Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/3/24: 2024 Voting Begins, Trump Caves To Pro-Lifers, Trump Endorses Legal Weed, Brazil Blocks Twitter In Elon War, Israel Protests Erupt, Bibi Sabotages Ceasefire Deal

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss 2024 voting starts, Trump caves to pro-lifers, Trump endorses legal weed, Brazil blocks Twitter in Elon war, massive protests in Israel, Bibi sabotaged ceasefire deal.    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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Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it. I'm Max Chastain.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Hope everybody enjoyed their Labor Day off, as we certainly did.

Lots to get to. So this is the official launch of peak campaign season now, post-Labor Day. And one state actually starts voting literally this week. Debate is next week. We're going to be live streaming that, by the way. So join us here for that. That's right. Don't worry.

So a lot to get to there with some new polls. We will assess the state of the race. Also, since we last spoke, Trump changed his position on abortion roughly 14 different times. So we got new IVF policy. We got new abortion policy. Then we have a different abortion policy. It's all over the map. Also might be now pro-weed potentially.

So we'll get into everything that he said about all of those things. Also big breaking news over the weekend, Brazil has now officially banned Twitter. So we'll get into the back and forth between Brazilian government and Elon Musk and what he's saying, they're saying, etc. Ramifications potentially for free speech. Also massive protests in Israel. This coming after six more hostages were found dead in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli people really overwhelmingly blaming Netanyahu for blocking a hostage deal that could have secured a ceasefire. So we'll show you stunning images from there and where things go as best we can tell in Israel. And with regards to the ceasefire deal, we also are lucky to be joined by Dropsite News' Jerry Scahill. He has some bombshell new reporting about behind-the-scenes details.

He got some leaked documents of exactly how the ceasefire negotiations have gone that really, truly pin the blame directly on Bibi Netanyahu for not just failing to get a deal, but actively seeking to undermine and make sure that there is no ceasefire deal. This, of course, is no surprise to people who've been watching this show or been watching events unfold in any really honest way. However, Jeremy actually got the documents to back it up. So excited to speak to him about that. Yeah, it's going to be exciting. Make sure that you guys show up at breakingpoints.com, become premium subscribers. We're going to do live streams, as you guys saw that we did in Chicago, where we take audience questions and have a lot of

participation, which we really enjoy doing. So for the debate, go ahead and subscribe, BreakingPoints.com, become a premium subscriber, and we will have excellent debate coverage here live, hopefully at even more eventful than the last one, although very- That's- Unlikely. I think that's impossible. Listen, I would have said it was impossible before the first election. Given how many things we've experienced in this election season, what else could we possibly see?

I guess you never know. But it's September 10th. I believe that's Tuesday evening. So it's always fun. We have the whole gang here, all that good stuff. Yeah, it's really fun. All right. Let's go ahead and get to the official launch of peak campaign season.

Kamala Harris actually was campaigning with Joe Biden yesterday. Tim Walz was also out campaigning. Trump campaign was actually not campaigning yesterday. No events. Yeah. Which is weird. That's why we don't have any sound from it. Anyway, here's a little bit of Kamala Harris out on the campaign trail yesterday.

Everywhere I go, I tell people, look, you may not be a union member. You better thank a union member. For the five- day work week. You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time. Because what we know is when union wages go up, everybody's wages go up. Yeah. When union workplaces are safer, every workplace is safer. When unions are strong, America is strong.

So aggressively pro-union Labor Day message there in Detroit. Also, she and Biden were in Pittsburgh. I believe Tim Walz was at a union event in Minnesota. As I mentioned before, we're down to it now. I mean, it really is crazy with the shortened campaign season that we are used to these lengthy, drawn-out presidential campaign seasons. This one, the pace is very different. Put this up on the screen. Mail ballots go out in North Carolina this week, September 6th, in days. Then you start getting into all of these deadlines. This is just in the critical swing states documented here by UMich Voter. September 16th, you start with Pennsylvania absentees. Then you get September 21st, Wisconsin mail.

September 24th, Michigan absentee, on and on and on. So you can see we really are coming down to the wire here with final weeks until election day. Let me give you a little bit of the new polling. I thought this was noteworthy. This was a new ABC News poll. You can put this up on the screen. Kamala Harris now has a pretty high favorability here, outpacing Trump with regard to her favorable impression. But I found this interesting, Sagar. In this particular poll, they actually found more people who said she was, quote, qualified to be president as opposed to Trump. And that's one of the criticisms he's attempted to lob at her is that she's not qualified, the quote, unquote, DEI candidate.

And of course, she wasn't picked through an ordinary primary process. She was anointed onto the ticket as the VP. And then when Biden resigned, she immediately gets his endorsement and lines up all the endorsements and is essentially, you know, fait accompli to make her the Democratic nominee. So I found that noteworthy as well, that that had not, that particular attack had not stuck to her very effectively. Hasn't stuck yet. And I think this really highlights the danger that we were saying here for the Trump campaign, is that for weeks now I've heard from them is that they're like where all the powder is dry until Labor Day. And one of the dangers of that is that the definitional wars, the problem with those definitional wars was that in that period, Kamala's campaign not only

experienced the DNC, they also experienced a monolithic media moment where everybody was fawning over her. She did her last interview on the Thursday. You guys did a great job. I listened to that while I was gone. Oh, yeah. I wanted to ask you, any big takeaways there? I mean, I thought she was okay. I mean, I was like a B- It was nothing that noteworthy. Yeah, B minus for whatever performance, nothing particularly noteworthy. I mean, the way she flipped, I mean, really, my more criticism is not for her. It's for Dana Bash, where it's like, well, you've changed some positions on some things. I'm like, no, no,

that's not what we do. We go through a checklist and we're like, you said this, and now you say this. You said this, and now you say this. And she's like, well, you've changed some positions on some things. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not what we do. We go through a checklist and we're like, you said this and now you say this. You said this and now you say this. And she's like, well, I've always been true to my values. So look, on the substance, bullshit, in my opinion. It was a very check the box kind of a question. It was a check the box question. It wasn't like, let me follow up and really pin you down here. It was not difficult. There's a real reason that they picked her. So look, all of my criticism is more for CNN. If I'm a politician, that's the dream scenario, especially for somebody like here. Let's put that aside. The fact is, is that she did that on a Thursday before Labor Day weekend when a huge amount of people are on the road or on a plane taking vacations. So the number of people who even watched it, probably very low. The vast majority

of the coverage is positive. And the Trump people at the same time were experiencing a downswing, both in terms of criticism, but not knowing really what to do and their strategy. So the biggest problem I've seen from the Trump campaign is their inability to be on message. So the problem is, is that if you look at the more disciplined characters, people like J.D. Vance or any of the surrogates, it's all Kamala all the time. But with Trump, there's a lot of grievance around the fact that Biden is longer on the ticket. He's talking a lot about Biden. Every once in a while, he'll come back to Kamala and he's kind of all over the place. Interesting New York Times analysis, a guy named Sean McCreesh, who I believe he interviewed Trump. I've read him for a long time. He talked about how

Trump believes strongly in his theory of called the weave, where he weaves in and out of various different political messages and kind of stream of conscious. Trump believes that because it's worked for him for so long that he's just going to stick to the process. But I mean, and look, he's the guy who got elected, not me. I could just see that there is a danger in that, in that the definition wars at this point, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent just in the last month or so, defining Kamala Harris behind a lot of the media messaging, now leading into Labor Day, where the vast majority of Americans are now beginning to tune in a lot more than ever before.

There is perhaps a chance to make up some lost ground. I mean, I guess the bull case that I would make for Trump is, look, you're still 50-50. And you know, your powder is dry. You still have a fairly decent shot of winning the election. So maybe you didn't have to. You don't have nearly as much money as the Democrats did last time around. So you want to dump as much as you can when people are paying attention. So I'm still not counting them out or anything. No, nor should anybody. I just think it was a mistake not to really fight as hard as they possibly could when clearly they were on the back foot. While on a human level, I can empathize why they felt that way, from a practitioner level, I think they should have hit the ground running almost immediately a month ago. I think that's right. Because here's the thing, impressions of Kamala Harris were obviously very, very soft. Yeah.

As evidenced by the fact that her approval rating shifted dramatically in just a short period of time. And you can say, oh, the media, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, you're the campaign. You need to get out there and define your opponent in the way you want her to be defined. And that just hasn't worked. I mean, that qualification, that's just one case in point of something that they tried obviously didn't stick, obviously didn't land with the American public. She gets a pass on all the Biden policies too. I mean, if you ask voters like, who do you trust more on this and that policy? She's massively outpacing Joe Biden. So she's also not being saddled with whatever pieces of the Biden administration voters are unhappy with. I don't know if you saw this. I sent this in this

morning, Sagar. We just got new numbers about dollar amounts of ad reservations in key battleground states. And it's very revealing in terms of the Trump campaign has really narrowed their focus down to just a few states, basically Pennsylvania and Georgia. They are pinning all of their hopes on those two states. So they're spending $70 million on TV in Pennsylvania, almost $40 million in Georgia. Those are very equivalent numbers to what the Democrats are spending. It's almost identical to what the Democrats are spending in those states. In every other swing state, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, that one Omaha market that's a swing district because of the way they do the electoral college there. Democrats are massively outspending

Republicans. So it just, it really shows you they aren't feeling that confident about Michigan and Wisconsin. They're feeling like we have to bet the whole farm on making sure that we win both Pennsylvania and Georgia. And by the way, in that scenario, they also have to hold on to North Carolina, which is no longer a given. Now, if they do those things, they win. That's all they have to do is just win those three, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania. But really narrowly laser focused on that is kind of reminiscent of when Biden was in the race, Democrats had given up on Arizona, Georgia, certainly North Carolina. They were thinking, okay, if we just have to hold these three blue wall states, but that's our only path that's feasible at this point. Now the Trump campaign really narrowing their focus, it appears.

