Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/1/24: Voters Say Kamala 'Incompetent', Chaos At Trump Black Journo Event, US Pledges War For Israel, Media Smears Shapiro Critics As Antisemitic, Billionaire Melts Down On CNN, GenZ Men Embrace GOP

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss voters say Kamala 'incompetent', chaos erupts at Trump black journo event, Trump says Kamala turned black, US pledges war for Israel, media smears Josh Shapiro critics as antisemites, billionaire melts down on CNN, GenZ men embrace Trump.  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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We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. A lot of interesting things to talk about today. So first of all, we have our own exclusive breaking news. We had the folks over at JL Partners ask

people how they would describe Kamala Harris and separately J.D. Vance in a word. And we have those word clouds for you. They're very interesting. Yes, they are. Some surprises there. So we'll go through it. We've got it broken down by age and partisan affiliation and gender, which was maybe the most interesting breakdown. Sagar also going to be looking at the gender divide in America and his monologue today. Of course, everyone is talking about Trump's appearance at the National divide in America and his monologue today. Of course, everyone is talking about Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists. We're going to show you all of the wildest moments and dig in also on what appears to be a new explicit strategy of

the Trump campaign to talk about Kamala Harris's biracial identity and how she has talked about that over the years. So we'll get into all of that, I'm sure. Sagar and I may have different thoughts on that one. I've got a lot of thoughts. Trump is only saying what I've always said. Anyway, continue. Yes, you're not running for president of the United States. So anyway, we'll save that for that block. We're also taking a look at much more serious news about what appears to be an incredibly dangerous and fraught situation in the Middle East after multiple assassinations conducted by Israel. Iran already projecting that they are going to retaliate. The U.S. already saying, hey, we're going to get involved too.

We're going to have Israel's back. So extremely dangerous moment in the Middle East and also appears to have completely derailed any possibility of continued ceasefire talks. So we'll dig into that and all of what that means. We're also taking a look again at Kamala's VP choice, who it is likely to be. And also now, we'll surprise no one, those who are opposed to Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, being smeared as anti-Semites by the Atlantic. Also, no surprise. So we'll bring you all of that. We've got Matt Stoller joining us to talk about

what indications Kamala is giving with regards to corporate power and also the extraordinary public billionaire campaign to pressure her to ditch Lena Kahn. So, of course, Matt Stoller, the perfect person to dig into all of that. And as I mentioned before, Sagar with a fantastic monologue here at the end of the show. Thank you very much. Well, I haven't listened to it yet. Yeah, I haven't listened to it yet. I have confidence in you.

True vote of confidence. I really appreciate that. Thank you to everybody. We have been absolutely stunned by the number of people taking advantage of our free month trial. Let's go and put that up there on the screen. It will only be around for limited time only. So if you want to go ahead and take advantage, 30-day free trial, bpfree1 at breakingpoints.com. We really appreciate it. So not only are you going to get all the advantages of being a premium member, the local show, you know, uncut, you can do the AMA, et cetera. But really, you are helping support our work here. We are already in major talks already, you know, with the DNC and what we're going to be doing there.

And we have some great, great things planned. And of course, that does cost a lot of money. So your support of us really, really is appreciated at this time. We were able to commission these word clouds. We can have the flexibility. And it's all because of people like you. So thank you so much for taking advantage. And because we have so many new listeners and now so many new members, we appreciate you so much. If you want to join them, breakingpoints.com, you can take advantage BP free one for that free month trial. Yeah. Thank you guys so much. In fact, you know, the flood of

subscriptions and viewers that we got enabled us to have the content that we're about to show you right now. So thank you so much for making that possible. All right, let's get to it. As I mentioned before, we asked our friends over at JL Partners to go out into the field and ask voters in a word, what do they think about Kamala Harris? And what do they think about J.D. Vance? When Kamala picks her VP choice, we should do one for them as well. Of course. We don't know who that is yet, so we can't do that as of yet. Let's go ahead and put for all voters the Kamala Harris word cloud up on the screen. And we do have it broken down as well. But this is, you know, if you take everybody that was captured in the sample, what are the biggest words and descriptors that jump out? Number one, not a good sign for her, incompetent. Close behind, however, is a positive word, strong. And then you have probably in third

place there, it looks like you've got liberal, which is something certainly that they consider to be a vulnerability and the Trump campaign considers to be a vulnerability. Also, you have fairly high up there, which I think will be relevant when we talk about the NABJ block, fake. Some other things, you've got terrible, you've got leader, you've got smart, you've got awesome, intelligent, unqualified, powerful, unfavorable. One of the things, Sagar, that jumped out at me as a positive for her is nowhere in this word cloud is the word Biden or Joe, at least not that I saw looking at it. And for her, is nowhere in this word cloud is the word Biden or Joe, at least not that I saw looking at it. And for her, that's probably her biggest liability is just being tied to what was a very unpopular

administration. Well, she hasn't said Biden's name since she began running. I think maybe when she's at the White House, somebody took note. She said Donald Trump's name, I think, 14 times in one of her recent rallies. Joe Biden's name was not said once. We just got officially our DNC speaking schedule. Joe Biden is on day one, aka the day that nobody gives a shit. The arms day. Yeah, yeah. It's like, that's Joe Biden day.

Like, let's give him his due, but not really too much. Listen, it's crazy. Biden is for day one. You know who's on day two? Bill Clinton, who was president in 1992, the year that I was born. He will be speaking. So will Barack Obama, then the vice president, and then Kamala speaking. So will Barack Obama, then the vice president, and then Kamala Harris. So if that doesn't tell you everything that you need to know about who's most popular, I think in order of that. But hey, let's give him the credit where it's due. Whenever the man is gone, put him out to pasture and let's not even say his name anymore, which is basically the strategy. I think it is smart. There's also a couple of other things,

if we want to go to the next one, where we can dig in a little bit. That incompetent word, if we see, is very prominent, the biggest one amongst Republicans, but more critically here is independent. So we see a couple of things where last time around when we had our word clouds with Biden, old was the number one across all three categories. Everybody, including Democrats. Right, but the advantage that you have here is that amongst Democrats, you have strong,

you have honest, you have smart, you have competent, president, leader, positive, freedom, determined, charismatic, fresh. So what does that tell us? High levels of Democratic enthusiasm. Now, even amongst independents, you see some where if you look above the incompetent, you have incompetent, fake, terrible, literal, horrible, unqualified, all right, ridiculous. But beneath that, what do we see? Strong, nice, awesome, intelligent, smart, powerful leader. So independents genuinely are, I think, relatively split 50-50, although incompetent still remains, I think, the most potent attack. I think incompetent and fake, as you said, which we'll get to with the NABJ attacks, are the ones that are really going to

be dialed in. And this, look, free advice to the Trump campaign, they keep trying to say, too liberal, too liberal, too liberal. You don't see that anywhere really near the top, I think, of independence. It is actually a Republican attack, if you see there. Amongst Republicans, they say incompetent, liberal, stupid, fake, bad, terrible, unfavorable. That is where you see that attack resonate. So one of the things, and we haven't gotten to J.D. yet, that I would kind of urge people to do is look at the language with resonates between both the base and with the independent voters to try and win people over. Obviously, no Democrat is going to come over and vote for Trump now at this point, especially, what, eight, nine years into the Trump era. But, you know, with the very tiny limited amount of independent voters, remember, there's not very many these days who are up for

grabs. Those are the people that you're playing with. And you want to find an attack that kind of skewers the two. And that triangulating on that is very difficult. I actually think there are more swing voters than we really give people credit for. You know, you might be right only because my calculus is 2020, where Biden and Trump have always made up their mind. A lot of people don't know anything about Kamala Harris. A lot of people, let's be honest, most people in this country cannot even name the vice president's name. So then Democrats are like, oh, this is awesome. But a lot of independents and actually even J.D. Vance, I mean, you and I cover politics for a living. Everybody knows who J.D. Vance is. But I won't give it away just yet. Just wait and see what the number one word is for

most people. Like, I don't know who this guy is. Period. Yeah. I think there may be more swing voters than is typically given credit just because for two reasons. Number one, you see the fact that in the Senate races, you have Democrats outperforming. Like, you have more people who are saying, I'm going to vote split ticket. And that's an indication that they are up for grabs. And also just by how much this race has moved since Biden dropped. And I mean, how much it moved after his completely failed debate performance, people were like, oh, I can't do this. And then how much it has shifted again, getting Kamala Harris into the race. It shows you people are not just like partisan automatons. They are evaluating the circumstances in front of them to some extent.

And so, you know, there is more wiggle room there than I think I have even commonly thought over the past number of years. And I think you're right, Sagar. It was easy to have that perception when it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump because they were such known quantities that, you know, people were locked into their views of these particular men, even as they may be a little less like partisan, like hard part, I just vote for D, I'll just vote for R no matter what. There may be more people who are open to shifting back and forth. In any case,

I think your comment with regard to the partisan breakdown with Kamala is the most important one. She has consolidated the Democratic base. That is the source of a lot of her momentum in the polls. Now, she has improved among independents, according to the polling crosstabs, etc. So she is picking up ground there. But where her strength has really come in is reconsolidating that Democratic base, reconstituting that sort of Obama-style coalition, getting young people to back you strongly, getting people of color to back you strongly, etc. It looks more like what you would expect the traditional Democratic coalition to reflect. And the uniformity of the positive reviews for Kamala among Democrats is indicative of that. Now, let's go and put up the

gender divide here, which is really interesting, really interesting. So when you ask women about Kamala, top two are smart and strong. Now, incompetent also shows up there, but many more positives here. So you've got leader, strong, smart, intelligent, honest. You also have in smaller print here, incompetent, but still one of the major charges, unfavorable, unqualified. Those are some of the negatives that some women had about her. But you flip to the male. First of all, it's funny that woman is one of the words that pops up. But the number one is liberal and incompetent. Those appear to be roughly the same size there, so roughly coming in at the same level. You do have some positives here. You have strong, you have awesome, you have leader, and you also have terrible, you have idiot, you have bad. So you can see even just jumping off the page that you hear some of the gender divide, which I do think is going to be a central dynamic in this race moving into the fall.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I'm doing my own monologue on this. My monologue is more about Gen Z men and women, but this has long time been a major divide in US politics. I also think, but this is part of my thing, is if we're in an election, and this is an election where I think that the female vote has probably never mattered more than ever before, because of the high level of enthusiasm, I'll show people in my monologue the split between Gen Z women and men on abortion. It's almost like a 40-point swing in terms of salience, just in terms of what people think is important or not. So you may be pro-choice, but you're like, whatever.

You know, I mean, I kind of count myself in that category. I mean, that's very logical. Yeah, exactly. There is one group that it much more directly impacts. Yeah, so this is not to put anybody down, just to say if I was a Democrat, I would want the female vote because there's a lot of women out there who are probably voting at higher levels than ever before. And in a game of margins where

Trump won the 2016 election, let's say, what was it? 60,000 votes across four states. The margin of loss was roughly 80,000 votes again across four states. I mean, every single vote matters. So if you have a highly dedicated coalition, people who have been proven records of coming out to vote, I mean, in politics, that's as good as gold as you can ever get. So like I said, I want, if I'm a Democrat, you need a woman at the top of the ticket. Forget all this sexism nonsense. The question then is, can you still win white men at that same category? So it comes back to our, I believe our Tuesday panel. I pulled the numbers from Pew Research. Trump won 2016, the white male vote by 30 points, won it only by 17 points.

