Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/13/24: Trump Elon Interview CRASH, Voters Say JD Vance 'Anti-Woman', Olympic Athletes Stunned By Free Healthcare, US Cruise Missiles Ahead Of Iran Attack, Israel Economy Self Destructs

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Krystal and Emily discuss Trump and Elon interview crashes, voters sound off on 'weird' JD Vance, JD floats $5k child tax credit, US athletes blown away by free Olympic healthcare, US sends cruise missiles as Iran preps attack, Kamala flips in Gaza protest response, Israel economy self destructing.    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. Welcome to Breaking Points. I feel very weird doing that part. That's normally Sagar's part, but he is out sick today. And so Emily is filling in for him. Great to see you, Emily. Thanks for having me, Crystal. And thank you for sparing my ears because when Sagar does the good morning, I feel like I am dying. It is so loud. He really leans into it

in a way that I'm just not actually capable of. It wakes you up. The weaker sex. I'm just not capable of that kind of vocal oomph at this time of the morning. Your ears aren't built for it. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Speaking of ears, there was a lot that we were listening to yesterday evening. Trump did his big Twitter spaces with Elon Musk. It went just as well, if not even better, than Ron DeSantis' did when he launched his campaign.

So we will share a little bit of they had massive tech problems. It started 40 minutes late. Then when it did start, Trump sounded terrible. And there were a lot of interesting things. Anyway, we'll get into all of that. We're also taking a look at some new polling of where the race stands today. Emily and I are going to dig into some policy stuff, too. There's been a really interesting conversation about the child tax credit. J.D. Vance brought that up in his Sunday show interview,

so we'll talk about that from a left and right perspective, how realistic that is. Also, Kamala still hasn't really revealed at all what her policy plan would be. Her running mate, Tim Walls, suggested what he would like to see them lead with. There's also a lot of discussion among the sort of Democratic strategist types of, hey, maybe she just really shouldn't commit to any policy because vibes are easier to get on board with than specific policy proposals. So we'll look at that. We're also taking a look at something that went viral with regard to the Olympics. There was a number of athletes who were sharing TikToks and videos of themselves, availing themselves of the free health care that they could get access to

in the Olympic Village there and what that says about the American health care system. We're also continuing to take a look at what is going on in Israel. Huge internal battle between the Defense Minister Yoav Galan and Bibi Netanyahu as they continue to await whatever the Iranian retaliation is going to be. The U.S. military rushing significant assets into the region in what is a very scary situation. So Omar Badar is going to join us to talk about that. And I am taking a look at the Israeli economy, something we haven't focused on too much, but there has been massive fallout in the Israeli economy and a potential sort of doom spiral that some experts and analysts are taking

a look at as a result of this war, the economic impact of that. And also, even before October 7th had a significant outflow of Israelis who were upset about the increasingly sort of religious fundamentalist direction of the country. So I'll break all of that down for us in a monologue as well. Crystal, that is an enormous amount of news. And we're going to start with really what was unfolding last night in all of our ears, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk first were delayed, what I think was 45 minutes, ultimately 45 minutes. Elon Musk blamed a cyber attack. And I have to say, Crystal, the group chat was absolutely electric. This was the group chat of all of us. Ryan, Sagar, Emily and I, the producers, we were going back and forth on this one. So first, before the big Twitter spaces,

this was also consequential. This is actually really probably more consequential ultimately than Twitter spaces. Donald Trump has made his return to Twitter. So we can put this up on the screen. This was his first tweet back on the platform. He says, are you better off now than you were when I was president? Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We're a nation in decline. Make the American dream affordable again. Make America safe again. Make America great again. I'm sure his investors over there at Truth Social, where the platform's sort of entire value proposition was having the sole and exclusive Donald Trump content resigning there, are not too happy about this development.

What do you think, Emily, about the decision for Trump to return to Twitter? Because a view that I know Ryan shares, and I think I do too, I think Sagar does as well, is that actually kicking Trump off Twitter was doing him accidentally a favor because all of his like most insane ravings were no longer in the public's eye 24-7 and enabled people to kind of put rose colored glasses on about who he was. And we saw his favorability ratings rise over time during that period that he was off the platform. So to me, this is not necessarily a beneficial move for him and his campaign. Yeah, I think there's something to be said for that. Although I also think with, I wonder how much he actually uses Twitter, because he sort of flirted with a Twitter comeback before. And then it's just like, they clearly take all of their posts to true social. So he had that big post

we just put up on the screen, like, you know, we're make the American dream affordable again. And it's supposed to be a very splashy debut. Boilerplate, yeah. Right. Yeah. So does he, is he actually going to put all of his various musings that he puts on Truth Social on Twitter? If he does, I do buy into the argument that it probably does him more harm than good because Twitter is so forward-facing for journalists. It's much, much easier to pass around his tweet. The barrier to entry for dunking on Trump is much lower if you're in the media. And so it just drives, that stuff that the Trump campaign would prefer not be front and center in the media conversation, whatever he says about Nika Brzezinski's facelift or something like that, it's not the stuff that they want

to be talking about because the media will pick up on whatever dumb thing he said, even if, to your point, Chris, he sometimes makes some pretty serious policy decisions via tweets, hires people, hires people via tweets, but it's always the low-hanging fruit that ends up becoming front

and center to the discourse. And that's what the Trump campaign would rather not be front and center to the media discussion about their candidate at this point. So I don't know how much of a difference it makes, but I do kind of buy into that argument. Yeah, the quote-unquote adults in the room of the Trump campaign probably not super psyched about this development. And I mean, you guys will all recall back in the Trump highly on Twitter era, all the journalists in D.C. had notifications set up. So the moment he tweeted something, it was right there on their phone. You know, sometimes things from true social will still pop and go viral and whatever. But it's just not nearly as common. It's not nearly as in your face, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll see how all of that developments.

But let's get to the main event from yesterday. So he decided to do this big interview with Elon Musk on Elon's Twitter spaces. You'll recall Ron DeSantis also decided to do this very regrettably for him as the launch of his campaign. It was beset with massive technical issues. Well, apparently they have not worked out the kinks in however many months between then and now because it was, again, a technical disaster. As you said, Emily, I think they started something like 45 minutes late. Put this up on the screen. Elon claimed that it was a DDoS attack, like a cyber attack on X. It didn't really add up because the rest of Twitter was working perfectly fine.

Other spaces on Twitter, I believe, were working perfectly fine. And The Verge spoke to a number of Twitter employees, and they said that it was 99% certain that Elon was lying about that attack because the rest of X did appear to be working normally, and a source at the company confirmed there was not actually a denial of service attack. So, you know, apparently they just still cannot handle the level. I mean, there were a lot of people trying to get in to listen to this thing. When I was on, it was like, you know, 1.3 million or something who were trying to listen to this audio.

And this was after the 45-minute delay. So it was probably even higher when they were trying to start at the original time. They clearly just have not worked out the tech on this to handle this large number of people coming to listen to any one of their audio-only streams. And that's the other thing to remember. This is not even video. It's just audio. It's just audio we're talking about here. Right. Well, and also, Crystal, Trump, I thought this was interesting, clearly bought Elon Musk's claims about there being a cyber attack. And Elon Musk, it's not as though he just sort of had that as a throwaway line. As they finally started, and I think he even posted this on X2, he was saying, this is proof that a lot of people don't want to hear what you have to say.

And Trump kept saying, you know, congratulations on breaking all the records. And anyway, it just at one point they sort of stopped in the middle of the conversation because Trump was trying to look at the numbers of concurrence that were in the space. And so Trump obviously cared a lot about the numbers. And Elon obviously knew he cared a lot about the numbers. And I think clearly it was Elon convinced him that there was indeed some type of cyber warfare. Yeah. Or I mean, that was also convenient for Trump. It's also worth keeping in mind as we begin to talk about this. Elon Musk is at this point a major donor to Trump's campaign, perhaps the largest donor to Trump's campaign. There's some dispute about how many of his millions he's

planning to put in. Originally, he had of his millions he's planning to put in. Originally, he had the indication when he was going to put in $45 million a month to the Trump campaign. So this is a conversation between Trump, and they framed it very clearly. Elon starts out at the gate saying, I'm not going to ask any hard questions. This is going to be a quote-unquote conversation so that you can get the vibes of what Trump is all about. So that's the framework for what we're talking about here. A quote unquote conversation between Trump and one of his largest supporters and billionaire mega donors. And it's also worth recalling when DeSantis did go through a similar incredibly glitchy rollout.

The Trump team was, of course, totally relentless. You know, they absolutely savaged him for it. We can put this up on the screen as a little bit of a reminder of what they said about DeSantis' botched Twitter rollout. Glitchy tech issues, uncomfortable silences, a complete failure to launch, and that is just the candidate. So a little bit of karmic justice, I guess, being repaid to Trump here from the DeSantis team. Yeah, and even when DeSantis did it, I still, like Elon Musk, we always should mention, is also a defense contractor. So when he's blaming cyber warfare and they're having those types of conversation, I mean,

it's important. On the other hand, I do think Donald Trump, the way that Elon Musk sort of theoretically said the conversation was going to not be, quote, adversarial. They were going to have just a discussion. And theoretically, I do think there are too few people who are willing to actually engage with Donald Trump, like on a psychological level, like Elon Musk did at the beginning about how he was shot. Of course, Trump said at the RNC that he was never going to talk about when he was shot and then sort of recounted it to Elon Musk in great detail again. And just psychologically, I think he's a very interesting character. So I was sort of curious

to hear that back and forth with two psychologically interesting characters who are also enormously powerful. But then it just, we're about to get into this, I know, but it just went on and on. And it just, there was, it felt like it wasn't, you know, anchored in anything useful. But we did, I guess, get some, get some policy substance out of it, didn't we, Crystal? Yeah. So a few things. I mean, first of all, yeah, it went on for how long? I actually, I bailed at like 1030. I have to go to bed, y'all. I have to get up early. So at 1030, I was like, all right, this is, this is all I can do. I think it wrapped up what, Emily, you stayed on until the bitter end, maybe not too long after that, 10.50 or something like that.

And then I had a glass of wine. I even had a glass of wine afterwards. And here I am. Very impressive. Very impressive. So a lot of it, my big takeaway, just like consuming it as a whole, most of it was not about Kamala Harris. The overwhelming majority of the critique was aimed at Joe Biden.

And there was some about Kamala Harris. I'll play, you know, some of his better hits on her. He hit her a little bit for not doing interviews. You know, that was clearly part of the decision to do this conversation with Elon Musk was to make the point about, hey, Kamala Harris needs to sit for some interviews and get some face time. He hit her on the stuff you would expect about Borders are, and she's too liberal, etc., etc. But most of what he had to say was about Joe Biden. And I think, again, reflective of the fact that he is really struggling to move on from his past political opponent. The other thing that you'll

notice, I'm going to play this clip for you right now, talking about the quote-unquote coup that removed Biden from his position, et cetera, et cetera. You also probably note right away, Trump appears to, it sounds like he has a significant lisp in this entire conversation that was a major also topic of discussion online, etc. We did some digging. We asked our audio engineer here at Breaking Points what's going on with that because one of the theories was audio compression. So in any case, I'm going to play for you the soundbite of him talking about Biden and the coup. And then we can talk also about that content and about the quote unquote lisp on the other side. Take a listen. Don't forget, I beat Biden. He failed in the debate miserably. He hasn't done an interview since this whole scam started. And say what you want,

this was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn't want to leave. And they said, we can do it the nice way or we can do it the hard way. Yeah. I mean, they just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him. Oh, what they did with this guy. And I'm no fan of his. And he was a horrible president, the worst president in history. So, Emily, before we get into the quality of his voice, just your reaction to that particular soundbite and also the overall assessment that he spent way more time on Biden than on Kamala Harris. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's right. I think the Trump campaign is still clearly trying to find its footing with the attack on Kamala Harris. They want to build this broader narrative about her being a chameleon and somebody you can't trust. And they want to actually extend that to Tim Walz as well.

