Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/15/24: DNC Crashed By Gaza Protests, Kamala White Worker Surge, Trump Attacks On Stolen Policy, Candace Owens Freaks On Trump Sinking Ship, Mehdi Hasan Exposes IDF

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Krystal and Ryan discuss massive protests set to crash DNC, wild poll shows Kamala surge with white working class, Trump loses it on Kamala stolen econ policy, Megyn Kelly and Candace freak over Trump sinking ship, Mehdi Hasan reveals IDF soldiers proud of war crimes.   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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of ways we can up our game for this critical election. 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. All right, good morning and welcome to Breaking Points. Sagar is out today. Emily couldn't be here, and so here I am, joined by Crystal Ball. Crystal, how are you doing?

I'm doing good. A little lefty takeover of Breaking Points. It's appropriate. Yeah, we're going to talk about the DNC. And so I think people will benefit from the lefty takeover. I mean, lefty takeover, in my opinion, is always appropriate. It's always the right move. Yeah, so as you mentioned,

we're going to do a bunch of promoing of the DNC or previewing of the DNC. We're actually going to be on the ground, all of us there. It's part of why we wanted to make sure Sagar rested up so he is ready for that trip.

And we've got a bunch of new polls we're going to dig into from some interesting states and some Tim Wall's approval ratings we want to take a look at, see how he's doing with the people. We have both candidates talking about the economy. Kamala Harris issuing her very first policy pronouncements expected, what is that, happening Friday, I think she's given that speech. That sounds right.

Yeah, first one that's not a reversal of her past positions, exactly. Right, she's gone from backtracking to now we may actually lay some groundwork in terms of what she might actually do. We've got some grumblings from the right, including Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens, about Trump and his team and how his campaign is going. We've got the media deciding not to publish any of the hacked Trump campaign documents, obviously stark contrast with how they handled 2016. So I'm particularly interested to hear Ryan's perspective on that.

We've got Mehdi Hotlan coming in. He's got a documentary about the absolute horrors that are being perpetrated in Gaza. So looking forward to speaking with him about that. And Ryan's got, we got a little Ryan special. He's taking a look at MDMA therapy set, had a major setback at the FDA. And you've got two different experts coming in to talk about this, right, Ryan?

Yes. Both of them actually have been heavily involved in the decision that the FDA released recently not to move forward with legalizing it for medical purposes. So kind of a mess, complicated, and we'll talk to them. They disagree pretty strongly about which direction to go, and both of them played a kind of leading role in this mess. Yeah, so it's interesting because they're both advocates for the therapy, but they had very different views about what they wanted the federal government approach to be. So I'm looking forward to watching that one personally and hearing what the different perspectives are there.

But let's go ahead and get to the first block here. As we mentioned, the DNC is starting next week. It's easy to forget because everything just happened so fast and it feels like a million years ago at this point that Joe Biden dropped out of the race. But this is quite an unusual situation where just a couple of months ago, we thought it was gonna be a different guy who was being coronated at the DNC. Now we've got Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. As I mentioned

before, and can put this up on the screen, all four of us are going to be on the ground in Chicago. There we are. Look at that exciting group of people. Good looking crew. So just so you guys know, the timing of the shows, because, you know, most of the action, the DNC is in the evening. So timing of the shows and the structure of the shows, all that's going to be a little bit different next week. But as always, if you are able to support us, these sorts of things are expensive, but I think also add a lot to what you guys get out of the product.

BreakingPoints.com if you can become a premium subscriber. Let's go ahead and take a look at what we are expecting there in terms of the speaker lineup. We can put this up on the screen from NBC News. Joe Biden, former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, all confirmed as speakers. You're also gonna have President Jimmy Carter's grandson,

Jason Carter, who's gonna be confirmed to be speaking as a representative for his grandfather. I know you've also got Pete Buttigieg and some of the other sort of leading luminaries of the Democratic Party that are going to be there and have speaking slots as well. And we got a little bit of a preview of what the speaker lineup is going to be in terms of their order. We can put this up on the screen. This is kind of noteworthy because they've got Joe Biden buried in a not so great speaking slot time on Monday. Actually, Hillary Clinton got a better speaking slot than he did.

Then you've got Obama on Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton Wednesday, Kamala Harris Thursday, Walls Wednesday as per custom. So that's a little bit of a sketch of what we're looking at for next week, Ryan. Yeah, and the controversy that the kind of White House press corps is trying to gin up a little bit is about whether or not Biden is going to actually stay for the convention. And it appears that he's not. Those are the indications that we're getting so far, that he's going to give probably a pretty short speech Monday and then take his ball and go back to Washington and continue being the president for another couple months. They're also jitting up this controversy between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. Have these long-term friends, have they fallen out over Nancy Pelosi leading this kind of soft coup to get this guy off the ticket? And as I've been following this, I've been thinking,

are we supposed to really care whether or not these two people in their mid-80s are going to be friends for the rest of their lives? But more fundamentally, Biden doesn't really have a base, which is exposed by this whole non-controversy. He never developed a Bernie Sanders-style following or an Obama-style following over the course of his career such that if he gets slighted by a speaking gig on Monday, all the Biden heads are going to be furious about it. Biden was always just a stand-in for the party, and that's what he was as president. And now that he's no longer kind of connected to the party, I don't think there's going to be anybody who's willing to even be publicly upset

about the fact that he's getting snubbed. Not at all. Not at all. And you alluded to the palace intrigue. We can put this up on the screen, this tear sheet, that's what you're talking about. So you've got Joe Biden set to snub Barack Obama and Kamala Harris speeches at the DNC. And, you know, is it a snub or is he an old man

who doesn't really want to be there the whole time? Well, I mean, I wouldn't, right? I wouldn't want to be there the whole time. This was supposed to be your party. It's no longer your party. You can't, yes. If you have any pride whatsoever, you pride whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, just on a personal level. And so I do find the Nancy Pelosi Biden thing. I mean, I find her interesting as a character, the way she clearly is the one person the Democratic Party really understands and is willing to wield power. And then the tense, strange relationship

between Biden and Obama has also always been interesting because of their very contrasting political styles. Biden always had this sort of chip on his shoulder about, you know, Obama looking down his nose at him. Here's Obama, the Ivy League educated, blah, blah, blah, professorial, doesn't like getting his hands dirty and the rough and tumble of politics. Joe Biden, polar opposite, his thing was always having the relationships and getting in there and glad handling

and all of that sort of stuff. So, but I think you're right about the, about how much the media fixates on this sort of thing versus, you know, any of the more substantive questions, which we're going to get to later about the policy and what any of this actually means and what any of these candidates are actually promising for the American people. We can go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen here, which gives some more intel about what the week is going

to look like. This is kind of an attempt at a show of force here. Harrison Walls planning a rally in Milwaukee at the very same spot that Trump recently held a rally, and they're going to do it during the Democratic convention. So not during the primetime speeches, but this is an attempt to show, hey, we can put on two big events at the same time. We've got so much enthusiasm that we can not only pack the House, of course, at the DNC, but we can pack the House at this large arena that Trump was just speaking at. So trying to make, you know, sort of a point about how big and popular the campaign is at this point. Right. And at the same time, we can put up this next element. Organizers are expecting upwards of 100,000 pro-Palestinian protesters to show up at the DNC, which if they

can actually deliver on that number, and I suspect that they may be able to. I know personally of a lot of people who are planning on going. That's going to be an incredible show of force. And it's truly remarkable that it's coinciding with these ceasefire talks that are getting underway in Cairo and Doha. Today, just as we speak, the mediators are getting together and everybody just trying to push Israel to accept the deal that Israel already accepted. And we talked about this on the show yesterday, but Iran is basically publicly saying that if Israel will cut a ceasefire deal, basically accept the deal they already put forward, then Iran will not retaliate against them. So they can have a ceasefire deal with Hamas. They could avert a strike from Iran. And all they have to do is agree to the deal they already agreed to.

And it's all happening while the Democratic Convention is unfolding amid a backdrop of potentially 100,000 people in the streets. And yet everybody seems to think that Israel is going to say no to this deal. Do you have any optimism that next week we'll be talking about the implementation of a coming ceasefire deal? No. I mean, I think you'd be a fool at this point, given how many times we've been to this show, to have real significant optimism here. And listen, if it's left in the hands of Bibi Netanyahu, I don't think there's any doubt what direction we're going. And the only thing that could change that is if Joe Biden actually decided, hey, we're going to basically force you to take this. And by using the leverage that we have Joe Biden actually decided, hey, we're going to basically force you to take this.