That 13 point swing is exactly why Joe Biden is the president today. The only category of demographic that actually switched in the direction of Joe Biden and that Trump didn't win, but there's so many white people in this country. I think 70% of the electorate is white. And when we think about that, we know then that the sheer numbers here for both Kamala and Trump triangulating and thinking about how to balance the women category and men together is going to be very difficult. So I could actually see it kind of going both ways. But that chart just shows to me how different messaging and how it's hitting. Just remember, you know, there's a bit, not only are we all divided by many other things, gender is another

major one as well. Yeah. I mean, the incompetent thing is a problem for her. It's a big problem for her. And, you know, they need to figure out how. I know she's always been a very cautious politician. She doesn't like to go into unfriendly spaces. She is uncomfortable even in more friendly spaces. She has always, her staff has always kept her very sort of cosseted and been very careful about who they put her out to. And we know why, because she's had multiple instances when she's been really caught off guard and very flat-footed, and it has not gone well for her when she has been caught on the back foot. So they need to figure out a way to alleviate those concerns of incompetence. Because what does that speak to? Like, we don't really think that you're

ready to be president of the United States. And there's a reason why people think that. Her presidential campaign did not go well. And part of why it didn't go well was because of her incompetence in managing it. So they need to, that is a key vulnerability that they really need to deal with. If they're going to persuade independent voters and the American people in general who have never seen, you know, a, we'll say biracial now, given the conversation today, woman president, that she's ready for the job. I think that part of how Obama was able to become this historic figure was because the perception was that his campaign was a freaking well-oiled machine.

Which it was. And it was. It was true. And people thought, okay, if you can do this, of course it's not the same as running the country, but it is a very complex undertaking, and you rose to the occasion. Now, Kamala does have an advantage in that she didn't have to build this organization. It's all there in a box for her. So, you know, perhaps that's an advantage for her. Perhaps she, since Biden has basically like

disappeared and was basically not really even president anymore, maybe, you know, her stepping more fully into that role in terms of the public perception, maybe that helps her beat the incompetent charge. But I do think that is a really key and core weakness for her. And I guess the other thing I would say is perhaps her VP pick can help give people some comfort, because that was the other key for Obama, too, was he brought in Joe Biden, who's this, you know, moderate white dude who people were like, all right, that guy I can see in a position of power. And that also helped to give people comfort about the overall ticket. Very smart.

I put out yesterday, I said, there is no chance Kamala could survive a real 18-month run for POTUS. Her primary run fell apart through interviews, multiple debates, et cetera. But now she's only got to duck and hide for 97 days. I tweeted this yesterday, so 96 days today. In friendly spaces, commit to a single debate. That's a major structural problem for ours. I still believe that it is such a massive advantage for her to basically just be anointed,

to be given the campaign in a box. You have a campaign manager. You've got unbelievable amounts of money. You've got a baked-in coalition who's ready to fire it up, ready to go, as one might say, against Donald Trump. And just don't really sit down for any crazy interviews. Now, I think that's an abhorrent and terrible thing. She should do at least two debates. I hope that she would do three, especially given, you know, how late she entered into the race. She hasn't yet done a critical interview. I believe Joe Biden only dropped out of the race 11 days ago. I mean, that's plenty of time. We need one of those one. I would even take, you know what, take a friendly interviewer. I don't care. You know, even that if this NABJ event, you know, it's probably the friendliest media environment that she was going to get, just go.

Just take it. You have to answer questions. Sit down with Stephanopoulos, Chuck Todd, whatever, any of these people. Are they going to challenge you a ton? No, not really. But even Lester Holt, I mean, he asked her the most basic question of all time. He's like, so have you been to the border? She's like, we have been to the border.

He's like, but you haven't been to the border. But you literally haven't been. And she's like, but we have been to the border. And we're like, I'm still trying to decipher what that meant. And then she's like, we haven't gone to Europe. Well, yeah, it's like, but you haven't been to the border. But you literally haven't been. And she's like, but we have been to the border. And we're like, I'm still trying to decipher what that meant. And then she's like, we haven't gone to Europe. Well, yeah, it's like, okay. That's a whole other conversation. But that's the thing is that Kamala will emerge, right?

So far, it's been nothing but positive for her, right? She's doing rallies. She's doing a great job. She's not Joe Biden, right? She's got this fresh appearance. She feels like the new kid on the block, even though that seems preposterous. She's, you know, some, what is she, close to 30 years younger than Donald Trump. I think she's 59. Yeah, she's 59. She looks fantastic for her age, by the way. Everybody's doing a comparison with her and

Tim Walz. They're the same age and he looks like he's like 40 years older than her. He blames it on the high school kids. Anyway, yeah, so she's going to have to take some risks and she's going to have to show that she has that she's improved. You know, she if she does appearances where those same vulnerabilities come up, those concerns about whether or not this is really a person you can see as commander in chief, whether this is a person who is really up to the job. Those are going to become central. And I think in a sense, they already are central. So that's that's to me a real warning sign for her. Let's go ahead and take it. This was amusing to me.

Take a look at the age group breakdown for Kamala Harris. OK, so, you know, this also won't really surprise you, although it is kind of a reversal of where things were under Joe Biden, which is why I say, you know, I do think these things are more fluid than perhaps we've given credit for. Young people really like Kamala Harris. The number one thing is strong. Then you get awesome, optimistic, lucky. That's a funny one. Nice, brave, smart. Also, if you look on the left side of the graphic there in relatively small print but still abusing is brat.

Yes. Charismatic, independent, leader, empowering, honest, cool. Very few. There are a few up here, but very few negative descriptors among the young demographic. You've got bad, dishonest, incompetent also shows up. But the overwhelming majority of the words are positive. And, you know, certainly the largest descriptors for that group are positive. If you go to the other end of the spectrum, 65 plus, this was an area where Joe Biden had some strength. This was like the group that was holding up the best for him over everybody. And the two words here that jump out in very large

print are liberal and incompetent. Now, it's interesting to me, and perhaps this is where the battleground really is in those, you know, 30 to 49 and also the 50 to 64. There isn't one descriptor that really dominates. It's sort of like, you know, people are a little all over the place and the juries kind of still out. There wasn't just one thing that people thought of when Kamala Harris was put to them. You see under 30 to 49, you get awesome, powerful. You also get terrible. You get liberal. You get bad. You get smart.

You get strong. 50 to 64, you see. Incomposant is probably the largest one there, but it doesn't jump out nearly as much as in the 65 plus. Fake, I think, is another real vulnerability for her. Smart, leader, weak, woman, horrible, liberal, strong. So again, those age demographics, it's a little less clear, the verdict on Kamala Harris as among the youngest and the oldest demographics. Yeah. I think the incompetent one is, look, considering if we know the voting rates,

what is a 50% of Gen Z vote or 18-year-olds to 29-year-olds vote, but it's like 80%, the higher up you go, especially about 65 and 80. Incompetent just looks like the best bet, especially when we consider across all the groups. So the age group, especially with old people, and then let's also think about the demographics of the key swing states. There's a new battleground poll we were both looking at, what was it, this morning, that showed her actually up a little bit in Pennsylvania, but tied in Michigan and tied in Wisconsin. And that's really where I would be worried. That is a disproportionately white, older state, population-wise. The dynamic sunbelt of Atlanta and all that might actually show you, you know,

Georgia could possibly be in play under Kama, which was very unexpected. Arizona, though, the polling did not look particularly good. Nevada as well, another very, very dynamic state where things are very fluid and up for grabs in a way that they weren't last time around. Yeah. Yeah. If I think about the various demographics and who you really need to triangulate on, I'm going for the old white people in the Midwest. It looks like the Harris campaign is trying to put North Carolina in play. Yes, that's right. And it looks like the Trump campaign is concerned that North Carolina could be in play. Well, North Carolina is a very dynamic state.

It's a massive in-population. Raleigh and Charlotte are two of the biggest booming cities for young people, I believe under the age of 30. Highest job market for college graduates. Low cost of living. Decent weather. You know, previously tier two cities. I have nothing against it.

I'm just saying, it's not really a state that, it wasn't like Austin, let's say that four years ago, but all the data that I've seen that's come out in the last six months, I'm like, man, North Carolina is booming. So, you know, when you have new people coming in, that's a, especially who are young, that makes it more of a battleground state. Liberal retirees love them some Asheville, North Carolina. And I cannot disagree. It's a lovely, lovely sort of like hippie, crunchy town in the foothills of the mountains there. So in any case, the reason I say that it looks like Harris is trying to put it on the map and it looks like the Trump campaign is a little concerned about it is because both of them are going up on the air with significant ad buys in the state of North Carolina. Now, sometimes campaigns do that

as just like sort of a, what is the word, like a fate, a head fake, I guess is the right term because they want their opponent to think they got to spend money there and sort of draw them into a contest when they're not really trying to put it in play. That could be some of what's going on here. But I looked back, Joe Biden only lost it by I think like 1.8 percentage points. So it's not like it was a blowout. No, not at all. And when you consider what the different coalitions look like, Obama won North Carolina. And so if they're saying, hey, we're putting the Obama coalition back together, maybe the state is in play for us in a way that it wasn't for Joe Biden. It's not the craziest idea in the world. And I think the overall picture for Kamala, I mean, it's obvious

at this point, she's outperforming Joe Biden wildly and not just his post-debate performance. She's also outperforming where he was at his best during this race. But not during 2020. He was way up at this point in 2020. So we also have to be clear about that. She has way more paths to 270 than he did. He really was narrowed down to like, all right, you got to go all in on the old white people in the Rust Belt. And she, because her coalition is different, there's a, it really does expand the map and potentially put a state like North Carolina in play or at least force the Trump campaign to have to think about a state like North Carolina. Looking at the data, Obama won it in 08, 49.7 to McCain's 49.3, lost it in 2012 with Romney at 50.6 and 48. So actually it's been relatively in play and tight,

close, almost like Georgia-esque numbers where it was a sleeper swing state. But Obama won in 2008. People thought it was kind of a flash in the pan. But yeah, last time around, and like I just said, you got all these young people who are moving into the state, the Charlotte economy and all that is booming. You got a Democratic governor. These are all signs of decent fundamentals for if there were a flip, it could be this time around. So good point. It's not crazy to think. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the J.D. Vance word clouds. And these were also really interesting. All right, put the first one up on the screen. This is the overall. when you ask voters in general, right, left, center, old, young, everything, the number one word that jumps out, unknown. Number two, unsure.