But they obviously don't. I mean, I think there's a lot to work with there politically. I think there's a lot to work with there. But it has to trickle up, I guess, to the candidate. And when he's tried it, it still sounds like he really wants to focus on Joe Biden. And I guess it's fair to a point because Joe Biden is currently the president. And there was, as we covered here forever, obviously a coverup.

And Kamala Harris was obviously part of that coverup. But I don't know about you, Crystal. I have the sense that a lot of average voters have kind of moved on from that and want to, they're so glad to not have to vote for a corpse that they're like actually they want to hear plants yeah no uh and it's not just my that is my sense but also the data really backs it up i mean you've got some close to 90 of americans who are glad that biden stepped aside so they're not interested in going back and relitigating it they're glad that

he said okay it's actually one of the most popular things he's ever done as president is to say, I'm not going to run again. So, no, I don't think that lands. We covered yesterday some message testing that the Democrats did, a Democratic firm did of like what attacks land the most effectively against Kamala and then how to best parry them. And this stuff about, oh, it's a coup and it's so unfair and the stuff about, oh, she's not really black or she, you know, changed her identity or whatever. Those were some of the worst tested. I mean,

they just were not good attacks on her. And the type of thing that Trump is seems to be fixated right now. And also just, you know, it's one thing if you're talking about Biden and you're just constantly tying Kamala to Biden, Kamala to Biden, all the things that you don't like about Biden. I know that is one of their strategies that sort of the like, quote unquote, adults in the room want him to pursue, which makes a lot of sense. But it wasn't even that. I mean, most of the time he was just talking about his problems with Joe Biden, et cetera, et cetera.

So in terms of the lisp, we also had some videos that were recorded in the room because one of the things that was floated is, oh, this is an issue with the mic, which, again, we talked to our audio engineer and he thinks that is part of what's going on. Because if you listen to the clips that were recorded in the room, so this would be coming through a different mic, there still is a little bit of the lisp, but it's not nearly as extreme. So we pulled one of those clips just so you could take a listen to what we were listening to this morning. Well, I think we will. I'm pretty sure we will. And congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions of people. And it's an honor. We view that as an honor. All right. So we got a quote from our audio engineer, Steve. So I don't screw up any of the technical details here.

He says, Sibilance, S's and F's, a question with plenty of time to correct the bad audio, for example, switch to Zoom or Skype audio or simply use the phone's microphone before 8 p.m. Or during the 40-minute delay, why wouldn't they? Or better, why wouldn't two of the most high-profile personalities in the world spring for a professional audio engineer on one end or the other? So, Emily, that is the official assessment of the Breaking Points audio engineer. It's exactly what I was going to say, Crystal, down to every last detail. The sibilance, you were on top of that. Yeah, I was going to bring up the sibilance. I think that's crucial to this. But, you know, it is, we were just talking about how so many people are glad they're not having to vote for

a corpse. Trump is old too. And some people were like, are his dentures slipping? This was like the discourse on X. I have no idea. But I do think anytime, it's fair game, anytime an older person who wants to be president of the United States seems to be struggling with basics, words, etc. And it also raises, I mean, we had a lot of discourse about this with regard to Biden, and it's fair game for Trump as well, because and I do think, you know, Biden being so old and so obviously in decline, it did hide the fact that, hey, Trump is also an old dude. To me, what's most noticeable isn't in any of these, you know, verbal slips or whatever. It's his inability to be nimble and grapple with the circumstances. This is something, you know, you see in older people, you're sort of locked into a routine or you're locked into a way of thinking and it becomes more difficult to adjust.

And his inability to move on from Biden seems to me to be part of, you know, representative of the age bracket that he's in at this point. But it also raised questions that, you know, we were asked, you mentioned our group chat. We were asking the group chat of like, you know, he only did, he did this one rally in Montana. He doesn't have any other rallies on the schedule for this month. That is a dramatic difference from 2020, even more dramatic difference from 2016. So it does ask, you know, raise a question in your mind of, is there something going on here when you have this consistent verbal issue that I have never really noticed before with him over the course of this entire interview? I would imagine that security and money are probably involved in the rallies.

I don't know if it's also an energy thing. I do think he sounded, since he was literally shot in the head, like he has like less energy. He seemed a little like, I don't know if down is the right word. That's just something I've picked up on. And it's totally understandable if you're a literal elderly man who took a bullet to the ear. So I get that. Although I do also suspect that those rallies are just crazy expensive.

The security situation is now obviously totally different. So I don't know what's going on there, but he has seemed lower energy. And to your point about him being older, he gets caught up in these stories like people's grandfathers do. You know what I mean? Like just this, I think that's part of the reason why this thing didn't end for two hours. They just kept going down in different down off on different tangents. And when people called it rambling, it really was. And Trump can be interesting when he rambles sometimes, but this definitely wasn't that.

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I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up Department of Education, move education back to the states where states like Iowa, where states like Idaho, you know, not every state will do great because states that basically aren't doing good now, you look at Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he's terrible. He does a terrible job. So he's not going to do great with education. But of the 50, I would bet that 35 would do great. And 15 of them or, you know, 20 of them will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great. Not exactly a compelling pitch for this idea. And you're like, well, some of the states, you know, the kids in California, I guess they're screwed, but others may do okay, Emily. But I mean, more noteworthy is just him backing one of the significant policy ideas on a Project 2025. Did he say Gavin Newsom?

Like, was it supposed to be a pun? Oh, I don't know. Or did he just get the name wrong? Either way. Yeah, so the Heritage Foundation actually back in the 80s attacked the Reagan administration. And this goes a long way towards explaining why a lot of so-called movement conservatives really latched on to Trump. The Heritage Foundation in the 80s, which takes a lot of credit for the Reagan revolution, was attacking the Reagan administration for not abolishing the Department of Education. If you go back and look at their publications from the mid-80s,

they were like, what happened? Why has the Department of Education been abolished yet? And so it's kind of like Trump embracing this. It's an example of him being sort of this willing conduit for ideas that movement conservatives have had for a really long time. They just haven't had a vehicle for them because there's no way in hell George W. Bush is going to get rid of the Department of Education. So I think it's an interesting example of where a lot of people

in the conservative movement have saw with Trump, someone who really will do some of those. Admittedly, I'm someone who would support scaling the Department of Education to a state level, but that's admittedly like a radical position. That's admittedly like an extreme position and one that no Republican would dare touch other than Donald Trump, probably. Yeah, he spent some time, too, talking about, he brought up, what did he say? Like, there's a place called Argentina or something like that.

Yeah, see, he talked about that. This is one of their tangents. They went so deep on Millay and he said in a place called Argentina, man ran on MAGA. It worked out beautifully because let's make Argentina great again. And they just did that for 10 minutes. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, Javier Millay is, you know, sort of anarcho-capitalist, like hard libertarian, which is the opposite of, it's funny for Trump to say this is MAGA, when in reality, the conception that was supposed to exist in 2016 of MAGA was actually we're

getting away from these hardcore libertarian ideas and there's more of a place for industrial policy or we're going to talk about J.D. Vance with child tax credit and stuff like that. So, I mean, to me, it's just emblematic, as you said, Emily, of Trump doesn't have a lot of his own ideology. It's just sort of whatever is laying around, which is why he ends up in his first term doing this massive tax cut largely for the rich, because this was a project that had been developed, you know, Paul Ryan, Heritage, et cetera, had this thing locked and loaded and ready to go. And so that's why that ends up being the main policy accomplishment of the Trump administration. So, you know, when there's an attempt by the Trump campaign to distance themselves from Project 2025, because it's always

difficult to defend anything that's going to be in a 900-page policy document. They don't want to have that hung around their neck. But it's entirely reasonable to look and say, no, this is this big, massive conservative project. This is the plan that exists and is likely major pieces of it to be implemented in your administration. I think this moment is sort of confirmation of that. Moving on to some of the attacks that he did manage to make on Kamala, some of them were in the zone of what his campaign has tested and what they think will work most effectively against her. In particular, he talked some about her role as the quote unquote border czar under the Biden administration. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that.

And she's in charge of it because, you know, now she's trying to say she had nothing to do with it. And she's such a liar because she was called the border czar the first day and it was on the headlines of every newspaper. She's the border czar. And she never even went there. She went to one location, which had nothing to do with where the problem is. You know, she went in and out, I guess, because she was getting a lot of pressure, but had nothing to do with the problem. But she was the border czar. And people can't allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign.

Now she's trying to say that she wasn't really involved. The whole thing is horrible. She was totally in charge. She could have shut the border down without him. He didn't know what he was doing anyways. He wouldn't have even known what happened. Yeah, I think, Emily, politically, I do think this is one of their more salient attacks, both because this is the one issue where he really clearly has an advantage over Kamala Harris in terms of who is more trusted to handle the issue. And it's one of the only issues that the Biden administration really put

into her sphere. She benefits from the fact that in a lot of ways, she was sort of, you know, kept at arm's distance from most of the Biden administration. And so she doesn't get a lot of the blame for anything else that he did that may have been unpopular or just the state of the economy, which is unpopular. But here, you know, she really was put in charge of the border. She really was sent out to do that interview. She really was sent out to, you know, go and try to get to the root causes of the problem. And so it makes it more difficult for her to distance herself from what has been an unpopular track record in the Biden administration. 100%, her fingerprints are all over it. And I also think what's powerful here is how horrible the media coverage has been. And that's where he

kind of started that specific tangent with, is that, I guess it wasn't a tangent, but that specific line of argument with saying the media is covering for her, she was the border czar, and that's going to be really powerful for the Trump campaign. I don't know if journalists understand how powerful that is for the Trump campaign, but when you're able to put these headlines side by side, and when Trump is able to make that point over and over again at rallies and in interviews, and it trickles into new media spaces. It is such a glaring example of media dishonesty that it does no favors to Kamala Harris, actually, when you're able to call attention to it because it has been really, really bad.

The cleanup job and the rehabilitation of Kamala Harris's image, not just on the border, but definitely on the border. Also, though, kind of across the board. So I think that gives it an extra oomph as he, and you can hear it in that interview, it's what animates him more than anything. It's hard for her to get away from the very bad policies of the Biden administration on the border, which even if you're like left or right, you have a problem with it. There's basically nobody who's happy with the Biden border policies. Yeah, no, that's true. Because, you know, in my view, from a left perspective, they just adopted

a lot of the hardline tactics of Trump, which Kamala Harris ran aggressively against in 2020. And even just from a political perspective, and I talked to Sagar about this some yesterday, so I won't totally, you know, relitigate all of it. But she's out with this new ad that Trump's kind of referring to there. It's painting her as really tough on the border and basically adopting the Republican framing of, you know, the thing we need to focus on is just a crackdown and effectively seeding the ground that, oh, immigration is just bad in general. And it's not even the most effective political message. And it does open her up to a very clear attack of this is not at all what you sounded like two minutes ago. You know, this is very different from the way you talked about and the way you felt about immigrants and

immigration back when you were running in 2020. And so not only do I think it opens her up to really clear and fair hit on, hey, this is, you know, this is a major flip flop, but I also don't think that it is the most compelling political strategy for her to just buy into the Republican framing around immigration, because you're never going to be perceived as being more hardline on immigration than Donald Trump. And again, there was some message testing that bore that out, that actually the most effective message for her to parry these attacks about her being, quote unquote, border czar was for her to talk about make a pathway to citizenship.

