Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/4/25: Elon Rages On Trump Budget, Piers Grills Israel Rep, Schumer Demands Iran War & MORE!

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Elon rages over Trump budget bill, Piers Morgan grills Israel rep on Gaza children, Schumer badgers Trump on Iran war, Ukraine bombs Crimea bridge, Joy Reid reveals MSNBC firing, Laura Loomer war on neocons over Venezuela.   Juan Rojas: https://x.com/rojasrjuand    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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Urging an attack on Iran, basically. About Taco Trump. Taco Trump. So stick around for that. We have a little exclusive from the State Department this morning pertaining to a controversy over one of their employees. So we're going to do that and talk about updates from Ukraine. Joy Reid is weighing in more on why she left MSNBC, so we have some video of her. And WandaVid Rojas from Compact joins us to talk about Trump's conflicting, what do we say, the conflicting factions? Contradictions inherent, yeah. The factions in Trump world that some people seem to want a new policy in Latin America.

Other people seem to be clinging to the Cold War mentality. No surprise there. But Juan David has been covering all of it, and he's going to join us to talk about that. Yes, indeed. All right, let's dive in, Ryan, with Elon Musk. Playbook actually counted that Elon Musk posted 13 times over the course of six hours yesterday rampaging against Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill, which we can now abbreviate, hopefully, as BBB, which is why BBB is on the screen if you're watching this. So let's put—

Are they mimicking Build Back Better? Is that what they were trying to do there? Or the Better Business Bureau. There's too many triple Bs. This is— That's where our bond rating is going if you pass this bill. If we're lucky. So we can put this up on the screen. Elon's tweet here. I guess we have to call it a post on X. No, we don't. No,

we don't. He goes, I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it. He adds it will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to two and a half trillion dollars and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt. Ryan, there is a lot to talk about here. I just want to start by saying the central premise of Republicans pushing the big, beautiful bill is that that two and a half trillion number is wrong, that the Congressional Budget Office

is underestimating the growth that'll come as part of this bill. So Elon Musk is not just pushing back on the bill. He is now adopting the counter-narrative. And he's not the only one. People like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul are as well. But this is a man who is like a week out of his special government employee status at the White House. And he sounds a whole lot like Rand Paul. And again, Elon Musk was not going anywhere near significant criticisms just a week ago. I'm on the Musk side here because there's two types of quote unquote growth that people might be referring to. One is asset inflation, which is basically the stock market goes up and we get a housing bubble. And certainly the more debt we circulate and the more, let's say you start having Bitcoin

backup treasuries, yes, you can get a run-up then in asset prices. That's not economic growth, though. Because the way to get economic growth is either expand productivity or invest in things that yield back actual returns for people in the real economy. And cutting taxes for the rich doesn't do that. Because unlike, Elon Musk might be the exception among billionaires because apparently he doesn't spend a whole lot of money. He doesn't have like 15 different houses. He has 15 different children probably.

Well, that's true. He probably spends on all of his different children the amount that a normal billionaire spends on their houses. He also flies everywhere. It's not like he's living a cheap life. Yeah, he's not a monk. The point is, he's so rich, and these other rich people are so rich, that giving them more money doesn't mean they spend more. Mm-hmm. If you give a normal person a little extra money— If you give a mouse a cookie. ...they're going to spend it, yes. Yeah, I mean, actually, if you give a mouse a cookie

is sort of the explanation for how this works. But if you give a regular person money, they're going to spend it because there's things that they want that they can't have because they don't have enough money. If you give a billionaire another $50,000, they don't even notice for the most part. Might see this uptick in the stock market. So that's why I think the higher estimate is probably more accurate. Now, I want to nitpick him. Is there pork in this bill? Pork is where you're like, hey, we're this community center or this bridge

in this district in Kentucky is going to get $75 million. Is there some of that in there? So that is definitely a nitpick because no. What they're going to do is the Trump administration will then do it for them rather than put it in the bill. Yeah. And that's sort of similar to the Biden infrastructure bill, but that's actually part of the problem that some people like Elon Musk and Rand Paul have with it is that it hasn't fully dismantled. So Republicans are chalking this up to Elon Musk being mad that it gets rid of some of the EV, like Biden's EV support package. It's crazy. Like who spends hundreds of millions of dollars

and gets, well, I mean, he got all his investigations knocked away. But yeah, he's getting absolutely routed when it comes to the government benefits that he was getting. I just don't know how important that is to him. I mean, it's important to Tesla, but how important is Tesla in his portfolio? His leverage, he is highly leveraged. His collateral is Tesla stock. Yeah, yeah. So if that collapses, then the bankers start calling. And the bankers, he does not have the kind of bankers that you want calling.

These are people who are like, hey, why don't we meet in the consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, to talk about, you're a little bit overdue on your latest payment, and then you leave in a bucket. So he's actually, by complaining about pork, asking for pork for Elon, if that's his definition of pork, which is something that's inserted into the bill to please the very particular or niche interest of the donor class. It's not really the technical definition of pork, but there is, some people are upset that there haven't been, this was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, there haven't been, there isn't enough dismantling

of the Biden agenda in this bill. But that's, of course, what's upsetting to Elon. And this is where Trump right now is between a rock and a hard place because moderates say the bill is already cutting too much. And then people like Rand Paul and Ron Johnson say the bill is not cutting enough. And that includes now, I suppose, Elon Musk. So let's go ahead and roll A3. This is Rand Paul on Fox yesterday, Fox Business yesterday. In a separate post, Trump said there's a false narrative about spending in this bill. He said it is, quote, single biggest spending cut in history by far.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul joins me now. Mr. Senator, I know you want more spending cuts included in the bill. Can you tell us what specifically you'd want to cut? Yeah, it's even more than that. The biggest objection I have to the bill is adding $5 trillion to the debt ceiling. I'm actually very supportive of the tax cuts. I don't accept the CBO notion that the tax cuts will lead to deficits. The reason I believe there'll be more deficits is they're raising the debt ceiling $5 trillion. We know that this year,

most of the Republicans, not me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels in March. So we're going to go through September of this year, and the deficit for this year is going to be over $2 trillion. If you're borrowing $5 trillion, that makes me think you're going to add over $2 trillion, maybe $2.8 trillion next year. So it doesn't show me that you've turned around. If you look at the spending cuts, it's complicated because it's at $1.5 trillion. It sounds like this enormous number, but it's over 10 years. It's $150 billion a year. They're also increasing spending for the military and for the border, $300 billion.

That's actually more than all the doge cuts that we've found so far. So something doesn't really add up here. And I can't be on record as being one who supports increasing the debt by $5 trillion. I think that's irresponsible. The bond markets are already starting to show that they're skittish over this. We've got interest rates of over 5% on the 10-year bond. There are real problems we face as a country, and we can't just blithely go on the way we have in the past.

So Ron Johnson also specifically said that he's very concerned about how the bill will affect the bond markets, which is a completely reasonable concern. Would he be a no? Yeah, right now he's a no. And they say they only need four of them. That's the line that you keep hearing from Rand Paul and others in the Senate. They only need to band together four people. And that could mean an unusual marriage between Susan Collins. And is Utah liberals going to? We'll see. But there, I mean, you might not even need that because if you combine the fiscal hawks with the moderates, you're already easily at four. Well, Collins, you'd need Collins to get the four, right? Collins will be wobbly on, because of Medicaid. Oh my God. She's already indicated. It cuts LIHEAP, too. There's a lot. So you're asking Maine's senator to cut energy assistance, oil assistance for working people in winter in Maine.

Then also, this is where it gets even worse for Republicans. They have to kick— Also Alaska. It gets cold there, too. Yeah, also Alaska. They then have to kick this back over to the House to approve the changes. And everybody remembers that this only went over to the Senate because Mike Johnson cut a deal with some of the fiscal hawks in the House to basically rubber stamp it and say, we trust the president to work

with the Senate to get a better deal, but we don't like this bill. We're not voting for this bill. We're voting basically to send it over to the Senate and to get the ball rolling. They want to have this bill done. Donald Trump continues to push to have this bill done by a month from today, July 4th. They want the bill to be signed and enacted by the 4th of July. Try to get it done fast. Right. Otherwise, you start losing to the recess and you're into the fall and then you're into midterms. So it sounds ridiculous because we're only a few months into the presidency, but midterms come up really fast,

especially because Congress gets so much time off. And so the House hawks, they want the bill to get, to add spending cuts in the Senate. Right. Whereas in order to get the senators that are wobbly, to get Rand Paul, you'd have to do more cuts like the hawks in the House want. But to get Murkowski and Collins, you'd have to do fewer cuts. Right. And is the Pentagon just, like, we're doing a trillion dollars for the Pentagon and that's all there is. Like, there's no, nobody can come in and be like, hey, guys, what if we didn't, like, massively increase the Pentagon budget?

