phone be like, okay, you screwed up.

Here's another route, whatever. But I will tell you, I was a lot better at knowing how to get places. Oh, this is a thing. Yes. Everybody who has had both experiences knows this is a thing. Like, I have to use GPS to get to places that I've been, you know, a lot of times. Whereas at that time when you had to actually think and use your brain and engage, you were able to navigate places. And I feel like with AI, you can kind of extrapolate that to your entire brain. Yes. Yes. There's research on this. Um, and Nicholas Carr started writing on this.

When was the shallows was like 2011 that's right yeah um and actually there's a decent bit of research about how your brain atrophies in different ways when you start outsourcing critical parts of it to computers it's not to say that we should never allow anyone to touch a calculator obviously i don't agree with that but there's so much that we're going to lose so quickly and not even have a baseline you know there are people who don't remember map quest don't know map quest that are very much alive. Like, your kids probably. Like, they have no idea what it is.

And you're like, what? What the hell is MapQuest? You printed something out? Like, what are you talking about? It just gives me so much PTSD about, like, coming late to soccer games because the MapQuest was hard to get to. Oh, my God. But in all seriousness, like, this is a real problem.

But thankfully we have a Surgeon General who will be on top of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. She'll be thinking all these things through very deeply with her lack of a medical license. All right. We'll get to that. I was going to say for later. That's a deep tease.

They're coming down the road. Biden's surgeon general was excellent on that. Vivek Murthy. He was really good on this. You know what? You're right about that. You're right about that. He was very thoughtful.

He put out a warning. He basically said that social media uses should be treated like tobacco, alcohol, like that kind of seriousness. We're like, OK, anyway, thanks, kiddo. Leave me alone for a little while. Be quiet. Good luck. You'll be fine. Camp Shane, one of America's longest runningrunning weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that

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

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

two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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. All right, let's go ahead and get to some very serious topics. But starting with, you know, we were talking yesterday about how Trump has basically taken the Houthis up on their deal to back up for a second. Okay. Houthis have been doing their operations in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. During the ceasefire, the brief Gaza ceasefire, they stopped all activities. When the ceasefire ended, they resumed activities, but just vis-a-vis Israel. They were not bombing or bothering U.S. ships. We started bombing them aggressively and killing a lot of civilians and Signalgate and all of that sort of stuff.

They have long said, and a dropside interview to Ryan and Jeremy's credit, actually interviewed Houthi leadership who said, listen, we've always said, if you don't bomb us, we won't bomb you. So apparently Trump decided to take them up on that deal and decided to stop bombing them. And in response, they are not supposed to bomb us either, even as they continue their hostilities vis-a-vis Israel. So Trump gets asked about this yesterday and has just about the most Trumpian answer of all time. So let's go ahead and take a listen to that. But so we do, we take their word for it. It was, you know, we hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment. They took tremendous punishment. And, you know, you could say there's a lot of bravery there that it, I, it was amazing what, what they took, but we honor their commitment and their word. They gave us their word that

they wouldn't be shooting ships anymore. And we honor that. We honor the bravery of the Houthis. Very brave. We honor their commitment. I mean, it's just like, it reminds me of some of the things that Trump would say in his first term, like when he was talking about Putin, he's like, what, you think we're so, you think we don't have the killers? Yeah, we're so innocent here. He's like going full Chomsky. Yeah, or the way he would, you know, talk about meeting with North Korea or meeting with the Taliban. Like, I feel like we got

a little more of this Trump in the first administration. This was a bit of a throwback, but it's also funny just in the context of, you know, a bunch of lefties, Hassan in particular, have gotten a lot of shit for talking about the Houthis and being like, you know, it's brave what they're doing, and here you have Trump being like, they're very brave. What can I say? Honor their commitment. Imagine Barack Obama calling the Houthis brave. Imagine how Republicans

would react. Oh my God. Honoring the bravery of the Houthis. You just can't. You cannot. Only Trump. Only Trump. We would still be talking about the scandal of it to this day. I'm not even kidding. It would be more about how outrageous it was. It's kind of a crazy thing to say, but—sorry, Hasan—but, like, it is kind of crazy from the president who's in charge of the United States foreign policy. And yet, and yet, here we are. Here we are.

So—but I guess a little bit of good news on that front, too, and cannot be divorced from the broader context of the administration heading to Oman this weekend for negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal. We have some updates on that front as well. Yeah, we do. But before we get to that, I want to talk about this report from Reuters, which is deeply troubling and really significant. Let's put this up on the screen. So they were able to get this exclusive report that the U.S. and Israel are discussing a possible U.S.-led administration for Gaza. Let me repeat that. A U.S.-led, indefinite administration, occupation, you could say, of Gaza. Let me read you a little bit

of this report because just the utter insanity of this, I cannot possibly be overstated. The U.S. and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza. According to five people familiar with the matter, the high-level consultations have centered around a transitional government headed by a U.S. official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged. I'm sure that'll be easy, Emily. No problems there. According to the discussions, which remain preliminary, there'd be no fixed timeline for how long such a U.S.-led administration would last. So we're talking about literally could last forever, which would depend on the situation on the ground, the five sources said.

Those sources who spoke on condition of anonymity compared the proposal to the coalition provisional authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003 shortly after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Emily, how did that go? Can we check back in on that? How did that work out for us? No spoilers. Was that a great idea? Did we execute it well? Did it, you know, foment tons of terrorism and horror for years to come?

I think we were able to successfully win the love and affection of the people and establish a democracy. Mission accomplished is what I heard. What we did was spread democracy. And democracy is contagious, as you know. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Especially in the Middle East. I just, these words, they truly, I mean, a few things are shocking to me with Trump at this point, but he ran in opposition to the Iraq war. This was one of his campaign innovations. Calling Jeb, I mean, we all loved watching him call out Jeb Bush to his face on stage or his brother going into Iraq. And that was one of the ways he really did separate himself from the pack and really did seem to represent some sort of a break from the traditional Republican establishment. And now here you are talking about perhaps the most disputed land on the entire planet.

And we are going to administer it indefinitely? And the model is the coalition provisional authority in Iraq? I mean, the human horror of it, the stupidity of it, the insanity of it, I literally cannot get over it. And of course, we fund one side of the dispute in that conflicted territory to the tune of billions of dollars a year. So trying to pitch that to the Palestinian people, you're already going to be like, well, what are you talking about? This is just basically the same thing as giving Israel the land. A hundred percent. And I can't tell if this Reuters story is a leak from people who think it's a really good idea or people who think it's a really bad idea. I couldn't tell

genuinely in the story if this is a trial balloon to try to acclimate people to this idea or it was to try to blow the whistle and say someone needs to stop this. My instinct is that this is people saying this is a really great idea. Let's slowly try to acclimate the media and the public to, this is a quote from the article, the quote, high-level consultations have centered around a transitional government, as you read, headed by a U.S. official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged. So just zeroing in on that, we have no idea what a timeline would look like in that case. Until a viable Palestinian

administration had emerged. The word viable is incredibly vague. That could mean a million different things and it could mean a million years for as long as for as far as we're concerned, because viable is going to be in the eyes of the U.S. beholder and the Israeli beholder in this case. And it's very hard to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition won't always be in power, but believes, you know, he's totally at odds with Joe Biden about the question of a two-state solution, doesn't believe in a two-state solution. So what does viable mean? That's right. How did our viable government in Afghanistan work out? How did that one go as well? I mean, I just, I had the same question about who was leaking this and why.

And then the other question I have is Trump teased this big Middle East announcement. Is this it? I think so. I think that I think that's exactly what it is. You do? Yeah. I mean, I don't even know what to say. I don't even know what to say.

But it's consistent with what he's been saying all along about we are going to own Gaza. So this is the roadmap to the Gaza Riviera, basically. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, again, I think you have to take him seriously. I think he got this idea in his head and his eyes lit up at the idea of like the beachfront property or whatever. And now here we are planning some indefinite, endless occupation of Gaza. It's just an absolute horror. And at the same time, the Israelis now, the mask is totally off. You know, in the beginning days, Emily, I'm sure you remember, we had all these conversations about like, well, what's the day after the war and what's the plan? And of course, Bibi would never say, you know, he would always, oh, well, it's just, we're just focused on the hostages. Also, by the way, update on that

in a moment, stay tuned for how much they care about the hostages and what a priority that is for them in this new expanded Gaza operation that they just authorized. In any case, they have now made it plain. The goal is we want to, we want to permanently occupy Gaza. We want to flatten Gaza. You and Ryan covered this earlier this week. And some Democrats are starting to be a little bit more vocal. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who I have to say has been, compared to other Democrats, he actually had traveled to the region previously under the Biden administration and was blowing the whistle. That's right. That was him. Was blowing the whistle on the, you know, all of the ways that they were blocking aid and how insufficient the

aid was. At least some aid was getting in at that point, but how insufficient it was and that it was the Israelis' fault that more aid wasn't getting into the Strip. So he has been, you know, a vocal critic here for a while. He's now going one step further and saying that the Israeli plan is brazen ethnic cleansing. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I want to talk about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. It's now been well over 60 days since the Netanyahu government imposed a total blockade of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, not allowing any food or any other humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, not allowing any food or any other humanitarian assistance to reach the over 2 million civilians there. Withholding food and humanitarian assistance

as a weapon of war is flat out illegal under international law. It is collective punishment, pure and simple. And now we're told that the Netanyahu government plans to seize and reoccupy huge parts of Gaza. And recently, Ben-Gavir, one of the most ultra-extreme members of the extremist Netanyahu government was in Washington calling for the implementation of the Donald Trump plan to essentially force 2 million Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza. That is simply ethnic cleansing by another name. And Ben Kavir, of course, very influential in this administration and very much in line with what many members of the Netanyahu government and frankly,

much of the Israeli public also want at this point. And we are more than two months since any food, water, medicine has been allowed to enter the Strip, more than two months. And you've got roughly 2 million people there. We really don't know how many people there are still alive at this point. President Trump had suggested the number was lower at this point. But in any case, you have millions of people there, and they will all die if food does not come in. We already have dozens who have died of starvation, you know, children in particular suffering gravely from malnutrition. And that's where we are at this date. Let's put the next element up on the screen. This is a tweet from Dropsite, which looked at a Times of Israel report from yesterday, May 7th. And Crystal, this just makes

your stomach sink. The headline here is, leaked Israeli document rescuing captives ranked last in Gaza war goals. A leaked Israeli military document shows that rescuing captives in Gaza is listed last among six official objectives for a planned ground offensive in Gaza. And let's just go through these six. Because if you're reading these as steps, and I think that's a correct way to read them, by the time you get to six, it just, again, it makes your stomach sink. One, defeating Hamas. Two, achieving operational control over Gaza. Three, demilitarizing the territory. Four, striking Hamas government targets. Five, concentrating and relocating the population. Six, rescuing the captives. And Netanyahu is already facing regular protests from the hostage families because many of them want him to make a deal to rescue any living hostages, obviously, and to

return the bodies of any deceased hostages. But this has always been the fundamental early criticism. I mean, going back to middle, late October of the Netanyahu administration from hostage families, not all of them, but some of them, who felt that actually rescuing the hostages was taking a backseat, basically, to this broader goal of taking over Gaza, of obliterating. I mean, to put it in the words of Netanyahu, obliterating Hamas, eliminating Hamas. But in the process of eliminating Hamas, do you eliminate the lives of hostages? In some cases, we know that is likely what happened. Yeah. And secondly, I mean, because this tweet says,

despite repeated public claims by Israeli leaders that freeing them is the war's top priority. But you know what? There's been mixed messages on that. They've kind of tried to have it both ways, saying that the hostages are their priority, but also that the top aim of the war is to eliminate Hamas. And those goals are not necessarily categorically compatible. That's exactly right. And that is what many hostage families and many Israelis recognize. And that really has been the focal point, from what I can tell, of a lot of the protests. You know, if you ask Israelis, according to the polls, has the war been too brutal on Palestinians, the number that say that is like 4%. I mean, it's shockingly low. But there's been a lot of dissent around the issue of what the impact is on the hostages of this all-out assault, genocidal assault on Gaza. And it has long been clear

that Bibi and co. did not care about the hostages. They were happy to use them for propaganda value and they aggressively, I mean, you remember in the early stages that the pictures of the hostages were everywhere. And if you weren't fully behind the Israeli war effort. Well, you don't care about the hostages and you just want them to die. And for a long time from the beginning, what hostage families and others have been saying is, yeah, but you don't know where our family members are. So if you are bombing and starving this population, our family members are there, too. So if you actually want to prioritize the hostages, what you would prioritize is, remember, there was that brief deal early in the war that there was a brief ceasefire and there was an exchange of hostages from both the Israeli and the Palestinian side. That's when most of the hostages who were released were released during that time period. That is how you actually get the hostages back, is through diplomatic negotiations and a ceasefire.