And yes, people should come here legally. My own parents did come here legally, but we need to have a pathway that's available. And right now that's just not the case. So, you know, creating a totally different narrative and vision around immigrants and around immigration versus just accepting the Donald Trump framing of like immigration is bad and we need to stop it, period, end of story. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. I don't think it's smart politically for her to do it. I don't think it's going to end well politically for her

because this is the crux of the argument that the Trump campaign is developing. They clearly don't have it like totally perfect yet. And that's because the candidate was sort of changed right before convention. And they're working to develop a whole new campaign strategy. But the centerpiece of it is going to be that she's a chameleon, that she's a flip-flopper, that you can't trust her. And this goes to the tax on tips sort of in a way that makes your opponent's central argument, it just seems incredibly stupid. And by the way, Biden ran against the Trump border policies, like all of the rhetoric from Democratic candidates in 2019 and

2020 that their voters clearly wanted to hear was against it. And granted, we've had four years or three years now of a failed experiment in terms of Biden's policy. But I think the rhetoric about, again, I don't agree with the framing, but the rhetoric about compassion and welcoming immigrants, it works really well with a big chunk of voters in the suburbs, especially that they need. Yeah, it's popular. I mean, when you pull on immigration, it depends so much on the question that you ask, because broadly speaking, Americans do really value our self-conception as a nation of immigrants, as a welcoming place, as the great melting pot. And so not only did Biden run on that type of rhetoric in 2020. He won on that type of rhetoric in 2020. So, you know,

I think that this is, I think this is an error, you know, morally, I object to the policy direction, but I think also it's an error politically. And we've seen, not just here, but there was a study of European parties and leaders who tried to move to the right. These were sort of like center left types, you know, Emmanuel Macron types, who tried to move to the right. These were sort of like center left types, you know, Emmanuel Macron types who tried to move to the right on immigration signal that, oh, actually, I'm the hawk on immigration. And it doesn't work because it demoralizes their own base. And it's not credible to, you know, voters who are immigration hawk voters that they're going to be more hawkish than the right wing people. My own sense of this politically

is that most of the people who are single issue immigration voters, like they're not going to be more hawkish than the right wing people. My own sense of this politically is that most of the people who are single issue immigration voters, they're not going to be voting for Kamala Harris anyway. So I don't know that it is the salient issue or the top issue that Republicans really hope that it will be. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is one of the places where they can draw blood, they're going to draw blood, that they're going to lean into, and she's going to have to find a better way to deal with this, in my opinion, than she has thus far. But moving on, Emily, there are also some just like really weird moments, of course, in this long conversation between these two very, you know, unique, we'll say, individuals. One of them in particular, Trump starts talking about there's a new Time magazine cover of Kamala Harris, which actually, go ahead and put A8 up on the screen, guys, just so you can see it.

You know, it's this very, like, hagiographic puff piece of Kamala Harris, her moment, which she didn't even sit for the interview for this freaking puff piece, which is kind of pathetic. But anyway, she looks great in the cover. You know, she's an attractive woman, and they have sort of this drawing of her where she looks really, you know, dignified and really fabulous. And Trump talks in this interview about how beautiful she looks here and how much she reminds him of his wife, Melania. So let's take a listen to that. And actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania. She didn't look like Camilla, that's

right. But of course, she's a beautiful woman. So we'll leave it at that, right? Okay. What is he doing? What is he doing? And then he called her Camilla. Like, is he the Camilla Barker Bowles? Like, it's just, it was, that was incredible. Maybe worth staying up for. There was another moment. This was on, really on Elon's end. Most of the time it was just Trump talking and Elon could barely get a word in edgewise. But when they started talking about energy, Elon, of course, you know, with the EVs and whatever, he had a lot of thoughts about energy. And he starts going off on this tangent about how actually nuclear fallout

is not that big a deal. And it's like overstated how dangerous nuclear fallout radiation is. He's talking about Fukushima, you know, the Japanese nuclear power plant that melted down. And he starts talking about how even, hey, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like they're great cities now. So it's really not that scary. And it was like, what? This is total. To me, that was the most insane moment of the whole thing. Trump just nodded along with it. He didn't really like push back or say anything. It was mostly on Elon's end. But to be like, yeah, nuclear weapons, nuclear fallout, that whole Chernobyl thing, no big deal. It was it was really overblown, was kind of crazy to me, Emily.

We need to overcome our fears of nuclear catastrophe, like an apocalypse. It's just holding us back. But you know what? It came in the context of a somewhat interesting conversation because Elon was trying to make a point that he believes in climate change. He just doesn't see it as a sort of emergency or an urgent apocalypse. And I felt like he was trying to get Trump's response to that. And Trump just was not taking the bait. He wasn't willing to say, yes, climate change is real. And it seemed like, I had two guesses. One, Elon Musk was trying to signal to everybody listening

that he repeated over and over again, I have always seen myself as someone on the left. And Trump at one point said, yes, Elon, I've always thought of you as being somewhat left. And, you know, it was trying to make a point. Like, I am not, I have not been this like red meat conservative. And I felt like he was trying to do that with the climate thing. And he was like, you know, I'm not maybe Ted Cruz or whomever, but Trump just didn't take the bait at all. And they ended up down this like little detour. I guess it wasn't a detour, this little, what's the right phrase? What's the right metaphor for that? Crystal, if it's not a detour, it was like a wrong turn down the road about Fukushima. Right, right, exactly. And then, yeah, as part of that, Trump responded that, hey,

if the oceans rise a little bit, I guess there'll be more oceanfront property. So he definitely was not going with Elon along the, yeah, climate change, You know, it is a thing. It is a thing maybe we have to be concerned about. So in any case, before we move on to some of the latest polling, any other reflections or overall takeaways on the big Twitter spaces here? There's a lot of propaganda on Twitter this morning. Oh, billion people saw it, etc., etc. These numbers are totally fake, by the way. And also because they usually count, they put it on everyone's timeline, right? So it was like unavoidable. So I don't doubt that there were, you know, a lot of people that scrolled by it or saw that it existed or like popped in for five seconds and

then were like, this is horrible. You know, I'm not sitting through this three hour discussion as we did. But what is your overall takeaway on the success or impact or lack thereof of this conversation? You know, I thought overall it could have been really interesting, but I guess maybe it never could have been really interesting, if that makes sense. Like, they're two interesting people. It reminds me of those SNL sketches where they put Bjorn together with Charles Barkley on that old, it's like a mocking sketch of something that used to be on, I think, Bravo. And they put them both together, and they have these, they take them to, in the SNL sketch, a cheesecake factory.

And it's just mocking this idea that you put two totally interesting people together, you don't always get something interesting. And there was so much just agreement. There was so much signaling. They were trying to both, I think, really signal to different, maybe it was donors or their peers that they were doing one thing or the other, like with the climate stuff. And it's just important to remember that a tiny fraction of the public is on X, a tiny fraction of the public, let alone in primetime on a spaces. So I don't think it's going to Elon Musk was willing to do this experiment again after

the DeSantis one had so many issues getting off the ground and that Trump, I imagine his team was reassured over and over again that they would not have any issues getting off the ground. And when you have a source in that Verge article saying there wasn't a cyber attack, I don't know. I don't know how that ended up happening. Yeah, no, I think to the extent that this has any longer term repercussions, it's just, listen, this is a campaign that doesn't have a lot of time. You know, they've already wasted a number of crucial weeks where the public is deciding what they think about Kamala Harris and now what they're thinking about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And the fact that you've spent those weeks, you know, spinning your wheels and going on with Aiden Ross and launching weird attacks about,

is she black or is she Indian? And not effectively defining her. I mean, that's one of the big things that came out of the New York Times-Siena battleground poll that Sagar and I talked about yesterday is, you know, they tested a bunch of different character traits on Kamala Harris. And she, you know, people saw her as intelligent.

They saw her as caring about people like them. You didn't even have a majority saying she was too liberal. So there's plenty to work with that's out there. The Trump campaign knows that. You know, they've done the testing. They've done the polling. They know what the focus group results say, et cetera. But because Trump is such a dominant figure that his messaging over

whatever the paid communications are going to be way more effective. And because he really can't grapple with it now being Kamala Harris, they have already burned through a bunch of time. Now we're headed into the DNC, then you're headed into Labor Day and you're in the home stretch. And every day that goes by where the Trump campaign isn't defining Harrison Wall as you can bet, the Democrats are defining themselves in the most positive way. The media is certainly happy to give them an assist. And at the same time, defining Trump and J.D. Vance in particular in the most negative way possible, which we're about to get to. So that's to me, that's the broader significance, not any particular thing that they said, even though some of it was kind of interesting

and also kind of wild. Some of it, most of it was actually really largely boring and uninteresting. But just the fact that they continue to burn time and attention and resources that they really don't have at this point when you're talking about getting into, you know, a home stretch in a really condensed campaign timeline. I think that's a great point. I think it's a great point. And like looking to not seem niche and quote weird. Yeah, there's just a lot of central kitchen table issues that need to be emphasized. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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He was ahead in all the battleground states. You know, it looked like things were just going his way indefinitely here. Biden incapable of turning things around. But if you look at the top line number here for Trump in terms of how he was pulling against Biden, he was at an average of 43.5% of the vote. It's just Biden was down at 40% of the vote. So if you look at the next chart that we can put up on the screen, Trump's total actually hasn't budged at all with the switch of Kamala Harris into the race. He is still averaging 43.5% of

the vote. It's just that Kamala Harris has added nearly six points to Biden's total, and she is up at 45.9% of the vote. And I thought that was really interesting, Emily, because, you know, one of the things that has happened for Trump over the past several weeks, especially post-assassination attempt, his favorables are actually some of the best that he's had maybe ever and certainly in years. But his poll position has not budged. I do think that he has, you know, quite a ceiling on his support because while Kamala Harris is really being defined right now and Tim Walz is being defined, J.D. Vance is being defined, people know how they feel about Donald Trump. There's not much you can say about this man at this point that is going to change people's views of how they feel about him,

love him, hate him, or somewhere in the middle. So if I was the Trump campaign, I would actually find this very concerning because they, no matter what has happened in the race, they basically have been unable to move the needle beyond this 43.5% of the vote total. And obviously that would be insufficient to win either the popular vote or the electoral college. Yeah, sealing is exactly the word that I was going to use. And I think that's always been a huge problem for Donald Trump. And what happens is that you can get to November. And if you can successfully define Kamala Harris and maybe to some extent Tim Walz as extremists,

Trump on his call with Elon referred to her as a San Francisco liberal, which sounds kind of boomery, but San Francisco is such a mess right now that it just might work in places where, in fact, there are a lot of boomer voters. And if you can do that in the weeks leading up to the election and really paint them that way,

then maybe some of that support that has gone to Kamala Harris in the aftermath of Biden dropping out leaves her. And some of it goes to him. Not all of it is going to go to him. Some of it may go to Jill Stein. Some of it may go to just not voting. So if he can do that, that's where when people actually go to pull the lever, so to speak, he can make gains as people who say, I just can't. I don't like Donald Trump, but man, I really don't want Kamala Harris to turn America into San Francisco or whatever it is. That's where the ceiling can suddenly be like budged up on election day. But it's tough. I mean, that's extremely hard to do. And that was one of his biggest

problems with Biden. It's that like they were both racing to see who had the slightly higher ceiling, who could just like find a way to like a Herculean, you know, I can budget up one inch on election day because honestly, they both weren't very well liked. And if Kamala Harris can be well liked, that's sort of game over, in my opinion. I don't know how well that's going to go for her because this is what happened with her 2020 campaign. Had a honeymoon after a great rollout, was getting amazing media coverage. And because she goes into these weird rabbit holes about the significance of the passage of time, it goes away. Yeah, true. No, that's absolutely true.

Right now, she has overall positive favorability rating. Her faves have gone through the roof in a really quite extraordinary way. Tim Wall is also very popular. He's actually the most popular person of any of these four individuals at this point. So right now you have a ticket that has pretty high favorability versus a ticket that has fairly low favorability. But can that last? Because right now Kamala Harris is kind of in the sweet spot of the generic Democrat. By the time you get to November, she's not going to be a generic Democrat anymore. She's going to be defined. So, you know, are they able to bring down those favorability ratings and, you know, bring back some of the concern that surrounded Biden, not

about her age, but about whatever it is that, you know, most lands for voters. The other person who is a major factor in this, of course, is RFK Jr. There was just a court ruling in New York kicking him off the ballot there, which I think is outrageous, by the way. I think this, you know, they make it far too difficult for third party candidates to be on the ballot, regardless of how you feel about RFK Jr. in particular. But they said that he was using sort of a sham address. And so he got kicked off the ballot in New York. It could precipitate other states making the same decision. But, you know, one of the things that's happened post Biden dropout is some of the people who were disaffected voters, Biden voters who were backing RFK Jr. have now come home to the Democratic Party with Kamala Harris.

