Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/28/24: Tulsi Joins Trump Campaign, Swing States Keep RFK On Ballot, Israel Attacks West Bank, Zuckerberg Admits Biden Censorship, France Erupts Over Macron Election Denial, Independent Tied In NB

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Tulsi joining Trump's campaign, swing states keep RFK on ballots, Israel launches massive West Bank attack, Zuckerberg admits Biden Facebook censorship, France erupts over Macron election result refusal, and Dan Osborn joins to discuss his independent run in Nebraska.    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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. 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. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

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Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chastain.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking 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 CounterPoints. How you doing, Emily? I'm doing great. How are you, Ryan? We have an amazing show today. We really do. Today we do have an, you know, we say it, but today we have an amazing show. I was telling Sagar I need more of his kid in the candy store energy in the show.

You need more ghost energy. Yes, just fired up and happy to be here. Yeah, okay, well maybe that's more of a psychological thing, though. All right, there we go. Okay. You just need more Kamala joy in your life. That might be it. There you go. That's it.

Joy is rubbing off. So we're going to talk about RFK, a lot of RFK. And also people have been asking about the Friday show. We're back to Friday shows. This Friday we're going to have a debate over the kind of the role of RFK in this race and his role in the general, whether or not he's going to actually be a boost to Trump or not, or whether he feeds into the Democratic weird meme that they're trying to wrap around Republicans. Yeah, we'll be joined by Michael Tracy and Jeff Hodges, the field director for RFK Jr.'s campaign for a debate about the

future of RFK Jr.'s Trump endorsement and all of that. So stay tuned to the Friday show for that debate, but it'll come out early for premium subscribers on Thursday night. We're going to start by covering the ongoing situation where Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are now going to be stumping for Donald Trump on the campaign trail. He's sort of collecting his former Democrat Island of Misfit toys and sending them out. And I don't say that derisively because I think we'll get into it. I don't want to. The Republicans love theirs. I mean, the Democrats love theirs. They put their Republicans up on stage at the convention. And we'll be doing some election updates. We have some interesting news about ballot access, about Kamala Harris's fundraising numbers, which are eye popping. We're going to talk

about the hostage release yesterday in Israel and other updates. Massive raid by the IDF of the West Bank. They currently have Janine surrounded. Bizarrely, they are calling it Operation Summer Camps. Come on. Are you serious? You always also know the operation name, which I think is useful. I guess sometimes it is. Other times you're like, what are you doing? Because it's such a window into the- Operation Summer Camps, come on. It's so bizarre. All right, and then we'll be talking about Mark Zuckerberg's kind of concession, his regrets about censoring- Mistakes were made.

Mistakes were made. Posts were censored. Right. And that's about both COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop story, as Zuckerberg put in a letter this week. So we And that's about both COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop story, as Zuckerberg put in a letter this week. So we will be talking about that and just the crazy ongoing situation with the French government and the French sort of their attempts to form, actually their attempts to form a government. And we'll tell you what Emmanuel Macron is up to because it's a doozy.

We were just saying that whenever your republic is called the Fifth Republic, that might not bode well for its longevity. So we may be staring at the tail end of the Fifth and the beginning of the Sixth, and it'd be interesting to see what we have in the middle. Or they just stop with the whole republic thing. It might not be a Sixth. That's true. Are there any Napoleon heirs around? There might be.

There might be. Brian, tell us about Dan Osborne, who's joining the show as a guest as well. This is fascinating. Everybody believes that control of the Senate and thus the agenda for whoever comes into office hinges on the Montana Senate race. That if Democrats and John Tester hold that one, that they're going to hold the Senate. There's also this wild card of Nebraska, where Democrats decided, you know what? People hate us so much, we're not even going to run a candidate in Nebraska. Forget about it. The absolute political dynamo of Montana Republican

Senator Deb Fischer is unbeatable. In comes veteran Dan Osborne, who led a massively successful strike in the state. And he's running a kind of class-first, independent campaign. Polls have him, shouldn't be surprising to anybody that watches this program, neck and neck with the brand-name Republican in the state. You could have a scenario where this actually pans out. Or this might be a Democratic gimmick, where they're just trying to cloak a Democrat in independent clothing, although one who happens to be a labor leader in the state with a cool background. We'll ask Dan Osborne which he is at the end of the program.

Great. Well, looking forward to that. Let's start with Tulsi Gabbard and also RFK Jr. jumping into the race on behalf of Donald Trump. This has been developing over the course of the week, obviously started with RFK Jr.'s announcement that he was formally endorsing Trump, but has developed as Trump has brought them both on as campaign advisors. This is some of the big news. And we have a clip from RFK Jr.'s recent appearance on Tucker. Tucker reportedly helped kind of broker the negotiations about an endorsement and a dropout. So let's take a listen to what RFK Jr. said on an edition of Tucker Carlson's show that came out yesterday. I'm going to work to get him elected. And, you know, I'm working with the campaign. We're

working on policy issues together. I've been asked to go on to the transition team and to help pick the people who will be running the government. And I'm looking forward to that. And I'm going to fight – I don't know what would happen to me if we lose. Well, that's kind of – I mean a lot of people I know personally and I'm friends with have gone to prison. One of them is in prison right now, Pavel Durov. There are others. Like, what happens if he loses to you? If, you mean if… Trump loses and Kamala Harris becomes president. Listen, I know, I don't, I never really think about that. What I think is, okay, here's what I got to do today. And, you know, get up every day and say, reporting for duty, sir, and then go do that. And, you know, nothing's a crisis.

Everything's a task, right? And so that's what I'm going to be, kind of a happy warrior. You know, I know what I have to do, so I'm going to do it. So Tulsi Gabbard also made a speech at a National Guard. Trump made a speech. She made her formal endorsement of Trump at a National Guard event in Detroit. So let's take a listen to Tulsi Gabbard. And as I cue up this clip, I'll also mention that it's worth remembering both RFK Jr. and Tulsi endorsed

Bernie Sanders in 2016. So here's what Tulsi Gabbard had to say at that speech. This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before. This is one of the main reasons why I'm committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House where he can once again serve us as our commander-in-chief. Because I am confident that his first task

will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war. We cannot be prosperous unless we are at peace. And we can't live free as long as we have a government that is retaliating against its political opponents and undermining our civil liberties, weaponizing our very institutions against those they deem as a threat. Kamala Harris has done this over the last three and a half years. She won't hesitate to continue that if she is elected as president. President Trump has been their first and foremost target in this because they don't want us as voters to even have the option to vote for him.

I've been their most recent target, Added to a secret domestic terror watch list after exposing the truth about what kind of dangers we would face if Kamala Harris is elected as president. Okay, so that was Tulsi Gabbard. She also, and you could probably fill in the blanks from the speech, but said one of the biggest reasons she was endorsing Donald Trump is that there were no new wars started under his watch.

And that was, foreign policy was a huge feature of the speech. I guess no surprise from Tulsi Gabbard. Now, I don't know who to blame. Go ahead. Quick programming note on that one. She mentioned that she was put on this terror watch list. Quiet Skies. Quiet Skies. Next week, we're going to have Matt Taibbi and Jeffrey Sachs on the Friday show. Yes. Talking about other stuff. But Taibbi has done a bunch of reporting on the Quiet Skies, Tulsa Gabbard element, so we can get an update on that. Anyway, go ahead.

No, no, I was going to say, I don't know who to blame for putting this Chris Silliza tweet in the rundown, because why? But we can go ahead and put A3 up on the screen. Chris Silliza tweeted this fairly interesting graph that comes from the Pew Research Center. Now, what's also pretty interesting about this, you're seeing how Harris Trump supporters view key cultural issues. If you're listening to this, that's what the graphic says. Goes down the line of gun ownership, how the legacy of slavery affects the position of black people in America today, openness to people from all over the world, religion should be kept separate from government policies. And what you see is just really intense polarization.

That was also the same between Biden supporters and Trump supporters, which is fairly interesting. Pew redid the poll after Harris got in the race because Harris has actually gotten RFK Jr. voters, this is also from Pew, who were supporting him in July, broke for Harris two to one, according to their research between July and August. So this is all happening against the backdrop of really stark cultural polarization. And I think that's what makes it doubly interesting that both RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard come from positions supporting Bernie Sanders. Tulsi obviously, memorably, was the vice chair of the DNC. These are not people who were sort of figuring out what they believed and the type of centrists who were brokering deals with the never-Trump Adam Kinzinger.

I mean, these are ideological. These are ideological. You might take issue if I say leftists, but they were at least close to that. I think what's telling and interesting about both of them is that they're both, they both have eccentric and kind of malleable politics. And that's not a criticism. What that means is that when there's a realignment happening, when there's a shift on the move, they're going to be the first types of people who are on the move. Gabbard was the kind of, so when she first ran in her primary, she was considered the more conservative of the Democrats running in the primary. And there was some skepticism of her coming in because of this really ardent support of the global war on terror, which is one of her few positions that has remained completely consistent throughout her career.

And that's why conservative is a weird label for her, among many other reasons. Yeah. And so then in February 2016, right before Super Tuesday, she resigned from vice chair of DNC and supported Bernie Sanders. But then in 2020, she ran herself rather than support Sanders. And then after dropping out, instead of endorsing Sanders, who was still running, she endorsed Biden, which is a weird, like that's not really on the horseshoe. That's her just kind of going on the spectrum, the old traditional spectrum with a little stop in the middle and then becoming an independent and then an independent conservative and then a Republican and then a Trump supporter.

