5/5/25: Trump Says Recession OK, Buffett's Warning, Houthis Strike Israeli Airport & MORE!
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That's S-P-A-C-E-8-0. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

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Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Breaking Points. I'm very excited about this show. We actually have a little bit of a global flair here crossing three different continents with the guests that are going to be joining me. So first off, very special guest Sagar is going to join for the A Block to talk about the very latest with regard to tariffs. No baby yet, but he is very busy and occupied with, you know, preparing for the big day. So he's going to join us off the top.

Then we're going to be joined by special guest host, special celebrity guest host, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. I want to get his take off the top of just, you know, overall impressions of the Trump administration. And I've got a bunch of news I want to dive into with him. This Houthi strike on the Israeli-Bengurian airport, the boycotts bill that actually was pulled.

pulled a very rare APAC L here. So that's an interesting one to get into. There was a big deep dive into John Fetterman's mental and physical health almost appears like another democratic coverup of his specific situation. His staffers are speaking out. So lots to get into there.

Claudia Scheinbaum is hitting back at Trump after he offered to, what an offer, to send our military in to Mexico to fight the cartels. She is saying no thanks to that. At the same time, the Trump administration is weighing designating suspected gang and cartel members as enemy combatants, potentially another path for them to attempt to deport people with no due process. So very interested to get Glenn's take on all of those things. Also going to have a journalist join us from Australia.

Australia has just sort of followed in the footsteps of Canada with their election results. The Liberal, the centre-left party, coming from behind to really secure a landslide victory. The Prime Minister there, Tony Albanese, is going to... He was re-elected. His opponent is...

Actually, again, like Canada, not only lost the overall party election, but also lost his own seat. And America and reaction backlash to Trump's policies has a lot to do with that. So really looking forward to getting the view from down under there. Let's go ahead and get to it. Very excited to announce a special edition of Breaking Points. Let's put this up on the screen, guys. We've got the Baby Points edition.

Sagar is able to join us for the top of the show here as he navigates his life heading into a very, very important day. It is lovely to see you, my friend.

Thank you for the special graphic. Honestly, I needed that. I needed that. Thank you to the audience. And I just want to say this before we even get started. Thank you to the whole team, to everybody. It has been just an absolute roller coaster over here in the Ingenity household as we're dealing with the medical system and everything else. And just knowing that the team has...

My back and everybody else are producing a great show for everybody. It's just it's incredible. So seriously, thank you, especially the premium subscribers and others who enable this. And I am very glad to be able to hear to talk about tariffs and specifically about baby strollers. It's a very relevant thing in my life right now. And so, yeah, I think that's a good hook. Yeah. What was Trump's quote? He was like, everything's going down except the things that they carry the babies in or something like that, which by which he means strollers.

Right. Today is May 5th, actually, where one of the largest stroller companies here in the United States called Upababy will actually be enacting all of its new price hikes. Part of it's caused mass panic amongst a lot of my friends and others who are having children. So, yeah, it's really great. And in addition, I'm sure that we'll play the clip of Trump, you know, at

We don't know the gender, Chilling and I, of what we're having. But if it is a girl, I guess I will only be able to buy, what is it, three beautiful baby dolls. Two or three. Right, two or three. Yeah, just chilled...

Little girls notoriously do not need more than two or three little dolls. But yeah, okay, let's get to it. Yeah, and I'm sure the Trump children, they didn't have any excess, surely. Of course not. They never had a gilded- Didn't have more than they needed. Have you seen the photo of Melania with literally a gilded baby strong?

So yeah, it must be nice. It must be nice not to have to worry about these things. We are currently, I mentioned this last time, Crystal, I'll say to you, Jillian and I are spending our free time researching diaper supply chains just to make sure that we're going to be able to have access. That's just a really great addition to our new family life. It's not like you had anything else to worry about, Sagar. So plenty of time on your hands, no other problems or challenges to worry about. So I'm sure that's how you wanted to spend your time. Yeah, it's been awesome.

All right, let's get to, we've got a couple of interesting comments here from Trump from this interview he did with Kirsten Walker over at NBC. This first one where he seems to indicate, sort of downplay the possibility of a recession and what the impact of the recession would be. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I want to know what you think about that.

Are you comfortable with the country potentially dipping into a recession for a period of time if you are able to achieve your long-term goals? Well, you know, you say some people on Wall Street say, well, I tell you something else. Some people on Wall Street say that we're going to have the greatest economy in history.

Why don't you talk about them? Because some people on Wall Street say this is the greatest thing that ever happened. Well, that's what I'm getting at. That's what I'm getting at, though. It's the same question. There are many people on Wall Street say this is going to be the greatest windfall ever happened. And that's my question. Remember this. The long term. Is it okay in the short term to have a recession? Look, yeah, everything's okay. What we are, I said, this is a transition period. I think we're going to do fantastic. Come the Trump economy.

It partially is right now. And I really mean this. I think the good parts of the Trump economy and the bad parts of the Biden economy, because he's done a terrible job. He did a terrible job on everything. Your thoughts, Sagar?

Yeah, the Trump economy are the good parts of the Biden stock market. And actually, it will remain the Biden stock market until it starts to go up again. It's just preposterous now at this point. It is pretty crazy to be almost a month, more than a month actually now at this point, removed from Liberation Day. And for all of us to actually try and take a step back and

and realize what has now happened. We have a massive market volatility. In fact, though, the US economy is suffering one of the greatest supply shocks in American history, almost comparable to COVID, except this is a self-induced supply shock. And I know we've been warning about

the shipping drop and how that will all manifest in terms of shelves and all of that. And that's just going to be ever present here because it's going to take months for us to see some of this. And already we're seeing this like crazy run on iPhones, on strollers, on other importable goods or imported goods, like things like televisions, consumer electronics. But what about six months from now? I'm also thinking about the fact that

we're in May. So, you know, six months from now, whenever we're in the holiday period of whenever people are going to be shopping for gifts, think about Cyber Monday and all these other things, Q4, one of the most important quarters in all of retail, just consider, you know, what those resection comments and how they can come back to bite you. It is also fascinating because Trump simultaneously is a student of like some political history. Now, he recently was talking about and texted Newt Gingrich about

Read my lips, no new taxes. This was the infamous line that sunk Judge George H.W. Bush. I mean, if you don't even think about your political fortune, you know, somewhat in the future for the Democrats in the midterm elections, it's very obvious that that recession clip and others of him talking about this are going to be massively impactful

for Republican chances. I know that there's a take out there that Trump doesn't care about the midterms, but from a purely self-interested level, it's like, dude, do you want to spend over $150 million in legal fees? Because you, Pete Hegseth, Mike Wall, all these other guys, like every...

Elon, every, you know, potential mini scandal or any of this other thing, you are going to spend your ass living before Congress and adjudicating contempt and, you know, like subpoenas from the House of Representatives for your entire presidency. This is a tale as old as time from, I remember Benghazi and all this other nonsense that we were forced to live through. I mean, this is just this.

classic waves of an administration. But I mean, the only alternative is this is what he believes. And there is just no shaking, you know, his foundational belief. Every once in a while, you're allowed to rush into the Oval Office and to cause a Trump truth or whatever that will implement a 90 day pause. By the way, where are the deals? You know, I know I've been gone for a while, but every once I check in, where's the deal? I was told it's an imminent deal. You haven't missed much on that front. I know.

I'm aware. And it's my point. You know, every morning I check the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, at the very least, just checking for something. Even India, Japan, the European Union. In fact, it feels like every other country is doing better than we are. I just read this morning, European traders had their best year in a decade.

And that foreign traders and others all trading off of the volatility and the currency shocks from the United States. So it seems like everybody else seems to be doing actually pretty well. I haven't seen like a major shock to or actually politically. I know you guys are covering Australia today. It's like, oh, cool. You know, it's like basically ushering in like global centrism. I'm sure that was definitely the project of the Trump administration. So it's just been colossal progress.

failure, stupidity, ridiculous. And it would be funny if there were not millions of people to be affected. Like, I mean, the stroller thing is just a minute example, you know, for someone like me. But I mean, you know, it's only what one of the most important periods of your entire life. And, you know, just to think about people who are struggling, who are out there, who need a stroll. You know, I've talked about this. You're not allowed to leave the hospital if you don't have a car seat. It's OK.

Good luck. Over 94% of them come from China. So if you're having a kid six or seven months from now, I know you're probably not thinking like this. I would buy one today. And, you know, if you can't afford it or something like that in the future, you're going to try and buy secondhand. That's not really something that I want people to have to do. Right. And so these are these are really bad things that you're inflicting on people's lives.

Yeah. And, you know, my view is, first of all, I think they just assume that the midterms are going to be a loss and it is what it is. And for Trump, I think, yes, he likes tariffs and he likes power and tariffs give him the ultimate power. You know, I think he even the comments in the Time magazine interview said,

he was like sort of delighted that he had upended the election in Canada. He didn't care that it was in service of the opposite of his idea, supposed ideological project. He just liked that it revolved around him. And I think that, you know, he made other comments in that interview about how he's like the, you know, controls the world effectively. And I think that's the way that he feels about it is he loves making the whole world dance to his tune. And,

And that's really more than anything to me what this is all about. But we did, as you mentioned before, we did get some new guidance from the dear leader about what sorts of toys and in what quantities and school supplies our children should be content with. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Trump on that. You were at your cabinet meeting. You said, quote, I'm going to quote what you said. Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

Are you saying that your tariffs will cause some prices to go up? No, I think the tariffs are going to be great for us because it's going to make us rich. But you said some dolls are going to cost more. Isn't that an acknowledgement that some prices will go up? I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs, that's 11 years old, needs to have

$30, I think they can have $3 or $4. Because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China. When you say they could have $3 instead of $30, are you saying Americans could see empty store shelves? No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying they don't need to have $30. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.

Five pencils. I guess the good news is the doll allotment has been increased from two to a max of four. So progress there.

Yeah, I mean, to borrow from Richard and Ania, like this is MAGA Maoism. Like this is literal Maoism, you know, in terms of. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I was thinking about that because I saw a lot of people saying like this is this is like communism. But at least in communism, the idea was like you're going to take from the wealthier people and make everybody equal. This is like we're going to take from the poor to make the rich richer and like make sure that Donald Trump and his oligarchic cartel.

are, you know, wildly wealthy. Although, you know, I see you shaking your head. It is true that the billionaires are getting hurt here now too. But the idea is if you're one of the insiders, you're going to be able to consolidate even more power because who's going to get decimated by these tariffs? Amazon and Walmart, they're going to have a bumpy path. They're going to make it through. Small and medium-sized businesses, they're going to be destroyed.

You know, I don't disagree. I was just going to say that that actually was the net effect of the Soviet system, which is, yeah, everything's great, but actually IRL, what happens is a bunch of commissars and all those other people. So actually I think the Mao analogy is accurate because really what it was is that Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, and others, it used ideology. I've got a good Mao book behind me, actually, which was used as a tool of ideology to purge anybody who was not sufficiently like, you know,

who is not sufficiently like, uh, worshiping the cult of personality around him, including some of the most effective people like Deng Xiaoping and others while cultivating this era of stupidity where it was all supposed to be in service of like the great cultural revolution of the peasant class. Um,

And the net effect was like famine while a lot of these other people either lived large or amassed large amounts of power. I think the Soviet system, very similar. So the stupidity and the corruption within it is kind of baked in, I think, to the general ideology. But yeah, I mean, really what it comes down to is this is antithetical, I think, to a lot of the reasons, not only the reasons why Trumpism, if there is such a thing, was popular. I mean, if we really do think about why Trump even

won the overall election, people were not just upset about inflation or upset about immigration. I think in general, you know, the American spirit has a lot of social libertarianism to it, where the idea is, is that we don't want to tell you what to do. Just go ahead and live your life. We want to make everybody rich and or

better off so that they can be able to do whatever it is they want to do. And so it's pretty different, you know, whenever the president is telling you the number of pencils that your child is allowed to have at school or the number of toys that you're allowed. Like, look, you know, maybe he's right. Crystal, you know a lot better than I do. Maybe kids don't need a bunch of different Barbie dolls. But what if you want to

buy it for him. Okay. You know, what if, you know, I already know that if, you know, if I have a, uh, a daughter and she's five and she's asking me for, you know, if I have the money, it's happening. All right. That's probably a bad thing, but like, I'm going to buy it. And, um, that's that it's one of those where it's kind of grotesque, you know, to be lectured, um, by the leader of the country as to what you're allowed to spend your hard earned money on.

on. Now, and just finally, because now I've been beating this drum for a month, if we wanted to start a program of building children's toys, which are super safe with no lead, where we know exactly where they're made, and we're supporting small businesses and people who are craftsmen and others who have been working on this for a long time, and it's somebody's dream to be able to open a store, and they get a tax credit and all that, I would be all for it.