And so you do have a more clear dynamic of RFK Jr. isn't on a lot of ballots, that pretty clearly helps Trump and adds a couple percentage points potentially to his totals in states where that could end up really being the difference. So that's the other factor to keep an eye on here. Harry Enten over at CNN dug into some of the recent polling and found that one of the key reasons why Kamala Harris has improved so much over where Joe Biden was is because more voters now say of the top issues I'm concerned about, she actually is the person who is most focused on them. Let's take a look at what they had to say. Trust more on the issue that's most important to you. This is among likely voters. In June, we're going to look at a national. But Look at this. We see Donald Trump at 50%.

Look at Joe Biden at just 40%. So Donald Trump had a 10 point lead on the issue that folks said was most important to them. They could list any issue. Jump forward now to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. What do we see? We see a completely different ball game. We see Harris at 50%.

We see Donald Trump at 48%. Within the margin of error, but a 10 point advantage for Trump. I mean, you Trump at 48 percent within the margin of error. But a 10 point advantage for Trump. I mean, you go and this is this this is the type of stuff that campaigns dream about. And the Donald Trump nightmares about look at this Harris now with the two point advantage. This is significant movement. This is the type of movement that turns losers, which Joe Biden was against Donald Trump in a winners or at least, in the case of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. And again, we don't know which issue

is most important to each voter, but in terms of what they think is most important to them, that's where things have shifted. So that could be inflation, it could be immigration, it could be abortion. Could be protecting democracy. It could be protecting democracy. Earn their position.

Kamala Harris, 45% of voters say that she earned her position. Compare that to Donald Trump, just 42%. Donald Trump and his campaign is losing the messaging war right here. How about they are weird? This is not where Donald Trump wants to be leading it. But 55% of voters in those seven states say that Donald Trump is weird compared to just 39% for Harris.

So the Harris campaign, their messaging or the messaging against them is not working for the Trump campaign. And the messaging from the them is not working for the Trump campaign. And the messaging from the Harris campaign is working against the Trump campaign. What do you make of those numbers, Emily? I think that poll question is extremely useful, actually. And I don't think that about a lot of poll questions, but that one is super interesting because it's one thing to just pull people's top issues and then look at how they think any given candidate is doing on that issue. We don't know. It just doesn't give us as good of a window as just

plainly asking on your top issue and comparing snapshots in time to each other. So I think that's very significant. I think it shows from my perspective how powerfully the media is still manipulating public opinion. That's not to say I don't think the Trump campaign is making mistakes. I do. I also think the Kamala Harris campaign isn't doing incredible, just the best campaigning you've ever seen that would turn the Titanic of public opinion on her around like this. Because one of the benefits of that poll question is it's such a vibe snapshot. It reminds me of the polls about why Romney lost in 2012

and then Trump won in 2016. People thought Obama cared more about people like them. People thought Trump cared more about people like them in some of these key swing states. So those vibe poll questions are actually really important. And this one, I think the Harris campaign should be very cautious because I suspect that they will start to see numbers like this going down. On the other hand, the Trump

campaign isn't, you know, doing a slam dunk on making their argument right now either. So I think it's a little bit of both, but huge takeaway for me, and I know we're going to talk about J.D. Vance in just a second, is how powerfully this media honeymoon is shaping the vibes right now. The weird framing is landing. I mean, that's what that poll shows. Basically, like the Democratic frame is landing. And then Trump, you brought this up earlier, Emily, his fixation and concern that, you know, this was a coup and she's illegitimate. And this was, you know, signaled by also the argument that she's a quote unquote DEI candidate is not landing. You've got more people saying she earned her position than Donald Trump, which is pretty

incredible since he did have to go through a primary process and she didn't. But it just, you know, there's number one, it's not a hit that is just landing with the American people. It's not their top concern. They're glad that Biden stepped aside. And number two, there hasn't been any consistency of messaging coming from the Republican side, which makes it much more difficult for any of their attempted framing to really land. You know, we were talking, the weird thing is, you know, J.D. Vance really sort of propelled that framing of the Republican Party to the forefront. In fact, when Trump was asked about the weird framing at a donor event, he said he basically threw J.D. under the bus and was like, well, they're mostly saying that about J.D. But there's some new focus group testing showing,

you know, that the Trump campaign's attempts to define J.D. in context of his biography and his story and, you know, his bootstrap story and the bestselling biography and all of these things have really not been the thing that have caught on with the American public. The Democratic framing has been much more potent in terms of how people are thinking about the J.D. Vance pick. Let's put this up on the screen. Now, this is from a Democratic pollster, so all the caveats are important here. Semaphore wrote it up. This is a Reid Hoffman, right? This is a Reid Hoffman poll. A Reid Hoffman-backed poll of how people are viewing J.D. Vance. First of all, and this is consistent across a number of polls, his net favorability has fallen from minus seven to minus 11, and you have fewer voters unsure either way. That's why these early attempts at

defining candidates are so important because once a particular view is locked in, it's much harder to change once you have your first impression versus if you're trying to shift down the road what you think of a candidate. It's very difficult. People already think Hillary Clinton

is crooked Hillary Clinton. Good luck trying to change that public perception, right? So they asked respondents how they viewed Vance. And this is the semaphore write-up. They say he's become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were conservative, anti-woman, and weird. More positive options like young, smart, and businessman declined from July, and the percentage calling him extreme shot up 13 points. We can put this next piece up

on the screen, highlighted by Pod Save's Tommy Veeder here. He says, brutal new polling presented with a list of options described Vance in August. The most common answers were conservative, anti-woman, and weird. They were also, participants were very aware, they were most aware of the childless cat lady comments. 50% of those surveyed said they had heard the remarks and 55% said that they were bothered by them. Scoring worse but less well-known was the 2021 interview in which he defended a Texas abortion law's lack of exceptions for rape and incest by suggesting pregnancies from such circumstances are inconvenient. 62% of voters said they were bothered that Vance used the word inconvenient to describe pregnancies that stem from rape and incest, with 50% reporting it bothers

me a lot. So that particular comment that he had made hasn't gotten as much traction and pickup. People are less aware of it, but they're actually more bothered by that than the childless cat lady comments, which they were also rather sort of bothered and offended by. And those went, I mean, here's what just drives me crazy. And I'm on the right. So obviously everyone can take this with a grain of salt, but the coverage of Tim Walz has been, I think he's like a fairly talented politician, but the coverage of him has been insane. I mean, down to the type of L.L. Bean barn jacket that he's wearing. And there have been like 20 stories about his fashion choices. There have been however many stories about how Kamala Harris is campaigning on joy and how Tim Walz is bringing

this folksy, you know, accent to the ticket. Whereas I think the only dose of cold water I have seen corporate media throw on anything to do with Tim Walz, sincerely, other than like there's some of the stolen dollar questions that they've covered a bit. But other than that, he is the rural whisperer, except for this one segment that we talked about last week that Steve Kornacki did, showing that Tim Walz owed his victory to running up big margins, to his credit, in the Twin Cities, and actually is not super well-liked outside of the Twin Cities in some of these rural counties. And it's just this side-by-side of how the cat lady comment was bouncing around. It was like two years old. I thought it was wrong. I've talked about that. It bounced all over pop culture. It just took off. And you just, like, I get that

J.D. Vance is absolutely a movement conservative, like new right kind of guy. I think that people like us are weird. Like, don't get me wrong. I do think that's all weird. But at the same time, it's like, good lord, the juxtaposition of coverage here has been infuriating. And I think it does contribute to some of these imbalances. And watching the shifts has reinforced to me that these gatekeepers are still powerful. They've never been less powerful, but they're still powerful enough to make a difference in manipulating public opinion to some extent. That's not to excuse

the errors that Republicans are making because they are making them. But, you know, I mean, listen, there's no doubt, like, the MSNBC and CNNs of the world, they're liberal-inclined, right? They're very pro-democratic. There's no doubt about that.

But also, like, Republicans know that going in, you know, so it's true. It's and it's not like Republicans have never been able to make their messages land about candidates before. The entire country thought Joe Biden was really old, even though, you know, even though the media for a while didn't really want to cover it or say anything about it. The public really thought Hillary Clinton was corrupt and crooked and, you know, had real issues in terms of her sort of honesty. And that wasn't a narrative that the mainstream press wanted to push, but it was what people had observed. And let's not forget, conservatives have their own very powerful media organs at this point, too. I mean, Fox News is

much larger than CNN or MSNBC. So I don't know. I'm sorry, Emily. I think it's cope. Although I do think most Americans also thought Kamala Harris was kind of a joke until the media started to cover Kamala Harris really powerfully and she replaced Joe Biden, which I understand. But I do feel like there's been an element of the media really rehabilitating her image successfully with some people, not with everybody, with some people, though. I think there's some fairness to that. But also I do. I anticipated and I think you did as well that people would just be so happy to have another option that there would be.

You can't fake the level of enthusiasm that exists for her. Like the media can't manufacture. If they could, they would have manufactured it for Hillary Clinton. You know, they would have manufactured it for Joe Biden and they couldn't. Yeah, I agree. So yes, they're getting a media assist. There's no doubt about it. There's any number of like glowing profiles and the conversations about the vibes and oh my God, who's behind her social media brilliance and very few critical questions that I want to see asked about what is your policy,

right? Are you going to give in to the billionaire demands to fire Lina Khan, for example? What are you going to do on Israel? What are you going to do on Ukraine? I want to see those critical questions asked too. So I'm also very, you know, I'm not happy with the way that the media has approached this. But I also don't think you can deny there is a genuine enthusiasm for her. There's a genuine enthusiasm for Tim Walz, who is a very talented politician, does have a way of speaking that has worked for him politically, not just in terms of that gubernatorial race. But this is a guy who won a district that Trump won by, I think, 12 points. He outperformed Hillary Clinton in a pretty red district that has only been won, in terms of the Democratic side, has only been won by him over the past number of decades. He underperformed Joe Biden, though, which is interesting.

In 2020, what are you talking about? In 2020, he underperformed Joe? Yeah, compared to, yeah, right. So when he won his gubernatorial election, he was underperforming compared with Joe Biden. But when you look at his overall electoral track record, this is someone who does have a track record of appealing to voters that politicians like Kamala Harris have struggled with. And all he has to do is help to return to the Joe Biden levels of white rural working class support. It's not like anyone is expecting Democrats to win those groups. So, you know, if you look at the ticket right now, he is the most popular of all four. He is the

most popular. He's plus like 11 in the state of Pennsylvania. And you don't get there by only appealing to the suburbs. So, you know, it's the media part of the, of course, of course. But, you know, I've seen Republicans be very capable at driving a message in the past. And so far, they just have not really landed on a consistent message that has worked to ding up either one of these. And as you pointed out with like the stolen valor, quote unquote, questions about Tim Walz, it's not like when pressed, they won't bring up some of these points and put Democrats in a difficult position, have to answer for it. And I guess we'll wait and see what the polls say in a couple of weeks, now that those attacks have a chance to sort of like, you know, be processed by the broader

electorate, whether that has been a successful line of attack to, you know, ding him up and bring down some of his favorability ratings. And we forgot to mention, actually, that one of the strangest moments in the spaces last night was Trump talking about tampons, obviously. Tampon Tim? Yeah. Call him Tampon Tim. I think he said the line was something like, you know, he puts tampons in boys bathrooms.

That's all I needed to know. Something like that. That was his point. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there's— Not meeting the beer charges with that one. Talking about tampons with Elon Musk. Yeah, it doesn't help probably. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids,

promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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 One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me

to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's talk some more policy because this was interesting.