But I do think this is not a criticism of hers. What it says is that I think somebody like her who has kind of the kind of politics that a lot of people have, which you have, you know, you agree with some people over here and you agree with some people over there. Defies categorization. Defies categorization. That she would be more attracted to the kind of looser coalition that is Trump right now. And she's also, correct me if I'm wrong, but she's also like a Medicare for all populist economic person as well.

She definitely was. It'd be interesting to see. Recently, I saw her saying stuff about how government spending is out of control and we've got to attack the deficit. Interesting. Very non-Bernie type stuff. But I admit she should come on the program now as an ambassador. We'd love to talk about that.

As a surrogate and say, look, I will talk about where you are on that. Because Trump is for all that stuff practically. I mean, it depends on his mood. But there was that famous moment where Paul Ryan's like trying to repeal Obamacare for like the 53rd time. And Trump's like, why don't we just do single payer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ryan's like, yeah, we're not going to do that. No, we can't.

Well, no, there might be some issues. We're not doing that. We're not that party. Right. But Trump, what does he care? He's like, is it good health care? Right. But Trump, what does he care? Is it good health care? Brent, I particularly wanted to get your take, actually, speaking about that, on this clip from RFK Jr. where he's discussing how the environmental movement's obsession with

carbon started to push him away from the Democratic Party, away from the left. He calls Tucker Carlson a radical environmentalist. Tucker agrees with that very heartily. And I think it fits into this broader discussion about how increasingly a lot of normal Americans just defy categorization. That might be because of Trump, by the way. You know, people feel like they don't belong in the Republican Party because they're really uncomfortable with Donald Trump and they're really uncomfortable for support for Donald Trump. Or you have people like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. RFK Jr. in particular has some colorful quotes about

Donald Trump from years past where he's highly critical of him. So it's kind of a remarkable turn of events to what you were just speaking about. How does Tulsi Gabbard go from endorsing Bernie to endorsing Biden to endorsing Donald Trump? And I'm thinking about Tulsi in Afghanistan. You know, Biden wanted to end the war in Afghanistan. Everybody sort of has their big priorities. And they say, I can deprioritize all of these other policy issues where I disagree with one candidate on because I think what they're going to do on this particular issue, which is my priority, which I think is the most important thing in the country, is going to get done under them. That's kind of what RFK Jr. is talking about here with the environment. So let's roll this clip of him talking to Tucker Carlson. You literally spent your life with Riverkeepers as an environmentalist and environmental lawyer

in the environmental movement. I mean, that's your life work product. Have you been expelled from the movement? Pretty much, yeah. You know, the weird thing is I think of you as a radical environmentalist. Well, I definitely am. Yeah, you are.

I haven't showered inside in 10 years. Yeah, yeah, no, I feel it so strongly. Also, you know, you love nature. You're against these big projects that are destroying it. And, you know, you talk about toxics and the environmental movement no longer talks about toxics anymore.

They don't care about it. I talk, Roger Ailes, all the time, we both of us, who would let me occasionally onto Fox News to talk about it. But there was so much hostility from the Republican Party because it was like you're attacking corporate profit taking and that these are chemicals, they're molecules, who cares? You know, they can't hurt you. And there was just, and then you do this incredible show on endocrine disruptors. And I'm like, oh, my God, Tucker Carlson has just done the best show that's ever been done showing, you know, what's happening with endocrine disruptors, how they're just destroying us. and the Democrats went after you and the environmental movement. And I'm like, what?

You know, this is what we've been trying to get for 40 years, the Republicans to care about these issues. And they said, oh, he's saying that chemicals turn people gay and he's anti-gay and all this stuff. And that wasn't what you said at all. And that's not what anybody said. Ryan, you're a hippie. Is he right? Yeah. Is he right that toxins in particular, because that's not what anybody said. Ryan, you're a hippie. Is he right?

Yeah. Is he right that toxins in particular, because that's what he's doing. He's saying, listen, Donald Trump has said that he might give me the ability to have some oversight over public health, the obesity crisis, the chemical crisis, the metabolic disease crisis. You know, I think that is the most important thing in the world. And if we don't deal with it, you know, that's why I'm basically supporting Donald Trump. So is he right that the environmental movement has moved away from those priorities in a way that's alienating sort of old school RFK Jr. environmentalists? Or is he mischaracterizing? I don't know if it's alienating old school RFK Jr. types other than him, but he's absolutely right about the focus on carbon and

climate change. There's no question about that. I don't think, and we could get him back on the show and ask him, I don't think it needs to be an either or. Climate change is an existential threat to us. The Middle East is going through, as we speak, one of its worst heat waves in history. Just looked, it's like 110 in Baghdad, which i understand people are like oh it's the middle east it's hot over there no it's like it's like much hotter than than normal um and we are facing massive problems as a result of it his point that we have overlooked toxicity is dead on. There's no constituency right now calling out forever plastics. Except for Tucker Carlson. Right. Yes. And that was an interesting program that he did on endocrine disruptors and plastics and also the way that our food system is poisoning us,

basically, at an industrial level. These are all like also existential questions that we need to be faced. So it shouldn't be an either or. Right. Because you have to get them both right. If you get one right and you don't get the other right, good luck. Yeah. So yes, we do need to focus on them both. It would be kind of a shame if you wound up with like one party is like, we need to deal with toxics than the other ones. We need to deal with carbon. And they're like, ah, forget it. Let's just do neither.

It's crazy because you can easily see like the revival of the crunchy con trope is exploding more than it was when Roger originally wrote the book Country Conservatives. Like this is right now. I've never seen anything like this in the Republican Party where you have people like R.F like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard supporting Donald Trump and talking about these issues. People like Tucker Carlson openly talking about these issues. You could easily see a world where we see this on economic policy a lot, health care policy a lot. You just never end up putting the two pieces together. They can have conversations and be like, yes, you're right. This is so important. important, but it falls apart. And this is one where you really have to bring both sides together

on this because you can't approach the question of toxicity and toxics in our food system and in our water from a personal responsibility right-wing frame. Right, right, right. You just can't. It's like, hey, have better personal responsibility. Find water that doesn't have plastic in it. Right, right. You can go to the Arctic and you can't find that. Yeah. This is a global problem that requires a global, you know, literal top-down solution that can be like democratically executed and agreed upon by everybody. But yeah, just saying like we need to, and it goes to the kind of environmentalism that corporate America tried to foist onto the world in the 90s and 80s, 90s and 2000s. One of them was, one of their big scams was recycling. Recycling, yeah.

Where they're like, just take personal responsibility and put, you know, separate things, put them in these bins, feel like you're doing something good, then they'll all put them all in the same place and they'll just make that much more plastic. The second was when they invented the term carbon footprint, as if every particular act you take has some particular carbon footprint. And then if you just buy offsets for your little carbon footprint, then actually everything's okay.

It's a great scam. Rather than saying, no, no, no, the problem is the industrial production of blasting carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be reined in at a global level, not by a few people making different choices and biking rather than driving, which you should do, but you should do all these things because they're good for you, not because you think that they're going to be the solution to a global crisis. Well, and that's the opening for, I think, a conversation with conservatives. And it's bubbling into something that's more than a conversation, which is where that's particularly worth watching. Because some of these things, right, like when you're trying to talk about

healthcare or right-left alliance or trade or right-left alliance, you can have all these conversations and then you hit a brick wall because ultimately you don't want to be seen with Donald Trump or you don't want to be seen with Joe Biden. Like chips, great example. It ultimately passed, but a lot of Republicans ended up dropping out of their support for chips, which they had like shepherded through the Senate and through Congress. And here, I mean, I just don't know where this goes because to your point, I mean, if conservatives are concerned about forever plastics, microplastics, endocrine disruptors, all of these things, you also have to, I mean, that's tethered for many people like RFK Jr. to climate, to production of like intense industrial production levels. So we'll see how it ends up. Right. There has to be an actual earnest

conversation about it because it gets really interesting because on the forever plastics, for instance, one of the leading sources of them, if you go down this rabbit hole, is car tires, like the rubber in car tires. And you need stronger tires to drive heavier EVs. So paradoxically, the more EVs you get, the more toxic tires you have, and then the more forever plastics you have out there. You could be, the oil industry would be like, aha, that shows we shouldn't do EVs, we shouldn't care about climate at all. Or you could say, okay, these are problems.

We're not morons. Like, we can get together and collectively figure this out if our goal is to actually make a better planet and not to just protect like incumbent oil industries or plastic industries or whatever else. Sure. Well, it'll be a fun one to watch. For sure. 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

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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. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me,

but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast.

