cover of episode 8/14/24: Tim Walz Slams Trump Union Betrayal, US $20 Billion To Israel As War Looms, New Inflation Report, IDF Shoots American In West Bank, Audience Laughs At CNN Host On Colbert

8/14/24: Tim Walz Slams Trump Union Betrayal, US $20 Billion To Israel As War Looms, New Inflation Report, IDF Shoots American In West Bank, Audience Laughs At CNN Host On Colbert

2024/8/14

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Shownotes Transcript

This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

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Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show.

All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We're not going to talk about the elections much in this show today, so let's get through a couple of those real quickly. A friend of the show, Will Stancil. You just gave him that title on the spot. House representative race in Minnesota. If you

The way that you know that you're too online, whether or not you got that reference. This is a guy who made a career the last decade out of annoying people on Twitter and parlayed that into a run for Minnesota State House. He lost by maybe 600 votes or so, which is a landslide in a Minnesota state.

House race. Respectable. Also in Minnesota, Ilhan Omar thumped Don Samuels. Not even close. Yeah. Nothing like what happened to Cori Bush. AIPAC stayed out of that race basically as well. There was a lot of money that funneled through AIPAC representatives to the campaign, which was reported in the last couple of days. It looked actually in violation of FEC rules. There are no such things as FEC rules anymore, so it won't get prosecuted. But yes, AIPAC itself stayed out. The Super PAC stayed out.

Ilhan Omar won comfortably. Do you think that's because they like having Ilhan Omar? They would rather have Ilhan Omar as their sort of foil than totally take over? No, I think it's they don't like to lose and they thought that they would. And I think in Oregon...

APAC and the NRA are similar in the sense that they survive significantly on the reputation of invincibility and of all-powerfulness, that if they come into a race, if you cross them, they will finish you. So they pick and choose. And so, therefore, they can't come into a race and lose. Because then other people are like, wait a minute, maybe I can win.

challenge AIPAC and survive. So they really don't want to take any L's. Makes sense. Although they have. They've been. They lost it. They've been. But that was such a weird race. People didn't even know what to make of that. This California Democratic primary where they went after a guy who was totally pro-Israel.

So, yeah, interesting. And they should hope they don't go the way of the NRA because times are not good for the NRA. But we're sort of light on 2024 content today because it's the eye of the storm right now. Everyone's preparing for the DNC. We are, of course, going to cover Tim Walz right at the top of the show. He gave a pretty interesting speech yesterday. And there was news on the labor front, given what Donald Trump said to Elon Musk. And Crystal and I covered some of that yesterday. We're going to cover developments out of Iran.

And Ryan has an incredible story, and Dropsite has an incredible story about something that happened in the West Bank. We are getting inflation numbers as we record this right now, bright and early. And then we have an interesting media block because some on the left are now speculating about the pro-Republican mainstream media. So we'll have a good conversation about that, I think, Ryan. Yes, it reminds me of 2016 where the entire kind of democratic infrastructure was persuaded.

that the mainstream media was basically in the tank for, either in the tank for Trump politically or because they just loved the ratings. Yeah, and there's just something about Hillary Clinton that the media just absolutely, yeah.

That's their contention, at least. So let's start with Tim Walz. We will be at the DNC, of course. The whole Breaking Points team, you're probably aware, will be at the DNC next week broadcasting every single day. Tim Walz will be giving a speech at the DNC, obviously. Biden is on Monday. We just learned that Pete Buttigieg is getting a primetime slot. I think he's going to be speaking on Wednesday. All

All of the Democratic celebrities will be there and we'll be there to cover it all. Wednesday, and that's a setup. That was Barack Obama's position in 2004. And he's speaking. Which he used to launch. Buttigieg is a very strong Obama impression. Yes.

We'll see. Obama will be speaking as well, obviously, at Chicago, so it's sort of his home turf. So we will be there covering it with Crystal and Sagar and the whole gang. Make sure to stay tuned for that. But while Washington, D.C. really awaits convention season and then Labor Day, and after that it is just the last stretch, the home stretch of this race, Tim Walz gave a speech yesterday. And let's start. Ryan, first of all, could you tell us maybe about the significance of Walz talking to this union?

So making one of his first big campaign events or his first solo campaign event with the union is sending a signal that we love to see. He's speaking at the AFSCME conference, which is the Federation of County, State, Municipal Employees, a lot of government workers. It's huge though, right? Massive national events.

labor union makes up a significant part of the backbone of organized labor teachers I Saw some stat that teachers Gave more money than basically any other profession to the Harris walls ticket after walls who was in a teachers union himself Was named to the ticket

very reliable Democratic voting base and when it comes to You know intra-union politics Government employees who are in a union are about the most reliable Democratic votes that you're gonna get and but just to see him broadly making the the case for labor unions generally in such a full-throated way and

is different than we're used to getting from Democrats even at campaign time. And he kind of made a point about that. Let's start with this first clip of Tim Walz yesterday. I happen to be the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan. But rest assured, I won't lose my way. Probably should be a few more union members in elected office, President Saunders. We might want to work at that. I think I'm looking at some, so...

You heard the story. You knew Vice President Harrops grew up in a middle-class family, picked up shifts at that McDonald's as a student. I keep asking this to make a contrast here. Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald's trying to make a McFlurry or something? It's, oh, he knows, he knows us, he knows us. He couldn't run that damn McFlurry machine if it tells him anything, so...

Vice President Harris and I have both had the privilege of joining workers on the picket line. And it's why as governor, I signed one of the biggest packages of pro-worker policies in history into law. In Minnesota, we made it easier for workers to form unions. We strengthened workers' protections. And yes, we banned those damn captive audience meetings for good in Minnesota.

Last time I said that at a union meeting, they sued me over it. It was the best thing to get sued over I ever sat. And so Labor Twitter was losing its mind over that. Loving it. Just absolutely loving it. The captive meetings, if you've ever been in one, it's...

Your boss sits you and your co-workers down and they tell you, "Hey, you may have heard something about this union drive going on in the company. Let me tell you why it's such a terrible idea." And they are incredibly effective. It's a way to dish out a whole bunch of threats to workers. It's a way to spew a whole bunch of lies. Over the years, we've done a ton of reporting where we've just, you know, it's workers,

often record them and then send them to the press. And it's just absolute fear-mongering and a pack of lies to try to get them to vote down the unions. And so for Walls to be so familiar with them, to have

I don't know the back story of him getting sued for talking about it. Labor law is wild. You can get sued all over the place for violating it. Oh, yeah. Which Donald Trump and Elon Musk are finding out, which we can talk about in a second. But for him to be that kind of familiar with it and also angry about it is super exciting to people. But what was your reaction to seeing him

tell so much of a labor story? Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, I think he's really, really good at that. There's no denying it. He's a talented politician. I think he's a good surrogate for her to be able to go to the conference in Los Angeles and speak the language of workers directly to them. He has a lot of energy right now. Also, he feels like, similar to Kamala Harris, he's got that...

He's got the vibes right now, you know, he's he's feeling good They're feeling like they have the momentum and it shows in the way that they're speaking So I I think it's a really bad split screen. We're gonna get to this in a moment with the Trump Elon Musk conversation I don't know that I agree with the McFlurry point because I think it's probably hard for everyone to make a McFlurry That's not one those machines are breaking constantly - it's not the workers fault clearly clearly we all would have problems

making McFlurries. There's something going on with the McFlurry machine. Also, smart workers like break those machines on purpose so that you don't have to deal with them anymore. But so I also wanted to get your take on this next clip where he tries to thread together his cultural politics, social politics, and material and labor politics. Not...

I'm not even going to like bias it ahead of time. Let's just roll. Why would you think I need your advice to tell me what books I can and cannot read or when to have a family or how to have a family or what religion to worship or how to organize? You stay in your lane and I'll stay in mine. That's not that difficult.

So he's taking the freedom and the mind your own business line theme and applying it to labor protections. Like don't have the government go in and side with the bosses to squash a union. I love the effort.