I would say that's fantastic. It's great. Let's get it out of China. Let's make sure that these are actually to a very, very high safety standard, unlike many children's toys that we have right now. But that's not what's happening, right? You know, it's like instead you're just cutting off from them and then you're not really helping anybody over here. And in fact, you know, who's the best off?

Like you said, it's Amazon and it's Walmart or any of these other places, which are just going to use loopholes to be able to stockpile inventory. Or, you know, right now, Walmart is actually discounting, even though they're eating a ton of loss. Why? To nuke everybody else because they can afford it. They have a ton of cash on their balance sheet. Same with Amazon. I don't know if you, I talked about this on Wednesday. Amazon literally told its suppliers, we're not accepting price increases. Right. Which means what? You're screwed. You're screwed.

If you're a supplier and you need to sell on Amazon, good luck to you, man. You're done. I'm already starting to see it. A few little products that I buy no longer available on Amazon. Oh, wow. Really? Yeah. I mean, listen, on the critique of consumerism, there is a version of this I'm open to.

Right. I wish we had a less sort of disposable society where, you know, the number of toys and books and clothes and whatever that just gets like, you know, basically tossed or or, you know, taken to Goodwill or the op shop or whatever. There's you know, we don't really value having a few quality, perhaps locally made things. Right.

But that is not what we're talking about here, right? There's no other part of that agenda that exists. In fact, Doge is making sure we don't have safety regulators to make sure there's no lead in the toys. They're rolling back the provisions with regard to toxic chemicals, etc. So yeah, it's just like suffering for the sake of Trumpian power plays. This is...

is an interesting and sort of complicated one. Let's put this up on the screen. We've been covering Timu and Sheehan and their, the way they're impacted by the tariffs. So in addition to everything that's been done, Trump is now rolling back that de minimis loophole exemption that you have had your eye on for a while, Sagar, that basically lets

These low-cost producers ship directly to consumers here in the U.S., and so long as the amount is under $800, they have been able to bypass any sort of customs, imports, duties, etc. That is being rolled back. It's going to have a huge impact on Timu and Sheehan, but also it's going to have a huge impact on...

Google and Meta and any sort of online platform that depends on ad revenue because the numbers around this are quite astonishing. They'd flooded Google in the U.S. with ads for the goods they sell. Those started to disappear from the platform in April. On April 5th, Tmoo accounted for 19% of all U.S. ads.

So almost 20% of all US ads displayed on Google Shopping. Now that number is zero. Shein also went from around 20% to zero by April 16th. So there will be significant reverberating effects, not just with Timo and Shein, but with the entire economy that revolves around advertising revenue, including yours truly. Yeah, good.

Good luck. Look, I'm for the de minimis thing. I'm for, you know, Timu Shih. I think they're bad. I just think they're empirically bad. I think they're bad for the American consumer. I think they're bad for the way that they use the de minimis loophole. It effectively does punish people in the U.S. But again, let's get back to the point. It's not about, you know, Timu and Shih and bad...

overnight, cut them off good or not. Let them stay. It's about plan. It's about the fact, like you just said about advertising, it's like a fast fashion or making sure that people have access to bigger things or other things to be able to buy. Do you know if there's like, Oh,

like a cultural component, obviously, that the government can't get deeply involved in. But more broadly, the other thing with the Trump administration is you just never know if this is real or not. Like, is this part of some sort of concerted strategy? Because de minimis, we've covered here now for several months, has been on and off approximately five or six times.

So if you're a company like, or anybody else who's thinking about like, oh my gosh, Temu or Shein is going away. Maybe we can start. I'm trying to think, what was that brand called? American Apparel, something similar. Like not fast fashion, but like a mid-tier fashion band made in America. They had quite a bit of success actually, if I recall. But the point is, is that,

If you wanted to bet on building something here, how do you know that overnight Timmy and Sheehan are not going to be able to come back? Look at the TikTok thing. It's literally a piece of legislation that Trump just decided that he's not going to enforce. Whether you like this or not, this is a ridiculous way to make policy. And the whole point is that it just freezes investment overnight.

all across the US. It punishes US consumer. They're seeing only things that are subtracted. There's nothing being added. There doesn't feel as if not only there's a steady hand at the wheel, but they're just generally thrown into complete chaos. And that is just not really a way to live.

for people who are not, you know, it sounds stupid about shopping or whatever, but you know, like you said, 20% reduction in Google ad spend, that has some pretty reverberating effects across the economy. Take us out of it. I mean, do you know how many, I would venture to say that almost every American who owns stock probably owns some share of Google. That's 50, 60%, whether you own it for the S&P 500 or

or not. Think about if you live in an area which relies on Google, they build data centers or anything. So that's the other thing is about the downstream overall economic effect of what this stuff looks like. There are 50th and 60th order consequences to just sucking all of this money out of the US economy. And I think that's what I really object to here.

Griffin was saying it'd be pretty ironic if Trump ends up destroying the U.S. podcast class. Yeah, that would be kind of funny. I mean, you know, it's funny, though, because I think they would probably still be fine. Unfortunately, the sports gambling industry is still roaring and they're the ones who are really propping them up, along with a discount via AgriPills. So I don't think those are going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll have to wait for the next

Maoist move from Trump to go after those industries.

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Let's go ahead and take a listen to the guy who runs the port in L.A. because there is perhaps no one who would have his finger on the pulse more of what is headed our way. And more importantly, what is not headed our way right now? Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he has to say. About a third of the import volume, which means give or take about 50,000 20-foot equivalent units, gone off the arrivals coming in next week.

From next week is when you expect to see this really hit. That's correct. And that matches up. The announcement's back on April 2nd. Then on April 8th, a little bit of a change on everybody ex-China, Mexico, Canada. And those arrivals are coming at us this weekend. We'll, of course, dedicate time to your poor, but I'm just wondering how you're anticipating this rolls and ripples through the economy from here, how it hits trucking.

When this turns up on the shelf, what's the distance, the time from when you see a drop off in volume and when we as consumers see the shortages? Right. So CEOs are telling me hit the pause button. Right. I'm not going to import any more at these kind of prices. Let's wait and see. I don't know if it's going to be two hours, two days or two weeks till I get some clarity.

Then hiring off the table for right now, capital investment pause. And the retailers are telling me that realistically, with even the 10 percent, I'm going to have to pass it on to the consumers. So how much is this really coming from all over? It's not just about China. This is about really global trade coming to a standstill until there is a much greater degree of certainty and a much lower tariff rate than even the baseline that's been put out there.

Yeah. When I was last with you all, Lisa, I said global trade is going to slow. Economies will follow. And that's exactly what we're seeing. Back in November, so many of us were wringing our hands about 4% inflation. We've just added 10 percentage points of imports coming out of Southeast Asia for our port and these unbelievable numbers out of China. How much are you going to see a real decline in dock workers if this goes on? Yeah, this is the question. So the trucker.

Hauling four or five containers today, next week, she probably hauls two or three. The dock workers are no longer going to see overtime and double shifts. They're going to probably work less than a traditional work week starting right off the bat. Every four containers mean a job. So when we start dialing this back, it's less job opportunities. And what happens if we get a deal?

If we get a deal, it's going to take about a month. Let me walk you through that real quick. About two weeks to get the ships repositioned around these major ports from Qingdao to Shanghai to Xiamen, load up all those containers, and then another two weeks to steam across the Pacific to get to us.

This is important because now we're talking about spring and summer fashion. So we're kind of at a crux here that we've got to have something pretty quick. And back to school, which is, I think, very critical when it comes to political pushback for this administration. It's interesting what he says there, not just about the timing, but he's like, we're not just talking about China here.

And, you know, let's just put Arnaud up before I get your reaction to all of this, Sagar, who was talking about, you know, Japan. Originally, the idea was that we're going to have this grand encirclement strategy. We're going to use Japan to agree to this to help to isolate China. Fast forward to today, Japan is so antagonized, they're publicly calling U.S. proposals absolutely

unacceptable and are threatening for the first time ever and on national TV to sell their holdings of U.S. treasuries as a tool of economic warfare against the U.S. In other words, a policy intended to isolate China is achieving the exact opposite outcome.

Yes. I mean, I was flagging a lot. I could see this coming from a mile away. You know, I saw the Japanese prime minister in the parliament and I was like, man, this is not good. Whenever you start hearing that type of rhetoric, these are very careful and reserve people. They know exactly what they're doing. That also is an indication not only of how they're feeling it at the governmental level, but broadly how they're seeing, you know, being able to push back against the U.S. as a democratic thing, which is really good.

not happened in a long time in Japan. It's very isolating. And so not only is it about a failure of policy, but it also does show you that the amount of uncertainty now injected into global trade is such that the overall effect for the US consumer, it takes months to shake out. I think the most interesting part of the Port of LA CEO there was him saying, even if there was a pause on everything, that it would still take a month for it to come back. So I mean, what is that, like a

lost quarter of overall us gdp like that's a lot and we just had what the negative print um on the number and it's a little complicated and i know you guys have talked about that in terms of because a big part of it is a number of imports and things like that so it's not perhaps as catastrophic as people may think but i'm very curious to see what that next figure looks like with this overall drop in trade and i also feel for a lot of those dock workers truck workers and others people who um

really i mean they were going through it already uh and you know it's already in terms of the decline but you know trucking what is it the number one industry for non-college educated men in the u.s to be able to earn over a hundred thousand dollars per year uh it's why it's one of the reasons it's the most popular industry you get paid a decent amount of money you get to set relatively some of your own hours you have a decent amount of freedom this is just it takes it away from you and uh

That's financially devastating, you know, for people. And then you're going to have to start looking at other things. I saw, I wish I could remember the numbers, but the percent of people who live in and around LA who are somehow employed by the port ecosystem is just massive. And obviously, I mean, LA is the biggest port in the country, but Oakland is also huge. I mean, we have a number that would be massively impacted. And frankly, I think a month

to like, let's say there's a deal, the executive director there of the Port of LA saying it would take a month to sort of shake things out. Based on COVID, I feel like that's kind of optimistic because there were so many reverberating impacts that, you know, because once you, the truckers aren't getting enough work, then they leave and they go to other jobs and then you don't have enough truckers. And then, you know, the dock where like there's whole compounding impacts that are hard to anticipate.

in advance. So I feel like a month is kind of a best case scenario, assuming that everything goes relatively smoothly in being able to unwind all of this. Two quick indications here before we move on to Warren Buffett. We can put up McDonald's on the screen, Burger Chains, saying that tariffs are hurting sales after reporting largest decline since the pandemic. Apparently also they're like

kiosk situation in the stores is also a big flop, which I would agree with. It takes so much fricking longer to order on those dang kiosks than just telling someone your order. So please bring back the human beings. In addition, Apple, they say that the tariffs could cost them $900 million. So almost a billion dollars just this quarter. And they're,

Tim Cook says there's actually some extraordinary factors that make that number less this quarter than it could be in quarters moving forward. And Sager, remember, Apple is one of the companies that has been a beneficiary of some of the larger exemptions to the tariff policy. So this is also being seen as a pretty dire indicator.

Yeah, well, I think one of you guys said it was like this is one of the best managed companies in the world with a shit ton of balance sheet cash. And, you know, they're global experts at trade navigation and all of this. And for them to be, you know, ripping a billion a quarter, that's not a joke, not in terms of.

not only in terms of their inventory and how difficult it will be for them to navigate, but I think the point was now multiply that by the average Fortune 500 CEO. And you're like, well, if this is one of the best companies in the whole world, then just think about what that's going to mean for so many others. I don't know. Yeah, because they had already shifted. It looks like bad.

They had already shifted a significant amount to India and Vietnam, I believe. So they were sort of anticipating this and even so and got their exemptions because they're politically connected and even so taking this kind of a hit. Let's go ahead and move on to Warren Buffett, of course, legendary investor. He just announced that he is retiring. I mean, what? He's in his he's in his 90s. So certainly. Yeah.

Yeah, he's certainly put in his time. We can go ahead and take a look. He got a 10-minute standing ovation at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting where this was announced. You can see everyone standing there for him. And he made some interesting comments during his remarks here in addition to announcing his retirement on the trade war and on global trade in general. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. We want a prosperous world, right?

with eight countries with nuclear weapons, including a few that are what I would call quite unstable. I do not think it's a great idea to try and design a world where a few countries say, ha, ha, ha, we've won, and other countries are envious. So the main thing to do is not use... Trade should not be a weapon. And the United States...

