Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/25/24: Tel Aviv Attacked, Journo Kidnapped By IDF, CNN Smears Rashida Tlaib, Kamala Says Eliminate Filibuster For Roe, Biden DOJ Sues Visa, Massive Port Strike Looms, Marcellus Williams Executed

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Tel Aviv attacked as war spirals, journalist kidnapped by IDF, CNN doubles down on Rashida Tlaib smear, Kamala says eliminate filibuster for Roe v Wade, Biden DOJ sues Visa, massive port strike looms, and Missouri executes Marcellus Williams.    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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Good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. How are you doing, Emily? I'm great. You just got back from a big trip. You might be a little jet-lagged. I'm feeling good now. Yeah, I was in Doha for some reporting and for a conference. I'd never been to Doha before. Kind of exciting to see that. There are some of the roads down by the sea that are basically paved with the marble that we would use for our, you know, if you're rich here, you'd put in your kitchen. They're paving their roads with it. They're doing well in Doha. Another level of rich. They are. But are they rich enough for ghost energy? I'm sure some of them are. It also puts the inequality that all wealth rests on,

like right in your face, because you have all these guest workers everywhere. And, you know, here you talk to your Uber drivers and you're kind of like, you know, normal people with normal families here in the U.S. Over there, it's like, oh, yeah, I haven't been back to Sri Lanka for two years to see my family. And I make like, you know. Pennies. $500 a month. Yeah. And send it all back. Right.

It's like absolutely. Like there are so many people across this world living just the most difficult lives, and those are the people lucky enough to get those jobs. It's a reminder of just what an ugly world we've developed. And we will be talking about some drop site reporting actually later in the show. We're going to start with, obviously, breaking news as it relates to Tel Aviv. This is just breaking as we're after we had prepped most of the show. So we're going to get to that in a moment. Updates on Lebanon.

There is a truly remarkable Rashida Tlaib block. Rashida Tlaib kind of versus CNN or versus the world, if you could say, that we're going to get to just after we do some updates from the conflict itself. Kamala Harris and the filibuster, a saga that started in like 2022, actually. Probably, I'm sure she commented on it before, but Joe Manchin has now said he will not endorse Kamala Harris because she told the radio station yesterday she wants to get rid of that filibuster. There goes West Virginia. She had such high hopes. All those West Virginia voters going to the polls and voting to preserve the filibuster.

Joe Manchin himself didn't run in West Virginia because he was going to get crushed. So not sure what his endorsement would have meant. But anyway, yes, Kyrsten Sinema also not happy. And then we'll be talking about this lawsuit that the Department of Justice filed against Visa, which is excellent and awesome. It actually comes after Trump was piggybacking off of Bernie Sanders again, saying that he's going to cap interest rates at 10%. We'll talk about why they filed this lawsuit and what it might mean if they actually succeed

for prices and for people who use debit cards, which is basically all people. And then what do we got? Oh. Marcellus Williams. Yes. Yes. There was an execution in Missouri of, and I'll give him his real name, Khalifa Ibn Raiford Daniels. He converted while in prison. Executed last night, despite the fact that the family asked for clemency. The victim's family. The victim's family asked for clemency. There are significant doubts about his conviction. The jury only included one black member after the prosecutor later admitted striking people because of their race effectively.

And the prosecutor's office that originally prosecuted him wanted him to get clemency. Instead, he's dead. Yeah. So we will break down all of the details and even talk about the larger trend, because I think just this month, there's a host of executions that are scheduled to take place. A whole bunch in the next couple of weeks. Yeah. The pace is pretty high in the next couple of weeks. So we'll talk about all of that. Let's start on another bleak topic, which is we're going to be beginning with Tel Aviv. Ryan, breaking news out of Tel Aviv, where Israel says that it intercepted a missile that was heading for Tel Aviv. Now, what we're hearing is that apparently that was the story from Hezbollah, is that it was intended for a Mossad headquarters. Is that right? Yeah, the Mossad headquarters in the suburbs of Tel Aviv,

which if this were a newscast about an assault on Gaza or on Lebanon, the newscaster would immediately say that Israel is keeping its military and intelligence infrastructure in civilian areas to hide behind human shields. And when we see the reverse, we see how clearly it is, how clear it is, that that doesn't make it okay to bomb a suburb. For some reason, the American public is swayed by that argument when it comes to, say, Gaza or Lebanon or anywhere else, say, oh, well, it was in a suburb. Well, I guess that's a real shame that they had to level all those apartment buildings and that entire civilian area or that hospital. Oh, they found a couple weapons.

I was going to say, people conflate those two things. The idea of, as in this case, having Mossad headquarters in the suburbs, which is the same with the CAA, for example. A lot of those intelligence agencies are out in the suburbs here. They might bomb Costco here if they're aiming for the Pentagon. And no casualties reported so far in this case, but people will conflate having in a densely populated area like Gaza infrastructure that's near military infrastructure with people when they're literally hiding like bombs under children's beds. Those two things are not the same. And another difference would be the actual firing of the missiles. Right.

You know, Hamas or PIJ will fire missiles from very nearby, like a school or a mosque or something else. But again, that's related less to, I think, you know, morality and more to just the massive asymmetry. Like Israel has the U.S. sending, you know, fighter jets and endless amounts of bombs and missiles and has the capacity to, you know, to just launch from the air. When they go about building their infrastructure, they build their military infrastructure right into Tel Aviv. So again, no casualties reported so far in the situation. The death toll, according to the Associated Press, since Monday in Lebanon is 564 people. That's 50 children and 94 women, according to Lebanese authorities.

So there's been also attacks from Hezbollah in northern Israel. A couple of people in a kibbutz. We'll roll some of the VO here of the cartonage. This is Beirut, right? Yeah. Well, this is southern Lebanon. Southern Lebanon. Okay.

And there was reports of people getting hit by shrapnel in a kibbutz in northern Israel. What you're seeing on your screen right now, Ryan, this is southern Lebanon. Utter destruction. Yeah, and this is a man who was going back to try to get to his wife. Here's some other attacks that you're seeing across Lebanon. I think it's worth kind of setting up some of the context here for people who have been focused mostly on the

Israel-Gaza war and also the attack on the West Bank. So very, very brief history of Hezbollah. Like they emerged as a result of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, and they formed into a guerrilla group to expel Israel and actually finally succeeded in doing so in 2000 and kind of became heroes of resistance around the region as a result of it

and then began to embed themselves into the body politic of Lebanon, which is a very ailing and kind of psychotic body. Like it's just a complete, Lebanon as a state is a complete mess. In 2006, they launched a little cross-border raid and grabbed a couple of Israeli soldiers It's a complete Lebanon as a state is a complete mess in 2006 They lost launched a little cross-border raid and grabbed a couple of Israeli soldiers And let and Israel then launched a massive all-out bombing campaign and ground invasion into Lebanon Which turned out to be a failure did not get the hostages back and also with withdrew which again kind of raising the celebrity status in the region of Hezbollah.

But then in the 2010s, there was a Syria civil war and Hezbollah sided with Bashar al-Assad. Now you can imagine why they would do that because they are allies with Iran. Iran is allies with Syria. And so if Hezbollah is a client of Iran and Iran's got business, Hezbollah is going to carry out that business. But that meant that they were fighting with a lot of kind of Sunni rebels in Syria and killing a lot of Muslims. And that very much tarnished their reputation

and led to a break between Hamas and Hezbollah. Like they were, they became adversaries. They were on the other side of this. Hamas was supportive of the uprising in Syria. But since then, a little bit before October 7th, Hamas and Hezbollah had a detente and became allies again. And so right after October 7th, when the rubber hit the road with the war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah immediately starts launching rockets, which sends 60,000, roughly, Israelis from the north scattering, displaced back towards Tel Aviv and elsewhere. That is what is driving the political pressure to now go to war with Lebanon,

to try to get those 60,000 people back into their homes who've been displaced for that long. Imagine how much pressure that puts on Israel at 60,000 people. Gaza's 2 million people have been displaced for 11 months. And so in the same way that the Houthis were facing domestic problems and regional problems because of the civil war there, were able to politically overcome those by challenging Israel. Hezbollah too was able to overcome its problems that it had in the region by challenging Israel. It's the oldest story in politics. You got problems at home, you find an adversary somewhere else that people hate more, and everybody rallies around the flag.

