Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/14/25: Trump Threatens Putin Before Summit, Will Dems Fumble 2026

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss the upcoming Trump Putin summit in Russia, inflation numbers showing a brutal reality for the GOP in 2026, and Israel reveals its plan for "Greater Israel".   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. box. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. Back to our regularly scheduled programming. What do we have today, Crystal? Oh, we have a lot to tackle this morning. We're going to preview that big Trump-Hooten Alaska Summit. We're also going to take an early look at how the midterms are shaping up. We've got some news out of Israel, including Netanyahu, embracing the greater Israel project. So just mask fully off at this point.

Also going to take a look at Theo Von had an American doctor who was just back from Gaza's pretty extraordinary episode. I really recommend that you guys go and listen to the whole thing. But we have a clip from that. I wanted to talk a little bit about that as well. Marjorie Taylor Green and Laura Lumer in an absolute flame war. Break the details down there. And Laura Lumer making a pretty dire prediction about the future of the Republican Party.

So that is interesting to dig into as well. Perhaps more substantive. I don't know. To dig into as well. Congresswoman Luna is telling Joe Rogan, about UFOs. So Sagar has some thoughts there. I guess I have some thoughts there too. Well, she made some crazy claims, but she's also gone after some whistleblowers, so we'll talk about it. It's actually, there's a lot going on there. Okay. All right, you'll break that down

for us. And then Israel might be preparing to go back to war with Iran. So we are going to have Dave DeCamp of antewar.com. It's first time on the show I've been wanting to get them on for a little while to break down all of the details there. We're also going to be doing our AMA live today. If you guys want to be part of those, make sure that you sign up over at breaking points.com. That's right, breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today. If not, no worries. If you can't afford it, just please hit the subscribe button here on this video and or send your favorite episode to a friend.

So let's go ahead and start with that Trump-Pooten summit. It is tomorrow. We'll have some reaction on Saturday, by the way. We'll get to that in terms of our future programming notes. But we actually wanted to start with some of the contours of the debate and kind of where things lie. So we thought we would kick it off with Dave Smith, who was recently on Pierce-Morgan's show. debating a very pro-Ukraine, pro-Western NATO sentiment and really revealing some of the core

truths, I think, behind what continues to drive a lot of the NATO support for the war. Let's take a listen. What are we doing? You're just trying to insult Vladimir Putin, insult Russia. It's like the most childish, immature, just taunting. There's an actual war going on right now where hundreds of thousands of people have been dying. And there's a meeting coming up between the two leaders of the United States and Russia, as I said before, 90% of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Let's all take this down a notch. Vladimir Putin has at least signaled recently that he will maybe is open to the idea of keeping the Donbass region, Donask in Luhansk, of getting a corridor to Crimea,

and of leaving some of the other territory. Why are we not all pushing in that direction? It is undeniable that the West did a lot to provoke this conflict. It's just undeniable. Our CIA director, through all of Joe Biden's term, Bill Burns, was the one who wrote the Nietz-Means-Memmo, who warned Condoleezza Rice, do not keep pushing in this direction. And we continued pushing regardless. It's resulted in this catastrophe.

Like I said before, Pierce, I'm not absolving Vladimir Putin of any responsibility. He launched this war, and he's responsible for the destruction. But when you start the program by asking a simple question, like what is? is the exit strategy here? What is the plan? No one really has anything. No one has anything other than maybe we could keep sending weapons and money in and this slow grind of people dying will continue. And Vladimir Putin will then at the end of that take the territory he wants. Let's try to negotiate an end to this nightmare that never needed to happen. I thought he did a good job kind of laying some of the stakes out. And yes, again, I understand

nobody's absolving Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. We're simply acknowledging the contours of what led to this. I actually find it almost similar maybe to the Israel Hamas conversation, right? It's like to talk about October 7th in a vacuum is kind of ridiculous.

Well, in the constant like, do you condemn Hamas? Right, exactly. I'm like, yes, of course, on October 7th and it's like, let's look at the contours of the conflict. That's part of the reason I think that Daryl Cooper's series on Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem went so viral because people are like, I genuinely had no idea about the history of these two actors and what led up to this.

And it starts to make a lot more sense, actually, from both sides in terms of their actions, both October 7th and the Israeli reaction. Yeah. And you're able to actually be able to condemn both and then look at it, you know, without some single Israeli covered or Palestinian covered glasses. Right. And that makes it what? It's called nuance. It's about understanding how these things don't happen necessarily in a vacuum. It's not the Disney version.

where it's just like, he's an evil bad guy, so he does bad stuff, and they're evil people, so they hate us because we're free, you know, it's like the cartoon version of it. And I will say, there was one person on that panel that was absolving Vladimir Putin. That was the dude in the car. It was like some, I don't know, Russian state TV propagandists. And so that was supposed to be like Dave's ally in the debate. Obviously, Dave doesn't agree with him, which he made clear, like went out of his way to make clear. Like the things that this dude was saying, I do not co-sign whatsoever.

So, Peers is more pro-Ukraine. The woman that was there is herself Ukrainian. And then you've got two neocons there who are, you know, very pro-Ukraine. And so it was basically Dave versus the entire panel. And as you can see there, handled himself quite ably just by pointing out, you know, reality of where we are. Because this is, you know, I have a lot of sympathy and continue to have a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainians. In fact, I'm disgusted with the fact that the U.S. was so integral and glowing. a potential peace deal early on. I'm also discussed with the actions that multiple U.S.

administrations, including the first Trump one, including Biden, including going back, you know, before this war, that they took that led to the provocation that created the context for this illegal offensive action invasion by Russia. And so, you know, if you are interested in trying to bring this thing to a close, you have to live in reality. The other alternative being offered here is just, what, endless war, or, you know, if we're actually going to try to get Ukraine to quote-unquote win and take back all their territory, I mean, that would require our actual direct involvement. Yes.

Does anyone want that? And that's what's driven me crazy about this conflict from the beginning, is there's been a total unwillingness to have an honest debate about what happened in the past, what it's going to mean, what the off-ramp is, what the plan is, where this whole thing is going. And now it's just a mess and a quagmire. And, you know, I'm not particularly hopeful about this summit this weekend. I'll just put my cards on the table. And I think we'll have some indications you're about to share of, you know, not great signs going into it.

But, you know, I don't know. I'm just at this point, there really needs to be some sort of rational close to this thing. And I don't know that we're anywhere close to that. I don't see it either. Here's Trump talking about the summit, setting expectations. Let's take a listen. Russia face any consequences if Vladimir Putin does not agree to stop the war after your meeting on Friday? Yes, they will.

What will the consequences? There will be. There will be, I don't have to say, there will be very severe consequences, yes. Very severe consequences. I'm going to return to that because basically this thing, at least for now, looks like it's set up to fail. To be fair, here's what the Trump people have been telling me behind the scenes. He starts off from the maximal political place so that he can. and negotiate down from there, which sounds reasonable in practice, like maybe in business, but in, you know, something as sensitive as this, I still remain to be seen, I think, in terms of the success. And part of the reason why is this. Let's put this up there on the

screen. There's been multiple reports out now. None of it contradicted with the White House. Yesterday, Donald Trump held a meeting both with Ukraine and many of the European great powers ahead of the summit, where they agreed, quote, on Ukrainian red lines with Europe before the Putin summit. The U.S. leader told European peers he will not negotiate territorial issues during Friday's meeting, but will seek an immediate ceasefire. Now, included within that provision for a European ceasefire, and I want to reiterate this, are some of the things which are already non-starters for the Russians. I'm going to read it here. Quote, ceasefire as a prerequisite for any further talks. Quote, any territorial discussion will start from the current front line.