The United States, we've won. I mean, we have become an incredibly important country starting from nothing. 250 years ago, there's nothing been anything like it. And it's a big mistake in my view when you have seven and a half billion people that don't like you very well. And you've got 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they've done.

And Sagar, I don't know that Warren Buffett's views on trade are exactly the same as my views on trade, but I do think that last point he makes, it's a really key one just in the way that this particular trade war has been executed. He's like, you're making the whole world hate you. The whole world. You're uniting the entire globe against you. Like, this is not a good idea.

I respect Warren Buffett. He's a classic neoliberal free trader, and he's profited quite a bit off of the Chinese economy and all of this. So I mean, look, I don't want to besmirch or whatever who I think is a very interesting man. But yeah, we'll put his views on trade aside. He is not-

you know, broadly about not only the chaos and the isolation that has happened as we just discussed with Japan, but, you know, we also should look to his financial strategy for, if anything, let's disregard maybe his like broader geopolitical views and,

we can say he's definitely an expert in making money. If anybody ever wants, there's a great book about him. I think it's called Snowball, which I read several years ago. Fantastic book, just broadly about like who this guy is, what makes him tick, the strategy behind all of it. It's actually really Warren's life

tracks the development of the modern US economy. And since he's one of the greatest investors on paper ever, seeing his mind kind of work through those decision points at those critical moments in US economic history is just a great way for not only to understand Buffett, but also to understand kind of everything that's happened. But to take this out of it, look at what he is currently betting on. His mind still works quite well. They're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash because of

And that is a giant red signal, right, to the overall U.S., to the atmosphere.

equities market, to the banking sector, to the consumer investors and others for how they should be thinking in terms of whether they should outlay anything. And so that kind of hold back for where if you have the cash, you should just go ahead and keep it. That's going to have big impacts no matter what, because people look to Berkshire Hathaway to make their own investment decisions. And I think that actually is the most critical part of Warren Buffett, at least in his importance right now.

Yeah, no, you can't deny his track record in, you know, investing and seeing trends and anticipating them, et cetera. And we can put this element up on the screen, guys. This is something we've been tracking and covered previously, but it's worth updating you on. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway just announced

They now hold a record $348 billion in cash since 2022. Buffett's cash balance is up $239 billion. He has net sold stocks for $10 billion.

straight quarters. Their T-bill balance is actually 56% higher than the Fed itself. And that cash pile is now larger than the market cap of giants like Bank of America and Coca-Cola. Now, we don't know for sure whether there were any sales, you know, during this period, recent period of market, not sales, per

purchases during this recent period of market volatility to draw down on that cash balance. But based on the comments he made at that meeting, it seems like he's still very unimpressed with the direction of the market.

Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary. And again, like people should take just general notice that one of the greatest investors doesn't think that this is a good time to buy and or is holding a decent amount of cash. And, you know, just broadly, and I think we have this element as well, just about all of these different billionaires who are disclosing plans to sell

billions of dollars in their own stock. Bezos here selling about 5 billion in Amazon stock. And I believe the same is the case for some of the other major tech CEOs who have taken a massive hit to their balance sheet. So yeah, they're taking money off the table and they're hoarding cash, just like Warren Buffett. We've talked about this. If in an era of uncertainty, businesses hoard cash. When you hoard cash, you're not making investment or hiring employees or doing any other different things that you may do. And not good, not good.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I don't know, I'm sure you saw because you, I think, read all of Weisenthal's things as I do, but his theory is that part of why the market hasn't crashed as much as you may expect, although I will say looking at 10.30 a.m. right now, it is down this morning, but is because retail has been so conditioned to buy the dip.

That they are actually buoying the market. And that if you look at the much larger institutional investors, they are all extremely bearish. And I think, you know, Berkshire Hathaway here and Jeff Bezos and other billionaires would be sort of emblematic of that.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't fault anybody for buying the dipper or dollar cost averaging or not making any big or not deviating. I think on the institutional side, they also, as we're talking about just broadly, like they have investors or they have shareholders and they need to be able to plan for the future. They're not thinking about it similarly. And so for them, the problem, you know, the retail guys always discover is that those large forces are much more market moving and important.

than you are, you know, with your $100 a month or whatever, that you're auto buying the S&P 500. And this is the problem, you know, with major capital and their control is that they're the ones who decide the fate really for all of us, their major decisions. And so whether we like it or not, they're the ones who are really pulling the strings here.

Yeah, that's true. I have to live in the reality as it currently exists. Sagar, lovely to have you, sir. Great to see you. Everybody is very excited about you being daddy-to-be and thinking a lot about you and Jillian as you go through this.

Thank you, guys. Yeah, just shout out to any other expected parents out there. It's not easy. Do your own research. Stand up for yourself. Be your own advocate and just make sure that, you know, you're taking everything with a grain of salt and making sure that you're paying attention. That's what I really hope. Lock in. But yeah, we're doing our best. We're hanging on. And I'll let everybody know as soon as I can when things are in motion. All right. And lastly, we're bringing in, you know, some celebrity guest hosts to try their best to fill your shoes.

And we're about to I'm about to bring in Glenn Greenwald, who scarcely needs an introduction, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, host of System Update on Rumble, etc. Any any advice for me or for him as we move into the celebrity guest host portion of the show?

I think just change things up. I think that's one of the most fun things whenever you have different guest hosts on with different perspectives or different hosts or any other things. You know, it can just be, it can be something new. And I think that's refreshing sometimes, especially in a crazy time like this. All right, Sagar, go take care of what you need to and hopefully we'll see you again soon. Thank you. Bye.

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Listen to The Girlfriend Spotlight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players...

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I'm so happy to be here. I just wanted to say I'm very well prepared. I actually, I don't know if you've studied it, but I'm a big believer in method acting. And I spent the last few days navigating life as Sagar. Like I dressed like him, had my friends and kids call me Sagar. So I feel very immersed in the Sogerness. Oh yeah, where's your glasses?

No, I'm done. I had to come on as myself. You don't want to like show what you're doing. So my pocket, my, my, my pocket handkerchief as well, but yeah, I'm ready to embody Sagar. Excellent. I'm looking forward to that. Um, we actually, Sagar was able to join for the a block. So the audience will be able to compare and contrast just how well you do. Excellent. All right. Well, I'm doing good.

And we already gave you all your accolades, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, blah, blah, blah. So don't worry, you're properly presented here. I've got a bunch of news stories I want to get to with you. There's a lot of stuff that is like right in your wheelhouse. But before we did that, I wanted to get your reaction to Trump gave an interview to NBC's Meet the Press, Kristen Welch.

There were a number of moments that were noteworthy, but I wanted to get your reaction to this one specifically where he says he's not sure if he's got to follow the Constitution. Let's take a listen. Some of the worst, most dangerous people on earth. And I was elected to get him the hell out of here. And the courts are holding me from doing it. But.

Even given those numbers that you're talking about, don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president? I don't know. I have to respond by saying again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation. Is anyone in your administration right now

in contact with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia to the United States? I don't know. You'd have to ask the attorney general that question. So, Glenn, it doesn't surprise me to hear Trump saying, like, I don't know if I need to follow the Constitution. Some aspects of his administration, I think I expected, basically, the direction that he's gone in. But I have to say, you know, as someone who was accused of having Trump derangement syndrome and is still accused of such things,

It's actually been much worse than I anticipated. And so I was just curious your perspective on how this is going vis-a-vis your expectations, what parts of it are, you know, pushing further the attacks on civil liberties, some of the authoritarian tactics, et cetera. So what's your view of how this is all going now that we're more than 100 days in?

It's a little bit of a complex question for the following reason. Obviously, I have been extremely vocal in denouncing countless Trump policies that are clear violations on basic civil liberties, on core concepts of due process and free speech. It's like an onslaught against the Bill of Rights, against the whole idea of having three branches of Congress. These things are very concerning and very worrying and very dangerous.

That said, I just wanted to make two quick points about this. One was in that interview that you just showed with Amitaprasad,

I do think that a lot of times, so many of the scandals that became these kind of red alert, 11 on the outrage scale scandals are the byproduct of Trump either trolling or not being very clear. He's not actually, he's a very effective speaker, but he's not a very cogent or clear order of his thoughts. They often get very confused. He cuts himself off in the middle of sentences. I think what happened there was not, he wasn't saying, I think, that, oh,

oh, we may or may not have to abide by the Constitution. The context for that was the Rodrigo Garcia case where the Supreme Court by a nine to zero ruling ordered the Trump administration to do everything to facilitate his return and then report to the courts what it is that they were doing to be able to prove that they were complying with the Supreme Court order. When President Trump, days later, met with Bukele in the Oval Office, and a reporter asked him about that, like, hey, the Supreme Court told you, get him back,

It was obvious he hadn't read the Supreme Court opinion. I don't think it comes as a surprise to anybody that Trump doesn't read Supreme Court opinions. And so he sort of said, I'm not sure. And then he asked Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller stood up and explicitly and directly lied to Trump saying, President Trump, we won on a nine to zero ruling. It was nine to zero in our favor saying we don't have to get him back.

And I believe Trump believes that to this very day. So I think in the interview, he was when she was saying, do we have to buy by the Constitution? It could be a question of do we have to obey lower court judges or does the Constitution require you to get him back? But having said that, just on that one issue. Yeah.

I do think that there is this, they came in very prepared. And I kept hearing that throughout 2024 from Trump people. We know what we did wrong the first term. We didn't know what Washington, we had too many people in the administration sabotaging us. They came in with a very clear plan, most of which Trump explicitly discussed during the campaign. And it was all about eliminating and

any impediments to what Trump wanted to do, not just in the executive branch, but in the entire country, colleges and media outlets and dissidents and activists. And that is where I think they have been so radical and so extreme and a full scale, very well coordinated attack on anything that might impede Trump.

Yeah, and that's where, you know, even on this comments, like I hear what you're saying about, well, he's clumsy and how he answered this. And sometimes he can be trolling. You know, he's also flirted with 2028. But then in this interview is like, well, I'm not really that interested in that, etc. But when you also layer on top of that.

He is also brazenly defying the Constitution in any number of ways. I mean, you know, they think they have a case that they can take to the Supreme Court about the Impoundment Control Act, but the power of the purse has long rested with Congress, and they just feel like they can do whatever they want with regard to not spending funds that have been appropriated, fire whatever they want, run roughshod over the government.

Obviously, with regard to the Alien Enemies Act, they just decided, like, we don't have to offer due process, another brazen violation of the Constitution. The assault on free speech with regard to college campuses, not just with regard to foreign students, but also with regard to pressuring universities to, you know, withhold diplomas from American citizens, etc.

All of these things are... Oh, there was a memo that came out from this government or their position officially is that they don't need a warrant to go into your home if you are suspected of being a gang member. And apparently being suspected of being a gang member just means like you're maybe from Venezuela and perhaps you have a tattoo. So...

When you put the comments in the context of it doesn't seem like this administration does feel like they need to abide by the typical understandings of the Constitution. One of his very first executive orders was to say, hey, we're going to end birthright citizenship, which the language of which is plain of day, plain as day inside the Constitution.

That's one of the ways that I feel like Trump 2.0 is different than Trump 1.0, where there was a lot of merit to the, well, I'll take him seriously, but not literally. This time, I feel like you do kind of have to take him literally based on the actions that they have taken thus far, which really have indulged his most maximalist instincts.

Yeah, I agree with that. Absolutely. I should note that several times Trump has been asked in the first four to six weeks of his administration, if the Supreme Court rules against you, would you ever consider ignoring or violating a Supreme Court order? And he very explicitly said, absolutely not. I would never do so. And the difference between the first. So I'm not saying that means he won't. I'm just saying that that idea has been in his head. I mean, because he basically is right now. Right. Right.

Especially with regard to, I know they're trying to play this legalese. Oh, well, facilitate means we don't really have to do anything. No, there's no question they're ignoring it. There's no question. Zero question.

And they're doing it brazenly and defiantly when they go to a court, a lower court or an appellate court. Their contempt for their idea that they have to justify what they're doing is palpable. So I agree with you about the difference between the first and second term. This is what I will say, though. I remember when Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil in 2018, he had a long history of just the most alarming and disturbing statement. You're like, first thing I'll do is close the Congress. You know, Pinochet didn't throw enough people out of helicopter, on and on and on.