J.D. Vance did a bunch of Sunday show interviews and, you know, really leaning into his role as the attack dog on the Trump campaign. In fact, at this point, he's way more out there and visible than even Trump is in terms of the number of interviews he's doing. And he's doing rallies. Trump is not doing rallies, but he's doing all these rallies. So it was really interesting to hear how he parried some of the attacks that were coming his way on childless cat ladies and on the overall ticket. But he made one significant policy pronouncement that he would like to see a larger child tax credit. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. It's called the child tax credit and we should expand the child tax credit. If you think about what the child tax credit does. So you and the

Biden administration agree on the child care tax credit? Well, we think it should be bigger. I think President Trump and I believe in expanded child tax credit, but we also importantly want to actually get this thing done. The child tax credit has languished thanks to the Biden administration because Harris has failed to show fundamental leadership. Chuck Schumer's been unable to get it through the United States Senate and we want to have a more pro-family policy. Now, you asked about like- There was just a vote on this. You know that.

Well, let's- And you weren't there. It was a messaging bill. I'll give you that. It was a show vote. I'm with you on that. And if I had been there, it would have failed. So tell me specifically what you want to do to expand the child care tax credit,

because it's like two grand per kid right now. Well, I think one of the things you can do is make it bigger per child. I think we'd love to see it at a higher dollar value. And again, President Trump and I have proposed that. I mean, look, I'd love to see a child tax credit that's $5,000 per child, but you, of course, have to work with Congress to see how possible and viable that is. We've also proposed legislation, Margaret, to end this practice of parents getting these surprise medical bills where they go to the hospital, they have a baby, they chose an out-of-network provider, and they come home with unexpected bills. I've actually sponsored legislation to end that

practice. So we have a whole host of pro-family policies that are out there. And again, on the Harris administration, I got to push back against something a little bit, Margaret, because when these comments where I said parents should pay lower taxes via the child tax credit came out, the Harris administration immediately jumped and said, we disagree with this. The Harris campaign said, we disagree with this. So do they want the elimination of the child tax credit, or were they just being careless in responding to remarks that I made three years ago? Emily, what did you make of these comments and their significance? I thought he did a really good job in that exchange. I thought he did. And that's another

reason, sorry, not to bring it back to the media conversation, but I actually think J.D. Vance has been, as there have been all these conversations about how Trump might want to ditch him from the ticket and he's dragging everyone down and his unfavorables are dipping. There's this other storyline that while that's happening, the Trump campaign is putting him on all the Sunday shows and he's doing a fairly good job, which is an interesting, I mean, it signals confidence and signals that the campaign still has confidence in J.D. Vance. And I don't know if he can turn his own numbers around by being forward-facing in the media like this, but I actually thought he handled that really well. One of the big overlying questions, though, is whether there are enough

Republicans who Donald Trump would surround himself with in a second Trump administration who would go along with this. Now, the tax bill that passed through under the Trump administration did have a meaningful child tax credit in it because Marco Rubio and some other sort of new right guys pushed for it. But a lot of them wanted it to be bigger. And there's a huge question as to whether those kind of conservative movement folks we talked about earlier in the show, actually, who Donald Trump would surround himself with are good with a $5,000 child tax credit, which is extremely generous. Another thing that's kicked around in the new right is free births. If you go to a hospital and give birth, you don't have a bill that is totally subsidized and covered by the government. These are ideas that I think are fantastic. They're

easy to sell on shows like this. But are they viable with other Republicans? I still have huge questions about that. Yeah, well, I mean, the recent voting history would suggest no. And also, listen, J.D. Vance can support whatever J.D. Vance wants to support. I've never heard Trump talk about a child tax credit. He had four hours or whatever on with Elon Musk on X yesterday to talk about it. And it did not come up, at least unless it was in the last 10 minutes when I tapped down. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. So, you know, ultimately, what J.D. Vance says on the topic is not all that important. And as I was just alluding to, you know, Democrats expand the child tax credit was expanded during the covid crisis. Democrats

wanted to extend it and it was blocked by Republicans. And they just had a vote. J.D. actually brought this up because he got pressed on a little bit. They just had a vote on expanding the child tax credit. He didn't show up for the vote. Okay, that's one thing. Then you can sort of like guess, okay, we don't know which way he would have voted. But it was overwhelmingly Republicans who blocked it. I think there were 48 votes against it, and they were almost all Republicans. So, you know, there's also, not to get too wonky and in the weeds, Oren Kass, who we've obviously had on this show, and who is one of sort of the leading thinkers in terms of this new direction, the Republican Party, wrote up a post

in response to J.D.'s comments here. We can put this up on the screen on his Substack newsletter, which is called Understanding America. It's the one big thing from J.D. Vance's Sunday Show tour. There also is a difference between how Democrats want to approach a child tax credit versus how Republicans typically want to approach a child tax credit. Even someone like J.D. Vance, who wants it to be relatively generous, or Orrin Cass, who wants it to be relatively generous, they want to see a work requirement. So the very poorest families wouldn't benefit. And, you know, to me, that isn't pro-family because, you know, if you have a single mom, for example, you're really prioritizing her being in the workplace, wherever that is,

versus being able to be with her kids and raising her children. So, you know, I'm a universalist on all of these policies. That's why I support, like, Tim Wells' free lunch for all kids type of programs, because I think, first of all, taking out all that bureaucratic, you know, means-tested neoliberal actually stuff is beneficial to everyone, makes the programs much more simple, makes them much more beneficial in terms of the number of children you would lift out of poverty. It's a massive difference. And also just makes it so the programs are more popular because everyone benefits from it and there isn't this weird, like, you deserve it,

you don't deserve it, cliffs, cutoffs, et cetera, that again have been a really typical feature of the new liberal era. And I think this is a really helpful discussion actually because not only are those the fundamental disagreements between people who support a child tax credit like you and me, they're also the fundamental disagreements between Republicans.

And so the big backlash to the Biden increase was over some of those, like you say, those neoliberal, I think it's fair to call them half measures, that honestly, I have a hard time conceiving of supporting a child tax credit without some of that. And so do most Republicans. And from my perspective, it's not the same reason as why a lot of Republicans want to do it, which is because they're stingy with our own taxpayer money. It's more just because I think that's important to

family formation. And Oren would agree with this too. It was one of the big divides between when Mitt Romney came out with a child tax credit plan and Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at the time jumped on the Romney plan, and this became a historic dust-up in the brief history of the new right, was over this very question, whether Republicans were going to move towards that universalist, populist, genuinely populist economic policies away from saying we do also ideologically believe that there's something anti-family about sort of creating systems of dependency, which I know you and I disagree on. And I think I probably disagree with you, Ryan Ansager, on that question. But so do Republicans now disagree with each other on that.

And even the new right people who have gone to bat for the child tax credit, like Marco Rubio did back in 2017, even they can't get on board with super mainstream Democratic policies that are absolutely popular, no question about it, on the child tax credit. So it's actually a pretty interesting clash ideologically and for the future of both parties. Yeah. So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about how the politics of this could play out. Let's skip ahead, guys, to this soundbite we have B3B. He gets, J.D. gets asked about, you know, his childless cat lady's comments and specifically

about, hey, Kamala Harris is a stepmom. Like Pete Buttigieg has adopted kids. Do you not consider them to be parents? And let's just take a listen to, you know, how he parries those attacks and how he describes what he was trying to say with those comments. You called out Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg in particular. Kamala Harris has two stepchildren. Pete Buttigieg and his husband have adopted twins. Do you recognize them as parents and more broadly as being part of families? Well, of course I do, Dana. I mean, you know my life story. I was actually raised, I was raised, but Dana, I was raised, one of the first people that I gave a hug to after my RNC convention speech was my stepmom, who's been an incredibly important person

in my life. So she's not childless. My kids call her Mamaw. Of course she's not childless. But you called her that. The criticism, I certainly did not call my own stepmom childless. No, no, no, Kamala Harris.

I criticized Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exists in American leadership that is anti-family. I never, Dana, criticized people for not having kids. I criticized people for being anti-child. I never, Dan, I criticize people for not having kids. I criticize people for being anti-child. And I do think that Kamala Harris has made some bizarre statements. She has said things like, it's reasonable not to have children over climate change. I think that's the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families. I want to expand the child tax credit. I want to stop those surprise medical bills. I want to make housing more affordable so that if you have a young family, you can actually afford

to put them in a home. And I think that it is unfortunate that so much of our public leadership has become anti-family. So I think he does the best there with, you know, what he can, given the nature of his comments. That's what I was going to say. Where, I mean, he very clearly said, like, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, these are, you know, childless cat ladies that are running our country, et cetera, et cetera. But so I sort of feel about this framing of the election and the contest the same way I feel about Democrats leaning into an immigration issue. If this election is about immigration, Democrats are losing. Like, no matter how good their rebuttal is, et cetera, if that comes down to that's the number one issue and people are concerned about chaos, like it's over,

it's not happening, right? Because you're, you're never going to overcome Republicans' natural advantage on this issue. I think it's the same. I think this is very poor ground for Republicans to fight on. I recognize it's not exactly what they chose. It's these comments were unearthed, et cetera, et cetera. And now J.D.'s trying to grapple with them and make them more palatable. He was using the language of effectively a niche online subculture that is very popular and very commonplace in that subculture and sounds horrible to the rest of the public and takes issues like a child tax credit that are, you pull that, it's a 70% issue and makes it sound like something that is radical fringe, weird, like out of step with mainstream America, et cetera. It's the worst

possible messaging you could possibly have, right? But if you pull Americans on who has better like pro-family and pro-child policies, I have zero doubt that Kamala Harris comes out wildly on top of that conversation. And having Tim Walz on the ticket only helps with that because, you know, he did paid family leave, paid work leave. He did a child tax credit in the state. He did, you know, school for people who are under $80,000 a year. He did the free lunch for all kids. And so to me, this is a very, this is very difficult ground for Republicans to fight on because not only do Democrats just have a sort of natural advantage and you have the salient culture war issue of like, you know, J.D. Vance voted against protecting IVF in the Senate, and that's become very salient as well. But you also have even Republicans like him a little hamstrung in terms of how much they can say about this without their policies just sounding like democratic policies, which again are popular.

But who are you gonna trust more to do a child tax credit? Are you gonna trust Donald Trump who when he was in office, and the Republicans who typically vote against these things and block the child tax credit? Are you gonna trust Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have consistently supported it. Yeah, and I think actually there's no question defending the childless cat ladies comment is going to play, like it is not a politically wise strategy. It's obviously not one that they had an option, like they weren't choosing to lean into the childless cat ladies thing. They still aren't. He's just kind of responding defensively to questions. But that is not a good position to be in for all of the reasons that you just listed. That said, I think ideologically, not politically, in the long term, it is a question. You know,

some of the things that Kamala Harris has said that J.D. Vance tried to raise there about talking about children and climate change. I remember at the RNC, before the Dems rolled out this weird messaging line around the childless cat ladies uproar, Republicans were trying to make this, the election of weird versus normal. And that, it's been so interesting to hear that shift because this is one of the reasons that Republicans kind of wanted to lean into that message.

And I've heard, honestly, I've talked to Marianne Williamson about this. I remember I talked to her on a podcast about this a couple of years ago. It is a real fear that serious people on the left have that, you know, why are young people not wanting to have children? Why are they talking in ways that you sometimes hear, not from everybody, but you sometimes hear from people on the left that just makes it sound miserable to be a wife or a mother and almost demonizing it sometimes. Not everybody, again. But I do think ideologically, if not politically, there is something serious. It's just when you try to take niche podcast conversations and then turn them into a presidential ticket, it's not going to go well. Yeah, that's and I think that's,

you know, that's part of what they're struggling with. You know, just a last piece here, you know, to not leave Kamala Harris unscathed, like we don't have a policy agenda from her, right? We don't know what she now you may say, OK, she just jumped into this thing and you can just kind of assume she's going to continue what Biden was doing more or less. That's probably a decent assumption, but there are some specific issues where it'd be really good to know. And there was a piece that came out, actually, that said a bunch of these Democratic consultant types are saying effectively, like, say as little as you can, because the more that you get nailed down on an issue, the more divisive it becomes, you know, then you are litigating the details of this or that plan, et cetera. And that can create Democratic Party rifts. So just go with the vibes,

go with the general values rather than actually being upfront with the American people about what your policy plans and ideas are. I think that that's outrageous. I don't think the media should let her get away with that. But we did get you know, we got an indication from Tim Walls, who has a track record of very different from most Democrats of when he had power actually using it. You know, a total counter to most Democrats in Washington. When they have power, they find every excuse not to do the things that they claim that they support. And he expressed a very definitive opinion about what they should lead their policy agenda with. Let's take a listen to that.