Quote, binding Western security agreements that Russia must accept, quote, Ukrainian participation in the talks, and, quote, support from both the U.S. and Europe, including Ukraine, for any deal. Now, already on the Ukrainian side, it's going to be very difficult to get a deal. Why? Because Zelensky has a total ability to set the table and to bring anything to some sort of national referendum, which he's not even allowed to pursue any sort of peace on his own accord. He has to bring it to the people. Now, he may not even want to bring it to the people, apparently according to their own polls, the Ukrainian people are actually much more pro-peace than he is, whereas his entire administration. Remember, he's deeply unpopular already for some of the authoritarian anti-corruption laws that he just signed into office. He's already been dragging down in the polls. There's been no election. The Ukrainian opposition has either been banned or jailed inside of the country. Why would you want to give that up if you're already a leader of that country? His vision for how this thing was going to go is already out of step with the Ukrainian. Secondary to that is, quote, some sort of security.

guarantee that Russia can, that Russia must accept. The security guarantee would effectively be some sort of NATO-style security guarantee outside of NATO. So Trump is trying to play two sides of this coin where he's like, well, it won't be from NATO. It's like, dude, if the U.S. has a treaty-bound obligation to defend every inch of, let's say, 80 percent of Ukraine, that might as well be NATO. I mean, it doesn't matter, right? Whether it's America or NATO, whether it's outside of NATO or not, if all of the NATO powers have an obligation to come and to defend your territory, then that's basically NATO. Why would Russia live with that?

And then the final one is that Russia must agree to the current front line and they must not demand any more of their territory. Well, again, for people who don't even follow the conflict, Russia just had its best breakthrough on the front line in over a year. Part of the reason why a ceasefire for them right now may not make a lot of sense is because they're rolling. Every single day that the war continues, they're doing better. And then finally, there's this theory of severe consequences. Russia is the most sanctioned country on earth by the United States. I actually don't think people know that. More than Iran, more than any other place,

there's not another sanction that's going to be left. That's why they're threatening these, quote, secondary sanctions. Well, they've put 50% sanctions or tariffs on India. India has not budged a single inch, not one. In fact, they're going to Moscow. They're going to China, to Beijing. The two biggest buyers of Russian oil are China and India, China by far, by the way, and it faces no current consequences. The Senate has a bill which Trump is threatened to support, which would put 500 percent tariffs on any buyer of Russian oil. But let's think about the consequences of that. That would mean a 500 percent tariff on China, which would effectively bring the U.S. Commerce industry, retail industry, e-commerce, et cetera, to a complete halt.

shut off trade. Is everybody willing to shut down our economy and all of our global trade for Ukraine? I mean, this is where, you know, it gets back to where we all had to pay higher gas prices because of the Ukrainian conflict. That wasn't popular, actually, even though a lot of people were like, yeah, sure, I'll pay higher gas. It's like, yeah, I don't work out. In theory, in the beginning, in theory. Yeah, you got a lot poorer. Most people paid a big, hefty Ukraine tax at the pump for years. And instead, by the way, they still continue to pay it at least in some form. But my point remains, oh, I mean, I'm not even talking about the European consequences. All of those, you know, the summers where their electricity prices were sky high,

it deregulate, it destabilized their entire economies. The German economy, it took a massive hit. I mean, it basically looked like their entire manufacturing sector was underwritten by cheap oil and gas. Like their whole future of their economy is up in the air right now. All that being said is just to say, you know, Trump would always say we have the cards. And he's right for Ukraine. On Russia, it's not right. I mean, absent, full-blown U.S. military NATO intervention, what else can you do? Yeah. This is not a military capable of adopting NATO weaponry. They've proven that. They only, and I'll get to this a bit, they only know how to fight in a Soviet way, which is throw as much manpower into the trench as possible. You think you're going to beat the Russians at their own game? They have millions more people than you. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I guess the alternative view with regard to Russia's recent success on the front lines would be, you know, this has been going on for years now, and they've basically been stuck in place. There have been minor advances on the Russian side, but it hasn't been like, you know. Yeah, they're not taking over the whole country. Yeah, it hasn't been dramatic. And that these latest gains may be a result of them really throwing a lot of force in one area to try to improve their bargaining position going into this summit and these negotiations.

is kind of the alternative explanation. As far as Trump goes, I guess we're just hoping, since he goes back on his word all the time, that maybe he doesn't actually mean anything that he's saying here about just like, I'm in lockstep with the Europeans and the Ukrainians and Russia's going to pay a price, et cetera, et cetera. Very possible. Very possible that Trump doesn't mean a word that he is saying about any of this

and will completely flip once he's face-to-face with Vladimir Putin because famously, he's very influenced by whoever happens to be in front of him at that moment. So we'll see. I just want to zoom out, though, also for a second and talk about how utterly hypocritical and preposterous it is at this point in time for the Americans to posture like they care so deeply about territorial integrity. We're going to cover later in the show how Israel is now greenlit, this massive and very consequential expansion of settlements that basically makes a two-state solution impossible. It's directly intended, according to Smotrich himself, it was in charge of such things, directly intended to make a two-state Palestinian, you know, solution completely

impossible, completely off the table. And of course, we are also greenlighting the complete annexation of Gaza as well. So West Bank annexed, Gaza annexed. And that we are, we are part of. We are greenlighting. We are funding. We're providing diplomatic cover for. And then on the other hand, we're going to pretend like, you know, territorial integrity is all, you know, some rarefied sacrosanct thing. I mean, it's just the levels of hypocrisy are so brazen it in your face. Yeah, I mean, I've talked about before,

but all of the rhetoric that you hear on Ukraine, they're like, oh my God, Russia's killing civilians. Look, I'm not minimizing any civilian death. I think it's bad. But Russia has killed, you know, on a daily basis, they'll be like, wow, 12 civilians were killed in Ukraine. I think that's horrible.

How many civilians does Israel kill every single day with the U.S. bomb? Who are we talking to? you know about this. Yeah. Same, Buka, the massacre. It was a genocide. That's what the Ukrainians say.

Yeah. I mean, again, look at the death toll and compare it to the Palestinians. It's like we can't talk out of both sides of our mouth. And instead, we just need to all be honest. This is a great power conflict. The goal was to try and destroy the Russians via Ukraine as a proxy state. It failed miserably. I never thought, my great naivete was having any confidence in the U.S. global hegemia on banking.

I thought that there was no way the Russian economy would survive. I have been stuck. There's a lot of lessons, actually, in the way that the Russians have been able to. It shows you that there's only two things that matter. If you can make guns and if you can pump oil, that's literally all that you need. You don't need America at all. And, you know, they're doing just fine. The world is way more prepared to move on from us than we thought.

It's true. I truly, truly underestimated not only them, but I vastly overestimated the power of U.S. sanctions and HVijemini. and I kind of wish that we hadn't done it for a conflict which has no bearing whatsoever on the United States. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

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Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Let's get to President Zelensky, who recently had a press conference in London, where he's been meeting with all of the European powers setting the table for the summit. Let's take a listen. I told President Trump and all our European allies, Putin is bluffing. Putin is bluffing that sanctions is nothing and they don't work. In fact, sanctions are hitting Russian war economy hard.

That Putin definitely does not want peace. He will so occupy Ukraine. And we all understand that Putin cannot fool anyone. We need future and further pressure. and European and American sanctions against Russia. So you can see he's like Putin doesn't want peace. And I mean, all of the table for that is that I don't want peace either, right? Is that we want to continue fighting, throwing our people into the breach.

Let's put the next one, please, up on the screen just to, you know, continue what I was saying. Trump promises, quote, very severe consequences. At a military level, absent sending troops actually on the ground, I was speaking with some military experts yesterday, there's not a whole lot left. Biden gave them everything that they could possibly have asked for. The critique from that is that, oh, he gave it to them too late. But we are where we are. We're in reality, right?

We're in the average age on the Ukrainian front line is probably between 40 and 60 years old. Nobody even really knows what that is. It's horrifying what has already happened to the entire population. But, you know, as you said, the hope is that maybe he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth and keeping everything up for negotiation. But I'm just not so sure, considering I would have thought that, you know, You know, in the first month of the Trump administration, we have the Gaza ceasefire. I was like, wow, I was like, this is amazing, right?

Well, you know, now we are where we are, where Wiccoff has used talks with Iran as cover for a strike, where on the Israeli side, we just keep saying things like, well, it's up to Netanyahu, you know? It's like, well, here, it seems like we've done a total about face from the initial days of the administration. Trump's sending $250 million in additional military equipment, and Trump continuing, you know, these via European arms sales, but still fueling the conflict, sending Patriot batteries, threatening Russia with sanctions, just straight out of the Biden playbook. The India thing is literally out of Lindsey Graham playbook. He's been wanting to do it since day one.