Number three, weird. You get conservative, bad, idiot. But I think this shows some, it's a positive for the Trump campaign in that they still have a chance to define him, like he hasn't been fully defined. But I also say it's a real risk for them because Democrats are aggressively working to define him right now. And Republicans will show you that, I mean, we'll show you this with the Trump comments at the NABJ. They aren't really doing much to defend him at this point

and to define him in a different way than what Democrats are trying to do. So it's both like, you know, it's an opportunity for the Republicans, but it's also a risk because you could get into a situation like Obama with Romney back in 2012, where he came out so early and so aggressively defined Mitt Romney. And that caricature was close enough to reality that it stuck, that there was nothing they could do to change the public perception of Mitt Romney as this like, you know, plutocratic elite. So Democrats very much want that word weird to be the number one thing you think of with J.D. Vance. And they're not there yet. And we'll show you this will be really clear when we get to like

the partisan breakdown, et cetera. But there isn't an alternative Republican descriptor that is popping out here at all. I agree. It's an issue for J.D. And the main problem is what do we all know about Donald Trump? If you ever upstage him, he will cut your legs out from underneath you. So J.D. is not really in a position to be defending himself. He's not set up to succeed. He doesn't need, like, it would be the worst, the worst possible thing for him would not be to combat Kamala Harris on weird. It would be to become the main storyline and to upstage Donald Trump. And if he started, you know, giving high profile interviews and aggressively trying to go back against this, then Trump would be furious at him and be like, who does this guy think he is? I mean, you already saw undercurrents of that with the NABJ answer, which we will get to. I totally agree. Yeah. Because I think most of the storylines about the Trump campaign

over the past two weeks have been about J.D. Vance. Which drives Trump crazy. Crazy. Because I actually saw somebody say this, somebody who was close to Trump. They're like, Trump would not pick a running mate at all if he was not legally required to, because he hates having anybody else share his spotlight. Anybody else on his name, that's something that we know well about him. So let's put this up there on the screen. A to B, please. The J.D. Vance across the category. So the Democrats have very clearly won the weird war. Although unknown is still the number two word that Democrats associate. So it's one of those where clearly amongst Democrats, this has reached high salience. When you look though at independents, you see unknown, unsure,

smart, idiot, bad, fake, IDK. I personally like IDK. And then amongst Republicans, unknown is the second largest word, and conservative. Which conservative is just like, I mean, that's fine. But yeah, it's not like, that was my point about, there's not an alternative competing vision of who J.D. Vance is. That's really breaking through. I mean, when Trump has tried to defend him, he's talked about like, oh, well, he loves the family. And he's talked about, oh, he's really in touch with the working man.

You don't see any of that in here. None of it. And actually, instead, what you see is uh it's it's like smart idk cool uncertain unpredictable these are amongst republicans unfamiliar clearly people don't know anything about him that actually kind of explains too why hillbilly elegy is skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller list and hillbilly elegy the movie i think is the most downloaded movie on netflix people like who is this guy which again is a great reminder i bet you 90 of the people who traditionally watch the show know who he is. But remember, don't forget,

most Americans do not pay attention at all to politics. I do think J.D. is in a very difficult position. The weird thing is one that Democrats and the media are repeating over and over again. And Republicans don't want to be in a position of defending their vice president because if they are, it would be seen as upstaging Donald Trump. Vance himself, I mean, look, when you're the vice president, I've been reading his speeches. I'll just say this. I've known of his speeches and listened to them for a while. This is not how he would traditionally speak. I'll just put it that way. It is clear to me. What do you mean by that? It's just very, it's so cookie cutter. It's very basic. Yeah. It's like, he feels very uncomfortable up there. To me, it just looks like first grade reading level and look, probably the right strategy. Right. I mean,

if we if we think about that, even the New York Times only written for fifth grade reading level or whatever. But, you know, it just does. It doesn't come across what I think are the strengths and all that he has. But at the same time, like that's what it means to be vice president. You're signing up as a number two man. You say whatever they tell you to say. And so, I don't know. For him, I do think they're in a tough position just because, again, his team and his job is to not make problems for Trump. And let's be honest. It was a problem for Trump.

There's nothing Trump hates more than having somebody who he doesn't even – in Trump's mind, he can deal with anything as long as it's about him. But whenever it's about others, it's like, oh, he'll he'll throw you under the bus instantaneously. And he did yesterday. I mean, it's certain. I mean, the answer was weird because he both defended him. And then he was like, look, this whole thing is moot because it's actually about me. But you know, it was funny. I did counterpoints with Emily yesterday and we did the like conservative. Yes. we watched some of it. And when I asked them about J.D. I think that's a very similar answer, especially for Menez. She was like, well, I don't really think vice president matters.

And so it's felt to me like I don't want to draw too much from that. But it felt to me that that was kind of like the cope that had gone out among Republicans of like, yeah, this is all this is all irrelevant. Vice presidents don't really matter. And I don't think that's really true. I know that that's what political scientists, some will argue that. It's traditionally true. When you think about the vice presidential picks over the past number of cycles, I think that they made a difference. I mean, I think Mike Pence made a difference for Donald Trump in 2016. I think Sarah Palin was initially very additive for John McCain when she first came out and she had tons of charisma and people were like, oh my God, this could be a problem for

Democrats. And then she sort of crashed and burned and became a liability for him and showed a lack of seriousness and a willingness to kind of take risks with the country future that doomed him ultimately. I think Biden was important for Obama as that kind of validator like we discussed. I think this vice presidential pick for Kamala is gonna be really important. And the thing with J.D. Vance, I do think you could argue for Trump because he's such a singular figure that it is less consequential than Kamala's pick. I think that's completely fair to argue. But when Democrats wanna put the whole ticket in the fringe extreme weird bucket, and you add a guy on the ticket who is being labeled as that, and the label's kind of sticking. And on the two issues that Trump knows himself that he has an issue on,

which is abortion and Project 2025, and J.D. brings baggage to the ticket on both, there were other choices. Glenn Youngkin was sitting out there ready for the take-in to put Virginia in play. So it's not that I think J.D. Vance is going to sink the ticket, but I think he makes it easier for Democrats to make the case about the ticket they want to make and frame it through the prism that they want to frame it. I don't necessarily disagree. I think a lot of it is marginal. And that's why it's like, did it matter? Did it not matter?

I think Sarah Palin probably did matter. But it's like, what was more impactful, the 2008 financial crisis or Sarah Palin? It's like, okay, well, I think we know the answer. Sure. You know, here with Donald Trump. I'm not saying it's the only thing. No, I agree. Look, these are all multifaceted, multifactorial.

There's so many confounding variables. October's the price. You know, you can never, if anything, the narrative is probably more important here. I really think – I think if J.D. was running on his own, he'd be in a much better position because you can actually fight back kind of on your own terms. But when you're hamstrung as the number two man to one of the most sensitive, like, candidates in modern – probably ever in modern history who, you know, is sensitive to that. I mean, all presidents are sensitive about their number two, showing them up, but this is like dialed up to 10. I mean, you basically just have to do whatever his people tell you to do. Yeah. I think that's a problem. Can we put gender, please, up on the screen? Because that also,

you know, kind of underscores to me the issue here, too, if we're talking here about women candidates. I mean, unknown. And this is also where I would say the weird thing belies it. I mean, look, he's a recent Catholic convert, and he believes very strongly in being pro-life. That's just all. Look, you know, I use my personal level. I know him.

But if I were running against him, that's all I would talk about. That's it, period. I mean, he said it literally on camera. That's kind of the things you have to do whenever you're running for a Republican race and you're going and I think he won the Susan B. Anthony list, for example, endorsement in his race. Just play that on a loop. I mean, that's one where it's very, very easy to drive that home and to make it clear. Now, to be fair, every single person on Trump's list, save for Glenn Youngkin, was actually adamantly pro-life. This is also, too, where when we think about the context of the vice presidential pick,

the vice presidential pick for J.D. was made in the context of Joe Biden is staying in this race. And this is one where he was relatively confident not only about his victory, but he was concerned about a secondary on the ticket who was going to be loyal to him and loyal to his agenda. At the very least, that was important to his advisors and the people who are picking him, where he didn't know he was going to be in a knife fight, you know, on abortion. Now, would he have picked J.D. still? It's certainly possible. I think maybe even likely, considering what Trump, you know, considers important. But yeah, I think he would be lying to say his calculus wouldn't have been a little bit different if he didn't know that Kamala was going to be in the race. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if Trump could keep the number one descriptor of J.D. Vance at unknown,

I think he'd be happy with that. Yeah, it's the worst. We've had worse things. That's not realistic, right? He's going to get defined and known to the American public between now and November. And so Trump better defend him because the Democrats are certainly not going to lay off in how they're aggressively seeking to define him. And what was interesting to me, actually, about this gender divide is that there wasn't a big one. Men are more likely to say conservative, but all like both genders saying here unknown, unsure, unknown, unsure and then weird. So it was interesting to me. Actually, I was expecting more of a gender

divide in terms of the descriptors among men and women. And that doesn't jump out at you right here. I guess perhaps a positive is you don't see like abortion on here anywhere or extreme. It may be in there, but not as like one of the main descriptors. But I think the weird thing is, I think it's a problem. I think it's very Trumpian type of descriptor that, you know, it's impossible to refute, right? And the more you refute it, you try to refute it directly, the more you kind of play into the imprint of the word

and it's very hard to beat the charges. So that's what I would say. If I were them, I would not even utter the word weird. Yeah, because the more you say it, the more it just imprints in people's minds, like J.D. Vance weird, J.D. Vance weird. I read his speech that he gave last night in Arizona. I was long asleep by the time he delivered those remarks. But I read it this morning, and it was Kamala is fake, Kamala is independent, Kamala is liberal. I was like, okay, yeah, that's basically what I would say. But at the same time, like I said, when you run for number two,

a lot of people don't really care what you have to say or who you are. I'm basically with you. I don't really – I think unknown is probably the best you can really hope for at this time, especially because he cannot make an affirmative case for himself because that would upstage him to Donald Trump. Not an enviable position. It's the worst position that you could possibly be in. All right, let's put age. Yeah, let's put age up on the screen. We can take a look at this one. The breakdown here, this was amusing to me, 18 to 29. Instead of unknown, it's IDK. You got weird is the,

jumps out the most in the youngest demographic. In the oldest demographic, you've got conservative, bad, idiot, unknown. But really the thing, you know, that is consistent across the board is unknown and unsure. Yep. Don't know who he is. Yeah. So I think that's, like I said, I think it's a real risk for the Trump campaign because the longer it remains as unknown, the more of an opportunity you have for Democrats to define who he is for you.

But it also means that the negative perceptions of him have not completely taken hold in a unmovable way amongst the public. There's still a possibility to define him in a way that would be positive for the ticket rather than negative. Yes, absolutely. 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 One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. 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 thing is.

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

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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. Former President Donald Trump made an appearance at the NABJ, the National Association of Black

Journalists event. And let's just say it was fiery. It was astonishing. The circumstances itself were absolutely crazy. Trump was held off the stage waiting for some 34 minutes to go on because there were microphone issues. The microphone issues then manifested themselves during the interview. During the interview, they were talking past each other.

Trump himself was facing a jeering crowd. Many people there were very upset that he even appeared in the first place. And it went off the rails from the very, very first answer. Let's take a listen. I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like animal and rabbit to describe

black district attorneys. You've attacked black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are, quote, stupid and racist. You've had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking black supporters to vote for you, why should black voters trust you after you have used language like that? Well, first of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question so in such a horrible manner. First question. You don't even say hello. How are you? Are you with ABC? I was invited here and I was told my opponent, whether it was Biden or Kamala, I was told my opponent was going to be here. It turned out my opponent isn't here. You invited me under false pretense.

And then you said you can't do it with Zoom. Well, where's Zoom? She's gonna do it with Zoom and she's not coming. And then you were half an hour late. Just so we understand, I have too much respect for you to be late. They couldn't get their equipment working or something was wrong. Mr. President, I would love if you could answer the question on your rhetoric and why you believe that black voters can trust you with another four years. I have been the best president for the black population since Abraham Lincoln. That's my answer. Better than President Johnson who signed the Voting Rights Act? For you to start off a question and answer period, especially when you're 35 minutes late because you couldn't get your equipment to work in such a hostile manner,

I think it's a disgrace. All right, Crystal, that is a vintage 2016. I was gonna say, I'm checking the calendar because it feels like 2016. He's back, folks. The ear, what was it, being nice and all that? It only lasted for a couple of days. This is as Trump as Trump has been in quite a long time on the campaign trail there. But I mean, I guess the only thing that we could say at least here with the question is about Kamala Harris, because she was originally said that she couldn't make it. And then apparently like he was talking there about Zoom. So she it's very trying to figure out, is this lady going to speak at this event or not? Well, it's very, it's very confused what unfolded in the, you know, lead up to this.