And by using the leverage that we have. And of course, there's zero indication that he's willing to do anything other than, you know, once again, leak to Barack Ravid how upset he is about how things are going. Like, I think that's the most that we could expect. But the polling is also at this point really quite clear. We have Mehdi Hattan on later in his outfit, Zateo. They did some polling showing that this is a significant electoral issue for quite a large chunk of Democrats and independents, and that there is nothing but political benefit to be gained from actually obtaining and achieving a ceasefire. You know, Bibi, obviously, he not only wants to run out the clock, he wants to drag us into this larger war, which is something he'sfire. You know, Bibi, obviously, he not only wants to run out the clock,

he wants to drag us into this larger war, which is something he's wanted, you know, is to get us more directly involved in some direct conflict with Iran for a long time. That would be a disaster on every level, on a humanitarian level, on an American political interest level. It would be a disaster for Kamala Harris's campaign

on a political level. Those are all, and those are all things that he, you know, he hopes for. He wants Trump to be back in the White House. So if it's bad news for Joe Biden, the Democrats and Kamala Harris, that's a positive thing for Bibi Netanyahu. So, yeah, the only way that I think that we're talking about the implementation of a ceasefire deal and what comes after and what, you and what the potential prospects for a longer term, more lasting and just peace might be is if Biden actually had some sort of awakening

and decided to use leverage in a way that there is just no indication. But if you're Kamala Harris behind the scenes, whatever leverage she has, which I don't think she has much power in that White House, I don't think she's ever had much power in that White House. The best thing she could do politically for herself would be to press and push Joe Biden and his team to put that kind of pressure on Netanyahu to achieve the ceasefire deal, because those protesters will, you know, are a visible

reminder of one of the biggest political problems that she has and one of the most difficult situations that she has to resolve. Because, you know, Ryan, I'm curious your thoughts on this. I was on Majority Report last week and Sam was asking me this question of, okay, but, you know, she's the vice president. Like, how far can she really distance herself from Joe Biden? Doesn't she just kind of have to do this, like, wink and a nod that I promise guys I'll be different and send down some, you know, Ben Rhodes onto Chris Hayes' show to signal like, no, no guys, she's really going to be different if she gets in there. Do you think that's true? Or do you think there's more room for her to separate herself from this monstrous genocidal policy of Joe Biden? I think there's such different people

that there is at least an opportunity. And I think people did understand how powerless she was, which paradoxically creates an opening for her to start flexing some power. Now, we actually put up this next element, which is related to this. This is about the shocking parallels that a lot of people have identified between 1968, the convention in Chicago that devolved into anti-Vietnam War protests and a police riot. And this year, a key lesson from 1968 that a lot of people have kind of missed is that privately, Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's vice president and was coronated at Chicago without basically a primary, was against the Vietnam War, wanted to end it, but was unwilling to kind of buck Johnson. And so went into the election,

this hobbled candidate who was seen by the public as just, you know, continuing to pursue the Johnson policy and not having his own path towards peace. Under pressure from the protests, he eventually said that he would propose a halt to the bombing. Johnson then got mad at him about that and said it was undermining his negotiations with the Viet Cong. Kissinger and Nixon then back-channeled in a genuinely treasonous way to the Viet Cong and urged them not to cut a peace deal because they would get a better deal if Nixon won in 1968. That not only was that treason and cost the lives of many Vietnamese and Americans, it was a lie. Like they did not get a better deal. The war went on for many years.

So I was expecting perhaps a replay of that. Trump is very much a Nixon kind of acolyte. Yet, speaking of Barack Ravid, he reported for Axios that Trump, and I don't know if you saw this, had a call with Netanyahu and told him, buddy, you need to take this deal. So even the Trump administration, which presumably would benefit, sorry, the Trump administration, which presumably would benefit, or sorry, the Trump campaign, which hopes to be a Trump administration again, which would benefit from Bibi rejecting the ceasefire deal, even they are pushing him, which suggests that there's some structural interest that the U.S. has that is diverging from Israel's at this point, which is the one thing that gives me some optimism

that perhaps this is going to move forward. Because at the end of the day, Israel is a tiny country and it is a client of the United States. And the United States has major interests that it may feel are being undermined. And it may believe that Iran, China, and Russia are all objectively becoming more powerful as a result of this flailing that we're doing in the region. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. And it is

interesting. I wonder with Trump too. I mean, he's also looking at this and saying like, I don't really want to inherit this mess if I'm back in the White House either. But I'm sure the calculus for Bibi has always been, all right, let me just muddle through and get to a potential Donald Trump White House. And then I can really do whatever I want and face absolutely no even like hand-wringing or leaks to the press, et cetera. So I do wonder if that significantly changes his calculation, if he sees, okay, even this guy who's supposed to be my guy, even he is ready for this to get wrapped up. So potentially a little bit of hope there. Go ahead, Ryan.

No, just, and the funny element there, the interpersonal element, Trump is still mad at Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his victory. So petty. So petty. Like, BB didn't stop the steal. And so he's going to pay for it the rest of his life. Yeah, I mean, incredible stuff. The funny thing about that op-ed that we put up from the Washington Post about the 1968 parallels, of which there truly are many, is, of course, the conclusion is that's why the protesters should back down. That's why the protesters shouldn't be pressing Biden or Harris, etc. Instead of, that's why Biden needs to push to get a ceasefire deal. That's why we need to bring

this outrageous, immoral genocide to a close and move beyond this. Instead, it's all on these relatively powerless protesters who are objecting to the absolutely horrific images that they're seeing in their social media feeds every day. So perfect Washington Post ending there. One last piece here with the DNC coming up. We've got a little bit of a chart analyzing the Democratic Party vibes, the all-important vibes heading into the DNC.

So this is just among Democrats. It's from Civics. And they asked people, how are you feeling about the way things are going in is just among Democrats. It's from Civics. And they ask people, how are you feeling about the way things are going in the U.S. today? And you can see when Biden exits the presidential race, the number that feels hopeful just absolutely skyrockets, jumps up. That's that blue line there to 34%. The number that says, the percent that says that they're scared really drops down. Angry drops down. Excited jumps up a bit.

So they definitely, you know, putting aside genocide, they come in with the vibes, Ryan. They come in with much better vibes than they did previously. They sure do. And pretty hard to see a vibe shift like that that isn't drug-induced. That's just reality making that line spike. Really quite incredible. Yes, indeed. 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.

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This is from Cook Political Report. They did a big survey of all the battleground states and the news is really quite good for Kamala Harris. If you can keep this up on the screen, guys, so I can talk through it. So overall, if you put together all of these battleground states, which by the way, includes North Carolina and of course includes Arizona and Georgia. Previously, when it was Biden, Trump was up in these states by five points. Now, if you put them all together, Kamala Harris is up by two points. So significant shift, and it's reflected in all of these states. In fact, the only state where Trump remains in the lead is Nevada. Now, previously, he was in the lead by eight points in Nevada. This survey shows him up by five points. The next closest you've got Georgia tied previously, that was Trump plus four. But actually, this survey has

Kamala Harris winning in North Carolina, a state where when it was Joe Biden, it was Trump plus eight. This is all the numbers I'm giving you right now are the ones that include the third party candidates, which, you know, tend to be the most reflective, although, you know, there's a lot of work being done to try to kick RFK Jr. and Jill Stein and Cornel West off of some of these ballots. However, you know, the movement, Ryan, is pretty undeniable here, especially when you, you know, it's difficult to say, okay, is it exactly this number? But this is the same survey done with the same methodology, and you just see an extraordinary shift in basically the blink of an eye in terms of political time from Joe Biden losing badly to Donald Trump to now Kamala Harris having an edge.

Yeah, basically, I think what's going on here is that as we saw in every special election and in every election that's happened since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the country is leaning Democratic. Like that's that's that's just the baseline fact. The only thing holding Democrats back from that becoming the manifest reality in this election was the presence of Joe Biden. Generic Democrat was always beating Trump. They swapped in two generic Democrats for the price of one, and then he's beating Trump. And they're beating Trump. It really seems to me quite that simple. It's a reversion to the mean, and the mean was Democrats up by a couple points.

Closely divided country, but leaning in their direction post-Roe. Yeah, and we saw that when it was Biden. That really showed up in the fact that every swing state Senate Democrat was winning. All of them. They were all outperforming Joe Biden by quite a fair amount, whether they were more liberal or conservative or moderate or what their personal characteristics or political talent was, every single one of them was significantly outperforming Joe Biden. And as you said, in special election after special election, we were seeing very similar results. I do want to mention there was a Fox News poll that came out last night after we put the show together. It's the first poll in quite a while that shows Trump with any sort of a lead. It

gives him a one point edge nationally over Kamala Harris and actually looks very similar to what the landscape looked like in that one poll from when Joe Biden was in the race. So I'm sure the Trump campaign is going to be happy to see that one from the Fox News poll, which is a highly rated pollster, by the way. I mean, their conservative lean in terms of their content doesn't seem to carry over in terms of having a consistent conservative bias in terms of their polling. But CNN dug into some of the numbers in the recent polling, and we've been talking about, okay, Kamala Harris, obviously, she's doing much better with young people. She's doing much better with black and brown voters.

But surprisingly, at least in some of these surveys, she's actually even outperforming Joe Biden among a group that was supposed to be an area where he was outperforming, and that was with white working class voters. Let's take a listen to Harry Ent and break that down. Kamala Harris is making gains in key swing states with a surprising and crucial voting group. And Harry Ent is here with me to go beyond the numbers. So Harry, we know, obviously, you look at the overall polls, you see these swing state polls, the ones over the weekend from Siena did stand out. We'll see if that's really where this goes. But you found something very interesting in terms of one group that stands out. White working class voters, white voters without a college degree. That is Donald Trump's core

group. That was the reason why he was able to break down that giant blue wall, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, in the Great Lakes, and look at their support now versus where we were a few months ago when the matchup was between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Look, Donald Trump still leads, but look at that margin. It has shrunk significantly. It was 25 points back in May. It is now 14 points now here in August, nearly been sliced by half. Those numbers that Harris is putting up amongst that group right now are actually slightly better than Joe Biden did four years ago amongst those voters in those key states. Those are the types of numbers that Kamala Harris needs to put up in order to win. And of course, Joe Biden was like, I don't want to drop out of the race because I'm not sure that

Kamala Harris can break in with this group. But it turns out she absolutely can. So that's in the New York Times Sienna polling, which is a high quality poll. However, it's always dicey when you go into what's called the cross tabs where you break down all these different demographic groups because inherently the sample size is going to be a lot smaller. So the accuracy is going to be a lot lower. And I find it hard to believe

that at this point she's outperforming Joe Biden's 2020 numbers among this group. But if it's even in the ballpark where she's even hanging on to what Joe Biden was doing before, given the way she's outperforming with other groups, that's a very positive indication for her. Right. And in general, when you're doing well, you do a little bit better with everybody. And so I think that at least directionally, that's what it seems to be reflecting here, that white working class voters too are like, Trump is struggling. And this person who's like healthy, you know, cognitively together seems like they could actually be president. You know, it's early. There's still like people say it's a snap election,

but, you know, in France, they did the whole thing in, what, two or three weeks. We still have all of September and October to go, so a lot could change. But you can imagine why Trump is as angry as he is. Yeah, definitely. And I do feel like there is a caricaturish view of white working class voters that certainly exists among liberal Democrats, but also very much has been picked up and exists among Republicans, where they tend to feel like this is a sort of lowest common denominator group. They tend to feel that they can take this group for, you know, they can take it for granted as well in a way that, you know, Democrats decades ago felt. And so, yeah, they're also looking at like, you know, this was an election between two old guys, neither of whom I'm

particularly fond of. And now we've got some energy injected into the race. And I think Tim Walls is an asset in terms of his appeal there as well. So it wouldn't shock me if at the end of the day, Kamala Harris is able to outperform Joe Biden, even with this group of voters that was supposed to be, you know, his core appeal as Grant and Joe, because as you were pointing out before, Ryan, it's not like he,