And so it is in the kind of domestic political interest of all of these actors, whether it's the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, to challenge Israel. Because it makes them look like they're standing up for Gaza, which they are. Right. And what Nasrallah keeps saying, the head of Hezbollah, and the Houthis as well, we are not ending this until the war on Gaza ends. This was going to be my big question for you with all of that context because the massive open question is, does this escalate? And that's been the fear since violence broke out on October 7th. I mean, where do you see this going in terms of how it can pour even more sort of gas on this fire?

If it's good, if it's in the interest of Hezbollah politically to escalate, does Hezbollah escalate? Are there external pressures? A lot of people would say they're, so the argument from like the neoconservative camp would be that Iran is orchestrating all of this. They're puppets or they're like sort of chess pieces in Iran's game versus the West. So it's not necessarily what Hezbollah wants. It'll be what Iran wants. How do you respond to that?

So I don't think it's in, well, one point on that, Iran has major influence over Hezbollah. U.S. has major influence over Israel. Both Israel and Hezbollah have their own agency as well, though, from their kind of superpower. And their own agency as well, though, from their kind of superpower. And their own political motivations. Iran's not a superpower, a bigger power, and their own political motivations. But I don't think it's in their interest to escalate. I think it's in their interest to look like they're putting up a strong resistance and

continuing to put pressure on Israel to end its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Like, I think that's what works for them. They think, and Iran and Hezbollah have been very clear in kind of the signals that they've been sending and that their proxies have been putting out, that they believe Netanyahu wants a regional war to bail himself out. Yes. That Netanyahu's kind of stuck in a cul-de-sac of his own making and wants to just flip the table

and see what happens on the other side. It's not even necessarily a strategy, but it's a strategy to blow things up and live to see another day. And both Iran and Hezbollah think, if that is the thing that our adversary wants, let's do everything we can to avoid giving him that. Which is exactly what I and some other people were saying right after October 7th. It was like, Hamas launched this attack very clearly as a provocation to bring about an overreaction that would then discredit you. On the world stage. On the world stage. And the U.S. And hurt your economy and flip the table and just see what happens. Upset the status quo.

So if you're Israel, be smart. Don't give them that. But they couldn't help themselves. So there are some who think that Hezbollah has been so thoroughly degraded by the intelligence infiltration, basically. So it's interesting how in Gaza, Hamas has obviously been completely shellacked. But Israel had to do it by destroying the entire area. And then laying waste to Hamas. When Hamas lives to see another day as an organization.

Exactly. But they have not been able to, but they've been able to inflict a lot more damage more quickly on Hezbollah. I think some of that has to do with how, because Gaza is such a closed off society, like literally physically closed off, and Israel has much less intelligence. Let's actually put these up on the screen. So this is A2. This is a map of where you can see the latest death toll. And look at the concentration there in southern Lebanon. If you're listening to this, a massive cluster of dots in southern Lebanon from the border with

northern Israel. We also, though, Ryan, this is, I think, sort of along the lines of what you were just talking to. If we put A3 up on the screen, this is a map. Explain what we're seeing here and how it relates to everything you were just mentioning. Yeah, so this is a map that basically Israel putting out saying like… It's in Hebrew. And I put it for the next one. I think we have the translation, a bit of a translation in the next one. Basically, what they're saying is that what I said earlier, that Lebanon is a mess of a state. So this is Amakai Chikli,

Israeli minister of diaspora and combating anti-Semitism, minister in the government, saying basically Israel isn't, Lebanon is not a real government, not a real state. It was, you know, drawn by colonialists. He talks about Sykes-Picot, the amount of projection and like irony in it is overwhelming. But he says, this isn't a real state. These borders aren't real. And by having these Lebanese civilians down here by this green line, it makes it more difficult for our people who live in villages up north to live there safely. So basically what they're saying is we need to push these Lebanese folks way up higher. Not a country.

And it's not a country anyway, so we can just redraw it. Like he says, you know, the country actually, a country's borders ought to be drawn by natural boundaries and power, power politics, which, okay, I guess that is how it's always been done. We're just kind of used to it being stable over the last hundred years or so Yeah, what they're what they're implying there is that they're going to you know Run a campaign about the cleansing and and clear it out of people So that they can repopulate Northern northern areas that I mean that has been a longtime goal of what's called greater Israel But they've been eight But they've been able to infiltrate Hezbollah in a way that has allowed them to kill an enormous number of senior officials and middlemen.

The Pager attack, it sounds like it maimed something like 1,400 or 1,500 people. It's a fighting force of about 40,000 to 50,000, but its communications had been disrupted by all of the assassinations. They moved from cell phones over to pagers. Then the pagers start exploding. So it's an open question about how much damage has been wreaked. And so there are some people who are saying that the lack of a huge response so far is strategic and that it is related to Iran and Hezbollah not wanting to give Israel this all-out war.

There are others who are saying they've really received a massive blow, and that they don't even have the capacity, and that its supporters are kind of covering up the fact that they've received this major blow by pointing to a strategic pause, like, you know, hold me back, hold me back. And before we get to this new drop site report that is chilling, could you walk us through what ProPublica found in the investigation about Gaza yesterday? This was released yesterday, I believe, as well. This is A4. We can put this up on the screen.

Yeah, so interesting piece here. So the ProPublicist investigation, Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Anthony Blinken rejected them. So on the one hand, we reported here at the time based on Akbar Ahmed at HuffPost and actually DevEx, which does some great reporting on USAID, and it's like a trade pub that focuses on development around the world, had reported that of the three agencies within the State Department that were asked to sign off on whether or not Israel was restricting humanitarian aid,

two of them said that they were restricting the aid, that that was their assessment on the ground, that Israel was blocking aid from getting in. The legal consequences of that was under this provision called 620I. We can't give military funding to a state actor that is at the same time blocking our own humanitarian aid from getting to the people we're trying to send it to. Pretty reasonable law. Kind of funny that we even had to put that into law. It's so common sense. No, of course we're not supporting somebody who's actively our adversary in attempting to get humanitarian aid. Turns out we would do that. And so the State Department, or Blinken at least, had to figure out a way to affirm to Congress that this law was not being broken. And his problem was that his people inside the State Department were telling him that the law was being broken.

And what ProPublica does have that hadn't been reported before is this fascinating email exchange at the very end of its article. So if you read that piece, just scroll to the very end. It's very strange. Their last six paragraphs like awesome. The rest of it is like, we all, we knew all this already, but go to the last six paragraphs and read those. But basically what happens is the top state department official who really is in charge of moving the money, moving American tax dollars to Israel. So Israel can send them back to us for weapons is telling the general counsel of the State Department, we really need to move this money. Israel has bills to pay,

which is also absurd. They're not paying their own bills. We're paying the bills. We're just moving it over there and moving it back. Hope we're not paying banking fees to Visa, though, or Western Union the entire time. That should be the next drop site investigation, honestly. That is a big question. Who are the banks that are just like siphoning fees as we send money to Israel and Israel sends them back to Roslyn for the weapons? But so anyway, they're like, look,

they got bills to pay. We need to move this money over there. But the General Counsel's like, ooh, but we still don't have approval yet because there's still questions about whether they're blocking humanitarian aid. So there's this email chain and a top bureaucrat writes back, a woman named Noyes, I forget her first name. She writes back, it's our assessment that they are in fact still blocking humanitarian aid. And so the GC is like, so are you saying that they're in violation

of 620I? And she's like, yep, that is our assessment. So it's like, boom, okay, done. You cannot send the money then. They take it offline, as ProPublica reports. The woman has a couple meetings with senior officials. And she decides that, you know what, Israel really is doing not everything that we'd like them to do, but they're really trying and they're making commitments. Sure.

They're saying things. And it is true that the situation is difficult. It's true they said things. And it's true the situation is difficult. It's true that there are legitimate problems with getting the aid to the right people in a war zone. True, but USAID, in its report, in its private report that has since surfaced, they have examples of aid workers who Israel gives permission to evacuate along a certain route that they then run into an Israeli checkpoint, gets stopped. Yeah. They're like, we have been approved to move through here.

They're like, nope, sorry, go back. They go back. IDF opens fire on them and kills them. So USAID is like, okay, maybe there are some challenges here to what we're doing here, but what they're doing is malicious. And they didn't use the word genocidal, but what they're doing is far beyond what is necessary. And how do you read the Blinken politics into this? Blinken was clearly always just going to sign off on this. And you know, I guess fortunately for Blinken, a decent number of State Department officials have resigned in protest over this policy.

So now he doesn't have to worry about them either. He can just, the only time that humanitarian had ticked up a little bit was after that World Central Kitchen massacre. Yeah. And Biden had to get on the phone with Netanyahu and say, like, you need to do better. Mm-hmm. And for several days, things were better. And then they went back to normal. 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying.

Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives.

My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me, and he's getting older now, too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is, and they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's, like, really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend.

So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me, just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better so the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that i'm really happy or my family in general let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen

to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of things being, well, I shouldn't say normal, but the sad state of normal, at least in the last couple of years, Ryan, let's put A5 up on the screen. And can you talk to us about this story on Dropsite about a captured journalist? Yeah, so you guys might remember here, a couple weeks ago, we talked on this program about an article that Mujahid Al-Sadi, who's a really well-respected journalist writing mostly in Arabic,

who writes in Arabic. He reported the piece for us. We translated it into English so that an English-language audience could benefit from his journalistic skills. You may remember that he was one of the handful of journalists who was chased by that bulldozer and fired at in Jenin while they were doing their reporting. You can actually put up the next element. This is his piece that he wrote for us. So it turns out that this piece was earlier in September. On September 19th,

so 2.30 a.m. in the morning, IDF burst into his home. And according to his brother, they start beating him with the butts of their M16s. He's barefoot. It's 2.30 in the morning. His wife tries to get him his shoes while they're dragging him out of there, and they start beating his wife. And you've all learned this from accounts from the family. Accounts from the family and other people that were kind of familiar with how this happened.

He had three young children. So then we learned that they moved him to Jalama Prison where they interrogated him before transferring him to Megiddo, which is an utterly, people can Google it, M-E-G-I-D-D-O, utterly notorious prison. At least four people held there have died since October 7th. It's known for torture and absolutely kind of grotesque and barbaric conditions. And we have asked the IDF for information about him, and they have told us that they'll look into it. That's the best that she was shot and killed by the IDF in

Jenin. He's a very well-respected journalist in the region. Not the kind of person you would expect this to happen to if Israel was trying to do that thing where they're like, oh, actually, this guy's Hamas. So, this is not Hamas. Right. He's a very well-respected journalist in Jenin who, as we sit here, it's difficult to comprehend the conditions under which he's being held. And really, you've got nothing from the IDF. The IDF is just totally mum. Yeah, we'll get back to you. Yeah. We'll continue to press on them. There are obviously a lot of organizations and supporters of his in the

region who are also pressing for answers. But that's, yeah, I wish I had more. Important story to follow. That I could report. We're actually, we're going to see what we can do. We're launching a petition. If it's out by the time this is up, I'll put it in the comments section of this. Maybe if a couple hundred thousand people demand

that he be released. Helps. Some pressure on that, I don't know. Well, yeah, be released, there's some pressure on that. I don't know. Well, yeah. I mean, it's an important story to follow, especially given how Israel sort of clings to the only democracy in the Middle East. Yeah, come on.

And this comes after and right around the same time that they shut down Al Jazeera's Ramallah office. Ramallah is like the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which is a subcontractor, effectively, of the IDF, of Israel. 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that

to another person that was getting treatment that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was,

my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me, and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is, and they're starting to be like yo your dad's like really the goat like he's a legend so he gets it what does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family it means a lot to me just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good like that's what's really important and that's what

stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Quite a situation brewing in Michigan, Ryan, with Rashida Tlaib versus CNN versus the world. This has been an unfolding, wild series of events.

Unfortunate series of events, really, for CNN. But tell us how Dana Nassel, and we can put this first element up on the screen, factors into all of this in Michigan. Yeah, I think you could do an entire course on media bias and duplicity on this five-day affair. It's actually more than five days, and we can get into why. But yeah, so to start out, Dana Nessel is the Attorney General of Michigan. And so she tweeted on September 20th, which kicked all of this off, Rashida's religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she's a terrorist. It's Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job

fairly as Attorney General. It's anti-semitic and wrong. Now, I remember seeing this post and thinking, boy, that is terrible. I hope nobody would do such a thing. And also, what's going on with this cartoon? So, on this day, a Detroit News cartoonist had published a cartoon in National Review. So, here's a tweet here from Dearborn Mayor and friend of the show, Abdullah Hamoud, posting the National Review cartoon. So if you're watching, if you're listening to this only by audio, it's basically saying, why is my, you know, why is her pager exploding? Basically saying, you know, suggesting that Rashida Tlaib is like a member of Hezbollah that's being targeted by the IDF. So like clearly deeply Islamophobic cartoon that in a different kind of world would have kick-started a news cycle where you'd have the media pressing critics of Tlaib as to whether or not they denounced this attack on her. This

kind of baseless attack that came out of nowhere. Instead, yeah. Well, I'll just say I disagree that it's bigoted and Islamophobic because the argument from a lot of, I mean, it does come from a lot of, particularly from Jewish conservatives who say that they have these deep suspicions that I completely disagree with, that Rashida Tlaib actually does side with the militant aspects of Palestinian resistance. Thus, it would make sense that a pager, that is their line of thinking. And I don't think that is necessarily bigoted. That is their line of thinking. But the reason that I think it is bigoted Islamophobic is the reason that they think that it has a lot to

do with her Palestinian identity. She and Marcy capped, um, she and Betty McCollum agree on most things when it comes to Israel, Palestine policy, Betty McCollum though, it's a white lady. And so people don't accuse her of being a terrorist. I mean, people accuse Democrats of being like even white Democrats of being terrorists. Like it happens that's because, and I think it's really wrong because it's this idea that if you are opposed to Israel's military action. All right. So maybe we don't live in a world where we ever would get a condemnation of that cartoon, but. I don't disagree with you though, that like there are people who just connect the dots and say, oh, well she's, you know, vaguely Arab, so she must, of course, be Hezbollah. Right. No, I don't disagree that that is a thing. I just don't think it's necessarily bigoted. And so Meg Whitmer comes on CNN.

Gretchen Whitmer. I'm sorry, Meg Whitmer. This is a New Jersey one. Yeah, right. I thought you were thinking of Meg Whitman. That's a real throwback. Yes, Gretchen, big Gretch. The governor of Michigan, goes on Jake Tapper's program, and here's what he asks her about. Nessel responded by saying, quote, Rashida Tlaib should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as attorney general. It's anti-Semitic and wrong, unquote. Do you think that Tlaib's suggestion that Nessel's office is biased was anti-Semitic? Listen, Jake, you know what? All I can say is that I know that our Jewish community is in pain, as is our Palestinian and Muslim and Arab communities in Michigan. I know that

seeing the incredible toll that this war has taken on both communities has been really, really challenging and difficult and my heart breaks for so many. But as governor, my job is to make sure that both these communities are protected and respected under the law in Michigan, and that's exactly what I'm going to stay focused on. But do you think Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn't be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she's only doing it because she's Jewish and the protesters are not. That's quite an accusation. Do you think it's true?

Like I said, Jake, I'm not going to get in the middle of this argument that they're having. I can just say this. We do want to make sure that students are safe on our campuses. So if you're watching that on CNN, you would assume that Rashida Tlaib said that Dana Nessel, because she's Jewish, is biased against Palestinians. That is what CNN reported she said. And it's because Dana Nessel said that. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General, it's anti-Semitic and wrong.

So what the media is doing in this case is taking the word of a partisan actor. And we say it all the time. It's not new, but it is always worth noting that Jake Tapper picked up on exactly the point that Dana Nessel made on X. Exactly. And it turns out she didn't say that, as would be evidence. Rashida Tlaib didn't say that. Rashida Tlaib did not say that, as would be evidenced by an actual reading of what she said in the original article in the Metro Times. But still, Gretchen Whitmer, sorry, is under huge pressure.

And so she puts out a statement, gives to Jake Tapper. You can put this next element up on the screen. She says, the suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is anti-Semitic. Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes. It's an interesting formulation there because the suggestion is anti-Semitic. Okay, that suggestion is. She didn't actually make that suggestion. Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, he jumps on it, asserts that it happened and then denounces it, ironically, doing, if she wasn't a public figure, what would be defamation?

Because he's saying something that is wrong and that would be checkable if he just bothered to read the entire article. Now, here's what's fascinating. So we put up this next element here. The article that they're all talking about was published on September 13th. And Nestle responded on the 20th. Nestle responded on the 20th, the day she was attacked in that cartoon. Cynical. Instead of, and she just brought it up out of a week later. Yeah. And so what, and we can get into this more in a second, what Rashida Tlaib said is that she has been to many protests in Detroit

against police brutality, against racism, for climate change, climate justice, and on and on. And Nessel has never brought felony charges against any of those protesters, yet is bringing them in this case. She then goes on to say, and we'll talk about this more later, that Nessel was under significant pressure from the University of Michigan regents and leadership. And that that created a biased approach to this. And they got significant pushback from a public relations perspective, from an alumni perspective when those protests broke out. And they were obviously being responsive to that outcry in the media of the surge of anti-Semitism at the University of Michigan.