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attempt to get off of the presidential ballot in Michigan. They say it's too late for him to remove his name from office, according to the office of the Secretary of State in Michigan. Now, that may not seem like a big deal. It actually really is because we remember how close the margins were in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, especially in 2016. Speaking of those states, we can go ahead and put the next element up on the screen. He's also going to remain on the ballot in Nevada, North Carolina, and guess what? Wisconsin, blue wall state. So Ryan, I've seen some theories floating around that this is kind of an effort to hurt Donald Trump on behalf of

these Dem officials in these states who want to give voters who may be torn between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump the option of voting for RFK Jr. because, you know, there are a lot of double haters and they're just going to say, I'd rather not vote for Trump. I'm going for this Robert F. Kennedy Jr. guy. You know, reasonably, many people don't follow the news as closely as we do. Mercifully, it sounds like a wonderful life, but they may not even, you know, by the time, I would assume everybody knows what happened But a lot of people are tuned out and and reasonably so so I don't know that it's like a conspiracy But it definitely does seem like it could have a small Positive effect on the Harris campaign. I almost said the Biden campaign

Yeah, Democrats started by trying to keep him off ballots now. They want him desperately to try to keep him on Some of it is his own fault. In Nevada, the deadline was August 20th. Like you show up in person, like the law is you have to show up in person and file by August 20th to get yourself off. He didn't. It was like August 20 whatever that he decided to endorse Trump. So the election officials, man, they're like, look, we got rules, rules and rules. In Wisconsin, I think he was nominated by the Natural Law Party and they held a convention. That could mean so many things. I know. It's great. So just for people who don't mercifully, you know, haven't looked into this

throughout their life, it's very difficult to get on these ballots around the country. And so one thing people try to do is try to find a party that doesn't have a candidate and a party that just for some bizarre quirk of state history has ballot access. And so RFK Jr. found the Natural Law Party in Wisconsin. And I guess his campaign was like, hey, anybody running for this? Can we run for it? They ran for that nomination. They won it. And Wisconsin said, look, in order to get him off of a party's ballot, because he's not an independent, they would have to have another convention, vote to get him off and get a new candidate. And there's no time. Ballots are going out. North Carolina ballots are going on September 6th. I was just going to say. And something like a third of North Carolina's hundred counties

Have already sent their ballots to the printer. So like we're getting into Like actual practical problems like if it which if it weren't for them Which would Trump just like say thanks JD and just put RFK jr. As his running mate Do you think if you think if logistically it could be done? He'd be done, he'd be like, you know what, let's just have Trump-Kennedy? No, I don't know, because I think Trump, I would be very curious to hear, I haven't heard this from many people, just journalistically, what Trump really thinks of RFK Jr., because one of the things with him is if you endorse him, if you sort of engage in these negotiations with him,

he doesn't always respect you. He feels like he sort of owns you. And I don't know if he has that level of respect for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But he thoroughly owns J.D. Vance. He took J.D. Vance from like third to first in the Senate race. Right. Yeah, that's true. Although RFK Jr. is sort of, yeah, I don't know. He's just like, he kind of kooky and Trump maybe Trump don't like his voice Trump well that's also also RFK Jr.'s like kid or whoever leaked that phone call that must have ticked him off I'm sure oh and North Carolina to wrap that one up they have said that I forget what party he's running on there but they said they've got no word from the party that has nominated RFK Jr. in North Carolina that he wants to be off the ballot.

Because you would think like, okay, we had a press conference, we said we want this. But he also, in North Carolina's defense, he said, I'm going to remove my name from roughly 10 battleground states where I think it's competitive, but I'm going to keep my name on in the other states for some reason. So in North Carolina's defense, they're like, look, okay, unless we get a phone call, then we're not going to take any deliberate action. Once everyone gets back from the Labor Day holiday, it is shocking how quickly the voting comes out. These ballots are going out. So I just have this calendar in front of me. There are a lot of states that are 45 days out from election, 50 days out from election, and one or two.

I think one of those might include Pennsylvania. So people are quite literally going to start voting very, very soon around the time of the first debate, which is scheduled for September 10th. Because think when we get back from Labor Day next week, there are about 60 days left before the election. So it's coming up extremely fast, tons of pragmatic questions. Now, James Carville, to this point about Donald Trump, was on a show recently talking about Trump's efforts to like right the ship of his campaign

amid the, and maybe I'm just going to go out of order to the control room here. It's in the context of what we saw happen with Kamala Harris. This is before a report from Al Jazeera, but it's been also reported elsewhere that her fundraising numbers are at a record level right now. I think she's hauled in some $540 million just after the DNC. This is a presidential record. 82 million during the convention itself. Bernie raised in 2016, 250 million from small dollars. And that was amazing. And which broke all kinds of small dollar records. I mean, Obama was in separate cases, you know, included the general election. This is just weeks, shattering records in weeks. And I think people need to understand that this also, if you believe that politicians are bought and can be bought, which you should believe because that's obvious, to have them bought by $540 million largely from

just normal people is actually a really good thing for our democracy. And the Republicans are moving in that direction too. Just filling up your inbox. And Democrats do the same thing. Fill up your inbox, begging you for money. And then in moments of real enthusiasm, you go and you're like, okay, fine. And you give, obviously you give Kamala Harris $540 million. So Kamala Harris has also 1.5 million new donors, which is really interesting coming in after Biden drops off the ticket. So that's people who weren't previously giving to the Biden campaign. This is according to the New York Times who analyzed the disclosures, which is, I think, fairly significant, actually,

just in and of herself. Who was giving to the Biden campaign? I mean, I know big money people, of course, would do that because that's their job and they're trying to buy influence. But if you're a regular person. Well, because you hate Trump. I mean, you're genuinely. You hate Trump, but it was so embarrassing. It was so bad. It was so demoralizing. Yeah. This is just uncorked enthusiasm. The New York Times reports Harris donors were slightly more likely to come from more educated zip areas and more educated areas. Zip code were more than half of those 25 and over had a bachelor's degree. And Ms. Harris also claimed a slightly higher share of first time small dollar donors from zip codes were more than 5 percent of the population was black. So that's where some of that 1.5 million new donors are coming in.

But this is obviously, if you're the Trump campaign right now, you're on your heels. These numbers are astounding. So let's go ahead and roll this clip of James Carville talking about how Trump has, in his mind as a Democratic, sort of legendary mythical Democratic strategist, analyzed the Trump campaigns or Donald Trump himself's reaction to Harris joining the ticket. He has a shark-like survival instinct. And he knows that he's not having the same effect as he used to.

He knows that Harris has become what he's always wanted to be, is the kind of hot item. He does. And he's not wanted to be is the kind of hot item. He does. And he's not the new kid on the block anymore. And he's struggling to regain that. But he, like I say, he has very primitive survival skills. And I think this is something that and it's driving him crazy right i think what you're saying is he's in deep in deep trouble and is aware of it he is he is and he's aware and now how he gets out of it or can he get out of it i don't know very primitive survival skills

so james carmel's well said well i mean I don't know. He survived pretty long at this point. But primitive creatures survive for millennia. Fair enough. Fair enough. Now, the interesting, well, it's beyond interesting. I mean, it's always worth remembering. It kind of feels like it gets lost in all of this. A primitive is a compliment, by the way, because it's like those are the best survival skills.

Okay. I don't think he was using that as a compliment. You don't want an accountant's survival skills. Okay. I don't think he was using it as an accountant. You don't want an accountant's survival skills. True, but James Carville seemed to be using it in the sense that he's a kind of Neanderthal. Yeah, but I think he respects a Neanderthal. Okay, okay. Fellow Neanderthal. As a Clinton, yeah.

A Clinton operative, fair enough. Well, Donald Trump is in, quote, deep trouble because if he loses this election amidst this flood of cash for his opponent and a polling surge for his opponent, he could be facing jail time. He can't dismiss, for example, the DOJ's case against him, the Jack Smith case against him. That was just re-upped. Can't pardon people. Right, yeah, just re-filed yesterday to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity or to make it more, to sharpen it in light of with the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity or to make it more, to sharpen it in light of what the Supreme Court decided in that case. So he is, quote,

in deep trouble if he loses the election because, you know, obviously his freedom is on the line. Yeah, and we can put up B5 here. Democrats are now getting extremely confident about, not about extremely confident, but they're getting excited about the possibility of actually flipping the House. And we're going to talk to Dan Osborne, Senate candidate, at the end of this show, because Democrats actually also believe that they have a chance of holding the Senate. There is a chance that they could, they went from assuming, and several members of Congress in this article said, that they were going to lose all three chambers decisively to thinking we might actually win all three of these at this time. And a Democratic operative was making an interesting point to me about Harris that I think plays into this, which is that there's a key difference between her and Barack Obama in this sense that in 2008, the Democrats and kind of

independent progressives and others kind of invested their hopes into Obama as this transformative, unique leader who was going to, you know, take them somewhere new. Like he was the guy that was going to do it. They absolutely do not think of Kamala Harris that way. When they think of Kamala Harris, they think of somebody who can be the vessel for people's ability to fight against Trump. That's interesting. She'll do. Interesting. And they're actually just, they're rooting for her. And that's why they're, I think, fine that she hasn't had any interviews yet at all and when they watch that interview Thursday night that she's gonna do with Dana bash they're all just

gonna be on pins and needles and with their fingers crossing like please comma please come please Kamala just you know hoping that she does well enough that she can then be the thing that that they used to kind of fight back against Trump. Whereas when it was Obama, they would have been sitting back and just watching and like allowing Obama's genius to like wash over them. Yes. And I think- Like their joy washes over everyone.

