7/30/24: Kamala Vs Trump Panel, JD Vance ' Cat Ladies', White Dudes For Kamala Zoom Call, Biden SCOTUS Reforms, Shocking Secret Service Failure On Trump, Israelis Storm Torture Camp
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Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We are very excited about the show today because we're going to have a big old election 2024 panel. They're going to tackle who's up, who's down. There was some leaked J.D. Vance audio revealing perhaps some electoral anxiety on that side. We're also going to get into the big cat.

That lady debate, finally. It'll be fun. Much anticipated. We're also gonna have them tackle this whole Karen's for Kamala and white dudes for Kamala situation. So looking forward to hearing what they have to say about that. Also yesterday, Joe Biden announcing a push for major Supreme Court reforms. Kamala Harris joining that. So we'll break that down for you, what it means, whether or not it is going anywhere. More revelations, I feel like I say this literally every day about Secret Service failures on the day of the Trump assassination attempt.

Now we have the text messages that cops and Secret Service were sending to themselves, complete with pictures of the shooter.

hour and a half before this all unfolds. I mean, it really is wild what we're learning at this point and how this 20 year old was able to completely outsmart and stay ahead of all the cops and all the law enforcement that was there on the ground. We're also taking a look at some wild scenes coming out of Israel. This is gonna sound like an exaggeration. It literally is not. A mob stormed multiple Israeli military bases in Israel.

in defense of the right of Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinians. I'm not kidding you. That's what happened. It's sort of like,

You take Abu Ghraib prison scandal, you take January 6th, you put it all together in terms of American political context. So we're actually gonna talk to an Israeli journalist about his thoughts as he was watching all of this unfold. And it's actually really shaken some of his own conceptions about his state, which is interesting. His viewpoint, he's sort of like a liberal Zionist. So really looking forward to speaking to him about what this means for the state of Israel. And of course, very consequential in terms of our support of that state and their continuing atrocities in Gaza.

Yeah, I didn't believe it at first, but it's actually all true. And the way you know it's true is that even the liberal Israelis are like, hey man, this is totally out of control. So anyway, super interesting. Before we get to that, as we teased yesterday, we do a big announcement now. Let's put this up there on the screen. We are offering a 30-day free trial of our premium subscription.

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It's crazy. We thought we were going into this election of like, no one's really gonna care about this matchup between these two dudes that they're sick of. And now suddenly, I don't know that I've ever seen interest in the political horse race as high as it is right now. That's the highest it's ever been. Yeah, so-

Thank you to all of you who've been tuning in and supporting us and liking and sharing, and especially thank you to our premium subscribers. We really appreciate your support. That's right. All right, let's get to the panel. We are joined by an A-plus panel this morning. This is sort of like our inaugural 2024 political panel, so you guys should both feel extremely honored. On the right, we have Ryan Gerdusky, political commentator and the author of the National Populist Newsletter on Substack, which I am told Sagar highly recommends. I do.

And on the left, we have Michael Starr Hopkins, who is a fantastic political commentator and host of It Matters. Great to see you, gentlemen. Good to see you guys. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. So we got a few different topics we want to tackle with you, but I wanted to start by just sort of getting your general sense of where the race is today. And to kick that off, we just got some leaked audio from JD Vance on like a fundraising call where he's talking about Kamala Harris being switched in for Joe Biden and what he describes as a political sucker punch. Let's take a listen to that. All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch. The bad news is

that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might say, Kamala Harris is a lot younger and Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did. So Ryan, let me just start with you, react to those comments. And who do you see as the favorite in this race at this point?

Well, I mean, what he said was true because Joe Biden was having serious issues, serious cognitive issues. And Democrat internal polling showed them in a statistically tied race in New Jersey. And when you are behind in New Jersey and you're losing Virginia and you're losing New

in your own internal polling, that's a really bad state for Democrats. So Kamala Harris changes the race in the sense that New Jersey is no longer a toss-up state with her as the nominee. That being said, Trump still leads in the head-to-head

national polls by about a point, maybe a little over or under, depending on what polls you're looking at, which he's never led before. He's still in a better state than he was in 2016 and 2020. He still leads in all three major Rust Belt states. Republican voter party registration is significantly up in all swing counties. So in the end of the day, I mean, Trump probably still has about a 60% chance of being the president in January 2025. Michael, what do you think?

I mean, look, Donald Trump got shot and then had the Democrat or rather the Republican convention and really saw no bump coming out of it. So if I'm the Trump campaign, I'm worried. Yeah, they're in the lead right now. But Kamala Harris still hasn't had the convention. She hasn't named her VP nominee. You're seeing this huge enthusiasm boost among young people, among women, among African-Americans, women.

I think it's really problematic for the Trump campaign because they've been running the same playbook against Joe Biden for the last, you know, almost six years. Well, now they're running a very different race. And the things that I think they want to attack her on are really going to ignite that base of support among women and African-Americans.

All right, so let's put this up there on the screen. Let's start with, what is it, A2, please, just kind of a general summary from Frank Luntz. And I want to get Ryan's reaction here to how some of the state of the race has changed. It says Kamala Harris is rebuilding a more traditional Democratic coalition, more pats to 270. Trump is more popular at any time than in the past four years, as Ryan noted. Biden's retirement is wildly popular, and RFK Jr. is significantly free-falling in respect to disaffected Democrats are mostly going to Kamala while disaffected Republicans resign.

remain with RFK so far. So Ryan, strategically, what do you think that the Trump campaign has to do differently now that Kamala is in the race? And perhaps either adjust messaging, address strategy, where do you see their campaign right now? Well, that's the first time I was like, Frank Luntz, let's hear all these mistakes he's about to say. We picked someone you both would dislike. Yeah.

So I think what the Trump campaign more or less was doing to Joe Biden was running a very scaled back effort. I mean, they were letting Joe Biden hang himself in the wind. And every time he spoke, it was a negative reaction for Joe Biden. With Kamala Harris, they have to be a little more aggressive because 2019, when she ran for president, she took wildly unpopular positions that many people don't remember. So.

So reminding people of the positions that she took now that she's running away from as fast as she possibly can. You know, every position from Medicare for all to gun buybacks. I'm sure she's going to be against banning all plastic straws, which she said, you know,

Uh, in 2019, I think that, uh, I think that that's really where, uh, they have to sit there and switch. And I think it took them a second, a second longer than it should have for them to, uh, really pivot, um, into a different kind of campaign. One more, much more aggressive than the other, but they are outspending, um, Kamala pretty significantly in almost every swing state now. Hmm.

So Michael, in addition to like, they'll get to cat lady and some of that stuff in a minute and DEI and all of that. But the core argument that's being made by the official campaign apparatus and the Speaker Johnsons of the world is the one effectively that Ryan is making that Kamala Harris had these quote unquote extreme positions in when she was running in the Democratic presidential primary. She's already come out and like said, I no longer

believe any of those things anymore. I'm a totally different person. To me, that's more of the true knock on her is that she doesn't actually have any ideological grounding. She shifts depending on what's convenient for her in that particular political moment at that particular time. But if you're advising the Democratic Party, how do you defend against that attack, either that she's a flip flopper or that she's too radical, extreme, liberal, coastal, etc., etc.?

Yeah, I mean, look, Kamala Harris has been called a lot of things, but at her core, she's been a prosecutor. She's been an attorney general. So the idea that she's too liberal, I think, is probably not something that's going to stick. And look, when Republicans are running that Democrats are against plastic straws and Democrats are running that Republicans are against abortion, I think that's going to be a really problematic message because every hit that

that Republicans are gonna try to take on Kamala Harris is gonna be about liberal, about climate change, about things that really aren't driving voters right now. The thing that's driving voters right now is fear that Trump's an authoritarian and fear about the banning of abortion and the banning of autonomy. And so it just feels very out of touch what Republicans are talking about right now. And it's why I think the label of weird is really working for Democrats because what Republicans are talking about is weird.

We'll save the weird debate that's coming for the cat lady section. Let's put this up there on the screen. Kamala Harris's favorability. And what it is, is that her morning consult, July 22nd, her approved disapprove was 43-51. Whereas after she entered the race, it is now approved disapprove 50-46. Almost all

All of that is Democrats who previously viewed her disfavorably and have basically switched. But it represents something significant, Ryan, which is a very enthusiastic Democratic base that we haven't seen previously. So with Trump, how would he adjust in terms of thinking about

the race, where he no longer has the significant enthusiasm advantage that he once had. And does it mean reaching out to swing voters? Does it just mean driving up that percentage even more? How would you see it? Well, I mean, Biden, so against Biden, yeah, he had a huge, huge advantage. I mean, but Biden was...

I mean, literally, he made Ben Carson look energetic. So I think that that's really a position that he was thriving in. I think that in, you know, against Kamala, the difference is as popular as she is, she's still 10 points behind non-white voters than Joe Biden was in 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal poll, New York Times poll. She's the worst performing Democrat ever with African-Americans since Richard Nixon. Yeah.