And some of their protests did get a little, they got hairy. But Tlaib was explicit about where the bias was coming from. This pressure had nothing to do with Jewishness. Dana Bash goes on CNN after Jake Tapper. Let's roll Dana Bash here. And now to a sad reality, and that is anti-Semitism is everywhere. And it comes from both ends of the political spectrum. But politicians sometimes sidestep calling it out when it comes from a member of their own party. We saw two examples on State of the Union yesterday.

First, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when my co-anchor, Jake Tapper, asked about a Democratic congresswoman's accusation that the state's Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job. job, what does it tell you about the inability or unwillingness to do so when it comes from a prominent person in your own party? That you changed your word. It's not an inability. It's unwillingness. And it's because you're putting politics ahead of principle and morality. And that's what both of them did there. It's not very hard to say that Rashida Tlaib saying that Dana Nessel is pursuing charges because she's Jewish is an anti-Semitic thing to say. It is. Okay. Yeah. Again, she didn't say that. Now, because Twitter exists, there was a lot of

pushback from- Ryan Grimm. From Ryan Grimm and other people. We're like, wait a minute. Pulling my hair out, what hair I have left. She didn't say that. What are you talking about? So finally, we do get a clarification from Dana Bash, but not really. Here's what Dana Bash clarified. Clarification on a story we brought you yesterday concerning Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib's comments attacking a decision by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to bring charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan. Tlaib accused Nessel of quote, biases. Here's Tlaib's full quote to the Detroit Metro Times. It seems that the Attorney General decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going

to treat it differently. And that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs. Now, Tlaib did not reference Nessel's Jewish identity. Her office has not responded to our request for clarity. Her allies insist that's not what she meant. But Nessel still says she believes it is anti-Semitic and repeated on CNN yesterday that, quote, clearly she's referencing my religion. So again, if she wants clarity, she could go read the entire article where she says the bias comes from pressure from the University of Michigan. Yeah. That is the equivalent that you just saw of whenever somebody posts fake news on social media, when they get called out. The follow-up tweet. The follow-up

tweet is always, yeah, but isn't it interesting that I believed it? It is. It is. It absolutely is. Somebody said there's a saying in the Czech Republic that goes, it's not true, but it might be. So that's basically the Dana Bash standard there. Jake Tapper also issued a bit of a clarification here. Let's roll Jake Tapper. I should note that I misspoke yesterday when asking a follow-up of Governor Whitmer, who I asked about this. I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib's comments. What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion, and so it's unfair for you to make that allegation? It's kind of an interesting question. It's like, she never said it, so it's unfair for you to say that she said it. How do you respond to that?

It's just, it's, the fact was too good for them to check out because in a way it reminds me, actually, this sounds like a hard pivot, but of the Jesse Smollett story because it- You were just all ready to believe it? Well, it confirmed, it's confirmation bias. Of course, she said that. 100%, it's confirmation bias. So, like Rashida said that. 100%. It's confirmation bias. So, like, it fits the larger truth. It fits this larger trend that we believe to be true. Therefore, I sort of automatically will take the word of Jussie Smollett. I will automatically take the word of Jussie Smollett, as David Chappelle would say.

But I'll automatically take the word of Dana Nessel because she seems to be the adult in the room in this interaction between, if I'm being asked to choose between Rashida Tlaib's truth and Dana Nessel's truth, I'm going to go with Dana Nessel and I will smear someone and accuse them of anti-Semitism. The whole thing is just more evidence of the anti-Palestinian bias that she said exists in these institutions. But here is how Nessel answered that question. Well, a couple of things. First of all, in 2022, when my opponent accused me of being a groomer and a pedophile, everyone understood that those were homophobic remarks because I happen to be gay, right? I didn't have to explain it to people. Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well known

for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are anti-Semitic in nature. So this isn't the first time that we would have heard these words out of her mouth. I think it's very clear to everybody exactly what she was saying. Yeah, I don't like her. I feel like she could have said that. So again, if we can put up this next element, the real pushback, I think, that got CNN to do this weak clarification was from the reporter of the actual article. This is a reply that he had to Jake Tapper. He said, I'm the reporter who interviewed Rashida Tlaib. She never said Nessel did this because she's Jewish.

Never. You're spreading lies, unquote. And the Metro Times felt like they had to do a fact check. And so they wrote up a new story a week later saying, no, she said what she said in our article. It's the funniest fact check ever. It's like, all they did is re-quote their own article, which anybody else could have done. And we can put up B11, which is just so people have the specific context. Here's what Tlaib said. I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it, Tlaib says. I think

President Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this. It had to come from somewhere. That's in the original article. Yeah. In which you have Dana Bash and also Josh Kroshauer, a Jewish insider, he wrote, we didn't receive a reply from Tlaib requesting clarity on her comments about what she was referring to. Because you see a lot of people saying, okay, well, she says that Nestessel's office had anti-Palestinian bias. It must be coming from somewhere. And therefore, what she's implying is that it's actually because Nessel is Jewish. Right.

All you had to do was read the next paragraph and you question, if you're actually curious, gets answered. Here's the actual answer. That she felt like she was pressured and that the University of Michigan did not pressure Nessel when it came to Black Lives Matter protesters or when it came to climate justice protesters. And so there is a difference. These protesters were treated differently. The other difference, the University of Michigan pressure. That's what Tlaib said. It's amazing how from this entire sort of like cancel culture woke like journey that we've been on in the last decade, how little lessons have been learned from applying overly broad definitions. And that's why when we were talking about the cartoon,

it's like they have in their heads this own logic that ties Rashida Tlaib to actual militant groups. And I completely disagree with it. It's not rooted in bigotry for everyone. And there's just this reflex when it comes to accusations of anti-Semitism. And I would say the same thing if we wanted to talk about on the right with jumping to accusations of racism or misogyny or whatever, that people don't have their own logic. And the sad part of that is it misses dealing with the actual logic. If you disagree with Rashida Tlaib's argument for Palestine, deal with it on those terms. Don't smear her as an anti-Semite. It's wildly counterproductive anyway. You're not even making progress for your own cause. Yeah. And the other irony, of course, is that Rashida Tlaib is not remotely a supporter of violence.

She's somebody who is constantly making arguments for dignity, equality, coexistence, peace, that everybody should live together and value each other as human beings. And that gets read as being a militant support of Hamas and Hezbollah, which I think proves the depth of the anti-Palestinian bias that she talks about there. Jordan Sheridan, our buddy, had the reporter on his show and had an interesting exchange with him. Let's roll Jordan's interview here. It's B12. You know the attorney general. You've reported on her. Was that surprising to you that she was a week later insinuating that Congresswoman Tlaib had somehow, I guess, was inferring something about her being Jewish in her criticism?

I thought it was a bold time to attack Rashida at a time when she just got attacked in a very disgusting racist cartoon. And she did it that day. So that surprised me i have heard though that dana nestle has been has taken this hamas attack uh last year very seriously and she's lost some friendships over it um but it did surprise me that she would come out and mention this on the day that that cartoon was published. But also, I was surprised that she used Rashida's words, misrepresented them, and then attacked her based on that misrepresentation. That surprised me. I want to drill in on that because I think Congresswoman Tlaib used the phrase biases to refer to the Attorney General.

And I think that's what the attorney general was zeroing in. That somehow Tlaib was inferring by biases that she's Jewish. I don't take it that way and I'm Jewish, but you were saying from your reporting, attorney general Nessel, who is Jewish, she has been however moved or affected by the Hamas attack, and she's lost friendship over it, which would indicate to me that her charges against these pro-Palestine protesters on student campuses, she might feel strongly on this issue,

which might then lead to some bias, and she's charging them in more rigid ways than other types of protesters. Yeah. Yeah. And to be clear, when I talked to Rashida Tlaib, what she was talking about, that bias, she was talking about an anti-Palestinian bias that's across many institutions, news organizations, companies, attorney general's offices, governor mansions. There's definitely an anti-Palestinian bias. And most of those institutions aren't run by Jewish people. So when she said that, she's referring to an anti-Palestinian bias, not a bias because somebody is Jewish.