So this is where Elon Musk, while he's siding with Rand Paul here, you also heard Rand Paul throw a little bit, very subtle dig at Doge, saying that the spending is higher than the Doge cuts. And that's because a lot of Republicans, in order to get this bill passed, which, by the way, is, as we've talked about, a really critical element of the tariff agenda. So they believe that the tariff agenda, this is the sort of necessary supplement to it that creates an industrial policy for onshoring. We could debate whether or not that's the case, but it has things like 100% write-offs retroactive to January 20th for factory building, manufacturing building, all that kind of stuff. I think the

corporate tax rate going from 21 to 15 is industrial policy. So they feel like this is an absolutely essential part of the tariff agenda. All of that was predicated on the idea that Doge was going to find so many cuts in the government that they could basically do whatever they wanted to with this bill. This is where I start to worry about your people. My people. Yeah. That anybody took seriously the claim from Elon Musk that he was going to cut a trillion dollars. And at one point he said it was going to be $2 trillion. Makes me worry about them. Makes me, for viewers and for regular people whose media diet has been telling them that there's waste, fraud, and abuse shot through the federal government their entire lives,

I don't blame those people who believed that this was going to be possible. I don't even blame Elon Musk. He's just a drug-addled tech guy who, just like most tech people, doesn't know anything outside of this very narrow area, but thinks there are experts everywhere. That's just his personality type. So I don't even blame him. But the people who've spent decades in Washington

thinking that Elon Musk was going to come in and identify trillions of dollars in painless waste, fraud, and abuse, that makes me worry about them if they were not just cynically using him. Steve Bannon, friend of the show, was saying from the very beginning, this is a fraud. Because they wouldn't go to the Pentagon. Right. And now he's been saying, look, all of these people in Washington, these Republicans in Washington, didn't want to make the painful cuts. And so they just put their faith in Elon Musk that he was going to find this trillion dollars. He didn't find it. He was never going to

find it. And so he marched them into this place where now they've got all the tax cuts ready to go and the Pentagon spending, but they don't have the cuts. The cuts were never there because they weren't willing to go after power centers. Medicaid and Medicare fraud is on the provider side. It's the private equity-owned doctors. It's the straight-up fraudulent. just put bars around Miami. Don't let anybody leave until you find every Medicare fraudster. Generally a good idea. Yes. I mean, ask Rick Scott, Medicare fraudster, who's a senator from Florida. Like, ask him, like, hey, how'd you do that? And he could tell you in like two minutes, oh, it's really easy. You just claim that you did services that you didn't do and you send that to the federal government. The federal government with no questions asked sends you money.

And we're like, oh, well, we have AI now that could maybe detect that stuff. Like maybe you have to send an actual photo of, oh, you say you sell wheelchairs. You say you sell scooters. Send us a picture of the scooter. And we're going to reverse Google search image of that thing. Make sure you didn't just pull it off the web. Yeah. You can stop this stuff. It's not that difficult. But what's difficult is doing it politically.

Because these are white-collar criminals who have bought off the system and have gotten themselves elected into the system. So that's why you weren't going to find the trillion dollars. It's partially a matter of semantics too, because when they say things like widespread fraud and abuse, I actually agree with that. But so what are they looking at right now? Like 160, what is it, 160 billion in cuts from Doge? That's the top line nonsense. The way to actually calculate what they really saved would be how much is Congress quote unquote rescinding. That's money that was spent, but then because you found the fraud and abuse, Congress can just take it back. And that's $9 billion. That's insane. Two of that is NPR and

PBS, which you don't need Doge to defund NPR and PBS. That's an ideological thing that they can just do. So that's seven. And a bunch of that is like leases and let's just stuff that and God help us if any of that actually saves us money. Like this is probably stuff that you cut that seven billion dollars. It's going to end up costing the federal government more money down the road. But OK, fine. Seven billion. He found seven billion. How do we know that none of it was fraud? Because have you seen a single headline about Doge referring a fraudster to the Department of Justice? It's a lot of what's called—

Would that not be just leading everywhere? Well, on there— We got them! Ladies and gentlemen, we got them. Definitely. Okay. So this is what I mean. Semantics, the waste question. Yeah. I mean, but if you're saying widespread to the tune of $2 trillion, which is what he projected, what you end up finding, and let me say plenty of waste at the Pentagon that they could have gone after. So no, I do think there's widespread. He could have been like, hey, guys, why are we building another nuclear triad?

Like, we don't need it. Like, they're talking about spending a trillion dollars on a new batch of nuclear weapons. Yep. You could be like, hey, number one on the agenda, let's just not do this. Yeah. And make people argue why you should do it. Like, actually, all right, we heard the arguments. We have enough nuclear weapons that we can kill everyone on the planet 175 times over. We're good. It's a trillion dollars saved. That would actually, but guess

what? That would mean special interests who are involved in that nuclear program would have to take a haircut and they don't want to do that. So that is to say, the question of how widespread it is versus the just amount of money that we spend on Medicaid, for example, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, it just pales in the Pentagon budget too, although you could actually just delete the Pentagon. You could get rid of the entire defense budget, and it would not make a dent in the deficit, which sounds crazy, or in the debt, I should say, which sounds crazy, but it's true. At the Manhattan Institute, they've run the numbers on that. So

it's just like the fiscal hawks there have run the numbers on that. It's really, really- It would get your lines closer, which is what the market really cares about. Yeah, it would be helpful for that type of thing. It doesn't close everything because you've got a $30 trillion debt right now, roughly. I mean, it's still – actually, defense spending pales in comparison to how much money – the expenditures, annual expenditures on Medicaid, Medicare, and those things. I mean, if you took a trillion out, then that $30 trillion debt starts to shrink. However, actually, it doesn't. The debt is what it does.

Because then it is the American military that makes the dollar the reserve currency. Right. So the whole thing collapses without the military. This is so much fun. But maybe you don't need a trillion dollar one. But that's what gives people like Ron Johnson pause. And this is Ron Johnson from the Tea Party wave, by the way, who is talking about how now is not the time to be cutting taxes. And he specifically has looked at the said said to look at the bond markets. He was just on Tucker Carlson's show actually

making this case, making basically an extended case against the BBB. So the Trump administration has a month to somehow get these dug-in factions to the same place. And I mean, Rand Paul has said that he is ready to compromise, that he is, he understands he's going to have to compromise. If you are Mike Johnson and you have been giving Elon Musk cover for months, you are just beside yourself and furious about this right now because he didn't find the cuts that he was supposed to find. And now he has the audacity to criticize your bill. It's rich. It is. It is. At the same time, you also look at someone like Mike Johnson, you say you have the audacity to talk about government spending and then put a bill like this on the table. So just I don't honestly, I don't know where they go. I mean, they're they're desperate, which means that they'll be willing to make significant compromises. I don't know that they even have a good idea of what some of those compromises might look like going forward. And that's pretty important for the way that they see the entire economy, the American economy is sort of hanging on whether or not they're able to

get some version of this past. We will see, Ryan, how that ends up. We will continue to follow the story. Ryan, let's move on to Gaza. What's the next thing to watch on that? And then we'll go to... So John Thune is meeting with Donald Trump at the White House today, and they're huddling on policy, particularly on tax policy. So we'll see what comes out of that. It's going to be daily negotiations. I mean, I actually think Trump has had sort of a lighter schedule the last couple of days because he's working the phones and taking meetings to try to get people onto the same page on this, which it's just sort of, at this point, unfathomable what you can do to build that bridge. But they have a month to try. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.

She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Pierce Morgan has gotten increasingly fed up with the arguments that he's been hearing from defenders of Israel on his program in a way that I think is symbolic of the broader shift in Western media and politics going on at the moment. There have been a couple of viral moments just from the last 24 hours. One of those we wanted to play here, this is Natasha Hasdorf, who is a UK lawyer who represents Israel, and went on with both comic Dave Smith and Piers Morgan, though you'll see that Dave Smith plays the same role that you're going to play in this, which is just watching. So let's do that. I was told by the ambassador to UK it was a blood libel for me to

suggest that Israel had killed children. No, I don't believe that was the ambassador to UK. It was a blood libel for me to suggest that Israel had killed children in this war. No, I don't believe that was the case. I think it was to do with targeting children. There is a difference. Right. Because we are hearing that Israel is targeting children, and that couldn't be further from the fact. Well, last week, nine out of ten children in one home where two doctors reside

were killed in an airstrike. What was that? It's just remarkable. What was that? That has been based only on the basis of hearsay. You don't believe that story? I want these stories. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.

You don't believe that those children were killed? I have seen conflicting accounts, and I want that story to be properly investigated before the international media runs with it. I have a question. You think those two parents, one of whom I think operated on one of the children. I have a question.

You think that those two doctors, the parents, they just made it up? Why are those children there? That nine of their ten children had been blown to pieces by an Israeli airstrike? If this is true... You don't believe it? Well, why on earth was artificially generated imagery used

to promote this story when it first happened? I've got to say, Natasha, I think what you've just said about that family is despicable. We've seen time and time again. I'm sorry, it's despicable. What is truly despicable? You talk about blood libel, like Dave said. You talk about blood libel.

You talk about lies. All I said, James, was that there were conflicting accounts. And here you sit here as a lawyer and you say that you do not believe those nine children were killed. I didn't say that. You're putting words in my mouth. Do you believe it or not? I said that there were conflicting accounts. Do you believe it?'re putting words in my mouth. Do you believe it or not? I said that there were conflicting accounts and it needs to be investigated.

Do you believe it? I thought you would be the first person... The parents said nine of their ten children were killed. Do you believe them or not? Or did those two doctors make it up? They haven't said that directly as far as I have seen. I have seen second-hand accounts and hearsay. But it's important to ask,

why are these civilians still there? Why is it that uniquely... It's important to ask whether why are these civilians still there? Why is it that uniquely... Actually, no, it's important to ask whether you believe that family have lost nine of their ten children. I want to know why the international community... You don't, do you? You don't. And this goes to the point that I would say about Israel generally now in this war now.