And she, once again, the campaign has really just began. She hasn't sat down for a major interview. She hasn't asked, hey, what did you know about Joe Biden's cognitive decline? They're going to make her own Joe Biden's issues over the economy, over the immigration. Obviously, they've already started doing that. And I think for Trump,

campaign is, you know, run up the margins. Because she's doing so poorly with non-white voters, the Sun Belt still seems out of reach for her, although obviously Georgia's in a little bit of a tighter position. And he now still leads in every Rust Belt state. Pennsylvania is the only Rust Belt state, by the way, that the polls were pretty accurate for in both 2016 and 2020. And Trump's

It's the RCP average, but it's three points. On other polls, it's about two points. So in the state with the most accurate polling, Trump's lead is pretty substantial. So if you look at the—I was just going to say, if you look at the Fox News battleground polls, they're tied up in all those states with the exception of Minnesota where Kamala Harris is up by six.

So I actually agree with you, Ryan. I think it probably is 60-40 in favor of Trump at this point. Because if you look historically at the polls, you're right to point out 2020 at this time, Joe Biden was up like nine points in these same polls. However, I don't think it's accurate to say that according to the polls, she is significantly down in the battleground states.

And she's obviously dramatically improved Democratic performance among young people and among all voters of color, black and Latino in particular. That's not true, that's not true. That is 100% true. It's absolutely not, Crystal, because what you're doing is you're looking- As compared to Joe Biden, 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

as compared to Joe Biden. As compared to Joe Biden post-debate where he literally said he defeated Medicaid and you both, by the way, had aneurysms live on air. Yes, she's done better from that point. Right. She's about exactly where Joe Biden was in March, though. And she's still the worst performing Democrat right now among Latinos and Blacks in modern history. There's a reason for that, though. So,

when you talk to African Americans, one of the biggest worries about her isn't whether she can win. It's whether white people will vote for her. It's very much the Obama-esque Iowa situation. Black support has a tipping point. We have to believe that white people will vote for her before we're willing to give our support. Now you're seeing this huge tipping point, which is why you're seeing the influx in voter support, especially among young people. You know, you see the, uh,

African-American women for Kamala, the black men for Kamala, now there's the Latinos for Kamala. You're going to see a huge inflection point, which there's an undercurrent

Trump had that undercurrent in 2016 and we couldn't really pull for it because these were unlikely voters. I think you're gonna see the same thing in this election among likely voters, Trump is winning. But among unlikely voters, new voters, young voters who aren't usually engaged, you're gonna see I think a 2%, maybe three point bump. Ryan, one thing just really quickly, I'd like you to weigh in on something I've been thinking about and I wonder if you think there's anything to this.

When it was Biden versus Trump, it was very clear who was the change candidate, right? Biden's the incumbent, he is like, run and restore democracy, right? I mean, that's his whole, I want to bring things back to a pre-Trump era. That's his whole pitch, right? Very clearly the incumbent status quo candidate and Trump very clearly the change candidate.

Kamala Harris, I think, scrambles some of that calculus and makes it a lot less clear. And I think she is trying to play for the lane of I'm the change candidate in a year where I think that's probably pretty compelling. Now, that may seem counterintuitive given that she's the sitting vice president of the country. But let's be honest, she was basically sidelined by the Biden administration, so she isn't

doesn't have that sense of incumbency around her. And just by merit of the fact that she is a lot younger and she is a biracial woman, she feels really fresh and different, which is why you're seeing so much unbelievable off the charts enthusiasm, fundraising, etc. I mean, do you see that as a challenge that the Trump campaign is gonna have to grapple with? What do you think are some of the weaknesses of the Trump campaign and mistakes that they're making at this point?

That's a really good, really good observation. I agree with that because on the surface, it does look like the change candidate. And then when you look and you boil down to a lot of the positions, she is the vice president. She will, it depends on how much of Biden's resume, Biden's time in office.

a six to kamala versus being a brand new candidate i mean the great irony of kamala harris is three weeks ago she was online anyway she was considered somebody who looked at the show veep and thought it was aspirational and now she is the great savior of the democratic party overnight i think a lot of things have to happen in the sense that i don't really kamala doesn't really have a campaign theme yet it's only been 10 days it feels a lot longer but it's only been a few days

Over the next five weeks, you know, she will be testing since she'll have a VP, she'll have the DNC, and she'll probably have her first series of really, you know, major interviews. And then we'll be able to sit there and see, okay, can she hold up to, you know, the expectations that have been presented by a lot of Democratic commentators? Because as of right now, she's a fairly untested candidate. She only ran for nationwide office once and it didn't go super well. So I think in the next five weeks is really where it's going to boil down.

Michael, you think that's fair, Michael, before we move on to cat ladies? Yeah, I do. I'll point out 60% of her donations in the last seven days have been from new donors. And I think that's the number that should really scare Republicans.

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Okay, Cat Lady. People have been asking for it. Let's get into it. We're going to have multiple days here on breaking points of Cat Lady conversations. First the male panel, then the female panel. So let's start originally with the J.D. Vance original comments. They've been making the rounds. Jennifer Aniston's very upset. The weird label has now been made, and it all traces back to this interview. Let's take a listen. Look, what I was basically saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,

by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? Ryan, this clip has basically gone everywhere amongst liberal women. It's a

supposedly very animating. What do you make of this, I guess, in the context both of the Vance pick, but more broadly, the pickup of the attack immediately after Kamala Harris became the nom, or I guess the presumptive nominee for the Democrats, the circle. Do you think it's gonna be a problem broadly for Trump? What's your just reaction?

I think, I mean, listen, Trump was shot two weeks ago and no one talks about it today. I think it depends on how long this news cycle lasts for. It obviously wasn't a great rollout. That being said, I don't think that it was the end-all, be-all rollout. The whole thing about being weird is a different version of what Democrats have been saying about Trump for years, which is that he's not normal. I mean, I've had to hear not normal for a decade at this point over and over and over again.

but at the same exact time, I don't know how much of a kill shot they think this is among the base. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, if their ticket improves among white men by two points from where it was or three points from where it was in 2020, he's going to an overwhelming landslide. It is that much of the margin. And of the women who are...

You know, women, we have a very different split electorate among men and women. I don't know how many women they would have won to begin with in terms of women who are so deeply offended by this that they won't vote for him. They might be deeply offended and they still vote for him, but I don't think that they are that deeply offended where they won't vote for him. Interesting. Yeah, go ahead. Michael, do you think that it's kind of

funny because the JD Vance pick comes at like the one moment when the Trump campaign really is riding highest, right? He just has survived this assassination attempt. We got the photo with the American flag and all this stuff. And right in that moment, because of the assassination attempt, all of the chatter about we got to pull Joe Biden off this ticket temporarily quieted so that people, myself included, thought, all right, Democrats are stuck with this dude. That's the context in which the JD Vance pick is made.

Do you think given this comments and others that have been made, do you think that they regret that choice already?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, J.D. Vance was a self-gratification pick. No one really likes him but Don Jr. and Peter Thiel. And so, you know, I think especially after that audio came out, I'd be surprised if Donald Trump is even talking to J.D. Vance. It's hard for me to believe that he would drop him from the ticket at this point. I don't even know if legally that could happen.

But if he could, I think there would be real conversation about it because the problem with J.D. Vance is there is no real audience for him. Like people just don't like him. He comes off as that guy who hangs around and thinks he's smarter than everybody who just like hangs out in his basement in his

you know, as he tries to double down on Trumpism, he lacks that kind of charisma that Trump has. You know, I don't like Trump, but there is a side of him, the way he talks, the way he kind of carries himself, that, you know, you kind of laugh at. There's nothing to laugh when it comes to J.D. Vance. Ryan, we'll get your reaction before we actually play what Trump himself had to say. He's got tremendous support. And he really does among a certain group of people, people that like families. I mean, you know,

He made a statement having to do with families. That doesn't mean that people that aren't a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else, it doesn't mean that a person doesn't have... He's not against anything.

but he loves family. It's very important to him. He grew up in a very interesting family situation and he feels family is good. And I don't think there's anything wrong in saying that. All right, Ryan, give us your react, both to what Michael said and to the Trump clip.

Yeah, Trump is just so funny. I'm also very sleep deprived and semi delirious. So when it comes to what Michael said, you know, the election is won and lost in the Rust Belt. J.D. Vance is one of only two U.S. senators that are Republicans from the Rust Belt. I guess Indiana, too. But

of major states that are electorally up for play, one of two Republican senators. He is also a Dynamo fundraiser who's bringing in tech money for Donald Trump that was previously

off the ticket. He is also, if you talk about age dynamic, he's our first millennial candidate. You know, that's a different kind of thing. His life experiences of what majorly affected him in life is the Iraq war, is the WallStreet.com bubble, sorry, the real estate crash.

things that affected us, things that affected people like you, people like me. And the fastest growing group of people who are becoming Republicans are Gen Xers and older millennials. And I think doubling down on that base is kind of very important. Yeah. Yeah.