At a military level, just to underscore that, let's put this one next one, please, on the screen just to show everybody what the military reality is here. Excellent piece written by some people who are actually military experts. And they say, quote, Ukraine's once nimble army is mire. in Soviet decision-making. I remember reading this over the last couple of years about how NATO tactics and others were encouraged, NATO weaponry and a lot of these other things training to try and get the Ukrainians to fight that way. But their response is basically, look, we don't even know how to do that, but also this is just the way that we're trained. And we've found some level of battlefield's success. But attritional warfare favors the great power, not the small power,

especially the one that has no industrial base, that has no capacity to wage war on its own, and would basically be giving up in a single day, 24-hour period, if the United States and Europe pulled the plug from the conflict. The person who is able to sustain that on a long enough basis is the Russians. And there was also this theory that lots, and I also got this wrong, I'll admit it, if I look back, you know, one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union, or at least stirred up a lot of internal dissent, was the death toll in Afghanistan. during the Soviet war. And, you know, the Russians have, nobody knows exactly how many troops have been killed,

but it's a lot, hundreds of thousands, probably. The Russians will claim otherwise. There doesn't seem to be very much. There just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of dissent. They somehow seem to have solved that problem. I guess the population just supports it, unlike they did in Afghanistan. I really have no other explanation. I also read that they're paying very generous salaries to a lot of the draftees

or a lot of the people who will come in from the caucuses or these other regions. much more than they could ever earn otherwise. And so even the widowers and the families are like, well, it sucks to lose your husband, but I'm getting a pension for the rest of my life. I don't know how they did it. I'm not an expert or anything. But I thought that this could be an Afghanistan type situation for them. It doesn't appear to be.

People, they seem willing as a polity to accept hundreds of thousands, if not millions of casualties in Ukraine. There has been zero actual internal dissent since 2022 and a lot of the draft. In fact, it may have worked out for them because the Western style, They all just left Russia. And so everybody who's left is like, yeah, we're on board. We're on, you know, we're on the train. Let's go.

Yeah. They have a large, you know, relatively poor rural population that is committed, that believes in the war goals, like believes in the aims. And, you know, for whom those salaries are quite appealing. And so I, you know, I don't know, but that's my guess as to why they've been able to sustain this high rate of casualty without having any notable, significant societal backlash as far as we can tell, you know, as outsiders looking in. So, you know, with regard to the ongoing war tactics,

there was actually a great quote in that piece. One of them said, you know, big Soviet army beats little Soviet army, basically saying like, yeah, they use these same terrible tactics of just throwing men into a meat grinder and never wanting to retreat even when it makes sense, letting their troops get encircled and slaughtered. But they have a lot more people than we do. So in the end, how do you think that that is ultimately going to work out?

You know, there was also some quotes in here from a guy who's 50 years old, wanted to go fight, signed up. He was like, you know, he'd never handled a weapon before, had zero training, he'd never been in the military before, but wanted to serve, and thought that he could go in and get some training and go do something that wasn't really on the front line. I mean, again, he's 50 years old. He's never been in warfare before. He's never fired a weapon before. And they didn't even give him a gun before they send him to the front lines. And he, you know, he left. He was like, I'm not doing this.

That's the most Soviet thing I've ever heard. He was like, I'm not doing this. And apparently they have a lot of deserters because of exactly this. They're like, you didn't give me any training. You're sending me to the front lines. The guy who's in charge here is just willing to, you know, let us get encircled and slaughtered. Like, we're not doing it. And so, you know, you also have that dynamic unfolding on the ground here too.

But, you know, your point about us having all the cards with regard to Ukraine is a really important one. Really important. You know, the party that we really have the most ability to pressure is the Ukrainians. They are very dependent on us. That's just the reality. And so, you know, pressure needs to be put on them. And it needs to be done in order to secure a deal that, yes, they're going to be unhappy with, right? It's not like, in order to bring this war to close now, it would require territorial concessions.

There's just no doubt about that. Certainly Crimea, you know, eastern Ukraine. And what needs to happen is there needs to be some ability to create face-saving for Zelensky. Like if you're interested in actually bringing this thing to a close, you put pressure behind the scenes, you try to resolve the underlying issues that led Russia to, you know, create, to launch this illegal invasion to begin with. And you try to create some sort of face-saving pretext for Zelensky so that he has, because his ego is massive, clearly, and he's backed himself sort of into a rhetorical corner, so that he has some sort of an out. And it just seems from the beginning, the complete opposite policy has been pursued.

You know, the pressure has been on the Russian side. Zelensky gets publicly humiliated. That actually doesn't help you in terms of trying to get him to back off of his egoistic position. What you should be doing is pumping him up in public and then putting the pressure on behind the scenes to force an outcome that, again, is like not ideal and it's going to be deeply painful. But increasingly, the Ukrainian population is actually open to. Yeah, I think, look, all well said, the prop, the summit, you know, the initial, by the way, as you know, I loved the initial office meeting. I thought it was great. I was like, he needs to be put into his place. And finally, that we can break, you know, in terms of our so-called special relationship. We could force him to the table. But since then, it's like I said, Trump, total about face. And this is not an advisor's thing. I really believe that he seemed to think that he could just use his relationship with Putin to bring the conflict to an end. I think he did too. It was very nice. And he did not understand the fundamentals. And Putin, the thing is about Putin is he's crazy, but he has very rational objectives from within his

worldview. If you look at it, he disregards, which is insane, you know, the existence of all of these outs, like these breakaway republics. He thinks the Treaty of Bresla-Tosk is like one of the greatest disasters to ever befall the history of Russia and that the tragedy was the fall of the Soviet Union from the demise of a great power and that they've been bullied by the West. Like I said, he is a czar through and through in his security defense or depth vision. Well, for him, if you look at him in that view, it's personality has nothing to do with it. Yes, he will use you as a personality to get relations or any of that. But he only cares about one thing. He invaded Ukraine for a reason.

and he will continue, you know, along the same reason path. They've committed their entire country towards this end. They will not simply give up because of a nice phone call. Sanctions don't matter anymore. None of this stuff. It's all about territory. And if, and with the current side, I mean, even on the Ukrainian side and the Europeans, they're like, we will never recognize diplomatically any of this territory.

Maybe we can't live with it, but we will never diplomatically recognize it. I'm like, I just don't see us. where any of this stuff is going to fly, right? Or where there's no, how can you normalize relations or any of that in the future? I guess the Korean model, you know, some of these, you know, technically Korea's, you know, state of war with the treaty and all of that, it is possible, but it's very difficult to see with the emotions and the way things are right now. And, you know, I come, if I tie it back to Israel, something I love that you said in one

of our last shows, you're like, Israel exists. It's not about right to exist. We have to deal where we are today. Right. That's it. You know, we just have to look. And it's not just, it's not nice, but that's geopolitics. It's, you know, there's no rights to territory.

There's simply the ability, basically, to take it or not. In the Israel context, it's kind of flipped because we're the ones enabling the Russia of that region. And then out two sides of our mouth, we're speaking differently. Yeah. And I get that it sucks to be Ukrainian. We've done more to blow up that international law consensus of, like, territorial integrity and human rights than any other country on the planet. So. Yeah.

Again, it's like the country that invaded Iraq based on the coalition of the willing is going to go around telling people about territorial integrity. What are we doing here? You know, the country that toppled Libya and turned it into a failed state. Syria, look at where it is right now, led by literally al-Qaeda. You know, it's like one of these where this commitment to democratic norms or any of that stuff, it has never been U.S. policy. And in fact, I think that, you know, by holding that up and continuing that, you know, by holding that up

and continuing to act the way that we've done. It's exactly why we are, where we are with Russia, with Ukraine, with so many of these other different conflicts. And, yeah, it just really holds us back. So anyway, that's the table set. We'll see what the hell happens. Yeah. It could all go otherwise.

