Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/7/24: Morning Joe Weeps Over Walz, Trump Loses It On Kamala VP, Cenk Debates Pro-Trump Lawyer, AIPAC Defeats Cori Bush, Elon Says UK Civil War Imminent

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Morning Joe melts down over Walz pick, MSNBC savages Kamala VP pick benefits, Trump says Walz will cause hell on earth, Cenk debate pro-Trump lawyer on 2024, AIPAC unseats Cori Bush, Elon says UK riots are sign of civil war.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Emily, how you doing? I'm good. We're matching. We have a matching color scheme today. Look at that.

It wasn't even intentional. You're welcome, everyone. Excellent. Great work. By the way, we've got BreakingPoints.com to go to your, get your premium subscription, whatever you want to call it, and support this show. Yesterday, I did an AMA with Saga. People were asking about the Friday show. Because of the election and everything, we're still doing the Friday show. We did not kind of fold that up because of the travel, the conventions coming up and the election. We're not going to do the exact same format where we have those kind of long-form debates for the next. We'll do a few of those. Yeah.

And then after the election, I think we'll go back to that kind of format. We're recalibrating based on the insane news cycle. Yeah, it's crazy. It won't stop. We love it. We love it, though. We love it. We hope you love it.

But it's just been insane. There's no way to schedule something for a Friday that is like a shelf life is two days long. Right. But you love to see it. You really do. You love to see it. You love to see it. Yesterday, I filled in for Crystal on the day that Tim Walls was announced as the pick. Sagar seemed down. The vibes were

down from this side of the desk. But I'm so curious how you respond to the joyful Walls pick, where he's at once uniting the country, but uniting them behind bullying J.D. Vance. That's pretty funny. I got, you know, our favorite friends at the Trotskyite World Socialist website sent a great headline this morning next to a couple of other ones. I got people right wing, you know, panic about Tim Walz. They send out from World Socialist website, Kamala Harris picks right wing governor as Democratic running mate. Love it. Of course. You love to see it. For the Trotskyites, it mate. Love it. Of course. You love to see it. For the Trotskyists, it's a right-wing party, so.

You love to see it. What are you going to do? Cori Bush lost her election last night. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. What else we got? We've got Cori Bush. We've got a panel, a really good panel, that's going to talk. Cenk Uygur and Will Chamberlain are going to debate the Wall's pick. We're going to debate the Wall's pick, and there's a lot to talk about. Like you mentioned, we're going to be talking about's pick. We're going to debate the Wall's pick, and there's a lot to talk about.

Like you mentioned, we're going to be talking about Cori Bush, and Elon Musk is predicting a civil war in the UK. He loves to predict civil wars. But he's really predicting a civil war to the point where sometimes your predictions get to skirt the line of materializing. Yeah, so he's in a back and forth with Keir Starmer as those riots continue to unfold. And basically anti-immigrant riots continue to unfold in the UK. Yeah, absolutely. It's actually a fairly interesting story. So we will get to that. But first, let's start

with the news of the day, the news everybody's talking about, Tim Walsh. Some people are still trying to figure out who Tim Walz is, but we've had like a day to get really acquainted with him. Ryan, you're reporting on Walz has gone back a while. You've, at The Intercept, you guys were reporting on Tim Walz. There's a lot to say about him. The rally yesterday, Kamala Harris kind of got to formally introduce Walz to the country. Let's take a look at A1 here.

There they are. Just looking like, Ryan, you mentioned this. You're like, he looks so much like a social studies. You said he looks so much like a football coach. And then I said, he looks so much like a social studies teacher who is also a football coach. Coach Walls. He looks like the kind of coach you'd want to have. Like not the mean coach, but the one who's a little tough, but happy, joyful the whole time. Like I've seen a whole bunch of people saying like, where the heck did they get this guy? He's so out of perfect central casting for a politician. Made in a lab. He's, like you said, social studies teacher.

Military. Who becomes a coach, whose team wins the state championship in a Midwestern state. He's military, but he's not, he didn't go in as an officer, but he's not, and he went in as an enlisted man, and they're like,

if you're going to make him in a lab, how about a sergeant major? Boom. Sergeant major. Give him an injury that he overcomes through his nationalized health care. Make him a dog lover. How about a cat lover, too?

Throw that in. Two cute kids. And then driving a minivan, hunting, doing all the Americana stuff, but then also being culturally, socially quite liberal. Yes. But then helping to enact a sweeping kind of working class agenda, you know, the left-wing working class agenda through the Minnesota legislature, but then also the left-wing social agenda. And so it's it's gonna be wild to see, you know, how that unfolds because, you know, Democrats couldn't kind of have a better mascot for, I think, their kind of politics. Yeah, it's an interesting combination. We'll talk more about

it, I'm sure. Again, there's just a lot to say about how you can combine populist economics with or how you can sort of try politically to combine populist economics with either cultural conservatism or cultural progressivism. Here's a flavor of how the rally went. This is Kamala Harris, a mashup of sort of some of the things she had to say about what Coach Walls, I guess, is what it was. Coach Walls, let's go with that. Tim Walls will be ready on day one.

In fact, in fact, when you compare his resume, shall we, to Trump's running mate, well, well, some might say it's like, it's like a matchup between the varsity team and the JV squad. J.D. Vance literally, literally wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda. Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That's not what middle America is. And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy.

That is if he's willing to get off the couch and show up. So... You see what I did there? Sort of like he's being played by Chris Farley. Yeah. But it's him. It's like a cross between Chris Farley and Rob Ford. Yeah, yeah.

When he says, see what I did there, and then makes that kind of grin to the camera. And you know what? Rob Ford and Chris Farley have in common. People love them. That's true. That's not the only thing they have in common. That's true. So we also have, so that was Tim Walsh, Kamala Harris, obviously in Philadelphia. Before we go to Shapiro, I'm curious for what your initial reaction was, because at the very end, everybody watching this

show is probably on. Actually, I don't know. We have a very broad cross section of viewers at this point. I was about to say that everybody watching this show is online enough that they got the couch reference. I think that's true. If you didn't, go to the comments section. I'm curious. Tell me if you didn't. It's funny to even try to explain the couch reference. So I'm not even going to. But it's an online meme. It's a way that the left has kind of been bullying J.D. Vance. And he went there. Yeah.

But he did it with a big Midwestern Minnesota nice smile on his face, which is, people are like, that's not Minnesota nice. It's like, no, that is Minnesota nice. You tell me more. You know the Midwestern nice more. But there's a sharpness to it as well. I don't know. I don't know about that. I feel like there's a sharpness to Southern hospitality. None of the Southerners

are going to get upset with me, whereas the Midwesterners is pretty genuine. Yeah, bless your heart. Yeah. Way of saying F you. Right, yeah. Producer Mack, he can tell us more about the accuracy of that assessment, but yeah. Producer Mac, he can tell us more about the accuracy of that assessment. But yeah,

the couch thing, I saw a lot of sort of centrists freaking out about last night. I don't know if you saw any of that on X. It was very much, some people were just like,

this is a really bad sign, right? This is a unity ticket that is now, you know, making couch jokes at J.D. Vance. And, you know, while they are up here claiming the mantle of happy-go-lucky and unifying, which the media then granted them and said,

you know, a lot of people were like, this was the perfect note. They hit all the perfect notes. And then, you know, at the same time, he's making jokes about the couch. Some people were like, this is a sign that we have all sort of, we're all now scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's just a meme. It's just a meme. It's a dumb meme. I don't even think it's a good meme,

but it's just a meme. It's the AP's fault because the AP did it. It is. They Streisanded it. Yeah, the AP did a fact check that you can find. Because people needed that. And then retracted their fact check, which if they hadn't retracted the fact check, we might not be where we are today. Yet we are. Right. Now, they were in Philadelphia, and everyone thought that meant it was going to be Josh Shapiro. And now, of course, Josh Shapiro didn't want the job. He did not want the job. It must be said, he was really on the fence about whether he should leave his very critical role as Pennsylvania governor. And I joke about that

because it seemed to clearly be leaking from his camp that as soon as he realized the writing was on the wall, that Kamala Harris was going to go with someone else, he started signaling, counter-signaling, maybe I don't want the job. Now, in Philadelphia, of course, even though you're not picking Josh Shapiro, you still kind of have to have Josh Shapiro speak. Now, in Philadelphia, of course, even though you're not picking Josh Shapiro, you still kind of have to have Josh Shapiro speak. Otherwise, it's weird. So here is Josh Shapiro doing his best Obama impression. And if you're listening to this, you should also note that he is not wearing a tie. Sager obviously can hear that. But if you don't have Sager's ability to just hear tirelessness through audio, he's not wearing a tie, and he's doing his very best Obama impression. Obama used to go tireless at rallies.

It's just across the board. A cringe Obama impression. Take a look. And I want you to know I am going to continue to pour my heart and soul into serving you every single day as your governor i'm going to be working my tail off to make sure we make com harrison

that's leaders the next leaders of the United States of America. That's right. Democrats of a certain age, John Ossoff does a good Obama. Buttigieg was doing it for a while. Yes. I think he developed his own version. I guess he doesn't hit the stump. We'll see if he still has the Obama

as he hits the stump for the re-election campaign, or not re-election, but election campaign of Harris. We see him mostly on CNN and MSNBC and Fox. And he's his own kind of rhetorical dude there. But yeah, on the stump, he was very Obama. It's like a particular 2012 flavor of Obama. But I mean, he's also a good speaker.

And he's been pressed about this, Shapiro has. And he said, look, he's also a good speaker. And he's been pressed about this, Shapiro has. And he said, look, it's not a criticism. Obama is the greatest orator Democratic Party's had in 50 years. So I'm proud to be compared to him. It's like, well, it's not exactly what people are saying. It's just way too close. It's so obvious. It's just the way he even is modifying his tone of voice. It's just too, it's ridiculous. And the way that Obama would do. It's like a single white female thing. Obama would do like the Southern accent.

Yeah. And you'd always be like, Obama, where's that coming from? And the y'all and the, you grew up in Hawaii. It's not quite as good as. Little Kansas, but mostly Hawaii. When Hillary Clinton would do it, that was much worse. But then for Josh Shapiro from Spurton, Philadelphia to be doing the Southern accent that he's drawing from Obama, it's like, what are we doing here?

What are we doing here? Which helps to explain why Walls resonates with people. Because he, as you can tell, he's not trying to be anybody else. Right. Or maybe he's trying to be an architect of a football coach. Right. But he's been doing that his whole life and he just fits it so perfectly that you can tell he just feels comfortable in his skin up there. Right. So actually, that's a good point because one of the things we wanted to put up

on the screen here is A5. This is Jackie Heinrich of Fox News saying, two sources confirm on background the deciding factor in the VP's choice was what Senator Fetterman said publicly, concerns Shapiro's own personal ambitions would cause him to upstage slash override Harris. The video Shapiro produced with Philly Mayor Sherelle Parker's team solidified this sentiment on Friday. And absolutely, as that video leaked, everyone said, oh, it's a done deal, done and dusted. It's Shapiro, Philadelphia, the video's been made, here we go. And yet, if we put the next element up on the screen, this is A5B, this is one of the leaks I was referencing earlier, that after Shapiro and Harris met on Sunday when she was doing her apprentice interviews with the candidates, Shapiro then leaked that he called Harris's team and said he was, her apprentice interviews with the candidates. Shapiro then leaked that

he called Harris's team and said he was, quote, struggling with this decision to leave his current job as governor of Pennsylvania in order to seek the vice presidency. So he got bad vibes, and he made sure the press knew. Pulling out of contention, good move. Yes, and apparently when Coach was asked, when Coach Walls was asked by Harris, like what he wanted to do as vice president, he said, you know, you you tell me. Right. You tell me, coach, like, just put me and given the worst dreck of the Biden administration as Biden was given the worst dreck of the Obama administration. And so she wants this crap to roll downhill and land on walls. And he sounded like he's happy to take it. She's like, here we go.