Let me just say though, I mean, yes, he's a senator in the Rust Belt. He underperformed every other Republican who was running as the lowest favorability. I mean, what you're talking about is basically like identity politics, right? Like, oh, because they're from the same region and they shared the same identity, they're gonna vote for him. And I saw an interesting analysis, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, Ryan, that

The childless cat lady thing, if it was just that, okay, you're right. The news cycle is gonna move on. It's gonna be a blip that we all basically forget about very shortly. But-

It's indicative of a style that he picked up in order to both try to appeal to a MAGA base that was skeptical of him because his prior comments about Donald Trump. And also I saw someone saying this online, which I thought was really interesting. He wants to change some of the economic orthodoxy of the Republican Party, but he doesn't wanna sound like a Democrat when he's arguing for something like the child tax credit. So instead of framing it like the way Trump does, like, he just loves families.

He's gotta make it in this sort of like own the libs aggressive off putting way where it's not I support families. It's I hate people who don't have kids. So to me, that's the bigger problem with him is that he's adopted this like edgy online persona that is well suited to being a right wing online influencer but is not particularly well suited to winning over a general election audience.

Well, as someone who worked in the 2022 J.D. Vance Ohio Senate campaign, he was the only contender, as you said, he underperformed. He was the only contender against a serious opponent against Congressman Tim Ryan. Everyone else, I think the governor was running against a dog catcher from Columbus. So it's, and he was also the only non-incumbent. And so that's why how you get to a position where you are performing lower. Federal candidates are more competitive than state candidates are, especially against incumbents. But the place in the,

in the state that he performed the most poorly and underperformed the most was actually the Appalachian region where you would think he had the deepest ties. Right, but he overperformed in Cincinnati, which is the whole myth that he doesn't appear to appeal to city people or suburban people is also not true. I think he overperformed Trump in Cincinnati. But nevertheless, and yet still, the idea that

He is trying to make this personality for himself that is not real. Remember, J.D. Vance was a literal celebrity in 2015. He had a movie made after him with Oscar nominees and Oscar winners.

If he wanted to continue that route, it would have been a much easier place to always be the white Republican who hates white Republicans. This is not an act. This is who he is. Can he be a little simpler on the campaign trail and speak in smaller sentences?

but that's also what goes on with high IQ, very smart people is they often talk too much. I don't know that it's the length of the sentences that's the problem here, Ryan. I think that, I think that, yeah, no, I think it is. I think that it's overly intellectualized ideas. I think he'll get better over time. And once again, this race is won and lost by people who have went through his life experiences. There is no other candidate in this race. Marco Rubio did not have the life experience of knowing what the fentanyl crisis was like. Uh,

You know, the governor of North Dakota, I forgot his name already, did not have a life experiences. Kamala Harris was living in Canada for portions of these things when she was being raised there, you know, before she came back to accuse Joe Biden of racism. This is a different set of things.

J.D. Vance speaks to certain voters' life, and they relate to him. And as much as everyone's talking about, you know, the cat lady comments and all their stuff, the number one downloaded movie on Netflix all last week was Hillbilly Elegy. The number one bought book in the country was Hillbilly Elegy. People are genuinely interested in him. That is not being seen on Twitter all the time. Yeah, that's a good point. So it's his lived experience, in other words. Yeah.

- Yeah, they always say that matters for BIPOC women is their lived experience. It matters for millennials too. - I do wanna get your reaction to this, Michael, because Ryan is correctly identifying. Like if Kamala wants to play to win, she's going for 270 electoral votes.

You're not going to go on some go big strategy. All the conversation before we get to the whole, you know, Karen's for Harris, white dudes for Harris and all that is, I think, correctly identifying that you actually do need to win the white men and female vote at the same margins he did last time. So then in the VP direction for Kamala, which way do you think she's going to go? Is it one that, you know, as you said, tries to excite, you know, younger or Latino or black voters, which obviously would be nice to have, but you

really need white male voters in the Rust Belt. How do you think she's going to think about it in this context? Yeah, I think she's going to try to drive up some support among college educated men, but I think she's really going to try to drive up support among suburban women, among young women, young educated women. You know, just anecdotally to the cat lady comment, I talk to a lot of friends who have struggled to have kids. My wife and I, you know, we want to have a family one day and we don't yet. And

one of the things that really hit with that comment was just kind of the meanness of it because people really, it's hard to have kids. It's expensive. There's, you know, if you go through IVF, that's $30,000, $40,000. And so when you talk down to a lot of these people and their struggles, I think

that really could resonate among, especially like suburban families, young families who are trying to get started, who already are having trouble buying new homes. And now they're trying to start families late in life. And they see people like JD Vance criticize them. It's something that among my wife and her friends, it's been a really big inflection point. So I think that's something the Trump campaign should really worry about. Yeah, it's possible. But I

It's not like your wife was ever gonna vote for Trump anyways. So Ryan, that's any final thoughts I think from you sir, just on this general dynamic as it continues and where you see that competition in the Rust Belt and with Kamala and her VP pick that she might go in that direction.

Uh, you know, I've, I've heard all the names, everyone else heard Shapiro, Kelly. I probably would say my, I guess, and I don't have much insight, but I think it's probably be Kelly if I had to guess. Um, but Shapiro, you know, Shapiro has been making a fight for it. Kelly's been spending a lot of money for it. Um, so we'll see. Um, and it's going to come down to, you know, those major three swing States. I have not seen any evidence that the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt and serious play outside of, of where it's been. And, um,

Well, you know, we'll see. We'll see a lot of people, a lot of people from a political activist wanting to register a new house in Pennsylvania over the next couple of months.

The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard pressed to forget. I did something in '88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh gosh, the US Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes, we're going out there smashing into each other full force.

Listen to The Podium on the iHeart app or your favorite podcast platform weekly and every day during the games to hear the Olympics like you've never quite heard them before.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance. And it was peak TV. This is new Scandal content.

content for your eyes for your ears for your hearts for your minds well suit up gladiators grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes listen to unpacking the toolbox on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts I've been thinking about you I want you back in my life it's too late for that I have a proposal for you come up here and document my project all you need to do is record everything like you always do

One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Michael, I want to get your reaction to these affinity groups that have sort of gone wild. I mean, listen, political affinity groups, this is like oldest politics, right? But so first we had a huge organizing call that was like black women for Kamala. Then it was black men for Kamala. Then we had other minority groups. And then we went all in with the

affectionately named Karens for Kamala and the White Dudes for Kamala. Let's take a look at a little bit of the content that is being created out of the Karens for Kamala Zoom call. Ariel Fodar, affectionately known as Mrs. Frazzle to her combined audience of over 1.5 million followers, is here to help gentle parent us through this election.

I'm going to share some do's and don'ts for getting involved in politics online and navigating the toxicity that comes with it. And spoiler alert, as much as the toxicity can come from the outside, it can come from us too. So first, don't isolate yourself. We can do our best work when we're in community together like we are tonight because the toxic feels smaller when we support each other. But

Don't make it about yourself. As white women, we need to use our privilege to make positive changes. If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat. And instead, we can put our listening ears on. So.

Do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people, we have a lot to learn and unlearn. So do check your blind spots.

You are responsible for your algorithm. So, Michael, I personally find this woman to as as a white woman, as a member of the white woman community, I find this to be extremely irritating and off-putting. But more I you know, when you start having white identity affinity groups, I get really uncomfortable. And I wonder what your reaction is, Michael.

Yeah, I mean, innately, it makes you a little nervous. You get a white guy call, you wonder whether it's gonna end up like Charlottesville. But I think this is how, if it's gonna happen, how you want it to happen. I'm not afraid necessarily of the white guy call and the white- But Michael, what if it's the white guys for Trump call? Then how do you feel about it?

Yeah, it makes me nervous because of what has happened when white men congregate around Trump. In and of themselves, I'm not worried about a bunch of white guys together. That's just called a fraternity. But when you put them together around Trump, then other things start to happen. So, you know, I think there's got to be context to it.

Ryan, I know you're running low on time, so I want to get your reaction. Because I actually saw you, not defend per se, but you were like, hey, it's actually smart to reach out for white people. There's a lot of white people in this country who vote. That would be great. Yeah, the real question is, should Trump just have white guys for Trump, white women for Trump, and all of those calls? Because clearly you can raise a hell of a lot of money whenever you do a phone call like this. I would have given someone everything I have in my bank account if after she was done talking they said, ma'am, this is a Wendy's. I literally was...

