Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/30/24: Kamala Vs Trump Panel, JD Vance ' Cat Ladies', White Dudes For Kamala Zoom Call, Biden SCOTUS Reforms, Shocking Secret Service Failure On Trump, Israelis Storm Torture Camp

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss JD admits Kamala replacement 'sucker punch', JD Vance 'Childless Cat Ladies', White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call, Biden proposes SCOTUS reforms, secret service aware of Trump shooter earlier than previously thought, Israelis storm torture camp.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We are very excited about the show today because we're going to have a big old election 2024 panel. They're going to tackle who's up, who's down. There was some leaked J.D. Vance audio revealing perhaps some electoral anxiety on that side. We're also going to get into the big cat lady debate, finally. It'll be fun.

Much anticipated. We're also going to have them tackle this whole Karen's for Kamala and white dudes for Kamala situation. So looking forward to hearing what they have to say about that. Also yesterday, Joe Biden announcing a push for major Supreme Court reforms. Kamala Harris joining that. So we'll break that down for you, what it means, whether or not it is going anywhere. More revelations. I feel like I say this literally every day about Secret Service failures on the day of the Trump assassination attempt. Now we have the text messages that cops and Secret Service

were sending to themselves, complete with pictures of the shooter an hour and a half before this all unfolds. I mean, it really is wild what we're learning at this point and how this 20-year-old was able to completely outsmart and stay ahead of all the cops and all the law enforcement that was there on the ground. We're also taking a look at some wild scenes coming out of Israel. This is going to sound like an exaggeration. It literally is not. A mob stormed multiple Israeli military bases in defense of the right of Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinians. I'm not kidding you. That's what happened. It's sort of like you take Abu Ghraib

prison scandal, you take January 6th, you put it all together in terms of American political context. So we're actually going to talk to an Israeli journalist about his thoughts as he was watching all of this unfold. And it's actually really shaken some of his own conceptions about his state, which is interesting. His viewpoint, he's sort of like a liberal Zionist. So really looking forward to speaking to him about what this means for the state of Israel. And of course, very consequential in terms of our support of that state and their continuing atrocities in Gaza. Yeah, I didn't believe it at first, but it's actually all true. And the way you know it's true is that even like the liberal Israelis are like, hey, man, this is totally out of control. So anyway, super interesting. Before we get to that, as we teased yesterday, we do a big

announcement now. Let's put this up there on the screen. We are offering a 30-day free trial of our premium subscription. The promo code is BPFree1. So let me repeat that, BPFree1. You can sign up for it at BreakingPoints.com if you're interested. This is just a way of saying thank you to all of our new listeners and subscribers on our YouTube channel. We hear you, we thank you. It has been an extraordinary month over here at Breaking Points, and we want to have you along for the ride. So BPFree1, go ahead and take advantage of that. You're going to get access to the show early, the locals, AMA, and all of the other premium benefits, which you'll see listed there in our description. So the videos it's in the description that it's in the podcast description. That's wherever it is. Or if you're just listening

and you just heard me say it again, BP free one at breakingpoints.com. And we're going to give you exclusive insights, benefits, et cetera, especially as we head into the convention. I'm really excited for us all to be on the ground there. We have some great stuff planned and they'll be the very first to hear about it. Yeah. So a lot of you all have joined us just in the past month because the politics news world, everything has been so crazy. So we wanted to give people an opportunity to try out a premium membership, see if they find added benefit to it. And also just to mention, we have some things coming up that I think you're going to find really interesting, including something that we should be

dropping later this week. So stay tuned for that. I won't give you all the specifics, but we have a lot of exciting things planned for this election season, which has suddenly become red hot. It's crazy. We thought we were going into this election of like, no one's really going to care about this matchup between these two dudes that they're sick of. And now suddenly, I don't know that I've ever seen interest in the political horse race as high as it is right now. That's the highest it's ever been. Yeah. So thank you to all of you who've been tuning in and supporting us and liking and sharing. And especially thank you to our premium subscribers. We really appreciate your support. That's right. All right, let's get to the panel. We are joined by an A-plus panel this morning. This is sort of like our inaugural 2024 political

panel. So you guys should both feel extremely honored. On the right, we have Ryan Gerdusky, political commentator and the author of the National Populist Newsletter on Substack, which I'm told Sagar highly recommends. I do. And on the left, we have Michael Starr Hopkins, who is a fantastic political commentator and host of It Matters. Great to see you, gentlemen. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. So we got a few different topics we want to tackle with you.

But I wanted to start by just sort of getting your general sense of where the race is today. And to kick that off, we just got some leaked audio from J.D. Vance on like a fundraising call where he's talking about Kamala Harris being switched in for Joe Biden and what he describes as a political sucker punch. Let's take a listen to that. All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch. The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might say, Kamala Harris is a lot younger and Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did. So Ryan, let me just start with you, react to those comments. And who do you see as the favorite in this race at this point? Well, I mean, what he said was true because Joe Biden was having serious issues, serious

cognitive issues. And Democrat internal polling showed them in a statistically tied race in New Jersey. And when you are behind in New Jersey and you're losing Virginia and you're losing New Mexico in your own internal polling, that's a really bad state for Democrats. So Kamala Harris changes the race in the sense that New Jersey is no longer a toss-up state with her as the nominee. That being said, Trump still leads in the head-to-head national polls by about a point, maybe a little over or under, depending on what polls you're looking at,

which he's never led before. He's still in a better race state than he was in 2016 and 2020. He still leads in all three major Rust Belt states. Republican voter party registration is significantly up in all swing counties. So in the end of the day, I mean, Trump probably still has about a 60% chance of being the president in January 2025. Michael, what do you think? I mean, look, Donald Trump got shot and then had the Republican convention and really saw no bump coming out of it.

So if I'm the Trump campaign, I'm worried. Yeah, they're in the lead right now, but Kamala Harris still hasn't had the convention. She hasn't named her VP nominee. You're seeing this huge enthusiasm boost among young people, among women, among African-Americans. I think it's really problematic for the Trump campaign because they've been running the same playbook against Joe

Biden for the last, you know, almost six years. Well, now they're running a very different race. And the things that I think they want to attack her on are really going to ignite that base of support among women and African-Americans. All right, so let's put this up there on the screen. Let's start with, what is it, A2, please, just kind of a general summary from Frank Luntz. And I want to get Ryan's reaction here to how some of the state of the race has changed. It says Kamala Harris is rebuilding a more traditional Democratic coalition, more pats to 270. Trump is more popular at any time than in the past four years, as Ryan noted. Biden's retirement is wildly popular, and RFK Jr. is significantly free-falling in respect to disaffected Democrats are mostly going to Kamala, while disaffected Republicans remain with RFK so far. So Ryan, strategically,

what do you think that the Trump campaign has to do differently now that Kamala is in the race, and perhaps either adjust messaging, address strategy. Where do you see their campaign right now? Well, that's the first time I was like, oh, Frank Luntz, let's hear all these mistakes he's about to say. We picked someone you both would dislike. Yeah. So I think what the Trump campaign more or less was doing to Joe Biden was running a very scaled back effort. I mean, they were letting Joe Biden hang himself in the wind. And every time he spoke, it was a negative reaction for Joe Biden. With Kamala Harris, they have to be a little more aggressive because 2019, when she ran for president, she took wildly unpopular positions that many people don't remember. So reminding people of the positions that she took,

now that she's running away from as fast as she possibly can, every position from Medicare for All to gun buybacks. I'm sure she's going to be against banning all plastic straws, which she said in 2019. I think that that's really where they have to sit there and switch. And I think it took them a second, a second longer than it should have, for them to really pivot into a different kind of campaign, one much more aggressive than the other.

But they are outspending Kamala pretty significantly in almost every swing state now. So, Michael, in addition to like, they'll get to Cat Lady and some of that stuff in a minute, and DEI and all of that, but the core argument that's being made by the official campaign apparatus and the Speaker Johnson's of the world is the one effectively that Ryan is making that Kamala Harris had these quote unquote extreme positions in when she was running in the Democratic presidential primary. She's already come out and said, I no longer believe any of those things anymore. I'm a totally different person. To me, that's more of the true knock on her is that she

doesn't actually have any ideological grounding. She shifts depending on what's convenient for her in that particular political moment at that particular time. But if you're advising the Democratic Party, how do you defend against that attack, either that she's a flip-flopper or that she's too radical, extreme, liberal, coastal, etc., etc.? Yeah, I mean, look, Kamala Harris has been called a lot of things. But at her core, she's been a prosecutor. She's been an attorney general. So the idea that she's too liberal, I think, is probably not something that's gonna stick. And look, when Republicans are running that Democrats are against plastic straws

and Democrats are running that Republicans are against abortion, I think that's gonna be a really problematic message because every hit that Republicans are gonna try to take on Kamala Harris is gonna be about liberal, about climate change, about things that really aren't driving voters right now. The thing that's driving voters right now

is fear that Trump's an authoritarian and fear about the banning of abortion and the banning of autonomy. And so it just feels very out of touch what Republicans are talking about right now. And it's why I think the label of weird is really working for Democrats, because what Republicans are talking about is weird. We'll save the weird debate that's coming for the cat lady section. Let's put this up there on the screen. Kamala Harris's favorability. And what it is, is that her morning consult, July 22nd, her approved disapprove was 43-51. Whereas after she entered the race, it is now approved disapprove 50-46. Almost all of that is Democrats who previously viewed her, you know, disfavorably and have basically switched.