Well, I was going to say, I have a lot of substantive rebuttals to that, but I guess those are... What would those be? Well, I would say, for example, I mean, his COVID policies are huge, huge. They hugely undermined his, you know... The freedom agenda was not in full display during COVID. Yes, his respect for civil liberties... Freedom to live. Like many people's respect for civil liberties had a momentary lapse. And understandably at first, you know, given the level of the emergency and what we didn't know, but then continued on into the future. So I think that's, you know...

That would be one big substantive rebuttal. Another one would be, Tim, nobody's telling you that you can't read these weird porn books. They're just saying, like, please keep them out of my child's library, meaning you stay in your lane and stop putting these like weird books in these libraries, these K through 12 libraries. And we've talked about this a lot before, but those are just like two off the top of my head that I would say.

What I was going to mention, though, is I think my substantive rebuttals are sort of less important in the context of the question you asked, because politically, I think it's really smart. I think in America, anytime you can successfully make the sort of get off my or get out of my lane, stay in your lane, mind your own damn business. Anytime you can successfully, energetically and sharply make that argument as a politician, it's really powerful because that's kind of the American spirit.

There you go. Stay in your lane. There you go. Not you. You can swerve all you want. I'll stay in my lane. But I do love the effort to at least talk about organized labor and workers in the same context as the culture war, because the culture war has, for so many years, been used to distract away from it. Yeah. And to try to connect those two things and to say, look,

These same people that are coming after your books and coming after you in the doctor's office are also going to come at you in the workplace. Yeah. And are going to make it impossible for you to freely organize together and demand, you

more dignity and protection and higher wages. - Which is so interesting because again on the right, there's the sense that the wealthy class, the sort of billionaire, multi-multi-millionaire class that donates to political campaigns, the sense is they have no interest in the culture war.

It's not true of every billionaire, of course. And what Watts is using is those sort of powerful interests who are very much into the red meat of the culture war and tying them together politically because they also happen to be the same people that are anti-union. I mean, that is correct, that some of those...

wealthy, powerful interests really are. I think there aren't many of them that really want to lean hard into the culture war, but some of them do. And if you can tie that together, I do think it's powerful. And another thing I just wanted to mention. It's real, yeah. I think it's a fair... There's something there. And another thing I want to mention is that him speaking the language of organized labor so fluently, and I think personally,

reminds me a lot of how conservatives feel about J.D. Vance, in that he speaks the language of the new right, the kind of, the conservative movement, not the old conservative movement, but new people. He uses the same words, he's singing from the same hymn book, is probably the best way to put it. And it's kind of interesting that both VP picks have that connection with such a big part of their bases.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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It comes right after this massive own goal, what I would call a massive own goal from Donald Trump during Elon Musk's interview. Let's roll this clip that this is the one I've seen circulating the most, but that might just be my own ecosystem. But Democrats were, I think, over the moon when they heard this from these two billionaires. And we're among the first to start pushing it around. So here's

Here's Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it. Speaking of Ronald Reagan, that was sort of Trump admiring the Reagan and Elon Musk. And interesting again, because

Trump has a significant base of support from members of organized labor. Like Reagan. Yeah, like Reagan. I mentioned on the show earlier that in the 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter, the Air Traffic Controllers Union endorsed Ronald Reagan. And then he destroyed, like literally destroyed them. And so, you know, organized labor has a long memory. And the air traffic controllers were a

reactionary union of mostly like white guys in their 40s and 50s. And if you so if you can imagine that in like the 1980, like that's that's a pretty right wing, like cultural block of voters. Yeah. And so that's why they voted against their kind of more obvious material interests in supporting, you know, Jimmy Carter, who would come one vote short of like

a labor, a union reform bill that it was the most sweeping thing we would have ever had passed in the country. Everybody thought, oh, we'll get that. We'll get that next cycle. And it never happened. And instead, the wave kind of washed the unions back to sea. But yeah, so they felt like, you know, Reagan's speaking our language culturally. Go with him. And so,

But Reagan was smart enough to never say before the election that he was going to fire everybody. He did it after he won. Trump and Trump has also now drawn a labor complaint from the UAW. And this, by the way, is a huge not by the way. And Brian, you're like the best person to talk to about this. This is I feel like this is a pretty huge moment in the campaign. And it felt during that rambling two plus hour Twitter conversation or space conversation on X that

A lot of it just was going to fade into the ether and we were never going to remember some of these moments again. And it didn't break a ton of news, even though they had some interesting tangents that they

went down or roads that they went down. But this one actually might really stick because the one thing I saw get under Democrat skin this election so far, maybe the biggest thing, was Sean O'Brien speaking at the RNC. I mean, that was brutal. And Sean O'Brien has now said that doing...

What Trump lauded in response to his comments what he lauded Elon Musk for doing is quote economic terrorism, right? So basically called Trump an economic terrorist. Yeah, so the fire it is first of all It's illegal to fire workers who are out on strike It is also a violation of labor law to threaten to fire workers for going on strike Which is why the UAW which is trying to unionize some you know Elon Musk plants is filing a labor complaint saying basically what you have done is you have you have

Quite rather explicitly even if you even if Trump said I'm not gonna mention the company like we're all morons here and

Even if you don't mention the company's it's quite explicit that he's saying that he's willing to fire workers who try to organize a union at a Tesla and so the UAW files a complaint and it makes yeah makes Sean O'Brien and the Teamsters president look like a fool for having given Republicans that that olive branch and it was such an Unnecessary thing to say like right. He's just he's riffing just riffing like who does it?

Who did that line appeal to that was already not 100% in both of their camps? But he was just riffing. They were literally just having a conversation, which is such an unusual thing. That's what Musk said, you're going to have a conversation. I know, but it's like... To Musk's credit, it was... He said, like, a conversation is going to be more revealing, and sure enough. They're both clearly people who are...

more interested in having these literal conversations than reading off of scripts, to their credit, that sometimes

is not great for their campaigns or their businesses or whatever, but it does give us as the public good insight psychologically into how they are approaching these issues, which Trump, again, it's about strength, right? Like just, you're done with them. You're the boss and you're gonna act like the boss. But the Sean O'Brien thing, I wonder, Ryan, if this antagonizes him because he took so much heat for speaking at the RNC and now he gets this comment from Trump

Looks like it makes him look like a fool to your point. So does he I mean Does he come out even harder? Does he start pushing against Republicans and against Trump because now he's in this position? He's probably extremely mad about it I think what he'll do is he'll read the tea leaves because his he was making a several plays here, you know one is

There was a there was an under there's an understanding whether it's accurate or not among labor unions that if the Trump if a trumpet the second Trump administration comes into office that there will be an effort to Take on organized labor to dismantle, you know organized labor power in a significant way And so O'Brien was trying to get ahead of that and say okay you can go after everybody else but

Don't go after the Teamsters because look, you love the Teamsters. We got hard hats. We're good for you. And look, we didn't even support the Democrats in the election. So please don't put us up against the wall with everybody else. That was the one path. Separate path was his own internal politics within the Teamsters union. He's up for reelection. There are a lot of Trump supporters in the Teamsters union. Yeah. And there still will be. Of course, definitely still will be. And so he wants to be able to say to them, look,

I'm not a partisan, woke SJW Democrat. - Yeah, yep. - I'm Teamsters first. If Trump is our guy, I'm with him. If Democrats are the better path for us to go for our workers, that's where I'm gonna go, so therefore you should reelect me. In some ways, this is a gift to him because now when he goes back to supporting Democrats, if he does in this election, which he'll do if he thinks they're gonna win, is my guess, he can tell the Trump supporters

In the union. I tried and then they threatened to fire striking workers. What do you want me to do? Right. He crossed a red line. That's economic terrorism. I can't support that. So I think he actually, while it's humiliating for him, politically it makes his situation less tenuous and less difficult than it was. Because I think a lot of people in labor recognize that.

that he is in that tricky spot because of the significant support for Trump within the Teamsters union. Right, and that's a really interesting point because that's not going anywhere. The significant support among Teamsters for Trump, rank and file, is not going anywhere because for some- Yeah, they'll be mad at that comment, but they'll be like,

It's Trump. It's Trump. Because for the reason that so many rank and file teamsters, other union members, blue collar workers, Obama, Trump voters in the Rust Belt decided to vote for Donald Trump, A, some of them in the Republican primary, but B, in the general election over Hillary Clinton, really to your point about like the immediate material interests, that's part of it. But it's also this

this sense that he understands them and, you know, hears the needs of people outside of the beltway. And, you know, we could have a full show debating that. But that's a, that. It's a broader, it's a broader support. And right, when I say they, I mean the Trump diehards. Right. Like if you're already a Trump diehard, like he said, he can shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue. Yeah. He can fire them. Yeah. And they'll still be like, you know.