That is so insufferable. Yeah, yeah. I watched the white guys for Trump call, and the one interesting thing was they said, what policies has Biden championed that are positive for white men? That's actually a really important question, one that people are not allowed to talk about, and I think...

I really think that there is a new door that has been opened in politics because of this. We are going to talk about what are the interests of white people in this country and white voters in this country, by the way, which overlap with many, many other people. Some of them are white-exclusive policy. But there are a lot, 200 million white people in this country, and no one has ever, one, asked for their vote, and two, specifically asked for their vote, and two, talked about policies that work in their benefit. We kind of have comments like suburban women, white,

blue-collar worker, which just means a white person of a certain income level. But I think that it is a really important conversation because there's millions of people. The reason Trump became president in 2016 was speaking towards people who felt marginalized and in a

invisible. And maybe this is the very first step, maybe not these calls, but the very first step to having a conversation to how to reach out to help the lives of people who feel marginalized and invisible. I mean, as a class first leftist, I find that I don't support that way of looking at things. Michael, I wonder if you feel that we need to do more, spend more time thinking about what would be good specifically for white Americans?

Yeah, I mean, look, a rising tide lifts all boats. So usually what helps white Americans should to some degree help other people, but that hasn't been historically true. And so I think, yeah, focusing a lot of attention on what's going to help white America is that's just the norm. So I think allocating our time towards making sure that groups, minority groups, subgroups,

being lifted up is really the focus. But I do think you do have a little bit of a point in terms of the Democratic Party has to be better at talking to white men. Because as much as I talk to Democrats, when I talk to kind of independent and right-leaning men, they do feel like they're being left out of a lot of the conversation. And whether that's right or not, it's how they feel. And so it has to

is to be addressed. That's my last question actually for Ryan, which is, there has been a long obsession in Republican politics about increasing minority vote share. Obviously, this would change things in a different direction. Do you think then that because of the recognition amongst the Trump campaign, are they gonna continue to try and go down the blacks for Trump, Latinos for Trump lane, which

very rarely, if ever, actually materializes? Or is it going to come down to the recognition of, as you just said, all we have to do is take Kamala's white male percentage from 17 to 15, and she's going to lose the entire election. How do you think they're thinking about it internally? You know, from what I've heard is obviously they're looking to double down on Hispanic growth that happened in 2020 and black growth that happened in 2020. Yeah.

But that being said, the election is about white voters. White voters in the Midwest and the Rust Belt are the most important group of people in this election. And as the whole rising tide lifts all boats, that's true. But there are certain problems that are specific to the black community. There are certain problems that are specific to the white community. We have a suicide epidemic among middle-aged white men that is very specific to their group. We have had a fentanyl crisis. We've had a deindustrialization crisis. We've had a rural America crisis.

a crisis in rural America that has certainly affected them differently. We have a suicide crisis among white teenagers that is differently than among like the homicide crisis among black teenagers. These are just different things. It's not wrong to talk about them, to them about how to make their lives better about what's affecting them. Talk about reducing crime and improving an economy. Yeah, that helps everybody.

but speaking specifically to the things that are affecting them where they live, that's something that people haven't done that Trump did pretty well in 2016 that I hope J.D. Vance and Trump do this time around. - If memory serves correctly, the one demographic group that Democrats actually improved their performance on in 2020 was white men. - That's true. - So I guess the Democrats are doing something right with regards to this group.

Gentlemen, great to see you both. I really appreciate both your perspectives. It was great to see you both. It really was. It was fun. Thanks, guys. Thank you. The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget. I did something in 88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh, gosh. The U.S. Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes. We're going out there, smashing into each other, full force.

Listen to The Podium on the iHeart app or your favorite podcast platform weekly and every day during the games to hear the Olympics like you've never quite heard them before.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's and I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, unpacking the toolbox where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show to officially unpack season three of scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three mesmerizing, but

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth-pulling scene that kicks off a romance.

And it was Peak TV. This is new scandal content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling, as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words. Yeah.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

President Biden has decided to give us proof of life and that he does in fact exist. He's decided to unveil a new Supreme Court proposal. He did it yesterday at the LBJ library in Austin, Texas. It was replete not only with the policy proposal, but with several old man moments. And so we will give it to you in all its glory. Let's take a listen. I'm calling for a constitutional amendment called no one is above the law amendment. It holds

I mean this sincerely. It holds that there's no immunity for crimes former president committed while in office. The second thing I'm asking for, we've had term limits for presidents of the United States for nearly 75 years after the Truman administration. And I believe we should have term limits for Supreme Court justices of the United States as well. Supreme Court's current ethics code is weak and even more frightening, voluntary. Voluntary.

Any code of Congress must be enforceable. Under the reform I propose, justice would be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, recuse themselves in cases in which they have -- they or their spouses have a financial or other conflict of interest. Most people don't realize that Congress passed a law decades ago that says all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, have to recuse themselves in such cases. But the current justices insist

on enforcing that requirement themselves without any public oversight.

We're compulsive. Okay, so what we can learn not only from the speech itself, which by the way, we didn't even include some of the best tangents and others. It was truly something of a performance, is obviously Biden is trying to use here the mantle of the presidency and his outgoing presidency to help elevate some of the best issues for Kamala Harris. Supreme Court has been a major flashpoint in the election, especially over both Roe versus Wade, but also the Trump immunity case and several other decisions that have come down as of late. Let's put this up

there on the screen. Biden, well, at least somebody in the White House laid some of the details out here in a Washington Post op-ed. It basically comes down to this. First is a constitutional amendment called the quote, no one is above the law amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes that a former president can be committed while in office.

Uh, second would be a term limit for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme court justices. So I believe he supports an 18 year active service term limit on the Supreme court. The third is quote a binding code of conduct for the Supreme court. The court's current voluntary ethics code is weak and self enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, uh,

refrain from political activity, recuse themselves from cases in which their spouses are financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by this code of conduct. There's no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt. So obviously, I mean, look, it could have been very, very different. There have been a lot of leftists and other people on the right who've been very worried, or sorry, people on the right worried about leftist calls to pack the court and restructure the court and all that. I would say this is a relatively middle-of-the-road proposal. Yeah, it's very moderate for

From the Democrat, in the mindset of the Democratic Party and their approach to the court. I don't think it was any surprise then that Kamala Harris immediately endorsed it. But this is an effort to try and get the court on the mind of Americans, especially in the context

of Roe versus Wade. And I think it was interesting too, culturally, where people were like wishy about the Supreme Court, but I don't think people had particularly strong feelings. But Roe really significantly elevated the issue specifically for the Democratic base to a level that has not been

in quite a long time on top of a lot of the Clarence Thomas investigation. Plus just in general, I think a lot of Democrats are grappling with what those lifetime appointments look like in practice. RBG obviously her narcissism literally led to a Republican having the ability to appoint her seat. Currently we have the diabetic Sonia Sotomayor who's just refusing to step down for God knows what reason, right?

And all of these, I think, are combining of the salience of the court and a lack of deference at this point, especially with Biden stepping down, to the elderly political elite refusing to give up power. So all those things coming together, it's a relatively strong position for Kamala to be on. And it's one of using the office of the presidency here to try and bolster the Harris campaign.

Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, it's a win-win-win from their perspective. The issues they're talking about here, I haven't seen polling specifically on a constitutional amendment, which is obviously like the furthest reaching of these and almost impossible to imagine there ever being a prayer of getting something like that since it does have to require a constitutional amendment through. But in terms of the polling on term limits and the polling on a code of ethics in

We're talking 70 and 75% support. It is as bipartisan a consensus as you can possibly imagine. Because of course, there should be a code of ethics for the frickin Supreme Court. Most Americans would probably be shocked to learn that there isn't one.

All other federal judges are subject to some sort of ethical code. So these are kind of like no brainers in terms of political issues. So there's a few goals here. As Sagar rightly points out, the Supreme Court has become deeply salient to the Democratic base in particular in a way that it has always been very salient to the Republican conservative base. It's typically been Republicans who've been more interested in voting on Supreme Court appointments and Supreme Court politics.

Now you have sort of the shoe on the other foot with Democrats being deeply interested and deeply invested in the Supreme Court. So it raises the salience of the issue there. It also puts Republicans in a tough spot because who wants to be the one out there being like, no, I don't believe in a code of ethics that 75% of the country is like, of course they should have.