And as it turned out, when he got in, the question was, are Brazilian institutions strong and willing enough to confront him, even if it means risks? And the answer ended up being yes. He ended up being actually a very weak president. I think that happened in Trump.1, too. There was such a mobilization of every institution to try and stop him, in my opinion, almost excessively. What we're seeing now, though, Crystal, is

some serious pushback that I think can be meaningful. Like I said, Trump lost 9-0 in the Supreme Court. Yes, they're ignoring it. They're not facilitating his return. That's going to go back to the Supreme Court, and we'll see what the Supreme Court does. You see other cases where they lost on a 9-0 ruling as well with the Alien Enemies Act and whether due process is required before they can deport people. And the Supreme Court said, absolutely, not only that, but advance notice is required as well. A Trump

appointed judge just three days ago, last week, said he doesn't even have the right to invoke the Alien Enemies Act because we're at war. So I just think that a lot of what Trump is doing is extremely disturbing, extremely alarming. We're still in the first three months. We'll see if they run out of energy, if they start having internal dissent, but more importantly, whether our institutions can really confront it.

Yeah, I think I agree with that. And I think there's been more of a, uh, resistance that has been mounted in recent weeks and the courts, you know, they take time to act. And one of the things that Trump 2.0 has done, you know, very intentionally is flood the zone is just take the chainsaw and just move and just act. You saw this very explicitly with the, uh,

with the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. They drafted it. They held it. They got the people they wanted to deport in place, ready to board the planes before they released it publicly. You know, there were attorneys who, immigration attorneys who were starting to get wind of it. That's the reason they were able to cobble together this last minute hearing where the judge says, hey, you have to, even if the planes are the air, you have to turn them around and

And again, they just ignore that and, oh, well, they were over international waters. We couldn't do anything at that point. So sorry. And by the way, since you issued that order from the bench, it doesn't really matter. But in any case, the point is just that because they've been so willing to act aggressively and in ways that they themselves know are probably not going to hold up to judicial scrutiny,

It has been very difficult for the courts to keep up. The Democrats have been utterly pathetic in almost all instances. Seriously? That's so unlike them. I know. It's just, you know, who could have predicted that?

But, you know, their initial instinct was to be really cowed by Trump 2.0. I think a lot of the media's instinct has been to bend the knee and basically bribe Trump to leave them alone so they can get their mergers through, etc. You initially had Columbia University really bending the knee in particular and other universities getting to follow suit. Now you've started to have

led by Harvard. You've started to have a little bit of backbone demonstrated with the universities, a little bit of backbone now starting to be demonstrated by the law firms as well. Still waiting a bit on the media. I guess we have a few signs of that as well. But, you know, I agree with you that now that Trump has become so unpopular, I think the tariffs have in particular sapped him of a lot of popular support and institutional support as well.

I think there's more pushback than there was previously, but I'm concerned about how much damage they can do before things are reined in. And as you know, because you've covered this better than probably anyone, once the executive claims a power for itself, once an executive tramples on our rights, it's very hard to put that genie back in the bottle. Usually you just go increasingly in that direction of whatever power the last president grabs, the next president grabs that power and expands it even further.

Yes, I just want to pick up on that last point because I think it's such a crucial one. During the campaign in 2016 and then even during the Trump presidency, one of the things that bothered me and concerned me about the liberal reaction to Trump, you know, like the maximalist hair on fire kind of reaction. And I don't just mean things like Russiagate. I mean, like, you know, just reactions to a lot of the policies is

is that so often things were depicted as some sort of singular Trumpian evil that was this radical departure from the American tradition. I remember the first time I really was irritated by this was when Trump invited the Egyptian dictator Sisi to the White House and the media went berserk and said, no American president would have done this, embraced a dictator like this before. And I was like, what? That's the whole history of the post-World War II era. American presidents embraced dictators

Pretty much every month, it's what they wake up and they do. And so much of what I feel like going through these first three months of this civil liberties onslaught is it reminds me so much of those Bush-Shaney years, you know, when I began writing about politics, where the big framework was the administration could do anything. It could put people in prisons with no charges in the middle of an ocean or kidnap them or torture them or spy on people. And if you raise questions about it, the answer always was,

why are you defending the terrorists? And he would be like, what? The whole point of what I'm saying is that you don't know if someone's a terrorist until they get due process. And that's, and you know, they invented all these radical presidential theories about why they can ignore congressional law. And there's an article today by Jack Oldsmith, the Bush Cheney, DOJ, uh,

lawyer and Harvard Law professor in the New York Times basically saying that most of the policies Trump is embracing, all being radically extended in more dangerous form, come from precedents that Obama won, that Biden won, that George Bush won on the extent of presidential powers. And he says that's really the main problem this country has is we've made the president into a king, which is exactly what the founders sought to avoid.

Yeah, and the last thing, then we can move on to what's going on with Yemen and Israel and Iran, some very ominous developments that we'll track.

The last thing I wanted to get you on is something that Michael Tracy has been talking about, is the way that this Trump administration seems to think that national security or deeming something a national emergency, as with the tariffs, is a kind of cheat code to be able to just do whatever you want without having to worry about laws, Congress, courts, due process, etc. You see that that's the Alien Enemies Act. That's the the

of declaring cartel members enemy combatants. That's the justification for the tariffs as well. And that direction to me is also very unethical

unnerving because historically the courts have granted the executive a lot of bandwidth to declare what is and isn't a national security threat, what is and isn't a national emergency, et cetera. So they feel like they can just stretch that outrageously to be able to claim effectively wartime powers here at home, you know, with massive blowback on our own citizens, not to mention immigrants who are here as well.

No, that is a massive concern. And that was part of what Professor Goldsmith's article is about, was exactly that. There's the set of precedents. Now, the idea that presidents have virtually unlimited power in war, that's very embedded in American culture. Obviously, Lincoln notoriously suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. We obviously don't have anything remotely close to that.

FDR used the Alien Enemies Act to detain huge numbers of Japanese Americans in concentration camps on the grounds that they're alien enemies. And the courts have often approved of these over the decades, creating this almost omnipotent presidency. But most presidents have had some restraints on what they were willing to do, political ones or ethical ones or whatever. And Trump is taking that to the fullest extent.

And, you know, again, in the war on terror, that's what was happening in well. And then finally, you did have pushback from courts like in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that even Guantanamo detainees have a right of habeas corpus to go in and see the evidence against them and to question it. And huge numbers prove their innocence from that, showing the dangers of just allowing the president to treat people as guilty before they've been found guilty.

But again, I think that Trump is exploiting in a very dangerous way, a long history of expanding executive powers in part because people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They're happy to let the president make tough decisions because they just want to get reelected. The number one hit true crime podcast, The Girlfriends is back with something new. The Girlfriends Spotlight.

Our first two series introduce you to an incredible gang of women who teamed up to fight injustice, showing just how powerful sisterly solidarity can be. We're keeping this mission alive with The Girlfriend Spotlight.

Each week, a different woman sits down with me, Anna Sinfield, to share their incredible story of triumph over adversity. Like Luanne, who was raised in a secretive religious community. Do I want my freedom or do I want my family? And found a way to escape. When she said, you know you can leave, right? It was a light bulb. And now helps other women get out too. I loved my girls. I still love my girls. So come and join our girl gang.

Listen to The Girlfriend Spotlight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This has kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players...

all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things.

Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. On November 5th, 2018 at 6.33 a.m.,

A red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle. No belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were ten vile... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

that to this day have been kept restricted from the public. Until now. You feeling this too? A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That's a good transition to Yemen and the Houthis, I would say. And we can go ahead and put these images up on the screen. So they were able to successfully launch a ballistic missile that struck near Israel's main airport. This just happened on Sunday. You can see the black smoke there rising in the air.

air. This is, according to Wall Street Journal, a significant target, a rare hit of such a significant target, and happened just hours before the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to expand their war in Gaza. There were a number of injuries, no fatalities, however, and the Houthis are saying that they are going to continue. They're saying that they're instituting an air blockade. I don't think they have that

those capabilities, but they certainly demonstrated here the U.S. and Israel attempted to intercept this missile. They were unsuccessful. And so you have it, you know, causing some damage there near the airport. Glenn, what do you make of this? And also just, I mean, this is...

is again an escalation and continuation of the Biden policy vis-a-vis what the U.S. has been doing with the Houthis of just, hey, we're going to just keep bombing them rather than we know the one thing that worked to get the Houthis to stop doing the thing that they're doing was a ceasefire. But instead, we're just going to keep bombing them even though everyone knows this is not going to be successful and yet,

Somehow, you know, this was the topic that was in the Signalgate conversation. Everyone pretends like if we just make a bomb go boom somewhere in Yemen that this is a quote unquote success.

It's so interesting because one of the worst humanitarian crisis of this century was when Saudi Arabia waged all-out war with the very direct and overt help and cooperation with the Obama administration on Yemen in an attempt to exterminate the Houthis. It killed massive numbers of innocent people. It caused mass famine in Yemen.

Yet, it really didn't degrade the Houthis capability at all. They learned how instead to protect their military assets, how to bury them underground, how to disperse them. It really made them stronger.

And it's so interesting that you say that throughout 2024, Biden was bombing the Houthis almost every day, not nearly to the extent the United States is now bombing them under Trump, but still nonetheless bombing every day. And I don't know if you've seen it, but in mid 2024, he did an interview Trump did with Tim Poole, who asked him about the bombing of Yemen and Trump denounced Biden saying, yeah, these Democrats, they just want to go all around the world bombing people. It's totally unnecessary. Why would we bomb the Houthis?

At least then, from like an America First perspective or whatever, Houthis really were attacking American ships because they blamed us correctly for arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza. Once that ceasefire happened, the Houthis said, we're not going to attack anybody anymore. Our cause is done. And they did stop.

And then once Israel quickly violated the ceasefire agreement by blocking humanitarian aid from entering, the ceasefire required them to do so. They said, we're going to resume our attacks, but only on Israeli ships. So not on American ships. They hadn't attacked American ships for two months when Trump suddenly decided he was going to not only reinstate, but radically escalate the bombing campaign in Yemen. And it is such an interesting task in some way for MAGA.

in that they've claimed one of their main goals of their political movement is to end Middle East wars.

And here you have Trump totally gratuitously restarting one. And there's been some muttering, but not very much pushback at all. Well, and this was one of the things that was most disturbing to me about Signalgate is when you look in all the people that are in that chat, you got Tulsi Gabbard, you got J.D. Vance, you got Joe Ken, all these people, a number of whom are supposed to be MAGA in America first. J.D. Vance puts up this like weird statement

complain about, isn't this just too good for Europe that we're doing this? I mean, listen, I get it. He's trying to appeal to a certain audience. But once that gets swatted aside and Stephen Miller comes in over the top and basically says, no, this is what the boss wants. Everybody, okay, great. You know, fist pound, fire, American flag emoji, et cetera. And that to me was sort of lost in the

Also, significant and serious conversation about use of signal and all these sorts of things and kind of the process of it. But the fact that there was next to no dissent about a policy that everyone knows to have failed and also, by the way, is illegal, in my view, should be authorized by Congress. And, you know, this all just played out in this very casual signal chat where we know now there have been massive protests.

strikes on innocent civilians. There was a migration center for a number of African migrants who were killed. And this just goes almost unremarked at this point. Yeah, I mean, as Michael Tracy said, you can never go broke betting on the continuation of bipartisan foreign policy in Washington, no matter how many candidates who win say they're going to revolutionize it and uproot it. It just sort of continues endlessly.

I think that signal chat is interesting. I mean, I think J.D. Vance, I would give him a little bit of space in that he knew he was communicating with a bunch of people who don't care about civilian casualties at all, don't care about the implications of starting a war. So he was trying to kind of play into their prejudices and beliefs. Maybe I'm being naive, but he was trying to cater his argument to that crowd saying,

I think this is a mistake. You know, he was clearly opposed to it, but it was very timid, very meek. Soon as he got pushed back, he said, no, no, don't worry. If it happens, I'll support it publicly. And then when Pete Hegseth showed, look, we just, you know, destroyed this whole building, this residential building that they bombed an apartment building because they thought a Houthi commander was inside with his girlfriend. It was a residential building. J.D. Vance said, you know, awesome. And they all started putting up their muscle on American flag, you know, emojis.

Including Tulsi, who I know for so long has been vehemently outspoken against the bombing of Yemen. And now she too is a supporter of it. And I know we're going to talk about Mike Walz in a second, but this to me is one of the most alarming parts of the Trump administration is...

You do have some ideological diversity and disagreement in some areas, but what has been made abundantly clear to everybody is that the only relevant metric is not where you stand on this issue or where you stand on that issue, but absolute loyalty to Trump. So when Trump speaks-

You nod, you defend it, and you carry it out with your greatest enthusiasm. And the slightest hint of disloyalty puts you under suspicion or even getting fired. And that is the climate that I find so chilling because it's not just for the White House, but they're trying to make it for the country as a whole. Yeah, that's so well said. And the other part of the...