I remember Helsinki, where it was totally different, right? So it could be very pro-Pooten. I could be wrong. I don't know. Absolutely possible that we're eating crow by Monday, and we would be happy to do it. Yes. Programming note, we are going to forego the Friday show

in order for Saga and Ryan actually are going to cover the results of this summit on Saturday morning. So we're going to have a Saturday show instead of a Friday show, so everybody look for that. That's right. Because the powers that be decided that Alaska is five hours behind

and so by the time we even get all the news and all that it probably won't be. It could be midnight or something like that if it all runs late. Which, by the way, having covered some of these diplomatic summits, they always go way longer than they're supposed to. The meetings are scheduled 20 minutes. the last an hour and 50 minutes.

The press conferences and then you have to wait to get both sides of what happened. Yes, the instant readouts. They're going to hold a just joint press conference, which that's going to be kind of fun, actually. That's one of my favorite traditions from the Washington Press Corps is it's called a two and two, where the American press corps, when you get called on by your president, you actually have the opportunity to ask Putin a question. And so whoever gets that, please do your homework.

Don't ask some dumb-ass question. Actually ask something which is useful. both for the Russians and for ourselves as well. So, you know, don't try and make yourself and do a hero looking at you, Jim Acosta, or any of these other people. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog. will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve.

of the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's AZ Fud. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion

and recent most outstanding player. You may even know me as a People's Princess. But now, you're also going to know me as your favorite host. Every week on my new podcast, Fud around and find out. I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all from my travels across the globe to

preparing for another run at the Natty with my Yukon Huskies to just try to make it to my midterms on time you'll get the inside scoop on everything I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture basketball and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court you'll even get to have some fun with the fud family so if you follow me on social media or watch me on TV you may think you know me but this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out Listen to Fun Around and Find Out, a production of IHart women's sports and partnership with unanimous media on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more. And found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal.

He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. So we haven't done a lot on polling and where we are as we head into. I mean, I know we still have a good bit of time before the midterms, but trust me, these things are already taking shape, already heating up.

So we wanted to do, spend a little bit of time on the horse race and taking a look at where things stand as best we can tell as of today. Harrington did a breakdown specifically on the issue of inflation and how Trump has really fallen off a cliff on the issue that voters continue to say is their number one concern. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Look, voters on Trump and inflation. He won the 2024 election because he was more entrusted on inflation than Kamala Harris was,

led by a margin of nine points. Look at where his net approval stands today, though, on inflation. My goodness gracious, on the issue that got him elected, he led by nine points on it last year, and now he's 25 points underwater. As I said, this is a complete and total disaster for the President of the United States. Trust which party more in inflation.

You go back to the 2022 midterms. Look at this. Republicans led by 13 points on which party was more trust in inflation. Look at where we are now. Nearly a 15-point shift in the Democrats' direction. It's within the margin of error, So the Democrats up by a point, this just looks totally different from where we were back in

2022 when, of course, Republicans took back the House. That's what Democrats are trying to do this time around. What is the top issue for you right now? It's a runaway. It's inflation. It's 34% compared to the economy, which is basically very similar at 16% Medicare and Social Security at 14%. But the bottom line is voters in Paul after Paul after Paul say that Donald Trump has taken

his eye off the ball, off the big issue of the day, which is inflation. and that is why Donald Trump is way underwater on this issue, and it's why Democrats have caught up to Republicans on the all-important issue of inflation. And, Sager, in some ways, I think that last piece about which issues are most important to people is maybe the most devastating for Republicans, because, as Harry Anton points out,

Trump is now very unpopular on any economic issue, but inflation, you know, certainly, so inflation is the number one issue. Economy in general is the number two issue. I don't think just like firing the BLS person and then not putting out jobs report, is really going to fix that for him. And then number three is Medicare and Social Security.

Well, what do you think that's about? Yeah, that's about the big beautiful bill. That's why people are concerned about Medicare. And I do feel like the big beautiful bill is it like, we probably need to talk about it more because I think for average people, it's factoring into their perception of this presidency much more than it's sort of given credit for.

Because just think about the numbers. You have millions of people or now have to be concerned about whether or not they're going to have health care going forward. And you pair that with the fact that the way that's being financed is a giant tax cut predominantly for the rich. And it is an utter political disaster. Yeah, especially on the Medicaid front, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're going to see some impact. And I mean, by the way, part of the problem with the messaging or whatever around this is that, you know, for a lot of people, they didn't necessarily read Medicaid. They thought maybe it said

Medicare. Yeah. Well, there are, and there are changes to Medicare as well. But the bigger changes are certainly Medicaid. Yeah. But in particular Medicaid, snap, any of those types of programs. By the way, just as you and I were talking, there is a new report out that shows that the core producer price, the PPI inflation, came in at 3.7% versus 2.9%. And the stock futures are diving, literally, just as you and I are talking right now. The wholesale price rose by 0.9% in July, which is much, much more than expected, quote, the producer price index, which features final demand goods and services jump 0.9 compared to the Dow Jones estimate of just 0.2%. That's excluding food and energy prices. So that's particularly wholesale goods, which is going to show up at the

grocery store. I know 0.9 does it sound like a lot, but it's much more about the impact of the overall rise in inflation. It's almost three times higher. It's as high as has been since April of 2021 in terms of the jump. So that is one where it could be a precursor to higher inflation. Just again, though, that's going to be something that if the economist's stock market and all these people are worried about, that could be something that's showing up. For you, combine it with the Social Security, the Medicare, any of this stuff where, again, look, I mean, Social Security didn't get touched. But the Medicaid stuff, and in particular, the tax cut. Because, again, the thing about the tax cut that everybody doesn't remember is that that's when the Trump

presidency in 2017 went off the rails. The first six months of the first Trump administration was an outright battle inside between, like, Paul Ryan and Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. Remember, Steve Bannon had his whiteboard for all the things that they wanted to do. And, there was even the, you know, about the border wall, there was this floated tax called the border adjustment tax, which, by the way, it would have been a great tax, which went after remittances and trade. It was supposed to be an initial kind of trade imbalance way to correct with Mexico, and that would have financed immigration enforcement. And the entire GOP was like, yeah, we're not doing that. They're like, we're cutting taxes for rich people, and that's it, right?

And so by the time that came out with the corporate tax, the reduced taxes, not only for corporations, but for the highest, you know, income brackets, that is really where Trump sank to his lowest ever level of support. It makes total sense to me. It's very similar to Obamacare. You know, if you think back to the coverage of the 2010 election, the anger that was bubbling up in the town halls was over Obamacare. But the country of national media had kind of moved on from there.

By that point, they were talking about various different things. But that is what slammed them at the ballot box. So it's very possible that inflation, and in particular the capriciousness around trade policy. What I have found is that Americans don't want to tune into the news on the economy. They want it to just run. And so when they have to check every day, not only their portfolio or businesses have to pause deals and unpause have to pause hiring and then maybe reduce salary, or if you have to think about policy when it impacts their business, that's some people get upset.

They don't want it to. They only want to pay attention whenever it's good. But when it's bad, that's not what they want. And by and large, that's mostly where things are right now. Well, and you pointed out, too, there are certain key items where you can really see that price hike directly as a result of tariffs. In fact, I sent us this morning. Rokane is doing something smart. He's introducing legislation to roll back specifically the tariffs on coffee.

Because we hit Brazil so hard, you know, because we're mad at them over their court decisions with regard to Bolsonaro, that is causing coffee prices to spike dramatically. It also is causing beef prices to spike dramatically. Good probably for American cattle ranchers. But if you're trying to include steak in your diet here in the U.S., you know, it's going to become much more costly. So in any case, I thought that was a clever tactical move from him. Yeah, smart. Well, the coffee thing.

Yeah, look, it's something, I think the vast majority of Americans drink coffee every single day. If not, I mean, it's probably like 70, 80%. I need to check the data. But the point is actually is that if you look at, the way it will really impact you is if you buy it at a retail chain like Starbucks or anything. By the way, Starbucks or anything, has anyone been recently? I never go to Starbucks.

I went, it's like $5. And it was like, what the hell is going on here? Yeah, exactly. I was like, I was like, whoa. I mostly brew almost entirely on my own coffee. I'm pretty much, you know, immune from whatever the retail market or anything. But every once in a while, you'll just check and you're like, what the hell is going on here? I mean, even if you're not going to Starbucks, like how many, you know, blue collar guys are going out, you know, early morning, they're stopping at 7-11, getting their cup of coffee as they're on the road headed to their job.