Apparently, the best I can figure out is she had said, hey, I'm not going to come, but I can do this via Zoom. Right. And they were like, no Zoom. And then once they announced that they were going to interview Trump and there was this huge, in my opinion, stupid backlash. Oh, about platforming? Yeah, I know. Your journalist. He's the former and potential future president.

Like, of course you should interview him. And in my opinion, like what happened here is very revealing. And it is something that the American public should see, however they feel about it. OK, so in any case, they got a massive backlash over, quote unquote, platforming Trump. They had board members who were resigning, et cetera. And so I think in an effort to try to clean things up, then it looks like they went back to, and again, this is the best I can figure out from the reporting that's out there. Then I think they go back to Congress and say, oh, wait, actually, we can do the Zoom. And by that point, like,

she's made other plans or whatever. And so, anyway, that was all a mess. And then there were technical difficulties, which as someone, listen, nothing is more frustrating. It's not their fault, like the journalist's fault. It had nothing to do with, like, setting up the mics and whatever.

But you have to remember, this is, he's not as old as Biden, but this is also a cranky old man. So I think that he came in there already loaded for bear, already with an idea of, I'm going to drop a bomb on this place. And I'm going to cause the whole country to talk about what it is that I have to say. And by the way, the major comments that everybody's sharing here about Kamala's identity, we're going to do a whole separate part on that because it's quite clear now that was part of like an intentional campaign strategy. So we're going to separate that out. But I think, you know, he already was like, I'm going in there with this plan. And then when he had to wait for 30 minutes, so frustrated, then it's just off the rails from the beginning. I

mean, to her, listen, overall, I didn't think that this trio, they were kind of at odds with each other. The questions that I would want to ask were not asked, you know, about economics and, you know, the things that really impact people's lives. But let's be clear, that first question, like, she had to ask that first question.

I mean, in the context of her events, I guess. And for him to be so thin-skinned about, you know, this had been controversial for their group, she had to ask that first question. And he just, you know, completely off the rails from the beginning. I just thought it was stupid. It was very Megyn Kelly-esque. It's like, you've culled women. So what do you think he's going to say? Yeah, he's going to be like, you know what?

You're right. I'm a freaking racist. It's just, like, so dumb. But, look, this is the other thing. I don't think it's dumb. Like I said, I think she has to ask that question, given like the concerns of the group that she's representing and the controversy going into it. You know, I don't it's unreasonable to expect that you're just going to get like a softball out the gate. You have a limited amount of time with him.

He's the he's a very consequential figure, potential future president. You know, the notion that he should just be handed a softball as a first question is preposterous. Oh, I don't think it should be a softball. I mean, the last part is you think you're the most consequential president since Abraham Lincoln for black people. How could you possibly say that in good faith? Maybe let's get into that. But again, and also on a professional level, you and I prepare very stringently for interviews. It's very clear these three ladies didn't talk to each other about who was gonna ask what, because they're always talking across. And so it's very clear these three ladies didn't talk to each other about who was gonna ask what. Yeah, they were. Because they're always talking across.

And so it's funny, cuz afterwards, all these journalists were like, my God, they did such a good job. I was like, I thought that was a freaking disaster. And whoever put that thing together, you should be humiliated. We have higher standards here on a YouTube show. Now, there was a consequential and interesting answer here, where Harris Faulkner over at Fox News pressed Trump on the J.D. Vance childless cat lady comments. And you can see here in real time,

he both moves from defense to listen, vice president, it doesn't even matter at all. Let's take a listen. And that's why this decision is important this time. Bad things happen. You said it twice. When you look at J.D. Vance, is he ready on day one? Does he what? Ready on day one, if he has to be. I've always had great respect for him and for the other candidates, too. But I will say this, and I think this is well documented. Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there's a lot of commotion as to who, like you're having it on the Democrat side, who it's going to be. And then that dies down. And it's all about the presidential pick. Virtually never has it mattered. Maybe Lyndon Johnson mattered for different reasons

of what we're talking about, not for vote reasons, but for political reasons, other political reasons. But historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference. That is interesting. What's up? The LBJ thing is interesting. I didn't actually catch that the first time I listened. What he's saying is that because JFK was assassinated, that's why he ends up being consequential. Right.

Well, I was so I was thought because Trump has previously praised Roger Stone, you know, he's their friend. Roger wrote a whole book about how LBJ is actually the one who killed JFK. And so I was like, did he mean it in terms of LBJ was a part of the assassination? That's kind of immediately where my mind went to. I was like, is he implying that LBJ was part of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK? Look, I don't know. It was definitely. You can read a lot of things in those comments. What's funny, though, is that if you actually know the history, he is right.

One of the things that was very present at the 1960 convention is that people were very upset with- The Democratic Party at that time was totally split between the Southern conservatives and the Massachusetts Northeast liberals. The Massachusetts and Midwestern liberals all supported civil rights. Obviously the Southern, the states didn't, and they weren't going to back anybody who was a number two on the ticket, unless it was somebody who was anti-civil rights. In their head, they believed that Johnson who had kind of bamboozled them his entire life was against civil rights and was a Southern ally. And so his adding to the ticket was actually very, very consequential for at least bringing over some of the Democratic senators and then trying to push back against the George Wallace rising

segregationist sentiment in the South. So I think he unintentionally was correct about why LBJ, I actually do think is probably the most consequential vice presidential pick in modern history. Right, I mean, that's fair. That's obviously fair. And because of what, also, he basically stole the state of Texas for JFK whenever it came to the elections. Fact check true. But obviously the bigger takeaway here is he gets asked a very direct question. Is J.D. Vance ready on day one? And he does not say yes.

No, yeah, he doesn't say yes. That's such a gimme. That is such a gimme. Like even if you don't believe it, of course you say yes. You picked this vice president because you believe they're ready on day one. And he dodges the question. And then he goes on to say, he says something that I have respect for, I have respect for a lot of people. And then he goes on to say, Josh Barrow tweeted, it's very clear this is what his advisors are telling him when he's freaking out about the pick himself.

And vice president doesn't matter anyway. So whatever, who cares whether he's good or bad or ready on day one? Trump is never gonna, Trump's gonna be like, I think in Trump's mind, he's like, ready on day one, what about me? I'm ready on day one, I'm here, I'm ready to go. Anything that could possibly upstage him, cause problems for him. Look at Project 2025, the most slavishly devoted people to Donald Trump. And the moment they cause an issue for him, he's like, I'm gonna cut you loose, I'm never gonna talk to you or see you again, and I'm gonna declare war on you. This is his part of his M.O.

This is as close as you will get to confirmation that Trump does regret his choice right here. Being unwilling to say like really a single positive thing about J.D. Vance, being unwilling to say that your vice presidential pick is ready on day one is really something. And so, yeah, for him to go on this tangent about like, well, who cares about him? It doesn't really matter. See, I read it as that's what he would say about anybody who he had picked. I'm not sure he would have said that necessarily about Doug Burgum or any of these other folks, because if Burgum was the nominee, yeah, I get it. He codes more. He has actually said more positive things about Doug Burgum, I think, at this point than

he has about J.D. Vance. Straight out of central casting. Yeah, and he also, he did a whole thing about Doug Burgum that was interesting where he is like, he's a little too nice, he doesn't realize sometimes a little controversy is a good thing, something like that. This is what I mean with this man, it's like you can never win, okay? So I don't know if I would put it that way, I would just say with Trump, anytime that you're causing even an inkling of an issue for him, he's going to immediately nuke you and throw you under the bus and remind you kind of of your place. Yeah. Now, as you said- J.D. Vance, you are on your own. That is very clear.

I think that's always been. And I think anybody who's going into that job should have been very clear-eyed that loyalty only goes one way in that relationship. Let's put this up here on the screen from April Ryan. So she reported kind of what you were saying, Crystal, about the NABJ. They shut down a conversation for a virtual town hall because apparently Harris said that she needed to be in Chicago in person. Or they said that she needed to be in Chicago in person. Only then, after they began to ask her to consider it, then yesterday afternoon they moved on after being told no about being in person. Then they came back and they asked for a VP surrogate. Megan Thee Stallion, Oprah, or Barack Obama. Yeah, we're going to

interview Trump. And then after that, we're going to ask Megan Thee Stallion's opinion. Okay. I mean, Oprah, maybe, whatever. Obama, okay. Obama was the only one. Hey, Mr. President, did you ask Joe Biden to drop out of the race? Yes or no question. Yes or no question. And he's going to try. I mean, that's actually newsworthy and interesting. Obama is newsworthy. Yeah, I would take that. But Oprah, has Oprah even endorsed in this race yet? I don't know. Megan Thee Stallion is hilarious. But anyway, yeah. So basically, according to April Ryan, what happened is Kamala said she could do virtual. They were like, no, we want you in person. She said no to in person. Then we had this freak out about Trump.

Then they're like, oh, maybe we can do virtual, whatever. Anyway, so that's the backstory. It was definitely a mess. I still think it was a mistake of Kamala not to clear her schedule and actually try and get it done because the optics of it are ridiculous. It's like, why is Trump in the midst of obviously a very hostile environment where people were like weeping and jeering, you know, in the back and gasping, you know, all of these people. And why didn't she show up or at least, you know, try to make it work? I get that people are busy, but also look, politicians are a lot less busy than you would think. Sometimes they can do. When they want to make something happen, they can make it happen.

I do think, listen. You have a private plane. It takes off 30 minutes late. Okay, you know, come on. It's consistent with she is, she's afraid of these kind of settings. Because while it would be a friendlier audience for her, you know, you get Harris Faulkner up on the stage.

And she's not gonna, they're gonna feel, especially after doing a tough interview with Trump, they're gonna feel, especially after doing a tough interview with Trump, they're gonna feel like they need to show balance with Kamala and not just do a softball interview with Kamala. And she is nervous about those settings. And she has reason to be nervous about those settings, cuz in the past, it hasn't gone that well for her. So I think you're right about, if it went well for her, then it was a missed opportunity for her to get out there. And obviously this became like the big story of the day and she becomes a sideshow to it.

But if it didn't go well for her, then it was the right call to skip it. No, I mean, this is the issue. Strategically, I would do the exact same thing if I were her. I'm going to look at my record and say I'm terrible at management and I'm bad in interviews. You know what I'm not going to do? Interviews. Apparently what she had pushed for was, this was another report about some friendly fireside chat. And to their credit, they're like, no, you have to do an interview. And that's the thing about Rachel Scott. Look, I don't think she did a particularly good job here in this interview,

but I have seen her get yelled at by Nancy Pelosi. And look, any Democrat screaming at you in the hallway, that actually is important. You know, if you were willing to sit there and take it a little bit and actually ask a challenging question. So I don't have any doubt that both her and Harris Faulkner would have pushed her at least a little bit. You know, I mean, there are serious questions to be asked here. Did you know that Joe Biden was old? At what point did Joe Biden tell you he was going to run for president? These are ones where if you don't ask that, you are a joke as a journalist. Well, and also really critically, and we're going to talk to Matt Stoller about what we think she might do as president. What do you believe, lady?