I think one of the things is that people really see because it empowers their family. It shows that I think the paid family and medical leave. We're the last nation on earth basically to not do this. It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial wellbeing. I think we should do paid family medical leave across the country.

And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude, strengthen the family. This is one, if J.D. Vance is right about this, that we should make it easier for families to be together, then make sure that after your child's born that you can spend a little time with them. That'd be a great thing. I do think if they just picked a few of these like bread and butter, like really popular issues and just relentlessly message and lean into them, I think it will be very potent for them. Agree completely. I think Tim Walz is really good at that. I have long thought Tim Walz is really good at that. And Ryan and I talked about this last week, but there's the Reagan line of bold colors, not pale pastels, which is that you can be principled and sell your principles

politically, even if they're not super popular with a broad swath of the public. You can actually make a more persuasive case by saying, listen, I actually really believe in this stuff and I think you're going to like it. And I was elected and I'm going to do it. I'm going to pass this stuff through the duly elected legislature. I don't like Tim Walz. I don't agree with a lot of his policies.

I think some of his stuff is going to undercut, some of his culture stuff is going to undercut some of this populist stuff when he's trying to sell himself to the public. But serious credit to being a Democrat who believes in the bold colors, not pale pastels, I think, argument, because that's where you find politicians that are both principled and smart politicians. And that's a rare combination. And I think he does understand that.

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

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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 the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really

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

June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

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

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go and move on to this story that went viral from the Olympics, which really caught my attention. We put this up on the screen. So if you're an Olympic athlete, you actually get access to all kinds of health care services. And some of these athletes made great use of that because, number one, you know, even a lot of the medal winners in sports that are less popular, that aren't the mainline, you know, basketball, et cetera, they don't earn a lot of money. I mean, these are incredibly high level exceptional athletes, but they may not have the money to afford health care in the United States of America. And so you have this headline here that American athletes were radicalized by free health care available to them at the Olympics. And in particular, you had a rugby player, I believe, who realized that she could go and get like all of her appointments and whatever and was

shocked to find that there was no cost to her whatsoever. And she started making TikToks about this that went viral. Let's take a listen to that. Okay, y'all. So not only in the village do we have free food, but we have free dental, free health care. I literally just got a pap smear for free and I have a dentist appointment. And I exam next week. Like, what? And Emily, like, we're the only developed country in the world that doesn't have free health care. There were all kinds of comments about basically, like, oh, Americans discover health care. national embarrassment that our top elite athletes who are going here to represent our country don't have access to like a basic gynecological exam and a pap smear back in the United States of America. So again, like this is the biggest handicap in the world for Republicans and they

legitimately have no idea. Like elected Republicans in Washington, D.C. have absolutely no idea how seriously this issue is weighing on the minds of voters, how heavily it's weighing on the minds of voters. And you can see it by the fact that they even made these videos, like the Olympians made these videos, because it struck them immediately. And Democrats, you see the Harris campaign, you see Tim Walz starting to talk a lot about freaking health care. Hakeem Jeffries is coaching his candidates to talk a lot about freaking healthcare. Hakeem Jeffries is coaching his candidates to talk about healthcare. Republicans have no answer to this.

And they are the ones then, because they have no answer to this, that end up looking like the supporters of our legitimately cruel current system. Basically, everybody agrees that our current system absolutely sucks and is a disgrace. And because Republicans have nothing to offer, they're the ones that look like they own the system

that these Olympians are going viral for being like, man, this is so much better than what we have. Well, Republicans are the defenders of the status quo on healthcare just by default. Yeah, well, that is true just by default. But I mean, I don't want to let Democrats off the hook here. Joe Biden claimed in his presidential campaign that he was going to fight for a public option. And then the minute he even got the Democratic nomination, he stopped talking about it. And obviously, even in the midst of,

you know, there were some changes, attempted changes to health care and expanding Medicare in particular to include dental and vision and ears as if your, you know, ears and your eyes and your mouth aren't part of your body, but expanding Medicare to include those things. There was a push for that, but it wasn't ultimately successful. There also has been some success, limited, very limited success in terms of bringing down prescription drug prices and specifically on in the case of insulin. But any of the broader sweeping changes Democrats have just sort of given up on as too difficult, as too much intra-party friction in terms of what the right solution is. And so Kamala Harris,

in terms of her rhetoric on this campaign trail, has just been about like Republicans are going to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Now, Trump tried to do that. So she had some grounds to say that. He did attempt to do that in his first term. But, you know, is that going to be another push that he makes? I don't think I don't hear Republicans talking about health care at this point at all. They've just also been happy to sort of let the matter drop. And meanwhile, this continues to be if you're thinking about, you know, families, if you're thinking about working class, middle class people, just a basic quality of life issue, this continues to be a massive pain point that both parties find it too difficult or too inconvenient politically to try to address. Not to mention the massive array of moneyed interests who benefit, who get unbelievably rich off of the current system, who are very happy to have any conversation about reform completely buried.

And who got really rich and benefited a lot from the Obamacare system. And Matt Stoller has written about this. Our friend Matt Stoller has written about this. And his research and writing here is excellent. And I think that's really important, too, because it creates vulnerabilities for Democrats. But it just shows, you know, we talk about the unit party a lot in the context of foreign policy, but when interests are so tangled on lucrative issues like this, you end up with stasis. You never get anything done because healthcare is legitimately a very complicated issue. There's a lot of money to

be made on it. And so that is a recipe for absolutely nothing ever changing. And even the Affordable Care Act, which was supposed to be this radical sweeping change, it's been incremental at best. It's changed the system in some ways for the better, but in some ways for the worse, and in some ways just really not much change at all. So it's so depressing to think about how we are probably, I don't know, Crystal, I feel like we're never going to get out of this mess. I just don't see a light at the end of the health care tunnel, which really sucks for normal people because it's extremely expensive. And we're lucky we still have a high quality care in the U.S., but I'm not optimistic that we stay at that level. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I mean, on Obamacare, I think it's undeniably better than the disastrous system we had before, just in terms of, you know, you can no longer be denied for preconditions and some of those systemic changes that were made.

But it was designed to be good for the health insurers so that they wouldn't stand in the way. And that was always going to really curtail how much you could do with it. You know, it's interesting. Nancy Pelosi, I think, talked recently about how she still regrets not being able to get a public option, at least into Obamacare. And it's certainly not a major push. And then that means that the salience of the issue, too, in terms of people's focus and what they're voting on also drops because that's the only thing that would really change this at this point is a massive national backlash that could overcome those powerful interests. All right, Emily, I know we have to say goodbye to you a little bit early.

Thank you so much for filling in for Sagar today. It's always fun debating these issues with you. Yeah, and thanks for letting me do it remotely. I have something to tape here. So it just worked out that way. But Sagar so rarely takes a sick day. So you know it's serious with him. And we hope he feels better and rests up because we all have a big week in front of us with the DNC coming up in a few days. That's right.

It's going to be big. And we will see you and Ryan for counterpoints tomorrow. So we are still awaiting that potential Iranian response to the Israeli provocation. Of course, they assassinated top Hamas leader on Iranian soil the day before Iran's president inauguration. And there's a lot to sort through here. So I brought in an expert to help us understand what is happening with regards to Iran, also what is happening domestically with regards to Israel, also what is happening with regards to Kamala Harris and how she may approach this conflict.

Omar Badar, Palestinian American political analyst and great friend of the show. Great to see you, sir. Absolutely. Great to be with you, Crystal. Yeah. So let's start with this, the U.S. military rushing all kinds of assets into the region in anticipation of this Iranian response. In fact, yesterday, everybody was on pins and needles thinking that the response was incredibly imminent. You had a lot of American soldiers who were deeply concerned about potential attacks on American military bases in the region. Let's take a listen to this Fox News clip setting up what assets are moving into that area. Right now, Israel putting their military on high alert

once again, as Israeli intelligence is picking up signals that Iran and one of their terror proxies, Hezbollah, are now poised to attack at any moment, really. The Pentagon is now racing to send more firepower to the Middle East to defend Israel and our assets and bases in the region. So they have sent a submarine that is loaded with a reported 150 cruise missiles, as well as speeding up now the arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which is now near China, but is heading quickly to the region. And that adds to the wide range of American force that is already there. In addition, let's go and put D2 up on the screen. The White House is saying that they agree with the Israeli intelligence

that it is increasingly likely Iran will attack Israel this week. Put the next one up on the screen. We also have indications Iran has taken, quote, significant preparatory steps in its missile and drone units, similar to those that it had taken before the attack on Israel in April. Israeli and U.S. officials tell Barack Ravi they stress, however, that Israel and the U.S. do not know the exact timing of the attack. So, Omar, if you could just react to sort of where we are and what is expected at this point. Sure. And honestly, just a part of what you said in the

setup, I think is really important to emphasize, which is that this all started with that assassination in the Iranian capital. And you can imagine if another country had set off a bomb in Washington, D.C., what the American reaction would be. We would instantly be bombing whatever country is responsible. And the same for any European capital. The same for Israel also. You constantly have the U.S. officials saying things like, well, Israel has to respond to this. There's no way they can let something like that go. And here you have a situation in which the Iranian capital is hit. And the Lebanese capital is hit by a missile. And rather than a super targeted assassination that takes somebody out in a car or in a military base,

they bombed a civilian building in Beirut and they killed multiple women and children in the process. And yet you have everybody right now talking about it. And you saw it in a statement that that Biden also put out with some European allies talking about the need to defend Israel from Iranian aggression I mean the entire thing is backwards and it's until it's insulting to the intelligence of anybody who's actually paying attention so what the US position right now what they are defending is a situation in which There is different rules for different people We say if this were to happen to us, we have to respond.

If it happens to Israel, Israel has to respond. But when it happens to Iran or to Lebanon, then you need to take it. And if you do react to that, then that's an act of aggression that we have to stand up against. And that really is such a microcosm of American policy in the region at large, of the fact that we don't value life equally. We don't value sovereignty equally, we don't value sovereignty equally. That's right.

We constantly treat Israel like a country that is above the rules and above the law and that is why we have this conflict that we're in. You can diffuse all of it simply by insisting that Israel behave within the bounds of international law, respect human rights, and in this case, end the genocide in Gaza. The solution is so simple that you simply need a ceasefire for this onslaught that has lasted for nearly a year. And yet instead, we're seeing this rush towards further militarism and confrontation, all in defense of an order in which we and our friends get to do whatever the hell we want to,

and nobody else gets to object to it. And I think it's important to remember too, you know, we have a number of soldiers who are stationed in the region who are very much put at risk by these provocations. And yes, last time around, you know, the U.S. rushed to Israel's rescue and was able to repel. And I think it seems there was some back channel coordination even with the Iranians to make sure that that would be the end result. There's no guarantees of that this time around. And so not only is it obviously grave danger for our soldiers stationed in the region, but grave danger for the potential escalation

that we could see after. I mean, let's be clear, this has never been a conflict that has stayed within the borders of Gaza and Israel. However, you could have a much bigger and much even more deadly and destructive war than what we've already seen. It's honestly difficult to put into words how significant it would be.

