Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/5/25: Trump Travel Ban, Economy Seizes Amid Trade War, Trump To Explode On Elon, Bibi Gov In Collapse

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Krystal and Ryan discuss Trump's new travel ban, economy seizes amid trade war, Trump set to explode on Elon, Bibi government collapsing.   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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Ryan Grimm, great to see you, my friend. Great to see you. I, again, will be channeling the esteemed Sager. Excellent. So I will be making sure that the populist right gets its, you know, its full-throated voice. Maybe not full-throated. You could lay off the full-throated.

I'll give the straw man version of Sagar's arguments. That's fair. And then you can dismantle them. Actually, I think we are going to have the one and only esteemed Sagar back next week. Indeed, we will. Yeah, so you won't have to wait much longer for that. When I say today is a jam-packed show, there are probably ten more things that we could have put into this show

that got left on the, what is it, the cutting room floor? Is that the expression? And let's talk about one of those real quick. So Trump and Putin spoke yesterday about Ukraine's attack on Russia. The drone strike, swarm strike or whatever. Trump then posted on Truth Social and then deleted immediately and then reposted again on Truth Social. Basically his own readout of the conversation with Putin. And he said, you know, Putin, very angry. He's going to respond very strongly.

And Trump was just saying it matter-of-factly, like this is going to happen. And he also said that he enlisted Putin's help to get closer to an Iran deal. Now, the German chancellor is coming here today, and he's having a, and Trump's having a call with Xi tomorrow. And the Wall Street Journal this week said that people need to start referring to this period no longer as the post-war period, but as now the pre-war period. True. Which is an awfully scary thing to hear from the Wall Street Journal. And they say it aspirationally. Like, they want this to be the pre Wall Street Journal. And they say it aspirationally. They want this to be the

pre-war period. Not understanding that the greatest destructions of wealth in human history were World War I and World War II. Wall Street Journal readers, a few of you will do well. Most of you will lose your shirts. Some of you will lose your lives. So anyway, we're getting very close to a very dark time. Yeah. I mean, I think many people feel that. And didn't I also see Trump said something like the drone swarm attack? He thought it was badass, something like that. Yes. Which is kind of, anyway, Trump, yes. And maybe he hopes that by slobbering about it helps him. Flirting with a hot nuclear war. Yeah, that's badass. Feels great. Yeah. It's going to be a badass World War III.

So anyway, that didn't make it into the show, but we've got a new travel ban from Trump as well. Some other immigration news in terms of court decisions. We've got new jobs numbers that came in quite low. We've got new Elon Musk fallout. Bibi's coalition appears to be collapsing. Democrats are studying men. Yeah. My friend Tori is going to join both to talk.

I want two men to talk about it. Yeah, that's right. I'll just sit back and let you gentlemen tell me what I need to know. But we are going to let Joy Behar weigh in on that one. She has some great ideas. She has thoughts. Tori is also going to give us a Diddy Trial roundup because he's been following closely and posting a bunch of TikToks about it. He blew up on TikTok.

He's doing so well there. And also actually has a new show as well that he is involved with. And then we had big news last night. First of all, there's a debate in the New York City mayor's race, which has many very interesting moments that I think you guys will be interested in. But then when I woke up this morning, we got the news that AOC did decide to jump in and endorse Zoran Mandami, who is, as you guys probably know, the Democratic socialist challenger to frontrunner Andrew Cuomo. There's a bunch of other people in this race, too, but really it comes down to is it going to be Cuomo or is it going to be Mamdani at the end

of the day? Yeah, it's a two-dog hunt at this point. Yeah, there's some, yeah, we'll get to it. But let's go ahead and start. We don't even have this on the board yet because, and we've added this in yesterday evening as well, but wanted to make sure to make mention of the fact Trump did announce a new travel ban. He put out a video explaining, you know, his his thinking here and why he's imposing this. Now, let's go ahead the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas. We don't want them. In the 21st century, we've seen one terror attack after another carried out by foreign visa overstayers from dangerous places all over the world.

And thanks to Biden's open-door policies, today there are millions and millions of these illegals who should not be in our country. In my first term, my powerful travel restrictions were one of our most successful policies, and they were a key part of preventing major foreign terror attacks on American soil. We will not let what happened in Europe happen to

America. That's why on my first day back in office I directed the Secretary of State to perform a security review of high-risk regions and make recommendations for where restrictions should be imposed. Among the national security threats, their analysis considered are the large-scale presence of terrorists, failure to cooperate on visa security, inability to verify travelers' identities, inadequate record-keeping of criminal histories, and persistently high rates of illegal visa overstays and other things. Very simply, we cannot have open migration from any country where we cannot safely and reliably vet and screen those who seek to enter the United States. And this is an example of Trump, too, being prepared in a way that Trump, one,

wasn't because Trump, one, they do the Muslim ban right out of the gate. It's ridiculous. It gets thrown out in court. Can't you can't do a Muslim ban. Right. So then they look through over the next eight years, look and they sort of tried a version of it and Trump won. But they look through the regs and the laws and they're like, oh, wait. So a president can say that restriction from a particular country is restricted if we say it's not because we're bigoted against Muslims, but because of reasons. Right. So on day one, he said, State Department, go find reasons for a variety of countries. And noticeably, they throw in a few non-Muslim majority countries so that you can't say that it's a Muslim ban. Yeah, put M2 up on the screen. This has a list of a dozen, I think, countries that they have

picked here. Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen. None of this is funny, but I did see one good joke. It's, man, Equatorial Guinea must have crossed the line. Okay, that's kind of bad, but also kind of good. Ultimate dad joke there, right? Again, not funny. Yes, again, not funny. And then there's another seven similar-ish countries that are getting restrictions but not a total ban.

So, yeah, this is just slapdash across the board, but designed to stand up in court. Yeah. And this was the thing is it's not like they needed much justification last time around. You just can't outright be like, we are racist and discriminating against Muslims. You had to give some fig leaf. And then, yes, the executive does have a significant amount of discretion. So I still expect this will face court challenges. And, you know, I don't want to predict ultimately where that goes, but it has a much more higher likelihood of standing up in court than it did the first time around.

And the other thing people are raising, Ryan, is like with a have the World Cup coming here. And like, there's exemptions in here for players from these countries, but not from fans, for fans from these countries. So this has really obviously significant impact, not to mention being sort of overtly discriminatory and throwback to Trump 1.0. The other thing that's worth mentioning is he name checks there the Egyptian national who committed that terror attack in Boulder, Colorado as justification. I mean, Egypt isn't on this list. That's his situation. But, you know, he's using this as-

Egypt is too important of an ally to do this. Exactly. Yeah. But he's using this as a pretext to say, oh, see, you know, this is the justification. Invading Iraq because Al Qaeda in Afghanistan attacked us. Exactly. Yes. Similar to that. Exactly. So in any case, I don't think that that was the reason that he did this. I think it is something that he used to make the rhetorical case. But to your point, Ryan, it looks like they've been working on this effectively from day one to try to do this in a way that may actually stand up in court. There was one other piece of immigration news here that is

quite significant we wanted to get in the show. I can put M4 up on the screen. That federal court judge, Boasberg, here in D.C., issued a ruling saying, hey, those people that you just swept up and sent to El Salvador, to Seacott, to rot in a concentration camp for life with zero due process, you've got to figure out some way for them to be able to challenge their removals. So, you know, obviously the Trump administration has done

everything they can to defy the courts, especially when it comes to the migrants who were sent to Seacott. So I don't expect anything imminent in terms of a process that will enable these men who were, you know, sentenced to life in a gulag with no due process to be able to challenge their detention there. But this will, you know, begin a process that will play out through the courts, and we'll see where it goes from here, Ryan. Yes, indeed. We have a programming note. We mentioned this yesterday and the day before. For this month, we're bringing back the monthly, so $10 a month premium subscriptions to Breaking Points. We used to have those, and then it switched to just annual. But sometimes it's