Houthi strike on Ben Gurion Airport that is playing out right now, I can put this next piece up on the screen, is Bibi is clearly trying to use this as a pretext to try once again for the millionth time to pull us into war with Iran. So he says here, he's quote tweeting an old post from President Trump. He says, President Trump is absolutely right. Attacks by the Houthis emanate

from Iran, Israel respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport and at a time and place of our choosing to their Iranian terror masters. And the post that he, you know, he quote tweeted here says every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran. And Iran will be held responsible and suffer the consequences. And those consequences will be dire. So yeah, there are really

Really, there are ideological battles that are playing out within the Trump administration. We've seen this person and that person getting fired, Mike Waltz most notably being, you know, given the much less prominent and significant role of UN ambassador. But some of these battles are also less about ideology and more about personality conflicts as well. So it can be kind of hard to suss out what exactly is going on here. But there's no doubt that

Bibi is trying to do everything he can to draw us into war with Iran. President Trump so far has been interested in negotiating with Iran. I think that's one area of this administration that I can say, you know, that's to his credit. And I hope he continues in that direction. Nor do I have, but it's not like I have a lot of confidence that we're going to have the patience to wait out what will undoubtedly be difficult diplomatic maneuvers here. Yeah, yeah.

I think there's a clear split inside MAGA that is very genuine. You've seen some very prominent

MAGA voices or influencers that Trump cares about, I guess you could say, including Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, who are essentially on a public and private crusade to make sure that Trump doesn't get pressured by Israel into going and attacking Iran. And J.D. Vance is part of that. Donald Trump Jr. is part of that. Make of these people what you will. Make of their motives what you will. The reality is that they have been

on a very over coordinated campaign to try and persuade Trump that this will destroy his legacy and destroy his presidency. And then you have this other camp, of course, that Mike Waltz was in, that Marco Rubio though is still in before we make too much of Mike Waltz's firing, his replacement is Marco Rubio. Right. On cotton, Lindsey Graham, that whole crowd, along with of course the Israelis.

Now, I do think, you know, I'll just tell you an interesting story. I debated Alan Dershowitz about seven months ago in New York, and the proposition was something like the U.S. should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. And I knew he was going to come and say-

Yeah, I knew he was gonna come and say, of course, because he's Alan Dershowitz, and he's an Israel supporter. Iran is like six and a half seconds away from having a nuclear weapon. So I wanted to come and show how long those warnings, those same exact warnings have been emanating from Israel supporters. And it actually shocked me. You go back to like the late 90s throughout, I mean, it's been like 25 years that Netanyahu and his loyalists inside the United States have been trying to lure the United States into a war with Iran.

by saying over and over, you remember that chart, that primitive cartoon that Netanyahu brought to the UN of the ticking time bomb? They are desperate and have been desperate to get the United States to go and destroy. This is not about destroying the nuclear installations. They want to change the regime and reinstall the Shah of Iran's son.

And I do think there's a part of Trump instinctively that would like his legacy to be like, I ended wars. I was the peacemaker. I think some of the bellicosity we saw exactly the same thing from Pete Hegseth this weekend where he basically said exactly what Netanyahu said. Iran, be on notice. We're going to pick a time and place of our choosing to make you pay for arming the Houthis.

Hopefully, that instinct that I really do believe is real in Trump with conflicting instincts will be able to be kind of manipulated. The problem is, as you know, Crystal, they withdrew from the Iran deal. And so any new deal has to be significantly stronger than the Iran deal for just Trump to justify why he pulled out.

But that's very hard because the Iranians negotiated to their fullest extent and got to the point where they wouldn't go any further. And the question is, how do you get in some middle ground where you're not going to war but getting an Iran deal that isn't the Obama deal? Yeah.

think they could probably get away honestly with just basically having the Obama deal but with some face-saving bullshit that Trump could point to like I don't think it would I don't know just something symbolic yeah that different that they could just be like oh and look we we crafted this gold Trump statue and he'll be like look this is

so much better than the other deal that Obama did or something of that nature. I do want to quickly get to the Mike Waltz thing. This is extraordinary. There's a report from the Washington Post that Trump got pissed off at him. This is also encouraging, by the way, because he was seen as having acted too much in coordination with Bibi and it was just too overt that he was trying to push Israeli interests over

over U.S. interests. The headline here is Inside Waltz's Ouster Before Signalgate Talks With Israel Angered Trump. And to your point, I was like, good that Mike Waltz is out. Now we have Marco Rubio in. That's not really an improvement. And put the next one up on the screen. They're talking about Stephen Miller being the potential replacement for...

for Mike Waltz. And Miller's the guy who in the signal gauge at is ultimately sort of the decider and seemed to be the one who was representing the position of the boss and

to your point earlier about, I do think that Trump just believes whatever Stephen Miller is telling him with regard to the Alien Enemies Act and what the Supreme Court said. I think he even believed Stephen Miller just telling him like, oh yeah, his knuckles totally said MS-13, even though it was the most embarrassing Photoshop

Of all time. So in some ways, Stephen Miller already occupies this position of extraordinary power. But he is I mean, he is an extremist. He has been aggressive about wanting to deport anyone who's pro-Palestine. He, like I said, was the one who came in and said, yes, let's bomb Yemen. Let's go forward. We're good with this. This is what the boss wants, etc. So it certainly doesn't give me any comfort that it would be potentially Stephen Miller occupying this post if they don't just keep it with Rubio indefinitely. Yeah.

Yeah, I read The Washington Post over the weekend where it basically said that Trump advisers were telling the media that Waltz had stopped serving or working for the president of his country and began working for the president of another country, which isn't quite technically treason, but it has the very core spirit of being that. Yeah, it's quite traitorous at the very least.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, plotting against your own president by consulting and conspiring with a foreign leader, that's like the definition of it. If it had been any other country, people would be immediately understanding of that. But I also thought like anyone who reads that Washington Post and Washington was thinking, wow, therefore, but for the grace of God, go I, because when is the last time that was punished, conspiring with Israel to advance and prioritize interests, its interest over American interests? Hmm.

But again, I found this encouraging too, Crystal, even though Marco Rubio is his replacement, even though Stephen Miller and a bunch of other radical, zealous defenders of Israel are very much lurking in high positions of power, because I think what irritated Trump

is not just the disloyalty part of it, where he met with that and Yahoo kind of behind Trump's back in a way that Trump received it. But also, obviously he talks to Mike Walz every day about key foreign policy decisions. That's what that job is. And it seems like every day, Mike Walz kept pushing Trump and pushing Trump and pushing Trump

to ignore a deal, just saying forget a deal, it's not even worth it, you can't trust the Iranians. That is the Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham position. And I think Trump has decided, no, he wants to do a deal. He's gonna do everything possible to do a deal. I do think there'll be a war after

or if they don't get one done. But when you have the person next to you pushing you to war, and there's all these comments, remember the Liz Cheney comments, he gave big speech about neocons, how there's a pathology in Washington of people who just constantly want wars. And I think he came to see Mike Waltz as one of those people. Three months late, he's always been that person. But I think that in this particular case, it just became too much. Yeah, the Ukraine hawks have been kind of smarter about the way they've approached Trumpian psychology.

Where they're like, oh, you can do this minerals deal with Zelensky. It's a deal. You like deals, right? Am I right? And it de facto, though, acts as a security guarantee and an indefinite U.S. commitment to Ukraine. So Lindsey Graham is delighted he's crafting a new all-out sanctions on Russia bill, which I didn't even know there were possible sanctions that we haven't levied against Russia yet. Are there any left?

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, what else can you possibly do? But he's got some ideas, apparently, that's got possibly a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate if they choose to bring it up. And so, yeah, I think the, I guess the Iranian-

The desire for war with Iran was a little too aggressively pushed by Mike Waltz. He didn't quite understand the Trumpian psychology and how to handle this appropriately. And apparently he also pissed off Susie Wiles and treated her like she was a staffer. And so she was like, okay, buddy, have fun at the UN. The number one hit true crime podcast, The Girlfriends, is back with something new, The Girlfriends Spotlight.

Our first two series introduce you to an incredible gang of women who teamed up to fight injustice, showing just how powerful sisterly solidarity can be. We're keeping this mission alive with The Girlfriend Spotlight. ♪

Each week, a different woman sits down with me, Anna Sinfield, to share their incredible story of triumph over adversity. Like Luanne, who was raised in a secretive religious community. Do I want my freedom or do I want my family? And found a way to escape. When she said, you know you can leave, right? It was a light bulb. And now helps other women get out too. I loved my girls. I still love my girls. So come and join our girl gang.

Listen to The Girlfriend Spotlight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This has kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players...

all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things.

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

In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It was just me naked.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carvel. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's go ahead and get to this boycotts bill that I know you've been tracking really closely. In fact, Glenn, why don't you go ahead and set up what this bill was meant to do? Because it is unfortunately in line with some other legislation that has previously been passed into law. Seemed like it had a head of steam, co-sponsored by Mike Lawler and Josh Geithheimer. So you had bipartisan support.

And yet it ended up being, at least for now, they pulled the vote and looks like APAC may take a rare L on this one. Yeah, I think that if I just give the brief historical context, I think it's so interesting and so important, which is, you know how there was this whole industry, quote unquote, anti-woke pundits or whatever, who incessantly focused on college campuses? And you're like, why are you so worried about college sophomores at Oberlin? Yeah, I'm a little familiar with that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you've heard a little bit about that. Maybe you mentioned it a few times. One of the main reasons, if you look at most of those people whose careers were built on that, they're very strong Israel supporters.

Israel identified like 10 or 15 years ago that one of the main threats to their ability to dominate and repress their neighbors is that there was a growing boycott movement centered on American campuses that they were afraid of because it was modeled after the one in South Africa in the 80s that was driven by campus activism and that took down the apartheid regime. And they set out to decide we have to put an end to this whole idea of advocating a boycott.

They got the EU to criminalize advocacy of boycotts as anti-Semitic. They got that expanded definition of anti-Semitism. And now they're doing the same thing in the US. The thing that always amazed me, Crystal, is so few people know that in 37 American states, mostly red states but not all, it is a requirement if you want a contract with the state that you have to sign a loyalty oath saying you do not support and have never participated in a boycott of Israel.

You can boycott American states or other countries, just not Israel. And now this, that law was the basis for what Trump did in 2018, which is he said, it's now a felony if a company participates in a boycott sponsored by another country that the US government doesn't support. So let's say like Iran wants to boycott Israel and some company participates in that boycott, even though the US government isn't, that's a felony.

to do. And now this new bill would expand it to include not just governed, not just led by or advocated by foreign governments, but also international organizations. And it would include people who are boycotting Israel out of conscience and conviction, and it would turn them into felons.

And I think finally, this is almost like a bridge too far for a lot of people in the Senate who, by the way, are also angry that the HRA definition prohibits anybody from saying that Jesus participated in the killing of Jews, even though the Bible kind of implies that in some ways. So I think they're kind of going too far finally. Interesting. Let's put C1 up on the screen. This is from Dropsite, which did a fantastic job covering this. And actually, Ryan was saying-

The amount of social media traction they got from covering this bill was like extraordinary. So I think there likely was a massive effort, like a huge number of people probably called their congressman and were saying, do not vote for this bill. And on, you know, on both sides of the aisle. So I think there might have been a public pushback here that was important, too. You can see the Democratic campaign.

co-sponsors. You got a handful of them here, Gottheimer, Moskowitz, Morrell, Davis, and Gillen. You have a longer list here of Republican co-sponsors. I mean, and the primary sponsor is this guy, Mike Lawler. It's also interesting to me, this is a blatantly unconstitutional and extremist bill. And

And yet Lawler is seen as this quote unquote moderate. He's in a swing district in New York. I think he's very much in jeopardy for election this time around. He just got reelected. So he's been there a relatively short period of time and is the type of district that could easily flip in a wave election year. But in any case, you know, I thought this thing was going to sail through.