Why are these Palestinian civilians? Israel says they don't believe anything. Coming out of Hamas, indeed. Every story that comes out about the deaths of civilians in Gaza... Because there pop up representing the Israeli government saying, ah, it's propaganda. It's not, and I think what she's referring to is that like six months before these nine children were killed, there was an evacuation order given for that area where they live. The problem with these evacuation orders is that Israel does not, they don't expire. They'll say, okay, we're going to be, the IDF is going to be operating in this area. Everyone from this neighborhood leave. People leave, IDF comes in, and then the IDF leaves, and then everyone from the neighborhood comes back. And then six months later, they bomb it and say, well, we told you to

leave. But the underlying quote there, what are these civilians still doing there, I think represents this like deep, something deeper. Like they are very frustrated that there are still civilians in Gaza. Like 20 months later, I thought, why haven't we not fully expelled everybody yet? Like what is going on here? Why are you even still there? And that brings us to this absolute calamity of an effort at aid distribution over this week. It's been a wild week because over the weekend, remember, there was this massacre at about a kilometer from an aid distribution center. The IDF initially claimed that it had not fired any shots whatsoever. They sent an email out to some reporters that said off the record, we did fire shots at the direction of suspects because we told them to

stop coming at us and they kept coming. So we did shoot, but we don't believe that we shot any. Right. They said that off the record in an email that also included the denial, right? That also included the denial. And so a reporter sent me this. I'm like, hey, I can't use this because I've agreed to receive these emails that are off the record. You haven't agreed to this. So I published that. So like, okay, yes, we did shoot, but we don't know who was hit. And like, maybe there was Hamas. And then they released this video that they said was Hamas gunmen doing the shooting. Turned out that was at a different day at a different location and were, it was in Khan Yunis and it was gangs that are backed by Israel who had stolen aid and were selling it. And people who wouldn't pay them for it,

they were shooting them. So that fell apart. The Washington Post yesterday issued this like incredible like correction that said, while three eyewitnesses talk, let's talk about the weekend massacre. While three eyewitnesses told the Washington Post that the gunfire came from the Israelis, Israel denied it. And we did not give proper weight to the Israeli denial in our original article. I can't imagine any other shooter who would get that kind of grace, even though three people said they saw you do it. You said you didn't, and we should have put it that you said you didn't right in the headline. While this debate over the level of Israel's culpability of the weekend massacre was ongoing. I was going to say, by the way, I don been a massacre every single day at a Gaza

humanitarian foundation aid distribution site, including just recently, including again last night. We can roll B1. This is imagery from yesterday evening, Gaza time, where the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation announced that it was going to be pausing distribution because the Boston Consulting Group, which was the American consulting firm that basically did all the work to set up GHF, announced that it was leaving. They said this was pro bono work and we're putting on leave the partner who brought us into this debacle and we're not helping them anymore. Conflicting reports came out that they were sending million dollar invoices for the work that they had done here. I'm sure we'll see that sorted out in court. Either way, the word goes out, okay, we lost our consultant. We're not going to do distribution. Truck drivers leak to their friends and family in Gaza, hey, there's going to be a conv, like a truck will stop. And then what happens is when the truck stops, they just unload everything right there.

And whoever is close enough to the truck and strong enough to like hold on to the bag of flour gets to like leave with the bag of flour in this Hunger Games style situation. And so while this chaos is unfolding, and what you see in the video there is people running from gunfire, different reports of where it was coming from, helicopters, quadcopters. Again, you get denials. We can put up this next element, which I think is B6. As we're going back and forth over what happened, who did the shooting, Moshe Babu Toha, who you guys may remember, he's the Gaza poet who won a Pulitzer Prize this year. He got this video where he says, I've just found this video posted by Amin's friend, the man's name, the man's named Amin Samir Khalifa. He documented the moment when Israeli soldiers opened fire at them yesterday morning. Amin was killed along with over 30 people.

The Israeli forces denied their responsibility for the killing and the media changed their headlines. Can you tell us who killed Amin and the other starved people? And if you go find this on his feed, it's just an absolutely horrifying scene of explosions and gunfire. And then tell yourself this this is built as an aid distribution site. This is why you don't militarize aid distribution sites. Like they turn an aid site into a war zone. For the first 16, 17 months of the war, the UN, World Food Program, World Central Kitchen, and others, you didn't see images like this. Occasionally, you would see the flour massacre, which involved the IDF. You saw World Central Kitchen trucks getting hit by the IDF. But you never saw the World Food Program shooting at

hungry people. And you never saw scenes of warehouses getting mobbed or trucks getting mobbed. It's only when this program has taken over that you start to see this. And I think because Piers Morgan is covering this stuff every day, that's what accounts for his turn. What do you think? I think Piers Morgan, as such a, you just said turn, as such a staunch defender of the Israeli government and the Israeli side of the conflict, is representative of something that we've covered in general, which is the public sentiment in places like the UK and the US just shifting over the course of the post-October 7th war in ways that just people like the barrister he was interviewing are not at all prepared for. I think it's catching them off guard to some extent. It was a really dark exchange, a really dark exchange in that video. And just watching the last video we watched and hearing, thinking back to her point about why artificially intelligent videos, AI-generated videos, had initially come out. That is so, so dark when you think about it. We're going to see that now. Exactly. Anytime there'll be a massacre going forward, there will also be some AI-related content that

comes out as well. And the people who carried out the massacre will say, well, look, this part's fake, so maybe all of it's fake. And they may generate it. They might generate it. Right. And that's really, really – you may generate it as a shield. So it's just quite frightening to hear that line. It does, I think, grind smack of desperation.

And the only other point I wanted to make is I think Piers Morgan is wrong. I think she actually does believe that the family was killed. I think that's probably why she didn't want to really answer the question. And that's to your point about the more interesting or the most interesting line being that why were they still there? Why were they still in Gaza? I think she probably does believe that they were killed and just doesn't feel the need to or doesn't feel like it would be advantageous for her to defend it. And so it's easier to say from the sort of public relations cynical perspective, well, we don't really know what happened. I think the answer is that they believe, the government believes, that's the collateral damage. Yeah, here's the exact line from the Washington Post. The Post didn't give proper

weight to Israel's denial and gave improper certitude about what was known about any Israeli role in the shootings. The early versions fell short of post standards of fairness and should not have been published in that form. This is after Bill Ackman like snitch tagged Jeff Bezos on Twitter. I was like, and saying that like this is the kind of thing that is producing anti-Semitism around the country. It's like, no, the Washington Post reporting on these massacres is not what is driving anti-Semitism. And to me, none of it should be driving anti-Semitism either way because Israel is a state. And I refuse to allow Israel to claim that it represents an entire religion that is thousands of years old. That to me is what everyone should be drawing a line at. That these actions do not represent Judaism. Like how anti-Semitic would it be to say that they do?

The Bill Ackman snitch tweet is a way to use that, expand the definition of anti-Semitism to use as a shield that protects a political actor, a state actor, from scrutiny, due scrutiny, that would apply to any political or state actor in a conflict. And so their new version, written to satisfy Bill Ackman, says, while three witnesses said the gunfire came from Israeli military positions, the Israel Defense Forces denied the allegations, saying in a statement that an initial inquiry indicated that its soldiers did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the distribution site. Then they add, an Israeli military official later said

that troops had, quote, acted to prevent several suspects from approaching, unquote, them overnight and fired warning shots at the group. Well, wait a minute, which is it? But that there approaching, unquote, them overnight and fired warning shots at the group. Well, wait a minute, which is it? But that there was, quote, no connection between this incident and the false claims made against the IDF. Okay, yes, so we did shoot at those people at the time that this is said to have happened, but there's no connection between that. I have never seen a line that is closer to these are not the droids you're looking for than that one. Okay, yes, we did it, but there's no connection between this incident and the false claims made against the IDF. Oh, these are not the droids we're looking for. It's dark, really, really dark stuff.

Meanwhile, the Gaza flotilla, I believe it's called the Maldin, is getting closer. We can put up this next element, getting closer to Gaza. This borderline suicidal mission, which includes Greta Thunberg and roughly what, a dozen or so international activists. I'm trying to think if I see any Americans on here. I do not see any Americans on board this ship. We can put up B4. They posted this image or this audio of a drone flying over top of them. Let's roll B4. Hey, everyone. This is Tiago Avila. I'm here on board the Madeleine. We are on our mission to break the siege of Gaza. This is the 39th, and there's a drone on top of our ship. We need your support right now, right now. Please tell everyone, demand a safe passage. If this he say? I hope that Greta can swim. And a bunch of other kind of pro-Israel influencers were making the same remarks, that wouldn't

it be great if Israel would just solve our Greta problem here and just sink the ship. After the 2011 flotilla was raided by Israeli troops, and I think 11 were killed. So they're trying to distribute aid, is my understanding. So what do you think practically happens when they get... So they, I think, set sail from Italy. So when they get... I mean, it can't be at this point too far away. What happens when they get there practically would be your prediction. I mean, they could just let them, like, it'd be wild if they just got out of their way and just let them land and let them distribute everything on the ship. Like, there's no, there's no way there's weapons on that ship. There's just no way. Like, how suicidal would that

be to have weapons on the ship? And so, just let them give the food and medicine that's on that ship. There's just no way. Like, how suicidal would that be to have weapons on the ship? And so, just let them give the food and medicine that's on the ship and let them just unload it and then go back, go away. Like, that is an option that is available to the Israelis at this moment. That that is not even being discussed in meetings about how to handle this is indicative of the tenor of the approach towards humanitarian aid. The best case scenario is that there's some Israeli naval ships that kind of stop the ship and turn it around within what Israel is considering. The worst case scenario would be what happened in 2011 where they attacked the ship and board it and killed a bunch of people. And let's pray that that doesn't happen.