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I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Some big news with regard to the economy. An interesting exchange between a Republican senator and Howard Lutnick asking

about, hey, okay, so what does Vietnam, as one example, actually need to do to be able to come to some sort of a beneficial trade deal with this administration? Let's go ahead and take a listen to this exchange. If Vietnam, for example, came to you tomorrow and said, OK, Mr. Secretary, you win. We're going to remove all tariffs and all trade barriers. Would the United States please do the same? Would you accept that deal? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

That would be the silliest thing we could do. Why is that? Vietnam has a $125 billion exports to us and imports from us $12.5 million. And you're thinking, Vietnam exports $125 billion? I'm aware of the figures, but tell me why you— But where do they get it from? They buy 90 billion from China, then they mark it up and send it to us.

So you wouldn't- They're just a pathway of China to us. You wouldn't accept that deal. No, it's a terrible deal. We're the one with money. We're the one with the store. Of course they want us to take down. What's the purpose of reciprocity then?

Is reciprocity not one of your goals? Are you telling the president that we shouldn't seek reciprocity? If that's what you're telling him, why are you trying to do these trade deals? So are you or are you not seeking reciprocity in these trade deals? We are thinking,

we are absolutely seeking reciprocity with respect to things that can be reciprocal. But you just said- But when they're importing from China and sending it to us, they're not. You just said that if a country came to you and offered you the ultimate reciprocity, no tariffs, no trade barriers in return for us doing the same, you would reject that. Of course, because they buy from China and send it to us. Don't you agree with me? Suppose they said we won't buy from China.

Now we're talking. And there's actually a lot to say about this with regard to Vietnam specifically. What he's referring to there is the issue of, they call it trans shipping, where it's like, okay, well, we've got tariffs on China, but maybe some companies will just ship their goods from China. This is illegal, by the way, but it still happens. We'll ship their goods from China to Vietnam to avoid the tariff. There has been also an effort in subsequent U.S. administrations to actually try to relocate manufacturing from China to Vietnam, you know, to sort of, since we have a close relationship with them, friendly relationship with them at this point. But it's, this is exactly the problem and why they have zero trade deals effectively at

this point is because if you say to a country, like, even if you lower your tariff barrier to zero, that is still a terrible deal that we won't take. Like, what can you do? Right. And to channel Sagar and also like Matt Stoller here, they would point out that the Commerce Department, even under Biden, did an investigation into, this was in particular with the renewable energy, clean energy industry, that China was basically shipping a whole bunch of stuff, producing the things in China, moving them to Vietnam, and then getting around kind of bans on monopolization. Because there's also another thing you can do to try to skirt the rules is you, you know, have it all but assembled and then ship it to Vietnam.

And then there's just a building where they just sort of put the pieces together and then claim, okay, this is made in Vietnam instead of China. Right. And so he says, hey, look, what if they say they won't take the stuff from China anymore? He says, now we're talking. But again, the problem here is that they're talking as if this trade war is still going on as a strategic thing that may result in some useful outcome for the United States when it seems like the world has decided that we don't have cards, that Trump just kind of popped off with these tariffs and is going to have to climb down. And so they're just kind of waiting him out. And then after that, maybe

we'll be able to sit down and create some new global trade regime that we're all satisfied with. But this is not getting us there. Yeah. And of course, significant that it's a Republican senator who was going that aggressive at a Trump administration official is rather noteworthy. Had some really bad jobs numbers yesterday that came out in the ADP private payrolls report. This isn't the big one that gets the most attention, but it also, you know, significant. The big boy is Friday. The big boy is Friday. And oftentimes, you know, this one sort of front runs. Now, sometimes they're totally disconnected and they show different numbers, but sometimes this is

also indicative of what we could expect on Friday. So put this up on the screen. Wanted to make sure to highlight this. Private sector hiring rose by just 37,000 in May. So, I mean, nearly flat. The expectation was that it would be 110,000. That was the forecast. And it is below the previous jobs report number in April, which was revised down to 60,000. And in particular, noteworthy here, Ryan, that one of the industries that actually lost jobs was manufacturing. Yeah, I have that here. The goods producing industries down 2,000 jobs, manufacturing down 3,000, natural resources and mining down 5,000. If the tariffs were creating investment here in the United States to produce goods here, to mine our own natural resources and to manufacture,

you would not see the numbers going down. We were not prepared to go into this trade war, which is incredible because it's not as if anybody sprung this on us. We chose the time and the place for this trade war, but had nothing ready. We caught ourselves unawares. We caught ourselves unawares. We had nothing ready for this. And China's like, hey, all those things you need for your manufacturing industry, we're also going to restrict those. And we're like, that's deeply unfair. How could you do that to us? How rude. Incredible. This is utterly outrageous. Incredible. And actually, let's go ahead and put the next piece up on the screen because this is a CBO estimate, which I don't even know how you estimate the impact of these tariffs and see who the hell even knows what they're going to be.

But anyway, the Congressional Budget Office, which we're going to talk more about in the big, beautiful bill block, they did an analysis and they thought, OK, if we left this in place because of the tariff revenue, you would see a reduction in the other hand, they say real economic output will fall on net, meaning that you're going to have a smaller economy. And if you are collecting a high level of tariff revenue, that means, Ryan, you have not actually been one is reshoring manufacturing, reindustrializing the country, the other being getting a whole bunch of tariff revenue in, those two things are actually at odds. The more that you reshore production, the lower the tariff revenue is ultimately going to be because obviously you'd be buying those goods domestically rather than importing them from abroad. And the 0.4 percentage point inflation over each of the next two years that the CBO includes in that analysis is quite significant. Like if your target for inflation annually is 2%, you know, that's 20% higher than your target just for that. And again, this assumes that they stay flat or that the policy doesn't change, which the policy has changed, I can't even count the number of times, just since Liberation Day.

So why would they change? There had already been policy vacillation before Liberation Day. So it doesn't make any sense to think that they'll stay this way for 10 years. Yeah, especially when you consider another administration. I mean, all of it is incredibly uncertain. It's almost worthless to do an analysis. But anyway, that's what they're saying, if you left the tariffs in place. Couple things we wanted to highlight here in terms of fallout already, early indications of where things could be heading. This was interesting, put A4 up on the screen. So the Trump officials delayed this report on farm trade because they didn't like what it said. Effectively,

the report indicated that the trade deficit in farm goods had actually increased and Republicans had made a bunch of hay over a increase in the farm trade deficit during the Biden administration. So rather than just, you know, going ahead of schedule, putting out the report on time, revealing these numbers that are uncomfortable and inconvenient for the Trump administration policy, they just pushed the report off. And then some of the numbers, they're just like, yeah, we're just not going to put that part out. No. And the written analysis they haven't put out yet. And they're not even sure if they're going to. Now, the analysts are saying that the redacted version does match the original version. So like they didn't actually, in the end, monkey with the numbers. But this goes to what Trump keeps doing,

which is cutting off at the knees the real U.S. advantages that we have globally. And I agree with Trump that we need to rearrange our economic relationships and that the way that global trade is set up is damaging to everybody and should be rethought. But if you're going to rethink it, you have to build on what you have. And then you go from there to transform into something better.