And now they've at least pulled the vote for today. I did not think it would get through the Senate because I didn't think they'd be able to garner enough Democrats to overcome a filibuster. But you did start to get, you had Marjorie Taylor Greene, we can put C2 up on the screen. She, I think, was the first person who came out and said, listen, I'm not going to vote for this. I'll be voting. No, it is my job to defend Americans' rights to buy or boycott whomever they choose without the government harshly fining them or imprisoning them. But what I don't understand is why we are voting on a bill on behalf of

other countries and not the president's executive's orders that are for our country. You had Thomas Massey, who has been

quite principled when it comes to free speech. He came after Marjorie Taylor Greene and says, I agree. I'll be voting no on this bill as well. And you had Charlie Kirk also chime in and weigh in on this debate with his commentary. There was one piece of this that kind of irritated me, but we'll see if you had the same reaction to it. He says, tomorrow the House will vote on H.R. 867, a bill that will criminalize private boycotts of Israel, fines up to a million dollars in prison time up to 20 years,

Bills like this only create more anti-Semitism. I think that's true and play into growing narratives that Israel's running the U.S. government, also true. In America, you're allowed to hold differing views. You're allowed to disagree in protests. We've allowed far too many people who hate America to move here from abroad, but the right to speak freely

freely is the birthright of all Americans. That's the part that annoyed me because, of course, First Amendment free speech rights apply to everyone who's here. In any case, this bill should not pass. Any Republican that votes for this bill will expose themselves. We will be watching very closely. So I guess I am kind of curious what is going on here because...

If you look at Marjorie Taylor Greene's record, if you look at Charlie Kirk's record, Thomas Massey, I put in a little different category. Like, they're all on board with kidnapping students off the street for daring to publish an op-ed that was critical of Israel. It's not like they've been real consistent on the free speech part. Marjorie Taylor Greene sponsored a censure resolution against Rashida Tlaib.

for daring to participate in pro-Palestine protests and called those protests, you know, insurrections. So it's not like she's been principled here. So where do you think that this is ultimately coming from? You know, it was so interesting when the Ukraine war happened. I had a lot of people in Congress who are MAGA affiliated or MAGA adjacent.

and they were all against the Ukraine war. And I would love, I did it with RFK Jr. too once. I would have them come on and be like, why are you against the Ukraine war? And they would all say,

It's enough, enough is enough with funding the militaries and wars of foreign countries. We have so many problems with the United States. We can't afford to keep doing this. It's time to cut off all these wars that we're fighting that aren't in our interest and keep the money at home. And I would always say, oh, that's so persuasive. Does that apply to the financing and arming of Israel as well? And of course they would start stuttering and trying to find reasons why somehow the rationale was different when of course it so blatantly wasn't. I think what you're starting to see, and there was another Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet about Iran recently,

very vocally saying we cannot go to war with Iran. We are sick of fighting wars for other countries in the region that have huge nuclear arsenals, which obviously means Israel. We're sick of fighting wars for Israel. You know, Crystal, if you look, and this struck me the other day,

Almost every day, literally, there's some major event that comes from Washington, like a policy initiative or an executive order or a resolution or a press conference or some big social media campaign from our politicians in Washington that are all about Israel. Like it's every day they talk about Israel, every day they want to do something for Israel. And I do think like those free speech abuses, it's starting to create this backlash. Like, wait a minute.

I thought our whole movement was about America first, like we're gonna focus on the forgotten person and the working class and the downtrodden and the deindustrialized cities. And instead we're spending all this time in Israel and attacking American civil liberties on behalf of this foreign country. And I do think it's starting to create some real resentment, not like in little spaces, but some growing resentment. Rand Paul gave a huge speech on the Senate floor about the attacks on free speech from this IHRA bill.

And those are significant. Once that starts happening within a movement, many respected and influential voices within the movement saying the same thing, it can really spread quickly. And let's hope this does. I think you were right to point to that provision that Christians really took umbrage at, felt like that was constraining what they could say about their own faith.

But I also think we have to be honest about the fact that there is a growing, like, overtly anti-Semitic part of the republic. I mean, I'm thinking about Nick Fuentes. Very popular, overt Nazi ideology, right? And I wonder, I don't want to put that label on, like, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene or whatever. I don't know what's in her heart. But how do you feel about the fact that there is kind of a horseshoe with people who hold a view like Nick Fuentes's?

And those of us who are trying to be principled about free speech and principled about, hey, let's not like endlessly bomb babies. This seems really bad. How do you intellectually grapple with that sort of thing?

I think this is true of almost every issue where people on the same side of the issue have sometimes differing motives or even radically antithetical motives. You could have people who are concerned about the influx of people illegally over the border because they're just white nationalists and don't want brown people in the country, and there are a lot of those.

And you can have people with good faith concerns. I mean, people on the left used to worry about how it would drive down wages for the American worker or how it would make cities incapable of absorbing them all in a humanistic way. And the fact that some people are on one side of the debate and who have really malicious ideas and others have well-intentioned ideas, I think you just have to separate them out, but it doesn't impugn the...

fact that there's this coalition itself. And you know, you can say that on the other side of that issue too, people who want open borders were big corporate interests. And now there's a lot of liberals who believe that are not open borders, but far less repressive and restrictive ones.

So, on the one hand, I get what you're saying. And this whole idea of America first, you know, goes back to Charles Lindbergh and the isolationist for World War Two, who thought we were getting involved in World War Two, because the Jews were kind of prompting us to do so. So that is the tradition out of which America first non interventionism grows today.

But I also think these people do have a, because if it were only, if they were only applying it to Israel, I would say, okay, this is probably driven by antisemitism. They're also against the U S involvement in, in Ukraine. They think that's just as much of a violation of the America first ideology that it's globalism, pretty much any military invention around the world intervention around the world. That's how they see it. So yes, of course there's lurking antisemitism like every other bigotry and every faction, but

I personally don't think that's the driving thrust of all of this. I think they're starting to make it's becoming unsustainable to keep saying America first on the one hand and keep voting one bill after the other and putting a tax on the civil liberties of America about this one single foreign country. I think it's becoming increasingly unsustainable with the base bill.

I would say, and we've seen, look, Republicans are far more supportive of, I'm talking about base Republican voters, far more supportive of Israel than Democratic base. But Democrats have basically fully turned on Israel at this point. Some 80% or something say we should not be shipping weapons anymore. The real core demographic that still supports this view are basically boomer Republicans. But even among Republicans, there's been a shift in public sentiment.

And I do think that there is power in, it's just so brazenly incompatible to say I'm America first. And yet I spend all my time thinking about talking about and passing legislation for the nation of Israel and hang an Israeli flag. Or wear an IDF soldier uniform into the halls of Congress or whatever, you know, like it just, I think from a public perspective, it's very hard to sustain that position. And so I do think you see some representatives who are having to

bend some to that reality. I'm just, you know, on a whole, I'm just much more cynical about these people just based on the track record.

Yeah, I mean, they're still all voting for more weapons shipments to Israel in lockstep. Like there is no dissent on that whatsoever. They're all on board with, hey, let's just disappear any college student who participated in a protest we don't like. Let's just disappear and detain them and deport them and do whatever we can and attack the universities in this like in this the ultra protest.

The wokesters could never have dreamed of the authoritarian tactics being used to constrain speech at universities in defense of this one supposedly oppressed minority group. Right. And so I just don't see anything approaching a consistent principle being applied here, which is why it's almost confusing to me that there was any dissent on this bill whatsoever. And I didn't expect it.

Yeah, you know, just on that woke stuff, I mean, if you listen to Israel supporters and the way they argue, they have verbatim copied the script that they were kind of the character of the script of the woke left that they had spent years mocking, you know. Oh, yeah, the safe spaces. Yeah, safe spaces. They had that like 22-year-old college kid come from the University of Pennsylvania. I am not safe. I was stood by Mike Johnson, you know, crazy.

hate speech codes to protect this minority group. Plus like the instant resorting to calling everybody a racist and bigot the minute you disagree. This is all like woke caricature of woke one-on-one that they've been mocking that they now adopt completely. That said, you know, you mentioned these polls and there's clearly a very substantial decline, which we haven't seen in decades in American support for Israel. And while yes, a big part of that is due to almost uniform democratic reversal on this, a big part of it as well are,

younger Republicans, Republicans under the age of 50 who have had a massive jump, I think it's now a majority of people who say they disapprove of Israel. It's really just like older Fox News watching Republicans who still have maintained their support for Israel. And if there's one thing politicians know, it's public opinion. So I'm sure they go to their town halls and are constantly asked about this. Of course,

AIPAC is not going to disappear overnight. The Israeli lobby is not going to disappear overnight, nor is these decades long dogmas about how we have to protect Israel. But I do think that these things happen gradually, you know, through these incremental changes. And then also, I do think once people get desperate, like once Israel supporters really believe they're losing the debate, they resort to increasingly extreme tactics like censorship and other things in a desperate hope to win. And it fuels the backlash.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And so you have two key constituencies apparently supporting Israel in lockstep right now. That would be boomer Republicans watching Fox News. The number one hit true crime podcast, The Girlfriends, is back with something new, The Girlfriends Spotlight.

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Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

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So this is an extraordinary piece from New York mag. Obviously, Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania, wins as this kind of progressive everyman champion. You know, this is someone I was excited about seeing in the Senate. He positioned himself as a kind of like Bernie Sanders adjacent mayor of a steel town, declining steel town, et cetera. Great profile. Then Trump's

during his campaign, suffers a pretty severe stroke, is still able to defeat Dr. Oz even after having a debate performance where it was very clear that stroke had significantly affected him.

And then once he gets into the Senate, his politics almost completely change. Now, in fairness on Israel, and Ryan did all the reporting on this, he had even before the stroke been like, I'm pro-Israel. And by the way, you know, AIPAC and your affiliated groups, just tell me what you want me to say. I'm going to say it. Because he wanted to also make sure that...

they didn't get involved against him in his primary with Conor Lamb, who seemed like he could be a strong challenger in that Democratic primary at this point. But, you know, we were just talking about members of Congress who seem to spend all their time thinking about this foreign nation. And Richie Torres and this guy are like,

pace and point number one and number two. So let's put this article up on the screen because some of Fetterman staffers decided to speak to New York magazine about what they are seeing behind the scenes. And, you know, if you take them at their word, they're basically describing another health coverup kind of akin to what we saw with regard to Joe Biden, where the stroke did really change his personality, made his views more extreme. Um,

also have created, you know, this pattern of really erratic and frankly dangerous behavior. The headline here, all by himself, John Fetterman insists he is in good health, but staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew. They say his 1600 word email, this is Fetterman's, came with the subject line concerns contained a list of them. Sorry, this is one of his staffers who was sending an email of their concerns.

From the seemingly mundane, he eats fast food multiple times a day, to the scary, we do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not. We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed, Jentleson wrote. Conspiratorial thinking, megalomania, for example. He claims to be the most knowledgeable source on it.

Israel and Gaza around, but his sources are just what he reads in the news. He declines most briefings, never reads memos, high highs, low lows, long rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues, lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room. Let's go ahead and put the next piece up on the screen. Members of his team told this journalist this was an early warning sign that something was off with their boss in early February, 2023.

After Fetterman had indeed been sworn in, members of the Senate gathered at the Library of Congress for a caucus retreat. Fetterman, fresh off a hard-fought victory in the cycle's marquee race, should have been riding high, only he wasn't. Stafford recalled getting a text from a person at the retreat asking if their boss was okay. Fetterman was sitting at a table by himself, slowly sipping

a Coke and refusing to talk with anybody. Later that day, another staffer heard an alarming report from a journalist. Fetterman had just walked obliviously into the road and was nearly struck by a car. Fetterman went on to make statements that shocked people in opposing a ceasefire with regards to Gaza. He said, let's get back to killing. Person who heard the conversation told me he said, kill the

all. In a statement, Fetterman denied the account, adding, any reference to killing was solely about Hamas, and I do support the destruction of that organization down to its last member. And Glenn, in another part of this article, they describe his wife being in tears. You know, she's a sort of

liberal humanitarian, she was upset over his position on Israel and Gaza to the point of, you know, being quite emotional about it and saying, listen, they're bombing babies. You can't have this position. Now she denies that there's been any changes in his health status, but

But when you read the details here, including of his day at Walter Reed, you come away with a quite clear impression that he is not well, that it's impacted his ability to serve his constituents, that it has fundamentally changed his positioning and his approach to a number of issues that voters elected him, you know, to have a certain ideological viewpoint on. Yeah, you know, just to address the leading example you raised,

It is true that in 2022 and elsewhere, Fetterman sort of gave lip service to the idea that he was in favor of Israel. I think most people understand that if you want to win statewide office, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, where there's a very heavy pro-Jewish contingent, pro-Israel contingent, you can't just be waving a Palestinian flag. So I think people kind of dismiss that. But what we've seen from him is

is not just like sort of pro-Israel lip service, but like almost like a psychotic,

joy in seeing the destruction, wanting it to continue on top of an extremely hostile posture to anybody who raises it with him. He tries to be just as kind of offensive and alienating as possible in the ways that he speaks, which I don't think was the John Fetterman that we saw regularly prior to this stroke. I'm always a little hesitant to comment on someone's mental health or psychological state in part because I'm not a professional, but also because it's hard to assess people from a distance.