Right. It was a complete representation. And so even when queued up by Jordan to say, well, maybe there's something to it because the reporter's like, no, that's not what she was talking about. And he was being fair to Dana Nessel as well. Yeah, which, yes. And also, so Jordan,

as people might have put two and two together, knows Dana Nessel quite well because of all of his reporting on the Flint water scandal. And Dana Nessel ran on a promise to prosecute Rick Snyder for that, never managed to do so. Rashida Tlaib's kind of first tweet was she couldn't manage, you know, Nessel couldn't manage to prosecute Snyder for the Flint water crisis, but could manage to file charges against these Palestinian protesters, which, again, not about religion. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, yeah, that's super interesting from Jordan. And

I think, you know, this Dana Nessel, Gretchen Whitmer coming. I mean, it is just Michigan right now as a swing state ahead of 2024 is such a weird brew of these like little dust-ups over basically like Rashida Tlaib and Dana Nessel. And it's all getting so nasty. Yeah. And this whole thing start to finish was just wild to watch unfold. She didn't say that. You're right. How are we here five days later asking for clarifications and, oh, we reached out to Tlaib's office. What do you mean reached out to Tlaib's office? She's already said what she said. I actually might add this to my journalism curriculum for the students because it's such a perfect example of them taking the word of a partisan actor and recycling it as total objective neutral reporting.

And the nice part about this one for education purposes is you don't have to debate the underlying facts. Like what she said is what she said. It's not how you do journalism. And you can't even, you don't have to go to a place of, well, maybe she, because she didn't say why she was biased. No, she said why they're biased. Yeah. They're biased because University of Michigan put pressure on them to do this. Yeah. Like she said that. You agree or disagree with that. That's what she said. Yeah. You don't need to. It's not a statement of rank anti-Semitism. Yeah. Yeah. Very clearly. 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. daughter who is 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. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real?

I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95

has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now?

Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good.

Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to Kamala Harris, who this is the this is actually another kind of strange media story and strange politics story, because Kamala Harris has been on the record, along with Joe Biden, opposing or actually supporting eliminating the filibuster. So opposing the continued upholding of the

filibuster, which Ryan, you'll correct my history on this. This is about the turn of the century that the filibuster, early 1900s, right? We get the filibuster late 1800s. It's very complicated depending on which filibuster you're talking about. There are, yeah. The 60 vote threshold comes in like World War I because they were trying to get weapons over for the war and you had a couple of anti-war folks. Got to get around them. You got to get around them. So you said, okay, well, we can end debate with two-thirds and then gradually that becomes 60. Anyway. It's not in the Constitution.

It's definitely not anywhere near the Constitution, nor was it intended to be part of the Constitution. They never imagined ever that you would need a 60% vote to get something passed, a Democratic chamber. It is now seen as an absolute cornerstone of lowercase r, Republican government in the United States. And Kamala Harris and the Biden administration have openly supported getting rid of the filibuster since I think at least 2022. Kamala Harris was on a radio show in Wisconsin yesterday on WPR. It's called Wisconsin Today. She told the host that she would support getting rid of the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade.

That kicked off a firestorm. So let's start actually listening to Kamala Harris herself. It is well within our reach to hold on to the majority in the Senate and take back the House. And so I would also emphasize that while the presidential election is extremely important and dispositive of where we go moving forward, it also is about what we need to do to hold on to the Senate and win seats in the House. That being said, I've been very clear. I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and

every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do. So Joe Manchin responded to this by telling Manu Raju, we can put this next element up on the screen, of CNN, asked if he would back her for president. Manu says, now that Harris has vowed to gut the filibuster on this issue, Roe, Manchin said he wouldn't back her for president. Quote, that ain't gonna happen. I think that basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person's ideology. I think it's the most horrible thing. Now, earlier, Manu noted that Manchin responded to Kamala Harris saying she wants to, quote, gut the filibuster to codify Roe. As Manu put it, shame on her, said Manchin. She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy. It's the only thing that keeps us talking and working

together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the house on steroids, right? I'm personally of two minds on the filibuster. I've had this conversation on the record even with Ted Cruz, who has told me, I'm sure he's told other people too, but I remember having this conversation with him around 2018 that he brought himself from this position of the filibuster being the holy grail of democracy to believing you should just get rid of it because he believes the left is going to get rid of the filibuster first the holy grail of democracy to believing you should just get rid of it because he believes the left is going to get rid of the filibuster first. So you might as well go down the doom spiral with the left and at least get your priorities out of the way when you control Congress.

And so it's kind of a race to the bottom mentality. But it's very interesting because Kyrsten Sinema responded to Kamala Harris. Let's put this on the screen, C3. She is right. Sinema says, to state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, short-sighted idea. Again, Sinema is correct, but you would never, this would be, I'm curious for your take on this because this is why a lot of people on the left support getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans would, in sort of modern America at this point in time, I don't know if they could recover in a decade from banning all abortion nationwide.

They just don't have the public support for that. There would be, I mean, it would be significantly worse than Roe if suddenly every single state banned every single, every single kind of abortion. So it just, the political will doesn't exist to do that in the country. So that would be, I think, the obvious rebuttal to Kyrsten Sinema. But her point is correct. Her point is technically correct. And it has a history throughout the 90s and much of the 2000s, inside the Democratic coalition, one of the fiercest opponents of filibuster reform was actually pro-choice groups, reproductive freedom groups that made that precise argument that Sinema is making, that Republicans, that

we've got Roe in the Constitution, Supreme Court stands by it. Why risk letting Republicans overturn or enact actually abortion restrictions? They're saying basically underneath Roe, what Republicans would do if they had a majority and no filibuster is they would enact a lot of these restrictions that they were enacting at the state levels that would pretend to sort of comply with Roe, but would actually make abortion access much more difficult. That changed. The pro-choice groups changed their position on that throughout the 2000s and came out for filibuster reform saying, no, we actually need to go on offense on this. And they argued, don't take this from a position of defensiveness. This is a winning issue for Democrats.

Here are the polls. And they would show these Democrats polls showing the massive overwhelming support for abortion rights. And Democratic leaders, I don't want to talk about abortion. It's gross. I don't believe you. I don't want to talk about abortion. It's gross. I don't believe you. I don't believe these numbers. But when it came to overturning the filibuster, they put a lot of pressure on people like Barbara Boxer and others who were holdouts on filibuster reform. Sinema is wildly anachronistic on this, making that point.

She made this point. There was a push to get rid of it as Democrats were losing their majority, when they still had a chance to do it, after Roe was overturned. And even then, she said, no, I'm not doing it. And she gave this reasoning, because you could ban abortion. People are like, buddy, the Supreme Court just overturned Roe v. Wade. You're talking about a hypothetical banning of abortion? What are you talking about? The good news is it doesn't matter what she thinks. She's done. We took her out. Ruben Gallego is the Democratic nominee. It looks like he's probably going to win. And he has said that he would get rid of the filibuster for abortion protections. Basically, the entire Democratic caucus has said that at this point.

And it really was unthinkable. I mean, this was a norm that Joe Manchin is very much, what Joe Manchin said to Monty Roger yesterday would have been greeted with polite applause in the halls of the Capitol before, I don't know, five years ago, before the Trump era, really. This actually was, him using the Holy Grail term is so resonant because that actually really was the standard. People saw this genuinely as the Holy Grail. I was actually there for this fight. So in 2009, it really, really kicked off. It was Obamacare. Yeah, because Democrats lost their 60 vote threshold. And also the kind of liberal blogosphere, and I was writing for Huffington

Post at the time, did not love the fact that Joe Lieberman and a handful of other centrist Democrats who gave them their 60th vote. Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Well, no, he was vice president by then. Oh, yeah, that's true. Well, but he was still, he's still pro-Tem. Yes, no doubt. And he loved being up there. So the argument was, don't let these guys have this power. You've got 59 and 60, whatever. Then as their numbers dwindled, the pressure became even greater. Then as McConnell started blocking judicial nominations. Yes, that's what it was. And in 2013, finally there was enough pressure that there was reform on judicial nominations. So, you know, lower than Supreme Court level. Now that we got rid of it for Supreme Court as well.

Yeah. So there's been that push for this long. But yeah, now Democrats are basically there. But it was relegated to like, well, that's a Ryan Grim idea. And the Joe Bidens of the world would be horrified. They would be totally in the mansion camp. But to have Manchin be sort of the last man standing with Kyrsten Sinema on this, while Joe freaking Biden is on that point. It's like, well, Joe Biden is the one who was saying, yeah, let's do it.