Yeah. He also said, according to, I think, Politico, he's at the end of his career. Nothing left to fight for. No personal ambitions. Yeah. He's 60. She's 59. He is.

He'll be 68 in two terms. By some miracle, you can imagine a Harris administration serving two terms, which is young. That's spring chicken. Compared to our current leadership class. Yeah. Which he just joined. Absolutely. Now, the football coach life expectancy is like 60s. Jeez, that's so dark. I mean, I don't know what it is, but the heart attacks, they get the football coaches. So Morning Joe, I think, reflected the sentiments yesterday that a lot of the Beltway was feeling. When Walls was announced, you've got to take a look at this Morning Joe meltdown. Again, it seems like it was, if you wanted to take the temperature of the Beltway yesterday, this segment did a good job of capturing what people felt here in Washington, D.C., after Shapiro was passed over for walls. Well, exactly. Candidate has to make the decision herself.

And I will tell you, the candidate that I'm most comfortable with is a candidate that helps me win Pennsylvania in 2024. So let us hope, Jonathan Lemire, that those outside of Pittsburgh loves Tim Walz. So talk about Walz. Let's talk about how the decision not made, the road not taken. Josh Shapiro, a guy that has approval ratings in the 60s in Pennsylvania, the must win state for both campaigns and also the one who was considered the front runner for a very long time. But then there was a backlash and we heard backlash. It was a very public campaign against Josh Shapiro and a really ugly whisper campaign against Josh Shapiro. And it's unfortunately, that's something that is now hanging over this choice. Can I make one point? And I don't want to tell Morning Joe how to do their job. But there was not actually a loud campaign against Josh Shapiro. There were people on Twitter against Josh Shapiro.

But elected officials, people with power, organizations, which of them came out against Josh Shapiro in the Democratic coalition? Apparently, behind the scenes reporting now says Nancy Pelosi and others, but not with the— Pelosi supported walls. Right, right. But what he's talking about is this- Anti-Semitic. Quote, unquote, genocide Josh. Yeah.

Like the attacks on Shapiro over his Israel policy. And I'm questioning the premise that there was actually like a large scale national. Now, there were like this show and people like us and others, like, raised concerns about it. Like, that's a thing. But nobody with the level of access to power, like Morning Joe, said anything about Shapiro's Israel policy. In fact, the only reason, I would say, that it was a part of the national conversation was Morning Joe and shows like Morning Joe, but very specifically Morning Joe, when they would bring out Jonathan Greenblatt from the ADL to police criticism that was being leveled at Shapiro, like on Twitter.

And for Greenblatt to say, this is all anti-Semitism, this reflects the rot within the Democratic Party and how anti-Semitic everybody is, they were elevating that conversation constantly. regular segments on Morning Joe particularly, but then also the kind of left cable media more broadly, highlighting mean tweets about Josh Shapiro and calling out anti-Semitism in the Democratic coalition and elevating it and saying that this is something that needs to be rooted out from the Democratic party and creating an intramural contest that really is manufactured, like does not exist on the level that they're saying it exists. And so I think the Harris campaign was like, you know, we actually can avoid this entire Morning Joe driven fight. So I think they actually cost Shapiro far more than his critics on Twitter did. That's interesting because, I actually think that is a very interesting point because it's hard to

know behind the scenes how seriously the Harris campaign took the possibility. Obviously, it was on the table. Obviously, there were people in the sort of proverbial smoke-filled back rooms who were saying Josh Shapiro's having volunteered with the non-combat, you know, the IDF and Ben Peres. But none of the people who are concerned about that are in those smoke-filled rooms. Well, but there are people in those smoke-filled rooms who know that there might be people who are concerned about it who might whip. Who are scrolling Twitter. Right. No, I don't disagree with that. So to what degree that was for them a cynical calculation, you know, or part of what is obviously always going to be a cynical calculation, I think is an open question and a giant sort of variable here because you're right. It's not as though Ilhan Omar was making these decisions for the Kamala Harris campaign. I don't remember her saying, did she say anything about Shapiro? I have no idea.

I doubt it. I don't think she did. So, and this is another thing we, I accidentally skipped over this element, but it's premised on this idea that Waltz is obviously a worse candidate than Shapiro. Because you hear that in the morning, Joe freak out. And we're going to get to this in the GOP block, too. But it's this premise is that Walsh is inferior as a candidate. He doesn't carry the Pennsylvania votes. He's not from a swing state. And he's just kind of a goofy football coach, blah, blah, blah. So why would you go with this

goofy social studies football coach over the governor, the popular governor of a big swing state. But let's roll a three because I think there is, it's worth kind of comparing the political talents. We saw Shapiro's Obama impression. Let's watch Tim Wallace in this video with Kamala Harris. Hi, this is Tim. It's Kamala Harris. Good morning, Governor. Good morning, Madam Vice President. Listen, I want you to do this with me. Let's do this together. Would you be my running mate and let's get this thing on the road? I would be honored, Madam Vice President.

The joy that you're bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that's out there, it would be a privilege to take this with you across the country. Well, let me tell you, I have just the utmost respect for you. I have really enjoyed our work together. You understand our country. You have dedicated yourself to our country in so many different and beautiful ways. And we're going to do this. We're going to win. And we're going to unify our country and remind everyone that we are fighting for the future for everyone. So let's get out there and get this done, OK? Let's do it. Do the work in front of us. Let's win this thing. That's right. All right, buddy. I'll see you soon. Take care. Thank you. OK. Bye. I don't know when we decided that we needed to film these videos. This is like when Sagar and Crystal called us to do counterpoints.

We should have been filming it. It's probably over text. But you can see how the phoniness of Josh Shapiro, who is very much like, I don't mean this ideologically, but has the sort of Gavin Newsom, I'm pretending to be really good at talking to people, and I'm really good at pretending to be good at talking to people, so it's almost convincing that I'm good at talking to people type vibes juxtaposed with whatever we think about Tim Walls, and we're going to get into that in a second. I'm sure we disagree on a lot of things about him, but he comes across as a much more normal human being. And so I don't know that that premise,

which is that only anti-Semitism or anti-Israel cynicism would motivate Harris to pick Waltz, I don't even think that premise is correct. Right. Because progressives got the idea that, wait, it's actually possible they might pick Waltz. And so once that was clear, I think that also ratcheted up the attacks on Shapiro. Because it's a zero-sum contest at that point. It becomes between these Waltz and Shapiro. You've got to take out Shapiro if you want. You've got to elevate.

Right, right. Anyway, the whole question of anti-Semitism around that I think is more complicated than it's being made out to be. We can save that for another time, though. Well, yeah, we'll talk about that in the GOP block because we have a clip of Ben Shapiro that I think will open up part of that conversation because he addresses it on his show yesterday as well. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them.

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bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, if we put A7 up on the screen, this is a shout out to Kyle. He compiled a list. And, you know, there were a lot of lists bouncing around, actually, because the LFG mentality of the Minnesota DFL folks, led by Tim Walz, has actually been an LFG agenda. That's the Let's F and Go agenda, which, Ryan, you've

followed very closely and you can tell us more about. But it has resulted in this insane list of bills and actions that Tim Walz has signed or spearheaded just in the last couple of years in Minnesota. And it's a very interesting sort of collection of both cultural progressivism and economic populism that has left-right appeal. Sourabh Amari wrote a piece in Compact immediately after Walz was nominated or was picked yesterday, saying that Republicans can learn a lot from the economic populism of Tim Walz and supporting a lot of Tim Walz's sort of economic agenda. So that said, tell us, Ryan, a little bit about what the Minnesota DFL folks have been doing under Walz, because the reason he started to, I think, rise to the top of the surface of the candidates

is people looked at it and realized, holy smokes, yeah, what they've been doing in Minnesota is extremely impressive. Although I wonder if he rose in spite of that, because this is the kind of thing that would actually scare, I think, national Democrats. Calm down. Yeah. Emily and I had talked months ago about doing a story about how several years ago, Minnesota and Iowa were both swing states, both purple states. And to some degree, Minnesota still is. In the 2018 election, Minnesota went blue by just like a handful of votes and a trifecta as well. Walz as governor, Democrats took control of both houses. I think they took the house by like one seat. And, you know, these House races are decided by hundreds of votes, sometimes just dozens of votes. And on the other side of the border in Iowa, a state that had, you know, recently had Democratic governors, senators, etc.

And would, you know, did Obama win Iowa? Yeah, I think she did. Yeah. That state went Republican, Republican trifecta, and they pushed through as aggressive a conservative agenda as they possibly could. But it's the kind of mirror version of Minnesota in the sense that it's very pro-business, not the kind of fancy and Trumpian national populism economics. And then it was the extremely conservative social stuff as well. And just across the border, with just a few thousand votes pushing the state blue, they push through. And we can put up this Kyle tweet again as he runs it down. Universal free school meals. That's why you see that picture of the kids hugging him.

Legal weed. Carbon-free electricity by 2040. Tax rebates for the working class up to $1,300. 12 weeks paid family leave. 12 weeks paid sick leave. And then he banned conversion therapy. He was a pro-trans stuff. 12 weeks red, and then he did gun stuff, free public college for people making under $80,000.

To me, the ban on forever chemicals, that's hard to get political power behind because everybody supports it, but there's nobody pushing for it. Minnesota is a big, people don't realize it is a big business state as well. Huge, political power behind because everybody supports it, but there's nobody pushing for it. Minnesota is a big, people don't realize it is a big business state as well. Minneapolis is a huge business hub. There are a lot of very powerful corporate interests in Minneapolis. Corporations and warehouses and an increase in K-12 funding and then a bunch of pro-union stuff as well. And he vetoed a gig worker reform bill and then said he would compromise, come back with a compromised version because Uber and Lyft had threatened to leave if it passed. And he did come back with a compromised version. So normally when a Democrat wins by a couple

dozen votes, they reach across the aisle. They say, we can't govern as if we won a huge mandate. We have to tread lightly here and basically be a center-right party. They said, no. We believe our agenda is popular. We believe the Republican agenda is unpopular. We're going to push ours through, and we're going to run on that. And it's like, they basically haven't done that anywhere, except maybe New York after all those DSA people took over the legislature. But even so, it's a completely different thing. And this is one of the- Right. Doing it in Minnesota is different than doing it in New York. It's a conversation actually that's been very popular with the J.D. Vance types on the right,

because there's this, I go back to this a lot. Ronald Reagan gave this famous speech where he talked about painting with, not with pale pastels, but with bold colors. Bold colors, not pale pastels. And it's sort of a famous saying, but people, you know, now associate Reagan with squishy sort of neoliberalism, when in fact the Reagan revolution was very much a revolution. It was a war against the centrists in the Republican Party that had, you know, it was, people hated Ronald Reagan in the Republican Party in D.C. And his theory of the case was always that if you are an ideological conservative, you will be politically benefited by not trying to hide that. So you can talk about it ideologically, whether it's more, you know,

honest and moral to go about that. But his theory was that it's more politically beneficial to just be honest about if you have bold beliefs. It's sort of the Barry Goldwater, and Reagan was a Goldwater supporter when he says extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. That is the theory. And I think that is true in many cases. Obviously, your elections, who your opponent is, all of those things depend. But Tim Walz is a version of that on the left, which is, I believe these things, and I'm going to make Minnesota a trans refuge, as it was dubbed by the AP. Now, I think those policies that he's pushed through as they relate to children are awful and will not be well sold on the national stage.