Joe Biden didn't really have a base or like a particular appeal among any demographic group, even as he himself may, you know, his own self-conception might be middle-class Grant and Joe. But the reality is, you know, his own self-conception might be middle class Grant and Joe. But the reality is, you know, that's not the group of voters that got him to win the Democratic primary. And it's not really what was the core of the reason that he was able to barely eke out

a victory over Donald Trump. It was this sort of anti-Trump coalition that, you know that held together enough to get him across the finish line in key swing states. His lack of a base was in some ways his superpower in the sense that because he wasn't connected to any particular element of the party, he could just kind of move with the political winds. When the party was shifting right in the 80s and 90s, he shifted right with them. After 2018, as it shifted left with the whole Bernie Sanders moment, he kind of shifts back towards the center a bit. And because of that, it made it harder for Republicans to kind of attack him as any particular thing, because he was no particular thing. A consequence of that, of course, is that then you don't have

any solid base that kind of regrets your exit from the scene. And they're willing to, you know, just move with kind of whoever else is just following the political breeze, which is what we seem to be having here. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I mentioned Tim Walls. Part of the reason potentially he was put on the ticket was he's won a number of elections in swing districts that are difficult for Democrats in rural areas. You know, he himself comes from a small town. He also, one of the things I've been talking about is Tim Walz is an extraordinarily class diverse pick for the Democratic Party. You know, he's the first Democrat on a presidential ticket

not to have a legal background since Jimmy Carter. He does not own any stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto, or anything of the sort. He's like, you know, crypto, or anything of the sort. He's living off his public school teacher pension. So he's a union member, which I know you and Emily talked about yesterday, which also makes him quite unique. And there's a sense that he has a comfort level talking to a group of voters that has become increasingly skeptical of the Democratic Party. We're getting a look at his approval ratings as people get to know him and process some of the Democratic Party. We're getting a look at his approval ratings as people get to know him and process some of the Republican attacks on him, see him

perform on the stump and see what Democrats are saying about him. We can put this up on the screen. So his net approval overall is plus 5%, which is the highest of any of the four, of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz. Tim Walz has the highest net any of the four, you know, of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walls. Tim Walls has the highest net approval rating, very popular, obviously, among Democrats, plus 60%, hanging basically even with independents at plus 1% and deeply underwater with the Republicans at minus 53%. The one that I found potentially most notable here, Ryan, was if you break it down by ideology,

because, you know, if you look at down by ideology, because, you know, if you look at that independent group, you have a lot of people who call themselves independents, but are really just Republicans or people who just call themselves independents, but really mostly vote Democrat. If you look at liberals, of course, he's very popular. But among moderates, he's doing quite well. He's at plus 16 percent. So the other thing that's been interesting to me is, you know, Tim Walz has been the subject of a lot of conversation on the right about quote unquote stolen valor, about quote unquote tampon Tim, et cetera. I've seen so many people on the right speculate that he was such damaged goods, he was going to have to drop off the ticket, et cetera, et cetera. And to me, it just exposes what an incredible bubble these MAGA influencers

live in. Because lo and behold, he is the most popular person on either of these tickets. So it's so divorced from reality as to really be quite extraordinary. It is a letter of faith in the conservative world now that the pick of walls was a, quote, fiasco, a disaster, that they would do it differently if they had to do over again, that any minute now, you know, she might get rid of him and replace him with Shapiro or somebody else. Like, that is, you say that, and that is just conventional wisdom among a massive portion of the kind of, I don't know if you'd call it an electorate or a punditocracy or whatever it is. And yeah, I see that stuff. And I'm like, you guys following the same thing I'm following here?

Like, Democrats are not actually that bothered by it. Walls does seem to have stretched. And I think he was, like, misleading on purpose sometimes about what exactly, you know, his service was. The way he would talk about deploying for, you know, Operation Enduring Freedom or deploying for OEF. He did deploy. He deployed to Europe in support of it. And he is usually pretty careful not to go over the line. And he'll say some things. And when I say he's trying to be misleading, he said some stuff like, I carried weapons during war.

It's like, okay, I see what you're doing there. You carried weapons, and then there was a war over here. And in our minds, we're thinking you carried the weapon in the war, like with bullets flying around your head. What you actually mean is you had a weapon while you were like loading the transport planes that were flying into the actual war. So I understand why they're so frustrated with him. At the same time, the fact that he was a veteran may have made up a lot of his biography in 2006 at the height of the Iraq war. While that was a big thing that Rahm Emanuel wanted all Democrats to run on, he went around recruiting veterans everywhere, although he didn't like Tim Walz and thought Tim Walz would lose, a separate story. But it's not 2006 anymore.

Like right now, his bio is he's a football coach and he's a teacher and he's a union member and he's a dad and he drives a minivan. So unless, I mean, I don't know if he drives a minivan, but like that's the caricature. That's the vibe. Yeah. Right. So unless you can challenge the fact that he was a football coach or a teacher or a dad, then you're not going to get at his bio. And so I think the Republicans are, you know, getting off a lot of decent shots on him, but they're firing at the wrong target. What have you thought about Tim Walz's response? I'm not sure if you and Emily talked about it yesterday, but when he was speaking to that union, ask me, he said, you know, listen,

I'm not going to back down. I am proud of my service. And by the way, even for my opponent, you know, the only thing I have to say about your service is thank you. Thank you for serving the country. And that compelled J.D. Vance to have to respond and be like, well, I'm glad for your service too, but you shouldn't have lied about it. I thought it was a pretty good response not to back away from it. And, you know, also, listen, you're dealing with a ticket that number one, the guy at the top, of course, there's a whole

bone spurs situation, right? And the, you know, whether it happened or not, the suckers and losers conversation and the comments to John McCain, I like, you know, soldiers who didn't get captured or whatever.

And they just were in Montana supporting this Republican Senate candidate who accidentally shot himself in a national park, apparently, and claimed that he was wounded in war, like claimed that as a battle wound. So it's not like they have a consistent track record of actually caring about whether he finished his, you know, continuing education to maintain the rank and precisely talked about that in the right way? I think, yes, the people who are predisposed to not like Tim Walz are going to dislike Tim Walz even harder as a result of this. But in general, it won't move the needle for folks outside of that. And also, it's the vice president. So it's like, are you really going to make your decision based on this? Which is what Trump has been saying about J.D. V it's like, are you really going to make your decision based on this?

Which is what Trump has been saying about J.D. Vance, you know, privately and even to the press when they asked him, do you regret it? He's like, well, you know what?

Nobody really votes on the vice president anyway. And he's right. I love the anecdote about he got asked at a fundraiser by a bunch of billionaires, like, what do you think of these attacks on you guys

that you're wearing? And he's like, oh, they're just saying that about J.D., not about me. So I just bought a bit, apparently. Of course, that's not really the case. I mean, I think the problem for him with J.D. Vance is just the pick of vice president is an important signal about how you will govern what things you value. And it also made it a lot easier for Democrats to be able to frame their attacks through this lens of weird, fringe, extreme, etc. Because you don't have that.

You know, if you put a Doug Burgum or a Glenn Youngkin, I think is probably, in fact, a better choice on the ticket. It makes it more difficult to land the like, these are a bunch of like fringe, overly online, like obsessed with these strange online subculture weirdos who don't relate to you whatsoever. I just think it makes it more difficult for that to land. Once you get J.D. Vance in the mix, there was another clip that came out where he was agreeing with a podcast host who said that post-menopausal females,

only real purpose in life is to raise grandchildren. It's like, it makes it much easier to land those sorts of attacks when you've got a J.D. Vance on the ticket versus a Glenn Youngkin on the ticket. 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. 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. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Trump gave a speech on the economy Apple Podcasts. Now, this is a little bit different day because this isn't around. This is we're talking about a thing called the economy. They wanted to do a speech on the economy. A lot of people are very devastated by what's happened with inflation and all of the other things. So we're doing this as a intellectual speech. You're all intellectuals today. Today, we're doing it and we're doing it right now.

And it's very important. I gave Harris and Biden an economic miracle and they quickly turned it into an economic nightmare with a nation wrecking agenda ripped straight out of Kamala's San Francisco liberal playbook, what they've done. And we will do something else, which was copied. I mean, viciously, ruthlessly copied. No tax on tips. okay? No tax on tips. You know, if they wanted to do that, why didn't they do it three and a half years ago? They didn't want it. It was actually the opposite. They hired 88,000 IRS agents to go after these people. Kamala and Joe tried to take credit for $35 insulin.

You know that. You know who did that. I did that. I did that. I did the insulin and it kicked in. And you know, I remember when I did it. To help seniors on fixed incomes who are suffering the ravages of inflation, there will be no tax on Social Security.

We're going to stop it. No tax on Social Security. This cruel double taxation of Social Security benefits, and this has been talked about for a long time. She'll probably announce this on Friday, too. That was I like how she ended that. It's like she'll probably say on Friday that she's going to do this, too. And after that, he pointed out, oh, there's Kamala's guy is like taking notes on my policies. He is so burnt up about the fact that he picked off about the fact that she picked off his like no taxes on tips policy. Yeah. And that and also burnt legitimately by the fact that he picked off, about the fact that she picked off his like no taxes on tips policy. Yeah. And also burnt legitimately by the fact

that when he proposed that the media was like, this is a terrible policy that will be filled with loopholes that will benefit hedge funds and private equities, which is true. Yeah. And then when she proposed it, they're like, oh, this is great.