No, that's their joy in Biden being gone. But I think it's actually paradoxically a much healthier relation. They have a much healthier relationship with Kamala Harris. You should not invest all your hopes into a politician. Yeah a politician. You should actually have no confidence in them at all and need to kind of push them and drag them because that's the democratic will then kind of working rather than this guy is going to take us to the promised land. The magical transformation of Kamala Harris, though, I think has some people who were previously very cynical about her now genuinely investing like emotionally in Harris as a human

being, which is, yeah, is absolutely wild. So to your point, also a brilliant move, I think, by the Harris campaign to finally agree to a sit down interview. It's going to be a joint interview with Harrison Walls on CNN with Dana Bash. And they put it as far forward as possible. And yeah, weeks ago, she said she hopes her team will schedule one by the end of the month. It is like, right. It's happening on Thursday night, literally the eve of Labor Day weekend. Maybe we'll get one by the end of September. Maybe if we're lucky. But I mean, it's just like, tactically, it's the same thing with this entire campaign. It has been such a risk-averse campaign. And I think it's like

anti-small-D Democratic and hypocritical from the democracy. And risk- it's like anti-small d democratic from, you know, the, and hypocritical from the democracy. And risk averse vice presidency. It's smart. We played a couple months ago that clip with Lester Holt, where she sits down to do an interview on the border. Oh, yeah. And he asks her, you know, why haven't you gone to the border? She's like, I have gone to the border. He's like, no, you haven't. She's like, oh, well, I haven't gone to Europe either. It was the most surreal exchange. Like, why did you just say you went to the border? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. She didn't do an interview for like a year after that. Yeah. I mean, it's not her strength. It could be Palin-esque. But, you know, she's feeling herself right now. And that goes a long way just in terms of your personal confidence when you're in

These interviews and it can backfire on you too and having walls there It's kind of a funny move and also right for this tiny ecosystem on the right the Laura Loomers of the world who were convinced that Democrats deeply regretted their choice of Tim walls and that he was gonna be swapped out for whoever any minute now They must be very confused by Kamala Harris asking Walls to join her in her first interview. How do you make sense of that if you're convinced that he's actually cooked and they're embarrassed by him? Yeah, I don't know. It's a good point. But any mistakes they make will absolutely be buried in the Labor Day weekend. I mean, it's Thursday. That's true, right? Yeah? So Friday, many people are already on vacation.

D.C. is like all in the Hamptons right now. So everyone's empty. Yeah, city's empty. Everything will just be buried. Anyway, so sort of a brilliant move. As much as I hate it, game respect game. Camp Shane, one of America's longest runningrunning weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal.

It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez.

I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Ryan, let's move on to the Middle East and the invasion of the West Bank, which is ongoing right now. Tell us what happened. So last night, the IDF launched what they called Operation Summer Camps, which is an invasion of major parts of the occupied West Bank, focused heavily on the refugee camp of Jenin. We can put this first element up. Associated Press was reporting that every entry in and out of Jenin was being blocked by armored vehicles- Which you can see on the screen here. Yeah, and that the hospitals were, they had blocked access to all hospitals

and other medical centers. Their argument was they didn't want to allow people to kind of shelter in hospitals. And so they have said that this is the largest assault. The Israeli army announced that this is the largest assault, the Israeli army announced that this is the largest assault on the West Bank since 2002 that will involve thousands of service members and will last for days. And they have said it's a preemptive attack on what they said is the buildup of resistance

groups in these refugee camps. They just did a preemptive attack on Hezbollah, a lot of preemptive attacking going on, the preemptive attacks for decades at this point. At least nine Palestinians were killed in this attack, which is a number that, yeah, which pales in comparison to this day, the numbers of deaths that you get in Gaza from the ongoing Israeli attacks. You're also having, and we can talk about this later in a bit, an attack on southern Qanunis by the IDF, a raid there, which appears to be based on intelligence gleaned from the Bedouin hostage who befriended, this is what we're hearing in the media. By all accounts, it appears to be true that he did, you know, he had a good rapport with some of his captors and has been debriefing with the IDF continuously since he was released. And that the coincidence of the kind of raid on South Konya seems to be suggest that

The IDF believes that they have Intel that they can they can operate on so we may soon be hearing new you know the the bodies of hostages being recovered or more more hostage rescues the way that the the way that the Bedouin hostage was rescued, it turns out, was because communications were disabled, you know, between, because the infrastructure is so completely annihilated in Gaza that, you know, different Hamas operatives lost communication and basically they weren't able to keep up with people. A number of hostages were recently found suffocated in a tunnel after an IDF bombing.

And so there's a huge risk to hostages of the constant shelling and the constant attacks and destruction of the infrastructure and the inability of their captors to communicate with each other because they're, you know, they don't want them to die. Like, they want to keep them alive. This guy, very, you don't want to call anybody who went through that 10 months of hell lucky, but lucky in the sense that the tunnel didn't collapse on him and he didn't suffocate. And we've heard that from other rescued hostages who said they felt like nobody knew where they were and there was indiscriminate bombing around them.

They didn't have confidence that they were being protected or safe. And they felt lucky. Basically, that's the implication there is that we're lucky that we didn't die. Right. From our, like, I don't want to call it friendly fire because it's not exactly the same, but from bombing in Gaza. Yeah. What do we have to see, too, here? Put up this next element.

So, yeah, this is Channel 14 is like Israel's Newsmax, basically. The army has launched a large-scale missile in several areas at the same time in Channel 14. One of the correspondents there said something like, everyone's survivor, you're all going to die. If you ever want some blood-curdling stuff, Channel 14 is the place to go. Put up the third element here in this block. Ah, yes, there it is. Terrorists in Northern West Bank,

the gates of hell have opened. Either you surrender or you die. Which, okay, some interesting trash talking, just weird from a journalist. I'm somebody who believes in putting some passion into your journalism and it's okay to have a point of view. Just an interesting approach. Just a little weird. The gates of hell have opened. So anyway, Operation Summer Camp, according to Channel 14 in Israel, is the gates of hell opening on the occupied West Bank, which again, to be clear, is not Gaza and is not controlled by Hamas. You know, and the Operation Summer Camp with that juxtaposition to the communication, that is just, yeah, it's very, I mean, not surprising, but bizarre nonetheless.

I'm putting the fourth element here. This is the Biden approving humanitarian aid to Gaza via the floating pier, despite warnings from the U.S. government that rough waves could pose significant challenges and objections. This is from Yashar Ali saying an IG report revealed that Biden himself approved this plan. Right. Right. Which we would have assumed there's no way that this gets done without Biden. But it's this this IG report has some interesting details that of people arguing logistically, quote, high waves was what they were calling it. Here we call it high tide. They're like, look, this isn't going to work.

The idea just logistically is dumb. And he's like, no, it's fine. Let's put hundreds of millions of dollars into this. And then separately, the report exposes internal objections, which kind of leaked out into the press at the time and also were obvious. There were people inside the State Department were saying, this gives Israel an out on actually letting humanitarian aid through the ports of entry that already exist. And if you remember from our reporting on this at the time, like, this is weird. Like, you're acting like there's some natural disaster around the rest of Gaza. It's waves.

Where you're unable to just put food and humanitarian aid into trucks and drive it in and distribute it to people. Like, somehow that has become an impossibility that what you need to do is build this $500 million peer and then bring it in from Cyprus. But then as soon as they started loading supplies into Cyprus, the IDF was just crawling around Cyprus and doing the exact same thing with their pencil and their clipboard. They're like, oh, what number do you have on this truck here? That number doesn't match what I have. Sorry, back of the line. So if you don't solve the problem, what is one extra port that doesn't even work going to do? We talked to someone a couple of months ago, I think it was

in Cyprus at the time that we had that conversation with him about how trucks were being. And that's the United States wanted Israel to accept more trucks. And as a huge backer and funder of the war, if your ally, who's prosecuting this war, won't comply with that, you then spend how much money? I mean, what's the total on this pier to get around it? Because they won't let trucks through. The only extent to which this worked at all is that because of this pier, that's when you had the World Central Kitchen convoy attacked by the IDF and killed. And because they attacked the World Central Kitchen, because people in Washington, D.C. know Jose Andres, that embarrassed Biden enough that he made a phone call to Bibi and said, come on, this is embarrassing. You're killing me

here by killing all of these people. And then all of a sudden, for a couple of weeks, more trucks started getting in, proving the case that it was actually Israeli policy. Because if it wasn't, then why could, you know, Bibi tweak it and all of a sudden more trucks are getting in. That obviously didn't last long. And the long-term effect of killing the World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers was that there were many fewer humanitarian aid workers willing to, for good reason, go out onto the distribution runs, which then led Israel to say, well, it's the United Nations and UNRWA that can't distribute the aid. It's really not our fault. It's their

fault. Ignoring the fact that they had killed more than 100 family and workers of UNRWA and had led a global campaign to defund them. There's some truth to the claims about UNRWA from the Israeli perspective. But we've talked about this before. When it's that embedded in such a tiny and concentrated population, that's sort of inevitable. And a big picture thought on this is post-World War II, these are all of the tangled, bizarre conversations that we have. And now we have international pressure that you feed civilians of your enemies, which is in the sort of aggregate, a good thing and unusual in all of human history. But if you say that you're doing it, you got to do it. If you agree to the terms, and if you want to throw international law around like Biden does when it comes to Russia and then flout it or fail

to pressure people into complying with it when you're supplying arms, etc. It's obviously incredibly problematic. Let's put C5 up on the screen. This is a video of the hostage rescue. Yes, and that's actually a Muslim citizen of Israel, 52-year-old man, was rescued. You can see the body cam footage from the IDF on the screen here. Like Ryan said, pretty lucky situation. well worth mentioning, that this has re-upped calls from the family members of other hostages who have not been rescued, of which there are, I think, roughly an estimate of like alive 70,

something like 60, 70 right now. Those families are calling for a ceasefire. So it has put that in the spotlight once again in headlines that you have the family members, the loved ones of people who are still being held hostage re-upping their demands for ceasefire because this was the fourth successful recovery, I think, the fourth successful recovery by the IDF of hostages. But there are a lot of people who have been over there since October 7th and their families want to ceasefire and they want them back. And that domestically complicates the politics for Netanyahu as well. It's Wednesday. You could have all of the hostages or an enormous number of the hostages out by the end of this week if they would just agree to the deal that Israel already put forward.