Hamas has said from the beginning, we'll do an all-for-all exchange. You release all of the Palestinian hostages, prisoners that you're holding. We will release all of the Israeli hostages that we are holding as well. So it has always been clear. And the military effort to rescue any of the hostages have been, I think there was one that was successful. And it also included mass civilian death and a lot of chaos in Cardage as a result of that operation to rescue hostages.

So it's always been very clear. If you actually want to secure hostages, then you need to negotiate. The diplomatic resolution is the way that you're going to save hostage lives. And we were told that, you know, the no, no, no, the hostages are the number one priority. And now, again, as I said before, the mask is coming off of Israel. They no longer feel the need to lie and pretend like hostage lives are the number one priority. And, you know, this leaked document just confirms, actually, it's the last, last on the list of war aims. The least important war aim is to secure the release of the hostages at this point. Well, and it was always for the sake of this goal that, again, was unattainable without complete and utter civilian destruction.

Because we knew, I mean, we could tell in the early stages of the war that Hamas was not going to be defeated without that, that they were already reconstituting within, what was it, like six months? It was about six months. They were already reconstituting control and like government authority in particular areas of Gaza, like in Rafah. So it was all, I think if I were, you know, a hostage family, that is what would weigh most heavily on me is that they're not like, what is the end here? I don't think anybody ever really knew because, well, I mean, the end for many people, let's say, was just this goal of, quote, unquote, eliminating Hamas. But what that would actually look like when that would end, if it was attainable. Those were the questions I think that were were haunting a lot of the end, if it was attainable. Those were the questions,

I think, that were haunting a lot of the families of the hostages. All right, let's go ahead and get to this update with regard to Iran negotiations. J.D. Vance, this was in Munich yesterday, correct, that he was speaking, getting asked about this? He returned. He returned to Munich. By the way, the tone this time, much softer. Yeah, it was interesting. A little chastened. What did you make of that? Well, yeah, it was interesting because he started off by acknowledging the elephant in the room

and breaking the ice, cutting through any tension and saying, I wasn't sure if I was going to be invited back. And his tone overall, it was a conversation and not a speech. So I think that helped it. The tone be more more a little bit more um what's the right word maybe chastened or just like buttoned down it was a bit more relaxed the JD Vance that was on stage with Tim Walls yes it was very much like a very nice moderate dude like just you know we're trying to get along here whereas the first speech was very aggressive yes it was it was very prickly and abrasive. And this was him, I think, realizing that you can catch more flies with honey.

And I think also the trade war has changed the dynamics where also they feel like they need Europe to side with the U.S. against China. And so there's there have been some shifts there. In any case. He did have a really good quote where he said basically like, the point is not U.S. versus Europe. And I don't want things to seem that way, though you can understand why the Europeans, by the way, interpreted that earlier Munich speech

as U.S. versus Europe. But he's saying that's not the point. The point is that we actually need each other. It was a much, it was actually, I think, a much more mature version of the argument. And obviously he's had a couple of months to get feedback and hear from people about how that first argument landed. Don't forget too, that the Signalgate chats that leaked down,

where J.D. Vance is trying to make the case against the strikes in Yemen by being like, oh, we're just bailing out those crummy Europeans again. And Hegseth, I think, was the one that chimed in, right? Yeah. Who was like, yeah, we, you know, we can't stand them. I mean, there's a lot of Euro bashing going on in that chat. Yeah. And they read those as well. So I'm sure they were also not super happy about the contents of that, those messages. Super quickly, I pulled up the quote because I think it gives a good flavor of his tone yesterday. He said, quote, I wasn't sure if after February I'd get the invitation back. Everything that I said there applied as much to the previous American administration as it did in any government as it did any government in Europe.

So he was saying sort of humbling himself and saying, well, not not himself, but humbling his country and saying the Biden administration was just as bad as I think you guys are. It's like Biden's same thing. Biden administration wasn't kidnapping students off the street for writing op-eds. That part always goes unsaid. Yeah. Then he goes on to say, it's not Europe bad, America good. Both Europe and the U.S., we got a little off track. So that's a night and day tonal difference. But he wasn't in conversation this time. So I guess it's not like a scripted speech attack. He was talking to some guy up on stage. Gotcha.

Okay. So in part of that talking to some guy up on stage, he gets asked about the status of the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. Interesting comments here. Let's take a listen. So there are a couple issues with the earlier agreement. The JCPOA, as it's called here in the United States and I assume in Europe. But the two big issues with that agreement are, number one, the enforcement or the inspections regime was incredibly weak. And I don't think that it actually served the function of preventing the Iranians from getting on the pathway to a nuclear weapon. That's one thing that must be different. And then second, yes, we believe that there were some elements

of their nuclear program that were preserved under JCPOA that, yes, they weren't nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, but allowed Iran to sort of stay on this glide path towards a nuclear weapon if they flip the switch and press go. And we have to think about this, not just in terms of Iran, which, again, the president has said this, we think that there is a deal here that would reintegrate Iran into the global economy that would be really good for the Iranian people, but would result in the complete cessation of any chance that they get a nuclear weapon. And that's what we're negotiating towards. So what did you think of his comments there, Emily? What was noteworthy? Yeah, I mean, really interesting because they need the buy-in of Senate

Republicans who have been hearing these leaks, the broad contours of a potential Trump-Iran negotiation and saying that sounds exactly like the JCPOA. The Foundation for Defense of Democracy is very hawkish on this. Some of their folks have been making that criticism. And I think the Trump administration knows that they need the buy-in of a significant part of the Republican coalition, and they're not going to get that for the JCPOA, even if it's Donald Trump. You know, you saw, we didn't talk about this yesterday, but Tom Tillis, Senator Tom Tillis coming out against Trump's D.C. attorney pick, Ed Martin, and tariffs. Had Rand Paul, for example, bringing together this bipartisan coalition to try and get a vote to take back, at least symbolically, Congress's power over trade. So I think they realize that on the highest priority issues, and I cannot think of a higher priority issue for the hawks in the Republican Party, the

like remaining neoconservatives, a Tom Cotton, a Lindsey Graham, whatever it is. You cannot just copy and paste JCPOA, even if you're Donald Trump, which is one of the reasons actually people ended up getting on the Trump bandwagon back in 2015 and 2016 because he was such an opponent of JCPOA. So I think what J.D. Vance was doing yesterday was making a substantive and fair criticism of JCPOA's oversight, the oversight, let's say, regime that was in JCPOA. Like, you have to be able to verify what Iran is actually doing. Otherwise, the whole thing kind of falls apart and it's kind of useless. So I think it's a reasonable criticism.

I also think it was a way to distance the Trump plan. See, this is totally different. This is nothing like the other plan. This is way better than that. It's not impossible that they land on, especially if we're grading on the curve of like neoconservative Republican Party lawmakers. It's not impossible that they land on a solution here

that is much better than your typical Republican or maybe even your typical Democrat would have negotiated. But that obviously remains to be seen. They're negotiating in Oman. It's the weird thing of the Trump era is that because of the oddities in the coalition and because of Trump's very eccentric, to say the least, approach to these negotiations, they sometimes end up in good places. And because of Trump's very eccentric, to say the least, approach to these

negotiations, they sometimes end up in good places. We'll see. Yeah, we'll say, fingers crossed, that they just, you know, get back into something approximating JCPOA, but are able to put some rhetorical flourish on that keeps most Republicans on board, because I do think that that is a genuine risk, Given the fact, you know, we're about to transition a block on the Medicaid cuts, the block on what's going on with Maha, there are cracks that are starting to emerge. And as this administration gets more unpopular across a broader range of issues, as the economic numbers get more uncertain, it just gives you a lot less room to navigate.

And also as the midterms get closer and many of these, you know, the members who are up are looking at their reelection bids and getting very nervous. And then, of course, there are such hawkish organized forces in Washington that the vast majority of the Republican caucus has been, you know, has been aligned with. So it will be difficult for them to persuade their own caucus that this is a deal worth negotiating. We shouldn't just go to war with Iran, which, of course, would be an utter disaster. They have been flipping out over it as soon as it became likely or possible that Trump was going to pursue a broad plan that or a plan that broadly resembled JCPOA in some way or another, meaning allowing for some enrichment for at least civilian purposes in the agreement, quote unquote civilian purposes. It's not that they don't have a point. That's something that people should absolutely be concerned about. But is it realistic? No.

In all likelihood, it's not realistic to start, let's say, thawing these tensions or cooling these tensions without coming to some sort of agreement that has—in an agreement, you have to give and take a little bit, and you end up with no agreement whatsoever. And the administration has been all over the map with regard to enrichment. J.D. Vance there seemed to say no enrichment. Others have said no enrichment. Donald Trump got asked about it, and he said he's not sure, which is good. I'm glad he said that. I think Whitcoff's gone back and forth as well. Yeah, I think that's right too. And I don't remember if it was in the clip we played there or not, but J.D. Vance made a comment during there saying that no country has ever had civilian enrichment and not ended up

with a nuclear weapon. And that is just not true at all. Japan, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands are among countries that enrich uranium and haven't pursued nuclear weapons. So that part was not particularly encouraging, but we'll see where it all goes. Hey, that's a rare glimmer of optimism, I suppose.

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

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 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. All right, let's go ahead and move. Speaking of not having glimmers of optimism, let's move to the quite drastic Medicaid cuts that appear to be part of the big, beautiful bill that Republicans are in the process of negotiating. David Dayen over at the American Prospect getting the scoop here on the specifics of the Medicaid cuts that the Republican caucus is planning on making. Let's put this up on the

screen. And guys, I'm going to take my time to go through a little bit of this because this is so important. So he says, I've obtained a list of the Medicaid cuts in the Republican reconciliation package. The big one is that they're going to raise premiums and co-pays on beneficiaries at or above the federal poverty line. That is what helps pay for the tax cuts. And that's what he has here in this text. He says the most potentially explosive item on the menu is cost sharing above 100 percent of FPL, that's the federal poverty line, that appears to mean that Medicaid recipients making at or above the federal poverty line, which is $15,650 for a single individual and $21,150, so very low amounts here, for a two-person household would have to pay some money for

coverage either in premiums, co-pays, or hospital visits and other treatment or other fees. Currently, Medicaid gives states the option to impose out-of-pocket spending on recipients, though some populations and services like children under 18 or pregnancy care are exempted. Some premiums and enrollment fees are limited to beneficiaries above 150 percent of the poverty line. This policy would take that number lower. Making poor people pay more for health care is exactly the kind of cut, effective cut, to Medicaid that moderate Republicans have sworn they would not abide. While reducing the federal share of Obamacare to Medicaid that moderate Republicans have sworn they would not abide while reducing the federal share of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which provides federal funding to extend Medicaid to adults under age 65 up to 138% of the poverty level in 40 states and D.C.

is not part of the menu. This is a backdoor way of achieving something like that reduction on the backs of individuals who get Medicaid. There are other provisions in here as well. There are some changes to the Affordable Care Act that would also increase premiums and raise out-of-pocket costs for people who enroll through the ACA marketplaces. So that is significant. There are some changes here in terms of work requirements that also, you know, What has been found previously with the Medicaid work requirements in particular, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, this is also in Dane's reporting, is that 61% of U.S. adults on Medicaid already work. A large fraction of those who don't are either disabled or elderly. The requirement would primarily add red tape to the enrollment

system, push people out of Medicaid using bureaucracies is a very common tactic. And states like Arkansas have already experimented with this and found that exact situation. It was expensive to implement and ultimately did not improve efficiency or anything, you know, the goals you might imagine with that. Instead, it just pushed people out of the program because they couldn't go through all of the bureaucratic red tape in order to get in. So bottom line here is that they are planning on making Medicaid more expensive, raising premiums, making people who are somewhat above the federal poverty line pay in, and doing some other tweaks around the edges, including these work requirements, in order to reduce the cost of Medicaid. So quite significant. And we can put this next piece up on the screen just to get a broader sense of some of the different

options that they had floated. This isn't specifically looking at the day-to-day report of what they've sort of landed on, but it lists all of these different options that had been suggested, had been proposed. One of them is reducing the expansion of the population matching rate. Another one is limiting state taxes on healthcare providers, capping spending per enrollees, repealing eligibility and enrollment final rate. Any one of these options, they find, would, yes, reduce the federal deficit somewhat, and also would reduce Medicaid coverage by millions of people. Anywhere from 8.6 million people to 2.3 million people would be cut off from Medicaid, and you would have a significant

increase in all instances in uninsured people. So that is where we are and what we're looking at. This is a tripwire for Republicans who want to and need to, by their own strategic intentions, pass a tax cut bill in order to, we could disagree with their argument here, but in order to supplement the tariff regime and the trade war. They don't believe, I mean, they've said this over and over again, that they need a tax bill to have their intended effects in the trade war. And, you know, you could go and look at that and say, well, then maybe you should have done the tax bill first.