Great for the service workers. Yeah. The original coverage, by the way, was the correct coverage. No taxes on tips. It has a lot of like intuitive appeal. And I understand, of course, you want to cut service workers a break. The much better way to do that is to get rid of that tip minimum wage altogether,

at least the very least raise it. Because as you point out, I mean, one of the problems with it is next thing you know, you've got hedge fund managers saying, oh, this is an income, this is a tip, so it doesn't get taxed. So in any case, yes, he is very salty about the fact that she picked that up and copied him in a speech out in Las Vegas. I don't know if you watched this whole speech, Ryan,

but the funny thing about it is, it was very clear the whole time that it was like his advisors told him he had to give this speech and, you know, twisted his arm and wrote up the script for the teleprompter and whatever, because the whole time he's just trying to run away from the actual core content of the speech as much as possible and go on his normal, you know, tangents about what he thinks about Joe Biden dropping out and how Kamala Harris is far left. And he said something he said about Harris and Walz. He said, they're actually beyond

socialists. I think they skipped over socialists. So it was more of the greatest hits with a little bit of like the economic script sprinkled in. He also made this comment that kind of gave away that his arm was being twisted to talk about this stuff, which apparently he really didn't care about. He says, they say the economy is the most important subject. I think crime is right there. I think the border is right there. We have a lot of important subjects.

So even in the speech where he's supposed to be like leaning hard into the economy, he's sort of like, you know, undercutting it. And the reason I bring this up is just, this is the challenge for the Trump campaign. They were doing much better, obviously, when Joe Biden was in the race. But when Trump was just kind of being not doing all that much and letting the issue landscape speak for itself,

now they've got a really clear edge, especially on immigration. If you ask voters, they've got a clear edge still in almost all polls on the economy, although that edge with Kamala Harris seems to be shrinking. You've got some things to work with there, but Trump is, he's Trump. Like, he's not going to follow your script. He's not going to just read your, like, economic policy speech off the teleprompter and really lean into that

and make that a core message. Right now, he's finding it incredibly difficult to move on from Joe Biden. So even in this speech, he's still talking about Joe Biden getting taken off the ticket and all of these sorts of things that he finds to be very unfair and it's his own personal grievance. So in any case, that's some of what's going on there. At the same time, we've got Kamala Harris, who to this point hasn't really announced any policy to speak of. Most of what she's done, as you mentioned before, Ryan, was like, tell us what

she's not for. Like, I'm no longer for Medicare for all, no longer for that fracking ban, like running away as fast as possible from those sorts of positions. But we are supposed to get some specifics of an anti-price gouging policy this week in a speech that I believe is happening Friday. We can put this up on the screen. She apparently sees it to really be in her interest to try to separate her economic policy and vibes from the current president, Joe Biden, who of course is very unpopular on the economy. So on Friday in North Carolina, she's gonna outline a plan to lower costs of healthcare, housing, food. Polls, they say, show an opening for reset on economy and inflation not defined by Biden. Look for an emphasis on the prosecutor background, including price fixing fights as the California Attorney General. We can put the next piece up on the screen because just this morning,

we got some specifics about what she's going to be looking at here with regard to her initial policy proposals. The Politico headline says grocery price gouging to feature prominently in Harris' economic plan. And they say in addition to her push for the first ever federal ban on price gouging by food corporations, she would also direct the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and levy penalties on food companies that violate the ban. She's also going to argue Trump's plans, including threats to slap new broad tariffs on US imports, will only drive up costs for food and other everyday items. So on the corporate power piece, Ryan, certainly our friend Matt Stoller is going to be very happy about this direction that she's choosing to take her campaign in from the very initial onset of the

first policy pronouncements. And it's a good fight to have because they're also able to divide, you know, it divides Democrats because a lot of kind of neoliberal Democrats, you know, really recoil at the idea that you can have the government doing anything about prices and about profits. But those Democrats, because of partisan concerns, are going to shut up right now. So you're not going to have that fight, which is a terrific benefit for that policy. On the right, you're going to have a little bit more division because the J.D. Vances of the world, you know, very much do believe that it is the government's role to go in and investigate a corporation if it is price gouging. Like that is squarely within that kind of new right, you know, populist nationalism. But it runs up against all the, you know, the free market

ideology that dominates so much of the rest of the Republican Party. So that could kick off some interesting kind of internal turmoil among those. But there's long been this idea for the last 50 years or so that the government should just stay out of prices. But that historically has not been the case. Governments all around the world forever have done some version of price controls. We currently have price controls when it comes to, we control our interest rate policy. We control our energy prices, whether it's through utilities or whether it's through our use of either our military or our strategic petroleum reserve when it comes to gas prices or whether it's our influence with OPEC. We control wages. Like if we see the price of labor, if we see the price of labor going up,

the Federal Reserve comes in and wraps workers right on the knuckles and makes sure that those wages go right back down. So all this is saying is that we'll extend this general idea to corporate profits. And if there is price gouging going on, they're going to come after that. What that means remains to be seen. How Harris tries to even come close to defining that is an open question. It also suggests that she would need Lena Kahn. The idea that you're going to lead with something that is the FTC's purview and that requires an aggressive FTC, but you're also going to get rid of Lena Kahn, just doesn't match. So it feels like she's winning this fight against Reid Hoffman right now. What's your sense there? Yeah, I mean, it seems like that. And there was

another policy personnel choice that people were paying attention to that I'm interested, your take on, Ryan, we can put this up on the screen. So, Ryan Deese is back. This is some reporting from Brian Schwartz, who's a good reporter over at CNBC and advising Kamala Harris on economic policy. David Dayen comments here, Deese has a resume to upset everyone, Black Rock experience, but he was also a good on the National Economic Council that crafted much of the break with typical Dem policy on industrial manufacturing, full employment, and more. He was also a good on the National Economic Council that crafted much of the break with typical Dem policy on industrial manufacturing, full employment, and more. I look at what he did in office and say it's good to have him in there. I know Matt's fuller, as I mentioned before, also very pleased with this pick.

And on the corporate price gouging piece in particular, a couple things that were noteworthy to me is, number one, at least some of what Kamala Harris is talking about in the speech on Friday are things that you can do with just executive power. So even if you don't have Republican, you know, if you still have a Republican Senate in particular, you can still take a lot of action here

as Lena Kahn has, as FTC had. The other thing is, you know, as indicative of Brian Deese as being the carryover, like some of this stuff has been done by the Biden administration. There was originally when progressives like you and I were talking about how corporate price gouging was an important part of the inflation picture. We were practically, you know, laughed out of the room. Like all the mainstream, oh, it's preposterous.

It's just government spending, blah, blah, blah. The data became undeniable that this was perhaps the most significant part of the inflation picture. And so while Biden did a little nibbling around the edges with regard to the meatpacking industry in particular, number one, he's just not able at this point to really clearly and forcefully articulate this case and prosecute this case. And number two, he seemed to be uncomfortable with it. And he had people in his orbit. There continued to be this internal divide over like, oh, it's not appropriate to call out corporate power. It's not appropriate to go after

these companies. There continued to be a reluctance and a hesitation to publicly make this case. But the data backs it up. It's a very strong both reality case, but also political case to go after. The American people have long said that these corporations are price gouging, that they don't have to charge these high prices and make you pay through the teeth at the grocery store, etc. So I think it's a very strong place for her to stand politically. And I also think it's a very strong place for her to stand in terms of actually making a difference in people's lives here. Yeah. And to have tough antitrust enforcement is also a way to police this pricing problem because what it tells companies is that one of the limits on what you can charge

people is that you're going to draw the attention of the FTC. Like if your profit margin goes from 5% to 25%, then the FTC is going to wonder, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. If this was a competitive market and you're jacking up your prices by 25% and just taking it back as profit, some other competitor ought to be able to come in and undercut you on price. That's how the market works. And if that's not happening, then you're doing something illegal. You're breaking the Sherman Act somehow when it comes to monopolization and antitrust, and we're going to investigate and we're going to cause problems for you. And so even if a company is a monopoly, they may want to continue

to fly under the radar by keeping their prices low. And if that's the result of that for consumers, that's not just as good as having monopolies broken up. But from a consumer perspective, it keeps prices down and it makes it so you can afford more groceries. So that's a win. So it's really a win-win to have both of these things working together. Yeah, that's right. And it's also an area I feel where the bully pulpit actually does matter. Where if you have the president calling you out in campaign speeches or in the State of the Union or in a press conference, et cetera,

you know that you now have the eye of the federal government trained on you potentially for those sorts of enforcement actions. So having someone who is able to, in a just clear and consistent way, make this case actually matters quite a lot. The other thing that you and Emily, I think, touched on some, and we'll just skip over this stuff from Tim Walls at AFSCME. He also talked a lot about specifics with regard to labor and continue to advocate for the PRO Act. So that seems to also

be on the agenda as a priority action item. The other thing that was noteworthy, we can put this last element from this block, guys, up on the screen, is the Harris team has really shifted the type of ads that they are running against Donald Trump. So the headline here from The Washington Post, Democrats' ad shifts from Trump to abortion and economy with Harris as the nominee. They did an analysis of data from the political research firm, Ad Impact. They found that they are now running much more on these issues, abortion and the economy,

versus the threat to democracy, et cetera, et cetera, really fixating on Trump type of ads that the Biden team was running. And we had shown earlier in the week, on Monday, I believe, some of the message testing from the Reid-Hoffman aligned polling pack put out some message testing on how Kamala Harris should approach this race. And what they found, I think, is not that surprising, which is that you're not going to change how people think about Donald Trump.