This is not the persuadable demographic at this point. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Ryan, Iran, obviously we can put this next tear sheet up on the screen. This is from the Times of Israel. Biden has said that Iran is expected to push off attacking Israel if the Gaza ceasefire deal is clinched. This is a big development that was unfolding yesterday. President Biden said that yesterday. What did you make of that as a kind of

Was unfolding in the last 24 hours so the politics of this and and the geopolitics of it are are Fascinating as we're watching this unfold or not unfold you you've got again. You've got domestic pilot the Iranian domestic politics and

You've got the kind of bilateral politics between Iran and Israel. You've got the relationship between the US and Iran. You've got Iran and Russia. All of this coming into play, Iran figuring out how best to balance this while they weigh how and whether to respond to Israel killing Ismail Haniyeh.

in the suburbs of of tyron which they have vowed that they are going to respond to a couple days ago there were some some threats made that they were going to kind of do all-out attacks on u.s forces in in bases in iraq and syria which again raised the question of why on earth are there u.s forces in bases

in Iraq and Syria. Fortunately for them, that did not come to pass. And now we're getting this reporting that the ceasefire negotiation track is playing a role into Iran's consideration of how to respond. Iran recently had a presidential election and elected a moderate who ran on strengthening ties with the United States. Immediately after that,

Israel did its attack in Tehran and people understood that to be a way of forcing the new president into a kind of armed confrontation with Israel in the United States and just as Hamas's attack on October 7th was a provocation intended to get Israel to overreact and then undermine the global standing of Israel and they succeeded in doing that

Because Israel took the bait like if you remember at the time we're saying like Hamas wants you to do everything you're doing right now They didn't I don't think they quite guessed that it would be as over-the-top as it was but they wanted an overreaction Like they didn't think that they were gonna go into Tel Aviv and conquer it sure like it was it was an attack that was intended to upset the apple cart bring in a Massive attack and then bring global isolation to Israel Israel did exactly what Hamas wanted them to do

And so there are factions within the Iranian leadership, including apparently the president, who is saying, well, wait a minute. Israel wants us to do some kind of overwhelming direct attack on both inside Israel and hitting U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.

So that then Iran is further isolated and Israel can lay waste to like huge portions of Iran. And then the productive capacity that Iran has in delivering missiles and drones for Russia is degraded. There's all sorts of things that kind of work out in Israel and the United States that benefit if Iran overreacts. So there's a faction within the Iranian leadership that's saying,

What if we just don't do that? Like, we're not actually required to do what our adversaries want us to do. At the same time, there's a hard right in Iran that is saying, no, you are required to because you're weak. You can't, you know, they're picking off

IRGC leaders are picking off Hezbollah, mid to high level people constantly. They killed Haniyeh right there in Tehran. Your weak little response back in April clearly didn't do any deterrence, so you need deterrence. That's the hard right argument. Then comes in the Hamas ceasefire negotiations, and that I think gives a way for this debate to be resolved inside Iran. Say, okay, you know what?

The hardliners say, look, we don't even think that Netanyahu is serious about these talks. So go ahead. If you can reach a ceasefire deal, then go ahead.

And so Biden was in New Orleans and he replied to a comment from reporters about whether he expected a retaliatory strike would be pushed off if there were entirely prevented if there was a ceasefire deal that was reached when talks resume later this week. He said, quote, that's my expectation. Quote, we'll see what Iran does and we'll see what happens if there is any attack. Yes, we will. And then he said, quote, but I'm not giving up.

Now, we can put the next care sheet up on the screen. This is from the associate. Oh, and one other point before we go to that one. Hamas is...

Sort of not showing up for these talks. They're supposed to start in Doha tomorrow or in Cairo but they all their people are in Doha and are right near the negotiators that they would need to be talking to What what Hamas has said is that they're willing to accept the deal that the US and Israel put forward in July They'll take the deal just implement the deal. They don't want to go back to ground zero start over and

Go back to square one because they said that yahoo's not serious like if Netanyahu serious. Here's his deal We accept it and so that's the kind of contours of this whole

these negotiations. Yeah, that's helpful because you know Biden can say that all he wants and who knows what actually plays out. So the next headline this is from the Associated Press, "US approves 20 billion dollars in weapons sale to Israel amid threats of a wider Middle East war." So according to the Associated Press, this is news from yesterday, "The US has approved 20 billions in arms sales to Israel including scores of fighter jets and

and advanced air-to-air missiles as the State Department announced on Tuesday. So Congress was notified of the impending sale, which includes more than 50 F-15 fighter jets, advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles, 120-millimeter tank ammunition, and high-explosive mortars and tactical vehicles, according to the Associated Press. So again, happening in the context of peace negotiations or ceasefire negotiations resuming later this week.

Wonderful news for property values in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. Always is. DMV stays undefeated. We're doing great here. Another 20 billion for us, which whether that's 20 billion that we're just printing and then sending to Israel and Israel sends it back to us in order to

bump up those real estate values in Northern Virginia, who knows? But that's the game we're playing here. 2026 timeframe on these ones. Yes. 2026 is generous. Like this is long-term stuff. And so- The jets comprise the biggest portion of the 20 billion in sales with the first deliveries expected in 2029. Right, exactly. These are not for the immediate war effort. This is an expression of our long-term commitment to Israel's, quote unquote, security. And

And these are weapons that will be there to replenish whatever weapons they use between now and then. And yeah, it sends one more signal of how tight the relationship remains. And Ryan, maybe you can walk us through these next elements. This is a tweet from Ryan, B3, we can put up on the screen. Some examples of the ongoing human rights situation.

In the Middle East right now. What are we looking at here? I just wanted to share a couple of these couple these developments so a Doctor Jumana Farid Abu al-Qumsan had twins on Guess you know, it's not not long ago last last week there's she

As is very typical she received a ton of messages like the what a miracle and you can imagine what an absolute miracle it must be to be to be able to Take twins to term in Gaza at this moment and deliver them successfully we have twins and it's like the amount of nutrition you need to You know successfully

give birth to twins, even if it's 30 weeks, 34 weeks, 36 weeks, the photos on them, they look beautiful, they look healthy. The father then goes out to go pick up the birth certificates and while he's out, there's a precision strike on their room and the mother and the twins both killed. Yeah.

There's a lot more that people can find if they want to go look about this particular incident. And it's just, it's one incident. It's three lives among the tens of thousands that have been killed by the IDF in this war. But it just hit that much harder because it's such a at once relatable experience, but then such an absolutely kind of otherworldly

Yeah. Just utter devastation. At the UN yesterday, there was an emergency session called to basically to debate and condemn Israel for the massive attack on a school recently.

which included a speech by Israel's representative to the United Nations, which people can find as well, that is one of the most bizarre things you've ever seen, where he starts screaming at the other representatives of the United Nations saying that Israel is the most moral country in the world, which is the most moral country, and he just keeps repeating it, most moral country in the world, most moral country in the world.

Which, if they were not carrying out this genocide, would even be an odd thing to say to other countries.