I mean, this is very common, you know, experience, cross-class experience. Yes. And those are the people who will be most sensitive to those price increases. And so even if it's not five bucks at Starbucks, you're still going to notice that price increase. Absolutely. Let's go and get to this next slide that shows you where the generic ballot is. So this is just if you ask people, would you vote for the, you know, whoever the Democrat is or whoever the Republican is in your congressional district without specific names attached, who comes out on top? And you can see, listen, let's all take the polls of the grain of salt at this. point in our lives, at this point in American history. However, you have a very consistent trend here in favor of Democrats. The overall RCP average has them up 3.5% on the generic ballot. You've had one poll from Yahoo News. Actually, this Atlas Intel one is the highest one up on the board of plus eight for Democrats. More common is more in the two, three, four type of range. But, you know, a significant edge, especially when you consider that Republicans have a very

narrow edge in the house. Now, what is going to happen with all this redrawing of the maps in Texas and California and New York and whatever's going on there? I don't know. Maybe Republicans, but I mean, I think the very fact that they're pulling the fire alarm to potentially do a new census to redraw these maps, et cetera, shows you they don't feel real great about their position going into the midterms either. Now, on the other side, on the flip side, let's put this next piece up on the screen, I think this is what Republicans are kind of comforting themselves with. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. Net favorability plunges to near three decade low, according to polls. And to me, Sagar, I think this reflects a lot of things. I mean,

there's just like a lot of mistrust of the Democratic Party overall. But the reason it's reached this historic level of unpopularity, and this is reflected in this is reflected. And this is reflected in data is because there are a lot of Democrats that are disgusted with the Democratic Party. And I do think Israel is a big part of that because it's just such a, you know, moral atrocity. It's such a, there's such massive divergence in, you know, the numbers are starker than maybe any other issue I've seen, the distance between democratic leadership and where the base is.

Then you add to that that they feel that they aren't fighting the Trump administration, they aren't, you know, going to the mat to try to fight for democracy, fight against their, you legislation in the ways that they want to see. And then you see, like, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffery's not even willing to endorse or on Mom Donnie. I mean, they're just an embarrassing, pathetic mess. Yeah. Especially at that, like, the higher up you go, the more embarrassing and cringeworthy it becomes. So I think that's a big part of why their favorability has sunk to such historic lows. I saw it actually in the D.C. context. Dave Weigel was like, you know, because the D.C. mayor and the politicians were all caught off guard. And Wigel was like,

oh, you've only had seven months to prepare when he said he was going to do it on the campaign trail. It's like, so if you're Chuck Schumer, fine, you know, you're not focused on Washington, D.C. If you're Mayor Bowser, it's like, what, you never thought about it? It's like, you guys literally never thought about it. You had no plan for how this was all going to go and police chief embarrassing yourself on national TV

or anything. It's like, so what's happening, right? It's like, I think that's what's so frustrating for a lot of people. Ryan and I interviewed a councilwoman who was, who's more on the left. Yeah, I remember. Who was disgusted with her and like, you know, you're not even going to like try a law. to, you know, at least force them to say what the emergency is, like, at least go through that process.

But instead it was just like, eh, okay, what are we going to do? Yeah, I just thought it was crazy the way that, well, actually, D.C., another good example. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who if you live in Washington, is your, she has a non-voting power in the House of Representatives. But it's symbolic, but I mean, you have, you're a politician, you're popularly elected. What is she, 88 years old? She has not made a single public statement on what's happened. And is running for re-election. And is running for re-election. And by all accounts, is based, look, I mean, you know, to avoiding libel or whatever, hasn't showed up to a lot of events.

Yeah. A lot of questions by her, some of her constituents about her health. The D.C. political machine doing nothing about it. And it's like, you look at that. If you're Washington, D.C. Lib, which statistically 95% of you are, you should be really mad about that. I mean, you know, if you're, everyone on license plate says no taxation without representation, but it's like even your, even your. representation is doing nothing. Yeah. Again, I'm not saying, you know, that I'm, that if you're a Republican, you should be like, yeah, that's hilarious. But if you're a Democrat, you should be mad. I mean, you should think about it in the Republican context from back in 2009. That's exactly why they voted out so many of their leaders in 2009 or in 2010 and again

in 2014 because they felt completely abandoned on the issues that were the most core to them. Yeah. And that's what is different is that they do feel abandoned. Democrats do feel abandoned by their leaders in a way that is very different for any other time, you know, that I've seen in modern history. And if you play on that Tea Party 2010 wave analogy, you also had Republicans unpopular with their own base. But that didn't mean that they didn't do well in the midterms. There was, you know, a massive wave. Obama called it

a shalacking, you know, so many Democrats swept down of office. It ends up being incredibly consequential because then you had the 2010 census, then you had redistricting. That helps to lock in the political era that we're in at this point in time. But in any case, though, I don't I don't know that this number of Democratic unpopularity is going to be the saving grace that Republicans hope it is. Now, what I will say is if they were doing a lot better, I think they would be poised, you know, if they were fighting in a way and had a clear and compelling message and had people who were younger than 80 years old, making that clear and compelling message

on a day-to-day basis, I think they would be in position to truly romp and have, you know, an opportunity to maybe take back the Senate or things like that. I think the fact that they are not particularly trusted will limit the game. But I still think they're probably in well-positioned history would indicate that in this midterm, you're likely to get a backlash against the incoming party in any case. The other thing that to keep an eye on that's coming up more rapidly here is there are two states this year that have their governor's race as New Jersey and it's Virginia. New Jersey, obviously, more of a Democratic state and Virginia more of a swing state can put B4 up on the screen. So this race is going to pit former undercover CIA agent Abigail Spanberger. Why are these spooks running?

The Democratic Party loves any like national security, police, whatever, they love that. This is a Rama manual thing, actually, recruited all these like veterans and, you know, cops and whatever. So anyway, that's who Abigail Spanberger is. She's very centristy kind of a Democrat. And the Republican is Winston Sears, who is the current lieutenant governor. and she right now, Spanberger has a pretty wide and as far as I can tell in the polls quite consistent lead. Now, again, the polls can be wrong, but I will say in Virginia, they have, she has,

winsome Sears has a particular problem because of Doche. So many federal government employees live in Virginia. And I'm not just talking about Northern Virginia, although Northern Virginia is where a lot of the political power in the state is at this point in time. You also have a lot of federal government jobs throughout the state surrounding many military bases, et cetera. I mean, the little town I live in is based around a civilian scientist naval research center called Dahlgren. And so this is a very key issue. And Winsom Sears has not availed herself well.

When she's talking about Doge, she's been unable to separate herself in the Trump administration, unable to separate herself from the Doge federal government worker cuts. And so, you know, I think that has significantly hobbled her chances. And I think it was going to be a difficult race to begin with. I believe I saw something about the RGA basically like abandoning and not funding. It's all a question of how much she's going to. I mean, I think Spamberger might be, what do you think? 17, 18 points?

I don't think that's too far. So what's, Yonkin 1 by 2? Well, what was the 2017? I'm going to say Spanberger by 7. Spanberger by 7. Wow, that's still actually lower than I would think. because, I mean, all indications right now are just a blowout. Put B5 up there on the screen.

I sent this because this just shows you how crazy things are. The Virginia Police Benevolent Association, which four years ago supported every Republican in the state, is now backing Spanberger over Winsom Sears. They're like, yeah, she's done. We don't even have a choice. Well, I think, yeah, and I think that's what it is. First of all, Spanberger did try to vote for, like, police funding. She was certainly never a defund the policeman, right? But they endorsed against her when she ran for Congress.