That's what's so wild about these ongoing negotiations, that Israel put forward a deal, Biden made that deal public, Hamas said, this works for us, let's implement this framework, let's do it. And then Netanyahu's come back with, well, actually, we want to checkpoint in the Tzareem corridor, we want to control the access through Rafah, etc. And so we're back to a place where they're deadlocked again. And yeah, okay, so that's important context to all of this too. That's where we are right now with the potential ceasefire deal, which was the Biden camp was saying was more and more likely as we went through the Democratic Convention week, which I thought was very interesting timing. And now after DNC week is over, maybe these things

are not, but my theory at the time was those public relations for the Biden campaign to say, like, hey, this is going really, really well. We're doing a great job. We're almost there. And, you know, when the week turned to the next week, it became pretty clear that's not what was happening. Right. And meanwhile, it's been interesting to see kind of Israeli society first mourning a lot of the children that were killed who were kind of Syrian Arab children in occupied Syria or calling them Israelis and then saying they're going to attack Hezbollah over that when the relationship between those populations and the Israeli government is mostly adversarial otherwise. And then if people wanna look up how kind of,

the Bedouins are treated in settlements that are refused to be recognized legally by the Israeli government, that's just an interesting juxtaposition here uh watching this unfold and as as we think about the the the mass roundup that must be going on as we speak in in the west bank it's worth noting this final element here is a human rights just absolutely horrifying human rights watch uh report uh that has come out that is confirming a lot of what B'Tselem and other reporting has already shown us about the absolute, I don't want to say collapse of the

Israeli detention system because that suggests that it's something that was done accidentally. The Smotrich, oh, no, sorry, National Security Advisor Ben Gavir has said. Don't forget him. Yeah, that he has said that he wants conditions in these detention centers to be as horrifying as you could possibly imagine, and then some. And the Human Rights Watch report takes all the caricatures that you've understood about torture throughout the worst movies you can think of, and ratchets them up to 11. People held naked naked upside down, you know, being, you know, tortured with electrocution, sexual assault, rape. Well, one, I don't know if you noticed this, one of the accused rapists from that prison facility is now regularly going on like Israeli game shows and being kind of feted and celebrated

as a way to say, like, look, we defend this, we support this. So check that Human Rights Watch report out. Yeah. We'll continue to follow the story, of course. 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. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024. Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover,

to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice

in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty.

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fairly big news from Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, who actually wrote in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee this week that he regrets two different censorship moves that Meta took back in around 2020, roughly, pandemic era. One was surrounding the Biden White House's, not secret at all, in fact, Jen Psaki at the time was public about this in a sort of braggadocious way, demands for social media companies, including Meta, to censor what they deemed at the time to be COVID disinformation. We can put D1 up on the screen. And also, the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Zuckerberg, we'll get to this in just one moment, memorably told Joe Rogan, the FBI approached Meta in the weeks before the 2020 election, informing Meta to be on high

alert for Russian disinformation. 2021, Biden administration attempts to censor COVID content. 2020, the Biden campaign and the FBI had pressured them to censor- Well, he doesn't say Biden campaign. Right. No, no, no, he doesn't. But we know that the Biden campaign was telling people not to run the story. Doing it deliberately. I mean, they were doing it publicly, basically. A hundred percent. And now what's also very interesting is Zuckerberg responded in this letter to Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee, where he did, of course, copy ranking member Jerry Nadler, and said that the roughly $400 million that he had put into

boosting, quote, electoral infrastructure. You can see this quote on the screen in front of you if you're watching. He will not be making similar contributions this cycle. That money was huge. And by the admission of a Molly Ball story in Time magazine, everybody remembers she described efforts spearheaded by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. That's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. It's $400 million contribution as that well-funded cabal. That is the word of the time. This is the language of the Time magazine story. And there were analyses that came out afterwards saying it disproportionately boosted election infrastructure in Democratic areas. Zuckerberg in this letter to Jim Jordan said

he doesn't agree with those analyses, but he won't be contributing nonetheless in the context of all of the concerns about what happened. That is a response I think probably most prominently to my former boss, Molly Hemingway, who wrote a book basically about what happened after Zuckerberg made those contributions called Rigged. And I don't know, I haven't seen Zuckerberg directly address it in a way like this before. So he just kind of seemed to be throwing a bone to the right in this letter in huge, huge ways. Now, I think I agree with everything that he says here in terms of like directionally. I think this is all good. But he also called Trump badass recently. Remember that? Yeah. Well, he was saying you're getting shot in the ear and then standing up and

pumping your fist was badass, which objectively is true. Yeah, no, it absolutely is. But like, he's an enemy. He's long been considered an enemy of Trump. So it was sort of interesting. Which I don't know exactly why. The Clinton people think that Facebook actually boosted Trump. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's probably an argument to be made for that. But, I mean, he's been at least— He lives in Berkeley, or he lived in Berkeley or whatever. Superficially anti-Trump.

They ever listen to what this guy said? Not so sure that's the case. The reason I don't buy into as much of that, so on the Wisconsin Zuckerberg money that went into boosting the mail-in ballots, I think it's probably true that the analysis necessarily deserve blame for that is that the reason it helped Democrats is that Trump and Republicans made the absolutely inscrutable decision in real time to urge all of their encouraging people to vote by mail is going to benefit the party that is taking advantage of it. Trump, I think, recognizes that that was a fundamental mistake. And you see him now saying, we're going to get rid of mail-in voting when I'm president. But we haven't yet. So everybody needs to vote whatever way that you should vote. Gone is that rhetoric of don't do mail-in voting

mm-hmm because it also leaves you vulnerable to chance like in Nevada where Democrats all voted early and then in northern Nevada on Election Day. You had a giant snowstorm. Yeah, we're like, yeah, I'm not gone Not been spinning my truck off the side of the road for Trump. Yeah, right so here's a flashback to how Zuckerberg talked about the lead up to the Hunter Biden laptop controversy with the New York Post. This is two years ago on Joe Rogan's show. Zuckerberg kind of opened up about this with some, I mean, if we take him at his word, and he seems to be genuine in this quote because it's like he's

reflecting on how he didn't know what he was getting into. And I'm doing a segment on my show Undercurrents tomorrow on this because I found it so interesting that Zuckerberg in his letter cited kind of his own declining institutional trust. He says, at the time, I trusted the FBI. This is what he gets into with Joe Rogan. He's like, I trusted law enforcement that they had, you know, best interests of the country. And we, you know, thought this was the right thing to do. So let's take a listen to Zuckerberg on Rogan. It's like, okay, if someone has spent a bunch of time, you know, searching for puppies, you know, they like puppies. So if you show them a puppy video, they'll probably engage with that. But if you only show them puppy videos,

over the long term, you're missing an opportunity to understand what other things that they're interested in. So even though it might not be kind of ideal for the experience today, carving off, you know, 5%, 10% of basically the experience to just try to expose people to different things to see if they're interested in that too, ends up paying long-term dividends. So I do think that these systems have done well. If you design them with a long-term perspective and you're not just trying to kind of maximize engagement today, but you're really trying to understand what people care about and who people want to become and what their values are, I think you can build some stuff that gets really good over time. But I do think

that the design of the system and the values that go into it matters quite a bit too. So that was actually him talking about the way that Facebook and social media should be designed healthily. But in that Joe Rogan appearance, he also talked about how the FBI approached him. He trusts the FBI. And it wasn't that they told him, you must suppress the Hunter Biden story. He said that there was a lot of daylight between what Meta did and what Twitter did at the time. He was sort of criticizing Jack Dorsey for throttling the New York Post link.

I don't know if you remember this. I remember going to DMs to- They took the New York Post account down. So this is genuinely the most Orwellian thing I've ever experienced in this country, when you went to send the link, you copy, paste the link into a direct message, it would say, can't do it. We just say this, this won't work. Pakistan. Same thing. Yeah. It was the same thing when you tried to post it. So that in and of itself was a pretty interesting, but it's, I think one of the big takeaways here. Jack Dorsey has also said

that the reporting in the Twitter files showed that Twitter was mismanaged under his leadership. He's agreed with a lot of the criticisms in the Twitter files. Basically, he's supported Elon Musk. Jack Dorsey said it was a mistake to throttle the link. And now it's like all of these regrets. You look back and listen, a lot of people on the right are like, this is too little, too late. I mean, this is good. I'm like the only the top line for me is that this is good. But our allergy to government censorship is kicking back in. I think that's a good thing that the antibodies and the American system saying, I don't care if I, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is not like a Trump supporter, no matter if he's a sort of Silicon Valley

Nietzschean oligarch, he's not a Trump supporter. And Jack Dorsey is certainly not a Trump supporter, even though he's been supportive of Elon Musk. But so these people saying, your government should not be telling us what information can be disseminated generally. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. Apple ended up letting Parler back on the App Store. So, you know, dust settled. And I feel like we actually came out on top.