I think Americans have a memory of what a war in Afghanistan looked like, what a war in Iraq looked like. And frankly, a full-scale war with Iran would be fundamentally different. It is far more destructive and devastating than anything that we've seen, simply because Iran and its allies in the region have such a massive capacity for launching rockets that can target just about any spot in the region. You can think of any part of Israel, all American military bases in the region, the major cities of other countries that are allied with the U.S. If this thing blows up, it really, it could lead to the

deaths of millions of people, literally, not figuratively. It's a very, very dire situation. And it's kind of crazy because neither the U.S. nor Iran want this war. They made it clear that they don't want it. You saw it in the communication behind the scenes about it. And yet we're put in a situation right now where Iran feeling compelled to respond to a major assassination in their capital city is pushing us to a potential confrontation between the US and Iran.

And it's utterly insane that you allow Israel that much leverage over American politics and policy to the point to where we're willing to go to a war that we don't want to go to against a country that doesn't want war in defense of a regime that is currently committing genocide in Gaza and engaging in these propagations to spread that war. And it's worth noting what Netanyahu is thinking in all of this. He is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There is no political way out of the situation that he found himself in. The genocide has been going on for over 10 months, killed endless, countless people in Gaza, tens of thousands. And those are the low estimates. The official estimates are almost certainly an undercount. He hasn't defeated Hamas militarily, has not been able to retrieve the hostages militarily. And the only way out of this is basically a ceasefire, but a ceasefire also means the end of Bibi Netanyahu's career and his entire legacy as the person on whose watch everything fell apart. This promise of Israeli security did not, you know, just he knows that this is the end for him. And he is willing to provoke a regional war in order for him to find a political way out of it because ultimately for Netanyahu, the only victory there is there is to successfully complete the genocide in Gaza. And with a Biden administration, that means endless time.

He wants to be able to drag this out for as long as possible. Or if he gets a Trump administration in, then they might have a complete loosening of the reins and for them to simply go berserk and actually start massacring people at far, far greater numbers, which is kind of crazy to think because what's already happening is a horror beyond imagination. And likely accelerate the annexation of the West Bank as well, which is something that Miriam Adelson, who's a huge donor to Trump, has said that she, you know, that's basically what she's asking for in exchange for her campaign cash.

And Israeli policy has been, they have not been squeamish about being open about that at this point. You have the entire Knesset voting in opposition to a two-state solution or a Palestinian state, even in the future. And a situation, frankly, right now where they're running literal rape camps and torture camps for Palestinians. And when news of that breaks and gets out, the reaction is not to deny or be embarrassed, but to basically flaunt it and be proud of it. You have massive riots in defense of the rapists taking place in Israel and members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, also saying openly that they defend this kind of policy. And, you know, they're basically on track to let these people off either on no charges at all or on extremely light charges simply because they have that little value for Palestinian life. And that's the regime that we're going to bat for.

It's just utterly insane.'re going to bat for. It's just utterly insane. It makes absolutely no sense. So yesterday, you brought up the ceasefire talks, which are ongoing and I think very pretty hopeless at this point. I mean, for one thing, Israel assassinated the top Hamas negotiator, who, you know, in the context of Hamas, was more interested in those peace talks. And now you have Yahaya Sinwar, who was the direct negotiator, the top communicator in terms of those talks. We got one of these reports

yesterday that we've gotten a million times of, oh, Biden's really frustrated with Bibi this time, and there's really tough conversations happening behind the scenes. And this time, allegedly, the Americans were going to indicate that it's not only Hamas that's the problem in the ceasefire talks. They're going to admit that Bibi Netanyahu is a problem in the ceasefire talks. And lo and behold, this morning in the New York Times, we get this report that I'm sure was an intentional administration leak. The headline here is Israel was less flexible in recent Gaza ceasefire talks. Documents show basically indicating that Israel came in and after they offered a proposal that Hamas, by and large, basically accepted, then Bibi came in and added

all these additional demands that his own negotiators knew were effectively poison pills to try to kill these talks. This is no surprise to you and me. Is it actually a surprise? Like, are they that dumb that they really didn't see these dynamics which have been in place the entire time? Yeah. Honestly, for people who have been paying attention, that has also been obvious for a very, very long time. That Hamas has made clear early on that they're willing to give up all the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire. And Netanyahu kept looking for reasons to put up obstacles. And the big sticking point for many months was that Hamas wanted the permanent ceasefire and Netanyahu wanted only a temporary ceasefire where Hamas

releases all the hostages. And then he goes back to finishing the genocide in Gaza. That was a non-starter position. And insanely enough, Hamas was finally under enough pressure to actually agree to it. The idea of simply a temporary ceasefire with a possibility of it extending and Netanyahu still found a reason to say no to that. So I believe that Biden is deeply frustrated with the fact that he does want the ceasefire. But the question is, are you willing to use the leverage that the United States has, the only leverage, with somebody as recalcitrant and rejectionist as Netanyahu? None of this is going to matter unless you cut off the weapons supply. What obviously needs to happen right now is for the United States to make clear that the US is not going to send another

penny or another bomb or another bullet to the Israeli military until Israel ends that genocide or takes very meaningful steps indicating that they're moving in that direction, which right now there has been none of. So that's the contrast, is that you have a U.S. administration that is willing to share its frustration more publicly now because they are feeling under pressure and they do see what Netanyahu's plot is and where this is heading. And yet they're not willing to use meaningful leverage. I don't think Netanyahu gives a crap whether Biden leaks to the press. Is unhappy, leaks this or that or no. Yeah, it's much bigger stakes for Netanyahu. He's going heading into further war and conflict and violence. And it's going to take a meaningful change in American policy for that to actually change for them. In fact, I think an argument can be made pretty compellingly that, you know, the instances where Biden has expressed displeasure about this or that or leaked displeasure about this or that. And Bibi has gone ahead and bucked him and done what he wanted to do have actually bolstered him politically. That has actually improved his approval ratings within the state of Israel. It's incredibly humiliating for the American president, just for that dynamic between us

and a client state that they constantly tell us to shut the hell up. They don't want our advice on what to do. They just want us to keep paying, you know, paying for the weapons and sending them over. That's a stupid dynamic. It's fine if you want to say that Israel is an independent country and they can make their own decisions, fine. But certainly American taxpayers should not be funding their crimes. That's the problem here is that we have a dynamic in which we constantly insist that

Israel is an independent country, they make their own decisions, all we can do is advise them. Meanwhile, American taxpayers are picking up that tab. And instead of taking care of Americans at home with, you were just talking about in the previous segment about the fact that we're the only developed country that doesn't have healthcare. Right. All that stuff is set to a side, and in Israel, everybody has public healthcare. And that's the country that we're sending extra weapons and money

to, to make sure that they can commit atrocities with impunity. That's an extremely stupid and broken dynamic that Americans ought to object to if they were more familiar with actually how it works. That is such a great point. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

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Ad-free at 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

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or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanted to get your assessment of how the switch of Biden for Kamala Harris, how that changes both, you know, the potential trajectory of Israel policy here in the U.S., if it does represent any type of a potential shift. And also, I was curious from your perspective how Bibi Netanyahu may be assessing that switch and how that may have changed his calculus here as well. Yeah, I think that there is the potential for a change with Kamala Harris. It was quite obvious that Biden, in addition to carrying out a terrible policy, also did not know how to talk about this with any kind of empathy towards Palestinians.

It was fundamentally clear. I don't know whether it's him deeply ideologically from his background or it's his mental decline or whatever it might be, but he always spoke in a very humanizing way about Israelis, utterly dehumanizing of Palestinians, whether you can believe them or their numbers and all that. And it's obvious that it's just empty rhetoric whenever he expresses concern for Israel engaging in discriminant bombings and all that. It did not have any emotional content behind it. He did not speak with any real or meaningful empathy. And on top of that, repeated every Israeli lie about Palestinians, whether it's the 40 beheaded babies, he claimed he saw the pictures of them. That was an Israeli lie about what took place on October 7th, about the Hamas headquarters being under a hospital. All that stuff was stuff

that Biden was willing to endorse. And the only meaningful shift that we've seen so far between Kamala Harris and Biden is that Kamala seems to appreciate the magnitude of the crimes that Israel is committing. And even though she's not offering a different policy, she's speaking about it with greater empathy. She is talking about how utterly unacceptable it is that people are behaving in that fashion. The fact that so many Americans of Palestinian origin are losing family members and how devastating that is and how it desperately needs to come to an end immediately. She's able to express some more empathy. But whether that's just campaign rhetoric because they look at the polls and they see how deeply a problem it is, or whether Kamala Harris is actually interested in a meaningful policy change is something that remains to be seen. And I think that just the fact that it's not Biden on the ballot at this point will bring a portion of progressives who have been deeply troubled by his policy to be able to stomach the idea of voting for Democrats. But it's basically hers to win or lose. And I think it really depends on how she behaves

between now and the election and how strongly she signals a major shift in American policy or whether they can even get a ceasefire between now and the election. That could have a very, very significant impact. So speaking of that tone, we had an instance in Detroit where there were pro-Palestine protesters and she took a very dismissive, condescending, I'm speaking tone, and there was a backlash to that. Then she goes to another rally. I don't know if this was the Phoenix or the Las Vegas one, where she's again faced with protesters,

and she clearly had developed a different strategy to address the protesters. Let's take a listen to how she handled this one. Which includes respecting the voices that I think that we are hearing from. And let me just say this on topic of what I think I'm hearing over there. Let me just speak to that for a moment, and then I'm going to get back to the business in hand. So let me say, I have been clear. Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.

Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home. So I respect your voices, but we are here to now talk about this race in 2024. Alright, so on the one hand, Omar, you have better tone there. You have her comments after her meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, I also thought were, you know, well executed. You have her choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro.

Walz was much more empathetic towards the uncommitted movement. Shapiro, of course, compared Palestinian protesters to the KKK. So you have that. You have actually a new choice of a liaison to the Jewish community that people were, you know, favorable towards that seemed to be a positive indication as well in terms of her direction. One of her top policy advisors is more of the, like, Obama school of foreign policy, which was an Iranian nuclear deal, a little better on these issues than the Biden foreign policy team has been. On the other hand, even what she says there, that's just the Biden policy. So it's not like we've had any actual concrete indication of a shift.

So how do you look at this constellation of events and signals? She's savvy, right? She watched the backlash to her first reaction to protesters and realized that she had to make an adjustment and she made it. And I think that the VP pick actually is not that trivial either. Yeah. It's funny because both Tim Walz and Shapiro are both your standard pro-Israel Democrats. Right. Both of them are kind of soft on accountability for Israel. None of them is eager to cut off military aid or any of that stuff. Literally the only difference between them is that emotional intelligence on how to address the deep anger

among young people in this country about what's happening in Gaza. And in one case, you've got the standard pro-Israel line of Tim Maltz. That is, we support Israel, but we understand why people are angry and why this means a lot because the situation is unacceptable. It's again, just speaking about it with empathy versus Shapiro, who speaks about it basically like a monster. Just going, you know, dismissing those people and ascribing racist intentions on their part and basically even suggesting policies that might curtail their free speech. That's a deep contrast on a domestic level, not on a foreign policy level. And yet you have the entire Republican conversation, again, amplifying the ridiculous charge of anti-Semitism being alive in the Democratic Party and part of this decision.

Ironic as hell, given that Donald Trump, nobody comes even close to him in the conversation in terms of anti-Semitic engagements. He accused the American Jewish community of, you know, he keeps saying Israel, your country, as opposed to America being their country. Right. In a meeting with Republican Jewish donors, said, you don't like me because I don't need your money. Again, playing into that trove for the idea that you like, I think he may have even said

the words, you like to control people, your politicians with your money, and I'm not game for that. This kind of rhetoric from Trump, and the fact that there isn't anybody, you know, when you look at that ticket with Vance, and you contrast it with the Democratic ticket, with Kamala Harris having a Jewish husband, with the secretary of state under Biden being also Jewish, with the fact that the leader in the Senate is Jewish, all of that, and to still be able to have Democrats panic in reaction to that charge of antisemitism. In a way, it's troubling to me. I mean, you should be able to just laugh off that kind of accusation from Republicans and shut it down because it's utterly baseless. It's just on

its face, the behavior of clowns when they bring that up. And instead, you constantly see this pressure. And my speculation is that the initial bad reaction from Kamala Harris to protesters came on the back end of all that backlash of how come you didn't pick Shapiro as your running mate. And I think she felt the need to compensate there. And at some point, I really wish the Democrats would just develop a backbone and start dismissing bullshit charges that are directed at them and start owning the progressive positions that, you know, again, a lot of it is rhetoric. Not enough of it is policy.