And so now I read it as they see the writing on the wall. And they're like, we may as well endorse her and be in good with her because it'll put us in a better position to advocate for whatever it is we want when she's governor. That's how I read the endorsement anyway. I think that's the right way to see it. But the point is just that it's always been a precursor. This one, I think as you said, it's more of an outlier just because Doge is going to be so impactful. If you saw yesterday, Emily and I covered the layoffs, highest since

2021, a massive portion of it is government employees. Massive portion of those are going to live in northern Virginia. And so those people are just, I mean, again, these are my neighbors. They're irate. They hate, they probably hate Trump more this time than last time because of those. They just can't stand it. Here's the other thing is it's not just the direct federal government employees, the contractors. You're right. They all, so many of these contracts, like the funding was cut. And, you know, even if you're not losing your job, okay, you don't, you're not on with this particular client. I was actually just talking to a woman about exactly this. She's like, well, they cut our contract over at a camera, I think she was at USDA. And so now there's not

really a place for me to go internally. So I'm just going to be working at like Booz Allen Hamilton, you know, doing the whatever in the office. And so it's a, it has a wide ranging impact. And if you drive around this area, you know, within a 40-mile radius. It's contractor after contractor after contractor. And this has been a huge upending of their lives. And, you know, it's the having to come into the office. It's the, you know, the change to lifestyle, the commuting, the pay cuts, the contract loss, the actual job loss, just the chaos and the uncertainty, which is very stressful. So that will definitely weigh on the Virginia race. I mean, in some ways, it'll be interesting to watch the New Jersey race, even though all expectations are that the Democrat, Mikey Cheryl,

who's another like centristy type of Democrat, all expectations are that she will end up prevailing, but the margin there will be interesting to see as well if there's some sort of a democratic overperformance, especially since New Jersey was a state where Trump sort of overperformed. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I still wonder how much of that is a 2020. I think the 2024 election will be the high watermark for Republicans and Republicanism for quite a lot. a long time. There's a lot of reasons for that, the popular vote. You have the popular vote. You have the vibe. You have Kamala. Like, there are multifaceted reasons for why it was. Yeah. I think it could either be a flash in the pan or they could have built on it. I think the built on it has passed

mostly at this point. I mean, they could still be a popular vote. We'll talk about this more in the Laura Lumerbach. It's possible. It's very possible. It could do it again. It would have to be, I think, a total change, both in the way that the two parties come into the 2028 election. But Yeah, just looking at where things are trending right now and in terms of the way that they've handled themselves, it does not look like the midterms are going to go all that well. All gerrymandering or redistricting or whatever withstanding, which is still such an insane story, the way that that is all happened. They could also screw themselves with that. Yeah, I agree. If they try to be too cute and make the districts a little too tight, they could, yeah, like it's not, you know. Yeah, Ryan made that point.

It's an uncertain thing. If you go 5248 in every single district, you can find yourself in some serious upsets, which happens in Texas all the time. especially because Trump has this particular unique pull. So the numbers that Trump pulled, let's say, with Latino voters in, you know, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, you can't rely on another random Republican to be able to pull the, on Ted Cruz or whoever, to be able to pull those kind of numbers. Ted Cruz ain't win in South Texas, okay? Yeah, they probably hate him, you know.

It's sad. Many do. Very common story. I'm sure John Cornyn is going to clean up down in Laredo, you know? It's like, that's not happening. Exactly. And so I think, you know, I think that's, that makes it even dicier is that Trump is sort of like his own entity. So you don't have as much predictability about the way individual like voting groups are going to behave. So anyway, we'll continue to track that.

That's an interesting story in and of itself. Agreed. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases

to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's AZ Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion and recent most outstanding player. You may even know me as the people's princess, but now you're also going to know me as your favorite host.

Every week on my new podcast, fud around and find out, I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all. From my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the Natty with my Yukon Huskies to just try to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball, and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the FUD family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on TV, you may think you know me. But this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out.

Listen to Fud Around and Find Out, a production of IHart Women's Sports and partnership with unanimous media. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all.

Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast.

It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All right, let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen, a little update about some of the full mask off that the Israelis are going on at this point. So Netanyahu says he is on a historic and spiritual mission and that he feels a connection to the vision of greater Israel. Let me go ahead and read this specifically.

He was asked if he feels a connection to that vision of greater Israel. Natanyahu says, quote, very much. That question about a greater Israel after he asked him, Premier, if he feels he's on a mission on behalf of the Jewish people, Netanyahu answers. He's on a mission of generations. There are generations of Jews that dreamt of coming here and generations of Jews who will come after us. So if you're asking, if I have a sense of mission,

historically and spiritually, the answer is yes. And this has been a pretty consistent theme here, Saabert, that, like, from the beginning, if you'd listen to either the most hyperbolic leftist or the most psychotic settlers, you would have a much better understanding. Certainly don't listen to the Western press, certainly not listen to the U.S. politicians who just pretend they have no idea what's going on,

even as you have words directly out of the mouths of the prime minister, the minister of defense, like the, you know, Smotrich, Ben-Givir, the members of his coalition, et cetera. They just pretend they don't hear or see any of that. But at this point in time, Netanyahu is feeling so emboldened, thanks to a combination of Biden and now Trump, you know, enabling every atrocity and allowing him to do literally whatever he wants, apparently, that he is just out and out saying, yeah, greater Israel. I'm into that.

Just so people, if they don't know. Now, in fairness, there are apparently different conceptions of what, quote, unquote, greater Israel might mean. Some of them mean just from the river to the sea, you might say, including, quote, unquote, Judea and Samaria, in the Israeli, which is the West Bank, in with Israel and the Gaza Strip. But there is a more expansive vision as well. We can put this map up on the screen that looks like this, you know, including. includes Egypt, includes part of Egypt, part of Saudi Arabia, part of Iraq, part of Syria, all of Jordan, you know, the Sinai Peninsula, of course, all of Israel plus the West Bank, plus Gaza. So, you know, just putting it out there that this is a potential vision and certainly

the actions that Israel has taken, given that they have been bombing almost all of these countries over the past couple of years, again, with our support and arming them, makes it much less preposterous than it felt at one point. We can put this up on the screen C3, Saudi Arabia, very unhappy with these comments from Prime Minister Netanyahu, foreign ministry expressing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's condemnation in the strongest terms possible of the statements made by the Prime Minister of the Israeli occupation government regarding the so-called vision of Greater Israel and expresses its outright rejection of the settlement and expansionist plans adopted by the Israeli Occupation Authority. So, Sagar, what did you make of these

comments. Well, the Saudi Arabian ones are interesting because the entire theory is the Abraham Accords and all of that. But the whole point around greater Israel is just the ideological vision and divorcing it from the things that they say, as in like, look, we're just about dismantling Hamas. We're just about occupying Gaza. We're not going to stay there. We promise, even though we said that there was going to be an indefinite presence. I mean, the reason why KSA is so upset about the map is because, did you see the map that we put up? Yeah, it's got half of Saudi Arabia. Yeah.

And the reason why you are forced to take it seriously is because of the actions of the Israeli government under Netanyahu. If it was just Gaza, it would be part of the Greater Israel Project. But you have to contextualize it with the current treatment of the West Bank, of the two-tiered system of justice, of the indefinite presence in Lebanon, of the indefinite presence in Syria, of the overthrowing of the Syrian government. and then basically trying to establish a Drew's Israeli free zone inside of a country outside of the Golan Heights of the 67, you know, recognized boards.

Right. So, like, all of these things point to an expansionist rogue power. And we're going to get to a little bit later on in the show about the potential war with Iran, but it all fits together as part of something which is just destabilization, regime change everywhere else, in order to serve this smaller nation, which could never do any of this without the backstop of the United States of America. Yeah. That's really the point.

They recognize the historic moment that they're in where support for Israel is plummeting off a cliff. I mean, we're the only country that really matters to them. Correct. And support for them is plummeting off a cliff. They've already lost the Democratic Party. It's gone. I don't think you're going to get a 2028 Democratic nominee who holds the same positions that

Joe Biden and Obama and every other, you know, bipartisan politician has on Israel and modern history. I don't think you're going to get that in 2020. And I don't think it's going to be possible. And certainly the Democratic base. is disgusted and horrified by what our tax dollars have done. And on the Republican side, as we've discussed, you have a younger generation that thinks very differently.