And if you got it passed, then done all of these tariffs at the sort of wild levels, unexpected levels that a lot of, you know, even the administration sort of admits were very radical because they ended up locking them back. And Trump said the bond market was getting a little yippy. So it's by their own admission that some of this is a little wild. So maybe wait till after you get the tax cut bill passed, because now Republicans need to offset the tax cuts with significant spending cuts. They believed that Doge was going to find, Elon Musk first said $2 trillion in savings. He then said $1 trillion in savings. Now we don't even know if it'll be $200 billion in savings. They probably spent more money than they say.

I'm not kidding. Genuinely. Not out of the question. Yeah. They have not come anywhere near what Republicans expected Doge to do. They actually thought they were going to cut $1 trillion or something? Absolutely. They really thought that?

I don't think anyone thought two trillion was possible. But I think, I mean, the federal budget is a wild thing. And I think even like some Democrats, well, yeah, you could probably do that. But the way they went about doing it, it's kind of exactly what you would expect when you let an oligarch run wild in the federal government with a bunch of 20-year-olds. 20-year-olds, right. Because it's the same argument that people made against throwing Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and we talked about this with Mark Lucas, like, maybe you need somebody, you have to find the rare person who knows the bureaucracy in order to take on the bureaucracy, otherwise you end up not being efficient at all, because you don't even know where to look, you don't even know what to do,

and that's sort of been an interesting, like, Ezra Klein argument against Doge, is that it's not efficient to just come in and make cuts. Some of these cuts end up being inefficient, and then you end up maybe spending more money than you even cut. But the bottom line is congressional Republicans now have to come up with a budget that allows them to do these tax cuts, because they're also full of deficit hawks. They now have populists because some of these Republicans represent working class, heavily working class districts with a lot of people on Medicaid.

And Trump has said we could roll the tape back from I think it was February 19th. He's sitting next to Elon Musk in an interview with Sean Hannity and says Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff will be touched. Then he goes on to say maybe for-citizens, that sort of thing. And so he was assuring you, the U.S. citizen American taxpayer, your Medicaid, your Medicare is going to be safe. The only things we might make are tweaking around the edges to affect non-citizens or fraud. So they might be able to make the argument that work requirements are going against fraud or whatever. I mean, Medicaid spending is about 9% of the federal budget as of at least 2022. I mean, it's a huge amount of money. So it's irresistible

for deficit hawk Republicans to want to cut Medicaid. But if you cut Medicaid, you infuriate a lot of people who put their, rightfully or wrongfully, their trust in the Trump Republican Party and in Trump in particular. How do they get to the tax cut bill with enough votes even to pass the House, the slim margins that they have? Genuinely a mystery at this point. Well, and most of the tax cut bill is just to give away to the rich. I mean, you are literally cutting health insurance for poor people cut bill is just a giveaway to the rich. I mean, it's, you are literally cutting health insurance for poor people

to pay for a tax cut for the rich. That's what you're doing. And there was even some acknowledgement. Remember, there's some leaked Republicans to Axios, I think, saying like, that's going to be a tough one

for us to message on. Yep. Because that's, it's so politically toxic that it is hard to imagine doing something more unpopular. We have the C3. This is Don Bacon.

Yeah. Go ahead and put Don Bacon up on the screen. Don Bacon is in this, he's in Nebraska, right? In the swing district. Omaha. Has not actually announced whether he's running for re-election again. I don't think there's any way he wins. I just, you know.

I don't think he runs. The way that this year is shaping up. This is one of the districts actually Bernie Sanders went to as well, recognizing and very smartly recognizing that him and others in similar positions would be a vulnerability on trying to cut Medicaid. In any case, Don Bacon, one of the most vulnerable House members, is warning some Republican leaders have privately tried to get him and others on board with this reconciliation bill by claiming any steep Medicaid cuts passed by the House, they're going to be blocked by the Senate anyway. Here's the tactic they've been using, he says. Don't worry about the Senate. They'll fix it. And now we're getting ready to take our third vote on this, Bacon said in a recent interview. We feel like we're being pushed up to the edge of the cliff here. So here he is in the swing district. He knows that this is political

poison. And yet they are the tax cut thing. Trump, this is the one thing that he consistently promised to the financier class. I mean, really explicitly like vote for me and you're getting your tax cut. And they are not particularly happy about the whole tariff situation. So I think that adds pressure that you on that piece, you have to deliver. And, you know, Republicans have long been lined up behind giving tax cuts to wealthy people. That was the primary accomplishment of Trump's first administration. So I think he also has like, you know, a sort of ego commitment to it as well, outside of the way it benefits himself personally as well. So that piece has to be in. And then to make up for it, they're increasing the Pentagon budget. So it's not coming

out of the defense side of the ledger. That would be the other place you could look if you don't want to take health care away from poor people. Well, that's off the table. They're upping the budget over there. So that leaves you with a force to make really quite significant cuts to Medicaid that Trump promised he wouldn't and that are wildly politically unpopular and, more importantly, are going to be really devastating to millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid. And, you know, in a way, this is a very, a real success of Obamacare, the way that Medicaid expansion has made this program much more politically popular and much more difficult politically to cut because you have so many more millions of Americans who benefit from Medicaid at this point than prior to the Obamacare expansion. So that's part of the background here as well. Yeah. I mean, the politics of this for Republicans, even, you know, I went back. So I wrote about this yesterday. I was going back and looking at some of you might remember this because

you ran in the Tea Party years. Republicans were very careful the way they talked about Medicaid, like actual Republican politicians were very careful the way they actually talked about. They would talk about, you know, needing to reform Social Security or whatever. But when it came to Medicare and Medicaid, it was only like the hardest of the hardcore who would talk about like actually just cutting it and getting people off entitlement programs. There was a sensitivity around it. If you go back and look what they said, you'd be like, wow, that's really interesting. Because even at the time, I think they realized how just disastrous, how important it is to the seniors and the working class people who hate the government and maybe sought some, like, hope in the Tea Party movement

because they were like, yeah, term limits and, like, screw the big banks after the recession, how important these programs are to people. So it's just like it's the chickens are coming home to roost for Republicans on this. Yeah. And I guess, Emily, can you speak to I mean, because the other side of it, you got the Don Bacon's on one side who were like, I'm about to get tossed down and may not even run for reelection because it's looking so bad. Then you have people who are genuine fiscal hawks who have signed on to some letters saying, like, no, we need steep Medicaid cuts. So they're trying to balance all of these pieces, which is, I guess, why leadership is going

to Don Bacon and saying like, just trust us. It's going to be fine. They'll work it out in the Senate. It's not going to be that bad. Yeah. Well, the Senate, I mean, they're not that that might be their best option. And I think that's sort of what Mike Johnson is getting at, because he's ruled certain, quote, unquote, cuts out. And that leaves them with like waste, fraud and abuse work requirements. And to quote Rick Perry here, there's a third thing. I'm just forgetting it. I have it right in front of me because Dan posted it. But, yeah, they're going to get on whatever like they're going to find some outline. But that

outline is then going to be taken. And Dayen put it a great way. And it's similar to what you just said. He said in his story, he was like, yeah, you're making poor people pay more for health care. That's the direct quote from Dayen. No matter what Republicans do to Medicaid. Yeah. Democrats are going to be able to say that. Yeah. It doesn't matter. That's what they're going to be able to say. Yeah. It doesn't matter if you get it down to unless it's just on like non-citizens or something. But it doesn't matter if you add work requirements. That's still making poor people pay more for health care. And there's ways you can message it very effectively in some populist red districts. But it's an uphill battle, a real uphill battle. And it gives Democrats a huge gift

with a very polarizing political environment and a polarizing president. And it gives Democrats a huge gift with a very polarizing political environment and a polarizing president. And I just want to say with regard to work requirements, like I said before, Arkansas tried this. So this has been studied and it really should be seen as a similar tactic to what Doge is doing with social security, where they're just making it so you can't get someone on the phone. You go to the field office, the field office has been closed, or the field office has a three-hour long line. So you're making it impossible for people to access those benefits. And this is a common tactic and issue in neoliberalism, where they put up so much red tape and layer it with so much bureaucracy. This is the kind of thing where you like a real doge to tackle. They lay it with so much bureaucracy that it means that people just cannot jump through all the hoops or don't have

time to jump through all the hoops or can't figure out how to jump through all the hoops in order to access the benefits that they are entitled to. And that is, I think, what you should really, that's the real underlying goal of work requirements is the idea that if we make it more difficult for people to be able to obtain these benefits and you have to justify, OK, here's where I'm working, here's the hours, and I talk to my boss and may I call you on the phone and all of these sorts of things, then you are going to make it so fewer people enroll in Medicaid. And that's the way that you're going to cut the numbers that are on this program. So it is a backdoor way to make it so that fewer people are on Medicaid. It's a cut. That's it. Bottom line.

And yeah, so Democrats will be able to point to the numbers whenever we get the final bill of exactly what is coming with, you know, what these cuts entail and say this many millions of Americans are getting kicked off Medicaid for this many millions of Americans. You are increasing the cost. And, you know, it's Republicans will try to say, oh, work requirements, able bodied. And no, it's not really a cut all day long. But I think it's very difficult to explain your way out of your cutting health care for poor people to pay for rich people's tax cuts. Yeah, it is. To put it in a corporate a bill with a corporate tax cut,, which by the way, I mean, taking the corporate tax rate from 21 to 15 percent, we don't need, it's a can of worms

to open it now. I'm just like a total, you need a, like a flat tax basically type of person. And we probably disagree on that, but I just believe that's the only way to close loopholes. And closing loopholes is the only way to get corporations to pay their fair share and to pay, uh, like to put revenue into the treasury. But, um, to do this, to add this into a bill that's cutting the corporate tax rate for 21 to 15%. Yeah. That might get companies to, in some small way, bring back their corporate headquarters, which have, you know, like, uh, moved to Ireland, Johnson controls, for example, moves to Ireland, but that's the corporate headquarters. It doesn't necessarily affect that many workers. Either way, they can make this argument that it's about onshoring, bringing jobs back, et cetera. But at the end

of the day, Democrats can now say in a corporate tax cut bill, you cut Medicaid. It's just a disaster politically. There's no question about it. And they have this happened again in 2017. Paul Ryan was out there. This is just going to be my little rant for just a brief second. Paul Ryan was out there talking about how he was going to get taxes down to a postcard. And that is like actually a very, I think that would be, if you're talking about like doing it via a flat tax, that is a very just system of taxation, wouldn't require corporations to actually pay their fair share if it had the right policy incentives in it. And not that I trusted Paul Ryan to do that. But genuinely, if you say we have this mandate and we're going to revamp the tax system and you end

up with the TCJA, which was a tax hit bill in 2017, and then you end up with whatever this bill is going to be, you have all of, if you claim this mandate from political heaven right now, and you have the generational opportunity to do something like Doge, and you're not going to take it to do anything, we know it's just because lobbyists would swamp them. You can never have a fair system of taxation because lobbyists will swamp you, and then you lose, and you have no courage or backbone or spine. And that's how we end up with these awful third ways. Yes. Some of that I agree with. I think if you actually got rid of all of the corporate deductions and loopholes and whatever and had a lower

top line rate, but they actually had to pay it, there is a version of that that I would support because many of these corporations pay nothing because they avail themselves of so many of these loopholes that exist in our tax code. All right. Well, you know who understands some of these things? No. Our hero. Our heroine. Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer, who is also...