What are you even talking about, the most moral country in the world? And then he just, and he says, you hear that, Palestinian representative? And this guy represents terrorists. Meanwhile, all of this is unfolding, plus a nationwide debate about whether you can rape detainees. It's like utterly divorced from reality. And there was one other that I didn't want to let pass. I have to put my glasses on for this one. We can put the last one back.

this absolutely harrowing piece that Yunus Tarawi, who's actually written for us over at Dropsite, he's a Palestinian reporter, he just takes this post and translated it, and it reads,

I came to search for the remains of my son who had gone ahead to the dawn prayer. Someone gave me a bag of 23 kilograms and said, "This is your son. Bury him." As I carried him, I remembered a day when I was coming back with him from the market carrying a heavy bag. He, in complete filial piety, asked to carry it for me. He went to his mother happily, boasting of his manhood, singing in front of his siblings and teasing them that he carried all his weight alone for his father.

His siblings embraced him and his mother prayed for his long life and goodness. Now, once again, you precede me with the bag to the house, my son. But how do I convince them that you are the one inside it? That your laughter, which used to fill the house, your thin arms that you used to use to spar with your siblings, your head that used to rest on your grandmother's lap, and your feet that tirelessly searched for water, all have become one in this bag.

When your mother asks me in a bitter Gazan tone, "Do you know if there is any electricity, Abu Salah? Where will I store all this? All the goodness we give to the neighbors? How will I tell her, my son, that what's in this bag is not suitable for charity and that 23 kilograms of remains is our share of death this week?" A lot of the casualties of that strike on the school were children.

One of the more harrowing images that came out of it was so many parents because the children had been so dismembered and destroyed by the strike just picking up their their children in bags and this so this is this this father's Remembrance of it. Mm-hmm

Brian, actually you're going to keep sharing right now in our next block here some awful and tragic details of what's unfolding. While everybody is, well actually while the focus is actually waning I think on Gaza and the entire region even as it gets closer to a regional war, meanwhile in the West Bank

the crucible of the conflict, the property annexation continues. We'll talk about that next.

I'm Jeremy Hobson. The election is just days away, and on The Middle Podcast, we open the phones to everyday Americans. Hi, this is Anna from Tennessee. This is Amari calling from Houston. I find it's always good to talk things out rather than bottling things up. So why not open the conversation up to our closest neighbor, Canada? They are America's biggest trading partner, after all.

And even though they can't vote, our election does matter to them. So keep an ear out for a special cross-border conversation only on The Middle with Jeremy Hobson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A few weeks ago, I asked Breaking Points and CounterPoints viewers to help support the launch of the new independent nonprofit news outlet I was launching with my old colleague, Jeremy Scahill, and a humbling number of you did so.

The launch has gone so well that I can now announce the hiring of another former colleague, Murtaza Hussain, who you've seen here on the show. We've also hired The Intercept's former deputy editor, Nausicaa Renner, and have plans to continue growing as long as the support keeps growing. So if you still want to subscribe with the CounterPoints discount, go to dropsitenews.com slash counterpoints, where you can find the link there.

down below. Now yesterday we published a new report by Murtaza looking at a single conflict over a West Bank home just outside of Bethlehem. With all the focus on Gaza, Iran and the soft war in the north with Hezbollah, it's easy to lose sight of what's happening in the West Bank, a creeping de facto annexation, property by property. The fight over the family home of Alice Kaysia has been heating up the past week. The family property once hosted not just their home but a restaurant they had built.

That was before settlers vandalized and demolished it. Now it is home to a makeshift campground the family guards fiercely, while Israeli settlers, with the active help of the IDF, have managed to squat on a portion of it. The family isn't leaving without a fight, and their stand has drawn the support of some Israelis and Western activists, who are hoping their presence will slow down the process.

The family has gone to court numerous times to try and assert legal protection over the property, only to see those claims ignored on the ground by settler activists guarded by Israeli soldiers.

So the poster on the right here in this photo is a blown up version of the property record showing that they are the proper owners. So a number of representatives from the group Combatants for Peace, which is a mixed group of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants turned solidarity activists, have attempted to physically block settlers from displacing the Qaysiyah family from their property. In recent days, armed soldiers have arrested demonstrators or physically driven them off the site.

Meanwhile, more settlers have arrived who have vandalized the Qaysiyah's remaining property, including a statue of the Virgin Mary owned by the family that was found smashed at the site. Not that it should matter, by the way, that these are Christian Palestinians. In video from the property shared with Dropsite, groups of settlers guarded by IDF soldiers can be seen mocking the family and activists who have come to defend them while trying to break into a gate surrounding their land.

So last Friday, Amado Sison, an activist from New Jersey with the solidarity group Fazia, joined fellow demonstrators near the West Bank village of Beita, not far from the Qaysiyah home. In an interview with Murtaza after being discharged from the hospital, Sison said he was taking part in a "protective presence exercise" aimed at defending Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank from settler and military violence.

He said the IDF began firing live rounds at them and they ran into a nearby olive grove. It was then that he felt what he said was a, quote, blunt impact in the back of his leg. He initially thought he had been hit by a tear gas canister. It turned out to have been a live bullet which entered his thigh and exited from the front of his leg. In video of the incident provided to Dropsite,

You can see his friends and fellow activists carrying him here away from the Allah Grove and toward a pickup truck, which would then take him to a hospital in Nablus. We asked the State Department for comment on Sassan's shooting and got the following statement.

Quote, "We are aware of these reports involving a US citizen in the West Bank and are in contact with local authorities to gather more information. We are greatly concerned when any US citizen is harmed overseas and work to provide consular assistance. We reiterate our advice to US citizens to reconsider travel to the West Bank. Over the past few months, there has been an increase in extremist violence and military activity.

Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment, unquote. So after being shot, Sassone was treated and discharged from the hospital in Nablus. He was lucky. The bullet that struck his thigh did not hit any major arteries or bone, and he's expected to recover.

Now, while the shooting has gotten zero attention in the U.S., it did get some coverage in the local Israeli press, where a spokesperson for the IDF said troops had, quote, used riot dispersal means and fired live rounds in the air to disperse a, quote, gathering in the area near the settlement outpost. The statement added that, quote, a report was received regarding a foreign national who was accidentally injured by the riot dispersal means and was evacuated to the hospital, unquote.

A number of Americans have been killed or wounded by the IDF in recent years, including both Palestinian citizens living in or visiting the West Bank and US activists like Sasson. Earlier this month, the US government announced that it would not pursue Leahy Act sanctions against an Israeli military unit, the Netza Yehuda Battalion, implicated in the death of an elderly Palestinian American man, Omar Assad, who died after being bound and left exposed to the elements by soldiers from the unit.

Two Palestinian American teenagers have also been killed in separate shooting incidents by the IDF in the West Bank since the start of this year.

The US government has taken halting steps in recent months to sanction particularly violent settler leaders. The sanctions stop some individuals and groups associated with the most extreme fringe of the settler movement from accessing the US financial system, while also targeting selected outposts in the West Bank for blacklisting by banks. The Biden administration, which is being sued over the sanctions by pro-settler groups in the US, has hinted that these limited sanctions measures could theoretically expand in the future to target more of the settlement enterprise.

Now, while President Biden has promised U.S. retaliation for violent attacks targeting Americans elsewhere in the region, there has been near radio silence over a steady drumbeat of violent incidents that have affected U.S. citizens in the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli military or settler groups. That selective interest and concern by the U.S. government over violence targeting its own citizens has frustrated Sison. He told Murtaza, Biden has said that if any U.S. citizen is attacked, we will respond.

Yet there have been multiple times now this hasn't been the case." Unquote. So I guess, you know, it's his own thought that Biden was going to respond to violence against him.