Yeah. And it's also highlights something that we've been trying to hammer home here, which is that the map fundamentally changed from last time around. With Pennsylvania, Kamala is more likely to lose Pennsylvania and win Georgia under the current. That was a flip last time around with Joe Biden. So I want everybody also to kind of flip the way that they're thinking about where tipping points may come, what they could look like. There are multiple pats to 270 for the Democrats that don't include Pennsylvania. I mean, that could be wrong too, because sometimes I think about it. I'm like, well, in a scenario where she loses Pennsylvania, is she really also going to win Georgia? I mean, theoretically, from what we're looking at,

that is possible. I also find it a little bit difficult just because when things are off, they're usually off all in one direction. So in my head, she's either gonna win them all or she's gonna lose them all. But I mean, listen, it could be a true nail biter. It could be like a 1960 level election where it all comes down to, you know, even less

votes than they did last time. And it really is, you know, forty nine point two versus forty nine point one. And we have to live through weeks of recounts. I wouldn't risk that possibility either, actually. Yeah. And there's also the question I agree with you, by the way, about, you know, a lot of times there's like, wouldn't it be crazy if she won this one state and lost all the, it's like, usually these things all move in the same direction. Usually they all trend a little bit this way or a little bit that way. And that's in the Senate races as well. It's unusual for it to be like, oh my God, she crushed in Michigan, but got destroyed in Pennsylvania. It's so nationalized at this point that typically, I think things tend to trend in one direction or the other. But put that aside, it is really remarkable when you think about the fact that

last time with Joe Biden, he won the popular vote by roughly four points. And we all know how close that ended up being because of the electoral college advantage that Republicans benefit from. Now, people like Nate Silver, who studied this stuff, say that electoral college advantage has diminished a little bit for Republicans. And there was a poll that just came out that had Kamala Harris up three points nationally. If she wins the popular vote by three points, that is like, knife's edge. That's what we just said, 49.2 versus 49.1. That is like nightmare recount, like you won by three votes in two states or whatever. I mean, it's starting to have those vibes. Let me just roll through some of the other poll numbers that came out.

This is also from that ABC News poll that just says everybody's favorability. This is something that I've been talking about. In terms of the old who would you want to have a beer with test, it looks like Harris Walls are winning that. She's plus three. He's plus 11 in terms of favorability ratings. Trump in this one, minus 25. She's plus three. He's plus 11 in terms of favorability ratings. Trump in this one, minus 25. That's an outlier. Because his favorability ratings recently have actually been a bit higher. But in any case, minus 25 in this particular poll, I take that with a grain

of salt because it is an outlier. J.D. Vance, minus 12. That has been fairly on target with where his approval rating has been. So she's winning that, like, who would you rather have a beer or perhaps a glass of wine with Sagar? Next up, let's get a little bit into, we got some leaks about her debate strategy, which is kind of relevant in terms of the whole mic on, mic off debate. Put this next piece up on the screen. Sources familiar with Vice President Harris's debate prep tell NBC News she's focused on getting under Trump's skin, remaining calm in response to his attacks, pointing out his broken promises, and emphasizing his advanced age. So this gives you some insight into why they've been trying to keep the mics on, because she is betting on or hoping for some sort of like unhinged moment from him, you know, happening and she wants the mics on to be able to catch that.

Yeah, look, probably a good strategy. They're trying to get recreate Biden 1.0 debate, the very first debate where Trump was, I guess, hopped up maybe on something, maybe on his own ego. That's when he had COVID, so God knows what they had him on. Yeah, that's very true. But he was interrupting Biden constantly. That was the chaos debate. That was definitely, at the very least, I wouldn't say it helped him win the election or come close in the election. So that's what they're really trying to recreate this time around. It's actually not a terrible one because Trump actually has lost his cool in previous

debates. Or he has shown, well, I would say it's risky in one regard. Sometimes he's very good off the cuff. The classic moments of 2016, let me think about. You know, we had you'd be in jail. Some of the NAFTA attacks that were on Hillary Clinton, showing and trying to throw her off the bat in debate number two by bringing all those Bill Clinton accusers, which I think clearly did have some effect on Hillary going into that. So it's certainly possible.

He has risen to the occasion before. They are all trying to recreate his worst debate performance on record so far, which was the first debate last time around. Look, I mean, in general, this is a relatively easy test because all Kamala has to do is appear better than Joe Biden and deliver very classic attacks. I believe her biggest strength so far is not that. It was a moment in the interview where they asked her about the race attacks. And previously, these are the type of things that Democrats would have fetishized and be like, oh my God. And there was every buzzword in the book. And she said the same old thing from Donald Trump. Next question. I said, ah, you know,

that's the smartest thing I've seen her do so far. Smartest thing I've seen her do so far. Because you don't take the bait. Yeah. And I don't know if you caught at the end of the interview, too, Dana Bash put up that picture of Kamala's adorable grandniece. And she's got like the pigtails and she's, you know, a little black girl looking up at the black woman. She asked her a similar like, you know, what does this mean to all the like black women out there or whatever? And her response was, I'm running because I think I would be the best president for all Americans. So again, just very different from the Hillary Clinton campaign, just reeked of all this like narcissistic, like, oh my God, look at me. Aren't I so special? Won't it be so amazing for all women just to have me in office?

And Kamala Harris is leaning more into the way that Barack Obama handled this. Now, not that he never talked about race. He gave that very famous speech about race, which was very well received at the time. But by and large, he really went out of his way to emphasize, I'm running for everyone. And she seems to have taken that playbook. But I 100% agree. That was the best moment of the whole interview. And Dana Bash tried to be like, she was like, that's it. Kamala's like, that's it. So they've learned something about

how to run against Trump for sure. Yeah, that is smart. Let's put Nate Silver's piece up on the screen. Really interesting stuff. It's A7, guys. A7, please. Next one after this. Actually, it's Bloomberg. Yeah, this is the Bloomberg polls we can just mention. She's leading her tide with Trump in the seven swing states here. That includes North Carolina, where she's up to. So this is the Bloomberg polls. Go ahead and put Nate Silver up next. We can take a look at that. Let's go put Nate Silver. So the Nate Silver analysis here currently has each candidate's chance of winning has changed. And this is not necessarily the chance of winning right now, but the chance of winning has changed. Their win

probability at one point going at 55 percent for Trump and Harris at 44. He has an excellent post out this morning that I actually highly recommend everybody read, which has really changed my analysis too in the literal throwing my hands up, is why this election is not normal. And it's not normal for so many reasons. It was not normal for the RFK on the ballot for a huge third party, but then dropping out endorsing Trump. It is not normal for the extremely short, less than 100 day period sprint to the election. It is not normal in terms of the way that Donald Trump literally was almost assassinated. It is not normal in terms of Tim Walz going from basically an unknown figure now onto the national stage in a dizzying turn of events. It's not normal to be able to track

things over time. And so the ability to have a miss and perhaps a very large miss is perhaps greater today than ever before. So I'm really thinking and trying to incorporate that. And that's part of why when I was saying about Pennsylvania, it just seems extremely unlikely to me that she would win Pennsylvania or that Trump would lose Pennsylvania or sorry, would win Pennsylvania and just not win the entire election. But that is part of why I'm also injecting just like the general chaos theory of there is so much crazy stuff that has happened here. And look, we are as bewildered as all of you. And I think that's what we can try and help people think through is when they're going into this election, the normal rules just have not applied at all.

And that is okay, actually. And to think about, and so to use old heuristics and kind of apply them here, not really appropriate so far. Yeah. Well, I mean, anytime you're talking about presidential election, ultimately it's such a small sample size. So to say there's any sort of ironclad rule about how the polls work or how this works or what the electoral college path looks like or whatever, you just, you really do have to start with a fresh slate because every single election brings us some sort of a surprise that no one was anticipating. And we've already had a number of those in this particular election. You know, the, I guess the case I would make for if I'm going to play devil's advocate

about why maybe Pennsylvania could be different from Michigan and Wisconsin, it's just because of those numbers I mentioned earlier that the Trump campaign is spending massively in Pennsylvania and not spending massively in those other states. I mean, they're basically all that abandoned those other states. So to the extent that paid advertisements really make that much of a difference at this point, which is debatable. Very debatable. Very debatable. I guess the absence of it is bad, but the presence of it is not necessarily that meaningful,

which is kind of a crazy thing to think about. Political consultants certainly think who are making a lot of money on it. They think it's very impactful, but I don't know. I genuinely don't know if it makes that much of a difference at this point, given, like I said, how nationalized the elections are. But that would be the case for why a Pennsylvania and a Georgia could be different from the others is simply because the Trump campaign is spending way more of their dollars, focus, attention, I'm sure ground game, et cetera, in those states. So that would be one thing. But yeah, the bullish case to make for the Trump people based on the Nate Silver analysis that does have Trump now in terms of the electoral college, out of 100 simulations, 55 times Trump wins and 45 times Kamala wins.

That's basically a toss up, but gives Trump somewhat of an edge. So far, post-convention, there hasn't been much of it. It's basically been static from where it was pre-convention for Kamala Harris. And so his model is factoring in like, oh, you should have gotten a bump. And so it's sort of discounting the polls at this point that show her up, but don't show her getting a bounce. So if you consider this a honeymoon period, if you look at this and say, oh, well, you should have gotten a bounce, maybe that was negated by the RFK Jr. dropout, an endorsement, whatever, then a reversion back to the mean, if you lose those two points that

maybe she theoretically got but was negated by RFK Jr., then you're back to the popular vote being close to tied. And in that scenario, if they're tied in the popular vote, Donald Trump wins, given their electoral college margins. Put a eight up on the screen. This is the more, I guess, hopeful or bullish case for the Kamala people. So like I said, doesn't get a convention bounce. This poll does have her up by six, but it already had her up by six. So you'd still say, all right, well, that's still a good result. But we're going to show you some more of this data in the block we're about to do about abortion. The gender gap, women continue to move towards Kamala Harris. Women vote more often than men. So you would rather have the women's side of the gender gap than the man's side of the gender gap.