But it represents something significant, Ryan, which is a very enthusiastic Democratic base that we haven't seen previously. So with Trump, how would he adjust in terms of thinking about the race where he no longer has the significant enthusiasm advantage that he once had? And what does it mean reaching out to swing voters? Does it just mean driving up that percentage even more? How would you see it? Well, I mean, Biden. So against Biden, yeah, he had a huge, huge advantage. I mean, Biden was asleep.

I mean, literally, he made Ben Carson look energetic. So I think that that's really a position that he was thriving in. I think that in, you know, against Kamala, the difference is as popular as she is, she's still 10 points behind non-white voters than Joe Biden was in 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal poll, New York Times poll. She's the worst performing Democrat ever with African-Americans since Richard Nixon. And she, once again, the campaign has really just began. She hasn't sat down for a major interview. She hasn't asked, hey, what did you know about Joe Biden's cognitive decline? They're going to make her own Joe Biden's issues over the economy, over the immigration.

Obviously, they've already started doing that. And I think for Trump, his campaign is run up the margins. Because she's doing so poorly with non-white voters, the Sun Belt still seems out of reach for her, although obviously Georgia's in a little bit of a tighter position. And he now still leads in every Rust Belt state. Pennsylvania is the only Rust Belt state, by the way, that the polls were pretty accurate for in both 2016 and 2020. And Trump's, you know, it's the RCP average,

but it's three points. On other polls, it's about two points. So know, it's the RCP average, but it's three points. On other polls, it's about two points. So in the state with the most accurate polling, Trump's lead is pretty substantial. So if you look at the, I was just going to say, if you look at the Fox News battleground polls, they're tied up in all those states with the exception of Minnesota, where Kamala Harris is up by six. So I actually agree with you, Ryan. I think it probably is 60-40 in favor of Trump at this point, because if you look historically at the polls, you're right to point out 2020 at this time, Joe Biden was up like nine points in these same polls. However, I don't think it's accurate to say that according to the polls, she is significantly down in the battleground states.

And she's obviously dramatically improved Democratic performance among young people and among all voters of color, black and Latino in particular. That's not true. That's not true. That is 100% true. That's absolutely not, Crystal, because what you're doing is you're looking- No, no, no, as compared to Joe Biden. As compared to Joe Biden post-debate where he literally said he defeated Medicaid and you both, by the way, had aneurysms live on air.

Yes, she's done better from that point. Right. She's about exactly where Joe Biden was in March, though. And she's still the worst performing Democrat right now among Latinos and Blacks in modern history. There's a reason for that, though. So when you talk to African-Americans, one of the biggest worries about her isn't whether she can win. It's whether white people will vote for her. It's very much the Obama-esque Iowa situation. Black support has a tipping point. We have to believe that white people will vote for her before we're willing to give our support. Now you're seeing this huge tipping point, which is why you're seeing the influx in voter support, especially among young people. You know, you see the African-American women for Kamala, the black men for Kamala. Now there's the Latinos for Kamala.

You're going to see a huge inflection point, which there's an undercurrent. Trump had that undercurrent in 2016, and we couldn't really poll for it because these were unlikely voters. I think you're going to see the same thing in this election. Among likely voters, Trump is winning. But among unlikely voters, new voters, young voters who aren't usually engaged, you're gonna see, I think, a 2%, maybe 3-point bump. Ryan, one thing just really quickly, I'd like you to weigh in on something I've been thinking about.

And I wonder if you think there's anything to this. When it was Biden versus Trump, it was very clear who was the change candidate, right? Biden's the incumbent. He is like, run and restore democracy, right? I mean, that's his whole, I want to bring things back to a pre-Trump era. That's his whole pitch, right? Very clearly the incumbent status quo candidate and Trump very clearly the change candidate. Kamala Harris, I think, scrambles some of that calculus and makes it a lot less clear. And I think she is trying to play for the lane of I'm the change candidate in a year where I think that's probably pretty compelling. Now, that may seem counterintuitive given that she's the sitting vice president of the country. But let's be honest, she was basically sidelined by the Biden administration. So she doesn't have that sense of incumbency around her.

And just by merit of the fact that she is a lot younger and she is a biracial woman, she feels really fresh and different, which is why you're seeing so much unbelievable off the charts enthusiasm, fundraising, etc. I mean, do you see that as a challenge that the Trump campaign is going to have to grapple with? What do you think are some of the weaknesses of the Trump campaign and mistakes that they're making at this point? That's a really good, really good observation.

I agree with that because on the surface, it does look like the change candidate. And then when you look and you boil it down to a lot of the positions, she is the vice president. It depends on how much of Biden's resume, Biden's time in office sticks to Kamala versus being a brand new candidate. I mean, the great irony of Kamala Harris is three weeks ago, she was online anyway. She was considered somebody

who looked at the show Veep and thought it was aspirational. And now she is the great savior of the Democratic Party overnight. I think a lot of things have to happen in the sense that I don't really, Kamala doesn't really have a campaign theme yet. It's only been 10 days. It feels a lot longer, but it's only been a few days. Over the next five weeks,

she will be testing since she'll have a VP, she'll have the DNC and she'll probably have her first series of really major interviews. And then we'll be able to sit there and see, okay, can she hold up to the expectations that have been presented by a lot of Democratic commentators? Because as of right now, she's a fairly untested candidate. She only ran for nationwide office once and it didn't go super well. So I think in the next five weeks is really where it's going to boil down.

Michael, you think that's fair, Michael, before we move on to Cat Ladies? Yeah, I do. I'll point out 60% of her donations in the last seven days have been from new donors. And I think that's the number that should really scare Republicans. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

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at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Cat Lady. People have been asking for it. Let's get into it.

We're going to have multiple days here on breaking points of Cat Lady conversations. First the male panel, then the female panel. So let's start originally Let's get into it. We're going to have multiple days here on breaking points of cat lady conversations. First, the male panel, then the female panel. So let's start originally with the J.D. Vance original comments. They've been making the rounds. Jennifer Aniston's very upset. The weird label has now been made, and it all traces back to this interview. Let's take a listen. Look, what I was basically saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.

And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? Ryan, this clip has basically gone everywhere amongst liberal women. It's supposedly very animating. What do you make of this, I guess, in the context both of the Vance pick, but more broadly, the pickup of the attack immediately after Kamala Harris became the nom or I guess the presumptive nominee for the Democrats, the circle. Do you think it's gonna be a problem broadly for Trump? What's your just reaction? I think, I mean, listen, Trump was shot two weeks ago and no

one talks about it today. I think it depends on how long this news cycle lasts for. It obviously wasn't a great rollout. That being said, I don't think that it was the end-all, be-all rollout. The whole thing about being weird is a different version of what Democrats have been saying about Trump for years, which is that he's not normal. I mean, I've had to hear not normal for a decade at this point over and over and over again. But at the same exact time, I don't know how much of a kill shot they think this is among the base. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, if their ticket improves among white men by two points from where it was or three points from where it was in 2020, he's going to an overwhelming landslide. It is that much of the margin. And of the women who are, you know, women, we have a very different split electorate among men and women. I don't know how many women they would have won to begin with as terms of women who are so deeply

offended by this that they won't vote for him. They might be deeply offended and they still vote for him. But I don't think that they are that deeply offended where they won't vote for him. They might be deeply offended and they still vote for him. But I don't think that they are that deeply offended where they won't vote for him. Interesting. Yeah, go ahead. Michael, do you think that it's kind of funny because the J.D. Vance pick comes at like the one moment when the Trump campaign really is riding highest, right? He just has survived this assassination attempt. We got the photo with the American flag and all this stuff. And right in that moment, because of the assassination attempt. We got the photo with the American flag and all this stuff. And right in that moment, because of the assassination attempt, all of the chatter about we got to pull Joe Biden off this ticket temporarily quieted so that people, myself included, thought, all right, Democrats are stuck with this dude. That's the context in which the

J.D. pick, J.D. Vance pick is made. Do you think given this comments and others that have been made, do you think that they regret that choice already? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, J.D. Vance was a self-gratification pick. No one really likes him but Don Jr. and Peter Thiel. And so I think, especially after that audio came out, I'd be surprised if Donald Trump is even talking to J.D. Vance. It's hard for me to believe that he would, you know, drop him from the ticket at this point. I don't even know if legally that could happen.