There will be a problem for him on the national stage. But I respect the hell out of him for being honest about the fact that he is a cultural progressive in a rural state that in northern Minnesota, Donald Trump did a rally in Duluth. I mean, that is crazy for Republicans to do rallies and draw thousands of people in a place like Duluth. It's just, that is a changing state. And I think Tim Walz is putting that theory to the test. And Democrats, for people like you,

Ryan, who probably come down on that same theory of the case that I believe in and that I would hope that Republicans would follow, on the left, it's sort of like a validation. It's saying like, look, this guy is doing the damn thing. We can do it too. Like you don't have to pretend that you are just like Mr. Joe Biden, who just gets along, Scranton Joe gets along with everybody and doesn't have any controversial ideas. You can say that you believe something that's unpopular. Yeah. And I think the same way that Republicans had a hard time painting Joe Biden as a far lefty, I think they're going to struggle with Tim Walz. And it's identitarianism. But it's working in Democrats' favor because you're like, oh, this old white guy can't be a flaming radical communist.

Right. The effort to paint Joe Biden as that, I know it really frustrated Republicans that he could be basically lined up with Bernie Sanders on a lot of his domestic agenda that he was getting through. Yeah. And it just wasn't landing on him because he's Scranton Joe or whatever. And I think we'll see because Joe Biden had been in the public eye for 50 years. And maybe that matters in a significant way, more so than just his identity as like a normal looking white guy. But we're going to find out because they went and found this normal-looking white guy. And Republicans are already saying

he's the most radical nutjob ever. We'll talk about this in the next block. Most radical nutjob ever to walk the face of the earth. And it's like, we'll see if that works or not. And if people like you, so if you're just a generally likable person, that's the same thing with Reagan. Reagan did have ideas that were unpopular

and out of step with a lot of the country. Right, but like, yeah, look at him smiling. Right. No, but that's exactly right. And so with Tim Walz, you can call him radical. And I think on certain cultural issues, he is radical. And he would, I mean, people on the left would say, like, these are radical populist economic policies. You know, he probably wouldn't embrace that label. But just last week, he was saying one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness. Like, he hasn't sprinted in the opposite direction from any of this. Now, the electoral implications are fascinating, though, because all of this depends on the

coalition that you can put together. And Sager made a really good point about this on Twitter X yesterday. We go on Twitter. We'll go on Twitter, yeah. I'd refuse to think of it as X. But anyway, Sager said his job is not to activate blue-collar voters in reference to Waltz. He said it's to activate affluent white suburban liberals who like feeling he could appeal to blue-collar voters. And Sager then clarified he didn't mean that in a bad way. He meant that it was like this is a successful pick. They have said this is the goal, and it's not a dumb goal, and he's someone who can accomplish it. But let's watch the Steve Kornacki clip explaining how Walsh did in different parts

of Minnesota, because Minnesota is one of those states that's very much coming apart right now, to borrow the famous phrase, between Minneapolis and some of those rural, especially northern parts. So here's Kornacki on how Walz has performed in different parts of the state. Now, here's the key, because this county, Democrats used to be much more competitive in. Look at this. In 2012, Barack Obama won 43 percent of the vote in this county. There's only a little bit more than 10 points that he lost to Romney by here. The floor fell out for Democrats here when Trump came along in that Clinton race in 2016, and they haven't recovered it since. And that wall's performance here, it's a little less than

Biden's number. It's more than Clinton's. And it's a far cry from what Obama was doing here. And again, I'm showing you one. This is a stand in for dozens of counties in Minnesota where you saw the same thing with large rural populations, blue collar, white populations where Obama and some of them he was winning others. He was holding his own just a dozen years ago. This is where Democrats have lost ground in walls in 2022. He didn't gain any ground that the Democrats had lost. He didn't do that here. He didn't do that in other counties. Walls really owes his victory. That big margin. He got eight points there statewide. He owes it to the Twin Cities area here, the area where Democrats in Minnesota

and all these other states are already doing well. Look at his electoral history. Tim Walls is in 2022. And the idea that he's got this automatic appeal with these small town areas in those three key battleground states, you don't see it in what he actually did on the ballot in 2022. So all that is to say, Beltway pundits should be very, very careful to assume that Tim Walz being the governor of Minnesota means that he is reflexively or categorically popular and easily sold and packaged throughout the rural Midwest because his own electoral victory was heavily dependent on the most urban part of his state, which is Minneapolis, which is also a booming metropolis. So that is a very, very important,

I think, piece of nuance in the big Tim Wall story. The only amendment I would have to that is that if Democrats can maintain Biden's share of the rural white vote, basically, white working class vote more broadly, then they will win. And so that's the only caution on that, on those stats, is that Biden did better than Hillary Clinton. And that with walls sticking close to Biden, rather than that, you could look at that two ways. One, it would be like, oh, wow, he didn't outrun the national ticket. So therefore, he doesn't actually appeal that well. But you could also say, well, Joe Biden actually outran the kind of normal Democrat that would have, how a normal Democrat would have performed. Biden did better just because of his whole shtick. He's likable.

And Wall also stuck with Biden in that direction. But nobody should be fooled and think that because he's got, there's like a Harris-Walls camo hat, that they're going to win rural America. Yeah. Or that they're going to even do that much better than an average Democrat. Yeah. Because it's still Harris and Walls. Right. But I don't know. Yeah. It's a do no harm thing. He's not hated in rural America. Yeah. In the way that kind of Hillary Clinton was. Yes. And that Kamala Harris may come to be, by the way. Yeah.

Oh, well, yeah, if she wins, it's going to be an interesting four years. That's for sure. Sure will. Stick around for that. Yeah, I was in rural Pennsylvania a couple years ago, and the amount of F Joe Biden signs were surprising even to me. Just on total dirtback roads with bolt holes in them, just F Joe Biden everywhere. Oh, yeah. It's wild. Yeah.

Yeah. Not a lot of love for Democrats in a lot of those places these days. My uncle in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, kept arguing with this guy who had a sign right at the front of town that said F Joe Biden. He's like, this makes us, think whatever you want about Joe Biden. Can you have a, like, I don't like Joe Biden. I like Trump.

Screw Joe Biden. Like anything. Like this makes us look so trashy. Like, do you have any pride in this town? Come on. No. The answer was no. Yeah. The answer was no. Yeah.

The answer was actually probably hell no. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.

Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to Republican reactions to the Wallace pick because there's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in terms of how Republicans sort of decided to navigate. You have this rural hunter. You have the Shapiro being passed up, and now there's reporting suggesting that Team Trump was intentionally coordinating to take down Shapiro as the pick. Right, and they were sort of celebrating that the pick wasn't Shapiro and

was instead Wallace, because they see Wallace as sort of weak and easy to attack and easier now to sort of staple his resume to Kamala Harris. So this is from Fox News right away yesterday after the pick was announced. Well, facts still matter. So let's look back at his record. Waltz's first executive order as governor was to create a diversity, equity and inclusion council. He also supported open borders. He talks about this wall. I always say, let me know how high it is. If it's 25 feet, then I'll invest in the 30-foot ladder factory. And he pushed socialism. Don't ever shy away from our progressive values. One person's socialism is another

person's neighborliness. Just do the damn work. Oh, wait, and there's more. He signed an executive order protecting gender-affirming care or surgeries for minors in his state. And in 2020, he was the governor of Minnesota during the George Floyd riots that burned part of Minneapolis to the ground. It was so bad that Waltz himself called out his own response. I got a call from a friend and a dedicated public servant. Senator Torres Ray called in her district and it was on fire. And there weren't any police there. There weren't any firefighters.

There was no social control. And her constituents were locked in their house wondering what they were going to do. That is an abject failure that cannot happen. If the issue was that the state should have moved faster, yeah, that is on me. All right, so they're throwing everything against the wall phase. What do you think would stick there? Well, I mean, go to a bar outside Duluth and say you want to invest in a ladder factory to help people get over a border wall. See how that goes, Tim Walz. I mean, there's a serious- Well, I think he's telling a joke that the wall is a joke because people can easily find ways around it. And you could talk, you could say, hey, look, the United Kingdom is having a massive immigration problem. They have a

giant ocean around their country. They still can't figure it out. I don't... They have a huge moat and a channel. We can continue going on his immigration policies. Defending them in that proverbial bar or that hypothetical bar outside Duluth would be hard, whether it's driver's licenses, healthcare assistance. That's a really hard argument to make now. So to make that point, I think there is those lines of attack. I don't think vice presidents matter that much. I could see on the margins, same way on the margins, I could see, you know, stapling J.D.

Vance's, you know, all his public comments and stuff to Trump could be painful for them in the suburbs, especially with affluent women who look at that and are really creeped out by J.D. Vance saying different things. I could also see on the margins people being concerned that Waltz has said things like one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness, which- See, that was on the white dudes for Harris. It was on the white dudes for Harris' call, which, by the way, is not... That's a conversation that we could all have here.

But when you're governor, it freaks people out. And so I commend him for being honest about it. Isn't that a cool way of saying it, though? One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness? I think it is. But Republicans... We're all in this together. We're all in this for our neighbors.

100%. Unless their neighbors are, as long as our neighbors aren't bothering us, we'll leave them alone. 100%. You know as well as I do. If they need help, we'll help them out. If they're not bothering us, we're not going to criticize them. Agree completely. The label pulls so poorly that Republicans just a couple of years ago, during the Dem primary, were salivating over the idea of a Bernie Sanders candidacy because they were just pulling the word socialism in the suburbs. Right. But that's why he's rebranding it to neighborliness.

Right, but he said it in a way that makes it, they can run that as an ad. I'm just saying, I don't think it's a- I would beg them to run that as an ad. I don't think it's a- Please run that as an ad. I think it's politically, it would be, I think it would be wrong to say politically that does not add some vulnerabilities to the ticket. And now I don't think those are huge vulnerabilities. I do think they are vulnerabilities. I also think that his trans policies in particular, because they were so specifically related to children, will be a problem on the campaign trail because the mood in the country has shifted on those issues significantly. So if Kamala Harris is asked

to defend that over and over again, that will be tough for her. It's also every VP candidate was going to have some problems. Mark Kelly, his big problem was he was lousy on labor. And at The Intercept, back when he used to be at The Intercept, we're just trying to help Democrats out. And we hammered Mark Kelly multiple times for refusing to sponsor the PRO Act, a major labor reform. And he didn't take our advice, didn't do it. And sorry, buddy, next time listen to us and maybe you'd be VP right now. Instead, you had Sean Fain out there saying that the one he really liked, the two he really liked actually were Beshear and Walls. And UAW, the most kind of resurgent labor union in the country right now, I think that really helped him and hurt Mark Kelly. Now, on the point about the trans politics hurting

walls, this is where the weird thing comes in. Because even when, so when you poll that question, then in general, Americans are against against the surgeries for minors. In general. But it's very complicated if you call it gender affirming. But overall, I think people don't like that Republicans are making them think about it. And Republicans are the ones that are tagged with the weirdness. For bringing it up. Yeah. Republicans are the ones that are tagged with the weirdness. For bringing it up. Like, there was a tweet that I saw circulating yesterday where a liberal is saying, like, good luck, you know, painting this guy as a commie and showing him, like, hunting with his, like, hunting dog.