We don't know, right? We don't know. And she's already this week, she's changed her position on a number of issues. Fracking, Medicare for all. What am I missing? The border. Yeah. No, there's one more. No, that's still on the list. She hasn't changed. That one's still out there. There's another, there's one more. No, that's still on the list. She hasn't changed. That one's still out there. There's another one that's out there. She's in a tough spot to reconcile who she wants to be now in this context versus who she's been in the past or what she's run on. And there are difficult questions, obviously, out there for the taking that you would be irresponsible as a journalist not to ask. And I do think that these journalists would have

asked her some of those questions. And so, yeah, it's not a surprise to me that she didn't want to be there in person, that she, you know, after they were like, okay, you can do Zoom, it was like, I'm busy. Because these are the types of situations that she typically does want to avoid. Yeah, I think you're right. That doesn't surprise me. So, by the way, in terms of the verdict, we have still not yet come down on whether she's going to appear or not. Allegedly, what did you say? There was something about September. She might do it. But that's a month from now. That's not fair. You know, it should be now, like the immediate days. It's only been 11

days since Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Like you've not done a major interview. You have to. How many rallies has she done? It's not fair to the American public. But I could sit here and cry all day. It's not going to matter. At the end of the day, she's actually making the right call. I wouldn't say a damn word. I would do these rallies with Megan Thee Stallion, rile people up. She's raising $200 million. One in 200 something Americans is donating to her campaign. You're going to get a VP pick and get an ocean of Wall Street money. Maybe flirt a little bit with this whole Lena Kahn thing. A hundred something venture capitalists, multi-billionaires signed a letter backing her. This is the best position a Democratic candidate has been in basically since Obama.

And I mean, what, early Hillary Clinton before some of the worst parts of her were coming out. So and let's be honest. I mean, this is this is the new this is the new, is mostly candidates don't feel the need to subject themselves to anything that may even approach a hostile interview. Joe Biden certainly didn't. He would go on some wellness podcast or on some totally, not even a journalist softball, such a late night or whatever. And I do think it's, I think it's wildly anti-democratic. I think it's a very negative trend. And you're absolutely right. She has been brought in here at the last minute. There was no democratic process whatsoever that led to this result. And so people deserve

even more so to have access to her, hear how she handles these questions, hear how she views her role and her ascension and what she would do with an extraordinary amount of power. You know, people do deserve to hear that, but that doesn't, you know, doesn't mean that I have any hopes because if you're just looking tactically,

they're playing it exactly the way that they should play it. And the polls reflect that at this point. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. and episodes 4, 5, 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 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. Okay, let's move on. The headline, the big one. What actually came out of this? Donald Trump asked, actually, I don't even know if he was asked about this, but brought it up seemingly. No, he was asked whether, about the attacks on Kamala Harris as a DEI candidate. That's right. And then he gives- And then he gave this answer about her heritage. Let's take a listen. It was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn

black and now she wants to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? She is always identified as a black. I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a black person. Just to be clear, sir, do you believe that she is a- I think somebody should look into that too when you ask a continue in a very hostile, nasty town. It's a direct question, sir. Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is a DEI hire, as some Republicans have said? I really don't know. I mean, I really don't know. Could be, could be. All right. So that was the answer. And actually, clearly, it was part of a concerted

strategy. Let's put this up there on the screen, because immediately afterwards, they put up on the big screen at a rally that Trump was incoming. Yeah, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, California's Kamala Harris becomes first Indian American US senator. So Crystal, you may have heard rhetoric like this before, because I think I was complaining about it. I think I was on our AMA. And all right, I'm going to do my best to try and thread the needle here, because people are very upset about this. And I think, frankly, a lot of it is crocodile tears. I think that Kamala Harris is somebody who was raised very much almost identical to me. She was raised basically by an Indian

professor, South Indian specifically. And for the vast majority of her early life, identified as Indian. Her mother even said that she culturally identifies as Hindu. It is clear, though, that after she attended Howard University, that being, quote, unquote, black and black only became the identity that she began to ascribe, except when politically convenient. So Lee Fong reported in his sub stack several days ago that she ran as quote Kamala Devi Harris. Devi is her middle name. It's an Indian word as well, as South Asian in her first race in 2003, but by 2020 was listing her in her bio only as a black woman. And this is where, if we connect our word clouds, the fake moniker, the being a chameleon, the code switching, which if we're all being honest and watching the way that she talks in front of various different

audiences, I think is unambiguously true. That is kind of where I think Trump is trying to quote unquote triangulate here. And actually amongst Indians, this has been a longtime beef with Kamala Harris is she forgot she was Indian a long time ago. So, and just to be clear about her hair, her dad is Jamaican. Her dad is from Jamaica or was he from Jamaica? I think he's definitely Jamaican. He is Jamaican. I think he's, you know, an immigrant from, I think both her parents were immigrants to the United States. Yeah. And they met. Yeah. Yes, so mom is Indian, dad is Jamaican. She is biracial at different points in time.

She has emphasized one part of her heritage versus another. Republicans are sharing this like clip of her with Mindy Kaling, like this is some big gotcha, which I actually think is sort of like counter to the narrative that like, oh, now she only talks about being black because here she is in this clip with Mindy Kaling. That's the one time she's called herself Indian. Also talking about being Indian. But in any case, I think you're 100% correct. The goal here is to try to play, try to lay out a narrative of Kamala Harris as fake. And as someone who, and this part is very accurate, has been politically all over the place,

whatever has been convenient. I think that attack is pretty salient, although I have to tell you, after looking at our word clouds, I'm actually convinced that the incompetent attack is probably a more effective attack on her. But I think that like fake and doesn't believe it. I think that's more effective than the she's a radical liberal blah, blah, blah, because they say that about literally everybody. However, as I said before, when we had the DEI debate, I think when you are the party that is constantly talking about someone's race and their gender, it is very off-putting. And I actually think the biggest problem with these comments demographically isn't actually black people or women of color. I actually think it's white people

because, you know, if I go back to like Obama, white people in this country loved the idea that we were a country that would elect someone like Barack Obama, right? Who had this complex biracial upbringing, who was, you know, who would code switch, who was sort of like culturally ambiguous, could be different things to different groups and, you know, product of, of an immigrant, one immigrant parent, like people liked that perception of the country and they liked what it said about themselves that they could vote for a Barack Obama with that background. So, you know, a lot of this stuff was tried with him. And I actually, I don't know if you remember this,

because you're much younger than me, but you probably do because you're a political nerd. But there was an effort on the left to say Barack Obama's not really black. Oh, yeah, this was the whole Jesse Jackson thing. Because he's not the descendant of African slaves. And this was widely, like, mocked and ridiculed and sort of laughed out of the room. And then on the right, you had, which Donald Trump was a part of, the whole birtherism thing, also really didn't land and wasn't an effective attack on Barack Obama. So that's why, to me, trying to make the fake, phony case with Kamala, but by going in on how she's identified herself and how she

has at various times talked about her identity. I think it is such a political loser. And the last thing I'll say about this, Agar, is I think Trump misunderstands his own appeal. Because part of what has led Trump to be somewhat rehabbed in the public image is the fact that he was kicked off Twitter and people can't hear his crazy bullshit all day long anymore. And to me, what occurred here is, and I think some of this you agree with, he wasn't in the headlines. Kamala was in the headlines and J.D. Vance and cat ladies were was in the headlines. He can see the numbers. He can see the race slipping away a little bit. You know, he's still probably, you know, somewhat the favorite, but

it's very different ball game. And I think he got a little bit freaked out and felt like I need to pull the fire alarm and do something that is going to get the cameras on me, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. He thinks all controversy is good controversy. and I just, I don't think that that's actually correct. This is where I'm just not sure. Look, I lived, this is the thing. This was such a 2016 moment, and the media immediate reaction to it, and everyone's like, oh, he's finished.

He's never gonna, I'm like, guys, I lived through a cycle where what he questioned, what was the Mexican judge? He's like, oh, he's not even a real American or something like that. This was like day after day. Who was the gold star father and the gold star mother on the stage? The Khan family. Yeah, he attacked the Khan family, right? It's one of those where, listen, guys, I've seen it.

I've seen this whole movie and he won that election. So I'm just not gonna sit here and pretend that this is gonna be some earth shattering thing. On the question of race. Now I am, look, I agree there are liberal white people who love the idea of voting for a black person. Now, this is also where I need to separate the politics because on a personal level, this has always driven me nuts. And it's not just about Kamala. It's people like Bobby Jindal and others who it's like, if you listen to him, oh, he came out of nowhere and he just was born a Catholic.

It's like, really, Paiush? Is that what happened? Or maybe, you know, you converted to Catholicism and now that's the only thing you even talk about with your identity. In fact, amongst Republicans, the only authentically Indian candidate who has ever run is Vivek Ramaswamy, who never changed his position, never lied about his religion or made up some story. I think he's even a vegetarian, so he's more religious than I am. But my point is just that most Indians in this country, especially Republicans and others, they run away from it. Kamala is also one of those people who was raised in the early times when there was only a couple hundred thousand

Indians in America, and she ran away from her identity. And that drives me crazy because, like I said, she was raised like me. Her father wasn't even there around when she was being brought up in frickin' Canada, like in like Winnipeg with her mother. She heavily identified. And then it's like politically, you know, it's very convenient in San Francisco, heavily Asian city. There you can be Kamala, Davy Harris. But now you're just only a black woman. And I think that's gross.

And that's why like any time somebody's time, someone says, oh, she's Indian, too. I'm like, yeah, well, she hasn't hasn't wanted to be for a long time. I do think the phony chameleon thing does hit a little bit. The reason it didn't work against Obama is Obama was authentic from the, he wrote a whole book, dreams of my father about his father who abandoned him, how he was half black and his father was from Kenya, how difficult and weird it was to be raised by his white grandparents in Kansas, how he came to black culture also almost as a stranger moving to Chicago. What was it? Marrying Michelle Obama and really like being what it was, knowing what it was like to be in like a black family there and eventually come up in black politics. Every single one of that is not only true, it's authentic.

And that's why people didn't smell it as gross. With Kamala, I think that is where what people can at least project on is that fake moniker and see somebody who has shapeshifted her entire career. So I'm not so sure that it's a bad thing. And, you know, look, whenever we think too about this white liberal vote and all that, these people are voting for Kamala anyways. There's a lot of suburban ladies out there. Yeah, and they're all voting Democrat because of abortion. I mean, it's just like, I don't think that this is really such a swing state killer. If it was, then it would have been bad in 2016.

Here's the thing to me is like, first of all, I do think with some swing voters who were very concerned about voting for Biden, like it is the party that obsesses over race and gender war is a party that is going to be losing. And right now it is the Republicans who are freaking out about her race and her gender. And we actually have her reaction. This is B7. I actually thought she played this perfectly well, because to me, what she and the Democrats should do is not to go into Hillary Clinton, pearl clutch, constant moral indignation mode. It should be to keep it moving, keep it moving. And I think she did actually a very effective job with that. Whether the media can do that or not is kind of out of her control. But let's take a listen to what she had to say at the rally last night about these comments.

This is B7. We all here remember what those four years were like. And today we were given yet another reminder. This afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists. And it was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,

a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength. So I say to Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Incorporated, ours is a fight for the future. So let me tell you why I think she played this one. We of all, she doesn't even go into what he said. Everybody knows, like, they're laughing. And she's in on the joke. She's, you know, she's not flustered by it.

She's laughing at him. And then she makes it about, she says, the American people deserve better. This is the same old, same old. Brush it aside. Laugh at him. American people deserve better. And that's the way she needs to play this. And I think it's the most effective way. Because again, I think the trap that Hillary felt, first of all, Hillary was already an unlikable person.