I think they know that. And so that's why they are really going for it, trying to secure this greater Israel vision, abandoning the pretext that this, I mean, just think of how preposterous it is at this point to pretend like, oh, this is all just in self-defense and we're doing these limited, targeted strikes against Hamas, and this is just all about going after the bad guys who got us on October 7th, utterly and completely preposterous when you consider the number of countries that they're bombing, the territory that they've annexed, the actions in the West Bank, you know, that we're going to talk a little bit more about that Jasper Nathaniel has been

highlighting. And the West Bank annexation is all but complete. And this is all in quote-unquote self-defense for October 7th. You'd have to be a fool to believe that at this point, or a liar, you know, there are many of those as well. Just to take it back to what the settlers have been saying because they've long been pushing this biblical vision, quote-unquote, of greater Israel, let's go ahead and take a listen to Daniela Weiss, explaining why this is central to her conception

in her ideological goals. How big is that land? It's very big. No, this is the promise of God to the patriarchs of the Jewish nation. It's 3,000 kilometers. It's almost as big as the Sahara Desert. So this is the biblical Israel.

Can I call it Israel? Yeah. So, and this is what's, and so which country are this? And which country, don't mention. I think it's Iraq. Iraq? And Syria. So you believe. And part of Saudi Arabia.

This is a holy place. It's a place. One part of the universe that was chosen by God. It's a kind of a stage for the Jewish nation to express the ideals, the ideas and ideals of the Jewish nation. So there you go. She's very large. She lays out for you. It's Iraq.

It's Syria. It's part of Saudi Arabia. This is God's promise to us. This is also why theocracies are really bad. Because if you believe that your religion justifies a genocide. Rogue wars against all your neighbors, this incredibly, you know, expansionist, aggressive foreign policy. If you believe that, and, you know, obviously Netanyahu is sort of embracing that, even though himself, he's like more of a secular figure, but he's allied with these hardcore religious figures and, you know, who have absolutely psychotic ideas about what the state should be and what they should do to effectuate it, you end up with absolute horror, which is exactly what we have. And it fits actually with this next piece to put it up there on the screen.

This is very significant. And inside of Israel is actually getting a lot of play. So after a 20-year freeze, the finance minister, Bezal Smotrich, has approved the construction of new housing units in an area where the development has been blocked. The reason why even these psycho-settler movements and others have not allowed settlers to go and be there is because doing so would, quote, effectively block the establishment of a Palestinian state, due to its strategic position, separating areas south of Jerusalem from those to its north. And actually, they followed it up this morning, Smotrich, in a press conference in the country

where he said, by doing this, we quote, bury the idea of a Palestinian state. Just again, to understand exactly while all this is happening. And even in the Israeli press, here's what they say, to understand the significance, we have to go back to 1948 during the War of Independence, the Arab militia's place to siege on on Jerusalem. After they broke the siege, you know, the holiest site has now been under Jordanian occupation until the IDF liberated it in 1967. This siege left a stain on the consciousness of Israeli leadership, but they've kept it open for the potential establishment of a Palestinian state. So now, by greenlighting, yes, even the small settlement of 3,400 people, the strategic

location of it is a signal to the Palestinians, to the Arab states, to the Jordanians, and others, it's not happening. And it's also meant as a counter-diplomatic signal to all of the Western countries, which are talking about recognizing Palestinian statehood. You can't recognize statehood if it doesn't exist in any sort of conception. Yeah, that's what people say. It's like, okay, point to me on the map where the Palestinian state is. Because this is, you know, this is an extraordinarily provocative and, I think, significant development in terms of blocking any future Palestinian state. I mean, Smokritch, again, he comes out and says it. You know, this isn't us just like theorizing or making it up.

They put it out there and make it plain what is going on here. And this is what Jasper Nathaniel wrote about in that piece that we interviewed him about. He actually talked about this specific development and how consequential it was in terms of blocking the possibility of a Palestinian state. So this is what's going on. This is why annexation of the West Bank is de facto complete. Because the Israelis have, in real life, like in what's actually, happening on the ground right now. They have complete control over everybody's life who lives in the West Bank. They are living under Israeli government rule. And it is truly, you know,

I mean, any thought that this wasn't an apartheid system goes out the window when you realize that, yes, the Palestinians who live in the West Bank are fully under Israeli government control. And we know that they don't have any rights whatsoever. We know the settlers are encouraged to go and murder them. And then, you know, they get the settlers get off scot-free and are just sent more sometimes American-made weapons. So that's the reality of what's happening in the West Bank. And just to, again, tie it in here because it's not only the religious extremist terrorists running Israel that are a problem and part of what has created such an insane situation. You also have some, you know, plenty of religion being invoked to justify our continued

endless support of Israel here in the U.S. as well. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Lindsay Graham. I am tired of the word genocide. Let me tell you about genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they could. They have the capability to do that. They choose not to. To people in my party, I'm tired of this crap.

Israel is our friend. They're the most reliable friend we have in the Mideast. There are democracy. It's not a hard choice if you're a Christian. A word of warning. If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us. Israel is not the bad guy. They're the good guy.

The bad guys are the radical Islamists who would kill everybody in this room if they could. So I haven't lost my vision of right and wrong. When it comes to foreign policy, President Trump is stood up for all the right things. and he stood up against wrong things. Yes, the government that is starving babies to death, they're the good guys. Those are the good guys. But he says, if Americans pull the plug on Israel,

God will pull the plug on us. And Saga, perhaps you want to weigh in on his statement that Israel's the best friend we could ever have. They're great. I can't weigh in whenever it's rooted in your, like, biblical ideology, which, you know, many of your own believers say is Harris. Look, I'm not Christian. You know, it's not my job to sit here in.

dispensationalism or whatever, I can only just say, I think it's crazy and not really the way that you should conduct foreign policy based upon the particular interpretation of the Bible, which is a much more recent development and divorced from any sort of national interests. But that's Lindsey Graham and the Republican Party for you. I don't even know. You know, that's the other thing here with him. Does he really believe this, or does they just use it as a cudgel? I actually don't know which one it is.

I kind of think the latter because, you know, look, Lindsay Graham, he has crazy beliefs. I don't think he's a dumb guy. I think what he does is see clearly to preserve his, like, neo-conservative ideology that the one last bastion of pro-Israel support is these Kufi, John Hagee, evangelical Republicans. South Carolina's full of them. And so that's the one way that he can message himself as like the upholder of their religion in terms of their foreign policy priorities. That's the only way I could possibly see it. And to hold on to any sort of like grasp organically at a political level. But that is a a window into Israel support now. It's all biblical, biblical. Yeah. No, I think you're right that it's

probably cynical. I mean, not that it really makes the difference whether he believes it or not. But the Israeli certainly use it cynically. Of course. You know, they see this and have long cultivated the, you know, evangelical Christian right in order to, you know, make sure that they have this solid base of support in the U.S. And we have to say it's been very successful for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let's go and get to this next piece. I listened to this entire Theo Von. podcast. I really recommend that you guys do as well. You know, Theo made a lot of waves when he came out and said, listen, guys, I think this is a genocide. He asked J.D. Vance about it when he was on the show. And he went a step further now by hosting a doctor, an American doctor, who was just

back from Gaza, you know, for a full episode to discuss what this doctor saw when he was there on the ground at Nassar Hospital. Let's go and take a listen to a portion of this. Saturday, they had the MCI. It's called a mass casualty incident. And they basically pull a fire alarm. I was like, what the hell is that? Oh, every doctor come down to the ER to try to help. And so I was like, okay. So went downstairs, got in there. It's just like brain matter coming out of people. There's guts coming out of people's abdomens. There's people's legs blown off and someone's carrying it in next to the, you know, one of the family members bringing it in for the doctors and, you know, they think you can just reattach it. And it's just like absolute chaos. There's family members,

security in the hospital is trying to push out the family members so the doctors and nurses can take care of the patients. It's absolute chaos. And then us American physicians are just like looking at it. They're like, what is going on here? And, you know, that was, that was, that's when reality hit. And I was like, okay, this must be like a one-off. And it just kept happening every day.