And I think it was Stephen Miller. I sent that to you, yeah. Yeah, Stephen Miller says he puts tampons in the boys' room in high school. And it's like, okay, you're... Why are you a grown man talking about tampons? Stephen Miller is the one making me think about this. Like, come on. Yeah. I don't know. I see both sides of that one. Because I do think it's like, you guys are selling this dude in a camo hat who's, who's hunting, you know, just like a lot of my family as just your, your average Minnesotan. He did sign the bill that, you know, mandated

tampons in men's rooms. But he, my thinking on. But you're saying that when Republicans talk about children's tampons, it makes you think about it and you're like, shut up. Right. Exactly. And also, because like when I think about it, it's like, okay, should tampons be in the boys' room in middle school or high school? It's like, if they are, it's probably because some student like found that helpful to them. And I don't care. Like put them wherever. And also like pro tip, bring your own pads or tampons to school. Like Don't count on the school to have them in the bathroom. When you need them, they're not going to be there. Why did you feel the need to dispense this advice?

Because if somebody's watching this program and they're like, oh, I can just go to the bathroom. Either one. It is why people watch this show, though, for the health advice from Ryan Grimm. Yes, exactly. This is what we're paying for people. Don't you agree? You wouldn't count on like school having pads or tampons. There are a lot of things I would just generally not count on schools for. That is one of them. So the Trump campaign's reaction was, I guess, sort of as predicted. Here's what they said yesterday. Frank Luntz made a funny point, and I'm loathe to say that, but here's Frank Luntz on X.

Interesting, this is B2, interesting that Trump says Tim Walz will be the worst VP in history because it means that Kamala Harris is not. That's a Trump campaign email, obviously. He'll unleash. Looks like spam. How does that get through the spam filter? I don't know that it does. I guess it got through Frank Luntz's, but this is an actual quote from it, in all caps, highlighted. He'll unleash hell on earth

and open our borders to the worst criminals imaginable. Thought they were already open. That's true. That's a good point. Maybe keep our borders open to the worst criminals imaginable. Green new scam, trillions of dollars on fire, millions of dirty cash to buy the White House. That one,

I don't fully understand. The real killer, he's already pulled in, quote, millions in dirty cash to buy the White House. You're right, it does look like spam. Now, Trump- Wouldn't he support lighting the trillions of dollars on fire because it would reduce the money supply? That's a good point. And they think there's too much money supply in the economy. Have you considered responding to him? That would be quantitative tightening. You should respond to him on True Social. This is why you should be on True Social. No, if I can find his email in my inbox, I'll just reply to whoever that inbox is. This is what he posted on True Social. Gavin Newsom then posted it to Twitter

and said, oh, he's scared. What are the chances that crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the U.S. whose presidency was unconstitutionally stolen from him by Kamabla, Barack Hussein Obama, crazy Nancy Pelosi, shifty Adam Schiff, crying Chuck Schumer, and others on the lunatic left, crashes the Democrat National Convention coup to the people in the world He most hates and he wants it back now The Kamala thing has started to get some traction, too It's not great if you can't tell if it's a typo or an attempt at a nickname. Yeah, is it a real attempt? I think so. I think so because and he's is he basically calling there for a January 6th to restore Joe Biden to the nomination well, we know calling there for a January 6th to restore Joe Biden to the nomination? Well, we know that there's a January 6th, there's a soft coup, there's a hard coup, there's a soft J6, there's a hard J6.

Who knows what degree of J6? One thing Trump and Biden have in common from Trump's perspective is that their vice presidents both pulled coups on him, right? Mm-hmm. And as Trump would be foolish not to remind us of this. That's right. But Tim Walz also was on camera, so I think it could hurt him. Shortly before Biden stepped down, right after the debate, saying that Biden was fit to lead.

He was outside the White House saying that into a microphone to reporters that Biden was fit to lead, fit to be president for another four years, basically. So that could hurt him as well. Now, J.D. Vance has been hitting the trail hard. Dude has been everywhere. The idea was that Donald Trump was regretting the pick of J.D. Vance, that he wanted to sort of turn down the volume on Vance. Vance is crisscrossing the country right now. Here's what he had to say yesterday about Walz. The reason I didn't say a whole lot about Tim Walz is because the Democrats have showed a willingness to pull a little switcheroo on us.

So I don't even know if we're actually going to get Tim Walz out of this campaign. And I think that a lot of us are asking ourselves, well, it's not going to be official until the Democrats actually nominate him, I guess, at their convention next week. So that's the first reason. The second reason is, look, Tim Walz's record is a joke. He's been one of the most far left radicals in the entire United States government at any level. But I think that what Tim Walz's selection says is that Kamala Harris has bent the knee to the far left of her party, which is what she always does. The only thing I'll say about Josh Shapiro is I genuinely, there's some fans out here. I genuinely feel bad that for days, maybe

even weeks, the guy actually had to run away from his Jewish heritage because of what the Democrats are saying about him. I think that's scandalous and disgraceful. Whatever you believe or just whatever you, whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody, the fact that that race, the vice presidential race on the Democratic side, became so focused on his ethnicity, I think is absolutely disgraceful. Do you think you have any similarities? Can you talk about a common ground that you share with laws? Well, look, I mean, yeah, we're white guys from the Midwest.

I guess there are similarities there. I guess. Yeah. What'd you make of that? Why did I say chaos behind him? That was my first. The sign behind him? The sign behind him said chaos. Chaos, yeah.

You've got to think more about the signs you're going to put behind somebody. I don't know it combined with that Trump tweet feels like real sour grapes from Republicans about the fact that they're not getting to run against Joe Biden anymore and I get it I would much rather be running against Joe Biden they were about to win Minnesota and New Mexico and Virginia

yeah, Minnesota. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they were on their way to an absolutely historic landslide. A landslide so historic Trump was like, I'm going to go with Don Jr.'s pick. J.D. Vance, my vice president. And then all of a sudden, and also I think that they're extremely frustrated by the fact that Harris has been running for president now for two weeks. He's not done an interview, not at a press conference, and basically not rolled out any policies except to flip-flop on Medicare for All, on basically everything she ran on. Like anything that was progressive that she ran on in 2019. I don't want to say 2019 because it's not 2020 because she did not

make it into 2020. She dropped out before then. Yeah. She has walked away from all of those things. December. Yeah. She's found time to retreat from all those policies, but she has not put any affirmative policies out, except she said she's going to make the Affordable Care Act better, which good. I'd like to see the Affordable Care Act made better. That can really mean anything with her because remember when she raised her hand about Medicare for All and the, yeah. Right. But yeah, Trump also says he's going to make the Affordable Care Act better. He says everyone will have coverage.

Good. Great. If we can have a presidential campaign with both candidates competing for who's going to make the Affordable Care Act better, who's going to expand coverage more, better, great. So I think Republicans, tell me if I'm right, are just extremely frustrated. Now, they're used to the mainstream media kind of taking them for this ride. And then this. Now, it's interesting that the Trump campaign was so nervous about Shapiro. Like that they felt like, and there was some analysis I saw that said that he would add about a 0.4% margin

to the Harris ticket in Pennsylvania, which sounds like not much, but in a very tight race is actually a huge amount. Yeah, it's a good point. If you believe that it's statistically significant, like that race very likely will be decided maybe by that amount. Yeah, because if you look at the tallies from 2016 and 2020 in some of those states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, I was looking back at them the other day,

there's razor thin margins in those states. So the Trump campaign seems happy that it wasn't Shapiro, but I wonder if they're a little bit, I think they expected worse Democrats than they're getting right now. Well, I think that's true. And I think they also underestimated. In fact, I know they underestimated the degree to which Kamala Harris would be accepted with open arms by this sort of political establishment from the media to elite Democrats. The left didn't put up much of a peep. Right. And so I sent this to you guys yesterday. It was like Cynthia Nixon sipping like coconut water yesterday. It just has been that all of the coup stuff has gone away. And that's what the Trump campaign really wanted to hammer home. It was like, this was a soft coup.

They have just totally thrown democracy out the window while they're running. That stuff is not sticking. And it's not saying it's like Trump saying, this is a soft coup against a guy that I believe should resign. So it's like. I feel like that's, it's not sticking partially because the media just fully moved on. It's not entirely untrue that basically what we saw happen was an immediate decision after the debate. It wasn't immediate. It took a couple of weeks, but it was immediately things started to fall into place. It didn't happen for the primary for a reason, and then suddenly happened after the debate. So I get that. But I think people are frustrated by how big of a boost Kamala Harris has gotten from pop culture and media. I don't think they expected it.

They should have expected it. I don't think they did. That said, the race is still basically tied. She is doing well in some new polls. But the Shapiro thing in particular, let's roll this clip of Ben Shapiro. No relation. No relation. Talking about how he ended up getting passed up and what he thinks that means.

Roll B5. She has opened herself up wide to every attack on her radicalism by picking Tim Walz. See, there was another pick that was available and everyone sort of expected that person to be picked. That person, of course, was the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro. Pennsylvania has 18 electoral votes. Josh Shapiro has a 61% approval rating in Pennsylvania. Very easy pick. Super, super simple pick for Kamala Harris. And we know why she didn't pick Josh Shapiro. And the reason is because he's a Jew. Also adopted under Tim Walz's governorship, background checks for

private gun transfer, which of course means effectively a gun registry. DFL lawmakers also banned supposed conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, which is much more controversial than it sounds like. When they're talking about conversion therapy, they're no longer talking about the horrible old practice of taking teenagers who were gay and electroding them or something. They're talking about actual therapy

for people struggling with their sexual identity, for example. He legalized recreational marijuana. He required a carbon-free electric grid by 2040. Again, that is such insanity. That is not going to happen. That is not going to happen because the alternative sources of electricity,

like wind and solar, are simply not up to the task of supplying electricity to an entire state in the middle of some of the coldest areas of the United States. Adopted a new reading curricula based on phonics, and passed a massive $2.58 billion capital construction package. So that is tax hikes. That is spending. That is Tim Walz in a nutshell.