And hearing him talk about the Facebook algorithm is interesting from the perspective of what if you actually just showed people stuff from the people you follow, your friends and family, and you showed your stuff to the people who follow you? What about that? Can you imagine? It's a crazy idea. It's so wild. Why did they make everybody jump through all these hoops of friending people and actually listing the things that they like and subscribing to things that they like. And then they wrote an algorithm that says, actually, none of what you have

told us is going to be factored in in any significant way into our algorithm. Instead, we're going to just feed you stuff and see like a rat, which makes you click the fastest. Right. Going to your basest human instincts. Yeah. Race to the bottom. Rather than the things that you consciously from your better self and like, no, I want to keep up with what my aunt's up to. Yeah. Right. Even if like, I don't agree every single time, but I'm curious, like what's she up to? What's my cousin up to? Right. And they're like, no, you don't actually care about that. What you really care about is, you know, seeing like a random fist fight in Milwaukee. So we're going to give you that. Why Milwaukee?

I don't know. Why not Philly? Milwaukee suburbs, yeah. I say Philly. Or, yeah, you want to see like. Eastern Shore. Yeah. Well, I never see anything from there.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Because even if you care about it, they know that they can, they're more likely to get you to spend more time. As somebody like jumping off a cliff or something. Yeah.

Like what is it, like why are you, like, I'm so old. Actually, you do sound really old right now. But yeah, it's a pretty, like just the, all of this was written in a letter to Jim Jordan, like, these major concessions. Interesting.

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.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people

who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So let's move over to France, where this isn't getting a ton of pickup in the American press, but incredible. And maybe it's because the American press isn't as attuned to the actual left. I don't know, because if you're on the actual left, the story is incredibly disturbing and validating as the sort of the mushy neoliberal middle and their true allegiance to, what do they say, lowercase d democracy and all of those things. Ryan, what on earth? We can go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen. This is from BBC. French left backs protests after Macron rejects prime minister choice. What is going on behind that headline? So this is wild. So let's explain to people how this

fifth republic, this fifth French republic works. So basically they've got a president and a prime minister. The president is the kind of good-looking guy you put out on the international stage, handles foreign policy. Doesn't matter if he's short. Does not matter. Short game. The prime minister handles domestic affairs. Traditionally, they've always been from the same coalition, the same party, basically, because that's just how it has worked out

They may have stumbled on a fatal flaw in their fifth Republican Constitution so in the last election results the the far left finished first the far right finished second and Then McCrone and his center-right party finished third. And I guess you got some little other part, and then a bunch of like dregs, you know, finishing after that. So you would think, okay, fair enough. The far left gets to form a government and we go from

there. Macron and the far right are like, no, we actually don't want to see that happen. And they have the power to stop it because the far left did not win an absolute majority. And they don't have anybody forming one with them. from the far left to form a government, the right and the center right and the rest of the dregs would immediately hold a no confidence vote and oust the government. So he could do that. And in Spain, the king did that. They had like an 18 month standoff that was very similar to this one. And the king was like, okay, fine. You you know what the right wing in this case was the right wing the right wing won more votes uh but doesn't have a majority so fine go ahead form a government and like backed off and let them try then they failed and then they let the center-left form a government so macron is not even allowing that and so what the left said okay

fine you don't like us you don't like our policies and macron has been okay, fine, you don't like us, you don't like our policies. And Macron has been very clear. It's we don't like, I don't agree with your policies, your politics. Like we don't want the left in charge. He's been very clear. He's like, I don't care what the voters said. So they have said, okay, here's this 34-year-old unobjectionable woman who will be our prime minister minister and we will take zero cabinet positions. They're like, that's their concession to the fact that they did not win an outright majority.

And Macron's like, no, not good enough, not going to do that. And as we saw, you put up this next element here. So he's sitting down with Le Pen and saying, all right, who knows what he's talking about with Le Pen in these talks. And the French left, by the way, was so concerned that Le Pen's party would do incredibly well. And the elections were in July, would do so well that they, that's the bigger context, is that they all formed a coalition alliance. Right. And that's. To fend off the fascists. Right, exactly. Right. And so now Macron is like, well, let's sit down with fascists. And so you've got all these bizarre arguments where they're saying the left doesn't deserve to govern because some of the people who voted for the left weren't actually voting for a left

wing agenda. They were only voting to block Le Pen. Right. So it's illegitimate. And you know what? Okay. A, that's true. B, like psychoanalyzing why somebody voted for somebody is ridiculous. You have no idea. They voted for them. Yeah. C, that's the only reason anybody has ever voted for Macron. So by Macron's own reasoning there, Macron is thoroughly illegitimate. Nobody has voted for Macron. And every time he has won, he has won because he's not Le Pen. And so here he is.

So now, so I talked to Art Goldhammer, who we've had on the show before, who's a French, he lives in France, an American who lives in France. He translated Piketty, he translated Tocqueville. He's great. And he's like, I have no idea where this ends. Usually he's like, here's where this goes from here. And he's like, it has the feel of the beginnings of an extremely bitter divorce. Like there's absolutely no good faith among any of the parties. And he's like, it might be a fatal flaw in the Constitution.

Very poignant. Because there actually is no way out of school and to make people understand why this is happening now in this new era where we have kind of far left and far right both rising For the entire history of the French Republic and this goes for other countries to the dominant parties Were the center left and the center right? Hmm, and so if if let's say this Let's say McCrone center-right party wins the most votes The center-left wins the second and then the far left and far right are off in the background somewhere

The center-right would then grab a couple of little tiny parties from the far right and they form a government Center-right wouldn't complain because they didn't win the election and they get to be part of this governing coalition and in general The voters wouldn't complain because they'd say, okay, this is fair enough. Like a majority of people voted either for a center-right or a far-right government. Now, when the dominant polls are the far-left and the far-right, it's not clear who the far-left forms its coalition with.

Because, okay, let's say the far left forms its coalition with the center left. Who then is the prime minister? Well, it would only be fair that it's from the far left because they won the most votes. But at the same time, a majority of voters voted against the far left. You know, let's say 55, 60% wanted center left over all the way to the right. So the center left party says, no, actually, if you want to represent the median voter,

it should be us. But there is no median voter anymore because you're using this old spectrum rather than understanding that actually you've got different wings of populism that are the overwhelming majority against the kind of fading neoliberal elites. And so the old frame just doesn't work for the new politics. It's so interesting you say that because I was just going to bring up this, I'm reading from this unheard article, Keir Starmer doesn't understand populism because Keir Starmer gave a speech this week that was described as, quote, gloomy by a lot of the press. And the author of this article makes a really, really good point that actually really the failure

when Starmer was talking about, quote, the snake oil of populism in his speech. He's pinning all of those riots, the Southport riots that we talked about a couple of weeks ago on, quote, 14 years of Tory failure, just pinning the blame on the Tories. And this writer says, the public has a sense that the roots of our national woes go much deeper, more than 40 years of a broken economic and social settlement, which we owe to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, as well as their heirs, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Rishi Sunak. The mantra, there's no alternative, has produced decades of rampant economic and social individualism dressed up as progress, when in reality, we've gained individual freedoms, yet lost stability and common solidarity. This is connected to what

we talked about in the first block of the show today, about people like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard founding common cause with Donald Trump because he's somewhat heterodox in the Republican Party on particular issues, how he uses government, etc. But still not even that being the perfect marriage. Our categories don't work anymore. They only kind of superficially ever did for the average voter. And everybody right now is just spinning their wheels and reeling to try and figure out the solution. But people like Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron and arguably Kamala Harris, and maybe even to some extent you could say Donald Trump, they have no real idea how to address this. And James Pogue wrote that story about Chris Murphy for the New York Times. I don't know if you read it about how Chris Murphy is genuinely trying to figure out

what Democrats can do to address some of the concerns that the new right is tapping into. He's like the only person in the Democratic Party other than Roe. He's my neighbor. Roe Conno. Oh, really? Well, he should talk to you. He was like actually seriously engaged in that project. You see basically none of that from the Starmer, Macron, Harris's of the world. Right. Yes, that's right. And so we can put up this third element here from this Macron ally, Bayrou. Or this is a great, great follow. I don't have my glasses on, so I can't tell exactly what his ad is. What is it? Arnaud Bertrand. He's great on so much stuff. Yeah. What is he? He's fantastic. It, Arnaud Bertrand, he's great on so much stuff. Yeah.