There's also the data that I referenced before is that women are registering in like astronomical numbers, even higher rates than post-Dobbs, which is kind of extraordinary. So that's the bullish case for the Harris people. You know, if you want to do a little unskew the polls on the Kamala Harris side, you would say, listen, these new voters, these new women who are registering to vote, they're not going to be captured in a likely voter screen. And they are much more likely to vote. New voters are much more likely to vote than people who have been registered for a long time. So that's kind of the bullish case on their side, which I think has some merit. Oh, absolutely. That's some merit. That's why voter registration, I think we're going to continue

to track that metric. And that's going to be very important in the way that we think about all of this as well. So in general, yeah, I mean, my main thing is normal rules don't really apply. All of this is a lot of signaling. We are trying to figure out like which way things are going. And then also to what extent the so-called fundamentals still matter. We're going to pretend that they still do. But as we all found out last time around, they don't necessarily always. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves.

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

and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's actually maybe a good turn to the next one, which is abortion, because abortion was not a topic, whichever was so-called fundamental. It was relatively a decided issue in the minds of most Americans. To the extent that it was an issue, it was an issue for Republican voters in presidential primaries and perhaps in terms of turnout. Trump himself has no idea what to do here. Last time around, he could just say he was pro-life, but the stakes of being pro-life didn't have any real electoral consequences

outside of driving Republican votes in his primary. This time around, you have literally tens of millions of women and voters who are, this is if not their number one issue, one of the major issues influencing their decision to vote in the 2024 election. So Trump has changed his position now several times just in the last 96 hours. First and foremost, and this is what really set off a firestorm, was an NBC News interview where he appeared to come out against a six-week amendment, which is on the ballot in the state of Florida, known as Amendment 4. Let's take a listen to his original comments.

And you want abortion to be a states' rights issue. In Florida, the state that you are a resident of, there's an abortion-related amendment on the ballot to overturn the six-week ban in Florida. How are you going to vote on that? Well, I think the six-week is too short. It has to be more time. And I've told them that I want more weeks. So you'll vote in favor of the amendment? I'm voting that I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks. Look, just so you understand, everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated for years, 52 years. I got it done. They wanted to go back to the states. Okay, so that is crazy because of course, not only has he said previously,

what did he say six weeks was cruel? I think that's what he said in his criticism of Ron DeSantis. But he basically came out there and seemed to say that he was gonna be voting in favor of Amendment 4. Amendment 4 is the so-called right to abortion initiative that will be actually on the ballot. And it says specifically that amendment to limit government interference with abortion, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient's health as determined by the patient's healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the legislature's constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion. That's the text of the amendment.

So basically codifies Roe, effectively codifies Roe. It's actually past Roe, right? Because it isn't even talking about the first trimester. Effectively, and this is what the critics of it are saying, is that it legalizes abortion all the way up until nine months, if that is what a healthcare provider were to recommend. Of course, relatively rare case. But anyway, that's part of the reason why some of the anti-abortion activists are very influenced by it. The other consequential thing that he said in that was not only that he opposed in principle six weeks as quote being too short, he also came out in favor of mandating insurance coverage of IVF for all Americans. Let's take a listen. So we are paying for that treatment.

All Americans who want it? All Americans that get it, all Americans that need it. So we're gonna be paying for that treatment or we're gonna be mandating that the insurance company pay. Okay, so perhaps no comment pissed more traditional conservatives off than this one for two reasons. One, it actually expands insurance coverage. It quite literally mandates insurance companies to cover. But second was, of course, that there is a philosophical objection by some very, very religious elements of the GOP to IVF. So this was his first like 2016 moment that I'd seen in quite a long time. And I was like, hey, that's actually quite a smart play. But of course, you know, the people inside the coalition are

going to be absolutely furious about it. You know, I thought about this and I'm not so sure it is a smart play because in the same way that I don't think it's smart for Democrats to validate the frame of Republicans on immigration, an issue that they are never gonna win on, I don't think it's smart for Republicans to validate that. I want them to. I would like them to be pro-choice. I appreciate Donald Trump for three minutes attempting to move the party in a more pro-choice direction, but just speaking tactically, he's validating the Democratic frame here. And he also just looks like panicked. And also you're gonna see him completely change his position in the course of like two days time. So any of the criticisms that they have of Kamala

Harris, which are legitimate of her being a flip-flopper, hard to make that land when you yourself have four different abortion positions over the course of one weekend. So even on the politics of this, I actually sort of agree with the Lila Roses. You put her tweet up on the screen here. This was after these initial comments. She says, expressions of disappointment are not enough. Disappointment is not being counted at the ballot box. The currency, the language in this season is votes. Trump has plenty of opportunity to still win the pro-life vote, and it will only help his campaign. I want Trump to win as a pro-life candidate. But let's be clear, Trump winning as a pro-abortion candidate is a loss for the pro-life movement. So the two risks politically are, number one, you demoralize your base, which has been very critical and very steadfast with

him. You know, the evangelical right, the religious right since 2016 has been his strongest and most solid base of support. So you risk sort of, you know, de-energizing them, demotivating them so that they don't turn out and they don't volunteer and all those sorts of things which are critical. But also you are validating the Democratic Party frame. And you're always going to be the guy who put the people on the bench that overturned Roe. You're not getting away from that. So the position he took in 2016 in service of winning the Republican primary and then in service of holding on to evangelicals after the whole Access Hollywood situation. You know,

in a sense they really have, um, I do think they helped him to be able to win that election, but they've really come home to roost in a way that I don't think he can, you know, jujitsu his way out of on the IVF thing though. If I were Democrats, I would take him up on it, put a bill on the floor, make them vote like, okay, let's cut it. Let's, let's guarantee IVF. Let's have the government pick up the bill or the insurance companies. If you have private health insurance, let's do it. Let's go and see what happens because we've had legislation go through the Senate to protect IVF and almost every Republican voted against it. So I guess the reason that I have, I'm not thinking of this through politics. I'm trying to say, how do we just shift the

Overton window so that these Lila Graces of the world are not ruling the Republican Party for no reason? These are extremely unpopular positions. Sorry, it just is, as all recent politics has shown you. It is also extremely unpopular. And also, it doesn't make sense to be the so-called pro-family party and not be in favor of expanding IVF protections. I 100% agree with you on that. I'm sticking with policy here. And I'm like, so I think it's important when the leader of the party

is like, no, we're going to mandate that all government is going to pay for IVF. I'm like, hey, you know what? That's actually what a pro-family position would look like. And that's one of those where this is why everyone's like, oh, one of the attacks, I saw somebody say like, when is the last time Sager said anything, you know, traditionally conservative? I was like, what makes you think that I'm traditionally conservative? Because that is one of those traditional conservative points that I think is extremely stupid if you do care about the eventual outcome. We can argue a million times about other stuff. But on this one, too, this is something Ross doubt that it said previously as well.

He's like, look, I'm at literally pro I'm pro-life pro-family. And the truth is, is that being legitimately pro-life would require a massive expansion of a lot of family-based social safety net programs that most traditional Republicans are not comfortable with. And that is actually ideologically consistent. Now we can argue a lot about marriage and work incentives and all that other stuff, but this is an actual difference in the framework. Now, on the politics of it, maybe you're right, but at the same time, a lot of it is trying to meet Americans where they are. The truth is, is the vast majority of Americans are quote unquote pro-choice under the Roe consensus. The absolute super majority of people are pro-IVF. And then also, most people hate their insurance

companies, and they also hate the modern healthcare system and the bills associated with fertility. So the average cost of a single round of IVF is some $12,000 to $14,000 for a single cycle, meaning it's a luxury good. And that's not right. It's actually not right. I agree. And what it tells us is that if we want to live in a society where people of all classes, experience, etc., who want to be able to have a family should be able to have one, then we need to expand protection of said medical, in the same way that we would with so many other different policies. So my only point here is just that the current economics of it on healthcare, insurance, all that, trying to become less scary as Republicans on the issue is very important, I think,

on a framework level. But you could be correct only because he's not willing to fully have some sort of sister soldier moment where he's like, no, guys, I'm breaking from you. He's like, you're either with me or you're not. I mean, I think he should because, frankly, I think they'll all show up to vote for him anyways. Let's go to the next part on Matt Walsh. He says, Amendment 4 in Florida will enshrine a right to murder children up until the moment. This is what I was talking about, by the way, in terms of what the pro-life activists were saying. They say it's an abject evil, radical leftism, etc. The point is, is that after significant pushback by Matt Walsh, by people like Michael Knowles, we can put the next one up there, who says, quote, as a practical matter, most persons created through IVF are destroyed or frozen indefinitely. Additionally, IVF establishes the domination of technology or the origin and destiny of human life and asserts a perverse right to a child and severs the unitive from the procreative.

For those not familiar with such terms. I'm sure 3% of people agree with you there, buddy. This is religious. It is perhaps a blessing and a curse that I know so many religious Catholics, thus I frankly understand what he's saying. But if you don't, then you wouldn't maybe understand a lot of this. All of this is to say is that after a lot of pushback on the initial Amendment 4 conversation, Trump then reverses his position and now says, actually, no, he will not be voting for Amendment 4. Let's take a listen. I'll be voting no for that reason. No on Amendment 4.

For that reason, because it's radical. And when you talk about radical, having a baby, abort, abortion, doing an abortion in the ninth month is unacceptable to anybody. There's something in between, but the six is too short. It's just too short a period. And the nine months is unacceptable. But for that reason, for the radicalization on the Democrat side, we're voting no. They have tried this a million times. And guess what? It's just not going to work. We saw it in 2022. People are not concerned about the so-called cases of late-term abortion. They are very concerned about early-term, six weeks, and

really between six and 12, first trimester. Again, like I said, a literal, not only majority, I think it's almost 60-some, maybe almost 70% of Americans support a Roe consensus. And thus, if we put this last piece up here, just Trump contorting himself on abortion in search of political gain, it is an extremely difficult position that he is in as long as he wants to try and keep all sides happy. I genuinely believe that this is one of those a time for choosing moments and that you either have to, as I said, have a literal sister soldier moment and just say, look guys, I don't support this.