It's a huge change. And it was because the Ryan Grim sort of won out. We packed a lot of punch back then. Yeah, we could, we could, we could. Sometimes literally. We could land a real blow. Actually, sometimes literally. Harry Reid's spokesperson used to say every time we would do something on the filibuster, yeah, their phone lines would just like get absolutely lit up. And you'd be like, damn it, grim. That's really funny. But Harry Reid like saw that and saw the energy.

And it actually kind of transformed him as a politician. The question of whether they win the Senate is, I don't think, as optimistic as Harris put out. New polls, you know, Tester is really struggling in Montana, and they need to win in Montana or Nebraska. And will he caucus? What does he think on the filibuster, Dan? Well, we asked him. He said, basically he said he's pro-choice. But would he get rid of the filibuster?

Exactly. Yeah, Dan Osborne. Did we not ask him that? Well, we asked him about Roe, but I don't remember. We didn't ask him about the filibuster. I mean, well, this is where we started this block saying it's kind of bizarre because we know where Kamala Harris stands on the filibuster. And because she told this radio station the news, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema reacted in ways where Joe Manchin is saying she's never going to get my endorsement now. And it's like, we have known this.

It's just such a weird little media cycle. It's not really anybody's fault, but it's just crazy how one comment can suddenly become a news cycle and can raise the issue again when it's not new at all. It's not new at all. But if Democrats are smart, they'll just run on it. It's an amazingly popular issue. I will codify Roe if you give me this House, Senate, and White House. I'll do it. Roe, I see Roe. The filibuster's not like super popular.

The reason on principle that I've been against the filibuster is that imagine a world in which politicians ran on a promise, got elected on that promise, and then actually enacted it into law. And then voters decided whether or not they liked it. Imagine that. Crazy system. Instead, we have the system where you run on a thing, and then you get into Washington, and you can point to these parliamentary obstacles or legislative obstacles. Well, yeah, I ran on this, but we're not going to actually do it. We should get Bovard in here. Now let's have another culture war fight two years later. It'd be fun to do something with Bovard on the follow-up. She's probably against it, right? Yeah, yeah.

It would be fun. We should do that because it obviously is like a huge looming issue for everyone. It could completely change the way that this legislation is done. So on that note, speaking of government working, Brian, let's transition to this block about Visa and the Department of Justice suing the company over alleged monopoly practices. This is D1, a tear shoot from CNBC. You can see the headline, Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of, quote, nearly everything. The Biden DOJ continues its streak of actually, it's partially their streak. When it comes to Google, that was a lawsuit the Biden DOJ continued from the Trump administration. A lot of energy in the antitrust space, as we know,

Ryan. But going after Visa for alleged monopoly practices, that's an escalation in a good direction. Yeah, and if we can put D2 up on the screen, the filing is about like 70, 75 pages. And it's actually quite clear. It's well written and lays out precisely why they believe that Visa is an illegal monopoly and how they've gone about building a moat. And they have, you know, obviously they have like on all these good ones, they got good emails and other internal memos where the criminals lay out their criminal scheme where they say, this is how we're building our moat. It's like building a moat is anti-competitive.

The Sherman Act says you can't do that. You just can't. We have decided that markets, in order for them to remain competitive, need some government intervention to block monopolies from completely controlling them. So they go through the history here where Visa controls, I think, 60 to 70% of that debit transactions. MasterCard then has like 25. So it's not a monopoly, right? Not a monopoly. Everything's fine. And that there were a couple different things that happened over the last 10, 15 years that they lay out in this civil indictment, basically, civil complaint, which is, one, it's like, wait a minute.

Didn't we just have like PayPal and Venmo and all of these like all this technology came about in the last 15 years? How the heck is it that we still have this outdated technology that is still sucking $7 billion out of the economy every year? And that's like, well, I don't pay when I swipe my debit card. Well, yes, you do pay because the merchant that you are buying from pays a fee to Visa and they pass that fee on to you. And so Visa, when all these new technologies were coming around, saying, uh-oh, like these are existential threats to us. They called Apple's App Store or Apple's like Apple Pay an existential threat. And the way that in a competitive free market, a company would respond to those threats is

by delivering a better product at a lower price. That's what you're going to hear from the Milton Friedmans of the world. Instead, they went out and cut deals with Apple, PayPal, all these other potential competitors and said, look, we'll just pay you to not get in our business. So you monopolize your thing over here, charge people exorbitant fees for these types of transactions. We'll charge people exorbitant fees for these types of transactions. And we'll pay each other. Because isn't it better if we're all making lots of money that we're siphoning off of consumers rather than competing with each other to offer a better product for less cost. And the competitors were like, hey, that's fine.

And this also goes to like quarterly. Which you can only get away with if you're huge. But also the way our system is set up, they call it quarterly capitalism where every quarter you're reporting your revenues to the market And your compensation as an executive is tied directly to those earnings because you're paid mostly in equity. The bulk of your pay is in equity. As your revenues go up, your share prices go up, your equity goes up, you become richer, then you switch jobs. You don't care. You're just trying to... So for somebody like a PayPal or another competitor, a potential

competitor Visa might say, you know what? It's going to take us three years of investment and work to get to a place where we're competitive with Visa on this particular thing. That's a lot of quarters. That's a lot of quarterly conference calls where we're losing money. And I want to leave here within two years. And I would like to leave here having made $45 million as a vice president or whatever. And so they're like, and instead, Visa is offering me this amount of money right now if we don't compete against them, which will lead directly to a bonus for me. Wouldn't that be nice? Let's do that instead. It's really aggressive from the Biden administration. I mean, Visa. This is the senator from Delaware, by the way. This is his administration. If you need

evidence that Joe Biden is not in charge of his own administration, just note that they're going after Visa. Oh my God, if he found out about this. He's going to be so pissed. They used to call him a Democrat from MBNA, which was the gigantic credit card company in Delaware. So maybe he wants them to go after Visa. Well, they got bought up, so they're basically Visa by now. But one thing that's interesting here, we're talking about democracy in the last block. This sort of thing, because our democracy is so corrupted and bought off, has to come from the Department of Justice or the FTC at this point.

I spent a couple of years back in like 2010, 11. Speaking of you being old. 13, yes. Covering this intense fight over what are called swipe fees between basically merchants and these credit card companies. Back in like 2011 in Congress, it was the most, it wasn't covered by the major press because nobody cares because it's just a fight between two major power players. But they were employing maybe over a thousand journalists, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, getting – Lobbyists.

Lobbyists, yeah. Same, same. Whoops. Yeah, dominating the entire congressional legislative agenda, fighting over what you would set the swipe fee cap at or whether there would be a swipe fee cap, which rolled out of what was called the Durbin Amendment from Dodd-Frank. The Durbin Amendment actually makes an appearance in this lawsuit because the DOJ points out that the Durbin Amendment had a provision that said every debit card has to have two, has a visa and somebody else that are able to use it, which would then allow merchants to choose, say, okay, you know what? Actually, I don't want to take Visa because Visa charges

these huge fees. So your card also has MasterCard. So you can use MasterCard. That's cheaper here at my store. And what Visa did to get this this new law that required these two things they went to stores and they said all right we have a lot of what are called non-competitive transactions where the person only has Visa so you can only do Visa on those if you cut a deal with us we're going to make them fairly cheap and the deal is you then have to use us for everything bracket if you don't cut a deal with us Then we're charging you a boatload of money for every one of those Non-competitive transactions where they have to use visa. So all these merchants were just totally jammed up and they had to sign these agreements that locked them in and

DOJ is saying the agreements are are illegal and the court ought to oust all of these. I just want to read one quote from this. Put up this third element here. So I think this is the most fun story that I've ever written. It's so good. Go back and read this one. You will absolutely die reading it. I want to do like a Stefan.

Like it's got everything. Saxby Chandler. Yes, it's amazing. It's incredible. The use of the word twit pick. Twit pick used to be a thing. And cups. Cups. It's such a fun story. But here's one of the most fun quotes from a moderate Democratic senator. He said to me, I'm surprised at how much of our time is spent trying to divide up the spoils between various economic interests.

I had no idea. I thought we'd be focused on civil liberties, on education policy, energy policy, and so on. Is this a senator? This is a senator. The fights down here can be put in two or three categories. The big greedy bastards against the big greedy bastards. The big greedy bastards against the little greedy bastards. And some cases, even the other little greedy bastards against the other little greedy bastards. What he's saying is that Congress is like a host that has shaped itself to the parasites. Yes.