So is it a game changer in terms of the political landscape? No, but it's part of a series of actions that Democrats are taking to try to make it clear that they stand on the side of issues that are broadly popular and put Republicans on defense having to defend positions that are broadly unpopular. Another example of this, I don't know if you saw this, but the Senate is going to take up a vote on the child tax credit.

which again is an issue, child tax credit has 70% support according to recent polls and Democrats are almost wholly on the side of it and Republicans are almost with very few exceptions on the other side. So they're trying to push this legislation and put these policy proposals out there that they support that Republicans don't support where the numbers are in their favor and to frame the debate that way. - They're trying their best and they're basically, look, I think these are all probably the correct moves. If I were them, that's basically the ground.

that I would play on too. That interestingly enough, actually, that one, the child tax credit thing that they're talking about is combined with a business tax credit of some $80 billion. And those two things actually passed the House of Representatives with decent enough support. I'm talking about with Republican support. So the fact

that it's going to get voted down, this is a major issue where you have a lot of these guys like John Cornyn and Mike Crapo and others have been whipping against the bill. And the truth is, is that a lot of them, even though they do in principle support a lot of these business tax credits, they either, quote, don't want to give Biden the win or they straight up are against the child tax credit. I believe Josh Hawley said he would vote for it. I'm actually curious if Vance will make the vote and if he will

attend the vote and if he will pass it, which would compare with some of the discussion that we'll have later today. But yeah, this is one where I'm not quite sure how much it is all going to work though. And this is only because unfortunately the issues have not been central to this campaign as of yet. Now it possibly could be, you know, certainly

abortion, immigration, the two flashpoints that the two want to really focus on. The Supreme Court code of ethics and all that is a proxy fight on abortion, which is why I think it's probably going to be a little bit more salient. But at the same time, you know, whenever we think about how Kamala and how the campaign

is prosecuting themselves right now. From what we've seen so far, Kamala's two ads, and I believe there was another one this morning that I watched. It's about her personal story. It's about the L of freedom, very vague concepts. Same too, whenever I've watched the first two Trump ads that have come out now against Kamala Harris, most of them are just like too liberal and or open border, pretty classic attacks. And I expect them to stick with

that, basically throughout the campaign. But nonetheless, this is an effort by both Biden and Schumer to do everything that they can to bolster Democratic chances. I guess we should say this too. This is an effort by Schumer because he's not just thinking about the president, he's

thinking about his own senators who are up in 2024. So he's got Sherrod Brown defending, people like Jon Tester defending, and others in a tight spot. And he's trying to tee up votes for them to go home and to campaign on and to say why that they should get elected. So possibly could help somebody like Sherrod Brown, who's in a tough race in Ohio, help Jon Tester as well, who's in a very, very tough race in Montana. So those are some of the calculus, I think, behind all this. Yeah, I think

we may have Trump did respond to some of this in a statement that Trump campaign accused them of wanting to undermine the legitimacy of the court. They said it's all part of Kamala's scheme to pack the Supreme Court with far left radical judges who will render decisions based on politics, not the law. So this is the stance that they're taking. But the fact that I'm

Again, these reforms are like really moderate and really popular. It just puts them in a tough bind. They have to sort of mischaracterize and claim that this is an effort to pack the court. It's not court packing. It's term limits, very, very different scenario and something that Americans broadly support. So it's an effort to put them on the back foot, to have them have to deal with issues that are

outside of their comfort zone. Obviously, Republicans want the election to be primarily about immigration and about inflation. So when they're having to defend things like the Supreme Court not having a code of conduct, it's less than ideal for them ultimately. But do I think most Americans, even given the raised salience of the Supreme Court for anyone left of center, given Roe versus Wade, do I think most Americans are going into the ballot box thinking about a Supreme Court code of ethics? No.

Does it help contribute to an overall picture of these people are for things that you don't support and they're on the fringe minority in terms of their views and the things that they support and defend? Yeah, it could help contribute to that picture. It'll also be interesting if these issues do come up for a vote in the Senate, if there are any Republicans who feel pressured to vote yes on something like a code of conduct, code of ethics for Supreme Court justices, because that just doesn't

feels like such common sense. I believe that's already gone down. I'm trying to remember. Okay, yeah, here it is. So I found Leonard Leo. He's the chairman of the Federalist Society, so very influential in circles. So he put out a statement. He said, if President Biden and Democrats were truly serious about ethics reform, they would ban all gifts and hospitality of any kind to any public official in any branch of government, starting with Congress, where the real corruption is.

They would close all of the loopholes that allow members to travel on private jets to fancy hotels and restaurants. With respect to judges, they would include the things where influence peddling is most present and dangerous. When liberal justices rub shoulders with influencers in places like law school, arts associations, progressive think tanks, and other offices. Here's the funny thing. I totally agree with this. You know, it's, no, no, no. I'm not saying I agree with the criticism, but I'm like, yeah, I agree, dude. Let's do it.

You know, it's one of those where, uh, I actually want, he's one of the people who's like primarily responsible for putting together those influencers and billionaires with conservative justices. So again, he knows of what he speaks. It's a bipartisan phenomenon as so to my or Kagan and all of those can show you, but no, you're not wrong. Uh,

One of the things I would say, one white pill I want everybody to take is that it does look like some congressional stock trading legislation will be reported favorably out of a bipartisan committee in the Senate. And it's possible that Schumer could actually tee that up to try and give Democrats and or Kamala Harris some talking points going into both the Democratic senators trying to defend on corruption allegations and there. So we could have actually some, at the very least, stock

trading legislation go through. But one of the things he is empirically correct about here, not saying he may even be sincere, but is that the amount of loopholes, as we all find out with the Menendez trial, we have to put this man on trial twice and he has to straight up take gold bars from somebody to be convicted of bribery. The bar is set way too high. The gold bar is set way too high. Yes, yes.

Gold bars are way too heavy to try and convict a lot of these people. It is ridiculous, you know, the amount that they are able to get away with. We did find that out, too, with the Supreme Court. And it is the most difficult part, I think, is that you have the federal judges who already have to comply with those ethics codes. And I remember there was a story we did many years ago. It might have even been on Rising.

And it showed about how federal judges often even did not comply with that code of ethics. But it's only because of the code that we got some insight into their personal stock trading portfolios. And there were many instances where they actually were ruling in the favor of companies that they personally held stock in. Now, it's only because of

of the legislation itself, but we even got insight into that. We don't have the same level of insight into the personal finances of the rest of these people. And I do think that is bad because sometimes we do learn certain things like, so to my org getting X amount of money for speaking fees or books and all that. And I'm like, I don't think that should be allowed period. You and I both know anybody who's prominent

Speaking fees are BS. It's pure influence peddling. It's just whitewashed money. It's one of the, I'm not saying the Republic, I'm sure Alito, Scalia, all these other people took advantage. Same even with books. The book loophole is one of the tried and true ways that these politicians make millions of dollars while they're still in office. And all of those are just, it's just unseemly, the way that they use their power to amass great fortunes. Well, and it was...

Like less of a news story and it became less front and center in the American mind when it was just those things would sadly have become sort of like accepted forms of corruption. The book parties, the speaking fees, all of those sorts of things.

It really was the ProPublica reporting about Clarence Thomas taking it to another level that made this so salient. I mean, just completely sponsored effectively by billionaire Harlan Crowe, having his mother's house paid for and getting a loan that we don't,

alone that we don't know that he ever paid back for extremely expensive RV going on these lavish vacations, including private jet travel to these exclusive locations repeatedly, by the way, that made people go like, what the hell is going on here? And ask these questions about, okay, what is the standard? What is the code of conduct?

And you come to learn there isn't one, at least not one that's enforceable in any sort of way. It's just sort of every justice makes up the rules for themselves that made this a relevant issue. But you brought up an important point about Bob Menendez and the gold bar standard of corruption. It's a Supreme Court that has narrowed the definition of what counts as corruption. And I don't think that it's wild conjecture to suggest that

That perhaps the reason that they saw fit to narrow that definition of corruption is because they themselves are open to potential allegations of corruption, given, you know, depending on the definition thereof. So it was in their personal interest to make it so that corruption basically doesn't exist unless you literally are in the position of taking gold bars for an immediate exchange of a business deal or favor or whatever it is.

A lot of this goes back to the case against Bob McDonnell, former governor of Virginia, who was taking all kinds of gifts and luxury this, luxury that. In exchange, it appeared for business deals in the state of Virginia during the time that he was governor. He was convicted and then so returned by the Supreme Court. And that was a significant narrowing of the definition of corruption. There was another case recently with regard to some Andrew Cuomo aides in New York.

just to show you this is bipartisan exemptions for corruption all around, where because they had technically resigned their government positions,

when they delivered on the quid pro quo, they're like, oh, doesn't count. It's not corruption because you weren't technically in that position, even though you went back to the position after you engage in the quid pro quo. So, you know, this is just all to say it's not just about the conduct of these individuals. It's also the way that this can have downstream effects on the decisions that they make

defining corruption for all branches of government to go back to the Leonard Leo point about how, hey, this isn't just about the judiciary. True, true. But that doesn't mean that there are real problems with the judiciary to be dealt with. So that's the deal. The last thing I have to say about this is just going back to the Biden speech, like how happy are Democrats that this guy is not there?