He was guilty of a little bit of wishful thinking, but I think he probably knew better. Like I think that he understood going in that if our partners, as the State Department calls them every day at the briefing, if our partners are the ones that do the shooting, you're not really going to hear much about it. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. For me personally, one of the

incidents, a fairly recent one, you know, relative to the scope of this tragedy that started to, um,

Well, I don't know. I think the U.S. response to it was so pathetic that it started—I don't even know what the right way to put it is, but the Shirin Abu Akleh killing. The way our government responded to it. Palestinian American, Christian, journalist, all of these different categories that Americans obviously purport, and Israelis obviously purport on the world stage to care about.

the responses were just disappointing would be putting it mildly. They were absurd. The responses to what happened there were absurd. So these incidents are, when you look at how the various governments respond to them, it I think tells you a lot about what we put up with in our foreign policy. Right. And that's just a really basic way. I mean, like that's a 30,000 foot view, but I mean, it's just-

That's the view that will give you the correct vantage point. Yeah. It's crazy. I mean, yeah, it's crazy. And it's the same thing when you talk about how the Biden administration cites the ICC in relation to Putin and doesn't have any use for the ICC in relation to Israel and talking about the rules-based international order when it suits you and not when it doesn't. It's just turning a blind eye willfully, intentionally, and

yeah it's insane yeah and in interviews with my colleague jeremy um who helped me launch drop site hamas officials have said that what's going on in the west bank was a significant driver of their decision to launch the attacks on on october 7th because the the deck is being rearranged and every time that another large piece of property

Is is taken there's not a lot of property left. Yeah to be taken Yeah, then it becomes that much more difficult than to get to a political resolution especially when Israel continues to say that that the key stumbling block for any agreement is this Palestinian demand of right of return yeah that they get some of the land back and

So as they continue to lose land and continue to be told that there will be no land that comes back in an eventual political process. Yeah.

It makes the political process seem untenable. And there's that old famous saying that those who make peaceful resolutions tenable make violent resolutions inevitable. That's a paraphrase, but it's something like that. But that is what you see going on here. Yeah. No, that's a really well-applied phrase here. And I think what I was trying to say earlier is also just like Israel is not—

Israel-Palestine has never been one of my top issues. I'm far from an expert in it, but the propaganda surrounding it, because we were doing the show actually together, and we were covering what happened to Shrena Abu Akleh, and normally, because it's not one of my top issues, I don't

I just sort of like don't dig into what's happening if I don't have to because I don't have to talk about it. These people I trust are saying things. Or just like don't – it's not one of my top issues, so I'm not thinking about it all of the time. And because we had to think about it when we were covering it,

you're peeling back the layers of the propaganda. And it's, you know, to me, and I know a lot of viewers, it's going to sound naive, who've been, this has been one of their top issues for years and years. But when I was sort of forced to reckon with the propaganda, it's not to say that there isn't crazy propaganda on the other side, because there is. But when I was reckoning with the propaganda from the U.S. and Israel in that case study, it was shocking, shockingly bad, which again sounds naive to people who've been following this for a really long time, but it's never been one of my top issues. And

When you're forced to peel back the layers of the Israeli propaganda, it is insane. I don't think anybody should ever feel guilty about not knowing something because nobody is born knowing everything. Totally. We all have our issue areas. And everybody comes to things. Either they come to you sometimes or you come to them.

But for you it was it was Shireen that really kind of broke through or yeah it was and I think you would probably say this to the propaganda in that case when you have so crazy many I mean it was insane you had the bullet patterns on the trees you had all of the audio and video analysis you had all of these categories that both countries claimed to be protective of and Revere in one

case study. I mean, it was all, everything was wrapped up in that case study. So I think, you know, there have been various incidents over the years. I'm like, oh yeah, this propaganda is crazy. But that one was just unreal. It was all tied together in such a tragically perfect kind of situation. Yeah. Well, that's well said. You know, and it takes flexibility and courage to like

think things through in a plastic way. Well, your reporting is always so helpful and I'm loving everything on Dropsite. Incredibly good reporting. Well, thank you. Very much appreciate it. And thank you to everybody else who's supported it. It's been really gratifying and encouraging. So there'll be more of this to come for sure. You'll love to see it. Well, not really, but you'll love to see the good reporting. Right, there you go.

So we actually have the inflation numbers out right now, just as we were talking, these numbers were released. Ryan, should we start with the Republican spin? Because I know we have an element of that. It's Rick Santelli, of course, that was already clipped and posted by the official Republican Party X account. Let's roll this clip.

Right now for the July consumer price index, headline number coming in as expected, up two-tenths of a percent. Up two-tenths of a percent on headline number follows yet unrevised down one-tenth. So we went from basically the weakest, the biggest negative percentage

Month over month change, a positive in CPI since COVID, 420, 4-2020. And now we're at a level that we haven't seen really since April. We're up at three-tenths. If you look at ex-food and energy, exactly as expected as well, up two-tenths. The issue is, of course, it's following one-tenth, which, just like the last number, was comping towards the first several months of COVID.

- COVID. - Okay, so that's the Republican spin immediately upon the numbers being released, but Ryan, let's get into some of these numbers and actually what they are because it's the first year over year

being less than 3% of an inflation increase, the CPI here, first year over year since March of 2021. So year over year, the first time that it hasn't been over 3%, 3% or higher since March of 2021, right in the heat of the pandemic. How do you think Wall Street's going to react to this? Because they were, as the New York Times put it, quote, on edge ahead of the CPI being released, which is always the case. Yeah, and they were, this is a,

It beats expectations by a little bit. Last month also beat expectations by a little bit. So that's two months in a row. The big question that Wall Street is going to have and that all of us are also going to have because it matters to us as well is whether there will be a rate cut next month from the Federal Reserve

But this number seems to move that question to what kind of rate cut we're going to have. Is it going to be a quarter point, which is the kind of normal state of affairs for the Fed to cut? Or is it going to be a half point cut?

And this pushes the possibility of a half-point rate cut closer to happening. I think rates are, the Fed sets its current rate, I think 5.3%. But a half-point cut would send a dramatic signal that

There's going to be more money flowing into the economy that loans are going to be easier to get. And then you will start to see long-- you're already seeing interest rates coming down, interestingly, over the last several months, like 30-year mortgage rates coming down. This would send mortgage rates significantly down, which means, you know, $500 to $1,000

more off of a mortgage payment for people who either refinance or purchase at the exact same price. Do you think that potential rate cuts going to depend on the jobs report September, early September? That'll play a role. And that'll probably be soft, which means that it probably will not, they will probably not have added as many jobs, you know, as they had in previous months and

That then will further induce the Fed to cut rates. Now, the politics of this are such that Trump is probably going to spend the next several weeks browbeating the Fed not to cut rates.

You know, he has said that he wants he wanted a market crash and he wants no Fed Fed rate cuts like in order to help his his reelection campaign and it's Delightful for us as political reporters that he just says the stuff out. Yeah, no, but really that's what that's what all candidates who are Opposing the incumbent want but he just says it out loud. You don't need any truth serum Like we never needed MK ultra. We just need a Trump. He just says it

It's all we ever needed. Just tweets it out. He got his market crash, but then immediately kind of rebounded over the next several days. And that market crash also probably also woke up the Fed a little bit. The reporting around Powell's thinking on this, the Fed chair,

is that he doesn't want the Fed to appear political by coming in and, you know, it would be Trump will accuse him of being political and accuse him of kind of biasing the electoral results towards Democrats. If Powell thinks that Democrats are going to win anyway,

No, that kind of gives him more reason. So obviously everybody is political. So if he, when it was Trump versus Biden and it looked like Trump was gonna win like New Mexico and Minnesota. Yeah. And your pal, then you're like, you know what? I'm not gonna tick this guy off.

But if it looks like Trump's going to lose anyway, and you are risking the soft landing that you've been going for, which would be your legacy. Like, if he can oversee this spike in inflation around the pandemic, right?

Then bring the and then bring inflation back down to the 2% range while keeping unemployment at the 3 to 4 percent range and not going into recession that would that would be a legacy for a Fed chair that you that he would go around and give speeches about and people write books about him and get some money for those speeches too and if but if he holds rates too high for too long he risks sending the economy and spiraling into a recession and

which then undermines his whole legacy. But what's interesting about the GOP spin that we played at the top is that that's also true in some ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a case where

what both sides are saying is true. So you want to run through some of this? Yeah, I was going to say, let's get into that because in this CPI, shelter costs are still going up. So it's a half percent, but that's still significant because that's one place that is absolutely crushing. People will get into that in a moment. New and used cars are going down. That has been a hugely significant expense for a lot of families. Food prices still going up in the CPI.