This is not the direction that we're going in. This is the new consensus. We are gonna have to argue on very different framework. And this is a lot like the way that the European right-wing parties argue on the issue of abortion. Or he's going to have to become explicitly pro-life and just live with the consequences. But this current trying to satisfy everybody, it's a lot like immigration, where on the issue, it's just such a polarized one. And the choice actually does matter so much on where you directionally fall that Trump, all of this like firing in all different directions, it's just not going to work. Yeah.

I don't see it right now. No. And, you know, after the DNC, he tweeted that thing about like, no one's going to be better for reproductive rights than me. No one is going to believe that. No one is going to believe that. No one is going to believe that. I mean, we've got 40, 50 years of Republicans being the party of blocking abortion access. You are not going to change that association, just like Democrats are not going to change the association of suddenly think that Kamala Harris is going to be more of a hawk on the border than Donald Trump. That is not happening, right? So yeah, there is no winning on this position for Donald Trump. And one of the things I

wanted to mention, the New York Times Siena polls, which are considered very high quality polls as good as they get in terms of for whatever that means, the number one issue for women under 45 is abortion. It's not actually the economy, it's not democracy. It's not anything else. The number one issue for women under 45 is abortion. That tells you how central this has become to a lot of political energy and activism at this point. Let me go ahead and put this ties in with what I just said, put B9 up on the screen. I mentioned this voter registration data earlier, but let's just show you really clearly here. This is TargetSmart. It is a Democratic-aligned firm, but they track voter registration, and those are just hard numbers, like you can't Democrat or Republican the actual numbers of who's registering and when they

register, whatever. You can see the spike in women registering to vote post-Dobbs, huge spike, led to monumental victories for the pro-choice position in places like Kansas and Kentucky, right? Then after Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, you see a spike that actually outpaces, surpasses the Dobbs spike in women registrants. And I guarantee you, Trump is seeing some of this data and he has always had an instinct. He was the first Republican after Roe was overturned to say, this is going to be a problem for us. Privately, he was telling his aides, this is going to be a disaster for us. Ironic, given that he's the one who made that happen. But anyway, put that aside.

This is effectively what they're terrified of right now, is that this issue, even if it's not the primary issue for a majority of voters. It is so motivating for such a key slice of the electorate that it could in and of itself be determinative and has been in some of the special elections that we have seen post-Obs. That wasn't the last thing I want to say. One of the other things I think is the reason it's stupid and Trump should have actually just stuck with his position on Amendment 4 is, guys, Amendment 4 is going to pass, all right? I'll eat a sock here on the show if it doesn't pass, because that is one of the things about Florida. It can be a R plus 20 state, and abortion can also still be extremely, or at least being the pro-life position, can be extremely unpopular. As we all learned in 2020, when Trump wins the state of Florida by some 3.5%,

and minimum wage passes by like 60%. Yeah. People are very multifaceted and very different, especially whenever they have to vote issue by issue at the ballot box. Amendment four is 100% going to pass. So coming out against it, what's the point? Why would you want to be on the other side and then give the Democrats even more of an edge to run up the scoreboard against you. Because they're gonna guarantee you Florida Democratic Party will use that. Will he still win the state of Florida? Yeah, absolutely. But my point is just like, why give people more ammunition whenever they would need it? Because I can also tell you that Florida may

not matter, but Arizona's got an abortion thing on the ballot, and you think they won't be slicing that in to their coverage? It's a gift to all of the people that you are running against, and especially in places like Arizona, where Cary Lake is a massive drag right now on the ticket. You need every inch that you can possibly fight for to win that state. So for it to pass in Florida, because it's a constitutional amendment, it takes a 60 percent supermajority. And the polls that I've seen recently have it like basically right at that 60 percent. But like you, I think are going to see those initial comments and agree with them and be more inclined to vote for it.

So I expect it to pass, but it's not a gimme given that it has to get, it'll definitely get a majority. We'll get over 60% probably, but it's not a gimme in my opinion. Yeah, I think you're probably right. But I still think it's almost certainly going to pass. And even then... We'll still make you eat a sock. I mean, sure. I mean, all it is is a dry mouth. All I'm saying is that, you know,

you don't want to be on the opposite ends of very, very popular issues. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits

as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

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Let's go to the next part. This is a personal one. Very, very personal personal one. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Speaking of Trump supporting things in the state of Florida, Trump is now in support of the recreational quote unquote recreational marijuana or marijuana initiative in Florida. Let me read entirely. As everyone knows, I was and will be again, the most respected law and order president in US history. We will take our streets back by being tough on crime, blah, blah, blah. In Florida, like so many other states that have already given their approval,

personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults with Amendment 3. Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of voters. So it should be done correctly. We need the state legislature to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat-run cities. True. At the same time, someone should not be criminal in Florida when this is legal in so many other

states. We do not need to ruin lives and waste taxpayer dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them. And no one should grieve a loved one because they died from fentanyl-laced marijuana. We will make America safe again. So Trump is now fully in support of Amendment 3. And it's funny because a lot of the criticism from the pro-life side of Trump on these amendments and all that applies exactly to this one. This is not, let me be very clear, Amendment 3 is not decriminalization. It is straight up commercial legalization of pot. In the same way that you see in Denver and everybody else, which will lead to the massive

proliferation of weed stores literally everywhere, the putrid smell of marijuana. You can say whatever you want about, oh, well, we need to prohibit public space. It's not going to happen because the commercial incentive is way too strong. My friend Charles Lehman wrote a great Wall Street Journal op-ed just this morning about the problems with widespread legalization with no curbs on commercialization, excuse me, with no curbs on commercialization or on, no curbs on commercialization or on the increased percentage of THC in products, no regulation literally whatsoever. And by the time people even try and get around to doing that, a lot of the damage is already done in terms of traffic fatalities, rising addiction, problems with

children, schizophrenic breaks, and increased amounts of crime. So that's all I would say on the subject, but Trump clearly has, quote, gone woke on the issue. Why follow popular trends on weed, but on abortion, we're like, oh no, well, we gotta stick with the most. Well, you know the answer to that, because the abortion people are very powerful. Well, maybe I should become powerful. We all need to rise up. Maybe we should, Sagar. Yeah, I mean, weed, being against weed, especially against the commercialization of weed,

is probably a way more popular position than being straight up pro-life, the way some of these IVF religious Catholics are. So I have the polling on it. It depends on, you know, your definition of where these things lie, I guess, in terms of the popularity of the position. But overall support for marijuana legalization is 70 percent. Democrats, it's 87 percent.

Independents is 70 percent. Republicans, it's 55 percent. So even among Republicans, it's a majority at this point. So, you know, he's reading the polls. I guess I would just say with all of this stuff, it just, I don't know. You tell me if you feel this way too. It all just feels really sort of flailing and desperate. Like the pander is a little too obvious.

You know, I mean, it feels, especially on the abortion thing, like all over the place. You can tell he's looking at the polls. He's like, I got a problem. What can I do? He's spinning his wheels. He's trying to throw different attacks at Kamala against the wall that aren't really sticking. The weed thing out of nowhere feels the same way.

It just, it all feels a little panicked and flailing and not considered and not, you know, again, I'm happy for him. If he stuck with his pro-choice position, I prefer that. I prefer he stick with his marijuana position. We'll see if he does. He probably will because there isn't as much of a powerful organized constituency on the other side. And that's ultimately what caused him to fold, which shows you just how powerful that constituency continues to be in the Republican Party. Even with Donald Trump, who does have this very strong hold on the base, cult of personality around him with that, whatever, even he felt like he couldn't hold his position shifting on abortion without facing

real ramifications from that part of the Republican base. So yeah, in any case, he's reading the polls and looking at that 70% overall support and thinking that he's got to get on the right side of that. And I guess because it's on the ballot in Florida, he didn't feel like he could not take a position on it. Or maybe he thought, you know, the other thing, Sagar, this just occurred to me. He's on the Lex Friedman podcast today. Obviously, he's excited about RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing him. He's been going on all these different, like, streamer and podcasts.

That's been a concerted strategy. And his campaign thinks that they can reach young men in particular through this like podcast approach. And in that frame, you know, he changed his position on crypto. That was part of the appeal to this audience. And so this could be part of a concerted campaign strategy to appeal to young men. Because if you look at age 18 to 34, 79% of young people, men and women, age 18 to 34, support marijuana legalization. So it could be a part and parcel to that strategy. It actually just occurred to me. You're obviously correct. And I know that's right, which is that this is a attempt to win over the coveted, the quote unquote barstool,

socially libertarian demographic. People who don't trust the mainstream media, listen to a lot of podcasts, Lex Friedman, Theo Vaughn, and all that right in that. Sean Ryan podcast as well. The so-called YouTube politics space, which is predominantly on the right. Lex Friedman is not right wing, but I'm saying previously there's been a lot of crossover with, at the very least with Sean Ryan's show, right? In terms of politically the valence of what that looks like. And you want to be able to spread and try and reach people who traditionally are not going to be in a mainstream platform. I think all of that is actually quite smart.

Weed is almost certainly going to be a part of that. If he does, let's say, appear on the Joe Rogan podcast, which we'll see, then Joe said he doesn't want to interview him, but he may, I don't know. Joe would probably ask him about it. So he wants to get in a position where he's roughly in line with where it's going to be. But my only point on this is that it's very funny to me. It's like, oh, he'll pander and go in one direction on one issue like weed, but then on pro-life or whatever, the genuine tyranny of the minority, you know, if we're thinking of like Nassim Taleb and how the most intolerant almost always win, their litmus tests are the ones that are literally forcing him into one of the most unpopular positions in modern American history. And if he loses, it is no doubt in my mind that that is the only reason why he lost the election.