And the parasites are the lobbyists. And so both parties are trying to figure out how much cash they can raise for their campaigns. And so they go out and they try to find things that two big industries will fight over. Sales tax on Amazon was like another one. And it's basically the same way the mafia goes to a store and is like, nice store you got here. Shame if something happened to it. They smash the windows up and then they pay them off and then they don't smash the windows up anymore. So what Congress would do is deliberately produce legislation that they think would be destructive to some powerful interest like Visa and say, wow, you're making a lot of

money on those swipe fees. We're going to put together a bill that caps the amount that you're able to charge these merchants. Right. And then they go to Visa and they say, hire all of our people, give money to all of our campaigns, and maybe we won't do this. Then they go to the other greedy bastards. They go to Target.

They go to Walmart. They go to Home Depot. And they say, don't you hate Visa the way that American, American Express, they're really ripping you off, aren't they? We've got this bill that will stop them from ripping you off. And all you got to do is hire all of our friends and donate to all of our campaigns. And then they will drag that out for years. That fight over the Durbin Amendment is still going on today. That senator's heart is absolutely in the right place.

But it is such a naive approach to government. That is, of course, what this is. This is Vegas, baby. This is Vegas in the 70s. That is our economy. Yeah, so you kind of have to have the DOJ do it. And luckily— But usually the DOJ won't.

Usually they won't, right. Because of the revolving door, it's not necessarily that they're being lobbied, it's that they want to lobby. Yeah, do you know how much lobbying there was against Jonathan Cantor getting into the DOJ to run the antitrust policy of the Biden administration? Reid Hoffman is openly lobbying Kamala Harris right now, not as a registered lobbyist, but just as a rich dude with a lot of power and public platforms to get rid of Lena Kahn. The good news is during the New Deal, they did pass this law that says you can't do this. And so the White House, at least until the Supreme Court says they can't enforce laws

that weren't passed within the last five minutes, they can still enforce laws that are on the books. We'll see. If they feel like it. Good for them. All right. What will this will do? Lower the price of everything. 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. It's a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.

She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying.

Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. shape the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good.

Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to this port strike, Ryan. Speaking of prices. Speaking of prices. We can put this first element up on the screen. This is from The Load Star. USMX and ILA in claims blame game as strike deadline looms.

Can you break this one down for us, Ryan? We're covering a lot of Ryan Grimm topics today, which is great because it's always educational and enlightening what's happening with this contract. First of all, credit to this shipping trade publication for claims blame game. That's funny. It is New York Post worthy. It is. And you don't see that from trade pubs very often. The reason we're using a trade publication article here is because there's been very little mainstream coverage of what's going on here. If the International Longshoremen Union and this conglomerate of basically

dudes that run ports don't come to a new contract by October 1st. The ports are going to shut down all along the East Coast and the Gulf. So as a result of that, already lots of shippers are moving their shipments over to the West Coast. And as the trade press talks about, a lot of kind of holiday merchants moved their orders way up. They're already getting in their artificial Christmas trees and all the other junk that we're going to buy for each other utterly paltry wages and then lying publicly about the way that they're kind of doing the math and saying, oh, look at this huge increase they're giving. And so they haven't met in months.

And we're at an October 1st deadline. The White House has said it will not use its federal power to kind of force these workers back to work. If you remember, that's the same law that they used to force the railroad, basically force a contract on the rail workers a couple of years ago. They could do that again when it comes to this one. And it seems like the bosses here are banking on the fact that the White House will do that. They're saying we don't need to negotiate with you because an October 1st port shutdown would be such an absolute political crisis.

They're probably right. That the White House will actually, does Pete Buttigieg, because it's Buttigieg who's basically responsible for kind of being the secretary who is in between this and trying to get to a deal, does Buttigieg want this to be his thing? So the unions, meanwhile, are like, just give us a decent deal and we'll come back to work. Lots of leverage. Now, one thing they could possibly do is kind of force them back to work until after the election, which is sort of what they did with the rail workers, if you remember. And then, and what you can do is you can force them into mediation. So I tend to think that they're not going to let a strike happen October 1st. But according to their current statements, they are. Now, I don't know what kind of brinksmanship that is or not.

But the workers do not seem like they're in a position to get rolled over here. And what can, so actual question here, what Biden's power hypothetically would be in these negotiations? It probably looks similar to what we saw for the rail. It's pretty serious power because it involves the transportation and the cornerstone economic interests there as the Taft-Hartley Act that allows significant intervention from the U.S. Not just allows, but sort of incentivizes for the federal government in the case of shipping. Yeah, and the bosses have relied on that since the 40s or whatever to say, you can't go on strike because the government's going to come in and stop you.

But I think they took a lot of heat for that, for forcing that contract on rail workers. And they certainly would rather not have the political optics of being anti-union right in October before the election. Yeah. Well, and you know, it's funny because this is sort of a parallel situation to what Mike Johnson was facing this week with a government shutdown on the eve of the election that he knew Republicans were going to be blamed for, which is why he and sort of Republican establishment ended up siding with Democrats and brokering a deal on the SAVE Act and doing this three-month stopgap that would end in December, which is certainly going to result, as Freedom Caucus types are saying, in a big spending package

right before Christmas, nice little Christmas present, because nobody wants a shutdown over Christmas. We've seen it before, of course, but nobody really wants it. And Mike Johnson's logic explicitly was that we are not risking a shutdown, shutting down the government as Trump wanted over the SAVE Act, which basically creates protections so that you can't have non-citizen voting in federal elections. Shutting down the government over that would not be politically viable, politically worth it. So basically the leverage was with the people who were saying, like the Freedom Caucus had no leverage in this situation. And the billionaires that are being called out by these union leaders don't really have leverage in this situation because all the money in the world that they can give to Joe Biden isn't going to

offset how serious the threat to the election would be if we remember back to the rail uprising after what happened in East Palestine. The level of political crisis for Biden and Buttigieg was incredibly high. And to have that literally weeks before a presidential election, I mean, they have a pretty good case going to the Biden administration here. It's an interesting test for Mayor Pete, Secretary Pete, to see if he can get a deal here. One reason I wanted to cover this, even though nobody else is, is that they don't pay any price by forcing workers back to work if nobody knows it's happening in the first place.

Like if nobody's talking about it, then the White House could actually much more easily just jam them and say, you know what? Nobody's looking. Just go back to work. Well, so Steve Lamar, the president and CEO of the American Association of Footwear and Apparel, makes a very, very, very good case to Biden. He says, our members, if they can get their product to market at all during the critical holiday shopping season, will only be able to do so with massive delays at an exorbitant cost. Exporters, particularly agricultural exporters, will literally see their product rot on the docks or in the rail yards. And just when inflation has started to come under control, American families will face a surge in prices and product shortages not seen since the pandemic. It would be a disaster. Absolute disaster,

no doubt about it. And they say that for every day that the ports are shut down, it takes about five days to clear that backlog. So even if there was only a 10-day strike, then you're talking about a two-month backlog. And exactly, just as the Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates. It's already a problem. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I was gone, so I didn't get to do my victory lap. I was correct on the half-point cut. I know. I saw that right away. I was like, this is perfect. It's why I didn't guess. But it was a great call. Yeah, you could have.

I'm sure that there were predictive bets on that. Oh, the whole market is a predictive bet. That's true at this point. Again, it's all Vegas. It's all Vegas all the time. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.

She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla simone breaking down lyrics amplifying voices and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives my favorite line on there was my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes yeah now i'm curious do they like rap along now yeah because i bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too so his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is and they're starting to

be like yo your dad's like really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that,

I'm really happy, or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a much bleaker note, let's turn to the horrible case of Marcellus Williams, who was executed in Missouri at 6.10 p.m. yesterday.