They think about Donald Trump what they think. It's not like you're going to see an ad on TV and be, oh my God, you're right. He is a threat to democracy. I never thought of it that way, right? So I think the Harris team is smartly looking at that data and saying, okay, well, instead of endlessly moralizing about Donald Trump,

which people already feel about however they're going to feel about, we need to bolster Kamala Harris on the issues where she needs strengthening or where she's already strong. And we need to attack him specifically on the abortion, try to knock down his numbers on the economy. So maybe Kamala Harris even has an edge on the economy. I think it's a much more intelligent political strategy that they're pursuing here with their ad spending. Yeah, for most people, if you're like 60 years old or younger, Trump has been famous

your entire adult life. Like since you became cognizant of the news, Trump has been famous. So I think that's exactly right, that there's no 30 second ad that you're going to run that's going to all of a sudden change people's minds. So the better approach is, okay, yeah, Trump is this thing, but we're going to do this. Whether it's codify Roe or we're going to crack down on corporate price gouging. Whatever you think of Trump, here's what we're going to do. So, good for them. Because it forces them to actually then come up with something. And we're, what, three or four weeks into a Harris campaign at this point. Maybe it's less than that. I can't keep track of time. Me neither. But it's funny that this is, like, basically the first thing we're getting. So that, you know, her campaign deserves an enormous amount of criticism for.

The fact that it's a good thing, we'll take that. Yeah, definitely. 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. 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. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, steal somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

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

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. At the same time, let's go ahead and move on to some of the criticism that's coming from the right as they're watching the poll numbers shift.

I mean, it must be head-spinning to be a Trump supporter and, you know, come off the assassination attempt and the, you know, the iconic image and the RNC and Joe Biden is floundering and you feel so emboldened you even put J.D. Vance on the ticket. You are riding high. You're thinking, hey, are we going to be able to put New Jersey into play? And now, just in a few weeks time, the world is completely different. And it's at best a toss-up race. I think that probably is correct where it is, is basically a toss-up at this point. But the trends keep moving against

you. Contrary to the idea that Kamala would just have this bump that was like a honeymoon period, she continues to expand her margin and she continues to put additional states in play, like the state of North Carolina as one example. So you're starting to get, as with any team that feels like they're, you know, starting to lose, that the unity cracks and you start to get people complaining about this or that. Now with Trump, as you know, on the right, they never complain about Trump directly. It's always like the team around Trump, that's the problem. So that's mostly what you've been getting

is like, oh, he's got to fire these campaign managers and they're giving him bad advice, et cetera, et cetera. But you did actually have Megyn Kelly come out and make some directly critical comments about Trump and his style specifically. Let's take a listen to a little bit of what she had to say in a conversation with Nate Silver. One of the reasons why Trump gets upset with yours truly

is because I have been raising that question for a while. And when he has what appear to be senior moments, I will call him out on it and he doesn't like that. And I can't say that I blame him, but that's my job. I will say that in that discussion with Elon, to me, he seemed quite rambling. I mean, it was like, yeah, he he rambles. He goes on too long at his rallies and in these exchanges and at his presser the other day to where you get kind of bored. You lose the thread. You lose interest, which is not something you're used to with Trump.

Trump in 2016, he was tough to lose interest, which is not something you're used to with Trump. Trump in 2016, he was tough to lose interest in. And I think that's probably an age-related change. So I think this is one of the challenges of the people around him who are, I'm sure, are desperately trying to get him to stick on message. And Ryan, some of the polling has shown that since Biden has dropped out of the race, people's concerns about Trump's age have actually increased now that you don't have the comparison of him versus Biden where you're going, oh, in comparison to that guy, he looks great. Now you're comparing him to Kamala Harris and it looks very different. Yes, and people don't really want him,

his advisors don't necessarily need him to stay on message. There's no such thing when it comes to Trump. But right, stay on brand. And on brand is entertaining and is interesting. And whether you're gawking because it's a car crash and you're wondering if the car crash is going to continue, or you're loving the way that he's just beating the heck out of the liberal elites and the media and all the others, that's what you want. You don't want to be bored. You don't want to think that this is just an old guy telling you the same stories over and over again, saying, oh, did I tell you this one? You're like, yeah, well, does it matter if I tell you? That's like the assassination story that, you know, at the RNC, he's out. This is the last time I'm ever going to talk about this. And then he spends like 30 minutes with Elon Musk going through detail by

detail once again, that very much had that vibe. Candace Owens is sticking in the lane of like, I'm not going to directly criticize Trump, but I'll criticize the people around Trump as like a proxy criticism. Let's take a listen to what she had to say about how the campaign is going. Something feels a little different right now. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. It was very clear to me and I think to the entire world that he was going to win the election because he emerged as a leader in his response and in his speeches thereafter, in the way that he communicated with the crowd. It just seemed so obvious that in order to defeat the deep state,

who I believe was behind this assassination attempt, that we needed to elect Trump. But things have changed in just a very short time. It just, the energy of the MAGA campaign feels very different. Now, at first, I was owing that to the fact that there has to be some reasonable trepidation. You don't just survive an assassination attempt and just keep going. And you don't come out of that not being a fundamentally changed person. And I think,

by the way, for the better, like, you know, really recognizing how precious life is, maybe perhaps being further committed to Christian principles as a leader. You know, you're going to be changed having survived an assassination attempt. But there is something else that seems to have happened where I'm just not sure who is driving the MAGA bus anymore. So she's not sure who is driving the MAGA bus anymore. We know who's driving the MAGA bus. It is and is always Trump. But there are rumors, Ryan, we can put this up on the screen,

that Trump may be planning to fire two of his top campaign aides. That would be characteristic. This is a man who has fired, I think, every campaign manager he's ever hired. So it would not be a shock if he's looking at these poll numbers and rather than looking internally about perhaps where he has gone astray,

he's instead pointing at Suzy Wiles and Chris LaCivita. Yeah, and it's a funny moment of classic UK tabloid reporting that we're mentioning because Dan Bongino yesterday, kind of vaguely in response to this reporting, was saying the knives are out for the good Trump people, and he meant LaCivita by that. And so he was kind of coming to LaCivita's defense. He's like, I didn't want to have to do this. I didn't want to have to talk about the internal turmoil because I want to focus on the Democrats, but it looks like I can't because now these rumors are

leaking out. But the way they leaked out is just incredible. So it's that Daily Mail with this UK tabloid. They don't mention La Savita or the campaign manager in the headline or even in the article. The only mention of him is in a photo caption within the story, which says Trump is reportedly talking to his confidants about firing his campaign managers, Chris Lasavita and Susie Wiles. Pictured. So they're breaking news in a caption with no sourcing whatsoever other than reportedly. Well, who's reporting it? The Daily Mail is reporting it in their caption. So it's complete and total garbage reporting, but it does appear that it reflects something real going inside the campaign because of what we know from Bongino's public comments. Otherwise, you could just be like, this is just because tabloids don't often

fabricate stuff. What they do is they play extremely fast and loose with sourcing rules and norms and what's supposed to be off the record and what's not supposed to be off the record. So it sounds like they had some stuff that was off the record. They wanted to get it into print. They couldn't quite figure out how to do it. And some genius editor is like, well, what if we just slip it into the caption? There's different kind of rules around it. The photo caption, and then boom, it kind of picks up fire on social media once it's in there. It's like, oh, Daily Mail is reporting. So just a little weird insight into how rumors get started.

But Bongino's response to it, I think, is suggestive of the fact that there's something going on. And also, it plays as, like, it sounds right, right? Yeah. When Trump is flailing, he's all, like, this is not just Trump. Everybody, when they're flailing, youailing, starts pointing fingers at those below them. But Trump particularly. Yeah. And also when a campaign or a team is flailing, then everybody starts throwing everybody else under the bus.

And any previous unity that they had five minutes ago is completely shattered and everyone's looking at who to blame. And also, you shouldn't underestimate how quickly the posturing starts for people to write the postscript narrative of whose fault it was. So in the after action report or whatever reporting gets released or whatever book comes out, they're not the ones who shoulder the blame. So that positioning starts very early in these campaigns as well to make sure that they come out looking good, even if it's a losing effort. We're gonna have to skip over this conversation about the Trump campaign being hacked

and maybe it was Iranians and then the news media decides not to report on it because we've got guests standing by and we don't wanna be too late for them. But just 30 seconds, Ryan. Do you see newsworthy value in the J.D. Vance dossier that was apparently leaked to the Post and Politico and one other news outlet? Supposedly, this oppo dump about J.D. Vance is all based on public information. You know, it's

like, it's going to be things that are like hypocritical. Like he said this at one point, he said this at another point, you know, He said this offensive thing about this group of people on this podcast. So it all seems to be public information. And we're constantly, it's not just Iran that leaks these documents. The campaigns themselves sometimes leak these oppo documents. And all it often is is just a collection of clips and quotes from like podcasts and appearances. And so in that sense, it's not really newsworthy. And so I can understand why they would say, you know what, this is just a standard oppo book. We're not doing Iran's dirty work here. But I'm sure they're happy to have the oppo book if it ever becomes useful. What do you think? Yeah, I think it seems newsworthy

because even one of the narratives around J.D. Vance is like, did they even vet this guy? Like, did they know about this childless cat lady stuff? Apparently they did. Did they know about like the post-menopausal woman comment, whatever? So even just to have a confirmation that, yeah, they knew that and they still put them on the ticket

or no, they were blindsided, but they had an incompetent vetting team and they didn put him on the ticket. Or no, they were blindsided, but they had an incompetent vetting team and they didn't actually pull some of his most controversial comments. Or they were actually worried about this issue over here and it turns out they didn't anticipate that the cat lady thing would be a real issue for him. Yeah, I think that is all very newsworthy.