So again, I don't think he's wrong that those bring vulnerabilities to the table and vulnerabilities that Josh Shapiro might not have had. But I don't agree with this premise that Walls does not also bring advantages to the ticket that Shapiro wouldn't bring to the ticket and that Shapiro is just this sort of Gavin Newsom like playing, I could play a politician on TV type guy. And Kamala is very much, seems like a politician. Yes. So two of those. Yeah, I agree. Again, and against Trump, the anti-politician is a tough, tough race. Yeah. And Shapiro

very much acknowledged Walls' avuncularness, he called it, his affability, like his likability. Like, I think it's the one thing that everybody is like, okay, yeah, it's a likable guy. Right. He seems cool. Yeah. And that's going to be what, because one of the reasons Kamala Harris reportedly was interested in Wallace is that when he went on cable news, Chris and I talked about this last week and made that weird remark about JD Vance that these people are weird. That was impressive because coming from him, it seemed to stick that he had this. Now, Republicans may, because of that sort of cultural progressivism, may actually have an ability, we'll see how well it sticks,

to paint him as weird. Again, we will see how well that politically sticks, but that coming from him is different than that coming from Josh Shapiro. I don't know that Josh Shapiro could even pull that off because he just seems less regular. And when it sounds like a regular guy saying it, it's easier to make it stick. Right. And the more that Stephen Miller goes on Fox News, like, ranting about Tim Walls and tampons and getting offended at the weird things. Like, you're not beating those charges,

man. I don't think this is the guy you want to drag out to tell us that you're not weird. And again, yeah, I agree that all those things are vulnerabilities, but to what degree they're vulnerabilities in this larger context of how much a vice president will even matter. To your point, there are marginal reasons that these are important picks in places like Pennsylvania. So I don't disagree with that either. But how much this conversation will be about Tim Walz and his various policies going forward is very much an open question. It depends on what Republicans decide to run on. Certainly this gives them something to work with, but voters are thinking about people at the top of the ticket for the most part. So I don't know that this is going to be a

huge part, even like when people are making up their minds about who to vote for. In a place like Pennsylvania, if your governor's on the ticket, that's different. Republicans probably were not going to win Minnesota, even with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. And so up next, we're going to have two people debating this very question. Cenk Uygur, TYT host, and Will Chamberlain. What do you describe him? A conservative attorney? Yeah, conservative attorney. Activist. I would say he's a sort of new right.

Conservative attorney and very much a pro-Trump voice on the right. Yeah, and Cenk was taking a kind of counterintuitive contrarian Shapiro, not necessarily pro-Shapiro but anti-anti-Shapiro line, but is over the moon about the Tim Walz pick. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion- dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player,

Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher.

Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch.

What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

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Joining us now to discuss more on the Tim Walz VP selection, we've got Will Chamberlain, a kind of a new right conservative activist writer. Attorney. An attorney as well. And we've got Cenk Uygur, host of TYT's main show. Cenk, Will, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. And Cenk, let's start with you because talk to us about how you were feeling during the kind of veep stakes competition, which interestingly was kind of what we had been proposing Democrats do for their actual nomination, is to have this kind of an open process where it wasn't necessarily going to lead to actual people voting, but by the general vibes of the country, somebody would emerge as an obvious favorite. And that seemed to happen here. Like it was a participatory democratic process, even if nobody got to go and actually cast votes.

So how did you feel about the kind of VP selection before the process kicked off? And how did you feel about it by the end of it? Yeah, I felt many different things. First of all, I felt told you. Second of all, apprehension. And then at the end, elation. So told you as in, look at all these amazing Democratic candidates. This is why we thought that Biden should step aside, because the idea that Biden was the best that the Democrats had to offer was so preposterous at this late stage in his life. I'm like, how about the governor of Pennsylvania or Michigan or Kentucky or apparently Minnesota? And it turned out when we looked into them, they were all fantastic. I told you, of course, there's a lot of great Democrats out

there. Now, the apprehension part was, I was like, oh no, here we go again with the Democrats. With all these great candidates out there, if they pick like a Mark Kelly snooze fest, because they think they already have this thing won, or even worse, the corporate Lego man, Pete Buttigieg, all this will have been for naught. And then I would have put them back as underdogs. But they didn't. They didn't. And at the end, I felt elation as I can't believe they made the best pick. I can't believe. And I can't believe that the last two were the best two, Josh Shapiro and Tim Walz. So that couldn't have got any better. Well, let's start electorally. So just cynically, like setting aside what you think about the policies that this ticket is going to put forward. Electorally, from your perspective on the right, how do you think this pick plays?

Which, by the way, I want to add is an important addition to what Cenk just said, is that, you know, is Tim Walz a good candidate? To Ryan's point, is he a good candidate for Democrats or do his vulnerabilities, as you see them, outweigh the potential advantages that he brings to the ticket? I think among the finalists, he's the pick we're happiest to see as Republicans. We were worried about Josh Shapiro. We think that Josh Shapiro has massive favorability ratings

and what's most likely to be the tipping point state. If you saw him speak yesterday at that rally, he's a hell of an orator. Like, just real talk, the guy can speak. But he made a pretty good joke, too, when people said he was compared to Barack Obama. He's like, well, Obama's a pretty good orator, so I'm not upset about that comparison.

So we were worried about Shapiro. Tim Walz makes this a very simple election. It's make America great again versus make America burn again. They are going to have the Minneapolis riots hanging over their head for the next three months. It's going to be an immigration and crime election. They're going to have to explain why Tim Walz decided to let rioters run wild while he twiddled his thumbs, and then why Kamala Harris promoted a fund to bail those rioters out. Yeah, what do you think, Cenk?

All right, first of all, let's all be amused by the idea of someone who definitely should not be running. If they didn't call the National Guard soon enough, and they just twiddled their thumbs while there was a riot happening, like on January 6th. Awkward. Okay, so listen, it's hilarious that we have agreement here. on January 6th. Awkward. Okay. So, listen, it's hilarious that we have agreement here. He thinks Tillman Wall

is the best candidate for them. I think Tillman Wall is the best candidate for us. The brother passed all these wonderful laws that are intensely popular. Paid family leave, you know,

free lunches for poor kids. By the way, free college for lower income families so they can compete with the rich families, which Republicans are going to hate. And they did hate. They voted against it. He's passed so many economically populous bills and then just popular, popular bills like legalizing marijuana. And all of these poll at over 70%. So if they're going to run on Tim Walz's record, they're going to run straight into our iceberg. And I love it. Please make the case against the American people how they shouldn't have paid family leave. They shouldn't have child tax credits.

They shouldn't have abortion rights. Go for it. Go for it. Make our day. By the way, don't get me wrong. I like Josh Shapiro. I favor Josh Shapiro. But this whole thing that they do after every pick is like, well, if you'd picked the other

guy, we would have been scared of that guy. But you pick this guy, we're thrilled. I've seen this 2,000 times over. So, Will, I imagine what was going through your head, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but as Cenk was talking about some of these popular and sort of genuinely populist economic policies that the likes of Sourabh Amari and others even on the new right have looked at and said, there's some interesting stuff in here economically that is popular with voters, whether or not it's right or wrong, popular with voters at the very least.

What was probably coming through your mind was some of the cultural policies that Waltz has passed. So that would be on LGBT issues, immigration issues, the way he's talked about both of those issues that create vulnerabilities for him. So is that something that as Republicans are looking at this, you think drags Waltz down, drags Kamala Harris down from now until November, Will? Yeah, I mean, it's not 2012. Mitt Romney is not at the top of the ticket with Paul Ryan. We're not about to run on, you know, cutting entitlement spending or bending the cost curve or whatever. So it's a very different Republican Party. The head of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican convention. We're not going to be running on child tax credits are bad. The real problem with Waltz, I think, I mean, first off, obviously, immigration, Waltz has allowed for taxpayer money to go to paying for illegal immigrants college. That's something we're

certainly going to run on. I mean, I'm generally of the view that tax American taxpayers money should benefit American citizens and not not the obvious, not the opposite. He's got some very big issues on the trans stuff. It's not merely, you know, like, should do trans people exist? This is stuff like, you know, he's going to trans people exist? This is stuff like, you know, he's going to make it impossible for red states to set laws that prohibit transgender surgeries on children. And, you know, like as much as Cenk wants to say this stuff is popular, this stuff is not popular. You know, deacons of reactionary conservatism like England and Norway and Sweden have banned all these treatments. This is stuff that's not going to go well with the broader public.

And then there's also the biggest issue, which I think with Wallace, which really hasn't been covered. He's a deployment dodger. He was in the National Guard. He was the leader of a unit. And the moment that the Iraq war, that his unit was about to deploy, he just said, sorry, guys, have fun. And just let them all go off to Iraq. And three of them died. Okay. Let me answer that.

So the brother was in the National Guard for 27 years. He got at least three medals that I saw. And he enlisted. He's the highest enlisted ranked member of the Armed Services ever serving Congress. And you're going to compare him to Commander Bonespurs, who ran from Vietnam and they asked him, hey, your daddy wrote you a note about how you had Bonespurs in your ankle. Which ankle was it? He's like, I don't know. Maybe both, maybe both. Your guy's a total, utter coward. He ran from Vietnam and then later bragged that his Vietnam was dodging STDs at the

orgies he was going to. So you want to compare him to a guy who served for 27 years? Have at it, Voss. Yeah, I'll go right back at you on that. My guy's the guy who got shot in the face and got up screaming, fight, fight, fight. Your guy, who's a 47-year-old man supervising teenagers and young men who are about to go to the war, leading them for years. The moment they're about to deploy, walks off the job. Total loser. Anybody's a coward in this race.

It's Tim Walz. You're nuts. So you're saying actually defending the country is cowardly if you do it for decades on end and you incite them to do it? When did he defend the country? Hold on, hold on, hold on. The one chance he had to do it, he quit. Hold on, hold on, hold on. The one chance he had a chance to do it, he quit. Hold on, hold on, hold on.

You don't get to talk over me. Sorry. Okay, fair enough. And then wins the Nebraska Citizen Soldier of the Year. He wins every award there is. And then you go, well, no, you didn't serve 30 years. You didn't serve 40 years. Your guy served zero years.

Okay, so Cenk, though, could you respond to what Will said about immigration, trans issues, causing vulnerabilities for Waltz? I mean, it is true that as popular as some of those economic policies might be, those are way more fraught issues. And Waltz, who really relied on Minneapolis to win his gubernatorial election, as Steve Kornacki pointed out on MSNBC yesterday, those are tougher sells outside of Minneapolis on some of those big cultural issues. Yeah, I understand that. So again, though, I wanna make sure that everybody understands

that Donald Trump is a giant coward who ran for Vietnam and wanted poor people and middle class people to die on his behalf. But to be fair, his daddy's doctor note was really sterling, well paid for. Okay, so now in terms of those issues, look, it depends on how you ask the questions on immigration, trans rights, etc. And so if you say, oh my God, the police department and the fire department in Minnesota are wrong. They shouldn't have driver's licenses, even though it would make the cops' lives much, much easier in identifying them. And I can't believe that an undocumented immigrant would ever get anything. They should be demonized and we should hate them and we should

pretend that they're evil. Okay, you can go that route. You can run a hate-filled campaign. And by the way, it might resonate with some people, I get it. But we're gonna come back and double down on how he helped the average American and his economic bills are overwhelmingly popular. In fact, 90% of the bills that he's passed are overwhelmingly popular. Here's a guy who was a teacher, a football coach, and from the Midwest, I almost pulled a Trump and said from the Middle West. That's a thing that we say. Okay. So look, compared to a loser bankrupt businessman and a vulture capitalist, I've added, Hoss. Okay. Tell us about how popular you guys are. And oh, we have the most popular billionaires and Wall Street tycoons on our side. Go for it. Okay. But I don't think those are going

to play well at all. I think they're going to get their asses handed to them. What's your response to that one, Will? Oh, I mean, I think like Tim Waltz is just goofy. That's another thing about him. He's a really, really, I mean, think about Tim Waltz. Here's the other thing. The guy made a sex joke in his like announcement as VP referencing this couch stuff. You know, it'd be one thing if he was just doing that on some podcast. He's doing it on the speech where he's making himself known and then he shakes his wife's hand. I don't know if I shake my wife's hand,

I get slapped. The guy's ridiculous. And then I think also on this economic stuff, I mean, Minnesota is an economic basket case. It's actually relative to other states. It's gotten far worse in the past few years. People are fleeing the state to Florida. He's not actually done a good job of managing his state and then the state's also become a high crime state because he's so inept on crime as demonstrated in minneapolis in

2020 okay it's the uh fifth best state for business so this whole thing of extreme liberal is absurd it's the third happiest state. And then I love every point about Tim Walz. It's as if they're talking about Donald Trump and don't realize it. That guy's really strange, says weird things. Can you believe he said inappropriate things? Really? A guy supporting Trump is going to tell us about how the other guy said inappropriate things, a vague joke about a couch. But you where you're, but you're not outraged that Trump was like, yeah, I grabbed him by the genitals. You don't think that's weird? That's totally normal. And then, oh my God, I can't believe he shook his wife's hand. Well, that's better than Trump.