What is he? He's fantastic. It's Arnaud Bertrand, so R-N-A-U-D-B-E-R-T-R-A-N-D. And so he's talking here about how this Macron advisor is just very explicitly saying that it's the left program that Macron objects to and that they, as the establishment elite, object to and that they're going to cling to power against this

come hell or high water. The fact that this is happening at the exact same time the establishment elite object to and that they're going to cling to power against this come hell or high water. The fact that this is happening at the exact same time as they arrested the Telegram founder in Paris, I think it might be a coincidence in the fact that events are lining up at the same time, but the trends are similar. The establishment elite is going to need censorship and authoritarianism to kind of lock down this bubbling rise of populism. And so what Bayrou is arguing there is he's stating a fact, which is that the left did not win an outright majority. But then he goes on, therefore they should not be able to govern. But whenever the center-left or the center-right won 45% of the vote, they were not told, and were the leading vote-getter by far, they were not told, oh, you only won 45%, you don't get to govern. If it's the center-left, the left-wing parties

would join with them and they'd form a coalition. If it's center-left, the left-wing parties would join with them and they'd form a coalition. If it's center-right, the right-wing parties would join with them and form a coalition. But the center is unwilling to do that for either poll. Right, right. Center-left and center-right too, whether it's Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer. Right. And so, although in our system, they seem a little bit more willing to do that. And also that our centers are holding better than, well, maybe are the center and the Democratic Party is holding better than the one in the Republican Party? Yeah. No, I mean, that's the question. It's like, how much longer does that last? I posed that question actually to Rick

MacArthur, who's the president of Harper's and publisher of Harper's, because he wrote a story for Spectator World about how Democratic elites have been able to control the party so well over the course of the last several decades. And the Sun undercuts, too. And there is such a difference between how Republicans totally lost control when Donald Trump came along. And Democrats fought Bernie Sanders tooth and nail in 2016, were able to use the muscle of the DNC to shut down the Sanders campaign or to hamper the Sanders campaign. Did it again in 2020 by getting Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to come together. And the Republicans had basically no ability to do anything about Donald Trump, whereas Democrats actually, like the DNC, figured out how to muscle him out of the picture and to get rid of people like Marianne and Tulsi, just basically shut those campaigns down. And I mean, not shut them down, but hamper their ability to be serious contenders.

It's a good segue into our next segment, which is an interview with independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. We don't know if this will be the independent that breaks through and becomes an actual senator. But I do think it's going to happen over the next several cycles. Somebody's gonna break through and do it. I mean, obviously Bernie Sanders already did it, us as an independent in Vermont in 2006 but Nobody else has been able to do it since then. Mm-hmm Well, I like right now I'm not thinking of anybody who is like a fake version of that

So anyway up next independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne who is polling neck polling neck and neck with the Republican in Nebraska on a class-first message. 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. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover,

to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is Nebraska Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne.

Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on Thank you so much for having me on. And so we're having you on at kind of an interesting time in your race. Now, not only has your Republican opponent, Deb Fischer, just been officially nominated to be your only opponent, and I believe it's correct that there's no Democrat running in the race, but you really kind of rocketed to Nebraska stardom as the leader of this strike and the leader of the Kellogg's strike, very successful strike three years ago, seeing that Kellogg's is now claiming it's closing its plant. So can you back up for

people who aren't familiar with the Kellogg's story at all? Tell us about your 18-year career there that led up to the strike and what the strike was over and where we are now. Yeah, not that I'm really ever into correcting people, but it was 20 years I spent there. 20 years, sorry. Yeah, no, no worries. Those details matter. Sometimes, this one not necessarily. But yeah, I was a mechanic there for 20 years. Really, my origin story with Union begins at COVID. We all have our COVID stories. Most of them not good. But I was Union president during COVID.

We were working, and it's noteworthy to say that there's four North American plants under the umbrella of the master contract. And we were all working seven days a week, 12 hours a day as essential workers during that time. Kellogg's made record profits that year. They went from, well, it's noteworthy to say also, we kept all plants going at 100% capacity. So they made record profits. They went from $19 billion to $21 billion. The CEO gave himself a $2 million raise. The board enriched themselves, the stockholders enriched themselves, and our contract expired that year. We figured it was going to be

a no-brainer. We were going to get our little slice of the pie. But instead, Kellogg sat across the table from us. On the first day, they said, we're going to go after your health insurance. We're going to go after your cost of living wage adjustment, which was our only form of wages designed to keep us even with inflation. You know how that went. And we're going to implement a two-tier wage system with no path for a lower-tier employee to move to the upper tier. So essentially, everybody's going to be on the lower tier. So for me as president, that was my old crap moment. There hasn't been a strike in Nebraska since 1972. I had to learn what that meant.

But we could not come to an agreement with Kellogg's, and so we shut down four North American cereal plants, and we walked off the job to preserve our wages and benefits. We all felt we were on the right side of history on this. And I knew out on the picket, one congressperson to come out to the picket line and one governor to draft a letter on our behalf to send it to the CEO, imploring him to get our people back to work. But we were on strike for 77 days and we got a favorable contract. But I stood up for the people when we felt we were getting wronged. But Kellogg's announced that they're closing the plant in Omaha in 2026. And a lot of people online, a lot of keyboard cowboys and cowgirls online

blaming me in particular, but the union for that closing. Well, there's also three other plants in the network in North America that are under the same master contract that get the same wages and same benefits, but they only announced Omaha. But two years is a long time. A lot can happen. I have a good feeling that this is not going to occur the way they are saying it's going to occur. This could even just be a negotiating tactic by Kellogg's to try to get the union to take concessions. We'll see. But again, two years is a long time. Is any of it political? Do you think they announced this

closure two years later to try to torpedo you? You know, I thought about that. And, you know, I appreciate the thought that I'm somebody special enough for a corporation to announce we're going to close the plant because of one guy. And so, no, the answer is absolutely not. Well, let's put this element up on the screen. These are the polls from 538.

Obviously, it's incredibly difficult for an independent candidate to poll as closely as you are coming in. This is a YouGov poll. You can see right there at the top from 538's collection of polls, 500 registered voters. And it finds Deb Fischer up. By the way, she's running for her third term, right? So she's been in office since 2012. She's up by two points in that YouGov poll. I imagine that's within the poll's margin of error, 41 to 43%. You're at 41. She's at 43. And you've got that Deb Fischer poll that has just absolutely crushing you. Yes. She has a poll out that has her up 26. But then there was a poll

from your camp that found you guys tied. And these are all since the last day that we mentioned are since July. So the polling is showing a competitive independent candidacy. There's no question about it. So my question for you is why run as an independent? A lot of people who are aligned with labor jump in as Democrats, obviously. So I imagine some of our viewers outside Nebraska who aren't super familiar with this race might say, why be independent here? Why not just go with the Democratic Party? What's your answer to that? And how do you sort of describe your own politics?

Yeah, well, I became an independent in 2016. I became disenfranchised with the two-party system. I see this huge divide that is being created, seemingly both sides catering to their extremes and leaving people, I feel like, me out of the middle. Like, there's nobody like me in the United States Senate. And by that, I mean less than 2% of our elected officials in both the House and Senate come from the working class. I get frustrated when I see their corporate agendas.

For example, 90% of Deb Fischer's campaign funds come from corporate super PACs. But we're being different. I'm not taking any corporate money. I don't want to be beholden to corporations if elected. I don't want to be beholden to a party boss if elected. I want to be beholden to the people of Nebraska who elected me because that's the way the framers of the constitution set this whole thing up, right? A government for and by the people. It's not a government for the 1% of corporations. And that's where,

you know, when I do deep dives into our government and our politicians, that's my findings. So I want to be different and I want to bring it back to the people. And what has Deb Fischer won by in the past? And what is a typical Republican, you know, win by statewide in general? Yeah, you know, she's never really had any competition either in the primary by, I think, design parties like to support their incumbents, which I completely understand that. And, you know, here in Nebraska, it's a red state. It's very conservative values here. And I believe she wins, but she wins by large

margins. Trump won by six with about 60% of the vote in 2020 and Biden got about 40%. So, yeah. So, so how, how do you, how do you thread, how do you thread the cultural conservative, conservatism of Nebraska versus any, any impression that you're like, you know, I'm sure they're trying to saddle you with, oh, this is actually, he's actually a liberal. Right. You know, in independence clothing here. So what messages are you finding are resonating? Where do you come down on the kind of general kind of social conservative spectrum of questions?

Sure. And, you know, Deb Fischer is going to paint me as a Democrat in sheep's clothing because, you know, that's probably what I would do if I was her too, right? I'm running against a Republican. There's no Democrat in the race, so it stands to reason she's going to paint that picture.

But I've never been able to put myself in a tidy little blue or red box. I've always felt like I like things from both parties, but what's differentiating me from being a Democrat or being a Republican is my core message. And my core message is we have to get corporations out of our politics. We have to have corporate, or excuse me, we have to have campaign finance reform.

We have to end things like Citizens United. We have to get the corruption and the money out of our politics in order for it to be this sound entity that is mostly free from corruption. Again, we're being different. I'm not taking corporate money. My average donation is $35.

We've raised $2.3 million. So this campaign is truly powered by the people. But where I lean towards the right would be, we do have to have a secure border and we have to do it yesterday. Both parties are to blame. They keep kicking the can down the road. I mean, we haven't had any meaningful border or immigration reform, for that matter, in a very long time. And also, we have $34 trillion in debt. You can place the blame on

both parties for that. Many administrations adding, you know, six, seven billion dollars or a trillion dollars to the national debt. So we have to do things like hold the Department of Defense accountable for passing audits, things like that. And we have to hold corporations accountable for when they start price gouging and grocery stores for jacking prices up a thousand percent. These are the things that I think we need to do because we're all hurting. I'm hurting. I'm a steam pitter for a living now. I got fired from Kellogg's after the strike. But, you know, these are the things that are taking money out of our wallets at a time where we're all hurting. So that's kind of where I set myself apart. And Bernie Sanders is sort of famously independent from Vermont, obviously, but caucuses with Democrats

or has long caucused with Democrats. And some people didn't even know that Bernie Sanders was actually an independent because he ran in the Democratic presidential primary and has caucused for years with Democrats. So do you have plans for how you might approach the caucusing question should you be elected to the Senate? Do you have plans to caucus with Republicans, with Democrats, or just not caucus with either party?