Just like I think it would be newsworthy to know we have had some reporting, which is again, proof that all very newsworthy, just like I think it would be newsworthy to know we have had some reporting, which is, again, proof that this is newsworthy, that the Harris team did know that Tim Walz would likely fake these type of attacks over his service. But I would still be interested in knowing, you know, specifically how heavily did they weight this? How did they think about how to respond to it? Did they know all of the aspects of how he would be attacked on this, et cetera? You know, of course, I think that that would be newsworthy and interesting to the public. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Let's see it all. Put all the oppo out there. Yeah, put it all out there. Let's see it all. All right, let's go ahead and get to the guests that we have standing

by. 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. 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. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything

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

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

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

Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. There's a lot going on this week with regard to Israel, and we're very fortunate to be joined this morning by Mehdi Hathman, who is founder of Zateo News and out with a fantastic new and horrifying documentary about IDF soldiers and their conduct in Gaza. Mehdi, it's great to see you. Good to see you, Crystal. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So to set up the premise a little bit, and you can elaborate here

as well, there's been this question that's been floating around. We've seen all these social media, TikToks, Instagrams, et cetera, of IDF soldiers just publicly broadcasting their war crimes. And so you decided to send a team to Israel and actually speak to these soldiers and get in their own words why they are posting these atrocities. We have a little bit of the trailer we can show to people. And the name of the film is Israel's Real Extremism. Let's take a look at the trailer. Here's a soldier saying that they've destroyed the university. There's no more education now in Gaza. I think the education in Gaza was something you need to preserve.

Can you find it humiliating? Maybe humiliating. As I told you before, I don't see any problem with humiliating the Palestinians. There is nothing which humiliates them. Since the war in Gaza started, Israeli soldiers on the front line have been broadcasting the devastation and their dehumanization of Palestinians on social media. Actually, when I filmed it, my commander was very... They want me to do it. There's videos where they've shown that they've tortured captives. They didn't torture captives. You are lying.

You are lying. You are lying. They are not torture captives. This is a video where an Israeli-French soldier... They are being investigated. A lot of Palestinians who are already suffering are starving. It's a wrong question, OK? Because the Eid gets to Hamas. The issue for Israel now goes well beyond the occupation.

How much do I think we need to kill? His Eid will be Hamas. If we need to kill a million, a million. It will always be the response of the West. We are exaggerating, but we are working. We are genocidal. So, Mehdi, not only did these soldiers and activists justify these acts, I mean, they truly celebrated them in the conversations that you were able to have here.

Yeah, I mean, we throw around the word crystal shocking a lot, but there is a lot of shocking stuff in this film, even for those of us who commissioned it. And props to Basement Films in the UK, who are a bunch of Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning filmmakers who had this pitch to go find the soldiers behind these TikToks and Instagrams.

And interestingly, major networks, I won't say the names in both the UK and the US, turned this down. I wonder why. But we came along, Zateo managed to fund it, and they did go out there and they did get the soldiers. And as you saw in that trailer, a lot of them don't care. And it's not just the soldiers, by the way. Media personalities, radical right-wing activists who are blocking aid at the border, settlers who want to resettle Gaza,

all of them on tape bragging about this stuff. And it's so indicative of what has happened to Israeli society, especially post-October the 7th, the shift to the far right, the obsession with vengeance, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and the complete obliviousness, Crystal. They just don't care. What were the lines, Mehdi, that you came across? Were there any lines in these interviews where you would get soldiers or their defenders saying, okay, you know what, if that happened, that did actually cross a moral line? So one of the brothers, we interviewed a barbershop owner. You may remember there was an infamous image out of Gaza where a soldier had a bunch of Palestinians, possibly dead, we still don't know, bound and gagged. And he had a sign for his brother or brother-in-law,

I forget now, barbershop in Israel, advertising it in this video, such as the dehumanization. And the team on the ground managed to go speak to the owner of the barbershop. And he says in the film, he says, look, torture is wrong, but not torturing terrorists. That's fine with me. And obviously, we've seen in recent weeks, since the film was made, the allegations, the video evidence of the rape and abuse in Israeli prisons that's been coming out. Look, that is a trend amongst people who really do not see these people as human, right? There's a clip from one of the soldiers. His name is Hen Cohen. He's a kitchen fitter, right?

He's a guy who fits your kitchens in Israel in everyday life. Goes out to Gaza, films himself laughing in destroyed Gazan kitchens, saying, hey, who wants a Palestinian kitchen? And when we spoke to him, he says quite openly, and it's in the trailer, he said, look, I walk around feeling superior to these people. Why not? I am superior to them. Wow. I mean, when you hear this sort of sentiment, you would hope it's a fringe sentiment, but we know that it's not because we see the way that

it's represented in the current government. So what is your sense of how commonplace this view is where, you know, first of all, every Palestinian is just, you know, inherently made to be guilty. And once they're made guilty, well, nothing is off the table. We played here, and I'm sure you covered as well, the debates that were unfolding on popular Israeli television programs about how not only should it be fine for IDF soldiers to rape Palestinian detainees, but actually the only problem is that they don't do it more and it's not systematized. And this is happening on Israeli television. It's happening inside the Israeli parliament in the Knesset where they're

debating the right to rape. What's interesting is it's not being seen in the U.S. Congress, Crystal. It's not being seen on U.S. television. U.. US newspapers have not gone big on the video that was leaked and aired on Israeli television of an alleged gang rape of a Palestinian detainee. And that's why we wanted to make this documentary, Israel's Real Extremism, because you've got to see this stuff. You've got to hear it from them in their own words. You've got to see it on the ground. Because we talk so much about shared values. We talk about all the aid that we send Israel. Well, this is what it's paying for. And it's not a fringe, sadly. I wish it was a fringe.

The fringe has taken over, just like the GOP here. The fringe has taken over the beast. You've got mainstream ministers in government. And I say mainstream because Itmar Ben-Gavir is not fringe. He's mainstream. When you're the security minister, you're mainstream. When you're the finance minister, Bizarro Smotrich, you're mainstream. And these ministers, as we show in the film, have attended conferences calling for the resettlement of Gaza. We cite polling in the

film that shows anywhere between 25 and 40 percent of Israeli society, Israeli Jewish society, supports resettling Gaza. Now Netanyahu's come out and said, we're not going to resettle Gaza. But there's a big chunk of his own government and of Israeli society that wants to do that. We interview Yosef. You just saw that very young radical settler who said, look, if we have to kill a million people, we'll kill a million people. But his dream is to go back into Gaza. They're going back in and trying to put, you know, facts on the ground has always been the Israeli way.

And by the way, we're speaking in a week where Ben-Gavir and all these guys have just announced a brand new illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank, which we don't talk about enough because obviously our attention is on Gaza. Yeah, and to the extent that Israel does defend its attacks on civilians, what they will say is that, well, Hamas is using civilians as human shields. Oh, the projection. Right. You hear a lot this saying that every accusation is a confession. So I wanted to get

your response to this Haaretz investigation. We could put this up on the screen here, where they confirmed what has been known for many years, I believe this is, yeah, there it is, that IDF troops are often using human shields either tied to kind of roofs of cars or sent out into the streets or sent out into homes where they believe there may be militants, believing that the militants will then not fire at the Palestinian civilians, which to me is in conflict with the rhetoric that Hamas not just doesn't care about Palestinian civilian life, but actively wants them to die because then they get more international solidarity and support. So the fact that

they would believe that those humans would be actual effective shields against Hamas seems to undercut that rhetoric. Did this play a role in any of your interviews with folks on the ground there? Only in the sense, as I say, that when you're confronting these people with the images, they just don't care. I mean, all roads lead back to dehumanization, right? And you saw Itamar Fleischman, very prominent Israeli right-wing media personality, at the start of that trailer, saying, I have no problem humiliating the Palestinians. Nothing wrong with that. Just very blunt. And it's kind of, you know, from the horse's mouth, as they say. And even when it comes to this story, and Ryan, you're so right to use the phrase, you know, every accusation is

a confession. Fundamentally, it has been the single most popular and prevalent defense of Israel's brutality in Gaza since October the 7th, which is, it's all Hamas using human shields. And now we get this Haaretz investigation, which, as you say, confirms what we already knew has been on for years, especially in the West Bank, where we just saw a few months ago a guy tied to the roof of a Jeep. But what's so shocking about the Haaretz piece is three things. One is the Palestinians they grabbed to do this totally random. These are not kind of alleged militants who are being used as human shields. They're just random folks on the street who are grabbed by the IDF. The second point is that this is done with the approval of senior military leadership.

These are not random rogue operations. And number three, the most shocking part of it is they put them in Israeli military uniforms, i.e. they want them to be shot at, right? They want them to be, not accidentally, they want the Hamas militants, fighters, whatever you want to call them, to shoot at Israeli soldiers

who are actually Palestinians. And as you say, it goes against the whole argument, which is, well, hold on, Hamas don't care about civilian life. So why would they, you know, why would they stop shooting if they knew it was a Palestinian? But, you know, don't let any contradictions get in the way. By the way, going back to the TikToks, when we're talking about every accusation as a confession, I just saw yesterday an Israeli soldier put out another video on his social media of him using UNRWA aid to cook himself a meal. And again, weren't we told for 10 months that Hamas is stealing UNRWA aid? Here's an Israeli soldier stealing the aid. Oh, the projection. Wow. You know, Mehdi, obviously the most important

factor here is the horror that Israelis are perpetrating against Palestinians. But we interviewed a liberal Zionist, an Israeli liberal Zionist, Shia Ben-Ephraim. Ryan and Emily had interviewed him previously. And he was drawing a lot of parallels between the dehumanization and the increasing level of fascism in Israel with the United States. And it kind of bristled at,