What he's doing without building to something better, he's wiping out what we do have. And one of the things, going after all the universities is one. Making it impossible to build a manufacturing base is another. But what this does is it goes right to the heart of our hub as the financial services sector for the global economy. Like people, and this is crazy to think, but people trust American banks. Right. And people trust American financial analysts. We have all sorts of macro corruption. But on a micro level, people trust that if you give your money to JPMorgan, Chase, you know, you give your money to Bank of America, you get a loan from them, your pension is

whatever it is. Like, it's going to stay there. It's going to stay there. It's going to be there. And the activity is going to match the terms that you're offered and so on. That trust is very hard to win back. And part of the trust comes from the government data being considered reliable by everybody across the board. And you're already seeing, and I think we'll talk about this in a second, people questioning the BLS data because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that there's this hiring freeze and they had to do a bunch of layoffs.

And so they couldn't do the same analysis that they could do before. So they're like, we're not sure about these numbers. And what's so scary, now the commodities traders are waiting for this report. This is like every quarter, this report comes out, people trade. It's a big event. Right. For it not to be there. And then for people to be whispering, are they messing with the numbers? Right. Then you might as well be investing in China. China's big problem is people don't trust the

stock market. People don't trust the numbers coming out of the companies or the government. They think they're fudging the GDP rate, all this stuff. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. But the trust isn't there. We have the trust, and we're just going to just let it drain right out. There was discussion early on in this administration, too. I can't remember if it was Ludnick or Besson, but I covered it at the time, of changing the way GDP is calculated. Because this was at the height of Doge and the chainsaw and all this stuff.

And they're like, government activity shouldn't count in GDP. Right. Which is like so silly if you actually think it through. Not to mention there actually already is a metric that I can't remember what it's called. But it is, you know, GDP without the, you know, government and public sector spending. So if you want that metric, it already exists. They just didn't like the potential consequences of what they were doing with Doge on what it could mean with GDP. And so they're, you know, at that point, there were a bunch of, you know, a bunch of experts and analysts who raised red flags about them potentially monkeying with that data behind the scenes or, you know, trying to fudge the numbers so that they are

beneficial. And I mean, could you put that past this administration? Of course you couldn't. Right. Of course you couldn't. Like they will lie to you straight to your face every day. They will be confronted with directly contradictory, like definitive proof that what they're saying is blatant, complete lies. And it does not move them at all. Like Caroline Levitt saying that the bill actually decreases the deficit. Exactly. And yeah, and we're supposed to trust that they're not going to like monkey with the GDP or the jobs or the farm trade numbers. Like, of course, people are going to be like, I don't know if something that looked kind of bad was set to come out. You can definitely see them just kind of, let's round it this way. Let's round it that way. Let's push it off. Let's just not let

these numbers get out to the public. And the advantage China does have is that when their government wants to do things, they are broadly in strategic control of the direction that they're going to take. And the companies have to then feed off of that and follow along. Here, not the case. So you can put up this next element, Axios reporting, same thing we saw in the Biden administration during COVID and supply chains, but now this time, companies may be using the new tariffs as an excuse to raise prices across the board. Again, so we saw this during COVID. You started seeing inflation kick in and all of these companies who have market power, in other words, you can't go somewhere else to get the thing, started raising their prices and blaming COVID or blaming supply chains.

And then when you look into it, oh, wow, their profits are way up and their profits are significantly up over what the input costs are. And so what they did here with this report is they looked at companies that do not have tariff-related implications. Right. And saw significant increases there as well. Well, some of them admit it. So you have a heavy construction equipment supplier told the New York Fed they were raising prices on goods unaffected by tariffs, quote, to enjoy the extra margin before tariffs did increase their costs. I like extra margins. They're very enjoyable.

Of course. I like to enjoy those extra margins. What company wouldn't want to enjoy those extra margins? Some of what is being done is somewhat justifiable because rather than putting the entire cost of one tariff on one good, they're like spreading it across. But there's an, I didn't really, I just learned this recently, there's an industry term called taking price, which effectively is when your competitor, when you have the opportunity to raise prices and you have some sort of an excuse, you're going to do it. You're going to take price. And we also know from the COVID shocks

that once those prices go up, guess what? They're not rushing to, even after, if they had real cost increases, once those costs go back down, your prices do not go back down. You ain't going to give up price. No. Once you've taken that price, you're not going to give up that price. So, yeah. And so, meanwhile, Trump is finding that, yeah, things with negotiating with China are not as easy as he thought it was going to be. It's incredible. He's talking to Xi tomorrow. He's been pining for this.

We'll put this next element from The New York Times up on the screen. He's been pining for this call for a very long time. Crazy headline for The Times. Trump bemoans how, quote, hard it is to strike a China deal with hard and long. It looks like one of our headlines. Yes, it does. With the caps and everything. The New York one of our headlines. Yes, it does. It's like, is this New York Times? It's on YouTube now?

All caps, H-A-R-D there. And so it looks at this true social where Trump said, I like President Xi of China, always have and always will. But he is, and this is all caps, very tough and extremely hard to make a deal with, three exclamation points, with the Times saying Politico had reported that Trump has grown, quote, obsessed with holding a call with Xi. But as they report, Xi is showing no interest in making a deal because he doesn't have to.

Yes, China needs the United States as a market, but we need China more. That is very clearly the sense. And they note that Bloomberg reported that China is now talking to Airbus about buying a whole bunch of planes from there. Like China is doing everything it can to try to reduce its dependency on either American exports. Like the last time he tried this, China was like, let's stop buying so many soybeans from the U.S. and went to Brazil. And now they have this locked in relationship with Brazil, which is leading to enormous amounts of rainforest getting whacked.

And it has also like very much hurt Iowa and other soybeancing parts of the country because it just never came back. So they're figuring out how can we find other markets for our goods and also how can we find other places where we can buy what we need. Yeah, and these were adjustments that they made prior to this trade war. So unlike us, they actually— They've been thinking about it. We haven't. And their largest trading partner is no longer the US. If you count the ASEAN countries as a block, that actually is their largest trading partner now. And our share, we're still a gigantic

customer, still very important to them. I don't want to diminish it. But our share of their exports has significantly declined over the years. So it's not the same dynamic that it was even five years ago. And we talked about this briefly yesterday, but the hardline kind of anti-China president in Korea, you know, tried to do a self-coup to like get more power, lost. Six months later, the election comes around and the more pro-China center-left candidate wins, the more pro-U.S., anti-China conservative candidate loses. And so that area of the world, their area of the world, you know, gets more friendly to them. Again, everything Trump is doing is systematically turning the world against us. Well, and check this next