But if he could, I think there would be real conversation about it because the problem with J.D. Vance is there is no real audience for him. Like people just don't like him. He comes off as that guy who hangs around and thinks he's smarter than everybody, who just like hangs out in his basement. And, you know, as he tries to double down on Trumpism,

he lacks that kind of charisma that Trump has. You know, I don't like Trump, but there is a side of him, the way he talks, the way he kind of carries himself that, you know, you kind of laugh at. There's nothing to laugh when it comes to J.D. Vance. Ryan, we'll get your reaction before we actually play what Trump himself had to say. He's got tremendous support, and he really does among a certain group of people, people that like families.

I mean, he made a statement having to do with families. That doesn't mean that people that aren't a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else, it doesn't mean that a person doesn't have, he's not against anything, but he loves family. It's very important to him. He grew up in a very interesting family situation and he feels family is good. And I don't think there's anything wrong in saying that. All right, Ryan, give us your react, both to what Michael said and to the Trump clip. Yeah, Trump is just so funny.

I'm also very sleep deprived and semi delirious. So when it comes to what Michael said, you know, the election is won and lost in the Rust Belt. J.D. Vance is one of only two U.S. senators that are Republicans from the rust belt, I guess Indiana too, but of major states that are electorally for play, one of two Republican senators. He is also a Dynamo fundraiser who bring in tech money for Donald Trump that was previously off the ticket. He is also, if you talk about age dynamic, he's our first millennial candidate. You know, that's a different kind of thing. His life experiences of what majorly affected him in life is the Iraq war, is the WallStreet.com bubble, sorry, the real estate crash. Things that

affected us, things that affected people like you, people like me. And the fastest growing group of people who are becoming Republicans are Gen Xers and older millennials. And I think doubling down on that base is kind of very important. Yeah. Let me just say, though, I mean, yes, he's a senator in the Rust Belt. He underperformed every other Republican who was running as the lowest favorability. I mean, what you're talking about is basically like identity politics, right? Like, oh, because they're from the same region and they, you know, share the same identity, they're going to vote for him. And I saw an interesting analysis. I'm curious your thoughts on this, Ryan, that the childless cat lady thing, if it was just

that, okay, you're right. The news cycle is going to move on. It's going to be a blip that we all basically forget about, you know, very shortly. But it's indicative of a style that he picked up in order to both try to appeal to a MAGA base that was skeptical of him because his prior comments about Donald Trump. And also, I saw someone saying this online, which I thought was really interesting. He wants to change some of the economic orthodoxy of the Republican Party, but he doesn't wanna sound like a Democrat when he's arguing for something like the child tax credit. So instead of framing it like the way Trump does, like, oh, he just loves families. He's got to make it in this sort of like own the libs, aggressive, off-putting way where it's not I support families. It's I

hate people who don't have kids. So to me, that's the bigger problem with him is that he's adopted this like edgy online persona that is well suited to being a right wing online influencer, but is not particularly well suited to winning over a general election audience. Well, as someone who worked in the 2022 J.D. Vance Ohio Senate campaign, he was the only contender, as you said, he underperformed. He was the only contender against a serious opponent against Congressman Tim Ryan. Everyone else, I think the governor was running against a dog catcher from Columbus. And he was also the only non-incumbent. And so that's why how you get to a position where you are performing lower. Federal candidates are more competitive than state candidates are, especially against incumbents. The place in the state that he performed the most poorly and underperformed the most was actually the Appalachian region where you would think he had the deepest ties.

Right, but he overperformed in Cincinnati, which is the whole myth that he doesn't appear to appeal to city people or suburban people is also not true. I think he overper performed Trump in Cincinnati. But nevertheless, and yet still, the idea that he's trying to make this personality for himself that is not real. Remember, J.D. Vance was a literal celebrity in the 2015. He had a movie made after him

with Oscar nominees and Oscar winners. If he wanted to continue that route, with Oscar nominees and Oscar winners, if he wanted to continue that route, it would have been a much easier place to always be the white Republican who hates white Republicans. This is not an act. This is who he is. Can he be a little simpler on the campaign trail and speak in smaller sentences? Sure. But that's also what goes on with high IQ, very smart people, is they often talk too much. I don't know that it's the length of the sentences that's the problem here, Ryan. I think that, yeah, no, I think it is. I think that it's overly intellectualized ideas.

I think he'll get better over time. And once again, this race is won and lost by people who have went through his life experiences. There is no other candidate in this race. Marco Rubio did not have the life experience of knowing what the fentanyl crisis was like. You know, the governor of North Dakota, I forgot his name already, did not have the life experiences. Kamala Harris was living in Canada for portions of these things when she was being raised there, you know, before she came back to accuse Joe Biden of racism. This is a different set of things. J.D. Vance speaks to certain voters' life and they relate to him.

And as much as everyone's talking about, you know, the cat lady comments and all their stuff, the number one downloaded movie on Netflix all last week was Hillbilly Elegy. The number one bought book in the country was Hillbilly Elegy. People are genuinely interested in him. That is not being seen on Twitter all the time.

Yeah, that's a good point. So it's his lived experience, in other words. Yeah, they always say that matters for BIPOC women is their lived experience. It matters for millennials, too. I do want to get your reaction to this, Michael, because Ryan is correctly identifying. If Kamala wants to play to win, she's going for 270 electoral votes. You're not going to go on some go big strategy. All the conversation before we get to the whole, you know, Karen's for Harris, white dudes for Harris and all that is, I think, correctly identifying that you actually do need to win the white men and female vote at the same margins you did last time. So then in the VP direction for Kamala, which way do you think

she's going to go? Is it one that, you know, as you said, tries to excite, you know, younger or Latino or black voters, which obviously would be nice to have, but you really need white male voters in the Rust Belt. How do you think she's going to think about it in this context? Yeah, I think she's going to try to drive up some support among college educated men, but I think she's really going to try to drive up support among suburban women, among young women, young educated women. You know, just anecdotally to the cat lady comment, I talked to a lot of friends who have struggled to have kids. My wife and I, you know, we want to have a family one day and we don't yet. And one of the things that really hit with that comment was just kind of the meanness

of it. Because really, it's hard to have kids. It's expensive. There's, you know, if you go through IVF, that's $30,000, $40,000. And so when you talk down to a lot of these people and their struggles, I think that really could resonate among especially like suburban families, young families who are trying to get started, who already are having trouble buying new homes. And now they're trying to start families late in life. And they see people like J.D. Vance criticize them. It's something that among my wife and her friends, it's been a really big inflection point. So I think that's something the Trump campaign should really worry about. Yeah, it's possible. But it's not like your wife was ever going to vote for Trump anyways. So Ryan, that's any final thoughts, I think, from you, sir, just on this general dynamic as it continues and where you see that competition in the Rust Belt

and with Kamala and her VP pick that she might go in that direction. You know, I've heard all the names everyone else heard Shapiro Kelly I probably would say I guess and I don't have much insight but I think it's probably Kelly if I had to guess but Shapiro you know Shapiro has been making a fight for it Kelly's been spending a lot of money for it so we'll see and it's going to come down to you know those major three swing states I've not seen any evidence that the Rust Belt and the Belt's in serious play outside of where it's been. And, you know, we'll see. We'll see a lot of people, a lot of people from a political activist wanting to register a new house in Pennsylvania over the next couple of months. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

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

and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

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

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

What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, I want to get your reaction to these affinity groups that have sort of gone. I mean, listen, political affinity groups.

This is like oldest politics. Right. But so first we had a huge organizing call that was like black women for Kamala. Then it was black men for Kamala. Then we had other minority groups. And then we went all in with the affectionately named Karens for Kamala and the white dudes for Kamala. Let's take a look at a little bit of the content that is being created out of the Karens for Kamala Zoom call. Ariel Fodar, affectionately known as Mrs. Frazzle to her combined audience of over 1.5 million

followers, is here to help gentle parent us through this election. I'm going to share some do's and don'ts for getting involved in politics online and navigating the toxicity that comes with it. And spoiler alert, as much as the toxicity can come from the outside, it can come from us too. So first, don't isolate yourself. We can do our best work when we're in community together like we are tonight, because the toxic feels smaller when we support each other. But don't make it about yourself. As white women, we need to use our privilege to make positive changes. If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat. And instead, we can put our listening ears on.