Yeah. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that

to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do we got next? Oh, Chuck Schumer.

We can talk about it, Ron. It's just actually, sadly, a decent segue from this block to the next block because we've seen the connection many times over the course of the last couple of weeks. But we do have a really incredible clip of Chuck Schumer, the most talented politician of his generation. That's right. And so let's set up the context here. So Steve Witkoff, who is managing both the Ukraine file,

the Iran file, and the Gaza file for Trump, same day he's dealing with negotiations between Hamas and Israel over a ceasefire. He sent a proposal to Iran around their reentering the nuclear deal, in which Barack Ravid at Axios reported the U.S. conceded that Iran would be able to enrich at a civilian level. So there'd be tight inspections. They'd have to blow up a bunch of their kind of weaponized program, no new centrifuges, but they would be able to pursue a civilian program. That gets leaked to Ravid.

Donald Trump then, about five hours later, goes on Truth Social and says, absolutely no enrichment happening. Forget it, mullahs. Which then led to Chuck Schumer injecting himself into the negotiations this way. day he's backing off. And now, all of a sudden, we find out that Witkoff and Rubio are negotiating a secret side deal with Iran. What kind of bull is this? They're going to sound tough in public and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything? That's outrageous. We need to make that side deal public. Any side deal should be before Congress and, most importantly, the American people. If Taco Trump is already folding folding the American public should know about it No side deals

So taco Trump that's Trump always chickens out as the Wall Street phrase for it's okay to you know go long on Because Trump is gonna back off of his his tariffs and now there's Schumer trying to use it to egg on a war With Iran, so it leads to this open question of what's actually in the proposal. Is there enrichment or is there not enrichment? And we'll roll Samuel Aryan in just one second, who is a Palestinian who is very well connected and has connections to people who are familiar with the negotiations. We interviewed him yesterday at Dropsite.

We can roll what he says about the enrichment, what's in it regarding enrichment. But think about this. What are the chances, 0% to 100%, that Donald Trump has read Witkoff's proposal that he delivered to Iran? Because we're making news based off of what Trump says about the proposal. So we should know, do you think he read it? Did you see the report last week that Tulsi Gabbard had been preparing to shift the daily intelligence briefing to look like a cable news segment? So it's not in, you didn't see this, it's not, you don't have to read it. Have Hegseth read it. Right. You don't have to read it, but

that the president. Have Hegseth do the, like do it as a standup on, from a couch. Trump is famously not super interested in written text. And so that's, it seems to me that through word of mouth, he could be getting different versions of what's in the Whitcock proposal. Different spin and framing. Exactly. What Trump knows about that proposal is what he was told about it. No way he read it. I'll bet my life that he did not read this proposal. Samuel Arian, we asked him if he had any sense of what was in it. And this is C5. Let's jump to that one. What can we understand about what the actual offer is from the U.S. to the Iranians? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible that you have one person who's acting like the effective secretary of state. That's Steve Vukov, someone who has never been confirmed by anybody, has never been accountable to anybody except to Trump.

I think that's the first probably in America's history when it comes to one person, one envoy, having all these very crucial files. You have the Gaza file, the Iran file, and the Ukraine file. Leaving that aside, my information, which is confirmed through what has been reported by officials in Iran is that indeed the letter that was sent by the Americans does concede, and this is very much confirmed, concedes the right of Iran to enrich uranium. So that point's already been conceded by the United States,

which opened the possibility of reaching an agreement. The second point, they wanted to freeze that enrichment. The Americans wanted to freeze that enrichment and offered that there could be a regional hub by which there could be enrichment activities in which Iran can participate. Now, the details are not very clear, but the Iranians are very much encouraged by the fact that the Americans have already conceded the point that Iran was not willing to walk away – was willing to walk away if that was never conceded. So the fact that the Americans have already conceded this point, that opens the possibility of an agreement. The Americans offered the 3.67%. I think whether it's 3.67% or more or less, obviously it's going to be less than 20% depending on the application,

is something probably that is subject to negotiations. but the Americans never talked about the ballistic program, the rocket program, or the support of other non-state actors, particularly when it comes to Israel-Palestine. So having the fact that the Americans are not tying or linking these subjects and that the Americans conceded the point the possibility of reaching an agreement now is much, much higher than it was a week or 10 days ago or even a month ago. Will the Israelis accept this? Will they sabotage? They will definitely do everything in their power to sabotage this.

But again, because this is a state actor and the implications of any military strike on Iran is going to be catastrophic, not only against U.S. interests, but globally it will be felt. I think the Americans will be very, very careful not to allow the Israelis to sabotage. So you can imagine why the Israelis are upset about this, not only as far as our sources and Ravid understand it, it does allow some low level of enrichment and does not stop them from supporting Hamas, Ansar Allah, Iraqi militias, the whole set of proxies, Hezbollah. And the ballistic missile program is something that is dear to the hearts of the Israeli

government as well, because that is the delivery mechanism for the most part. So you can imagine why they're upset. And Schumer is channeling that. Right. New York Times this morning, the Trump administration is proposing an arrangement that would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium at low levels while the U.S. and other countries work out a more detailed plan intended to block Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. The proposal amounts to a diplomatic bridge intended to maneuver beyond the current situation, but the details remain vague and the two sides remain far apart on some elements. So potentially what's emerging here is a pitch from Witkoff for a bridge, like to say, we'll allow low levels, but that's not the final deal. That's our bridge deal.

And who knows if the other deal actually ever comes, but that seems to be potentially what the administration is landing on as an effort to sell this to the Lindsey Grahams of the world. Yeah, which they don't seem interested. Because also they don't want it to work because they don't want sanctions lifted. And that's another thing that Samuel Arian talked about, is that the key thing that isn't getting a lot of focus here in the U.S. is that Iran's major interest here is not just the economic sanctions, which are increasingly less important than the various terror designations.

Because if you, as Cuba has found out, the fact that Cuba is listed as this state sponsor of terror makes it so that they can't bank with anybody anywhere. And they're like, what terrorism? We're not doing any terrorism. Setting Cuba aside. So we'll talk about that with Juan Rojas. Yeah, exactly.

But Iran, you can make a stronger case if you believe that all of these organizations are terror groups, which the U.S. designates them. Iran does support them. So Iran wants those things lifted. And if they don't get that lifted, then what's the point? We're not going to give up our deterrent if we don't get economic advantage out of it. Mm-hmm. I mean, Chuck Schumer, actually, I'm curious how you make of the way that Chuck Schumer is framing this, because there's the, it's oppositional Trump framing. But, and we can put C2 on the screen. This is polling from the Brookings Institution. Most respondents prefer a deal limiting Iran to a peaceful nuclear program. Only 14% of Americans back military action to

destroy Iran's nuclear program. So thinking back and how the Republican Party framed the Obama Iran nuclear deal, the politics of this for Chuck Schumer going after Taco Trump are also kind of interesting. I don't know quite what they're thinking with this, Ryan. Well, either the utility or the futility of Taco Trump is demonstrated in this moment. I actually used the exact same phrase on TikTok. Chuck Schumer and I are both TikTok natives. Right. Digital natives. Digital natives. And we both went after Trump over this. I went after him from the opposite side for undermining Witkoff's offer. I called him Taco Trump for his truth social where he said there can be no enrichment.

Enrichment. Yeah. Because he's chickening out against Schumer and Netanyahu and the rest who are pushing on him. Schumer's calling him Taco Trump for the original Witkoff proposal. Right, right. So Taco Trump, it might fall apart because it might just be too useful. You can just use it constantly. And anything that is that vague then ends up getting drained of meaning and it loses its pop. Well, it also sounds just kind of whimsical. It makes everyone think of tacos, which they love. So putting something you love in front of—

As long as he keeps being bothered by it, then it will maintain its resonance. And he seems to not like it. I was going to say, so C3 we can put on the screen. This is Axios reporting that the DNC rented a taco truck to mock Trump. The chicken costumes are—yeah, he's not going to like that. He's really not going to like that. But at a certain point, if it becomes like Dem leadership cringe, then it probably does lose its power with Trump. It probably becomes a meme of how pathetic it is to see Chuck Schumer looking like he's literally in a nursing home, which I suppose literally is because he's in the Senate in that video that we played.

Like saying Taco Trump to egg Trump into a nuclear conflict. And also putting tariffs on the entire world. Like this is what Democrats are daring him to start a war with Iran and put tariffs, high tariffs on everybody everywhere around the world. Right. Right. Things are going great.

Could not possibly be going better. So all is well. But Chuck Schumer is a star. He is a star. You scroll back and see. The star power just pops off the screen. It jumps right out. I wonder how many takes that was. What do you think? That's a good question. Because is he reading off a prompter? Did he have to memorize lines? Did they have cue cards? We should get to the bottom of this. I think that, I think he didn't, I think it was off the cuff. Yeah, you should be able to do that.