The stories he was telling, it was an hour and something long speech. And that part was probably the most cogent that it got. And how insane is it that there was anyone that, what, two weeks ago was, oh, he's sharp as a tack. He's got to stay in there. He's amazing.

amazing, he's gonna win. My 13 keys say he's gonna win the prize. Just watching it, I was so shocked. I mean, I still am. And look, it's funny, but it's not funny because at the same time, we got a whole Israel block. We're talking about Israel Hezbollah that we talked about yesterday. I am terrified of this man in the White House and the situation. It's crazy. We have months left to go. And in his speech, all of his dealings

You really – look, the memes where everyone was like, who's running the White House and all of that, it's all true. I mean seriously, who is even running the Israel-Palestine policy portfolio? Is it just these random bureaucrats who we know – Amos Hoxley. I don't know anything about Amos Hoxley. I do this for a living, and I've tried my best to learn a little bit about him. Or Jake Sullivan, failed track record.

blink and fail track record. All of these other people, it's outrageous. It really is. It's scary, you know, watching him up there. So look, I'm glad he's going away, but I'm not glad. It's not soon enough. Yeah. I mean, it gave you a little glimpse into why literally 90% of Americans are like, thank goodness this guy is not running for

pre-election again. It's a very unifying moment for the country, but also should go back and look at the people who were doing the he's sharp as a tack and all the media is unfairly attacking him. And it'll be illegal to take him off the ballot and there'll be all these legal challenges and you literally can't even do it. Never trust a word those people tell you again, because the very same people the next day were like,

oh, we're so happy, Joe Biden's amazing, that for stepping down, and we love Kamala Harris, and we're so happy, without a second of reflection on how wrong they were and how much they were lying and gaslighting in service of this obviously, obvious, like, man who was obviously unfit to serve even right now today, let alone four years from now. So anyway, yes.

The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard pressed to forget. I did something in '88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh gosh, the US Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes, we're going out there smashing into each other full force.

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Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance. And it was peak TV. This is new Scandal KCBQ.

content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up gladiators, grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to unpacking the toolbox on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling, as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, let's get to the next part. Some really troubling information now about further holes in the Secret Services narrative of what happened in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. New text messages who have been obtained by the New York Times reveal that local police were tracking the gunman some 1.5 hours ahead of the attempted assassination. Let's put this up there on the screen. So you can actually see through a variety of these text message screenshots that

He continues,

learning about around building we are in. AGR, I believe is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI, if you want to notify SS snipers to look out, I lost sight of him. Also a bike with a backpack sitting next to it in the rear of the building that was not seen earlier. Call into command and have a uniform check it out.

out. So they were following this young man for basically the entire time ahead. All of his movements, 5:10 PM, the young man no longer at the picnic table. He's right below the counter snipers. Counter sniper takes photos of him, sends it to law enforcement for the app. And then according to the after action report, they see that all of these text messages, which were from these local police are shared in the group chat amongst the officers.

They need to inform the Secret Service. They're giving him a heads up. Then by 6:11 PM, that's shortly after the shots are fired and the gunman is killed by the Secret Service counter snipers. But they see how in the hours ahead of the assassination,

that they were identified, that the gunman was identified, both by the local police, that they not only were tracking that he had a range finder, that he knew exactly where the counter snipers were, that they were sending heads up. And then it highlights the communications breakdown that we talked about yesterday, a decades-long communication failure between local police and Secret Service against

out into the open. What we really see here is that the Secret Service attempt to throw the local cops under the bus, I think is shameful now with the revelation of this. They were doing their job. They were tracking this person. They were trying to give a heads up to the higher command. They clearly were trying to plug the holes in the perimeter. They had good situational awareness. And it was the communications breakdown, obviously the failure itself from Secret Service that allowed something like this to happen. And clearly, I mean, the

The other problem is too, it's raising a lot of conspiracy theories, maybe even legitimate ones who are like,

Okay, seriously, what's happening here? Yeah. How is this even allowed to happen? Was this an inside job? At a certain point, you have to ask crazy questions where are they just obtuse and not learning the information at all? Did a radio call never go out? Was there really not a single comm check between the local police and others? Especially if he tells them, call it into the higher command. They were doing everything that they were supposed to do, remaining aware, seeing where people were, notifying their higher ups.

and each other. It seems that the counter snipers themselves didn't even know about it and the Secret Service agents ultimately allowing Trump to go out onto the stage. Remember, he's only shot some five minutes after he goes out there, so they should never have let him out on the stage in the first place. - No doubt about it, no doubt about it. And I mean, part of what is so revealing here is the fact that they had eyes on this guy and knew there was a problem an hour and a half before Trump takes the stage.

And yet there and they know, hey, we saw him with a range fighter. Hey, I lost sight of him. And still nothing is done. Still, Trump is allowed to take the stage. And his locals, the Secret Service detail that were on him were claiming like we didn't have access to any of those communications. We had no idea. So what the hell is going on here? And when you read the tick tock of this, it really is astonishing because don't forget. So apparently crooks

Went the day before to scope out the rally site and was able to walk around and take a look around. Then he was able to fly his drone over the rally site while law enforcement is there setting up and setting the perimeter and getting everything ready. How the hell does that happen? Then-

After he flies his drone around, that's when he finishes and sits at the picnic table. That's when he's spotted by this counter sniper. He then walks to his car, left the drone inside the car, and was then just hanging around the warehouse complex. So you have this guy who flew a drone, who's lurking around with a range finder, who's identified and photocopied.

One of those photographs is one that circulated immediately afterwards. We had no idea that it was actually taken by law enforcement that day prior to the shooting. And all of this happens. And you get even to the point where he's on the roof and you have local regular citizens yelling at Secret Service, yelling at law enforcement. There is a guy on the roof with a gun. And this still goes forward. So, you know, seeing this.

the TikTok of all these text messages and the manifest multi-layered failures is quite astonishing. Another thing we learned, we just learned is that these local police departments, they were struggling to fill the request.

for the manpower the Secret Service was asking for. People had different obligations. This is not a large urban, I actually know this part of the country pretty well. And this is not a large urban area. So they don't have a massive manpower, a massive police force. So if your Secret Service and your local partners are not able to fill all the roles, then that's on you to make sure

that everything is secure and that the manpower needed is provided. So I agree with you that while there may have also been local law enforcement failures, ultimately the buck stops with the Secret Service. This is your job, this is your duty, and clearly there was a massive failure here. Yeah, even more on the TikTok of the day, super interesting. It seems that the morning of he goes to Home Depot, buys a ladder. So he has enough situational awareness of the site to know that he needs a ladder to get up there.

He arrives, he apparently stays in his car, flies his drone, gets out, begins attracting attention now. One hour before, the first photo of him is taken at 5:14 p.m. So that's exactly an hour before the shooting. Now people are like, hey, this guy knows where we are. He's acting sketchy, he knows where we're going. Then you start to say, hey, this dude was on with a range finder. I mean, basically at every single time,

All the way up till 5:38, there were probably three or four separate opportunities that he could have been stopped, both from the drone the day before. You also see that the Secret Service itself was aware of some serious issues in staffing. That's what you're referencing about how they had difficulty getting enough police officers to volunteer, to take over the site. I mean, the real question too is about how some of his other past activity was never flagged or by law enforcement of any kind. Let's put this up there on the screen.

What they show here is that the Trump shooter began quote, buying guns and bomb materials more than a year ago. Now, this is part of why I get so frustrated whenever they always talk about needing more resources afterwards. Was it not, what, some 30 years ago now almost that they blew up the Oklahoma City courthouse with fertilizer? And lo and behold, that's the type of stuff that he's ordering online.

Allegedly, that was supposed to trip some signs and actually get people to come and to visit and to pay attention. But he apparently was able to search online pretty repeatedly.

Listen to this. For information about power plants, mass shooting events, improvised explosive devices. He then researched that May assassination attempt on the Slovakian prime minister and apparently had been Googling, quote, major depressive episode. I mean, all of these look obvious in retrospect, but the big flag to me is the more than a year ago buying bomb making materials, because according to the FBI and others, they're supposed to be super adept at

piecing all of these things together, going back some 30 years. Clearly, I mean, it's a huge fail. And it's obvious that their own security dragnet that they purport to be very effective in all of that. They're not even good at policing it. So the more that you learn about this entire thing, you see all of the things come together. You see the text messages reveal the incompetence. But I still think that there is significant more questions here about whether the Secret Service itself actually knew of the gunman.

some minutes before. And if the call was made by the Trump detail to allow him to step onto the stage, because we have a photo of the gunman exactly almost one hour, 58 minutes or whatever before the shooting. That is just a simply unforgivable thing that they allowed him to do. To me, almost the craziest thing is the drone. Yeah, yeah. I would never in a million years think that on the day of hours before a rally, you could just casually fly a drone,

scoping out the rally site and that this would be fine and no one would even notice. That's crazy to me. And I'm sure for anyone else who was out there with malicious intent, they are clocking very closely how many failures there were. I mean, thank God this was just some 20-year-old who was sort of freelancing it. If this was a trained professional, we all know what the result would have been. And we came within an inch of

of that result occurring anyway. It's interesting what you say about the online searches because we have given up in this country so much of our civil liberties, both to the government and to these large tech companies. And it's like, all right, if you're gonna be spying on our every search, can you at least do some good with it? Can you at least identify the dude who's buying an AR-15 and stocking up on bullets? It was his dad's AR-15, let me be fair. Well, he did purchase it from him, so.