Who's an invite out for tomorrow's show. This is like... Yes, she does. That's right. Laura, we would love to talk to you tomorrow, genuinely. Laura Loomer and David Dayen are heavily featured. Yesterday was the Sean Duffy show. Tomorrow, today we've got...

It's the Loomer show. Laura Loomer and David Dayen. This is the difference between when I planned shows and when you planned shows. I guess so. Emily loves her some Sean Duffy. I don't know. All right. Put this up on the screen for Laura Loomer. So this is so funny to me, always how she praises this. But anyway, she is hammering this Trump ally, Paragon Health CEO, Brian Blaze, as a rhino saboteur because he's pushing for aggressive Medicaid cuts. I'm going to read you her post here on Twitter. She says, in a shocking betrayal of President Trump's unwavering commitment to America's working class families and his promise to protect Medicaid, which he did promise. Paragon Health CEO Brian Blaze,

a covert never-Trumper, masquerading as a maga loyalist, is spearheading a dangerous campaign to undermine the Republican Party's midterm prospects. 2016 tweets from Brian Blaze reveal he once said, this is why we can't have Trump,

meaning like, oh, he's a Trump critic. Along with bashing Trump on X, Blaze has also complimented Barack Hussein Obama. God forbid, see screenshots below. Brian Blaze doesn't want you to know this, but he is propped up by millions of dollars from the Koch Network's anti-Trump war chest. He's currently pressuring congressional Republicans to defy the president's ironclad pledge to protect Medicaid, a program critical to the Hartleyan voters who propelled Trump to his election victories. Blaze's insidious push to eliminate provider taxes would gut Medicaid funding, hitting Americans the hardest in rural red states like Texas, Florida,

and Louisiana. By the way, this is one of the pieces that Dan reported is planned to be in the bill, where Trump's base depends on the Medicaid program for survival. This is why Democrats are falsely accusing President Trump of trying to cut Medicaid because they know it's an effective way to suppress GOP turnout for the 2026 midterm. She goes on to talk about Steve Bannon. It's a long post. I won't read you all of it. But, you know, basically, it's look, it's clever how she frames it. She frames this as like it's a betrayal of Trump's promises when, of course, like obviously Donald Trump, if he didn't want Medicaid to be cut, could just go to Mike Johnson and John Thune

and be like, we're not cutting Medicaid. That's not happening. But definitely. Yeah. But obviously she's got to frame it in terms of like he's betraying Trump and Trump's promises and endangering and intentionally endangering Republicans for the midterms. So that's that's her play here. Clever framing, though. Let's throw this next tear sheet up on the screen because Republicans are going to be sort of flailing around. Basically, that Republicans are looking to offset the tax cuts, again, by selling some public land.

This is actually a fairly popular proposal in some corners of Republican world. I haven't looked too deeply into it, and I will now, Crystal, but they're going to have to come up with some really creative mechanisms because Doge didn't do what they wanted Doge to do, and they are cutting taxes a whole lot on top of the tariffs,

so they badly need this to be, like, a real shot in the arm to the markets and to the overall economy, and they also have to get the damn bill passed. So that's the... I mean, they have to get the damn bill passed. So that's the, I mean, they have to make all of these cuts, like massive cuts and get the bill passed with what,

like a two, three vote margin in the house. And increase the Pentagon budget. So you have to make up for that as well. And increase the, um, the ice budget and the detention, the,

you know, the budget that goes to like these private prison contractors, so that stand up detention centers, that's being increased massively. So it's not just the tax cuts, although that is the most sizable piece of it, but you're also upping the police and the military. And so now you're like,

maybe we can sell off some public land, some public assets to fund tax cuts for the rich. I'm sure that's going to go over well. Yeah, this should be an easy sell back home at their districts over the course of the summer. But again, like the pressure here is so high. The stakes are so high. They can only lose like three votes or something. And you have the Don Bacons of the world who may not be running for reelection. He's actually criticized. Was it Hegseth the other day that he came out and criticized? He's been critical of the administration in some surprising ways, which to me signals he doesn't think he's running for reelection or he's at right now.

I mean, it's like you said, could he even win reelection? I don't know. I think they've given him a lot of bandwidth to criticize the administration because they recognize the situation that he's in and they want him to run again. Because I think I think he's probably dead man walking in terms of getting reelected anyway. But if anyone could win the seat, he's like the only one that has a prayer. So I think they're willing to give him

a fair amount of bandwidth is my read. We'll see what they do for Republicans in that situation as they approach votes, which probably I'm guessing will be around 4th of July. So we'll follow it all. Shall we get to this very interesting story with regard to the Surgeon General? Okay, I'll start from where we are and then we'll back up and do some of the backstory here. So put Trump's announcement here up on the screen. He polled his previous Surgeon General nominee and has now announced Dr. Casey

Means to be nominated as our next Surgeon General of the USA. Casey has impeccable Maha credentials. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance.

Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us Luckily, it's You're Not the Father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back?

That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still

somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll work closely, this is what Trump said, with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to ensure a successful implementation of our agenda in order to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and ensure great health in the future for all Americans. Her academic achievements together with her life's work are absolutely outstanding.

Dr. Casey means has the potential to be one of the finest surgeon generals in U.S. history congratulations to Casey Secretary Kennedy looks forward to working with Dr. Jeanette I don't know how to say her last name do you Nishai Watt in another capacity at HHS thank you for your attention to this matter Dr. Jeanette I'll call her. Sorry that I don't have the pronunciation correct. Happens to be married to Mike Walsh. So good. There's another, just gotta, gotta love that one. So this is Shakespeare. This is Shakespeare. It truly is. So, and she, and the drama is as of yet unresolved. There are many acts, I guess, to go in this, in this drama, but wait, there's more. Dr. Jeanette gets pulled after criticism from Laura Loomer and others, I think.

Who, by the way, now says she's been hired by Donald Trump himself about four times, but his staff has always thwarted the hiring process. Really? I just saw this. Okay, interesting. So anyway, the original one gets pulled because of backlash from Loomer and others, feeling know, feeling like she had been, she was too pro-vaccine, that sort of thing, right? She was like too sort of normal in terms of the medical establishment. So they didn't like her.

So they pulled her. There was also some question about her LinkedIn page said she graduated from a different medical school than she actually graduated from something like that as well. Okay, so she gets pulled and Dr. Casey means gets put in. I'm going to leave it to you to explain a little bit about Casey means and her brother, Callie means who kind of came out of nowhere to be huge. I mean, I think it's fair to call them health influencers. You know, they make the podcast circuit, Rogan, Tucker, very tied in with the, the Maha movement. And so, and you know, they make the podcast Circuit, Rogan, Tucker, very tied in with the Maha movement. And so and, you know, have voiced all of the right skepticisms of vaccines.

We'll show you Joe Rogan clip where Casey Means is saying, like, you know, vaccines may cause autism. The same nonsense that RFK Jr. peddles and is aggressively pushing with his, you know, his study that he's conducting. That seems he's already come up with the answer of what he wants that study on autism ultimately to say. So that's kind of the world that she comes out of, Emily. So I think maybe a good place to begin is with this clip of Callie and Casey Means on Joe Rogan's show. And actually Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told people to watch their appearance on Joe Rogan's show, kind of held it up as a good example or a good explainer, primer on what Maha is all about. So if we roll this out from Rogan, it's C7. You'll get a good flavor of sort of what they're all about.

And we can go a little bit deeper, given that she's now nominated for Surgeon General. So let's go ahead and roll C7. Yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism. But what about the 20 that they're getting before 18 months? Like we don't look at it in synergistic, you know, and so that's a big problem. And this is where the cult of the science, and I say the science specifically because science is beautiful. Using the scientific method and using that way of inquiry into the natural world is a beautiful art. But weaponizing papers that are often bought for

or corrupted, and the leaders of some of our key medical journals have actually even said that 50% of scientific research that published ends up being wrong. So it's bought for corrupted or wrong. We rely on this. And if one interesting trend that we're seeing in our world is that if we do choose to put dots together, use our intuition, our God given intuition, anything other than this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need to really question. You know, I think, especially as a woman, like, and I'm thinking about having kids soon, I'm like, thinking about like, wow, like, I, I have the ability in my body to like build a human 3d print a human pulling a soul to that human i don't need a peer-reviewed study or a textbook to tell me how to do that our body and our our

intuition and our minds and the subtle things happening inside us are important they are incredible we have now been told that like you can't trust it and you are dangerous if you do that and i think that's one of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated right now is because parenting, I'm not a parent yet, but, you know, Callie is. But like, you know, when we're being told now that parents are the enemy for using their own judgment about their families and kids, like I think that's probably it's deeply frustrating to people. And that's basically what we're being asked to do. So I think that clip actually encapsulates a lot of Callie and Casey Means in just the two minutes that you heard. So to Crystal's point, they did kind of come out of nowhere. Callie Means, and I always confuse their names, by the way.

Callie Means, the man, their brother and sister. So Callie Means, the brother, sort of has this whistleblowing story of how he used to be a food lobbyist, so working for some of these awful, corrupt, big food companies. Like Coca-Cola, you're referring to. Like Coca-Cola, right. And so he started doing kind of whistleblower threads on X, and that started to get a lot of attention. Now his sister, nominee for Surgeon General, her personal story, and she explains it on that Rogan episode, basically is that she went to med school, and I think it was Stanford. Yeah, that's right.

Prestigious. And I think they come from a pretty well-off background. I think their dad is also a doctor. Something like that, right. You wrote some book that Laura Loomer did not like about gay people. Yes. It was about a flamingo. It's a kid's book.

I don't know what the book is about. Anyway. Laura Loomer said that it was about trans people, but apparently it was just about gay people. We don't even need to get into it. But she went to med school, did five years of her residency, and then dropped out because she says she had this sort of awakening as to how, and this is very popular in the mahal world, it's a very popular argument, our medical system is obsessively treating symptoms for the sake of profits that go to pharma, ag, big food, and end up corrupting the medical system rather than treating causes in ways that don't benefit pharma. So Ozempic is a good example. They talk a lot about it.

Instead of asking people to spend more time cutting out sugars or carbs or doing a lot of physical activity, we just give people Ozempic. And whether or not that's true, that's the argument that they have. I think there's actually a lot of truth to their criticisms and actually to RFK Jr.'s criticisms

of the corruption in the system. But do they then peddle appropriate solutions? That's where the question becomes much more significant. It's very well and diplomatically put. Because, well, and here's the thing. You know how I feel about these people. Yes. Because she and Callie Means and R.K. Jr. and the Maha crew, like they'll talk a lot about the profit motive and the corruption in the system, et cetera.

But then your solution has nothing to do with getting the profit motive out of the healthcare system. And in fact, both Callie and Casey Means have their own for-profit healthcare companies

that their solutions, whether it's to COVID or anything else, just happen to bolster their own profit-making direction. It's like, well, what if we applied the same analysis you're applying over here? What if we applied that to you? What does that come out looking like? So in any case, these two individuals, apparently a lot more controversial in some of the MAGA and MAHA world than I really expected. This was like overturning a rock and seeing beneath the surface that there's all kinds of bugs fighting each other. And I don't mean that that wasn't to imply people were bugs. It was just to imply that, like, beneath the surface of Maha, there's this raging battle for the soul of Maha because the close, close stakeholders have, like, this is a very tight-knit circle. I think it's a fair way to say it. Not just online, but offline.