The crooked Hillary thing really stuck. I mean, there was a lot going on there, okay? Kamala Harris, right now, her favorability is actually coming up. People are liking her more and more. She's good in these settings, and she has a natural ease to her that Hillary Clinton has literally never had. But the trap Hillary fell into was they would just go into constant pearl clutching, moral indignation, fretting about our children are watching whatever. And people found it irritating, was like, okay, we get it. This guy's a maniac. Move on, like move on, move on, move on. And so anyway,

I think that the Harris campaign seems to have internalized those lessons. And so if they're the ones out there talking about things that people actually care about, and the Trump campaign is obsessing over when she said she was Indian and when she said she was black and that she's a woman and is she a DEI hire and whatever, people are going to be like, who cares? Who cares whether she's black or Indian or biracial? And when she said what to whom, et cetera, you kind of are actually distracting from the core message you want to have about this is someone who's phony, who, you know, on the issues is changing her position and you make it exclusively about her race and gender versus that broader conversation. If they can connect the two, I still think it could be potent. I think the door's out.

We need to see, I want to wait a little bit longer and see how it goes. But I hate to say it, I agree, because one of the things that you're hoping for when you're Trump is the freak out, is how dare you, Mr. Trump, you are a racist. And it's like, oh, never heard that one before. So with the media reaction, they responded very predictably. But I actually thought that was a relatively measured response. That's basically how I would have played it. Yeah, that's the right way to play it. You know, going forward.

And if anything, maybe it shows Democrats have learned something, which is constantly concern trolling about our children watching just doesn't work. It's a completely failed strategy. So she had some confidence there. Again, though, we need to see this woman in an interview. I desperately, desperately need to see her on. I don't even care about this. I need to see her, you know, like, why did you reverse five of your seven positions that you ran on when you were president in the span of the 11 days since you've been running for president? Yeah, because that

would be 10 times more powerful than any of the stuff that we're even talking about here. Yeah. So there you go. Yep. Agree with all of that. 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 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 Glod. And this is season two of the war on drugs. But 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. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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 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. So as Emily and I covered with Dr. Trita Parsi yesterday, there have been an extraordinary series of events in the Middle East over the course of a very short period of time. Israel first assassinated a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, in the capital of Lebanon. And then they, it appears, assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, who was in Tehran, so in the Iranian capital. And he was the political head of Hamas. Iran, of course, threatening retaliation. You can only imagine what we would do if there was an assassination in Washington, D.C., how we would respond. And we are also dealing with the fallout of those ceasefire negotiations because Haniyeh

was one of the key figures in Hamas who was actually pushing for a deal against, you know, Yahya Sinwar and some of the other more hardline Hamas members. So Israel has effectively assassinated the top negotiator in those ceasefire negotiations. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was asked about exactly what this will mean going forward for those negotiations. Let's take a listen. Hania was involved in ceasefire talks in Gaza. What impact is his death going to have? Well, of course, I've seen the reports. And what I can tell you is this. First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in. It's very hard to speculate, and I've learned over many years never to speculate on the impact one event may have on something else. So I can't tell you.

So, Sagar, interested for your reaction. I mean, a couple things that are noteworthy there. Obviously, he's claiming, oh, I don't know what this will mean. Like, obviously, this is going to be a problem. And it's entirely consistent with the track record of Bibi Netanyahu doing everything he can to blow up these negotiations at literally every point. So let's put that aside. The other thing he claims there is that the U.S. had no idea. That may be true. I don't know. But it also may not be true. Because remember, Bibi Netanyahu was in town last week. These were both very sophisticated operations, so it raised a lot of questions. Hey, was the CIA involved in helping to plan this? I can tell you

people in the region are very skeptical that the U.S. had no idea, had nothing to do with this. Well, I'm not sure which is more terrifying, that we knew or that we didn't know. If we did know, and then we are lying about it, and then yet still bearing the cost. Or that we didn't know. If we did know and then we were lying about it and then yet still bearing the cost, or if we didn't know and then that we're somebody who's backing to the hilt. So in a certain sense, it doesn't really matter which one it was because we're going to bear the brunt of that no matter what. That was very evident with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin being asked about this. Let's take a listen. If Israel is attacked, we certainly will help defend Israel. You saw us do that in April. You can expect to see us do that again. But we don't want to see any of that happen. We're

going to work hard to make sure that we're doing things to help take the temperature down and address issues through diplomatic means. You're in it now, folks, whether you like it or not. That's right. That's one of those things people were like, what, are you not saying that he shouldn't have been killed? I'm like, well, let's just say this. It's kind of a statement, right? He's been sitting in Qatar. So if you want to kill him, why didn't you kill him in Qatar? If he's on a plane, why didn't you blow his plane out of the sky? I mean, I think killing somebody in the, what was it, the presidential complex on the first day of the reign of the Iranian president, that was a very

coordinated statement by the Israelis just to the level of the Iranian president. That was a very coordinated statement, you know, by the Israelis just to the level of penetration they have, their technology, the lack of Iranian missile defense. There's a whole host of military things. But politically, it's a, you know, it's like a, hey, we're not afraid of you. And in a certain sense, like, shouldn't be, right? Because America is the one that is now underwriting all of this. Now, if they had to stand on their own, it'd be a whole other story, wouldn't it? Because what did, didn't you and Ryan cover this? I mean, Hezbollah missiles penetrated the Iron Dome. Are we all just going to ignore that? That was like two weeks ago. And here, this attack that just happened where 12 people were killed. I don't

know. It could be Hezbollah, whatever. Regardless, something went wrong, I think, and that should kind of shake people in Israel to their core. But they don't seem to be afraid because they think America is going to bail them out. And increasingly, that just seems like the correct assumption. And now here's who is running this country. Is it Blinken? Is it Lloyd Austin? Who's making the security guarantees? Is Joe Biden even on the phone here? One of the things we've learned electorally is Joe Biden wouldn't call people back. Sean Fain apparently requested a phone call with him. Biden didn't call him. Are you calling Bibi? Like who's running this stuff, dude? It's terrifying. Fantastic question. That is a fantastic and very legitimate question. We haven't heard a peep. Yeah, he hasn't said

anything. Joe Biden about any of this. Not that that would really allay the concerns. Let's be clear about who is really running things behind the scenes. I mean, unfortunately, I think Biden mostly has been running the Israel policy, which is part of why it has been so utterly dreadful and destructive, both to the U.S., to Israel, and most first and foremost to Palestinians. You know, this type of potentially escalatory spiral and true chaos and true breakout of a massive regional war has been, is so predictable and has been completely predictable from the beginning and was a key part of why we've been, people like us have been pushing for a ceasefire for so long.

Because the longer the conflict goes on, the more you have a risk of exactly this type of dangerous chaos unfolding. So it is unconscionable to me that our Secretary of Defense comes right out and of course, of course, we'll join the hostilities. Of course, we'll have Israel's back because make no mistake about it, Iran is already saying they're going to retaliate. Hezbollah, to your point, Sagar, this is a formidable foe. They have Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Sight News. We used this in the show yesterday. He interviewed a top scholar of Hezbollah who has studied them and their methods and their tactics and who they are and how many fighters they have. They have somewhere around 100,000 fighters, very different from Hamas. They have very sophisticated weaponry. And he says if

they entered a full-scale war, Israel versus Hezbollah, it could be so devastating that it could lead to, this is his words, the unraveling of the Israeli state. No question, yeah. So I mean, I'm not saying that's what would happen. I asked Dr. Parsi about this, and he said, I'm not saying that's what would happen, but many analysts and scholars believe that is the level of destruction that we're talking about that would be on the table. Let's put this next piece up on the screen from the Financial Times. Headline here, assassinated the arch enemies of Israel, killed in twin strikes. It also is not lost on me that these dual assassinations come as Israel

was facing a massive domestic political crisis, which we covered here on the show earlier this week. Members of the Knesset joining up with right-wing militia mob to storm two separate Israeli bases because they were upset about soldiers being prosecuted for the gang rape of Palestinians or literally rioting to protect soldiers' right to gang rape Palestinian detainees that were being held there. So this was a moment of massive political crisis for Bibi Netanyahu. You can bet that all political factions in the country are united behind the efficacy and the execution of these two assassinations. And then the other way it serves Bibi is it once again drags us in and expands and extends the conflict, kills the ceasefire negotiations, as I said, which he has never wanted to go forward with.

And just to back up what I was saying about that from the Financial Times, the piece we just had up on the screen, they write, Haniyeh's killing risks the failure of the already stalled indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Quote, he was one of the ones pushing for a deal and compromise. And because of his stature, he was able to speak to the guys in Gaza in a more convincing way than other guys, according to an Arab diplomat. While there were others from Hamas involved in the negotiations, you've lost a big voice who was influential and could have a strong say internally within Hamas and was for a deal. The Qatari prime minister also said that the killing would endanger the talks. Quote, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side? So Dr. Parsi's analysis saga was that part of the motivation here, too, may be to try to box in Kamala Harris, where there's a question mark about how she would approach this conflict and whether it could be different from Joe Biden.

But if you drag us into some frickin' regional war, then she is stuck, stuck pursuing the same failed strategy of a Joe Biden. Well, it would be smart. That's exactly what I would do. You know, you box him in, and then she's already uttered the shibboleth of American politics. Israel has a right to defend itself. Yeah, that's right. Does Iran? Something you must repeat over and over and over again to become president. You have to say it three times and turn around. And that's what makes you American president. Let's put this up there on the screen. C6, please. This is the terrifying stuff that's happening, again, with no president on the watch.

The Department of State has now raised its Lebanon travel advisory to, quote, do not travel, recommending that U.S. citizens enroll to receive alerts. You also have multiple domestic airlines here in the United States canceling their flights to Israel as evidenced by the fact that they are afraid of Hezbollah rockets. So all of the ingredients for a massive conflagration are there. Basically, Biden is asleep at the wheel. This might be one of the most dangerous times in the international system because America is bogged down in Ukraine. It doesn't even make the news that we just shipped a bunch of F-16s to Ukraine yesterday with advanced weaponry, which takes forever to manufacture here in America. It's cool. If we got a shortage, it'll be all right.

We have 3,500 troops in Iraq and Syria, some who have already been attacked as a result of this very recently. America actually had an airstrike in Iraq just two days ago, trying to take down somebody before they launched an attack on US soldiers. We got this Iran-Israel situation. Secretary of Defense says we're ready to roll. So we got two front war basically on the brink right now. Who knows what the hell's going on in East Asia? Could be good.

You know, there we go. Unbelievable. And the last thing that I'll say, you can put C4 up on the screen in terms of the likely Iranian response. This is from the political, sorry, this is from Supreme Leader Khamenei. Following this bitter, tragic event, which has taken place within the borders of the Islamic Republic, it is our duty to take revenge. And as we speak, I just saw a Reuters report that Iran and their proxies are meeting to discuss retaliation. Representatives of Iran's Palestinian allies, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, as well as Yemen's Tehran-backed Houthi movement,

Lebanon's Hezbollah, and Iraqi resistance groups are all attending this meeting in Tehran. So we're all watching and waiting to see what happens next. But make no mistake, this is a very dangerous situation. Yeah, and that president, it was his very first day on the job. So what do all presidents do whenever something happens in your hometown? You have to appear tough.