one out in terms of unintended consequences and the policy having exactly the opposite impact of what this administration has claimed to be their goals. Put this up on the screen. A number of U.S. automakers now are considering moving some of their auto parts manufacturing to China. Why? Because China's put into place very predictably these rare earth magnet export controls. They are absolutely necessary for the completion of automobiles. And so you have several, both EV and traditional automakers who were like, maybe we got to do part of this in China. And maybe, by the way, long term, maybe if the tariff regime stays in place, yes, we manufacture cars here for the domestic U.S. market, but for the rest of the world, maybe we relocate some of this into China. So, and again, this is incredibly predictable. I think anyone with a baseline knowledge of the

way China's been operating around the world to try to shore up these supply lines and how far behind we are in terms of that race to secure those minerals, those materials, could have predicted that this would be one of the ways that they would retaliate against us. And the automakers purportedly were going to Trump and saying, hey, we're going to be in trouble like really soon if we don't get this thing figured out. Right. It feels like we have a few years, and this is setting aside whether or not some massive war breaks out. It feels like we have a couple of years where we can reach some kind of detente with China and do a China. Everybody thinks China is like China. Everyone here in the U.S. thinks they want to rule the world or something. I don't think that's quite accurate. Like if we proposed a G2, basically, all right, it's a huge world. You're all the way over there. We're all the way over here. We're going to do a G2. We're going to share the world. We're going to cooperate where we can. We're not going to

be in direct conflict. We'll compete, but we'll compete fairly. And a rising tide lifts all boats. Otherwise, a U.S. that doesn't have some sort of soft power projection is basically Brazil. That's what will be long termterm. Very, a lot of similarities geographically and resource and demographically and historically between us and Brazil, but we became much more of a global power. They didn't. So they've got, they have the same amount of kind of runaway inequality, but they don't have as much wealth. So they've got favelas, whereas we have, you know, you'd much rather live in our favelas than theirs. Yeah.

But that's where we're headed if we don't reach some kind of detente, is my take. Yeah. There's a world in which that the Trump administration is rushing towards, which is just zero sum and based on hard military conflict. I mean, they're, you know, getting rid of all the soft power. And obviously the bill, and this would be a good transition to the beautiful bill, increases our hard military power. Like that's seems to be the only type of power that they're interested in. There's a world that's zero sum where we are directly at odds in a way that is both dangerous and also, you know, economically terrible for us. And there's a world in which we, you know, care about mutual cooperation coexistence.

And I would say that world has never been more important, given the fact that many of the challenges that face the globe are truly, truly are global existential challenges in which you will need to work with China and other countries around the world. And, you know, instead they have this sort of like bunker prepper mentality, something Naomi Klein's been talking about. Just take the prepper mentality and extrapolate it out to a national basis. That's effectively the mentality they have. Right. And on the hard war side, and we should do a segment on this, get somebody on, maybe even Maz, my colleague Maz Hussain has been studying this a lot.

It's not obvious that we would win. We have a corrupt backwards Western kind of military industrial complex. When is the last time one of our military adventures went well? And here's some bad news. In India, Pakistan, the U.S. asked Pakistan not to use airplanes that we had provided to them because, you know, for geopolitical reasons, you don't want, they don't, you don't want a U.S. made bomb and a U.S.-made jet killing Indians. So stand down on that. So Pakistan said, okay, we're going to use a bunch of these next-gen Chinese weapons that we have,

both anti-aircraft, both air-to-air, surface-to-air, and warplanes as well. And India is much, much richer and bigger now than Pakistan economically. Right. And Pakistan outperformed. The Chinese weapons that people in the military industrial complex world called it kind of China's deep-seek military moment. These Chinese airplanes knocked a bunch of Western airplanes out of the sky and, you know, cheaper and more effective. So it's like, hmm. So Pakistan's, which, you know, was in that case a proxy against India for China, showed that this is not, already this would not necessarily go well for us.

90% of all drones are produced in China. Right. So how do you think about the future of warfare, which is already arriving, if you look at Ukraine versus Russia and what they were just able to pull off, even though they're a much smaller country, much smaller population, much smaller industrial base, what they were able to pull off inside of Russia. And, I mean, a lot of that war is like drone versus drone at this point. And, yeah, we are dramatically behind. Dram dramatically behind. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

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She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

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

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corps vet. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's go ahead and transition to the latest with regard to the beautiful bill. A lot going on here. So Steve Bannon making some interesting comments about the nature of what you would actually need to do if you cared about deficit reduction. And he has been saying for a while now you really need to lift taxes on the rich. Let's take a listen to that. I want to stop the dead bomb, Elon and the guys on Capitol Hill. You're going to have to raise taxes. The wealthy can't get an extension of the tax cut. That's got to go to the middle class and the working class.

That has to be extended. It has to be made permanent at 40 percent of the top bracket of 40 you pick them that's got to go to 39 go back to 30 snap back to 39 and a half percent to go to 40 the math simply doesn't work there are no doge cuts let me repeat this and this is not usa id those are programmatic things i'm talking about waste for where's the fraud in Medicaid? Which is where is it? They haven't showed up with any. Has anybody been turned over to DOJ for fraud?

The problem with Musk, and I said this from the beginning, he gave false hope to this political class who doesn't want to cut anything. The reason, if the big, beautiful bill's got all these problems and it has some issues, he drove it because he promised a trillion dollars, ladies and gentlemen, $1 trillion that got him off the hook. It's time for everybody to grow up. Run around, oh, it's a,

show me where it is. The rescission next week is $9 billion and 2 billion folks as PBS and NPR. Give me a break. Didn't need Doge for that. Been fighting for that one forever. There's seven billion dollars in there supposedly of, I don't know, fraud on a seven trillion dollar. He committed to what he committed to the president of the United States, one trillion dollars. So, Ryan, his position is basically like,

oh, well, the reason the big, beautiful bill blows up the deficit is because of Elon, because they actually took seriously, Trump included, apparently, this idea he was going to cut a two trillion or a trillion dollars, which I just I just can't believe that they were. I just can't accept that they are really that dumb. Like, do you accept that? Like, if you just look at the government and where it is and what you would need to do, were they really, they really thought he was going to cut a trillion dollars? I have, as you know, covered Congress for a very long time. Yeah.

Tell me. I believe. You think they're really, they're really that dumb. We are not sending our best. I mean, and he's trying to, so part of it, obviously, like, you know, I agree that they should lift the taxes on the rich. And also, by the way, when they say lift taxes, they just mean like, don't cut taxes as much as is planned to in this bill. But in any case, um, it is, I'll say this. Yeah. Every time I speak

with a member of Congress whose lights are on, it is a revelation to me. It's like, it's like, oh, awesome. I found you have You have a working brain. Republican, Democrat, like this is somebody who has an idea of what they're talking about. Yeah. And that is very unusual. That is not the normal member of Congress. And so he's saying effectively like that Trump too bought this idea that there would be a trillion dollars in cuts made by Doge and then they could just like go wild in this bill and spend whatever they want, most of which is, you know, gigantic tax cut for people who really don't need that tax cut. And that would be a-okay. And that they were caught unawares again that, you know, this wasn't going to happen. But I mean, also this also doesn't really hold up to any level of scrutiny

either because by the time this bill is being crafted, it is already abundantly clear that Doge is utter and complete failure. And he points to the thing that you've been pointing to, basically like, okay, if there was fraud, where are the indictments? Like, name, give me one instance of, one, a single one. Not things you didn't like, not things that were DEI, not departments like USAID that you just don't think should exist. Actual fraud, of which I am quite sure exist within the federal government budget. Not a single instance, not one. Right, right. They would be frog marched in front of the.