I didn't say much at the time. I just let him say his piece, but I kind of bristled at, I didn't say much at the time. I just, you know, let him say his piece, but I kind of bristled at it because I was thinking to myself, okay, but on the other hand, we haven't had someone in Congress literally making the argument that, yes, it's fine for us,

for soldiers to rape detainees. Like we have not gone to that level. On the other hand, can I really draw that distinction when it's our country that is sending the bombs? when we have, you know, not just the right, but we have many elements of the Democratic Party, including the president and, you know, apparently the vice president, who have been supportive of this policy, who will, you know, leak some, oh, we're unhappy about this, and then send billions of dollars more in weapons to drop on schools where innocent Palestinians are sheltering. What are your reflections on that? And also, what is our support of this conflict doing to us and our country and the way that we view our fellow citizens around the world? It's such a good question because, yeah, I grapple with this as

well. And it's an interesting point. I think I would say a couple of things. One is, you know, I've made the point before that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and all of our freaks in Congress, they look like muesli-eating, sandal-wearing San Francisco liberals compared to a Itmar Ben-Gavir or the heritage minister who wants to drop a nuke on Gaza or some of these kind of people arguing in the Knesset for a right to rape. Look, the Israeli far right makes the American far right look mild. That's just a fact based on the record. Having said that, as you say, we are complicit in this. In fact, we have liberals, quote unquote, we have Democrats,

we have John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesman, saying on the record, at the podium, that their military takes more precautions than our military does. We have American officials saying that the Israeli army is better than the American army, which I find astonishing on so many levels. And the only way they can do that is by, you know, see no evil, hear no evil. When people in America, especially Democrats, sign off on aid for Israel, to be fair, they're not saying, well, we want this money to go so we can rape Palestinian detainees, but they're doing something else that's disingenuous, which is they're saying,

well, we don't want to know what's happening, right? And that's one of the reasons we made this film. And I would urge, you know, let me do a plug for anyone from the White House watching this, realisrael.film, R-E-E-L, realisrael.film, go watch the film, right? Because if American TV, if CNN, NBC, and the rest, New York Times are not showing this stuff,

go watch and see what our tax dollars, what USAID is paying for, what this Israeli military looks like. Hear it from the soldiers' own mouths. Because that is the problem I have, is that people in America talk about Israel at some weird abstract level. A lot of people like Joe Biden are thinking of an Israel, I don't know from when. And nobody talks about the specifics. How many members of Congress have you seen, Crystal, be asked about the gang rape allegations in Israel? How many members of Congress are asked in TV interviews about what's happening with settler violence and terrorism in the West Bank? We just don't see those specifics put to our members of Congress. They're able to write blank checks and then go off and do an event,

do a rally, kiss babies, and forget about the fact that, as you say, we're complicit in this horror. All right. We could take the two-shot here for one second. Because earlier in the show, we talked about the ceasefire talks that are opening today in the region. Do you have any sense of whether or not things have shifted, that we should expect something different this time? I think what we're now seeing belatedly, Ryan, 10 months into this is a lot more focus on Netanyahu, right? Before it was, even until, what, a couple of months ago, it was Joe Biden saying,

Israel's accepted the deal. Hamas is the bloc. Even as Netanyahu was like, we haven't accepted the deal. It was almost like a really bad, like, skit from a comedy show. It was like, they've accepted. No, we haven't. And they even got it into a UN resolution, amazingly. skit from a comedy show it was like they've accepted no we haven't and they even got it into a UN resolution amazingly

there was actually a UN resolution which said Israel has accepted the deal when Israel had not accepted the deal bizarre just kind of gaslighting on a level I've not seen in a long time like Trumpian level gaslighting from the Biden administration now I think there's been so much pushback publicly and credit you know I give a lot of credit to Israeli

hostages, families who've not just protested on the streets of Israel and been, you know, water canoned and beaten up by police. I spoke to a family member who's been assaulted multiple times by the Israeli police, but they also came to DC, protested Netanyahu's speech, were arrested outside the speech, even as Netanyahu inside the hall called them Iranian proxies. So they put a lot of pressure on and have come out and said, look, this is a complete failure. We've had people like Benny Gantz, former war cabinet member, come out and say, there was a deal. Netanyahu undermined it. So now we are seeing a

bit more pressure. And I think now with the Haniyeh assassination in Iran, the Hamas leader who was actually leading the negotiations, they killed the guy leading the negotiations. There's good faith for you. I think you're seeing Hamas now saying, look, they're taking the deal more seriously. Iran has come out and said, if you don't want us to retaliate for your illegal bombing attempt, bombing on our soil, get a ceasefire. Quite a good deal, I think. Seems fair. Seems fair. Seems like a great deal.

We won't retaliate if you give another group of people a ceasefire that everyone in the world wants. And that you have already approved through your cabinet. Approved through your cabinet, through UN resolution, through the Biden administration. Word is a Biden. So, yeah, I do hope that we are in a better place in terms of, I say, no, no, no. The problem is, he's a stubborn dude. So, at the end of the day, even if everyone comes around to it, unless you pressure, unless Joe Biden makes the Ronald Reagan

to Menachem Begin phone call that some of us have been urging him to make for months now, pick up the phone, call Netanyahu, make him do it, which he has the power to do, yeah, he's not going to do it. Yeah, I think they just need to experiment with an asylum for him or something. He can live his days out in South Florida if they'll agree. Go join his son there in Miami, right?

It might appeal to Sarah Netanyahu. Yeah, oh, absolutely it would. Maddie, final question for you. What are your expectations about Kamala Harris and whether she would pursue a different policy than Joe Biden has with regards to not just, you know,

this particular assault on Gaza, but with regard to Israel, Palestine in general? It is the $64,000 question or maybe the $3 billion question. I don't know the answer to that in terms of policy. I think clearly we've seen a shift in rhetoric. We've definitely seen a shift in rhetoric, but obviously that rhetoric doesn't save anyone's lives. The uncommitted movement are pressuring and will be pressuring at the DNC next week for some movement on an arms embargo. The Harris team have come out and said she doesn't support an arms embargo, but you know, that's what pressure is for. What's interesting is those of us who put pressure on Democrats before the switch from Biden to Harris were told, you want Trump to win. And actually, no,

Harris taking over means Trump is less likely to win. And actually, no, Harris taking over means Trump is less likely to win. We were right about that. And now we're saying, hey, come out for an arms embargo. They say, hey, you want Trump to win. Again, it's actually good policy. That's what a lot of people are trying to convince the Harris team. Put aside the morality, put aside international law. It's good for her and the Democrats to take a stronger line on Netanyahu. Great statistic in the new IMEU Yahoo, sorry, YouGov poll that my colleague Prem Thakur has just reported on, which shows of Biden 2020 voters in Pennsylvania who are saying that they will not vote for Biden, will go third party or stay at home, 57% say they're more

likely to vote Harris if she were to come out for an arms embargo. 0% say they would be less likely to vote Harris if she came out for an arms embargo. So pretty say they would be less likely to vote Harris if she came out for an arms embargo. So pretty strong polling showing that it's all there for the taking. If she can make a move on policy, the rhetoric, great, keep doing it. But policy is what matters.

Yeah, no doubt about it. Well, Mehdi, congratulations on the film and, of course, congratulations on Zateo. Tell people where they can go to support the work that you guys are doing.

We've got three media entrepreneurs here, two that just launched new endeavors. So go sign up at Dropsite News and Zateo, Maddy, go ahead and give people the web address. Krista, you were ahead of the pack. Me and Ryan are just following

in your footsteps. Zateo.com is our site, but if you want to specifically watch the film, you can go to realisrael.film. That's R-E-E-L, realisrael.film. Check it out. Terrific. Matty, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having me. All right. Up next, we're going to talk about the FDA's new terrible decision on MDMA. Stick around for 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. 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 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. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. So on Friday, the FDA released a major decision on the question of MDMA-assisted therapy, rejecting the request to make it legal for official kind of medical use and kicking it back for what could be years of further study.

Joining us today to talk about this are two people who've been pretty deeply involved in the push and pull over whether or not MDMA-assisted therapy would be allowed. We have John Lubecki joining us from the middle of the screen, an advocate and, I believe, participant in a portion of this FDA study. And also David Nichols, who eventually became kind of an opponent of the process we're going to talk about. I don't know if that's a good way to characterize it. We'll give you an opportunity to kind of characterize yourself when it gets to you. But John, quickly, tell us where we are today as a result of this FDA ruling. Well, that's actually a very good question that there are still a lot of answers that need to be,

that FDA needs to provide, like as Therapeutics is requesting a meeting with the FDA to be able to sit down and get more information that is not contained in the denial letter or the notification that they got, which didn't provide a lot of information. One of the major things that they had issues with were addiction or potential for addiction as well as trial design, even though the FDA themselves

were involved in the trial design. Once that meeting takes place, which should happen probably within the next two months, then LICOS will have more information on what's required with new trial designs, how many more participants need to go through, how many more trials need to go through, etc. But even with the denial, this isn't going to stop FDA approval. It's eventually going to be approved. One of these days, the question is when. And David, let me get you to respond to a couple of clips from the kind of key hearing.

If we can put up F3 here, these are the scientists who are tasked with kind of reviewing the process, talking about what they're calling adverse events, which means things not going well for people who are in the study. Let's roll this real quick, F3. I'm also concerned about a lot of the adverse events not being perhaps recorded correctly. Adverse events associated with MDMA should be recorded. Seeing less adverse events. Until an actual member of the FDA stepped in and said, this conversation needs to stop.

I've heard some comments about outside reports of potential misconduct in the studies. Although we are aware of those reports, we consider them to be unverified at this point until we do our own inspections. So the discussions and voting should be based on what is contained within our briefing documents. So that's from a video that's called What a Trip. And I think it's alluding to some of the reporting that you did that seemed to influence the committee members there.

So can you talk a little bit about what those adverse events were that she's talking about? And then generally, give us your view of like, how you would characterize your role in this process? Sure. I think there's probably, it bears mentioning from the start that that video is replete with inaccuracies and misstatements on a number of things. And you're referring to the rest of the video, right? Yes. Oh, and so with regards to that particular statement, I mean, there's sections of that video that I would say are deceptively cut as well. The FDA adcom explicitly discussed the failure to report adverse events, things like positive adverse events as well, right? So like experiences of

euphoria, things that they felt could lead to drug seeking behavior in the wake of trial participants getting MDMA from Lycos. And so there are actually very clear documented failings, which Amy Emerson, the CEO of Lycos Therapeutics, spoke to as far as why they didn't provide data that FDA was very much expecting from them, and that is also considered adverse events. Now, the sort of deceptive editing or what is being presented as some of the unverified reports. Obviously, in that clip, they're not getting into the specifics.