So, you know, there's a record of that. Stocking up on bullets, stocking up on fertilizer. Now, his parents were interviewed and they said that he'd always been, quote, interested in science and experiments. So all this like chemicals and gun equipment that he's stockpiling, they were like, oh, this is fine, which...

There are questions there as well about what exactly is going on. But yeah, it's like, okay, well, if we're going to be spied on every second of the day, the very least you could do is use that information in some sort of a useful manner here. But that obviously did not happen. And, you know, I don't doubt that it's difficult to, this is a classic lone wolf situation.

As far as we can tell, there really was no ideological motivation outside of just creating mayhem, chaos, and horror. That seems to have been his whole goal based on the searches was to find the most high-profile person, target he possibly could. And it just so happened that Trump was holding this rally very close to his home. And so it was, in a sense, this crime of opportunity.

And if you can imagine if it had been Joe Biden or another person there, given the searches that he was engaged in, it may have been a different political figure that he ends up targeting. So I don't doubt that it's difficult to track these people in advance. But when the dude is there flying a drone on the day of, and then you spot him with a range finder, and then you spot him behaving suspiciously. And when you try to track him down, he grabs a back

pack and runs away from you. That seems like a pretty significant sign, just as a layperson, that there's something bad that's about to happen here. Yeah, exactly. And that's one of those where don't let the whole like, oh, well, you weren't there. You weren't a professional. It's like, no, I think we all know. And at a certain point, we are the people who pay for all of this. Do you have any idea? I mean, the Secret Service budget and protection and all that is technically secret, but it costs probably

I would say in the range of a couple hundred million a year in terms of securing the president. What are we paying for? All of this nonsense so that they can fly the beast all the way to China 24 hours before the president lands for this great big security perimeter. And it's like then the former president active Republican candidate is on the stage.

And we're not pulling him when we know the most glaring and obvious things that happened right here in our own country, some couple hundred miles away from Washington, D.C. The whole thing is just absolute nonsense the way that it happened. So still lots of questions to be had here, especially from the agent and the agent in charge of the detail itself, whether he had any. If he did, I mean—

Just imagine. To me, the most legitimate, like, quote unquote, conspiracy theory. Ryan used this term, malicious incompetence. Yeah. Where it's like, you know, it wasn't an inside job or, you know, he wasn't a recruited asset. He doesn't seem like a particularly, like, likely candidate to have been a recruited asset. But-

Was there just a sense of like we don't really care. We don't really care what happens at this rally We aren't really that interested in protecting this particular individual that I would say is an extremely Legitimate and very open question at this point. Yeah, well said. All right, let's get to Israel

The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard pressed to forget. I did something in '88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh gosh, the US Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes, we're going out there smashing into each other full force.

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Masmerizing.

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance. And it was peak TV. This is new Scandal KCBQ.

content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up gladiators, grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for an even more behind the scenes. Listen to unpacking the toolbox on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do.

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Wild scenes coming on of Israel yesterday when members of the Knesset and government ministers joined a far right armed mob to storm multiple Israeli military bases. And as I said before, you may think this is an exaggeration, but it was literally in defense

of IDF soldiers who gang raped a Palestinian prisoner. So let me back up, let me show you some of the images here as I speak. This is one of the mobs storming a military base that has been turned into a mass prison camp.

Now, this is a place that has become quite notorious post-October 7th. There have been multiple news reports and a UN investigation that revealed horrifying details of systematic abuse of the Palestinians who are being held there, including systematic sexual assault. Specifically, we've got multiple accounts of a hot metal rod being shoved in the anus

of multiple Palestinian prisoners. We've also heard about severe beatings. There have been dozens of Palestinians who have died at these facilities.

Starvation, I mean, every kind of degradation and torture you can imagine has been documented by Palestinians, doctors, Israeli doctors, whistleblowers, journalists, and the like occurring at this location. So the Israeli government has been under a lot of pressure from the ICC, the ICJ, and also from some different world governments, including the UK, to show some sort of willingness to prosecute their own people for these crimes.

So they decided to go ahead with the prosecution of, I believe, nine IDF reservists who they claim they have overwhelming evidence participated in one of these sexual assaults of a Palestinian prisoner. So yesterday when the military police go to arrest and detain these IDF soldiers, it kicks off this absolute riot first at the location where the abuse occurred.

occurred. Then at the other military base where the reservists were brought and detained and held awaiting trial, just absolute insane scenes that are unfolding. So in order to understand this a little bit better with regards to Israeli domestic political context, we wanted to bring in a guest. We've got an Israeli journalist who's set to join us. So let's get to that.

Happy to be joined this morning by Shael Ben-Ephraim. He is the host of multiple shows, one on YouTube called Shael Ben-Ephraim Explains Israel and another one called the History of the Land of Israel podcast. Welcome, Shael.

Thank you, good to be here. Yeah, so I did my best to set up what unfolded in Israel yesterday with this mob storming multiple Israeli military bases. Let's actually put F2 up on the screen. This was, I think, some of the secondary clashes that broke out at the detention center where the Israeli reservists who are accused of sexual assault are being held. Could you help us just understand here, Shael, some of the context

within which these clashes erupted? Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult for Israel watchers to fully comprehend what's going on here too, but I'll do my best. So the best way to set the stage for this is to look at what's going on socially in Israel right now. So there's always been a pattern where when Israeli soldiers are accused of doing anything to Palestinians,

a lot of elements in society rallied behind them. It used to be the extreme right, and now it's spread. So there's always been this kind of impulse to defend Israeli soldiers. It used to be a minority position. But October 7th strengthened that trend a lot. So after October 7th, the Israeli soldiers were seen as heroes,

to a much greater degree than they ever had been before. And the events of October 7th made the Hamas members the worst enemies of the public in the state of Israel.

And for many people, it even spread to other Palestinians, especially in Gaza, who they saw as supporting the events of October 7th. So you really had an increased amount of support for the IDF and an increased amount of hatred for Palestinians and Hamas in particular. That meant that there's a sort of culture of impunity there.

to do whatever you want to Hamas because of what they did on October 7th. It strengthens existing trends, but it made them a lot stronger. And that's one of the reasons why when there have been various crimes committed, alleged crimes committed by IDF soldiers in Gaza and also in Israel against detainees,

the IDF has not prosecuted them or has very rarely prosecuted them. Now, it's important to note that the military brass and the IDF wants to. They want to prosecute people who do things like this, not because they're bleeding-hard liberals or anything, but because the military has an impulse to keep discipline. Because without discipline, it's hard for them to function. But they know that if they prosecute people,

They won't get the backing of the government, to put it mildly. Elements in the government will come out against them, attack them, try to get them fired. Protesters might try to harm their families. So the pressure from the extreme right is great. So that's why there hasn't been much discipline in the IDF, because no one wants to touch the rank and file soldiers. And of course, among the rank and file soldiers, there's a lot of right wing extremists as well.

But also people who are very angry at the Palestinians for what happened on October 7th and also just people who are not good people who want to do whatever they can and now they can get away with it.

There hasn't been much discipline. - Got it. So let's put this up there on the screen. Crystal laid out some of the details. Just one second, I wanna get your reaction here. Where they're storming this detention center and these lawmakers, as you're saying, are trying to inject chaos into the Israeli army. Can you just then outline the exact circumstances of what happened here and what it's like to witness it from inside of Israel? - Yeah, yeah. So what happened now,

is because there's been massive pressure from abroad, most particularly investigations from the ICC and the ICJ, but also a demand from the British government and to a lesser extent from the American government to start cracking down on what's happening in this facility, in this detainee facility, which is known as Detainment. So in May...

And in June, exposés came out about Zdete Eman on CNN and the New York Times, citing serious war crimes, torture, to the point where some detainees were getting killed from beatings that they had. Others were having limbs amputated because they were kept in positions where the blood wasn't circulating, and claims of sexual abuse.

Israel denied it, but the allegations weren't going away because they were true. As it turns out, they were true. So under immense international pressure, and when the British said they would stop selling arms to Israel, Israel finally decided to prosecute nine soldiers who had been involved in a sexual assault on a detainee.