So do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people, we have a lot to learn and unlearn. So do check your blind spots. You are responsible for your algorithm. So, Michael, I personally find this woman to as a white woman, as a member of the white woman community, I find this to be extremely irritating and off-putting. But more I, you know, when you start having white identity affinity groups, I get really uncomfortable. And I wonder what your reaction is, Michael. Yeah, I mean, innately, it makes you a little nervous. You get a white guy call, you wonder whether it's gonna end up like Charlottesville. But I think this is how, if it's gonna happen, how you want it to happen. I'm not afraid necessarily of the white guy call

in the white- But Michael, what if it's the white guys for Trump call? Then how do you feel about it? Yeah, it makes me nervous because of what has happened when white men congregate around Trump. In and of themselves, I'm not worried about a bunch of white guys together. That's just called a fraternity. But when you put them together around Trump, then other things start to happen. So I think there's got to be context to it. Ryan, you know, I think there's got to be context to it. Ryan, I know you're running low on time, so I want to get your reaction.

Because I actually saw you, not defend per se, but you were like, hey, it's actually smart to reach out for white people. There's a lot of white people in this country who vote. That would be great. Yeah, the real question is, should Trump just have white guys for Trump, white women for Trump, and all of those calls? Because clearly you can raise a hell of a lot of money whenever you do a phone call like this. I would have given someone everything I bank account of after she was done talking. They said, ma'am, this is a Wendy's. I literally was so insufferable. Yeah. I watched the white guys for Trump call. And the one interesting thing was they said, what policies is Biden champion that are positive for white men? That's actually a really important question.

One that people are not allowed to talk about. And I think that the, I really think that there is a new door that has been open in politics because of this. And we're going to talk about what are the interests of white people in this country and white voters in this country, by the way, which overlap with many, many other people. Some it's a white exclusive policy,

but there are a lot 200 million white people in this country and no one one has ever, one, asked for their vote, and two, specifically asked for their vote, and two, talked about policies that work in their benefit. We kind of have comments like suburban woman, blue-collar worker, which just means a white person of a certain income level. But I think that it's a really important conversation because there's millions of people. The reason Trump became president in 2016 was speaking towards people who felt marginalized and invisible. And maybe this is the very first step,

maybe not these calls, but the very first step to having a conversation to how to reach out to help the lives of people who feel marginalized and invisible. I mean, as a class first leftist, I find that I don't support that way of looking at things. Michael, I wonder if you feel that we need to do more, spend more time thinking about what would be good specifically for white Americans. Yeah, I mean, look, a rising tide lifts all boats.

So usually what helps white Americans should to some degree help other people, but that hasn't been historically true. And so I think, yeah, focusing a lot of attention on what's going to help white America, that's just the norm. So I think allocating our time towards making sure that groups, minority groups, subgroups are being lifted up is really the focus. But I do think you do have a little bit of a point in terms of the Democratic Party has to be better at talking to white men. Because as much as I talk to Democrats, when I talk to kind of independent and right-leaning men, they do feel like they're being left out of a lot of the conversation. And whether that's right or not, it's how they feel.

And so it has to be addressed. That's my last question actually for Ryan, which is, there has been a long obsession in Republican politics about increasing minority vote share. Obviously, this would change things in a different direction. Do you think then that because of the recognition amongst the Trump campaign, are they gonna continue to try and go down the blacks for Trump, Latinos for Trump lane, which very rarely, if ever, actually materializes? Or is it going to come down to the recognition of, as you just said, all we have to do is take Kamala's white male percentage from 17 to 15, and she's going to lose the entire election. How do you think they're thinking

about it internally? You know, from what I've heard is obviously they're looking to double down on Hispanic growth that happened in 2020 and black growth that happened in 2020 uh but that being said the election is about white voters white white voters in the midwest and the rust belt are the most important group people in this election and you know as the whole you know rising tie lifts all boats that's true but there are certain problems that are specific to the black community there are certain problems that are specific to the black community. There are certain problems that are specific to the white community. We have a suicide epidemic among middle-aged white men that is very specific to their group. We have had a fentanyl crisis. We've had a de-industrialization crisis. We've had a crisis in rural America that has

certainly affected them differently. We have a suicide crisis among white teenagers that is differently than among the homicide crisis among black teenagers. These are just different things. It's not wrong to talk about them, to them, about how to make their lives better, about what's affecting them. Talk about reducing crime and improving an economy.

Yeah, that helps everybody. But speaking specifically to the things that are affecting them where they live, that's something that people haven't done that Trump did pretty well in 2016 that I hope J.D. Vance and Trump do this time around. If memory serves correctly, the one demographic group that Democrats actually improved their performance on in 2020 was white men. That's true.

So I guess the Democrats are doing something right with regards to this group. Gentlemen, great to see you both. I really appreciate both your perspectives. It was great to see you both. I really appreciate both your perspectives. It was great to see you both. It really was. It was fun. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

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

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

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

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

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never 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. President Biden has decided to give us proof of life and that he does, in fact, exist.

He's decided to unveil a new Supreme Court proposal. He did it yesterday at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. It was replete, not only with the policy proposal, but with several old man moments. And so we will give it to you in all its glory. Let's take a listen. I'm calling for a constitutional amendment called No One is Above the Law Amendment. It holds. I mean, sincerely, it holds no immunity for crimes former president committed while in office. The second thing I'm asking for. We've had term limits, term limits for presidents of the United States for nearly 75 years after the Truman administration. And I believe we should have term limits for Supreme Court justices in the United States as well. Supreme Court's current ethics code is weak and even more frightening, voluntary.

Voluntary. Any code of Congress must be enforceable. Under the reform I propose, justice would be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, recuse themselves in cases in which they have, they or their spouses have a financial or other conflict of interest. Most people don't realize that Congress passed a law decades ago that says all federal judges,

including Supreme Court justices, have to recuse themselves in such cases. But the current justices insist on enforcing that requirement themselves without any public oversight or compulsion. Okay, so what we can learn not only from the speech itself, which by the way, we didn't even include some of the best tangents and others. It was truly something of a performance, is obviously Biden is trying to use here the mantle of the

presidency and his outgoing presidency to help elevate some of the best issues for Kamala Harris. Supreme Court has been a major flashpoint in the election, especially over both Roe versus Wade, but also the Trump immunity case and several other decisions that have come down as of late. Let's put this up there on the screen. Biden, well, at least somebody in the White House, laid some of the details out here in a Washington Post op-ed. It basically comes down to this. First is a constitutional amendment called the, quote, no one is above the law amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes that a former president can be committed while in office. Second would be a term limit for presidents for nearly 75 years.

We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. So I believe he supports an 18-year active service term limit on the Supreme Court. The third is, quote, a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. The court's current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from political activity, recuse themselves from cases in which their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by this code of conduct. There's no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt. So obviously, I mean, look, it could have been very, very different. There have been a lot of leftists

and other people on the right who've been very worried, or sorry, people on the right worried about leftist calls to pack the court and restructure the court and all that. I would say this is a relatively middle-of-the-road proposal. Yeah, it's a very moderate proposal. From the Democrat, in the mindset of the Democratic Party and their approach to the court. I don't think it was any surprise then that Kamala Harris immediately endorsed it. But this is an effort to try and get the court on the mind of Americans, especially in the context of Roe versus Wade. And I think it was interesting too, culturally, where people were like wishy about the Supreme Court, but I don't think people had particularly strong feelings. But Roe really significantly elevated the issue specifically for the Democratic base

to a level that has not been in quite a long time. On top of a lot of the Clarence Thomas investigation, plus just in general, I think a lot of Democrats are grappling with what those lifetime appointments look like in practice. RBG, obviously, her narcissism literally led to a Republican having the ability to appoint her seat. Currently, we have the diabetic Sonia Sotomayor, who's just refusing to step down for God knows what reason, right? And all of these, I think, are combining of the salience of the court and a lack of deference at this point, especially with Biden stepping down, to the elderly political elite refusing to give up power. So all those things coming together, it's a relatively strong position for Kamala to be on. And it's one of using the

office of the presidency here to try and bolster the Harris campaign. Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, it's a win-win-win from their perspective. The issues they're talking about here, I haven't seen polling specifically on a constitutional amendment, which is obviously like the furthest reaching of these and almost, you know, impossible to imagine there ever being a prayer of getting something like that, since it does have to require a constitutional amendment through. But in terms of the polling on term limits and the polling on a code of ethics, we're talking 70 and 75 percent support. Like it is as bipartisan a consensus as you can possibly imagine.