Melania won't even touch his hand. So, I mean, everything you say about Tim Walz is like are steroids comically true of Donald Trump? I mean, context seems pretty obviously different, what you say in private versus what you say at a rally. I mean, you make sex jokes at a rally. Oh, yeah, I sexually assault people. That sounds great. Yeah, in private, it's way better. Can we stick on the question of Walz's economic record, actually, because, Jane, can you flesh out that point about, this is something I've started to see coming from people actually within Minnesota who have said, you know,

Waltz did pass these economic populist policies, but what he did with the money and the budget and all that, you know, conservatives in Minnesota, unsurprisingly, will hammer Waltz for having been bad on the economy. Your contention is that actually it's a benefit for him that he has, the economy that he's overseen in Minneapolis or in Minnesota is a benefit for him on the campaign trail. Yeah, so look, first I should also acknowledge that the sexual assault that Donald Trump was convicted of was in public. He actually assaulted her in public. Yeah, he did. In addressing- None of that, none of what you said is true.

He was not convicted of a sexual assault. That is false. A jury said he definitely did it, and it was in public. It was a civil suit. It's not a conviction. Oh, I'm sorry. It was a civil suit where he- In New York. Jury said he definitely did sexual assault in public.

Okay, so, to the economic issues. So look, he passes all these wonderful laws that help Americans. Look at paid family leave. That's Democrats saying, hey, moms should get, in that case, 20 weeks off after they have a baby so they could bond with a baby. And Republicans go, no, that would hurt corporate interests. Corporations want you to go back to work the next day. And so they all voted no. And they said, well, if you vote to have moms spend any time with their babies, and you know how much Republicans hate babies. And if you do that, my God, it's going to sink the economy. Except it didn't. It's the fifth best state for business. So not only did the

average Minnesotan get a lot better situation, but you guys were all wrong. It didn't hurt business at all. So it's always been a mirage. It's the Republican Party is built to serve the rich and serve corporations. So they don't want you to have one day with your baby at all. They don't want you sick leave. They don't want anything. They don't want child tax credit. They don't want any of that stuff because it would hurt their beloved corporations, they think, in their infinite greed. But it turns out it doesn't even hurt them. It still makes business perfectly happy. So he found a way to balance interests in a way that helped everyone. You can't argue with that. And Will, I feel like

Republicans are going to have two problems in going after Walls. And one is that, like you said, Walls seems like a pretty boring white guy. So painting him as a radical is going to be difficult. And Minnesota is Minnesota. And so painting it as Stephen Miller tried as like the next Mogadishu is going to be difficult. And like portraying it as some like, you know, communist Mecca is also going to be difficult because it's Minnesota. But maybe I'm wrong here. Like, what is your sense of how you guys are going to be able to turn Minnesota and Tim Walz into kind of scary figures? We're just going to keep publishing the images and videos of Minneapolis in June 2020 over and over and over again. That's what we're going to do. I feel like—

The guy's twiddled his thumbs. I mean, I think you're probably— I appreciate that. I suspect you will. I think that people are over that, like that it's, that you're going to look like you're complaining about something that people are kind of ready to move past and are going to say, look, the protests were well-meaning. They were targeting a genuine injustice. They went overboard at times. We don't necessarily want to be reminded of that. Why are you guys reminding us?

Maybe you're, maybe you're, do you see my point? Like, I don't know if this is going to work for you. I see how you're doing it, but I think that the sort of people who are swing voters in this election, I mean, you look at generally, like, what do swing voters care about? What are the Republicans' strongest issues with swing voters? Immigration, crime, inflation, right? Those three. Those are the ones.

And crime is a big one um like the defund the police stuff that kamala has said in the past abolish ice stuff that's all stuff that she's extremely worried about that's why she spent like a whole week having her flax go out there and claim that she wasn't the borders are so like they're worried about this stuff tim waltz makes it much worse for them this is where josh Shapiro would have been a really much stronger candidate, more moderate, better on crime. But Tim Walz is just, it fits into the narrative because one of, again, one of Kamala's weakest points is that she promoted that bail fund in Minneapolis. And Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota who twiddled his thumbs. And why, Cenk, is that not a huge problem for Walz, in your opinion?

Yeah. So a couple couple things here number one uh this is the same thing democrats did about january 6th they beat it into the ground and they showed the video after video after video until people got bored of it uh so i'm kind of known for being honest about our side and and the weaknesses in in our side and i don't think that was great political strategy and right now uh, Republicans are making that same mistake. I think Ryan's exactly right. People get it. Hey, listen, George Floyd was one of the greatest injustices. I don't know, maybe Republicans changed their minds

and they think maybe he had it coming or something. I don't know. Maybe they're gonna defend Chauvin like they defended Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman. But in terms of the riots, he did call out the National Guard. They're saying, oh, he didn't do it fast enough. But again, if your candidate is Donald Trump, and he refused to call out the National Guard on January 6, and he sat around and enjoyed it,

while his own supporters chanted hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence, and he said he didn't mind. I don't think you get to make the case that, my God, there'll be chaos if the other guys are elected. So I just don't think that that's a winning issue for them. I think it feels old and stale, but they could run it. And when they do, again, it'll feel a little bit racial. And so I think that they can't help themselves. They keep attacking on race, on the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman. So, you know, on Tim Walz, I mean, they got nothing because of what

Ryan pointed out. It's Minnesota. He's a lovable old grandpa. He passed laws that the people of Minnesota are thrilled with. And so they're going to go to weird. But that's what he said about you guys. And everybody thinks that's true. So it just seems super weak. I don't think they have any case at all. Look, guys, just real quick on this. When Joe Biden was in the race, I said he had a 0% chance of winning. So it's not like I'm telling you, oh, yeah, rah, rah, Democratic Party, they're so great. Now I think they're the clear favorites because his record in Minnesota is excellent. Kamala Harris has been terrific on the campaign trail. And now Donald Trump looks like the stale, old, tired guy who's still raving like a lunatic in the corner. I think they're in a world of hurt. So Ryan made a point earlier in the show about

this exchange Stephen Miller had with someone about the, it was someone posting a picture of Tim Walz with his hunting gear on, like bird hunting, something like that, and said, how are you going to paint this guy as like a San Francisco liberal or coastal leader or something? And Stephen Miller replied, he put tampons in girls' bathrooms, or in boys' bathrooms, I'm sorry, and the exchange went super viral. So Will, Ryan was making the point that it backfires on Republicans because then they look like the middle-aged men who are obsessing over tampons or like forcing you to think about tampons. What's your response to that? Because to me, I actually think the Stephen Miller point is pretty successful at undercutting the Dem argument that this is just your average,

you know, rural Minnesotan dad. But on the other hand, I do see Ryan's point. I think the politics of that issue in particular have changed over the last eight years and that the general public is a lot less sympathetic, especially when it comes to stuff about trans and kids. So I don't think it helps Tim Waltz that he was like making his state a refuge for, you know, puberty blockers for children. I think that it's going to actually look bad for him. But more broadly, I think it's like, generally it's just this Hickliffe stuff

where, you know, it's like, oh, look, it's a liberal with a gun that's going to persuade conservatives that he's just a fine guy. I mean, we've got so many obvious attacks. I mean, obviously the deployment Dodger one is the biggest one. The guy's not going to have credibility among veterans.

Every veteran's going to look at him and be like, you would have abandoned me when I was about to deploy. That's Every veteran's going to look at him and be like, you would have abandoned me when I was about to deploy. That's what they're going to look at him and say. That's sick. That's really sick. Cenk, I mean... It's just true. It's sick.

You guys do it every time to actual veterans. It's an immoral line of attack. You did it to John Kerry after he took bullets for this country. Your guys are all chicken hawks. They're all loser cowards like Donald Trump, who ran from Vietnam. Dick Cheney, who never served. Tom DeLay, who said, oh, black people took my spot. Otherwise, I would have gone to Vietnam.

They never served. They're always cowards. They always send other people to die. They're always rich people going, hey, why don't you poor middle class people die for the wars that I start? Except J.D. Vance. And now this goes for 27 years. Yeah, JD Vance went to Iraq. What did Tim Walz do? Okay, why don't you go serve for 27 years, then I'll judge you. I'll judge, oh,

you should have stayed 28th year, I'm judging you. So Cenk, the knock on him that you're gonna hear from the right is that it was May 16th, 2005, I guess when Walz stepped aside. And as he retired, so this was after 20 plus years in the National Guard, when he, when, when Walls stepped aside. And as he, as he retired, so this was after 20 plus years in the National Guard, but as he retired, his unit was about to deploy. And according to people in the unit, he had told those in the unit that he would deploy with them to, to Iraq. So that, that's going to be the hit. You think it doesn't land because, because they'd go, they, they went after John Kerry, so they'll go after everybody, so they've lost.

And Cenk, let me add also that Chris LaCivita is the head of the Trump campaign with the Wilds right now. He is the architect of the Swift Boat ad campaign. Of course, that's why he does this. He does this to every veteran who's served. Oh, you wanna serve America? We're gonna find a way to smear you. And we're gonna pretend that you didn't get shot enough.

We're gonna pretend that you didn't serve long enough, even though our guys never served, and you served over two decades. But we're gonna find a way to use that against you. So hey, listen, if you're an average American, and you like politics, and you care about this country, and you wanna fix it, be careful. If you go into the armed services, the Republicans will viciously smear you later. He took a bathroom break once. I didn't like him. Oh, yeah. He once did something I didn't like in training in the army or in the National Guard. Okay, where was your guy? Oh, no, he didn't have a unit to deploy because his dad literally bribed a doctor to write a doctor's note about a bone spur he didn't have. So Will, can you explain? I'm being serious, because you're smearing a guy who served for decades.

So I want you to answer to me why Donald Trump isn't a gigantic coward from running from Vietnam. Don't tell me about an assassination attempt, okay? That's a different thing, and I gave him credit for that. Tell me about why he ran from Vietnam and let poor and middle class Americans die for him while he bragged about going to orgies instead. I don't know the details of what exactly went on with this Vietnam stuff, but I will say this, this is the obvious comparison. He was 22 when Vietnam was going on. Tim Walz was a grown man

and the leader of his unit and he abandoned them. So since he was a spoiled little brat, and his daddy had given him $400 million, and he was 22, and he wanted to get laid, he let other people die for him. That seems like a really compelling argument. You guys seem super brave and really into veterans. I mean, Tim Walters did exactly that. He could have gone with his unit. Three of his unit died. These were the men he was leading and told what he would deploy with them. And then he left. 50,000 died in Vietnam. None of them were billionaires' kids, that's for sure. None of them were rich kids like Donald Trump who all dodged. And when you dodge a draft like that, what you say is, I don't mind if a kid from Minnesota or Nebraska dies on my behalf.