This story came to light when doctors saw that one of the detainees had their anus had been something had been inserted in their anus very forcefully. And the injuries were very clearly indicative of sexual abuse. Once that news came out.

that they had been arrested, soldiers in their unit posted on social media about what was happening and said that this is an outrage. And within an hour, people showed up on the base.

protesters, family members, members of Knesset, the most extreme right-wing politicians like Gottlieb from the Likud and Tzvi Sukkot in Ben-Gvir's party, and along with masked people in uniform, heavily armed.

Eventually, the police managed to get them to leave. They convinced them to leave. The police, which is under Ben-Gvir, who is the most extreme right-wing leader in Israel, convinced them to leave. Then after that, they assaulted the detention center where they were being held in Bet-Lib and went into the military courts.

And again, the police didn't stop them because the police is under the extreme right wing. So what we have here is the Israeli security apparatus captured or at least strongly hindered by the most extreme right wing elements in society. And it's important to note that that leader, Ben-Gavir, and people like him didn't go to the army. They're hated by the security services. They're considered terrorists by a lot of people in the security services. But the security services are increasingly powerless because

to stop them. And this threatens the ability of Israel to operate as a sovereign state. And of course, also threatens Israel standing in the world and is an absolute nightmare for Israel from every perspective. And of course, it also shows

that these elements in society are one of the reasons that this happened because Ben-Gavir is responsible for the prison services. So he's also responsible for oversight over this prison. And he's made it his populistic goal to show that under him, terrorists will have the worst possible conditions.

And I don't know whether he ordered any of this or not, probably not, but he created a circumstance where being inhumane to detainees was expected. It was a good thing. And of course, we need to point out that a lot of these detainees were not members of Hamas. We don't know the exact number. It looks like the person who was abused in this case was a Hamas terrorist. But a lot of the people who experienced these things are innocent.

So this is a scandal that speaks to Israel's human rights. It speaks to Israel's ability to govern as a sovereign state and so on. Were any of the violent protesters yesterday arrested? No. No one was arrested. They were convinced to go home.

The police will not arrest them unless there's a political decision to do so. So Shael, what does all of this mean for, I saw some speculation about that you could have an even greater conflagration if there's a withdrawal from Gaza without whatever complete victory looks like. Which the complete victory that's been laid down of destroying Hamas is likely impossible to achieve.

What do you expect this portends for the future of Israel when the viewpoints that are being expressed as you lay out were once fringe and are now completely mainstream to the point of, you know, I could show the video, but I'll just paraphrase it. You're literally having a debate in the Knesset about whether it is legitimate to, quote, insert a stick in a person's rectum. And you have a member of the Likud party, a Knesset member, saying, yes, it's

If he is a Nukpa, a Hamas terrorist, everything is legitimate to do to him. That's how mainstream these views have become. So what does this portend for the future of Israel? Well, unfortunately, the trend predates. It predates the war. The war has exacerbated it. And it's actually not that different now.

from what we see in the United States or what we're seeing in other countries where the populist right wing is becoming increasingly powerful. They use a lot of the same methods that MAGA does here, that Le Pen does in France, but it's tied to a deep

Jewish fundamentalist impulse that has always been in Israel and it's frightening. What does it pretend for the future? It's sort of hard to...

have a country that is secular, liberal, the way that Israel has been with its flaws and that has this kind of impulse in its governance. The next elections will be a battle for the soul of Israel. And as we know from the United States, even when the more moderate side wins, the other side continues with disinformation and venom and

and trying to sabotage the ability of the government to rule. Uh,

I think there's going to be a lot of people in Israel who, if this continues to be the kind of government that they have in the long term, will leave. And those will be the most productive members of society. Those will be the high tech leaders. Those will be the professors. Those will be the literati and so on and so forth, which is something that I think the extreme right in Israel wants.

because that will help them run the country better. And there's an attempt to dismantle the Israeli judicial system because that's the one check and balance the Israeli system has against this.

this kind of power. So right now, Israel, similar to a lot of other countries in the West, the United States, as an example, is having a battle for its soul. And I think if the liberal democratic forces in Israel lose, Israel will be lost. It's not going to be able to survive if it doesn't have allies in the world, and it's going to be sanctioned by everyone, treated like a pariah state.

that that liberal part of the country is what kept Israel as part of the international community and what kept it allied with the United States and what kept it as a big trade partner for the EU. And if Israel loses that, it's not going to be able to survive. The extreme right fringe and the fundamentalists aren't going to be able to support the Israeli economy, aren't going to be able to support Israeli society, not in the long term. Many don't serve in the army.

It's a disaster for Israel. If these people take over and this is a step towards taking over, like make no mistake, hindering the functioning of the state. If they completely take over, the state of Israel will not exist in the long term. And I don't think I think that's quite a possible outcome, unfortunately. But there's a lot of people in Israel who are against this. A lot of people, maybe the majority at this point, I have no idea. And hopefully they will fight back.

Shael, I think it's fair, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you would sort of politically identify as like a liberal Zionist. Is that a fair characterization of your views? So there are plenty of things that- Absolutely. Yeah, that you and I wouldn't necessarily see eye to eye on. But I really wanted to put up this tweet that you sent yesterday and commend you for it, because I think this is a very difficult thing to admit when we've gotten something wrong or to acknowledge and identify our own blind spots. So if we can put F66,

up on the screen. You said in response to all of these events yesterday, I feel stupid and ashamed. In May, an expose came out on CNN detailing the abuses in State Taman. I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation, apologies. Then the NYT released their own article on it. Both were backed up by Israeli sources crossed with Palestinian ones. Yet you say you dismiss them because your government sources and Israeli media denied them my whole life.

I was told that the international media was out to get Israel and that they were all anti-Semites. And so with that blind spot, even with the reporting, even you had a UN report about this, you had multiple mainstream media outlet reports, you dismissed it because of the propaganda ecosystem that you existed in and what your own government sources were saying. So I'd love for you just to talk a little bit about that and also talk about whether

This revelation has changed your assessment in any other part of, you know, Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza or Israel in general. Yeah, OK, that is a difficult question. So as far as what was happening with Steteman, I knew that what was going on there was very bad and no one in Israel was denying that. It's just that the worst abuses were being covered up.

the ones that like what we're talking about. And now people I've talked to who told me that these things weren't true are now telling me that they are. And that's because military censorship is no longer on some of these cases and there's going to be other prosecutions. So there's been a change of strategy there. And that, yeah, that definitely undermined a narrative that I had. It's hard to explain to people who aren't Israeli

what the attitude towards the rest of the world is. You know, there's the legacy of the Holocaust. There's a legacy of anti-Semitism. Israel is singled out in the United Nations more than any other country. And the international media focuses on Israel more than just about any other country. And what Israelis have always felt is that they're singled out by the international community and that this has to do with the legacy of anti-Semitism. And it's not that that viewpoint is not completely true.

it doesn't have any validity to it. It's just that it blinds us to things. So, you know, if you say to Israelis, oh, the New York Times said this and that and that, they'll say, well, the New York Times, they're out to get us. They're anti-Semites. And I grew up in that attitude. And now that I've had this verified, I see that

I read the article again and I see the article was very well sourced. And it shows the kind of blind spot that we had. And now I'm going to have to rethink a lot of things. I think the war on October 7th was absolutely just, had to happen because after the events that occurred in Israel, they had to happen.

But I've always had questions about the way we've conducted this war on multiple levels. And now I have more questions. And now I am more prone to believe reports...

about what Israel is doing to innocent civilians. And again, I've always believed these reports to some extent, but thought they were exaggerated. Now I'm going to be looking a lot more objectively at these numbers, a lot more objectively at this information. And I'm going to be a lot more concerned about Palestinian civilians who are being killed.

I was concerned before, but I also was more skeptical about the information that I was receiving. None of this stops me from thinking that Israel needs to fight for its survival. None of this makes me stop thinking that Israel is facing people who want to destroy it.

But it's making me a lot more critical of how Israel is doing it. There are a lot of people in the Israeli government who have bad intentions and have absolutely no morals. And there's a lot of people in society who back them. And I don't trust them to wage this war morally or effectively. I think that people who support Israel need to very carefully hold their feet to the fire and criticize violations of human rights,

and to criticize the way that they're running this war and any Palestinian civilians who are needlessly suffering as a result of this war and strive to end the war, get the hostages back, start to rebuild, and move towards a two-state solution. So I'm still a Zionist, but I want Israel to be more moral. And it hasn't been moral. We appreciate you joining us, sir. Unfortunately, we're on a tight timeline, but really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching. Appreciate it. Enjoy CounterPoints tomorrow. We'll see you all on Thursday.

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Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And we're the hosts of Unpacking the Toolbox, the Scandal Rewatch podcast where we're talking about all the best moments of the show. Mesmerizing. But also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for an even more behind-the-scenes Scandal.

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