And sometimes multiple times a day. Essentially, basically we can, we found the pattern related to when the GHF sites were opening up. So he's there backing up the claims, which we heard directly from a doctor who was just recently back. We of course heard from Anthony Aguilar, GHF whistleblower, that when the sites are active, you are going to have mass casualty incidents. You were going to have, he says, hundreds of people showing up in the hospital, wounded, you know, in the conditions that he describes. There were a couple other moments, saga that I also thought were really interesting,

I mean, horrifying. He said that he heard of people who were basically trying to commit suicide. by GHF, where, you know, an Islam suicide is banned. And so people would talk about, like, listen, if I, if I lose my family, like, I'm just going to go to one of these GHF sites and hope that they take me out. Like, that's how grim and dire the situation was. And yet he was really inspired, you know, of course, by the people he saw there, he was really, man, doctors are cut out of a different cloth because he felt so energized by just getting to go and help care for people and, like, be in the situation where he was able to

do something and not just walk from, watch from afar. So, I mean, it's just remarkable to see the way these people operate. And then there was also a moment that I thought was pretty interesting from Theo, because he explained more why he felt the need to speak out on this and come forward, even though he felt some pressure not to. And he's like, you know, from the time that you're a kid, you're taught endlessly about the Holocaust and this idea of like this genocide and can never happen again. And then you see it happening. And you're supposed to stay quiet. he, you know, he sort of really took in at face value, this idea of, like, we can't be involved in that we, when we said never again, we really actually should mean it. And that's why he felt

the need to say something and speak out, even though that's obviously, you know, sort of an uncomfortable place for him to be. Yeah, I mean, I think for him, he is just naturally found out about the issue. He's horrified by the issue. He's not boxing to politics since he's like, this is how a normal person reacts. So it's actually a good barometer. I think so. You know? Yeah. Because for most people, they're not coming. in with all the baggage of Washington and the social consequences and they're like, yeah, I think this is really messed up.

That's it. And then actually, it's when you get the backlash that you're like, whoa, am I crazy? And then that's the battle test for Theo and for Miss Rachel. It's kind of fascinating, the track of Miss Rachel. If you go and you look at it, is she started out with a single

thing where she's like, my heart weeps for the babies of Israel and Gaza. Boom. I mean, mass attack. Then she did her Hop Little Bunny's song with a three-year-old girl who got her leg blown off. Same thing.

Now it's like anti-Semite, anti-and-and-and-and, and she had to decide. I've actually been listening to some interesting episodes and stuff where she talks about this. And she was like, look, I mean, by the way, look, let's not deny. Miss Rachel's filthy rich, all right? So at this point, you don't need to do it for the money.

You're one of the most watched YouTube videos, Netflix and all that. You're a brand. And so she's like, okay, so if I'm the next Mr. Rogers, which she considers herself, like, in that vein. She looked back to a 1969 episode that Mr. Rogers did where he hosted a black man and they both put their feet in the same pool as a statement against segregate. He didn't

make anything about it. It was just one of those things where by doing it, treated as normal as a statement against Jim Crow and against segregation. So she sees herself now in that vein where you've made enough money that you don't care anymore. And then you set yourself at the standard. And what I think that a lot of these Zionists and pro-Israel supporters don't understand is that when you bring the full hammer down on people, especially if you're independent like Theo or Miss Rachel or places like this show, you don't have the tools of control, you actually make us be like, no, actually, screw you. Like, we're going all in. Now I'm going all in. Yeah, we're going all in. We're talking about intermarriage. We're talking about Jewish supremacy.

Like, we're putting it all on the table now. And I think that's what they underestimated in terms of U.S. popular culture is that for the Internet and for people who don't have their ties to all these think tanks or whatever, you can speak very, very freely and say whatever you want. And so, you know, and acknowledge reality. And that's part of the consequence of how this is all gone about. Yeah. And it's actually really pushed people and made them feel as if they have a responsibility at a certain point to be like, no, I need to counter, you know, all this other BS that's out there. Yeah. And it's why the tactics become increasingly heavy-handed. Yep. Where it's like, okay, we're going to deport you. We're going to arrest you. We're going to,

you know, block your, we're going to install an IDF sensor at TikTok. You know, they become increasingly desperate. And it also ties in back to what we're saying about, you know, them really going for it with the Greater Israel Project and the complete annexation, both of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because they recognize that there's a limited runway here for them at this point. One other thing I wanted to highlight is Emma Vigeland interviewed over on the Majority Report, a doctor who was talking about, you know, what he saw in the ways in which he believes. And this is backed up by, you know, a Lancet study and other studies.

of the death count, why he believes the official death count is such a wild understatement. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that. The numbers are a wild undercount. That's perfect. I can tell you, for example, about malnutrition. So I work within the Ministry of Health System, right? We as what are called emergency medical teams international doctors and nurses and allied health professionals, we go in solidarity with medical teams. And so we sort of follow their lead in terms of how they do things.

When I document what the cause of death is for somebody, everybody receives a piece of paper that says how they died. What our directive is, is that if there's anything other than simple malnutrition that's causing this death, don't write it down as a malnutrition case. You can write it as secondary tertiary, but don't write that this person died for malnutrition. Similarly, Palestinians do not count the dead unless they have been to a hospital. So, for example, there have been many aid massacres, which, by the way, is another kind of depravity we haven't even touched upon. When the aid massacres have been happening, there are many bodies that people tell me lots of my patients will talk. me, there are bodies stranded there that we couldn't get to. We don't count those dead.

We don't count them even really as more than missing because we don't know for 100% sure that that person is dead. Like, look at the lists the Palestinians release. They release only the bodies they can identify with the ID numbers attached to them. Of course, it's a wild undercount. Think of how many people are under the rubble. How many people are still in red zones? How many people are thrown around laying dead in the sun, including at GHF sites? Of course, it's a wild undercount.

Really credible organizations that have done these counts. for other places like Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo estimate the number at this point to be five to six times more easily. That's 300,000 people who are very likely dead. And of course, there's another concept in medicine called excess deaths. So for example, I've seen numerous number of people, a dialysis patient. So I saw dialysis patient who we worked on yesterday for a number of hours who ended up dying. In our account, that person died of a kidney related cause, but obviously that person was malnourished. They couldn't receive dialysis care the way they were supposed to. They were killed by Israel. They were killed by the occupation. But we don't

count those as direct conflict-related deaths. So I thought that was a really effective explanation of the ways in which, and the very, you know, rational ways in which this is likely a very wild undercount. And, you know, I also think about Amir, who was killed at a GHF aid site and is now just, quote, unquote, missing. You know, how many other people were, I mean, likely what happened is Israelis came in with their bulldozer and he is buried somewhere under or the sand there by that GHF aid side. Very likely the case, you know, as they come through and they use the bulldozers to destroy all of Gaza City, like how many bodies under the rubble will never be recovered.

And then he talks about, you know, people who have other conditions, they're not able to get the medical treatment they need. Their bodies are incredibly stressed by hunger and a lack of clean drinking water and the endless displacement. And now they're exposed to elements with there's been extraordinary heatwave in the Gaza Strip. And those deaths don't get counted in. in the official war death toll. So, you know, I don't know if we'll ever know exactly what the count is,

but I think we can say with a lot of confidence now, it is wildly higher. The number of people have been killed by Israel during this genocide is wildly higher than the official number. And if anything, the news media downplays that number. It's, oh, the Gaza, you know, the Hamas run, Gaza Health Ministry. Yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Yeah.

Yeah, like this health ministry, truthorism or whatever. Look, eventually one day we'll know. I actually thought his point about Rwanda and all of that was very apt because the death toll did take a while for all to come in. It would make sense that you can't have accurate counting of the dead. I mean, what? You think the Nazis had a very accurate account, right? Of who they killed and when? It was more accurate than people thought, but, you know, people had to go back and look to actually assemble all the records to come to the numbers that they eventually did.

So it's just one of those where, you know, you really have to just think about both the death toll and. and the way that it's being messaged. But I do broadly think that the Theo Vaughan, Miss Rachel phenomenon on all of that is very impactful on the culture in a way that a lot of people in Washington are underestimating. I really think American politics

is way too captured by Twitter where Israel is wildly overrepresented and that if you look at any other social media platform, it's 90-10. I remember thinking that with the Nelk Boys episode, and that's a real lesson for people, just in terms of media consumption, and kind of where the country is going.

And I think it should be internalized by people in power, but they don't want to listen. No, they certainly do not. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, Every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.

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