But I do, it is so interesting to me, you know, when he had that stroke, every Republican I know was saying, you know, he's a vegetable. How can he possibly run and yet alone win? And the minute he comes out and says, I'm a big supporter of Israel. They're all like, wow, his brain recuperated. He's one of the most sensible people in all of Washington. They, that really is all it takes to cure your mental health and stroke problems. I mean, I gotta tell you, I have to

I have to say, Glenn, I hear you on like being reluctant to comment on someone's mental, like I'm also not an expert, but I feel less that way post Biden. Because the, like, if you're hiding from us what your capacity is,

That has a direct impact on all of us. I mean, not just constituents of Pennsylvania. Senators are very powerful individuals. He has become an extremely prominent voice held up by people like Bill Maher as a potential presidential candidate. Now, I think that's preposterous because much of the Democratic base hates this guy at this point. But, you know, so that's why I don't.

I don't have any reluctance about it because I think there has been such an inclination among both parties, but in particular, Democrats have had some of the worst examples lately. If you think about Feinstein, if you think about Biden as well.

of trying to cover the reality of members and the president himself who were in decline, who were really not capable of fully functioning in the job. And I think it's an outrage to democracy. I think it's an outrage to, you know, Americans who deserve capable representation.

No, it's a great point. I mean, I think the hiding of Biden's cognitive decline, even though the entire public saw it, the hiding of it within the DC press and political circles of the Democratic Party is a massive scandal. And it's one of the reasons why presidents have a duty to disclose their medical records, because of course it is relevant, and then it's the same for senators. I think the only difference I would put there is that the reason Americans concluded that Biden had those problems was because they saw it for themselves. And we've seen some public

publicly disturbing behavior from Fetterman. There was that video circulating of him refusing to put on his seatbelt and kind of getting aggressive about it. But no, I agree. It's a huge issue. And I think you can see major changes in Fetterman. I mean, he fell asleep behind a wheel. Yeah.

He fell asleep behind the wheel coming back from the billboard. And yet almost killed somebody. And almost killed somebody. Right. Not to mention like himself and his wife who was in the back seat. After insisting, his staff tried to insist on picking him up from the airport. He wouldn't do it. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a direct, seems like a direct safety risk, but also obviously has consequence in terms of public policy.

Yeah, I just like to see like somebody, a professional's like, you know, examine him or I do think it warrants, you know, I don't think we should just forget about it and be like, oh, that's not our business or we don't, we're not capable. It is alarming and you can see it in some ways. And like I said, the way he talks about Israel, to me, that in and of itself is some sort of mental health problem. Like it's one thing to say, I support Israel. I care deeply for the Palestinian civilians. This needs to end, whatever. But he talks about it with this like glaring,

that Palestinians are being killed, not just Hamas, but in the most horrific ways possible. And that to me is mentally disturbing.

Let me get your reaction to Simone Sanders, D3, the guys put up on the screen. So, you know, she's gone from being a paid spokes, political spokesperson and operative to now a quote unquote journalist over at MSNBC. And she's reacting to this. She says, I don't know if you care about someone, you know, them personally airing your grievances in the pages of the paper just doesn't sit right with me, but to each their own, I guess. And then she got pushback from

a lot of people, but Josh Barrow in particular, she responded to. Let's put D4 up on the screen here as well. She says, here's the thing, Josh. I'm consistent and consistently I have the soul of giving people dignity. My follow-up questions are, did Sharif Street, the chair of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, know about this? Was Schumer aware or Senate leadership alerted? I'm not saying no one should say anything. Frankly, that's a willful misread of my statement. What I am saying is how

one goes about it matters. Ben did his job as a journalist, but the staff who seemed to say their only recourse was Ben Terrace, I'm not buying it and I'm fine to have my opinion about that. Lastly, not sure why you felt the need to attack me because of what I used to do. Regardless, that says more about you than me. So basically she's saying you should have raised these concerns with Chuck Schumer. But if the problems are as severe as is being depicted here, then

There's no one in the Democratic caucus who doesn't know there are issues and none of them has chosen to do anything or say anything because, you know, it's it's a Pennsylvania swing state seat, difficult to win, et cetera. So and he's more or less a reliable Democratic vote. So they just kept their mouth shut.

I actually think there's a big problem with media. You know, we've always had like people who were in government sort of migrate sometimes to media. Bill Moyers was the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson and became, you know, a great television journalist. It's not like it can't happen. The problem is with the dominance of cable news and 24-7 coverage,

That's pretty much all you have. And then so many times people who have been political hacks or party spokespeople and apparatchiks or government officials end up not just appearing on these networks, but as hosts. So now they're supposed to have a much different role. But you know, you look at Jen Psaki or Simone Sanders, there's plenty of them on Fox and

They're exactly the same. I mean, Jen, I listened to Jen Psaki. It sounds like she's giving White House, you know, press briefings. And of course, Simone Sanders is there as a Democratic Party representative. And the idea that if you have somebody like this in your caucus, it's fine to talk about it privately, but not publicly is such, it exhibits such contempt for the American people. You know, like we close ranks, we cover things up. And especially after watching what happened with Biden and how destroyed, how, you know, credibility that destroyed, what destroying that was for Democrats in the election and the media. It's

It's amazing they still think that way. I know. It really is incredible. And it does speak to your problem specifically of like, you know...

I have no problem. I have a perspective. You have a perspective. I think we're pretty upfront about that. But if you've been paid to be, you know, an operative for a specific political party and you're still close with the people that are, that's where you really start to have these, you know, these issues. And, you know, you see it with the crossover with Fox News. You see it with the crossover with MSNBC in particular. And I think it comes out here. I mean, the instinct to care. Look, I

I get it on like a human level, but the instinct to think that like protecting the feelings of Joe Biden was more important than defeating Trump, if that's your view, or, you know, advocating for issues that you're not going to be able to if there's not a Democrat in the White House or just the interest of public, the public having transparency around what's going on with the president of the United States, then I think you've got your your priorities pretty screwed up for someone who is holding themselves down as like a neutral journalist and analyst at this point.

I want to get to one last story here with you, Glenn, before we let you go, because I think this is extraordinary. And, you know, I'm just really interested what you think about it. So Claudia Scheinbaum, who's the very popular president of Mexico, who Trump seems to, for whatever reason, kind of like. We can put her image up on the screen here. She recently confirmed that

that Trump had generously offered to deploy U.S. troops in Mexico in order to combat the cartels. She said no and told him Mexico's sovereignty is inviolable and it is not for sale. We will never accept a U.S. military presence in our territory. This is something that Trump, and this is part of Project 2025. A lot of Republicans have been talking about, hey, we're going to designate the cartels as defenseless.

terrorists. And then we're going to be able to use these powers that presidents have grabbed post 9-11 in order to basically wage war without having to get permission of Congress. Trump also yesterday evening confirmed that he had made this generous offer to Mexico. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Mexico is saying that I offered to send U.S. troops into Mexico to take care of the cartel. She wants to know, is that true?

Do you think I'm going to answer that question? That's why I'm asking. We'll see. I will answer it. It's true. Absolutely. Because they should be here.

They are horrible people that have been killing people left and right. They've made a fortune on selling drugs and destroying our people. We lost 300,000 people last year to fentanyl and drugs. They're bad news. Yeah, that's true. If Mexico wanted help with the cartels, we would be honored to go in and do it. I told her that I would be honored to go in and do it. The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They're evil.

And, you know, we had 300,000 people die last year from fentanyl and all of that. What do you make of all that, Glenn, and in particular that connect to the war on terror?

It's an obvious replica of the war on terror, right? That we've identified these groups, these kind of shady transnational groups, not part of the government, but that are in certain countries. And then we just go in and wage war supposedly on those groups and ends up being a war on that country. You know, I, and of course it would have all the same failures. You're talking about extremely well-armed groups, like way more well-armed than the Taliban. And we couldn't win after fighting the Taliban for 20 years.

I think the broader issue here is this is a difference with Trump's point 2.0 is that he's so high on his own victory, his stature in the world, that when he speaks, he really does speak as if he's kind of the leader of the world. Yeah, that's right. Like he talks about, you know, he says, I want this, I want this, I want this, Panama, Greenland, et cetera, Canada. But also when he talks about like ending the war in Ukraine, he'll say,

Putin needs to change this. I don't like this. And then he'll turn around and chide the Ukrainians as though they're all competing for his approval. And this mentality is really alarming. Like, we want to go do this in Mexico. They better say yes. And I think the requirement of absolute loyalty to Donald Trump inside the White House makes all of that so much worse because he just gets that reinforced every day. Yeah, I think that's right. I also think the Supreme Court

Immunity decision probably makes him feel more YOLO as well. Certainly the efforts that were made in the offseason to strip away any of the factors of resistance that previously stood in his way. I mean, that was their learning from Trump 1.0 was basically like, you know, we didn't go far enough. We didn't indulge Trump's instincts enough. And so the Republican movement, not just Trump, but the Republican movement really set out

on an explicit project to make sure that would not be the case this time around. And so this bombing the cartels policy flows directly out of that. And we could put this next piece up on the screen as well, which is also extremely troubling. So they are exploring labeling some suspected cartel and gang members inside the U.S. as quote unquote enemy combatants.

Let me just read a little bit of this article. So they say this is a possible way to detain these individuals more easily and limit their ability to challenge their imprisonment. According to multiple people with knowledge, the enemy combatant designation could also be applied to suspected narco-terrorists outside the U.S., the people said, as a way to potentially give the U.S. justification to conduct lethal strikes against them. And so this reads to me, Glenn, as basically the court's

are have struck down the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I do suspect when that ultimately gets to the Supreme Court, they are probably also going to say this was, you know, an improper invocation on the merits. But in addition, they've been blocked from continuing to use this in various jurisdictions. The Supreme Court has said you have to facilitate release. You have to give some form of reasonable notice and due process, even for the individuals who you want to be able to sweep up in this.

So they're saying, OK, well, that pathway is maybe not really working out. So instead, we'll use this enemy combatants designation to do a different end run around the Constitution and not provide any sort of due process, expanding on some of the actions that were taken, you know, starting in the Bush administration. And all this, of course, comes in the context of.

Their analysis of who is a suspected alien enemy, who is a suspected cartel of gang member could be something as simple as like a tattoo or that you hail from a certain part of Venezuela or they suspect you do.

You know, this crystal is why I have been so nauseated and disgusted by that whole never Trump movement that came out of the Bush Cheney faction that did so much of the war on terror is because so much of what they claim to dislike about Trump beyond like the decorum and compartmental or ethical issues.

is a replica of exactly what they did. This is all sounds so familiar to me. I spent years and wrote books on all these issues. I remember David Frum had a cover story in the Atlantic and it was something like a huge picture of Trump and it said like, this is how authoritarianism is created. And I was like, is that like a playbook from your knowledge in the Trump, in the Bush administration? Because these are all the things that you did

A lot of this did get some restraint, but it is true they're playing on a vulnerability in American in American politics, which you referenced earlier, that the Supreme Court becomes extra deferential to the president when he has claims of national security and war. And we're waging, you know, we're in a war and an enemy combatant is who we're killing because it basically eliminates all constraints and it has all the same problems

all the same damages, all the threats to liberty that the war on terror had. And if you add on top of that, like an actual military action with our Southern neighbor in Mexico that they don't want, that would be one of the gravest violations of sovereignty in many years. Yeah, that's right. What would it take for you to forgive the number of Trumpers, Glenn? What would they need to do?

Every religion, every ethical system teaches that a prerequisite to forgiveness is an admission of guilt and an apology for it. None of them have done that with respect to these issues. I'm not saying they didn't say, oh yeah, the Iraq war was improperly executed, but with all the whole other Guantanamo torture, et cetera, unitary president, none that I know have acknowledged that or that they caused a lot of the problems now. So I think forgiveness should be kind of off limits.

We need like a Bush era truth and reconciliation commission for them to come clean, admit their sins so we can move forward. But Obama said we have to look forward, not backwards. So we never got that. Damn. Well, you know, next time, next time, maybe. Glenn, anything else that you're taking a look at that you want people to be aware of today?

No, I think you did a great job covering it. As you promised me, we're going to find some Glenn issues. And I think you did an excellent job of doing that. So no, I feel like we covered the gambit. All right, Glenn. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's always fun getting your perspective. And just a pleasure, sir. Thank you. You know I love the show, so I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for asking. My pleasure. The number one hit true crime podcast, The Girlfriends, is back with something new, The Girlfriends Spotlight.

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In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw up.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carvel. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So we are very excited to be joined by Anthony Klan, who is an independent journalist. He's the editor of the Klaxon down in Australia to break down some pretty stunning election results there. Welcome, Anthony.