But at least in positions to advocate for progressive policies in which you treat everybody equally, that's something to be proud of, not something to shy away from. And they have to develop more resilience to the smear machine that we see, especially in relation to Israel, where it's a wedge issue that Republicans constantly use to bludgeon Democrats. And every time they do, rather than own a policy of accountability for Israel, they immediately panic and say, we have to prove that we're more pro-Israel. It's just, it's a losing strategy in the long term. We're seeing the beginnings of it. And

there's an obvious, you know, demographic shift among young people who see this issue very, very differently. Right. One of the things that I've seen with regard, you know, to defend Kamala is this idea, well, listen, Biden's the president. She can't really publicly undercut him. Like she's trying to do her little tone shifts and pick the people that seem to indicate a different direction potentially. And, of course, we're very pragmatic about what that would – they're not going to be where we are, but, you know, maybe a little more Obama versus Biden. But she can't undercut Biden, so she can't actually come out and set forth a policy that is different than what he has expressed. Do you think that that's fair? Or do you think that she does have some room to set herself apart from his policy?

Yeah, it is. She's in a tough spot precisely because of that. I think that is fair. But it's incumbent on her. There's just the reality that the Israeli policy is absolutely intolerable. It is completely morally indefensible. And yes, you do have the constraints of currently being vice president, serving to a president that feels maybe a little bit differently about this. But it's really on her to draw the contrast between now and the election.

Really, it's a dynamic where voters are paying attention and they've lost many of them over this issue. And it's really on her to try to figure out a corrective course. And yeah, she's not in an easy position, but you can't expect people who have been deeply frustrated with this administration and the way that they have dealt with this issue to basically simply be threatened

with a prospect that Trump is worse. There's no doubt that Trump would be worse on every issue, including this one, frankly. Right. But still for a lot of people, genocide is a red line. And I think one way that Kamala Harris could potentially do something meaningful is apply internal pressure

within the administration right now to get that ceasefire done. And maybe that is something that ends up swinging a little bit more in the Democrats' direction for progressives come election day. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, Omar, my highest aspiration is just that you would have someone who's not ideological on the issue. Biden, clearly very ideological. And I think Josh Shapiro also, through his repeated expressions and the way that he approached the issue, was also clearly very ideological. Because if you have just your sort of replacement level Democrat, they can read the polls and see that this policy, forget about, I'm not counting on their morality, right? They can see this policy has been politically

disastrous for them and created this potential, you know, massive war, which would be even more politically disastrous for them. So my highest aspiration is that in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, you just have two people who are not ideologically committed to the issue, who see Bibi as the partisan, far-right, fascist figure that he is, who wants to elect Donald Trump, by the way, and can read the polls and respond to the pressure and realize that this is a politically foolish direction because, as I said, I'm not counting on anyone's morality here winning the day. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think in a way, Bibi Netanyahu is paying attention to the fact that this is the trend. It's escalating pressure

way too slow for my taste. I think you should have pulled the plug on genocide from day one. Right. But Netanyahu is noticing the fact that there is growing frustration in the Biden administration, and which is why he's pushing for this regional war to blow things up. And it's not surprising that it came on the back of his visit to Washington, by the way, that he did the bombings in Beirut and Tehran. You wonder what conversations may have been had with the Trump team while he was here, because he did actually meet with Trump as well. And it seems like the Republicans seem to think that for things to blow up, this rhetoric from Trump has been all in the direction of, we have all this chaos in the

world because of Biden. And if I'm in power, then I'm going to restore peace and order and all of that. You can't believe a word of what Trump is saying. But nonetheless, if he can demonstrate more chaos in the world while Biden is still president, that's a strategy that Republicans think play in their favor. And it seems to be one that Bibi Netanyahu is running with. And here's the insane part, is that after those provocations and the prospect of regional war

expanding under Netanyahu, what did Biden do? He released the 2,000 pound bombs he's been withholding from Israel in preparation for that regional war. So in a way, the lesson for Netanyahu is the more you escalate, the more you're going to get the Biden administration to bend for what regional war. So in a way, the lesson for Netanyahu is the more you escalate,

the more you're going to get the Biden administration to bend for what you want. And yeah, it's a dynamic. It's precisely what you said. We have to understand that Netanyahu was interested in electing Trump. And if Democrats are serious about not allowing, you know, not to be taken advantage of in this case, you need a real, you need the backbone to do not a cosmetic shift in policy, but a meaningful shift in policy. And it's just having the foresight. You know, politicians are by nature risk averse. It's all about status quo is how I got here. And you need to stick with the status quo to remain in power. But something is happening in the world that is a very, very

significant major shift. And either you adapt to it or you keep your head stuck in the sand until you pay the consequences and lose over it. And this to me is a wake up call of reading the room, looking at what's happening in the world and understanding that if there was ever, it's always been the morally correct position to have a major shift in American policy and to stop treating an apartheid regime in Israel like it's above the law and above the rules. But right now that's a political necessity as well. And the question is, is the Democratic Party going to wake up to that shift and the fact that it is a domestic political necessity as well at this point, rather than just a strategic and a moral imperative? All very well said. And Omar, always grateful to have your time and your expertise. So thank you for coming in this morning.

Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade

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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. Ad-free at 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. Israel's assault on Gaza continues endlessly, seemingly no end in sight. The U.S. limply looks on, makes some meaningless disgruntled noises from time to time, some superpower we are. The ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocidal attacks, to no avail. The ICCs threatened arrest warrants, well they have failed to materialize as of yet. And we all wait with bated breath to see if Iran's retaliation in response to Israel's provocation will plunge the whole region into an even bigger and much more deadly war. It often feels like the Israeli state can just act with impunity, raining terror down on a trapped population with no one and nothing

able or willing to stop them. But just below the surface, a doom spiral for the Israeli state may already have been set into motion, a mounting economic calamity that threatens to collapse the state entirely. The BDS movement in their wildest dreams could never have imagined the economic toll that the Israeli state is basically inflicting on itself right now as we speak. So here are the details. Mondo Weiss compiled what data is available on the Israeli economy, and the picture is really quite dire. Quote,

Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel's credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost junk bond levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023, as a result of the policies of Israel's far-right government before October 7th, show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the state of Israel. Now, those business closures, they may actually just be the beginning. An estimate cited

by the Times of Israel found that up to 60,000 businesses might close before 2024 is over. This is a greater impact than the COVID pandemic shutdown and would only be exacerbated by an expanded war with Hezbollah and with Iran, the impacts of which, frankly, would be unfathomable. Just think about the realities right now, though, for the Israeli economy. Israeli workers have been called up to participate in the Gaza annihilation, undercutting the country's much-celebrated tech sector. Another key sector, tourism, has completely dried up. Construction is at a standstill because the Palestinians that Israel relies on as cheap labor force have been banned from coming to work outside of the occupied territories. Israeli attempts to import foreign workers as a new source of cheap

labor have been largely unsuccessful. Turkey has announced a ban on exports to Israel, further crippling the construction industry. And efforts to import from other nations are hampered by the efforts of the Houthis to block shipping into Israeli ports. 250,000 Israelis continue to be internally displaced as a result of the tit-for-tat war with Hezbollah. And panic has set in as Iran threatens a large response to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh that occurred on their soil. Now, perhaps the biggest body blow, however, was intel pulling out of a planned $25 billion investment in the state of Israel, an indication that capital is engaged in their own self-interested BDS, weighing the ever-risking risks,

ever-rising risks of operating in Israel to be greater than the benefits. Even more trouble, though, could be ahead. Here again is Mondo Weiss. Israel's power grid, which has largely switched to natural gas, still depends on coal to supply demand. The biggest supplier of coal to Israel is Colombia, which announced that it would suspend coal shipments to Israel as long as the genocide was ongoing. After Colombia, the next two biggest suppliers are South Africa and Russia. Without reliable and continuous electricity, Israel will no longer be able to pretend to be a developed economy. So while the U.S. will apparently never cut Israel off of literally anything, including the 2,000 pound bombs that they use to drop on schools where displaced children are

sheltering, the rest of the world apparently not so keen to continue doing business with this terrorist regime. There's another dynamic that's a little harder to quantify here, though. It came up in our recent interview with an Israeli Zionist analyst, Shael Ben-Ephraim, who we brought in to discuss the right-wing riots that broke out in Israel to protect the right of Israeli soldiers to rape and torture Palestinian detainees. I asked Yael what this trend meant for the future of Israel if they continue to drift towards lawlessness in a state governed overtly by Jewish supremacy. I was frankly a little bit shocked by his response.

I think there's going to be a lot of people in Israel who, if this continues to be the kind of government that they have in the long term, will leave. And those will be the most productive members of society. Those will be the high-tech leaders. Those will be the professors. Those will be the literati and so on and so forth, which is something that I think the extreme right in Israel wants because that will help them run the country better.

And there's an attempt to dismantle the Israeli judicial system because that's the one check and balance the Israeli system has against this kind of power. So right now, Israel, similar to a lot of other countries in the West, the United States, as an example, is having a battle for its soul. And I think if the liberal democratic forces in Israel lose, Israel will be lost. It's not going to be able to survive if it doesn't have allies in the world

and it's going to be sanctioned by everyone, treated like a pariah state, that liberal part of the country is what kept Israel as part of the international community and what kept it allied with the United States and what kept it as a big trade partner for the EU. And if Israel loses that, it's not going to be able to survive. The extreme right fringe and the fundamentalists aren't going to be able to support the Israeli economy,

aren't going to be able to support Israeli society, not in the long term. Many don't serve in the army. It's a disaster for Israel. If these people take over, and this is a step towards taking over, like make no mistake, they're hindering the functioning of the state. If they completely take over, the state of Israel will not exist in the long term. And I don't think,

I think that's quite a possible outcome. So Shael alludes there to the fact that the most conservative ultra-Orthodox members of Israeli society are increasingly represented in terms of governing ideology, but don't actually contribute too much to society. They tend to have large families, rely on government welfare, and receive a religious exemption from military service. The numbers supporting this dynamic were already getting kind of dicey because this group has much higher birth rates than more secular Israeli Jews.

If you see a significant brain drain due to unending war and overt fascism, according to Shael, quote, the state of Israel will not exist in the long term. Bolstering this point, Mondo Weiss quoted an Israeli economist, Professor Dan Ben-Tavid, as saying that the Israeli economy is held together by 300,000 people, the senior staff in universities, tech companies, and hospitals. Once a significant portion of those people leaves, he says, we won't become a third world country. We just won't be anymore. Has this exodus already begun? Difficult to say. And frankly, some of the data is really conflicting. But according to the Times of Israel, Israelis have already begun leaving the country prior to October 7th due to the Netanyahu

government's extremism and attacks on the judiciary, which had led to a large protest movement for more secular elements of society. That outflow accelerated after October 7th, leading to about 42,000 permanent departures from November through March of 2024. And one can only imagine what an all-out war with Hezbollah and or Iran could do to those numbers in a country where a significant minority of the population hold multiple passports. By enabling the worst of Israeli atrocities and excesses, self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden may have unintentionally helped to galvanize a force that could actually destroy the Israeli state. We may be watching in real time as Israel collapses under the weight of its own internal divides, capital's aversion to risk, and the world's revulsion to apartheid and genocide. That's the show for today, guys. Thanks for tuning in. Emily did a

great job. It's always fun to get to talk to her. She and Ryan are going to be back with a great CounterPoints tomorrow. Sagar will hopefully be feeling better and be back in his chair on Thursday, and I will see you then. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts,

the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month

and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. That's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more

on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge.

So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.