Now, if we put this element up on the screen, it is a long Wall Street Journal report on basically picking apart where people are still getting hit really hard from inflation. And some of these numbers are truly insane. Car insurance is still up like 40 percent. Child care, water, sewer, trash costs, some of these like very essential services still up. Rent and electricity up

10%. So consumer prices overall since June of 2022 are up 6%.

Car insurance, I think I already said that one, 40%. Shelter costs are, yeah, rent, I already mentioned that, but shelter overall, it's another metric that they measure separately, still really high. There are things that have gone down. Cable, shampoo, there are some kind of random places where people have seen cooling, and that's all true.

But if you can imagine across the board, I mean, some of these, depending on how people live and where they live, it's a little bit uneven. Some of that matters. And if you're in a city like childcare, super, super high in cities right now, not going down.

Doesn't show any signs of going down. So it's it's being experienced differently in different pockets of the country But some of these things like 40% increase in car insurance prices almost everybody is feeling I mean you just almost everybody's feeling that increases in essential services Those are things that everybody is feeling and they're not showing any signs of going down at all It's not a good sign that the shelter costs are still increasing even if it's a slowed rate of increase so you

So you look at these numbers and you have the answer to the question of why do we have a quote unquote good economy, which is low unemployment and low inflation. Good market. And then a booming stock market. Yet my life is miserable. Like how on earth are all of those things true? And the reason that they're true is what you what everybody kind of intuitively gets rent

and housing is through the roof since the pandemic. Energy costs, your power bill are through the roof and car insurance. Basically those, and food prices have gone up and haven't come down. So like even though they're no longer going up, they're up. And wages have kept up with food prices, but if you throw in rent,

and you throw in the car insurance, you throw in the electric bill, you're way behind from what you used to be. And so just looking at some of the BLS numbers from this month, so transportation services, which includes car insurance, Ubers and Lyfts and cabs and all that stuff are way up, still rolling at 8.8%, which is rough. And that is partly because

used cars and trucks and new vehicles were so significantly up. Like you said, they're now coming down. So used cars and trucks are down 10.9% year over year. But that's because they went up. They were up really high. Massive number. Yep.

The more expensive new and used cars are, the more expensive it is to replace them, the more expensive your insurance is. Now, a bunch of people who watch this show were mad at me for saying that climate change is one of the drivers of why auto insurance has gone up so much in the last couple of years. And this Wall Street Journal article just

confirms that once again. And maybe the insurance companies are lying and their data is completely faked and it's fake news. But they say that storms and crazy weather have been a significant drivers in recent years of damage to vehicles and as a result of higher insurance rates. And you can go ahead and say that maybe the storms and all the crazy weather has nothing to do with climate change.

But that's not what climate scientists believe. And the numbers are showing what they're showing. I think the rise of electric vehicles playing a role here too, like you get in a car accident with an electric vehicle. That sucker's totaled a lot faster. Plus, you cannot underrate the role of what Kia and Hyundai are.

of selling millions of cars that are easy to steal. Like this is an under told story. - Okay, yes, but then also the cities that are wildly over permissive of the stealing of those cars. - That's fine, but if you create cars, if you produce cars-- - You should, yes, they should have done that. - That you can just walk into and drive away. - Yes, they should not have done that. - And refuse to stop doing that after it's called to your attention.

Like the number of car thefts that are directly connected to Kia and Hyundai making cars that are easy to steal. But mostly to the people thieving. First and foremost, connected to the people stealing the cars that are easy to steal. Right. But if you make it harder to steal...

It's a deterrent, no question about it. No question about it. Like you tighten that up and there are gonna be fewer cars stolen. But it's a complete, and so the other spiraling effect here is as car insurance gets more expensive, fewer people acquire it, even if the law says you're supposed to have it. What does that do? That drives up the cost of insurance for people who do have the insurance because now,

If you get into a car accident, the chances that you hit somebody that doesn't have insurance have gone up. Yeah. And so, like, at some point, it feels like we're going to need a public option here. The car insurance public option. Yes. Because this is going the wrong direction. Because every percentage increase that you have in car insurance costs is going to mean a higher percentage of people without car insurance. Mm-hmm.

We should do a whole segment on that. Which then drives car insurance prices higher. That's interesting. We should do a whole segment on that. So, yeah, you're paying. Yeah. And if you're not going to solve climate change, then the public option for car insurance. This is before we get to property insurance, flood insurance. Yeah. Which I don't think anybody's going to quibble with me about that being related to climate change. Not even Trump, who in his conversation with Elon Musk said, listen, maybe it'll create more oceanfront property for me.

It's not happening, but it'll create more oceanfront property. Yeah, but I mean these So it's to your point about the kind of duality here that the Republicans been I probably shouldn't have even been laughing and mocking the Republicans been because it is tackling something really real There's the duality of that and the good news. So it's like there's good news. There's bad news but

Overall, still just bad news for everybody because there's no sign like, well, it's, I guess, good that we're below 3% for the first time year over year since March of 2021. Yeah, I guess that's good news. On the other hand, it's hard to see this kind of

what's the best way to put it, the Titanic being turned around here. Because even these good things, we don't have an answer to the housing costs. And there's an interesting quote in the journal article where a guy says, yeah, gas prices are cheaper, but I'm not feeling it in my budget because the other things have gone up, basically. Gas prices can go down. Cable prices can go down, which I honestly don't even believe. I don't know how they're getting that cable number.

Maybe it's for... Well, I think because cable prices went so through the roof because of the pandemic. That's true. That's true. Like cars and... Yeah, because everybody was at home. But the Wall Street Journal article is good. People should read it. And you can... By the way, you can just take the journal article and go to like...

Not that I would tell anybody to do this because maybe it's illegal to tell them, but it is possible to go to archive.is and put the Wall Street Journal link in there. You would never. I would never suggest such a thing. But if you do that, you can find an archived version that goes around the paywall. But we don't recommend it. Absolutely. That would be terrible. Who would ever do such a thing? Not our viewers. And don't do it to Dropsite either.

Well, Dropsite, everything's free there. That's right. So. Charitable man. That's right. The only thing you get if you subscribe is you can comment. That's cool. And the goal of that is actually just so we don't have to moderate the comment section. So we figure if somebody is paying to subscribe,

that they're not going to be a terrible troll in the comments. Well, as we learned at The Federalist. That'd be a weird way to spend your money, but. It's a good way to do it because as we learned at The Federalist a few years ago, they will come after you if people say crazy things in your comments and demonetize you, threaten to demonetize you on Google Ads, which basically means you can't run a news business. Do not do that to us. Internet business, yes. So that is a great way to do comments. But the good news, if we're going to finish it on that, is if the Fed does lower interest rates,

and that brings down the price of mortgages, then that can help with rent and housing costs. That is a path out of this. And if you can make it easier to borrow money, you can build more housing. Now you have to deal with the NIMBY problem. But then obviously there's prices elsewhere that get affected by that too, which is why the job support is probably pretty important. Right. The concern is that if you lower interest rates

the economy is going to grow, wages will grow and wages will produce inflation. As Powell has said, the connection between wage growth and inflation is much more tenuous than it used to be in the 1960s, partly because there aren't unions. Like back in the 60s, you had unions who had contracts and made up like 40% of the workforce that if they would get raises based on the cost of living increase that the federal government produced through these numbers,

And so then the federal government would say, well, cost of living was 7%. Unions would get an 8% raise.

And then that would drive 8% the next year and then unions would get 9%. So it had this like feedback effect, which thanks to neoliberalism breaking labor unions, we don't have that feedback effect anymore. So now it actually seems like interest rates play a more significant role. High interest rates play a more significant role in driving prices up and costing people more.

than they do in slowing or growing the economy. Interesting. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. The journal article is worth your time if you're able to read it.

hilarious moment unintentionally on Colbert. The only funny moments that happen on Stephen Colbert's show are unintentional these days. But Caitlin Collins at CNN stopped by Colbert's late night show and this exchange was really beautiful. Let's roll the clip.