I bet it was third or fourth take. Yeah. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch

and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's move on to Ukraine, Ryan. Yes. So we're on the brink of nuclear annihilation right here in Washington, everywhere around the world. As the escalatory ladder continues to be climbed by Ukraine, we put this VO up here. This is footage of the Crimea bridge, boom, going boom. This was many months of planning, according to Ukraine. They strapped enormous amounts of explosives, as you can see there, to the base of the bridge. Apparently, it's back up and running. So maybe we can take a step down. What are the more important bridges if you're Russia? Yes, the Crimea Bridge, it's not just a prized infrastructure project of Putin,

but economically and culturally it's extremely important for connecting Crimea with, say, the rest of Russia at this point. This comes after this, you know, wild drone attack that went deep into Syria, going after the Russian bombers that are used, you know, that the Ukrainians will say we hit them because they're used for, you know, bombing targets deep inside Ukraine, critics of the operation say they're a central part of Russia's nuclear arsenal, and you are playing with nuclear fire by going there. One of those is retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was asked about what he sees as the risks of this Ukrainian attack. And he had a rather chilling response. We can roll that. Sort of set up an analogy. Mexico or Canada or any third party, particularly one that was proximate to our borders, launching missiles that hit Whiteman Air Force Base and destroyed B-2 bombers or hit Barstow in Louisiana or Minot and destroyed B-52

bombers, or came in on Groton, Connecticut, where a ballistic missile submarine was being serviced and hit it. These are things that during the Cold War, we swore to each other, Moscow and Washington, that we would never do. These are things that are so destabilizing that Putin would be in his every right with regard to all the lessons we have learned, and there are many, to attack and to attack with nuclear weapons and to say to the rest of the world, they provoked me, they surely did, and I'm not losing my devices for responding should I be really provoked by a first strike. And that's what you're talking about. Never, never hit the assets that your nuclear armed enemy needs to assess whether or not you're attacking them. That's a no-no. Always been a no-no.

No one disputed that in Moscow or Washington, or for that matter, in the other capitals in the world. See, Emily, I don't think that this justifies a nuclear response from Putin, but I don't like the idea that we're even in the area. Yeah, of course. Where it's an open question. Yeah, it's insane. We should try to avoid being in the area, the gray zone of nuclear response.

It's completely insane. Just sleptwalk directly into it. And right now on the Hill today, Richard Blumenthal, Lindsey Graham are meeting. They're back in the U.S.? They're back here and meeting with a top advisor to Zelensky actually today and pushing the sanctions package. And who knows what else? The other thing I— They were just in Ukraine.

They were just in Ukraine. Just cheering them on. Yeah. And demanding more support from Trump, who's obviously frustrated with Putin and not—without reason in the peace process, of course. But, Ryan, the ease with which—I mean, Ukraine said that operation took several months, according to CNN. It's crazy to me that when you watch the video, you realize, I mean, it just, it seems like that should be a much harder target to hit, given its importance. True, but underwater.

And they also hit it several months ago. If you remember, there was footage of the car. You're just driving along and boom, all of a sudden. Which is why it's kind of wild that they're able to pull it off after several months. I mean, that's one of the most obvious targets. But I think part of what's... I mean, it's so obviously provocative to do that to the bridge, to do that to that bridge. It's so obviously provocative. Yes, it's wild.

This is while peace talks in Istanbul. So it's a message, obviously. And they've been getting hit really hard in the days leading up to it. But, Ryan, we're hearing from Donald Trump for however long that he would broker a peace deal within 24 hours. We are now pushing into the six-month of his presidency, and it's getting worse. It's not getting closer at all. State Department official and one of the key guys in pushing back against, you know, one of the key guys in what you would call like the peace camp. The non-interventionist, yeah.

Yeah. He'd be sort of decried as an isolationist from the Lindsey Graham faction, yes. And so he's getting hit in the telegraph with this article. The headline is, Trump official who shut down counter-Russia agency has links to Kremlin. Darren Beattie, who alarmed the State Department with his pro-Moscow views, is married to a woman whose uncle has ties to Vladimir Putin. By the way, as a former tabloid reporter at the, when I was at HuffPost, the word tie, anytime you see the word ties or links, that is what's called a kind of get out of defamation jail free card. Yeah. Because think about the word link. Yep. You're linked to everything. We are linked to Putin by doing this segment. We're linked. Yes. Breaking points linked to Putin. Yes. Or untied to Putin. Linked untied. Linked untied. Yes. So do we have a statement from the State Department here? Yeah.

This is an exclusive statement to breaking points from the State Department that says, it isn't a coincidence that these attacks on D Darren Beatty are surfacing as the administration is working to fight censorship domestically and champion free speech around the world. We will get back to that in just a moment. These fake news outlets are so desperate to keep these censorship tactics alive and discredit the transparency initiative. They are publishing false mirrors on a respected and effective employee at the State Department. Now, Derby is an enormously controversial person who was working in the sort of media

punditry space before being plucked into the State Department in this administration. He had worked in the White House. Got fired for speaking at like a white nationalist conference. Right. From the first Trump White House. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then brought in the second administration, ruffles feathers for sure,

but especially among the interventionist crowd, because they are probably more offended by his questioning of interventionism. The white nationalism stuff, whatever. It's coalition. Yeah, it's coalition. Yeah, it's coalition. So anyway, Darren Beatty, we confirmed the State Department says passed all of his background checks. So this innuendo about his wife and her uncle, it's interesting, Ryan, because to work in a key position in the State Department, actually, the Biden State Department went through this with, what's his name, Rob on Iran stuff. Porter? No, that was Trump. Oh, Rob Malley. Yeah, Rob Malley on Iran stuff. And it did eventually come out that he had some interesting links and ties. But you'd obviously be vetted.

So, Darren Beatty's wife gave a statement to the Times, the UK Times, quote, Far from being Kremlin-aligned, Putin publicly denounced my uncle and his ownership stake in Bosch-Kirsota, whereupon the Putin government stole his company from him. He has lived in exile for Russia for five years, I'm deeply disappointed that the Telegraph would omit these material and publicly discoverable facts that completely undermine the suggestion that my uncle or I am Kremlin-linked, which is the narrative backbone of the entire piece. Linked to the Kremlin by being adversaries. So we'll find out if this is get out of defamation jail or not, because I imagine, you know, the UK, it's much easier to get sued. It's much easier to win a claim than it is here in the US. So, yeah, like, so, right. The point is, yeah, there is a connection between her uncle, which is like, come on, uncle.

Yeah. Now you're responsible, not just for what you do, not just for what your wife does, but for what your wife's uncle does. And it turns out the wife's uncle was actually beefing with Putin over some oligarch stuff. Mm-hmm. And that's not really in the article, is it? Yeah. So, Ryan, it is amusing to see the State Department, and Beatty himself in his post on X said, for anyone who passionately supports President Trump and fights to advance his agenda for the American people, immediate hit pieces come with the territory. Interestingly, that echoes the exclusive statement that we got from the State Department, which

is suggesting that this is a hit piece timed specifically because of what's happening in Ukraine right now. And you read the piece, and can even take issue with Derembiti working in the State Department, can take issue with his views, I actually think that it is laden with innuendo and probably timed exactly as they're implying it's timed. Yeah, it probably is. But we shouldn't move on without just taking a moment to dwell on the ability of the State Department and Marco Rubio's people to apparently hold two completely contradictory things in their head at the exact same time. One is that their administration, quote, is working to fight censorship domestically and champion free speech around the world.

You're like, I'm sorry, you're doing what? You're fighting censorship domestically by going through the social media of every college student and then trying to find anybody who's here on a visa. Of every non-citizen college student, apparently. And yeah, so you've got a permanent resident trying to find anybody who's here on a visa. Of every non-citizen college student, apparently. And yeah, so you've got a permanent resident who protested Israel's actions at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder

married to an American citizen who has an American citizen daughter who he has never seen because he is behind bars for his speech and you every day are fighting censorship like okay anyway like just that they could say like the fact that they could type that up and nobody's like um this is gonna to come off weird to the whole world who sees what we're doing every day. Well, it's important from their perspective messaging-wise that they actually do lean

into that because their contention, it's not from their perspective morally inconsistent because their contention is that it's speech for U.S. citizens. And so they've done things like get rid of State Department contracts with the Global Engagement Center and groups that have designed these censorship apparatus. And they, what was it, just last week said that they were no longer giving visas to people who had sought to interfere with the free speech rights of Americans. So again, I disagree, obviously, with the OzTurk and Khalil cases and the way the State Department has handled those. We've said that. We've covered that many times. But I think from their perspective,

you have to lean all the way into saying that we just totally brazenly are champions of free speech because otherwise it would imply that they think they actually are curtailing free speech. And what's amazing, though, is if you think about that, let's take their explanation at face value and pretend it is on the up and up. They're saying, yeah, okay, what we are concerned about is the speech of American citizens. If you're a foreigner here in our country, that is a privilege, and shut up. We don't want to hear any criticism from you. At the same time, they're telling other countries, if an American citizen is in your country, the First Amendment applies to them in your country, and they are not subject to your censorship laws. Your people, if they come to our country, cannot criticize Israel, and they are subject to our censorship rules. But when our people come to your country, they cannot be censored. Not that they would try to make anything consistent,

but what's the principle there under which their citizens are not entitled to speech rights in our country But we who are these free speech champions of the world insist that ours are entitled to it in your country I was a really important point is about that principle period because the argument that Mahmoud Khalil remains a Ostrzturk are undermining the U.S. foreign policy goals, which is the provision that Marco Rubio has used to justify revoking the visas, the principle of their speech, which in Ozturk's case was a pro-BDS op-ed about the college student government and the administration at Tufts, that that is somehow undermining the foreign policy of the United States, interfering with the foreign policy of the United States. Now, the powers of that law are broad and actually probably should be

reconsidered, period. As former Judge Trump said. Yeah, let alone used. But all that is to say, the principle is that it is beyond the pale to be critical of Israel because it's hurting the foreign policy goals of the United States. And I think what you're getting into there is criticism of Israel being anti-Semitic, which is something, of course, that has been passed in bills in Congress before, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and is a common refrain. And that's not free speech for Americans either, even though it's being applied in this case to people who aren't American citizens. The implications down the line are setting the stage for more censorship of American citizens. And if we can tell other countries, you know,

what their speech codes and laws need to be with regard to American citizens, can we tell other countries that they must ban criticism of Israel within their countries too? Not to give ideas to anybody but like... You just did. I mean most of them don't need that idea. It's already, they've already gone down that road. If they end up getting rid of Darren Beatty, they can bring you in. There'll be a job open. You can come in. Well, Beatty and I have both interviewed Imran Khan.