A lot of these people know each other, work with each other now. And RFK Jr. is the figurehead of the movement. A lot of people have personal relationships with RFK Jr. And we didn't have time to put this in the rundown because it just kind of this was all happening last night but dr jack cruz who is really big in maha circles um and you know he's been on podcasts with like andrew huberman huberman i think uh before as maha guy he says quote i have it on firm authority that kelly victory another maha figurehead was bobby's pick last weekend for Surgeon General.

Kennedy called people Monday and said Jeanette was out. And Kelly was the frontrunner in a phone call to Kelly from RFK. All caps. This means Bobby has no juice, no power. DJT, Donald Trump, allowed Susie Wiles to put in the World Economic Forum and Fabians inside the gates. So this is not a random nobody. This is somebody in Maha World who's pretty significant and is already staunchly against this nomination for Surgeon General.

The meanses have been very close. The meanses have been very close to Bobby Kennedy. It's obvious everyone kind of knows that. Yeah. But they're, they come across to a lot of people in the world as suspicious and her nomination, when they thought that their other ally, Kelly Victory, had it just graded on these people who were already very suspicious of Kelly and Casey Means. They do think the story is a bit convenient that both of them sort of dropped out of these prestigious gigs, medical school, residency, lobbying work, suddenly started infiltrating Bobby Kennedy world, which is quite interesting. You can imagine those circles are filled with people from all walks of life, including, you know, like Intel world, including

like quirky science world. It just got to be the strangest place to go to Thanksgiving dinner. Can you imagine? No, actually people from glossy magazine, like it's just crazy stuff. So they're very suspicious of the means. They see them as people who may be compromised by the political establishment. And this just set that into hyperdrive. So this is the one that was really shocking to me. Nicole Shanahan, who was R.K. Jr.'s vice presidential pick and has been—she has said some things that she was nervous about, but she's, as far as I know, really held back on any significant criticism of him or HHS or the Trump administration. She tweeted this. Yes, it's very strange with regards to Casey

Means being put in. Very strange. Doesn't make any sense. I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation, that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment and that people much more qualified would be. I don't know if RFK very clearly lied to me or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions. And it isn't President Trump. With regards to siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.

There is a lot going on in that one tweet. I mean, first of all, she has to be persuaded to support RFK Jr. in a Senate confirmation hearing. That's news in and of itself. And one of the pledges that was made is that Casey and Callie Means would be nowhere in this administration. So interesting, by the way. Right. Because to your point, RFK Jr. talked about them a lot on the campaign trail. You know, in big speeches, he would make a point of shouting out, you know, Callie Means in particular. And so the fact that this is a little behind the curtain and behind the scenes, she wants nothing to do with that, is actively seeking out pledges that neither one of them will have anything to do with this administration. And is now saying, maybe he lied to me or maybe he has no juice. Someone regularly is controlling his decisions,

and it isn't President Trump. So that is, there is a whole lot there. And I think it also comes in the context of, like we were saying before, as the administration becomes more unpopular, you're going to see more things like, you're going to see more cracks emerge, more people coming out who are willing to be critical, who were not willing to be critical before. That's a good point. And by the way, paranoia breeds paranoia are willing to be critical, who were not willing to be critical before. That's a good point. And by the way, paranoia breeds paranoia. So when I mentioned like Intel a couple minutes ago, the reason I say that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is somebody who is incredibly critical of the CIA for obvious reasons and is like

actively taking steps to get these files released that obviously the intelligence world does not want released. And we could have separate debate and segment all about what's actually happening in that space. But the bottom line is he's obviously somebody who would be a target for concern and surveillance from that world. And you see how that is, you know, that's pretty, pretty much people agree on that. Like, it's not a, that's not crazy. And it's not a conspiracy theory. It's just,

yes, of course, they would be keeping track and keeping tabs on someone like that, especially now that he's in a really big position of power in the United States government. Now, on the other hand, because some of that stuff is obviously sort of true, logical, common sense, you end up with paranoid people fighting other paranoid people. It's sort of a circle of paranoia that is trying to be a governing coalition. And that is incredibly difficult to hold together just in a practical sense, like not even based on the merits of Maha. It's just practically really hard. I think we saw this happening actually at the Pentagon, where they were so paranoid about leakers that someone who was trying not to leak ended up getting pushed out of the Pentagon for leaking,

even when he was trying not to leak, because the paranoia is so intense. And I think we're seeing the same thing happen in Maha world, but that's where just my last point is the language about born and bred Manchurian candidates in the Shanahan tweet is, and she calls it, quote, very strange. It is, I think, alluding to and generating a sense of paranoia in Maha world, which is already conspiratorial. Yeah, that's such a great point not in ways that are like you know i think there are some really suspicious things about robert f kennedy's the shooting of robert f kennedy i don't think that's insane but if you if your gateway into politics is from those issues then you end up uh sort of in these paranoid firing circles like mexican standoffs like the spider-man meme i saw mike flynn is now like who standoffs, like the Spider-Man meme. I saw Mike Flynn is now like,

who was like the number one QAnon hero is now like some QAnon people think that he is, you know. I did not see that. They came up with some other conspiracy in which he's the villain. So that speaks to the dynamic you're talking about.

I just pulled up Laura Loomer's Twitter feed and she is going in. Oh, is she? She is going in on Casey Means. Yeah, she's fighting with Charlie Kirk about it. Ooh. Let me just, I'm just going to read you one of her posts because it's interesting. She says, President Trump's pick for U.S. Surgeon General Casey Means said she prays to inanimate objects, communicates with spirit mediums, uses shrooms as plant medicine, and talks to trees.

She also doesn't even have an active medical license. That is actually true. The inmates are running the asylum. This is literally from one of Casey means newsletters. I have the entire page archived and took screenshot. She was just chosen by president Trump to service the next U S search in general. Take a look at this section on her newsletter.

Casey means said she was looking for romance. She would do shrooms, talk to trees, participate in full moon ceremonies and pray to inanimate objects with a spiritual medium. So basically, the new Surge in general is a total crackpot, a shroom consumer, and she talks to trees and doesn't even have an active medical license. She's making me like Casey Means more. I was just going to say, you know who we need to have on in all seriousness?

Ryan Grimm. Well, Ryan, yes. We should have Ryan and Marianne talk about the merits of this type of woo, as Casey Means has put it. Like she's openly said embrace the woo woo. That's right. And some of this stuff is unfairly derided by like snobbish elites. There's no question about it. Now, should the Surgeon General be somebody who's writing about openly talking to trees on her hikes?

You know, Crystal, I'm less firm on that one. I think probably no. Probably. What about if you have an active medical license? How do you feel on that one? Don't love that either. Don't love that either. So her conclusion here is, again, it's never Trump's fault. Another failure by the geniuses who work for Trump on his non-existent vetting team. It's the vetting team's fault. I guess there isn't a single conservative doctor in America who doesn't have a history of being a Marxist tree hacker. We are so doomed,

aren't we? And then receipts. Producer Mac just texted, the trees can talk if you believe. That's right. If you do some shrooms, and then you try to talk to the trees, see what happens. We learned today, as we were prepping this segment, I don't want to take Ryan's thunder.

You can ask him about this tomorrow, Crystal, but he is a certified or former certified Reiki instructor. So we're not anti-Wu here at Breaking Points. No, not at all. Not at all. But I guess to make the political point, there have long been tensions and contradictions within the coalition which elected Trump. And it is true that like the – Marianne is a perfect example of this. The like woo alternative medicine, hippie – like the anti-vax thing used to be like rich L.A. people. Yeah. That's how R.K. Jr. and Marianne were running in some of the same social circles.

That used to be on the left. And so when that group gets subsumed into the MAGA movement, there are going to be some beliefs that clash. And in any case, I don't know. I think we're just still scratching the surface of this one. I really hope Laura Loomer comes on the show tomorrow so I can hear more from her about what she thinks. I do too. We're going way too long on this, but the final point I make is Alex Jones was popular on the left after 9-11 because of his conspiracy theories, and that's another coalition that's been subsumed into the broader MAGA coalition and is really paranoid.

So again, like you put all of these eccentric puzzle pieces together and it's really hard to actually govern. And again, it's not that there aren't good reasons to question government and elites. It's just as a working coalition, practically really hard to have so much eccentricity and distrust in place. I thought, I can't remember who wrote, maybe it was Naomi Klein. I'm not sure. Wrote about like a crank realignment where it's like all the various conspiracy branches. Naomi Wolf. Yeah. All sorts.

Yeah, exactly. All sort of like coalesced within the Republican movement. And sometimes those conspiracies clash in important ways. And I think that's part of what's playing out here. That's right. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies

were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame

one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes,

Hold up. So what are they going proof that could get the money back. Hold up, so what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my god. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family

in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, let's go ahead and get to the latest with regard to deportations. This is another one that I guess it's a little bit of a mystery at this point, although some pieces of it are significantly reported out. So it looks like the Trump administration was, maybe still is, planning on expanding their worldwide foreign gulag deportation policy beyond El Salvador, also to Libya. President Trump was asked about this. Specifically, he says he doesn't know. There's so many parts of his administration that he just has

no idea about, apparently, Emily. And that may be the case, actually. It may be the case that Stephen Miller is just handling this portfolio and Trump is like, do whatever you want to do. And that's how things are going. In any case, let's take a listen to the president. Any other questions? Are you administration sending migrants to Libya? That's how things are going. In any case, let's take a listen to the president. Any other questions? Are you administration sending migrants to Libya? I don't know. You'll have to ask Homeland Security, please.

So doesn't know. Seems like a kind of important piece for him to have some insight into at this point. But he claims he has no idea what's going on here. So let's put this up on the screen. This has now sparked a court fight because you first had the New York Times and one other outlet, I want to say it was Reuters, reporting that the administration was planning on shipping some migrants to Libya in an expansion of the El Salvador program. And it was pretty well reported out. We talked about a little bit on the show yesterday. Then lawyers started getting wind from clients that they were being transferred and they were

being asked to sign papers that told them, that required them to agree to getting deported to Libya. And most of the immigrants, I think all of the immigrants who were receiving these papers were from somewhere in Asia, different Asian countries that were being given these papers and being told you are going to be shipped to Libya. So let me read a little bit from that political report we just have up on the screen. The Trump administration's reported plan to hurriedly deport immigrants to war-torn Libya would clearly violate an earlier court order barring such summary deportations, a federal judge warned Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy's assessment followed an emergency motion filed by lawyers for a group of Asian immigrants

seeking to block a military flight that appeared to be on the verge of taking off from Texas, even as the two competing governments that control portions of Libya reportedly indicated they would reject deportation flights from the U.S. Libya remains divided after years of civil war, thanks to us, controlled by a U.N.-recognized government in the West and basically a warlord named Khalifa Haftar in the East. Haftar's son, Saddam, interesting, was in Washington last week. Meeting with Trump administration officials, interesting. Libya has a number of detention facilities for refugees and migrants, which human rights groups have described as deplorable. I saw others described it as a hellhole.

Have warned that abuses are rampant, including torture, forced labor, and slavery. That's what these Libyan prisons are known for. So effectively, you get the New York Times report saying they're planning on doing this. Marco Rubio had previously said they were going to expand beyond El Salvador, so it fit with his comments. Then you have Asian migrants being moved around and asked to sign these papers asking them to accept their deportation to Libya. Lawyers intervene. They file this emergency motion. There was also a flight that, you know,

how you're able to look up scheduled flights. There was a flight that appeared to be the military flight that was going to take these migrants to Libya. So lawyers intervene. They have this hearing. The judge says, you can't do this. If you are planning on doing this, this would violate prior orders. So it's blocked for now. And then both of the Libyan governments are in this divided country are saying, no, no, no, we wouldn't accept deportation flights. But the son of the warlord part of the government

had met with Trump administration officials last week. So that's kind of where we are. Yeah, here's a part from the Politico article. They say they've also worked to reach potential agreements with the Trump administration with countries to detain people deported from the United States, similar to the agreement they reached with El Salvador. And so when you factor that in, the United States feels that it was getting a deal with the Sikot deportations, but it was also helping to fund Bukele's prison expansion.