I got orgies to go to. You know what Donald Trump did with veterans who were homeless in front of Trump Tower? He had them removed. He thought that they lowered his property values because those veterans went to Vietnam. Oh, I guess they were traumatized because daddy didn't get them out. So here, get them off of my, in front of my Trump Tower. This rich bitch who ran, ran, ran, who never served, who was a giant coward,

who doesn't know which ankle had the bone spurs, has the temerity to go after a veteran who served for over two decades and has the medals to show for it. It's disgusting. Let me, maybe this is a good place to start winding down

the conversation, because does any of this actually matter? That's the question I want to pitch to both of you. This is the vice president, the vice presidential nominee, that is. So does litigating the details of his departure from Army National Guard, like, whether it's that, whether it's his economic policies, is it going to have a meaningful effect on the Harris ticket or on the Trump-Vance ticket?

Is Tim Walz, does he really matter? And I'll start with you on that one, Cenk. Yeah, look, I have to play defense on it because these guys are immoral. So they keep smearing every Democratic candidate in the same exact way. Oh, you dare to serve in our armed services? We're going to use it against you. We're going to weaponize. So I'm not going to let them do that, okay?

Especially when their party is filled to the rim with cowards who never serve. Okay, so you don't get to smear veterans after you chose to run from every battle and start those wars and then never serve in them. So I'm not going to let them get away with it. In terms of what people vote on, go ahead, do your immoral smears of veterans. It'm not going to let them get away with it. In terms of what people vote on, go ahead, do your immoral smears of veterans. It's not going to work. The only thing people

care about is how does this election affect my life? There's many reasons I was against Biden, but one of them was he kept talking about my legacy and I got to have a second term, etc. I'm like, yeah, brother, what's your policies? How are you going to help the average American? But now we have a team that has a track record of helping. I mean, you want to talk about Tim Walz, you're attacking him. He has a track record of passing dozens of bills that help the average person in Minnesota. That's why he's intensely popular in his own state. That's why these bills worked, because they weren't about ego building for Tim Walz.

They're about actually improving the lives of Americans and Donald Trump doesn't have that record. He has a record of what he did one giant bill when he was in office Enormous corporate tax cuts for his donors and that's his legacy. So he's gonna run on that Oh, I helped all the corporations. So all the corporations are my best friends I gave them all the biggest tax breaks and they're all now richer, and you guys have to pay more taxes because of it. Go ahead, run on that record. And I think that it's gonna be super obvious who people should vote for. I think we're gonna win this actually relatively easily now. And Will, any final words? If you got like one minute to talk to the swing voter who was gonna

decide this election, or swing, whether they're going to vote or not vote, might be their swing decision. What do you say to them about this pick? Like, really, are you better off right now than you were under the Trump administration economically? The economy was booming under Trump and it absolutely crashed under Biden. Inflation is out of control. If you even go to the grocery store, you can tell gas prices are out of control. And why? They're at war with domestic energy. I mean, Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking. She's said that repeatedly. So you have, I mean, if you're talking about just core economic issues, like is this team, Harris-Waltz, going to be good for your pocketbook?

It's not. They have a slew of bad policies. Meanwhile, you know, they're trying to portray Trump-Vance as Romney-Ryan. It's a different Republican Party. This is a pro-worker Republican Party that had the leader of the Teamsters on at the convention. You can both be pro-worker and not indulge in insane green delusions that kill your economy. And that's what the Republicans are all about. All right, well, thanks to both of you guys. I was gonna say that's an interesting place to end

because I think Will just previewed where Republican messaging will want to go and whether or not Donald Trump carries that successfully is an open question. Trump and others carry that successfully as an open question and how it works against wallets is an open question. So thank you both.

That was a very helpful discussion. Thank you guys. Thank you. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

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

Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast.

We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher.

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

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years

of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

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

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wesley Bell has defeated Cori Bush in the race for Missouri's first district's Democratic primary. He won, ended up winning by about six points, about five and a half points. Ryan, you followed this race really closely. A lot of chatter in the media today about what actually happened. I'm not convinced that the media knows what actually happened, but I am convinced that you know what actually happens. So please tell us. Well, so, I mean, the headline is the, you know, the squad is now, depending on how you count it, shrinking from what was eight members at the beginning, if you count Summerlee and Greg Kassar. Should we start crossing people off on your book cover? Yeah. You can see it on Ryan's book. Yeah, you've got Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. So of those six,

two of them have lost primaries, but have cost AIPAC a combined total of at least $25 million to knock them out. That's crazy. $17 million in Jamal Bowman's race, and now $8 million dropped on Cori Bush to win. All the votes are not counted yet, but we're looking at about 63,000 for Wesley Bell, pushing $56,000, over $56,000 for Wesley Bell, pushing 56,000, over 56,000 for Cori Bush. So it ended up being a pretty close race for as massively outspent as Cori Bush was. What we learned from the Nina Turner race and the Summer Lee race is that millions of dollars in spending on TV can move the needle roughly 20 to 30 points. It's a dramatic amount that you can kind of push

the number. Now, if you have Summer Lee ended up winning that race where she dropped 25, 30 points in a couple of weeks. She won it by just a few thousand votes. Nina Turner ended up losing that race by something like 4,000 votes. Very close race as well. But people are not plugged in. A lot of voters don't have a depth of feeling about a candidate such that millions of dollars is not going to sway their choice for that race. And so you get a lot of debating about whether or not spending, AIPAC spending $25 million in these two races matters, which to me is the craziest question you could ever ask. I get it that people who can afford to give $25 million have enough money that they're not going to be poor

as a result of giving it, but they still are not spending that money for no reason. And it's almost insulting to their intelligence to suggest that anybody would spend $25 million to have no effect. Why would you do that? Just buy it. There's things they could spend that money on, like an elevator for your garage so you can move your cars up and down to different...

Romney. Yeah, like Romney. That would be a cool thing to have if you're super rich. Instead, you're going to waste it for no reason on a political campaign. They have a lot of money to waste. The money matters. And this does not count, by the way, the – we don't know the – well, we can figure out the final total later. But most of the money that Wes Bell raised directly to his campaign was bundled by AIPAC. And that money is actually more valuable than the $8 million. And it's complicated, but not that complicated. So if you are a super PAC, like APAC's super PAC, which is called United Democracy Project, you have to pay higher rates for cable television and television advertising. So your $8 million doesn't go as far as it does for the candidate themselves. So the candidate gets discounted rates.

Also, the candidate can coordinate with their own campaign. The candidate can say, all right, I want to do a million dollars on this channel. I want to do a million dollars targeting these voters. I want to do a million over here. And these are the exact messages that I want to hit, whereas the Super PAC is just out on its own, you know, running its own polling and running its own operation. So for those two reasons, the ability to coordinate the money and the discount you get on television advertising, it's much better to get money directly to the campaign.

And APAC raised, we'll find out in the next couple of weeks, but an enormous sum directly to Wesley Bell's campaign. And that's on top of the $8 million that they spent through their super PAC. And I want to ask you now about how that money was spent. Because if we look at the polling, this is the next element, D2, that we put this up on the screen. It was absolutely all over the place. So this is from 538's sort of collating of the polls. Last one had Bell up by six points. Now these small house races, the polling is usually going to be scattered through a lot of different time periods of the reliable polling at least. But one before that had Bell up 23 points, late June, early July. Another one though that was also taken in mid-June had Bell only up by one point,

and then one from all the way back in February had Bell by 22 points. The one constant in that is Cori Bush never led in one of those serious polls, at least as 538 defines them as worthy polls. So were there wild swings in public sentiment as it came to Cori Bush? I think probably the likelier story is that these races are just really hard to pull. And, you know, support for Bell was probably around, you know, 10 plus. Then Cori Bush did come in towards the end of the race. And actually, if there were polls finding her down by 23 points, made it closer than it probably should have been. So what were they talking about? And what was West Bell doing with the APAC money in terms of

messaging that was weighing on voters' minds yesterday? And credit to Mark Melman, who's the head of the Melman Group and also the founder of DMFI, which is basically an APAC affiliate. Some of these polls are from DMFI. Yeah, he's the one that did the plus six poll that was a couple weeks ago and the plus one poll. And I think those look pretty accurate. So he's a pollster and also runs DMFI, which was the super PAC that was running before APAC developed its own super PAC. and it still runs in Democratic primaries. Cori Bush was hitting Wesley Bell with everything in the kitchen sink, including in one of her final ads,

attacking him for sleeping with subordinates as a prosecutor. He was a kind of reformist, kind of Soros-backed DA in St. Louis. He got sued. He was able to, or for some reason, the lawsuit that would have involved a lot of dirty laundry being aired was delayed past the election. It was scheduled to take place maybe six, eight weeks ago or so, and on the day of the hearing it was then postponed. So that really helped Wesley Bell because basically he's getting sued by women in his office who either fired or who quit and are making all sorts of allegations.

And maybe those will come out a year from now and we'll get a Cori Bush-Wesley Bell rematch and a Jamal Bowman-Ritchie Torres race. How did Bell successfully sort of- It's the same playbook that they went after summer Lee with that they went to mall Bowman with it. Cori Bush is is a radical She's out of step with Democrats even as a reformist prosecutor. He was able to sort of make that argument. Well, that's yeah because I mean Being a reformist prosecutor in st. Louis is very popular among Democrats. Yeah So yeah, just just a tech. Okay So yeah, none of the ads, to your

point, were about Israel-Palestine. APAC spent, in the $25 million they spent on these two races, almost zero was spent talking about Israel-Palestine. There was one ad that AIPAC Super PAC ran shortly after October 7th, where they came after Cori Bush. And they mentioned, and it was about Israel-Palestine and basically calling her a Hamas supporter. That was before Wesley Bell had even jumped in the race. And we can talk about this if we have this audio that we published over at Dropsite News. Wesley Bell was originally running for Senate. And there were rumors last summer that were published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was actually running for Senate to raise his name identification so that

he could then jump into the race against Cori Bush and benefit from all of the super PAC spending that is always there to go against anybody in the squad. After October 7th, that level of money that was available increased. So he called Cor he called Cori Bush after the St. Louis paper had said that he was thinking about doing this and swore to her that that absolutely was not happening. Do we have that audio? Can we run that? just from being in his game long enough. Those are, Halman is a hack. He is a hack. And the proof of it is there ain't one legitimate reporter

that would run anything close to that. This is stupid. Exactly. No, you're right. You're right. You're right. Don't think, don't even think

for even a second that that's the case. And I'm telling you right now, I'm telling you with my word, I am not running into you. That is not happening. So, Ren, this is audio of Bell telling Bush that Holloman was a, quote, hack. Yeah, so basically what he says. What's going on? So basically what he says is that the author of the piece is a total hack. Everybody believes he's a hack. The reporter should not be believed. There's no chance. Don't

think for even a second that that's the case. I'm telling you right now, I'm telling you on my word, I am not running against you. That is not happening. And Cori Bush says, well, you know, I'm just thinking, you know, Steve Roberts, who ran against her last time, had said the same thing, like, and, but that he wouldn't run against her, he wouldn't jump from one race to another, but he did, and he's like, I'm no Steve Roberts, I ain't, he says, I ain't no Steve Roberts, Steve Roberts then ended up endorsing Wesley Bell, so, anyway, so shockingly, he lied to her and then jumped into the race. But we could see a rematch in 2026. Who knows? We'll see what, and Cori Bush got attacked for paying her husband to do security. That quote unquote scandal.