It will be because of abortion. Now, there will be a lot more that backs all that up. But as we see from all the numbers, that Harris graph that you showed us on registration, on the animating reason why Democrats are coming out to vote, it's just such an own goal for him. And it is almost an insurmountable political force for him, whereas I think he could have gotten past many, many other things if this wasn't on the ballot. Well, and think about what just happened. With these comments and shifting positions or whatever, he gave people a new cycle that's about abortion, which is the last thing he wants a new cycle about. And it's the polar opposite of what has always been his superpower.

And this is what he's really struggled with in the Kamala Harris era, is because the Democrats aren't taking his bait the way they used to, as evidenced by Kamala in that interview. She gets asked about the, you turn black comments, and she's like, whatever, same old playbook, next question. They're not taking the bait. And he is struggling to define the news cycles and set the tone of the conversation and set the terms of the conversation in set the terms of the conversation in the way that he has always been able to do and that has been so effective for him. So with this flailing all over the place with abortion, he gifts the Democrats a news cycle about abortion, which is, you know, that's their greatest wish. If they have more days talking

about abortion between now and election day and fewer days talking about immigration between now and Election Day, guess what? That landscape is looking pretty good for them. And he just gave them an assist in that regard. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family

that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver,

the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what

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

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

and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes

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

Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to Brazil, where there's an important free speech story surrounding Twitter and a big fight with Elon Musk. Let's put this up there on the screen. Brazil has now blocked Elon Musk's ex after the company has refused to comply amid a feud with a federal judge. So this is a fascinating kind of a story that I had to delve into. Just anytime we see a Twitter or ex so-called or any social media company get literally blocked in a major country, it's important. But actually in Brazil, Twitter, YouTube, and social media plays a major outsized role, as I've learned from following Glenn Greenwald and kind of some of the other observers

of what's happening. So this is actually especially important in a very large democracy and, of course, a place which is very nearby to the United States and perhaps what it all means. So it all begins kind of with this one judge, I'm going to butcher these Portuguese names, so I truly apologize. I'm going to go with Alexandre Demor, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered the Brazilian telecom agency to block X from across the nation because the company, quote, lacked a physical presence in Brazil. This is after Twitter's office in Brazil did not comply with a court order to remove so-called, quote, X accounts that said broke Brazilian law. All of these orders are sealed currently. Twitter said that they will publish them. The Justice also originally said that any person in Brazil who still tried to use X

via VPN software will be fined some $9,000 per day. Now I believe that has since been rescinded. The Lula government though has backed up this basically blocking of Twitter and there's been a major showdown now between Elon and between the country of Brazil and its justice system. Let's put this up here as well. A friend of mine, Brendan Carr, he's actually one of the FCC commissioners, put out a really interesting analysis. And he says that the text of this 51-page decision to shut down X in Brazil is, quote, far more concerning and sweeping than headlines may suggest. In his own words, it makes clear

they are attempting to strike a broader blow against free speech in favor of authoritarian control. His opinion does not try to hide it. He comes out and points to Brexit and the 2016 election of Donald Trump as examples in his telling of, quote, the types of extreme populist outcomes that he is attempting to avoid by imposing a new censorship regime in Brazil ahead of the country's elections later this year. Quote, this type of censorship and political ideological nature is explicitly prohibited by Brazil's own constitution.

Nonetheless, they argue that free speech on X, quote, cannot be allowed to continue because the diversity of political opinions expressed on the site might influence the people of Brazil ahead of their 2024 elections. In other words, he is arguing that free speech is a threat to democracy and that quote, of course the opposite is true. So he warns in his decision that they warned over the playbook of labeling political speech that runs contrary to his own orthodoxy is quote, misinformation and disinformation. So there's a lot of seeds of a lot of the same debates that we have here, Crystal.

And of course, this is also affects our friend of the show, Glenn Greenwald, as well, who we're always thinking about here and his safety as well. But it is extremely, I mean, it's concerning. And it is also perhaps a preview of especially what is to come with some major fights, especially with Elon's ownership over Twitter in countries where Elon does not want to comply with the current law. Yeah, which is not all countries. Yeah, that's true. I mean, let's be honest. Because he has succeeded to many government censorship requests. I'll get more to that in a minute. Just to back up a little bit where this fight originates, as best I understand, and let me admit, I am no expert in Brazilian politics. This is my simplistic understanding. Effectively, they had kind of akin to a January 6th situation. Bolsonaro lost the election to Lula. He denied those results.

You know, there was a whole spin-up of like Stop the Steal style activism online on places like Twitter and culminated in this storming of a government building, again, kind of akin to January 6th. So in response to that, there was a crackdown on speech in Brazil. And this ruling from this judge is part of that. By the way, it's worth mentioning that a larger panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court that I believe had five members on it unanimously backed up this judge. So there's been an attempt to kind of personalize and make it just about this dude. But this larger panel also backed up the ruling and found it to be grounded in Brazilian law. The specific thing that they're pointing to here is it all spawned from a request to take down certain accounts.

Those accounts, as you mentioned, Sagar, the rulings of exactly which accounts they were, it was actually sealed. Elon has now actually docked them and their real names and revealed who they were. They were all these Bolsonaro-aligned type of right-wing activists who the courts wanted them to block. There was a threat, apparently, that the, according, this is according to Elon, that their representative in the country could face personal arrest and prosecution. So he removes that legal representative from the country. And then that's actually the piece that triggers the suspension is under Brazilian law. If you are going to operate a social media platform in the country, you have to have a legal representative. Elon refused to

name a legal representative of Twitter in the country. And so that's the specific thing that ends up sparking this whole situation. For the people of Brazil, there's no doubt that this is a, I mean, the VPN thing is crazy. It's not clear how that would be enforced or if that's actually gonna remain in effect. But the idea of fining people $9,000 to use a VPN, and that's a massive amount in any country anywhere, but also, you know, specifically in the country of Brazil. Insane given, you know, I'd have to look up what the average, like median salary is per year there. But that's just, that's wild, right?

And in the same way that when you ban Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp in countries like China and countries like Russia, obviously it's a free speech issue for the people of Brazil. I think with regard to Elon, though, specifically, it makes more sense in the context of thinking of this as an ideological project. And the reason I say that is because, as I alluded to before, and we can put C3 up on the screen, when it was countries with leaders and political movements that were in charge that Elon is ideologically aligned to, he agreed to the censorship request. He, you know, he did it with Turkey. He did it with India. These were kind of the two most

famous examples. When we interviewed Jack Dorsey, he made a point that was really important. That was actually that, listen, under my leadership, there were all kinds of, you know, issues that we criticized at the time, but they actually had a common free speech understanding. And they pushed back on more government censorship requests than Elon has now that he is, you know, in charge of and owns Twitter. Some 83% of government censorship requests have been agreed to by Elon Musk. So you ask yourself, okay, well, what's different between, you know, Turkey and India and Brazil? And it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the difference is an ideological one. And so that's why in one instance he says, yes, I will help you, government of Turkey, government Modi in India. And no, I will not in the country of Brazil.

The other reason that I say that is because another thing we talked about at the time, Sagar, is that we disagreed with, by the way, at the time. I continued to disagree with. His definition of free speech was, and this is how he justified those takedowns in India and Turkey, was, well, whatever the laws of the country are, that's what I have to follow. And that's my definition of free speech. He said this in particular in a big interview sit down he did with BBC that you guys might remember. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. We have a responsibility to adhere to the law. And if people want the law changed, they should talk to their elected representative and get the law changed, and then we will adhere

to the law. But if you want us to go beyond the law, that is us deciding to be censors. And I'm against censorship. I'm in favor of freedom of speech. And freedom of speech only is relevant when people you don't like say things you don't like. Otherwise, it has no meaning. So, sorry, that was actually the Don Lemon show. There was a different interview with BBC. You can put that up on the screen from CNN

wrote up the interview. But he makes very similar comments about, you know, he said he has no actual choice about government censorship requests and that their definition of free speech is effectively following the laws of whatever country. Now, you can see the problems with that because there are all kinds of repressive regimes around the country. You wouldn't want to be following, you know, the laws of Saudi Arabia and consider that to be free speech. But that was his definition, at least when it came to

countries where, you know, he had either business or friendly ideological relationship with the government. And it's different when it's Brazil because it's Lula and it's left wing. And so he has an ideological disagreement with the government. So I think that that's, you know, the best sort of frame to think about. It's probably ideology. But I mean, I think a lot of it is business, too, with Elon. And that's part we'll never you know, this is all his problem with Elon. Yeah.