Oh, really? He did the last interview with Imran Khan before he was jailed. No way. Beatty's very good on Pakistan. Oh, that's quite interesting. He is an eccentric thinker. This is very good on Pakistan. Oh, that's quite interesting. He's an eccentric thinker. This is undoubtedly a true statement. I have to say I was surprised when they brought him in.

Even I was surprised when they brought him in. I was too. As the kids say, based. Yeah, and it's not, I don't think that Rubio was involved in bringing him in, to put it gently, right? Likely not. Maybe Michael Anton and those guys. I don't know. It's a good question.

We'll see. All right, let's move on to Joy Reid, Ryan. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about

a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ousted MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is sharing more of her thoughts about why she ended up getting the ax just a couple of months ago. Let's roll this first clip of Joy Reid in conversation with Katie Couric. I got to, you know, NBC and I joined Twitter back in 2000. I think I joined in 08 or 09, and the bosses were horrified. And anytime I would tweet anything, I would get calls. I would get, please get off Twitter. We hate it. They just, they don't like that it pulls their talent and their reporters out of their control because now you're not running what you're tweeting through standards and practices.

It's giving your personality directly to the audience, which they don't like because it's no longer managed and curated by them. And they don't like because it's no longer managed and curated by them. And they don't want people breaking news. I'm just now realizing that Katie Couric has that famous picture of Joan Didion framed behind her on her podcast set, which is just, to be fair, I have a Joan Didion book on our set back here, but that just Katie Couric with the Joan Didion portrait is something just really getting under my skin this morning, Ryan. But that's neither here nor there.

We need guest hosts, right, while Sagar's out? Katie Couric. Katie Couric or Joy Reid, right? Hey, bring them in. See what happens. It's a fine line between, I've always said this, between Katie Couric and Sagar and Jetty. They share many similarities. Yeah, so it's something to think about. Now, Joy Reid makes—

Katie and Saga would be fun together. Yes, yes. Something to think about. Producers, I know you're listening, but Joy Reid makes a fairly interesting case in this clip, by the way. And I will not be rescinding any of my criticisms of Joy Reid whatsoever, but she makes an interesting case about MSNBC in this clip, which is that she didn't have the worst ratings at MSNBC, which is a low bar, by the way. She says to Katie Couric, I wasn't told the ratings were terrible.

It's something you did. You tweeted a terrible thing. She said she had been being, quote, extra careful on social media at the time because there was a real anxiety, she said, about it. And that's kind of interesting. She says it wasn't the ratings because we had just a ratings meeting a couple of weeks before that talking about the fact that our show, other than Rachel Maddow, we were down the least after Trump's election win. So being down the least. But it's actually an interesting point because it's not as though now that we have a few months in hindsight, it's not as though MSNBC is actually trying to change its brand. It's not as though—so when I saw the firing of Joy Reid, I was like, this is interesting, because Joy Reid was, I think, symbolically a very powerful representation of—

and maybe we disagree on this, but where MSNBC went wrong during the Trump years, which was this kind of sanctimonious doubling down on being the voice of truth and facts and nobody else could possibly, or nobody who disagrees with me is on the side of truth or facts. I'm on the side of truth or facts and I will tell you what's right and what's wrong. And I thought maybe that they were getting rid of Joy Reid because they were trying, you know, however ham-fistedly to go in a different direction. But they're definitely not really doing that.

They haven't really made any significant changes. Yeah, I don't see Joy as being – differentiating herself in that crowd of people during the first Trump year. I think she had the same kind of approach as almost all of them did. The thing that did differentiate her from the PAC was that she was consistently critical of Israel's assault on Gaza. Like that was, if you try to think about the things that make her different than other hosts, either on CNN or MSNBC, that's the only one that I can think of. So she doesn't cite that. She says, quote, I'm a black woman doing the thing. You know what I mean? And so I'm not different from Maddow or Nicole Wallace, but quote, I think that there's a difference for

Trump and hearing the kinds of criticism specifically out of a black woman. I think that is true. It bothers him in a way it doesn't bother him like anything else. She says there's a fear of him, implying at MSNBC, we're seeing it everywhere. Now, I'll have to. I think she's right about that. Like, sorry, Trump people. I think she is. Really? That Trump has some issue? Black women being critical of him hits harder for him than like a Rachel Maddow. Or certainly hits harder than like a white guy. Especially a good looking white guy. He's fine with that. Well, I guess this is a little bit different, but the man he hates more than anyone else is Chuck Todd. Chuck Todd seems to be, gets under his skin more than just about anyone.

But he likes some of the other guys. Like who wrote the Enemy of the People book? The Enemy of the People book. The CNN guy. Oh, Jim Acosta. Yeah, yeah. Like he loves, you can tell he loves those guys. He loves going back and forth with Jim Acosta. Yeah, because that's a handsome newsman right there.

You're fake news. Yeah, Tric-Tot isn't exactly out of central casting, as Trump would say. He wants them out of central casting. He wants his enemies to be good-looking white guys. Now, remind me. So I'm looking at this right now because MSNBC was spun off. So Comcast spun off its portfolio of cable news networks, and that includes MSNBC. This was announced back in November.

Reed was let go, that was what, earlier this spring, roughly around March-ish. So that's why at the time I thought maybe MSNBC was just going in a different direction, which, by the way, would mean, actually would mean getting rid of Nicole Wallace or at least like turning down the volume on Nicole Wallace. It'd be the entire. The Scarborough, the Scarborough Brzezinski disaster, which is. Hayes, I don't know. Like they all have to go. Right. Yeah. I mean, if they're trying to brand differently, at least you would. But so she's saying she's basically lumping in the CBS settlement and other settlements, ABC's Stephanopoulos settlement, and implying that MSNBC might have a similar fear.

Which I think is also true. It's interesting because it's a question of whether Comcast still has, so where they are in the process of actually spinning MSNBC off is Comcast, is there implication that Comcast is afraid or is it that MSNBC, because MSNBC is a left of center network, I don't think would be particularly afraid unless they're trying to get sold. Because that was another thing, Elon Musk was flirting with the possibility that maybe he would buy MSNBC, but you could easily see another right-wing billionaire, doesn't have to be Elon Musk, swooping in and buying MSNBC. And then at the time, if they were trying to ready it as a property for an acquisition, maybe that's what's going on. Or maybe it's just hard to work with.

Yeah, I think it was the Comcast stuff. Like Comcast is a terrible business whose entire existence depends on largesse from the government regulatory for the most part. And so that is like the most vulnerable kind of company. Yeah. So you don't want to anger the king if you depend on the king. I don't know. I just – Joy Reid, yeah, I guess we probably disagree on this, but I've found her to be one of the more difficult, one of the representations of a lot of the stuff that went wrong during Trump era journalism. And to her credit, one of the more interesting things

she did, she would have conservatives, right-wingers, MAGA people on. And she made compelling television because she fought. And that's something that I think people like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace, I suppose, should do more of. So I definitely give her credit for that. I agree, actually. I think the Blue MAGA stuff is totally fine to do as content if you're going to have people arguing with you on there. It's not my kind of thing.

It's not what I would want to watch, but if you're going to debate it out with people, then fine. It's the Blue Maga echo chamber stuff that becomes really corrosive. Yeah, I agree with that. Rachel Maddow, I think, has sadly fallen prey to that. I just think Rachel Maddow is a really smart

and talented journalist. She is, journalist. Her monologues are always the long, like 10-minute long thing she does at the top. Those are always fun. Well, they were also masterfully crafted, and the writing was extremely compelling. If you were watching some of those- Where is this going? Where is this going? Right. The Trump won monologues that Rachel Maddow would do, which became kind of famous or infamous, but probably infamous after she claimed to have Trump's tax returns. And all of Washington was watching. I even watched that.

Yeah, me too. The opening of Maddow that night. And it was like Geraldo at the vault by the end of it. Her scoop was like way overhyped on what she actually had, but the writing was just masterful. So it's sad when people get kind of sucked into the universe where they just have purged anyone who might disagree. I think the best segment on the debate between porn, the debate over whether there's porn in schools

and the library controversies is between Joy Reid and Tiffany Justice on Joy Reid's MSNBC show, and I recommend everybody watch that. controversies is between joy reed and tiffany justice um on joy reeds on this nbc show and i recommend everybody watch that it's good because like it forces them both to like learn what the other side knows and understands and thinks and then before you can rebut it yeah all right so up next we've got wanda v rojas who's a conservative but kind of a heterodox conservative. I don't even know. Writer when it comes to Latin American politics. Roughly, I mean, he's conservative on immigration policies. I wonder, maybe we should ask him how he sees himself. But he does fantastically interesting and heterodox coverage of Latin American politics from Ecuador to Venezuela to Cuba and to Mexico as well and has been on a tear

recently with some interesting coverage of Claudia Scheinbaum, friend of the show, and also friend of the world, Venezuela. We particularly want to dive into a story he's written on Venezuela because happening under the surface, percolating under the surface of this administration is a divide over how to approach Venezuela between like the Rick Grinnell, Laura Loomer camp and the old school cold warriors. So we're going to dive into all that with Wanda B. Ross right after this. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her,

is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As promised, we're joined now by Juan David Rojas, who writes at Compact. Juan, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, guys. Laura Loomer is right about is really important because just last week there was significant controversy over whether Chevron should get a reauthorization to continue doing drilling in Venezuela, basically, and that pitted Rick Grinnell against the Marco Rubio kind of cold warrior camp. And in a really interesting way, because we hear from Rubio—actually, I literally just heard from Rubio last night at the American Compass Gala saying that people are still clinging to the Cold War, that we had these Cold War policies meant to prevent uprisings, and then we kept those Cold War policies going forward. And you can—you sort of assume in that context—he was speaking generally, but that he was thinking about Ukraine in particular. But Venezuela and Cuba, which we're

going to talk about as well, are good examples of this too. So Juan, can you tell us a bit about what's percolating under the surface of the Trump administration as it relates to Venezuela and maybe more broadly Latin America? Because this is, I think, a really, really important and underappreciated part of what's happening over at State. Yeah, that's a great point, Emily. Now that I think about it, I saw that comment elsewhere from Rubio as well. But yeah, that definitely doesn't apply to Latin America for him. You know, he's an old school Miami hawk and his former constituents here in the state of Florida. I live in Fort Lauderdale. A lot of them, the only thing they care about is regime change in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua.