You gotta show strength. What do you think? It doesn't take a genius. Like, they have politics just like we have politics. Yes, I understand it's a dictatorship, etc. It's still a big ass country with a big population. You still have to manage and think about what the populace is thinking and how to maintain your grip on power.

He's got internal fights that he has to have with the IRGC, who just had somebody blown up in their own headquarters. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which way that the domestic politics of each country is going to push them towards. It's only ours, apparently, where our domestic politics doesn't matter. It's just governed by Israel in particular. But no, to your point, he was elected, the new Iranian president, as a relative moderate, which on the one hand, you can say, okay, well, maybe he'll be more interested in de-escalation. And the Iranians have actually, the previous retaliation was closely calculated to show strength, but hopefully not be escalatory, you know, in terms of making sure that there were no massive, like,

civilian deaths or anything like that. So, however, you also have a dynamic where you can imagine here if someone is elected as kind of like a dove, then you got to beat the rap that you're going to be too soft in a situation like this. So in any case, we'll see how this all unfolds. 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 thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush.

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

And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 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 Catherine 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.

At the same time, we are watching closely the veep stakes for Kamala Harris, because I do think that who she picks will be quite consequential as a validator for her, potentially to help shore up some of those Midwestern former blue wall states. And one of the top contenders who has emerged is Governor Josh Shapiro. He has come under a lot of scrutiny from people like me and others of the top contenders who has emerged is Governor Josh Shapiro. He has come under a lot of scrutiny from people like me and others on the left because in particular of some very strident comments he made about student protesters comparing them to the KKK. I'm going to bring you those comments shortly. But in addition, he also took actions to directly quash protests within the state. He also is, you know, bad on charter schools from our perspective, from a left perspective, and has earned the ire of a lot of unions because of that.

He just came out and did this whole thing. I want to slash corporate taxes. So that's also an issue. And, you know, he's taken a number of positions that have caused some problems for him among the young progressive base in the Democratic Party. So there's somewhat of an organized online movement for Kamala to back Tim Walz in particular, but the ire is trained towards Josh Shapiro. Because everything now has to be framed in this way. The real issue that is being alleged here is not about those policy positions or the comments he made comparing protesters to the KKK. No, no. The Atlantic has decided the real issue is that we're all just anti-Semites because Josh Shapiro happens to be Jewish. Let's put this up on the screen.

We have Yair Rosenberg who wrote a piece for the Atlantic. He tweeted it out by saying, Josh Shapiro called Netanyahu one of the worst leaders of all time, but anti-Israel activists have mobilized against him and him alone being on the Democratic ticket. I wrote about the campaign against Shapiro and the perverse politics of Jewish identity. You can put his piece up on the screen from the Atlantic. He says, anti-Israel partisans have every right to advocate against candidates who oppose their cause, and there's nothing inherently anti-Semitic about doing so. But as his name implies, the Genocide Josh campaign is not about applying a single standard

on Palestine to all VP contenders. It's about applying them to one person who just so happens to be the only Jew on the short list. And to make matters more absurd, Shabir's positions on Israel don't come close to fitting the epithet. It's become hard to escape the conclusion that some of the activists imposing this inquisition have a problem not just with Israel or Zionism, but with Jews who they assume are serving a foreign power no matter what they've actually said or done. Okay, a few things. First of all, none of the other candidates on the short list made it such provocative. Like, no one else compared us to the KKK. Okay. So let's start there. Number two, J.B. Pritzker was talked about for VP. The left likes J.B. Pritzker. Bernie Sanders is like still the reigning icon of the

left. Both of these gents happen to be Jewish. So the, you know, the total dismissal of either the Israel concerns or any of the other policy-focused concerns that the left have is just part and parcel where it is becoming increasingly the case that someone's Jewish identity can be weaponized to silence any sort of criticism or dissent that you may have on what their actual positions and policy statements have been. Yeah, exactly, especially when you compare the comments that he made and how vociferous they are. I think we have those comments. Why don't we take a listen? They have a responsibility to keep students safe. Students shouldn't be blocked from going to campus just because they're Jewish or learning in a classroom as opposed to being forced online because they're Jewish. It is simply unacceptable. And you know what? We have to query whether or not we would tolerate this if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia, making comments about people who are African-American in our communities. Certainly

not condoning that, Jake, by any stretch. But I think we have to be careful about setting any kind of double standard here on our campuses. We got to call it out for what it is. And these university leaders have to make sure there is order on their campuses. Yeah, it is just a classic misnomer to call everything anti-Semitism and to not focus. He didn't even mention it, you know, in the story. It's just all about his identity. This is like as good as, this is as good as identity politics gets, you know. It's like you're the one using your Jewish identity to weaponize a legitimate criticism of you. But, you know, apparently that's not anti-Semitic. So whatever. This whole stuff, it always drives me crazy. Last thing I'll say on this is that in that Atlantic article, he makes a point that I think is an interesting point where he says,

basically, you know, he could serve as exactly the opposite of what you say by being Jewish, using his identity as like a shield for the anti-Semitism claims that are already coming at Kamala Harris. Kamala's married to a Jewish man, but Trump says that he's a crappy Jew, I think was the comment, and that you can't believe any Jewish person would vote for Kamala or the Democrats, et cetera, et cetera, that he could help blunt some of that criticism and create some space for a different policy vis-a-vis Israel that wouldn't be immediately tanked as anti-Semitic. I think that that is actually correct, that if he wanted to serve in that role and capacity, that is a possibility. The problem is that based on the positioning and

the rhetoric so far, there's no indication that he would want to serve that role. Kamala herself is very impressionable. No one is under the impression that this person has any sort of her own ideological core or principles. So that's why if you bring in a vice president who has strongly held views on this issue and is more ideologically committed in the way that Joe Biden was very ideologically committed, who isn't Jewish, by the way, then that can have an outsized impact on the administration versus if she actually had her own independent views on the issue. So I do think that that's a legitimate point to make, that his identity could end up being an asset, sort of like a Nixon goes to

China kind of a deal, that it creates space or Bill Clinton ending welfare kind of deal where it creates the space to blunt those charges of anti-Semitism. I just see no indication that he actually would want to serve in that role, which is why there's such a concern. And, you know, as I mentioned before, the concerns with him go beyond just Gaza also in terms of his policy orientation, promising corporate tax cuts, you know, being very like Obama-esque in terms of his commitment to charter schools and voucher programs and those sorts of things, which have earned the ire of teachers unions in the state. And then the other potential issue for him is these allegations about a sexual harassment cover up among a close aide that were a big deal within the state of Pennsylvania.

But, Sagar, I think, you know, it looks increasingly likely it's going to be Josh Shapiro. Yeah, I would bet pretty good money on it. At the same time, I think the confounding variables, the UAW did endorse Kamala Harris just two days ago. They said that their two candidates are, what was it? Bashir and Waltz. Andy Bashir, Andy Bashir, unlikely. So it could be Tim Waltz, you know, certainly possible. I mean, I just don't think. Don't get my hopes up, Sondra. I just don't think. I'm prepared for defeat.

It takes a genius. It's Philadelphia. It's a swing state. He's a very popular gov. Like, you know, he's more popular than Tim Waltz even in his own home state. It's the most likely tipping state. Yeah, exactly. Tipping point state.

He is very popular. And her launch is, her like launch with her VP pick is in Philadelphia. Is literally in Philadelphia. So, I mean, either that's like a giant FU to him. Could be, yeah. Because can you imagine picking like Tim Walls and in Shapiro State? But I mean, I guess crazier things have happened. Her aides are promised. Oh, it's had nothing to, the schedule was already preset. It had nothing to do with her pick. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see.

All right, let's go ahead and get to Matt Stoller to talk about Kamala Harris and corporate power and the billionaire campaign to pressure out Lena Khan. Let's get to it. 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. 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. We are back in a big way, in a very big way, real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star studded a little bit, man.

We got a Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman trophy winner. It's just the 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 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. 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.

So joining us now is the aforementioned Matt Stoller, who of course works at the American Economic Liberties Project and authors the big Substack newsletter. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you, man. Hey, good to see you. So there has been this ongoing situation of billionaires publicly pressuring Kamala Harris to oust Lena Khan, of course, FTC commissioner, who has been instrumental in the antitrust

direction of the Biden administration, which is your bread and butter. The most recent part of this saga that I'll start off by getting you to react to was Jake Tapper actually had one of those primary billionaires on, Reid Hoffman. And to everyone's surprise, he did a good job of holding Hoffman's feet to the fire over these demands being made. Let's take a listen to how that exchange went down. You and other big money donors are giving money to Vice President Harris, suggesting also that she replace the head of the FTC, which impacts policy and the economy. What do you say to somebody who watches this and says this isn't how American politics should work,

rich people getting to buy levels of influence? Well, I totally agree with not buying levels of influence. I separate my role as a donor and expert. So if you ask me as a donor, I say I'm giving money to Kamala Harris because I think she's the best future president for the U.S., for business, for a bunch of other things. If you ask me as an expert about what, you know, kind of Lena Kahn is doing and where I think she is helping or hurting America relative to your anti-merger policies, which are mostly to bring litigation versus really solidly grounded in kind of what's going on, what helps American business thrive here and overseas, then I give an expert opinion. But I think donor and expert should be

kept separate. And I've never tied the two ever in any conversation anywhere I've ever had. Right. But I mean, that world doesn't really exist where people say, OK, now I'm talking to Reid Hoffman, the donor, and Reid Hoffman, the guy with political ideas, I'm going to put into the other room. You know, when I speak to these things, I speak more as a venture capitalist. I never speak as a Microsoft board member. But there aren't all these, there aren't like a hundred Reid Hoffmans. It's not like one of you is a donor and one of you has opinions on Lena Kahn and one of you is on the board of Microsoft and one of you is a venture capitalist. You're all the same guy. Of all of Biden's appointees, J.D. Vance is most enthusiastic about Lena Kahn. And maybe that has some, you know, swing voter implications.

And maybe also, you know, some I've also gotten a bunch of feedback from, you know, a bunch of people I deeply respect within the Democratic ecosystem saying, well, you know, we're much more positive than you. And I'm like, look, I love what she's done on anti-competes with employees. I dislike what she's been doing on. And I think it's bad for investment on kind of antitrust and investment. So Matt, before I get your reaction, if you could just specify which identity of Matt Stoller you're going to use in order to give this response, because apparently, what did you make of this exchange? And give us a little bit of like the backstory of how we got to this place of Jake Tapper

asking Reid Hoffman these questions. Yeah, so the Biden administration has done, you know, it's kind of mixed in a lot of ways. They've kind of continued the neoliberalism of the democratic establishment, except in a couple of key areas, industrial policy, trade, and antitrust. So it's sort of taken on big corporations, kind of. And the main people in that,

there's been a couple of regulators who have been the leaders in that. Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission is kind of the most famous one. And so you have a lot of anger from Wall Street and from Silicon Valley oligarchs about this because they want to do their consolidation of corporate power. Reid Hoffman is a leader in this area. He was a founder of LinkedIn. He is actually part of a network called the PayPal Mafia. There's a bunch of billionaires in Silicon Valley that got their start at PayPal.