Thank you. Great to be with you. Yeah, of course. So a lot of people are saying a lot of echoes of what just happened in Australia with what previously happened in Canada. Sort of a come from behind in your case, really landslide victory for the incumbent party, the center left party. Big disappointment from conservatives who had previously seemed like they could surge and pull off a victory. Not only that.

the leader of the Conservative Party, confusingly Liberal Party in Australia. But in any case, Peter Dutton, just like Pierre Poliev in Canada, actually lost his own seat. That's how bad the drubbing was. So just set up the dynamics here and give us a sort of top level view of what happened.

Of course. So the election, the federal election, Australia's federal election was held on Saturday. The leading the government of the day is the Labor Party, which is sort of centre left. It's been in power for three years. The centre right party, much the same as Canada, was the opposition. It came in. It was it had quite strong was quite strong in the polls. It was looking like it was quite a good contender and perhaps even going to win in around November.

about the time that Donald Trump came to power, and very similar to as we saw in Canada, which was also a centre-right opposition, the party sort of slumped in the polls over the early part of the year, particularly part of the campaign, the electoral campaign. The opposition here did particularly poorly, but it was an absolute drubbing. It was blood on the streets. It's an electoral wipeout. So there's sort of questions at the moment in Australia regarding the future

of this Conservative Party. Obviously, it's still going to be there, but the number of seats has just been pretty much wiped out. So we saw, obviously, we saw in Canada, the Conservative Party there was unsuccessful and the leader lost his seat. Same as in Australia. It's actually been quite a bit worse than Canada. The

There was talk of the government, current government in Australia, being forced into a minority government rather than a majority government, but it's a majority government and by a long way, by about 20 seats. So it's quite the outcome.

Let's go ahead, guys, and put F1 up on the screen. This is a tear sheet of one of the articles your outlet wrote in advance of the election. You said coalition, that's the opposition party headed for disaster, worst result in 80 years, according to this YouGov poll. Of course, us Americans love to think that everything is about us, but it does seem like Trump's policies and the backlash to such did have some reverberations in terms of this election. So help us understand how significant those dynamics were.

For sure. So there's quite a few issues at play here. So it wasn't just this the Trump effect, as they're calling it, but it definitely had a substantial impact. And it's difficult to know exactly what caused people to vote on the day. But clearly, I think over President Trump's first hundred days since inauguration, you've seen international markets, stock markets roiled, a lot of uncertainty.

And in those situations, people have voted for the incumbency, voted for the existing government, who have concerns with that sort of instability and the threats. It was also raised quite a lot regarding President Trump's threats against Canada, regarding tariffs, but also, you know, the sort of talk around annexing and that sort of thing made a lot of Australians a bit nervous, thinking, look, you know, we're a very close partner with the US, as is Canada. You know, this could be us. So I think that had quite a big impact.

It's also noteworthy the opposition leader here. He was very keen towards the end of last year sort of saddling up to this sort of MAGA side of things, Make America Great Again. He was sort of very, you know, quite happy to be associated with that as the winds were to his back and to Donald Trump's back. But then as things sort of started to fall apart a bit and the wheels sort of started to fall off in the US regarding Brexit,

some of the more extreme statements from the president. We've seen that our opposition party sort of trying to backpedal a bit and sort of said, oh, look, well, no, we're different. But by then it was very much in train. One particular noteworthy point during the campaign was we had the opposition leader standing next to a senator from his party.

And his senator said, look, I'm here. She said, I'm here. I want to make Australia great again. And that sort of caused quite an issue because, you know, that's MAGA right there. And she immediately said, look, no, it's not me. The media is obsessed with Donald Trump. And within 24 hours there was a photo of her with a Make America Great Again cap holding a miniature Donald Trump that surfaced from a few months before. So that was an interesting thing.

To the point of who's obsessed with whom with that one. Well, it is interesting because, you know, with Canada, obviously, like you were saying, the threats have been really overt. You know, Canada and U.S. huge trading partners and especially the threats to invade and annex Canada as the 51st state. Really, obviously, Canadians were not thrilled about that.

that. And anyone who seemed like they were even tangentially associated with Trump and his politics then sort of paid a price for that. I was listening to some Australia voters talk about why they voted the way that they did. And certainly the roiling of the markets and the way that's affecting people's market accounts, et cetera, that was certainly a part of it. But it also just

seemed like a general reaction against what was perceived to be an extreme direction from the US. I wonder if you could tease some of those things out as well. What were some of the things that Australians felt were coming from the US that were contrary to their values? Yeah, for sure. Look, I think sort of this conservative populism, and it was taking off quite well, or there's quite a bit of it going on last year. But it's often, it's difficult to tell. The polls were reflecting that the public wasn't as

as adverse to it as as as the actual electoral outcome states but i think people were increasingly uneasy about this sort of um this populism and this sort of extreme right wing uh uh extreme right wing uh activity as well as there's a lot of um us style sort of disinformation groups um astro turf groups whatever you want to call them that are sort of set up and pretend to be grassroots movements of ordinary australians um when in fact they're sort of run by uh

fossil fuels entities and sort of bad actors pretending to be someone they're not. So we've seen a lot of that surfacing in Australia the past 12 months particularly, and I think people have become increasingly aware of that. And we obviously have a much smaller market in Australia, so when you have this sort of activity happening, it's easier, when it is called out, it's easier for the broader public to see what's going on because we're much smaller. There's...

many fewer moving parts. So I think a lot of that's played a part as well. People have looked at some of the issues in Australia. We have very similar issues going on as on the east coast of the US there in particular regarding offshore wind turbines. Now, quite a few studies and experts have been looking into this area. We're finding a lot of disinformation groups, astroturf groups,

in the US that have sort of been pretending to be environmental groups, but are actually fossil fuelled back, fighting against these offshore wind turbines, obviously, because fossil fuels want to continue their business model. A lot of those same groups, same entities and same methods are being used on the east coast of Australia. So I think a lot more people were sort of waking up to that and combining those two together was sort of recoiled somewhat and voted for the existing government.

You know, one of the things that we've been trying to wrap our heads around here is how much sort of irrevocable damage Trump is doing. It's one thing the trade war. OK, a new president can come in and they can change the policy, et cetera. But Mark Carney in his victory speech really spoke about a sense of of real betrayal and a sense that even if the president

particular politician in the White House changes or the policy changes, that there's been a breach in the relationship that is going to cause Canada to go in another direction, sort of regardless of what happens from here on out. I was just wondering what the view is from Australia about the U.S. and whether there's been sort of an irrevocable change in the way that the U.S. is viewed by Australians.

I think it's much less... It's not as hectically viewed as the Canadians have viewed it. Obviously, there's been a very different relationship between the way that the president has treated Canada and Australia, at least vocally so far. I think the Australian...

public and the Australian authorities are sort of thinking, hang on, we need to reconsider a bit our position. We've sort of relied extremely heavily on the US as a security partner and partner and that sort of thing. I think the relationship will remain regardless. It's strong. It's, you know, it's not going anywhere. But I think it's sort of made people think a little bit, hang on, maybe we should stand on our own two feet a little bit more, which, you know, to some degree, that's obviously a good thing. And look, I don't think there's any sort of terminal long-term damage done there. It's just made people sort of wake up a little bit

Yeah. And what is what was the view of Anthony Albanese prior to this election? What are people's sense of his governance? So he was swept to power, came to power last three years ago. We have three year terms, which is quite unusual on the international stage. But three year terms, he came to power. It had been nine years of the conservative government in power before then. Now, they'd sort of as many many governments do, they'd fall into the trap of cronyism and corruption in parts.

And during that period, interestingly, Australia fell further towards corruption than any other OECD nation, according to Transparency International, over that nine-year period. And that's with the exception of Hungary, with which Australia tied. So it's not very well known. But during that period, we're obviously a fairly high base, but we fell...

We fell down the list substantially. A lot of that was due to Australia not having a National Integrity Commission, being a national body that oversees corruption or alleged corruption involving politicians. So the Albanese government, he came to power. He promised this brand-new...

National Anti-Corruption Commission that was going to set up and have transparent hearings and all the rest of it to hold government officials to account. Now, he brought one of these bodies in, but they sort of kneecapped it behind the scenes and made it have actions all in secret, basically all its hearings in secret. So you don't know what it's doing, and it's been pretty much a major flop, and it's being criticised from all sides. So I think a lot of people were very disappointed in that. He sort of made a lot of promises for his first term that he didn't come through with. He was all about

and accountability, but as soon as he got in, that all went out the window. But I think what's happened over the past six months with what's happened in the US and the Trump factor, then people have thought, well, look, we'll kind of forget about that for now. We've got bigger issues. We don't want this conservative government coming in. And it's basically a few of the issues with the conservative government

They're sort of, as the public's pointed out, they're behind in the times looking to rewind Australia a little bit rather than embracing renewable energy, of which we have plenty of sun and wind. They were looking at actually introducing nuclear power in Australia for the first time, despite the fact it was going to cost between two and five times as much. For no real reason, it was just sort of an ideological issue. So people were sort of...

I'm not particularly happy about that. But so it wasn't a good opposition for starters. But the Trump effect obviously played a pretty big role. Yeah. And I think I read what Dutton had said something about having a nuclear reactor in his writing that his opponent seized on. And how long he held that seat for, what, 24 years, something like that?

That's right. Yeah, more than two decades. And it had been on a small margin. He had it by about 1.4%, I believe, the seat of Dixon in Brisbane, which is halfway up the Australian coast. So there were a few questions as to whether he was going to hold that seat, but he's lost it quite convincingly of about 6% swimming against him. Now, this issue with the nuclear reactors was something that's

We picked up on quite early on in the piece and it was coming from a lot of the same actors, the fossil fuels groups. One of these in particular in Australia is called the Institute of Public Affairs. Now, it's sort of a proxy almost for fossil fuels interests. And this is where Peter Dutton, the opposition leader, launched his nuclear reactive policy about 18 months ago.

So he actually launched it, this fossil fuels lobby group. And you're looking at these things, these small modular nuclear reactors that he was spruiking. They don't actually exist anywhere in the world in a commercial basis. And they were going to cost about six times more than normal electricity anyway. So it was pie in the sky sort of stuff.

And it was seen by many experts as just a way of prolonging fossil fuels. So obviously they opened themselves up to this whole huge issue of nuclear power in Australia. And beyond the economics of it, you've got the issue of we haven't had nuclear power before. So a lot of people sort of a bit uneasy about the idea. And it brings up the whole the whole specter of nuclear energy. And obviously he left himself open there. And the question was, hey, look, would you have a reactor in your backyard, in your electorate? And he said, of course. And obviously people in these electorates

weren't so keen about that. They were not so excited about that idea. Last question for you. How did some of these independent movements like the Teals, how did they play into these election results?

Yeah, so Australia has a much the same as the US, two major parties, not quite as tied in as the US, but we have two major parties. Last election, there was a group of independents that came about. They were called the Community 200 Independents. Basically, fundraising model was set up to get independents into government because usually you've got all the same actors that

the fossil fuels, the big banks, et cetera, that are funding the two major parties. So this was sort of a new model that came in and they were very successful and they called it the teal wave last time around. Half a dozen or more independents came into power. This time around, those same independents are there. There's been a landslide to the ALP, to the existing government, which is centre-left,

They have the majority of power, but the independents from last time, the teal wave is still there. Most of those people, if not all of them, are back in again, as well as a couple of other gains. And that's more of a long-term strategy to get more independents into government, into Australian government, with the idea being there's less power to the original backers, the original donors of the two major parties. Amazing. Well, thank you, Anthony, so much for joining us and helping us to understand what's going on there. Tell people where they can find you and follow your work.

Oh, thank you. You can find us at the Klaxon, K-L-A-X-O-N.com.au. And we're an investigative news site covering all the other, the stories that the other majors aren't. Thank you. Fantastic. Great to meet you. And thank you again for joining us. Thanks so much.

All right, guys, that does it for today's global edition of Breaking Points. Thank you so much for joining us. And I just want to give a shout out to everybody who's been signing up as a premium member. We've had a huge surge of support, I think attributable to excitement around the Friday show and just all that's going on in the news and our efforts to cover it. So thank you so much for supporting us. It makes a huge, huge difference. And we'll see you guys tomorrow.

This season of Revisionist History, we're investigating everything from the secret behind the perfect nooks and crannies in Thomas' English muffins to the merits of Paw Patrol against its critics. There's some things that really piss me off when it comes to Paw Patrol. It's pretty simple. It sucks. My son watches Paw Patrol. I hate it. Everyone hates it. Except for me. Listen to Revisionist History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Leavittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We need to talk about the war on drugs.

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