Now, this case goes back to 1998, the August murder of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Felicia Gale. Felicia Gale's family believed that Williams was guilty, but opposed his execution, was not at his execution, which is typical of families who often go to the viewing of the execution. Now, there was no forensic evidence that ever tied Williams to this crime. There's circumstantial evidence, but even that had been contaminated. This is a very typical death penalty case where there's been sort of legal back and forth for literally decades at this point. There's been evidence in both directions. There's been a man with poor legal representation, as we've seen in filings, that things just ended up getting botched or poorly argued along the way. The state Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court both rejected last minute pleas from Williams' camp. But this is, I mean,

the prosecutor from his 2003 conviction, so five years after this alleged murder, did not support the execution. The family alleged murder, did not support the execution. The family of the victim did not support the execution. There were stays granted to Williams back in 2015 and 2017, also very typical of death penalty cases. But he was executed yesterday in Missouri. And the Supreme Court, the federal Supreme Court, by six to three, let the execution go through. Obviously, the three liberal justices would have stayed the execution, the six conservative ones went for it. He converted to Islam while in prison, Khalifa Ibn Raifur Daniels was his new adopted name. I don't think we've

talked about the death penalty. The part that has always flummoxed me about conservative support for the death penalty is that conservatives are quick to point to all of the problems with government inefficiency and screw-ups everywhere, whether it's the EPA or regulation of the markets. They say, you know, there's government bureaucrats, they're going to screw things up. Yet in a life or death situation, they're willing to let these county bureaucrats, you know, the same people that populate the show like Parks and Rec, like let those people handle the evidence, handle the prosecutions with immense amount of power, power a little very little oversight. Yep, and When it comes to life and death you can't make mistakes Yeah, and from the conservatives perspective like governments are making mistakes all the time

and in this one there was the the defense argued that there was also racial bias because yeah a prosecutor struck I, six of seven black people from the jury pool. So there was only one black person on the jury pool. And he specifically said, I struck one of them because he looked too much like Marcellus. It's like, well, I think you just admitted what's going on here. But it wasn't enough. So where do you come down on that question? This issue turns me into a bleeding heart campus leftist. It was one of the earliest

issues that animated me politically. So I'm the worst person for a show called Counterpoints next to you on this. Well, at least you're consistent on the whole pro-life thing. I guess. It just, it makes me so angry. And your point about bureaucracy is such an important one. I just have a plain moral opposition to the state carrying out, I mean, I think self-defense is a legitimate explanation to take another life. I think we all mostly agree on that, legitimate cases of self-defense. I don't think the state has a right to take life like this, nor do I think it should. I think the drugs are incredibly problematic and basically forms of torture that we're also asking bureaucrats to come to conclusions on and experiment with humans on. Zedulani has already blasted out a great piece on this particular case as sort of a hook in his subsect, The American Saga. His headline is,

yes, innocent people have been executed, but the death penalty is also slowly being phased out. Both points absolutely true. But if we're focusing on what you just mentioned about conservatives jumping to support the state executions and death penalty cases, despite the bureaucracy being an abject disaster that is often politically weaponized and just incompetent. Zed points out in his piece this number that is astounding. But again, you can look all of this up. In the past five decades, at least 200 people who've been executed have actually been exonerated after they were executed. 200 people in the last five decades. So that's not just cases that are murky. This case is absolutely murky.

This is not a clean-cut case. It has gone fairly through the legal system. I don't need to adjudicate whether he's guilty or not because my position is just that it's wrong. But it's not a clear-cut case. And we have seen 200 times that after people have died, at least 200 times because there are cases probably still to come just out of the last five decades, but 200 times where people are exonerated, exonerated, black and white, clear-cut exonerations after being executed.

So it's just, that's one, I think, very obvious argument against the death penalty that should give many people who are distrustful of government pause, but just a stunning figure. Stunning, stunning, stunning. And maybe it's because of technological advances that, as Zed points out, these trends are moving in the other direction, but we still have a spate of executions scheduled for what, the next couple of weeks. There's a good Associated Press story on this. I mean, it's absolutely still happening. Yeah, a huge uptick in them coming over the next couple of weeks, totally wild. But if we could put up F2 here, which is a quote from this local article, just to give you the background here.

So, faced with the DNA evidence and other new information in Williams' case, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, who defeated Cori Bush, sought to toss out the conviction on numerous grounds, including the results of the DNA testing and constitutional violations during the jury selection process. So this was the prosecutor's office saying that after reviewing the way that things were handled, they wanted to see this tossed out. It was so poorly handled that when they took the knife to get it tested, the only DNA they found on it was a bunch of assistant prosecutors who had been improperly handling the evidence. And so once that emerged, Williams had no way of getting out of, you know, no way of

kind of proving innocence and said, look, I'll take life. I'll take life. Just don't kill me. And the family was fine with that. Prosecutors signed off. But the Missouri governor and the judges insisted on moving forward with it. So we put up this next VO here. This is a footage of more than a million petitions asking for Williams' execution to be stayed, being delivered to the Missouri governor's office.

Evidence of the just intense amount of public opposition to this state-sanctioned killing. And the governor just decided to go forward with it anyway. Now, there was a moment on Jake Tapper's show that happened just last night where Marcellus Williams' attorney, Innocence Project attorney, heard the news from the Supreme Court right before the interview began. Let's roll this element. Have you spoken to Marcellus today? The team has spoken with him today. And actually, we just spoke with him momentarily ago. We actually just got news that the U.S. Supreme Court has denied a stay. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a stay. That's horrible news. I mean, that's it. That's the end of that. There's just nothing else that can be done unless the governor has a change of heart,

which seems unlikely. That is correct. Under what we have currently from the law and the governor, tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man and they will do it even though the prosecutor doesn't want him to be executed. The jurors who sentenced him to death don't want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don't want him executed, and the victims themselves don't want him executed. That is what will be the state of justice tonight in Missouri. Why do you think that the governor or the state Supreme Court, why did they deny him clemency? Why have they not stayed this execution? And what we hear time and time again is this argument of finality. It's too late. Things

should have been brought before. Things have been heard before, but they've never been heard with this evidence. They've never been heard with what this prosecutor knows and concedes to that Mr. Williams had an unfair trial, that the prosecutor admits that he struck jurors based on their race, but we have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that. Yeah, and at minimum, you would think that if you really want to get it right and you really got the evidence and you can prove the trial's unfair, try him again. Try him fairly. Well, but this is what's so, I think this is what is so

partially harrowing and just unsettling about these really contemporary modern death penalty cases is that he has been tried so many times. And it is still a question mark. I mean, you know, like we have gone through this. This man has sat— So many appeals, you mean. Right, right. Like this has been litigated over and over again for decades. And the family has had to put up with it for decades.

The victim's family has had to put up with it for decades. And it's just incredible how you can keep going and going. I'm reading from St. Louis NPR. This is just a little bit more details on what happened, because it was a lot of kind of back and forth. They write, Williams had always maintained he had nothing to do with the murder of Gayle. Police would find some of Gail's possessions in a car that belonged to Williams, and he pawned a laptop belonging to her husband. But no forensic evidence like DNA, hair, or fingerprints ever tied him to the scene. He was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole. I believe, Laura, yeah, both of these witnesses have since

passed away. That's how long this case has been pinging back and forth through appeals and going on for. And to end with still, again, a question mark, the case study is an argument in and of itself against the death penalty, like the way that this has all been prosecuted for decades. There are five executions that are set to happen in the span of a week. The Associated Press has the story. The first one was on Friday in South Carolina. There's another one, Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma. And according to the Associated Press, it's the first time in more than 20 years that five executions nationally have been held within seven days. So I think Zedd is right to point out. And I think to some extent, as we were mentioning earlier, DNA evidence probably accounts for a lot of this, which is

such a sad statement in and of itself. But right now, this week, five. Yeah. And we didn't hear anything, by the way, from Kamala Harris on this, who, when she was district attorney, often used the argument in exoneration cases that, well, you may have a good point there, but you missed the filing deadline. Or you didn't make this claim of poor counsel previously when you could have. It's like, well, of course you didn't because you had poor counsel. So, yeah, her hands are not clean on this by any stretch. Yeah, and I mean there's obviously racial variables but also class variables, incredible class variables in the new class-conscious conservative movement to consider.

There you go. So bleak note to end on but an important one. Ryan, glad you got back safely. Good time in Doha. Ryan Grimm in the Middle East, I would be a little nervous. You've done some – your reporting is too good. It's too good for you to be perfectly calm. But it was totally fine.

Yeah. Yeah. You're speaking for Georgetown, right? Yeah. I was at a Georgetown conference and did a couple of interviews for some stories that hopefully will pan out in the next couple of weeks. Well, we'll be watching for those. We will actually be back here before, I think, next Tuesday's show because the debate is on, or next Wednesday's show because the debate is on Tuesday.

Oh, wow. I guess I will be. Yeah. So it's coming right up. I'm filling for Saga on Monday, but then Tuesday we'll all be here, Breaking Points, Cinematic Universe. That's right. Maybe I'll bring some ghosts. No Friday show this week? No Friday show this week. Sorry about that. Producer Mac, we should also clarify that we

have zero paid sponsorship with Ghost. We just really like it. But Ryan's been drinking coffee, so he has plausible. That's terrible for you, but it is very good. I don't know how it could possibly be terrible for you when it has 100% of four daily vitamins. There you go. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. BreakingPoints.com for the full version of this show right away to your inbox early. And it doesn't get cut up into little clips. So it's a nice little perk.

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