And so you could see how warlords in war-torn Libya would maybe see all of this money as potential, like, I'm going to say jobs program, but that means, you know, spoils program in like really corrupt countries in all likelihood war-torn, corrupt countries, you can see where their motivations would be. Like, we're going to actually get more power and control in our own country with these deportations. I mean, it just, the motivations on Libya's part, there's just, it's money. I mean, it seems pretty clearly that it's money, which puts- And power.

Right, right. Because if you're in the midst of, you know, what's effectively, you know, a civil war, and you want to bolster your position as the true legitimate government of Libya- With the U.S. Doing a deal with the Trump administration seems like a pretty solid way to achieve that.

Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm looking up how many people are registered lobbyists for Libya right now. I just went to Farah.gov because that's typically how these sort of deals get greased. You have some lobbyists whose client is one of these governments and they make the introduction and then it goes from there. Glenn has talked about this. Greenwald has talked about this, how you actually can't deport people to prisons with particular conditions. You have to have conditions that are the same, that are like in compliance with U.S. law, basically. I mean, this was established during the war on terror where it was like, no, you cannot deport. You can't send people to Egypt knowing that Egypt will torture them and then be like, well, we didn't torture them, even though you know that, you know, this other country is going to torture them. It's the same law applies here. You can't say, well, you know, well, it's up to Bukhali what he does with them. No, you know the record of these prisons. You know the record of these prisons in Libya, which are described as

a hell rife with, you know, slavery and sexual abuse as well, by the way, and just horrific, every horrific condition you can possibly imagine. So that appears to have been the plan. Now, it's interesting that both Libyan governments are denying that they would accept these deportation flights that either could be CYA with regard to domestic population that they feel would not, you know, like this arrangement. Or it could be that the Trump administration asked them to say that they were not going to accept these deportation flights. Because, you know, when you look at the – it looks quite clear that this was their – they were planning to do this if they were not immediately blocked by the courts. They were moving aggressively, you know, quite hastily to move these Asian migrants, to get them to sign off these papers to, you know, they had the flight ready to go. And it's only because the courts were able to intervene pretty quickly that this was blocked. But I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn El Salvador to other countries around the world as well.

Go ahead and put D4 up on the screen here, too, guys, because we had just a couple of other updates we wanted to bring to you guys. So federal court, this is from Prem Thakur. He says a federal court has denied the Trump administration's efforts to stop the transfer of Ramesa Ozturk to Vermont. This is the student who wrote the op-ed and then was, you know, arrested by like six, some of the masked agents of the state. Court orders that she be there by May 14th. The Trump administration was trying to keep her in Louisiana. She has been accused of no crime, just co-writing a campus op-ed arguing for divestment. And this is really significant because the administration was really judge shopping, and that's why they wanted her in Louisiana. So it's where Khalil was as well. That's exactly right. And they thought they had a much better shot there. And wasn't Khalil also, wasn't, didn't he? Oh, Khalil, it wasn't Khalil. It was the other Madawi who was released in

Vermont. In Vermont, yes. So I think that they, you know, they feel like the Vermont judges are going to be more favorable to these cases. So this is a really significant win for her in attempting to be released and, you know, and this deportation based purely on speech to be denied. But, you know, these cases are definitely going to go all the way up the chain, I would say, to the Supreme Court is going to have to say whether or not Marco Rubio can just decide based on your student op-ed that you're a threat to our foreign policy and that you're an anti-Semite and therefore you must be deported. That remains, you know, ultimately unresolved. But big, big temporary win for her to be, you know, force them to move her back to Vermont.

Well, yes. And I think if the government, this has happened a little bit with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, you have to wonder why all of this information, like the video from his traffic stop in Tennessee and additional information about, about like the restraining order allegations of domestic abuse, which his wife has since walked back. It's very strange to me that that stuff wasn't immediately presented when the media started to focus on the Abrego Garcia case that was first happened with an Atlantic article, actually. And the administration's response was piecemeal. And some people have

speculated that what they were trying to do was lay a trap for Democrats like Chris Van Hollen, who were going to El Salvador, and then after he's in El Salvador, release the spousal abuse allegations. And the reason I'm connecting this to Ozturk is that I genuinely think if they had any other information other than this op-ed, there was any other evidence than this op-ed that went into this woman's arrest by thugs. Sorry, but they're like masked, all black, wearing ice agents. It looked like a kidnapping. We still don't actually even know what government agency did this. And so if we if they had more information, I think we would know it at this point. I don't actually think the administration was strategically dripping out information on

Abrego Garcia. I think they're they're just shooting first and asking questions later. Yeah. And flying by the seat of their pants. And so, again, I think if there was more evidence that Ozturk was like a reasonable candidate for this kind of deportation. Some sort of actual Hamas operative. Exactly. Right, right, right. Then we would know it by now. And literally nothing in her case, like nothing has come out. They had that court filing in the case of other Vermont. Madawi. Yeah, they had that court filing about the gun store clerk that came out. It took them a while.

I don't believe that story, by the way, but anyway. It was a wild story. It was preposterous, yeah. But anyway, they at least have the story. They at least have that allegation. And in this case, there's been absolutely nothing over the course of more than a month now since her arrest. Yeah. Nothing. And she really has been one of more than a month now since her arrest. Yeah. Nothing. And she really has been one of the cases that has captured people's attention.

Because it is, first of all, we have the video. Second of all, it is so preposterous, the idea that you would write an op-ed for a student newspaper and be disappeared and vanished and, you know, disappeared into Louisiana and attempted to be deported just over that. Well, not a crazy op-ed either. No. Like, disagree with it, but not like an actual anti-Semitic screen. No, it was just like, you know, politely calling for divestment from, you know, by the universities. It's just really standard stuff in terms of basic campus activism. And, yeah, so I think you're right about

that. I saw some speculation also like, oh, maybe there's something else that we don't know about it. It's like, I do think we would know at this. They would have dug something up if there was anything to dig up whatsoever. So in any case, that's a significant win for her. Just one last piece here, just to keep an eye on in terms of the conditions in our own detention centers, which are wildly overstretched and overcrowded. Put this up on the screen. We've had a fairly significant number of migrants who have died in custody during Trump's first 100 days. These are still under investigation. So in many instances, we don't know the details of what happened, whether they had preexisting conditions that, you know, contributed to these deaths.

But certainly something to keep an eye on. Seven migrants have died while in the custody of immigration police or ICE. One woman in particular blazed and two other migrants died in Florida. One died in Arizona, another in Missouri, one in Texas, one more in Puerto Rico. Individuals ranged in age from 27 to 55, came from different corners of the globe, embarked on the Odyssey of the U.S. for various reasons, through various means, but ultimately ended up in the same place, imprisoned in an infamous network of migrant detention centers, denounced for their mistreatment and conditions. So one other piece to keep an eye on is even as we focused on the conditions in Sikat,

focused on now the conditions in Libya and what that would potentially look like, you also have allegations, significant allegations of mistreatment and lack of sufficient care in the detention centers here as well. I still look at these cases. I think one of the big questions is whether this rate is outpacing what we've seen before. That's one of the questions that the Trump administration is going to face. A lot of migrants are, for understandable reasons, in poor health, and it's obviously incumbent on the U.S. You know, this is part of the problem with the law that people— I don't mean that it's a problem with the law.

I mean it's a problem for providing health treatment to people. The law says you do have to detain people while their asylum cases are heard out. The Biden administration actually found ways to not do that, which is part of people like my criticism of them. But when you detain people, then that does create a huge burden on the health system because you actually have to attend to their well-being. And so to let that sort of drop in the priority list is obviously that should be a huge, huge area of concern for DHS and anyone who's overseeing these facilities who are absolutely crowded. But are they then re-detaining people for the sake of deportation at a rate that allows them to provide adequate medical oversight.

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

we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes

of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair.

Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale,

listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. Let's turn to what's going on in the crypto world. You know, favorite topic of mine here, Emily. I still am not over the fact that Trump launched and then his wife launched these meme coins days before. I mean, literally like a day before he was inaugurated. Insane. It is Hunter Biden's art on steroids. I mean, Hunter Biden's art could not have imagined the possibility. I mean, Hunter Biden said, damn it, I should have done that. Yeah.

I have a friend. I don't think he'll mind me sharing this story. I have a friend who was convicted of he ran for state Senate in Missouri, Congress in Missouri. Yeah. And he was convicted of he was coordinating with the super PAC. It was the most penny-ante shit you could possibly imagine. But the government really wanted to throw the book at him and make an example of him. And the Carnahans, which were very powerful in Missouri, hated his guts.

And so anyway, he gets sent to prison for a year. And his fellow inmates were like, well, what did you, you know, how much money did you get out of this? And he's like, literally nothing. And they're like, what's wrong with you? Like, if you're going to do something and end up here, you may as well at least like really properly bet him. And that's how I, what I keep thinking about with regard to the, like the Hunter Biden,

the Nancy Pelosi insider trading, all this shit looks like nothing compared to the billions that they're collecting through these meme coins, through their development properties around the world. I mean, it really boggles the mind and is, in my mind, one of the top examples of how we just are not a functioning society. Agree completely. The fact that this just happens and everyone just moves on.

This is late capitalism. You couldn't script it better. Yeah, this has to be end-stage capitalism, where it's just eaten everything. It's eaten everything. So in any case, put this article up on the screen. All right, so we are learning more about who exactly are the top Trump crypto buyers vying for dinner seats since he's giving away these, you know, the top crypto investors are going to get to have a special dinner with him, which is just, again, astonishing. More than half of the top holders— When are they going to talk about? Maybe some business?

I'm sure just how much they appreciate the, you know, his crypto savvy. Anyway, most of the—more than half of the top holders here have used foreign exchanges that say they ban U.S. users, suggesting many of the purchasers of these Trump crypto meme coins are based outside the U.S. Buyers of the Trump token, a cryptocurrency the president began marketing two days before his inauguration, drove sales higher in the past two weeks after its issuers announced an unprecedented promotion. More than 200 of the meme coins' largest holders would be invited to attend a May 22nd dinner with trump it's virginia golf club while the top 25 would qualify for an exclusive reception beforehand and what the meme coins website describes as a vip tour now an analysis by bloomberg news shows that all but

six of the top 25 holders who've registered on the website's leaderboard used foreign exchanges that say they exclude customers living in the u.S. More broadly, at least 56% of the leader board's top 220 holders used similar offshore exchanges. The prevalence of these likely foreign buyers echoes concerns that congressional Democrats have expressed about the ethics of marketing the coin with a promise of presidential access raises questions about how attendees at the promotional dinner who are publicly identified only by three or four letter usernames they've chosen will be vetted. So the TLDR here is that the Trump administration, Trump himself, not the

administration, just Trump, has opened up the most brazen avenue of obvious corruption you could possibly imagine. Where if you are a foreign government, foreign person, a company, a U.S. person, whoever, rich person who wants to get access to and get a goodie from the Trump administration, which has consolidated all this power within the singular person of Donald Trump, what do you do? Well, perhaps you buy millions and millions of dollars in Trump's shit coin, which personally benefits him, show him, brag about how much you pumped up his crypto coin, or you get to go to this fancy dinner and get to get your time with him and plead your case. It's completely insane. It is insane. It is absolutely insane. And again, if we were anything approaching a functioning society, there is no way that we would just permit this and go on and that this would be OK.