And so you have this tug of war within the administration that's really interesting between hawks like him. And then like in Congress, there's the three republican representatives for south florida mario diaz balart um maria elvira salazar and um carlos uh jimenez and um yet all like i said all they care about is regime change and so any like new sanctions any like you know sort of favors or benefits that Venezuela, Cuba could get. In this case, since 2022, Biden has allowed Chevron to pump oil in Venezuela. They have a license which allows them to explore in Venezuelan waters, and both administrations have been around for a long time. Right.

And when Trump got in, I just assumed that he, you know, they would just, you know, go maximum pressure again on Venezuela. But what we saw is that the immigration hawks actually were open to dialogue because they wanted to be able to deport people directly to directly to Venezuela which you know they they weren't authorizing they're revoking that the back and forth to the TPS for the three majorities was gonna say one just quickly that the TPS revocation of that status temporary yeah 350,000 Venezuelans so the number of deportations that they require cooperation with Venezuela, otherwise they need to find other countries to send literally

tens of thousands of people to. That's how high stakes it is for them. Exactly. Yeah, it's super urgent. And so you've had this tug of war between the, because there's these slim margins in the House of Representatives. They just have a 2C majority. So those three congressmen can sink basically anything that they want. So in February, they threatened to not vote for the continuing resolution, the February budget. Yeah, when there's going to be a shutdown. So the administration said, oh, okay, we're not going to renew Chevron's license. Then they backpedaled and actually did. And then so the hawks got upset. And, you know, we could talk about that more in depth.

Well, the key moment comes when Venezuela, when they do pull the license, I guess, you know, however briefly, Venezuela then pauses taking deportation flights. And then the Trump administration sends them to El Salvador instead. Yeah, yeah. pivotal moment in the Trump administration's immigration and foreign policy ends up getting decided by these kind of three counter-revolutionary, like South Florida Republicans, who could not be more the kind of counter to America first if you tried to design it in a lab. Like they are very explicit that their most important priority is Cuba, and then Venezuela, and then Nicaragua, and then eventually, at some point, you get down to

the North American country of the United States of America. Yeah, it's horrible because it was definitely a contributing factor. I mean, you know, Stephen Miller doesn't need all that much help to do his own psycho stuff. But, you know, they were for like a brief period, a few weeks, because in days after Trump assumed office, they cut this deal with Maduro. Okay, you know, we'll renew the license if you agree to take deportees. And they did for a time. Then they reneged. And so, okay, we can't send people to Venezuela. All right, well, let's send them to El Salvador.

What was really horrible is that, at least according to multiple investigations, one from the New York Times, another from ABC, at least 200 of the 238 Venezuelans that they sent to a maximum security gang prison in El Salvador had no criminal records in the U.S., in Colombia, Chile, Peru, a ton of different countries. They were really thorough. You know, the administration denies this, but they also have refused to release the names or the, you know, supposedly heinous crimes that these people committed. To be fair, around like two dozen actually had credible, you know, associations as being gang members and committed crimes. About 10 percent. Yeah. But I mean, this is just completely incompetent.

And it's like, why would they do this? If, you know, I would dispute the use of the Alien Enemies Act because, you know, they said that, you know, they were terrorists and that venezuela's conducting this invasion of the u.s through trender agua uh so i think that you know using the alien enemies act is is wrong but at least if they sent actual criminals you could say okay all right well why are we going to cry over criminals and you you also uh it just completely undermines their case. And it's also been a huge boon to Maduro. Like, you know, he just goes out on TV. It's like, look at this, these forced disappearances to El Salvador. Look at how complicit the Venezuelan opposition is.

And he's right because the Venezuelan opposition can't criticize Trump because he's their chief political and financial backer. So it's been a colossal debacle. Where Loomer comes in that's really funny is that her and this Florida businessman wanted to renew the Chevron's license because they're saying, hey, you know, Trump has this agenda of energy abundance. We should be exploiting Venezuela's oil and not China, because most of Venezuela's oil exports go to China. Obviously, she doesn't really care about, you know, the deportations to El Salvador or anything like that. But, you know, in a very narrow sense, she's, you know, completely right. I mean, on its own terms, sanctions have not achieved their intended

goal of regime change, and it's just not going to happen. So why are we doing this? It just makes Venezuela more miserable. And yet, if anything, improving conditions there by allowing more economic activity would deter migration. And there's something similar going on in Cuba. We can put up F1 here, which is this Politico article about how, you know, where they say Cuba tried to improve its relations with the U.S. by cooperating with Trump's deportation flights. It didn't work. Cuba is facing sanctions and terror designations that make what the U.S. is doing to Venezuela seem almost friendly. You've had an unspeakably large exodus of people from Cuba to the United States and to other countries in the hemisphere. People are reporting losing enormous amounts of weight. There isn't enough food to go

around. Healthcare is completely collapsing because of the sanctions. And the terror designation means you can't get spare parts even from Europe or anywhere else. Nobody wants to bank or do business with Cuba. So they thought, okay, let's cooperate on these deportation flights, and that will end up benefiting us. It has not. The same hardline approach is still being taken to Cuba. I actually think, and it's become a kind of a mantra, that it's been 60 years almost, and we've been doing the same policy, and we haven't gotten regime change. I think it's actually possible, given the absolute dire state of the situation in Cuba, that they may actually accomplish their goal in the near term. Like, there could be complete collapse of the Cuban regime. I don't know, but there isn't much left

holding it up. That being a long-term goal of the United States, and now maybe even being in sight, what on earth would happen? Let's say they get their wish. I would imagine that creating another Haiti, creating a failed state on that island, does not have the kind of immigration consequences that the United States immigration hawks would want. So let's talk a little bit about this weird contradiction at the heart of the rights approach to immigration, where on the one hand they want no migration or very little legal migration. On the other hand, they want these hardline policies toward Latin America that cut off development and create failed states and plummeting economies that then produce mass exoduses of migrants toward the United States.

Yeah, and you know, historically, when we're talking about what I call Miami neocons, they actually supported an open-door policy with regards to Cubans. And, you know, they've had to backpedal more so with Venezuelans. But, you know, this makes perfect sense. I mean, most people of Cuban descent, Venezuelan descent, Nicaraguan descent are extremely hardline with regards to foreign policy towards their home countries. They're extremely, you know, you have what's called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which is basically any Cuban who manages to stay here for more than a year and a day is automatically granted residency. And this is, you know, just electorally, it's great for Florida Republicans. And it's something that, you know, exactly, exactly.

I've argued against it. It is a magnet for a ton of people on the island and conditions are very dire. As you've said, something like two million at least have left since 2021. And, you know, in the case of Venezuela, this is something I push back on some of my anti-imperialist friends who say that, you know, the country's collapse was just due to sanctions. Well, that's not entirely true because Venezuela is an oil state and their economy collapsed before we imposed sanctions on the oil sector in 2017. In 2014, the price of oil dropped massively and, you know, millions of people had already left before we imposed sanctions. That said, imposing sanctions obviously will make things worse. I'm against sanctions, whole scale. The case of Cuba is another story. The current crisis has definitely been caused by sanctions, specifically putting them on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which is something that

went back and forth. Trump put them on the list in the last days of his presidency, like January 2021. Biden took them off days before leaving office, and then Trump put them back on the first day. Their economy is completely dependent on tourism. And putting them on that list means that basically no one can do business with them. Cruise ships and all the like. And actually Biden imposed further rules like that. European tourists would have to report that they've been to Cuba. This is something that Dropside reported on. Yeah, that they traveled to Cuba.