Because of course, there should be a code of ethics for the frickin Supreme Court. Most Americans would probably be shocked to learn that there isn't one. All other federal judges are subject to some sort of ethical code. So these are kind of like no brainers in terms of political issues. So there's a few goals here. As Sagar rightly points out, the Supreme Court has become deeply salient to the Democratic base in particular, in a way that it has always been very salient to the Republican conservative base. It's typically been Republicans who've been more interested in voting on Supreme Court appointments and Supreme Court politics. Now you have sort of the shoe on the other foot with Democrats being deeply interested and deeply invested in the Supreme Court so it raises the salience of the issue there it also

puts Republicans in a tough spot because who wants to be the one out there being like no I don't believe in a code of ethics that 75 percent of the country is like of course they should have so you know is it a game changer in terms of the political landscape no but it's part of a series of actions that Democrats are taking to try to make it clear that they stand on the side of issues that are broadly popular and put Republicans on defense having to defend positions that are broadly unpopular. which again is an issue. Child tax credit has 70% support, according to recent polls, and Democrats are almost wholly on the side of it, and Republicans are almost, with very few exceptions, on the other side. So they're trying to push this legislation and put these policy proposals out there that they support, that Republicans don't support, where the numbers are in their favor, and to frame the debate that way. They're trying their best, and they're

basically, look, I think these are all probably the correct moves. If I were them, that's basically the ground that I would play on to that. That interestingly enough, actually, that one, the child tax credit thing that they're talking about, you know, with Republican support. So the fact that it's going to get voted down, this is a major issue where you have a lot of these guys like John Cornyn and Mike Crapo and others have been whipping against the bill. And the truth is, is that a lot of them, you know, even though they do in principle support a lot of these business tax credits, they either, quote, don't want to give Biden the win or they straight up, you know, are against the child tax credit. I believe Josh Hawley said he would vote for it. I'm actually curious if Vance will make the vote and if he will attend the vote and if he will pass it,

which would compare with some of the discussion that we'll have later today. But yeah, this is one where I'm not quite sure how much it is all going to work, though. And this is only because, unfortunately, the issues have not been central to this campaign as of yet. Now, it possibly could be, you know, certainly. Abortion, immigration, the two flashpoints that the two want to really focus on, the Supreme Court Code of Ethics and all that is a proxy fight on abortion, which is why I think it's probably going to be a little bit more salient. But at the same time, you know, whenever we think about how Kamala and how the campaign is prosecuting themselves right now. From what we've seen so far, Kamala's two ads, and I believe there was another one this morning that I watched.

It's about her personal story. It's about, you know, the L of like freedom, very vague concepts. Same too, whenever I've watched the first two Trump ads that have come out now against Kamala Harris, most of them are just like too liberal and or, you know, open border, pretty classic attacks. And I expect them to stick with that, you know, basically throughout the campaign. But nonetheless, this is an effort by both Biden and Schumer to do everything that they can to bolster Democratic chances.

I guess we shouldn't we should say this, too. This is an effort by Schumer because he's not just thinking about the president. He's thinking about his own senators who are up in 2024. So he's got Sherrod Brown defending, people like Jon Tester defending, and others in a tight spot. And he's trying to tee up votes for them to go home and to campaign on and to say why that they should get elected. So possibly could help somebody like Sherrod Brown, who's in a tough race in Ohio, help Jon Tester as well, who's in a very, very tough race in Montana. So those are some of the calculus, I think, behind all this. Yeah, I think we may have, Trump did respond to some of this in a statement.

The Trump campaign accused them of wanting to undermine the legitimacy of the court. They said it's all part of Kamala's scheme to pack the Supreme Court with far left radical judges who will render decisions based on politics, not the law. So this is the stance that they're taking. But the fact that, again, these reforms are really moderate and really popular, it just puts them in a tough bind. They have to sort of mischaracterize and claim that this is an effort to pack the court. It's not court packing. It's term limits, very, very different scenario and something that Americans broadly support. So it's an effort to put them on the back foot, to have them have to deal with issues that are outside of their comfort zone.

Obviously, Republicans want the election to be primarily about immigration and about inflation. So when they're having to defend things like the Supreme Court not having a code of conduct, it's less than ideal for them ultimately. But, you know, do I think most Americans, even given the raised salience of the Supreme Court for anyone left of center, given Roe versus Wade, do I think most Americans are going into the ballot box thinking about like a Supreme Court code of ethics? No. Does it help contribute to an overall picture of, you know, these people are for things that you don't support and they're on the fringe minority in terms of their views and the things that they support and defend. Yeah, it could help contribute to that picture. It'll also be interesting if you, you know, if they do come, these issues do come up for a vote in the Senate,

if there are any Republicans who feel pressured to vote yes on something like a, you know, code of conduct, code of ethics for Supreme Court justices, because that just feels like such common sense. I believe that's already gone down. I'm trying to remember. Okay, yeah, here it is. So I found Leonard Leo. He's the chairman of the Federalist Society, so very influential in circles. So he put out a statement. He said, if President Biden and Democrats were truly serious about ethics reform, they would ban all gifts and hospitality of any kind to any public official in any branch of government, starting with Congress, where the real corruption is. They would close all of the loopholes that allow members to travel on private jets to fancy hotels and restaurants. With respect to judges, they would include the

things where influence peddling is most present and dangerous, when liberal justices rub shoulders with influencers at places like law school, He would know. art associations, progressive think tanks, and other offices. Here's the funny thing. I totally agree with this. You know, it's, Oh, of course. I'm not saying I agree with the criticism,

but I'm like, yeah, I agree, dude. Let's do it. You know, it's one of those where, I actually, But he's one of the people who's like, primarily responsible for putting together those influencers and billionaires with conservative justices.

So again, he knows of what he speaks. It's a bipartisan phenomenon, as Sotomayor my or Kagan and all of those can show you, but no, you're not wrong. One of the things I would say, one white pill I want everybody to take is that it does look like some congressional stock trading legislation will be reported favorably out of a bipartisan committee in the Senate. And it's possible that Schumer could actually tee that up to try and give Democrats and or Kamala Harris some talking points going into both the Democratic senators trying to defend on corruption allegations and there. So we could have actually some,

at the very least, stock trading legislation go through. But one of the things he is empirically correct about here, not saying he may even be sincere, but is that the amount of loopholes, as we all find out with the Menendez trial, we have to put this man on trial twice and he has to straight up take gold bars from somebody to be convicted of bribery. The bar is set way too high. The gold bar is set way too high. The gold bars are way too heavy to try and convict a lot of these people. It is ridiculous, you know, the amount that they are able to get away with. We did find that out too with the Supreme Court. And it is the most difficult part, I think, is that you have the federal judges who already have

to comply with those ethics codes. And I remember there was a story we did many years ago. It might have even been on Rising. And it showed about how federal judges often even did not comply with that code of ethics. But it's only because of the code that we got some insight into their personal stock trading portfolios. And there were many instances where they actually were ruling in the favor of companies that they personally held stock in. Now, it's only because of the legislation itself that we even got insight into that. We don't have the same level of insight into the personal finances of the rest of these people. And I do think that is bad because sometimes we do learn certain things like, so to my org, getting X amount of money for speaking fees or books and all that. And I'm

like, I don't think that should be allowed, period. You and I both know anybody who's prominent, you know, speaking fees are BS. Like it's pure influence peddling. It's just a whitewash, you know, money. It's one of the, I'm not saying the Republic, I'm sure Alito, you know, Scalia, all these other people took advantage. Same even with books. The book loophole is one of the tried and true ways that these politicians make millions of dollars while they're still in office.

And all of those are just, it's just unseemly, you know, the way that they use their power to amass great fortunes. Well, and it was like less of a news story and it became less front and center in the American mind when it was just those things would sadly have become sort of like accepted forms of corruption. The book parties, the speaking fees, all of those sorts of things. It really was the ProPublica reporting about Clarence Thomas taking it to another level that made this so salient. I mean, just completely sponsored effectively by a billionaire Harlan Crowe, having his mother's house paid for and getting a loan that we don't know that he ever paid back for extremely expensive RV going on these lavish vacations, including private jet travel to these exclusive locations.

Repeatedly, by the way, that made people go like, what the hell is going on here? And ask these questions about, okay, what is the standard? What is the code of conduct? And you come to learn there isn't one, at least not one that's enforceable in any sort of way. It's just sort of every justice makes up the rules for themselves that made this a relevant issue. But you brought up an important point about Bob Menendez and the gold bar standard of corruption. It's a Supreme Court that has narrowed the definition of what counts as corruption. And I don't think that it's wild conjecture to suggest that perhaps the reason that they saw fit to narrow that definition of corruption

is because they themselves are open to potential allegations of corruption, given, you know, depending on the definition thereof. So it was in their personal interest to make it so that corruption basically doesn't exist unless you literally are in the position of taking gold bars for an immediate exchange of a business deal or favor or whatever it is. A lot of this goes back to the case against Bob McDonald, former governor of Virginia, who was taking all kinds of gifts and luxury this, luxury that. In exchange, it appeared for business deals in the state of Virginia during the time that he was governor. He was convicted and then so returned by the Supreme Court. And that was a significant narrowing of the definition of corruption. There was another case recently with regard to some Andrew Cuomo aides in New York, just to show you this is bipartisan exemptions for corruption all around,

where because they had technically resigned their government positions when they delivered on the quid pro quo. They're like, oh, doesn't count. It's not corruption because you weren't technically in that position, even though you went back to the position after you engage in the quid pro quo. So, you know, this is just all to say it's not just about the conduct of these individuals. It's also the way that this can have downstream effects on the decisions that they make, defining corruption for all branches of government. To go back to the Leonard Leo point about how, hey, this isn't just about the judiciary. True, true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real problems with the judiciary to be dealt with. So that's the deal.