A lot of stuff on this. One of the reasons why I'll never open his month about China, the most censorious government in the history of the world whenever it comes to social media, is that he has a massive commercial interest in China. In SpaceX and Twitter, it's not actually that big of a business bottom line. Whereas India is what? The most populous country in the whole world. Elon literally had met with Modi. You could call it ideology. I would actually call it much more business. So he'll pick the fight whenever it

both aligns with ideology and it isn't going to hurt him on his business bottom line. And I've always said this, there's a huge problem with him is that he will and wants to comply with a lot of Chinese censorship, specifically because they have Tesla, the company, they can destroy them overnight, anytime they want it, with their supply chain, with their batteries, and with Giga Shanghai, specifically. So if you look at the problems that he has in that regard, it's really big. Nonetheless, I mean, like you said, we're going to take, I mean, like in this particular case, it's really bad. The company, which I think to their credit, who has been the most consistent is actually Rumble. They have denied all censorship requests, basically across the board. They have fought

them in court. Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO of Rumble, actually put out an interesting thing just about some of the history of both the Brazil case, but also many others, which they've refused to comply with, many of which are complete BS, both in the UK, in France, all across the developed world. I think one of the reasons why this is really important, oh, by the way, I looked it up, GDP per capita in Brazil is $8,800. So $9,000 a day is quite literally the yearly average salary in Brazil. Insane. So if we think, though, about what this may mean in the future is there is a big fight that is being set up, specifically in the developed world. It usually, you know, the rules and the playbook may be a little bit more ham-handed in Brazil, in Russia, in India. But, you know, make no mistake, in France, in the UK, in Germany, perhaps maybe later this week,

I'll talk about in Germany, the AFD winning its first state election since World War II. You just wait and see how those Scientology right-wing laws that are on the books, how they're going to try and be enforced there. So this has major, major political ramifications. And not only that, the EU regulatory regime, which is one of the most insane regulatory regimes in the world, is much more aligned with this kind of Brazilian view of things. And in a certain sense, he's not wrong in terms of how populist, quote unquote, politics and others can bubble up through online and social media, because by definition, they have to circumvent the established powers. And then the damage that can be wrought. We watched this in the UK with the riots, where immediately they're charging and throwing people in jail for literally whipping

up, you know, whipping up, quote unquote, bad sentiment online. And a lot of that was on Twitter. That's really scary. To pick up on the business point, which is an important one, just to clarify one thing, Brazil is one of Twitter's largest markets. So you might look at that and say, oh, well, he has a huge business interest. Twitter is not where Elon Musk is making his money. And so Twitter is basically, you know, Elon bought it in the same reason that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post as an ideological tool. I think we should think of Elon's ownership of Twitter in the same way we think about Rupert Murdoch's ownership of Fox News. Yeah, sure. Good point. It's an ideological tool. I mean, he can't even pretend to be a neutral actor at this point. He

has endorsed Donald Trump. He is putting millions towards Trump's campaign. On Twitter, the algorithm really surfaces. And I don't think that this is actually, I agree with Ryan that this has been to their detriment and has convinced right-wing users that their voices are more, their viewpoints are more popular than they actually are, more prevalent, more influential than they actually are. But he's using Twitter as an ideological tool for the policies and type of governance that he wants to see. And so when you're thinking about these disputes that he's having with various countries, why this country? There's a dispute.

Why that country? He just accepts the censorship. I think you're right. The business piece is important to take into account as well. But then also, you know, his goals for Twitter as an ideological tool or an important part of understanding what's going on there as well. Yeah, that's smart. So anyways, it's a concerning situation. I'll continue to monitor it. And especially just thinking about, you know, Glenn Greenwald being in Brazil and some of the dangers that all come with that, you know, always,

always thinking about him and his safety. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. Thank you. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

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

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

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Huge news. We can put this up on the screen. There are massive protests in Israel. And the reason for these protests are you had six hostages, including that Israeli American

whose parents spoke at the DNC who were found dead in the Gaza Strip. We're going to talk more about their circumstances of their death in a moment, which appears to be, and this was sort of confirmed by Hamas, that as IDF soldiers were closing in on them, their Hamas or other affiliated captors were under instructions to, rather than let them be rescued by the IDF to shoot them and kill them. However, the reason these protests have broken out, and they are, we're talking about hundreds

of thousands of people in the streets, best I can tell, largest protest since this war began post-October 7th, is because they directly and correctly blame Bibi Netanyahu for putting his own political survival over the survival of the hostages. So, you know, that has been the framing of a lot of Israeli media. That has been, I'm going to play for you in a moment, one of the key opposition figures in Israel. They are saying, the hostage families, they are directly saying their blood is on your hands. Because rather than take the deal that was on the table, rather than negotiate in good faith, you have done nothing but try to undercut these

negotiations and guarantee that the war would continue because of your desire to maintain your own political standing. So in addition to these protests, and what I showed you in that video was they were being treated incredibly aggressively by the Israeli police, sprayed with what's called skunk spray. They also were hit with stun grenades. You might contrast that with the treatment and encouragement of the right-wing protesters who were blocking aid going into Gaza, where they were enabled, encouraged, etc. Here, a pretty vicious crackdown from the Israeli police. Let's put D2 up on the screen. In addition to the protest, there was a relatively brief general strike led by this longstanding

labor union in Israel. Friend of the show, Demi Reader, had put out a long thread sort of explaining the background of this union, what they are. My understanding based on his thread is that it's a sort of very top-down labor union tied in pretty closely with the government. There was a ruling that came back that said, hey, you can't do this general strike because it doesn't directly have an economic tie-in. And they just sort of like back down, like, OK, fine, whatever.

But that doesn't undercut the fact that you've had this huge grassroots in the streets reaction to this latest news. Let me go and put D3 up on the screen to give you some of the details here. This is from The Washington Post. Headline is protests escalate in Israel after six hostages' bodies are recovered in Gaza, including Hirsch Goldberg Poland, that Israeli-American I referenced before, and five others that Hamas took hostage on October 7th. According to the IDF, and as I said, sort of confirmed by Hamas, they were killed shortly before being found. They say in this article, Israelis react with shock and fury after the bodies of those six hostages were recovered. They also say that they were found

roughly half a mile from the tunnel where the IDF rescued a living hostage last week. The bodies were taken to the National Center of Forensic Medicine, where an examination determined the six had been killed by multiple close-range gunshots. Again, that's the Israeli analysis of what happened. But Sagar, getting to some of the reaction from some of the hostages' families, one of the hostages who had been released in the previous brief ceasefire deal, released in November after 55 days in captivity, accused Bibi of, quote, perpetrating psychological terror on us like Hamas perpetrated on us. So that is the strength of the sentiment among a lot of the population. Yeah, it's been very interesting to consume this through Western media,

through U.S. media, and then through Israeli media. So I was in the U.K. when all this was happening, so I watched BBC. BBC is actually quite good, I hate to say it, but they do a general— Better than our news media. So I was in the UK when all this was happening. So I watched BBC. BBC is actually quite good. I hate to say it, but they do a general- Better than our news media. They do a good job of being like, here's a view from Israel. Here's a view from the US, like US politician, President Biden has issued this. Here's what the prime minister has said. And actually the UK just suspended some arms sales to Israel. So there's a little bit of a difference in the way that they think about things over there.

They've got Keir Starmer in charge now. So Labor, he's been he's he's pretty pro-Israel, but at least he feels like he needs to make some sort of moves in this direction. Only point is that it's so different in the way that you consume a lot of this, because if you were watching Fox News, you'd be like, oh, this is 100 percent on Joe Biden. You're like, what? Like, how is that possible? If you watch MSNBC, I guess you're probably just going to be like, this is 100% on Bibi. But I mean, the view in Israel seems to be a major split between those who are pro hostage negotiation and ceasefire because their prime objective is saving the hostages, not the so-called destruction of Hamas. And then where you fall on that question is kind of whether you agree with the prosecution of the war and even the aims of the war itself. So that is a big kind of interesting thing because in America, you know, if you were to look at what people think the primary aim of the Israeli

military would be, in America, it's probably the destruction of Hamas and like the revenge for October 7th, whereas they think about things very, very differently over there. The fact that the protests did explode like this against the Israeli government after they were literally murdered in cold blood by Hamas does tell you though something, is that they're not willing to be like, this is 100% on Hamas, kind of the way that a US-based commentator predominantly saying that. Now, of course, they did murder them, and they did murder them in cold blood, which is horrible. From the Israeli side, they're like, yeah, we know that they're bloodthirsty terrorists. That's why we need to do a ceasefire to get them the hell out of there.

And the way that you think about that is really important. I don't know, though, how much credence to even give that side, though, at this point because the ceasefire just seems so impossible at this current time. I mean with the U.S. government, all these various frameworks, it just seems to me that if it was going to happen, it would have happened. And I think Israel has cast its die. I think they – the Bibi Netanyahu government, as it currently stands, I don't think they will ever agree to a ceasefire. Under Hamas, maybe it was possible before, who was it, was killed. But after that, you know, the people who are left in power are not the ones. Yeah, they're not the ones who want to pursue a ceasefire.

And it seems here that these, the Hamas people who murdered the terrorists, or sorry, murdered the hostages, and were on orders from higher command to kill them if they were to ever fall into IDF, if they were to fall back into IDF custody, the people who are in power seem to be just as extreme, if not more extreme than before. So we're in a lose-lose situation on both of those sides. So it was Ismail Haniyeh who was assassinated in Iran, in the Iranian capital in Tehran. And he was the lead negotiator. He was like the head of the political wing of Hamas. And now it's Yahya Senwar, who orchestrated the October 7th attacks, who is now the lead negotiator, has been put into that position. So yeah, I mean, Bibi literally murdered in a foreign nation's capital, the lead negotiator.

So I think that's pretty telling about his commitment to these negotiations. And these really people aren't stupid. They can see all of this. There is talk. Listen, I'm not there. I don't have a fine understanding of Israeli politics. So I can't say how likely this is or not. But our friend Shael Ben-Efrem, who's like a liberal Zionist who we had on the show

before, and others are saying there is a chance Bibi's government could actually fall this week if these protests continue. And especially if you were to have a longer general strike, which the general strike has already ended, as I mentioned before. So perhaps some of that pressure has been taken off. But you still have polls saying 70% of Israelis want Bibi to go. They do not want him to stand for election again. So there is definitely a majority sentiment of we would like to move on from this particular brand of political leadership. And if the pressure cooker gets turned up high enough, potentially

you could see the government fall this week. I have to be skeptical and cynical of that just because this guy is such a freaking political survivor. I mean, I just have to go back to that. He's made it this far when after October 7th, his whole philosophy of security was in tatters. His reputation was in utter tatters. Yes, of course, people blame Hamas as they should. But they also looked and said, listen, you're the one who said we could work with these people. You're the one who said, hey, well, why don't we, you're the one who sent these IDF troops to the West Bank to guard settlers rather than being there in the Gaza Strip. You're the one who failed in terms of assessing this, even though your own people were warning that there was some sort of a plan about to be put into action. We now know they

had the plans in advance. They just didn't take it seriously. So he has survived this far. So, you know, at this point, you'd be probably fooled to bet against him surviving a little bit further. And it's not that long till Election Day. And we all know who he wants to get into office. You know, with regard to the ceasefire piece, we're gonna talk to Jeremy Scahill more about this, but you had Biden come out, he got asked to like shouted questions, BB doing enough to secure a ceasefire deal?