This includes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and then there are some liberal ones. Reid Hoffman is the Democrat, and he is a big donor to the Democrats, longtime donor. And so what they're saying, they hated Biden because Biden was preventing them from consolidating power, which is what they really wanted. And so some of them moved to Trump

and some of them sort of participated in trying to push Biden out and now trying to kind of buy Kamala Harris. And that's what Reid Hoffman is doing. He gave a lot of money to Kamala Harris's super PAC. And they're trying to say, look, we love you. We think you're great. Push Lena Kahn out. Get rid of this new trade, industrial policy, tariff thing and antitrust thing. And we can go on and return to the great

days of Obama and Bill Clinton. And that's what this is really about. And so how successful do you think that that's be? How successful does that campaign look so far? Is she receptive to it? What are the leaks been like? I know you've been highlighting some Wall Street quotes. What do they think? Yeah, so the Wall Street murders guys and Silicon Valley oligarchs are super happy because they think that they own Kamala Harris. And they've been giving her orders.

Her advisors are people like Aaron Dunn, who's a Google lawyer and a Qualcomm lawyer, is actually leading the case against the government on Google's monopolization claims. And she's also helping to prep Vice President Harris for debates. And then Tony West is one of her close advisors, also her brother-in-law. He's the general counsel of Uber. Her niece, Mina Harris, worked at, I believe, Uber and Slack and Facebook. There's, you know, this network of people that she knows and has are very close to big tech, very close to Wall Street. So I think it's a pretty good chance that she does get rid of the antitrust enforcers, that she does try to return us to a kind of neoliberal frame on trade.

I mean, they think they own her. I don't think that's quite that stark, but I think they have a pretty good, she just kind of agrees with them, I think, in a lot of ways. And so the only question is, are the parts of the Democratic coalition that want more populism, are they going to stand up to her? They didn't stand up to Obama. Are they going to stand up to her? They didn't stand up to Obama, are they going to stand up to her? That's the only question. Yeah, and let me dig into that because it's not like Biden had some great reputation as some

opponent of Wall Street and corporate America, right? He was famously known as the senator from MBNA because of his coziness with the credit card company. He did all kinds of terrible things with bankruptcy law that Elizabeth Warren was fighting him about, etc., etc. So how does it end up that that guy, who has no track record of populism, really, to point to in terms of his lengthy tenure in the Senate and was part of the Obama-Biden administration, how does that guy end up being the guy that brings in Jonathan Cantor and Lena Khan and does industrial policy, etc.? Because I think part of that is the behind the scenes pressures, if I'm not wrong, that have been brought to bear on the Democratic Party. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's part of it.

But I also think, you know, I did a bunch of interviews right before Biden took office, just talking to his old to his kind of his crowd. And Biden always saw himself as kind of a foreign policy guy. And he was the Senator from Delaware. And he's like, look, I have to represent the credit card companies because that's, those are my constituents, but that's the job. But he always had this kind of resentment towards elites in particular, like Ivy league elites. He hated the Silicon Valley guys. He always thought the Wall Street guys looked down on him. His people were more like the cable guys, right? And the people in the industrial parts of the economy that like make things. And there was

a resentment there. Now, you wouldn't necessarily have seen it a lot in his track record, although Stephen Breyer, when he was overseeing him, he was the head of judiciary and Stephen Breyer was coming up to the Supreme Court. Biden did call him an elitist. So culturally, Biden was kind of like set. He's also old and understood the world before neoliberalism. And so Biden was in some sense, he had a mild streak of populism there. And then I think he saw what Trump had done. And he said, look, the Democrats have to move in a different direction. Kamala Harris is just not like that. While Biden's cultural people were kind of like this resentful, they had a sort of chip on their shoulder types. I think Kamala Harris is much more comfortable with the whole Obama world, very smooth, very tech friendly, very much like very corporate.

That does not say, she might look at the same situation and say, I agree with Biden, we need to move in a more populist direction. She might say that. She's also just a lot less substantive than he is. She does not have a particularly, you know, unlike Obama, unlike Biden, she just doesn't seem to care about policy for good or bad. So it's just, it's a different character. And I, maybe she just was like, you know, whatever. I don't want to pick fights with those, with the, with the populists. I don't know exactly what she does, what she's going to do,

but everybody's surrounding her and her whole kind of, you know, cultural milieu, her friends are going to, are pushing, are going to push her in a, in a really bad direction. On the other hand, she's not an ideologue. Like Obama was a very strong ideologue. Like we have to help the banks. We have to help Silicon Valley. That's how America great. And that's not what Kamala Harris thinks. So it's a little bit uncertain.

But I'm not super optimistic about the direction that she's going. Matt, one thing that I've been thinking about, I saw someone positing this on Twitter. I want to run this by you, is that the Reid Hoffmans and other billionaires who are pushing this like Alisalina Khan thing, they made kind of a tactical error by making this such a clear public litmus test from the jump. Because I've seen groups and senators organizing online to push back and say, and labor unions, Elizabeth Warren, those types saying, no, no, no, Lena Khan needs to say she's doing great work, et cetera. And so having this done publicly, like in front of everybody's eyes, has been a bit of a mistake in terms of their actual

goal, because this would be the type of thing that normally would be handled better in a back room at a donor meeting, et cetera. And she gets pulled before there's any attempt to marshal a defense of her. I wonder what you make of that. I think that's right. I mean, a lot of unions have come out and said, look, we like what Lena Khan is doing. We want to maintain the tariffs and so on and so forth. And so that makes it a lot harder for Harris to do. If Harris did want to change direction, it would make it harder because

a bunch of people have said, no, we like this. And so she'd have to pick a fight to do it. So that is certainly true. But I'd say there's another part of this, which is when a big donor comes out and says, we want to get rid of tariffs and we want to, you know, we want dominant corporations to do whatever we want and we own this candidate, it opens up a huge political, and Kamala Harris didn't disavow it either. Like they've asked her campaign and her campaign is like, well, we have no plans to get rid of Lena Kahn at this time. Not good. But that's not a denial. And it's like, that is a huge vulnerability if Trump picks up on it because Trump, I mean, he's not running a populist campaign, right? Steve Bannon is gone and, you know, we talked about this a little Trump, I mean, he's not running a populist campaign, right? Steve Bannon is gone.

And, you know, we talked about this a little bit, but like she's hugely vulnerable to being turned into Hillary if Trump does pick up on this stuff, because it's like crazy to be like, yeah, Silicon Valley billionaires are demanding that you sell out the country and you won't take a position on that. That looks really bad. And she's really lucky that Trump is so off kilter and unable to pick up on it. But isn't he also vulnerable to the same charge? I mean, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are all in, the other members of the PayPal mafia are all in for him. Elon Musk very publicly, like, well, he said he was going to give 45 million and then was like, no, I'm not going to do that. But it's very clear Elon Musk is running

Twitter for Donald Trump and the Republican Party's sole benefit. So isn't he also open to those charges? I mean, sure. Donald Trump is open to the charge of hypocrisy. That's right. But, you know, I just think it's opening up a vulnerability where she doesn't need to have one. And that is solely due to Reid Hoffman. I mean, Reid Hoffman is fostering, you know, this is a real risk for the Democrats that Reid Hoffman has opened up.

Big donors are, I don't think big donors, I mean, that's what Jake Tapper said, isn't this look bad? Big donors are not, I don't think they should exist. But like, it was a really huge, I think you're right, it's a tactical error, it's a strategic error. But it's also just really dangerous for him to do that to the Democratic Party and just make his advance. Yeah, I think that's all very well said. Matt, it's always great to have your insights into these things because, I mean, one of the difficulties with Kamala Harris is, like you said, she's not an ideologue.

She's been all over the place. Her rhetoric now on certain things, you know, sounds good, but you have no idea what she actually means at any given time. So trying to read those tea leaves is really important. So thank you for helping us

to do that. Good to see you, man. Hey, good to see you guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, a central idea I've tried to hammer home here on the show

over the last several years is what the media tells us divides us, which is race, has never actually mattered less in modern American history. It's not class either, although I wish it was. It's almost all education, whether you have a four-year college degree or not. I've done many monologues now on the subject about what that

means, but since it's a political show, I'll focus on how it manifests with parties. Basically, the best predictor today, especially if you're under 50, of whether you're a Democrat or not, is whether you have a four-year college degree. The higher up that you go on degrees, like Masters and PhD, the more likely you are to be liberal and a Democrat. The same is true, actually, down the educational spectrum, from PhD to GED to those who don't finish college. Now, what's been interesting in the last few years is not pointing out that trend, since it's very obvious now, but instead to see how it has put pressure on the other major divide in U.S. politics, gender.

Gender has always divided Americans. It's mostly true over the years that if only women voted, then Democrats would win. If only men voted, then Republicans would win. This slightly changes if you incorporate marital status and a few other factors, but something recently has changed a lot. It used to be that you could pretty reliably rely on at least young men to espouse more liberal views than their older counterpoints and more aligned with gender. Now, something basically true throughout modern

history. The recent educational divide, though, and especially the population of media with college-educated viewpoints, has now flipped that on a dime seemingly overnight. Young men, it seems, for the very first time ever in modern American history are actually becoming increasingly right-wing. A new Wall Street Journal analysis of multiple different data sets finds that young men between the ages of 18 to 29 are becoming astonishingly Republican and perhaps even more importantly are diverging significantly from young women and their peer group. For example, when Biden was still in the race, the Journal found that the young men under 30 backed Donald Trump by a majority with a full 14-point spread in the latest Wall Street Journal poll.

That swing is especially astonishing because just four years ago in 2020, Biden won young men by some 15 points. So it constitutes a net 30% swing. When you dig down into the issue sets, it actually starts to get very crazy. Take, quote, favoring or opposing major action on climate change. For women, it's a plus 67% issue. For men, it's just plus 32. For legal abortion with women, it is plus 53. For men, just plus 16. For student loans, it's plus 45 for women. For men, plus 2. Allowing kids to pick their gender identity. Women, plus 2. For men, it is a whopping minus 33. For supporting tax cuts, with men, it's a plus 23. With women, it's a minus 20. For building a

border wall with Mexico, minus four for men, minus 47 for women. So in other words, for some pretty major issues in US politics, the spread in importance and depth of feeling for young men and women is significant. That spread itself and what parties are running on, namely immigration and abortion, explains why both would then trend majorly in both directions. So what does this relate to education? Well, I would point out to you that the student loan question, the reason there's a 40% net difference between young men and women on student loans is it's mostly young women who are going to college. As I have covered here now for several years, many young men at higher rates than ever before

are dropping out. Many elite colleges are now running a 2 to 1 ratio of women to men, with the trend only going in an even further polarized direction. As I've covered here a lot, whether you go to college or not really just colors basically everything about you. What music you like, if you like to travel, what TV shows, what movies. But really what I think the difference is, is that young people also get almost all of their news online and all their entertainment, namely through social media, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. And the main force at play there is also algorithmic amplification. This explains why

there has been a big surge in young female enthusiasm for Kamala Harris. You've got the so-called coconut pill and the memes of Kamala's brat. They've been overwhelmingly politically inclined young women on TikTok and elsewhere. Simultaneously, if you're a young dude, you watch fitness content or the UFC, what are you seeing pop up? Things like Jake Paul's Trump endorsement or Logan Paul's Trump interview, Trump literally walking out to a massive fanfare at the UFC and fighters who are constantly talking him up.

Both are cultural institutions of men and women who are very young and are polarizing significantly. They consume very different media, they care dramatically about different issues, and in the future, it could set us up for some very interesting politics, one where men and women of the very same race and probably even the very same class begin to diverge their votes. I've spoken at length here about how I think the social

consequences of this will likely be bad. But at this point, all we can really say is that the ball is now clearly in motion and the future will be, I guess, interesting if this trend continues. So I was fascinated by this, Crystal. I actually thought that- And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right. Thank you, everybody, for watching. We really appreciate you, and we will see you all later. 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.

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