Trump has kind of been thrown on his heels by this, and he's not really sure how to go after Vice President Harris. He knew his attack lines on President Biden. He really has struggled with how to go after someone who's 20 years younger than him, who is a different gender, a different race. It's kind of been this moment where he has not been able to coalesce around a single attack line.

I know you guys are objective over there that you just report the news as it is. Oh, I know. CNN makes a... Is that supposed to be a laugh line? It wasn't supposed to be, but I guess it is. It's just brutal. It's so brutal.

His audience thinks that he's making a joke, but he was being serious, which reflects so poorly on him in so many different ways, not just on CNN. Obviously, it reflects on CNN, but also just on Stephen Colbert's ability to deliver a joke these days. Well, maybe he's just such a funny guy that everything he says is funny. It's always funny. But it shows kind of how partisan Colbert has gotten. I know, it sucks. That he didn't...

understand how that would land. - Zero self-awareness. - With his own audience. - Right, like he's in such a bubble that he, that's such a good point. He's in such a thick bubble that his awareness of what's funny and what's not is like shot. - Yeah, and his connection to the way that people are viewing

places like CNN, Caitlin Collins seems to be more in touch, actually, because she seemed to genuinely think that he was making fun of her. Yeah, she was like, wait a minute. But it's almost more embarrassing the other direction. But she is interesting herself, right? I mean, she came from conservative media. Yeah. In a journey to CNN, which is not

It's it's more common to come from like the New Republic or something but to become a star. Yeah, um

That's not too common, is it, to come from conservative... She's the only person that's done it, basically. Was she Daily Caller? She was. Yeah, I don't know if Sagar's ever mentioned this before, but yeah, they were colleagues at The Caller. I knew Caitlin. I like Caitlin. So she's had a very interesting path. Talking about her like she's dead. Yeah, well... The Daily Caller Caitlin is definitely no longer with us. But...

It's almost unheard of. I can't think of anybody who's gone from such a, like, she was a kind of rank and file caller blogger to such a high level of superstardom at CNN where she's like anchoring primetime shows and going on Colbert. Very much unheard of. Robert Costa started the National Review. True. But he was always a reporter first at National Review. And actually, when I was at The Huffington Post, we always had like one or two conservatives there.

that would cover conservatives. We tried to hire, we had John Ward. We tried to hire Costa at one point. He ended up going to the Post instead and has since become like a star

Reporter he's on TV a lot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely but not like Caitlin Collins Oh, he got a Biden interview the other day Costa did but he's yeah similar a lot of people in conservative media would would grumble heavily about both of them saying the only way really it's actually an advantage to come into liberal media as someone who was at conservative media and was a conservative because it kind of allows you to bring in all of those sources and

And also... That's why we would hire him. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then also sort of with added credibility, trash the right. So that's the kind of pattern that a lot of people on the right would grumble about. And speaking of the Republican Party and the conservative movement's relationship with the so-called mainstream media, let's roll this next clip because I think it'll drive this conversation in an even more interesting direction. What's your overall advice about how Democrats can sort of

What's your take on how Democrats can sort of balance the field? I think the most important thing is not to confer all of our, all the legitimacy onto the mainstream media as if they're advocating for us. I mean, they are so not on our team that they bend over backwards to show deference to Republicans. I mean, there were, I think, something like 69 Hillary's email stories in the lead up to the 2016 election. And so like, these are people...

who are not only not on our team, but they're broadcasting that they're not on our team. And yet we have independent progressive media like Crooked Media, like what I do, and like so many others in this space who are showing that we are willing and able to pick up the mantle for where the media is dropping the ball. And we have to be able to combat what the right has done. I mean, from the days of Rush Limbaugh

all the way to today with Fox News and OAN and Newsmax and Daily Wire and just the vast ecosystem of the right. We have to be able to push back. And by relying solely or only legitimizing mainstream media sources, we're not going to get there.

Yeah. I don't even think that they should be on our team because they're like, look, it's their their job is to report the news. Their job is not to help Democrats win elections. No kidding. Right. No kidding. Yeah. And Jon Favreau there is is right. I think they shouldn't be. But it is interesting that that is a that counts as an insight. Right. In that world, because.

It shows that there is this real dynamic. And you were listening to Brian Tyler Cohen, by the way, if you weren't watching this. The guy without the shirt. Yeah, button your damn shirt. He was down like three buttons deep. Like it was, we were seeing to his... That might have been four buttons even. Ballet button level, yeah. Yeah, maybe that's a new thing. Sager, this is probably what made Sager sick. This is what sent him to his sickbed. But yeah, there's this...

There's this unspoken view among a lot of liberals that because the media is a liberal institution in the kind of mill sense, like that it is without a democratic small d government, in an open society, in a liberal society, you need a free press. The free press cannot operate under an authoritarian regime.

You know, therefore, in this contest that they see between authoritarians and liberals, non-authoritarians, liberals in the old school sense, the media ought to be partisans on their behalf because it should be in their self-interest to maintain an open democratic society that allows for the free press to continue to exist. That plus then there's this cultural allegiance where you can, it doesn't seem weird that

one brother is a CNN anchor and the other brother is the governor of New York. Yeah. That that's, like, the politics of that kind of overlap. And it didn't seem weird to anyone, by the way. Like, that was happening at CNN for a long time. He was covering his brother, and it just didn't really upset anyone until COVID. But Democrats should also understand that, yes, while there are all these, like, cultural overlaps and political overlaps, and while they're, like,

Going gaga over Kamala the last couple of weeks in ways that must be infuriating to you and or actually probably not because you're used to it. It's on another level, though. It is kind of on another level. But you also can't rely on them.

Like, you know, they're in their own interest. I mean, this is... Or their own estate. I think this is interesting to juxtapose these two clips, by the way, where you have Colbert's audience laughing at the idea that CNN is just the facts, totally objective, because they assumed that was a joke. And the

Pod bros, I guess Favreau is right, so I shouldn't, I shouldn't, you know, but he probably makes the same argument about the Clinton email stories, whining about media being anti-left and

It's so laughable. It's so laughable. There are moments of sanity in the media or clarity in the media where the sort of old, if it bleeds, it leads, profit motive or certain journalists like Ken Vogel is just a fantastic journalist. And he is going to report out any scoop that comes his way.

So the New York Times guy broke the Hunter Biden story last night. He's so good. He's so good. And that still happens in corporate press. There are still flashes of excellent journalism in corporate press. But every time there are, people like Brian Tyler Cohen have this, they demand the authoritarianism of the press. Not reporting on Hillary Clinton's email scandal would have been an authoritarian collusion between the media and powerful interests.

That's what he's demanding from the New York Times. And they don't see it as authoritarian. They see it as fair because their idea of what's newsworthy and what's not. And that's why this collusion, whether it's between Republicans on issues like Israel or Ukraine in the press and the Pentagon, that's why these relationships should absolutely terrify people. Or it's Democrats on partisan questions like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris being drawn, as Trump said, like Melania on the cover of Time. That is...

terrifying. And to be, to see it through the lens that Brian Tyler Cohen is very common among, like the other funny thing he said was that he's saying they're broadcasting that they're not on our team. Yeah. First of all, I mean, they aren't really doing that. If you saw the Time Magazine cover, they're not really doing that at all. The different coverage of like the tax on tips. I don't know if you've seen any of the like split screen coverage of

how the media covered Trump's no taxes versus how they covered Kamala Harris's. It's just so obvious. But he's also saying now that independent, quote, progressive media like Crooked is picking up the mantle of the New York Times. That is what he just said, that independent media like

independent progressive media like Crooked is picking up the mantle of the New York Times. That is insane. They're not doing anything like what the Daily Wire or conservative media is doing. They're just talking on a podcast. They're not reporting.

Right, that is true. And Ken Vogel's beat over at the Times has always been big money influence. And he did a lot of great reporting on the Koch network back in the day and other kind of right-wing billionaires, but also Soros and others on the left. Back when he was doing a lot of that Koch reporting, if you noticed, he was on cable news all the time.