We would all know every detail. We know their name. We know their middle name. It'd be one of those people. Yes. Like a presidential assassin. And so Elon Musk going all in. It reminded me in the book where there's an anecdote, the Elon biography.

I'm sure you remember this, where he plays poker. And he has no idea how to play poker. But he wins, like his first night, he wins a decent amount of money. And somebody was like, you know, how did you do that? You don't even know how to play poker. He's like, I just kept going all in constantly. And then when I would lose, I would just buy back in and go all in again. And if you do that and you have unlimited funds and you outlast everyone at the table, you will eventually take all their money. He's right about that. I feel like that's been his approach to politics. He clearly doesn't know how politics works, but he just keeps going all in. He went all in,

taking on Boeing and the rest of the kind of rocket companies. And it worked. Huge credit to him. Taking on those incumbent industries and staking a position and then becoming kind of a dominant player, incredible. And a huge risk went all in. Then he went all in with Trump, putting so much on the line. Because if he lost Democrats were like coming for him on a lot of different levels. Went all in. But then he loses because he went all in on Doge. So he's like, oh, and he had no cards. So he loses the whole pile. Now put up this next element. He's going all in against Trump. He says, in November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people. And he's talking about voting for this bill. It was a party line vote in the House.

I was going to say all but what, five Republicans voted for the bill? So be my guest, brother. Yeah. So now he's saying he's going after all politicians. Now, will he do it? I don't know. But saying it is pushing all your chips in. Yeah. And I mean, from my reading of him and his history of biographies, whatever,

this is just how he operates. He's one of these, I'm sure you guys probably know people like this, who don't feel like they're living unless it's all on the line. And he's one of these people. Like if he's not risking everything, complete collapse, humiliation, bankruptcy, then he doesn't feel like he doesn't feel like he's really alive. And so I've been saying for a few weeks now, I could totally see him doing another face turn. Because remember, Elon was Elon and Obama had a great relationship. Obama basically saved both SpaceX and Tesla during his administration. You know, Elon was, you know, much more on the sort of like democratic liberal side of the equation, which just shows you these guys, like even in his complaints about

this bill, it's all about his own interests. He doesn't like that the EV credits were stripped down. I don't like that the EV credits were stripped down either, but that's, he's mad about that. He's mad about the fact that Trump pulled his NASA pick, which obviously very important to him with regard to SpaceX. But I could totally see him trying to do a face turn and go back to the other side of the political party. And there would be plenty of people in the Democratic side who would be happy to welcome him back in, at least at the elite level. I think at the grassroots level, once you've done your Roman salute and all the things that he's done and all the things that he's said and the

way that he has just completely made himself the most toxic figure on the planet to your average normie Democratic voter, I think that is going to be very hard to forgive and forget among the base. And I think he's also genuinely very concerned about the deficit impact of the bill, the debt impact, because if the United States enters a period of high interest rate service on our debt, that means that both private companies and the federal government are going to have less money to spend on his Mars mission. Yeah. So this is in direct competition with his life's mission. And I do think my reading of Elon is that that is the life mission, the making humans interplanetary and going to Mars as ridiculous and absurd as it seems.

I do think that that is his life mission, and that's why he jumped into government, because he realized it's not something you can do as a private company on your own. You basically need that mission to be backstopped by the Treasury of the United States of America. But we have to be like a, you know, functioning, wealthy nation with the ability to borrow and spend on something like a, you know, fantasy mission to Mars. And so I think you're right about that aspect. I think if he spent, curious for your take on this, imagine this, let's say he spends $4 million against Mike Lawler, Republican in upstate New York, who is one of the key targets. And he spends $4 million on a handful. I mean, Mike Lawler's going to lose anyway, isn't he? I don't know. It's going to be very close. He could hold on. And we'll see what the

world looks like in a year. But let's say he spends $4 million on 20 different races, $80 million, and helps Democrats win back the House. I think most activist Democrats are instrumental enough. They'd be like, welcome back. But, I mean, the level of destruction he did and gleeful destruction with the chainsaw on the stage, you know, just, you know, demonstrating such cruelty. Yeah. The Roman salute, elevating all of these freaks on Twitter. Yeah. I don't know elevating all of these freaks on Twitter. Yeah. I don't know.

Those are in competition. Where do you think they land? I think it depends very much on the kind of intra-party fight in 2028, you know, whether you have – because right now there is so much energy among the base and among the American people more broadly for, fighting oligarchy. And he is the symbol of that. And so, you know, I mean, he made himself the symbol. He's the richest man on the planet and he has spent his time in government destroying social security, you know, killing kids in Africa. I mean, it really is grotesque. Not to mention the like carnival level imagery of him on the stage with the chainsaw and the glee that he took in destroying people's lives. So while I think the elite leaders of the Democratic Party would be happy to welcome

him back in and happy to take his money, I think that the Democratic Party base is headed in a more radical anti-billionaire direction, and that is not going to be something that he would be able to coexist with. Let's hope. It would be very funny to go. It's already funny that he's going from, we must elect all these guys to save Western civilization. Right. Two years later, we must throw them all out of office. Right, right, to save Western civilization. Western civilization was overrated. Anyway, so Trump is unsurprisingly a little bit annoyed by this. Let's roll B3 because it's kind of funny. I think the Elon Musk thing really caught the president by surprise. And I hear

he is furious, but I think he's so smart to keep his powder dry because he just plays into what critics would have to say. The right can't get out of their own way. Instead, just you have a goal. Pass it. Elon Musk is not in the Senate or the House. Don't worry about it. Can I offer a different perspective, Ainsley? As someone who is supportive of the president's agenda,

I am upset with Congress right now. I don't blame the president for the big, beautiful bill. I blame Congress because they go to their constituents every single election and they say they're going to cut spending. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And it doesn't seem like there's a willingness to do that. But I don't think Elon is anti-MAGA now or anti-the president now. He worked so hard, put a lot of stuff on the line to get a lot of wasteful stuff cut. And it doesn't seem like Congress is showing that.

So I thought Elon was very respectful in some of the original interviews, just saying, look, we have differences. I don't agree with him on everything. But this latest comment about calling the big, beautiful bill a disgusting abomination. I was shocked to hear him say that. I can understand why the president would not be happy about that. This is someone who worked on his team. You know, I want to die and come back as Donald Trump. This guy, if he comes out hard against Elon Musk, the base loves that he did that. If he's mad at Elon Musk but is too afraid to say a word, he's savvy and sophisticated. That's right.

Art of the deal. If he writes a good, big, beautiful bill, then he's a genius for writing a great piece of legislation. If he writes a bad, big, beautiful bill, then it's not his fault. It's actually the people in the House. He was betrayed. He was betrayed. Like, there is nothing that he could do that would warrant even a second of criticism on that network. It's truly just absolutely phenomenal.

I mean, that was Steve Bannon, too, of like, well, it's not Trump's fault. Bannon still has not come out and said, vote this bill down, which he, despite the fact that Bannon has been enormously critical of it, and I love hearing him rip it apart, but he has so far stopped short of the logical conclusion, which is then don't do it. Bannon is a politician. He realizes that he needs his, you know, best chance of getting whatever things he wants and having access to power is by being on Trump's good side. He knows what that means. That's why he's so good at never criticizing. It's always somebody else's fault. It's never, it's Elon promised these things and didn't deliver and it's his fault. And you relied on his, you know, ability to find these cuts and he didn't do it.