And he said, no. It's like, I mean, the only way a ceasefire deal is actually gonna happen is if the US says, this is happening, we're cutting off your weapons, like this is it. This is the end of the road. We're making it happen. We're enforcing it, period, end of story. There was, this is a reporting from Jeremy. There was actually, you know, remember when Biden gave the big speech saying, hey, here's the deal that Israel's agreed to and now we're just waiting on Hamas to agree. Well, Hamas agreed to that deal. And then Bibi undercuts it and puts in a bunch of provisions,

poison pills that he knows are put in there intentionally to guarantee that Hamas would never agree to that. So there should have been a deal back then. Israel said, we accept this deal, and Hamas said, we accept this deal. And then Israel went back on their word and said, no, no, actually, we need these 10 other provisions to guarantee that Hamas won't accede to the deal. And I mean, that just makes it extra heartbreaking to see the level of death and destruction that has continued since July, including these hostages, including this Israeli-American, and also including the Palestinians who have been murdered between then and now when there should have been a peace deal in hand. The Biden people are now saying like, oh, we're going to take it or leave a deal on the table.

It's like, well, you know, Israel is going to leave it. That's entirely predictable at this point. So until you are willing to say no more arms, you are done. End of story. We're finished here. Until that happens, this horror is going to continue. Kamala Harris, we can put her response up on the screen. To your point, Sagar, about just the level of contrast between the commentary of figures like Vice President Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and the news media here versus the Israeli public opposition figures. News media there are extraordinary. She used the same, you know, basically framing as a Netanyahu would. She says Hamas is an evil terrorist organization. With these murders, Hamas has even more American blood on its hands. She went on to say that the

threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel and American citizens in Israel must be eliminated. Again, that's Bibi's type language. And Hamas cannot control Gaza. You have so many American officials, including the Secretary of Defense, who says Hamas cannot be eliminated. So at this late date, for her to still be buying into this fantasy that Hamas could, quote unquote, be eliminated is just foolish, unacceptable, unnecessary, all of those things. In fact, there were reports that Hamas has recruited thousands more fighters. They're reconstituted in the north and are reasserting their capabilities. So what exactly are we doing here? In direct contrast to that type of tone from Kamala Harris, you had opposition leader Yair

Lapid in Israel. I can put this up on the screen. He's speaking in Hebrew. I'll just read you a little bit of what he says here. He says, they were just alive. Netanyahu and his cabinet of death chose not to rescue the hostages. I call on the labor union, large businesses, and local authorities to shut down the economy. So that is more the tenor of the conversation that is happening there.

And finally, let's put this up on the screen. This is Caitlin Collins says, a group representing the families of Israeli hostages is calling for Bibi to address the nation, which he did, but he didn't do this part, and take responsibility for abandoning the hostages. They say the recovery of these bodies is a direct result of failing to sign a deal. They were all murdered in the last few days after surviving almost 11 months of abuse, torture, and starvation in Hamas captivity. The delay in signing the deal has led to their deaths and those of many other hostages. Again, mincing no words in where the hostage families are placing the blame directly at the feet of Bibi Netanyahu. Yeah. Again, you know, the tenor in the conversation, very, very different over there in terms of what the criticism and that look like.

And from the hostages themselves. That's always what's been so annoying. You know, you'll have hostages literally rescued who are like, we almost died and were bombed and you need to do a ceasefire. And then if you say that in America, people are like, you're a pro Hamas. It's like words have meaning, you know, throughout all of this. And apparently they don't, they only have meaning in Israel. They have no meaning here in America. And I think there is a real reason for that in terms of the way the conversation and all of that here is controlled. But in terms of where things go, look, maybe the guy is right, but I just, I don't, I always bet on his political survival.

He's an animal, you know, he's very, very talented. It takes, and you know, this is- In a Machiavellian way. Yes, in a Machiavellian way. He's a literal survivor. He survived the Supreme Court thing. He survived October 7th, survived the interwar period. He's managed the relationship with the United States in terms of playing both political parties pretty effectively. I think AIPAC is a major winner right now than at any time ever before. The ADL as well, all of their political machinery in Washington has been exercised at the highest level and mostly has won almost every fight that they've engaged in. So I don't bet against him. I don't bet against him coming out of this. All right, let's go ahead and get to

Jeremy Scahill of Dropsite News, who has a number of important scoops to bring us. Let's get to it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us

think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

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

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

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy to be joined this morning by Jeremy Scahill, who of course, alongside our own Ryan Grimm is co-founder of Dropsite News. Great to see you, Jeremy. Good to see you. Good to be back. Yeah, of course. So you have some bombshell reporting about these ceasefire negotiations and really pointing the finger at, in a conclusive way, at Bibi Netanyahu for intentionally undermining a deal that he had already agreed to. I can put this up on the screen and you can elaborate here a bit

more. But effectively, Hamas agreed to a three-phase deal that actually backed down on what was one of their key demands, that there be a permanent ceasefire. This was something that supposedly the Israelis had already agreed to. And yet after Hamas says, okay, yes, we accept, then Netanyahu specifically enabled, as you point out, by the US, layers on a bunch of additional conditions intentionally met to undercut the achievement of a deal. Talk to us about the documents that you were able to gain access to and put this in a broader context for us. I mean, the broad context is that for the past 10 plus months, the narrative from the United States and Israel has been that Hamas has been blocking a ceasefire. And that has not been true

throughout this entire time. Certainly, Hamas and Israel had very different perspectives on what they wanted in any document that established a framework for a ceasefire. But it's been propaganda from the beginning to state that somehow unilaterally Hamas was sabotaging it. But let's fast forward to the very current situation. You have Kamala Harris anointed as the Democratic nominee for president in Chicago earlier in August. And you had AOC and others praising her for working tirelessly for a ceasefire, saying the White House was working around the clock for a ceasefire. And what they were talking about is that President Joe Biden in May announced that that he was going to present a framework for a ceasefire that had actually been presented by Israel. And he said, you know, now the onus is on Hamas to accept this deal. And what that framework essentially said was that there would be three phases. And in the initial

first six-week phase, there would be a large exchange of captives. Many of the civilians that are being held by Hamas inside of Gaza. There are also some that are classified as in a humanitarian category. One of those we understand was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the dual U.S.-Israeli national whose death in Gaza was announced on Sunday by Israel. And so you had this framework. Hamas then looks at it. They gave some notes on it within the next 10 days. And they said that they wanted to be able to negotiate a permanent ceasefire in the first phase of the deal. Now, according to my sources in Hamas, they were told by the international mediators Qatar and Egypt, this was a deal breaker for Israel and the United

States. And so Hamas deliberated on that. The United Nations Security Council endorsed the so-called Biden framework. And by July 2nd, Hamas had actually backed off of what was one of their most important demands and made what they thought was a really big concession by taking that language out of what they were insisting on. They then go back to the mediators and the documents I have show that on July 2nd, Hamas formally informed both Egypt and Qatar, the two main mediators dealing with the United States and Israel, that they would accept the terms of the framework based on an American amendment. And Hamas sources told me that the Americans acknowledged that Hamas had accepted that framework and they went back to Israel.

And then Netanyahu bombards the process with a whole slew of new conditions, including an indefinite presence of Israeli troops in the Philadelphia corridor, which has been governed by agreements going back to 1979 and 2005 with Egypt and Israel. Israeli forces are not supposed to be in the Philadelphia Corridor or controlling the Rafah Crossing. And they also insisted that they would maintain troops in what's called the Netsarim Corridor, which essentially splits Gaza in half. So Hamas said, no, no deal on this. We already agreed to something. And so what we've seen is Antony Blinken running over to Tel Aviv and traveling around the Middle East. And now what's happening is they've tried to say to Hamas, yeah, we know that you've agreed to this, but now you have to accept parts of these other demands that you've made very clear you will not accept, which is an indefinite Israeli

troop presence inside of Gaza. Yeah. So, Jeremy, can we put E3, please, up on the screen? This was very interesting in terms of some of the reporting that was coming out where they say that the heads of the security intelligence services urging Netanyahu for months to reach the deal. We warned him and the cabinet officials about this exact scenario, but they would not listen. So how does this comport with some of the other reporting that you've done on the subject? Well, I mean, what's really ironic is that you have Yoav Galant, the Minister of Defense of Israel. Now, this is someone who made genocidal statements at the onset and said that, you know, essentially they were going to collectively punish the people, the Palestinians of Gaza, by shutting off food, electricity, water, etc. He has emerged internally as Netanyahu's most formidable opponent from within

the Israeli national security state. And we understand that just days ago there was a cabinet meeting. It's public that the cabinet meeting was called by Netanyahu to get an endorsement for his pledge to stay in that Philadelphia corridor that I was referring to along the Egyptian border. And according to Israeli media reporting, Yoav Galant exploded at Netanyahu during that meeting, said that he is doing this because he knows Hamas is not going to accept it. He warned Netanyahu that if any more hostages die, Netanyahu would have their blood on his hands. And he identified Netanyahu as the main obstacle to a ceasefire. And then just days later, this past Sunday, you had Israel announcing the deaths of six hostages and captives inside of Gaza,

including this U.S.-American dual citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Jeremy, talk a little bit about the way that the U.S. has enabled this behavior. Because as you said, I mean, Yair Lapid and certainly Yoav Galant within the government have emerged as direct critics of Bibi's strategy here, which is clearly designed to undercut the negotiations in an attempt to keep himself in power at, you know, obviously the expense of Palestinian lives, but more consequential in the eyes of Yoav Golan at the expense of Israeli hostage lives. How has that behavior been endorsed and enabled by the U.S. government, which has at every turn continued to lay all the blame at the feet of Hamas versus where at this point it very clearly, more accurately lies at the feet of Bibi? I mean, in the very simple big picture, the direct answer to that

is that instead of enacting any meaningful consequences on Netanyahu or Israel for their systematic war crimes in Gaza, the Biden administration has accelerated weapons transport to Israel. You know, August was the busiest month in a long time at the main airport in Israel that receives U.S. weaponry. And the flight data that's been revealed publicly about this shows that Biden was shipping emergency weapons to Israel at a time when he was telling the world that he had come up with a formulation to end the war. You have Harris also who was saying, we need a ceasefire.