Since he started doing the Hunter Biden reporting, I don't think I've seen him on cable like a single time. Yep. And so his story last night, I think is going to infuriate Republicans again, but not his fault. So basically what he reported is that the Times, he through the Times has been suing the State Department for,

public records related to hunter Biden's potential influence peddling with the State Department and The way that the Freedom of Information Act works now is you need to sue like if you don't have a lawyer And that's why it's costly to do investigative reporting nowadays Yeah, you can't you can basically no longer file a FOIA and get it returned to you like that But those days are just gone. Yeah, so you file a FOIA and they basically reject or don't really fulfill your FOIA and

Then you take them to court. After you take them to court, they start dribbling out bits of information to satisfy the angry judge who's like, you're not following the law. And so that's what the State Department was doing with this FOIA request that the Times through Vogel had put in, dribbling out bits of information. And then they moved. They said, we've given you everything we have. This case is closed. The Times sued again. No, you have not.

We know that you haven't given us everything you have because we have the laptop. And here are these things that are in the laptop that would be responsive to our FOIA that you haven't given us yet. So we know that. So what else have you not given us? So the judge is like, all right, keep giving him stuff. Then Biden announces he's stepping down. And one week later.

They give the hand over a new tranche of documents. And in that tranche, Vogel had been looking for something that this State Department official who had worked in Romania had done. But before he was in Romania, he'd worked in Italy and happened to find a letter from basically from Hunter Biden to the Italian ambassador saying, can you set up a meeting? Help me set up a meeting with the Burisma executives.

And this Tuscany dude, because they want to do geothermal. Apparently, Tuscany is like the place to do geothermal. And the Commerce Department guy inside the embassy is like a little bit nervous. Like, we want to be polite here, but like, you got to love these bureaucrats. They get that and they're like, no, this is not how this is. They know it's not supposed to work like this. The letter was completely redacted. So we don't know

precisely how Hunter phrased it and what he asked for. But we do know from other emails inside the laptop that Burisma was leaning on Biden, Hunter Biden, to get them a meeting to get this deal going. In Tuscany, the deal never happened. But that's what you pay somebody like Hunter Biden for. Make this meeting happen. Yeah, and Crooked Media is not going to report on that. Give me a break. They're not going to do the Ken Vogel legwork. And obviously, I kind of...

We are very supportive of independent media. I think podcasting is an important part of journalism now, no question about it. But to say that Crooked Media is the progressive independent outlet that is helping pick up the mantle, that's the word that he used there, that the New York Times is not, that the New York Times is somehow abandoning the mantle of, quote, being on the team, is

It's just such a bizarre, they're not even progressive. They're just corporate hacks. And again, it's not like, I don't think conservative media is perfect. I think conservative media has all kinds of problems. But the crooked guys are just, they're just partisan. They wouldn't even say, Favreau would say it. Here's an interesting point. They're independent in the sense that they have their own independent source of revenue, right?

from their basically ads that they run and they're from the users who pay for their product. And so that gives them an independence from the party structure. Yes. And they used that during the Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, should Biden step down? That is a good point. Yep. To really go hard and calling on Biden to step down. Now, and then, and they came under like fierce attacks from the party establishment.

wing the wing of the party established that wanted biden to stay in um they toned it down for a day or two but then they came roaring back and i think that when they came roaring back probably because they got word that like other elements of the establishment like nancy pelosi and obama were actually which you know they're they come from obama world were very supportive of where they're going so they and they took a lot of flack from their own listenership

because their listeners were these like ride or die Biden people now who never would admit it for a second that they were ride or die Biden. But they only- They all flipped. To be fair, they only flipped on Biden as soon as presumably their boss, ideologically, Obama flipped on Biden. It wasn't before, it was after the debate. And it's true that they were bucking what Biden himself said, but they only flipped after it became okay. And they made it even more okay.

But presumably they were – they flipped after they were hearing from other people the highest echelons of the Democratic Party. Yeah, I don't know how in touch they are with Obama on a regular basis. But that world. But yeah, Obama's going to still call those shots. Yeah, 100%. But yeah. And they're also not entirely independent politicians.

The George Soros Management Fund has a minority stake in Crooked Media, which is kind of interesting. Like they got a big investment from his. Oh, that's right. That's right. The for profit wing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. But last point on the on the Times thing, the so anybody who has common sense is going to look at this and be like, oh, the State Department held this until Biden dropped out. And then once Biden dropped out, they agreed to release it.

Vogel reports that his understanding is that they had actually already signed off on releasing this a couple weeks before Biden dropped out and that the State Department moves so ridiculously slowly that they would not be capable of pulling off a conspiracy of that level of like, oh, Biden's gone. Okay, now you can get Vogel the documents. But

And so I say that and so everybody can know that, have that information. But I also don't think they deserve any benefit of the doubt because it was their own slow walking that got them in the position to get accused of this malevolent behavior. So I don't actually think it was specifically malicious around this precise conspiracy, but I think it was definitely

driven by them slow walking public information that would be damaging to the administration in general. And so you don't get out of scandal free card because your malevolence was only on a general basis and not in a specific basis. You're still acting in a malevolent fashion against the public interest and against the clear statute that says

that you need to turn this information over and stop making us take you to court all the time. Yeah, Vogel's reporting is fantastic on all of this stuff. Highly recommend. And it was nice to see them, the Times actually, now this, I think you can criticize the Times for. The Times sent out an alert on your iPhone, sent out an email, breaking news, like really spiking the football and celebrating Vogel's scoop.

Which I do not think they would have done if Biden were still running.

And I think anybody, and I think that's a reasonable suspicion. Yeah, that's an interesting point. It's like all of a sudden now you're celebrating Vogel's reporting again. Yeah. You've been burying the guy for years. Seriously, seriously. Well, that does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. Ryan's going to be back here tomorrow. That's the plan? That's the plan. All right. Yes, because you've got unheard stuff to do. We're not trying to do a left-wing takeover of the show. No.

When we can, we're going to seize the moment like the Bolsheviks that we are. Well, you know, it's actually just such a good time for that, too. I said the last time you and Crystal did a show together, well, it wasn't the last time, but you did one together a couple weeks ago after Biden stepped off the ticket. And it was also because I couldn't do it. And it was perfect timing. That was good timing, yes. But this is, too, because it's going to be the last show before the DNC. And we'll all be at the DNC. Let's say we planned it that way. That's what I was going to say. Yeah.

No Republicans, no conservatives today. But Sagar and I will be with our lib team at the DNC. So hopefully we'll have all kinds of fun conversations there. You guys are staying in like a frat house, basically. So you know Sagar, Ryan, and producers Mac and Griffin will be well rested and

Well, that's why the show is going to start later, several hours later than normal. So don't expect in your inbox at 11 all the more reason to go to breakingpoints.com and get a premium subscription because you're going to want to get it an hour earlier because it's going to be pretty late when we're out at the DNC. Yeah, and the reason for that is basically at those conventions, the heart of the stuff starts happening in the afternoon and especially in the evening. That's the actual reason. That's the actual reason, but we'll go with your reason. Yes.

All right, so make sure to stay tuned for Ryan and Crystal previewing the DNC a little bit tomorrow, and then we'll be on the ground in Chicago all of next week and are excited to share some really fun and important coverage with you guys then. All right, see you later.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back.

And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba and the piña colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, 1974. George Foreman was champion of the world. Ali was smart and he was handsome. The story behind The Rumble in the Jungle is like a Hollywood movie. But that is only half the story. There's also James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, Miriam Akiba. All the biggest black artists on the planet. Together in Africa. It was a big deal. Listen to Rumble, Ali.

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8/14/24: Tim Walz Slams Trump Union Betrayal, US $20 Billion To Israel As War Looms, New Inflation Report, IDF Shoots American In West Bank, Audience Laughs At CNN Host On Colbert 01:26:54 Share

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

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8/14/24: Tim Walz Slams Trump Union Betrayal, US $20 Billion To Israel As War Looms, New Inflation Report, IDF Shoots American In West Bank, Audience Laughs At CNN Host On Colbert