So it's ultimately his fault. And you see the same kind of game going on there with the Fox and Friends people who are trying to make sense of this new world where Elon and Trump are at odds with one another. He did criticize Trump on the H-1B. Bannon did criticize Trump on the H-1B front. Directly? Directly. And every time he would say, we love you, you're the greatest. We've disagreed with you on this for a long time.

And I remember there was this Bannon interview that Bannon did when he was just a radio host in 2015 with Trump. And they were arguing about H-1Bs. Well, it looks like Bannon ultimately won that fight because at the time, Trump rhetorically backed the, you know, yes, we support H1B side of things. Um, but in practice, in terms of the policy, it's been Stephen Miller's policy agenda. And obviously they're going aggressively after, um, foreign students and visa holders. So, um, you know, ultimately he was savvy enough to know he could criticize Trump, not personally, just like on the policy and that, that he would probably win because he had Stephen Miller who Trump told, um, I Trump told I think it was MBZ and UAE. He told some emirates, some leader. And he's like, this is the guy who runs my administration.

That's how he introduced Stephen Miller. That's right. I think there's a lot to that. Yeah. Take the man at his word. Yeah. You see who was calling the shots in terms of speaking for the boss. There's some weirdness around the deficit conversation that's going on on the Republican side, because you have people like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, who are upset about the amount that the bill blows up the deficit. But the reason the bill blows up the deficit is because of these gigantic tax cuts for the rich that they ideologically support. And so there's, we can put the numbers up on the screen here. There's a chart that they assembled, Steve Ratner actually assembled, but I think it's useful to look at that shows how much this does blow up the deficit compared to other large packages in recent

years. I mean, the bipartisan infrastructure bill is nowhere close, but even if you look at the American Rescue Plan, which was the first COVID package, the CARES, or sorry, which was the second one, the CARES Act, which was the first one, the original Tax Cuts American Rescue Plan, which was the first COVID package, the CARES, or sorry, which was the second one, the CARES Act, which was the first one, the original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was the original giant giveaway to the rich. You know, this blows these out of the water. But they can't really say that because they're supposed to be really ideologically committed to the tax cuts and also because they're supposed to be really ideologically opposed to the CBO and scoring the tax cuts in like anything approaching a reasonable way and not just pretending like tax cuts are fairy dust and

they make deficits magically go away. So instead, they've been honing in on, well, it increases the debt ceiling. And that's what we really are opposed to. So what do you make of some of those dynamics there? Yeah, it's cowardly because the debt ceiling is not a real thing. It's a manufactured product of an old, very old way of thinking about financing the government. And it's ridiculous. And I've said, you know, I got to be consistent here. It's a ridiculous thing. Yes, it should go away. The Congress appropriates money and authorizes the Fed or the government to borrow certain amounts of money to pay for particular programs and to do particular spending. They do that. And then we throw in this extra step where you have to then also authorize the limit on which the debt can be generated.

It's like no other country does this. You already did all those things. Like you pass all those things, like get, get rid of this thing. And so I, but it lands for voters because it's one thing and it's one number. Like you want to borrow $5 trillion. That's crazy. That's an insane number. And so for a politician, it's easier for them, I think, yeah, to just latch onto that. Did we just have the Russ vote? Yeah. Put B6 up on the screen. No, we haven't talked about this yet. We've got a Russ vote tweet here, his spin. OMB director, this is the brains of this operation. Like this is the real revolutionary. This is the Project 2025 guy. Yeah. You know, he's the one.

What did he say? He thinks federal government workers need to be put through trauma or something like that. Yes. Like he is. This guy is hardcore. He and Stephen Miller together being basically the two most powerful people in this government is just a startling turn of events over the last hundred years. Like these are absolutely revolutionary gentlemen. So he writes here, OMB just reviewed the new CBO score of the one big beautiful bill.

It confirms what we knew about the bill at House passes. The bill reduces deficits by $1.4 trillion over 10 years. When you adjust, there's CBO's one big gimmick, not using a realistic current policy baseline. It includes $1.7 trillion in mandatory savings, the most in history. If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture. And so he does two things here. One is he says it's not fair to use the CBO's approach. These tax cuts were never going to expire. So we should not assume they were going to expire and then count that against us. Except the problem is Wall Street and the bond markets, they think about it much more closely to the CBO. The CBO and the bond markets agree. Therefore therefore the bond market has a say in this.

And that's where the movements in interest rates are going to come from. The second thing he does is he bullies OMB into giving him the numbers that he wants. Like he runs the OMB. And he's going to start with a conclusion and demand that they generate it. And this I know from sources inside OMB, and there's been plenty of reporting about this. And so what he told them basically is, you need to conclude that cutting all of these taxes is going to produce X amount of economic growth, which will then lead to more tax revenue, which will then cut the deficit. Right. Maybe it will. There's but there's no reason to think over the all of

the years that this has been tried, that that is what would will actually happen in practice. No, of course not. Because they'll just like, you know, rich people will not. You said this. Well, it certainly will not increase the real economy. There will be more share buybacks and things of that nature, more financial engineering, more inequality. It doesn't need the taxes. There will be all of that for sure. But, yeah, I mean it's – and the other thing is here in terms of the gimmick, what he's saying with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and what he's talking about with the policy baseline is when they pass that bill, part of what they did to monkey around with the numbers and make sure that it didn't say an even more gigantic number that was being added to the debt and the

deficit was that they had a technical sunsetting of these rates. And now you say, oh, we never intended those rates to go away. So you shouldn't, now you shouldn't count it in. So they didn't want to count it in the first time. And now they don't want to count it in now either is that that's the, you know, the fuzzy math that they're engaged in here, Ryan. Right. And so Russ Vogt testified yesterday in Congress about the dire consequences of not passing the big, beautiful bill. Let's roll this. If H.R. 1 fails, if whatever comes back from the Senate fails to get to the desk of the president and signed into law, what happens at the end of this year? I think we'll have a recession. I think we will be – economic storm clouds will be very dark.

I think we'll have a 60 percent tax increase on the American people. lawyer's question or statement, the notion that this bill, and we've been actually criticized unfairly on the reconciliation bill for the fact that it is all mandatory savers. I mean, you said, look, we need to address the mandatory side of the house. There's $1.7 trillion in mandatory savers on the reconciliation bill. Do we need to do things on the appropriation side, the discretionary side? Yes, that's what we're here to talk about with rescissions and the budget that we've sent up to you. But we have to get back to what we did in 1997,

where we had, for the first time, substantial mandatory reforms around not just cutting people and just getting people off programs, but reforms, a work requirement. We're using the same model that Bill Clinton signed into law, and we think it will have incredible impact on not just these programs, but giving people dignity of work. And we're not going to be ashamed by that. Mandatory means, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, those types of projects.

When Bill Clinton and the Republican House and Senate did this last time, the way that they saved money was by kicking people off programs. So he's saying right there, we should do it like Bill Clinton did. And Bill Clinton also did work requirements in order to kick people off the programs. CBO says that if this bill goes into law, 10 million fewer Americans will have health insurance coverage, mostly from getting kicked off of Medicaid. But there are also some changes to the Affordable Care Act and Medicare that will lead to losses in coverage. So you're talking about 10 million more Americans losing their health insurance coverage in order to fund giant tax cuts for the rich, not to mention cuts to SNAP and food stamps as well.