The last thing I have to say about this is just going back to the Biden speech, like how happy are Democrats that this guy is not their standard bearer? The stories he was telling, it was an hour and a something long speech. And that part was probably the most cogent that it got. And how insane is it that there was anyone that, what, two weeks ago was, oh, he's sharp as a tack. He's got to stay in there. He's amazing. He's going to win. My 13 keys say he's going to win the prize.

Just watching it, I was so shocked. I mean, I still am. And, look, it's funny. But it's not funny because at the same time, we've got a whole Israel block. You know, we're talking about Israel Hezbollah that we talked about yesterday. I am terrified of this man in the White House and the situation. It's crazy. We have months left to go. And in his speed, all of his dealings, you really, look, the memes where everyone's like, who's running the White House and all of that, it's all true. I mean, seriously, who is even running the Israel-Palestine policy portfolio?

Is it just these random bureaucrats who we know, Amos Hoxley? I don't know anything about Amos Hoxley. I do this for a living. And I've tried my best to learn a little bit about him. Or Jake Sullivan, failed track record. Blinken, failed track record. All of these other people. It's outrageous.

It really is. It's scary, you know, watching him up there. Look, I'm glad he's going away, but I'm not glad that he's still alive. It's not soon enough, yeah. It's really is. It's scary, you know, watching him up there. So, look, I'm glad he's going away, but I'm not glad it's not soon enough. Yeah, I mean, it gave you a little glimpse into why literally 90 percent of Americans are like, thank goodness this guy is running for reelection again. It's very unifying moment for the country, but also should go back and look at the people who were doing the he's sharp as attack and all the media is unfairly attacking him. And, you know, oh, and it'll be illegal to take him off the ballot and there'll be all these legal challenges and you literally can't even do it. Never trust a word those people tell you again, because the very same people the next day were like, oh, we're so

Joe Biden's amazing that for stepping down and we love Kamala Harris, and we're so happy, without a second of reflection on how wrong they were and how much they were lying and gaslighting in service of this obviously, obvious, like, man who was obviously unfit to serve even right now today, let alone four years from now. So, anyway. Five years from now. Yes. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that

Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated.

I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1 Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at

Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. 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 man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

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

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never 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. All right, let's get to the next part. Some really troubling information now about further holes in the Secret Services narrative of what happened in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. New text messages who've been obtained by the New York Times reveal that local police were tracking the gunman some 1.5 hours ahead of the attempted assassination. Let's put this up there on the screen. So you can actually see through a variety of these text message screenshots, say, quote, you have this one gentleman at 4.26 p.m. He says, someone followed our lead and snuck in, parked by our cars, just so you know. I'm letting you know because you see me go out with my rifle, put it

in my car, so he knows you guys are up there. He's sitting to the direct right on a picnic table about 50 yards from the exit. Roger that. Two people respond. Then at 5.38 p.m., two photos of the gunman are sent by one of these individuals. He continues, kid leaning, learning around building we are in. AGR, I believe, is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI, if you want to notify SS snipers to look out, I lost sight of him. Also, a bike with a backpack sitting next to it in the rear of the building that was not seen earlier. Call into command and have a uniform check it out. So they were following this young man for basically the entire time ahead. All of his movements, 5, 10 p.m., the young man no longer at the picnic table. He's right below the counter snipers. Counter sniper takes photos of him, sends it to law enforcement. And

then according to the after action report, they see that all of these text messages, which were from these local police, are shared in the group chat amongst the officers. They need to inform the Secret Service. They're giving him a heads up. Then by 6.11 p.m., that's shortly after the shots are fired and the gunman is killed by the Secret Service counter snipers. But they see how in the hours ahead of the assassination that they were identified, that the gunman was identified both by the local police, that they not only were tracking that he had a range finder, that he knew exactly where the counter snipers were, that they were sending heads up. And then it highlights the communications breakdown that we talked about yesterday, a decades-long communication failure between local police and Secret Service that gets out

into the open. What we really see here is that the Secret Service attempt to throw the local cops under the bus, I think is shameful now with the revelation of this. They were doing their job. They were tracking this person. They were trying to give a heads up to the higher command. They clearly were trying to plug the holes in the perimeter. They had good situational awareness. And it was the communications breakdown, obviously the failure itself from Secret Service that allowed something like this to happen. And clearly, I mean, the other problem is too, it's raising a lot of conspiracy theories, maybe even legitimate ones, who are like, okay, seriously? Like, what's happening here? How is this even allowed to happen?

Was this an inside job? Like, at a certain point, you have to ask, like, crazy questions where are they just obtuse and not learning the information at all? Did a radio call never go out? Was there really not a single comm check between the local police and others, especially if he tells them, call it into the higher command. They were doing everything that they were supposed to do, remaining aware, seeing where people were, notifying their higher ups and each other. It seems that the counter snipers themselves didn't even know about it and the Secret Service agents ultimately allowing Trump to go out onto the stage. Remember, he's only shot some five minutes after he goes out there, so they should never have let him out on the stage in the first place. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. And I mean, part of what is so revealing here is the

fact that they had eyes on this guy and knew there was a problem an hour and a half before Trump takes the stage. And yet they're, and they know, hey, we saw him with a range fighter. Hey, I lost sight of him. And still nothing is done. Still Trump is allowed to take the stage. And his local, the secret service detail that were on him were claiming like, we didn't have access to any of those communications. We had no idea. So what the hell is going on here? And when you read the TikTok of this, it really is astonishing because don't forget. So apparently Crooks went the day before to scope out the rally site and was able to walk around and take a look around.

Then he was able to fly his drone over the rally site while law enforcement is there setting up and setting the perimeter and getting everything ready. How the hell does that happen? Then after he flies his drone around, that's when he finishes and sits at the picnic table. That's when he's spotted by this counter sniper. He then walks to his car, left the drone inside the car, and was then just hanging around the warehouse complex. So you have this guy who flew a drone, who's lurking around with a range finder, who's identified and photographed. One of those photographs is one that circulated immediately afterwards. We had no idea that it was actually taken by law enforcement that day prior to the shooting.

And all of this happens. And you get even to the point where he's on the roof and you have local regular citizens yelling at Secret Service, yelling at law enforcement, there is a guy on the roof with a gun and this still goes forward. So seeing the TikTok of all these text messages and the manifest multi-layered failures is quite astonishing. Another thing we just learned is that, you know, these local police departments, they were struggling to fill the request for the manpower the Secret Service was asking for. You know, people had different obligations. This is not a large urban, I actually know this part of the country pretty well. And this is not a large urban area. So they don't have,

you know, a massive manpower, a massive police force. So if your Secret Service and your local partners are not able to fill all the roles, then that's on you to make sure that everything is secure, you know, and that the manpower needed is provided. So I agree with you that while there may have also been local law enforcement failures, ultimately the buck stops with the Secret Service. Like, this is your job, this is your duty, and clearly there was a massive failure here. Yeah. Even more on the TikTok of the day, super interesting. Like, it seems that the morning of, he goes to Home Depot, buys a ladder. So he has enough situational awareness of the site to know that he needs a ladder to get up there. He arrives. He apparently stays in his car, flies his drone, gets out, begins attracting attention now, one hour before, the first photo of him

is taken at 5.14 p.m., so that's exactly an hour before the shooting. Now people are like, hey, this guy knows where we are, he's acting sketchy, he knows where we're going. Then you're just like, hey, this dude, we saw him with a rangefinder. I mean, basically, at every single time, like all the way up till 5.38, there were probably

three or four separate opportunities that he could have been stopped, both from the drone the day before. You also see that the Secret Service itself was aware of some serious issues in staffing. That's what you're referencing, about how they had difficulty getting enough police officers to volunteer, to take over the site. I mean, the real question too is about how some of his other past activity was never flagged or by law enforcement of any kind. Let's put this up there on the screen. What they show here is that the Trump shooter began, quote, buying guns and bomb materials more than a year ago. Now, this is part of why I get so frustrated whenever they always talk about needing more resources afterwards. Was it not, you know, what, some 30 years ago now almost that they blew up the Oklahoma City

courthouse with fertilizer? And lo and behold, that's the type of stuff that he's ordering online. Like, allegedly, that was supposed to trip some, you know, some signs and actually get people to come and to visit and to pay attention. But he apparently was able to search online pretty repeatedly, listen to this, for information about power plants, mass shooting events, improvised explosive devices. He then researched that May assassination attempt on the Slovakian prime minister and apparently had been Googling, quote, major depressive episode. I mean, all of these look obvious in retrospect, but the big flag to me is the more than a year ago buying bomb making materials. Because according to the FBI and others, they're supposed to be super adept at piecing all of these things together, going back some

30 years. Clearly, I mean, it's a huge fail. And it's obvious that their own security dragnet that they purport to be very effective in all of that. They're not even good at policing it. So the more that you learn about this entire thing, you see all of the things come together. You see the text messages reveal the incompetence, but I still think that there is significant more questions here about whether the Secret Service itself actually knew of the gunman some minutes before. And if the call was made by the Trump detail to allow him to step onto the stage. Because we have a photo of the gunman exactly almost one hour, 58 minutes or whatever, before the shooting. That is just a simply unforgivable thing that they allowed him to do. To me, almost the craziest thing is the drone.