Sure. I do have a plan for that. And George Norris was the last independent senator from Nebraska. He's from McCook, Nebraska. He actually set up the nonpartisan unicameral that we enjoy in Nebraska today that I think Washington, D.C. could take a few notes from. But his last term, he did not caucus with anyone. And, you know, there's nothing in the Constitution or anywhere written that says you have to. People will tell me, oh, well, you'll never get a committee assignment if you don't choose to caucus. I would like to challenge.

I would like to challenge the entire system. Deb Fisher early on called, you know, dismissed us and she's refusing to debate because she says, oh, this is just a political science experiment. And I was like, yes, that's exactly what I am and what campaign is. And guess what else is a political science experiment? The United States of America, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, that's a political science experiment.

And I think it's done pretty well. But I would like to challenge the system, not caucus with anyone, but if I feel like the people, because I want to deliver for the people in Nebraska at the end of the day, and if I feel like I'm failing at trying to buck the system, depending on who, how the House is set up, how the Senate is set up, who's the president,

there's a lot of different scenarios. I'm going to have to make a decision on who to caucus with. And I will caucus with somebody if, again, if the people in Nebraska are suffering. But it's going to have to be a choice to make who I can best deliver for Nebraska at that time. If there was a bill that came to the Senate floor that would codify Roe v. Wade, would you vote to support that? And how big an issue are abortion rights in the Nebraska Senate race? Because it's a fairly conservative state, but then again, abortion rights triumphed in nearby Kansas. Correct, it did. And it is also a ballot initiative in Nebraska, as is the legalization of medical cannabis is going to be on the ballot as well.

And, you know, I always divert back to the Constitution of the United States and the founding fathers and how they envision the country. And they envision the federal government take care of the big stuff, the economy, the border, foreign affairs, things like that. And I don't think the United States government should be meddling in our personal affairs, whether that's at the doctor's office or our bedrooms. I truly believe that.

And so, you know, would I codify Roe v. Wade? You know, that goes, that boils down to also the federal government should be taking care of our individual liberties, right? The second amendment, things like that. And so I believe that does fall under the category of an individual liberty. Look, in my own personal life, I'm a'm 100 pro-life i i would never advocate for anyone that i know or love to have that procedure but if i also know that i'm a male and i don't have a womb and i would never advocate uh for women to have that choice and i know pregnancy is a very difficult thing uh and that it does need to be available for women who need that procedure because it could be life-threatening. So, you know, it's a very polarizing, a very

difficult subject to talk about. But ultimately, I would side on a woman being able to choose for her own body. What about the medical marijuana one? How are you going to vote on that? I didn't realize that was up. How does Nebraska not have that yet? Come on, guys. Well, I met the woman who is leading that ballot initiative, and she has a son that has a condition that would totally benefit from being able to give him THC to not have massive seizures. And so the fact that, you know, she doesn't have this medicine, and I'm going to call it medicine because ultimately that's what it is in this case. She doesn't have this medicine available to give to her son. And if she goes out and gets it

through other means and gives it to her son, The state can take her son away from her. This is absurd. So absolutely, I'm going to vote for that. I guess last question. Have you endorsed a presidential candidate? Because I assume that you're hoping that there are a decent number. I mean, you can't win in Nebraska if there aren't a decent number of Trump Osborne voters, people who vote for Trump and then vote for Osborne. How are you approaching the presidential?

Yeah, well, I approach it, I tell people, look, I will work with whoever the president is. And since I've been doing this and speaking to people who are 100% pro-Trump and, well, I'll go back to an event I had in Alliance, Nebraska. It's on the western end of the state. There was about 75 people at this event at a VFW, which I'm a member of. But I had a guy come in wearing a MAGA hat, an open carry pistol. I had people there riding with Biden t-shirts. So it was a very eclectic group of folks. And we had great conversations.

And both riding with Biden t-shirt and both MAGA open carry hat guy, they left with Osborne yard signs because my message is simple. We need to get back to working together because at the end of the day, I'm not red, I'm not blue. We're all, this is going to sound really cheesy, but we're all red, white, and blue, right? We're Americans and we need to act as such and we need to act as such. And we need to start to come back together and stop this silly arguing and this divide that's been created. And again, that's my message. And it's getting corporations, again, out of our politics, getting the money out of our politics, stop this corruption that we're seeing.

I want to be different. And that message is really resonating with both conservatives and liberals. So I have pictures with my Osborne sign out in front of a Trump tent that they were in. I believe it was Boone County, Nebraska, at a fair there. They put my sign out in front of the Trump tent

and I see my sign next to Harris' sign. So I love it. That's the whole message of this campaign is let's just be one people again. All right. Well, Dan Osborne, Navy veteran, steam fitter, union leader, and independent Senate candidate in Nebraska. Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate you. You got it. Take it easy. Emily, what do you think? He has your vote. I mean, I don't love Deb Fischer. I'm not surprised. I think zero people love Deb Fischer. I mean, her family loves Deb Fischer.

Well, I think she's probably been good to some particular industry in Nebraska. I'd have to like go back. Insurance industry, I think. That's the other thing. Nebraska is, it's not just culturally conservative. It's actually kind of a corporate state too because of Omaha. There's a lot based in Omaha. Warren Buffett, and then there's the insurance industry there. So the anti-corporate. Ag.

There's a lot of stuff out there. Yeah. Consolidated big ag. Yeah. The anti-corporate message is going to run up against some people are like, hey, wait a minute. We're a corporate state here. Well, no, I mean, it's so interesting. And it's like we weirdly didn't even plan for this, but this turned into like a realignment themed edition of CounterPoints because this kind of goes with every block.

Like we started talking about RFK Jr. in Tulsi, like not having a lot of luck in the third party lane or in the independent lane or in the like populist dem lane. They talked about how that's going in France. The weird journey of Zuck all throughout his realignment up to Nebraska. The most interesting part of that actually I thought was his answer on Roe. That one seemed like, I just got the sense that he felt that was the toughest one in the game. Yeah, I'm sure it is because on the one hand, I bet the ballot measure in Nebraska will pass. So, and you know, I don't know, but what do you think? I don't know how closely you followed, like how, you know, because don't know. But what do you think? I don't know how closely you've followed him. Like how, you know, because it passed in Kansas. Right. Well, but his version of, and Sager talks about this a lot, but his version of like live and let live libertarianism is really popular with Americans. And that's sort of what some of these like pro-abortion activists have tapped

into in places like Kansas is like libertarians for choice. Like those types of groups. You don't want a vaccine mandate. Right. Like they're doing, like they're really being smart about how they're pitching this stuff in ads to voters. And so that, his answer on that, I think was trying to channel that sentiment. And it's so interesting how he's coded and said, I'm pro-life. I think he said, I'm 100% pro-life when you asked him that. But he's also coded as a hardcore labor leader. I don't know anybody else who really brings those two things together. Because even Donald Trump would never say that he was 100% pro-life. I mean, I doubt he would say it like that.

But he's not great on labor. We don't really know what we actually do. You know, bring in the CEO of Exxon and Steve Mnuchin and just, you know, let things go. But it's so rare that you get a combination that's as stark like that. And we'll see if it reverts to the partisan mean and he winds up losing by seven, eight points or if he ends up kind of shocking people. A lot of money is going to come in for Deb Fischer, I'm sure. Yes, that's true. I wonder, it's kind of a catch-22 because I think Democrats,

even though I think Democrats are pretty confident he would caucus with them if it meant giving them the majority. A pro-life for caucusing with them in the Senate. Yeah, although who said he would vote? God, if I rose, that's how I read his answer. Life or caucusing with them in the Senate. Yeah. Although who said he would vote to codify Roe? That's how I read his answer. But will Democrats spend money on his behalf? Or maybe because then it makes him look like a Democrat.

Yeah. And Democrats are fatally, existentially unpopular in rural areas. And I think just giving up is actually smart. Including Tim Walz, by the way, if you look at his margins. Yeah, even Tim Walz, yeah. Yeah. So this is a really important race to follow. And maybe I'm a softie, but I just love that story he said about the riding with Biden and the open carry guys both leaving with his yard signs and them being able to just talk about this stuff is awesome. I think that's great.

I wonder where that Ryan with Biden t-shirt is. We can get you one. You can put it on the shelf. Maybe I'll buy that guy's off of eBay. I'll stuff it into your fish water bottle. All right. Well, we will be back if you're a premium subscriber on Thursday evening with a truly incredible debate about RFK Jr. featuring Michael Tracy and somebody who was a field organizer for RFK Jr.'s campaign, Jeff Hunt. So that's on Thursday night. If you're a premium sub, you can go head over to breakingpoints.com to get a premium subscription. You get full episodes of CounterPoints. You get Friday debate shows early. And we've got some pretty great Friday debate shows coming up.

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