Right. And unfortunately for all of us, those people don't stop getting sick, having heart attacks, having diabetes, having health complications that need to be treated. So you don't actually save money out of the entire economy. You're just moving it around. And it's cheaper to give people Medicaid as a society than it is to treat them in the emergency department. We have the most expensive health care regime in the developing world, in the world, because we have these little piecemeal and you've got to pay and millions of people don't get coverage at all. And it ends up being incredibly penny wise and pound foolish because at the end of the day, what you end up paying for is the most expensive type of care where people don't go to the doctor. They don't take preventative measures because they can't afford to. And then you're at the emergency room, you know, in crisis, which is obviously terrible for human beings and also, you know Court struck down the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare,

that left it up to each individual state for whether or not they would expand Medicaid. Most of those red states had to be pushed by the people in the states. So a bunch of red states only expanded Medicaid via constitutional amendment. They would put it on the ballot. The people went out and voted for it. We thought, okay, this is over. Everybody's fought for this, and now the Medicaid expansion is in there. But you get a revolutionary-like vote in there, and he's going to then cut the Medicaid federal match that goes to these red states. But look what happened. They put it in their constitutions. So the red states

don't actually have the option of dialing it back. Like they have to spend this because they agreed to do it in their constitution. So now the red state has to either raise taxes or they have to cut spending somewhere else to meet their constitutional obligations. So who is he screwing here? Right. A lot of red states, a lot of MAGA, Steve Bannon would say. Yes. All right, let's go ahead and turn to Israel. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing.

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I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

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

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. So NBC's Andrea Mitchell has been attending the State Department press briefings frequently since the Trump administration began and has been pressing Tammy Bruce particularly on Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza as well as its starvation campaign and the collapse of its aid distribution project. Here's an example just from yesterday of the way that she's been going back and forth with Tammy Bruce. Andrea. Let me just follow up on that because no one should jump to conclusions. We all have reporters on the ground. Israel has not let U.S.-based reporters in, but we have partners there and staff members there who have been courageously there since

October 7th doing this job. And unlike other war zones in Ukraine, in Iraq and elsewhere where U.S. reporters have always been in Vietnam, this is the first conflict where we have not been able to go in except with IDF escorts. What he said was not just misleading reports and the fog of war, we all know what happens in some instances and we're not sure of these cases, but to suggest that the press reports fostered anti-Semitism which led to the death of the two embassy people here in Washington and to other anti-Semitic attacks in this country, is hyperbole beyond what is normal diplomatic practice.

And as a journalist and as a member of this press corps, I think it's deeply offensive for someone who has... Well, I don't speak for Ambassador Huckabee. I understand, Andrea. I know. I understand. And I understand the depth of your work and the work... Andrea, I understand your work, the depth of your work, the work of people who cover war and the dangers that exist. I don't speak for Ambassador Huckabee.

I'm not going to parse what he has said, but what I can tell you is that inevitably, as we have all watched, the kind of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism that has been promulgated through media has been nonstop even after October 7th, and that if you weren't involved in that and others who are not involved in that, that's not who he's speaking about. I would argue that it would be naive to suggest that the Jew hatred that, whether it's through social media, through fake news, through the rhetoric regarding Israel, through the years, has not as professional as either the UN, excuse me, or the World Food Program and other people who are used to working in this area, and that there should have been more distribution points where people would not have been told to line up.

Andrea, again, you know what, but these questions now, these are critiques of an environment that we've talked about regularly every day. Every time I'm up here, it is this critique of, I say, seven million meals have been distributed. But, you know, it would have been, but not for you. It should have been those guys over there or these people over here. Over the last three years with the UN or the World Food Program, no one has distributed 7 million meals to Gaza. Many, many hundreds of thousands of people in Israel, as well as the families of the people being held by Hamas, are protesting this food decision.

The former defense minister criticized these decisions. There's plenty of... Well, I'm sorry, Andrea. Andrea, I understand. I understand. I understand. So two different avenues there to unpack. The first one she's standing up for. Journalists saying it's unfair to say that the media is responsible for the embassy staffers getting killed. Yeah.

What do you make of that back and forth? I mean, first of all, it's just extraordinary that it's Andrea Mitchell in there. And, you know, even this administration is much more deferential to her than they would be, like, maybe to you, for example. We appreciate the depth of your work. Yeah, we appreciate it.

She's 79. I just looked it up. I mean, like, God bless her for being in there and mixing it up. She doesn't have to be doing any of this. So it's kind of wild to see that. And I think it's emblematic of you see her, you see Piers Morgan, you see, you know, German and French and mitchell obviously is like a mainstream media institution the idea that they have not been sufficiently pro-israel is so utterly preposterous as to not even be worth like dignifying arguing like it's just so absurd even to this day the

type of headlines you cover the washington post thing where they put out this obsequious apology because they only had three witnesses to this massacre. Oh, how dare we not give enough credence to Israel's complaint. CNN came out last night with 17 witnesses. Wow. 17 eyewitnesses. Wow. That's saying that it was Israel.

And the Washington Post still, you know, we're so sorry we didn't give proper weight to this this Israeli denial of the thing that everybody saw happen. Yeah. So, I mean, so I think the fact that you have even an Andrea Mitchell who's in there like this is ridiculous bullshit and going back and forth, I think that is very indicative of the moment that we're in right now. And the second set of questions goes to the first point. It's not the media that has created this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation crisis. It's Israel that produced this. It's not the messenger that you need to shoot. It's the IDF that is defending Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that is shooting all the people who are coming to get aid. And you keep seeing the administration and Israeli supporters saying that they delivered 7 million meals. She says, what do you want from us?

Nobody had figured out how to get aid in, and now all of a sudden we've gotten 7 million meals in this week. And it's like, well, first of all, that's not true that nobody had figured out how to get aid in. Yeah, they had quite an effective distribution system. Yeah, the aid agencies were getting aid in. And people weren't getting shot. figured out how to get aid in. Yeah, they had quite an effective distribution system. Yeah, the aid agencies were getting aid in. It was hard for them to get through the crossings because Israelis would sometimes allow no trucks, sometimes 10, sometimes 100. But once they got in, you know, aid was getting distributed and you weren't seeing chaotic scenes. So, but now you are. And so she keeps, she keeps highlighting this, this 7 million figure.

Uh, but if you do the math on that, there's 2 million people plus, um, in Gaza. That means that's, and they're talking about over a week, uh, you know, 7 million for a week, that's three and a half meals per week per person. And there is no aid coming from anywhere else. So it's not as if this is just supplementing what people are already getting. That's what people are getting. And that's on average. If you take their numbers at face value. If you take your numbers at face value. That's being the most charitable to them as you possibly could be. Eight agencies say you shouldn't. And because of the way they're chaotically delivering it, the strong are getting most of it. So maybe some people are getting 20 meals a week and most everybody else is getting zero.