There have been a range of things that have come up. However, in my and my partner Lily Kay Ross's extensive investigative reporting that was published via New York Magazine, extensively vetted out via fact checking and the legal process that I'm sure you can relate to. There were a number of participants who experienced increases in suicidal ideation, non-completed attempts, mood drops after active MDMA sessions, and a psychosis, what was described as leftover psychedelic effects, and a variety of

other experiences that simply did not make it into the published literature around these trials. We know that there were issues with the reviewing of trial footage from the cameras that were recording different sessions. In fact, in one particular instance, when we asked the organization, the sponsor organization, when footage from a session that contained abusive behavior by therapists was viewed, we got five different answers. Different news media outlets got different answers than the five that we received. So when it comes to sort of adverse event collection, it's a bit of a mess. And I would describe myself as being agnostic with regards to the safety and efficacy of psychedelics as medicines.

I'm a longtime psychedelic user. I think psychedelics have a lot to offer. But my role with regards to sort of medicalization, I've been a longtime critic within the psychedelic field of the broader sort of socio-political implications of medicalization. And as a result of getting various reports over many years in this space, that was basically the impetus for the investigation that became Cover Story, Power Trip. And at the end of the day, I care about psychedelics. I care about people who are experiencing harm in both underground and above ground psychedelics. Interestingly, I report on harms from the underground.

And as you said, this isn't about whether it works or not. This is about whether certain people will have access, as you yourself have stated, in stating that law enforcement and veterans having access is a white supremacy problem. And I will throw that as far as in-depth fact checking, there's demonstrable errors in your reporting and symposia's reporting pertaining to me personally where you continually lie. So they're personally. John, before we get into that, can you give us a background of what your role was in this study and what your role is kind of in the field now? So 10 years ago, I had PTSD

and I was a participant in a Likers trial in Charleston, South Carolina with Michael and Annie Mithoffer. The therapy I received was, honestly, the therapy aspect was the same as regular therapy, like CBT, just talk therapy. I then, because I was healed of PTSD, I'd always had an interest in politics. So I started working on campaigns, was Rand Paul's National Veterans Director on a presidential campaign, worked on a lot of Senate, congressional, et cetera. I mean, Ryan, you know about campaign work. And I started doing a lot of media interviews on my own because when you're working on a campaign and you're sitting there

waiting for the candidate to show up, you've got a whole bunch of reporters waiting and you can't sit there and talk about the campaign. So you talk about anything else. I'm not a big baseball guy. So I talked about the MDMA experience that I had because I haven't done it in 10 years. I haven't had a desire to do it in 10 years. So I got more and more involved. And then because of my political acumen, MAPS became a client of mine to advise them on ending the night of monopoly and work on cannabis. They've never asked me to do an interview. Most of the interviews I've done, I've completely sourced myself, or I've had reporters email me or reach out to me in some way of their own volition. As a matter of fact, the first time you and I talked, you had mentioned

something about psychedelics on the show, and I shot you an email, or I think it was through Twitter. Now, they've claimed that specifically, let's see, in 2018, they've said that, claimed that I was on stage at CPAC. I've never been on stage at CPAC. That me and Rebecca Mercer had some conspiracy. I've never met the person. And that an interview that I did on Breitbart, mostly talking about ending the NIDA monopoly, that I was paid by MAPS to do that.

I didn't contract with MAPS till well after CPAC in 2018. So apparently Symposy's fact-checking hasn't exactly been that good. They just make assumptions, print them, and then when they do a peer-reviewed article, just point to themselves as a reference. And I will say, in the cover story of New York Times Magazine, they used me talking about my personal suicide attempt in order to denigrate me. And now, I haven't worked actually for MAPS or VETS or anybody for a couple of years now. I do humanitarian aid in Ukraine. I do still continue to talk about MDMA. My story hasn't changed, not once.

David, if you want to respond to that for a moment, and then I ask you about one other thing from the review. Yeah. I mean, any organization that attacks children, them a white supremacist, has zero integrity in my book. And that's something that you did, Brian. So I think there's a few different things that are worth replying to. So first of all, with regards to the idea that we only cover the clinical trials and not the underground, the first five episodes of the nine episode run of

Cover Story Power Trip actually deal extensively with underground abuses, including a practitioner couple that at the time was quite ascendant and that we actually got reports of what was going on. And that's what sort of kicked off what ultimately became the research and investigation that took us into the clinical trials. But it's really fascinating because both the underground and the clinical trials tie back to this Mexican psychotherapist named Salvador Roquette, who actually sort of,

not sort of, but who actually tortured student dissidents and leftists for the DFS. And there's very MKUltra vibes to the whole story. So this individual was a therapist in the trial? Is that what you're claiming?

So this is all in Cover Story Power Trip. I would suggest people listen. That's a simple question. Is this person a therapist in the trial? Because you're saying this is involving the trials. So is this person you're referencing a therapist in the trial? Yes or no? So Richard Jensen, who sexually assaulted Megan Buisson in the trial, was Salvador Roquette's interpreter and actually was a devoted acolyte of his methodology and mechanism and deployed the very methods that he talks about in the trial.

So I think this is – we're probably going to have to do a – We're in the weeds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're probably going to have to do a Friday showeds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're probably gonna have to do a Friday show on this so that we can like go a couple hours on this. That would be lovely. I think people are getting a very good sense of kind of the mess that became of these trials

through this conversation. I want to do, just play one last clip because we have to run, because we have another segment that we have to get to. So let's just play F4 here because this was the most striking comment that I heard during the review. We already have evidence-based treatments for PTSD. And yes, they do have dropout rates, but they do have really strong outcomes. They're covered by insurance. What is the burden on providers to be providing that treatment when we already have treatments that are really

effective? What I read from that reviewer is her saying, we already have pharmaceutical interventions. We already have drugs that work. I wouldn't say that they necessarily do work for PTSD, but let's pretend that's true. And she's saying, what's the burden on the providers? Which is code to me for, this would be too expensive for insurers to kind of pay for the psychotherapy and the MDMA-assisted therapy. Curious for just a response from the both of you, and then I promise we'll have you back on for a much longer discussion later. John, why don't you go first? If they're so effective, then why is there still such a high suicide rate with over 150 Americans committing suicide each and every day? Suicide is a known effect of PTSD.

The evidence-based treatments that work, they do. I mean, they do work for some people and they should be available. But also, if you take SSRIs for your entire life, plus the costs of secondary issues to taking those medications and the effects of PTSD, like alcoholism, liver damage, etc., we all know those, it's actually far cheaper to go through the protocol just from a financial aspect and be done. I mean, I haven't taken any medications other than for COVID and strep throat

since I went through the therapy. And the VA hasn't had to pay for any mental health treatment or anything like that. I think part of it is therapists like the concept of the 50-minute therapist hour where they don't have to be there with a patient for eight hours or six hours or however long the MDMA lasts in the system. I don't believe Big Pharma was against this, and I don't believe the insurance companies were against this. I think it was actually people who

freely admit they use drugs and that these are safe and effective. They just have issues with who would be treated and that everybody would have a right to heal. David, any final thoughts? And then we will have you guys back on. The reality is we don't know that these drugs are safe and effective for treating PTSD. Personally, I think all drugs should be decriminalized so people can take what they want, when they want, with whomever they want. My concern is that the quality of the research into MDMA and other psychedelics as medicines for specific indications is just not there. The quality is bad. And the reason that I'm here is because I'm trying to inform anyone who has PTSD, including veterans, that there are significant undisclosed risks and harms associated with these

trials. There's a reason that three papers were just retracted that were tied to the Lycos data. It's worth pointing out that even as veterans are claiming that this is going to decrease suicide, the sponsor hasn't actually reported that it decreases suicide. That isn't backed up by the data. And just as a final thing, I want to say that I resigned from Symposia at the end of last year because I was concerned about a former colleague's conduct and the trajectory of the institution as a whole. A major factor was that Symposia failed to investigate a formal complaint of unethical behavior filed against one of the members of the organization and then subsequently failed to address a multitude of additional issues that were presented to the team. I left nearly a year ago. I do not represent their views.

Some of the reporting that you have mentioned is not my reporting, was not done by me. It's your byline that went after my kid. But let's, yeah. We can talk about that next time. That would be great. John Lubecki, David Nichols, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this big mess of an MDMA trial. All right, Crystal, I know you had to step out because of the different Zoom issues with getting too many people remote at a time. But I think what that segment really showed is the complete and total mess that the MDMA, FDA trials produced and the mess that kind of undermined them. There's a lot more to it, as people could tell, and we'll get them back on for a much longer conversation that can really

breathe and unpack this, because this isn't over. The FDA doesn't actually have the authority to regulate psychiatry and therapy, yet the way that the therapists were involved with the medication ended up influencing the decision in a negative way. And so it's something that still has to be unpacked. It's going to take now many more years and millions more dollars. And so we might not have an FDA-approved MDMA medication for years at this point. Which is, I would assume, really important for sort of mainstreaming it and creating a permission structure, as they say,

for more therapists to take it up more broadly. Yes, because otherwise you basically can't do it. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to watching that. I know both of the experts you had on had really interesting opinions. So looking forward to watching that one myself.

Ryan, thank you so much for sitting in for Sagar today. And guys, as we said at the top, all four of us are going to be on the ground in Chicago for the DNC. So I'm super excited about that. Should be very, very interesting. And the show's schedule then

will be a little bit different next week. So just stay tuned for that. And if you can support what we're doing, breakingpoints.com, always appreciate that. And we will see you guys at the DNC next week.

All right. See you guys there. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case.

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