Yeah, yeah. I would never in a million years think that on the day of hours before a rally, you could just casually fly a drone scoping out the rally site and that this would be fine and no one would even notice. That's crazy to me. And I'm sure for anyone else who was out there with malicious intent, they are clocking very closely how many failures there were. I mean, thank God this was just some 20-year-old who was sort of freelancing it. If this was a trained professional, we all know what the result would have been. And we came within an inch of that result occurring anyway. It's interesting what you say about the online searches, because we have given up in this country so much of our civil liberties, both to the government and to

these large tech companies. And it's like, all right, if you're going to be spying on our every search, like, can you at least do some good with it? Like, can you at least identify the dude who's buying an AR-15 and stocking up on bullets? It was his dad's AR-15, let me be fair. Well, he did purchase it from him, so, you know. Oh, did he? Yeah, there's a record of that. Stocking up on bullets, stocking up on fertilizer. Now, his parents were interviewed, and they said that he'd always been, quote, interested in science and experiments. So,

all this, like, chemicals and gun equipment that he's stockpiling, they were like, oh, this is fine, which there are questions there as well about what exactly is going on. But, yeah, it's like, okay, well, if we're going to be spied on every second of the day, the very least you could do is use that information in some sort of a useful manner here. But that obviously did not happen. And, you know, I don't doubt that it's difficult to—this is a classic lone wolf. As far as we can tell, there really was no ideological motivation outside of just creating mayhem, chaos, and horror. That seems to have been his whole goal based on the searches was to find the

most high-profile person, target he possibly could. And it just so happened that Trump was holding this rally very close to his home. And so it was, in a sense, this crime of opportunity. And you can imagine if it had been Joe Biden or another person there, given the searches that he was engaged in, it may have been a different political figure that he ends up targeting. So I don't doubt that it's difficult to track these people in advance. But when the dude is there flying a drone on the day of, and then you spot him with a range finder, and then you spot him behaving suspiciously, and when you try to track him down, he grabs a backpack and runs away from you. That seems like, you know, a pretty significant sign, just as a layperson, that there's something bad that's about to happen here. Yeah, exactly.

And that's one of those where don't let the whole, like, oh, well, you weren't there. You weren't a professional. It's like, no, I think we all know. And at a certain point, we are the people who pay for all of this. Do you have any idea? I mean, the Secret Service budget and protection and all that is technically secret, but it costs probably, I would say, in the range of a couple hundred million a year in terms of securing the president. What are we paying for? You know, all of this nonsense so that they can fly the beast, you know, all the way to China 24 hours before the president lands for this great big security perimeter. And it's like,

then the former president, active Republican candidate is on the stage. And we're not pulling him when we know the most glaring and obvious things that happened right here in our own country, some what couple hundred miles away from Washington, DC. The whole thing is just absolute nonsense the way that it happened. So still lots of questions to be had here, especially from the agent and the agent in charge of the detail itself, whether he had any. If he did, I mean, just imagine. To me, the most legitimate, like, quote unquote, conspiracy theory. Ryan used this term, malicious incompetence. Yeah. Where it's like, you know,

it wasn't an inside job or, you know, he wasn't a recruited asset. He doesn't seem like a particularly, like, likely candidate to have been a recruited asset. But was there just a sense of, like, we don't really care. We don't really care what happens at this rally. We aren't really that interested in protecting this particular individual. That, I would say, is an extremely legitimate and very open question at this point. Yeah, well said. All right, let's get to Israel. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated.

I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-stud on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things.

Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. 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.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wild scenes coming on of Israel yesterday when members of the Knesset and government ministers joined a far-right armed mob to storm multiple Israeli military bases. And as I said before, you may think this is an exaggeration, but it was literally in defense of IDF soldiers who gang raped a Palestinian prisoner. So let me back up. Let me show you some of the images here as I speak. This is one of the mobs storming a military base that has been turned into a mass prison camp.

Now, this is a place that has become quite notorious post-October 7th. There have been multiple news reports and a UN investigation that revealed horrifying details of systematic abuse of the Palestinians who are being held there, including systematic sexual assault. Specifically, we've got multiple accounts of a hot metal rod being shoved in the anus of multiple Palestinian prisoners. We've also heard about severe beatings. There have been dozens of Palestinians who have died at these facilities. Starvation, I mean, every kind of degradation and torture you can imagine has been documented by Palestinians, doctors, Israeli doctors, whistleblowers, journalists, and the like occurring at this location. So the Israeli government has been under a lot of

pressure from the ICC, the ICJ, and also from some different world governments, including the UK, to show some sort of willingness to prosecute their own people for these crimes. So they decided to go ahead with the prosecution of, I believe, nine IDF reservists who they claim they have overwhelming evidence participated in one of these sexual assaults of a Palestinian prisoner. So yesterday when the military police go to arrest and detain these IDF soldiers, it kicks off this absolute riot first at the location where the abuse occurred, then at the other military base where the reservists were brought and detained and held awaiting trial. Just absolute insane scenes that are unfolding. So in order to understand this a little bit better

with regards to Israeli domestic political context, we wanted to bring in a guest. We've got an Israeli journalist who's set to join us. So let's get to that. Happy to be joined this morning by Shael Ben-Ephraim. He is the host of multiple shows, one on YouTube called Shael Ben-Ephraim Explains Israel and another one called the History of the Land of Israel Podcast. Welcome, Shael. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, so I did my best to set up what unfolded in Israel yesterday with this mob storming multiple Israeli military bases. Let's actually put F2 up on the screen.

This was, I think, some of the secondary clashes that broke out at the detention center where the Israeli reservists who are accused of sexual assault are being held. Could you help us just understand here, Shael, some of the context within which these clashes erupted? Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult for Israel watchers to fully comprehend what's going on here too, but I'll do my best. So the best way to set the stage for this is to look at what's going on socially in Israel right now. So there's always been a pattern where when Israeli soldiers are accused of doing anything to Palestinians, a lot of elements in society rallied behind them.

It used to be the extreme right, and now it's spread. So there's always been this kind of impulse to defend Israeli soldiers. It used to be a minority position. But October 7th strengthened that trend a lot. So after October 7th, the Israeli soldiers were seen as heroes to a much greater degree than they ever had been before. And the events of October 7th made the Hamas members the worst enemies of the public in the state of Israel, and for many people that even spread to other Palestinians, especially in Gaza, who they saw as supporting the events of October 7th. So you really had an increased amount of support for the IDF and an increased amount of hatred for Palestinians and Hamas in particular.

That meant that there's a sort of culture of impunity to do whatever you want to Hamas because of what they did on October 7th. It strengthens existing trends, but it made them a lot stronger. And that's one of the reasons why when there have been various crimes committed, alleged crimes committed by IDF soldiers in Gaza and also in Israel against detainees, the IDF has not prosecuted them or has very rarely prosecuted them. Now, it's important to note that the military brass and the IDF wants to. They want to prosecute people who do things like this, not because they're bleeding hard liberals

or anything, but because the military has an impulse to keep discipline. Because without discipline, it's hard for them to function. But they know that if they prosecute people, they won't get the backing of the government, to put it mildly. And elements in the government will come out against them, attack them, try to get them fired. Protesters might try to harm their families. So the pressure from the extreme right is great. So that's why there hasn't been much discipline in the IDF, because no one wants to touch the rank and file soldiers. And of course, among the rank and file soldiers, there's a lot of right wing extremists as well.

But also people who are very angry at the Palestinians for what happened on October 7th and also just people who are not good people who want to do whatever they can. And now they can get away with it. There hasn't been much discipline. Got it. So let's put this up there on the screen. Crystal laid out some of the details. Just one second, I want to get your reaction here. They're storming this detention center, and these lawmakers, as you're saying, are trying to inject chaos into the Israeli army.

Can you just then outline the exact circumstances of what happened here and what it's like to witness it from inside of Israel? Yeah, yeah. So what happened now is because there's been massive pressure from abroad, most particularly investigations from the ICC and the ICJ, but also a demand from the British government and to a lesser extent from the American government to start cracking down on what's happening in this facility, in this detainee facility, which is known as Detayman. So in May and in June, exposés came out about Detayman on CNN and the New York Times, citing serious war crimes, torture, to the point where some detainees were getting killed from beatings that they had. Others were having limbs amputated because they were kept in positions where the blood wasn't circulating and claims of sexual abuse.