We are talking about world historic levels of corruption endemic in this whole play. And I just I don't even know what to say about it. It's so naked. It's so incredibly naked. And of course, the idea that this administration, oh, it's America first and all for U.S. interests. And how does that possibly comport with allowing whoever around the world, but apparently a majority of foreign buyers, to outright bribe you through the mechanism of this meme coin? It's, I mean, it's exactly what we said it would be all along. It's a complete, and again, going back to the Clinton Foundation, remember the claims, actually, I think people on the left and the right could probably agree, like left, left, and populist right, populist left and right, could probably agree that what Hillary Clinton

was doing with the Clinton Foundation was completely insane. A hundred percent. That is what Donald Trump is doing with this meme porn, right? It's like a way to peddle influence and access with no transparency at all. That's exactly what this is. So the concept and in principle, it's very much the same thing. Yeah. It's like country friends art. Just accelerated through the magic of crypto. And it's always been, again, like this, Donald Trump is, you literally in the lobby, which is the actual the etymology of our phrase for lobbyists is because people used to hang out in the lobby.

I think it was of the Willard and talked to like Ulysses S. Grant. But that's what it is. It's getting access and influence to people in positions of power. And yeah, that's always, I mean, Trump divested from the Trump organization, I think, in 1.0 and 2.0. And it's like, why even bother? Just buy the hotel back. Might as well just move the White House business to the hotel. Well, and I want to emphasize, too, the way this relates to the tariffs, because and this has always been my contention with the tariffs that, yes, there may be various people in the administration of various goals, but one of the primary goals for Trump is power and the ability because, hey, this is a great marketing scheme for his crypto shitcoin,

because now everyone in the world has incentive to pay the money, give you your millions, come to your dinner, and make the case for why they need this exemption, they need this car voucher, they need this particular goody so that their business can survive and thrive in the Trump tariff regime.

Which is precisely why the power to levy these tariffs is supposed to be with Congress to avoid exactly this sort of direct favor trading and having to come and petition the king. That's precisely why those powers are supposed to be with Congress. So it really fits together. I do want to say Democrats don't get off the hook here. Put E2B up on the screen. This is our other David Dayen work reporting out here. So you've got really a lot of bipartisan support for crypto at this point. And not just crypto, but like allowing crypto to do whatever sort of scams and schemes that they want to. And there was this bill

that relates to a light regulatory touch for what's called stable coins that looked like it was on its way to sailing through because crypto has massively invested in funding the campaigns, both of Democrats and Republicans and punishing any Democrats, by the way, Katie Porter being the primary example of this, who were crosswise with them. So this bill looked like it was going to sail through. Then all of this Trump meme coin stuff really starts to bubble and Democrats start getting uncomfortable. Okay, well, do we really want to associate ourselves with this industry when you see what Trump's doing, et cetera? So it became somewhat of a question whether this pro-crypto

bill was going to be able to get through the Senate. And so basically in a classic Schumer move, in fact, someone quotes this as being quote unquote Schumer 101, they're going to add an amendment to the shitty crypto bill that allows Democrats to virtue signal, an amendment that is definitely going to fail, but allows Democrats to virtue signal about how much they disapprove of what Trump is doing and allow them to be able to message that like, oh, they were really trying to stand up to Trump when really they're just enabling the very corruption that Trump is aggressively partaking in. So that's their move. Yeah. Great. I love it. Yeah, classic. Things couldn't be better. Things could not be better. And the last one here, before we get to

Emily's breakdown of what's going on with Punchbowl, Jeff Stein, great reporting on another facet of extraordinary corruption within the Trump administration, which is the use of, put E3 up on the screen here, guys, the use of pushing Starlink as a tool in the tariff trade war. So Jeff Zients says we've obtained internal cable showing how the U.S. government is pushing countries facing tariffs to clear the way for Musk's Starlink. State Department says it's good to encourage other countries to adopt Starlink. Others point to blurring of Musk's private and government roles. And in fairness, if Elon Musk was not one of the most powerful people within this administration, maybe it does make sense to, the Biden administration also did some promoting of

Starlink as an alternative to Chinese telecoms. Who owns the satellites and the telecom infrastructure is very important. Personally, I don't want it to be owned by any singular person, even if that person does business in America, you know, or is an American citizen as Elon Musk is. So let me just give you a little bit of the details here because I think that is extraordinary. He says, less than two weeks after President Trump announced 50% tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, something we talked about here. But I think you pronounced it incorrectly. I think this was the whole thing when, remember, Lesotho, something we talked about here. But I think you pronounced it incorrectly. I think this was the whole thing.

When, remember, Lesotho was one of the, everyone was like, such a random country. Right. And then everyone was like, you're pronouncing Lesotho. Everyone's pronouncing Lesotho. Oh, you don't say the T-H? It's just a T. Okay. I'm sorry.

I didn't take the time to learn. Apologies, Lesotho. The country's communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink after their hit with the tariffs. The satellite business owned by Elon Musk had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk's firm the nation's first ever satellite Internet service license slated to last for 10 years. And it goes on to say they're far from the only country that has decided to suddenly take up Starlink. Company reached distribution deals with two providers in India in March, has won at least partial accommodations with Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo,

Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, although this is probably not a comprehensive count. So there you go. Congratulations, Elon Musk. Doge was not a complete and utter failure. Tesla may be in the tank, but your Starlink business is thriving. Well, this is one of the complicated things about Elon Musk and it's with SpaceX and Starlink in particular, I think are the best examples, is that Starlink is an excellent product. Like it is genuinely a significant innovation and it's helpful and it like probably is the best candidate, like SpaceX, in a lot of these different bidding processes and a lot of these different negotiations. But you can never actually, like, nobody will ever know whether Starlink or SpaceX during the Trump administration were chosen because they were the best candidates. Or other Musk products, by the way, get contracts because they were the best candidates.

Because obviously there's not a fair process, period. The illusion of a conflict is a conflict of interest. Anyone who studies conflicts of interest knows that. I'll tell you, just the appearance of a conflict in and of itself is undue influence. And so that is a problem with having Musk and the meme coin just be hovering over every policy decision that the Trump administration is making foreign and domestic is you can never disentangle the undue influence. That's right. That their personal interest has in all of this. And I think that's probably why, uh, the, the meme coin and I think even like Starlink is, is part of the background of our conversations, not our,

but like the national conversation about Trump and Musk, because it's never in the foreground. I mean, not often, although Jeff found a great example here, but it is always, it's part of the landscape. It is a permanent fixture and you can never go back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube when you have Musk not divesting, you have Trump with the meme coin. It just, it adds a permanent question mark. And that's what Banana Republics, like that's what happens in Banana Republics. You have just these permanent question marks and you can't always prove things. A plus B, you can't do it in every case. But that's the problem in and of itself. Yeah. And sometimes it does seem actually quite clear in

this administration what is going on. Last thing I'll say with regard to Starlink, just as a broader concern, is, you know, in the early days of the Ukraine war, Elon Musk comes in and says, I'm going to provide access, Starlink access, to the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. And Starlink has been extremely important for comms on the front lines in Ukraine. And then there were certain things that Zelensky did that he didn't like. And then he decided to pull access, I think, in Crimea or whatever. Whether or not you support the decisions he made in that instance, it was very troubling to realize this man is basically doing foreign policy as like a private businessman. And that's just to underscore. Remember his meeting with India?

Yes. With Modi? Absolutely. Yeah. And that's just to underscore how important this infrastructure is, how significant it is to our country, to foreign policy. And the fact that one business with the wealthiest man on the planet has so much control over it, I think everyone should be really uncomfortable with that to start with. And when you layer on top of that, the level of power he has within the Trump administration without having been elected, just, you know, installed in there in this role has always been really, really deeply troubling to me and continues to be so. And this is, you know, case in point of why this is really problematic in terms of, you know, our country and representing the best interests of Americans versus the best

interests of Elon Musk. It just makes me so mad because Musk, you know, leads this argument against George Soros' influence over the American government. And Trump will talk about the same thing, too. And it's just frustrating because it exploits the genuine concerns of a lot of Americans who feel like they get the short shrift and they get left behind in this economy that's designed for political elites and a spoil system that's designed to benefit elites over them. And they're exploiting that in ways that's like, give me a break. Give me a break. And entirely predictable, not at all surprising. And Trump has always been much more open about it.

I think that's what's even more grating about Elon Musk is he still sort of claims the moral high ground in a way that Donald Trump knows that he can't. And he almost just doesn't care. He's like a Roy Cohn, right? Like he's a mob boss and he kind of revels in that. But Elon Musk really, like, has an air of sanctimony about him when he talks about these things. And,

I mean, he just isn't even trying to look like he's not part of it. George Soros could never dream of the level of power and influence that Elon Musk has in the government at this point. Yeah. All right, Emily, what are you taking a look at? Okay. Well, we have a little exclusive here at Breaking Points this morning. Punchbowl News, the media startup launched by three Politico veterans back in 2021. We have a new document that reveals new details of how that company is supporting its journalism by courting deep-pocketed corporations. Obtained by us at Breaking Points, the document, which is offering, quote, 2025 partnership opportunities is hardly an aberration here in D.C., where outlets from Axios to Politico take major cash from corporate

sponsors hoping to influence coverage and reach Beltway readers. The leaked Punchbowl deck, though, is rich with specific details about their business model, including a, quote, $210,000 going rate for sponsorship of Punchbowl's flagship daily newsletter, $210,000. Ahead of publication, a spokesperson at Punchbowl News told us at Breaking Points that a chart reflecting those numbers from the leaked document, quote, is an outdated price sheet that no longer reflects accurate data about Punchbowl News. They added, quote, we are proud to be a growing, profitable media startup that employs nearly 40 people. So the deck that we got our hands on touts a quote from House Speaker Mike Johnson on

March 11th, saying he reads all of Punchbowl's newsletters, indicating that the deck is recent to at least the spring. And actually, we verified that Punchbowl was passing the deck along just within the last week. So in its pitch to potential sponsors, Punchbowl claims that the newsletter reaches 210,000 inboxes every morning with a 40 to 50 percent open rate. The outlet says the midday and p.m. editions of that newsletter reached 6,600 inboxes with an open rate of 55 to 65 percent. Punchbowl also bragged about internal polling that found, quote, K Street leaders resoundingly pointed to us, invoking, of course, lobbyists. When asked about the newsletter, they would characterize as the

most important part of their media diet. What a pitch. To sponsor the site for a week, during which Punchbowl claims to get 65,000 impressions, the rate is $30,000. Custom content will run sponsors a cool $250,000. Summits and editorial events featuring two lawmakers go for $355,000, which then drops to $325,000 for editorial events that feature a single lawmaker. Great deal. Punchbowl describes its audience as being made up of, quote, elite influencers, including 100 percent of Senate and House offices and committees with a 50-50 split between Republicans and Democrats, 97 percent Fortune 100 saturation, 100 percent executive departments and 11 offices in the White House. Indeed, when Caroline Leavitt hosted Punchbowl in the White House's new media seat and in April 29th briefing, she said, quote, It is the first newsletter that Capitol Hill and the White House read every morning, in the middle of the day and throughout the evening.