We need it quickly. But behind the scenes and, you know, I haven't just spoken with Hamas. I've talked to other people involved with the mediation. What the U.S. has been doing is saying, yes, President Biden said this is the deal and Hamas just needs to accept it. But now Israel is doing something different. And so we want you to accept all of these other things that we had already resolved through months of negotiation that led up to the so-called Biden framework. So you see Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at a very top level continuing to endorse Israel, even as it commits a horrifying genocide, even as it invades the West Bank and continues to sort of Gaza-icize the West Bank.

And then on a technical level, you have Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, other U.S. officials backing away from what they had said was a deal that Hamas could sign. Hamas agreed to it, and then they changed the terms of it. So at every move in the big picture and on a technical level, Israel is in control of the agenda,

and it's in control of the agenda because the U.S. is allowing it to be. Jeremy, just for people who would say, OK, well, why doesn't Hamas just accept these new conditions? Why don't they just allow for this Israeli troop presence in these two areas? What's the big deal? What would your response to those people be? To accept that would be to accept that international law doesn't exist, would be to accept that the genuine aspirations for self-determination, independence and freedom on the part of the Palestinian people are illegitimate. international criminal court indictments waiting for leadership members that have not been killed of Hamas for what prosecutors believe were war crimes that they committed on October 7th. But to imply that because October 7th happened, that somehow international law doesn't matter,

that somehow it means that Palestinians have no right to independence or no right to self-determination, or more specifically, no right to independence or no right to self-determination or more specifically, no right to armed resistance against occupation would mean that the so-called rules-based order that Biden and others embrace all the time doesn't actually exist. So, you know, there is a process that can be negotiated. There are political solutions that can be negotiated. But Israel, to come back into Gaza, I think the belief on the part of Hamas and most Palestinians is if they're allowed to do that, that they will never leave. And when you see Netanyahu holding up maps, as he did just in the

last 24 hours, he shows that the West Bank doesn't exist at the same time that he's talking about keeping troops inside of Gaza. So, you know, everyone wants to just say, well, what about October 7th? What about October 7th? Well, what about October 6th? What about 1948? What about 1967? I mean, these are legitimate questions. They're not just rhetorical devices. There's real law that governs this. And for Hamas to accept an indefinite Israeli occupation in Gaza would be to say that the Palestinian cause is dead. So, Jeremy, since you actually have sources in Hamas and you're one of the only journalists that genuinely tries to actually speak with them and then report the perspective, it's not an endorsement. It's literally just talking with them. What would you say then that the current state of Hamas leadership and their thinking towards a ceasefire deal is now,

now that Netanyahu's government and others have put in various different provisions which make the possibility less likely. Do they just fully endorse armed resistance and now the killing of these hostages? Is that the direction things are likely? Where do you think their mindset is right now? Look, let's remember that last month, Netanyahu and his forces assassinated Ismail Khania, who was not the military leader of Hamas, but was the top political officer of Hamas and was the lead negotiator. He was then replaced in a consolidation of power on the ground in Gaza and externally by Yahya Sinwar, who has been the Gaza commander of Hamas, leader of Hamas, and is believed widely to be one of the top architects of the October 7th

attacks. When Israel in June attacked Nusirat, the Nusirat refugee camp, to extract some of its hostages and killed hundreds of people, wounded many hundreds others, Abu Ubaidah, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas that has been leading the resistance against the Israeli forces in Gaza, said that there were going to be new rules given to the Palestinian fighters who were guarding Israeli hostages. They didn't specify what those rules were, but it appears that it may have included to kill hostages if Israeli forces start attacking sites where hostages are being held. And just last night, Abu Obeida released a series of written statements on social media channels about the six hostages and saying that he wanted to remind the world that they had warned Israel that if they continued to try to release the hostages through military means, that the choice they were making was for

them coming home alive or in coffins. It was widely interpreted as Abu Ubaidah taking responsibility for at least some of the deaths of the hostages. At the same time, though, Hamas political officials had said just hours before that statement was issued by the spokesperson of the Qassam Brigades that they laid blame for the deaths of the hostages on Israel and had implied that some of them may have been killed in airstrikes or were shot by Israeli forces. So, you know, what I'm sensing is that there appears to be a disconnect between some of the Hamas officials who are operating in Doha or Lebanon or elsewhere and what's happening on the ground.

It could also be that there's a compartmentalization of the military operations. And so the Hamas political leaders may not even be aware of everything that commanders of the Qassam brigades on the ground are doing. But one twist to this story that I think it's a little in the weeds, but I think it's worth mentioning, the American Israeli citizen whose death was announced on Sunday, whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention, on May 13th, the Qassam brigades had announced that they had lost contact with that American-Israeli citizen and the Palestinians that were guarding him, as well as four other Israeli captives that were being held. On Sunday morning, a top Hamas official said that they had not heard from the guards or that hostage, the American Israeli citizen, since that time back in May when they lost contact with him, and that they learned about his death from the Israeli announcement. So, you know, there had been speculation that he may have been killed in

that Nusirat attack where some Israeli hostages were were taken by Israel alive and brought out of Gaza in a rescue operation, as Israel described it. So we don't really know what exactly happened there. And there have been contradictory statements being made by Hamas. But just to directly answer the question, if you talk to political officials, their position has been they are ready to go back to July 2nd and discuss in more detail the terms of the framework that they accepted, which they said was also endorsed by the United States and originated from President Biden himself. That's what they're saying. Hamas's military wing seems to indicate that they are now doubling down on the notion that if Israel continues to try to, quote unquote, rescue

hostages through military means, that those hostages are going to go back to Israel in a coffin. The U.S. officials are saying that they're going to put some sort of a, quote unquote, take it or leave it deal on the table, whatever that means, in the absence of any willingness to use actual U.S. leverage and say, take it or leave it, meaning we're going to actually enforce this, we're going to guarantee something gets done here. Do you have any hopes or optimism given the level of backlash in Israel and the huge protests we're seeing on the ground? Do you have any expectation that this round of negotiations can end in a different outcome? Based on what Netanyahu has been saying the past 24 hours, it seems very, very slim. I think there is a possibility that the Egyptian and Qatari mediators

might be able to thread the needle between the United States and Hamas. And really, I mean, one thing that was described to me by people involved with the negotiations is that the Israeli negotiating teams at times seem to be open to conditions that could actually represent a breakthrough quickly. And then they go back and Netanyahu says, no way. And so part of the sense that I'm getting from sources is that the Israeli negotiators aren't even fully empowered by Netanyahu to make agreements. So and again, remember, Hamas is not directly participating in these negotiations.

They are doing it through international mediators. I think the real sticking point, I had some indication that the Netzerim corridor issue may be one that Israel is going to step away from. But the Philadelphia corridor thing seems to be Netanyahu's line in the sand. Hamas tells me they're not going to accept it. But it involves Egypt as well. So let's see what the Egyptians say. I think everyone on the ground in Gaza, regardless of their political perspective, wants this to end. This is a genocide. There was a polio threat that now hopefully is going to be addressed through this vaccination program. But to talk about a ceasefire in Gaza at a time when

Jenin is burning, when the West Bank is burning, when Israel is going in and just gratuitously destroying paved roads and civilian infrastructure and come in concocting theories about Iran establishing a base in the West Bank, a territory Iran doesn't share any border with. It's surrounded by Israel and Jordan. And Jordan recently defended militarily Israel when Iran launched missiles at it. So we're in the realm of Alex Jones' lunacy here with Netanyahu's theories about Iran while Gaza and the West Bank are burning.

So it's difficult to imagine. I think what's most likely is you get something temporary that looks like the November truce and Biden and Harris kind of claim some form of victory. And then Netanyahu resumes the torching of Gaza again. That unfortunately, I think is probably the most likely outcome. The last thing I wanted to ask you about, Jeremy, actually, is that invasion of the West Bank. Guys, we can put E4 up on the screen. This is some of the images of civilian roads being destroyed and this massive armed force entering the West Bank. And you can continue to play this while I ask the question. There's the demolition of civilian roads. For what reason? To what end, other than just pure destruction, annihilation.

Hard to say. What do you make of this invasion, of this escalation? What do you believe that the ultimate goal here, Jeremy, really is? On this one, I think you have to take Netanyahu at his word. I mean, he's talked about a final solution for the issues that Israel has with the Palestinians. And, you know, I think his agenda for a long time has been to erase any notion of Palestine from the map. They are now pressuring the United States to try to build some sort of a fence or a structure along the Jordanian border to further entrap the Palestinians of the West Bank and make it so that Israel is in even greater control of their lives to go from like 95 percent now to 100 percent. And I think that really what we're witnessing is that Netanyahu probably calculates this is his last shot at it and that he wants to go down in history as the man that destroyed Palestine and the Palestinians with it. I really think we're looking at a genocidal agenda. Jeremy, thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning and explaining your

reporting and helping provide context for what's happening. Please let people know where they can find Dropsite News and how they can support the work that you and Ryan and your team are doing. Yeah, thanks for that, Crystal. Dropsitenews.com, we're a nonprofit. You can donate to us. You can subscribe and pay to have a subscription, but nothing's behind a paywall. The most important thing you can do is hit the subscribe button

and let everybody you know know that dropsitenews.com is available to the public and we're trying to do hard-hitting journalism and take big swings at powerful people. Yeah, we already see that, even though it's early days. Jeremy, thank you so much. Always great to see you. Thanks, Jeremy. And thank you guys so much for being great voices for justice and truth and being willing to debate. We're doing our best over here. Thank you. Thanks for watching, everybody. We appreciate it. Great counterpoint for everybody tomorrow, and we will see you all on Thursday. day. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

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