Israel denied it, but the allegations weren't going away because they were true. As it turns out, they were true. So under immense international pressure, and when the British said they would stop selling arms to Israel, Israel finally decided to prosecute nine soldiers who had been involved in a sexual assault on a detainee.

This story came to light when doctors saw that one of the detainees had their anus had been, something had been inserted in their anus very forcefully, and the injuries were very clearly indicative of sexual abuse. Once that news came out that they had been arrested, soldiers in their unit posted on social media about what was happening and said that this is an outrage. And within an hour, people showed up on the base. Protesters, family members, members of Knesset, the most extreme right-wing politicians like Gottlieb from the Likud and Tzvi Sukkot and Ben-Gvir's party, and along with masked people in uniform, heavily armed. Eventually, the police managed to get them to leave.

They convinced them to leave. The police, which is under Ben-Gvir, who is the most extreme right-wing leader in Israel, convinced them to leave. Then after that, they assaulted the detention center where they were being held in Bet-Lib. And went into the military courts. And again, the police didn't stop them

because the police is under the extreme right wing. So what we have here is the Israeli security apparatus captured or at least strongly hindered by the most extreme right wing elements in society. And it's important to note that that leader, Ben Gavir, and people like him didn't go to the army. They're hated by the security services. They're considered terrorists by a lot of people in the security services.

But the security services are increasingly powerless to stop them. And this threatens the ability of Israel to operate as a sovereign state. And, of course, also threatens Israel's standing in the world and is an absolute nightmare for Israel from every perspective. And of course, it also shows that these elements in society are one of the reasons that this happened, because Ben-Gavir is responsible for the prison services. So he's also responsible for oversight over this prison. And he's made it his populistic goal to show that under him, terrorists will have the worst possible conditions.

And I don't know whether he ordered any of this or not, probably not, but he created a circumstance where being inhumane to detainees was expected. It was a good thing. And of course, we need to point out that a lot of these detainees were not members of Hamas. We don't know the exact number. It looks like the person who was abused in this case was a Hamas terrorist. But a lot of the people who experienced these things are innocent. So this is a scandal that speaks to Israel's human rights. It speaks to Israel's ability to govern as a sovereign state and so on. Were any of the violent protesters yesterday arrested?

No. No one was arrested. They were convinced to go home. The police will not arrest them unless there's a political decision to do so. So Shael, what does all of this mean for, I saw some speculation about, you know, that you could have an even greater conflagration if there's a withdrawal from Gaza without whatever complete victory looks like, which, you know, the complete victory that's been laid down of destroying Hamas is likely impossible to achieve.

What do you expect this portends for the future of Israel when the viewpoints that are being expressed as you lay out were once fringe and are now completely mainstream to the point of, you know, I could show the video, but I'll just paraphrase it. You're literally having a debate in the Knesset about whether it is legitimate to, quote, insert a stick in a person's rectum. And you have a member of the Likud party, a Knesset member, saying, yes, if he is a Nukpa, a Hamas terrorist, everything is legitimate to do to him. That's how mainstream these views have become. So what does this portend for the future of Israel? Well, unfortunately, the trend predates the war. The war has exacerbated it. And it's actually not that different

from what we see in the United States or what we're seeing in other countries where the populist right wing is becoming increasingly powerful. They use a lot of the same methods that MAGA does here, that Le Pen does in France, but it's tied to a deep Jewish fundamentalist impulse that has always been in Israel and is frightening. What does it portend for the future? It's sort of hard to have a country that is secular, liberal, the way that Israel has been with its flaws, and that has this kind of impulse in its governance. The next elections will be a battle for the soul of Israel. And as we know from the United States, even when the more moderate side wins,

the other side continues with disinformation and venom and trying to sabotage the ability of the government to rule. I think there's going to be a lot of people in Israel who, if this continues to be the kind of government that they have in the long term, will leave. And those will be the most productive members of society. Those will be the high-tech leaders. Those will be the professors. Those will be the literati and so on and so forth, which is something that I think the extreme right in Israel wants because that will help them run the country better. And there's an attempt to dismantle the Israeli judicial system because that's the one check and balance the Israeli system has against this kind of power. So right now, Israel, similar to a lot of other countries in the West,

the United States, as an example, is having a battle for its soul. And I think if the liberal democratic forces in Israel lose, Israel will be lost. It's not going to be able to survive if it doesn't have allies in the world, and it's going to be sanctioned by everyone, treated like a pariah state, that liberal part of the country is what kept Israel as part of the international community and what kept it allied with the United States and what kept it as a big trade partner for the EU. And if Israel loses that, it's not going to be able to survive. The extreme right fringe and the fundamentalists aren't going to be able to support the israeli economy aren't going to be able to support society not in the long term many many don't serve in the army it's it's a disaster for israel if these people take over and this is a step towards taking over

like make no mistake they're hindering the functioning of the state if they completely take over the state of israel will not exist in in the long term and i i i don't think i think that's quite a possible outcome, unfortunately. But there's a lot of people in Israel who are against this. A lot of people, maybe the majority. At this point, I have no idea. And hopefully they will fight back. Shael, I think it's fair, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you would sort of politically

identify as like a liberal Zionist. Is that a fair characterization of your views? So there are plenty of things that, yeah, that you and I wouldn't necessarily see eye to eye on. But I really wanted to put up this tweet that you sent yesterday and commend you for it. Because I think this is a very difficult thing to admit when we've gotten something wrong. Or to acknowledge and identify our own blind spots. So if we can put F6 up on the screen. You said in response to all of these events yesterday, I feel stupid and ashamed.

In May, an expose came out on CNN detailing the abuses in state. I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation, apologies. Then the NYT released their own article on it. Both were backed up by Israeli sources crossed with Palestinian ones. Yet you say you dismiss them because your government sources and Israeli media denied them. My whole life, I was told that the international media was out to get Israel and that they were all anti-Semites. And so with that blind spot, even with the reporting, even you had a UN report about this, you had multiple mainstream media outlet reports, you dismissed it because of the propaganda ecosystem that you existed in and what your own government sources were saying.

So I'd love for you just to talk a little bit about that and also talk about whether this revelation has changed your assessment in any other part of Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza or Israel in general? Yeah, okay, that is a difficult question. So as far as what was happening with Steteman, I knew that what was going on there was very bad, and no one in Israel was denying that. It's just that the worst abuses were being covered up, the ones that, like, what we're talking about.

And now people I've talked to who told me that these things weren't true are now telling me that they are. And that's because military censorship is no longer on some of these cases and there's going to be other prosecutions. So there's been a change of strategy there. And that, yeah, that definitely undermined a narrative that I had.

It's hard to explain to people who aren't Israeli what the attitude towards the rest of the world is. You know, there's the legacy of the Holocaust, there's a legacy of anti-Semitism. Israel is singled out in the United Nations more than any other country. And the international media focuses on Israel more than just about any other country. And what Israelis have always felt is that they're singled out by the international community and that this has to do with the legacy of antisemitism. And it's not that that viewpoint is not completely, it doesn't have any validity to it.

It's just that it blinds us to things. So, you know, if you say to Israelis, oh, the New York Times said this and that and that, they'll say, well, the New York Times, they're out to get us, They're anti-Semites. And I grew up in that attitude. And now that I've had this verified, I see that the article, I read the article again, and I see the article was very well sourced.

And it shows the kind of blind spot that we had. And now I'm going to have to rethink a lot of things. I think the war on October 7th was absolutely just, had to happen, because after the events that occurred in Israel, they had to happen. But I've always had questions about the way we've conducted this war on multiple levels. And now I have more questions. And now I am more prone to believe reports about what Israel is doing to innocent civilians. And again, I've always believed these reports to some extent, but thought they were exaggerated. Now I'm going to be looking a

lot more objectively at these numbers, a lot more objectively at this information. And I'm going to be a lot more concerned about Palestinian civilians who are being killed. I was concerned before, but I also was more skeptical about the information that I was receiving. None of this stops me from thinking that Israel needs to fight for its survival. None of this makes me stop thinking that Israel is facing people who want to destroy it. But it's making me a lot more critical of how Israel is doing it. There are a lot of people in the Israeli government who have bad intentions and have absolutely no morals. And there's a lot of people in society who back them. And I don't trust them to wage this war morally or effectively. I think that people who support Israel need to very carefully hold their feet to the fire

and criticize violations of human rights and to criticize the way that they're running this war and any Palestinian civilians who are needlessly suffering as a result of this war and strive to end the war, get the hostages back, start to rebuild, and move towards a two-state solution.

So I'm still a Zionist, but I want Israel to be more moral. And it hasn't been moral. We appreciate you joining us, sir. Unfortunately, we're on a tight timeline, but really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching. Appreciate it.

Enjoy CounterPoints tomorrow. We'll see you all on Thursday. who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down, and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott.

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