Amusingly enough, as it seeks to appeal to corporate sponsors in the Trump 2.0 administration, Punchbowl claims that it's, quote, not a legacy media organization, which allows us to be more nimble, more authentic, and more trusted by our core readership. Similar Beltway outlets, you probably remember this, came under fire from the Trump administration earlier this year. In February, Team Trump ordered, quote, the General Services Administration to terminate every single media contract expensed by the agency. We knew that according to an email that was obtained by Axios, which directed the GSA to, quote, pull all contracts for Politico, BBC, E&E, which is a political newsletter, and Bloomberg. So at the time, Levitt said, quote, I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers' dime will no longer be happening. Now, just last week, if you read Politico playbook, you probably saw it was sponsored the entire week by Planned Parenthood, perhaps as a consequence of the

outlet's rocky relationship with the current government. Got to find more money somewhere. Asked by Breaking Points, though, whether any of the subscriptions Punchbowl may have from cabinet agencies and executive branch offices violate any instructions regarding media subscriptions, a White House official confirmed to us yesterday, quote, Three subscriptions terminated, two at SBA, small business, and one at RRB as part of a broader effort to eliminate unnecessary media subscriptions. Little news there. In the deck, Punchbowl touts past partnerships on custom content with Google, Amazon, Walmart, and defense conglomerate RTX. Quote, Google and Punchbowl News partnered together in 2021 through 2024 on a sustained messaging campaign

through newsletters, custom products, and events supporting its work focused on small businesses and local economies, the outlet boasts. Now, this reflection on the outlet's, quote, support for Google's work is, of course, not easily reconciled with Punchbowl's repeated claim in the deck and elsewhere to present, quote, unbiased coverage. While the company may believe its coverage is free from partisan bias, it can't seriously claim to be free from ideological biases, given that its corporate benefactors are deeply ideological entities buying influence to advance those causes. In the deck, Punchbowl sells its custom, quote, the future of collaborations as actually including, quote, editorial features exploring different areas of a mutually agreed upon topic and a podcast series. So in other words, it is selling influence over specific editorial decisions to major corporations. And this is exactly what corporate funded news outlets deny doing, often arguing they do not allow advertisers or sponsors to influence coverage. We'll take your money, but we're going to do what we want. That's the line

you hear. The deck actually includes a Venn diagram illustrating the, quote, custom product as the overlap between the interests of your brand, described as a, quote, true partner, and the publication. I mean, it's amazing. Punchbowl also uses the document to pitch social events, which range in price from $100,000 to $175,000. Quote, a social gathering with Punchbowl News community members exposes sponsor brands to Washington's elite insiders. The deck says, adding, quote, Punchbowl News will work to bring together a high-level audience of D.C. insiders from across industries and the public and private sectors. Throughout the deck, Punchbowl highlights its previous partnerships with McKinsey, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs. One slide, this is amazing,

practically resembles like a NASCAR vehicle. It has the logos of 37 major corporate, quote, partners from massive pharmaceutical companies to defense contractors to oil and gas heavyweights. If you're listening to this and not watching it, go to YouTube and look at the video because just seeing those logos all in one place on a news outlet's pitch deck is incredible. It's again worth emphasizing, though, that Punchbowl is not alone in brokering these financial relationships or using them to get more business from the Fortune 500 world. The leaked deck is just a glimpse into the ordinary Beltway corruption of these outlets where they peddle access to corporations and lobbyists, and they deserve very little credibility when repeatedly insisting that those critical sources of cash do not at all influence editorial decisions. It was plain of day, actually, plain as day in this deck that they do. As both the journalists and their corporate sponsors know, that's kind of

the whole point. Crystal, when we were flipping through this deck we were having a good time yeah i mean i said to you i was like here we are appealing to the unwatched masses like suckers when all we need is to be like mike johnson watches breaking point sponsored by walmart yeah i mean it's but yeah this this is not a unique model to punchbowl whatsoever polit Politico Pro operates in these other, there's other like trade pubs where basically, you know, they gather information that is very valuable to one specific industry and then expect those, you know, members of that industry to pony up very significant sums for those types of subscriptions. But the, the DC newsletter tip sheet business is so incredibly lucrative. And then you expect- So lucrative, $210,000 a week.

And they say like almost, they have almost 40 staff members and their overhead is very low. Yeah. And then to be raking in these kinds of, you know, oh, you're going to pay $350,000 to have some one day event with two lawmakers or whatever. Google and Goldman have done it. It exposes the very corrupt dealings between corporate America, the media, and these members of Congress who are also, you know, showing up at these events and participating in them. Every consumer of the news knows that corporations and any person with common sense knows that corporations

want good press and they want good access in Washington. Journalists have absolutely no right to give it to them. I mean, it's insane. They have no reason to just give it to them. Unless, of course, it's genuine and vetted and reported out. They have no reason to give corporations this access and good press, which they do. You see it again. This has been going on for years. They will always embed a nice little ad when you're scrolling. It's not just the bar at the top that says Punchbowl AM brought to you by Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or whatever. It has that, but then it usually has a little blurb that's disguised to look like news in the middle of it, and most people

just scroll past. But at the same time, it's like, give me a break. They say in it, because usually they'll say that's not editorial content, that's an ad. But they say in this deck, the Punchbowl deck, this was one of my big takeaways from it. They say we will do events on a mutually agreed upon topic or we'll do custom content on a mutually agreed upon topic and we will give you podcasts for it. Those are editorial decisions that you're farming out. That's right. You're selling them. Yeah. I mean, you can't look, even if you are the most, you know, the most honest human being trying to maintain your integrity, when you structure a system where you are financially rewarded for towing a certain ideological line or reporting something and not reporting something else, human beings are subject to those incentives.

They can talk themselves into it and why it's the right choice and why it's noble and why actually they really do believe in going in that direction. So that's why it's so important to understand the incentives of your business and the way that you're structuring, which is, of course, something that we thought about very intentionally here. But, you know, one of the things that's ironic to me is in Trump 2.0, they're trying to brand themselves as like, we're new media. We're not like that. Like the media that's like biased against you in Trump 2.0, they're trying to brand themselves as like, we're new media. We're not like that legacy media that's like biased against you. We're totally different.

And, you know, in a sense, this is the danger of the new media era because those old boundaries that are in place. Look, I worked at a cable news network. The advertising department is kept totally separate. When I was on, you know, hosting a show, I had no idea what commercials were going on in the break. I wasn't involved in that. I didn't talk to corporate sponsors. I wasn't hosting events for a pharma or whatever or getting along. You know, there was none of that. traditional norms and boundaries that have existed, one of the things you open the door to is just more brazen, outright corruption because it is lucrative and it does allow them to be

quote unquote more nimble in servicing Google or, you know, whoever is willing to pay the $250,000 price tag. So that's been one of the things that has been troubling to me, frankly, about the new media era is that oftentimes it doesn't actually lead to more honesty and more independence. It leads to more brazen, more direct ties to whatever interest it may be. And, you know, that's certainly the case here with what we can see in this pitch deck. You know, it's also like not the same as, for example, Rogan selling ExpressVPN, right? Like these are massive corporations with significant public interest. I mean, it's like been political interest. And I always love when the, whether it's Politico or Axios, their line is, we are not, this does not, this is a firewall. It doesn't

influence our editorial decisions whatsoever. But of course, this is a firewall, it doesn't influence our editorial decisions whatsoever. But of course, if that was true, these companies would not pay them. They would absolutely not pay them if that were true. And it's also always on the front of your mind. If Meta is giving you money for your newsletter, you're very conscious of that. And as a writer, you know, because it's filed, like it's when you file, you then see it in your publication or you see it in the commercial break, whatever. They know they get special access. They know that they get warmer sentiments from you. The other point I want to make, Crystal, is that it's so funny to say they're unbiased,

right? Because they genuinely believe that. They really, truly think that they don't have a bias, R or D. and that means that they're quote-unquote unbiased. But what they are is biased towards the ideology of corporate influence. That's right. That's ideological. That is a bias in and of itself. We're biased against that, and we're open about that. We don't just pretend to be neutral. We are very against corporate influence. Yes. And so you have to recognize it's just like brain dead not to understand that that's a bias. That's such a great point because to them it's just like, it's just the air that they breathe. It's just, this is the default. And so

they don't recognize. You're supposed to be adversaries. What an extraordinary bias it is. And one that exists, yes, in both parties. So you can be very bipartisan, but also very biased in the direction of corporations should get whatever they want. Two final things. White House confirmation that Punchbowl subscriptions were canceled. Quite interesting because that was, you may remember, when the USAID money was being tracked by all of the right-wing sleuths on X? Yeah. Politico got hit pretty hard. A lot of unsubscribes from government offices where you get premium subscriptions to Punchbowl

that gives information that you pay a ton of money for the access to. So it looks like the White House, I don't know when that happened. I can follow up with them on that. But it looks like they had a few offices unsubscribe to Punchbowl. Not sure if that was a result of our reporting or if it happened before. But either way, that's also happened. And then secondly, Punchbowl giving us a comment that this is out of date. You know, at best, it would be out of date, you know, within a week or so.

That's technically out of date. Sure. I guess the other thing that I noticed is, like, their numbers are pretty small. I thought that was funny. You know, but they don't need them to be big. As long as the power players are reading their publication. Small group of people.

That's all it takes. Small group of people with a lot of money. Yeah, that's it. That's it exactly. And I think Ryan made this point when we were talking about like the USAID Politico Pro subscriptions. I think he was the one that made the point of like those publications, like the trade pubs in particular that go deep in different industries where there's not a widespread news interest. But, you know, if you're in this industry, like you need to know, like, let's say you're in the trucking industry or logistics industry, you need to know like what's going on and what's going on in Capitol Hill, et cetera. And so it does create a genuine need for that information that's important for lawmakers and important for those industries to understand

what is going on. So the, probably the only answer to that really is like public funding of those type, that type of information being created. Otherwise it is going to be just like the politicos or the punchbowls or whatever the world that, you know, capitalize on the need for that and the extraordinary benefit to a small handful of people that, you know, justifies huge sums of money being spent. Fun little document. Yeah, nice work on that one.

A lot of fun. Lots of fun, too. I mean, I did almost the whole week. I think maybe I did do. Yeah, you were a rock star this week. Thank you.

Well, thank you for having me. All of us have lots of things going on in our lives. It's crazy. Like, across the board. Appreciate you being able to jump in. And I heard you

and Ryan unilaterally decide that we're ditching the counterpoints. This is actually something we've been talking about. Because it is like, you know, the original idea is you and Ryan show, like, it would be different and be

your own brand and whatever. But increasingly, like, we're all just, we're doing a thing here, you know? And it's, everybody's, you know, it's very egalitarian. We're all on an even footing here. There's no counterpoints and breaking points separation. So I think we are very much in agreement that we should move beyond these artificial borders. Artificial borders.

Arbitrary lines. Arbitrarily drawn on the show schedule. More to come in that space. I think, yeah, people will be around. We will be around. Finally, Crystal, I did just want to make this point. We were talking about Libya earlier, and I mentioned I was looking up at Farah.gov if there are any registered lobbyists. Indeed, there are registered lobbyists. And Africa Confidential

actually noticed one of these filings back in November 2023. And this is still in active registration if you go to Farah.gov. Eyebrows have been raised in Washington, D.C. by the lobbying contract filed in October between the Libyan House of Representatives, now based in Benghazi, and K Street Outfit Vogel Group. It's a Republican, led by a Republican, which could benefit the political allies of Libyan National Army Leader General Khalifa Haftar. The contract is curious in that it is signed between CEO Alex Vogel, a former Republican staffer, and Joseph E. Schmitz on behalf of the Libyan Parliament. Fawzi al-Nuari, the ambitious deputy speaker of the assembly, is named as the principal. So to the point, that fair filing, actually, if you read it, you have to say what your

work is going to look like. You have to say roughly what it's going to look like. And of course, it's enumerated here. Government affairs and media consulting, including but not limited to providing introductions and to engaging with federal government bodies and entities, think tanks, trade associations and other public policy groups, blah, blah, blah, goes on to say that. So we'll look into it and try to get answers to see if that had anything to do with the attempted flight. Yeah. But we were talking in the segment about how those introductions between lobbyists are often how that happens. And come to find out, we see there is a lobbying contract that is specifically saying they're

getting paid for introductions. So we will try to put those dots together. The sun was here last week. Yeah. And then a flight was put on the schedule to ship migrants to Libya. It could be nothing. I mean, it genuinely could be nothing. We're just, you know, noting this, but we will look for answers. A lot of journalism-ing this morning, Emily. A lot of Googling. Nice work. All right. Last thing, last thing, last thing. We'll be here for the Friday show. Ryan and me, definitely. You, I think, have some other things going on, so we'll see if you're able to drop in or not. In any case, thank you guys, breakingpoints.com. For those of you who are premium subscribers, we super appreciate it. You have enabled the

expansion. And it's been, I think, really important in Trump 2.0 to be able to have that extra day and give you coverage Monday to Friday. So thank you for that. If you're not a member yet, if you're able to sign up as a premium member, we're going to have more news to come with regard to the premium subscription and membership. But just want to say thank you to all of you guys. And if you are not a premium subscriber, like, share, subscribe, share the videos, give us the good rating on the podcast, all that good stuff. It really does help a lot.

Thank you guys. Love you. See you back here tomorrow. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father.

Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars?

Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community.

I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there.