Her now husband, right. While also being a defund the police type progressive. It was, that was a big item in conservative media. Right. That wouldn't have mattered in race. That hit less hard. Yeah. In St. Louis. Democratic primary.

And also like the whole premise of the movie Bodyguard is about falling in love with Bodyguard. So I don't see how. Everybody loves that. Yeah. Well, I just mean for your average voter, if there's a sense or an aura of kind of drama and chaos around someone that can, you know, someone else comes in and says, you know, I'm a no drama Obama or whatever it is. It's, that can, that can actually hurt someone if there's a lot of like scandal. Yeah, that was the, that was, yes. Cori Bush is causing too much chaos and like it's about her and this.

So. us and like it's about her and this um so crystal and i back at the hill uh interviewed cory bush the morning after she won her primary um oh cool 2020 yeah that was a while it feels like a while ago um and i just have always been frustrated on some of the conservative attacks on cory bush because there's she's she's i'm very curious about her future because I think she falls into sort of whatever the, we talk about red meat, maybe blue meat. I think she falls into that sometimes. But she's also a more interesting person than some people give her credit for. Extremely interesting. Yeah. Here's where her future goes. I hope we haven't heard the last of her. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where

the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice

to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.

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

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on hell and gone murder line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

to ask the questions no one else is asking. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan, in the UK, the Southampton fallout, the tragedy that happened in Southampton continues to rock. The United Kingdom protests are erupting all over London. And Elon Musk is, of course, paying very close attention to geopolitics, as he always does.

Worth noting, in literally every discussion of Elon Musk and foreign policy that he is a defense contractor. So let's keep that in mind. It's not quite as relevant here as it is when he weighs in on Israel or Taiwan and China, but always worth noting here. Now, Elon Musk has been all over. Let's actually just put E1 up on the screen. This is an article from Politico Europe. The headline is UK PM slams Elon Musk for saying far-right riots were, quote, inevitable. So a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer came out and said there was, quote, no justification for Elon Musk continuing to say that Europe is heading towards a civil war, that the Labour Party's policies and actually the

Conservative Party's policies over the last decade plus, and this is something that a lot of excellent writers have pointed out at UnHerd, where I work now, that those policies were inevitably, the word inevitable has been used a lot in these conversations, were inevitably going to come to this climax, if it is a climax. Elon Musk seems to think there's more to come, full civil war to come, to the point where let's put up this next element. This is, yeah, so he says to Keir Starmer, shouldn't you be concerned about attacks on all communities when Starmer says we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities? This is in reference to the riots that have broken out after there were killings of children in Southampton that were initially attributed to immigrants.

It turned out that it was the child of immigrants, so a British, from what we know so far, it was Rwandan. What originally circulated on social media and heavily on Twitter was that it was an illegal Muslim that stabbed and killed these three little girls. It turned out it was a Christian who was born in Wales. To Rwandan parents. To Rwandan parents. And the UK took the step of actually putting out like, look, no, like this is who did this. This is misinformation. Regardless, it would not justify lynch mobs going through the street trying to beat up Muslims throughout the UK. Oh my gosh, nothing. And Elon Musk's attempt to both sides it there, I think, doesn't do justice to the reality of the situation.

That is, the rampaging mobs are in general racist, anti-immigrant folks going after Muslims and asylum seekers. Well, what's happened is- Like anybody who looks Muslim. In the aftermath of the original outbreak of protests against Muslim communities in the UK, Muslim communities have responded to this. And there has been, I mean, there genuinely now has been outbreaks of unrest on quite literally both sides. That's not where, what it started with though was this, I guess, a lot of people, this has also justified Keir Starmer's horrific policies of calling for more facial recognition and more surveillance of social media, more censorship of social media,

because there was disinformation that circulated on social media and seems to have provoked some of the response. But a newsflash to our technocrats in the EU and in Westminster, this is going to, people will spread disinformation at pubs and bars. Whether or not there's mother effing Twitter for them to spread the disinformation on, they will still organize. People have organized mobs for a long time before social media came along. Disinformation is not something that you can technocratically completely suppress. It's not going away no matter how many civil liberties you clamp down on. But Elon Musk, oh, go ahead. No, I mentioned this on the show yesterday, but it's an interesting historical fact to your point that pick a riot or revolution or uprising that you're familiar with and then go search like the origin of how it happened.

World War I. And it almost all or a world war. It almost always was based on something that wasn't actually accurate. You're going to do the British take on the American Revolution. Oh, that one too, right? Maybe the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party. How dare you. Some of that, yeah.

But what you always also find is that the structural conditions were in place for something to set off what came. So it's true that usually it's misinformation. And hundreds of years ago, predated Twitter. Or some mutation. But it also doesn't justify algorithms pushing, like, obviously false things in front of people's faces. Where's the community note? Where's this like? That's why we should get rid of algorithms.

Go back to old Twitter where it was just your timeline. And it wasn't putting its thumb on the scale. And just hear from your friends. Yeah. And you can be like, okay, so five minutes ago, because this is further down in my feed, someone said this. Now, you know, five minutes later and this is the new post and you can like make a human being with, you know, a brain. You know, not everybody is going to be brilliant at making those judgments, but it's it's better than Twitter's like algorithm making the judgments for us. Right, and also the mob didn't care when they were like, actually, it's a Christian from Wales who had Rwandan parents.

That's a good point. They were like, whatever, we're rampaging. And the broader point is that the levels of migration to the UK have been unsustainable. So that's what this like— Which again, as I mentioned before, they have a channel and water around them. It's also. Good luck with the wall. Also a very problematic birth rate, as you have talked about before.

So there's questions about all of that baked into this. But basically, there's this broader argument that is not just shared by people on the kind of far right, so-called far right, but also increasingly people on the left that look at this and say, this has been unsustainable over the last decade. And there's a very necessary conversation about how neoliberal wars pushed these migration waves into Europe, into the United States. But the sort of downstream effect of that has been really high levels of migration from places that have values that are different than Western values. And that is going to, whether it was Western people coming to their countries or people that have different

values coming to the UK, you're putting two very different cultures together in confined spaces. What did you think was going to happen? That's what Musk is saying. And we can put E3 up on the screen. We teased this earlier in the show, but when Elon Musk is repeatedly tweeting about how civil war is coming for Europe, it becomes a fine line between prediction and what did you say, Ryan? Provocation. Yeah. Civil war is brewing. Europe appears to be headed for a civil war. These are actually all from last year, like from after October 7th. So late October to early November last year. But Elon Musk is very convinced that civil war is coming to Europe. I think a lot of people are increasingly convinced

that civil war is coming not just to Europe, but to the broader West. And anytime you have outbreaks of civil unrest like this in ways that people have not been used to in the last, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s, this might feel unfamiliar, even though there has been a lot of civil unrest. If he would have said Bangladesh, he'd be looking so prescient right now. Civil war coming to Bangladesh, but he keeps saying it about America too. Yeah, he's invested in this. He's one of those guys like... Hopefully not literally.

Right. It's hard sometimes to know what people like him mean when they say Civil War. Do they really mean... Because when we think of civil wars, like we think of like armies that are, you know, fighting each other over, you know, for dominance within a country. Does he mean mobs rampaging, stabbing each other, beating each other? Yeah. What degree? If that's all he means, then okay, I guess England's got one now. There's clearly a culture war. And it's the culture war, a civil war war when, to this example, the child of these Rwandan immigrants was from Wales? It was not, quote unquote, foreign. So then it does kind of become the argument that it's— Well, the English would say it's foreign, right? Wales?

That's true. Thank you. But it does become civil war if it's internecine because of these people who are born with all of the rights as citizens. Well, again, we're getting to the Wales distinction, but let's just hypothetically say it's from London. All of the same rights as you, white Londoner. That means these values are just as, I mean, that's what a lot of people would say. These values are just as British as your values. So is it a hot civil war? Is it a cold civil war? I think is an open question.

Does it keep rupturing into civil unrest like this, or is it managed in, you know, is it managed in a way that becomes better or worse? That's the question. I do think at least the premise that there's a war or a clash is obviously true, but whether that becomes something much, much worse and much, much darker is not yet determined. I hope we manage our imperial decline better than the British manage theirs. Maybe we need to look into the Dutch imperial decline. They seem to have managed it pretty well.

Like they seem pretty, I guess it's, they have enough distance from their imperial decline. They're also tiny. That they're kind of comfy with it. I mean, they were absolutely massive and destructive and they caused a lot of misery for a long stretch of time. Their borders now, at least, though, are tiny. And they did collapse pretty badly. So, Elon Musk, though, announced, if we can put up this final element, that Donald Trump announced, sorry, that he's going to be doing a, quote, major interview with Elon Musk. Details to follow. My guess is that he will do this on Spaces. DeSantis though.

What an absolute disaster that the DeSantis one was. When you know Trump doesn't put up with that stuff, even if the lights are wrong in a room, he'll be like, turn the lights off. They're too bright. He does not put up with poor production. At the NABJ thing, the National Association of Black Journalists thing last week when the audio was bad, it was driving him visibly crazy. Yeah, right. He's been doing top shelf production work, Celebrity Apprentice, etc., for too long to be putting up with lousy audio. He doesn't like it. So, Elon, that tells us space has advanced.

We'll find out. We'll see. Elon Musk, tells us space has advanced. We'll find out. We'll see. Elon Musk, do not screw this up. Trump's going to be very mad at you. But Elon Musk says, even he denied the $45 million monthly thing. He says he's pledged, I think, like $180 million, something like that. It's nebulous what we actually know about it to the Trump re-election campaign. So, for that kind of money, maybe you put up with bad audio, or you put up with glitching spaces. But it does solidify, I guess it should solidify,

the new union between Trump and Musk, or the new alliance between Trump and Musk. Trump is now pro electric vehicles. He was in a Tesla. Did you see his Cybertruck interview? Yes. He hates electric. He hates EVs. No, he loves them. And he's openly said he has to love them because of Elon. Yeah. Which is like a perfect Trumpian construction on that. Also, can we bask in the delicious irony of Elon Musk saying that he was taking over Twitter because he was mad about the election interference and is now just like wildly tilting it towards

Donald Trump in the last few months of an election. That's kind of funny. Yeah. Also, I wanted to bask in him saying major interview because it reminds me of Christmas story where he says he's won a major award and it's the leg lamp. Major interview, major awards, same thing. On that note, that's the end of CounterPoint. I hope it goes better for him than the leg lamp did. Yeah. Yeah, that is a great note to end today's episode on. Just a really bad joke from me.

This is perfect, pitch perfect. But thank you, everybody, for tuning in and continuing to tune in. BreakingPoints.com. If you want to subscribe for the full show, get it in your inbox. You get it early. No breaks. You get all of CounterPointpoints, which is nice. You get access to every segment as opposed to the few that get posted to YouTube. I think we're posting them all now.

Oh, well, we might as well. They're all good. I promise. You don't want to miss a single one. I promise they're all good. Yeah, listen, we're always on. That's right. That's right. We never miss leg day. All right. See you guys soon. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The voices and the perspectives that matter 24-7. Because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all?

This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.