And obviously that's going to be a deterrent to tourism. And one, this is so interesting because the Trump administration, and it kind of seems like a 2009 era Obama, is on this like reset tour of the Cold War. At least some people in the Trump administration would love to reset American foreign policy from the pattern that we were stuck in for decades during the Cold War. And that applies to Ukraine policy. It applies to NATO policy. It applies to certainly Eastern Europe. But when it comes to Cuba, very, very close to our own backyard, Cuba does have some measure of cooperation with China. Venezuela have some measure of cooperation with China. Venezuela has some measure of cooperation with Iran and China as well. So it's not all on the

U.S. side, although we could go back into the tit-for-tat who pushed them into the arms of Iran and all of that. But all I'm saying is it does seem like the time is ripe for the Rick Grinnells and Laura Loomers to make an argument that a Cuba reset or a Venezuela reset would be in the American interest. Think about like Mara, Gaza. Like, what about Mara, Havana? Like, it just seems like there's an argument sitting there to be made to Trump about what could happen going forward. But I guess as long as you have Maria Elvira Salazar and others, it seems like maybe there's just no path to that. Yeah, funny story. I actually found an article that quoted Trump in like the 1980s. And he said, yeah, something along the lines, oh, I'd love to build a hotel in Havana. So yeah,

there's an opening there. But unfortunately, yeah, the Miami lobby is extremely powerful. I'm all for pragmatism. I think that, you know. What are the politics of that in South Florida, by the way? So just since you're coming from. Actually, some of them, you know, actually lived through really horrible things. They were persecuted by these government governments. Some of them were tortured. All these regimes. One thing that they'll do is that they'll withhold food to families in order to coerce them, you know, to vote for them or, you know,

attend rallies and stuff like that. So I genuinely get where they're coming from. In the same way that I completely understand where a lot of the anti-imperialists, both internationally and in the governments of these countries, like Cuba for a long time was basically a vassal of the U.S. Mob interests were huge. They didn't have control of their own trading policy until, trade policy until like 1934. Through the Platt Amendment. I mean, really horrible stuff.

It's kind of obvious that the revolution in 59 happened. But, you know, and through a lot of it also, there was just like dictators that were just kind of stooges of the U.S. So I get it. But because like the each side is so maximalist, on the one hand, the Cuban or Venezuelan regime is like, oh, because there's sanctions, that gives us free reign to just kill people on the streets, imprison or torture them. And then the neocons just say,

oh, well, look, they're killing and torturing people, so we need to impose sanctions. This is just the circular loop that's pointless. And I wanted to pick up on something you said earlier about the way that this has really been a drag on the Venezuelan opposition, because it feels like systematically across the globe, Trump is hurting his allies and boosting his adversaries. We just saw in South Korea, you know, the left, winning the presidential election there, which, you know, the bannons of the world are calling, you know, Korea having fallen to the CCP. But certainly the tariff, you know, Trump's tariff

threats to that region dragged down the Trump-aligned conservative candidate. Australia saw lefties win there. Canada saw its conservative movement just completely collapse. is being pushed on this question of, you know, are you with Venezuela's sovereignty? Or are you actually an agent of a foreign government? And, you know, what has been her response and what's been the kind of response of the public to that? So the day, I think the day after, days after those Seacott deportations, she issued a statement on X saying that something along the lines of that Venezuelans should not be treated at all as criminals. But she didn't actually, you know, verbalize any sort of opposition, you know into words that like okay you know like the seacott episode was not a good thing so it's just kind of up in the air and she has since

still just towed the line of the administration that oh maduro is the head of trend that agua and is directing an invasion which is just completely insane uh there's been protests in venezuela rightfully so from the family members of people that are, you know, like now content to life in prison inside the Secot against Bukele and against Trump. You actually had this Bukele said that he'd be willing to do a prisoner swap of the Secot prisoners for if Maduro released a bunch of an equivalent number of political prisoners. And so that was just kind of a spectacle for the two leaders. Maduro actually, a few weeks ago, paraded this like little kid, the child of one of the SICAD deportees who they didn't send to Venezuela because they were worried for her safety, but then they sent the mom and then they sent the kid.

And so Maduro was saying, thank you, Donald Trump. You're an impudious, but we brought back so-and-so. And it's just, it's something else. Yeah, so while we have you, um, I did want to ask you about, um, uh, another, uh, really good piece you had. This was for the liberal Patriot. If we can put up just the final, um, element here, what the, what Democrats can learn from which is the, uh, the party of AMLO and Claudia Scheinbaum. Um, and you had a, uh, you had a, you had a, let me see if I can find the deck to this article too.

The subtitle was, it sounded like it was written for Breaking Points. The Mexican left combined ideological diversity on cultural issues with a shared populist vision on material concerns, which is sort of like what Breaking Points has been screaming for years, would be an effective policy from either party. You know, ideological diversity on cultural issues, a big tent there, and populist vision on material concerns. So what can you tell us beyond the headline that, you know, for people who are just like, hey, yay, go, go, Claudia. But like, what, what, what beyond that did AMLO and Claudia do effectively that Democrats could learn from? And also, frankly, that Trump could learn from, because he seems to have his own odd set of admiration for, for both of those figures. Yeah, funny story. Last night, I got a notification from a pro-Morena outlet saying that Caroline Levitt defended Shavebomb.

The Washington Post ran some sort of, I meant to send you this actually, the Washington Post ran some sort of article that fentanyl seizures at the border had mysteriously declined and so caroline levitt was asked about that and she said it's not mysterious it's because of our tough stance on the border and our strong relationship with president claudia chain bomb so uh that was kind of funny that is um as far as like like but let's be real like that's that's probably true. Yeah, absolutely. The state does have more control. Both states have more control over fentanyl flows than I think that they let on. Yeah, yeah. Well, and this is actually a really good segue into that article. Shane Baum has done something really interesting.

It's not entirely a U-turn, but it's been framed that way. Well, it is kind of a U-turn, but it's been framed that way. Well, it is kind of a U-turn. She has taken a way tougher stance on security than AMLO ever did. And I think this is a lesson for progressives. I'm a big critic of progressive crime policy. And AMLO, what he did, he actually, it's not entirely correct to say that it was like soft on crime. It was kind of soft on the cartels, but in public security, for instance, if you go to Mexico, security is very militarized and you see like a lot of troops. You'll see like these trucks with like soldiers

standing on the back with these machine guns. But with regards to the cartels, he took a more hands-off policy. His view was that the previous governments had, you know, they declared a war on the narcos, and this just exploded violence. Before 2007, when Felipe Calderón, a former president, came in, Mexico actually had a pretty low homicide rate, equivalent to the U.S. at like 7 per 100,000. And he came in, and within months, he said, we're going to bring out the military, we're going to go after the cartels, and this just exploded violence, and it hasn't really improved much since. When Lopez Obrador came in, he said, okay, we're going to shift the strategy, we're going to deprioritize seizing drugs and going after kingpins. We're

kind of going to do damage control. So when there's an outbreak of violence with the cartels, we're just going to send these huge deployments of soldiers to try to quell the violence. According to official figures, homicides went down like 10% during his government, but disappearances were still huge. And this was a huge criticism against his government. Alsolevel guys in charge of logistics within cartels. And it really prioritized drug seizures. One of the problems was that AMLO got rid of the federales, which a lot of people might be familiar with from the movies, replaced it with the National Guard. The National Guard was a military, not a police entity, and so they didn't really have the training to do investigative work and seizing drugs was a problem. So she looked to professionalize the National Guard and is also looking to create an investigative police. In

Mexico, things are a bit different. Police don't investigate crimes. it's the prosecutors that do so uh she's uh created this uh her security minister announced a few weeks ago the creation of an investigative police and so far the results have been pretty good drug seizures on the mexican side have really gone up and homicides have gone down around 20 so that's extremely promising well it's all happening pretty out in the open so i'd imagine if And homicides have gone down around 20 percent. So that's extremely promising. Well, it's all happening pretty out in the open. So I'd imagine if, you know, there'd be a lot of gains to make out of the gate. Yeah, yeah. And to be fair, yeah, a lot of this is due to pressure from the Trump administration through tariffs and the like, whatnot. But going back to the point of the piece as to what Democrats can learn from Morena, yeah, that article is kind of a 10-year history of the party.

It was founded in 2014, and in 10 years, wow, they managed to basically take over the whole country. And López Obrador, he, you know, some people would dispute this. I like to say that he was a traditionalist, and he didn't really care a lot about social issues. I think that personally he was kind of conservative on some of the LGBT issues and stuff. But it wasn't really the focus of his politics. And the focus of his politics was all material, raising the minimum wage, backing unions, securing Mexico's energy sovereignty. And that's a good lesson that I like to critique progressives on. I think that climate change is very important, but working class people have a very different view of the energy transition. They think that, yeah, we should invest in renewables, and that's great,

but low prices are really the priority. You want to have an all-of-the-above approach, and that's something that the liberal patriot really hammers home all the time. It's better in the long run if we just invest in renewables, don't generate a backlash among workers and um bring down energy prices instead of trying to go full speed ahead and um you know go in on renewables which are unreliable you know the sun isn't always shining the wind isn't always blowing uh and unless you're in south florida exactly exactly so um what morena has uh the policy of Morena was, you know, we need to secure the needs of workers. AMLO, he prioritized refining after previous administrations had decided, you know, they were just going to import oil from the U.S. And this brought down prices.

You know, he built this huge oil refinery in his home state of Tabasco. And Shane Baum, well, she's a climate scientist. She cares about renewables. But so far, she's been very practical, and especially because of the tariffs that forced her to prioritize energy sovereignty. So her government is promoting partnerships and public-private partnerships and renewables and in fossil fuels. Carlos Slim is actually a significant backer of BEMIX, the state oil company, which has had huge problems. WandaVid Rojas, writer for Compact and other outlets, thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome back anytime. Thanks, guys. Ren, that was great. Super interesting. Yeah. Big WandaVid Rojas fan. Even though we don't agree on everything, he's always got something interesting to say. Right. Yeah. Something interesting, something different. Some interesting and different things percolating under the surface of the Trump administration, and we'll see where they go. It sounds like none of us are particularly optimistic that there'll be a true reset. Yes. There's a lot of entrenched, a lot of incumbent interest groups to deal with. Yeah.

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