Yeah. And they're not the kind of nutritious meals. Jeremy Lafredo for Dropsite News just went to an Unruh warehouse in Jordan. Maybe we can play that clip next week. And he tours it, and there's all this food expiring, but it's very precisely regimented for people who are facing malnutrition and for people who are only getting this in their diet. And so it's very precisely formulated to get all of the calories you need, all of the balanced diet you need. If you look at what

the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is bringing in, it's like, you know, pasta, right? It's like, it's not what aid organizations who've been doing this for a very long time would put together if it was up to them. So meanwhile, the isolation and the political problems facing the Netanyahu government both internationally and domestically continue. We can put this next element up on the screen. French dock workers are refusing to load machine gun ammo destined for Israel's army. This comes as, you know, Spain is cutting military contracts as there's a lot of pressure on the government of Ireland to abide by its own laws, which say that weapons are not supposed to be shipped through their airspace. And so at every, you know, kink in the system, there's increasingly increasingly there's going to be pressure.

I mean, here's what I would say. I think Chris Hedges was saying this to Hassan this week. The leaders are not going to do it. We're this far along. The leaders are not going to end this genocide. So it is up to actions like this to cut off the supply. And so to see these French dock workers standing in solidarity, it's quite significant. And we need much more action like that around the world. Meanwhile, a very interesting coalition of bedfellows is coming together to put pressure on Netanyahu. So the Haredi party is threatening to kind of dissolve the Netanyahu coalition. This is the ultra-Orthodox, this is, you know, the leading party for the ultra-Orthodox section of the Israeli public. And it's all over whether or not kind of Haredi men and women, you know, ultra-Orthodox men and women would have to serve just like everybody else. Every other

Jewish citizen of Israel, you know, has to serve in the IDF. And what's fascinating about this, and Amir Tabon also in Haaretz has a very useful kind of analysis that can explain how this, how the politics of this are all shaking up. But basically, there's a fundamental contradiction that can't be resolved. One is that Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir want a never-ending war to realize what they see as a once-in-several-generations opportunity to fully expel the Palestinians from Gaza. That's on the one hand. On the other hand is the material problem of not enough soldiers to carry out this genocidal task. Reconciling those two requires the ultra-Orthodox. There's no other way to get there.

It requires the ultra-Orthodox to participate in the military. And they don't want to do that. So what they are now, they're not saying out loud that this is what they're doing, but there is a belief among some in the ultra-Orthodox community that if the war ends, the pressure on them to participate in the military goes away because the pressure is being driven by the war. Right. goes away because the pressure is being driven by the war. And so a lot of people in Israel are saying, Netanyahu is not falling because of the Gaza war. He's falling because of this internal dispute within Israeli society, an internal religious dispute. And that's true on a surface level,

but it's only true because the war is making it something that can't be avoided. That's right. And we can put Shael's tweet here up on the screen. He's talking about Netanyahu was apparently recorded saying that the reason he fired Defense Minister Yoav Golan and Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi were because they were obstacles to allowing Haredi men that exemption from the army. This was a recording appeared on Channel 13, Netanyahu saying, we need to save not only the state of Israel, but also the Torah world. That is what I believe in, God willing. That is what we've done to do this. We need time to pass the law properly. So it cannot be challenged, the law allowing this exemption. We had huge

obstacles that we removed. You know, when the defense minister is against you, the chief of staff is against you, you can't move forward. Now we can. So, you know, exposing sort of how critical this fault line within Israeli society is. And the particular issue right now, obviously, is military service. But there is a broader, like, demographic, significant, longer-term demographic issue, which the ultra-Orthodox have, you know, the largest families. So much of the demographics of the state are shifting towards being ultra-Orthodox, but don't participate in the military. They basically don't work. Don't work, yeah.

And so the state really supports them. In the U.S. lingo, they're the ultimate welfare queens. And if you have a shrinking population that is of the more liberal – liberal in Israeli context, secular variety to support this growing ultra-Orthodox population, you're going to have long-term, very significant demographic issues so long as you continue to deny basic rights to Palestinians who also have large families. You know? Yeah. And perfectly willing to work, but that's off the table as a solution, apparently. Right. And which before October 7th, you know, Palestinians made up a huge portion of the labor force in Israel. You know, mostly West Bank, but also Gaza as well. And there have been efforts to bring in Indian workers and so on

that haven't worked remotely as well. The end of the Lebanon conflict, in the sense of having manpower in Lebanon, bought Netanyahu some time. It is classic Netanyahu that time. And it is classic Netanyahu that he doesn't have a solution to this irreconcilable problem. And so he's just trying to punt it forward.

Just trying to push it off. Just one more week, one more day, one more week. I mean, that's worked for him so far. So far, yeah. Last thing, let's go ahead and show this extraordinary footage, Ryan. And maybe you can explain what we're seeing here. This was posted by Dropsite News

of these two men who recorded themselves trying to obtain food and coming under fire from the IDF machine guns firing over their heads here. Yeah. And as you can hear in the background, this is these are Israel. These are gunshot. Let's be very careful here in our wording because we don't want to say anything that gets the IDF upset. These are gunshots. Let's be very careful here in our wording because we don't want to say anything that gets the IDF upset. These are gunshots coming from the Israeli positions. Bullets are emerging from Israeli weapons. But we can't know. Let's allow an investigation to play out before we figure out what really happened.

We need an investigation to figure out how it is that the bullet exited the Israeli weapons. I bet Hamas tricked them into it. And forwarded itself towards the Palestinians who were seeking this aid. But yeah, this is just another massacre, another debacle at an aid distribution site where they tell everybody, come at this time and, you know, basically first come, first serve. So, of course, when you have millions of people starving, you get chaos and then they shoot at people. And I believe they have, what, four distribution sites set up. Previously, you know, during times when there was a more fully operational

aid distribution network, you're talking about hundreds of sites scattered throughout the Gaza Strip. Now you have four sites in particular locations. It's a literal Hunger Games situation where if you were strong enough to trek the miles and miles you need to make it to one of those distribution sites and then to basically fight your fellow Palestinians in order to grab a box of this not at all nutritious stuff, and Brave being fired upon, those bullets exiting Israeli weapons, however that occurred. That's what they've set up here. And it is such a brutal and horrific and unconscionable system that even the Boston Consulting Group

has decided this is too much for them. And we, of course, originally had the American mercenary who was at the head of this thing. He dropped out before it even was put into place because he was like, Jesus, this is beyond, this is bad. This is beyond what I am even willing to do. And now you have this like, you know, completely soulless group of consultants who have also said, okay, we can't be involved with the quote unquote, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Yeah. And they claimed that they were doing it pro bono. Then there's, it's like, actually there's a reporting that no, they're getting millions a month or million dollars a week or whatever it was. We'll, we'll see. But yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's an absolute hell on earth. It's like Squid Games.

It's like you go back and listen to what these guys are putting up with to try to get a little bit of pasta in a box. The video of the American mercenaries who were there were like, oh, here they come. And it's just, it's so disturbing. I was saying this to you before the show. Like, there is no way that this policy unfolds of complete genocide and humiliation and dehumanization can unfold without all of the players involved just fundamentally not really believing Palestinians are human beings. Which is why they get so mad at Miss Rachel. For humanizing them. And then for the people who win the Squid Game and get one box, they smile.

They take a picture of them and post it on Twitter. And all these pro-Israel accounts share it and be like, look, what other adversary is feeding their enemies? And Tammy Bruce goes up and brags, oh, look at all the meals we're shooting. How can you complain about this? Yeah. You complain we're not giving them food, now you complain that we're giving them food. We can't do anything right.

Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. We'll be right back. the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war.

This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

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